Sunday, August 12, 2012
The Apostate Children Of God
Ambedkar knew that there would be outcasts as long as there
are castes
The Laws of Manu is one of the most exemplary texts of
ideology in the entire history of humanity. The first reason is that while its
ideology encompasses the entire universe, inclusive of its mythic origins, it
focuses on everyday practices as the immediate materiality of ideology:
how (what, where, with whom, when…) we eat, defecate, have sex, walk, enter a
building, work, make war, etc. The second reason is that the book stages a
radical shift with regard to its starting point (presupposition): the ancient
code of Veda. What we find in Veda is the brutal cosmology based on killing and
eating: higher things kill and eat/consume lower ones, stronger eat weaker,
i.e., life is a zero-sum game where one’s victory is another’s defeat. The
“great chain of being” appears here as founded in the “food chain,” the great
chain of eating: gods eat mortal humans, humans eat mammals, mammals eat lesser
animals who eat plants, plants “eat” water and earth… such is the eternal cycle
of being. So why does then Veda claim that at the top of society are not
warriors-kings stronger than all other humans, “eating” them all, but the caste
of priests? Here, the ideological ingenuity of Veda enters the stage: the
function of the priests is to prevent the first, highest, level of cosmic
eating: the eating of human mortals by gods. How? By way of performing
sacrificial rituals. Gods must be appeased, their hunger for blood must be
satisfied, and the trick of the priests is to offer gods a substitute (symbolic)
sacrifice: an animal or other prescribed food instead of human life. The
sacrifice is needed not for any special favours from gods, but to make it sure
that the wheel of life goes on turning. Priests perform a function which
concerns the balance of the entire universe: if gods remain hungry, the whole
cycle of cosmic life is disturbed.
From the very beginning, the “holistic” notion of the great
chain of Being—whose reality is the brutal chain of stronger eating weaker—is
thus based on deception: it is not a “natural” chain, but a chain based on an
exception (humans who don’t want to be eaten), i.e., sacrifices are substitute
insertions aimed at restoring the complete life cycle.
This was the first contract between ideologists (priests)
and those in power (warriors-kings): the kings, who retain actual power (over
life and death of other people) will recognize the formal superiority of the
priests as the highest caste, and, in exchange for this appearance of
superiority, the priests will legitimize the power of the warriors-kings as
part of the natural cosmic order. Then, however, around the sixth and fifth
century BCE, something took place, a radical “revaluation of all values” in the
guise of the universalist backlash against this cosmic food chain: the ascetic
rejection of this entire infernal machine of life reproducing itself through
sacrifice and eating. The circle of food chain is now perceived as the circle
of eternal suffering, and the only way to achieve piece is to exempt oneself
from it. (With regard to food, this, of course, means vegetarianism: not eating
killed animals.) From perpetuating time, we pass to the goal of entering the
timeless Void. With this reversal from the life-affirming stance to the
world-renunciation, comparable to the Christian reversal of the pagan universe,
the highest values are no longer strength and fertility, but compassion,
humility, and love. The very meaning of sacrifice changes with this reversal:
we no longer sacrifice so that the infernal life-cycle goes on, but to get rid
of the guilt for participating in this cycle.
What are the socio-political consequences of this reversal?
How can we avoid the conclusion that the entire social hierarchy, grounded in
the “great food chain” of eaters and those being eaten, should be suspended? It
is here that the genius of The Laws of Manu shines: its basic
ideological operation is to unite the hierarchy of castes and the ascetic
world-renunciation by way of making the purity itself the criterion of one’s
place in the caste hierarchy. As Wendy Doniger says in her introduction to this
text,
“Vegetarianism was put forward as the only way to liberate
oneself from the bonds of natural violence that adversely affected one’s karma.
A concomitant of this new dietary practice was a social hierarchy governed to a
large extent by the relative realization of the ideal of non-violence. The rank
order of the social classes did not change. But the rationale for the ranking
did.”
