The Nouveau Elite
Posted: March 9, 2011 Filed under: Academia | Tags: Books, Class, Pakistan, Post-Colonialism 1 Comment »Standard textbook Economics tells us that when a price of good ‘X’ increases, quantity of good ‘X’ demanded by consumers should decrease. In practice we see that inflation generally should and does force people into consuming less.
While teaching ‘History of Economic Thought’ last semester I introduced my students to Thorstein Veblen’s concept of ‘conspicuous consumption’ from his seminal work The Theory of the Leisure Class.
Veblen describes how in some cases, the perceived status of another good ‘Y’ would make us buy more of it the more the price of ‘Y’ increased. Calling it the ‘snob effect’, he described for preference for expensive goods rises for consumers who want to use (or at least want to appear to be using) exclusive products. Price, therefore, has an opposite affect for products such as expensive wines, branded hand-bags and luxury cars. A decrease in the price of these high-status goods would make the global elite not want them anymore. Veblen also talks about the ‘band-wagon effect’ whereby the more people around you purchase ‘Y’ the more you would want to purchase it too, regardless of its affordability. Case in point, iPods and Blackberries perhaps.
What is interesting is that although this describes a phenomenon that would presumably be ascribed to the exceptionally wealthy, Veblen argues that this is occurs in every class of people. It is a psychological experience that no class can honestly deny.
If this true then it would mean that everyone in this world wants to emulate the wealthiest class as closely as possible by consuming what the elite consume, dining where the elite dine, wearing what the elite wear and so on and so forth. Everyone would soak up he privilege and class power at the first opportunity presented.
The point of this academic prologue is to be able to read Rafia Zakaria’s op-ed in Dawn today a little more closely. I will not get into the definitions of who qualifies as the elite and who does not in Pakistan, since Umair Javed has done it brilliantly and comprehensively here. Whether those who aspire to be the elite are actually the elite, almost the elite or mostly elite can quantified in the ways Umair enumerates and more.
I want to get to something else here that Rafia’s piece insufficiently hinted at but first I will present a synopsis of her argument. Since Umair has put in a lot of labour in that, I will point you towards his words where he says:
“The basic crux of her argument, as I understood it, was that there is a class of people in Pakistan that do not belong to the landed elite, nor to the industrial elite, but somehow possess enough wealth to purchase branded clothes and accessories, live in roughly the same neighborhoods, attend the same parties, be seen on the same social pages, and generally hang around with the actual elite. She labels them, interestingly enough, as the ‘almost elite’. Their roots and social rise is not from land or industrial wealth, but rather on their abilities to dispense mental labor or artistic talent.
The article places this almost-elite, completely westernized (for the lack of a better word) in world-view and practice, as part of the country’s middle class formation. The proposed tragedy is that they actively label themselves as part of the upper class, and in the process shrug off all the responsibilities that a constituent group of the middle class would have in a developing country like ours. The proposed solution, however, is that an honest appraisal of reality is badly needed, which would ultimately direct the talents of the almost-elite towards the betterment of Pakistan.”
What I want to get at goes a bit further than the definitions that set up class analysis in Pakistan. What is even more problematic (and I can only hope Zakaria also meant this) is that this nouveau riche refuses to exercises meritocracy in the same way that is exemplar of the ultra rich. Once the economic and social gains have been made, this group of Pakistan elite goes on reproduce privilege and inequality in every sphere of their existence. There is that same hatred for the poor, the conceit in their own intellectual capacity and the belief that only they are the saviors of the nation. This very group, then, decries democracy as being incompatible with the structural problems of Pakistan.
One can argue that this is inevitable and this only indicates that more people have joined the ranks of the elite. As per Veblen’s analysis, this group of newly oriented elite has no reason to not act wholly and solely in ways that protect and enshrine their own power and privilege. I, however, feel it is deeply troubling and worth noting how socio-economic advancements enable these almost-elite (or mostly elite) to embody privilege in the most repulsive ways possible.
Coincidentally, it was just today that I came across Shamus Khan’s book Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School which was recently released in the United States. The introduction to the book divulges a promising read not very impertinent to this discussion:
“As one of the most prestigious high schools in the nation, St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, has long been the exclusive domain of America’s wealthiest sons. But times have changed. Today, a new elite of boys and girls is being molded at St. Paul’s, one that reflects the hope of openness but also the persistence of inequality.
