[Reader-list] OTHER: Digitariat, Jihad & Abhinavagupta

[inder salim]

OTHER: Digitariat, Jihad & Abhinavagupta
1.

I am lifting fragments from an essay by Dieter Lesage  from 'Another
Publication Is (n't) Possible'  which is part of the conceptual book
titled ANOTHER PUBLICATION brought out by Renee and Katarina from
Rotterdam.  I happen to be part of it, besides  other contributions
from all over the world. 'For Negri and Hardt, neither identity, nor
difference or hybridity are the key to anti-imperial resistance, but
'the common'. The multitudes should try to understand what is at stake
in their common battle: a decent life for everybody, not only for
those who belong to one's own people, nor only for those who share
one's own territory.

Negri and Hardt are very concrete when they formulate three political
demands of the multitude. First of all, they demand that all people
should obtain civil rights in their country where they live. Indeed,
the capitalist liberal democracies themselves are greatly responsible
for the migration of which they happen to be terminus. The demand can
be radicalized further: everybody should have the right to stay to go
where s/he wants. The multitude should demand the right to control its
own movements. This demand is nothing less than the demand for 'global
citizenship' and corresponds to the suggestion
by Immanuel Wallerstein that liberalism should be taken literally.
There should not only be freedom of circulation for capital and for
good, but also- and may be in the first place—for people.
Today people don't have the same rights as capital and good.
According to Wallerstein, one should demand that markets should be
really free and thus that markets should be open for all those who
want to come, Economic liberals will soon have to acknowledge that
they are not really liberal.

A second demand of the multitude which Negri and Hardt formulate is
that of a social wage for all producers. In the biopolitical
philosophy of Negri and Hard everybody is a producer. It has become
utterly impossible to maintain a difference between productive and
unproductive labour. Life itself is a production. ( after two pages
almost )

A third political demand of the multitude, according to Negri and
Hardt, concerns free access to knowledge, information and
communication. If we translate this as a plea for resistance against
copyright and theprivatization of the means of communication, or as
plea for copyleft and open source. Then this demand links up with a
central concern of  a fraction of digitariat, namely the open source
movement which, unlike the glamour proletariat, has developed a kind
of political activism concerning the systemic conditions of the
possibility of digital productivity. It is important to connect the
three demands
of the multitude with one another. Some will have difficulties…

The essayist, Lesage further argues that demands formulate the common
struggle of the multitude, but it is much less clear in what context
Negri and Hardt expect their demands to be fulfilled, given the fact
that they are absolutely against ' the state'.  The other criticism
which he points out is that thedemands reflect the virtual desire of
another transnational hegemony, since they have no trust whatsoever in
the classical mechanism of representation, characteristic of liberal
democracy ?

The essay enters a very interesting debate when the author highlights
the fact that, the new proletariat, the digitariat, shows
littleinterest in politics. It wants a certain lifestyle, but without
struggle. Struggle, they believe, has no style. And if, here and
there, they do participate in struggle, it is because struggle has
been working on its style, as in the case of 'Reclaim the Streets'.
Struggle only interests them insofar as it can be experienced as a
stylistic innovation. In that sense, struggle is often an artistic
pose.  It further explains how, there were times when not talking
about money was considered to be a matter of style.
And style was considered much more important than struggle, and
struggle was definitely a sign of lack of style.

2.

I have been reading a book 'Landscapes of Jihad' by Faisal Devji
whichI re-open again to quote. It might look like a bad book review,
but I am not, and neither I pretend. I hope, after  talking a little
about Abhinavgupta I am able to link 1,2,& 3 for some understanding of
our complex times.

I begin to lift, quite randomly. 'Al-Qaeda could neither control nor
even predict their global repercussions. Hence the actions of this
jihad, which they are indeed meant to accomplish certain ends, have
become more ethical than political in nature, since they have resigned
control over their own effects, thus becoming gestures of duty or risk
rather than acts of instrumentality properly speaking.  This might be
why a network such as Al-Qaeda, unlike terrorist or fundamentalist
groups of the past, has no coherent vision or plan for the future.'

