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What's in a Name? Or Why Clicktivism May Not Be Ruining Left Activism in India, At Least For Now
https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/revolution-2.0/whats-in-a-name-or-why-clicktivism-may-not-be-ruining-left-activism-in-india-at-least-for-now
<b>In a recent piece in the Guardian titled “Clicktivism Is Ruining Leftist Activism”, Micah White expressed severe concern that, in drawing on tactics of advertising and marketing research, digital activism is undermining “the passionate, ideological and total critique of consumer society”. His concerns are certainly shared by some in India: White's piece has been circulating on activist email lists where people noted with concern that e-activism may be replacing “the real thing” even in this country. But is the situation in India really this dire?</b>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Among those
who consider themselves activists in a more traditional fashion,
critical debates on what it means to be an activist certainly remain
alive and well. Among India's social movements, perhaps most
prominent, over the past decade, have been those that protest against
large-scale “development” projects and the displacement they tend
to cause – projects of which especially India's tribal people, or
<em>adivasis</em>,
often are the victims. In these circles, arguments against the use
of the Internet for activism often focus on the elitist character of
this tool: in a country where Internet penetration rates continue to
hover around a meagre five percent, frequently neither the people
affected nor the wider groups that need to be mobilised have access
to this resource. Clearly then, organising online is never
sufficient and, perhaps not surprisingly, debates about what is
called “armchair activism” consequently are both common and
intense. In a recent <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTnncO8kc-Y">video</a>
posted on YouTube, for example, the respected Himanshu Kumar – who
everyone will recognise as a grassroots activist –
called on the nation to support the <em>adivasis</em>
and their causes. In the same video, he also explicitly requested
people to get off the Internet: </p>
<blockquote>
<p align="JUSTIFY">
<em>Is
me jo shehero me rehne wale log hai, mujhe unse khas tor se kehna hai
ki aap sheher me baithe rahenge, net par thoda sa likh denge – usse
sarkar ko koi farak padne wala nahi hai. Na janta Internet padthi
hai na sarkar Internet padthi hai. Hum jo activist hai wohi aapas
mein Internet par pad lethe hai. Usse sarkar ki koi policiyan nahi
badal payenge, sarkar par pressure nahi create kar payenge. Jab tak
ham aam janta ke beech mein nahi jayenge, na to hame desh ki problems
pata challenge, na ham desh ke logon ko jaga payenge. </em></p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">
[To
the people in the cities, I want to especially say that, you keep
sitting in the cities, you write something on the Internet - it
doesn't make any difference to the government. Neither do people read
the Internet, nor does the government read the Internet. Only
activists like you and me read on the Internet. Through that, we
cannot change the policies of the government, we cannot create
pressure on the government. As long as we don't go among/approach
the common people, neither will we come to know the country's
problems, nor will we be able to awaken the people]. </p>
</blockquote>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Not
everybody I spoke to would have agreed with Kumar's argument. The
importance of mass mobilisation and the need to be in touch with
grassroots realities are recognised by all movement activists, as is
consequently the requirement to get active offline as much as online.
But whether mass mobilisation at the grassroots is the <em>only</em>
way forward is not something that everyone is convinced of. In the
context of the <a href="http://www.binayaksen.net/">Free Binayak Sen
campaign</a>, for example, there is considerable recognition that the
website was a vital complement to a well-organised offline campaign
to free Dr. Binayak Sen from jail, which kicked off in the spring of
2008. Sen is a community health doctor and civil liberties activist
who had worked for more than twenty five years among the <em>adivasis</em>
of Chhattisgarh, the heart of the current Maoist conflict, when he
was arrested on the basis of what many considered completely
baseless, yet non-bailable charges of being a Maoist himself, and
left to languish in jail for two years. A regularly updated website,
and related Facebook group and email list, soon became the focal
point for a massive outpouring of support for Sen from different
parts of the world, including in the form of a letter from twenty
Nobel Prize winners, as well as an important source of information on
the campaign for activists within the country. In May 2009, the
Indian Supreme Court finally released granted bail to Dr. Binayak
Sen. The Doctor's trial is currently ongoing.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">In
this context of critical debates, how do those who do see themselves
as activists, yet draw on the Internet as a significant tool to
publicise struggles, justify themselves? If the Internet can play a
role in changing matters at the grassroots, and has proven to do so
in the past, does it become possible to intensely use this tool and
still be recognised as an activist in a more traditional reading of
this word? The fact that most middle-class English speaking cadres
of movements are online, despite their protestations against online
activism for being elitist, may well play in the favour of advocates
of online protest: it does open up a space to argue for the relevance
of this medium, even if for a limited group, and for the importance
of its responsible use. Indeed, it may well be for this reason that
it is possible to watch on YouTube a number of videos in which
Himanshu Kumar shares his experiences at the grassroots, his own
discomfort with the medium notwithstanding. But it is not this
ambiguity that is at the heart of the claims to credibility of
advocates of online activism. Rather, as has always been the case,
it is their continued connectedness to the grassroots. How much you
are in the know of what happens at the grassroots; whether you have
physically joined struggles; to what extent you get your hands dirty
offline and show up for meetings, rallies, poster pasting, rather
than limiting your engagement to the online route – these are the
kind of elements that determine whether you are an online <em>activist</em>.
What you do offline remains as important as ever. To only
work online is not sufficient. </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Importantly,
such readings are frequently mirrored by those who do not have such
connections to the grassroots. In my research, I have more than once
come across “online activists” who started their conversation
with me by stating that they were not, in fact, activists at all.
Interestingly, Maesy Angelina has observed a similar reluctance to
identify as an activist among participants in the <a href="http://www.blanknoise.org/">Blank
Noise</a> project (personal communication and Angelina, forthcoming),
a campaign to combat street sexual harassment and, with its extensive
use of online tools over the seven years of its existence, one of the
paragons of online activism in India. While Maesy herself will blog
more about how Blank Noise participants understand activism later on
<a href="https://cis-india.org/research/dn">here,</a> (earlier
posts are available as well) at least in my research, the reason why
people refused the “activist” label was generally not because
they disapproved of what it might stand for. Rather, they saw a
clear difference between their own contribution and that of the
full-time activists who ceaselessly mobilise and organise people on
the ground, those who in many cases draw on a distinct and
easily-recognisable language of protest that infuses everything from
the shape protests take to activists' dressing sense in the process –
the “jholawallahs”, as
one person I follow on Twitter calls them, after the trademark cotton
bag that they often carry around. Those who refused the namecard of
an “activist” were clear that they would never have chosen such a
full-time activist's life; what new technology allowed them to do,
however, was to nevertheless make a contribution, even if often on a
smaller scale, of their own. As one person put it quite movingly:</p>
<blockquote>
<p align="JUSTIFY">
I believe that, I think that ordinary people, and I am <em>convinced</em>,
that they can do, can use this medium to actually make a difference,
you know or bring about change, to change the world. You know, these
dreams that you have sometimes, “I want to change the world in some
way” [laughs]. You know? I do believe that... it's possible. And
you don't have to be an activist or working in an NGO. You can be
working anywhere, you can be doing anything as your day job, you
know, or your regular job. But, you can contribute.</p>
</blockquote>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Clearly,
then, critical readings of what it means to be an activist are common
not only among those who are activists in a more traditional sense,
but among those who focus on exploring the use of new tools for
social change as well: the kind of credibility, based on offline
experience, that attaches to more traditional activists is not
something they claim for themselves. But what they understand is
that new technologies have facilitated a qualitatively new kind of
engagement with movements, with activism, with social change. And
what such “not-activists” do claim is that this has made it
possible for ordinary people to now also make a difference, even
though small that difference often may be. </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">In
many ways this type of involvement is actually not new, as
contributions of non-activists have always played an important role
in the survival and evolutions of movements, especially at times of
great urgency: doctors who are ready to treat patients for free;
lawyers who supply legal advice without expecting anything in return;
people with comfortable jobs in the private sector who one knows one
can rely on for donations when required (most movements in India
survive financially by relying solely or mostly on donations by
private persons). What is new with the introduction of the Internet
is that the possibility of contributions by people who are not
activists are now extended into new areas, as it has become much
easier to contribute to publicising and building community around
issues that are close to movements' heart as well.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">So
how to evaluate White's claim that clicktivism is ruining Left
activism in the Indian context then? For one thing, it is important
to remember that we simply do not – or not yet at least – have
platforms such as <a href="http://moveon.org/">MoveOn</a> or <a href="http://avaaz.org/">Avaaz</a>,
that draw, as White explains, on market ideology to conveniently
break down a seemingly endless number of political campaigns into
little bites for easy individual consumption with the click of a
mouse button. Left activism in India, even online, remains firmly
embedded in <em>communities</em>
of engagement. Surely e-petitions, for example, are popular here as
much as elsewhere. But the point to remember is that they rarely
circulate in isolation. Instead, they emerge from the email lists,
from the postings and repostings as well as conversations on
Facebook, from the blogs around which much Left activism online
revolves. And crucial to these uses of the Internet as a tool for
social change is not clicking, but engagement and conversation.
Perhaps it is for this reason that even a landmark campaign such as
Free Binayak Sen has hardly received any attention in the
international online activists' arena: campaigns such as this do not
revolve around the number of clicks they get, nor around flash-points
or events shaped to satisfy the hunger of the international media,
valuable as some may argue these can be; rather, they are intended
for the long haul, as they attempt to build on existing collectives
to extend the communities of solidarity around issues that move and
drive the Left in this neoliberal age. Even online, the politics can
and does infuse the method, at least for now. </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">This,
then, gives something to ponder over. It is true that working among
people, offline, remains of crucial importance if Left movements in
the country are to achieve their goals. But perhaps it is worth
considering more seriously the value and role of this pool of people
willing and available to help building such communities in a more or
less sustained fashion online (I am not talking about the accidental
activist here), without necessarily wanting to take on a core
“activist”'s role. Yes, perhaps their work does not amount to
activism as we know it. But nevertheless, it may well be that in
many cases the efforts of these committed individuals do not amount
to distractions, but to gravy: extras that help ensuring that more
and more people start to care as the message of social movements is
amplified to a much larger audience than might have otherwise been
the case, perhaps even getting many more people involved, while also
acutely aware of their own limitations when it comes to achieving
fundamental, lasting social change. In fact, perhaps the Left would
also do well to wonder whether it can afford to lose this valuable
support: as I will document in a future blog post, with the rise of
the Internet in India, online initiatives have also emerged that take
neither of the stances described above, but that instead explicitly,
and at times aggressively, seek to present themselves as a
forward-looking <em>alternative</em> to the existing progressive
politics in this country. A lack of engagement on the part of the
Left with supporters online would effectively entail a ceding of the
space to such challengers. </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">The
point to remember for now, however, is that many of those active in
online campaigns are acutely aware themselves not only of the
potential of their work, but also of its limitations. What we do
need to do, however, is to keep firmly alive this tension and debate
surrounding what it means to be an activist, as well as to remain
vigilant that the dazzling charms of the tools do not, in the long
term, blind us to our politics. At the moment, it seems to be the
continuing vibrancy of the Left in India that makes it difficult for
anyone who wants to get seriously involved with movement politics to
consider online activism a sufficient replacement. It is the
endurance of these attitudes of continuous critical inquiry that will
ensure that, clicktivism or not, Left activism will remain firmly
alive in this country in the future as well – in the hearts and
minds of activists and non-activists alike. <br /></p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"><br /></p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"><em>With
thanks to Prasad Krishna for assistance with the translation.</em></p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"><strong>References</strong></p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Angelina,
M. (forthcoming). 'Beyond the Digital: Understanding Contemporary
Youth Activism in Urban India' (working title). MA thesis. The Hague,
International Institute of Social Studies – Erasmus University of
Rotterdam.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/revolution-2.0/whats-in-a-name-or-why-clicktivism-may-not-be-ruining-left-activism-in-india-at-least-for-now'>https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/revolution-2.0/whats-in-a-name-or-why-clicktivism-may-not-be-ruining-left-activism-in-india-at-least-for-now</a>
</p>
No publisheranjahistories of internet in IndiaDigital ActivismmovementsResearch2011-08-02T09:25:39ZBlog EntryUnpacking technology - beginnings
https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/unpacking-technology-beginnings
<b>This is a work-in-progress that seeks to inaugurate a field of critical technology studies with the women-technology relationship as a unique entry point of investigation.</b>
<p> </p>
<p>This is a work-in-progress that
seeks to inaugurate a field of <em>critical
technology studies</em> with the women-technology relationship as a unique entry
point of investigation. To this end, it will</p>
<ul><li>lay down the historical and geo-political
contexts for the use of technology in India</li><li>engage with existing concepts like context,
postcoloniality, organicity, and exclusion that have come into use with the
critical responses to technology in India</li><li>
offer a conceptual vocabulary that explains the
tools being used to engage with the question, and</li><li>suggest strategies for testing of the hypotheses
being set forward in the paper, as well as parallel modes of generating
‘critical debate’ on them. <br /></li></ul>
<p>This is in order to contribute,
eventually, to a specific unpacking of the concept of technology that will in
turn help evolve a more robust response to it than has been our understanding
so far.</p>
<h3>A few questions to
begin with</h3>
<p>What are the conditions that drive
such an approach? Since the time of Nehruvian socialism, the language of the
relationship between human and technological elements in India has changed
considerably. While this has partly to do with more and more constituencies
asking for attention in the industrial polity and development frameworks, it
also has to do with changing perceptions of technology itself. Thus it is that strongly positive and dynamic images of technology
(to be found in the Indian scientific and medical establishments) as well as
strongly critical positions (anti-development stances, eco-feminist movements,
postcolonial theorizing) reside side-by-side in the discourse around technology
in India, in a manner that appears to be the particular characteristic of
postcolonial societies today.</p>
<p>The
effects or parallels of such criticality, however, are not limited to ‘civil
society’ positions, meaning that it is not a simple state-versus-the-people
problem. A cursory examination of development scenarios in the area of
reproductive health, for instance, yields evidence of a situation where state
population policy dictates, as part of infrastructural requirements, an
increasing use of technology, while at the same time insisting on an attention
to women as repositories of “indigenous systems” in order to “fill in gaps in
manpower [that can access or use technology] at village levels” (National
Population Policy 2000). The state also encourages discussions of increased
entry of women as professionals into academic technological institutions. In
cohort with the critiques, then, there are approximately four responses to
technology that are in evidence today across state and civil society positions
- presence, access, inclusion, resistance. The presence of women as agents of
technological change, improved access for women to the fruits of technology,
the inclusion of women as a constituency that must be specially provided for by
technological amendments, and a recognition of technology’s ills particularly
for women.</p>
<p>My
central suggestion is of a connection between all of these seemingly disparate
responses. For one, they espouse a vision of technology as discrete, bounded,
and separate from the human, woman being a ‘case’ thereof. Following such a
vision of technology as instrument or tool separate from human agency, and the
necessary corollary of pristine humanness, in postcolonial theorization
aggravated into empirical subalternity, the debates seem to hover endlessly over
technology being beneficial, devastating, or a judicious mixture of the two.
Complementarily, the pre-technological appears free of, or lacking in, the
instrumentality of technology; “everyday technologies” seem to offer respite in
the shape of an embeddedness in community; at the very least, they appear to
possess the mythicity, the poiesis, that critics so wistfully regret the
absence of in modern science. And these two – everyday technologies and the
pre-technological, in their common possession of such poiesis, such anarchy,
seem organically tied and a natural vantage point for a critique of the modern
technological.</p>
<p> What <em>obviously</em> happens to this understanding of technology, and to this
version of critique, with the arrival of digital, particularly internet
technologies? It may be stated fairly accurately that internet technologies are
<em>employed</em> by state agendas on the same
principle as the above, namely, as instruments of access, information, or
development. In the case of internet medical technologies, however, once we
shift our attention from the internet as medical data bases to systems like
Immersion medical simulators, robotic surgical systems, or robot surgeons, we
find a curious (some would say deadly) shift. Representation is no longer what
is at stake, so that these technologies are no longer aiming at providing
extensions or voice to the human. What is happening, rather, is <em>simulation</em>,
in a movement, as Donna Haraway puts it, from old hierarchical dominations to a
new informatics of domination. While the critiques have mostly hitherto
concentrated on the question of access on the one hand or of organicity on the
other, that is, asking for more (inclusion) or asking for less (withdrawal),
therefore, an unpacking of the word or concept ‘technology’ itself has also
somewhat forced itself to attention in this scenario. Old wirings of women-technology where one is independent of
the other have become circumspect with evidence, at least on the surface, of
overdetermined relationships of wo‘m’an-machine-nature.</p>
<p> I see the surface complications
brought in by these technologies as a <em>symptom
of the malaise of the old understanding</em> rather than as a new development.
And it is in this context that I propose a further, and more adequate, <em>unpacking of the concept of technology </em>through a specific understanding of internet
technologies. More specifically, I would suggest an <em>unpacking of the relationship of technology to its constituencies</em>,
of which I concentrate on one, namely women. What I am proposing, therefore, is
the development of a field that I will tentatively call critical technology
studies – a field that does not merely name each new technology as example, but
brings back a study of each to enrich the originary understanding of
technology. I begin from one node - women-technology. I start this
investigation with a series of questions -
once we give up on the wiring
between women-technology that populates mainstream positions as well as the
critiques, which also means a giving up on the representational relationship
between women and technology, how does one speak at all of gender and
technology? Of gender and science? Gender and development? Further, the
relationship, of wo‘m’an-machine-nature, an overdetermined relationship, <em>need not necessarily be a symbiotic one</em>.
Once this is taken into account, how does one talk of the difficulties of
technology? The devastating effects? If we shift our expectations of technology
from the beneficial or the symbiotic to the <em>arbitrary</em>,
and moreover, once we have refused to talk of nature or pre-capitalism as
pristine or prior entity, what of the critique?</p>
<p>Let us say, then, that I seek to
investigate afresh the nature of the relationship women-technology that may
help articulate a response to the ‘problem of technology’, without turning it
into either a monster or a benevolent entity. This would involve understanding
control strategies which, as Haraway puts it again, may have more visibility on
border regions rather than as disturbing the integrity of ‘natural objects’ –
women and their bodies among them. This would involve a shift from articulating
better politics, and policies, of representation, to understanding simulatory
strategies of new internet technologies. And this would involve, putting these
two together, recovering not a pristine narrative of women’s experience –
homogenous or varied, but an attention, instead to its possible aporeticity.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/unpacking-technology-beginnings'>https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/unpacking-technology-beginnings</a>
</p>
No publisherashahistories of internet in Indiarewiring bodies2008-10-31T09:47:08ZBlog EntryThe (Postcolonial) Marxist Shift in Response to Technology
https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/the-postcolonial-marxist-shift-in-responses-to-technology
<b>In her previous post, Asha Achuthan discussed, through the Gandhi-Tagore debates, the responses to science and technology that did not follow the dominant Marxist-nationalist positions. Later Marxist-postcolonial approaches to science and responses to technology were conflated in anti-technology arguments, particularly in development. In this post, the fifth in a series on her project, she will briefly trace the 1980s shift in Marxist thinking in India as a way of approaching the shift in the science and technology question. This exercise will reveal the ambivalence in Marxist practice toward continuing associations between the ‘rational-scientific’ on the one hand and the ‘revolutionary’ on the other.</b>
<p></p>
<h3>The importance of the subaltern <br /></h3>
<p>Ranajit Guha, writing
in 1982, was the first to consider, within Indian Marxism, the
structure of subaltern consciousness. Questioning the incidental place given to
the peasant in what I have called Marxist-nationalist frames, Guha proposed a
re-cognition of the subaltern – here the local peasant – as political and
politicised, and not merely a cog in the wheel or an included member of a
revolution conceived of by the vanguard. In re-conceptualising or
re-discovering (it is not clear which) the political, the Subaltern School, up
until the time of Subaltern Studies IV, brought up an analysis of colonialism
that challenged early and neo-colonialist historiographies, as dominance <em>without</em>
<em>hegemony</em> in at least the first fifty years of its existence. This
suggested that colonial power had not only <em>not</em>
worked with the active consent of ‘the people’; it had placed everything before
colonial time in the zone of non-history, and by extension, in the zone of the
pre-political. Nationalist historiographies had followed the same patterns in
addressing the peasant, thus leaving out the 'politics of the people' (Guha 1982). The Subaltern
Studies School up until Subaltern IV, then –</p>
<p>1.
Raised the question of subaltern consciousness.</p>
<p>2.
Uncovered the 'role of the peasant in nationalist
movements' as the subaltern domain of politics – a domain separate from the 'elite' nationalist domain – rather than an un-political 'sticks and stones'
activity.</p>
<p>3.
Re-read colonialism as a discourse of dominance without
hegemony, that resulted in separate elite and subaltern domains of politics.</p>
<p>4.
Challenged existing ‘elite historiography’ - both
colonialist and nationalist.</p>
<p>5.
Made these moves through a different mode of
history-writing that took into account unconventional sources, and used
different methodologies, producing, on that account, a different history.</p>
<p>I will not go into
the two significant challenges to the Subaltern School<a name="_ftnref1" href="#_ftn1"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[1]</span></span></a> that came up with Subaltern
IV. For my purposes, the early Subaltern phase, in its shifts from the
Marxist-nationalist moment, is important for the ways in which it aligns with (or rather, facilitates) various critiques of technology that permeate discussions around development today, and sometimes seek alliances with Gandhian philosophies in doing
so. Needless to say, all of these relied for their critique on the vantage
point of the subaltern. That subaltern was an empirical category or condition
as set out in Subaltern Studies.<a name="_ftnref2" href="#_ftn2"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[2]</span></span></a> I examine here two of
three spaces where this shift from earlier Marxist to subaltern perspectives is
visible – the popular science movements, the post-trade-union movements, and
the critiques of technology available in the postcolonial school.</p>
<p><strong>People’s Science Movements</strong></p>
<div class="pullquote">The <strong>Science and Rationalists’
Association of India</strong> (name of the organization in Bengali is <em>Bharatiya
Bigyan O</em> <em>Yuktibadi Samiti</em>) established on 1<sup>st</sup> March
1985, our organization is made up of like minded people coming from different
professions. We are not affiliated to any political party. </div>
<div class="pullquote"><strong> <u>Our aim</u></strong> is to
eradicate superstition and blind faith, which include religious fanaticism, astrology, caste-system, spiritualism and numerous other obscurantist
beliefs.</div>
<p> </p>
<div class="pullquote"> <strong><u>Our view</u></strong> is that
rational way of thinking shall be spread among the people as against spiritual
or religious teachings, and that alone can bring about social change. </div>
<div class="pullquote"><a href="http://www.srai.org/sra.htm">http://www.srai.org/sra.htm</a></div>
<p>The <a class="external-link" href="http://www.mfcindia.org/intro.htm">Medico Friends Circle</a> was set up in 1974 at
a national level, to critically analyse the existing health care system in
India and 'to evolve an appropriate approach
towards health care which is humane and which can meet the needs of the vast
majority of the people in our country'. With an emphasis on
the necessary role of the state in providing such health care, it demanded 'that medical and health care be available to everyone irrespective of her/his ability to pay … that medical intervention and health care be strictly guided
by the needs of our people and not by commercial interests'; and asked for 'popularisation and demystification of medical science and … the establishment
of an appropriate health care system in which different categories of health
professional are regarded as equal members of a democratically functioning
team'. Alongside, it also decided to push for 'active participation by the
community in the planning and carrying out preventive and promotive measures',
for 'a pattern of medical and health care adequately geared to the
predominantly rural health concerns of our country … a medical curriculum and
training tailored to the needs of the vast majority of the people in our
country', and asked, further, that 'research on non-allopathic therapies be
encouraged by allotting more funds and other resources and … that such
therapies get their proper place in our health–care'. It also asked that we be attentive to the
role of 'curative technology in saving a person’s life, alleviating suffering
or preventing disability'.</p>
<p>Community Development Medicinal Unit, an independent
non-profit voluntary organisation, was set up in 1984, to 'achieve the
basic societal need of facilitating access to essential medicines', to 'provide
unbiased drug information to health professionals and consumers, to weed out
spurious and “irrational” drug combinations from the market through consumer
information and pressure on government, to “negotiate with the Government to
formulate people-oriented drug policies and weed out irrational and hazardous
drugs from the Indian market, [and to] … conduct community-oriented research on
drugs' (<a href="http://www.cdmubengal.org/aboutus.html">http://www.cdmubengal.org/aboutus.html</a>).</p>
<p>These were a few of the many organisations that grew in the
70s and 80s to nurture the ‘social’, ‘civil’, ‘cultural’ space. Alongside other
organisations like the Janakiya Samskarika Vedi in Kerala, these determinedly
claimed an autonomous, non-profit <em>guardianship
of </em>'<em>the people</em>', reacting as much
to the violence in the political life of the entrenched Left as to its
vanguardism.<a name="_ftnref3" href="#_ftn3"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[3]</span></span></a>
Their primary aim, therefore, was to increase access and availability not only
to the fruits of scientific knowledge, namely drugs and curative technologies,
but to that knowledge itself, so that programmes of ‘popularisation and
demystification’, rural needs, ‘alternative system use’, were incorporated and
taken up as the activities of local science clubs.</p>
<p>On the other hand, the
stress was on 'active participation', which did not need an unpacking of
knowledge systems or knowledge-making, but rather an involvement at the level
of knowledge-dispensation, as also an extension of the WHO slogan '(think
globally) acting locally'. But the stress itself possibly had other histories.
