chocolateburgundy - Tumblr blog

[chocolateburgundy]

No estar en, sino ser el movimiento

So much movement

has left my brain,

unsettled and unstoppable.

i reach for the pen

to lay down some stable 

sedentary brain,

but to write is to pick

painfully amongst pickings

an audience amongst audiences.

so I put the pen down once more

and wait for

a place to sleep forever.

[chocolateburgundy]

Wow, reading the debates sparked by Chibber’s critique of postcolonial reason (some of the participants of which I have had dinner with) gives me a flurry of excitement because of how it demonstrates the open-endedness of the social science’s foundational assumptions and guiding questions. The debate centers mainly around the validity of Marxist theoretical constructs -- particularly the methodology of historical materialism -- in understanding and analysing non-Western societies (specifically those that emerged out of colonialism in the 20th century). Chibber seems to have undermined the foundational assumptions of Subaltern Studies, which among other fields forms the main core of the postcolonial academic regime. Postcolonial discourse surrounds so much of the jargon that Brown students use, and in extreme cases its use even stands in as a signifier for how woke you are. One gets a kind of heady rush when thinking about this, because it highlights the extent to which undergraduate student discourse is a reflection of the dominant strains of thought currently popular amongst intellectuals in academia. It will be interesting to see what future effect these Marxist critiques of postcolonial thought will have on the things that politically minded undergraduates say to signify their ‘wokeness’.

[chocolateburgundy]

Force in capitalism

I wrote a paper recently for my class called The Political Theory of the Economy taught by Professor Alex Gourevitch about the relationship between force and freedom in capitalism. If you’re interested, I’ve made the paper available here.

Ever since I submitted the paper, I’ve been troubled by some questions and complications arising from some themes that I explored. I have written a draft email to my professor outlining these thoughts but I’m still deciding on whether or not I want to send it in its current state. But I felt that in the meantime, I should share the email on here. 

So here's the first draft:

Dear Prof. Gourevitch,

While I was able to view my grade on Banner Web, I was wondering if you were planning on sending us back our papers with some feedback. This is besides the main point of this email, in which I was hoping to outline some extended thoughts related to the topic of my paper that have been simmering in my head ever since I submitted it. Mainly I wanted to talk about two clear complications that have arisen with my own line of argumentation: participation, identity and reproduction.

As you are probably aware, I wrote my paper on the topic of force and freedom in capitalism, and I came to the nebulous conclusion that force is the essential ingredient in capitalism and that any ‘freedoms’ that may exist under capitalism only serve to support its use. This revealed to me quite clearly that capitalism is essentially forceful and promotes unfreedom for the majority of people subject to it. However, it seems to me that in reaching this conclusion, I merely clarified something that I think was quite obvious. I think we are aware on some intuitive level that any notion of freedom under capitalism is a joke - but the crucial aspect is - that we still choose to participate in it, daily. Force, as experienced by the worker in the labour market and as used by the entrepreneur in carrying out new combinations, is definitely an essential ingredient, but it is not the only one in keeping this system running. Workers are also consumers, and as worker-consumers participating in this system, we collectively do have an enormous say over which new combinations actually do appeal to our tastes and preferences. Since new combinations often (but not always) exist at a level removed from subsistence, we can decide whether or not the combination will eventually succeed simply by evaluating whether or not it appeals to us. I feel that in addition to the question of force and freedom, examining the question of how capitalism works to channel the satisfaction of our desires primarily towards the consumption of commodities versus other activities (such as workplace organisation or politics more generally) is also essential to figuring out how we reproduce this system on a daily basis.

The other complication that arose was in the differential quality of force in contemporary society, and this is where identity comes in. While all workers do experience force as an inbuilt mechanism of the objective conditions of the economy, they often experience this force to a greater or a lesser degree based on certain social groups which they may belong to: a certain race, gender, religion, or - prominent in India - caste. Capitalist force is homogeneous by nature, but in a significant sense, it also thrives on internal divisions within the working class perpetuated by other forms of social oppression. While this isn’t quite clearly formulated in my head, I wonder how much social difference affects the effectivity of capitalist force. Would this force be less effective if attempts were made to reform/eradicate social oppressions first?

Lastly, I have been thinking about Marx’s discussion of the commodity in the reproductive sphere of the household. When we discuss the minimum wage paid to workers in society through a Marxist lens, we come to the conclusion that the wage is set at the price of the means of subsistence. However, the means of subsistence - once bought by the worker - are rarely ever consumable directly. An additional layer of production is carried out in the form of unpaid reproductive labour to transform these means of subsistence into finally consumable use-values. Moreover, most of this labour in society is carried out by women and is a crucial element holding this entire edifice together. This aspect is obviously tied to the gender aspect that I tried to outline before this, and it brings up similar questions. How do we locate and analyse the mechanisms of force that exist outside and independent of the strict imperatives of the labour market, in the reproductive sphere? We may also use the analytic provided by G.A Cohen to ask, what are the freedoms essential for the existence of this force? This sphere in some ways seems more important to me than the productive sphere in sustaining this system.

If you have the time, I would appreciate even a brief reply to some of these questions and complications I have been pondering recently in relation to my paper.

Best, Kanha.