It goes on and on about the complexity of Muslim world since the
divide between Christian and Muslim world is starkly visible.  It must
have begun earlier than it is realized now, when the all time great
Jean Genet's memoir of the Palestinian movement appeared in 1970s.

The book quotes Jenet: " Our Palestinian graves have fallen from
planes all over the world,  with no cemeteries to mark them. Our dead
have fallen from one point in the Arab nation to form an
imaginary continent. And if Palestine never came down from the Empire
of Heaven to dwell upon earth, would we be any less real?  So sang one
of the fedayeen, in Arabic. The last of outrage was urgent. Yet here
we are, a divine people, on the brink of exhaustion, sometimes close
to catastrophe, and with about as much political power as Monaco,
answered another. " We are the sons of peasants,
Placing our cemeteries in heaven, boasting of our mobility; building
an abstract empire with one pole in Bangkok and other in Lisbon and
its capital here, with somewhere a garden of artificial flowers lent
by Bahrain or Kuwait; terrorizing the whole world; making airports put
up triumphal arches for us, tinkling like shop doorbells—all this to
do in reality what smokers of joints only dream of. But has ever been
dynasty that didn't build its thousand year reign on a sham? So sang a
third Fedayeen .

The author Faisal Devji has done an extensive research and found links
to support his understanding of Jihad as a landscape and mental-scape
as well besides political one..  I would humbly like to add to his
outstanding book a line by  J.L.Godard's who said that " once Jews
carried the cross for Christians, but now their cross is carried by
Palestinians".  Another observation by great Iranian Film maker " it
is the shame…of the west
( see cold war ) which resulted in the destruction of Bamiyan Buddha
in Afghanistan" .
A deeper insight would even hint the possibility  that the very
occupying forces might have stage managed the destruction of B.Buddha
to pass on the blame to under-dogs of war.

The book is however overwhelmingly marked by  sub-chapters after
chapters with short witty titles. One such is 'New Market for our
traders'. The chapter quotes the decoded message of Al-Zawahiri, who
thinks that the fall of Taliban in Afghanistan has  opened opportunity
to open profitable trade for our Muslim companies.  It seems the
fundamentalism as represented by Taliban is in fact helping the
pseudo-liberal face of Capitalist regimes in the West. So, a net work
like Al-Qaeda becomes global beyond a politics of intentionality.   "
The global effects of Jihad have brought heterogeneous characters
likeGreenpeace movements under one umbrella, who have no prior history
of communication between them….

Violence, though definitive of the Jihad today, is probably the least
important of these responses, and likely the most short-lived compared
to other transformations that al-Qaeda has wrought. Indeed such
violence might well represent the final agony of an old-fashioned
politics centered in a specific geography and based on a history of
common needs, interest or ideas. Rather than marking the emergence of
a new kind of Muslim politics, in other words, Al-Qaeda's jihad may
signal the end of such politics.
Far more important than violence might be the emergence of a new kind
of global practice in the accidental and unintended effects of the
jihad…. The jihad displaces politics by ethics as a way of engaging
with its accidental universe. It is in this sense only the most
radical example of the proliferating debates on ethics that
increasingly mark global entities like non-governmental organizations
and multinational  corporations".

Recent discoveries of large scale 'slavery' in China have shown that
something is seriously wrong with the so called modern progressive
world. So cleverly, and so much is hidden under the gloss of
development, hat we often forget to remember our initial pursuits to
unravel the truths. We are all, in fact, sailing in the same boat,
heading towards a  death like black hole; but let us see which forces
are resisting.