In Privilege, Shamus Khan returns to his alma mater to provide an inside look at an institution that has been the private realm of the elite for the past 150 years. He shows that St. Paul’s students continue to learn what they always have–how to embody privilege. Yet, while students once leveraged the trappings of upper-class entitlement, family connections, and high culture, current St. Paul’s students learn to succeed in a more diverse environment. To be the future leaders of a more democratic world, they must be at ease with everything from highbrow art to everyday life–from Beowulf to Jaws–and view hierarchies as ladders to scale. Through deft portrayals of the relationships among students, faculty, and staff, Khan shows how members of the new elite face the opening of society while still preserving the advantages that allow them to rule.”
Members of the new elite face the opening of society while still preserving the advantages that allow them to rule.
In all of this, ladies and gentlemen, this is what I see as the problem.
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[Note: This isn't to say that there aren't more problems to Rafia's piece. Right now, I won't go into the several inconsistencies and biases she's betrayed in her analysis.]
Plagiarism In Schools And The Dying Art Of Teaching [*dramatic effect*]
Posted: March 3, 2011 Filed under: Academia | Tags: Books, Teaching 1 Comment »An edited version of this was published in The Friday Times [www.thefridaytimes.com]
Here is a fact: all students if given the opportunity will cheat their way to better grades. Every single student I have taught has cheated on assignments, projects and essays. Unless the school makes it physically impossible, be very sure that students will leave no stone unturned to cheat their way out of even final exams.
Plagiarism is an old problem that needs new, innovative techniques to confront it. It involves a lot of effort and creativity on the part of teachers. It involves being an active part of the process of production of ideas. One can no longer simply hand over a topic and a deadline, and expect original analysis. If we are to stop the Wikipediaization of our schools, it’s the responsibility of the teachers to require work that necessitates original thought and rigorous study. For example, instead of asking my students to write about the effects of WTO on trade, I asked them to conduct a series of interviews with traders and share the videos in class. Teachers have to create a culture of curiosity and inquisitiveness.
So why don’t teachers already do it? As luck would have it, teaching is probably one of the lowest paying jobs a well-qualified, talented person can have. It is a thankless profession without much financial rewards or growth. Teachers have to then resort to giving tuitions in the evening, teaching at multiple institutions or teaching part-time. In that case, they cannot give the time and patience it requires to develop a curriculum that incorporates critical thinking and creativity.
It doesn’t help that mobile phones with Internet in class have made it impossible to command attention of college kids. Not even five minutes pass before somebody is on their phone sending text messages, checking Facebook notifications, replying to e-mails or engaging in constant banter on BBM. Their cheeky audacity knows no bounds when they know they can simply Google a fact and prove the teacher wrong instantly.
While short attention spans have always been a problem, the matter is greatly exacerbated by 3-hour classes that cram a lot of material in one go just so that more courses can be taught at universities. Getting disinterested, distracted students to sit in one place for not one, not two but three hours and also making those hours engaging, entertaining and invigorating is impossible. It is a lose-lose situation.
And to what end? So they can stock up a plethora of facts and figures, learn how to make up stuff on the spot confidently and be able to follow instructions when they enter the real world a.k.a. eternal mental slavery? If the end goal is to produce clones of a certain kind of an individual that can perform well in corporate jobs, then we are not talking about education. We are talking about a business that supplies what is demanded at the workplace: someone who can follow orders but take the right amount of initiative, someone who will exude confidence but not arrogance, someone who is a hard-worker but not a troublemaker, someone who basically maintains the status quo and makes a lot of money while s/he’s at it.
It is almost like a mechanized production process: you send your children to a school as input, they get processed and the output is a product that function satisfactorily in society. And there go all your hopes of nurturing a unique individual who can have the capacity to contribute something atypical to the world.
This is what will happen when we treat schools and colleges like businesses. I have stopped counting the number of small hole-in-the-wall institutes that have cropped up that all offer the same blend of business, accounting and technology classes. Every nook and cranny is littered with Institute of This and College of That. It is not longer the duty of State to provide high quality, diverse, public education that is accessible to all. Perhaps it is our collective fault for not holding the State responsible.