Vegetarian priests are at the top, as close as humanly
possible to purity; they are followed by the warriors-kings who reality by
dominating it and killing life — they are in a way the negative of the priests,
i.e., they entertain towards the wheel of Life the same negative attitude like
the priests, albeit in the aggressive/intervening mode. Then come the producers
who provide food and other material conditions for life, and, finally, at the
bottom, the outcasts whose main task is to deal with all kinds of excrements,
the putrefying dead remainders of life (from cleaning the toilets to butchering
animals and disposing of human bodies).
Since the two attitudes are ultimately incompatible, the
task of their unification is an impossible one and can be achieved only by a
complex panoply of tricks, displacements and compromises whose basic formula is
that of universality with exceptions: ‘in principle yes, but…’ The Laws of
Manu demonstrates a breath-taking ingenuity in accomplishing this task,
with examples often coming dangerously close to the ridiculous.
For example, priests should study the Veda, not trade; in
extremity, however, a priest can engage in trade, but he is not allowed to
trade in certain things like sesame seed; if he does it, he can only do it in
certain circumstances; finally, if he does it in the wrong circumstances, he
will be reborn as a worm in dogshit…
In other words, the great lesson of The Laws of Manu is
that the true regulating power of the law does not reside in its direct prohibitions,
in the division of our acts into permitted and prohibited, but in regulating
the very violations of prohibitions: the law silently accepts that the basic
prohibitions are violated (or even discreetly solicits us to violate them), and
then, once we find ourselves in this position of guilt, it tells us how to
reconcile the violation with the law by way of violating the prohibition in a
regulated way…
British colonial administration of India elevated The
Laws of Manu into a privileged text to be used as a reference for
establishing the legal code which would render possible the most efficient
domination of India – up to a point, one can even say that The Laws of
Manu only became the book of the Hindu tradition retroactively,
chosen to stand for the tradition by the colonizers among a vast choice (the
same as its obscene obverse, “tantra,” which was also systematized into a
coherent dark, violent and dangerous cult by the British colonizers) – in all
these cases, we are dealing with what Eric Hobsbawm called “invented
traditions.” What this also implies is that the persistence of the phenomenon
and social practice of the Untouchables is not simply a remainder of tradition:
their number grew throughout the nineteenth century, with the spreading of
cities which lacked proper canalization, so that the outcasts were needed to
deal with dirt and excrements. At a more general level, one should thus reject
the idea that globalization threatens local traditions, that it flattens
differences: sometimes it threatens them, more often it keeps them alive, or
resuscitates them by way of adapting them to new conditions – say, like the
British and Spanish re-invented slavery.
With the formal prohibition of the discrimination of the
Untouchables, their exclusion changed status and became the obscene supplement
of the official/public order: publicly disavowed, it continues its subterranean
existence. However, this subterranean existence is nonetheless formal (it
concerns the subject’s symbolic title/status), which is why it does not follow
the same logic as the well-known classic Marxist opposition of formal equality
and actual inequality in the capitalist system: here, it is the inequality (the
persistence of the hierarchic caste system) which is formal, while in their
actual economic and legal life, individuals are in a way equal (a dalit today
can also become rich, etc.).
The status of the caste hierarchy is here not the same as
that of nobility in a bourgeois society, which is effectively irrelevant, just
a feature which may add to the subject’s public glamour.
