The original piece which I had written was a tad bigger in length than the version that came out in the blog. It is as follows:
On the Necessity to
Subvert
A Tale of Two Knights
Let’s start from a single point
and its apparent positive and apparent negative.
The Point – A vast majority of
people who write want their writings to be read by many people and Internet,
especially Facebook, satisfies this urge to reach out.
The Apparent Positive – The easy
flow and ready availability of poetry and poetic expressions: there’s no
monstrous publishing house with its clouts, touts, pimps, agents and other
sharks standing in the way, minimal censorship hassles, no need to put any
extra effort or spend any extra money for publicity, marketing and pitch.
The Apparent Negative – There’s
nothing stopping poetry we find lousy from hitting us. Bad poetry, as the
consensus goes, is worse than bad whiskey.
The above is an instance of underdetermination –
the banner which social networking, as the new white-knight of globalization,
upholds. Have we not united under that very banner? The purpose, as skeptics of
the world would agree, is to dissipate and dilute the clamour for more – because
‘more’ is still the exclusive jurisdiction of the dark knight – power, with its
several tentacles such as money, connections and other blahs.
Simply speaking, you don’t have
enough money or power to approach a literary agent of a big publishing house,
to spend for publishing and publicity, you don’t have enough money or power to
lobby at the corridors of the award-givers, so you are pissed, and there are
many like you who are similarly pissed. And then the Gods said, “Let there be
Social Networks!” Now, you are happy because you can make your work read by a
lot of people, and the big brothers of publishing are happy because you are not
mad at them anymore.
What? Are you asking for more? Good, there is self-publishing!
Spend a lump and here we go. Now, now, are you asking for even more? Hmm, now you are entering a rarified zone.
You need to spend a bigger lump this time, but it’s not just about money. You
have dared to enter the territory of the dark knight. Absolute obedience is
necessary. What happens to our hero after this will be determined by so many
factors that if I dare to spell them out, I will be accused of giving flowers
to the corpse of the demon essentialism, whom, as I have been told, our great
hero and saviour whom we lovingly call postmodernism, had slain.
These two knights serve their
master who currently goes by the name ‘globalization’ and who rules over the
castles our socially conditioned existence. One such castle was christened as
the ‘culture industry’ by a couple of scholars in 1944[1].
Language of the Globalizer, Language of the Globalized
The language of the globalizer is
one which would not lead to a red underline when you type it over on any
virtual counterpart of pen and paper without installing/activating any
language-pack. The script of the globalizer is one which can be typed on any of
these virtual counterparts without installing or activating any script pack.
Whatever you express through waves and particles needs to be comprehended by
the globalizer – who has fed and clothed our cognition, enabled us to open our
windows (not sure whether pun unintended or not), given us our bridges and
platforms. Making “at least some sense” has been the first criteria of reaching
out, ever since cavepeople learned to convert their grunts to speeches. Given
that we have learned to give the devil his due, and we have learned about
justice equity and good conscwhatever, we don’t have any “reason” at our disposal to rebel against the need for passwords to
cross the bridges. (Of course, unreason lurks,
repressed as symptom[2],
in the deep folds of our carefully cultivated reason; however, unlike our reason,
it (unreason) sees no daylight of our
conscious mind, which, thus, sees no reason to rebel against the taught need
for passwords and other rules of the game.) If you need to play the game, you
have to play by the rules as shaped by history. The picture is clear up to this
point. After that, the waters start getting murky.
Of Masterpiece and Masterpisses
We turn to the twentieth century
Greats, especially to Saussure and Barthes, to learn that one need not learn
great things and get great literary aspirations only from the greats. Here we
are stuck in a loop with another late twentieth century Great. Lyotard has
given us the ‘differend’ which implies confrontations pertaining to language in
which the ends are left open.
He uses the example of a
masterpiece in explaining the concept of ‘differend’:
A writer has written a masterpiece. No editor agrees to publish it.
Now, how can she prove that it is a masterpiece? We want to extend the question
into the zone of the future that is coming but is still unknown. How the writer
can sustain as a writer — who knows that she is writing masterpieces and it is
the very knowledge that confines her to a solitary cell — no one else is there
who knows it too, because the works just do not get published? Her masterpieces
do not get known as masterpieces due to the very quality of being masterpieces[3][4].
