I
see the Other in the picture, but the picture is in the Eye
Introduction
What
drove me to begin working on this paper were reflections on the estrangement of
certain sections present in our campus from the others. A direction of inquiry,
which I must add is opened up to a student such as myself only in circumstances
where the more immediate estrangement of myself from my fellow students is not
as pressing or is assuaged - a condition which I have been fortunate to find in
this campus. In speaking of this estrangement one sees the most acute form
being that of the karmcharis from the rest of the inhabitants of the
University. The karmcharis themselves are divided into the safaiwallas, the
people who run the canteens, and the guards. It is with the latter that I have
largely engaged with in the course of my interviews.
Choosing to focus on the guards was
driven by two conditions 1. They being the most visible of all the Karmcharis;
one necessarily encounters them everyday upon entering and exiting the
institution and as such cannot at any point even to oneself truly ignore them
2. The largely pragmatic consideration of the ease with which one can interview
them without disrupting their work which in this sense makes them the most
accessible of the karmcharis. It is to be admitted that such a study of a
certain condition of estrangement would have carried greater depth and body had
one been able to include the safaiwallas and the people who work in the canteen
within the ambit of its survey, yet the restraints of time have led this study
to its present form. Granting its limitations, I would like to add that in
consonance with the recommendations received on the abstract I have ensured
that I speak to guards of all genders.
Interlude
on the 'Other'
The central question which this
paper attempts to engage is that of the Other as constructed in our course -
Culture, Hierarchy, and Difference thus far, which shall be summarised briefly
to contextualise the questions raised here. Crucial to the course is the
dimension of difference, which includes the Derridean deferral of the arrival
of something which one may tentatively speak of as the fullness of a certain presence, where one understands this presence
to be its meaning. An example of the insistence
on the meaning of a certain moment thought along such lines is presented as the
manner in which the Indian State may insist on the meaning of Independence on
the 15th of August 1947. Such a construction of the meaning of Independence, it
is argued is done to establish a certain kind of dominance expressed in the
form of a hierarchy between the State and the people who themselves may have
suffered countless injustices which were interwoven into the process of the
state establishing its independence, such as the partition and the death and
suffering which came with it. Here the ability of the state to signify its
meaning of independence with greater force than the people who bore witness to
the partition is seen as a function of power and not of truth.
The Other here, as understood along
such lines would be her whose truth is overwhelmed or mitigated to maintain the
coherence of a certain dominant narrative regarding a set of events.
Ethnographically such a teaching works to inculcate a Levinasian openness to
the affectivity and sensibility of the other and it is in dialogue with this that the possibility of a discourse
emerges. One sees immediately the value of such a teaching, particularly as a
defence against an uncritical positivism which may seek to speak of the Other
in de-historicized, de-contextualised or in terms which reduce the other to
merely a functional term in a discourse alien to her. This being the teaching
of the infinite ethicality to the Other, of Emmanuel Levinas.[1]
One however does view the infinite exteriority of the position of the
Other, located via such a discourse with suspicion and this is also where the
problem with the Other as a category emerges. In its simplest terms the Other
is that which is not the Same and as such that which cannot be treated as the
same. One can well see at this point how a certain form of ethics may carry the
possibility of the unethical in its very formulation. It is to be admitted that
this is certainly not the intention
of such a discourse, yet this is also why one insists, unlike Professor Sarukai
- that it is not a question of Intentionality.
[2]
What one intends to do via a discourse is in no way a limitation of how the
discourse itself will be employed. One can at no point assume for oneself an
authorial role believing that such a position speaks for what a discourse does.
This is why Roland Barthes insisted that the author is dead.[3] It
is also why Zizek argues that every ideological engagement with the Real
carries the site of its own violation in it.[4]
This is precisely the problem with intentionality
- one uses an ideology to justify one's intentions yet one's intentions are
never identical with the ideology itself. This is what leads to the possibility
of the truly traumatic moment where one may have to violate an ideology to
serve the true intentions it justifies. It is also the condition which enables
the possibility of an ideology being used to serve intentions Other to what one
intends.
Return
to the Real
How then does one now see the contemporary political field
laid before us? How are dominant discourses being used by whom, to justify what
and even more tellingly - at what point are they willing to contradict their
explicit 'ethical' position. The
scope of these questions in their entirety are beyond the scope of this paper.
This paper will however engage with the field of Ambedkar University Delhi, and
the guards in it.
There is a certain way I feel that
we as a largely upper middle class set of students experience the guards in
A.U.D (it may be questioned as to how I make such an assertion about the class
character of the student body, yet here I rely merely on the apathetic nature
with which the fee hike and the proposal to have it increased by 5% every year
was received by the student community at large). Indifference doesn't quite
express this as there is a manner in which one may be indifferent to the large
majority of the students which surround us (which in itself if stretched a
little could be read as a form of alienation). In a sense one understands the
precision which the word 'Other' actually signifies here - they in a sense are
truly 'other' to us, but in what sense? In
the sense that the Lifeworlds one inhabits seem alien to each other, but not
alien in the sense of there being some unbridgeable distance or that of two
worlds existing as absolute exteriorities to each other. No, clearly not - we
see them every day and often they share the same space as us. Their relation to that space, the same one we
share is what is different. How they
negotiate with the terrain which we inhabit is what is different. And this
'difference' is fundamentally the distinction between the roles which we occupy
in such a space - the student and the guard.