Exemplary is here the conflict between B.R. Ambedkar and
Gandhi during the 1930s: although Gandhi was the first Hindu politician to
advocate the full integration of the Untouchables, and called them “the
children of god,” he perceived their exclusion as the result of the corruption
of the original Hindu system. What Gandhi envisaged was rather the (formally)
non-hierarchical order of castes within which each individual has his/her own
allotted place: he emphasized the importance of scavenging and celebrated the
Untouchables for performing this “sacred” mission. It is here that the
Untouchables are exposed to the greatest ideological temptation: in a way which
prefigures today’s “identity politics,” Gandhi is allowing them to “fall in
love with themselves” in their humiliating identity, to accept their degrading
work as a noble necessary social task, to perceive even the degrading nature of
their work as a sign of their sacrifice, of their readiness to do the dirty job
for society. Even his more “radical” injunction that everyone, Brahmin
included, should clean his or her own shit, obfuscates the true issue, which is
not that of our individual attitude, but of a global social nature. (The same
ideological trick is performed today by injunctions which bombard us from all
sides to recycle personal waste, to put bottles, newspapers, etc., in the
appropriate separate bins… in this way, guilt and responsibility are
personalized, it is not the entire organization of economy which is to blame,
but our subjective attitude which should be changed.) The task is not to change
our inner selves, but to abolish Untouchability as such, i.e., not as an
element of the system, but the system itself which generates it. In contrast to
Gandhi, Ambedkar saw this clearly when he, as Christophe Jaffrelot says,
“underlined the futility of merely abolishing Untouchability: this evil being
the product of a social hierarchy of a particular kind, it was the entire caste
system that had to be eradicated: ‘There will be out castes /Untouchables/ as
long as there are castes.’ … Gandhi responded that, on the contrary, here it
was a question of the foundation of Hinduism, a civilization which, in its
original form, in fact ignored hierarchy.”
In 1927, Ambedkar symbolically burnt a copy of the Manusmriti;
Gandhi always held in his hand a copy of the Bhagvad Gita—a text that
extolled the varna order in its originary four-fold form. Ambedkar mounted a
severe critique of the Gita for being a counter-revolutionary defence
of the caste order. The Gandhi-Ambedkar difference here is insurmountable: it
is the difference between the “organic” solution (solving the problem by way of
returning to the purity of the original non-corrupted system) and the truly
radical solution (identifying the problem as the “symptom” of the entire
system, the symptom which can only be resolved by way of abolishing the entire
system). Ambedkar saw clearly how the structure of four castes, or the varna
system, does not unite four elements which belong to the same order: while the
first three castes (priests, warrior-kings, merchants-producers) form a
consistent All, an organic triad, the Shudras (slaves) and Untouchables
(outside the four-fold system) are like Marx’s “Asiatic mode of production” the
“part of no part,” the inconsistent element which holds within the system the
place of what the system as such excludes — and as such, the Untouchables stand
for universality. Or, as Ambedkar’s put it in his ingenious wordplay: “There
will be outcasts as long as there are castes.” As long as there are castes,
there will be an excessive excremental zero-value element which, while formally
part of the system, has no proper place within it. Gandhi obfuscates this
paradox, as if harmonious structure is possible.
Saturday, August 11, 2012
A centralized location for your leftist literature
Slavoj Žižek Compendium
1992, Enjoy Your Symptom!
1995, Mapping Ideology
1997, The Abyss of Freedom
1997, The Plague of Fantasies
1999, The Ticklish Subject
Chto Delat Summer Educational Program, August 20—23, 2012
Monday, August 20
National Center of Contemporary Art
Moscow, Zoologicheskaya, 13
11.00—14.30
– Mladen Dolar, OFFICERS, MAIDS AND CHIMNEY SWEEPERS
– Slavoj Žižek, WHY PSYCHOANALYSIS MATTERS MORE THAN EVER
16.00—18.30 – THE URGENCY OF THOUGHT: PHILOSOPHY, POLITICS, PSYCHOANALYSIS (panel discussion)
National Center of Contemporary Art
Moscow, Zoologicheskaya, 13
11.00—14.30
– Mladen Dolar, OFFICERS, MAIDS AND CHIMNEY SWEEPERS
– Slavoj Žižek, WHY PSYCHOANALYSIS MATTERS MORE THAN EVER
16.00—18.30 – THE URGENCY OF THOUGHT: PHILOSOPHY, POLITICS, PSYCHOANALYSIS (panel discussion)
Chinese Pilot Jao Da (Lubyansky proyezd, 25)
22.00 – Concert by the band Arkady Kots
22.00 – Concert by the band Arkady Kots
Tuesday, August 21
Institute of Philosophy of Russian Academy of Sciences
Moscow, Volkhonka, 14
15.00—18.00 – Slavoj Žižek, IS IT STILL POSSIBLE TO BE A HEGELIAN TODAY? (lecture introduced by Mladen Dolar)
Institute of Philosophy of Russian Academy of Sciences
Moscow, Volkhonka, 14
15.00—18.00 – Slavoj Žižek, IS IT STILL POSSIBLE TO BE A HEGELIAN TODAY? (lecture introduced by Mladen Dolar)
Wednesday, August 22
European University in St. Petersburg
St. Petersburg, Gagarinskaya, 3
17.00—19.00 – Mladen Dolar, WHAT, IF ANYTHING, IS AN ATOM?