So there you have it. A bunch of zombies in every classroom who are interested in passing but not interested in learning. Zombies because they have been fed with so much useless, irrelevant, false little bytes of information over and over again that they can no longer till fact from fiction. As a teacher, one cannot change the system that they have been through for years and years and cannot undo the rot that has spread in their consciousness.
For these students, plagiarism is a viable, quick option that achieves the ultimate goal that has been set for them: to graduate with decent marks under impossible conditions. It is an exercise in perseverance, a test of fortitude, and a true measure of mettle and survival. If they do not hack it, they will live a life of failure, isolation and regret.
And here is another fact: all students if given the space are capable of original thought and creative pursuit. There are alternative ways to encourage them. We all have a choice.
Edward Said On Faiz In Exile In Beirut
Posted: October 3, 2010 Filed under: Academia | Tags: Poetry, Post-Modernism, The Left, Urdu 3 Comments »The other day I’d come across this anecdote from Eqbal Ahmed’s “Confronting Empire” where on page 38 he talks about this evening in Beirut where they had dinner with Faiz Ahmed Faiz. A couple of days later Edward Said’s “The Mind of Winter: Reflections on Life in Exile” came via Salmaan in the mail (thanks to Sepoy over at Chapati Mystery. Or was it Khanum?).
Said narrates the same night in Beirut below in ‘The Mind of Winter’:
Alan Badiou On The Burqa Ban: Behind The Scarfed Law There Is Fear
Posted: September 19, 2010 Filed under: Academia | Tags: Capitalism, Feminism, Foucault, Post-Modernism, Secularism 2 Comments »A friend of mine shared this brilliant essay by Alan Badiou (translated from French to English) on the French law banning the burqa. It’s pretty accessible and short so you should read it in its entirety. Below I’ve shared some bits that I found very interesting:
• While we’re on the subject, isn’t business the real mass religion? Compared to which Muslims look like an ascetic minority? Isn’t the conspicuous symbol of this degrading religion what we can read on pants, sneakers and t-shirts: Nike, Chevignon, Lacoste… Isn’t it cheaper yet to be a fashion victim at school than God’s faithful servant? If I were to aim at hitting a bull’s eye here-aiming big-I’d say everyone knows what’s needed: a law against brand names. Get to work, Chirac. Let’s ban the conspicuous symbols of Capital, with no compromises.
• Clear something up for me, please. What exactly characterizes Republican and feminist rationality on what is to be shown of the body in different spaces and at different times, and on what is not? As far as I understand, nowadays still, and not only at school, neither nipples are shown, nor pubic hair, nor the male member. Do I have to get angry that these parts are “withdrawn from the sight of others”? Must I suspect husbands, lovers and eldest brothers? Not that long ago in our own countryside-and still to this day in Sicily as elsewhere-widows wore black scarves, dark stockings and mantillas. You don’t have to be an Islamic terrorist’s widow to do so.
• It used to be taken for granted that an intangible female right is to only have to get undressed in front of the person of her choosing. But no. It is vital to hint at undressing at every instant. Whoever covers up what she puts on the market is not a loyal merchant. 15. Let’s argue the following, then, a pretty strange point: the law on the hijab is a pure capitalist law. It orders femininity to be exposed. In other words, having the female body circulate according to the market paradigm is obligatory.
• It is said virtually everywhere that the “veil” is an intolerable symbol of control over female sexuality. Do you really believe female sexuality to not be controlled in our society these days? This naiveté would have made Foucault laugh. Never has so much care been given to female sexuality, so much attention to detail, so much informed advice, so much distinguishing between its good and bad uses. Enjoyment has become a sinister obligation. The universal exposure of supposedly exciting parts is a duty more rigid than Kant’s moral imperative. In passing, between our tabloids’ “Enjoy it, women!” and our great-grandmothers’ dictate “Don’t enjoy it!” Lacan long ago established an isomorphism. Commercial control is more constant, more certain, more massive than patriarchal control could ever be.
