The Body-Without-Organs as a Response in Post-Earthquake Nepal

In post-earthquake Nepal, people have many ideas on how to deal with unbearable trauma, but mostly these ideas arise out of desperation and the need for a quick solution. And then there is now also more anger towards that nature from where the earthquake arose, an anger which could be problematic as it leads to more deforestation, poaching and pollution in Nepal...that is why the progressive development of Deleuze and Guattari's body-without-organs (BwO) is the most adequate response to the trauma of the earthquake: the BwO entails the removal of skin so as not to feel the sensations of the quakes, the removal of eyes so that the quakes are not visible...the losing of one's physical bodily organs linking one's self to the quake. The BwO could be a direct result of the trauma (“I lost sight in my eye-organ because of seeing too much of the earthquake”), an actual medical operation to remove the eye/skin, or it could be an intense imagined state, in any case where the skin and other organs that sense and respond to the earthquake cease to be a part of the functioning body, becoming instead a non-functioning mediation between nature and the BwO.

As everyone is running around in panic during the earthquake, the BwO remains steady and still, doing productive activities. As a careful tactician, the BwO channels all its productive energy/labor away from the organ which it sees as problematic: the eyes may be inactive/removed, for instance, but the ears can be more active than before. In this way, a clutter of organs is reduced to a few highly productive ones, and production does not cease even during and after an earthquake. In a world used to production from all available bodily organs, the production from a select few organs yields novel objects not encountered before, and in this regard the BwO's productivity works as a rebellion against full-bodied capitalist industrial production.

When one sheds one's skin, there is no need to enact a kind of violent change on nature to deal with the trauma of the earthquake; there is no angry response turned towards nature, because the earthquake is not felt, at least not in its full severity. On the other hand, there is no real change to the BwO either, because the skin is only a mediator between the BwO and nature; the skin does not belong to BwO or to nature. And hence the skin can be “shed” to curb the response of the conscious mind and body to the earthquake. The earthquake occurs and there is harm enacted upon the BwO, but, it is not registered, and thus the BwO continues to become productive, it continues to live with the earthquake but without reliance for its productivity on such whims of nature.

The BwO does not feel the sensations of harm to the body so as not to feel self-centered and self-defensive when it comes to the earthquake. Due to this selflessness, the BwO could have a positive social/altruistic function, very helpful in the post-earthquake situation. Also, for the BwO there is no sentimental attachment to the removed organs of the body, which is indeed a big feat given the protective mentality with which a person is characterized when it comes to the body's protection.

When the BwO becomes productive during an earthquake, it becomes admired for its bravery and for its work-ethic, and so it becomes a historical/heroic object, its “body-ness” not realized by those who celebrate it. But the BwO is still a living body, and death may occur to such a body at any time, for the BwO's survivalist tendency is weakened by the loss of organs. Yet there is still definitely a kind of contentment to the body's death, because nature has not been harmed, the earth remains safe for more years to come. 

Nepal's “Culture Shock” With Post-Earthquake Aircraft

It is post-earthquake Nepal, and unfamiliar planes have been flying overhead constantly...These aircraft are a necessity now, true, but they happen to be objects without proper cultural context and cultural reference points in Nepali society. And these aircraft are part of a wider problem: that the Nepali cultural production to deal with this crisis will be interrupted by drastically foreign objects/aid, particularly those signs of foreignness without a well-established significance and meaning in our society. A cultural imperialism is taking place in Nepal: the very loud sound of the unfamiliar aircraft reminds one of the stories heard of loud and disturbing music played to natives or prisoners in western wars as a way of muting and shocking those populations into instant defeat. But as this particular imperialism has the face of benevolent foreign aid, there will not even be many critical stories/legends about it. When there is no reference point to a foreign object, there is not even a properly 'visible' adversary one can identify, rather, something defeats one without even registering as an “enemy” or “adversary/opponent.”

The foreignness to the intervention found in this earthquake is in contrast to the previous earthquake: there were unique stories about and explanations to the previous big earthquake, for instance. But in today's context the issue is more about directly being involved as an aid worker, or a doctor, or a scientist, while the identity of the producer of cultural signs and symbols to address the earthquake has been ignored. The question is: where is the old man/woman to tell us the stories about previous disasters? Where is the platform for the old man/woman who has been a keen observer of this earthquake and the sensations and feelings it produced? This person is needed now, not at a later date when the shock of the earthquake has declined and when a comfortable/romantic remembering is underway. 

