[Reader-list] Myths, Mangoes and ordered houses - re: 10 myths about pakistan

[Taha Mehmood]

Dear Rahul

Thank you for your response.

I want to make three observations.

First I think we have in front of us in the form of India and Pakistan a
very important space which has had the good fortune of shared history,
culture and language. Of course, not all cultures, languages etc were shared
but some definitely were.

In this scenario, I think, for me to articulate a position becomes very
easy. I think my position would be similar to any person's position who
knows something about India and Pakistan, that is, he/she is aware of the
existence of a common umbilical cord that once tied these two lands
together, but at the same time, he/she is unaware of a relatively small in
scale yet significant social churning in the region.

Hence I feel  that there are many things about the India/Pakistan that I do
not know but I want to know.

Secondly, as an idea what we see here is coming together of many discourses
that are being thought through across disciplines. We need to make more
effort to garner as many voices from as many disciplines and indeed
inter-disciplinary and non disciplinary voices to have a robust debate.

And thirdly, I do not want to move away from discussing India/Pak issue.
Why? Because I feel that in order to understand and make meaning of our own
social environment we must make all efforts to to peer more closely and
thoroughly to clearly grasp the tones of grays before we pull out the blacks
and whites apart.

For instance,while reading your comments about the blog. I was particularly
drawn to one observation,you write- LET,after being banned,reemerged as JUD.


On the face of it the above assertion seems to relate to five factors- self,
identity, language, naming and knowledge.

Please allow me to inquire further.

First, What do we mean when we say, LET,after being banned,reemerged as JUD?
If I extend this idea further, then can one assert, that re-naming does not
change anything, the self remains the same. In which case in so far as we
can allege our membership to an organization or a social group we can claim
a common self identity. If this being the case, then for instance if one is
a resident of say x country, then can one claim the membership of that
country only by voicing his allegiance, given that there exists a very
informal manner in which the affairs of that country are carried out. Is
this way of assertion correct?

Second, by saying, LET,after being banned,reemerged as JUD, one hints
towards the very core, that LET's identity did not change, that LET was as
same as JUD. Now how are we to understand this? What do we mean when we say
A was as same as B? Please allow me to suggest by the way of an example,
this relates to a commodity that was in circulation in late 1980's and
1990's. Can one say that Cibaca toothpaste was as same as Binaca toothpaste?
When some factors like content of the toothpaste, production values, higher
management, sales team, total revenue, targeted customers etc at the moment
of change of name were same. Even with Multiple Purpose National Identity
Card I am struggling to find an answer to this very basic quesition. You
know, if we look at material on MNIC hosted by GOI in the public domain,
there seems to be no position of GOI in so far as the issue of identity is
concerned and MNIC is supposed to be an 'identity'card. So we need to
explore this very important issue of identity. What do we mean when we say A
was as same as B.

Third, we have to analyze what sort of a worldview we make when we frame the
understanding of so process as thus-LET,after being banned,re-emerged as
JUD. Because going by the confidence of this assertion, it seems, that there
is a very clear understanding in the mind of the framer about the nature of
LET and JUD as clear, distinct, verifiable, entities and he wants to convey
this confidence to his reader. What we need to ask is this- What is LET and
JUD? What do these names signify? Who runs these organizations?What is their
agenda? What types of legitimizing arguments the organizations encompass and
so on, which brings us to naming.

Fourth, here I want to ask, what does it mean to have a name? What does it
mean to say that for instance, I belong to BJP, or to RSS, or to CPM or to
Congress. We have to ask this question with respect to naming for two
reasons, first because we need to know, whether naming or name of an
organization has any significant value from outside the organization and
from inside the organization, if there is then what is the nature of that
significance? Who benefits more if one says I am a member of xyz or the
other who is indifferent to such a name or who is not indifferent or who
wants to persecute all those who claims that they are members of xyz.  The
second being if there is no significance then why are we asked to believe in
the profanity of a name? Why are we asked to identify ourselves as Hindus,
Muslims Indians, Americans, Canadians, French, Buddhists  etc.

Fifth, it seemed that one is aware and one knows when one asserts- LET,after
being banned,re-emerged as JUD. This assertion basically relates to the
question of knowledge. In words of Donald Rumsfeld speaking about the
dreaded WMD in Iraq-"Reports that say that something hasn't happened are
always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there
are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is
to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also
unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know." Hence here it
seems we are clearly stranded between known knowns, known unknowns and
unknowns.

This is, I think, an interesting starting point to work towards a deeper
understanding of the whole LET? JUD? HuM? etc

I tried to find a precedent to understand this phenomena and I think, in
literature, in Ralph Ellison classic novel the Invisible Man, I see an
interplay of issues that we have thus far touched.

I thank you again for the effort you have taken to reply back and I shall do
as much as i could to think with you on these important issues that you have
raised in your comments.

I have posted a small section of a rather long essay on Ralph Ellision's
work Invisible Man, for you to read and think. This essay analyzes the
tension that a self goes through in the event of re-naming, and
re-conjecturing of identity as it fluctuates between visibility and
invisibility.