The Sufis. Unlike the corporate Sufis, the Sufis are quite akin to the
radical contemporary artist of post modern practice. That includes the
performance art, even.  A chapter in the book is A metaphysical war
It furthers, that conceptually, the jihad's global character is
manifested in its abandonment of the freedom struggle for the
religious war. Fighting over material gains and losses continues to be
crucial in this narrative,
but what gives these battles global meaning is nothing less than a
metaphysical war.  Another chapter is titled ' The art of war' "
Unlike political movements in the past, including fundamentalism and
terrorism in the service of some national cause, the jihad's votaries
do not attempt to convert people to their vision of things. In fact
such conversion, as we noticed in the first chapter, might well occur
only as an accidental
effect of the jihad's ethical performance. The chapter elucidates that
how Jihad is fulfilling the desire of the mass media for real horror,
but on the same model as reality television shows. So while this
reality strives to achieve authenticity by its very extremity, just as
in reality television shows, it in fact achieves exactly the opposite
by becoming a piece of theatre.  It is the jihad's unwillingness to
distinguish  between media spectacle
 and political reality that most effectively illustrates its character
as an ethical performance. The chapter talks in detail about the
various forms of Al-Qaeda member's prophetic dream, eg a scorer match
played by men in uniform of pilots who finally won the match. The
dream came true, and now, it is usually prohibited to discuss dreams
in their close circles lest the content is revealed.

Chapter No. 5. THE DEATH OF GOD. At various points the slogans of
jihad resemble the slogans of Left.   The great Poet, Mohammad Iqbal
supported the vision of Pakistan under the shadow of God's death that
I ( the author ) contend marks the jihad with the sign of Islam's
modernity. The lesson, that death of God is necessary for religion's
modernity made possible by doubt rather than certainty. Chapter no. 6.
New World Order :  I quote " The jihad, suggests Derrida,
"demonstrates more clearly than any other
movement the strict character of global conflict in the wake of the
Cold War. So America can only address the threat of holy war by
attacking itself. Subverting the constitutional provisions of its own
civil liberties and impeding…

I hurriedly quote from the chapter THE END OF ISLAM : Does violence
therefore become an accidental factor in such movements ? I would
argue that the jihad is violent precisely because it is inherently
unstable, because it can in fact turn into its opposite. This is an
assumption on my part, but one that is based on the jihad's own
ethical practice, which links it to non-violent movements like
environmentalism or the anti-globalization protest. In other words it
is the very fragmentation of Muslim practice in jihad, or what I am
calling Islam's democratization, that prevents if from becoming
entrenched as a form of politics, and that consequently makes the
jihad such an unstable phenomenon. ….
In the long run, violence is probably Al-Qaeda's most superficial and
shor-lived effect, though it is certainly one of great importance for
the moment….

3.

This is from a well researched Monogram by G.T. Deshpande on Abhinavagupta:
As a result of his practices in Yoga, miraculous powers were
manifested in him.
Abhinava quotes in Tantraloka a text from Sripurva Sastra which refers
to some infallible signs found
 in such a Yogin. They are :

(i.) unfailing devotion to Rudra, (ii). The power of incantation.
(iii). Control over elements.
 (iv). Capacity to accomplish desired results. (v) Sudden dawn of
knowledge, and sudden burst of poetic faculty.

What is the meaning of 'The sudden burst of poetic faculty' one must
go to is Pratyabhijna ( philosophy ) first.

Pratybhijna is recognition. What is nature of this recognition ? We
shall try to understand  it with the help of an example. The usual
example taken in this respect in philosophical writings is' this is
the same Devadatta as I saw on that occasion ' This is a statement of
experience. What is the nature of this experience ? There is a direct
perception ( pratyaksa )
of Devadatta. But it is not perception alone. This perception becomes
the operative cause of recollection ( smriti ) of my previous
perception of him in the form of mental image of that object seen on
previous occasions. But this is not Smrti only. There is also the
experience of these two objects being identical. The novelty of
recognition lies neither in the direct perception alone, nor in
remembrance alone, but in the realization of their identity. We the
identity is realized, we have a new experience altogether. Another
example- Damayanti had heard about Nala, and thus formed an image of
him.
The object of her love was not identical to her image when he actually
appeared as Indira's messenger to her. But when at the end of the
meeting when the facts are revealed to her the image in her mind got
identified and she found her love.  Likewise though the individual
self is identical with the Supreme yet we cannot experience the joy of
the identity unless we are conscious of that identity. The aim of
Pratyabhijna is to
make us conscious in that respect.

The book quite lucidly explains the other nuances of the Pratyabhina
which I can not talk here in full, but I again lift another fragment,
quite randomly.

