If, like Prashant Kishore, you understand how Indian democracy works, you can make a lot of money helping politicians win elections in different Indian States and Union Territories while also improving outcomes for voters. On the other hand, if you are a stupid racist- like Thomas Blom Hansen- you can write portentous but illiterate garbage like the following.
Violence has, I propose, become a form of ‘general equivalent’ in India’s multiple publics, akin to Marx’s notion of commodities, prices, and money as the general measures of value of otherwise disparate objects (objects, labour, commodities, capital, debt, etc.).
This is because when Hansen takes a cab in India, he gets beaten and anally raped though, if this involves his losing an eye, he gets to slap the taxi driver once or twice by way or receiving change. Since Marx's 'general equivalent' is 'world money', it follows that if Violence is India's general equivalent then any country or foreign person or entity which trades with India also exchanges one form of violence with another in each and every transaction.
Hansen clearly lives in a fantasy world. Also he doesn't understand the first thing about Marxist, or any other sort, of Economics. He is living proof that Anthropology is now the specialty only of perverted, paranoid, imbeciles.
With Marx, we can think of equivalence as a form of translation and conversion mechanism, a mechanism whereby otherwise unintelligible and disparate objects, or events, appear intelligible because they can be apprehended through similar measures.
But this mechanism is global- 'world money'- and can't exist in one place if it doesn't also exist everywhere else. More particularly, economically more advanced countries will feature it more intensively. Thus, America and Europe must be way more violent than India.
Acts of public violence generate wildly disparate experiences and interpretations—avenging, retributive, sacrificial, or victimizing, etc.
No. Public- as opposed to private- violence is a signal promoting a particular correlated equilibrium, one in which a particular type of interaction is disincentivized. What this cretin means to say is that public violence can be of different sorts. Avenging and retributive violence are one and the same. Sacrificial violence involves a victim. This stupid cunt has made false distinctions. But the result of the public violence is univocal because correlated equilibria are robust.
Often, the experiences of violence are entirely incommensurate with one another, as in the reckoning after major communal riots and other crowd violence where the perspective of the perpetrator, the bystander, and the victim are almost incommensurable.
Fuck off! Either the major communal riot led to the minority having its head kicked in- which promotes a correlated equilibrium where the minority runs away or gets spatially and otherwise confined- or else the result is indecisive because some counter violence cancels out the public signal.
Perceptions may be 'incommensurable'. Outcomes aren't. They correspond to correlated equilibria and reflect the prevailing incentive matrix. Violence may be considered a 'discovery' process. There is no need for it, if threat potentials are accurately assessed and Muth rationality prevails.
At other times, violence is invisible and incomprehensible to an adjacent public and social world, as in routinized atrocities against Dalits,
Hansen is saying 'Dalits are very stupid. If they keep getting beaten and raped, they don't notice. It is up to nice Danish anthropologists to turn up and explain to them why their bones have been broken and their anus is dripping cum.'
Hansen won't say that high caste Hindus don't see or comprehend violence done to them because he himself occupies a Chair endowed by the Ambanis. Clearly only Dalits can be depicted as too stupid to understand when they are being beaten. No doubt, Hansen thinks he is repaying his Ambani benefactors by making out that the lower classes in India have rocks in their craniums.
or the systematic, structural violence visited upon Muslims across the country.
Hansen is a citizen of a country whose systematic structural violence has killed 1.3 million Muslims in a war of revenge which turned out to be counterproductive. Hopefully, those Muslims won't notice coz they are as stupid as Hansen imagines Dalits to be.
Yet, and here is the point, these experiences and real events can be presented, and performed, as public violence
Nope. Experiences can't be presented as anything other than experiences. True, I may try to present my experience of farting as a dissertation on the Mochizuki conjecture worthy of a PhD from MIT, but I will be laughed at. A performance is a real event- but only of a performance. It does not become the thing it represents unless you've been tricked into appearing in what you thought was a porn movie with hidden cameras whereas actually you are just sucking off homeless dudes.
—that is transgressing a tacit or explicit norm as extralegal, excessive, and exceptional.
Meaningless gibberish. Transgression is not legal. If it is excessive, it is by definition exceptional.
This enables them to become visible and intelligible across otherwise deeply segmented, and antagonistic, public worlds.
Nonsense. Only things which are actual can be visible. Gibberish- like Hansen's- can never be intelligible even if the fucker starts gouging his own eyes out so as to performatively incarnate his own imbecility. If 'public worlds' are really deeply segmented and antagonistic, no unmediated signals would pass between them. Thus Hansen has merely strung together a bunch of non sequiturs.
While the thick social context and experiences of violence are difficult to translate,
What's so difficult about translating 'Help! My limbs are being chopped off!' into any language?
the figures of bereaved and violated victims,
makes Hansen rock hard. He is jizzing copiously as he writes this shite
of angry and outraged crowds,
who are taking turns pounding Hansen's ass
or of the self-sacrificing activist facing senseless violence,
while the Sovereign nails Hansen's dick to a bench
the brutal police action against a crowd—
which, hopefully, culminates in a lot of truncheons being stuck up Hansen's bum while the Sovereign looks on laughing maniacally
these can transcend deeply segregated and segmented social and cultural worlds because they all bear the mark of an excess.
Hansen's manuscript is literally dripping with jizz
In democracies such as India where there is at least a rhetorical commitment to a measure of civility in public life,
as opposed to democracies unlike India, where there is a rhetorical commitment to shitting on everybody in public life
public violence is neither a particular physical act,
in which case it does not exist
nor a routine social form.
ditto.
