The Unaccommodated: The Himalaya and the Makers of Their Literature
Amrita Dhar [Amrita Dhar is a graduate student in the English Language and Literature PhD Program at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She has been reading about and visiting the Himalayan mountains since she was ten. She currently runs the Mountaineering Culture Studies Group, an interdisciplinary graduate forum at the University of Michigan.] In this brief note on the reasons, possibilities, and limits holding together—and evoked by—Himalayan mountaineering and its literature, I shall begin in a curious place: a windswept heath on which an aged Shakespearean king unexpectedly finds himself. I shall offer at the very outset that this story of reasons is also a story of reason, and the story of possibilities and fabulous aspiration also a story of great restraint. I shall mark, as I go, the often peculiar origins of works of mountaineering literature, the defences needed for the literature and the activity it seeks to represent, and the emotional and psychological uses the literature is put to by the mountaineering community. I shall end with the heights, asserting that despite its essential loneliness (for to claim any kind of singularity is to be without company) and veritable refusal to translate experience into text (despite all claims that that is precisely what it aims to do), the most engaged—and to my mind most successful—literature of mountaineering seeks but to articulate its author’s profound sense of responsibility, and to perpetuate the very activity and fierce attraction that is its occasion in the first place. Unaccommodation and the Making of Mountains There is perhaps no question with which mountaineering literature has so relentlessly had to grapple with as that of justification. When old King Lear, himself helplessly exposed to a raging storm on the pitiless heath, sees Poor Tom beside him near-naked and profoundly vulnerable, he is suddenly moved to extremest pity: Thou wert better in thy grave than to answer with thy uncovered body this extremity of the skies. Is man no more than this? […] [T]hou art the thing itself. Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.[i] Poor Tom, with nothing and no one in the world for shelter, and utterly defenceless in the face of an elemental storm, induces a bewildered and aching sympathy in his royal companion. There is something unbearably pitiful about the unaccommodated human being whose only ability is to suffer. He will suffer until he is extinguished, and he will surely be extinguished. Perhaps it were better he were already in his grave. Lear’s contemplation of such a state of man—while he is himself unaccommodated—leads him into what, the play will soon tell us, is a tearing apart of his mind. That way madness lies. To me, there seems to be a curious resonance, here, with the kind of perplexity and disorientation registered by the world that sees mountaineers at their mountaineering. It is almost a foregone conclusion that such a willingness—even desire—to be as unaccommodated as the high-altitude mountaineer on his/her mountain is, must be bordering on madness. Further, that too close a contemplation of the mountaineer’s repeated proximity to the edge of existence can perhaps engender madness. But there are those to whom the question of why they go mountaineering where the levels of risk are high enough to make the exercise seem pointless, is itself pointless. George Mallory’s famous words about Everest, ‘Because it’s there’ (in reply to a newspaper reporter’s question in 1923), variously interpreted as flippant, exasperated, and profound, is nevertheless honest in a way that mountaineers almost a century after find difficult to disavow.[ii] In fact, as David Robertson points out, a lecture Mallory prepared for the Broadhurst Theater on his fundraising tour towards the 1924 Everest expedition has a close and perfectly serious statement not far off being in the same temper. ‘I suppose we go to Mount Everest because—in a word—we can’t help it. Or to state the matter rather differently, because we are mountaineers.’[iii] It is important to note a crucial element betrayed here about the mountaineer’s commitment: he is unaware that by now he can make no distinction between the purpose and the agent. There is no mountaineer unless there is a mountain, but Mallory’s naming of his being a mountaineer as justification for mountaineering suggests the deep and complex engagement of the human agent with that which afforded him that agency. ‘We’ did not become mountaineers overnight. The mountains did that to the men. But now the mountaineers keep going resistlessly back (‘we can’t help it’). And that is how mountains get made. In our day, such an idea can find easy and almost facile confirmation if we look, for instance, at the exponential growth of the tourist industry in higher Nepal (those indigenous to the lands had always lived within striking distance of the peaks, but it was with Western interest in the mountains that mountain-tourism grew in the region), but it is well to remember that Mallory was not the only man unable to tell apart the doer from the deed. Tenzing Norgay, back in Darjeeling after his whirlwind tour overseas following the success of the 1953 Everest expedition, looks at Everest from Tiger Hill in Darjeeling. He recalls pointing out to a group of American ladies long ago, as guides and travellers do even in the present time, the outline of Everest. ‘No, it is not that one,’ he had said. ‘That is Lhotse. Nor that. That is Makalu. It is the other one. The small one.’ This is a true enough statement, as from the south Everest seems unbelievably shy. Yet Norgay reflects on what a strange appellation he had used for the highest mountain on earth: the ‘small one’, he had said. But, he considers, there is also a peculiar aptness to it, ‘for what is Everest without the eye that sees it? It is the hearts of men that make it big or small.’[iv] Deep Play and Unfiltered Experience Anthropologist Sherry Ortner
