[Reader-list] reader 05 reveiw 2

[Aarti]

Between Words and Worlds
http://contrapuntal.blogspot.com/2005/07/between-words-and-worlds.html

(To appear shortly in the Oxonian Review of Books)


/Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts/ (Delhi: The Sarai Programme, 2005)
Price: Rs. 350, $20, €20
Paperback, 581 pages

Reviewed by Rahul Rao


Navigating Sarai’s latest offering in its annual series of Readers – 
/Bare Acts/ – is a bit like making my way through an anarchist festival: 
there is no one place to begin or pre-defined route to take, the 
constituent pieces interpret the central theme in such varied and 
original ways that I am almost immediately sceptical of their 
juxtaposition (how does this all hang together?), and the overall effect 
seems one of intelligent and exciting dissonance that takes more than a 
little while to sort through (fortunately, one has an entire year). 
Those of a left libertarian persuasion will take the anarchist analogy 
as a compliment, but in common parlance the term has pejorative 
connotations: chaos, disorder, incoherence. The editors appear acutely 
aware of this possibility, clarifying that theirs is an eclecticism by 
design and defending it as ‘a commitment to a variegated and democratic 
universe of discourse production’, as a refusal ‘to make any one ‘voice’ 
feel more entitled to expression than others’ (p. viii). Noble words 
that must be judged against the standard they set for themselves: that 
of making ‘a series of coherent but autonomous and interrelated 
arguments’, of making ‘different registers of writing, the academic, the 
literary, the journalistic, the autobiographical and the practice-based, 
speak to each other’ (pp. vii-viii).


The Reader brings together an assortment of voices to consider the 
fraught relationship between ‘Bare Acts’ – the textual essence of legal 
codes, or the very letter of the law – and ‘bare acts’ – the range of 
acts of interpretation, negotiation, disputation and witnessing that 
reinforce or subvert the law. It is an ambitious attempt to map the 
relationship between words that seek to exert normative force (whether 
in the guise of formal legal codes or otherwise) and the world. In a 
collage-like rendition, it offers incisive accounts of this ceaseless, 
mutually constitutive dynamic in a staggering variety of contexts – 
urban studies, media, technology, environment, gender, migration, social 
movement politics, etc.


A recurring theme through which this dynamic is revealed is that of 
transgression. A number of pieces provide fascinating glimpses of the 
ways in which bare acts of transgression of existing Bare Acts, 
decisively reshape the relevant technological, commercial and/or 
normative contexts (sometimes necessitating a revision of the supposedly 
authoritative Bare Acts themselves). One sees this, for example, in the 
role that piracy plays, in creating new markets where none existed 
before (Lawrence Liang, ‘Porous Legalities and Avenues of 
Participation’), and in driving innovation to which ‘legitimate’ 
industry responds belatedly and grudgingly (Menso Heus, ‘Innovating 
Piracy’). One also sees this in the startling revelation that 
regularisation of violations of urban master plans typically constitutes 
the dominant way in which cities are built (Solomon Benjamin, ‘Touts, 
Pirates and Ghosts’). These illustrations of the deeply significant role 
that transgression plays in creating ‘facts on the ground’ and shaping 
the future context in which regulation must operate, suggest that there 
are descriptive, value-agnostic rationales for studying transgression.


But the editors are keen to highlight that there are strong normative 
reasons for the focus on transgression. Specifically, ‘the growing 
constriction of the domain of the doable by the letter of the law…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’ (p. 4). The Reader brings to light multiple contexts in 
which the constriction of the doable renders those already on the 
margins of society, trespassers on their own lands. I am drawn here to 
Anand Taneja’s account of the increasing limitation of avenues for 
non-elite entertainment – thanks to crackdowns on piracy and the growing 
stringency of safety regulations (which the more affordable cinema halls 
inevitably fall afoul of) – even as high-end shopping malls and 
multiplexes proliferate (‘Begum Samru and the Security Guard’). In a 
similar vein, Awadhendra Sharan describes how the middle-class 
environmentalism of India’s Supreme Court, with its particular 
conceptualisations of ‘nuisance’ and pollution, have often threatened 
the employment prospects of economically marginal groups (‘New’ Delhi). 
Under such circumstances trespass begins to look like an imperative of 
survival thrust upon subaltern groups.


