On The Poverty of Student Life
Mustapha Khayati [First published in 1966 at the University of Strasbourg by students of the university and members of the Internationale Situationniste. A few students elected to the student union printed 10,000 copies with university funds. The copies were distributed at the official ceremony marking the beginning of the academic year. The student union was promptly closed by court order. HUG reproduces a section from the pamphlet.] We might very well say, and no one will disgaree with us, that the student is the most universally despised creature in France, apart from the priest and the policeman. Naturally he is usually attacked from the wrong point of view, with specious reasons derived from the ruling ideology. He may be worth the contempt of a true revolutionary, yet a revolutionary critique of the student situation is currently taboo on the official Left. The licensed and impotent opponents of capitalism repress the obvious–that what is wrong with the students is also what is wrong with them. They convert their unconscious contempt into a blind enthusiasm. The radical intelligentsia (from Les Temps Modernes to L’Express) prostrates itself before the so-called “rise of the student” and the declining bureaucracies of the Left (from the “Communist” party to the Stalinist National Union of Students) bids noisily for his moral and material support. There are reasons for this sudden enthusiasm, but they are all provided by the present form of capitalism, in its overdeveloped state. We shall use this pamphlet for denunciation. We shall expose these reasons one by one, on the principle that the end of alienation is only reached by the straight and narrow path of alienation itself. Up to now, studies of student life have ignored the essential issue. The surveys and analyses have all been psychological or sociological or economic: in other words, academic exercises, content with the false categories of one specialization or another. None of them can achieve what is most needed–a view of modern society as a whole. Fourier denounced their error long ago as the attempt to apply scientific laws to the basic assumptions of the science (“porter régulièrement sur les questions primordiales”). Everything is said about our society except what it is, and the nature of its two basic principles–the commodity and the spectacle. The fetishism of facts masks the essential category, and the details consign the totality to oblivion. Modern capitalism and its spectacle allot everyone a specific role in a general passivity. The student is no exception to the rule. He has a provisional part to play, a rehearsal for his final role as an element in market society as conservative as the rest. Being a student is a form of initiation. An initiation which echoes the rites of more primitive societies with bizarre precision. It goes on outside of history, cut off from social reality. The student leads a double life, poised between his present status and his future role. The two are absolutely separate, and the journey from one to the other is a mechanical event “in the future.” Meanwhile, he basks in a schizophrenic consciousness, withdrawing into his initiation group to hide from that future. Protected from history, the present is a mystic trance. At least in consciousness, the student can exist apart from the official truths of “economic life.” But for very simple reasons: looked at economically, student life is a hard one. In our society of abundance,” he is still a pauper. 80% of students come from income groups well above the working class, yet 90% have less money than the meanest laborer Student poverty is an anachronism, a throw-back from an earlier age of capitalism; it does not share in the new poverties of the spectacular societies; it has yet to attain the new poverty of the new proletariat. Nowadays the teenager shuffles off the moral prejudices and authority of the family to become part of the market even before he is adolescent: at fifteen he has all the delights of being directly exploited. In contrast the student covets his protracted infancy as an irresponsible and docile paradise. Adolescence and its crises may bring occasional brushes with his family, but in essence he is not troublesome: he agrees to be treated as a baby by the institutions which provide his education. (If ever they stop screwing his arse off, it’s only to come round and kick him in the balls.) “There is no student problem.” Student passivity is only the most obvious symptom of a general state of affairs, for each sector of social life has been subdued by a similar imperialism. Our social thinkers have a bad conscience about the student problem, but only because the real problem is the poverty and servitude of all. But we have different reasons to despise the student and all his works. What is unforgivable is not so much his actual misery but his complaisance in the face of the misery of others. For him there is only one real alienation: his own. He is a full-time and happy consumer of that commodity, hoping to arouse at least our pity, since he cannot claim our interest. By the logic of modern capitalism, most students can only become mere petits cadres (with the same function in neo-capitalism as the skilled worker had in the nineteenth-century economy). The student really knows how miserable will be that golden future which is supposed to make up for the shameful poverty of the present. In the face of that knowledge, he prefers to dote on the present and invent an imaginary prestige for himself. After all, there will be no magical compensation for present drabness: tomorrow will be like yesterday, lighting these fools the way to dusty death. Not unnaturally he takes refuge in an unreal present. The student is a stoic slave: the more chains authority heaps upon him, the freer he is in phantasy. He shares with his new family, the University, a belief in a curious kind of autonomy. Real independence, apparently,
Dread Not Rasta