20.00 – Chto Delat film screening
European University in St. Petersburg
St. Petersburg, Gagarinskaya, 3
17.00—19.00 – Mladen Dolar, WHAT, IF ANYTHING, IS AN ATOM?
20.00 – Chto Delat film screening
Thursday, August 23
European University in St. Petersburg
St. Petersburg, Gagarinskaya, 3
12.00—14.00 – Slavoj Žižek, WELCOME TO THE DESERT OF POST-IDEOLOGY
16.00—19.00 – IS THERE A REASON IN HISTORY? STATE AND REVOLUTION
European University in St. Petersburg
St. Petersburg, Gagarinskaya, 3
12.00—14.00 – Slavoj Žižek, WELCOME TO THE DESERT OF POST-IDEOLOGY
16.00—19.00 – IS THERE A REASON IN HISTORY? STATE AND REVOLUTION
TODAY (panel discussion)
* Advance registration required to attend the events at the
European University in St. Petersburg: e-mail sociopol@eu.spb.ru or
phone +7 812 3867633
* Advance registration required to attend the events at
the National Centre of Contemporary Art in Moscow: e-mail pr@ncca.ru or
phone +7 (499) 254 84 92
* For all organizational questions and press inquiries,
phone +7 903 5931935or e-mail oxana_san@yahoo.com
* All events in Moscow (August 20-21) will be accompanied by
translation
* All events in St. Petersburg (August 22-23) will be
conducted in English
Liberal Communists
Excerpt from “The Apple Revolution: Steve Jobs, the Counter
Culture, and How the Crazy Ones Took Over the World by Luke Dormehl – review”
A genial account of the rise of Apple fails to probe the
company's cultural significance
[…]
Slavoj Žižek, in Violence – his analysis of the brutality at the heart of
capitalism – identifies "liberal communists" as
"counter-cultural geeks who take over big corporations". He looks at
the role of the hackers – once subversive and anti-establishment – and how they
were co-opted into the capitalist system through a kind of corporate
doublespeak that allowed them to marry their liberal, egalitarian ideals to the
cold machine of the market economy. He doesn't mention Jobs by name, but the
description of the "liberal communist" fits the Apple founder neatly:
"Liberal communists do not want to be just machines for generating
profits. They want their lives to have a deeper meaning. They are against
old-fashioned religion, but for spirituality, for non-confessional meditation."
Jobs, remember, could fit his legs behind his head. The only book he downloaded
on to his iPad? Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda.
Žižek identifies these "liberal communists" with
industrial barons of yesteryear such as Andrew Carnegie, who "employed a
private army brutally to suppress organised labour in his steelworks and then
distributed large parts of his wealth to educational, artistic and humanitarian
causes". The "liberal communist" is more threatening than the
sharp-suited Goldman Sachs banker precisely because he is shape-shifting,
slippery, using the language and semiotics of the counter-culture while firmly upholding
the establishment, raking in billions with one hand while getting on
stage with Bono (who,
ridiculously, called Jobs "the Elvis of the kind of hardware-software
dialectic") to lament the world's poor.
[…]
Letter from the Syrian Border
An on-the-ground report from the growing Syrian refugee
camps in Turkey.