Autonomous or otherwise, these organisations came out of what Raka Ray has
called the 'hegemonic field' of the Left, in Bengal
and Kerala, among other spaces. In attempting to move away from the notion of
vanguard party and the ‘mass’, ‘the people’ of a democratic state became the
organising metaphor for these ‘movements’ that not only 'took science to the
villages', but also admonished technology for its inattentions to the people. Appropriate technology and best practices, then, were the logical next step, as
also the accompanying challenge to big dams – all manifestations of technology
that suppressed subaltern voice.</p>
<p>While the <em>Bigyan O</em> <em>Yuktibadi
Samiti</em> may be the most caricatural
version available today, most of the people’s science movements did rely on
associations between 'rationalist' and scientific ideas, using the one to
bolster the other, or, in the later turn to the PSM, accuse the one on account
of the other. In this later turn, the PSM share the philosophy of the
anti-development positions, in their attention to the vantage point of the
subaltern as an empirical identity from which to critique the existing
knowledge frames. Part of the expectation from such movements, that
they would eliminate 'nativism' and challenge 'fundamentalism', then, was
obviously not met in the later turn.</p>
<p class="MsoBodyText3">Why have PSMs not
taken the fight to the priests and the temples?</p>
<p class="MsoBodyText3"><em>I believe that the nativist
turn by an important segment of Gandhian social activists and intellectuals
made it unfashionable to question tradition and religion. It became almost
obligatory to defend the 'wisdom' of the masses, as opposed to the 'violence' of modern scientific ideas themselves. This kind of
thinking moved the focus to 'safer' targets, like big development
projects, MNCs and such in which 'modern' technology and modern institutions
were the main culprits and people's traditions the source of resistance (I am
not suggesting that the left should not oppose MNCs and big development
projects, as and when they need to be opposed. But they have to be opposed
while defending a progressive, secular worldview; not in order to defend the 'people's wisdom' which contains many inherited prejudices and
superstitions). Science movements imbibed the populism and cultural
traditionalism of leading Gandhian/postcolonial intellectuals who took a highly
anti-modernist position for nearly three decades, starting around late 1970s
(coinciding with Indira Gandhi's emergency).</em></p>
<p> (Nanda 2005:
http://www.sacw.net/index.html)</p>
<p>Nanda’s statement is at the cusp of
the postcolonial appropriation of Marxian terminology in its anti-technology
arguments. We will go into these in more detail in the next post.</p>
<div><br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<div id="ftn1">
<p><a name="_ftn1" href="#_ftnref1"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[1]</span></span></a> Spivak
on subaltern agency (<em>Can the Subaltern
Speak?</em>), and Ajit K. Chaudhury on Subaltern Studies’ dismissal of Lenin’s
consciousness as ‘elite’ (<em>In Search of a
Subaltern Lenin</em>). In effect, both moves challenged the <em>empirical subalternity </em>on which Subaltern Studies perspectives
seemed to stand.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<p><a name="_ftn2" href="#_ftnref2"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[2]</span></span></a> 'The
word "subaltern" … as a name for the general attribute of subordination in
South Asian society whether this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age,
gender and office or in any other way'. And the work of Subaltern Studies
therefore relates to 'the history, politics, economics and sociology of
subalternity as well as to the attitudes, ideologies and belief systems – in
short, the culture informing that condition' (Guha 1988: 35).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn3">
<p><a name="_ftn3" href="#_ftnref3"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[3]</span></span></a> Another element of the organizational perspectives is a certain divide
between the political and ‘other’ activities that this period saw. Paralleled by the base-superstructure divide,
or the massline versus military line was this socio-cultural activity versus
political activity, a debate well demonstrated in the history of the Janakiya
Samskarika Vedi (Sreejith K., EPW December 10, 2005).</p>
<p> </p>
</div>
</div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/the-postcolonial-marxist-shift-in-responses-to-technology'>https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/the-postcolonial-marxist-shift-in-responses-to-technology</a>
</p>
No publisherashahistories of internet in Indiarewiring bodieswomen and internetmathemes and medicine2011-08-03T09:47:22ZBlog EntryThe 'Dark Fibre' Files: Interview with Jamie King and Peter Mann
https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/dark-fibre-files
<b>Film-makers Jamie King (producer/director of the 'Steal This Film' series) and Peter Mann, in conversation with Siddharth Chadha, on 'Dark Fibre', their latest production, being filmed in Bangalore</b>
<p>'Dark Fibre' is a documentary/fiction hybrid by J. J. King, producer/director of the 'Steal This Film' series, which has already reached over six million people online and is working towards achieving international television distribution, and Peter Mann, a British film-maker whose most recent work is titled 'Sargy Mann'.</p>
<p>'Dark Fibre' is set amongst the cablewallahs of Bangalore, and uses the device of cabling to traverse different aspects of informational life in the city. It follows the lives of real cablewallahs and examines the political status of their activities.The fictional elements arrive in the form of a young apprentice cablewallah who attempts to unite the disparate home-brew networks in the city into a grassroots, horizontal 'people's network'. Some support the activity and some vehemently oppose it -- but what no one expects is the emergence of a seditious, unlicensed and anonymous new channel which begins to transform people's imaginations in the city. Our young cable apprentice is tasked with tracking down the channel, as powerful political forces array themselves against it. Not only the 'security' of the city, but his own wellbeing depend on whether he finds it, and whether it proves possible to stop its distribution. Meanwhile, mysterious elements from outside India -- possibly emissaries of a still-greater power -- are appearing on the scene. This quest for the unknown channel is reminiscent of a modern-day 'Moby Dick', with the city of Bangalore as the high seas and our cable apprentice a reluctant Ahab. The action is a combination of verite, improvisation and scripted action.</p>
<h3>In conversation with Jamie and Peter in Bangalore</h3>
<p><strong>Q: How did you get the idea to make Dark Fibre, a fiction film?</strong></p>
<strong></strong>
<p><strong>Peter: </strong></p>
<strong></strong>
<p>We first met through BritDoc--British Documentary--and they run Channel 4 which is a Film Foundation. They have been good to us. They funded both Steal This Film and 'Sargy Mann'--a film on my father who is a blind man. They organised a meeting of all the directors they had funded and we met there. We were both thinking about what to do next and felt frustrated because we were making documentaries but really wanted to make fiction. We both shared the same ideas, with regard to shooting something completely as it is but presenting it in a fictional context.</p>
<p><strong>Jamie:</strong></p>
<strong></strong>
<p>And furthermore, we agreed that documentaries are not really real life. Because at the end of the day, I will keep only what I like, make you look at the way I want you to, I would cut you out of the picture if I don't agree with you. This happens even with the most worthy of the films. And you can be more truthful in fiction because its always a subjective truth. Fiction allows things to remain more real. I don't need an argument in the film. If I can just say, here is one guy's story and this is his story, then you can see the city with no bullshit. The story would allow you to look at things as they are; it's partly that idea behind Dark Fibre.</p>
<strong>Peter:<br /><br /></strong>
<p>This is in some way related to the concept of the artistic truth. You use all the tools at your disposal to tell a story, not just literal facts. This is about presenting things within an atmosphere, presenting things in a context. This then adds up to someone understanding something about the world, and I think fiction serves that better than documentary.</p>
<p><strong>Q: What brings you to India to make Dark Fibre?</strong> </p>
<strong>Jamie:<br /><br /></strong>
<p>I think the cablewallah networks are unique. I have never seen anything like this anywhere else myself. India is also in a very, very interesting time and place. The idea of information as a commodity is alive here as it isn't in many other places. The value of information is very high here. There is a western imaginary of Bangalore which is immediately fascinating. It's the place where our information is processed. This is where our credit card and our phone data goes. And it enters a weird black market that we don't understand. This is the cliché. We already have cliché films about Bombay and call centers. We do not want to put a call center into the film because that is already the imagined cliché vision of Bangalore. It is obviously far more sophisticated than that. And in some ways it is far patchier than that. Who are these information workers? What are they doing and at which level are they doing it? Are they the street workers putting cables into walls or is it the guy at Infosys who is hiring people and teaching them to fake English accents? Which is the real information worker? That variegation of information life in Bangalore is interesting, not just to us, but, I think, to everybody. Information dexterity is perceived as the signature of Northern dominance. The ability to manipulate information, to move intellectual property, to transform an idea into a product, to transform someone else's idea into your property. That kind of dexterity is seen as the keynote of western dominance. And watching a developing country transform into an information dextrous economy, seeing information dextrous people is amazing. And then there is the patchiness of it--who gets left behind? Who gets included? Whats missed out and what is added in that vision? How is it manipulated in favor of big businesses? And all of this is fascinating not only from an orientalist's point of view but from a general economic-socio-political point of view.</p>
<p><strong>Q: What is the underlying concept that brought about Dark Fibre?</strong><br /><strong><br />Jamie:</strong><br /> <br />While making 'Steal This Film' we spent a year on a 36 minute film trying to make an argument that would be staunch, impactful, and radical. What we learned is that it's very difficult to set out to argue your way to the truth. It's relatively easier to let the world itself speak and in the meanwhile observe it in detail. The kind of issues we are engaging with in Dark Fibre are around people's relationships with information and their relationship with freedom. These are very, very hard to nail down and speak about in a radical way. These are things left to the Intellectual Property lawyers, it's already happening, it's already cliché. All the arguments are already written. And even after a year of Steal This Film, it's shown in liberal universities – Wait! Liberal universities? I was supposed to be an anarchist! We want to go further. We want to tell people things through an image.</p>
<strong></strong>
<p><strong>Peter:</strong></p>
<p>Our idea of relationships is exploring the parallel physical communications networks and the virtual networks. In a city like Bangalore you see it. The traffic here is chaotic but it works. How? There is no answer to that. But it provokes questions. Through Dark Fibre, we are trying to say that there is a potential network in the city (cablewallahs) which is currently being unused and asking what it would take to unlock that potential and where would it take us if that really happens.</p>
<p><strong>Q: Why the cablewallahs? What is so fascinating about them?</strong><br /> <br /><strong>Jamie: </strong><br /> <br />Yes, we are interested in the cablewallah network and I think it's quite perverse that it makes people from around here laugh. You see cablewallahs as a fact of life, probably a mundane fact of life. Westerners, Europeans, who are used to orderly deployments of information technology are completely blown away when you tell them that this is how it works in India. Ad hoc, grassroots, messy, out of control.</p>
<strong><br />Peter:<br /><br /></strong>
<p>To the West, it is just unthinkable that the government would allow something like these networks, which supply 24 hours television. To not have these under government control is unthinkable.</p>
<strong>Jamie:<br /><br /></strong>
<p>So, obviously, we are at a point of transition where it's unthinkable to the Global North and it would become unthinkable here too. We are in the middle of that shift and thats one of the things we are trying to document; the network form, which is horizontal, ad hoc and on the street, becomes not only regulated but seditious.</p>
<strong>Q: Why would you call it seditious?</strong><strong><br /><br />Jamie: <br /><br /></strong>
<p>Because it begins to be seen as almost dangerous. As the regulators move in, they take Direct to Home control of all the deployments of their intellectual properties. The older networks start to look not only like intellectual property right infringements, but their disorder is also seen to be terrorist.</p>
<strong>Q: What is the film trying to propose through linking these cablewallah networks?</strong>
<p> </p>
<strong>Jamie:<br /><br /></strong>
<p>Our proposal in this film is - "What if instead of just dying peacefully, someone had the idea of transforming these networks that used to deliver international and local content, by connecting them together, and turning them in to massive local media networks which are used for media sharing, file sharing, your own local channel?" There is a potential because the network is already there.</p>
<strong>Peter:<br /><br /></strong>
<p>In a way, if you think about the microcosm idea of the Internet as a whole, that essentially is what our plot is. On a certain level you would say that it's just a network but then the internet is the most important driving force of the world today.</p>
<p><strong>Jamie:</strong></p>
<strong></strong>
<p>The point is that once this idea is out, we can create the infrastructure to connect the entire city, infrastructure we can all use. Everyone starts to have a stake in it, be it the newspapers, TV channels, pirate markets (they will say, "No one is buying our shit anymore because they can share it over the network"), the computer manufacturers, the importer of Chinese routers, a gangster who thinks he can advertise on the network, the intellectual property lawyer... different people start getting the idea that they might have something to do with this network. Basically this is a chaos scenario, from which arises the plot. It is a fictional scenario but is set in the reality of information sharing here today.</p>
<p><strong>Q: What is the technique you use to make the plot hybrid fictional?</strong><br /> <br /><strong>Jamie:</strong><br /><br />The main character is played by an actor and he will be an embedded actor, working with the real cablewallah. Parts of it will be documentary, seeing how the cablewallah works and the viewer, through watching this actor, will understand how the network works. We have already spoken to some cablewallahs. And they have been very happy about all this. We see this as sort of embedded journalism, where the embedded actor takes the place of an interviewer. The film is not going to be historical. The characters will have a background and the film is going to have a background, but what we are trying to do is show the 'now'. We want to make it speak about the past and speak about the future. About our future.</p>
<p><strong>Q: 'Steal This Film' was a critique of the international intellectual property regimes. Would this film also be similarly advocative?</strong><br /> <br /><strong>Jamie:</strong><br /><br />We are going to the next level from 'Steal This Film', and this is more of my argument than Peter's -- that the conversation about Intellectual Propery is over or the film is the last word at all. But I personally need to go somewhere else to say more. I am interested in information in general. And how information affects what we can think, what we can dream, what we can be, how it forms all of us -- that is what we are working on in 'Dark Fibre' and the question of intellectual property is a subset of that question. We spend a lot of time talking about ideas and that's one of the things that connects us. We want to articulate a lot of the philosophical, abstract ideas in this film. And we will see if we can manage to do it in a new context. 'Steal This Film' interested a few people and this will be the next point of departure for discussion.</p>
<p><strong>Q: Peter, do you share Jamie's passion for Intellectual Property?</strong><br /> <br /><strong>Peter:</strong><br /><br />Not in the same way. I am very interested in the subject. Anybody who creates work is interested in it. In my last film, there is a constant commentary of a test match going on and as a result of it, it is almost impossible to sell it to television; people who own the rights to the cricket say that we have to pay them thousands of pounds! I am interested in documenting the world as it is and not what is cleaned up for TV. I am interested in the specifics. If you get on a bus in London, the ringtone everyone has on a mobile phone is not a ringtone but a particular song. But you can't put that on film because Mick Jagger, or whoever the artiste is, will want ten thousand pounds for it. The frustration that I face is that it is impossible to put the world that I see in front of me on film. I used to work with TV commercials and you would never see anything in commercials that is not the product being sold. I was once working on a Coca Cola commercial in New York and there was a person who was appointed by Coca Cola to go around the whole set to ensure that no one is drinking anything that is not made by Coca Cola, whether that is water or juice. Anything. And I think all that is about creating a creased world that we don't live in. I am interested in the world, through documentaries or fiction, that we live in. And it is bits of music, it is referenced films, we reference music, we reference sport. Just because people have rights over these, you never see them on film. That is my main area of interest, more than what is happening on the legal front.</p>
<p><img class="image-inline image-inline" src="uploads/stf.jpg/image_preview" alt="stf" height="400" width="284" /> <img class="image-inline image-inline" src="uploads/copy_of_steal_this_film_2.jpg/image_preview" alt="steal this film" height="400" width="280" /></p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/dark-fibre-files'>https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/dark-fibre-files</a>
</p>
No publishersiddharthhistories of internet in Indiainternet and societyDigital AccessIntellectual Property RightsYouTubeart and interventionPiracyOpen Accessinnovationdigital artists2011-08-04T04:41:31ZBlog EntrySeparating the 'Symbiotic Twins'
https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/queer-histories-of-the-internet/symbiotic-twins
<b>This post tries to undo the comfortable linking that has come to exist in the ‘radical’ figure of the cyber-queer. And this is so not because of a nostalgic sense of the older ways of performing queerness, or the world of the Internet is fake or unreal in comparison to bodily experience, and ‘real’ politics lies elsewhere. This is so as it is a necessary step towards studying the relationship between technology and sexuality.</b>
<p>Here, I would like to deal with ‘openness’ as an idea that seems to structure discussions on the nature of both the Internet and queerness, in different ways. What does it mean to read an object/phenomenon/practice as signalling the acts of opening? What is opening placed in opposition to? The terms that come together to constitute the <em>field of openness</em>, so to speak, are these – transparency, publicness, privacy, safety, freedom, expression, anonymity (not so paradoxically), communication, virtuality on the one hand and opacity on the other, the closet, danger, morality, prohibition, lack of access and real life.</p>
<p>‘Openness’ is seen as the fundamental principle of the Internet. [1] The ramifications of this statement for Internet studies and by extension for studies on the ‘cyber queer’ or on the implications of Internet technology for alternative sexuality practices are then the concern of this post. What does this idea refer itself to in terms of how we live in the world? It refers to:</p>
<ul>
<li>communication – the idea that with the Internet, communication has broken free of the temporal, spatial, linguistic and national restrictions imposed by earlier technologies; </li>
<li>space – that space is no longer defined in material terms and the binary or inside/outside and public/private, has been radically recast by the entry into our lives of ‘cyberspace’ and of space thought of in virtual terms;</li>
<li>body – dematerialization, disembodiment, terms that imply that on the Internet, you become an entity of the mind and of a desire that does not need the material body. The implications of this then being that the threat to the body, posed by its circulation in ‘real’ space and time, is now reduced, because that body no longer has as much at stake as the mind does, in the world of virtual technology. It also means release from a body that is encumbered by class difference and the various ‘markers’ of social relations;</li>
<li>decentralization – that the Internet adopts the mode of ‘weaving’, which is seen as a refusal of hierarchisation, the kind imposed by the ways in which information is made available, or production and consumption are managed, the ways in which class, race and gender restrict the ways in which individuals ‘participate’. Weaving then refers to a network system in place of a top-down system. </li>
</ul>
<p>“The evidence of the trend towards openness is all around. Young people are sharing their lives online via Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Google, and whatever comes next. Though that mystifies their elders and appalls self-appointed privacy advocates, the transparent generation gains value from its openness. This is how they find each other, share, and socialize.”[2] (Jeff Jarvis, author of What would Google do?). We are henceforth titled the ‘transparent generation’, and we find the same value in the technology that defines our lives – the Internet. Why we are ‘transparent’ when compared to earlier generations? ‘Transparent’, ‘strawberry’, etc., are all terms that have come to describe the present generation of Internet users, the youth, a category born out of an idea of freedom from both moral and political constraint. In this imagination of them, they use technology in order to gain this freedom, in order to give their minds and bodies, which are straining at the leash, the required escape routes, from institutions (family, school and legal systems), from social relations (class and sexuality), and earlier forms of political identification.</p>
<p>The 90s was seen as the decade of openness, both in terms of new media technology and sexual practice. “With liberalisation sweeping the Indian mindset, more and more people are determined to enjoy the secret thrills sex has to offer. While high-profile executives are being seduced by escort services, the middle-class minds are being titillated by 'parties'. Those who are more discreet go for phone sex or MMS.”[3] What comes across is an idea of a new relationship to the temporal and the spatial, the cultural and the social. And sexuality seems to be central to this relationship. “A sexual revolution is sweeping through the small and big towns of India, and to stay immune to it is a big (t)ask.”[4] This article from The Week tells us how the ‘new sexual’ or the ‘newly sexual’ is described in popular discourse. So much so that the violence of the right-wing groups against women and against ‘obscene’ texts are sometimes explained through this very revolution of/in sex. It is read as a backlash, in a moment that is producing this new relationship, with the help of new media technologies such as the mobile phone, the Internet, the web camera and the ‘things’ that enable this openness. And because it is read as a backlash, the practices of the Hindu right are read as wishing to <em>close</em>, to reverse this process of opening out and to keep things <em>as they used to be</em>. Openness is not just a set of practices; it is read as a mindset, a shift from an older era of being bound within certain social structures. “Earlier only newly married women had the right, indeed were expected, to advertise their sexuality before receding into wall-flowers as respectable married women but today all that has changed….Walk into any college or even a school campus across the country and you have young men and women equating liberation and sexuality” (Patricia Uberoi). The linking of sexuality and liberation or freedom is here crucial, because what is particular to this era is the fact that ‘sexual expression’ is seen an indicator of freedom, whether this freedom is placed against moral or political orthodoxies, or on the other hand posited as Westernisation. Popular discourse reveals us as having arrived at the desire for sexual freedom (whether or not sexual freedom itself).</p>
<p><em>Queerness</em>, a phenomenon of the 90s in the Indian context, is similarly described as an <em>opening out</em>. ‘Queer’ signifies a stepping out of the binary of heterosexuality/homosexuality, which will no longer encumber the body or the mind. It is a conscious move away from identities like lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, in fact identity in itself is rendered fragmented and cannot emerge from a monolithic location.</p>
<p>“There was excitement and apprehension in the early '90s as an endless diversity of images flowed into private and public spaces…. Sexual speech came under special attention as newscasts, talk shows, sitcoms and a variety of TV shows challenged conventional family values and sexual normativity including monogamy, marriage and heterosexuality” (Shohini Ghosh – “The Closet is Ajar”, in Outlook[6]). Queerness is then linked to this rapid spread, this breathless circulation, this new access. Technological change is inextricably tied to this idea of the closet being ajar. “…the rapid spread of satellite TV and new media technologies continue to transform the cultural practices of the urban middle class.” It seems to be an era in which the boundaries of the sexual norm are being forced to redraw themselves, simply by the massive onslaught of ideas, speech and images. Queer identities are then seen as riding the crest of a wave of sexual revolution that has been washing over India over the past two decades.</p>
<p>These two formations, the Internet and the queer (we have not yet established what kind of formations they are), have been brought together in the term ‘cyber queer’ for the purpose of sociological and other analyses. The Levi’s ad for ‘innerwear’ shows a young black man saying, “On my web profile, I am a girl”. You can be a beer-bellied man in real life and turn into a voluptuous woman in second life. The virtual life, the virtual body and the virtual sex – the Internet is often spoken of as performing two functions for someone practicing alternative sexualities:</p>
<p>that it lets them be ‘other’ than they are (or are forced to be in real life);</p>
<p>by doing this, they are allowed to express their ‘real’ sexual desire or gender in a ‘safer’ space than in real life, thereby allowing for a freeing up or an opening (however, secretively it is done). “Cruising in physical spaces of the city has always been an affair which dangles on the edge of unsafety. Arrests and blackmail by policemen loaded with section 377, or extortion for money are often reported within queer circles. The <a class="external-link" href="http://www.gaybombay.org/">Gay Bombay</a> website has several articles and personal narratives which function as cruising guidelines and warnings. has several articles and personal narratives which function as cruising guidelines and warnings. In this context, Internet portals like <a class="external-link" href="http://www.robtex.com/dns/guys4men.com.html">guys4men</a> provide forums which can be used to manoeuvre cruising in a different manner, possibly much safer than in moonlit Nehru or Central Parks in Delhi or train-station loos in Bombay.” (Mario d’Penha, gay activist [7])</p>
<p>Again, the notion of ‘space’ as suddenly emerging from the shadowy realms of ambiguity and secrecy, to stand in for freedom, is something that one often encounters in relation to cyber-queerness. And it is not just physical space which is pulled into this discourse of the technological shift, it is desire itself - “Desire is unabashed, playful and complex here”[8]. Desire, personified thus, is then seen as something set free by and through technological innovation.</p>
<p>Though this notion of sudden freedom is contested by researchers and scholars within the field, the result of that contestation has often been to:</p>
<ul>
<li>affirm, in place of a single figure of the liberated cyber queer, the multiplicity of behaviours, dangers and freedoms that are generated. This is a little like affirming, in place of a single body called <em>the public</em>, several bodies that are termed multiple publics, or subaltern publics. The problem with this approach is that the nature of this public, the public-ness of it, is not then fully interrogated. It is assumed that the multiplicity in itself will be contest enough;</li>
<li>return to the body as existing at the root of queer existence. This return then, in claiming something that has been forgotten, or disavowed (our bodily existence), finds a strange comfort in this body, settling within it as if having found a location from which to speak, about the virtual, about cyberspace. For example, though Jodi O’Brien, in her essay “Changing the Subject”[9] refutes the claim “There are no closets in cyberspace”, she finds it necessary to return to the ‘body’ and not to subjectivity in order to do so – it is as if the materiality of the body is the only <em>concrete</em> thing that will allow this contestation. “The ‘alternative’ experiences that are enacted in ‘alternative’ or queer spaces are based on realities of the flesh: real, embodied experiences and/or fantasies cultivated through exposure to multisensory stimuli.” The body then becomes the explanatory fulcrum, and it is only from here that any kind of relationship to what is seen as virtuality can be understood.</li>
</ul>
<p>An ancestor to the above problem - “What precisely does the <em>cyber</em> add to the <em>queer</em> identity which it lacked previously?”[10] This question, framed as the most basic one can ask of this figure, makes the following assumptions – that ‘queer’ is a human subject that precedes ‘cyber’, a.k.a non-human technology that the latter <em>adds</em> to this human subject and how it performs in the world, or has transformed it <em>after the fact</em>.</p>
<p>It is remarkably easy to say that in the great saga of sexual practices, technology has been an agent of transformation. Or, more importantly, to place cyberspace and queerness on par with each other, as sharing the same nature, or functioning on the same fundamental principle – of decentering or destabilizing a previously integrated or unified subject. Nina Wakeford asks of the term cyberqueer, “…what is the purpose of creating a hybrid of the two? It is a calculated move which stresses the interdependence of the two concepts, both in the daily practices of the certain and maintenance of a cyberspace which is lesbian, gay, transgendered or queer, and in the research of these arenas.”[11] By this logic, they are interdependent because there is some inherent quality in each that makes it offer itself to the other. “Queer sex is about following the desires of the flesh into an unnamed, uncategorized, uncharted realm, and doing something that neither of you can 'code'.”[12] The value of queerness therefore, derives from this lack of naming, an escape from coding of a particular kind, the zone of ambiguous enactments of desire.[13] “While it is this open transparent character of online existence that lays the Internet vulnerable to surveillance, it is also its self-inscribing character that makes it the playground of possibilities it is at its best. Cyberspace is habitat, playground, university, boulevard and refuge” (Shuddhabrata Sengupta, ‘Net Nomad on a Rough Route: A Despatch from Cyberspace’[14]). It is a zone of enactments of desire, a playground of possibilities, undefined, unbound.</p>
<p>There is then a reading of technology and sexuality as feeding off each other - “The relationship between technology and sexuality is a symbiotic one. As humankind creates new inventions, people find ways of eroticizing new technology. So it is not surprising that with the advent of the information superhighway, more and more folks are discovering the sexual underground within the virtual community in cyberspace” (Daniel Tsang)[15]. The above quote assumes the following:</p>
<ul>
<li>that humankind existed before technology;</li>
<li>that first a technology is born and then there is the eroticization of this technology. It is only because of these assumptions that technology (in this case the Internet) as such can be seen as fundamentally open. Latour’s critique of the first assumption is that “Without technological detours, the properly human cannot exist.”</li>
</ul>
<p>At the point of encountering this strange euphoria, we need to pause and consider, with Latour, this very relationship between technology and sexuality. “There has been a persistent silence on matters of sexuality in critical cultural studies of technology, perhaps partially because technology was associated with the instrumental to the exclusion of the representational (Case 1995). The creation of the term ‘cyber queer’ is itself an act of resistance in the face of such suppression” (Nina Wakeford). If the relationship between the two is viewed along representational lines, then the only direction that can be taken is one which will posit the human before the technological, will posit technological as that which enables (or not) representations of this human subject. In this sense, the representational is not far from the instrumental as an explanatory framework.</p>
<p>In all the explanations we have seen above, at one level or another, technology has viewed as the ‘thing’[17], and morality as that which ascribes meaning in a particular way to this thing. For example, the mobile phone is seen as the thing, the technology, with concrete attributes and use value. Morality is what then prescribes how this thing is to be used or not used, or the dangers that follow from its use in the world of social relations. Latour argues against this way of positioning technology and morality, and instead calls them both modes of ‘alterity’, albeit two different modes. Alterity in his definition is being-as-another, technology and morality both then constituting a particular way of <em>being-as-another</em>. Technology is not what you use, it is not a means to an end, it in fact changes the end to which it is the means. It is the curve, the detour. Morality is what questions means and ends and prevents the easy categorization of objects or people as one or another.</p>
<p>We are used to thinking of morality as keeping things static, wanting them unchanged, preventing new ideas or practices from being absorbed into the domains of our existence. Especially when it comes to sexuality, morality is seen as that which blocks, which lives in the past, which ‘ossifies’ – “…morality consists precisely of the willingness/ability to accept and organize one's behaviour in accordance with… ‘ossified’ recipes for interaction. If gender is a primary (read: coded as ‘natural’) institution for organizing social interaction, then boundary transgressions are not only likely to arouse confusion but to elicit moral outrage from the boundary keepers.”[18] Morality here refers to boundary keeping. Latour shifts our understanding of morality in ways that allow us to read beyond the boundary keeping. According to him, morality constantly interrupts the means-to-end process by questioning the use of something/someone as a means towards an end. Morality is then a hindrance to this process, not an ossification of social relations or practices.</p>
<p>This argument disrupts the location of technology as that which signals an opening out of the universe, and morality as signalling a closing off. True, Latour himself reads technology as creating <em>new</em> functions, or as creating <em>new</em> ends but he does not categorise these and the technologies they derive from as ‘open’. For him, technology is opaque, unreadable. Sexuality also then cannot be read as feeding off of technology, as some kind of symbiotic twin to it. The relationship between technological shifts and sexual practices or identities has to be read alternately to this idea of freedom from the shackles of social relations and bodily constraints. Sexuality cannot also then be opposed to morality, as it has often been done.</p>
<p> </p>
<p class="discreet">[1] <a class="external-link" href="http://www.openinternetcoalition.org/">www.openinternetcoalition.org.</a></p>
<p class="discreet">[2] Jarvis, Jeff. “Openness and the Internet”, <a class="external-link" href="http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/may2009/ca2009058_754247.htm">http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/may2009/ca2009058_754247.htm.</a></p>
<p class="discreet">[3] Doval, Nikita. “Bold Bodies”, in The Week, September 7, 2008.</p>
<p class="discreet">[4] Ibid.</p>
<p class="discreet">[5] Quoted in Doval, Nikita. "Bold Bodies", in The Week, September 7, 2008, p 50.</p>
<p class="discreet">[6] <a class="external-link" href="http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?227507">http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?227507</a></p>
<p class="discreet">[7] Quoted in Katyal, Akhil. “Cyber Cultures/Queer Cultures in Delhi”. See <a class="external-link" href="http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/2007-July/002827.html">http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/2007-July/002827.html</a></p>
<p class="discreet">[8] Katyal, Akhil “Cyber Cultures/Queer Cultures in Delhi”. See <a class="external-link" href="http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/2007-July/002827.html">http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/2007-July/002827.html</a></p>
<p class="discreet">[9] Women and Performance: Issue 17: Sexuality and Cyberspace.</p>
<p class="discreet">[10] Wakeford, Nina. “Cyberqueer”, in Bell, David and Barbara Kennedy, eds. The Cybercultures Reader. Routledge: London, 2000</p>
<p class="discreet">[11] “Cyberqueer”, in Bell, David and Barbara Kennedy, eds. The Cybercultures Reader.</p>
<p class="discreet">[12] O’Brien, Jodi. “Changing the Subject”. In Women and Performance, Issue 17: Sexuality and Cyberspace.</p>
<p class="discreet">[13] Here I deal with the idea of queerness at an almost commonsensical level, not at the level of the queer theory of Judith Butler or Eve Sedgwick, just as cyberspace is also dealt with at the level of what it seems to be seen as doing.</p>
<p class="discreet">[14] Quoted in the Sarai discussion.</p>
<p class="discreet">[15] Tsang, Daniel. “Notes on Queer ‘n’ Asian Virtual Sex”. In Bell, David and Barbara Kennedy, eds. The Cybercultures Reader. Routledge: London, 2000.</p>
<p class="discreet">[16] Latour, Bruno. “Morality and Technology: The End of the Means”. See <a class="external-link" href="http://www.bruno-latour.fr/articles/article/080-en.html">http://www.bruno-latour.fr/articles/article/080-en.html</a>.</p>
<p class="discreet">[17] I put this in quotes because latour has a very specific definition of ‘thing’ or Ding, which this is not.</p>
<p class="discreet">[18] O’Brien, Jodi. “Changing the Subject”, in Women and Performance, Issue 17: Sexuality and Cyberspace. See <a class="external-link" href="http://web.archive.org/web/20040604123458/www.echonyc.com/~women/Issue17/art-browning.html">http://web.archive.org/web/20040604123458/www.echonyc.com/~women/Issue17/art-browning.html</a></p>
<p class="discreet">[18] O’Brien, Jodi. “Changing the Subject”, in Women and Performance, Issue 17: Sexuality and Cyberspace. See <a class="external-link" href="http://web.archive.org/web/20040604123458/www.echonyc.com/~women/Issue17/art-browning.html">http://web.archive.org/web/20040604123458/www.echonyc.com/~women/Issue17/art-browning.html</a></p>
<p class="discreet"> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/queer-histories-of-the-internet/symbiotic-twins'>https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/queer-histories-of-the-internet/symbiotic-twins</a>
</p>
No publisherNitya Vhistories of internet in IndiaCybercultures2019-09-18T14:10:06ZBlog EntryRewiring Bodies: Technology and the Nationalist Moment [2]
https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/technology-and-the-nationalist-moment-2
<b>This is the third in a series of posts on Asha Achuthan's Rewiring Bodies project. In this post, Asha looks at the Tagore-Gandhi debates on technology to throw some light on the question of whether there was a nationalist alternative to the technology offered by the West. </b>
<div style="text-align: left;" class="pullquote">'Pandit Nehru wants
industrialization because he thinks that, if it is socialized, it would be free
from the evils of capitalism. My own view is that evils are inherent in
industrialism, and no amount of socialization can eradicate them.'</div>
<div style="text-align: left;" class="pullquote">'Instead of welcoming machinery as a boon, we should look upon it as an
evil.'</div>
<div style="text-align: left;" class="pullquote">"Division of labour there will necessarily be, but it will be a
division into various species of body labour and not a division into
intellectual labour to be confined to one class and body labour to be confined
to another class."</div>
<div style="text-align: left;" class="pullquote"> </div>
<div style="text-align: left;" class="pullquote">But where am I among the crowd, pushed from behind, pressed from all
sides? And what is this noise about me? If it is a song, then my own <em>sitar</em> can catch the tune and I join in
the chorus, for I am a singer. But if it is a shout, then my voice is wrecked
and I am lost in bewilderment. I have been trying all these days to find in it
a melody, straining my ear, but the idea of non-cooperation with its mighty
volume of sound does not sing to me, its congregated menace of negations
shouts. And I say to myself, “If you cannot keep step with your countrymen at
this great crisis of their history, never say that you are right and the rest
of them wrong; only give up your role as a soldier, go back to your corner as a
poet, be ready to accept popular derision and disgrace.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;" class="pullquote">(Tagore 1921:
Chatterjee 56)</div>
<p align="left" style="text-align: left;" class="MsoBodyTextIndent"> </p>
<p align="left" style="text-align: left;" class="MsoBodyTextIndent">The Tagore-Gandhi debates – as a window on the
contestations between the ambivalent 'modern' somewhat removed from the
mainstream of nationalist politics, and the recalcitrant 'pastoral' within the
same stream – perhaps give a better idea of the responses to modernity and
science than the Nehru-Gandhi dialogues or the former's reading of the latter's
philosophy. In a series of letters exchanged between 1929 and 1933, and earlier,
in debates conducted in the pages of <em>Young
India </em>and <em>Modern Review</em>, Gandhi
and Tagore spoke to each other of rural reconstruction, of the possibilities
and limits of handicraft industries and the <em>charkha</em>
programme, of the discourse of science as opposed to that of religiosity.