The Place, Origin and End of My Teaching
Jacques Lacan So far as my place is concerned, things go back to the year 1953. At that time, in psychoanalysis in France, we were in what might be called a moment of crisis. There was talk of setting up an institutional mechanism to settle the future status of psychoanalysts. All accompanied by big election promises. If you go along with Mr So-and-so, we were told, the status of psychoanalysts will quickly be granted all sorts of official sanctions and blessings — especially medical sanctions and blessings, As is the rule with promises of this kind, nothing came of them. And yet something was set up as a result. It so happened that this change did not suit everyone, for extremely contingent reasons. So long as things had not been settled, there could be — were — frictions, what we call conflicts. In the midst of this commotion, I found myself, along with a number of others, on a raft. For ten years, we lived on, well, on whatever came to hand. We weren’t completely without resources, weren’t completely down and out. And in the midst of all that, it so happened that what I had to say about psychoanalysis began to have a certain import. These are not things that happen all by themselves. You can talk about psychoanalysis just like that, bah!, and it is very easy to verify that people do talk about it like that. It is not quite so easy to talk about it every week, making it a rule never to say the same thing twice, and not to say what is already familiar, even though you know that what is already familiar is not exactly unessential. But when what is already familiar seems to you to leave a lot to be desired, seems to you to be based on a false premise, then it has very different repercussions. Everyone thinks they have an adequate idea of what psychoanalysis is. The unconscious . . . well. . . it’s the unconscious.’ Nowadays, everyone knows there is such a thing as an unconscious. There are no more problems, no more objections, no more obstacles. But what is this unconscious? We’ve always known about the unconscious. Of course there are lots of things that are unconscious, and of course everyone has been talking about them for a long time in philosophy. But in psychoanalysis, the unconscious is an unconscious that thinks hard. It’s crazy, what can be dreamed up in that unconscious. Thoughts, they say, Just a minute, just a minute. ‘If they are thoughts, it can’t be unconscious. The moment the unconscious begins to think, it thinks that it’s thinking. Thought is transparent to itself; you can’t think without knowing you are thinking.’ Of course, that objection no longer carries any weight at all. Not that anyone has any real idea of what is refutable about it. It seems refutable, but it is irrefutable. And that is precisely what the unconscious is. It’s a fact, a new fact. We have to begin to think up something that can explain it, can explain why there are such things as unconscious thoughts. It’s not self-evident. No one has in fact got down to doing that, and yet it is an eminently philosophical question. ———————————— I will tell you from the outset that that is not how I set about it. It so happens that the way I did set about it easily refutes that objection, but it is no longer really an objection because everyone now is absolutely convinced on that point. Well then, the unconscious has been accepted, but there again we think that a lot of other things have been accepted – pre-packaged and just as they come — and the outcome is that everyone thinks they know what psychoanalysis is, apart from psychoanalysts, and that really is worrying. They are the only ones not to know. It’s not only that they do not know; up to a point, that is quite reassuring. If they thought they knew straightaway, just like that, matters would be serious and there would be no more psychoanalysis at all. Ultimately, everyone is in agreement. Psychoanalysis? The matter is closed. But it can’t be for psychoanalysts. And this is where things begin to get interesting. There are two ways of proceeding in such cases. The first is to try to be as with it as possible, and to call it into question. An operation, an experience, a technique about which the technicians are forced to admit that they have nothing to say when it comes to what is most central, most essential — now, that would be something to see, wouldn’t it! That might stir up a lot of sympathy because there are, after all, a lot of things to do with our common fate that are like that, and they are precisely the things psychoanalysis is interested in. The only problem is that, well, psychoanalysts have, as fate would have it, always adopted the opposite attitude. They do not say that they know in so many words, but they imply that they do. cWe know a bit about it, but let’s keep quiet about that. Let’s keep it between ourselves.’ We enter this field of knowledge by way of a unique experience that consists, quite simply, in being psychoanalysed. After that, you can talk. Being able to talk does not mean that you do talk. You could. You could if you wanted to, and you would want to if you were talking to people like us, people who are in the know, but what’s the point? And so we remain silent with those who do know and with those who don’t know, because those who don’t know can’t know. After all, it is a tenable position. They adopt it, so that proves it’s tenable. Even so, it’s not to everyone’s liking. And that means that, somewhere, the psychoanalyst has a weak spot, you know. A very big
Academia and the Political