But the Reader also offers multiple illustrations in which the 
directionality of this relationship appears to be reversed – where 
trespass is explicitly intended to expand the realm of the doable (or 
‘be-able’). The use of civil disobedience in struggles for the expansion 
of rights is perhaps the most obvious illustration of this. In this 
context, Preeti Sampat and Nikhil Dey provide a highly instructive 
account (‘Bare Acts and Collective Explorations’) of the manner in which 
acts in explicit defiance of long-honoured caste norms – petitions for 
land allotment, forest festivals, rallies, labour fairs, sit-ins, hunger 
strikes – successfully create the political impetus for Right to 
Information legislation. I am struck not only by the constitutive role 
of bare acts in the writing of (new) Bare Acts, but also by the extent 
to which the bare acts of transgressing caste norms rely on legal rights 
ostensibly guaranteed by (existing) Bare Acts. One sees here, more 
clearly than anywhere else, the bi-directionality of the relationship 
that is at the core of this Reader.


The overall message seems to be that some choose transgression as a 
means of expanding the realm of the doable, while others have 
transgression thrust upon them as a result of the constriction of the 
doable. In the latter situation, if it is the case – as Benjamin points 
out – that subaltern transgression relies for its success on ‘quiet 
politics’, I wonder about the ethics of analysing and publicising 
mechanisms of subaltern agency. Once subaltern agency is rendered 
visible in the manner accomplished by many of the contributions to the 
Reader, it is no longer ‘quiet’. Does making subaltern transgression 
explicit simultaneously strip it of its most powerful weapon? Whom does 
such knowledge benefit?


I also wonder at the very occasional lapse into unthinking relativism, 
in which there is a reluctance to judge the legitimacy of particular 
transgressions from any vantage point whatsoever. In this context one 
looks in vain for any acknowledgement, from Zainab Bawa, of the serious 
(class-neutral) implications for road safety, of her driving 
instructor’s ability to obtain licences for clients without the 
slightest demonstration of their competence! (‘My Driving Master’)


One strength of the Reader is that despite its central preoccupation 
with the promulgation of legal norms and their social reception, it is 
‘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’ and more specifically at the 
‘relationships of conflict, coexistence and accommodations between 
different kinds of codes that make claims to our idea of what is right, 
or just…’ (p. 2). This interest in a broad range of normative codes 
focuses attention on the crucial issue of the limits of the law: what 
sorts of considerations /are/ and/or /ought to be/ part of the judicial 
process? In this context, Clifton D’ Rozario brings to our attention the 
Supreme Court’s deafness to the normative claims of adivasis (forest 
dwellers) fighting against their displacement from the Narmada Valley on 
the basis of their traditional customary and modern citizenship rights 
(‘Bolti Band (SILENCED!)’). (He might also have mentioned the Court’s 
ready acceptance of the state’s arguments regarding the financial 
implications of halting dam construction – itself surely an extra-legal 
consideration.) Attention to the relationship between different kinds of 
codes also enables Aarti Sethi to reinterpret the notorious Nanavati 
trial and its convoluted political afterlife through the prism of an 
honour killing: from this rather intriguing perspective, Presidential 
Pardon becomes an act of state intended to allow compliance with a 
state-sanctioned honour code that contradicts the state’s avowed 
commitment to punishing murder.


Finally, the Reader brings together between its covers a mind-boggling 
melange of rhetorical and argumentative devices – the printed word is 
supplemented with photographs, sketches, cartoons and even a tantalising 
discussion on the use of videologs in documenting the production of 
‘trans-localities’ through the daily migrations of people in the border 
zones between Spain and Morocco (Ursula Biemann, ‘On Smugglers, Pirates 
and Aroma Makers’). Occasionally, a single piece does so many things as 
to defy categorisation – Kai Friese’s ‘Marginalia’ is a case in point. 
Part travelogue, part autobiography, part activist intervention, this is 
a delightful and depressing meditation on identity, nationality and the 
consequences of border transgression in both a literal and metaphorical 
sense. While marginalia can sometimes detract from the value of a book, 
Friese’s piece is a jewel.


Like any visitor to an anarchist love-in, no two readers will navigate 
this volume in quite the same way. Indeed, the editors’ classification 
of contributions is likely to appear rather arbitrary, given the 
potentially fruitful connections begging to be made across sections. In 
this sense – more than with most texts – the relationship between 
readers and this Reader might also be seen as mutually constitutive.


Sarai Reader 05 is available for free download at
_http://www.sarai.net/_


/Rahul Rao is reading for a D.Phil. in International relations at 
Balliol College. His research interests encompass normative theory and 
postcolonial politics, and he is currently writing on the international 
relations of postcolonial social movements. He lives in Bangalore and 
Oxford./