Although a lot of the dialogue between them is neither direct nor addressing
the other’s concerns fully, both had blueprints for rural programmes of
self-sufficiency; both were opposed to heavy technology, both were opposed to
state views on education. For both thinkers, the anti-colonial struggle was
symbolised in the protest against foreign cloth, heavy technology, or
government-sponsored education. This protest, in the form of the call for
swaraj, differed in nuance in Tagore and Gandhi, but essentially it signified a
moral freedom from the West, a dignity of human labour, a protection of the
intellect from colonization. Swaraj would involve, for both, a reconstruction
of life – the moral as well as the material.</p>
<p align="left" style="text-align: left;" class="MsoBodyTextIndent">For both, the moral and the
material were inextricably linked; the difference seems to be in the stress on
attaining material freedom through the moral in Tagore, and on attaining moral
freedom through material activity in Gandhi’s thought. Nowhere was this more
evident than in the different systems of schooling, both outside the
state-sponsored system, that Gandhi and Tagore set up, in Wardha and
Santiniketan respectively. Both had different and powerful analyses of the
hegemony of western science, and consequently different views on the nature of
oppositional practice. A point Akeel Bilgrami has noted about Gandhi’s thought
may be true of both thinkers here, namely, the integrity of their thought, the
difficulty of picking strands of it regarding particular issues, or of separating
their political impulses from their epistemological ones. Let us, for our
purposes, however, force such an initial strand, and take up the programme/metaphor of the charkha as 'cottage machine'<a name="_ftnref1" href="#_ftn1"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[1]</span></span></a>
to look at the debate around development and technology that ensued around it
between the two thinkers.</p>
<p align="left" style="text-align: left;" class="MsoBodyTextIndent">For Gandhi, the <em>charkha</em> programme was a
symbol for rural cooperation – a 'non-co-operation … neither with the English,
nor with the West [but] with the system the English have established' (1921,
‘The Great Sentinel’, addressed to Tagore). That system indicated the broad
sweep of Western materialism, expressed in hugely consumptive desires, and for
Gandhi, the charkha stood for a rejection of this exchange value for use value
– self-sufficiency. Gandhi’s early proposals around spinning the <em>charkha</em> offered an alternative programme
of rural construction, particularly the exercise of self-sufficiency. These
were followed up in 1921 in the laying down of 'indispensable conditions for
swaraj' (188-9). Later, he stood firm through Tagore’s qualified scepticism and
other critiques, moving from the larger programme to <em>charkha</em> as spiritual metaphor; 'To the perplexed', he said that 'I
do regard the spinning-wheel as a gateway to <em>my</em> spiritual salvation, but I recommend it to others only as a
powerful weapon for the attainment of swaraj and the amelioration of the
economic condition of the country' (Gandhi <em>Collected
Works </em>vol. 30, 450-1, 1958, quoted in Chatterjee 1986: 108). In response to
the poet’s chagrin at the requirement of all to spin, 'I do indeed ask the poet
and the sage to spin the wheel as a sacrament. ... The call of the spinning
wheel is the ... call of love. And love is <em>swaraj</em>. The spinning wheel
will 'curb the mind' when the time is spent on necessary physical labour can be
said to do so. ... I do want growth ... but I want all these for the soul. ...
A plea for the spinning wheel is a plea for recognising the dignity of labour.'
88-9. That growth of the soul, that spiritual salvation, the actual realisation
of swaraj, meant for Gandhi the rejection of the ‘system’ – the moral force
that made it irrelevant. That system included the railways and hospitals,
which, however, Gandhi was not 'aiming at destroying … though [he] would
certainly welcome their natural destruction … Still less … [was he] trying to
destroy all machinery and mills' (Gandhi <em>Young
India </em>26 January 1921, 33, Chatterjee).<a name="_ftnref2" href="#_ftn2"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[2]</span></span></a>
For he made the conventional acknowledgement that '[m]achinery has its place;
it has come to stay. But it must not be allowed to displace the necessary human
labour ... I would welcome every improvement in the cottage machine but I know
that it is criminal to displace the hand labour by the introduction of
power-driven spindles unless one is at the same time ready to give millions of
farmers some other occupation in their homes'
(Gandhi 1925, 'The Poet and the <em>charkha</em>', Young India, 5 November, Chatterjee 125).</p>
<p align="left" style="text-align: left;" class="MsoBodyTextIndent">Was Tagore too as clearly opposed to heavy
technology? The <em>yantra</em> <em>danava</em> is a recurring theme in his
poetry, and even at the time of his critique of Gandhi’s <em>charkha</em> programme, he was writing, in plays like <em>Mukta Dhara </em>and <em>Rakta</em> <em>Karabi</em>, searing
critiques of the effects of technology on people’s lives.<a name="_ftnref3" href="#_ftn3"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[3]</span></span></a>
As far as the rejection of the West went, also, he was with Gandhi, holding him
up as the 'Mahatma [who], frail in body and devoid of material resources,
should call up the immense power of the meek …' ('Tagore’s reflections on
non-cooperation and cooperation, <em>Modern
Review</em>, May 1921, Chatterjee 55), and reminding his readers that 'I have
seen the West; I covet not the unholy feast, in which she revels every moment,
growing more and more bloated and red and dangerously delirious …' (ibid,
55-9). His was not the mode of Non-Cooperation, however, for this movement,
with its 'noise', its particular strategems that instrumentalised, made 'barren
and untrue' the spirit of the Mahatma’s words, failed to provide for him the
‘melody’ he needed.<a name="_ftnref4" href="#_ftn4"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[4]</span></span></a> On the
yantra itself, Tagore clearly had ambivalent views, for on other occasions in his
poetry he offers what might be <em>homage</em>
– yantra namah.<a name="_ftnref5" href="#_ftn5"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[5]</span></span></a></p>
<p align="left" style="text-align: left;" class="MsoBodyTextIndent">While the withering critique of railways, doctors
and lawyers in <em>Hind Swaraj</em>
exemplifies at least the early Gandhi’s views on these symbols of modernity and
the need for their unconditional rejection,<a name="_ftnref6" href="#_ftn6"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[6]</span></span></a>
Tagore reacted again and again to such a view, particularly to the moral
element shoring it up, complaining, for instance, about the principles of the <em>charkha</em> programme - 'economics is
bundled out and a fictitious moral dictum dragged in its place' (Tagore, ‘The
Call of Truth’). While being opposed to heavy technology, Tagore refused to
accede to the “magical formula that foreign cloth is impure” (Tagore, ‘The Call
of Truth’). 'Swaraj,' he says, 'is not concerned with our apparel only - it
cannot be established on cheap clothing; its foundation is in the mind ... in
no country in the world is the building up of swaraj completed ... the root of
such bondage is always within the mind. ... A mere statement, in lieu of
argument, will never do. ... We have enough of magic in the country ... That is
exactly why I am so anxious to re-instate reason on its throne.' [Chatterjee
82].</p>
<p align="left" style="text-align: left;" class="MsoBodyTextIndent">What, then, of his critique of Western materialism? 'You know that I do not believe in the material civilisation of the West just
as I do not believe in the physical body to be the highest truth in man. But I
still less believe in the destruction of the physical body, and the ignoring of
the material necessities of life. What is needed is establishment of harmony
between the physical and spiritual nature of man, maintaining of balance
between the foundation and superstructure. I believe in the true meeting of the
East and the West. Love is the ultimate truth of soul. We should do all we can,
not to outrage that truth, to carry its banner against all opposition. The idea
of non-cooperation unnecessarily hurts that truth. It is not our heart fire but
the fire that burns out our hearth and home.' ('Tagore’s reflections on
non-cooperation and cooperation', <em>Modern
Review</em>, May 1921, Chatterjee 59)</p>
<p align="left" style="text-align: left;" class="MsoBodyTextIndent">In this sense, there was an affinity between Tagore
and Nehru – with respect to desirable national attitudes to faith, unreason, or
imperialist policy. For Tagore, swaraj was, as he wrote to Gandhi, '<em>maya</em>, … like a mist, that will vanish
leaving no stain on the radiance of the Eternal. However we may delude
ourselves with the phrases learnt from the West, <em>Swaraj</em> is not our objective.' (Tagore 1921:)<a name="_ftnref7" href="#_ftn7"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[7]</span></span></a></p>
<p align="left" style="text-align: left;" class="MsoBodyTextIndent">On the ability of the charkha to bring about rural
reconstruction, Tagore avers – 'The discussion, so far, has proceeded on the
assumption that the large-scale production of homespun thread and cloth will
result in the alleviation of the country's poverty. ... My complaint is, that
by the promulgation of this confusion between <em>swaraj</em> and <em>charkha</em>,
the mind of the country is being distracted from <em>swaraj</em>.' [Chatterjee
118]. 'One thing is certain, that the all-embracing poverty which has
overwhelmed our country cannot be removed by working with our hands to the
neglect of science. … If a great union is to be achieved, its field must be
great likewise ... the religion of economics is where we should above all try
to bring about this union of ours.' [Chatterjee 104-6-7]. What Tagore perceived
as happening in the charkha programme, on the other hand, was the 'raising of
the charkha to a higher place than is its due, thereby distracting attention
from other more important factors in our task of all-round reconstruction.'
[Chatterjee 112].</p>
<p align="left" style="text-align: left;" class="MsoBodyTextIndent">Tagore had
other problems with charkha and its being tied to swaraj. For one, the ‘cult’
of the charkha would not work for swaraj because it is an “external
achievement”, apart from being a call to obedience that only recalled slavery
in its worst form.<a name="_ftnref8" href="#_ftn8"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[8]</span></span></a> For
another, the isolationism enshrined in the act of rejecting foreign cloth only
seemed to bring back the “sin of untouchability” in the guise of the charkha
versus ‘impure’ foreign cloth. Further, and here Tagore raises his most
eloquent objection, his failure to see a difference between the charkha and the
high machine that introduces repetitive activity, boredom, and alienation in
human labour. “Humanity”, he says, “has ever been beset with the grave problem,
how to rescue the large majority of the people from being reduced to the stage
of machines. ...” [Chatterjee 104-5]. The discovery of the wheel signified, for
Tagore, “[t]he facility of motion … given to inert matter [which] enabled it to
bear much of man’s burden … [and t]his was but right, for Matter is the true <em>shudra</em>;
while with his dual existence in body and mind, Man is a <em>dwija</em>. … Thus,
whether in the shape of the spinning wheel, or the potter’s wheel or the wheel
of a vehicle, the wheel has rescued innumerable men from the <em>shudra’s</em>
estate …” (“The Cult of the Charkha”, <em>Modern Review</em>, September 1925,
Chatterjee 104). In such a scenario, it may be argued that “spinning is … a
creative act. But that is not so; for, by turning its wheel man merely becomes
an appendage of the charkha; that is to say, he but does himself what a machine
might have done: he converts his living energy into a dead turning movement.
... The machine is solitary ... likewise alone is the man ... for the thread
produced by his charkha is not for him a thread of necessary relationship with
others ... He becomes a machine, isolated, companionless” (ibid). And why is
this? Tagore refers back, here, to the discus of Vishnu which signifies the
“process of movement, the ever active power seeking fulfilment. … Man has
[therefore] not yet come to the end of the power of the revolving wheel. So if
we are taught that in the pristine <em>charkha</em> we have exhausted all the
means of spinning thread, we shall not gain the favour of Vishnu … If we are
wilfully blind to the grand vision of whirling forces, which science has
revealed, the <em>charkha</em> will cease to have any message for us.”
(Chatterjee 104) Therefore we must realise that “<em>swaraj</em> will advance,
not propelled by the mechanical revolution of the charkha, but taken by the
organic processes of its own living growth” [Chatterjee 121].</p>
<p align="left" style="text-align: left;" class="MsoBodyTextIndent">Tagore
refers, again and again in his polemic, to the dynamicity inherent both in the
truth of Vishnu, and in the progress of science, as against the dead burden of
“rites and ceremonials” that have produced in “India’s people” the habit of
relying on external agencies rather than on the self. The charkha embodies for
Tagore such an external object, static. Is he then subsuming the wheel and its
dynamicity in the discourse of science? A careful reading of Tagore’s polemic
seems to suggest that his point is rather in examining the nature of material
activity and making the connection, through dynamicity, without which neither
science nor the charkha might have any value.</p>
<p align="left" style="text-align: left;" class="MsoBodyTextIndent">There were other differences. Tagore recognized that
for Gandhi, productive manual work, such as that embodied in the charkha, was
the "prime means of intellectual training" (<em>Harijan</em>, 18 sep 1937). The sort of
oneness that such collective occupational activity may create for Gandhi,
however, fails to move Tagore, for whom the act is a performance of sameness
and stagnation. Charkha, he says, in one of his many tirades against the
programme, is “a befogged reliance on … narrow paths as the sole means of
gaining a vast realisation.” [Chatterjee
114]. As such, the philosophy of swaraj as it was being enacted, along with the
programme of Non-cooperation and rejection of the West, only produced an
isolation, a soliloquous discourse, a “struggle to alienate our heart and mind
from those of the West … [that could only be] an attempt at spiritual suicide …
India has ever declared”, he said, “that Unity is Truth, and separateness is <em>maya</em>.
This unity … is that which comprehends all and therefore can never be reached
through the path of negation … Therefore my one prayer is: let India stand for
the cooperation of all peoples of the world. The spirit of rejection finds its
support in the consciousness of separateness, the spirit of acceptance in the
consciousness of unity” (Tagore’s
reflections on non-cooperation and cooperation, <em>Modern Review</em>, May 1921, Chatterjee 62). More disturbing for
him was the violence enshrined in the principle of Non-cooperation. “The idea
of non-cooperation is political asceticism. ... It has at its back a fierce joy
of annihilation which at best is asceticism, and at its worst is that orgy of
frightfulness in which the human nature, losing faith in the basic reality of
normal life, finds a disinterested delight in an unmeaning devastation ...
[non-cooperation] in its passive moral form is asceticism and in its active
moral form is violence. ... The desert is as much a form of <em>himsa</em>
(malignance) as is the raging sea in storms, they both are against life” (Tagore’s reflections on non-cooperation and
cooperation, <em>Modern Review</em>, May 1921,
Chatterjee 57-8). Tagore was, perhaps, making a stronger critique, here, of the
violence embedded in political collectivities, and the moral questions
contained in non-violence as a practice.<a name="_ftnref9" href="#_ftn9"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[9]</span></span></a></p>
<p align="left" style="text-align: left;" class="MsoBodyTextIndent">Gandhi
responded to the polemic in several ways. At pains to explain to the poet the
relevance of the charkha, he reminded the latter, in some exhaustion, that “I
do not draw a sharp distinction ... between ethics and economics.” [Chatterjee 90]. Elsewhere he clarifies
in no uncertain terms – “I am always reminded of one thing which the well-known
British economist Adam Smith has said … he has described some economic laws as
universal and absolute. Then he has described certain situations which may be
an obstacle to the operation of these laws. These disturbing factors are the
human nature, the human temperament or altruism inherent in it. Now, the economics
of khadi is just opposite of it. Benevolence which is inherent in human nature
is the very foundation of the economics of khadi. What Adam Smith has described
as pure economic activity based merely on the calculations of profit and loss
is a selfish attitude and it is an obstacle to the development of khadi; and it
is the function of a champion of khadi to counteract this tendency.”
(Chatterjee 81) Further, “… I have asked no one to abandon his calling, but on
the contrary to adorn it by giving every day only thirty minutes to spinning as
sacrifice for the whole nation. … The Poet thinks that the <em>charkha</em> is
calculated to bring about a deathlike sameness in the nation and thus imagining
he would shun it if he could. The truth is that the <em>charkha</em> is intended
to realise the essential and living oneness of interest among India’s myriads
… All I say is that there is a sameness, identity or oneness behind the
multiplicity and variety. And so do I hold that behind a variety of occupations
there is an indispensable sameness also of occupation” (Gandhi 1925, “The Poet
and the <em>charkha</em>”, 124).</p>
<p align="left" style="text-align: left;" class="MsoBodyTextIndent">Does
that involve a separation from the world, an isolationist discourse? Perhaps
not … for “the message of
Non-cooperation, Non-violence and swadeshi, is a message to the world
...[through] Non-cooperation [which] is a retirement within ourselves … [for
i]n my humble opinion, rejection is as much an ideal as the acceptance of a
thing. It is as necessary to reject untruth as it is to accept truth. ... I
make bold to say that <em>mukti</em> (emancipation) is as much a negative state
as <em>nirvana</em>. ... I therefore think that the Poet has been unnecessarily
alarmed at the negative aspect of Non-cooperation. We had lost the power of
saying 'no'.” [Chatterjee 66-7]. (“The Poet’s anxiety”. <em>Young India</em>, 1
June 1921). As to the rest of the world, “I want the cultures of all the lands
to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off
my feet by any ... Mine is not the religion of the prison house. It has room
for the least among God’s creation. But it is proof against insolence, pride of
race, religion or colour”[ Chatterjee 64]. (“The Poet’s anxiety”. <em>Young India</em>, 1
June 1921).</p>
<p align="left" style="text-align: left;" class="MsoBodyTextIndent">Elsewhere, in response to alternative positions like
that of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyaya, who believed the absence of cultural
attributes had resulted in India’s subjugation by the British, Gandhi spoke,
rather, of the disjuncture between the prevailing politics and the morality of
the community that had resulted in the same. Chatterjee presents the moment of
Gandhi in nationalist politics as the moment of manoeuvre, proposing that
Gandhi’s critique of civil society and representative democracy emerges through
his reworking of the relationship between the moral and the political. Without
going in to the merits of Chatterjee’s formulation here, we could try to
understand this separation that Gandhi makes, in order to better understand his
accompanying take not only on the value of science, but on a necessary
relationship between its use and the morality of the community.</p>
<p align="left" style="text-align: left;" class="MsoBodyTextIndent">Again and again, in response to industrialisation,
in response to the work of doctors of medicine, in response to “much that goes
under the name of modern civilisation” (quoted in Chatterjee 1986: 80), Gandhi
reacts. “I overeat, I have indigestion, I go to the doctor, he gives me
medicine, I am cured. I overeat again, I take his pills again. Had I not taken
the pills in the first instance, I would have suffered the punishment deserved
by me and I would not have overeaten again. The doctor intervened and helped me
to indulge myself” (Chatterjee 84). And so with history, and so with the law,
all of which are the record of visible illness rather than of the truth. In
Gandhi’s world, it would seem that “[t]rue knowledge [which] gives a moral
standing and moral strength” (Chatterjee 119), can be the only basis for any
politics. To that extent, Non-cooperation or satyagraha, as “intense political
activity” rather than passive resistance, but in the form of a negation of the
existing political frameworks, was born. The “disobedience” here was not only
of the British administration, but of existing modalities of resistance. The
positive content of the programme was that of rural construction through khadi
and the charkha programme, which for Gandhi would be the true method of
non-violent swaraj. This too, however, needed the abdication of the state from
responsibility. The collectivity that Tagore found so suspect in this regard
was for Gandhi an experiment in the modalities of non-violent mass resistance.
And to Tagore’s eloquent argument against the charkha on account of its
staticity, what more eloquent answer than this – “It is a charge against India that her
people are so uncivilized, ignorant and stolid, that it is not possible to
induce them to adopt any changes. It is a charge really against our merit. What
we have tested and found true on the anvil of experience, we dare not change”
(Chatterjee 96).</p>
<p align="left" style="text-align: left;" class="MsoBodyTextIndent">How does this otherwise rich polemic help us to
understand positions on science and technology? Is Gandhi a pastoral
philosopher or a peasant intellectual proposing a separate epistemic realm from
that of the West? Can he be labelled a Luddite? Is he caught, like the European
Romantics were, in the dilemma between Reason and Morality? Or is he making a
fundamental distinction between truth and the knowledge encompassed in
disciplines like science and history, suggesting that truth cannot but strike
elsewhere from knowledge? While the answers to each of these may be difficult,
while individual examples for each of these arguments may be found in Gandhi if
not seen as part of the integral picture, and while any attempt to
intellectualise his thought may be doomed from the start, I might perhaps
attempt to say that there is, here, a critique of existing knowledge systems,
of which scientific knowledge is one, that calls for a fundamentally new theory
of knowledge, a theory of knowledge inextricably linked with morality, rather
than a choice of alternate system from the ‘West’ or any other.</p>
<p align="left" style="text-align: left;" class="MsoBodyTextIndent"> </p>
<p align="left" style="text-align: left;" class="MsoBodyTextIndent">In the next post, coming in a few days from now, we
will see how a peculiar conflation of these positions alongwith shifts in
Marxist thinking in India
helped to produce the classical responses to technology that then pervaded
feminist thinking and other paradigmatic frameworks on thinking gender and
technology.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<div><br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<div id="ftn1">
<p><a name="_ftn1" href="#_ftnref1"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[1]</span></span></a> (Gandhi
1925, “The Poet and the <em>charkha</em>”, 125).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<p><a name="_ftn2" href="#_ftnref2"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[2]</span></span></a> Gandhi’s
critique of these articles of faith of the scientific world, then, couched as
it was in moral language, was clearly outside the thematic of nationalist
politics, and more an attitude of selfness. While Nehru, for different reasons,
had ambivalent responses to nationalism as an ideology, his responses were
within the ambit of Enlightenment critiques of nationalism – a position Gandhi
was clearly out of.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn3">
<p><a name="_ftn3" href="#_ftnref3"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[3]</span></span></a> <em>Mukta Dhara</em> – Free Current – on the
question of construction of a large dam as symbolizing ‘man’s’ desire to
control nature, or <em>Rakta Karabi</em> – Red
Oleander – the story of a cruel king who lives behind an iron curtain while his
subjects, working under terrible conditions in underground mines, suffer untold
cruelties meted out by him, speak of displacement, the facelessness of
technology, of power, of dehumanizing impulses in technology.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn4">
<p><a name="_ftn4" href="#_ftnref4"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[4]</span></span></a> Probably
the sentiment Tagore experienced when he expressed his abhorrence of an
instrumentalist view of satyagraha which he felt was being used as a “political
gamble [while] their minds [continued to be] corroded by untruth …” Tagore’s
‘Call of Truth’, <em>Modern Review</em>.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn5">
<p><a name="_ftn5" href="#_ftnref5"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[5]</span></span></a> I am
grateful to Prasanta Chakravarty for this useful insight.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn6">
<p><a name="_ftn6" href="#_ftnref6"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[6]</span></span></a> So that
Romain Rolland calls <em>Hind</em> <em>Swaraj</em> 'the negation of Progress and
also of European science.' [Chatterjee
1986: 85]</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn7">
<p><a name="_ftn7" href="#_ftnref7"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[7]</span></span></a> This, from a Tagore who consistently held an
anti-statist position, on the grounds that unlike in Europe, the State was
never a central entity in the life of the Indian nation, and that further, in
the present time, i.e. in British India, the state is external to society,
rather than a part of it. “Our fight” as he puts it, “is a spiritual fight … to
emancipate Man from the meshes … [of] these organisations of National Egoism …
We have no word for Nation in our language. When we borrow this word from other
people, it never fits us. For we are to make our league with <em>Narayan</em> …” (Tagore’s reflections on
non-cooperation and cooperation, <em>Modern
Review</em>, May 1921).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn8">
<p><a name="_ftn8" href="#_ftnref8"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[8]</span></span></a> Those for whom authority is needed instead of
reason, will invariably accept despotism in place of freedom. ... [Chatterjee
82].</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn9">
<p><a name="_ftn9" href="#_ftnref9"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[9]</span></span></a> Tagore
draws parallels with his reading of the negativity of Buddhism to make his
point – “<em>Brahma-vidya </em>(the cult of Brahma, the Infinite Being) in India has for
its object <em>mukti</em>, emancipation, while Buddhism has <em>nirvana</em>,
extinction. It may be argued that both have the same idea in different names.
But names represent attitudes of mind, emphasize particular aspects of truth. <em>Mukti</em>
draws our attention to the positive, and <em>nirvana</em> to the negative side of
truth.</p>
<p>Buddha kept silence all through his teachings about
the truth of the <em>Om</em>, the everlasting yes, his implication being
that by the negative path of destroying the self we naturally reach that truth.
Therefore he emphasized the fact of <em>dukkha</em> (misery) which had to be
avoided and the <em>Brahma-vidya</em> emphasized the fact of <em>ananda</em>, joy,
which had to be attained. … Therefore, the idea of life’s training was
different in the Vedic period from that of the Buddhistic. … The abnormal type
of asceticism to which Buddhism gave rise in India reveled in celibacy and
mutilation of life in all different forms …” (Tagore’s reflections on non-cooperation and cooperation, <em>Modern Review</em>, May 1921, Chatterjee 57).
A significant difference in Tagore’s and Gandhi’s approach to the ‘moral’ seems
to be in evidence here – while for the former it is a need for creativity that
will be stifled by subjection to any constraint like collective action without
the conviction of the reasoning intellect – be it ritual or any other
“unreasoned creed” (The Call of Truth), for Gandhi, it was about self-denial –
“Our civilization, our culture, our <em>swaraj</em> depend not upon multiplying
our wants – self-indulgence, but upon restricting our wants – self-denial”
(“The Conditions of <em>swaraj</em>”, <em>Young India</em>, 23 February 1921,
Chatterjee 189). More than a simple separation of reason-unreason between the
two thinkers as some commentators have made out, this may be read as a comment
on the political that was reiterated by Tagore again in his repeated references
to the separation between truth and the “barren stratagems of the political”,
and moreover, the violence constitutive of the latter. In that respect,
Gandhi’s later frustrations, and stepping away, from the movement, may suggest
a greater overlap between their positions.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/technology-and-the-nationalist-moment-2'>https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/technology-and-the-nationalist-moment-2</a>
</p>
No publisherashahistories of internet in Indiarewiring bodieswomen and internetmathemes and medicine2011-08-03T09:47:17ZBlog EntryRewiring Bodies: Technology and the Nationalist Moment [1]
https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/technology-and-the-nationalist-moment
<b>This is the second post in a series by Asha Achuthan on her project, Rewiring Bodies. In this blog entry, Asha looks at the trajectory of responses to technology in India to understand the genesis of the assumption that the subjects of technology are separate from the tool, machine, or instrument. </b>
<p>The question
of technology perhaps arose in greatest relief in India in development and the
responses to development. In order to understand this, we need to understand
the pre-history of this activity in the nationalist moments.</p>
<p>A version of
Marxism pervaded Nehru’s nationalism – one that espoused the 'scientific,
economic sense' of progress. Some of the emphasis placed in the Indian National
Congress on economic issues, particularly during the 1937 elections, was the
direct result of Nehru’s urgings. This changed after 1937, but Nehruvian
socialism, inasmuch as it valued a materialist conception of history, or
considered the economic as important in the last instance, continued to pervade
nationalist agendas. Analyses of India’s
problems too were in this mode – 'Parties [in an independent India] will be
formed with economic ideals. There will be socialists, anti-socialists,
zamindars, kisans and other similar groups. It will be ridiculous to think of
parties founded on a religious or communal basis' (Nehru 1931: 284, quoted in
Seth 1995: 212).</p>
<p>Nehru’s stand on nationalism, by distinguishing between
oppressor and oppressed nations, also legitimised certain nationalisms, while
remaining critical of nationalism in general.<a name="_ftnref1" href="#_ftn1"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[1]</span></span></a>
Needless to say, this vision of nationalism had as its underlying philosophy
rationalist Enlightenment thought, and was also tied to internationalism<a name="_ftnref2" href="#_ftn2"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[2]</span></span></a>
and progress – a progress that would bring socialism as a 'saner ordering of
human affairs' rather than as a 'moral issue' (Nehru, Selected Works, 'Whither India': 8, quoted in Seth 215). To
that end, the scientific temper, as Nehru reiterates again and again, is the
requirement.<a name="_ftnref3" href="#_ftn3"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[3]</span></span></a>
And to realise that requirement, Nehru did, apart from his policy efforts, take
up the philosophical debate, pointing to 'the essential basis of Indian thought
for ages past … [which] fits in with the scientific temper and approach' (Nehru
1946: 526, quoted in Chatterjee 1986: 139). This temper informed, for this
version of nationalism, analyses of colonialism, cultural difference, religion,
and industrialisation; each of the first three were attributable to economic
backwardness and disparity, and the removal of these disparities, accompanied
by the development of ‘big’ science and technology, was the answer.</p>
<p>As far as
Nehru was concerned, the colonial state was the enemy of such
industrialisation, partly owing to its own selfish commercial interests, but
more importantly because such interests went against the universal models of
economic growth wherein developing nations also needed to grow in order to keep
the rich nations healthy. For his version of scientific socialism, then, a
critique of colonialism could not simultaneously be a critique of reason or
modernity – colonialism was ‘wrong’ primarily because it did not fulfil the
requirements of modern growth. Clearly, this also involved for Nehru certain
expectations of the national bourgeoisie who would provide political
leadership.</p>
<p>What confounded him, therefore, were the ‘spontaneous’ peasant
uprisings, as also the Gandhian philosophy of development that was singularly
in conflict with his own notions of progress. Both of these meant for Nehru a
shift not only from reason to unreason, but, in parallel, from the political to
the utopian. Chatterjee (1986) suggests that Nehru solved the problem by granting
to Gandhi a stage in the ‘passive revolution’ – an intervention – where, once
the stage had been set for the real political battle, the ‘masses’ could be won
over to the larger nationalist cause through faith, emotion, or other such
means both incomprehensible and vague of objective (to Nehru). The larger
nationalist cause was the promotion of large-scale industry over small-scale or
cottage industries, since 'the world and the dominating facts of the situation
that confront it have decided in favour of' the former' (Nehru Discovery of India,
1946: 414, quoted in Chatterjee 1986: 144). The ‘masses’, by whom Nehru usually
meant the peasantry, needed to recognize, like the rest of India, that
small-scale industry in these 'dominating facts of the situation' could only
function as a 'colonial appendage' (413). Industrialisation and expert
knowledge were what were needed for progress and a modern nation.</p>
<p>After
independence, this project of the modern nation was taken up by planning – what
Chatterjee calls the new systems-theorists’ utopia. In this scheme of things,
once political independence had been achieved and independent state control set
up, economic disparities would gradually disappear, for the only real problem
would be one of access, a technical rather than political issue. Planning, as
far as Nehru was concerned, would take care of this. Planning involved experts,
and an approach to individual concrete problems at a practical level, not a
political philosophy. 'Planning essentially consists in balancing ...'
(Nehru 1957: 51, quoted in Chatterjee 1986: 159) and 'co-operation in planning
was particularly soothing ... in pleasant contrast to the squabbles and
conflicts of politics' (Nehru 1946: 405, quoted in Chatterjee 1986: 160).