As a student, there are a number of
things which I choose to do in A.U.D - however there are also a number of
things beyond my choice. As to what it is that I may choose to do, the
possibilities are near limitless, contingent only on the kind of person I may
be and the social circumstances one may find themselves in. The things which I
am compelled to do however, are relatively few (attend classes, write
assignments etc.) It is these things however that define my identity as a student, which allows you to identify me along with all the others,
as students. What then defines the identity of a guard?
A guard in A.U.D works one of three possible
shifts - from 6am to 2pm, from 2pm to 10pm and from 10pm to 6am. For one such shift per month one is paid 6500 Rs. Often
those with families are compelled to work two shifts to make ends meet. Some of
the younger ones are resentful of the fact that the guards in the neighbouring
institution I.G.D.T.U are paid more. They are all contracted to a private
security firm called Rakshak which also handles the security for I.G.D.T.U.
They largely don't have very much to do in A.U.D as compared to other possible
locations of deployment such as a government hospital where one of them
comes from, and recounts with relief the heightened work pressure he left
behind. In A.U.D their work consists primarily of screening the people and cars
who enter and exit the gates, opening and closing the classrooms before and
after they are used by us and keeping the limited degree of vigilance so as our
liberal University's administration can maintain some degree of institutional
civility and decorum in the campus. And even this is really not expected to be
executed according to the letter of the law as one occasionally can get away
with smoking a bidi on the sly.
Objects,
Objects Everywhere[5]
One often sees them silently sitting
or standing at a post, removed from the tides of life which flow around them in
their stationary uniform amidst our carefully selected colours. Thinking
thoughts which do not pertain to us, located in a world not of ours - that is
alienation. Eric Fromm writes thus on
alienation "Alienation (or "estrangement") means, for Marx, that
man does not experience himself as the acting agent in his grasp of the world,
but that the world (nature, others, and he himself) remain alien to him. They
stand above and against him as objects, even though they may be objects of his
own creation. Alienation is essentially experiencing the world and oneself
passively, receptively, as the subject separated from the object." Written
in 1961 one can see how aptly a certain condition is depicted of this
experiencing of oneself as seperated from the world one is inhabiting.
In the corridor where the above picture was
taken there are scrapboards on the walls containing drawings, comic strips,
notices and even a few political propositions. As you can see in the walls at
the periphery of the picture you have graphitti signifying everything from
liberal paraphanalia such as "Discover your inner awesome!" to
radical quotations of Marx such as "The road to hell is paved with good
intentions". None of this however speaks to or of, the experience of the
Lifeworlds which the guards inhabit and as such is experienced as a pure
spectacle. I do not know how useful it is to think of such a condition as an
example of the colonisation of the Lifeworld by a System World as Habermas may in
his attempt to understand the disableing of the integrative function of
communication (ironically some of the graphitti are anti-colonial political
expresions) yet it may still be useful to think of the ways in which this is
not an Ideal speech situation.
The
symbolic distance between the guards and the graffittic assemblage of culture
around them is best
formulated in Coleridge's famous lines where I take my subheading from 'water
water everywhere, and not a drop to drink'. The gaze however, with which we as
bourgeoisie students see the guards (or not see them) may be the very gaze with which they see (or not see)
our assemblage of culture and all its significations. The myriad of social
games we play organized around our desires forming the discourse of the student
which we inhabit may not be lost to them...in the very way as they may not be lost to us, perhaps
presenting itself in the form of the unutterable
question. The question which we may not be able to ask even ourselves, for to
ask ourselves such a question may dissolve the very safety, the comfort of
locating oneself inside a discourse.
The notion of this question is not lost to our fellow graffiti artists in A.U.D
and in its simplest form, it is presented as thus...
The
Unutterable Question
There is
a question which I asked every single guard I interviewed. Often I received no
answers and the answers which I received were either explanations as to why
they do so or an elaboration of the process of what it is that they are doing.
The question itself was simple enough. I asked them how do they distinguish
between those that can be allowed to enter the gate and those that can't.
Initially the question is waved away as purely a function of on the job
experience - the proposition that one gets
to know who comes in and who doesn't. Here I asked but what of new students
who arrive every year - how does one know already with them? (and they did know
already as I was let in without even a second glance on my first day of admission).
Even the ones who humoured me thus far were slightly uncomfortable here and the
answers I received to this were the most opaque you will find. "pata chal
jata hai" or, in case of the really brave ones "student lagte
hai" but nothing that predicated the answer beyond this. The answer in
itself is always naked - the fact that in a campus such as ours, the way one
dresses, the language one speaks, the way one wears ones hair are all
significations of our location within a broader social milieu. That social
milieu itself expresses itself via culture very accurately mapping positions
and locations of power which we employ in cultural significations. But to
actually speak in the language that
may predicate this would mean actually formulating sentences such as "unke
kapade se" to which the dreaded question may be repeated "kya?"
