[Reader-list] Call for contributions to Sarai Reader 05

[Monica Narula]

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS TO SARAI READER O5
BARE ACTS: TRESPASSERS AND ENFORCERS IN PRECARIOUS TIMES

The 'Bare Act' is an expression used to specify 
the content of law, bereft of any interpretative 
gloss. In a legal library in India and many parts 
of the English-speaking world, a Bare Act is a 
document that simply codifies a law without 
annotation or commentary. The 'Bare Act' is 
legality pared down to its textual essence. It 
expresses only what the law does, and what it can 
do.

The enactment of law, however, is less a matter 
of reading the letter of the law, and more a 
matter of augmenting or eroding the textual 
foundation through the acts of interpretation, 
negotiation, disputation and witnessing. The law 
and practices within and outside stand in 
relation to a meta legal domain that can be said 
to embrace acts and actions in all their depth, 
intensity and substantive generality. This too is 
a stage set for the performance of 'bare acts', 
of what we might call 'naked deeds' - actions 
shorn of everything other than what is contained 
in a verb.

The 'Bare Act' that encrypts the letter of the 
law, the wire frame structure that demands the 
fleshing out of interpretation, and the 'bare 
act' that expresses and contains the stripped 
down kernel of an act, of something that is done, 
are both expressions that face each other in a 
relationship of tense reflection and intimate 
alterity. Bare Acts generate bare acts, and vice 
versa.

"Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts: Trespassers and 
Enforcers in Precarious Times" proposes to be a 
considered examination of this troubled mirror 
image.

We are interested in looking not only at what 
happens in law courts but also at customs, 
conventions, formal and quasi formal 'ways of 
doing things' that are pertinent to communities 
howsoever they may be formed. Thus the 
conventions and codes evolved by the 
practitioners of a juridically 'illicit' trade or 
calling or way of life, such as that of software 
pirates, or 'illegal' migrants, or squatters on 
government land, fall within the ambit of our 
concerns. We want to speak of the relationships 
of conflict, co existence and accommodations 
between different kinds of codes that make claims 
to our ideas of what is right, or just, or 
functional, or even merely appropriate.

To see 'actions' arrayed across a spectrum in 
this manner is also to see a range of ways in 
which laws, codes and a variety of formal and 
informal arbitration mechanisms act on us. 
Sometimes this may take the form of executive 
force and fiat, but crucially it may also rely on 
the powers of persuasion that characterize a host 
of quasi formal interactions between state and 
non-state actors, and between non-state actors 
and individuals. Typically, this for instance is 
the way in which non-legal entities like 
informally constituted councils, political 
formations outside the state, customary bodies 
and traditional councils act to enforce their 
will or influence those within (and occasionally 
outside) their ambit.

The landscape of actions and deeds covers a far 
more subtle, slippery, nuanced and ambiguous 
ground (than the codes that seek to index, define 
or govern them). Actions have gradients, they 
ascend and descend on to each other much as peaks 
emerge from and plunge into troughs in a three 
dimensional graph. The political, ethical and 
semantic facets of acts shade off, and slope into 
each other, now revealing, now concealing 
hitherto unknown aspects of themselves and their 
consequences, often in unexpected ways. Laws are 
attempts to understand, interpret and govern 
action, but their enunciative capacity is bundled 
up with executive authority; they are words that 
decree what must be done. But just as the way in 
which a map is drawn can have consequences on the 
ecology of a terrain, the phrases spoken as law 
too can transform and erode as well as irrigate 
the ground of action.

Laws are a creature of habit, of pattern, rhythm 
and repetition. The exceptional singularity of an 
action, which is precisely what law seeks to tame 
to the rhythm of the predictable, leaves us with 
a strange situation where the "bareness of an 
act" is precisely what is sought to be clothed by 
a 'bare act'. This gives rise to many tensions 
and aporias, which we invite contributors to 
reflect upon and report, from their locations in 
the real world, whatever be their locus standi.