Further, '[s]cientific planning enables us to increase our production, and
socialism comes in when we plan to distribute production evenly' (Nehru 1962:
151, quoted in Chatterjee 1986: 159).</p>
<p>Socialism too, then, becomes, rather than
a system of thought or a violent class struggle, the pragmatic planning of a
national economy – one that, if adequately planned, would automatically produce
the 'classless society with equal economic justice and opportunity for all, a
society organised on a planned basis for the raising of mankind to higher
material and cultured levels, to a cultivation of spiritual values … ultimately
a world order' (Nehru 1936: 552, quoted in Chatterjee 1986: 161). For
Chatterjee, this selective appropriation of scientific Marxism was how the
reason-unreason binary was precipitated, giving rise to a different politics
for the elite and the subaltern in mature nationalist thought. In the next post
I will try to demonstrate how this formulation of Chatterjee’s was one of the
foundations from which the critiques of development too took off.<a name="_ftnref4" href="#_ftn4"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[4]</span></span></a></p>
<p>My point here is to cull, from among
these debates, both the routes taken in development thinking and the contexts
for postcolonial approaches to the science and technology question. Marxism, in
its early nationalist avatar, presented an approach to science that involved
its accurate interpretation, application and access, rather than any critique.
As is evident from the debates between Nehru and the CPI,<a name="_ftnref5" href="#_ftn5"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[5]</span></span></a>
and Nehru’s own writing on the subject,<a name="_ftnref6" href="#_ftn6"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[6]</span></span></a>
colonialism was equal to capitalism, the anti-imperialist struggle of the
Indian masses was the route to independence, and the change in forces of
production would needs must bring about a change in the means of production.
For Nehru then, the nationalist agenda consisted at least in part of bringing
to the third world access to technology and a transformation in the forces of
production that would address poverty and unemployment. In the
Marxist-nationalist space, the debate was about what would be the agent of
change – the nationalist bourgeoisie or the working class; also whether it
would be forces of production by themselves or the subjective sense of the
proletariat.</p>
<p>But both
third-worldism and Indian nationalism had other, powerful and different
approaches to the same questions – the analysis of colonialism and the required
response, the question of technology, the concept of the state/cultural
difference. Was there then a nationalist alternative to the technology offered
by the West? We will, in the next post, look at the Tagore-Gandhi debates
on technology to throw some light on this question.</p>
<p> </p>
<div><br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<div id="ftn1">
<p><a name="_ftn1" href="#_ftnref1"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[1]</span></span></a> To
identify within oppressed nations overarching standpoints was also therefore,
in this frame, problematic, for, '[d]o we place the masses, the peasantry and
the workers first, or some other small class at the head of our list? Let us
give the benefits of freedom to as many groups and classes as possible, but
essentially whom do we stand for, and when a conflict arises whose side must we
take?' [4-5] Nehru, <em>Whither India
</em>1933]</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<p><a name="_ftn2" href="#_ftnref2"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[2]</span></span></a> 'Differences
[in national realities] there are but they are chiefly due to different stages
of economic growth.' [ibid, 5]</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn3">
<p><a name="_ftn3" href="#_ftnref3"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[3]</span></span></a> 'It is
better to understand a part of the truth, and apply it to our lives, than to
understand nothing at all and flounder helplessly in a vain attempt to pierce
the mystery of existence … It is the scientific approach, the adventurous and
yet critical temper of science, the search for truth and new knowledge, the
refusal to accept anything without testing and trial, the capacity to change
previous conclusions in the face of new evidence, the reliance on observed fact
and not on preconceived theory … not merely for the application of science but
for life itself …' (Nehru 1946: 523, quoted in Chatterjee 1986: 139).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn4">
<p><a name="_ftn4" href="#_ftnref4"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[4]</span></span></a> Seth has
concluded, differently from Chatterjee, that this was not a simple
appropriation of scientific Marxism, leaving its political core alone.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn5">
<p><a name="_ftn5" href="#_ftnref5"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[5]</span></span></a> See
Palme Dutt and his efforts to bring together the communist movement, the
democratic camp and the nationalist movement. Nehru’s truck with the communists
more or less dissolved around the response to the August 1942 revolution and
the dissent over relations with the Muslim League.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn6">
<p><a name="_ftn6" href="#_ftnref6"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[6]</span></span></a> At his
second Presidential address to the Indian National Congress in Lucknow on April 12, 1936, Nehru repeated some of his
earlier commitment on this, 'I am convinced that the only key to the solution
of the world’s problem and of India’s problem lies in socialism, and when I use
the word I do so not in a vague, humanitarian way but in the scientific,
economic sense.' From Jawaharlal Nehru, <em>Selected
Works</em>, vol. 7, p. 180, quoted in Seth 1995: 222.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/technology-and-the-nationalist-moment'>https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/technology-and-the-nationalist-moment</a>
</p>
No publisherashahistories of internet in Indiarewiring bodieswomen and internetmathemes and medicine2011-08-03T09:47:03ZBlog EntryRewiring Bodies: Methodologies of Critique - Responses to technology in feminist and gender work in India
https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/methodologies-of-critique-responses-to-technology-in-feminist-and-gender-work-in-india
<b>In this post, part of her CIS-RAW 'Rewiring Bodies' project, Asha Achuthan records the arguments within feminism and gender work that critique the use of technology in the Indian context, and attempts to show continuities between these arguments and postcolonial formulations. Overall, the post also records notions of the 'political' that inform the contour of these critiques.</b>
<p></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">I have, in the last six posts, attempted to
trace the trajectory of the critiques of <em>technology
standing in for science</em> in the Indian context. In so doing, I have also tried
to trace the methodology of critique itself that animates the political in India. I have shown the ways in which these
critiques access anterior difference (as in connections drawn in postcolonial
work between the ‘resistant’ past as prior to colonialism and an ‘other’
modernity produced within colonialism), the ways in which they posit resistance
as providing the crisis to closure of hegemonic Western science (through the
appropriation of the language of resistance of Subaltern Studies into the
hybridity framework), and the ways in which this resistance fails to meet the
promise of crisis (the crisis being a reference to the Kuhnian understanding of
crisis that might signal the fall of a paradigm). It follows that the sometimes
implicit claim for the rise of alternate systems of knowledge also fails since
the criteria for paradigm shifts is not met.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The present discussion turns on two axes. One
is that of the political, within which I will try to place the various
arguments within feminism and gender work that try to examine and explain
science as a political institution, and the options available to negotiate with
its power. These arguments understand the political as contained in a
discussion about power; they also chart shifts from the responses to power as
coherent, singular and monolithic, to a more disaggregated notion of power
itself that also then apparently demands a disaggregated response. This shift makes
sense if we also follow a parallel shift in the 21<sup>st</sup> century from a
politics based on ideology to one that proposes an attention to
micro-negotiations, that proposes a thick description of these negotiations as
the alternative. It is such an alternative that pays attention also to context
or situation, as also to experience. Along my second axis in this discussion –
that of the epistemological – I examine the case for situated knowledges, for
experience as the situation of knowledge-making, and the possible movement from
here to the articulation of a standpoint epistemology. Indications in this direction
I will lay down in the post following this one. </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">In attempting to ask the question of criteria
of knowledge through the allegory of what I have called women’s lived
experience, I adopt in somewhat mutated form the strategy of the ‘outside’
consciousness, something that has received much attention, in different ways,
in orthodox Marxist and subaltern literature, as an empirical something, a
socialist consciousness that can or cannot bring to revolutionary consciousness
the ‘mass’; also in feminist literature, at times as the empirical excluded, at
others as the sign of the ‘outsider within’ who may challenge dominant
formations.<a name="_ftnref1" href="#_ftn1"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[1]</span></span></a> At all
points in the history of these formations, the translation of formulations of
the outside has been at the level of the empirical. A link possibly exists here
between this kind of translation and the apparent difficulty of attaching the
political with the epistemological in any useful way. Politics, in such a
translation, has either been about championing the entry of the empirical
outside, or about championing the knowledge attached, ex-officio, to the
situation of outsideness. I will, in the formulation I am about to offer, work
with an understanding of exclusion to which inclusion in this sense is not the
answer. In order to do so, I would also then, beginning with a formulation akin
to that of the ‘outsider within’, attempt an allegorical description of the way
in which such an outsider(’s) perspective (I bracket the apostrophe in an
attentiveness to the difference between the abstract and the empirical here)
might offer a response to the act of exclusion.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">I am aware as I say this that the first task is
to provide a theory of the exclusion itself; in the case of science, to ‘prove’
that it is constituted by exclusionary acts. Further, it is important to show
the operations of technology and its parallels with the operations of science. I
have given exhaustive accounts, in previous posts, of the work that has
unconvincingly done this. For more convincing accounts, I rely partly, and in
somewhat unrepentant fashion, on certain clues available in the work of
‘western’ feminist epistemological thinkers – those ‘global’ feminist accounts
that for the first time enabled a possibility of thinking gender analytics
outside Marxist frames in Bengal, while remaining hegemonic in the field of
feminism; partly on the allegory of the <em>dai,</em>
whose engagements with the reproductive health system in India I explore in some detail,<a name="_ftnref2" href="#_ftn2"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[2]</span></span></a>
and partly on a different case for the ‘outside’ made in the work of a Marxian<a name="_ftnref3" href="#_ftn3"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[3]</span></span></a>
thinker in Bengal.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">To summarise, I attempt, in this set of posts, to offer an understanding
of the political that moves from ideology toward standpoint, and an
accompanying move from ‘one knowledge’ not to alternative or many knowledges,
but towards a standpoint epistemology.</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"> </p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong><em>Notes from a consultation, and
from a conversation</em></strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><em>The consultation</em></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><em>Tumi ki roj tablet khao? </em>Do you have the pill everyday?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Do <strong><em>You</em></strong>
(the doctor and authority) have the pill everyday?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Do
you have to have the pill <strong><em>everyday</em></strong>?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Do
you <strong><em>really</em></strong>
have to …</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong><em>Aamake</em></strong><em> niye
katha hocche na</em> … Its not <strong><em>me</em></strong>
we’re talking of …</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong><em>I</em></strong> am not
objectified body; <strong><em>you</em></strong> are.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">I am separate from you,
elsewhere.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Actually, I’m the one
who should be asking you the question.<a name="_ftnref4" href="#_ftn4"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[4]</span></span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><em>The conversation </em><strong></strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>In April 2002, I attended, as a medical doctor, a
training programme for ‘traditional birth attendants’ – <em>dais</em> – who had come from various parts of the island to attend an
intensive 6-day training programme organized by a non-governmental
organization. This was a group of women who had varying degrees of experience
with births at which they had assisted. They had been divided into two groups,
with one doctor trained in western medicine to conduct the training schedule in
each of them. The group I had been assigned consisted of 46 women. The youngest
member was 28, the oldest around 60. The programme had the stated objective of
imparting up-to-date and accurate scientific methods (adaptable to the field)
of attending to pregnant women going into labour, that should be introduced
into the village so as to help women with limited access to hospital facilities
in rural areas. Local traditional practices could also be taken into account
and legitimately incorporated where useful. In the event, it also sought to
draw the line between right and wrong practice so that the <em>dai</em> could decide when and in which case to seek the help of the
local health centre. </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>“To fill in gaps in manpower at village levels”, as
the National Population Policy draft (2000) says. The <em>dai</em>, in her own words the <em>mukkhu
sukkhu maanush</em>,</strong><a name="_ftnref5" href="#_ftn5"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[5]</span></span></a><strong> as yet uninitiated into ‘method’, has the key to a
vast field of experience at births, a field waiting to be tapped usefully in
development. Her know-how, which is ‘practical’ rather than ‘propositional’,
means that she has no value in existing frames as epistemological agent; hers
is the voice of experience that with a degree of training and modification can
apparently be made useful to the task in hand.</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>In the time and frame within which I had inserted
myself into the picture, I was able to concentrate largely on the level of the
gradients of power operating, mostly at the general/macro level, between the <em>dai</em> (the “subject[s] of enunciation that
subtend epistemology”),<em> </em>the
“development expert”, the NGO, the local male quack doctor. The NGO of course
had targets to meet – so many women over so many villages covered this year. I
was doing ‘research’, and this was one of the ways I could listen in. I was
there, however, as the ‘doctor’, the authority. The <em>dais</em> knew there was something in this for them. The kits that would
be distributed at the end of session, the legitimation of their knowledge by
the <em>sarkar</em></strong><a name="_ftnref6" href="#_ftn6"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[6]</span></span></a><strong> – they were now trained <em>dais</em>, not just <em>dais</em> – the
meanings this would hopefully carry in trying times when the local (male)
quack, armed with the ‘injection’</strong><a name="_ftnref7" href="#_ftn7"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[7]</span></span></a><strong> and assorted other drugs, in short with a sometimes
more than fair working knowledge of allopathic medicine under his belt, had all
but edged them out of their already meagre income. </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Prior to introductions, the <em>dais</em> were asked to give a written test, where, with the now
standard multiple choice questionnaire, they were asked to respond to problems
generally faced during the delivery of a child. Later, through lectures,
models, role-playing, and video films, the ‘new’, scientific methods were
introduced and explained. </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>The schedule had been planned by the
non-governmental organisation and the <em>dais</em>
informed accordingly. We started the programme with a short discussion on the
availability and advancement of scientific knowledge in the current setting,
and the consequent responsibility incumbent on those responsible for health
issues to avail of this knowledge. Parallely, the dangers of succumbing to
uninformed traditional practices were also touched upon. A format had been prepared
by the organisation for our guidance in conducting the training; further,
members of staff were available around the clock to help us communicate with
the <em>dais</em>, many of whom spoke local
dialects completely different from urban Bengali.</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Each class day started at around nine in the morning
after breakfast. We generally started the day with a new topic, discussing it
from both ends, that of Western Science as well as the perspective of the local
traditional knowledges apparently employed by the <em>dais</em>, the problems they faced therein, their interactions with
local ‘quack doctors’ at the time of a birth, the increasing presence and
authority of this group, and so on. I would generally question them as to why
they employed a particular practice, explain – in logical terms – why the
scientific method was better, and then go on to demonstrate the functioning of
the female body, as understood in (Western) medical literature, with a ritual
of endless repetitions – I even had a wooden duster to bang the table with when
the humming got too loud – for the women were hardly used to the attention
spans demanded of them. In the event, it did happen that practices or
understandings forwarded by the <em>dais</em>
afforded me glimpses of knowledges that did not conform to (or compare with,
sometimes) the Western episteme I was working with; but such difficulties I
(had to) set aside for the purposes of my work. And following me, so did the <em>dais</em>.
</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>While planning on ways to communicate with the
women, both of us (health professionals working with the two groups) had come
to the conclusion that visual models, role-playing etc. would be good methods,
since a large number of the participants were not only non-literate in the
conventional sense, but unused to conventional methods of classroom learning.
The “students” indeed took to these with enthusiasm; having overcome initial
inhibitions, they enthusiastically took on the roles of woman in labour, <em>dai</em>, mother-in-law, husband, doctor at
the local health centre, to enact the scenes as they should from now on be
played out, as I watched in satisfaction – the <em>dai</em> had come of age. </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>The
first question that the <em>dais</em> asked me
when I arrived in their midst was whether I was married. If so, how many
children I had. As I realised that I was alone in a room full of mothers, I
felt the beginnings of an unbridgeable gap; I might pick up the local tongue, I
might sit down with them and attempt to erase authority, but I did not share
what they shared with most other women, the kind of experience they valued (or
considered necessary for authority). As the classes wore on, this became a
little joke amongst us – every now and then, one of the older women would stop
proceedings to ask – <em>Accha, tomaar to
nei, tumi eto jano ki kore</em>?</strong><a name="_ftnref8" href="#_ftn8"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[8]</span></span></a><strong> And I would
counter sagely – <em>Aaro jaani</em>.</strong><a name="_ftnref9" href="#_ftn9"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[9]</span></span></a><strong> Finally they
settled for – <em>Aare</em><em> eto rugi dekheche, ekta abhigyata hoy ni</em>?</strong><a name="_ftnref10" href="#_ftn10"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[10]</span></span></a><strong> An
experiential referent had been found, however clinical, and that was
something! </strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"> </p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong><em>The turn to
experience – from consultations to conversations </em></strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">I have no names (of protected
confidentiality or otherwise) to offer for the women in both the episodes I
report above; neither was part of an ethnographic study, and both are offered
more as plausible accounts of a situation, and contexts within which feminist approaches
to experience have materialized.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The consultation was with
a recalcitrant mother who had been put on the contraceptive pill following the
abortion of an unplanned pregnancy and had returned for follow-up with a
continuing carelessness regarding its intake. The entire consultation, as is
evident from the report, lasted two sentences, leaving the female physician
irritated, and the patient engaged in a certain conversational response – the
kind of response that comes the way of the physician every day, but is
nevertheless the kind of response that is illegitimate, aporetic. Enough has
been said about power-knowledge nexuses that promote one knowledge – in this
case the Western medical – as high, as singular. This is the kind of response
that, through its own aporicity – neither appropriate, nor oppositional, nor
even alternate – makes visible, and bizarre, the positioning of medical
knowledge as objective, unanchored to experience, and on <em>that count authoritative</em>. It is also the kind of response that does
not sit well with liberal feminist approaches that would wish to mediate
authority through information, choice, or consent.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Feminist politics in India, in response to this authoritative stance,
initially took a ‘more women-in-science’ position; it asked for <em>increased</em> <em>presence</em> <em>of</em> <em>women</em> <em>as professionals</em> in the scientific enterprise, for <em>increased access</em> <em>for women</em> to the fruits of science and technology, as also to
information. It was hoped that changes in gender composition at the
professional level would both bring in women’s perspectives, and in so doing
transform the disciplines through such inclusion.<a name="_ftnref11" href="#_ftn11"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[11]</span></span></a>
The entire gamut of women’s right to health campaigns articulated this
position. Technology in this frame comprised the manifest diagnostic and therapeutic
tools of medical practice, particularly reproductive health practice. This is a
route that has been taken in later state development agendas as well, where,
after the World Bank clauses requiring clear commitments to gender appeared in
1987, States put in place protocols to include women’s perspectives in
development.<a name="_ftnref12" href="#_ftn12"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[12]</span></span></a> This
was a position that stayed with one-knowledge theories, wanting, along with one
knowledge, adequate <em>dissemination</em> of
the products of such knowledge.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The 90s saw a clearer
shift to a politics of ‘third world women’s experience’, from authoritarianism
to alternatives. This shift talked about bringing back ‘low’ knowledge, of
re-reading marginality as a place for knowledge-making, and of making the
‘third world’ – geographically understood – an empirical site for the same.
Eco-feminist moves like those of Vandana Shiva are a case in point, where the
experiential is the pre-technological, and also the anti-technological, the
proper sphere of resistance to the instrumentality of technology. There are a
couple of things I would like to point to here. On the one hand, this shift was
not so much a chronological as perhaps an ideological shift, and populated more
of the rhetorical than the clear-cut theoretical articulations of the turn to
experience. It was a turn that allowed a <em>re-making
of the third world</em>, for post-developmentalists, from the WID
(women-in-development) initiatives that exercised only inclusion rhetoric. It
was also a shift that informed a politics of the time – a politics of location,
a politics that allowed a community to speak for and in itself on account of
being in a marginal relation to what was perceived as hegemonic, that is, the
West. This was a politics of oppositional difference, a politics of resistance,
a politics that was born out of and needed, for its continuation, hierarchical
difference, a politics that said, “I know mine, you know yours, there can be no
dialogue”. But it was also a move that populated rhetoric more than theory or
practice, at least in Indian contexts, not always enjoying full status
alongside ‘one knowledge’ theories, so that “empowerment alongside perspective”
became the more acceptable motto. Such an attempt has perhaps been best
articulated philosophically in the work of Martha C. Nussbaum, who talks at the
same time of a uniqueness to women’s perspectives <em>and</em> of the need to raise them to the common level “human”.
Difference – either cultural or sexual – was not the motive force in this
attempt; rather, it was something that needed to be marked in order to be
transcended. Finding a commonality to women’s experiences and raising them
therefore to the universal level was the task. Knowledge was still one and
singular, but a <em>democratization in modes
of arrival </em>at such knowledge was the important goal. “We all know,
together” – such would seem to be the motto.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Such a democratization
did not obviously require ideological buttressing, and anthropological work
that began in the 90s, calling itself gender work but spurning feminist
stances, drawing upon women’s practices, critiquing trends in globalization but
not naming capitalism, marked a new shift in the turn to experience. I will go
into these in greater detail in a later section.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">It is in the context of these shifts that I
see the turn to experience in feminist and gender work. In using the allegory
of the two reports I provide, I also wish to mark my own shift – a shift that I
call a re-turn to experience. The particular relationship between the <em>dai</em> and the doctor could be and has been
read as a case of “I know, you do”, where the <em>dai</em>, in her own words the “<em>mukkhu
sukkhu manush</em>” – the unlearned person – is brought in as experienced but
non-knowledgeable, as probable representative of “indigenous health systems”
that fit, makeshift, into the overcrowded field of reproductive health care,
with the distinction alive at all times between Western medicine and such
systems that are neither standardized nor adequately tested for efficacy and
safety (NPP 2000). This is the orthodox ‘high knowledge’ position that works
well with simple policies of inclusion. In response, both feminism and gender
work have attempted to chart a politics of third world women’s experience, to
present an alternative picture, as I have briefly delineated. I will, in some
detail, categorize two of these moves.</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong> </strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong> </strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong><em>The global feminist making of the Third World Woman: building
capability, fostering agency </em></strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong></strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong> </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoBlockText">(The
‘typical’ breast-feeding mother as depicted in Community Health posters)<a name="_ftnref13" href="#_ftn13"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[13]</span></span></a> <strong></strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoBlockText"><strong> </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoBlockText"><strong> </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoBlockText"><strong> </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoBlockText"><strong>Feminist political philosophy has frequently been sceptical of
universal normative approaches. I shall argue that it is possible to describe a
framework for such a feminist practice of philosophy that is strongly
universalist, committed to cross-cultural norms of justice, equality, and
rights, and at the same time sensitive to local particularity, and to the ways
in which circumstances shape not only options but also beliefs and preferences.</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong> (Nussbaum
2000: 7)</strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">The first day of the typical
SEWA education program for future union and bank leaders is occupied by getting
each woman to look straight at the group leader and say her name. The process
is videotaped, and women grow accustomed to looking at themselves. Eventually,
though with considerable difficulty, they are all able to overcome norms of
modesty and deference and to state their names publicly.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> (17, fn. 20)</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoBlockText">By
women as a category of analysis, I am referring to the crucial assumption that
all of us of the same gender, across classes and cultures, are somehow socially
constituted as a homogeneous group identified prior to the process of analysis.
This is an assumption which characterizes much feminist discourse. The
homogeneity of women as a group is produced not on the basis of biological
essentials but rather on the basis of secondary sociological and
anthropological universals. Thus, for instance, in any given piece of feminist
analysis, women are characterized as a singular group on the basis of a shared
oppression. What binds women together is a sociological notion of the
“sameness” of their oppression. It is at this point that an elision takes place
between “women” as a discursively constructed group and “women” as material
subjects of their own history.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> (Mohanty 1991: 56)</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Vasanti and Jayamma</strong><a name="_ftnref14" href="#_ftn14"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[14]</span></span></a><strong> entered the
development literature when the imperative to attend to the local gained
legitimacy, as quintessential representatives of poor, “illiterate” women
caught up “in particular caste and regional circumstances in India” (Nussbaum
2000: 21); women situated, especially, on the lower rung of sexual hierarchies,
and yet “trying to flourish” (15).</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="Preformatted"><strong>Despite
all these reversals (and others), Jayamma is tough, defiant, and healthy. She
doesn’t seem interested in talking, but she shows her visitors around, and
makes sure that they are offered lime juice and water. </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong> (19)</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Persistent take-off points, they, or their names at
any rate, have gained iconic currency as the ‘real’ local women who can now
speak of the sufferings they endured till they moved from the ‘informal sector’
or a place “marginal to economic activity” (15, fn. 14) to the avowedly
different and more agential category of ‘self-employed’. Of Vasanti it is said,
“She now earns 500 rupees a month, a decent living” (17, contrasted in the text
with the Rs. 180 per month allotted to destitute women under the Indian
Criminal Procedure Code in 1986). In a world where “letting the women speak for
themselves” (17) is the task at hand, and one that is entirely possible, they
speak. They break sanctions, form political alliances, <em>learn</em> <em>to</em> <em>name</em> themselves. </strong><strong>And it is as a first step toward making possible
this movement <em>from the local
particularity to the universal value </em>that Nussbaum works hard to prepare
the ground for herself as justified observer of Vasanti’s and Jayamma’s
struggles. Such a universal will render possible for these women choice, the
capability to make that choice, the right to demand political rights according
to needs. For Nussbaum, detachment coupled with concern and familiarity is the
ideal (and achievable) point from which this is possible. </strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong><em>Speaking
to the local</em></strong><strong><em> </em></strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>Nussbaum, therefore,
begins her discussion on development, women and social justice by stating and
grounding her primary focus on “the case of India,
a nation in which women suffer great inequalities despite a promising
constitutional tradition” (9). It is also a country she is familiar with, and
this, she says, helps her “write on the basis of personal observation and
familiarity, as well as study” (9): </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="Preformatted"><strong>… I
went to India to look at women’s development projects, because I wanted to
write a book that would be real and concrete rather than abstract, and because
I knew too little to talk about the problems of poor working women in a country
other than my own. <em>I had to hear about
the problems from them</em>.</strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"> (ix, italics mine)<strong></strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>Drawing on Jawaharlal
Nehru’s concept of “One World that can no longer be split into isolated
fragments” to host her project, she also, however, describes being “both a
foreigner and a middle-class person”, and thus “doubly an outsider vis-à-vis
the places about which” she writes. Nonetheless, a certain mixture of
“curiosity and determination” helps “surmount these hurdles – especially if one
listens to what people say”. As a foreigner, Nussbaum believes she possesses a
“helpful type of neutrality amid the cultural, religious, and political
debates” that a local scholar would not be free from. “In a situation of
entrenched inequality”, she feels, “being a neighbor can be an epistemological
problem” (10).</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Speaking of tradition,
Nussbaum finds it “impossible to deny that traditions, both Western and
non-Western, perpetrate injustice against women”. But though traditions –
“local” or otherwise – cannot be denounced as “morally retrograde” through
“hasty judgement”, it is important not “[t]o avoid the whole issue” and “stand
around in the vestibule” refusing to “take a definite stand on any moral or
political question” (1999: 30), because “there are universal obligations to
protect human functioning and its dignity, and … the dignity of women is equal
to that of men.” Referring to what she calls Western tradition, an example of
sexual harassment at the workplace shows that “[c]learly our own society <em>still</em> appeals to tradition in its own
way to justify women’s unequal treatment”(1999: 30, italics mine). But although
“there is no country that treats its women as well as its men … [d]eveloping
countries … present <em>especially urgent
problems</em>” (2-3, italics mine). In such a situation, the need for a
cross-cultural universal becomes imperative. As a possibility, it is already in
place. </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>The urgency mounts with
paragraph upon paragraph listing the “uneven achievements” of developing
nations with respect to areas considered necessary to women’s quality of life –
female employment statistics, rape statistics, workplace harassment statistics,
literacy, health, nutrition. One must of course be careful, says Nussbaum, even
where favourable statistics are concerned, for “local governments tend to be
boastful.” </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>And through the increased
magnitude of the problems, only vestiges of which apparently “still”
contaminate the West, does one glimpse the spectre of the white woman who takes
on the onerous responsibility of saving the brown woman from her traditions? Of
course, armed with curiosity and the determination to satisfy it, the “neutral”
foreigner, the disinterested observer who is not embroiled critic, can serve,
apparently, as trusted confidante for the ‘innocent’ subaltern – a sensitive
alliance, as it were, between the concerned intellectual and the
yet-to-be-capable-agent – the moment not yet <em>realized</em> in representation.</strong><a name="_ftnref15" href="#_ftn15"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[15]</span></span></a><strong> The brown woman
“scholar”, despite her however tenuous commonalities with Jayamma or Vasanti,
might here be, by very virtue of her “enmeshed”ness, more suspect than the
“unimplicated” foreigner.</strong><a name="_ftnref16" href="#_ftn16"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[16]</span></span></a><strong> </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoBodyTextIndent2"><strong>It
is at this secure subject who is sought to be arrived at or revived on the
premise that she exists somewhere before context, and must be reinstated, or
given voice, that Nussbaum’s capabilities approach is directed.</strong></p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Working
on the local</strong></h2>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>The “capabilities
approach” has been proposed by Nussbaum in basic agreement with Amartya Sen.</strong><a name="_ftnref17" href="#_ftn17"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[17]</span></span></a><strong> Nussbaum talks of the capabilities
approach as a “foundation for basic political principles that should underwrite
constitutional guarantees” (70-1), and draws on “Aristotle’s ideas of human
functioning and Marx’s use of them” (70). It is proposed as a universal and
ethical approach that must nevertheless “focus appropriately on women’s lives”
(71) in order to be relevant, that is, it must “examine real lives in their
material and social settings” (71). Premised on the “intuitively powerful”,
“core idea … of the human being as a dignified free being who shapes his or her
own life in co-operation and reciprocity with others” (72), an “awe-inspiring
something” that is “above the mechanical workings of nature” (73), the
capabilities approach moves primarily in the direction of looking at each
individual as an <em>end</em> in her own
right, and endeavours towards promoting “central human functional
capabilities”, that is, capabilities that deliver readiness to make (certain)
choices regarding functioning in ‘multiply realizable’ ways that are “truly
human” (72), and living “a life that is shaped throughout by these human powers
of practical reason and sociability” (72). These capabilities are to be
promoted, and social and political institutions so structured, so that at least
a threshold level, a “social minimum”, of these capabilities may be attained.
It is the idea of this threshold that Nussbaum concentrates on, stating that
“we may reasonably defer questions about what we shall do when all citizens are
above the threshold, given that this already imposes a taxing and nowhere-<em>realized</em> standard” (12, italics mine).</strong><a name="_ftnref18" href="#_ftn18"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[18]</span></span></a><strong> “On the other hand,” says Nussbaum, “…
[one is] not pushing individuals into the function; once the stage is set, the
choice is up to them.”</strong><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">There is a distinction drawn, and
stressed, between capability and functioning. The concept of capability is
generally discussed in conjunction with rights, and the State is seen here as
guarantor of these rights, not an enforcer of discipline. The presence of
capability, then, is taken as reflection of a developed State, and the presence
of functioning flowing from this capability as reflection of a good State that
encourages citizens to express the choices they have been initiated into.