• Notice well how the hijab girl’s father and eldest brother are not your mere parental associates. It has often been insinuated, sometimes even declared, that the father is an idiotic worker, a loser “right out from the country” and working the assembly line at Renault. An archaic guy, but stupid. The eldest brother deals hash. A modern guy, but corrupt. Sinister suburbs. Dangerous classes.
• The Muslim religion adds the following very serious taint to other religions: in France, it is the religion of the poor.
• All of the society jargon about “communities,” and the as metaphysical as furious combat pitting “the Republic” against “communitarianisms,” all of that is utter nonsense. Let people live the way they want to, or can, eat what they are used to eating, wear turbans, dresses, hijabs, miniskirts or tap-dancing shoes, to bow low at any time [...] to take low-bow pictures of each other or speak in colorful jargons. These kinds of “differences” do not have the slightest universal scope. They neither hinder thought, nor uphold it. Nor is there a reason to either respect or vilipend them. That the “Other” lives a little bit differently-as admirers of discreet theology and portable morality are wont to say after Lévinas-is so obvious an observation as to be meaningless.
• But especially, Westerners in general and the French in particular are afraid of death. They are no longer able to imagine how an Idea might be something for which risks are worth taking. “Zero death” is their most important desire. They see millions of people around the world who, for their part, have no reason to be afraid of death. And among them, many die in the name of an Idea almost daily. For the “civilized” this is the source of a most intimate sense of terror.
• We get the wars we deserve. In this world that is numbed with fear, the big gangsters mercilessly bomb countries drained of blood. Medium gangsters practice targeted assassinations of those who bother them. It’s the really small crooks who draft laws against hijab.
Pakistan’s Militarised Economy
Posted: August 30, 2010 Filed under: Academia | Tags: Army, Economic Development, Pakistan 5 Comments »This piece was originally submitted to Viewpoint Online
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It is a common joke that Pakistan is one of those rare places where an army has a country instead of the other way around.
The armed forces in Pakistan have come to be accepted as the stabilising force under whose command we’ve witnessed high economic growth rates historically. It is the only institution capable of providing that needed fiscal discipline, perhaps at the expense of social, democratic progress. The military is unlikely to let go of this privileged position and the political clout to influence economic decisions. This vested economic interest discourages the armed forces from allowing democratic institutions to flourish in an environment where the military finds it more beneficial to stay in power.
The Pakistani government spends 3.3 percent of GDP more on defence than other countries of its income level. The overspending on defence is roughly equal to the sum of the underspending on health and education as a percent of GDP and almost twice as much is spent on defence as is on health and education combined. Pakistan’s defence expenditure as part of its GNP is the highest in South Asia.
Ayesha Siddiqua notes that military expenditure is just one part of the army’s wealth accumulation and that business ventures with military involvement in their economic stakes form a large part of the political economy, referring to the businesses that the military is involved in that are for private gain.
Pakistan’s military empire is estimated to be worth billions of dollars and its two groups – The Fauji Foundation and the Army Welfare Trust – are the largest business conglomerates in Pakistan. Siddiqua’s argues that the military is both a cause and an effect of a feudal, authoritarian and non-democratic system. The Fauji Foundation is the largest corporate player with over Rs. 10 billion in assets. Shah Mehmood Qureshi, current Foreign Minister of Pakistan, confessed in 2002 that “ all civilian governments ignored the military businesses or provided economic opportunity to placate the military ”.
Keeping in mind the absence of other institutions that undertake development, the military takes responsibility for building and investing in large industries and capital- intensive projects. Donors have also historically valued armed forces as instruments of domestic stability and support. This very legitimization of the economic interest of the military contributes to underdevelopment and social regression. For example, despite a lack of resources, that is often touted as the cause for underinvestment, the Pakistani government doled out US$ 25 million and US$ 20 million in subsidies to the Fauji Foundation in 2004 and 2005, respectively.
According to Saadet Deger and Somnath Sen (1990), “ for Pakistan, no economic sacrifice is too much for eternal military vigilance ”.
The military as an effective yet unaccountable institution:
When it comes to delivery of services, the Pakistani army is known to be effective and reliable. When the earthquake hit north of Pakistan in 2005, it brought in its wake a full-blown humanitarian crisis. Homeland Defence secretary Peter Verga appreciated the Pakistani army for being the first one to respond to the crisis with aid and reconstruction efforts. Verga said “ We must note the exceptional performance of Pakistani army during the crisis ”.