In organizations I think there seems to be a possibility of complete
transparency coupled with complete opacity. This swing between opacity and
transparency is most visible when we need, (those who are not part of this
organization, or those who are but who do not have any access to the
knowledge source,) to access some form of knowledge or data about which,  we
know that we don't know.

In this event we cannot approach any organization with an assumption that
there would be a probability of a hundred percent or the likeliness of an
event either happening or not happening, that is why perhaps even when we
carry out small, mundane tasks, like booking a railway ticket in India, for
instance, we may be confident that we may get a ticket but we never be sure
that we will not get or will get. In this regard Ralph Ellison's invisible
man and the essay below is very instructive because it talks about the gray
areas which witness a change in a self even as that self or the notion of
the that which, we can say and that which is unsayable part of the self
undergoes a profound transformation.

Please feel free to take you time and I will look forward for your comments
and I hope that in days to come we could have an interesting exchange of
ideas.

Warm regards

Taha

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2838/is_2_36/ai_89872239/pg_1?tag=artBody;col1

Plunging history: naming and self-possession in Invisible Man - outside of -
Critical Essay
African American Review,  Summer, 2002  by Jim Neighbors

 Prologue

In several interviews, Ralph Ellison joins many of his readers in resolving
Invisible Man into a declaration of coherent identity. Effectively
interpreting Invisible Man as a modem Bildungsroman, Ellison says: "In my
novel the narrator's development is one through blackness to light; that is,
from ignorance to enlightenment: invisibility to visibility" (Graham and
Singh 12); "It's a novel about innocence and human error, a struggle through
illusion to reality" (14); "Whatever [Invisible Man] did when he returns
...should be based on the knowledge gained before he went underground. This
is a question of self-knowledge and ability to identify the processes of the
world" (74); "I do believe that knowing where we are, has a lot to do with
our knowing who we are and this gets back to the theme, I hope, of identity
with which [Invisible Man] was sometimes involved" (263). This chain of
reasoning presents Invisible Man as successfully negotiating a labyrinth
designed to rob him of his identity. Once his invisibility is made visible,
a preeminent and self-reliant self lifts out of its confusing history in a
parousia of self-knowledge and resolves to act or write--conflated by this
logic into the same thing--a declaration of coherent identity. (1)

 This reading of Invisible Man as an heroic narrative of the ultimate
re/possession of a dispossessed self derives out of Aristotelian conceptions
of language and subjectivity. The Aristotelian logic of metaphor, in which a
metaphor properly resembles the essence of a prelinguistic and determining
referent, is compatible with--in fact, constitutive of--the logics of the
transcendental Self and instrumental writing. The term Self serves as the
literal figure that categorically names the proper transcendental Self that
sits behind, as it were, the term. A person's proper name, in this way, is
the literal--and, so, most proper--figure of the extralinguistic Self behind
the name. The Self is a stable referent that extends itSelf to its proper
name; the proper name thus consists of a transference, a carrying over, from
the stable referent of the Self. What motivates one's proper name is the
Self behind (before, a priori, etc.) the name. A proper relation of
transference from Self to proper name ("Self") defines res emblance. The
literalizing of the Self (to "Self" or proper name) is the process of
naming, of properly rendering into language what exists prior to language.
Writing, then, is instrumentalized in the process of naming: The term serves
(as a tool, or vehicle) the a priori Self as slave to master. The master
Self determines its linguistic presence by using appropriate language to
name itSelf. Language does not interfere in the process; it merely serves
the Self properly.

Conceiving of a Self prior to and as master of writing provides the
conceptual basis for interpreting Invisible Man as a Bildungsroman. By this
logic, Invisible Man becomes the stable identity behind the writing of his
story: He sits in his chamber, reflects on his life experiences, and writes
his biography, the meaning of which is guaranteed by the referential
stability and coherence of instrumentalized writing. The guarantee to
reference in writing by the transcendental and a priori Self not only allows
for the existence of referentially stable biography, but extends to any form
of graphein. As long as writing can be mastered, then history can be
written.

But Invisible Man does not so neatly resolve into such coherence. Following
a different narrator, this essay will argue that Invisible Man "plunges"
modem fantasies of narrative coherence and stable identity, and defines
history as being constituted by disruption, contingency, and the difference
in writing. (2) And while these qualities do not "add up" to the logic of an
aporia, I work to show that the relation between Invisible Man and his name
is not dialectical but aporetic. (3)

Dispossessing the Possessed Self

The ostensibly declarative opening of Invisible Man--"I am an Invisible
Man:--reveals, in a grammatical askesis of declaration, an in-completion of
the subject. Instead of the predicate nominative properly complementing the
subject, the modifier "Invisible" negates ("In") the empirical status of the
object, "Man." The "object" thus disappears even as it is called into being,
leaving "Man" to signify nothing other than a space of negation. This
disrupted declaration, however, seems to be explained by the narrator in the
second paragraph of the "Prologue":

That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition
of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the
construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through
their physical eyes upon reality.... you're constantly being bumped against
by those of poor vision. Or again, you often doubt if you really exist. You
wonder whether you aren't simply a phantom in other people's minds.... You
ache with the need to convince yourself you do exist in the real world...
and you swear to make them recognize you. And, alas, it's seldom successful.
(3-4)