YAYLADAG, Turkey (On the Syrian border)—Yasser Jani huddles
in a tiny sliver of shade. He wants to escape from the heat and crowding and an
uncertain future. But the small patch of trees just outside the camp for Syrian
refugees here didn’t offer one and his face shows it.
“Most of the people here are hopeless,” says the short,
middle-aged Syrian, who taught high school science before fleeing last year
with his wife, two small children, mother and brother. “They lost their homes,
their work, and their money and they don’t know anything about their future,”
he said.
“And I feel the same way,” he flatly adds.
As Syria boils, its diaspora lives in disparate worlds of
faith and despair, of denial and acceptance, and many places in between. The
young bodybuilder whose stomach was plugged with bullets from Syrian soldiers
nurtures old dreams while the husband, whose seventh-month pregnant wife was
killed as they were fleeing, is frozen in shock.
Daily the specter grows of yet another massive population of
uprooted and wounded souls in the Arab world.
Already more than 112,000 refugees are jammed in camps in
Turkey, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan, with thousands more are surviving on their
own in these countries. Many more Syrians appear ready to join these ranks and
flee their country as the fighting grows fiercer in Syria’s largest cities.
Dr. Moustafa, a Syrian psychiatrist now living in the United
Kingdom who would not give his last name, worries about the indelible scars
that he says will last long beyond any resolution to the crisis. The only
Syrian psychiatrist on hand here, he is forced to flit from camp to camp,
dealing with panic-stricken refugees, dispensing medication and trying to
measure the depth of the problem.
Yasser Jani is one of those refugees living somewhere
between hope and darkness. Despite his frustration about spending the last year
in the small, crowded camp, where he complains about the daily inconveniences,
he has helped out with classes for young children. It’s all he can do, he adds.
Likewise, Ahmed Hassoun, 56, follows the same daily routine,
which gives him meaning in Antakya, a large city in southeastern Turkey, where
many Syrians have gathered. A lawyer from Idlib in northwestern Syria, where
the fighting has been intense, Hassoun puts on a clean shirt and well-pressed
dark pants early in the morning in an almost empty apartment, where he lives
with his children, and heads to an office where he works with another 20 Syrian
refugee lawyers. His wife stayed behind in Syria.
He gets no pay for his work. None of the lawyers do. But
they have gathered daily, meeting with clients and taking careful notes for the
last month and a half. Their goal is to produce an accurate and detailed
account of the abuses suffered by Syrians under the Assad regime. They hope to
turn it over to the International Criminal Court or to a court in Syria when
they return, he explains.
They are also working with attorneys within Syria to compile
their records.
From the handful of refugees, who visit the office daily to
tell their stories or the stories of others who are too ashamed, as is the case
for female rape victims, or too overwhelmed to personally recount the events,
they have catalogued more than 30 kinds of torture, and at least 1,500 rapes,
some of them in groups.
His records show that Syrian torturers use metal and wooden
sticks and often electricity on their victims. They also use acid and it is not
unusual for victims to die of their burns and wounds, he says.
Soldiers caught escaping, “are executed right away by gun or
they slaughter them with knifes,” he says.
As a fellow attorney sitting beside Hassoun coolly recalls
seeing someone beaten to death on the street by Syrian soldiers with a rock,
Hassoun adds softly, “I feel terrible when I hear these stories.”
Many of the tortures that Hassoun has been recording were
suffered by Dr. Mohammed Sheik Ibrahim, 38, a soft-spoken pediatrician, who
didn’t want to leave Syria even after eight months in prison.
“They put me in a small cell for 28 days and they
interrogated me four times a day for an hour or two each time. Or they would
make me stand for hours. They beat me. They used wooden sticks and metal
sticks,” he says. “I heard them raping women and girls in the rooms nearby.”