Nussbaum says, “Thus, we want soldiers who will not <em>simply</em> obey, when an order is given....”</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">But in cases where functioning is
considered important, like casting one’s vote once the capability has been
given, citizens might be forced into exercising their given capabilities – that
is, into functioning. This argument is extended to innumerable situations,
including children who need to function in a particular manner to make for
capable adults, the spheres of health, maintenance of environments, literacy,
nutrition, citizens’ responsibilities like the paying of taxes, and others. “In
general, the more crucial a function is to attaining and maintaining other
capabilities, the more entitled we may be to promote actual functioning in some
cases, within limits set by an appropriate respect for citizens’ choices” (92).
“Even compulsory voting would not be ruled out, if we were convinced that
requiring functioning is the only way to ensure the presence of a particular
capability” (93).</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>In
attempting </strong>to arrive at a normative theory of
social justice,<strong> Nussbaum considers
state policies and principles of development in the third world as faulty not
inasmuch as they do not take into account the perspectives of <em>women in an essential sense</em>, but
inasmuch as they neglect women “as people who suffer pervasively from acute
capability failure” (6). A focus on “women’s problems … will help compensate
for the earlier neglect of sex equality in development economics and in the
international human rights movement” (6-7). Her approach to development,
therefore, is from the point of view of asking for recognition and inclusion in
the category of the “truly human”, and towards producing the ability to deserve
it. Capability building and agency are, to this end, essential components, as
is also the taking into account of the lived everyday experiences of women in
the third world, that reflects on the absence of this capability.</strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">Before addressing the several
questions begging to be asked on universalist values endorsed by Nussbaum, I
will briefly go into what implications such a position might have for a
response to science. Nussbaum sees in her listing of “central human functional
capabilities” the potential to suggest a normative ideal of bodily health, as
well as a principle that has been applied in definitions of reproductive
health:</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">The 1994
International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) adopted a
definition of reproductive health that fits well with the intuitive idea of
truly human functioning that guides this list: “Reproductive health is a state
of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely an absence of
disease or infirmity, in all matters relating to the reproductive system and its
processes. Reproductive health therefore implies that people are able to have a
satisfying and safe sex life and that they have the capability to reproduce and
the freedom to decide if, when, and how often to do so.” The definition goes on
to say that it also implies information and access to family planning methods
of their choice. A brief summary of the ICPD’s recommendations … “1. Every sex
act should be free of coercion and infection. 2. Every pregnancy should be
intended. 3. Every birth should be healthy.”</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"> (Nussbaum
2000: 78 n. 83)</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>Following from the
general notion of capability, this approach has a critique of modern medicine
and development with regard to inclusion, taking as neutral and commonsensical
the definitions of health or illness; the key question then is one of building
the capability to make informed choices on contraception, for example. For
women vis-à-vis development programmes, the question would not be about the
resources available at their command, or their satisfaction with those resources
(the Rawlsian account), but of what part of those resources – medical
facilities – they are capable of using – “what her opportunities and liberties
are” (71). The argument then is one for access and inclusion into an apparently
universal(ly understood) framework.</strong><a name="_ftnref19" href="#_ftn19"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[19]</span></span></a><strong> </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Nussbaum's position runs
immediately, as she is well aware, into charges of colonialist, imperialist and
universalist attitudes, and this is where it might be useful, as a first step,
to recall a critique like Chandra Mohanty’s, on “third world women and the
politics of feminism”. In her innumerable pointers to the “Western eye”,
Mohanty</strong><a name="_ftnref20" href="#_ftn20"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[20]</span></span></a><strong> has pointed to
the construction of the archetypal and “average” third world woman in Western
feminist work, as also in other kinds of feminist discourse sited in the
universalist frame. Such an archetype, in her argument, is the constitutive
difference that makes possible the image of the Western feminist herself. This
archetype is constructed through a slippage between the analytic and
descriptive categories “Woman” and “women” respectively. “The relationship
between “Woman” – a cultural and ideological composite Other constructed
through diverse representational discourses (scientific, literary, juridical,
linguistic, cinematic, etc.) – and “women” – real, material subjects of their
collective histories”, states Mohanty, “is one of the central connections the
practice of feminist scholarship seeks to address … [and is] not a relation of
… correspondence or simple implication” (53). The feminist writings of the Zed
Press that she analyses, Mohanty suggests, “discursively colonize the material
and historical heterogeneities of the lives of women in the third world,
thereby producing/ re-presenting a composite, singular “third world woman” – an
image which appears arbitrarily constructed, but nevertheless carries with it
the authorizing signature of Western humanist discourse.” (53) As part of this
effect, Mohanty traces “the similar effects of various textual strategies used
by writers which codify Others as non-Western and hence themselves as
(implicitly) Western. It is in this sense”, she says, “that I use the term <em>Western</em> <em>feminist</em>” (Mohanty 1991: 52), thus clarifying both her separation
from the geographical sense, and the ways in which certain articulations,
positioned alongside others, acquire a particular sedimentation of meanings
that constitute Eurocentrism. Mohanty traces some of these discourses –
colonial anthropological,</strong><a name="_ftnref21" href="#_ftn21"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[21]</span></span></a><strong> western
feminist, developmental, multinational capital – as addressed in the Zed Press
publications to make her point, and following her argument, it is possible to
also trace the continuities between these discourses.</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Such an archetype, Mohanty
points out, rests on the presumption of sexual difference as primary to the
oppression that women in the third world might suffer – “that stable,
ahistorical something that apparently oppresses most if not all the women in
these countries” (53-4). For one, it takes as stable and before the event
‘third world women’ as a sociological category, an “automatic unitary group”,
(7) building on this then to show up their ‘victimization’ under
“underdevelopment, oppressive traditions, high illiteracy, rural and urban
poverty, religious fanaticism, and “overpopulation” of particular Asian,
African, Middle Eastern, and Latin American countries” (Mohanty 1991: 5-6). In
doing so, it irons out the absolute heterogeneity of the lived experiences of
women in the third world. </strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>So
there is a “third world difference” too that is naturalised in and through this
archetype, and thereafter, an easy connection made between “third world women”
and feminism.</strong><a name="_ftnref22" href="#_ftn22"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[22]</span></span></a><strong> Mohanty herself, following Dorothy Smith
(1987), points to a more productive way of looking at colonialism as <em>processes of ruling</em> instead of as a
fixed entity, and suggests ways in which multiple contexts for the emergence of
contemporary third world feminist struggles may be traced. These include the
configurations of colonialism, class and gender, the state, citizenship and
racial formation, multinational production and social agency, anthropology and
the third world woman as “native”, and consciousness, identity, writing.</strong><a name="_ftnref23" href="#_ftn23"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[23]</span></span></a><strong> Mohanty would therefore ask for the
delineation of a more complex <em>relation
between struggles</em> rather than sexual difference as a primary origin for the
category of third world women, if at all it can be deployed – and that
deployment she is not entirely against. “What seems to constitute “women of
color” or “third world women” as a viable oppositional alliance”, she says, “is
a <em>common context of struggle </em>rather
than color or racial identifications … it is third world women’s oppositional <em>political </em>relation to sexist, racist,
and imperialist structures that constitutes our potential commonality” (7). The
Woman-women connection, then, as she sees it, needs to be adequately
historicized, set in context. And the category of Third World Woman has to be
seen, in order to be useful, as a process of subject formation through these
multiple conjunctures rather than as a pre-existing victim category.</strong><a name="_ftnref24" href="#_ftn24"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[24]</span></span></a><strong></strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>In
pointing to the absolute heterogeneity of the experiences of third world women,</strong><a name="_ftnref25" href="#_ftn25"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[25]</span></span></a><strong> Mohanty does not, however, give up on
the idea of domination or hegemony. What she suggests, instead, is that in
understanding the “complex <em>relationality</em>
that shapes our social and political lives … it is possible to retain the idea
of multiple, fluid structures of domination which intersect to locate women
differently at particular historical conjunctures, while at the same time
insisting on the dynamic oppositional agency of individuals and collectives and
their engagement in “daily life”” (13). The parallels with Homi Bhabha’s notion
of hybridity are here apparent, and indeed Mohanty herself points to the
parallel (75, n. 3), both in promoting a more complex notion of hegemony than
that offered by easy binaries of colonizer and colonized, and in identifying
the ways in which multiple negotiations in “daily life” can constitute
resistances that are intimately imbricated with the hegemonic.</strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>Mohanty’s
critique of such a difference as suggested by the naming of a ‘third world
woman’ is then, in sum, a reference to the hierarchization on which it stands;
in a more useful sense, it is part of an attempt to define “context” in a
conceptual manner, and it is this attempt that I will take up in greater detail
in the last section.</strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>Let
us, however, also examine Nussbaum’s own account of such charges and her
subsequent defence of the universal. Nussbaum considers three arguments
generally offered against universalist values – “the argument from culture”,
the “argument from the good of diversity”, and the “argument from paternalism”.
The argument from culture apparently presents a different set of norms as
constitutive of Indian culture – norms of “female modesty, deference,
obedience, and self-sacrifice that have defined women’s lives for centuries”
(41); norms that need not definitionally be bad, norms that work, presumably,
for Indian women, and norms that may actually be preferable to Western norms
that promote individualism for women. Nussbaum responds to her reading of the
culture argument in several ways. For one, she talks of the cultural diversity
of India,
both temporal and spatial, that hardly allows for reference to such a
homogeneity of norms – there are women who resist tradition, for instance.
Therefore, “[c]ultures are dynamic … and [c]riticism too is profoundly
indigenous … to the culture of India,
that extremely argumentative nation” (48). Further, such norms would be
acceptable if women had choices about adhering to or rejecting them, which
women like Vasanti or Jayamma do not, in her opinion. They do not even endorse
the norms they adhere to, and this strengthens her argument against simply
accepting a relativist thesis on norms. After all, “[w]hy should we follow the
local ideas, rather than the best ideas we can find?” (49) And a position of
moral relativism also fails when one realises that a relativist position,
conceptually, is not one that is tolerant of diversity or of other cultures. </strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>Regarding
the argument from the good of diversity, Nussbaum feels that cultural values
that are different from the ones we know still demand a judgement of and
decision-making on which ones to endorse and which to reject. “And this
requires a set of values that gives us a critical purchase on cultural
particulars … it does not undermine and even supports our search for a general
universal framework of critical assessment” (51).</strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>As
for the argument from paternalism, which would object to any effort at “telling
people what is good for them” (51), Nussbaum responds by saying that “a
commitment to respecting people’s choices hardly seems incompatible with the
endorsement of universal values … [specially] the value of having the
opportunity to think and choose for oneself” (51). Further, she says that every
law or bill does this, “telling people that they cannot behave in some way that
they have traditionally behaved and want to behave” (53), which is “hardly a
good argument against the rule of law” (51), particularly when it is required
to protect some from the behaviour of others. Also, in order to build the
“material preconditions” of choice, “in whose absence there is merely a
simulacrum of choice” (51), law notwithstanding, it might indeed be necessary
to “tell people what to do”, something that obviously requires a universal
normative account – what Nussbaum will call ‘political’ rather than
‘comprehensive liberalism’. </strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>Does
the build-up of Nussbaum's argument for intervention in “the particularly
urgent problems of developing nations” then indeed, after reading her defence,
seem to constitute West-centrism? Is she, as postcolonial critics of
universalism and third world feminist engagements would have it, and as I have
also been tempted to flag in her text, marking an archetypal third world woman
who needs rescuing? Are her ‘universal values’ constituted by such an
archetype?</strong><a name="_ftnref26" href="#_ftn26"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[26]</span></span></a><strong> Although her conversations are with
women who are typically poor, tradition-bound, victimized, yet defiant and
speech-worthy, for a philosopher like Nussbaum, the archetype is marked <em>so as to be transcended</em>, shed, saving
the brown woman from those of her traditions that are constricting,
transforming her, through an accurate application of universal principles, into
ideal human and citizen. To this end, Nussbaum also needs to demonstrate that
victimhood is not the essence of ‘woman’, just as difference in any form is
not. Indeed, essence or difference will find no place in her philosophy, and
her painstaking description of cultural particularity is merely a preamble to
then argue for commonality – these are features of “women’s lives everywhere”,
where the seeming oddities are only differences in manifestation of stereotypes
of women and men, rather than being signs of an “alien consciousness” (23). She
also quotes ‘local’ scholars to endorse their views on the undeliverability of
“a representative, authentic Third-world woman … [e]ven in India, there is no such thing as <em>the</em> Indian woman – there are only Indian
women. And the individuals are far more interesting than any assumed stories of
authenticity” (Indira Karamcheti, quoted in Nussbaum 2000: 47). However, “the
body that gets beaten is in a sense the same all over the world, concrete
though the circumstances of domestic violence are in each society” (23). In
that sense, India, with its
extent of poverty and difference, merely offers the model ‘case study’.</strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>Nussbaum
sees herself, then, in a peculiar relationship with these women. Her primary
interlocutor is not so much the feminist sited in the third world, who has
attempted to offer an interpretative edge to the naming itself. The purported
conversation is, instead, directly with the poor, tradition-bound, victimized,
yet defiant and speech-worthy third world women, each different from the other,
at the most mediated by a Leela Gulati, the anthropologist in the field. There
is no absence of commonality between women here and women elsewhere; there is,
however, a value to the ‘local’ that the feminist political philosopher needs
to acknowledge, a specificity to the problems that, though identifiable in
“women’s lives everywhere”, asks for the exercise of a <em>non-imperialist</em> <em>universal</em>
recognition of the particular <em>before it
can be represented</em>. It is this impulse that produces the insistent
declaration that her proposals are based on and grew out of her experience of
working with poor women in India.
The ghost of colonialism, once it is shaken off, can produce for Nussbaum the
reality of the ‘third world’. It is this “defence of universal values” that can
be adequately represented by her (34), and that is enacted here.</strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>What
rests on this exercise of delineating Nussbaum’s position and challenges to it?
I would suggest that the problem, at least in so far as current global feminist
analyses identify it, lies elsewhere than economo-centrism and the
non-attention to difference. For Nussbaum, the chief interlocutor is in fact
the field of development economics that does take into account various
non-economic indicators. Victimhood is no longer the critical discourse, if it
ever was. Nor is homogeneity of experience asserted, although commonality
indeed is. In fact, both Nussbaum and Mohanty are aware of and attempting to
nuance binaries here – Nussbaum to challenge the ‘West as evil’ image and
development as a totalizing discourse by pointing to the problem as one of bad
practitioners, and Mohanty working on the other arm of the binary, to point to
the impossibility of “third-worlding” in any simple sense. Mohanty’s critique
of universalism is accurate inasmuch as she points to the binariness of certain
existing critiques. It fails, however, in her insistence on historical and
socio-political heterogeneity as the necessary context of category formation;
any category, no matter how minutely contextualized, is by definition
nominalist, unintended to capture the entirety of experiences, and to that
extent, presence of heterogeneity <em>per se</em>
can hardly constitute a critique of category formation. Nussbaum’s categories
are, by her own admission, provisional, nominalist, <em>stable</em>, and hence not philosophically subject to this particular
charge of rigidity.</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>But … the charges of the
“Western eye” are not merely charges about faulty practitioners, as Nussbaum
would have it, nor, surely, can proof of resistance to norms be proof of their
absence? Further, the “third world” that Nussbaum names in the plural and as a
non-essentialist category, yet needs delineation in a manner that pointing to <em>practices of bias</em> cannot begin to get
close to. It is in the assumptions of the unimplicated foreigner, then, that
Nussbaum’s universalism lies, as in her complete indifference to the anchoring
“sample populations” on which the ideal citizen, or the neutral definitions of
reproductive health, for example, have been built. Herein lies the validity of
Mohanty’s charge of “ethnocentric universality” (53). While Nussbaum’s
arguments actually clarify for us that universalism in its ideal description is
hardly the problem, there is a double move in the delineations of the universal
<em>and</em> the particular in her writing,
and in other work in this frame. Vasanti and Jayamma are clearly not, in
Nussbaum’s lexicon, victims of the mute kind. They have been, despite the
unavailability of infrastructure and mechanisms that could reverse hardship,
negotiators and survivors. They are ‘lacking’ apparently only in the
capabilities that would allow them to access legal and economic structures. And
yet, embedded as they are in their “particular caste and regional
circumstances”, their negotiations with those circumstances are tied to their
bodies in ways that seem to embody their very specificity. A putting together
of body-situation-circumstance that makes up ‘third-worldness’ as a category of
description for Nussbaum and her fellow-universalists, be it the embodied
images of ‘mothers of colour’ breastfeeding their newborn, or the detailed
physical descriptions of Vasanti and Jayamma and their surroundings, then, is
not incidental to the narrative of their flourishing; <em>it is, singularly,</em> <em>the
narrative of the particular</em>. In a frame of lack of capability, Vasanti or
Jayamma can hardly be expected <em>not to
have a body</em>; and they can hardly be expected to produce analytic
statements. As a “political explanation”, therefore, when Jayamma says that
“[a]s a [domestic] servant, your alliance is with a class that is your enemy”,
her “use of the Marxist language of class struggle” must be taken with a pinch
of bemusement – “whether one endorses it or not” [19]. It is after this
particularity has been described in its entire nuance that Nussbaum can set out
to draw her comparisons with “efforts common to women in many parts of the
world”.</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>A useful critique
of universalism would mean, as Mohanty begins to suggest, an attention to
context, a beginning of knowledge <em>and of
categories</em> from enmeshment rather than outsideness, although it would
require a movement from that enmeshment to a form of objectivity – the movement
from perspective to story that Lorraine Code speaks of, in her work on feminist
epistemology.</strong><a name="_ftnref27" href="#_ftn27"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[27]</span></span></a><strong> It would also
require, and here Mohanty’s and other critiques of first world feminism fall
short, a recognition that <em>relationality</em>
between struggles in what I continue to provisionally call the third world will
also mean a space between them that is hardly ever <em>common</em> in the sense of a happy relation. It will, then, involve the
recognition that such struggles are sited in different <em>worlds</em>, and will, in their cohesion, also mean a movement away from
each other. It is only in the attempt to interpret this movement that a
discursive space of negotiation with the ‘first world’ can perhaps be forged. </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">To such a
universalist position, ecofeminists have replied with the following:</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong><em>A soliloquy of the local – ‘I know mine, you know
yours, there can be no dialogue’</em></strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> </p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">The ‘third world woman’ as perspective <em>to speak from</em> has perhaps not been articulated as clearly anywhere
else as in Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva’s writing on ecofeminism, and this work
is also evidence of the ways in which development becomes a powerful organizing
metaphor for ‘third world feminism’. Building on the notions of organicity,
wholeness, and connectedness as the primary postulates of ecofeminism, Mies and
Shiva thereafter take up certain cultural characteristics associated with the
Third World to offer a picture of third world women as already in convergence
with nature, as upholders of the subsistence economy as against the “capitalist
patriarchal” system, and as offering perspectives for resistance to such an
economy of the Same. Critiquing both Western science and development, they
endeavour to demonstrate the reductionist and universalist paradigms that the
former occupies. For these critics, the mechanicity that Western science relies
on, the ways in which it dominates nature-women-third world, treating and
re-producing each of these as a dead object, are symptomatic of a
subject-object dualism that is carried over into development philosophies too.
Western science, says Shiva, is philosophically embedded in dualisms<a name="_ftnref28" href="#_ftn28"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[28]</span></span></a>
of subject-object, which allow for such a possibility only vis-à-vis nature or
any researched object. The neutrality that this apparently guarantees the
researcher is however a false one, since the universal position from which it
emanates is itself anchored in Western paradigms. Mies traces continuities here
from Francis Bacon onwards – “scientists since Bacon, Descartes and Max Weber
have constantly concealed the impure relationship between knowledge and
violence or force (in the form of state and military power, for example) by
defining science as the sphere of a pure search for truth … [thus lifting] it
out of the sphere of politics … [a separation] which we feminists attack [as]
based on a lie” (46). This scientific principle, constructed through “violently
disrupting the organic whole called Mother Nature” (46), became then the route to
knowledge, creating the “modern scientist [as] the man who presumably creates
nature as well as himself out of his brain power … [after] a disruption of the
symbiosis between the human being, Mother Nature, and the human mother … [and
this is] the link between the new scientific method, the new capitalist
economy, and the new democratic politics” (47). Similar to this, asserts Mies,
is Immanuel Kant’s evolution of a concept of knowledge and rationality through
an extrusion of emotion.</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">The masculine character of Western
science, constituted through such an extrusion of emotion, such a “subjection
of nature and women”, was also associated with a violence that is evident in
all technologically advanced societies. Mies and Shiva cite the examples of
military, new reproductive and biotechnologies that accompany new globalized
economies, pointing out that such technology is never neutral but functions
through the “principle of selection and elimination” that provides the “main
method of conquest and control” over what will survive and what will not be
allowed to (195).</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">Development, Shiva asserts, has in its
overall philosophy followed the principles of Western science. It would follow
that development has then always been about ‘catching up’ with a universal model
that has apparently worked in Western countries to provide a good quality of
life, freedom from poverty, hunger, illness, and so on. The socialist states
were the first to set up the model, and despite strong evidence contradicting
its effectiveness even in those states, it has remained the model in dominance
today.</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">But Shiva has more than the
ineffectivity of the model to offer as critique. The accumulation model, she
asserts, is built on the premises of colonialism and capitalist patriarchy,
that “interpret[s] difference as hierarchical and uniformity as a prerequisite
for equality” (Mies and Shiva 1993: 2). “This system emerged, is built upon and
maintains itself through the colonization of women, of ‘foreign’ peoples and
their lands; and of nature, which it is gradually destroying” (2). Technology
is one of the tools of such colonization. Technological advancement is
accompanied by externalization of costs, so that workers in colonized
peripheries are treated differently and paid less than workers in the
metropole. The “colonization of women” involves the unpaid labour of women –
the “free economy” of mainstream economics – that shores up the market economy.<a name="_ftnref29" href="#_ftn29"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[29]</span></span></a>
The “hidden costs generated by destructive development … [include] the new
burdens created by ecological devastation, costs that are invariably heavier
for women, in both the North and South” (75).</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">Although this ecofeminist approach, like the other kinds of gender
work I have highlighted that negotiate science or development, speaks of the
need for “a creative transcendence of … differences” between women the world
over in order to offer resistances little or large, it is also in dissonance
with them in proposing a far more fixed position – a philosophy already
embedded in ‘the people’, here the women by virtue of <em>being</em> <em>woman</em>. The
intensification of the local provided in Mies and Shiva’s ecofeminist approach,<a name="_ftnref30" href="#_ftn30"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[30]</span></span></a>
then, separates itself somewhat from other approaches to the local as a
critique of development. Such an intensification is not in the frame of stark
cultural difference that would, in Mies and Shiva’s opinion, produce a cultural
relativism, nor is it interested in distilled essences of the local or the
“romanticization of the savage” (150) that appear in globalized market
discourse, but rather in a connection between the spiritual and the material –
a relation of soil-nature-subsistence that is somehow to be found in the
practices, intuitions, and indeed protest movements of third world women. In so
doing, ecofeminism of course exposes itself to the standard critique of
essentialism.<a name="_ftnref31" href="#_ftn31"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[31]</span></span></a> What is
important for our purposes here is the need to recognize that ecofeminism is
far closer to old ideological positions in the spectrum between these and the
new dynamic local or hybrid, and as expected, discredited for the same reasons
in the current climate. The understandings of colonialism and capitalism that
animate Mies and Shiva’s version of the ecofeminist project are, insofar as
they are spelt out, inadequate as provisional arguments. Further, the manner in
which the category of ‘third world women’ is activated through a reference to
the organicity and wholeness of their practices, fails to give an adequate
account of how this may happen; as such, it continues to fall into the trap of
romanticization that it seeks to avoid. A philosophy that is intuitive and
already in place, along with the interpretative ability to put it into practice
through various movements of resistance, fails to provide any evidence of its
assertions.</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong><em>A
disaggregated (third) world: women negotiating meanings</em></strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">But there is another kind of scholarship now
in currency that negotiates meanings of gender differently. Global gender work
disdaining the universalist approach takes on the hybridization argument and
works toward identifying contingent moments of resistance. This scholarship is
in alignment with postcolonial approaches. Anthropological investigations into
midwifery and childbirth practices exemplify this position. This is what I call
the space of not-feminist gender analysis. I take up, in this section, a
particular text that is fairly representative of such analysis, and that, to
begin with, marks its separations from post-development positions like
Escobar’s,<a name="_ftnref32" href="#_ftn32"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[32]</span></span></a>
concentrating instead on the heterogeneity of experiences as well as the
disaggregated nature of institutional apparatuses that apparently make a
description of hegemony difficult,<a name="_ftnref33" href="#_ftn33"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[33]</span></span></a>
and further, on the impossibility of even identifying such a hegemonic role for
Western science in the Indian context.<a name="_ftnref34" href="#_ftn34"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[34]</span></span></a>
Of course, having made this argument against the hegemonic nature of Western
science, in this case Western medical frameworks, this kind of global gender
analysis also carries with it the imperative to separate itself from
universalist positions, both in justifying the impulse of choosing subjects of
research<a name="_ftnref35" href="#_ftn35"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[35]</span></span></a> as well
as in declaring a detached commitment to such research.<a name="_ftnref36" href="#_ftn36"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[36]</span></span></a></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong><em>On culture and the local</em></strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>Cecilia
Van Hollen – who is fairly representative of a body of work in anthropology
(see Rozario 1998,</strong><a name="_ftnref37" href="#_ftn37"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[37]</span></span></a><strong> Ram 1998, 1994, 2001, and a large number
of other anthropologists working especially on reproductive health issues in
India) – begins her argument at the site of a shift she identifies as useful in
anthropological work, from a reading of practices as reflection of a culture,
to a reading of culture as “in-the-making” through everyday practices.</strong> Using this “processural view of culture-in-the-making”, she
clarifies that her anthropological approach does not seek to imply “one
monolithic thing that we can call “modern birth” in the contemporary world
order” (5). For her, it is important “to stay within the specific ethnographic
field of [her] own research and to underscore [her] point that biomedicine
always takes on a unique form at the local level” (8). At the very moment of
her refusal to call it monolithic or by a common name, however, she is speaking
of the re-interpretations of the global project of biomedical knowledge at the
“microphysical level by individual actors, collectivities, and institutions”,
and it is in this re-interpretation and the possibilities of hybridisation and
reconfiguring along caste, class and gender axes through it that she is
interested.<strong> In her case, she finds it
important to “view[ing] reproduction itself as a key site for understanding the
ways in which people <em>re</em>-conceptualize
and <em>re</em>-organize the world in which
they live” (5). She has a similar approach to gender ideologies, hierarchies,
or practices, and is at pains to demonstrate the impossibility of
cross-cultural assertions that do not take into account these practices and
their different sedimentation of meanings. </strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>Such
a disciplinary move is accompanied, perforce, by the need to challenge the
clear separation of biomedical technological systems and indigenous practices
of healing that has characterized earlier analyses of Western medicine and by
extension, science. It is accompanied by a challenge to the notion of
development as totalizing discourse philosophically anchored in the
geographical West (and hence the separation from Escobar). It is accompanied by
a challenge to the need to identify resistance in a straightforward rejection
of Western medicine or technology. In doing this, then, it is also avowedly a
move away from those feminist readings of the agency of third world women as
sited in the ‘natural’, the ‘cultural’, or the ‘indigenous’, and </strong>of Western biomedical practices as controlling of women (15). <strong>This means a re-cognition of the ‘local’ as itself
multiply constituted and constantly in flux. And it is accompanied by the
mandatory recognition, akin to Nussbaum’s, of the problem of being the Western
feminist and intellectual who must constantly strain towards transparency.
Here, of course, the anthropologist’s new requirement of self-reflexivity has
manifested as an expression of near-guilt – a moral problem. </strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">The agency question gets taken up
differently from Nussbaum in such an analysis that invokes the ‘local’ but at a
more avowedly involved level. There is a pattern to this kind of scholarship
that affirms the burden of a feminist re-invocation of experience while needing
to disavow existing feminist modes. Van Hollen has, for example, attempted to
speak of the marginalization of women’s labour within modern medical systems.
So “ethnographic stud[ies] of how modernity was impacting the experiences of
poor women during childbirth in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu at the end
of the twentieth century” become a part of the attempt to understand “how the
relationship between maternity and modernity is experienced, understood, and
represented” (4).</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">While feminist activism and
scholarship has done much to point to “medicalization” in Western medicine –
“the process by which medical expertise “becomes the relevant basis of decision
making in more and more settings” … the process whereby the medical
establishment … incorporates birth in the category of disease and requires that
a medical professional oversee the birth process and determine treatment” (11),
anthropology has avowedly contributed to a disaggregation of biomedicine itself
as it is practised in the ‘Western world’, through descriptions of how it is
actively redefined in the ‘third world’. Van Hollen states that such
disaggregations challenge “those feminist studies that view all the controlling
aspects of biomedicalized births as derived from a Western historical legacy of
the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution and that present a romanticized
vision of holistic “indigenous” birth, or “ethno-obstetrics”, as egalitarian,
“woman-centered”, and non-interventionist” (15). As she proceeds to unravel the
“historical and cultural specificity of the transformations in the experience
of childbirth” (15), it is clear that she sees resistance as embodied in these
specificities; moreover, she sites resistance in the bricoleur-like response to
various biomedical allopathic procedures rather than in a soliloquous ‘natural
therapy’ movement. And this difference between, say, the African home birth
movement and the individuated responses in Tamil Nadu, signals what she calls
cultural specificity.</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">What happens to the agency question in
this exercise? Clearly, empowerment here is through frames other than the
modified inclusions suggested by Nussbaum. Any use of the modern, states Van
Hollen, is bound to refigure it in ways that bear back on the definition of the
modern. Anthropological exercises such as Van Hollen’s see themselves as
different from ‘postcolonial’ studies that focus on rural areas and that, like
feminist work, tend “to depict childbirth practices as relatively untouched by
allopathic institutions” (8). By locating her own investigation in metropolitan
Madras (now Chennai), for instance, Van Hollen prefers to home in on more
central locations for allopathy, aiming to look at “the central role which
allopathy plays in women’s decisions regarding childbirth and … how women
choose from among different allopathic options as well as non-allopathic
practices.” In other words, the hybrid, mixed bag of tradition-and-modernity,
also a bag that is being negotiated in a way that avoids “falling into the trap
of representing others simply as victims” (10).</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">With such a frame in place, Van Hollen
proceeds to look at the various negotiations made by women in Tamil Nadu
vis-à-vis allopathy.</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong><em>After ideology</em></strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>In
the shift from a notion of strong hegemony to a description of disaggregated
discourses – which is actually a different exercise from suggesting hybridity
as a <em>model</em> – Van Hollen acts, then,
as representative of a position that determinedly embeds itself in the local,
in the category “women”, in experience, to propose weak and diversely
articulated structures of power rather than a singular monolith. Rather than
express these as ‘binaries’, Van Hollen finds it a more fruitful exercise to
concentrate on the processes of modernization that, for the purposes of her
study, “impact childbirth in Tamil Nadu: 1) the professionalization and
institutionalisation of obstetrics, 2) transformations in the relationship
between consumption patterns and reproductive rituals, 3) the emergence of new
technologies for managing the pain of birth, 4) the international mandate to
reduce population in India, and 5) development agencies’ agenda to spread
biomedical conceptions of reproductive health for mothers and children. These
processes,” she contends, “taken together, have transformed cultural
constructions of reproduction and social relations of reproduction in myriad
ways” (6). She is also interested in “assess[ing] how the five processes of
modernity mentioned above, in relation to other factors, influence the
“choices” poor women and their families make about the kind of care to seek for
childbirth-related needs.” In referring to choice, she clarifies that “the
decision-making process is never a matter of the free will of rational,
value-maximizing individuals, but, rather, it is always enacted in
political-economic contexts and shaped by socio-cultural factors such as
gender, class, caste, and age” (7).</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoBodyText2"><strong>How exactly does
Van Hollen undertake this project? Her conversations with the women she meets
in her two primary field-sites in Tamil Nadu produce for her a vast collection
of words that are in common conversational usage in terms of negotiations
(between modernity and <em>shakti</em>, for
instance), are also part of the canon of Hinduism, and the subject of much
critique. For Van Hollen, the feature to be noted is the ways in which these
words travel and acquire a rich concatenation of meanings – <em>which</em> concatenation, she will contend,
is what actually constitutes culture – an act of bricolage.</strong><a name="_ftnref38" href="#_ftn38"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[38]</span></span></a><strong> </strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>What,
then, does such an anthropological exercise achieve? Is it, in also shifting
from the earlier ethnographic impulse, talking about the bricolage that
constitutes culture? Van Hollen is definitely building up a glossary of words –
<em>vali, maruttavaci</em>, <em>shakti</em>, and so on, but these are words
that she refers to as the <em>originals</em>
in the analyses she makes. It may be that the particular word referred to in
translation may travel to the reader of her text against the grain as well, as
alternative interpretations of the words she has heard and put down. In the act
of simply putting down vis-à-vis western concepts of pain etc., however, there
is no suggestion towards such a move, and the glossary seems to act more as
evidence of fidelity to the ‘object of knowledge’, namely the “poor women of
Tamil Nadu”; like Nussbaum, a way of “listening to what they are saying”.