Let’s keep post-structuralism and Saussure out of the discourse and just
stretch this illustration. The writer uploads it on her Facebook profile as a
note and on her blog, tags a hundred people on each, copy-pastes the link on
all the free platforms available on Internet, including on the Facebook
profiles of ten thousand people. It’s not “published” in the traditional sense,
but it’s on the public pool, as a free resource. It goes ‘viral’. Thus, it
becomes a masterpiece. In this way the Internet, apparently, resolves this
particular conflict and it does not remain a differend. Of course, it’s not a
free lunch. She has to be in a social-economic-cultural-educational position to
have access to the internet, have enough means to pay her internet bills, throw
open her Facebook profile for advertisers to infiltrate (how often have you
been pissed/ not-pissed at the thumbsized picture of Oscar Wilde with the
caption: “Learn to write like the greats. Click to learn more” at the
right-hand column of your Facebook profile”?)and make a lot of virtual friends,
socialize with a lot of people on the
virtual sphere so that they don’t get pissed or remain indifferent to her masterpiece. Thus, any scope of her choice
of reclusion and/or poverty gets nullified because she wants to make her masterpiece a masterpiece but she hasn’t got
enough money or power or contacts to do so. It is this very want that both the white and the dark
knight of globalization seek to safeguard and strengthen and this very choice that they seek to deny. It’s a win-win
situation for globalization. It’s not a contract between her and globalization
but a submission – to the lord and master of the castle named Culture Industry
– on her part, one which she has no choice but to make, because she wants to. Her masterpiece won’t be a
masterpiece otherwise. Thus, what we see here is not a negation of a differend.
Lyotard still gets his last laugh[5]
and we are still at square one. We are not back
to it because we were always there.
Calcutta got the enlightenment-pump
in the 19th century when it became the capital city of what was then the
biggest British colony in terms of population, geographical expanse and the
wealth it generated for the British Empire. There’s no documented ethnocultural
history from the pre-colonial era of the geographical locus of this place.
Calcutta, just like Bombay, was established and developed as a city by the
colonizers keeping their colonial needs in mind. The “Western” perspective, i.e., the
perspective of the dominator tells us that Mapping, Documentation and Profiling
of culturally identifiable units is necessary. Moreover, the perceived dominant
position which those culturally identifiable units that had subjected
themselves to such Mapping, Documentation and Profiling for a long span of time
hold in the power-play of history has led to a definite inferiority-complex in
those ethno-cultural units which have not subjected themselves to similar
Mapping, Documentation and Profiling for such a long span of time and are hence
are being dominated by those units which had undergone such Mapping, Documentation and Profiling. This
complex is reflected in the way such groups trace and approach their own
cultural indentifier-roots. But this
inferiority complex causes discomfort to and leads to discomfiture of the ego
of the dominated and hence it is only natural that the dominated will try to
appease its ego by embracing the perspective and perception of the
dominated. Thus, it is not surprising
that the intelligentsia of Bengal has learned to approach its Bengali identity
as a group in a “Western” way, i.e., by mimicking the dominators – be it the
colonizers or the globalizers. The essay I had referred to in footnotes 3 &
4 terms it as ‘mimicry of overdetermination’. This mimicry can be seen in every
discourse the intelligentsia partakes, self-styled avant-garde art and literary
being no exception. For example, because of the fact that this city has been a
major platform for several artistic and intellectual ventures on the 20th
century, a significant chunk of the cultural-elites over here had started
terming Calcutta as the Paris of the East. Another example would be the fact
that those prominent personalities like Tagore & Ray who had received
acclaim from the West got easier access to the culture capital of the ‘Culture
Industry’. Thus, when Satyajit Ray went to Cannes in the 1950s, it became a
milestone in the cultural scenario of Calcutta, but it certainly did not become
so in the cultural scenario of France or Italy when the Renoir, Malle,
Antonioni or many other Western cinema-personalities who dealt with the New
Wave or Neo-Realism genres of Cinema made multiple visits to the city to meet
him and get a hang of the Parallel-Cinema cult of India.
Allow me to state where and how I
stand. Bengali is my ‘native’ language. I read and write both in Bengali and Engli$h.
I think and speak using Bengali. My grandpa and six generations before him were
colonized, my father was nationalized, I have been globalized. Because the West
properly entered East through the exact geographical locus I am sitting at
right now, these parts have a tragicomic cultural history. For all practical
purposes, the city I hail from was established by the colonizing forces. The
mission of ‘Civilizing the brutes’ began from this city and its surroundings.
The Engli$h language, along with ideas of Enlightenment, was the basic
signifier of the dominant discourse, and those who practiced, assimilated and
perfected the lessons learned from the West. Then our country got politically
independent, a lot of shit happened and a lot of shit has kept on happening,
but the dominant discourses have remained the same and the power-structure has
remained largely similar. This applies for the cultural front as much as it does
for the political and economic front. My grandfather needed to know the Engli$h
language to be ‘up there’ and so do I. As for writing, I write using both the
languages though I am more comfortable with Bengali because I think in that
language and hence I don’t have to translate my thoughts. It’s not that I have
to go through/perform a conscious process/activity of mental translation of my
thoughts and ideas to write in Engli$h, but it’s still a second language and it
will forever be so. Human existence is social and it’s largely owing to
conditions of existence that I will be forced to be a relentless player in the
dominant discourses and their interplay, whether I continue my literary pursuit
or not.