Richard C. Salter The dusty street into St. Thomas, a medium-sized coastal village in the eastern Caribbean island of Dominica, ran east to west along a garbage-strewn stream spiked with disposable diapers and trash. Matewé was taking me to visit Duke, a fellow well-known by youth in the area for his wisdom and the small “church” (his term) that he ran. After traversing a few alleys, and gaining entrance to Duke’s grandmother’s yard with an identifying whistle, we passed through the wooden shack into the backyard where the church sat. The church was about six feet wide by eight feet long and was built onto another building that served as its back wall. The church was an appropriate symbol for subaltern resistance, for the building that served as the church’s back wall was actually the village police station. Duke welcomed us, and with three other dreadlocked church members we entered the building for what could be called a five-hour “reasoning” session. After we entered the church and turned on a boombox inside, Duke cut and sorted the seeds from some ganja and then heated the ganja on a hot plate to remove impurities such as fertilizers, pesticides and “things used on plantations” that may have gotten into it. He then packed it into the “chalice” and lit it. The chalice was a water pipe made with a large bamboo stem, a hollow water-filled coconut as a base, and a hollowed out stone bowl. It resembled the water pipes favored in many Rastafari yards, and it was similarly passed member to member throughout the reasoning session. Duke did not use the term “reasoning” to describe the church activities, instead referring to the passing of the chalice as “prayer.” His young daughter (perhaps 5 years old) was with us and was surprised to see me, a white man, in the church. She asked, as the chalice was passed to me, “You praying now?” For some of the time at church we sat quietly, but at other times we reasoned and discussed the world. Duke said he was trying to get away from “churchy stuff” at his church: “We come when we want. We talk about what we want.” Typical of many Rastas, Duke was critical of Roman Catholics and distinguished the rules at his church from those of the Catholic Church, where formality made it impossible to eat or for kids to walk around during the service. Many of the topics we covered could be found at any Rastafari reasoning: what is a proper diet? If you avoid eating blood, is it okay to eat siwik (river crab), since it does not appear to have blood in it? What about crayfish? Salt? We talked about the merits of “bush medicine,” the benefits of zèb chèpantyé (Carpenter Weed) as a blood cleaner. We talked about the roots of reggae and jazz. We talked about the “wickedness” people do and our responsibility to improve the world for children in this generation. Duke was particularly interested in talking about the merits of ganja. That was not surprising, and indeed the merits of ganja as inspiration, herbal remedy, or tea, or the economic benefits to be had through hemp production would also be a topic at any Rastafari reasoning. But Duke was particularly emphatic that ganja should not be smoked with any sort of tobacco, including the local Indian Tobacco (lobelia inflata). According to Duke, ganja is “lamb’s bread,” and “smoking is eating.” He reasoned that “Jesus broke bread” (i.e., he smoked marijuana) and that “real food” means “to be contented with God.” He considered smoking ganja to be eating real food because it satisfies, it brings “peace,” it “brings one to God.” Physically, Duke and his church members resembled any other Rastas on the island. They wore dreadlocks and used much of the same argot as other Rastas. They also smoked ganja in the same way, using similar accoutrements, and they reasoned about the same topics in a common format. But although Duke would fit into what I have broadly defined as the Rastafari movement, he and his other three church members were adamant that they were not Rastas. Duke was a Dread. Dreads do not always constitute a self-identified group as they did at Duke’s church, but there are certainly many who call themselves Dreads in order to differentiate their beliefs from orthodox Rastafari. In addition, there remain some general social and organizational differences between the two groups. For example, unlike many orthodox Rastas, Dreads are with rare exceptions from the lower classes. The Dread movement is far less hierarchically organized than most Rastafari groups, and with a few exceptions, like Duke’s small church, Dread practices are individualized, and often ad hoc and idiosyncratic. The Dreads remain a movement of small groups, without systematic communication among themselves, and thus they also tend to be associated strongly with particular villages or locales. There are also areas of worldview, ethos, rituals and food practices that differentiate Dreads from orthodox Rastas. The clearest divergence between Dreads and more orthodox Rastas is in their attitudes towards a deity. Orthodox Rastas tend to maintain a belief in Haile Selassie, former Emperor of Ethiopia, as God. Dreads, on the other hand, tend not to proclaim the divinity of Selassie. Duke, for example, ridiculed Selassie and Rastas who claimed any belief in him. Even Dreads who acknowledged Selassie as a great leader, or as a great African statesman, suggested that it is dangerous to worship a human being. Francis was representative of many Dreads when he said that he would not call himself a “Rastafarian” or anything else: “I would just call myself a living man.” To him the term Rastafari was a “perversion” because the term “Ras” means king, and it is a perversion to call a man king when in reality we are all just men. To him, Selassie “was man just like me.” It would have made no sense to accept Selassie as God: “How could
The Dead Body