- forcing further predication. For a guard to speak in such a language would
mean for her to be abandoning the discourse
of dignity, that fragile thing which helps constitute ones subjective self
for one in such circumstances. Such a thing to a subject is the supplement
which helps sustain their very reality. Perhaps this is what Lacan speaks of as
the object petite a or the object
cause of desire, which I have clumsily depicted. It in this sense also frames
the true limitations of the subject's experience of reality.[6] It
is that whose presence frames the identity of the subject (possibly via a
discourse) and yet that which cannot be located in the subject but is sought in
the Other. It is to be kept in mind that for Lacan the Other as another subject
is secondary to the Other as a symbolic order and that one can think of the
Other as a subject only in a secondary sense when a subject embodies this
symbolic order for another.
Face
to Face?
Let us
now return to the professed Levinasian ethics one began with, the ethics which
is practiced in the face to face encounter, which as you can well imagine is
constantly at play in the process of interviews with guards which this study
draws on. There is a particular interview one has in mind which expresses the
kind of problem which this paper has been grappling with.
The guard in question is actually
one who works in I.G.D.T.U and I chanced upon him because he was sitting right
next to the Punjab National Bank ATM which is located very close to a building
used by A.U.D. But what particularly piqued my interest was that a friend of
mine had mentioned that he was once a college student who studied Sociology.
Our conversation ranged into a number of things, his life before coming to
Delhi to work, where as a college student he had studied Sociology and later
had done an M.A in Political Science, the pressures which drove him to leave as
well as his relationship with the administration. Our mutual friend naturally
arose as a topic of discussion and he joked about the fact that while our
friend smokes cigarettes and he smokes bidis, they both hide from the same
people in the same place to do it.
Of everyone I had spoken to however,
he was the most reticent of speaking about his work in the institution or his
relationship with others in it and my attempts to steer the conversation there
were dealt with generic descriptions of what he was expected to do. This was
the first time I met him so I did not push the issue any further as I let him
continue describing his schedule to me. Before leaving however I mentioned that
some of the guards in A.U.D were resentful of the fact that they were paid less
than those in I.G.D.T.U . He tensed up here, and spoke in a far more sombre
tone of voice. He warned me that I would not want to get very deep into this,
that there are things he could tell me which if circulated would result in him
losing his job. He hinted as to what some of these things could be but this may
not be the place to get into that. The revealing thing to me was how he ended
his insinuations stating that fundamentally, I would not want to be him, that
he is a majdoor and that after all this he would have to return to his job.
The point one can see here is that
the encounter itself cannot be
treated as the absolute plane of imminence where ethics is to be practiced. The
manner in which the Other presents itself to us is always already framed by
forces and conditions which themselves are not located or transcribed in the encounter. This is why my meeting
with the guard produces a certain
kind of discourse. A certainty which is not lost to him either as it informs
him of the avenues of what is to be said and what is to be unsaid, or rather of
what cannot be said. For to say that
would mean jeopardising his very subjective position in his reality (putting
his job in risk for example).
Face to Face?
A Political Addressal of the
Crisis of the Ethical[7]
How then
are we to address the impossibility of ethics within its field of immanence?
When the very field in which it can be practiced in is structured by forces
outside it? This truly is a question well beyond the scope of this paper, yet
from this meagre attempt what I hope can be garnered is that at some point we
have to (and perhaps already are) function interventively in processes outside of the sites of encounters, in
forces which frame the discourses permitted to us in our encounters. Such may
be an attempt which facilitates the construction of a discourse which allows
one to say what one means.
Bibliography:
1.
Samuel
Buchoul, De L’Infini: A Foreigner's Digression, 2014
2.
Slavoj Zizek, Less
Than Nothing:Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, 2012
3.
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 1967
4.
Jacques Lacan, My
Teachings, 2009
5.
Fredrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra,1978
6.
Introduction to The Privatization of Hope: Ernst
Bloch and the Future of Utopia, Edited by Peter Thompson and Slavoj Zizek, 2013
7. All pictures taken from within the walls of the AUD Kashmiri gate campus during the academic year of 2014.
7. All pictures taken from within the walls of the AUD Kashmiri gate campus during the academic year of 2014.
Assignment by K.S
Arsh
M.A Sociology 1st Semester
[1]
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity,1969,
Duquesne University Press
[2]
Sunder Sarukai, The 'Other' in
Anthropology and Philosophy, 1997, Economic and Political Weekly
[3]
Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author,
1967, Aspen
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavoj_%C5%BDi%C5%BEek
[5] Slavoj
Zizek, Contents, Less Than Nothing: Hegel
and the shadow of Dialectical Materialism, 2012, Verso, London
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Lacan
[7]
Slavoj Zizek, Conclusion, Less Than
Nothing: Hegel and the shadow of Dialectical Materialism, 2012, Verso,
London
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