You may be a human rights lawyer, or an 
intellectual property attorney, a philosopher, an 
artist, an activist, a combatant or peace maker 
in a conflict situation, a person who lives and 
works with ideas and words, a person who saves 
lives or takes them, a person who has custody of 
others, or who may be in the custody of an 
institution; in addition, you may be someone who 
either is, or identifies with, or sympathizes 
with, a hacker, a pirate, a re-distributor of 
intellectual assets, an illegal emigrant, a 
non-heterosexual person, a compulsive traveller, 
a squatter, a sex worker, a terrorist of the 
imagination, you may be free or in confinement, 
you may be healthy or unwell - whosoever you may 
be and whatever you are, you have to act, and 
deal with the actions of others, and all that you 
do, or do not do, is framed by a structure of 
bare acts of the law. Yet, you shape the world 
with the things you do to be yourself, to act in 
concert with others, to defend yourself and to 
pursue what you see as liberty and happiness, or 
simply, to survive.

We would also like to invite investigations into 
the production of 'legal subjects' through 
judgements (communiqués to the citizen/denizen) 
and petitions (appeals from the citizen/denizen) 
as well as through mechanisms like recording and 
registration mechanisms such as census records, 
land records, municipal records, forestry 
regulations, registers of citizens and aliens and 
other instruments that define and enumerate the 
person addressed by the legal-formal apparatuses 
that govern day to day life. What is the 
language, the rhetoric, the tone of these acts of 
address? How are they scripted, rehearsed and 
staged? All these are things for us to explore 
when we look at the law, whether in the 
courtroom, in a village council meeting, or in 
the performance of a 'courtroom drama' in a film. 
Crucially, here we want to explore the figures of 
authorised and unauthorised interlocutors, expert 
and wayward witnesses and the myriad characters 
that constitute the theatre of the courtroom.

This Reader invites you to reflect on actions, 
yours as well as those of others, to act with 
your words, thoughts and images to contribute to 
our understanding of the world, as we know it 
today. We are committed to an elaboration of 
positions that often find themselves identified 
with the interloper, trespasser and the 
proscribed, not because we have any special 
affinity for the illicit, but because we feel 
that the growing constriction of the domain of 
the do-able by the letter of the law (which we 
all face in societies where the state and para 
state institutions lay increasing claims to our 
fealty) leads to a situation where those 
committed to a modicum of social liberty, to 
expanding the territory of what may be creatively 
imagined and acted upon, have to invest in 
knowing and understanding an ethic of trespasses. 
Interdictions need interrogation, and this Reader 
is a call for such interrogations.

A 'bare act', as we said at the outset, can also 
be taken to mean action divested of everything 
other than its essence as a deed. Encountering 
the naked deed, action in and of itself, on its 
own terms, means facing up to difficult and 
occasionally challenging ethical questions. What 
constitutes violence? What is generosity, or 
hospitality? Why does altruism have to be hedged 
in by qualifications and constraints?

It also means asking - what it is to become 
someone through action? What is it to act, or 
play a part, in the theatre of social life? What 
is the border that separates action from 
expression? What connects the act to gesture and 
to performance, as much as it does to deed?

Moreover, what accounts can we give to the 'act' 
of witnessing, or bearing witness to a course of 
action, or to an event? Law or codes of action of 
any kind seem untenable without the notion of the 
witness. The presence of the witness is crucial 
to any notion of credence, the foundations on 
which arguments, petitions and judgements have to 
base their thrust and parry. We would like this 
collection to provoke reflections on the nature 
of the evidentiary and narrative protocols that 
frame acts of 'speaking' or 'speaking out' in the 
face of, or in the aftermath of, or in the 
memorialization of, acts and events that leave a 
mark on our times so as to instigate a more 
complex unravelling of the relationship between 
persons, actions, narratives and codes of 
behaviour,

To carry this argument further, we want to point 
out that in languages such as Arabic, Persian, 
Hebrew and Urdu, the roots for words as disparate 
sounding as 'martyr' and 'witness' 
(shaheed/martyr and shahid/witness) devolve to a 
common source. This suggests to us a febrile 
tension between the reality of a precipitate, 
even violent action, its consequence (the 
shaheed) and a recording presence (the shahid). 
In other words, given the fact that acts do speak 
for themselves (and sometimes make the claim to 
speak for others), we consider it necessary to 
take stock and reflect on what might be 
considered the heritage of the 'propaganda of the 
deed' - a doctrine that underpins violent 
terrorism, as well as non-violent civil 
disobedience and militant passive resistance, to 
see how such modes of acting stretch and 
challenge consensual notions of the relationships 
between means and ends.