The post-earthquake moment could be taken up to deny cultural production with the reasoning that cultural production is associated with “superstition” and “non-scientific knowledge.” And any elaborate and imaginative cultural production, such as a long story, or a figurative image, or a tragic poem, is taken as a sign of emotional trauma and subsequently suppressed or provided with an insipid environment where it can be kept away. Today children are not traumatized the most, but they are most easy to label as traumatized by the earthquake because they most quickly route their experience of trauma into cultural objects, and the many other identities who are also traumatized will only surface later, when these identities are influenced by the children and begin to deal with the trauma with their own cultural production. The earthquake has shown that cultural production is inspired by the work of children, and demanding children to do imitative art based on well established cultural signs and symbols is not properly inspirational to them.

More important than restoring destroyed temples is to allow children to inspire others with their art, and we must be ready to accept a drastic re-imagining of the cultural object on display. However, “superstition” may well be a part of this cultural production, and so we may indeed find a genuine and original (re)-emergence of temples in some form as children build them. We await a commemorative monument made by children, and we await a reaction/response which takes this commemorative monument as the singular influence and inspiration to a very productive, enduring and transnational artistic movement and practice. Nepal has been too isolated, and many foreign gestures cause too much disturbance. We are at risk of perpetuating this isolation if outsiders don't act because they feel intrusive. The gaze of this inactive outside world will translate into productive action when outsiders can see and feel how we are relating to the trauma and thereafter create something for audiences of their own choosing. The disaster is not just “natural” or “domestic,” but even the gesture to help out causes some harm: Nepal cannot be touched without disturbance, there is no neutral or observer position. Artists will enter Nepal next after foreign aid workers and will look to curb the disturbances caused by foreign aid itself.

Rock-Star Scientists in Post-Earthquake Nepal

With the recent earthquake, scientific knowledge in Nepal has been removed from the privileged individuals, institutions and social practices in which it usually operated; the “cultural sphere” where scientific knowledge circulates has shifted from high-brow to lower-mainstream. Indeed, all signs of a connection between science and privileged members of the population is being erased in order not to inspire anger and resentment among the wider public without such access to science. Politicians are playing the role of quiet, uninformed spectators, as if they had not been provided scientific rationales behind the earthquake, both regarding its cause and consequent safety measures (and in order that the “natural disaster” and its casualties is seen to have “natural” causes and not political, social or cultural causes.) Somewhere, a rock-star scientist is conducting the post-earthquake show. 

The rescue mission is in a “quick-relief” and technical-scientific mode: it is in the expensive and sophisticated jet airplanes now flying above, it is in the use of the most cutting edge infra-red cameras, it is in the hands of the more “scientific” (and hence “developed”) foreign rescuers, for whom the goal is to do the work efficiently as much as it is to be successful, and all the while even able Nepalis play the role of the uninformed and helpless. In fact, in the face of this foreign mission, it is because so many of us have to play the role of victims that we continue to stubbornly believe that we will be further victimized by more dangerous earthquakes. But this self-victimization is more so a problem of a sudden diminishing of work and productivity, rather than a traumatic and scared emotional response to the real crisis.

Scientists have organized scientific statements for the more “popular culture” public sphere and consequently scientific knowledge may soon be posted extensively out on the streets, advertised next to the images of consumer products, cementing the authority of science. Scientists have had to orient themselves towards utilization of the popular media, as opposed to the scientific journal, and for the sake of scientific knowledge scientists are to operate directly in the public sphere, exposing themselves to the interrogations of a general public, rather than operating in the gradual and methodical sphere of the seminar/conference. This kind of 'proletarianization' of science has been going on for quite some time, yet the intensity with which scientific knowledge has to be produced for the uninformed masses is especially high today. The scientist's audience is no longer an individual fellow scientist, the audience is a series of demanding but illiterate individuals.

A new bravery and "rock-star" ruggedness among scientists and scientific scholars is evident today, which is certainly to be admired, yet it will eventually lead to too intense a focus on the personalities of the scientists of Nepal and lesser focus on their innovative potential and knowledge production capabilities. In short, doing science in Nepal will be more about acting like a scientist and conforming to an image of a reasonable scientist: the scientist in this post-earthquake stage needs to 'look' the part more than anything else. Each individual scientist is to behave like an authority figure with full confidence on scientific knowledge; science becomes a matter of passion like music to a musician. And science will henceforth have a proper and permanent public face, the problem being that such a face demands a lot of attention.