Reflexive anthropology, in this case, makes the claim to transparency as much
as the earlier ethnographic exercise, with the difference that it wants to do
this through the insertion of the researcher into the frame, as against earlier
forms which unapologetically museumized the cultures being studied as exotic,
other, and as object of knowledge separate from the anthropologist. </strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>What
does such a position offer in terms of furthering the understanding of
hegemony, or, as Van Hollen herself puts it, of “how modernity was impacting
the experiences of poor women during childbirth in the South Indian state of
Tamil Nadu at the end of the twentieth century” (4)? What does the shift from a
notion of strong hegemony to a description of disaggregated discourses mean for
conceptual strategies to read the same? The disaggregated picture that Van
Hollen describes, the hidden corners it uncovers, all mark ways in which
childbirth is viewed differently, as also ways in which seeming centres of
power – institutions and policies – are negotiated. In her invocation of the
different relationship to labour pain or <em>vali</em>
– for instance the idea that “poor women in Tamil Nadu” seem to have a
relationship of attachment to, practically a summoning of, suffering as a
necessary constituent of childbirth, as against standard mainstream moves and
feminist calls for painless labour – she also wishes to point to different ways
in which both culture and gender may be constituted as dynamic practices,
rather than as an identity or reserve that is drawn upon, or as <em>structures</em> of domination and resistance.
In any useful extension of her project, then, it would be necessary to say that
the categories of domination and resistance are themselves difficult to define.
Why? Is it because of their contradictory nature? Their ambivalence? Van
Hollen, as indeed more and more anthropologists, performs the task of
description with fidelity and often with ingenuity. This task of description is
expected to offer a critique of macro-analyses, as also of rigid, monolithic
descriptions. In what often turns out to be a misunderstanding of
macro-analyses with generalization, of structural understandings with rigidity,
however, the task of description does not, as Van Hollen would have us believe,
offer a model of hybridity as a framework of hegemony. The engagement I set up
between Mohanty and Nussbaum shows us the same slippage.</strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>There
is something else happening here. While Van Hollen strains to clarify that she
does not wish to refer to an authentic and fixed notion of a culture, or a
cultural past, her use and interpretation of her glossary terms falls back on
relating conversational usage to the canon in some form. Such a method might
well, as postcolonial theorists have attempted, recall a notion of repetition
rather than origin. Van Hollen’s stress is on difference, however, and in
articulating this difference, it is a stable notion of culture that she falls
back on, still associating with cultural essentialisms while always disavowing
them. As such, the easy transposition of dichotomies like public-private that
make sense in Western intellectual contexts, to conversations Van Hollen has
with these women is in itself a simulation of the local that hardly works.</strong><a name="_ftnref39" href="#_ftn39"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[39]</span></span></a><strong></strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>In
the notion of a ‘gap’ or a ‘failure’ to understand or hegemonize the local,
this kind of anthropological analysis aligns with the framework of hybridity
put forward by the postcolonial school. It does not, however, do the same work
in even attempting a conceptual strategy, merely ranging itself alongside
instead.</strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong><em>Bringing the economic back home</em></strong><strong><em></em></strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">In the influential and important 1991
World Bank report on <em>Gender and Poverty
in India</em>, principal author Lynn Bennett announces:</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">… now,
researchers, women’s activists, and government departments are reaching a new
consensus. … [W]omen must be seen as economic actors – actors with a
particularly important role to play in efforts to reduce poverty.</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"> (John 1999: 105)</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>There
is another difference from other anthropological work that Van Hollen asserts,
and offers as a more strident critique of globalisation than isolated cultural
analyses. This she does by bringing in questions of consumer practices and
globalisation, and the various changes in birth practices in the light of
changes in the economic; in so doing, she re-configures third world women as
important economic actors.</strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>‘Third
world poverty’ is here a significant allegory. For Nussbaum it is a condition
to be resisted along with sexual hierarchies; for Van Hollen, economic
disparities and changing forms of the economy create different conditions of
possibility for changing cultural practices. In both, there is a sense that
economy is being brought back into the discussion, after a period of much-vaunted
culture as the last instance of difference. In both, then, the ‘economic’
becomes a metaphor for connection (Nussbaum will say that the lives of poor
women are the same everywhere; Van Hollen will refer to the ‘politics of
globalization’) as well as difference, in some sense actually regaining
importance, as it were, in causal frameworks. </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The World Bank report itself drew entirely on
the findings of the 1988 <em>Shramshakti</em>
report on the condition of women in the informal sector, compiled after extensive
field surveys in different parts of the country. The <em>Shramshakti</em> report, states Mary E. John, “was intended to show
women’s extremely vulnerable working conditions across diverse occupations
under high levels of discrimination, as well as the range of health hazards
women were exposed to on an everyday basis. The recommendations of the report
addressed to various ministries … included enlarging the definition of work to
encompass all women engaged in production and reproduction, recognizing women’s
position as major rather than supplementary wage earners, and finding
strategies to enhance women’s control over and ownership of resources” (John
1999: 112). This is a finding that is set up, in the World Bank report, to
actually say that these are women who are more efficient resource managers, and
therefore better negotiators of poverty, <em>than
their men</em>. In that turn, in the shift from <em>exploitation to efficiency</em> (as John points out), in the shift in
focus from the <em>formal to the informal
sector</em>, and in the <em>examination</em> of
poor third world women in this space as a given rather than as a problem (94%
of the informal sector is constituted by women, but this is not considered the
problem, as is not the conditions of employment that prevail in this sector), a
fresh image of the “third world woman” is constituted – enmeshed but not mired
in her cultural practices, poor but a survivor, and an important economic
actor, as a glance at the literature on social capital or New Communitarianism
will also show.<a name="_ftnref40" href="#_ftn40"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[40]</span></span></a></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><strong>What
does a moment when such a report was appearing alongside a vast literature on
the micro-politics of negotiation by women of third world countries, ask to be
read as? Clearly, negotiation as a strategy of power and economic resources,
encouraging a re-inscription of the ‘third world’ as agential, sits in a not
uncomfortable alignment with a concentration on the problem of development as a
‘third world problem’ – something mainstream development language has always
done. Further, the move from ideological critique to description, finds another
parallel, in an apparent move from politics to self-help.</strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><em>And
after feminism</em></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">We have seen, in Van Hollen’s text, the
impulse to move away from feminist articulations. Feminism here is, of course,
seen as the ideological stance that is both epistemically unreliable in its
monolithic description of social conditions, and vanguardist in not taking into
account women’s spontaneous consciousness/ negotiations. Given such an
understanding of feminism, the only alternative would be to move away from
feminism to women, sometimes positioning women as ex-officio knowers, sometimes
as learning through living, never as a coherent community, and never as
subjects of feminism. Apart from being the new and acceptable micro-politics in
the new globalised economy, this could also be read as a response to rigid
ideological stances in feminism that read <em>both
women and science</em> in homogenous frames. It is also, in other words, a
movement from ‘difference’ – both the hierarchical difference that was promoted
in Marxist perspectives on gender and the feminist call to a different
perspective to break free of Marxist methodologies – to differences.<a name="_ftnref41" href="#_ftn41"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[41]</span></span></a>
We would do well, I believe, not to simply label this the backlash against
feminism, for it has not merely resulted in an antagonistic positioning of
feminist and other kinds of gender work vis-à-vis development; there are
significant overlaps, too, in the two movements. The turn to autobiographical/
ethnographic narrative as experience, for example, has driven much feminist
analysis that struggled to shed rigid ideologies, as we have seen at least in
part above. The most significant overlap here with non-feminist gender work
would be the need to build a <em>narrative of
experience</em> against that of Reason, or Culture, or the concomitantly named
hegemonic entity. In this sense, the task in both later feminism and gender
analysis has been to turn to experience, as it were, and describe it
faithfully, in its diversity and heterogeneity.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">How does this exploration of feminist and
gender work offer an understanding of technology or its critiques? In previous
posts we have seen the framework of negotiations with the hegemonic set up in
postcolonial scholarship; we have also seen the ways in which Marxist metaphors
of revolution get recuperated into this work. Both feminist and gender work,
embedded as they are in these contexts, also present a critical response to
science, often science as technology, and the ways in which these critical
responses move from the ideological to the everyday, from the structural to the
microcosm, from the neutral to the situated and experiential, while continuing to
look at Western science as a powerful institutional apparatus, an apparatus of
which technology is a visible manifestation. I will say that the contexts of
‘women’s lives’ provide perhaps the most powerful site for the playing out of
these critiques. The point is to show how these responses continue to retain
the same notions of technology, as discrete, as separate, as instrument, and I
suggest that such a notion of ‘powerful technology’ is what shores up the possibility
of politics – in the shape of ‘isms’ or as individual negotiations – as a
critique of hegemonic knowledge systems, the Western scientific among them.
Such an understanding of the political serves not to unpack the philosophy of
these systems, concentrating only on the hierarchies and exclusions evident in
their institutional manifestations. To unpack the conventional understanding of
the hegemonic, in this case the technological, requires a form of critique that
might well begin from experience, as feminist and gender work has done, but inserts
that experience into the hegemonic to change that picture, rather than
valorizing experience per se as always already resistant to technology. Such an
inversion of the dialectic might well constitute revolution – a revolution in
understandings of technology, and to make a primary suggestion in this
direction has been the task of this project.</p>
<p> The
next post will examine a set of possibilities for feminist responses to science
that contain such a suggestion.</p>
<div><br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<div id="ftn1">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn1" href="#_ftnref1"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[1]</span></span></a>
The idea of the ‘outsider within’ was first mooted by Dorothy Smith (1987).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn2" href="#_ftnref2"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[2]</span></span></a>
The <em>dai,</em> or village midwife, or
traditional birth attendant as she is referred to in the development literature,
is usually considered the repository of experience and practice in terms of
“traditional systems” who might be called upon to fill certain gaps in manpower
(not in knowledge) in the reproductive health apparatus. I refer to her, her
responses, and her experience, in this post, not as repository of knowledge of
the traditional canon, but as the aporia, the impasse to the narrative of
science. My attention thereafter is not to the discovery or description of such
an impasse, but rather to what lessons we may derive from here in a
re-cognition of the narrative.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn3">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn3" href="#_ftnref3"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[3]</span></span></a> I
attempt here to make a distinction between Marxist and Marxian in the sense of
the former referring to organizational frameworks, practices, attitudes, and
theorizations that claim allegiance to texts of Marx, Engels and Lenin. Marxism
is in that sense a closed system of theory. By Marxian I refer to theoretical
formulations originating in Marx, but engaging with other texts and
methodologies as well, and not always in agreement with official or
conventional Marxist thinking. I draw from Marx’s own statement “I am not a
Marxist”, made in despairing criticism of the many entrenched positions that
were being put out in his name. In a letter to C. Schmidt on 5 August 1890,
Marx's fellow-author Friedrich Engels wrote, “As Karl Marx used to say about
the French “Marxists” in the 1870s, ‘All I know is that I am not a Marxist’”
(Marxist CD Archive 2003).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn4">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn4" href="#_ftnref4"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[4]</span></span></a> I
will come back to this vignette from the family planning clinic of a state
referral hospital, for now only wishing to draw attention, through the emphases
I have placed in the conversation , to the putting to work not only of
institutional and knowledge hierarchies, but also constitutive elements of the
propositional models of knowledge that are hosted here. For each part of the
conversation, therefore, I have set down these constitutive elements in the
indented paragraphs – those unspoken, seemingly bizarre, yet constitutive
elements. I will also say, in continuation of this point, that the somewhat
bizarre turn this conversation takes, and that I wish to point to, is not
entirely attributable to the apathy or non-personalized nature of care-giving
that is the feature of most large state hospitals.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn5">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn5" href="#_ftnref5"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[5]</span></span></a>
The unlearned people.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn6">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn6" href="#_ftnref6"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[6]</span></span></a>
Government. <strong>It is a case in point that
for the <em>dai</em>, the analytic separation
between government and non-governmental organization does not exist. The space
of civil society that the NGO conceptually occupies as separate from the state
is unavailable to her; both represent the call of legitimate authority that
have brought her here. And yet, does her turn to authority have an element of
the conscious? Puti di (Puti Jana, one of the economically more disadvantaged
of the group, also one of the most attentive and eager to imbibe the new)
approached me the day after the video film showing a trained <em>dai</em> at work in Rajasthan. She had
watched the <em>dai</em> in the film fill up
her register with the details of each birth she attended, and report to the
municipal office, and had come with a request for us to arrange something
similar for this group. So that, as she understood, they could make an honest
(and just) living, for in such a case payment to the <em>dai</em> would presumably be fixed and commensurate to her efforts. </strong></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn7">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn7" href="#_ftnref7"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[7]</span></span></a>
Oxytocin, used (under strict monitoring in hospital settings) to induce uterine
contractions, and used freely by these practitioners when called in to assist
at delayed labour, with effects ranging from the magical to the disastrous.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn8">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn8" href="#_ftnref8"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[8]</span></span></a>
How do you know, having none of your own?</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn9">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn9" href="#_ftnref9"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[9]</span></span></a> I
know that much and more.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn10">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn10" href="#_ftnref10"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[10]</span></span></a>
She’s seen so many patients, surely she must know something.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn11">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn11" href="#_ftnref11"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[11]</span></span></a>
As suggested in the manifesto of The School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University, 1988.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn12">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn12" href="#_ftnref12"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[12]</span></span></a> <strong>World Bank
operations evaluation study reports on ‘gender issues in World Bank lending’
have divided the period from 1967 to the 1990s into the reactive years – 1967
to 1985, and the pro-active years – 1985 to the 1990s. The reactive years, says
the document, displayed a consistent failure to draft clear directives (for
borrower nations), to have separate chapters on gender, and generally include
gender perspectives in policy formulation. No separate department had been
allotted for ‘Women in Development’ (hereafter WID) till 1987, the existing WID
advisor had few powers and fewer funds, and it was as late as 1980 that
higher-ranking officials in the Bank first used the phrase ‘women in
development’. But voices, within the Bank and outside, had begun to speak,
since the early 1970s, of the absence of the perspective of women in development
projects around the world. While the single most landmarked work in development
literature in this direction has been that of Ester Boserup (</strong><em>Woman’s<strong> Role in Economic Development</strong></em><strong>), documents titled “Recognizing the ‘Invisible’
Woman in Development: The World Bank’s experience” (1975) or statements
extolling the “immensely beneficial impact … from educating girls” (McNamara,
World Bank president, 1980) have been making their appearance since 1975. </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> </p>
</div>
<div id="ftn13">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn13" href="#_ftnref13"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[13]</span></span></a>
As is evident from the poster, breastfeeding is part of the exercise of
third-worlding that is promoted by development agendas and globalist feminist
rhetoric alike. Shorn of any talk of natural birthing or mothering that such a
move would be accompanied by in the West, it is nevertheless promoted – ideologically
in theory, and pragmatically in practice, as the battle against the bottle and
artificial feeds, as the alternative to global Capital making the third world
mother self-sufficient provider of nutrition, and as the metaphor for
responsible motherhood.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn14">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn14" href="#_ftnref14"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[14]</span></span></a> Stories of “two women trying to
flourish” as perceived and told by Martha Nussbaum. “Unlike Vasanti, Jayamma
has been examined previously in the development economics literature … I am
very grateful to Leela Gulati for introducing me to Jayamma and her family and
for translating.” (Nussbaum 2000: 17, fn. 21). Leela Gulati, known for having
brought anthropological perspectives to bear for the first time on seemingly
economic issues, was the first to discuss widow and brick-kiln worker Jayamma
in her work on widows in India (appearing in 1998, in Martha A. Chen, edited, <em>Widows in India: social neglect and public
action)</em>,<em> </em>and also in other work
on women’s studies perspectives.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn15">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn15" href="#_ftnref15"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[15]</span></span></a> It would be
important to note here that the ‘subaltern’ is another space of contestation.
Is the subaltern a person with a pre-given identity? Does there exist a
subaltern consciousness? Can the subaltern be known? Can the subaltern be
‘developed’? The answers to all these questions within development discourse,
and especially in Nussbaum’s version of critique, would be yes.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn16">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn16" href="#_ftnref16"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[16]</span></span></a> Is one allowed to
turn that virtue on its head and talk of enmeshedness, for instance, as one
reason among many for the local scholar to begin to understand or build
“ethical singularities” (to use Spivak’s phrase) with the subaltern? Spivak
clarifies that “I have no doubt that we must learn to learn from the original
practical ecological philosophies of the world. Again, I am not romanticizing …
[this] can only be attempted through the supplementation of collective effort
by love. What deserves the name of love is an effort … which is slow, attentive
on both sides … mind-changing on both sides, at the possibility of an
unascertainable ethical singularity that is not ever a sustainable condition”
(1999: 383). Enmeshedness may not be enough for critical intimacy; is it
necessary? What would I mean by enmeshedness? An involvement, both historically
and existentially, with the issues at hand. This is not to say enmeshedness is
enough, or can be looked at in isolation. It would be in an intersection with
location. And location would be understood not only as historical or
geographical context but as relational, between worlds, where the question of
consistently perpetuated structural inequalities between ‘first’ and ‘third’
worlds would come up, where the implication of white feminism in defining
issues on the global feminist agenda would have to be faced. It is a different
story, however, when I, “local brown woman scholar” (and the scare quotes might
remind me of the politics of identity implicit in that self-naming),
essentialise both my <em>geographical</em>
location and my “scholarship” to ground representative status for myself. Then
again, local scholars always stand the chance of over-compliant alliances with
the coloniser. It would also be useful to remember that this is not to initiate
a battle over representation, as it too often turns into.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn17">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn17" href="#_ftnref17"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[17]</span></span></a>
An Indian economist, Amartya Sen <strong>is
known for his contributions to welfare economics including his work on famine,
human development theory, understanding the underlying mechanisms of poverty,
gender inequality, and political liberalism. In order for economic growth to be
achieved, he argued, social reforms, such as improvements in education and
public health, must precede economic reform. Sen was called the
"conscience of his profession". He has addressed problems related to
individual rights (including the formulation of the liberal paradox), justice
and equity, majority rule, and the availability of information about individual
conditions, and has inspired researchers to turn their attention to issues of
basic welfare. </strong></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn18">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn18" href="#_ftnref18"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[18]</span></span></a>
Based on an approximation of “what seems to be part of any life we will count
as a human life” (Nussbaum 1995: 75), Nussbaum lists, provisionally, what are
“basic functional human capabilities … 1. Being able to live to the end of a
human life of normal length … 2. Being able to have good health; to be
adequately nourished … 3. Being able to avoid unnecessary and non-beneficial
pain … 4. Being able to use the senses; being able to imagine, to think, and to
reason … 5. Being able to have attachments to things and persons outside
ourselves … 6. Being able to form a conception of the good and to engage in
critical reflection about the planning of one’s own life. … 7. Being able to
live for and to others, to recognize and show concern for other human beings …
8. Being able to live with concern for and in relation to animals, plants, and
the world of nature … 9. Being able to laugh, to play … 10. Being able to live one’s
own life and nobody else’s … 10a. Being able to live one’s own life in one’s
own surroundings and context.” (Nussbaum 95: 83-85). Each of these are, stresses Nussbaum, “<em>separate</em> <em>components</em> [such that] [w]e cannot satisfy the need for one of them
by giving a larger amount of another one” (81).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn19">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn19" href="#_ftnref19"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[19]</span></span></a>
There is also, of course, an elision between sex and reproduction in the third
world here; how it follows from the ICPD recommendations that a satisfying sex
life is being talked about is a mystery.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn20">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn20" href="#_ftnref20"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[20]</span></span></a> Although the arguments quoted here
are from Mohanty’s text (1991) published well before Nussbaum’s, and although
Mohanty's critique is specifically based on the Zed Press ‘Women in the Third
World’ series of publications (as being “the only contemporary series … which
assumes that “women in the third world” are a legitimate and separate subject
of study and research” [75, endnote 5]), Nussbaum has already been expressing
her position vis-à-vis the capabilities question from the 1990s itself, drawing
on Aristotle as a resource for an account of human functioning. Further,
Mohanty’s work seems to read directly, critically, and powerfully into some of
the concerns in Nussbaum’s self-avowed feminist political philosophy,
particularly her writing on women in the third world that largely follows the
women-in-development approach. Mohanty has been one of the more vociferous and
visible critiques of first world feminism, and as such, it is necessary to
engage her critique at this point. There are also significant ways in which Nussbaum’s
text shows up shifts in thinking in first world feminisms themselves, and it is
with these in mind that I juxtapose the two.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn21">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn21" href="#_ftnref21"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[21]</span></span></a> With its nativization of the “third
world woman” (32).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn22">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn22" href="#_ftnref22"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[22]</span></span></a> “First, there are the questions of
definition … Do third world women make up any kind of constituency? … Can we
assume that third world women’s political struggles are necessarily “feminist”?
How do we/ they define feminism? … Which/ whose history do we draw on to chart
this map of third world women’s engagement with feminism? How do questions of
gender, race, and nation intersect in determining feminisms in the third
world?” (2-3). Needless to say, these questions are by now commonplace in any
discussion of feminism, and the question of ‘how’ may perhaps be a more useful
one to attempt to answer.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn23">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn23" href="#_ftnref23"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[23]</span></span></a> Where, for Mohanty, the writing of
testimonials as public record, rather than autobiographies, becomes the space
not merely for recording and recovery, but formation of subjectivities of
resistance (34).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn24">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn24" href="#_ftnref24"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[24]</span></span></a> I
have mentioned the Marxist trajectories that are one of the contexts underlying
development critique, and this would include the experience of becoming
feminist in Marxist spaces. This experience included, after the first enabling
encounter with Western feminist texts, the recognition of that qualifier –
Western – and my contention would be that it was the peculiar co-presence of
postcolonial Marxist discourses rather than direct experiences of oppression or
marginalization that made possible the primary recognition of this qualifier,
as against others. I am, then, somewhat in disagreement with Mohanty’s argument
on colonialism as a straightforward condition of possibility for third world
feminisms.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn25">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn25" href="#_ftnref25"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[25]</span></span></a> I would like to clarify that
throughout this discussion I am referring to third world women as referenced by
Mohanty.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn26">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn26" href="#_ftnref26"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[26]</span></span></a> Let me clarify that rather than
being a digression in the debate on possible feminist critiques of development,
these questions are relevant to where the positioning of such a possible
critique could be.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn27">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn27" href="#_ftnref27"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[27]</span></span></a> I
have discussed this argument in detail elsewhere. I will elaborate on the
possibilities inherent in this formulation, in my suggestion towards a feminist
methodological critique of development, and science, in the next post.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn28">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn28" href="#_ftnref28"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[28]</span></span></a> There are strong ecofeminist
positions on duality, however, that this approach fails to take up. See
Plumwood, 1993. <em></em></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn29">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn29" href="#_ftnref29"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[29]</span></span></a> For more work on
this, see Fraad, Resnick, and Wolff, 1994.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn30">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn30" href="#_ftnref30"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[30]</span></span></a> There are ways in which the third
world as local is re-produced in this discourse, even in the “transcending of
differences” among women the world over that it proposes.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn31">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn31" href="#_ftnref31"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[31]</span></span></a> This is a critique that
ecofeminists counter with the view that it stems from a dualistic thinking on
the historical-materialist Left that considers that nature is also socially
constructed, and that any attempt to say “body” is automatically reverting to
biology and some form of naturalism. On the other hand, “[f]emaleness is and
was always a human relation to our organic body [and] [o]nly under capitalist
patriarchy did the division between spirit and matter, the natural and the
social lead to the total devaluation of the so-called natural … a necessary
integration of both [ecofeminist and social ecologist] views … would not be
possible [they say, following Mary Mellor] ‘without reconstructing the whole
socialist project’” (160).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn32">
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><a name="_ftn32" href="#_ftnref32"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[32]</span></span></a> “<strong>Arturo
Escobar has proposed that development is first and foremost a discourse, a
coherent system of representation that creates the “reality” of its objects and
exerts control over them. … This Foucauldian approach accomplishes a radical
relativization of development discourse by showing it to be a distinctively
modern and Western formulation. It suggests, as well, that the logic of
development discourse is fundamentally cohesive. Ethnographic research, however,
highlights the gaps in what appears to be a totalizing development discourse.
The perspectives and experiences of both the people who are constituted as the
“objects” of development as well as the people in the institutions that
implement development locally point to a much messier and often contradictory
experience of development. Akhil Gupta describes this experience as the
“complex border zone of hybridity and impurity.” In short, we cannot assume
that the logic of development discourse as produced by official reports,
studies, and programmatic statements necessarily structures the way that
development is used and experienced at the local level” (Van Hollen 2003: 168).</strong></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn33">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn33" href="#_ftnref33"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[33]</span></span></a>
“… anthropologists have begun to examine the diverse and uneven ways … [in
which] childbirth is being biomedicalized throughout the world” (ibid: 15).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn34">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn34" href="#_ftnref34"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[34]</span></span></a>
“Unlike the situation in the United States and many parts of Europe, the
biomedical establishment’s control over childbirth in India can by no means be
viewed as hegemonic” (ibid: 55).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn35">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn35" href="#_ftnref35"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[35]</span></span></a>
The impulse being an avowedly a personal one – “My initial decision to carry out this research
in Tamil Nadu … had more to do with my own personal history in the state than
with a purely scholarly interest in filling a lacuna in academic research” (ibid:
18).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn36">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn36" href="#_ftnref36"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[36]</span></span></a> “My intent is not to criticize from
afar the work of so many hardworking and dedicated health care providers and
policymakers. In fact, I am keenly aware of the historical legacy of the
damning depiction of maternal and child health care in India by colonial discourse to legitimise
colonial rule. So I present these criticisms with a certain amount of
discomfort about my role in perpetuating this discourse in the postcolonial
era, despite the fact that I strive to show how international and globalizing
forces are intricately implicated in women’s critiques” (ibid: 9).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn37">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn37" href="#_ftnref37"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[37]</span></span></a> Who, during case studies of <em>dais</em> in Bangladesh, finds unpardonable the
luxury of “mythologizing and romanticizing the process of ‘natural childbirth’
and of projecting this image on to a Third World context where it is not always
appropriate” (Rozario 1998: 144).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn38">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn38" href="#_ftnref38"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[38]</span></span></a> Levi-Strauss has used the word
‘bricolage’ to suggest the origin of myths from tales put together, to abandon
“all reference to a <em>center</em>, to a <em>subject</em>, to a privileged <em>reference</em>” (Derrida 1978: 286), and to
separate method from truth. In French, a bricoleur is a jack-of-all-trades.