As we have said in calls for contributions to 
previous readers, on themes and subjects quite 
different from the ones that we have sketched 
here, these are open questions with no 
satisfactory and coherent answers. But Sarai 
Reader 05, like its predecessors, would like to 
take them on, so as to map new territories of 
thought about the things we all do and the things 
that are done to us.

Today, there are different images of naked 
legality that we have grown accustomed to. We 
know that the law is often the last resort that 
the poor and the marginalized can turn to in some 
societies to appeal for redress and comfort from 
having to face obvious and naked oppression. Thus 
the slum dweller facing demolition sees in a high 
court stay order, a breathing space in which to 
try and muster some means of continued survival 
in the city as a householder. A person on death 
row can have little hope but to argue for an 
acquittal or a pardon. There are also occasions 
when international criminal courts may be seen to 
be effective instruments of redress for victims 
of genocide and war crimes. These are but the 
bare facts of a case for the law, and for a 
conscientious practice of the legal calling as a 
continuing good in human societies.

However, we have also seen pictures of naked 
human beings in judicial custody in the Abu 
Ghraib prison in Iraq. This too is naked 
legality. We have seen migrants waiting to be 
deported. We have seen the banal playing out of 
the script of domination and violence, on 
streets, in educational institutions, in homes. 
We have seen attempts at the foreclosure of 
cultural and intellectual commons. We have seen 
attempts at surveillance and control, and we have 
witnessed, resistances to each of these - quiet 
subversions, cunning negotiations and outright 
rejections as well as attempts to scale the walls 
erected by the threat of interdictions, sanctions 
and prohibitions.

Sarai Reader 05 seeks to register these matters 
in their puzzling ambivalence, with intelligence, 
acuity and close attention to the pulse of our 
times.

A Preliminary List of Themes (these are not 
chapter or section headings, but point to areas 
of interest) could include:


 The Pure Act, the Impure Gesture and Bare 
Presences: A Sceptical Guide to Acting in Today's 
World

 Barely Human/Naked Power: Critiques of Contemporary Injustices

 Punishments in Search of Crimes: Histories and Practices of Illegality

 Authorised and Unauthorised Interlocutors

 The Human Right to Copy and Paste: Culture, 
Law, Conflict and Intellectual Property

 The Letter of the Law: Glossing Gender, Class, 
Race and Caste in the Courtroom

 In Camera: Courts, Prison and the Justice System in Cinema

 Rough Justice and Gentle Persuasion: Non-legal Forms of Arbitration

 To Be Done and To Be Seen to be Done: Legal 
Action and its Media Representations

 Despatches and Communiqués: Reflecting on Media 
Representations of Direct Action

 Private Matters in the Public Domain: The Law and Sexuality

 The Encounter: Terror In and Out of Uniform

 Caught in an Emergency: The Ethical Dilemmas of 
Humanitarian Intervention in War Zones and 
Conflict Situations

 The War Against Error: The Normalization of Surveillance and Identification

 Bearing Witness

 Citizens, Denizens, Aliens, Others: Taxonomies for Our Times

 Altitude Sickness: The Activist on Higher Moral Ground

 What is (not) to be Done: Understanding the 
Limitations of Action and Activism

 The Right to be Wrong: In Praise of Political, 
Ethical and Legal Uncertainties

 What it Takes to Be... Accounts of Becoming and Choosing to Remain Marginal

 At A Loss for Words: Talking about Things Perhaps Best Left Unsaid

 Utterance as Action: How Speech Acts Change the World Sometimes

 The Word as Violence: Interpretative Acts in the Field of Life and Death

 Politics beyond the Law

"Sarai Reader 05: The Bare Act" seeks to engage 
with this situation by inviting a series of 
reflections. We are looking for incisive 
analysis, as well as passionate writing, for 
scholarly and theoretical rigour as well as for 
critical and imaginative depth. We invite essays, 
reportage, diaries and memoirs, entries from 
weblogs, edited compilations of online 
discussions, photo essays, image-text collages 
and interpretations of found visual material.

