“Nepal”: The Voyeur's Territory

The Nepali common social space (going forward, just the 'Nepali common') has been increasingly sexualized, which could be the overt final step in the sexualization of the whole nation. What we imply by the term 'sexualization' is not an always positive direction towards more and more sexual freedom, but an alignment of sexual expression with other identity markers, such as ethnicity, class and gender in ways that marginalize certain subjects. Sexualization is the 'making systematic' of sexuality which only allows it to be expressed in certain ways and types and instances. We see in the sexualization of the society not the revolution of sexuality, but the freezing of sexuality and its sinister expressions, and most importantly its combination with power/control, most evidently in the logic of the pervert. One of the ways the pervert has determined the social space is by sexualizing the police; in other words, the police's uniform is a fetish for the pervert. But whereas in developed societies the pervert confines his police fantasies to the enclosures that are personal to him, in Nepal the social common itself has been privatized for the pervert, and the public police officer is his private sexual friend/object; he does not dress his friend as a police officer, but considers the police officer himself as already a sexual object. The perverted voyeur finds in the public sexually arousing traits; and the Nepali common has become increasingly more defined by sexual attributes, if we are to judge it with the voyeurism within all of us: the exhibition of skin is an example (but we can also look at the types of interactions between Nepali subjects, all of which have been more sexualized-for-the-voyeur). As such, Nepal operates in the pervert's logic as a private territory, where he can exhibit himself or be a voyeur; and in the process of his exhibition or his voyeurism he inaugurates the privatization of the territory; he is the privatizing impulse of global capitalism. For the voyeur, this privatization is on the part of the other, it is the other's private property, which means that at the logic of perverted capitalism, it does not matter whose territory or asset it is, it only need be privatized, or made anyone's property; and so the pervert may appear neutral, may appear 'for the people' by advocating for private property for the people, but this is not really something that is truly selfless and completely for the people. The pervert is the advocate of privatization in capitalism, but his agenda does not end there, rather he is to make private as much as doing so is an expression of his power and an occasion for a pleasure exclusive to him.

“Nepal,” as a concept denotes a private territory, private to Nepalis. As a particular nation-state, it is a territory which has been made private not by the agency of fellow Nepalis, not by the struggles, conflicts and histories that Nepalis have conducted to make a territory their own, but by the sustained and fixated gaze of the outside voyeur. It is the voyeur which demarcates the territories of states, and this is starkly evident in the sexualization of the process of territorialization: how it is focused on attributes such as the color of skin, the types of eyes of the different races, the different 'cultural practices'...the entire discourse of nation-building has a particular affinity with the sexualized thoughts of the voyeur; it is too focused on looking at sexual/sexualized attributes of a people. As such, within this logic of perverted capitalism, it seems one does not build a nation based on very deep and personal shared values between people, but rather based on external, superficial, sexual characteristics that seem to unite people together at the level of their flesh. But when we get to ever more narrower territories of privatization, such as our own small piece of land, then we have deep reasons why we think that that piece of land is ours, and we have more of a will to protect it and feel for it than we do for Nepal. Thus, to resist the pervert's voyeurism, there are two options: either ditch the primacy of the nation-state of Nepal completely and think of other forms of territorializing (which is problematic because it is too exhibitionist, that is, perverted in its own right), or express a deep affinity to Nepal, a deep relationship to it and with its people, truly personalize it (and not just privatize it) in other words, to not play into the pervert's logic and sexualize one's own people. 

That the Nepali government bureaucratic officials wear uniforms, a fetish, posits the government official strictly within the fetishizing logic of the pervert and not above or beyond it, which implies that national level government is not really in control because the pervert escapes it, and that, indeed, the pervert is the most accurate representative of international/transnational Law as it applies to a nation; the pervert is one such chief agent of the international superpower in the national space, putting government within uniforms in order to fetishize it. This locating of the pervert within a national space is because the pervert has a highly intimate link between control and pleasure; because control gives the pervert pleasure, he is ready to control more than others for whom controlling is only a duty. As such, not everyone is able to enjoy in capitalism and neo-imperialism, rather, the pervert is given the duty to enjoy and feel pleasure; he is the representative of pleasure in neo-imperialism. As such, the 'Nepali' pervert is not a national identity, and it is never nationalist. It always operates for the international superpower because it is such a keen and willing observer. This, however, does not mean that the voyeur acts simply as a messenger, someone who reports to the superpower what is going on here, someone who relays messages without actual interventions into the nation. Rather, the pervert is what proves that the gaze itself has agency, that the gaze is enough to enact change in the social. Just from a look, the pervert does something vital for the superpower. And it is precisely because the pervert does not need to act outside of looking that it is so vital: it is almost imperceptible but also very influential.