Derrida, critical of the value of the distinction between the bricoleur and the
engineer, sees in the ethnographic impulse the pressure to interpret, arrive at
“a truth or an origin which escapes play and the order of the sign” (292).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn39">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn39" href="#_ftnref39"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[39]</span></span></a> The analysis of <em>vācal </em>(translated as doorway), for
instance, as metaphorically separating the private and the public. Why is it
not simply a description? At the very least, what are the disciplinary
methodologies by means of which anthropology, for instance, seeks to apply this
semantic construction?</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn40">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn40" href="#_ftnref40"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[40]</span></span></a>
Also referred to as progressive conservatism, this proposes a political economy
embedded within local communities, as a buffer to the continuing collateral
damage of capitalist economies. Needless to say, this relies on community
networks already in place, including patriarchal ones.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn41">
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn41" href="#_ftnref41"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[41]</span></span></a> I
have examined, elsewhere, how legacies of Left critique worked for those
‘growing up feminist in Marxist spaces’ in Bengal in the ‘80s. My hypothesis is
that this legacy actually shaped the methodologies of feminist work on science
and development, including the shift from ‘access’ to ‘terms of access’, as a
parallel reading of the shift in Left approaches to science and technology from
the nationalist to the postcolonial moments would suggest. This is not to
suggest a relationship of bonhomie or emulation between feminist and Marxist
practice in Bengal, but rather a fraught and largely unacknowledged
relationship of antagonism. In Left spaces in Bengal, the positioning of the
‘feminine’ as inchoate and perspectival, as <em>experienced
but non-knowledgeable</em>, shores up Marxist discourse, rather, is necessary to
the articulation of a Marxist standpoint, and it is from here that I propose
that, in our contexts, feminist methodologies too have at least partly been
fraught with the need to retain the element of ‘perspective’ as a particular,
sometimes limited ‘way of looking’, an experience addressed to and <em>contained within</em> the hegemonic – here
masculinist Marxist practice – rather than an interpretative tool that could
provide both a knowledge of dominant systems, as well as a better account of
the world.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/methodologies-of-critique-responses-to-technology-in-feminist-and-gender-work-in-india'>https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/methodologies-of-critique-responses-to-technology-in-feminist-and-gender-work-in-india</a>
</p>
No publisherashahistories of internet in Indiarewiring bodieswomen and internetmathemes and medicine2011-08-03T09:44:04ZBlog EntryResearchers At Work
https://cis-india.org/raw/cisraw-faq
<b>CIS-RAW stands for Researchers at Work, a multidisciplinary research initiative by the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. CIS firmly believes that in order to understand the contemporary concerns in the field of Internet and Society, it is necessary to produce local and contextual accounts of the interaction between the internet and socio-cultural and geo-political structures. The CIS-RAW programme hopes to produce one of the first documentations on the transactions and negotiations, relationships and correlations that the emergence of internet technologies has resulted in, specifically in the South. The CIS-RAW programme recognises ‘The Histories of the Internet and India’ as its focus for the first two years. Although many disciplines, organisations and interventions in various areas deal with internet technologies, there has been very little work in documenting the polymorphous growth of internet technologies and their relationship with society in India. The existing narratives of the internet are often riddled with absences or only focus on the mainstream interests of major stakeholders, like the state and the corporate. We find it imperative to excavate the three-decade histories of the internet to understand the contemporary concerns and questions in the field.</b>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/cisraw-faq'>https://cis-india.org/raw/cisraw-faq</a>
</p>
No publishernishanthistories of internet in Indiainternet and societygeeksdigital subjectivescyborgscyberculturesarchivescyberspacespedagogyresearchwomen and internete-governance2012-01-04T05:27:06ZPagePostcolonial Hybridity and the ‘Terrors of Technology’ Argument
https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/postcolonial-hybridity-and-the-2018terrors-of-technology2019-argument
<b>In the last couple of posts, Asha Achuthan has been building towards an understanding of how the anti-technology arguments in India have been posed, in the nationalist and Marxist positions. She goes on, in this sixth post documenting her project, to look at the arguments put out by the postcolonial school, their appropriation of Marxist terminology, their stances against Marxism in responding to science and technology in general, and the implications of these arguments for other fields of inquiry.</b>
<p>Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it.
(Heidegger, 1927)[1]</p>
<p>By the very nature of its instrumental-managerial orientation to Indian society, modern science has established a secure relationship with the philosophy and practice of development in India. Indian developmentalists are now faced with the obvious fact that the developmental vision cannot be universalised, for the earth just does not have the resources for the entire world to attain the consumption levels of the developed west. It does not have such resources now, nor will it have them in the distant future. The developmentalists, therefore, have a vested interest in linking up with the drive for theatrical science to create the illusion of spectacular development which, in essence, consists of occasional dramatic demonstrations of technological capacity based on a standard technology-transfer model. Under this model, highly visible short-term technological performance in small areas yields nation-wide political dividends. This model includes a clearly delimited space for ‘dissent’, too. While some questions are grudgingly allowed about the social consequences of technology – about modern agronomy, large dams, hydel projects, new dairy technology, modern health care systems, space flights, Antarctica expeditions, et cetera – no question can be raised about the nature of technology itself.
(Nandy 1988: 9)</p>
<p>Science and technology have sustained various forms of systemic violence … [p]lanned obsolescence, with its de-skilling of communities, … [s]ocial triage, a rational framework for treating vulnerable communities as dispensable, … extinction, …[m]useumisation of tribals and other defeated and marginal groups who are unable to cope with modernity and development’, … the violence of development, including internal displacement, … the violence of the genocidal mentality, … [n]uclearism … [m]onoculture … [e]xclusion or enclosure … as central to the globalisation process … [i]atrogeny … in which the experts’ solution increases the endemic violence or suffering of a community … [and] the violence of pseudo-science, or antitechnological movements …
(Visvanathan 2003: 170-2)</p>
<p>Grassroots movements in India have suggested the ideas of ‘cognitive justice’ and ‘cognitive representation.’ Cognitive justice … holds that knowledge, especially people’s knowledge or traditional knowledge, is a repertoire of skills and a cosmology that must be treated fairly in the new projects of technological development. Cognitive representation, which is a corollary, presupposes that in the act of science policy-making, the practitioners from various systems would be present to articulate their concepts, theories, and worldviews. Both concepts seek to pre-empt the liquidation of certain forms of local or marginal knowledge.
(Visvanathan 2003: 165-6)</p>
<p>Modern science began as a powerful dissenting imagination, and it must return today to becoming an agent of plurality, of heretical dissent.
(Visvanathan 2002: 50)</p>
<p>The philosophies of anti-development have largely turned on the metaphor of violence. The violence of technology, the violence of science, the violence of reason, the violence of the market. The starting premise of most of anti-development has been the correlation between the ideologies of these phenomena – science, reason, the market,[2] and their collective exclusion of experience. The question of science itself has been charted through the question of technology.[3] These connections have permeated western as well as nationalist and postcolonial critiques of mainstream development, with violence being seen as constitutive of scientific knowledge rather than simply an effect of scientific practice or policy. This position is, of course, built by challenging the premises of scientific knowledge as objective, value-neutral, verifiable, and unified. Visvanathan, Shiva, and others challenging these premises of scientific knowledge, suggest that an exclusionary violence is constitutive of such knowledge that activates a subject-object dichotomy[4] although its claims to objectivity are shown up to be false in its imperialising tendencies; further, that it works with a systematisation ‘wherein science becomes an organiser of other mentalities, [affecting] … the domains of work, education, sex, and even memory.’</p>
<p>Like Shiva, Visvanathan marks western science as dualistic, as imbued with a knowledge-power nexus, and as vivisectionist. Shiva makes a strong proposal for choosing pre-existing alternative knowledges as against reductionist modern science, which she defines through her identification of the ontological and epistemological assumptions of reductionism, traced to Descartes; Visvanathan, however, claims a reluctance to a simple return, looking, rather, for an ‘escape from the dualism of Luddism versus progress’ (2003: 172). He refers to the ‘chaos’, ‘play’, or uncertainty that science traditionally allows but that gets disallowed once it enters the text. For Visvanathan, the scientific self is one without shadows, cut off from the moral one, as well as from the playful, spiritual, anarchic self of its initial imagination. The scientific community is merely an ‘epistemologically efficacious’ one that has no internal filters to exercise ‘ethical restraint’, to confront the ‘perpetual obsolescence that science and markets impose on a community’ (2002: 43).</p>
<p>He asks, therefore, at a conceptual level, for a return to a more ambivalent, anarchic self, to play, to a place for grief,[5] to memories of change in a community; at the policy level, for a plurality and democratisation among skills and knowledge systems. Such a return to what Visvanathan names a sacred root, is a rescue from the present homelessness of modern science in its secular, proletarianised form – a condition where science is treated as apart from and above a culture instead of being embedded in it. On the other hand, ‘[m]odern science began as a powerful dissenting imagination, and it must return today to becoming an agent of plurality, of heretical dissent’ (2002: 50). Such ‘play’, such an anarchy of perspectives, such a form of democracy, embodied for him in ‘grassroots movements’ like the popular science movements of the 70s, where the citizen is seen as a ‘person of knowledge’, and where those ‘currently designated scientists’ become ‘prisoners of conscience’, is what could effect a response to what he calls the secularisation and proletarianisation of science. He charts a series of exercises that might make this possible – renunciation of science, cognitive indifference to it, a different cognitive justice being among them. ‘One wishes one had a Gandhi or a Loyola to construct … a book for science, with exercises which, while spiritual, are also deeply cognitive and political. I think in this lies the real answer to the Cartesian meditations or to Bacon’s Novum Organum’ (2002: 47).</p>
<p>While Shiva makes fairly straightforward substitutions between science and technology in her critique, citing the violence of one to indict the other, Visvanathan suggests, at various points, that technicity (2002: 41) - by which he refers to an attitude that treats the human as immortal, nature as resource, and technology as both instrument and nearly universal antidote - is the problem with a science that might otherwise have been better. ‘Everyday technologies’, on the other hand, being embedded in cultural requirements and practices, release science from expertise.</p>
<p>My purpose, in charting these positions, is partly about this peculiar connection, or substitution, between science and technology that most of the critiques stand on in pointing to the violence of mainstream development. The ‘will to power’ of technology in these positions seems, more often than not, an obverse of the ‘will to mastery’ over technology in its most instrumental sense, which is why the debates seem to hover endlessly over technology being beneficial, devastating, or a judicious mixture of the two. The pre-technological appears free of the instrumentality of technology; ‘everyday technologies’ seem to offer respite in the shape of an embeddedness in community; at the very least, they appear to possess the mythicity, the poiesis, that Visvanathan so wistfully regrets the absence of in modern science. And these two –everyday technologies and the pre-technological, in their common possession of such poiesis, such anarchy, seem organically tied and a natural vantage point for critique of the modern technological.</p>
<p>All these critiques, then, try to offer a release from the ‘instrumentality’ of technology, but by attaching themselves to a certain instrumental view of technology itself. An instrumental view might be, as Heidegger puts it, the correct view, the fundamental characteristic of technology; is it the true (essential) one? The correct view of technology – in other words, what technology is – for Heidegger, is the instrumental and anthropological view, namely, technology as a tool and means to an end, and technology as human activity.[6] To move from the correct to the true requires an understanding of instrumentality itself, and Heidegger takes up the task of this movement in trying to understand ‘man’’s relationship to technology. To understand instrumentality is to understand the early Greek sense of responsibility, a bringing forth. ‘The principal characteristic of being responsible is this starting something on its way into arrival’, i.e. an occasioning or an inducing to go forward. This is the essence of causality in Greek thought, and not a moral or agential sense, as populates these and other critiques.[7] This bringing forth is basically a revealing, demonstrates Heidegger, an entry into the realm of truth – aletheia. ‘Bringing-forth, indeed, gathers within itself the four modes of occasioning-causality and rules them throughout. Within its domain belong end and means, belongs instrumentality.’</p>
<p>What of the difference between the older sense of craft and modern technology? Can it be said that this sense of revealing, bringing into unconcealment, is true only of Greek thought, and can be applied at the most only to the ‘handicraftsman’? Heidegger holds that modern technology too is to be understood in its essence as a revealing, with the difference that in modern technology, the revealing becomes a challenging that perhaps converts nature into resource, a ‘setting-upon’ rather than a ‘bringing-forth’. ‘But the revealing never simply comes to an end. Neither does it run off into the indeterminate … [r]egulating and securing even become the chief characteristics of the challenging revealing.’ [17]</p>
<p>A turn to Heidegger, then, at least seems to imply that a simple description of technology as instrumental and therefore somehow morally evil cannot be the basis of critique. Whatever the difference between the pre-technological or the everyday on the one hand, and modern technology on the other, both the fundamental characteristics and the essence of technology remain the same; further, techné as a form of knowing is hardly, in its originary sense, reducible to the ‘machine’, defined in opposition to a romantic vision of ‘man’. Although both ecofeminist and postcolonial critiques have declared themselves apart from such a Luddite view, they fail, in their persistent definitions of technology, to sufficiently separate themselves from it.</p>
<p>This ‘man’-machine opposition also follows on the debate around a clear separation between the two. In the various engagements with technology, or rather with the machine, we see attempts to bring it around to terms of friendliness with ‘man’, or to humanise it, or to get it to mimic ‘humanness’. Artificial intelligence projects look for the anthropomorphic answer – look in the mirror – to understand intelligence, science fiction longs for the monster machine that can be made human. The critical debates on the AI project too, then, insist on some ‘extra’, some remainder, in human consciousness, that must escape computation – an ‘essence’ in Searle, the search for a likeness in Nagel, a methodological mystery for Chomsky and others. For more external critiques, questions of machine learning, representing ‘man’ adequately, or emotive capacity, take centre stage.</p>
<p>It is not too difficult to trace continuities between these positions and the postcolonial ones I have just delineated above, with the development that the frail ‘human’ rendered even frailer in subalternity now takes centre-stage; and it seems that in both, the sacred boundary between ‘man’ and ‘machine’ is at stake. Haraway, speaking from within the late-twentieth century scientific culture of the United States, refers to this now ‘leaky distinction … between animal-human (organism) and machine’ to suggest that ‘[p]re-cybernetic machines could be haunted; there was always the spectre of the ghost in the machine. This dualism structured the dialogue between materialism and idealism that was settled by a dialectical progeny, called spirit or history, according to taste. But basically machines were not self-moving, self-designing, autonomous. They could not achieve man's dream, only mock it. They were not man, an author to himself, but only a caricature of that masculinist reproductive dream. To think they were otherwise was paranoid.</p>
<p>Now we are not so sure. Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and art)ficial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert’ (Haraway 1991: 152). The technological determinism that drives socialist feminist critiques of science and technology, then, and offers natural collectivities of women, or class, in their empirical connotations, as vantage points, is re-opened, so that destruction of ‘man’ by ‘machine’ no longer suffices as critique. Putting together Heidegger and Haraway, it is clear that it never did, and that boundaries are indeed the sites on which control strategies function, rather than the integrity of natural objects. With such a view, it is obvious that neither questions of vivisection nor of representation stand, with their reliance on wholeness and organicity.</p>
<p>Finally, following Sanil V., the history of technology is the history of culture. A critique of technology arising from culture, therefore, as the postcolonials seem to articulate, particularly, in their accessing of anterior difference, is hardly a useful, or sound, critique. It is, moreover, an instrumental critique, as caught in the thrall of technology as the mainstream itself, indeed more so. The necessity might be to recognise the impurity in the separation itself, rather than in, as again the hybridity framework seems to suggest, the negotiations with technology by culture.</p>
<p>To sum up this and the 2 preceding posts, therefore, I put down telegraphically the following steps. Predominant critiques of science in India that continue to have valence today have been voiced as critiques of technology. These have drawn partly on Gandhi’s critique of technology as instrument, and have articulated the empirical subaltern as seat of resistance to technology, retaining, in this move, the commitment to the ‘human’ of liberalism that they also purport to critique. Such a subaltern is also seen as having cultural continuities, in whatever inchoate fashion, with an anterior difference – an immutable past. When such a ‘subaltern-as-resistant’ is purported to offer crisis to western science, as the hybridity framework suggests, resistance is asked to carry the referent of revolution, without fulfilling the promise of inversion of the dialectic that revolution, to merit the name, must carry. I would suggest that, in such a case, resistance remains the Kuhnian anomaly, without succeeding in a convertion to crisis.</p>
<p>In the next set of posts, I will try to look at feminist arguments drawing from these and other positions.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>[1] Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, from Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings from 'Being and Time' (1927) to 'The Task of Thinking' (1964)'‘, Revised and expanded edition, edited, with general introduction and introductions to each selection by David Farrell Krell. Harper:San Francisco.</p>
<p>[2] ‘… both science and market are amnesiac communities, … hegemonic groups that force products, processes and communities into obsolescence. Both are seen as progress. But what is progress but a genocidal word for erasure, for forgetfulness’ (2002: 43).</p>
<p>
[3] There are many sides to this debate between whether the scientific and technical traditions were two streams that, for most of recorded history, run apart from each other. For most of postcolonial practice, which wants to work against a simple version of the technological as applied science, a connection is sought to be made between the two that is, however, not explored or explained carefully, except when referring to the everyday technologies, where, paradoxically, the separation of the scientific and the technological is what is drawn on, to suggest the value of one over another.</p>
<p>
[4] Vandana Shiva would make this case particularly with respect to nature, which, she says, is treated as passive in the western scientific knowledge binary of subject-object.</p>
<p>
[5] ‘The tear may transform the scientific ‘eye/I’’ (2002: 46).</p>
<p>[6] ‘We ask the question concerning technology when we ask what it is. Everyone knows the two statements that answer our question. One says: Technology is a means to an end. The other says: Technology is a human activity. The two definitions of technology belong together.’</p>
[7] ‘Today we are too easily inclined either to understand being responsible and being indebted moralistically as a lapse, or else to construe them in terms of effecting. In either case we bar to ourselves the way to the primal meaning of that which is latter called causality. So long as this way is not opened up to us we shall also fail to see what instrumentality, which is based on causality, actually is.’ [9]
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/postcolonial-hybridity-and-the-2018terrors-of-technology2019-argument'>https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/postcolonial-hybridity-and-the-2018terrors-of-technology2019-argument</a>
</p>
No publisherashahistories of internet in Indiarewiring bodieswomen and internetmathemes and medicine2011-08-03T09:45:43ZBlog EntryPornography & the Law - A Call for Peer Review
https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/pornography-and-law
<b>Namita Malhotra's research project on "Pornography & the Law". is a part of the Researchers @ Work Programme at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. Her monograph is an attempt to unravel the relations between pornography, technology and the law in the shifting context of the contemporary.</b>
<p>It is these shifts that push the arguments here to be relevant beyond specific occurrences or phenomenon in the digital world (the moment of video pornography, interactive cyber sex, webcam sex, camfrog, social networking and sexual behaviour, chatroulette, facebook, confessional and sexualized blogging, sexting and mobile phones, etc.) to attempt to understand the nature of affects that surround pornography, especially as reflected in the law and its desire to contain it, and how law’s desire to contain is also about subjectivities and practices around technology. The structure of the monograph is somewhere between a willful literature review and a dressing room, where various concepts, ideas, images or visions around law, film/video, technology and new media are tried on for size to explain or unravel parts or whole of the picture around pornography in the Indian context.</p>
<p>The Researchers At Work Programme, at the Centre for Internet and Society, advocates an Open and transparent process of knowledge production. We recognise peer review as an essential and an extremely important part of original research, and invite you, with the greatest of pleasures, to participate in our research, and help us in making our arguments and methods stronger. The first draft of the monograph is now available for public review and feedback. Please click on the links below to choose your own format for accessing the document.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/law-and-pornography" class="internal-link" title="Law and Pornography Word File">Word</a></li>
<li><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-pornography" class="internal-link" title="Law & Pornography">PDF</a></li>
</ul>
<p>We appreciate your time, engagement and feedback that will help us to bring out the monograph in a published form. Please send all comments or feedback to nishant@cis-india.org or you can use your Open ID to login to the website and leave comments to this post.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/pornography-and-law'>https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/pornography-and-law</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnahistories of internet in IndiaObscenityResearch2012-12-14T12:12:17ZBlog EntryPleasure and Pornography: Pornography and the Blindfolded Gaze of the Law
https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/the-blindfolded-gaze-of-the-law-and-pornography
<b>In the legal discourse, pornography as a category is absent, except as an aggravated form of obscenity. Does this missing descriptive category assist in the rampant circulation of pornography, either online or offline? Rather than ask that question, Namita Malhotra, in this second post documenting her CIS-RAW project, explores certain judgments that indeed deal with pornographic texts and uncovers the squeamishness that ensures that pornography as an object keeps disappearing before the law.
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<p><strong><br /></strong></p>
<p><strong>When Justicia, blindfolded, cannot see the profane …</strong><br /><br />In the legal discourse, pornography as a category is absent, except as an aggravated form of obscenity (1). Does this missing descriptive category assist in the rampant circulation of pornography, either online or offline? Rather than ask that question, I would like to explore certain judgments that indeed deal with pornographic texts and uncover the squeamishness that ensures that pornography as an object keeps disappearing before the law.</p>
<p>For instance, in the case of Fatima Riswana V. Chennai & Ors. (2) both the public prosecutor and counsel for the petitioners applied to the court for transfer to another (male) judge, to save the District Lady Judge from embarrassment. The order for transfer was passed, so that the District Lady Judge does not have to view certain CDs that are part of the evidence. The justification for this is that the 'said trial would be about the exploitation of women and their use in sexual escapades by the accused, and the evidence in the case is in the form of CDs, viewing of which would be necessary in the course of the trial; therefore, for a woman Presiding Officer it would cause embarrassment'.</p>
<p>This is a rather obvious case, where explicit and pornographic material is made to disappear before the eyes of the law, gesturing towards the larger complicity that allows society and law to create a ruckus about Richard Gere and Shilpa Shetty’s kiss, HBO's English movie channel, dance bars and other such aspects of the sleazy modernity that we inhabit (3), but simultaneously is oblivious to circulation of pornography, both online and offline.</p>
<p>In a rather confrontational visual juxtaposition, I place Savita Bhabhi alongside Husain’s Mother India, to be able to ask several questions, including the question of which one’s existence has been more threatened by the law. There is almost no doubt about it; Savita Bhabhi’s chequered career as a slutty housewife has been marred only by two scandals (and several almost patriotic accounts of India having finally arrived (4)) – once when a child sent an MMS about his teacher and it made references to Savita Bhabi, which led to some mention of action that might be taken against the website (5), and another time when Karan Johar (Mid Day, Delhi – 31 March 2009) remarked that one of the characters, Jeet, has a look similar to that given to Amitabh Bachchan in 'Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna', and this might be a case of copyright infringement. Neither of these have resulted in any serious charge against the alleged anonymous producers, Indian Porn Empire, or what is more probable, the blocking of the website regardless of whether the producers/creators can be found and prosecuted. However Husain’s untitled painting, which surfaced on a website for an auction for victims of a Kashmir earthquake in 2006 (two years after it was first sold by the painter), was dragged to court on serious charges of obscenity, which fortunately led to a rather progressive judgment on obscenity by the Delhi High Court.</p>
<p>Returning to the two images of nude women, obscenity law in India has laid down that “nudity in art and literature is not per se evidence of obscenity”. As stated in the judgment that dealt with the circulation of Hussain’s untitled painting (later titled 'Bharat Mata') 'the work as a whole must be considered, the obscene matter must be considered by itself and separately to find out whether it is so gross and its obscenity so decided that it is likely to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to influences of this sort'. What renders an object obscene is the transaction rather than the text -- a transaction involving the depiction-consumption of the female body , and the sexualisation of the viewer who in turn sexualises the object. It is not just that the painting/image may already be sexualized but also that the public is in turn sexualised by looking at it (and sexualises it with its
gaze), thus making them vulnerable to the perversion that is modernity
itself and the pornographic gaze (Nitya Vasudevan and Namita A. Malhotra, State of Desire - Unpublished article). To put it simply, the anxiety of the state is not just about the object, but also about its circulation in the public, and the meanings it acquires through these series of transactions.</p>
<p>Legal and public discourse is often obsessed with the various meanings that become possible because of the placing of this naked body - or the transactions of this naked body with the context, background, narrative that it is placed in. Though seemingly sexualised already as a naked body (this can be refuted not only by the Indian court but various examples in art, religious architecture, etc.) the meanings it may carry are further complicated when it is placed in a pornographic comic online, bearing a crown and saying 'I will be Miss India', or as a faceless hazy outline in the foreground of the map of India. Hussain’s depiction of the naked woman on the map of India, embodying India (in pain or anger) carries many jostling, conflicting meanings. Inspite of the furore over the painting, the High Court finally held that the painting was not obscene, stating that the intention of the painter was to evoke sympathy for a woman – indeed a nation – in distress (6) . However what is intriguing, is that Savita Bhabi’s body, her markings of Indian-ness, her poses and postures are not examined to that extent either by the court or the public.</p>
<p>Pornography, as obscenity in its aggravated form or explicit depiction of sexual acts without a relevant or coherent narrative, has been dropped from both legal discourse and academic and cultural analysis--is it possible to surmise that this has happened because it can be read as a blank slate, a place where meanings cannot be read, felt or inferred? Pornographic movies are spliced into mainstream films, circulate
surreptitiously through video stores, piracy markets or though online
spaces that cannot be easily accessed because of regulations and
filters in most places –- colleges, homes, schools, offices, cybercafes
(7) etc. Can we surmise that the transaction of the sexualized gaze with the obscene object has been, in this way, so removed from public gaze that it does not merit discomfort and anxiety for the state or public, unless it nefariously slips into public discourse (DPS MMS, Noida MMS, Mysore Mallige)? As long as it is a secretive (even if mass) consumption, it does not disturb the heternormative familiar and familial in the manner that an object whose obscenity is not quite obvious or clear does – for example, HBO's English movie channel (8).</p>
<p>In this context, let us look at an excerpt from the progressive judgment on Hussain’s painting, which demonstrates the extent to which the court has to read the meanings of an image to determine whether it is obscene or not, but simultaneously, by not ever having to interact with a pornographic text, the court (or the public) does not have to see that there are many meanings embedded in such an image as well.</p>
<p><em>'One of the tests in relation to judging nude/semi nude pictures of women as obscene is also <strong>a particular posture or pose or the surrounding circumstances</strong> which may render it to be obscene, but in the present painting, apart from what is already stated above, the <strong>contours of the woman’s body represent nothing more than the boundaries/map of India.</strong><br /></em></p>
<p><em>Even if a different view had to be taken that if the painter wanted to depict India in human form, it may have been<strong> more appropriate to cloth the woman in some manner may be by draping a sari </strong>or by a flowing cloth etc., but that alone cannot be made a ground to prosecute the painter.</em> <em>There can be a numbers of postures or poses that one can think of which can really stimulate a man’s deepest hidden passions and desires. To my mind, art should not be seen in isolation without going into its onomatopoetic meaning and it is here I quote Mr. Justice Stewart of the US Supreme Court in Jacobellis v. Ohio 378 U.S. 184 (1964) who defined ‘obscenity’ as, “I will know it when I see it”. The nude woman in the impugned painting is not shown in any peculiar kind of a pose or posture nor are her surroundings so painted which may arouse sexual feelings or that of lust in the minds of the deviants in order to call it obscene. The </em><em><strong>placement of the Ashoka Chakra</strong> or the States in the painting
is also not on any particular body part of the woman which may be
deemed to show disrespect to the Ashoka Chakra/States and the same was
conceded by the learned counsel for the respondent during the course of
the arguments advanced. </em></p>
<p><em>It is possible that some persons may hold a more orthodox or conservative view on the depiction of Bharat Mata as nude in the painting but that itself would not suffice to give rise to a criminal prosecution of a person like the petitioner who may have more liberal thoughts in respect of mode and manner of depiction of Bharat Mata.' </em>(9)</p>
<p>A body that doesn’t carry inscriptions of cities on different body parts, but is definitely inscribed as Indian is that of Savita Bhabi – from the mangalsutra that never comes off even during doggy-style sex, the sari that slips off rather easily, the bindi, the gestures and mannerisms, to the stories that place her in sexual encounters with familiar people – the bra salesman, the old boyfriend, the cousin, the doctor, the woman colleague, the boss, the aging star and many others.</p>
<p>Savita Bhabhi thus carries as many confusing, jostling meanings as a pornographic text. For instance, she refers to recession and aspirations to become Miss India. She ventures into the fantasy world of her fans, since many of her stories are drawn from their stories on the Savita Bhabi website and fansite –- whether these stories are make-believe or true is irrelevant. These resonances of the text beyond mere sexual arousal are obvious. Even if one were to ignore Linda Williams (10) and inferences from Foucault that pornography becomes one of the many forms in which knowledge of pleasure is organised, it is obvious that from varied perspectives within film studies and legal studies, pornography merits examination. Williams' point also seems to provide some insight into why pornographic circulation doesn't merit much anxiety from the state or in the law; if pornography is organised in consonance with the heteronormative familiar and familial and accessible primarily by men, then maybe it is not such a big surprise that the state or the law is not really invested in controlling pornography, since pornography itself is controlling modes of sexuality and/or sexual expression.</p>
<p>Returning to the comparison, Hussain's untitled nude body on the map of India is literally marked. She carries these inscriptions -- Gujarat on one breast, Bangalore between her thighs, Chennai on her calves, Goa on her hip. Savita Bhabi is marked by her sari, her bindi, her blouse, her aesthetic sense, her fantasies of film stars, her stories of encounters in dressing rooms and myriad other recognizable details -- that mark her as Indian, or at least as living in India, in an Indian (albeit a privileged fair North Indian) body. However, it is Husain's untitled painting -- not called Bharat Mata (and the painting doesn't seem to signify a maternal relation but that of a wounded woman or pained woman) -- that goes to court on charges of obscenity.</p>
<p>Before looking at the few judgments that deal with the actual pornographic text, I take a detour to look at another iconic female figure -- that of Justice. Though clothed, she is blindfolded, so as to be able to discern even a fraction of a slip in the scales of justice; visual cognition would not be sufficient for her to recognise such a slip. As explained by Costas Douzinas, ('The Legality of the Image, lecture – December, 1999), ‘Justice must be blindfolded to avoid the temptation of facing the concrete person and putting individual characteristics before the abstract logic of the institution'. Martin Jay traces the trajectory of how justice became blindfolded through the ages, in the article 'Must Justice Be Blind' (11). Justice was initially wide-eyed and alert; she was blindfolded by the Fool in a period when corruption of the rulers was rampant; she was immortalised by Vermeer as staring at empty scales; and in a transitory state before being completely blinded she had two heads, with a pair of eyes that could see, and a pair that was blindfolded -- shielded, maybe, from the profane and from embarrassment.</p>
<p>I look at this blindness of the judicial system that allows pornography to circulate, while pinning down the obscene and examining minutely its various meanings. The obscene ('Satyam Shivam Sundarmam', 'Prajapati' – a Bengali magazine which carries short stories, 'Lady Chatterley’s Lover', 'Bandit Queen') is examined firstly, for whether it is so gross, though grossness or vulgarity as such is not enough to establish obscenity. And secondly, for whether it has the tendency to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such influences and into whose hands -- or rather, vision -- such an object might fall (this is what allows for the circulation in limited publics -- adult audiences, time slots on television). <br /><br /><strong>Hard and Near Hard Pornography: Close Encounters of the Law with the Profane</strong></p>