A Conversation between Prasanta Chakravarty and Pothik Ghosh Institutions and Their Sites Prasanta: Over the past few years there has been a steady shift in the way the academic world is being reorganised and engineered in India. If the break-up of the USSR and the fall of the Berlin Wall gave an impetus to the initial set of policy shifts in the early nineties, the UPA II has been far more ruthless and clinical in its push and success for a set of reforms in the educational sector that is in consonance with larger social changes we witness. The public relations have been quite effective on the face of it. The middle class too, in some sense, is now ready and bloodthirsty to usher in rank consumerism and globalised politics in education. The economic downturn over the past few years has paradoxically emboldened the government to experiment with further reforms and surveillance. In this context, different kinds of responses are emerging from within the educators and intellectuals themselves. One form of response intrigues me a lot—the response of the responsible institution builder, the one who is inclusive, large hearted and reaches out to various ‘stakeholders’. Pothik: You do, indeed, have very good reasons to be intrigued. But my question is how exactly should one map such responses, both in terms of their symbolic economy, and their articulation within the constitutive political-economic structure of the university as an exclusive and exclusivist site of intellectual production? Don’t you think such responses, which are discursively grounded in liberalism, function more as ideological legitimation for the policy-bound neoliberal offensive on our education system, the higher education system in particular, rather than anything else – namely, a liberal politics to democratise the university? Given the changed character of the conjuncture, is it even possible for such liberal responses to be truly effective with regard to democratisation of the university in any small measure? For, what else can the persistence of liberal politics in a neoliberal conjuncture be save an ideology that legitimises the latter and its attendant state-formation and institutional architecture? The principal question for those interested in resisting such all-out neoliberal attack on the liberal institution of the university, and its humanist ethos, in order to deepen the process of its democratisation, is how to envisage a critical struggle that is simultaneously directed both at the authorities and this petty-bourgeois layer of liberal intermediaries in their myriad variety from among the academic community. Can such a politics be imagined without making problematisation and critique of the bourgeois-liberal conception of academics as an exclusive and exclusivist modality of intellectual production, and university as its constitutive material-institutional site, its integral part? That brings me to your assertion about the middle class being, “in some sense now ready and bloodthirsty to usher in rank consumerism and globalised politics in education”. I do not dispute the correctness of such a statement, and, yet, I tend to think that the way you have framed the problem bespeaks a nostalgic and moral registration of the same. Here I would wish to repeat my earlier concerns in a slightly different register. Is it possible, for instance, to develop an effective and comprehensive critique of the neoliberal commodification of education in terms of education as a right? After all, is not the liberal discourse of rights, on which most current critiques of commodification of education have willy-nilly tended to base themselves, structurally and epochally continuous with the neoliberal discourse and practice of commodification (which ought to be read as marketisation)? I mean what unites the two moments — embedded liberalism of early capitalism and neoliberalism of late capitalism — is epochality of the capitalist structure or logic of commodity fetishism, which includes as much the commodity fetish as the fetish character of the socio-economic relations that are its constitutively objective condition of possibility. To the extent that differential inclusion is the conceptual and structural presupposition for the discourse and practice of the politics of rights, such politics is nothing but the concrete expression and reproduction of the fetish character of social relations. That, in other words, is the capitalist specificity of power relations — the socially mediated nature of power. Don’t you think the institutionalised system of education in general, and the institutionalised system of higher education in particular, has, right from its inception, been integral to the segmentation of labour-power and labour market, and thus the stratification of the entire formation of production and socialisation? Therefore, can a struggle against the neoliberal reorganisation of our education system, the university particularly, be truly effective unless it becomes constellationally integral to a larger radical movement that seeks to decimate the epochal capitalist logic of segmentation of labour-power by confronting that logic in its conjuncturally specific and concrete mediation? Between Democratisation and Negation: Love in the Time of the Public Sphere Prasanta: You have brought up two very specific points of interest. The first is the very definition of a university—which you feel by its very nature is a liberal humanist institution and hence the role of the professors who reach out in order to get into a game of balancing various stakeholders, or ask for time from the parliament and so forth in order to actually fortify liberal democratic structures of governance are actually fulfilling their role at best as social democrats. I can see your critique has a lasting point, for you are seeking a (a) a reconsideration of the institution of university itself and (b) that such institutions and its members, students and functionaries cannot function in void but rather have to relate to material changes that are happening outside of such cocooned world. These are important arguments. To the first—whether a radical critique of the university itself is required is a point that has been thought by a few in different ways. There is one that is currently doing the rounds. It is a further refined way of ushering
Theatre, Number, Event: A Second Appraisal