There are more examples of the army’s social work. Over 2.1 million patients are treated per year through the military healthcare system; approximately 41,112 students are enrolled in the army education system; and over 6,000 individuals trained annually through the vocational and technical training centres. For a charity trust with so much money, it is surprising there are no publically accessible annual reports or audits. The Accountability Ordinance (1999) precludes the military and judiciary from being questioned under the new accountability rules. From a legal standpoint, the welfare foundations are not required to make their operations public, as they were chartered under Charitable Endowments Act 1890 as private entities.
The Role of Donors in Exacerbating Underdevelopment:
The amount allocated to economic and development assistance, including food aid, from 2001 to 2007 was US $3.1 billion while military assistance was US $7.9 billion. Since 2001, the U.S. government has given more than US $11 billion to the military regime under Pervez Musharraf. Of the total $12.3 billion in U.S. aid to Pakistan since 2002, less than 27 percent went toward development and economic assistance. Recently, Hillary Clinton acknowledged that the aid efforts in Pakistan had been haphazard and the policy for the last three decades had been ‘incoherent’.
Until 2009, information on US aid to Pakistan was either “ hidden from the public or released in a form too aggregated to allow for effective public oversight ”. $30 million were given to the Pakistani army to build roads, but there was no evidence that they had been built. This is evidence of corruption at the highest levels of the government and military.
A report for the Belfer Centre for Science and International Affairs by Ibrahim A (2009) confirms that US funds have discouraged democratization by giving the military a disincentive to submit to civilian control, increasing the latter’s independence from government, and ignoring evidence of profiteering. The report also points towards evidence of corruption within the Pakistani military. Despite the army’s known public record of corruption, no verification was undertaken between 2003 and 2006. According to Ibrahim, only 10 percent of the total funds were explicitly for development. By the end of 2007, the US was paying for roughly a quarter of Pakistan’s military budget.
Security concerns, whether real or not, have been used to justify the military’s extensive involvement in the economy to the extent that the people of Pakistan do not even question the huge sums of money that are misdirected. The institution is touted to be effective even though there are no standard accounting practises that would reveal the nature of expenditures. It is not surprising then, that rent-seeking opportunities are exploited and personal gain is the biggest motivation for officials who may as well be handed a carte blanche at the expense of the rest of the country. The role of the military as an economic empire and a policy-maker in Pakistan should be investigated as a contributing factor in reduced funds for development, possibly affecting outcomes of reform both during military regimes and under democratically elected governments.
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This is part of a longer paper written during my graduate studies. I will gladly share my citational apparatus with those who ask nicely.
A Page From Said’s Diary On Sartre, Beauvoir, Foucault
Posted: July 28, 2010 Filed under: Academia, Humour, Political | Tags: Foucault, Homosexuality, Post-Colonialism, The Left, The Palestinian Cause 10 Comments »
Edward Said loves shattering your academic heroes. In a seminar on the Middle East in Paris in 1974, he met Sartre, Beauvoir and Foucault at Foucault’s apartment and was disappointed in their pro-Zionist political stances. The amusing entry in his diary on the entire episode can be found here in its entirety but here are some brilliant anecdotes:
On Beauvoir:
Beauvoir was already there in her famous turban, lecturing anyone who would listen about her forthcoming trip to Teheran with Kate Millett, where they were planning to demonstrate against the chador; the whole idea struck me as patronising and silly, and although I was eager to hear what Beauvoir had to say, I also realised that she was quite vain and quite beyond arguing with at that moment.
Beauvoir had been a serious disappointment, flouncing out of the room in a cloud of opinionated babble about Islam and the veiling of women. At the time I did not regret her absence; later I was convinced she would have livened things up.
On Foucault:
In their biographies, both Didier Eribon and James Miller reveal that in 1967 [Michel Foucault] had been teaching in Tunisia and had left the country in some haste, shortly after the June War. Foucault had said at the time that the reason he left had been his horror at the ‘anti-semitic’ anti-Israel riots of the time, common in every Arab city after the great Arab defeat. A Tunisian colleague of his in the University of Tunis philosophy department told me a different story in the early 1990s: Foucault, she said, had been deported because of his homosexual activities with young students. I still have no idea which version is correct.
