Nepali Migrations, Neo-Tribes and Zones of Inferiority

Today we are faced with the issue of Nepali citizens going abroad to foreign countries in search of better employment opportunities, and companies are attracted to Nepali laborers because they can be paid lower wages than the locals. But this inequality in wages may not last long, as Nepali laborers may become politically active in these countries and demand higher wages, and so foreign companies must quickly devise new ways of keeping wages artificially low. To continue to keep wages low in the future, foreign companies need to resort to a new kind of racism, where they deem that foreign immigrants are “inferior” to the local populace and hence should get lower wages than the locals. This racism, and this drive to keep wages low through a specific organization of labor, will ultimately lead to unexpected scenarios in the conception and management of national territories.

The promotion of a kind of concentrated community of each nationality, where each national immigrant populace is kept separate from the rest, enables each national community to be so distinct and isolated from the rest of the populace that the community is compelled to locate in one place, meaning that a mass internal migration ensues where all Nepalis travel to one single region of the foreign nation to live together. For the foreign nation that brings about this mass internal migration event, this new region comprised solely of Nepalis will designate a “zone of inferiority” and the “tribe” of Nepalis will be so distinct from the rest of the locals that they will be given their own set of laws, their own jurisdiction, their own “reserve,” in the coming future. This national reserve results from an appropriation of the native American reserve, and also of the hippie commune, the hippie commune's unique cultural formations being taken even further in these national reserves because of the national territory granting to the neo-tribes their own jurisdiction. Culture will be of great importance, since it is cultural activities which differentiate the neo-tribe from the rest of the populace. Cultural activities that make the neo-tribe even more distinct from the rest will be promoted by the national level authorities.  

Simultaneously will take place a process whereby the big “post-national” companies, industrial estates and big factory complexes are located in the neighborhood of the neo-tribal areas. We use the term tribal precisely because the tribe lacks an organized form of capitalist enterprise and endeavor within its jurisdiction. It is a purely sociocultural sphere, where the leisure time and the time with one's family and community dominate any kind of economic activity to a great degree. Nothing is to be found within the neo-tribal territory except residence and the smallest and most basic of shops. Besides these shops, cultural organizations, such as museums and film studios, will be some of the few labor-demanding organizations to be established in these zones, but these cultural organizations will most likely be low-key and non-profit because any type of capitalist and wage-labor promoting activity is strictly discouraged within these zones, as much as these kinds of activities are very intensely encouraged just outside of the zones. Spending of the wages earned elsewhere is also confined to the enjoyment of the neo-tribal cultural products only in order to discourage resentment which could develop due to high prices outside the neo-tribal zone; consumer spending becomes localized and controlled. And so what appears from the outside to be a zone of "freedom from national law" is increasingly a zone submitted in a number of ways to a national law particularly conceived for that zone, and what appears as a neo-tribal zone composed upon a common sharing of cultural products and practices ultimately becomes a zone of the management of economic labor in which cultural production is a tactic for maintaining peace and control. Unlike the native American reserves running casinos, the neo-tribal territories will not be very economically active. They are like suburbs but comprising people solely of a common national identity, a national identity which is cowering away from the rest of the foreign nation in which they live, in great isolation and in a great communicative relationship with others of the same neo-tribe in order to counter the loneliness. 

A “Nepal-within-a-bigger-nation,” a “nation-within-a-nation” will help capitalists keep wages down for their enterprises. And they will not suffer backlash for "racism" because this type of racism is distinct from the racism we usually imagine. There is no “racial hatred” resulting in violence against the inferior race, meaning that this type of racism entails an appreciation of inferiority, because being inferior becomes a qualification for a job. Appreciation of inferiority is not the same as mobility towards a superior position, and this kind of upward mobility will be discouraged given that the only reason jurisdiction and a separate territory will be given to neo-tribes is because of their supposed inferiority, because they are inferior and hence weak and so they are not perceived as a threat to the bigger national identity. Immigration control will never take place unless there is an alluring economic incentive behind the management of immigrants.  

Macrobiology and “War on Disease”

We can name under 'Macrobiology' those sets of ideas, organizations and medical efforts that are meant to fight the medical conditions that spread: on the infectious diseases, the communicable virus and phenomenon such as “mass hysteria.” The diseases afflicting mass social settings and common social behavior became an issue of concern. It was problematic that even if man within his own activities and his own conduct was “normal,” he could be afflicted by an infectious disease if society was in a health-care crisis, if society was “abnormal.” The communicable diseases became articulated as an injustice not from one man on another, but an injustice of nature upon all of mankind, of exploitative nature which attacked human societies. We can ask here why do we destroy nature? The ruthless, war-like spirit with which deforestation occurs is inspired by the idea that nature contains the communicable diseases that could kill off the human race. Our engagement with nature is still driven by our anger at the communicable diseases nature develops.

Communicable diseases give medical science institutions such as big hospitals a permanent place within society; these hospitals are there to wage wars against communicable diseases. The communicable diseases allow medical science a busy and constant involvement within society, and enable doctors to obtain high stature, a high stature which is only so stark in places rife with communicable diseases like Nepal. And a question must rightly be addressed to the 'big hospital' when communicable diseases do indeed spread in some societies.

In the past, there was a tendency in society to watch the spectacle of disease as it engulfed another, and let the body wither and die under the disease's command. There was no guiding ethic in human society to save the diseased body, and it was thought that the disease died with the body. There was no widespread belief in a kind of unconscious transmission of diseases, it was impossible for these societies to think that communication between humans could also take place outside of language. The only thing that transmitted between people, it was thought, was language. 

