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. 

Aerial Warfare and the Warlord's Ego

Given the aura of the capital cities of most countries, given the ways in which the capitals are made attractive and have high symbolic value, the warlord's ego is especially fixated on capturing/invading the capital cities, rather than the other cities, towns and villages of a enemy country. What has enabled the warlord to attack precisely the capitals of countries? The modern fighter airplane is an invention which makes the attacks on strategic points of a country possible, and hence, to satisfy the warlord's ego, aerial warfare is conducted to attack the capital, to enable the capture of the capital straight away. The traditional myth of the military-industrial complex posits that the technological gain dictates the warlord's capabilities in combat, but, the warlord's ego is very much still a force in determining what types of technology are made possible and what style of warfare can be conducted. The collective efforts of the industrial labor force that works on combat technology are not what causes war, neither is war perpetrated for "national interests," rather, war is still driven forward by the ego of the (often individual) warlord. The warlord pools together the vested interests, or may indeed fabricate the vested interests entirely, in order that his ego's war be possible. That the capital cities have been westernized at least in their outward appearance is a telling sign that what the warlord fights against is in a sense 'closer to home,' for his ego has been developed in rivalry with other western egos and he has no real knowledge of the realities of the non-western individuals on the ground where his war is conducted. His war is about directly attacking sentiments of peace and freedom at home via the attacks on an "other" abroad that happens to be the object of scrutiny of the western pacifists that he knows. 

Whereas the process of conducting war is left to the warlord's ego, the aftermath of the war demands a whole other kind of expertise entirely, an expertise which needs to somehow manage the gains of war and which needs to return the whole country back to a kind of stability. War has a strict fixed budget and a fixed plan. Often its most important moments are the capture of the capital and the other important cities, after that, war has to be considered over, partly over fears that the boosted ego of the warlord will not want to stop and will thus conduct war on other territories as well. After the successes, the country needs a different kind of external force to impact it, and it must be returned to peace, however short lived, to satisfy the vested interests that helped war go forward. The warlord has to be replaced as the authority over that territory by someone who can command and maintain peace at the same time.

There is a problem in the aftermath of an aerial warfare focused on capturing the capital of a country. The problem is that if the enemy country's government did not have a good handle on the tribal and/or rural regions of the country, then capturing just the capital will not translate to a real authority over the rest of the country.  Too often in modern conceptions of warfare, the capital is taken as the most strategically important point of a combat operation, but, the gains made in the capital may not indicate a command over the other regions of a country, given other leaders who may command these other regions. An airplane may fly one straight to the capital, but something about the logic of traditional war still endures: that the peripheral village/tribal regions must be attacked first, and only as strength and confidence is gathered, and the ego is boosted, should the warlord progress slowly, by making gains and conquering the rural, towards the capital, which is usually located at a central point of the territory. It is problematic that the warlord's ego is today boosted in training and education than it is in actual combat operations "on the ground." War has been conducted with sensation in mind: with spectacular gains made in the capital being more valuable than the slow invasion.  

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.

Thamel and Lakeside: Nepal's Good 'Societies of Spectacle'

If we live in a 'spectacle society' as thinkers like Guy Debord believe, then we live in a society dominated by the need for cultural engagement, and we must be aware that cultural practices and products play important roles in managing society and economy. The division of labor force in society is a division of people between those who enjoy high culture and those who enjoy low culture; division of labor no longer has to do with socioeconomic stature, but we are divided as regards our tastes and preferences of various cultural products and practices.

The enjoyment of culture is possible today through an expending of labor and energy. Zizek writes that the super-ego's forced imperative to “Enjoy!” dominates today's subjects, and by enjoying, the laborer becomes productive, or, he/she expends labor in order to enjoy. What is needed, however, is the opposite: in both high-cultural and low-cultural activity in Nepal, there should be an enjoyment of laboring itself, there should be a 'making enjoyable' of the time one spends in one's office or factory floor. This enjoyment of work must be what culture facilitates, rather than culture standing as an escape or as the only point of enjoyment for the laborer.

Problematically in Nepali society, the wages that laborers earn are immediately and directly routed to cultural enjoyment; it is a frantic transfer of wages into consumption because only designated cultural practices, places and products can be enjoyed here. The laborer only thinks of cultural enjoyment when he/she earns money via expending his/her labor. Even though it has some psychological implications, this immediate enjoyment is not a genuine enjoyment of cultural objects, rather, it is a form of management of money within an economy, where money swiftly flows through the economy because of the rapid consumption of cultural objects; whereas in the Western societies consumption of industrially produced goods takes place, in Nepal it is (handcrafted) cultural objects that are the things causing consumerism. Engaging in culture turn out to be necessary for managerial purposes of the economy and society.

But there are some positives in Nepali society regarding cultural enjoyment. Tourist places of Nepal, Thamel and Lakeside, line up sophisticated jewelry in the public street in front of their stores to enable all people to enjoy these cultural products regardless of purchasing power and socioeconomic stature (all can enjoy the beauty of jewelry); these places are a part of Nepal's effort to erase the division of labor along culture lines, to erase the division between high-culture expats and the low-culture sweepers in these tourist places. Additionally, the lowly laborer's location within a cultural community enables his/her work to become enjoyable compared to a non-cultural workplace, because in a cultural community, a relaxed tourist occupies the gaze/place of power observing how work is being done.

Thamel and Lakeside foster true leisure for the lowly worker via the erasure of barriers between high and low cultures and also through the situating of the worker in a culture-centered workplace. Leisure is not an absence of work, rather leisure and work must operate at the same time, and ultimately leisure enables the investment in work of more energy developed due to the enjoyment of that work, in that, the true object of leisure is to make work better; a laborer's work-related energy and productivity are not constants, but change depending on leisure (work is dependent not just on leisure time, but also on the quality of leisure: the Marxist habit of equating the value of things with their time/duration must be countered because such a reduction to time does not give much substance to cultural activities which are important but of short duration, such as a fleeting look at a jewelry item). Leisure is possible for a laborer immersed in a community dismantling high culture-low culture divisions of a populace and if the dismantling of barriers makes possible a contact with diverse cultural objects.