Finally, we would like to see texts that draw 
attention to the curious and unfolding 
relationships between acts, actions (especially 
what is called 'direct action'), activism and the 
domain of media practice: namely between acts and 
representations, and on representations as acts. 
What are the trade offs involved in transmission 
of an 'action', how does the possibility of 
transmission help script an action before it is 
staged - these are urgent questions, especially 
at a time when the relationship between deed and 
representation tends to blur in the form of what 
we can call a 'media event'. This is not to 
evaluate such instances negatively or positively, 
only to register the fact that they occur, and to 
call for an attempt at an informed understanding 
of their contents and ramifications. We invite 
activists, media activists and media 
practitioners to revisit and reflect on the 
instances of the encounters between deeds and 
mediatization in their own practices, and on the 
relationship between media and action in a 
general sense. In doing so, we are revisiting and 
continuing a discussion on some of the questions 
that have already been raised in "Sarai Reader 
04: Crisis/Media".

The Sarai Reader 05, like the previous Sarai 
Readers, will be international in scope and 
content, while retaining a special emphasis on 
reflection about and from areas that normally lie 
outside the domain of mainstream discourses. We 
are particularly interested in contributions from 
South Asia, South and Central America, East 
Europe, the Arabic Speaking Countries, Central 
and West Africa, South Africa, South East Asia, 
China, Tibet and Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, Iran, 
Iraq, Turkey and Australia.

The Editorial Collective

*Guidelines for Submissions*

Word Limit: 1000 - 6000 words

1. All submission, unless specifically solicited, must be in English only.

2. Submissions must be sent by email in as text, 
or as rtf, or as word document or star 
office/open office attachments. Articles may be 
accompanied by black and white photographs/other 
visual material submitted in the .tif format.

3. We urge all writers, to follow the Chicago 
Manual of Style, (CMS) in terms of footnotes, 
annotations and references. For more details 
about the CMS and an updated list of Frequently 
Asked Questions, see 
-http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/cmosfaq/cmosfaq.html
For a Quick Reference Guide to the Chicago Manual 
of Style, especially relevant for citation style, 
see -
http://www.library.wwu.edu/ref/Refhome/chicago.html

4. All contributions should be accompanied by a 
three/four line text introducing the author, with 
email address and a relevant url.

5. All submissions will be read by the editorial 
collective before the final selection is made. 
The editorial collective reserves the right not 
to publish any material sent to it for 
publication on stylistic or editorial grounds.

6. Copyright for all accepted contributions will 
remain with the authors, but Sarai reserves 
indefinitely the right to place any of the 
material accepted for publication on the public 
domain in print or electronic forms, and on the 
internet.

7. Accepted submissions will not be paid for, but 
authors are guaranteed a wide international 
readership. The Reader will be published in 
print, distributed in India and internationally, 
and will also be uploaded in a pdf form on to the 
Sarai website. All contributors whose work has 
been accepted for publication will receive two 
copies of the Reader.


If you are interested in contributing, write to 
monica at sarai.net or shuddha at sarai.net with a 
brief note saying what you want to write about, 
or an outline. You can take time to write up a 
more substantial outline, but please make sure 
that they are in by September 30, 2004. Outlines 
can be up to 500 words.

The Editorial collective will write back to all 
those who have submitted the outlines in early 
October 2004, informing them whether their 
proposal for a contribution has been accepted.

Deadlines for the Submission of Articles is - November 15

The Editorial Collective of Sarai Reader 05 consists of the following -

Awadhendra Sharan, Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, 
Ravi Sundaram, Ravi Vasudevan and Shuddhabrata 
Sengupta (Sarai-CSDS, Delhi), Lawrence Liang 
(Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore) and Geert 
Lovink (Indpendent Media Theorist and Critic, 
Amsterdam)
--
Monica Narula [Raqs Media Collective]
Sarai-CSDS
29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054
www.raqsmediacollective.net
www.sarai.net