Prathama Banerjee [ HUG reproduces a second appraisal and an early critique of Soumyabrata Choudhury’s newly published book Theatre, Number, Event: Three Studies on the Relationship between Sovereignty, Power and Truth, IIAS, Delhi, 2013. The writer was a panelist in the recently organised session at C.S.D.S. , New Delhi on the occasion of the release of the book. This is the concluding essay in this series.] ———————————————————— Soumya is a very old friend from my university days, and it is a special feeling to be discussing his book. In that it is indeed a discussion rather than a comprehensive review of the book, and I do not even claim to do justice to the book’s ambitious narrative and unusual analytic frame. Soumya is an extraordinary mind. He is a philosopher, a literature student, a performer, a director of plays, a teacher and now I see also a historian. The book, therefore, like he himself, is a challenge for any friend and comrade, who like me shares his passion for politics and philosophy, but thinks very differently, perhaps even incommensurably. What I shall say by way of discussing the book is then a kind of response to this intimate challenge that Soumya poses before me. First, let me present briefly how I read Soumya’s book. The book is about sovereignty – sovereignty as simultaneously political sovereignty and sovereignty of thought, sovereignty as that of philosophy on the one hand and on the other, of the king/Christ/state and eventually of that impossible, uncountable entity, namely the people. Soumya works through a series of historical moments, though not chronologically (something to which we shall come back later) – 5th century BC Greece with its theatre and its civic assemblies of gods, citizens, faceless slaves and women, 12th century Europe with its notion of Christian theological kingship, 8th-9th century Byzantium with its controversy regarding the question of the icon and the idol and the worship and circulation of the same, 18th century France with its revolution, terror and increasingly medicalised madness, and finally the contemporary with its war on terror and its democratic revolutions. Soumya’s project is to tease out histories of the constitution of sovereign power in this long story of Europe (and he shall argue the world). Soumya implies that the history of sovereignty is produced at two levels – one, as the story of the sovereign as a figure and two, as the question of the ground, the basis, the founding principles of sovereignty. The figures of sovereignty as they appear in history, and yet fail to acquire full presence and stability (which is what the whole story is about), are the Greek gods with their strategic intelligence and liturgical role, the consecrated Christian king backed by the notion of eucharist transformation that transubstantiates the inscrutable idea of divinity into flesh, and the post-revolutionary republican people, counted as a disassembled numerical order of populations and while being mobilized as the One, the singular Nation. The ground of sovereignty on its part appears in two senses. One as jurisdiction – of law, administration and taxation – that appear through history as fisc and empire and patrie, in different ways assigning a territoriality, a world-extension to sovereignty itself. The ground also appears as the ground of thinking the power of the universal, which in the history of Europe appear as philosophy and theology and in modern times, mathematics. Through what Soumya calls a ‘commensuration’ of the figure and the ground, the book goes on to show that the ground of thought is also the ground of sovereignty, the ground which underpins the exercise of both power and truth. Soumya’s story is full of fascinating moments – as when he demonstrates that the imperative of governmentality is as old as and indeed part of the imperative of sovereignty; or when he lays out the long history of tithes and taxes in Europe as a dialectic between the debt to and debt of the sovereign; or when he excavates an older history of the economy as a domain of regulation mapped by the circulation of Christian icons, making the economy into God’s worldly plan for the salvation of mankind. We do not have time here to dwell on these details, though each of these by itself can be major point of discussion. I shall only mention here that in Soumya’s imagination, all these discrete moments make up what he calls an ‘inconsistent’ history of sovereign power, i.e. a history without unity or necessity. This means, in my understanding, that no straight-forward chronological or successional history is possible for sovereignty, precisely because the career of sovereignty is also repeatedly a history of its siege, its failure, its dysfunctionality – the manifestation of the groundlessness, the voiding of sovereignty, despite its cunning, its ruses and indeed its claim to truths. In that sense, despite its historicity, sovereignty, at different times must be set up anew, following its own failure. The place of the French Revolution in the book is precisely to show up such a moment of the failure of sovereign power and of the difficult search for a new ground and a new figure of sovereignty, namely the people. As Soumya shows through his reading of Michelet’s history of the French revolution, it is not as if forms of sovereignty, power and truth make successive paradigm shifts in a long history of political society, but that everything must be recommenced, the present reinvented every time, by rewriting once again its past and its future, following upon the defaulting of an earlier form of sovereign presence. Soumya’s account of the career of sovereignty is persuasive in its own terms, but in my eyes, the account comes up against a critical unresolved question – namely, the question of the relationship between history and philosophy. Soumya imagines this relationship as a kind mismatch – sometimes there is the glimpse of geological metaphors, a faultine, an abyss – between the metaphysics of truth and the structure of possible actualisations of power, between the philosophical