At the time of the Paris seminar, he told me he had just returned from a sojourn in Iran as a special envoy of Corriere della sera. ‘Very exciting, very strange, crazy,’ I recall him saying about those early days of the Islamic Revolution. I think (perhaps mistakenly) I heard him say that in Teheran he had disguised himself in a wig, although a short while after his articles appeared, he rapidly distanced himself from all things Iranian. Finally, in the late 1980s, I was told by Gilles Deleuze that he and Foucault, once the closest of friends, had fallen out over the question of Palestine, Foucault expressing support for Israel, Deleuze for the Palestinians.
On Sartre:
Sartre’s presence, what there was of it, was strangely passive, unimpressive, affectless. He said absolutely nothing for hours on end. At lunch he sat across from me, looking disconsolate and remaining totally uncommunicative, egg and mayonnaise streaming haplessly down his face. I tried to make conversation with him, but got nowhere. He may have been deaf, but I’m not sure.
For reasons that we still cannot know for certain, Sartre did indeed remain constant in his fundamental pro-Zionism. Whether that was because he was afraid of seeming anti-semitic, or because he felt guilt about the Holocaust, or because he allowed himself no deep appreciation of the Palestinians as victims of and fighters against Israel’s injustice, or for some other reason, I shall never know. All I do know is that as a very old man he seemed pretty much the same as he had been when somewhat younger: a bitter disappointment to every (non-Algerian) Arab who admired him.
[P.S: Said's comment on Foucault's homosexuality was unnecessary and in bad taste but he's defended himself in the comments]
Edward Said On Anti-Colonialism
Posted: June 29, 2010 Filed under: Academia | Tags: Books, Edward Said, Post-Colonialism, US Politics Leave a comment »“A generation ago the influence of Fanon’s typology of empire ensured that one could only be either very much for or very much against the great imperial structures that disappeared piece by piece after the Second World War; now, after years of degeneration following the white man’s departure, the empires that ruled Africa and Asia don’t seem quite as bad.
The perplexingly affirmative work of Niall Ferguson and David Armitage scants, if it doesn’t actually trivialise, the suffering and dispossession brought by empire to its victims. More is said now about the modernising advantages the empires brought, and about the security and order they maintained.
There is far less tolerance for the disorder and tyranny that [was] instigated in the name of anti-colonialism. A crucial tactic of this revisionism is to read present-day American imperial power as enlightened and even altruistic, and to project that enlightenment back into the past.
I am being impressionistic, of course. But I don’t think there’s any doubt that the mood that produced public excoriations of classical imperialism – including the disastrous American adventure in Indochina – has largely disappeared. Attacking Soviet imperialism is a livelier sport, as is ‘realistic’ reappraisal of previous enthusiasm for the cause of anti-imperialism. There are the many American intellectuals who followed from the ranks of the liberal Left into reactionary self-bowdlerisation. For them American power is sacrosanct.”
Frantz Fanon: A Life
Posted: June 29, 2010 Filed under: Academia | Tags: Books, Class, Post-Colonialism, Race Leave a comment »Disconnected excerpts from Meghan Vaughan’s review in the London Review of Books of David Macey’s book “Frantz Fanon: A Life”:
Outside France, Fanon was regarded as a leading intellectual associated with the doctrine of ‘Third Worldism’, which had begun to emerge in the 1950s. At the Bandung conference of 1955, leaders of the newly independent post-colonial states in Africa and Asia, disillusioned with orthodox Marxism, sought to articulate an alternative, non-aligned socialist vision.
In France, from about 1948 onwards, Sartre had been insisting on the central importance of Third World issues for the Left. The Wretched of the Earth has become known as the ‘Bible of decolonisation’, but Fanon’s relationship with ‘Third Worldism’ was complex.
He was deeply sceptical of Pan-Africanism, for example, and well aware of the pitfalls of nationalism. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he had little interest in the relationship between local cultures and the larger forces of colonialism and capitalism. Above all, he was unsympathetic to non-violent action. For Fanon, anti-colonial violence was not only necessary but virtuous.