As for globalization, it has
strengthened the fortifications of the roughly three hundred years old world
order. There’s this saying that the local is the new global and there’s also a
term ‘glocalization’ floating around these days, but these are the things we
are given to bullshit ourselves with. Of course, it terms of hegemony, cultural[8]
or otherwise, it’s still binary, it may not be 0 and 1, but it’s around ¼ and
¾, but the 1 had to concede the ¼ to the 0 for self-preservation but that
doesn’t really make it non-binary. Does it? It might or might not become ½ and
½ in future and then the power-structure may or may not start shifting, but
that’s none of my business.
Macaulay’s Bastard
Though I write using the
colonizer’s language at times, I would like to assert that I am not Aerial and that
language is not Prospero. At the same time, because I have not acquired the
Western ‘cultural’ heritage by easy birthright, I have not inherited it. When
my voice, as a writer, is to be heard (read) on a global/Western stage and
context, I can ill afford to be the bastard child of Macaulay. But, am I not
exactly that? Therein lies the dichotomy, a mad pull of opposites, and a source
of perplexing insecurity and conflict. Have I inherited the cross/crosses I
bear? What cross/crosses do I bear? What have I inherited? These questions can
never have clear-cut answers and if I attempt at finding same, I would once
again be deemed guilty of worshipping the demon of essentialism.
I do not want my writing to fall
into the void which I have explained while dealing with the writer who had
written her unpublished masterpiece. At times I feel like I have been pushed to
the edge of the cliff beyond which lies that scary realm of silence. The
fightback begins from this very point. I represent myself and my own voice. The
enemies are represented by the dark and the white knights, their great master
who currently goes by the name ‘globalization’. (the master had a different
name and a different face in the past and so had the knights, the master will
have a different name and a different face in future and so will the knights). I
have no desire to fan up or the flames of the sort of want which the author of the unpublished manuscript has, and I
don’t want the great master whom the
dark and the white knights serve to determine my wants and deny my choices.
That master is big and strong and so are the two knights. The sole weapon in my
arsenal is to subvert. Given that my want
is to not let my voice fall into the void of being unheard, I have to fight
them back and move away from the cliff-edges. That’s my first lack of choice. Again, given that the
opposition is the dominator and I am the dominated in this text, my choicelessness also lies in the very fact that I
have no option but to subvert. Being Macaulay’s bastard child and being a dominated
globalization has indeed killed my choices. Just that my wants are not the sort that can be fulfilled by either my bastardom
or my oppressedness.
In short, I want to be a dominant
part of the discourse through my written text. For that I need access to
platforms wherefrom I can reach out to the originators and recipients of the
existing dominant voices. The current spread and outlay of force and domination
stands against such access. I can’t indulge in full frontal fight against the
current voices of dominance, including that of the Culture Industry. Hence, there
is this need to subvert.
Despite the predominance of those
who indulge in collaboration and complicity with the agents of force and
domination (such as the two knights I have mentioned previously) in the realm
of texted voices(/voiced texts?) there are many out here whose aspirations are
akin to mine. Let the oppressed writers of the world unite (and subvert). They
have nothing to lose but their projected sanity. They have the world to win
seats of power to decentralize.
[1] Adorno
& Horkheimer, The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass-Deception,
1944
[2] Per the understanding of Freud-Lacan-Zizek
[3] I
have quoted this from here: http://ddts.randomink.org/Engli$h/mom-book/ch_1.html.
It’s a part of an insightful treatise on post-colonialism by three
Calcutta-based academics. It’s not been widely published or circulated. To me,
it is a masterpiece.
[4]
Chaudhury et al, Margin of Margin: Profile of an Unrepentant Post-colonial Collaborator,
Anushtup, Calcutta, 2000
[5] My
understanding of Lyotard is woefully limited. I have used his concept of the
differend simply because the illustration featuring the unpublished masterpiece
relates directly to the point/s I seek to make.
[6] I
refer to hegemony here as that of the ‘Culture Industry’, following the
understanding of Adorno and Horkheimer.
[7] This
term and the title of the next chapter are drawn out from the same essay as
mentioned in Footnotes 3 & 4 .
[8] Supra 5
2 comments:
I had to read through it atleast three times to get an idea of what you were getting at. Masterpiece, I say
Thanks buddy. :D
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