The voyeur demonstrates a quite disturbing truth about power relations. It demonstrates that when it comes to a territory like Nepal, not an entire force, not an entire army, is really in charge, but actually one single figure of authority is in charge and makes the most relevant decisions regarding Nepal. This figure is the voyeur, who operates with his own eyes, his own stature, that is, he is life size and not bigger than a single individual; the gap through which the voyeur looks is meant for his eye because it is precisely the gap through which the eye escaped after privatizing the other. This means that if we are to trace the path of power relations as it pertains to Nepali common territory, we are inevitably led to a single figure of authority, and thus, to authoritarianism. In the formation of a territory, in the struggle towards such a formation, then, there is no democratic solidarity among the people, but a voyeur who is in charge of the populace, making it sovereign. Of course at the national level there appears to be democracy, but at the international level there is only a single person (or a few people, a very small group of voyeurs) in charge of controlling Nepal. These voyeurs are never situated atop a tower and thus able to see everything below them, but they move about among people, they see directly with their eyes people up close and personally...they utilize the mobility of their legs, the agility of their bodies, the vision of their eyes and other senses...they walk about as people without tools, without enforcement, without symbolic power but with real power expressed through their bodies. The perverts do not utilize others, they utilize the structural gap in the symbolic order, the gap which inevitably has to be left there for the maker of the order, the primordial Father, to exit.  And it is precisely the gap which facilitates perversion, the gap which makes a pervert, who through this knowledge appears disarming and outside of law and criticism....my perversion is a disease or it is a gap in the symbolic, it comes from outside of me and I do not control it, he says, or even more frequently, I am looking at the gap, and not at the sexual action within it, I am only concerned with the gap, something which is meaningless to normal citizens...Going back, this is how power relations operate at levels of nuanced control and large territory, as relations between people as individual figures of authority, not between a person and the disciplined masses. Indeed, we cannot even call the relationship between the powerful and the powerless a power-relation, simply because the powerless never get to the possibility that they will get their own power...'the powerless don't deserve the term 'power,'' the perverted powerful will say.

Contrary to what we believe, exhibition/exposure is not the opposite of voyeurism; exhibitions do not solve the problem of the international gaze within one's own space. We cannot deliberately exhibit to solve a violation. Rather, it is when voyeurism is confused with sexual freedom and liberalism that exhibitionism is offered as a response. Nepali exhibitionism must be contextualized in the voyeurism of the superpower. But voyeurism must be problematized: it is the adding of a power component in sexual relations, meaning that the pervert only enjoys when there is a power component involved, he is power hungry. He doesn't, in the sexualizing act, make the other powerful, but rather makes the other powerless; his logic is to consume whatever power there is in the other. He knows all the ways in which power is present and is sustained/managed by the other; he knows of the other's good conduct. He therefore exhausts the other, taking from the other the power which was territorialized within the other and therefore eliciting the collapse of territorial boundaries/demarcations of the other; not just corrupting the other but making the other dysfunctional. He does not respect private property as it is but is the constant forward movement of the logic of privatization; newer and newer territories must continue to emerge and then collapse for him...it is (perverted) capitalism's process of continuously 'coding and decoding of territories,' as highlighted in Deleuze and Guattari, and of not oneself being within a private territory, but always being outside of it looking in. Therefore, the pervert, when it is engaged in the sexual act, cannot be considered a subject enjoying the other, but a subject draining the other, and as such, every response to the pervert's sexualization must be made at the level of power and power-relations rather than as a pure sexual act/attitude.