The recent resurgence of ‘Fanonism’ has tiptoed uneasily around the issue of revolutionary violence. The Fanon of post-colonial theory in the English-speaking world is not the Third World revolutionary so much as the author of Black Skin, White Masks, his first book, published soon after he qualified as a psychiatrist in Lyon. Not much read in its time, it is now required reading for thousands of students of literary criticism in the Anglophone world.
As Macey sees it, the Third-Worldist Fanon of The Wretched of the Earth was celebrated for his apocalyptic vision of rightful violence and revolution, while the ‘Americanised’ Fanon worried instead about identity politics. Fanon, the theorist of the ‘psychopathology of colonialism’, is now the subject of analysis, supine on a post-colonial couch.
For Fanon (who denied the existence of an Oedipus complex, or anything like it, in Martinican society), this was the black man’s foundational trauma – a trauma which reverberates in a number of his unforgettable, uncompromising phrases: ‘the Negro is comparison,’ he is ‘sealed into crushing objecthood’, the ‘black man must be black in relation to the white man’, and so on.
The primary psychological dynamic of the colonial situation, then, is one of ‘othering’ – the black man becomes the repository of the most fundamental feelings of hatred and desire on the part of whites. And he is paralysed by these projections, paralysed by the child’s shout of ‘Look, a Negro!’, ‘stricken and immobilised’ by white psychic needs.
In Fanon’s formulation, the colonial relation is not a dialectical one; indeed, it is not a relation at all, but a one-way projection. Under these circumstances, Fanon writes, the black man has no independent existence.
Fanon believed that the way to relieve the suffering of his patients was to end their alienation. He did not break the chains and open the doors of the asylum. Central to his practice of social therapy was a belief in the importance of inducing even the most disturbed patients to participate in the life of the confining institutions of which they were, willingly or unwillingly, a part. Within the larger institution of the hospital were smaller, patient-run institutions (the film club, the book club, the newspaper), through which patients would be involved in the symbolic exchanges which go to make up a society. Before they knew it, they would find themselves part of a group, integrated.
Macey makes it clear that Fanon worked tirelessly to this end, even as the violence escalated and entered the hospital gates of Blida-Joinville. Yet there is something ironic in his pursuit of this kind of social psychiatry with its ‘civilising’ mission according to which the violence and rupture of madness could be papered over by the rituals of tea-drinking and the writing of film reviews – an unconscious mimicry, perhaps, of the French colonial project of assimilation.
For Fanon, ‘race’ always took precedence over class in any colonial situation. In essence the colonial world could be divided into two halves: black and white. What unified the ‘wretched of the earth’ was violence. Fanon argued that the violence perpetrated by colonialism had had a profound atomising effect on colonised societies, which could be overcome only through a correspondingly violent reaction – those who took part becoming, in Sartre’s terminology, members of a ‘group-in-fusion’, united by a common purpose. Violence was cathartic and unifying, transforming disempowered and atomised colonial subjects into a powerful political force.
Macey argues that though this is a ‘brutal, even blood-curdling’ vision, Fanon stops short of glorifying violence for its own sake. It is impossible, however, to read Fanon today without also being aware of the bloodshed which continues to characterise modern Algeria. Macey tells us that his revolutionary writings are now invoked by the Islamic Salvation Front – the FIS – as a justification for violence.
The war with France, they argue, is not over, and violence is still required to ‘redeem’ the Algerian population. Yet as the conflict in Algeria and many other contemporary wars make clear, the post-colonial world does not fall conveniently into Fanon’s categories of black and white, victim and perpetrator. Thousands of Algerians die in the crossfire between the FIS and the Algerian Government. In this context, Fanon’s espousal of the purifying qualities of violence has a hollow ring.
Terrorism Is A Modern And Heterogeneous Phenomenon
Posted: May 27, 2010 Filed under: Academia, Political | Tags: Imperialism, International Politics, Islam, Religion, Taliban, Terrorism, The Left, US Politics 1 Comment »Islamist terrorism, unfortunately for those who need an uncomplicated enemy to hate, is not a heterogeneous edifice run by similarly intentioned malevolent men wanting to take control of the world. It is borne out of various ideas and histories and has roots in many parts of the world.