With the imperative to respond to the trauma of the earthquake, authorities of science in Nepal have had to reckon with themselves with the question regarding their “unity regarding a common viewpoint,” as in, the scientists have to evaluate the complete knowledge and set of beliefs that each scientist has, in order to isolate the deviant scientists that possibly may not conform to the dominant explanation and logic of the cause of the earthquake. A new sensitivity to madness is under construction in wider society: it begins by the stigmatization of trauma in the wider public but its true purpose is to create and isolate the “mad scientist” identity, in order that the deviant scientists are quickly branded to be insane and hence their opinions deemed invalid. It is important to note that all scientists are to agree upon the cause of the earthquake, so that science as a discipline as a whole is legitimized and its circulation in the post-earthquake context allowed by the wider public.

In the later post-earthquake Nepal, a new series of scientists will soon be under development, in order that the legitimacy of science be generated in Nepal through sheer numbers among the total general public population. This “production-line” of scientists is itself quite dangerous, for such questions on the ethics and intellectual potential of the new scientists will be ignored, rather, people will be able to become scientists with relative ease, especially as the scientific knowledge of geology that these new scientists will have to learn and support seems quite simple in its current stage.

Philosophy in "World" War 3 Propaganda

World War 3, as the other “world” wars, will be evident to a certain side when the enemy side's entire civil populace is seen to be invested in a certain conflict: especially when some conflict becomes a highly dominant social and political agenda among the enemy nation's lower class population. World Wars do not just play out in between politicians and through diplomatic decisions taken by the few, but rather they involves the masses and the masses' own ways of perceiving the conflict: it could be trench warfare, but it could also be a war in many fronts and settings, for the exact nature of the war will be dependent on the masses. A “world” war is dependent on a mass movement and a popular support for the war effort, because “world” does not imply the different nations' standing armies, but suggests the entirety of the world's armed forces and civilian populations.

An important factor creating a mass-mobilized war is the effectiveness of the enemy's propaganda. The enemy's propaganda turns lower classes into philosophical subjects and objects through a kind of rapid education, and because it makes them philosophical and educated the lower classes have immense appreciation for this propaganda. The object of propaganda is never just instruction, but also education, for the goals of propaganda are more longer term than the immediate enlistment and fighting in the war. Propaganda turns men and women towards investment in fighting for abstract and lofty ideas such as “human,” “nation” or “belief” so that they are not just ready to fight in armed war today but in the “war of ideas” of the future. As the enemy's philosophy is considered most threatening, the enemy's philosophical lower classes are attacked extensively, hence a World War concerns itself with mass-scale destruction.

Ultimately, the masses, once “made philosophical” extensively, will themselves shape the nature and style of war that they wish to engage in. They are not dictated by the elites to take up arms, rather, they make these and other decisions, for they have finally received a serious education directed towards them, albeit that this education is dismissed as biased propaganda by elites. And that lower class' initiative in shaping the nature of war is precisely the true intention of the elites: to not get their own hands and minds dirty in the war but rather see it play out, as if automatically, among the lower classes. In World War 3, the masses will learn to read through propaganda posters, they will learn to understand the concepts related to a war context, their education will be heavily influenced by the war. It is very possible that a kind of more non-violent “cold war” will take place, or that all “world” wars will in the future be “cold” because the philosophical masses choose not to “weaponize” themselves, but rather to express hostility in mass protests which are then publicized to the enemy. After propaganda has made them philosophical, they themselves will then develop propaganda to support one another, and the quality and effectiveness of propaganda will itself determine who is winning and who isn't. Propaganda posters, books, films, plays and other such products will be the medium of education, especially for those young ones born into warring times and regions, and so education will be dominated by “heavy” ideas even at the primary level. Another form of non-violent mass mobilization is the war on a “knowledge-based front,” such as the “space race” between USA and USSR, where the masses participate in a war where amounts of knowledge gained rather than territory gained become of importance, given that propaganda has turned the masses into philosophers rather than soldiers.