<p>In the case of Anonymous vs. the Commissioner Of Police (12), yet another encounter takes place between the embarrassed law and the pornographic text. The excerpt below describes the encounter of two women advocates asked by the court to examine what movies are being exhibited at a specific theatre. In the peculiar clash of social mores, that ensure who has access to pornography, and the law, that ensures equal access to all legally sanctioned media to everyone, the movie theatre was held responsible for violating the fundamental right of women to have access to their premises -- and thus access to pornography. <br /><br /><em>'We approached the booking counter of Rs. 20/- and asked for tickets. The booking clerk first informed us that it is an English movie and it is not meant for ladies to view. When we insisted for tickets, he asked us to come inside the booking room from the main entrance of the theatre. When we were entering the theatre, the gate-man informed us that ladies are not permitted as it is a "SEX MOVIE".</em></p>
<p><em>However, we walked into the booking room. Booking clerk issued us Box-A tickets and further asked us to see the Manager before taking seats. We did not see the Manager but directly went to Box-A and took seats. Even the Box-A doorman asked us to leave the theatre advising us that we being ladies cannot see it as the movie is a "SEX MOVIE". When the movie began at 12.00 P.M. simultaneously the Manager along with two men switched on the lights in Box-A and asked us to leave the hall immediately. Since he repeatedly insisted us to leave, we both came out of Box-A. On coming out we enquired as to why we should not see the movie, to which the Manager replied that it is a "BF". On asking for further clarification of "BF", the Manager stated that it means "BLUE FILM". When we asked him to identify himself, he informed us that he is Mr. Prasad, Manager of the Theatre, as such he has every right to ask us to leave. When we asked as to how it was not advertised that the movie is meant for men only, he retorted that "It is understood that whenever English movies are played in this theatre, ladies are strictly not permitted." As such we were forced to leave the theatre immediately.'</em><br /><br />The question before the court was whether the films exhibited in this theatre were being exhibited in accordance with the censor certificate or whether there was any tampering; whether there was any other device or contrivance to interpolate or intermingle blue films with any otherwise innocent-looking film. Here, though the court had taken it upon itself to address the pornographic text, it ran into a series of complications when merely trying to access the text or the evidence itself, as two women advocates were sent to determine if there was an illegal film exhibition taking place. Pornography seems to be continuously disappearing even on the rare occasion when it is addressed directly by the court, especially in the court's attempt to precisely locate the moment of transaction of the gaze with the pornographic object.</p>
<p>The court, when allowed to examine the film exhibited, found that it was 'a hotch potch of short films, advertisement films, party propaganda films, Hindi and Telugu feature film bits'. (13) The court finally located the pornographic segments (squeezing breasts in a tub, cunnilingus, brutal murder scene) and the court’s comment was that 'normal scenes were replaced by sexy scenes'. The recommendation of those who examined the films that were ostensibly being spliced into <em>Secret Games 3</em> and <em>Dark Dancers</em> is that, 'The only course proper is not to permit entry into the country for such films which prima facie may be <strong>classified hard or near-hard</strong>'. Though the term near-hard is amusing and unique classification of pornography, maybe it's a Freudian slip by a judicial system caught between disgusted arousal and embarrassment.</p>
<p>Finally, in this judgment, the court had to acknowledge its own blindness -- that there is ‘some hole somewhere in the system so that even excised portions by the Censor Board of the films have found their way to the theatres’, including portions that were never passed through the censor certification process at all. <br /><strong><br />Whose Hard-On (or Near Hard-On) Are We Looking for: The Law in Its Search for the Profane</strong><br /><br />In 2005, two teenagers frolicking were captured on a mobile phone camera, and the clip circulated first through mobile phones and then subsequently on the internet. The clip sparked off a phenomenon of hidden camera and mobile phone clips -- a booming pornographic enterprise now on the internet. For a split second, it seemed as though any kind of desire could become pornographic, captured in an ubiquitous medium and transmitted throughout the country. That thrill and anxiety was possibly grasped at slightly in Anurag Kashyap’s <em>Dev.D</em>, where Chanda -- the prostitute, or the other of the good girl -- is the one depicted as the unknown girl who was part of the MMS clip. Very few films have been able to grasp the visceral embarrassment and immediacy of desire as <em>Dev.D</em> does, and it is possibly not the story of Chanda, but that of Paro that achieves this. Paro, who sends nude pictures of herself across continents; Paro, the cyber-sexer; Paro, the entirely relatable slut who cycles with a mattress across fields of mustard in small town Punjab because she desires sex.</p>
<p>After three and a half years (countless MMSs, one movie reference, and a few academic articles later) the court passes judgment in this case – of who possibly can be held liable for the circulation of the MMS clip online, and specifically its sale on Bazee.com (an eBay subsidiary) by an IIT student (Avnish Bajaj vs State on 29/5/2008 by Muralidhar J.). In this case, it is not the pornographic text that keeps slipping and eluding the grasp of the court; the problem is in the inability, especially in the age of the internet, to fix the transactions around such an object that is rapidly changing hands and circulating at an exponential speed through the internet.</p>
<p>The court is in a bind -- the wrong person is accused. Not the corporate body of Bazee but the CEO of Bazee himself (the boy is a juvenile so is facing lesser charges in the juvenile court). The court has the responsibility to fix the blame of the circulation of the obscene object on Avinash Bajaj, without being able to establish that there is any knowledge on his part about the existence of the clip. Though the court was able to establish that there was negligence on the part of Bazee in running the website (in spite of notification, the clip remained on sale for a whole working day after the complaint), and that the filters used by Bazee were obviously inadequate to control what is sold through the website, it was still not possible to find the CEO liable for obscenity charges. If the company had been charged, this would have been possible. Eventually, even though obscenity as a charge couldn’t stick, similar provisions in the IT Act (Section 67 read with Section 85) were used to charge Avinash Bajaj himself, as opposed to Bazee (the corporate body or the company itself). </p>
<p>Here again the court is forced to confront a pornographic text only in instances where there has been a public furore around it, and the eventual judgment is not likely to be able to even remotely address the phenomenon of MMS clips and hidden camera footage from cybercafes and hostels that has been spawned as a result of this incident. The slippery transaction of the gaze with the pornographic object is difficult to fix though in a different way from the earlier judgment – here the pornographic nature of the text is understood rather than examined, more for its violation of privacy than actual elements of obscenity. But it is still hard to determine for the law, especially with the internet, how and by whom has circulation of the pornographic object has taken place and to fix these transactions to ensure legal culpability.</p>
<p>*****<br />Curiously this tale of women advocates and judges as representatives of law and justice, who are averting their gaze from the pornographic text or find that the text is constantly eluding their legal stare, must deal in its closure with the figure of the male judge. Anne McClintock’s male judge in her article ‘Screwing the System’ (14) is a judge who gets a hard-on each time he sentences a prostitute -- a judge who otherwise pays to be beaten by the very same prostitutes. The Hidayatullah paradox of obscenity law is that the judge who decides on obscenity has to decide on the basis of whether he is affected, or rather aroused -- and if he is turned on, then how is he any longer the reasonable judge, or even the 'reasonable man' who can be expected to pass judgment with the dispassionate authority of law? The work of both Shrimoyee N. Ghosh (on the dance bar judgment) and Lawrence Liang (on cinema and the law) on the relation between law and affect, gestures towards an interesting puzzle for us to consider here: if we could look into the eyes of justice, if she were not blindfolded, what would we see? And is the purpose of the blindfold indeed to prevent us from observing the affective life of law itself – its arousal, disgust and embarrassment?</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Endnotes:</strong></p>
<p>1. Ranjit Udeshi v. State of Maharashtra. Only in the recent fairly progressive judgment on Hussain’s painting, that held eventually after examining it, that it was not obscene, was there an attempt at giving some distinction to the category of pornography apart from it being an aggravated form of obscenity and to say that it, as a class of objects, images, paintings, videos, is designed for sexual arousal, while other material which may or may not be obscene is meant to have other meanings. Such reading of the author’s intentions is a convoluted way of restating Justice Potter’s statement – 'I know it (hard core), when I see it'. <br />2. Fatima Riswana v. State Rep. By A.C.P., Chennai & Ors.Case No.: Appeal (crl.) 61-62 of 2005<br />3. -'…in a clear shift of subject matter, what we are now seeing is an explicitly politicized moral censor looking at all this—looking not so much at the sex industry as at society-in-general, at society itself now theatricalised into a morbid stage of sleaze'. Ashish Rajadhyaksha, in his essay ‘Is Realism Pornographic?,’ which deals with the writings of Pramod Navalkar, former Minister for Culture in Maharashtra, points to how explicit or hard-core pornography does not seem to be the concern as much as a whole range of practices attached to the phenomenon of modernity<br />4. Anastasia Guha, The Beatitudes Of A Bountiful Bhabhi, Tehelka, Vol 5, Issue 19, Dated May 17, 2008. Available online at http://www.tehelka.com/story_main39.asp?filename=hub170508the_beatitudes.asp <br />5. Savitha Bhabi threatened, http://infotech.indiatimes.com/quickiearticleshow/3476748.cms <br />6. For instance, the court held that in Bandit Queen, the nudity during the sequence of rape and torture of Phoolan Devi is necessary in the narrative and essential for the impact and the moral that the story is trying to convey – her anger with the upper caste feudal landlords and her quest for justice become identifiable for the viewer, and hence the nudity is in fact necessary in the story, and has no ‘tendency to deprave or corrupt’.<br />7. The regulation of cybercafes takes place in a manner reminiscent of how cinema spaces such as movie theatres were sought to be regulated by the colonial law. Current laws demand placing of computers so monitors face outward, use of identity cards for every visit, data retention for at least a month for most users, etc. <br />8. Though the latter might be a valid assumption (and certainly beneficial for us) it is an assumption whose presumptuous certainties are shaken in the age of the internet, especially that primarily men access pornography and cyber sex through these newly opening up online spaces.<br />9. Maqbool Fida Husain v. Raj Kumar Pandey CRL. REVISION PETITION No. 114/2007. Decided on 08-05-2008</p>
<p>10. Williams, Linda. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989<br />11. Costas Douzinas, Lynda Nead (Eds), Law and the Image: the Authority of Art and the Aesthetics of Law. University of Chicago Press, 1999<br />12. Anonymous Letter-Un-Signed vs The Commissioner Of Police And Others on 26 December, 1996<br />13. For a judicial system that is invested in narrative film or narrative structure for reasons of copyright law (see generally Anne Baron, The Legal Property of Film) or for aesthetic reasons, as is evident from the judgment in Bandit Queen (that held nudity when she was paraded naked in front of the villagers to not be obscene because those scenes are needed for a narrative impact – for people to feel moved and disgusted by Phoolan Devi’s plight) it must also be a different kind of horror to find films chopped up into twenty sundry pieces, the last piece thrown somewhere else.<br />14. Anne McClintock, Screwing the System: Sexwork, Race and the Law, Boundary 2, Vol. 19, No. 2, Feminism and Postmodernism (Summer, 1992), 70-95. <br /><br /></p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/the-blindfolded-gaze-of-the-law-and-pornography'>https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/the-blindfolded-gaze-of-the-law-and-pornography</a>
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No publishernamitahistories of internet in IndiaObscenityinternet and societyArtcybercultureswomen and internetYouTubeCyberculturescyberspacesDigital subjectivitiesHistory2011-08-02T08:37:23ZBlog EntryPleasure and Pornography: Initial Encounters with the Unknown
https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/xxx-files-initial-encounters-with-the-unknown
<b>This blog entry is the first in a series by Namita Malhotra on her CIS-RAW project that is about pornography, Internet, sexuality, law, new media and technology. She aims for this to be a multi media and research project/journey which is able to cite and draw on various sources including legal studies, film studies and philosophy, academic and historical work on sexuality, art, film and pornography itself. </b>
<p>There are few dilemmas that one is faced with when working on the vague and over extended category of pornography. The first is the very familiar feminist dilemma over pornography, and the position of radical feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and Catherine McKinnon--pornography is violence or sexually explicit subordination of women. This is more popularly encapsulated in Robin Morgan’s words--pornography is the theory and rape is the practice. Even if this can be collapsed into the positions of pro-sex and anti-sex feminists, it does initially haunt any research agenda on pornography, especially for a guilty quasi-feminist like myself.</p>
<p>However, some of my previous writings have attempted to deal with the position of the women’s movement, specifically in India, on pornography (the details are given below) and here I hope to move beyond either the moral or feminist positions on pornography, to examine what the pervasive phenomenon does. One of the strands that I hope to continue to explore is the relation of body to film. Though film studies is mostly focused on the visual sense, few scholars have looked on film as a bodily experience and attempted to understand the mimetic relation between the body of the 'viewer' and the body of the film. A more tactile understanding of the experience of film and media would be a useful place to start exploring pornography.<br /><br />The second has arisen from many conversations that I have had – when I say I’m working on pornography, the response is either a withdrawal or over-enthusiasm bordering on insistence to share personal collections of erotica and pornography. Though these conversations are often insightful, I have now realized that it is hard for me to actually examine pornography in all its totality – from spliced moments in mainstream films in shady theatres to specificities of hentaii and tentacle porn. Personal tastes, preferences, and access make it hard to be able to be interested in everything. Which is precisely my fascination with pornography – that it is in fact an intensely personal relation or rather a space in which different people have kept very varied and specific material, words, and media--that it also is not entirely about the media/words themselves, but also about how and in what setting they are consumed, how they are bought, downloaded or searched for. <br /><br />The third is the legal conundrum posed by pornography – that it is not recognized in Indian law as a specific category but that there exist, nonetheless, stringent conditions for obscenity. Obscenity is determined on the basis of the Hicklin test, which originated in England in 1868 and has continued as an integral part of Indian law though it has been discredited in English common law and American law. Here, the legal scholarship of Nussbaum is an interesting starting point as it sets up a useful framework that refuses to look at the law as a rational system of rules that is devoid of emotions. Nussbaum analyses the cognitive content of emotions that work within law – in the case of determining obscenity, she points to how emotions of disgust and revulsion play a significant role (the other emotions that she examines in detail are shame, fear and anger in the law). In Nussbaum’s analysis of the cognitive content of disgust, she remarks that in most cultures, disgust is about discomfort humans have with 'our own bodies and decaying selves', and concludes that disgust is an unreliable indicator for obscenity. She refers to McKinnon’s and Dworkin’s work to state that the indicator should be harm done by the material, rather than disgust. I would disagree with Nussbaum on whether harm can be a useful indicator to determine whether something is obscene, but before that it is necessary to examine whether Indian case law actually relies on the notion of disgust. Within Indian law, there seem to be other factors at work including notions of cultural purity vis-à-vis contamination from Western culture. An interesting and rather progressive judgment to look at is the recent High Court judgment on Hussain’s painting of nude Mother India that held that the painting is not obscene. <br /><br />These are a few of the scattered aspects of this project and some of the strands that it will explore. I would also like to share two comics on internet pornography. The first is from the famou <a class="external-link" href="http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/rule_34.png">xkcd comic</a> series and the second from the relatively new comic series <a class="external-link" href="http://deviswithbabies.blogspot.com/2008/10/brown-girls-equal-opportunity-porn.html">Brown Girls</a>. Both capture how lusty desires will find their objects anywhere – in the explosion of the polymorphous perverse on the internet or presidential debates on television. <br /><br /><br /></p>
<p><strong>Previous material </strong><br /><a class="external-link" href="http://www.apc.org/en/pubs/issue/gender/all/world-wide-web-desire-content-regulation-internet"><strong>The World Wide Web of Desire: Content Regulation on the Internet</strong></a><br />This article attempts to understand the dynamics of pushing the child pornography question to the forefront of any debate around censorship and pornography, especially in contexts of internet regulation, both nationally and in international forums such as the Internet Governance Forum. This is often done at the expense of a more nuanced understanding that would be possible if the focus were on issues related to gender, the prevalence of draconian censorship regimes in most countries in Asia and concerns related to free speech.</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.genderit.org/en/index.shtml?apc=r90501-e95021-1"><strong>Do Not Look at Porn</strong></a><br />This is a short video titled "Do not look at porn" which is a remix video or a collage of different materials taken from television and other videos, famous art works, photographs and books. The video is almost boringly pedagogic in its attempt to illustrate the slippery-slope argument which is that obscenity laws generally lead to the ban of progressive material rather than only offensive material. The video features Sarah Jones' song 'Your revolution will not happen between these thighs', and the popular Warcraft character based machinema video 'The internet is for porn'.</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.genderit.org/en/index.shtml?apc=r90480-e95146-1"><strong>Search History: Examining Pornography on the Internet</strong></a><br />This article explores some of the dilemmas of the women's movement in India when faced with the question of pornography. It also is a very basic historical look at the category of pornography itself, as it emerged to describe the array of objects and artefacts discovered in the ancient city of Pompeii. These finds were kept at the Secret Museum; only men of a certain upper class were allowed and ‘trusted’ to have access to these objects, and not the ‘easily corruptible rabble or women’. Such distinctions would often arise in the case of pornography and be the reasoning behind censorship and regulation of many media in the next few centuries. Whether it was the birth of photography, cinema, video, and in recent times the internet and new media (CD,VCD, DVD), each technology has been greeted with suspicion of its possible harm to society. <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /></p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/xxx-files-initial-encounters-with-the-unknown'>https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/xxx-files-initial-encounters-with-the-unknown</a>
</p>
No publishernamitahistories of internet in IndiaObscenityinternet and societywomen and internetresearchCyborgsdigital subjectivitiesHistory2011-08-02T08:37:27ZBlog EntryPleasure and Pornography: Impassioned Objects
https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/impassioned-objects-unraveling-the-history-of-fetish
<b>In this post, a third in the series documenting her CIS-RAW project, Pleasure and Pornography, Namita Malhotra explores the idea of fetish as examined by Anne McClintock (i) . This detour is an exploration of the notion of fetish, its histories and meanings, and how it might relate to the story of Indian porn. </b>
<p><br />The etymology of fetish derives from the word fetico (Portuguese) which means sorcery or magic arts. In 1760, it was used to refer to primitive religions, especially in relation to the growing project of imperialism. In 1867, Marx coined the term commodity fetishism – using the implied meaning of primitive magic to express the central social form of modern industrial economy, whereby the social relation between people metamorphoses into the relation between things. It was only after this, in 1905, that Freud transferred the word, with all these meanings still clinging to it, to the realm of sexuality and perversions. As Anne McClintock points out, in her useful account and re-understanding of the fetish in the book <em>Imperial Leather</em> (ii), psychoanalysis, philosophy, and Marxism all take shape around the invention of the primitive fetish, which conveniently displaces what the modern mind cannot accommodate onto the invented domain of the primitive. She states that the not-so-concealed rationale of imperialism is fetishism. Fetishists (racial, sexual and other) became a mode of warranting and justifying conquest and control -- whether it was the policing of sexual fetishism for control of classes in Europe and colonies, or the invention of racial fetishism central to the regime of imposing sexual surveillance in the colonies.<strong> The imperial discourse on fetishism became a discipline of containment</strong> (iii) .</p>
<p>On the other hand in the realm of sexuality, fetish becomes a question of male sexuality alone -- male perversion par excellence. There are no female fetishists, either for Freud or Lacan, for to speak of female fetishism would involve displacing the basic precepts of psychoanalysis -- namely the scene of castration leading to phallic fetishism. However, McClintock points to the usefulness of studying female fetishism, as it allows for certain things to happen. First, it dislodges the centrality of the phallus in this discourse, which surprisingly makes way for the presence and legitimacy of a multiplicity of pleasures, needs, and contradictions that can’t be resolved or reduced merely to the desire to preserve the phallus. Very often, feminists such as McClintock read the Lacanian insistence on the centrality of the phallus as itself a fetishistic nostalgia for a single, male myth of origins and fetishistic disavowal of difference. Such a notion of fetish, embedded in phallic theory, gets easily reduced to sexual difference and does not allow/admit race or class as crucially formative categories as well; thus, race and class remain continuously of secondary status in the primarily sexually signifying chain.</p>
<p>“The racist fetishizing of white skin, black fetishizing gold chains, the fetishizing of black dominatraces, lesbians, cross dressing as men the fetishizing of national flags, slave fetishism, class cross-dressing, fetishes such as nipple clips and bras in male transvestism, leather bondage, PVC fetishism, babyism and so on -- these myriad different deployments of fetishistic ambiguity cannot be categorized under a single mark of desire, without great loss of theoretical subtlety and historical complexity.” Also McClintock points to racist, nationalistic and patriotic fetishes -- such as flags, crowns, maps, swastikas (or for instance chaddis) -- that can’t be simply rendered equivalent to the disavowal of male castration anxiety. <br /><br />McClintock calls for a renewed investigation of fetishism -- to open it up to a more complex and valuable history in which racial and class hierarchies would play as formative a role as sexuality. Rejecting the Lacanian and Freudian fixation on the phallus as central to psychoanalysis would call for a mutually transforming investigation into the disavowed relations of psychoanalysis and social history. In a way, it would be the bringing together of the varied ways in which fetish has been used -- by Freud (in the domain of psychoanalysis) in the realm of domesticity and the private, and by Marx (in the domain of male socio-economic history) in the realm of the market and possibly in the public. If these meanings were to speak to each other, what we discover is that fetish is in fact the historical enactment of ambiguity itself.</p>
<p>Fetishism involves the displacement onto an object of contradictions that the individual cannot resolve at a personal level. These contradictions could indeed be social, though lived with profound intensity in the imagination and flesh of the person. The fetish -- rather than being a merely an insignificant sexual or personal practice -- inhabits both personal and historical memory. It marks a crisis in social meaning -- the embodiment of an impossible resolution. This crisis/contradiction is displaced onto and embodied in the fetish object, which is thus destined to recur in compulsive ways. By displacing this power onto the fetish, then manipulating or controlling the fetish, the individual gains symbolic control over what might otherwise be terrifying ambiguities.</p>
<p>The fetish then can be called an impassioned object; something that emerges from a variety of social contradictions, rather than merely from the scene of castration or phallic centric domains. Hence they are neither universal, nor are they entirely about personal histories alone, but are about personal and historical memory or a social contradiction that is experienced at an intensely personal level. “As composite symbolic objects, fetishes thus embody the traumatic coincidence not only of individual but also of historical memories held in contradiction” (McClintock). This reading of fetishism gives rise to far richer possibilities of cultural analysis.</p>
<p>Fetish was neither proper to African or Christian European culture, but sprang into being from an abrupt encounter between two heterogeneous worlds during an era of mercantile capitalism and slavery. At this point it clearly embodies the problem of contradictory social value -- whether it is gold as valuable, or gold as warding off bad luck. Though initially just about heathen customs and rituals, it later also becomes a marking of certain groups of people for conquest. It is from this context that Freud transports the word, laden with meanings of conquest and violence, to the realm of sexuality. Obviously these meanings stain future connotations of fetish, the word fetish itself becoming prey to contradictory meanings of race and sex and difference.</p>
<p>For Freud, the fetish is the embodiment in one object of two positions -- castration and its denial. Though this does capture some sense of the ambiguity that McClintock also refers to, here the meanings oscillate between two, and only two, fixed options (a recurring male economy). The fetish becomes both a permanent memorial to the horror of castration, embodied not in the male but in the female -- as well as a token of triumph, and safeguard against the threat of castration. This has, of course, been critiqued by feminists quite severely. McClintock’s basic argument is that it is indeed hard, considering the varied nature of fetish objects, to find a single originary explanation in the psychic development of the individual -- in a single originary trauma. What is important here, however is to take on this notion of the fetish as an historical enactment of ambiguity itself, and see if as a theoretical concept it has any value to the study of the loose category of Indian porn, especially MMS porn. <br /><br /><strong>Soap in these strange days: fetish objects</strong><br /><br /><em>“Such spectacle creates the promise of a rich sight: not the sight of particular fetishized objects, but sight itself as richness, as the grounds for extensive experience.”<br />Dana Polan (iv)</em><br /><br />Anne McClintock’s work on fetish also looks at the seemingly ubiquitous object of soap as the carrier of many ambiguous meanings around gender, class, imperialism -- both the cult of domesticity (the running of the empire of home with servants, sweepers, cleaners, women, maids etc.) and the cult of new imperialism found in soap in its exemplary mediating form. The story of soap, for McClintock, reveals that fetishism rather than a quintessentially African propensity (belonging in the realm of lands and peoples that were being discovered through imperialism) was in fact central to industrial modernity; fetishism was not original either to industrial capitalism or precolonial economies, but was from the outset the embodiment and record of an incongruous and violent encounter (between two or more heterogenous cultures) and about rapid changes of modernity, rather than about the ‘primitive’. <br /><br />Marx says that the mystique of the commodity fetish lies not in its use value, but in its exchange value and its potency as a sign: “So far as (a commodity) is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it”. This could be linked to the idea of a mobile phone that is supposed to achieve so much beyond mere communication, at least according to the advertising -- they should mend ruptured relations and homes, get all the hot chicks, grow beautiful gardens, change the boring routine of life. For some time, the Samsung mobile phone ad with Estella Warren played in India, which probably moves the mobile phone with camera out of merely its symbolic use as enhancing attractiveness, to actually ‘getting’ or rather capturing girls by clicking. Magically in the ad, the act of clicking photographs make the girl not just willing, but she also takes the phone and photographs herself. Barring one scary moment when it looks like she might turn into an avenging warrior like Xena or The Bride, but instead she simpers into a loving sexy pose, she is willing. The ad can’t be easily dismissed as misogynistic, but it does give an intriguing glimpse of the intimate pictures and moments that can be captured with a mobile phone. <br /><br />That a mobile phone is fetishized as a commodity is probably evident, from the rush to get the more enhanced phone with the better camera and features, though mobile phones are also a ubiquitous element of one’s life, in some ways exactly like soap. Probably in a country like India, having a mobile phone can be read as opening up sexual possibilities in a way that wouldn’t be obvious in a more developed country. If the fetish is a social contradiction that is experienced at an intensely personal level, then the mobile phone, especially after the DPS MMS clip, is precariously located between the zones of the private and personal, and that which is entirely in the public domain beyond any control of the person(s). This ability of the mobile phone to occupy simultaneous universes because of its interconnectedness in a network, and that it is (for most people now) an entirely personal object with messages, numbers, conversations, images, videos, is what makes it unpredictable. <br /><br /><strong>Looking at MMS porn</strong><br /><em>“Memories were meant to fade. They were built that way for a reason”<br />Mace, Strange Days</em><br /><br />When looking at MMS porn, I’m irresistibly reminded of the movie <em>Strange Days</em>, in which Angela Basset’s character Mace expresses her frustration with Lenny (played by Ralph Fiennes). Lenny is obsessed with preserving memory and accessing other people’s experiences, through what in the movie are called playbacks. Playbacks are recordings of events in the brain that were fed back into brain waves to reproduce the earlier event -- the feelings, the sensations of touch, the smells and not just the visual. Playbacks haven’t been invented yet, but the obsessiveness with which Lenny wheels and deals (he’s also a dealer and collector of playbacks) gives a peculiar insight into how mobile phones are becoming fetish objects of sorts -- particularly MMSs recorded on mobile phones where other people are able to occupy the space of an unknown character that conveniently rarely ever appears on the screen. The famous pornographic ones are the DPS MMS clip and other MMS scandals, including the hidden voyeuristic ones taken without permission, and a precursor of this is Mysore Mallige where the man appears rarely on the screen and only at the end, almost like a signature. In a peculiar way MMS porn becomes like playback from Strange Days, a movie that is attempting to unravel the unknown future mired in technological changes that are messily intertwined with human desire and frailty. A future (set on the date of turning the millennium) that we’ve hopelessly gone past without even asking many of the questions that the characters in the movie pose.<br /><br />Indian websites advertise MMS scandals as a specific category of pornography. This category also includes genuine MMS clips of celebrities kissing (Kareena Kapoor), wardrobe malfunctions from Fashion Week, and also fake ones with celebrity look-alikes bathing, changing, having sex (Preity Zinta, Mallika Sherawat). Mostly what is being talked about are videos made on mobile phones by men, who record themselves having sex with ‘gullible’ women. The alleged gullibility of these women is probably essential to the erotic charge of such videos. They are shaky videos, especially when sex is underway, and have a grainy quality that makes them eerily real. Their perspective is usually that of the man who is holding the phone camera and rarely enters the frame himself, whereas the woman is definitely the desirable object that is being captured. Maybe this phenomenon can be understood better if one looks at McClintock’s idea of fetish and whether MMS/images on mobile phones can be located within that category -- whether the ambiguous nature of the video or image recorded on the mobile phone and its ability to be an intensely personal and private object and also to be so easily transmitted into networks signifies a crisis in social meanings around private and public. The mobile phone then merely becomes an object onto which this anxiety is displaced, and the recording of images repeatedly (and anxieties and fears triggered when they accidentally slip into the public domain) are ways of trying to control terrifying ambiguities over the private and the public (where aspects of sexuality, family and selfhood could be calamitously disrupted by a slip between the two categories). (v)<br /><br />In a strange way this is a parable for a larger phenomenon of pornographic circulation and the law, as well. The mass circulation of pornography is perceived as a private secret that is kept by all, and whenever there is slip between the two categories, the law and public discourse are barely able to deal with the furore of anxieties. And if not, then the law and public discourse proceed to deal with the banal unbuttoning of Akshay Kumar’s jeans by his wife as obscenity in courtrooms, as if we hadn’t all imagined an MMS that allowed us to be doing the same. <br /><br /> i. Anne Mcclintok’s work on sadomasochism illuminates some of the arguments that I make in relation to sexual subjectivity and the state’s interests and desires in policing it. (unpublished article for book on queer issues and the law). Her work borrows from notions developed by Foucault. “Sadomasochism plays social power backwards, visibly and outrageously staging hierarchy, difference and power, the irrational, ecstasy or alienation of the body, placing these ideas at the centre of western reason.” The analysis of sexual subjectivity and State’s interest in it also looks at the judgment on sadomasochism by the House of Lords, England that declares such activities that cause severe injuries and maim the body, as illegal, regardless of consent of parties. <br />ii. Anne Mcclintok, Imperial Leather: Race, gender and sexuality in the colonial contest, Routledge, 1995.<br />iii. Ibid<br />iv. Cited from Laura Mulvey, Some Thoughts on Theories of Fetishism in the Context of Contemporary Culture, October, Vol. 65 (Summer, 1993), pp. 3-20. </p>
<p>v. As in the story of Chanda in Dev.d loosely inspired from the DPS MMS clip incident<br /><img src="https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/uploads/kalkichanda.jpg/image_preview" alt="Chanda from Dev.d" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Chanda from Dev.d" /><br /><br /><br /></p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/impassioned-objects-unraveling-the-history-of-fetish'>https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/impassioned-objects-unraveling-the-history-of-fetish</a>
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No publishernamitahistories of internet in IndiaCyberspaceinternet and societyObscenitywomen and internetYouTubeCyborgsCyberculturesDigital subjectivities2011-08-02T08:35:20ZBlog Entryof doctors and maps - Snippet two
https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/of-doctors-and-maps-snippet-two
<b>This may seem like a careless swipe at the volumes of critique of technology. And yet ... I need to know ... </b>
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<p>Where am I with respect to technology?
Represented in it? Protected from it? Accessing it? And is my doctor the knower who will use the instrument of technology to heal me?</p>
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<p>Why then does he feel like an apologetic
outsider, unnecessary to this process, merely the public relations man as I lie
here, surrounded by the linear accelerator? Why do the women in the planning
room, wired through their scans with the accelerator, smiling benevolently at
him, seem more at home, more with me, within me?</p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/of-doctors-and-maps-snippet-two'>https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/of-doctors-and-maps-snippet-two</a>
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No publisherashahistories of internet in Indiarewiring bodieswomen and internetmathemes and medicine2011-08-03T09:45:22ZBlog Entry