Olivier Roy uses two different ways to study terrorism. The first would be the vertical method wherein one can establish the genealogy of all kinds of radicalisation in the Quran and Islamic history and trace it to Islamist radicals today. This method does not take into account definitive roots of terrorism and subjectively distinguishes ‘Muslim’ violence from manifestations of violence. The second approach is horizontal and frames terrorism in the context of contemporary phenomena of violence affecting all modern societies.
The second approach is more productive in understanding Al Qaida as a movement unlike many other movements borne out of dissent. I find Roy’s use of the words modern and contemporary while talking about Islamist terrorism particularly intriguing and will dwell a bit more on that below.
The Islamist brand of terrorism is a modern manifestation of violence and dissent. I use the word modern deliberately and cautiously. I say it to contest the opinion that Islam, Islamist terrorism or Muslims are not modern and do not belong in the modern times, which would suggest that there is something barbaric, ancient or other worldly about them . I argue that terrorism is not only a modern phenomenon; it is specifically a product of our globalised, interconnected, ultra-modern zeitgeist.
Firstly, the word modern is technically defined by a particular point in time, in particular after the Age of Enlightenment and Age of Reason in Europe post-fifteenth century. Any idea or event that takes place after that point in time, be it Modern Art or birth of the internet, is necessarily a part of modernity. Because it is associated with the colonial Master’s domain and defined in the Master’s language, it is assumed that Europe has the patent to enlightenment and modernity, and that all others from the third world must only consume modernity defined by Europe. It is the most civilised of civilizations that is the purveyor of modern culture and all Others must adopt and follow suit. If we, instead, take the formal definition, then all forms of Islamist terrorism have to be categorised as modern. It cannot be otherwise.
To quote Talal Asad:
In an important sense, tradition and modernity are not really two mutually exclusive states of a culture or society but different aspects of historicity. Many of the things that are thought of as modern belong to traditions which have their roots in Western history.
When people talk about liberalism as a tradition, they recognize that it is a tradition in which there are possibilities of argument, reformulation, and encounter with other traditions, that there is a possibility of addressing contemporary problems through the liberal tradition. So one thinks of liberalism as a tradition central to modernity. How is it that one has something that is a tradition but that is also central to modernity? Clearly, liberalism is not a mixture of the traditional and the modern. It is a tradition that defines one central aspect of Western modernity. It is no less modern by virtue of being a tradition than anything else is modern.
Such questions need to be worked through before we can decide meaningfully whether there are varieties of modernity and, if there is only one kind of modernity, then whether it is separable from Westernization or not.
Secondly, there are subjective connotations of the word ‘modern’ which may not define it so rigidly. Modern can be used interchangeably with ‘current’, ‘civilised’, ‘fashionable’, or even ‘up to date’. Even if we do take these terms facetiously, we will find that there is nothing out-dated or old about Islamist terrorism.
To argue that Islamist terrorism is not civilised is an incomplete statement without further accepting that all forms of violent dissent are uncivilised and barbaric. It would be difficult to qualify a statement that says anti-imperialist, anti-state movements such as the Baader-Meinhof Group in Germany, the Red Army in Russia, the Maoists in India or even Che Guevara are modern conceptions while Islamist terrorism is not. While there are several distinctions among these, I argue that they are all forms of modern, violent dissent to the global status quo.
Lastly, it is dangerous to even think about Islamist terrorism as a blanket concept that can possibly define Al Qaida, the Taliban, Hamas, Hezbollah and countless other groups in a singular narrative. At the outset of this essay, I remarked that they are not homogeneous organizations producing one type of a terrorist. For example, there are marked differences between islamo-nationalist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah that do not have any agenda outside their own political conflicts, and the global jihad of Al Qaeda that is not territorially defined.
To deal with the threat of Islamist terrorism, it would perhaps be more effective to think about it from a political perspective (a struggle for territorial control) instead of an ideological perspective (wide spread imposition of sharia law). I conclude with thoughts from Olivier Roy who says that “the process of radicalisation is to be understood by putting it into perspective with the other forms of violence among youth and any process of de-radicalisation should address youth populations, and not an elusive Muslim community, which is more constructed than real”.