“Construct Live” and Genocide in the Pacifist's War

The Foucauldian notion of “construct live” has in warfare been ingrained and internalized to a great extent, and that is a point of great pride for pacifists. We may never see the loss of armies in a scale comparable to the World Wars again, because even in war, the armies involved are not out to kill but rather to enable continual survival; a protective mentality reaches out to “the enemy's” ground troops too. The issue in war today is the removal of arms from the enemies' hands and the dispersal of the enemies from strategic points in a territory, while ensuring that the least amount of lives are lost.

A problem emerges due to this notion of “construct live” (or “let 'the enemy' live”): that the enemy which is in command of a region of interest, when dispersed and displaced by a stronger force, comes to another region within the territory where it is once again in command. When the weaker side is removed from one place it is simply moved somewhere else and becomes the new controller of that other region, without any direct exercise of its will or force. For the side with a weaker army, this invasion-without-force becomes ideal: it simply needs to evade the sporadic gunfire in one region and will find itself ruler of the next. And for the pacifists, the war-without-force is ideal, because it entails lesser casualties in the armies. The enemy becomes a permanent/immortal fixture in warfare, as long as the notion of “construct live” remains and there is land to move to, and this “immortal-and-mobile enemy” has shown that it can be more violent than peaceful.

We may therefore seriously acknowledge that indeed the pacifists are in control of war with this tenet of “construct live,” but that their faith in “construct live” is submitting more and more territories to brief but traumatic militaristic rule as the weaker side moves from place to place. "Construct live" and "mobility-and-immortality" lead to the rationalization and perpetration of genocide by the displaced, weaker side, because of these reasons: the lack of connection/loyalty with the land one is currently in charge of as the sole armed force, the frustration at displacement by a stronger side, the amount of idle time in this new type of warfare, the experience of privilege and comfort at not being killed, and most importantly, the constant maintenance of a certain high level of military strength. After the genocidal act, the tenet of “construct live” is abandoned and a new, more lethal phase in war begins.

The Brief Graveyard Shift at Nepal's Tribhuwan International Airport

A range of issues came to the fore when Nepal's Tribhuwan International Airport's workforce had to be mobilized for 24-hour shifts recently. The communication of vital information between shifts became an issue. The levels of depreciation of the workers needed to be judged carefully. Preparations for “random accidents” needed to take place. Continuous encouragement had to be given to prevent fatigue from becoming the precursor to a political movement of workers' unrest. To fulfill these tasks, the whole managerial artifice of the airport had to be awake once a small but important portion of the airport had to work for 24 hours. The 24-hour shift, a rarity in Nepal, brought the nation within the set of those countries that operate their national-capitalist system throughout the night, like a machine that can operate without tiring. The seeds were sown in Nepal for the depreciation of the workforce to not become a hindrance in the vitality/operation of the capitalist machine; the workforce could be replaced, a new idea in itself for Nepal, or the workers' depreciation monitored continuously and countered as much as possible. A new model of “insomniac capitalism” became a possibility for the businessmen of Nepal as the strength of the work ethic of Nepali airport workers became evident. The airport management could be scrutinized closely to see whether Nepali workers could be submitted to graveyard shifts. And also, for the workers themselves, more important than earning money from the graveyard shift was the need to uphold a favorable image of Nepal as a hardworking nation.

In general, when we take the workforce in its entirety, we often find that it is a machine. The ability of two human beings to operate one after the other to perform the same tasks is vital in the formation of this machine. Without a loss of productivity, the day shift laborer hands over the responsibilities of work to a night-shift laborer and so on the relay goes, throughout the day. A communicative relationship ensures that day-shift and night-shift laborers are able to continue with work as long as one of the workers is able to communicate to the other the nature of the work to be performed and any specific details regarding the work of a particular day. We cannot speak of Marxist alienation at work in the machine-like work system because there is an imperative to communicate between two workers so that work may be done day and night in a number of shifts. Alienation only applies to that period of history when work was completed for the day after workers left the factory. In a system that operates without taking a break, the workers are responsible for seeking out and communicating with other workers the details of the task and the responsibilities ahead, so the workers are not alienated from one another, but come into contact too much.

