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

[Rahul Asthana]

Dear Taha, 

Thank you for your response.Apparently I did not know what I am asking for when I thought I could "grasp the tones of grays before we pull out the blacks and whites apart" with you.I'll admit I do not have the stomach for this kind of thing.For the sake of my own sanity I will have to ask you to excuse me.I hope we can resolve this amicably.I retract all my posts addressed to you.This would be my last post in this thread. I wish you all the best.

Thank you
Rahul



--- On Sun, 1/18/09, Taha Mehmood <2tahamehmood at googlemail.com> wrote:

> From: Taha Mehmood <2tahamehmood at googlemail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Myths, Mangoes and ordered houses - re: 10 myths  about pakistan
> To: rahul_capri at yahoo.com
> Cc: "Aman Sethi" <aman.am at gmail.com>, "reader-list at sarai.net" <reader-list at sarai.net>
> Date: Sunday, January 18, 2009, 8:29 AM
> 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)