It is a moral transgression,
like shoving pineapples up Hansens bum in the super market aisle without paying for those pineapples first. This is a moral transgression because it is Hansen who gets charged with shoplifting even though, as he explains, violence in India is a 'general equivalent' and thus part of 'world money' and it was Indian violence which brusquely shoved the pineapples up his bum. Kindly check the CCTV footage. Invisible Hindutva hooligans did this dastardly deed. Anyway, I don't even like pineapples.'
however justified by anger or duty, that can be translated, generalized, and justified beyond the specific context and motives that drove it.
America's war on terror could be justified by anger. But it failed. It was counter productive. Some Americans tried to deflect attention from their own country's crimes by claiming to be concerned that it was Hindus, not America and its allies, who were the big killers of Muslims. Sadly, even Pakistani Muslim Cabinet Ministers recognize this is not true. America killed a lot of them and now if worshippers in mosques are blown up, it is America's fault though no doubt the actual terrorists are Tehreek e Taliban Muslims.
Therein lies its monstrous and almost irresistible political force.
A thing is 'monstrous' if it is too big for its intended purpose. America's response to 9/11 was 'monstrous'. It failed big time. Cunts like Hansen could pretend they were serving Uncle Sam by trying to deflect attention from the slaughter of innocent Muslims by making out that Hindus were worshipping Hitler. But that dog won't hunt anymore. Hansen & Co represent a political force which shat the bed in which they continue to lie.
Thinkers of modern democracy like Hannah Arendt,
who was shit at thinking. Still, she was a Jew and had managed to emigrate to the deeply racist US of A.
Habermas,
who was as stupid as Rawls
and many others see violence as the limit, if not negation, of political life and civil political discourse.
No. They see political life and civil political discourse and legal processes embodying economic mechanic design as reducing the role of violence while, at the same, time asymmetrically raising the State's 'threat point'. Obviously, they are too stupid to say any such thing. But it is what they see if they have eyes in their head.
However, it is clear that violence has become a completely routinized and integral part of the political life in India’s many diverse publics.
No. It is clear that non-violence defined and constituted the Indian democratic polity in a manner unexampled elsewhere. This was only possible because Indic religions place a high premium on 'ahimsa' as a moral absolute. Unlike Christianity, Islam and Communism, Hinduism has not valorized forcible conversion or 're-education', nor has it indulged in genocide. However, there was retaliatory ethnic cleansing when Nehru came to power.
Violence is a form of ultimate action
unless it is slapped down immediately in which case there are tears before bed-time
that demands attention,
just slap the thing down and it stops wanting attention.
a form of experience that generates reaction.
So does shitting into your cupped hands and flinging your feces about
It is one of the most powerful forms of communication
Money talks louder and longer
and a repertoire of public performance that has become deeply intertwined with the more formal, mediated, and institutional aspects of India’s modern publics such as newspapers, news channels, and social media.
Why bother understanding Indian politics- like Prashant Kishore- when you can simply masturbate over videos purporting to depict gruesome sexual violence perpetrated by violent mobs?
As Francis Cody
an anthropologist who has published some shite about Tamil Nadu. But Stalin will pay Prashant Kishore for his knowledge and expertise so as to win elections. Nobody bothers with Cody.
has shown in compelling detail, newspaper reporting and op-eds in the Tamil press always factor in the possibility of violent reprisals in the wake of controversial statements.
There is a certain amount of hooliganism in DMK circles. Stalin is trying to civilize his Cabinet. But TN is safe enough for most people. Brahmins keep their heads down and grin sheepishly if someone snatches off their sacred thread or gives them a drunken slap or two.
Similarly, Saamana and other right-wing newspapers are explicit about their reporting bias
Whereas Scroll isn't. So what?
(or ‘truth’, as its reporters insist), and they routinely taunt its readers to take ‘direct action’ against their enemies.
As opposed to masturbating furiously while contemplating gang-rape by murderous mobs
In actual practice in contemporary India, the street and the editorial office are not categorically different,
Siddhartha Varadarajan is a street-walker in between editing the Wire- right? No wonder his wife is so angry all the time.
one civil and objective, the other partisan, violent and rogue, but rather parts of the same vernacular publics where the public performance of anger and fury is every bit as legitimate as a sarcastic op-ed.
I suppose what Hansen is working up to is a 'public performance' of his own furious and frenzied masturbation. If that doesn't put an end to Hindutva- what will?
In contemporary India and much of South Asia, violence is no longer politics by other means. It is political life itself, by all means.
No. In contemporary India, politics is stuff Prashant Kishore understands. Hansen & Co may have had some salience during the 'War on Terror' in so far as America needed to deflect attention from its genocide of Muslims by pretending Modi was killing Muslims. But Muslims themselves know Modi wasn't killing anybody. America was. Hansen & Co were masturbating vigorously while gloating over Gitmo and Abu Ghraib and drone strikes on Muslim wedding parties in remote mountain valleys. They are a despicable, imbecilic, crew.
This, I submit, is a deeper and long-term process that must be factored into our understanding of how Indian democracy actually works.
Why? Will they, like Prashant Kishore, get Indian political parties to concentrate on 'last mile delivery' and improved Governance? No. They are stupid, evil, racist cunts. Laugh at them by all means, but don't for a moment think of kicking them in the slats. Those perverts would enjoy nothing better.
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