' The intellectual knowledge can only give us an idea of the universal
power of self.
 That des not suffice for the liberation. It is only the spiritual
knowledge that liberates us.
The consciousness of these powers in us, can change our whole
personality so much that our attitude of viewing life becomes
altogether different. Some Vedantins believe it to be only an illusion
as is the illusion of snake on the substratum of rope. Abhinava does
not subscribe to any of these explanations as the final explanation.
He holds that the world of experience is real, because it is the
manifestation of All-inclusive Universal Consciousness or Self.  (
This is similar to Oscar Wilde who thinks that the mystery of the
world exists in the
appearances alone  and not in the invisible. )

So this All-inclusive Universal Consciousness which is necessary to
explain the phenomenon of knowledge is called Anuttara ( the highest
reality or Para-Samvid). Annuttara means 'beyond which there is
nothing' Anuttara cannot be spoken as 'this' or 'that' not as 'not
this' or 'not that'. It is all but not in the sense in which all is
taken to mean by the limited human mind. The mind cannot grasp it
cannot be the object of perception or conception. It can only be
realized. It cannot be expressed by a word or words. In whatever way
we try to define it, our attempt is just that of a blind men who
 describe the elephant to be something like a table, or broomstick, a
pillar  or a winnowing basket. But the ultimate reality is much
morethan what the limited mind can imagine it to be. The ideas of
unity and multiplicity, of time and space, and of name and form are
based upon certain ways and forms in which the Ultimate appears. The
transitory world represents only an insignificant part of
manifestation.

Before I go to briefly to Praksha ( the Light ) here is a brief about
Vimarsa which is a distinctive aspect of the self signifies.

-       the capacity of the self to know itself to know itself in all its
purity in the state of perfect freedom  from all kinds of affections.
-       Analysis of all its states of varying affections due to the
internalof expertnal causes.
-       Retaining these affections in the form of residucal traces ( samskaras )
-       Taking out at will, anytime, anything out of the existing
stock of Samskaras and bring back
          he old affected state of itself as in the case of
remembrance.-       And, creation of an altogeather new state of
self-affection by making a judicious selection
                  from the existing stock and displaying the material
to selected on the background of its   Praksas aspect as at the time
of free imagination.


Thus when we say that the individual self is Prakasa Vimarsamaya, it
means that the self is luminous and contains residual  traces within
and that it is capable of receiving reflection of knowing itself and
others, of controlling what it contains within and of giving rise to a
new psychic phenomenon with the residual traces which are essentially
the same with the self.

About Prakasa, : One important difference between the individual
Prakasa and the Universal Prakasa. The affection of the individual
Prakasa is caused not only by internal causes as dream, imagination,
etc, but also by external causes as in case of direct perception. But
the Universal Self, being universal and all-inclusive, there cannot be
anything external to it and hence its affection by external cause is
out of question.


So, after constructing ( 1,2,3) three fragments like three different
dishes with different flavours, I am myself pretty confused about the
freedom of tasting all the three simultaneously. Besides these three
versions of reality, we have other multiples that keep on navigating
our minds for deeper meanings. For example, we have a close
possibility of mixing science, art and sociology. I again quote from a
mail reader-sarai-list.

"In an exchange several months after his New York Review of Books
article, Weinberg admitted that the founders of quantum theory had
been wrong in their "apparent subjectivism," and declared that "we
know better now" [15]. What exactly do we know better now"

Einstein fully realized that the world is not presented to us twice
–But, since everything is in flux what do we have concretely  in our
hands ( realization ) that we can call this as the original world and
the other its theory only.
As we know, there is a whole lot of writing on all that what I have
quoted and much more. What ignited me to do this little exercise is
the fact that I gotmails ( reader sarai list ) about Salman Rushdie,
Hussain, and chanderamohan, some opposing them, some in favour and
some indifferent even. At the surface it is about simple politics out
there, and as an artist I have no choice but to support the 'freedom
of expression'. But deeper than that I guess there is the question of
'other', which I feel all the three pieces (1,2,3 ) universally and
profoundly talked about 'that self' and 'that other' radically.

Meanwhile, please give me some more clues about the ways to
enter,digest,reflect THE OTHER.

With love
Inder salim

http://indersalim.livejournal.com