[chocolateburgundy]

Tired dreaming

Rise and shine exhausted

defeated by dreams once again

This time, a haunting sideways glance

from a previous lover

her sly red lipstick smile

from one of your eminent professors

leading a political theory seminar

in your favourite fast food

chain

these daunting and heady

attachments to negotiate.

Real people wonder if I’m daydreaming

but the punishment for losing to yourself

is always a fixed gaze

a silent stare with your pupils wide dilated

at that spot right there next to no one in particular

I’m stuck inside

Day:

a rotting mental sewer 

an endless cage running on crevices

of well-lit city streets

an inward seeping

of visages and visuals

Maybe I should go to the movies.

[chocolateburgundy]

My first steak arrived yesterday,

medium rare with a side of frites and salad,

charred leather sponge

the shape of flatiron shoe

soaking a pool of blood and onion juice.

The pierce of the fork prevents it from escaping,

holds it down for the back and forth grazing of the knife,

serrated and sharper than usual.

Each strip too big for a mouthful: I cut into two

put into mouth, and proceed to chew.

My jaw is a motor, my teeth are slippery grinding

and stained with its oil,

my tongue a fleshy pink funnel

for ‘natural’ meaty flavour.

My right hand tiring, I wonder

what urge it is I am sating.

Is this overrated satisfaction

just compensation for mealtime labor?

The materialist dialectic haunts me most

at moments of bodily blood transfusion.

[chocolateburgundy]

Intellectual spelunking

The best thing about holidays is that they free up time. From routine, from deadlines, and most importantly, from its inane compartmentalization into finite google calendar events that the strict temporalities of the academic semester force.

I long for this free time when I don’t have it because it means the potential for intellectual exploration outside the confines of class, and the opportunity to enrich myself culturally by catching up with music and movies so that I’m not just consuming them for self-care.

However, the more reptilian parts of the brain thirst for this free time, which promises them satisfaction through the endless consumption of Netflix shows (old and new) and youtube videos and by endlessly scrolling through the bottomless facebook and twitter feeds. With these, one cannot help but feel that their brain is degenerating but hopelessly clings on to the promise that the next movie, video, post, tweet or more generally ‘piece of content’ will provide some entertainment and satisfaction. In this way, every time my mind drifts even slightly, I fall prey to the internet-hyper attention-dopamine inducing-slow exhaustion matrix.

I’ve decided that the only way of keeping myself from entering these 12 hour internet rabbit holes and actually being productive (I hate this word but I can’t think of another one) intellectually is to have a list of questions, books and topics that I’ve wanted to think more deeply and write about which I can turn to in moments of impending crisis.

So here they are:

Innovation and creativity in political economy:

What could innovation under socialism/communism look like? How could this innovation be detached from the stifling qualities of the state? What essential and useful aspects of entrepreneurship could be salvaged in the construction of this future as we leave its harmful aspects behind? In what ways are markets necessary for innovation and to the extent that they are, how can they be disembedded from capitalist private property relations?

What does innovation and creativity in our present capitalist imaginary entail? What is the history of discourse around the words innovation, creativity and popular phrases like ‘disruption’? What is the role of these terms in neoliberal discourse?

Is innovation an epistemological question? Is innovation inextricably tied to certain capitalist ethical values?

I often get this feeling that socialists propose nationalisation as a self-evident solution to the ills of capitalist exploitation. But nationalisation is inherently confined to national boundaries and nationalisation of companies like google and facebook (with their international workforces) just doesn’t make any sense.

Identity and class:

To what extent is historical materialism as a method class reductionist? What exactly is the critique of historical materialism by race and gender scholars, thinkers and activists? I want to think about this in the context of debates around political platform building (where certain ‘class’ related issues are prioritised over race and gender-related ones) and the issues of representation and diversity (in the context of race, gender and also caste). I also want to interrogate the concept of intersectionality more deeply.

History:

I’m intending on completing a history major because I feel like by studying certain historical phenomena that I’m interested in, I will hopefully be able to get a glimpse into how specific the periodic crises I experience are to this era. Reading history and literature seems like the only way I can understand the specificity of my present reality a little more fully.

I’m interested in the histories of state building in emerging post-colonial nations and the history of revolutions and crises (like May ‘68)

Right now, I’m reading Walter Rodney’s lectures on The Russian Revolution.

I’m also trying to blend history and philosophy by reading intellectual histories of neoliberalism as a concept. This entails trying to figure out the historical evolution of an ideology by reading the works of its architects and proponents.

[chocolateburgundy]

Krakatoa

Where smoke billows out from a sate stall

jagged blue mirrors pierce the sky,

and the clouds are spongy shock absorbers

for the frenetic rush of horny bikers.

The dusty corrugated red tile hats

adorned by once whitewashed mansions,

as solemnly they stand with their heads bent down

on streets lined with lush green tree.

The spectral shade marks their defeat.

Like a linen shirt stuck to glistening skin,

or the rice-bed below

dripping barbecued chicken,

coconut water rescues a tongue

raw from the shock of sambal

steaming.

It’s been a day and a night and half a day

And Jakarta pulses exactly the same;

But I’m still waiting for what I came here for,

One chorus shower of its raucous rain.

(This is my first poem ever)