In a Lacanian sense, there was too much faith on the symbolic order as the order of language-based communication, and not enough attention was paid to the Lacanian Real, which is where nature is located, nature as the source of parasites and parasitic agents (microbes and viruses). Before Lacan, in anthropological writings, nature was imagined as big animals that behaved like humans, but a whole other, microscopic level of nature animates Lacan's writings. The invisibility and ineffability of the Real in Lacan's formulation can be interpreted as deriving from the Real's microscopic, bacterial nature, in that, that which is difficult to see and know is the Real. In biology, the Real was a parasite or a virus living off of language-based societies to stamp its authority upon humans. Because it is so authoritative, the Real is traumatizing in Lacan. 

In psychological phenomenon such as 'mass hysteria,' which are also of concern to biology, the Real is that unspeakable element that pervades through all the people and causes their collective hysteria. It is because of the presence of the Real that phenomenon like mass hysteria remain unexplained. As such, any time there is an indication or hint that a symptom or a condition in Lacanian psychoanalysis is not being explained fully, then we can find the presence of the Real's effects on these conditions, and indeed, Lacan's whole discourse is founded on the invasion of the Real upon human attempts at understanding and psychoanalyzing. The Real is that which invades on the symbolic and attempts to stamp its authority therein. 

It was with the idea of diseases stamping authority upon human society that first encouraged humans to challenge diseases. The objective was not to save the human life, but to wipe out the disease, the wish to fight the disease dominated over the wish to preserve man. And here we find how the most painful methods used to be commonplace within medical science because it was always the disease they were after, even if the diseased body suffered more from the “curative method” than it did from the disease.

To import the Foucauldian “construct live” and the medical-science concepts of infection and communication, a “philosophy of humanity” had to emerge, where the chief articulation was the concept of a common vulnerability and a common susceptibility of all humans to diseases and infections. Also emerged the idea of a sustained threat, something which couldn't be challenged but which would always be there, and that it was the human which would have to change and adapt. The virus is still out there, it is indeed a red flare which we live in and breathe, but we have found today a way to protect ourselves from the threat rather than to destroy the threat itself.

In the new philosophy, nature contained permanent threats, permanently threatening situations and organisms, and the goal was not to isolate some high-stature humans from nature, but to enable all humans to resist what was found in nature. This resistance of all humans to nature sounds like a philosophy of medical science which believes in the equality of all men and women before medicine, but the ways of resisting nature were developed not based on the idealist-romantic idea that all humans were equal, but that despite humans being unequal there was the risk of communicability of dangerous diseases between humans. 

How Can the Freudian Slip Save Nepali Garments Industry Analysts?

Industrial analysts are alienated from the powerful giants on the top of a certain industry. Our main driving example is the garment industry of Nepal, where we do not hear of the professional industry analysts, but only know of the powerful giants, the factories that produce the garments, the international sellers etc. The first problem is the hierarchization of the industry, a hierarchy which was established because to accommodate the over-exuberant individuals and organizations who wanted to participate in the successful industry, there needed to be positions which were not only symbolic but also productive/functional. Secondly, it is precisely as each of the positions became too functional and therefore independent of other positions in the hierarchy that there developed a communication gap. All indications of sophistication when a financial organization defines itself and defines its work are signs that that particular organization suffers from a communication gap with other organizations in the hierarchy of its industry. Such “sophisticated organizations” believe themselves to be independent of giants but are in fact isolated/alienated due to over-specialization. Industry analysts have neither the power nor the will to shape the industry through their organizations.

In a Lacanian sense, the lowly analyst first occupies the position of the symbol (such as the intelligible and therefore productive word) but then becomes the impotent 'sign' at the margins, where the sign is an economic organization/company which, despite its sophistication, does not have much of an agency in determining the actions that take place in the wider economy, for the sign is like a discarded made-up word in the universe of legitimate language. Given this problem, the analyst's goal should be to articulate a sign which can function as a Freudian slip of the giant, or, to move one's analysis company to that place where the giant's system of expert production can be broken up into parts by the intervention of one's doing. The giant must be confronted, at its height/stature and during its most productive moments, by the lowly analyst displaying to it the mystery of the meaning/function of a made-up symbol, which is the Freudian slip, and this act of display will inspire in the giant productive curiosity about the workings of the lower places in the industrial hierarchy. As the unsettled giant then formulates knowledge on the lower placed companies in the industry in its attempt to understand the meaning of made-up "Freudian slip" positions, it becomes more familiar with the analysts and hence a communicative relationship can be developed for further work. 

The fortunes of the lower organizations, of which the analyst is an example here, rely on the unknown whims of the giant. The bottom makes gains and losses in its field because it does not know how the top will operate in its respective field, but these gains and losses are attributed to “complex markets” and “unpredictability” without asking if major changes in the communications between the different parts of the hierarchy could have made the industrial gains and losses more systematic. No actor directly involved in the industry seems to be ready to address the administrative difficulties of a communication gap, and the system seems to be left as it is. Of course, mathematical data on the performance of the giant is published, and so are media reports of the giant's announcements, but, the performance of the giant itself is not dependent on a communicative relationship with the organizations in the middle and the bottom, in other words, the productivity of the communications between the top and the bottom is too low. Communication is a side-effect of success rather than something leading to it. 

With the media in crisis, the communication problems between an industry giant and an industry analyst are aggravated. The media and the giant are unable to work together to deliver the right statement that answers the queries of all actors involved; the media does not ask the right questions and the giant does not reach a level of disclosure or generalization in its statement to be understood by all industry actors. In a Lacanian sense, the more shortened, prepared and performed a media statement by the giant's leader or board, the more likely that there will be no place for the Freudian slip to occur from the giant's side, which is a problematic development. The Freudian slip, if the giant allows to occur among its own human actors, would bring forth an informality in relations between the giant and the analyst, thereby allowing collective interests of both parties to overcome individual selfish interests.