Manindra Gupta (Trans. Abu Hossain) The fable of the Brahmin and the Brahmani used to be an amalgamation of the mythical and the folk. The duo lives in that hutment right at the yonder corner of the village. The Brahmin, a simple guy, partly a simpleton even. The Brahmani, a termagant—a long life of travail and tribulation has made her utterly irritable at the fag end. The story could take different turns once you reach this juncture. For instance, he discovers a pot full of mohurs, guarded by the yaksha, among the ruins in the jungle, or impresses the lord of the land with his witticism and makes a fortune, or gets swindled by a conman, suffers harsh words from the Brahmani and chooses exile. This story of the twosome is actually our story—mine and my friends’. We get swindled everyday and our predicament worsens. As long as we were working, we were fishes secure within our respective shoals. A retired life is one of needless, sundry humiliation. How and where our fulsome sons and daughters spend their time, what drives their lives, I am rather unsure. Internationally acclaimed pundits doing the circuit or surefooted asocial danseuses adept at social dos—whatever their trade be—they have traversed a long way from us indeed. We oldies are vulnerable like the groping Brahmin couple of the tale. We queue up at the bus-stop, hear someone holler ‘get up, do get up.’ Soon the bus waves past, an anomalous bell ringing. We are left standing. An odd shove here, a thrust there in the crowd, (we hope to parry, but invariably fail) easily leaves us cold, downbeat, fallen. I recall the visage of old, weary Dhritarashtra, at the conclusion of the battle at Kurukshetra, returning with blooms and supplicating water—hungry, weak with fasting, trembling, superannuated, rapidly losing interest with living. Soon he enters the entrails of the forest with Gandhari, Kunti and Sanjay. And a fierce forest fire engulfs them. Sanjay entreats the old king to flee. The feeble king replies that he would rather scorch himself up. It is ideal to give up ones life to water, wind, fire and fasting. You may take leave Sanjay. King Bimbisara died of fasting too. I have noticed unwell creatures, nearing death, hunt down a quiet spot—quit food and await stilly until death arrives. Possibly their being wishes to touch some primordial pulse before departing for good. The threesome in Mahabharata also sat motionless. Modern death is a messy, troublesome affair. Face to face with death one realizes how perilous our circumstances are. These days there are hardly any treatment options at home. And nursing homes are veritable leeches. And then at the threshold of his last breath, the patient is pushed into a ventilator: artificial respiration initiates. Four or five days in that state, stark pale with death long ago, the nursing home declares the patient to be brain dead. The dead body and a bill of few lakhs are easily handed out. In the name of wellness and treatment, partial dead-bodies thus enter the chain of transaction. And a complete and spectacular disrespect for the dead starts right there. On one hand, the abhorrent antarjali-jatra, on the other, this horrendous ventilation: is there no simpler, more natural route for the patient on the death roll? Howsoever agreeably we lead our lives, in death we proceed towards the grandeur of the infinite and the unseen. These last couple of hours, at their very moment of disappearance, let not the dead suffer contempt from those who stay back. I would not have been so garrulous but for a jolt that I received the other day. I had gone to the samshan-ghaat, in solidarity, to witness the last rites of a neighboring friend. The gentleman, his wife, his kids—the whole family is illustrious, scholarly and free-minded. Probably the luster of scholarship had dried up the humidity of their bereavement. In every civic, popular or natural society, the disposal of the dead merits some procedural aspects. Various as the formalities are, one basic thread binds them: that we do not consider the dead to be gone, vanished, non-existent. The idea is to see that a modicum of love and benediction guide us even as we dispose off a body who had been possibly a fellow traveler with the living for so long and so richly. And to wonder and consider the remains before it surpasses touch and feel. The Eskimos of North Pole are an ancient lot. How do they resolve this conundrum of the wobbly, unsure old age? Once the old man realizes that he is unable to hunt, is dependent on his kinsman for food, the lumbering weight of life is getting better of him—he gets holds of a catamaran, and one evening quietly ventures on to the sea. Night in front, the ocean wide, below 30 degree Celsius the temperature. But he won’t return. What would happen to him, his body, his existence? The community is there by the sea-shore to bid him adieu. There are all kinds of traversing that final expanse: sometimes with such communal approval, at times alone and fasting—awaiting passage, and who knows, may be denying certain treatments even in the midst of mortal pain. There is a breed of sanyasis whose mortal remains are left to be eaten by the creatures of the wild. The whole of the Tower the Silence precisely hinges on such an understanding of the relationship of the living and the dead. Some practitioners are given water-burial, so that they enter the food chain via fishes and other aquatic creatures only to re-emerge materially. There is nothing demeaning about returning this earthly body back to the earth. Now, the usual rites are either internment or cremation. Two kinds of mentality work behind these differing procedures. Burial implies that he is around, his existence being mysterious now and he has left secretly to live elsewhere. The pyre suggests his unencumberdness, his transparency, the voyaging out: one can
Science & Fiction
Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay What is science fiction and what can the genre give us that other genres cannot? This, of course, is to assume that science fiction is a ‘genre’ – something that has been identified, labelled and samples put in a glass jar alongside many other jars in the laboratory of literature. This however is far from the case. There are many definitions of science fiction, but there is none universally agreed upon[i]. The cynics usually refer to it as a marketing label, while enthusiasts call it by many names depending on which species of science fiction they find most sweet. Considering moreover that the term ‘science fiction’ is not in common usage until the 1930s, although coined as far back as 1851 by William Wilson, might make us a bit suspicious of the pretensions of a genre to emerge suddenly and find its niche in the genre tree. There are no “emergences” in literature – movement of language is a productive process and mutation is law. Genres can at best be perceived as mutable mobiles – they have antecedents, precursors, share family resemblances and are perpetually in transformation; even the most exemplary genre object texts are small pins on the charts and tables of literary influence. Note for instance Hugo Gernsback’s definition of ‘scientifiction’ in the magazine Amazing Stories in 1926, which is often understood to have launched the genre: “By scientifiction I mean the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe type of story—a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.” (Gernsback 1926: 3) Like the narrator in Borges’ Pierre Menard, it is necessary for the reader of the new genre to know who begat who. What makes the retrospective labelling tick is not merely the pedigree, however important that might be in considerations of canonicity, but that it allows the identification of a preformation within which even the most qualitatively new becomes less bizarre. Darko Suvin’s definition of science fiction as the literature of “cognitive estrangement” relies equally on the balance between the estranged and the quotidian – for the radically new cannot be understood except by means of a reference to the old. While one may indeed be sympathetic to such claims, and also the attempts to give science fiction a long history going back to Ramayana and Lucian’s True History[ii], it is the specific character of the literature labelled as science fiction that is of interest to us. We might take 1851 as a watershed moment – a label first and then the genre that may be understood to fit that label. Such a model solves certain problems, such as that of chronology: anything prior may be classified as part of the same family but belonging to a different genre. It does not however resolve completely however the problem of definition. For instance, can we call Ibsen’s Ghosts or Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart novels as science fiction, simply because they deal with the now disregarded, but in the late nineteenth century regarded as ‘scientific’, theory of degeneration? There is science and there is a whole lot of fiction. But are they science fiction? Conversely, do we include theories now regarded as unscientific as science fiction? There are in fact two nested problems in the question of definition. The first is the proliferation of subtypes in science fiction, which makes it possible to label some texts as science fiction from certain perspectives and some other texts from other perspectives; a problem of inclusion and exclusion. The other problem lies in the nature of the alignment between science and fiction, insofar as the definition of science itself is unclear, which makes it impossible to label what is and what is not science fiction[iii]. By resolving (if possible) these two problems we can find the answer to our framing questions. Instead of providing an answer however, this short piece is a less ambitious attempt to identify a possible way of answering these questions. The first I believe can be addressed by means of a classificatory principle, namely that of ‘speculation’, and the second by a methodological principle that clarifies the nature of the science of science fiction. To begin with the second, constructivism or the sociological approaches to scientific knowledge provide an entry point because these focus on the manipulation of the categories of subjective and objective in the framing of scientific activity. Constructivist approaches, such of Thomas Kuhn, David Bloor and Barry Barnes, highlight the ‘theory ladenness of observation’, that is, what is observed in scientific activity is overdetermined by the theoretical perspective that one utilizes to explain the observation. The Nobel laureate physicist Leon Lederman’s invisible ball metaphor[iv] for scientific activity illustrates this – it is not that the explanation for the invisible ball is not a plausible one or has no connection with the observation, or that the observation itself is dubitable, though any of these is possible depending on the context, but that the explanation is a contingent one. As Bloor explains, reality as perceived through the senses is not denied by the sociologist; however, reality is under-determined by such perception: “because the area of reality being inspected under-determines the scientists understanding, an analysis of their knowledge must further assume the role of organising principles and orientations derived from elsewhere…scientists need their sensory experience of the world, and their natural inductive and deductive tendencies, but these always work through and with their culture, and that is the professional concern of the sociologist” (Bloor 1996: 841). Moreover, there is a continual attempt to establish a static picture of science in which experience and theory form a closed circle of knowledge, with one reflected in the other. Bloor argues that while empirical data does furnish experience and that the reliability of sense data is a precondition for sociological analysis, this experience alone is not knowledge. What gives experience its meaning is a theory, the “organising principles and orientations derived from elsewhere”, which is a social production, and not given along with the