What enabled the construction of this machine? Perhaps the workers' unions are an important factor, because we can locate in their activities a concept of machine-like capitalism. The workers' unions keep the machine in place and running through an accurate judgment of workers' depreciation and the effective prevention of “random depreciation” such as workplace accidents, spontaneous worker unrest etc. The workers' union also has a hand in the observation and judgment of the worker's health and abilities, and creates the proper conditions for the worker to either change to a graveyard shift or to resign, all in order that the machine is run smoothly. The workers' unions, in this role, are the most capitalist of entities, for they are not concerned with the generation of profit only, they are beyond that, their concern is ensuring that capitalism as a system produces in a constant flow, that it has a rhythm, that it is humming like a healthy machine...a poetic-philosophical image of capitalism which is quite tempting and hard to erase. The problem is that, these days, such is the level of habituation of the worker to work that the workers do not know when to stop working.

It has to be said that money, in this regard, is not the culprit responsible for a kind of unhealthy 'workaholic.' Money is not the enslaving/oppressive symbol that submits people to work beyond their will, rather, money is the symbol of people's eagerness to work; money is the object which symbolizes people's drive to work. Money is a symbol made by the people, it is not a symbol acting on the people. Given the free reign and circulation that money has in society, it seems to be resistant to its political management, and seems rather to be a cultural object, an object which is much more free in its flows throughout the globe, which is seldom the object of political scrutiny and censorship. Even if we make an allowance to say that the flows of money are in part economically and politically determined, we still have to say that the most worthwhile earning and spending of money is determined by our cultural practices, norms and habits. Unlike political signs, which are imposed on the worker, money then is a symbol of hard work formed by the workers in the celebration of their collective and machine-like endeavor.

The Desire to Make Nepal's “War Jungles” into Historical Objects

There are many efforts underway, during and after a war, to try and make history. One way to make history is to make a certain portion of the territory relevant to the masses for a long time to come. This historical territory is usually the “No-Man's-Land,” such as the border regions between nations in traditional war, or the jungles in a guerrilla war. One of the issues that propels sides in a war to convert a piece of land into a historical land of dispute is that it is a way to subvert insertion of that land into the monetary economy: the no-man's-land or the jungle is exempt from economic valuation as it becomes an object of history, to be remembered because it was a special territory fought over rather than something to be utilized for building, agriculture or mining purposes eventually. In this way, a common desire from both sides of a conflict converts the contested territory into a historical object; both sides in a conflict demonstrate a fixation with history-making. That there is so much loss of life and other hardships during a war implies that the conversion of a territory into a historical object via the overcoming of its economic valuation is a tremendous feat indeed; it is as if a piece of land 'naturally' tends to be more friendly towards economic valuation rather than history-making. Ultimately, however, economic valuation and utility is short-lived; all objects are ultimately historical objects.

The exact history of the conflicts that criss-crossed a certain piece of land, such as a Nepali jungle, is however hard to preserve and disseminate. We therefore forget that a piece of land has history attached to it, and this forgetting is what enables us to put the land into the economic logic of buy/sell, boom/bust, profit/loss etc. Land, in particular, is hard to put within a historical framework of conflicts, harder than it is to submit houses and peoples to history and to remember them. Conflicts are therefore renewed, repeated again and again, in order that the land these conflicts occur on and for may be inserted once again into our memories, and hence, in this regard, conflicts would be entirely unnecessary if our historical memories were more longer and more pronounced. The necessity of war, then, is not economic nor is it political, but it is historical, it is the need to repeat history that brings two sides towards an enactment, a dramatization, of War. Thus, there is a need to re-evoke and preserve in history those conflicts that took place on the land from the oldest periods of known human history, as a way of subduing the desire to make war and re-submit territories into history again and again. It should be argued and asserted by witnesses that the re-enactment of a war in the present does more to trample on the past wars than it does to preserve them. 

But a factor of concern is whether the contemporary moment is characterized by an amnesia deeper than in previous times. This amnesia is a real possibility: the forces of globalization are inserting the local land upon which history-making processes take place into much wider global channels which ultimately means that history-making processes are being "colonized" by neo-imperial powers that utilize land far and away to re-enact the wars that they themselves do not want to repeat in the peaceful homeland. All the wars that are taking place today all over the world collectively re-enact the massive World War 2 that took place in Europe. Wars take place here, but have a greater significance over there, which causes amnesia of the local residents here. All this to say that if the memories and historical production at the local level concerning the war is weak, then it can perhaps be speculated that such a war has greater significance abroad, where it is depicted in detail by the media, than it does at the local level.