When Ibrahim came home to Latakia from prison, he continued
to speak out to his clients, colleagues and anyone else about the regime’s
abuses. “I wasn’t afraid,” he explains. Then one day a high-ranking official
warned him that his life was in danger. He fled the next day, nearly nine
months ago.
Ibrahim has since been working with injured fighters in
Turkey from the Free Syrian Army. When thousands of fellow Turkmens from Syria
poured across the border recently, driven by aerial attacks, he rushed to the
camp that Turkish officials quickly set up for them here in Yayladag.
He is committed, he says, to work with the fighters and
follow them into Syria when they launch a large battle. His father has asked
him not to go, fearing for his life, but he remains determined to go with the
fighters, he says.
He explains that he is a doctor treating one wound after
another with no end in sight.
“When I am fixing them (the soldiers), I tell myself that
Bashar Assad is the man with the knife and he is the one causing all of these
wounds,” he says intensely, moving his arms, and raising his voice.
Like Ibrahim, Dr. Khaula Sawah knows much about the
refugees’ medical needs, because she has been organizing the help coming from
expatriate Syrians medical experts like herself. The expats arrive here in
waves from across Europe, the United States and the Arab world. They stay
several weeks and leave. Many return.
Sawah also works on finding medical supplies needed inside
of Syria. A clinical pharmacist at a Cincinnati hospital, she has come to
southeastern Turkey five times this year so far for this kind of work. This
time she brought her two sons along with her.
Born in St. Louis, Sawah moved as a child to Syria with her
Syrian-born parents. When her father was put in prison by the government, the
family waited 12 years in Syria until he was released.
Now vice-president of the Turkish branch of the Union of
Syrian Medical Relief Organizations, Sawah has lately been filling up a small
warehouse with medicine and then finding safe ways to smuggle it into Syria.
“The needs are humungous,” she says. “We’ll pitch in
$100,000 worth of medicine (in Syria) and it is gone in a few days.”
At the warehouse—the basement of a nearby apartment house in
Reyhanli—people are unpacking a new delivery of blood absorbing bandages.
A U.S. manufacturer had donated the supplies, worth nearly $500,000, Sawah
says.
From visits to the Turkish-run camps as well as clinics that
the Syrian physicians have set up, she is familiar with the refugees’ frustration.
It’s been especially difficult, she says, for those
who didn’t want to live in the camps because of their stark conditions or
isolation. As a result, they struck out on their own, renting apartments and
often doubling up with other families. In many places, rents doubled with the
refugees’ arrival, the refugees say.
“They are all illegal and they don’t have any rights,” she
explains. Soon they run out money and then discover that can’t get help at the
Turkish hospitals because they are not registered. “I just got a call from a
woman who went to the state hospital and said they wouldn’t check up her
child.”
But the greatest discontent, she says, is felt by those who
have been in the camps the longest. It wells up into squabbles between groups
and complaints about conditions. Indeed, there have been three disturbances in
refugee camps by Syrians asking for refrigerators, or water and food. Turkish
security forces used tear gas and fired bullets into the air to calm an
uprising at one camp.
But Sawah has also seen the way the refugees have struggled
to accommodate each other and adjust to a future on hold. Some have set up
small stores in the camps to earn money and make life more hospitable. And at
overcrowded clinics, older patients have given up their beds and slept on the
floor to make room for new arrivals.
At the Yayladag camp, where a recent fire took the lives of
a newlywed couple who had arrived only a few days earlier, Yasser Jani worries
about the young children who he says need more food and clothing, and the
teenagers who need a school. He worries too about the women who have to put up
with a lack of privacy and other difficulties.
After the fire at the camp, an old factory warehouse minutes
from the Syrian border, Turkish officials talked of moving the refugees to
another camp. But overcome by the arrival of as many as 1,000 refugees a day
and the need to open at least two more camps, the camp here has stayed open.
Privately, Jani worries about not having money and what’s
ahead. But on another day in the low 100s, he worries about just catching his
breath. Most nights he cannot sleep because of the heat.
“But I’m trying to make my life better,” he adds.
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