[Reader-list] IFS-2nd Posting BEFORE HISTORY & THEORY : POLITICAL PORNOGRAPHY OF THE PERSON

[ARNAB CHATTERJEE]

Dear List Readers,
       	 I've already said  my agenda is to resolve
the private/public dilemma by introducing  the
personal as a separatist third not to be subsumed
under the private rubric. This specific SARAI project
term of mine is organized around how personalist
social work vis-à-vis public mediations in the context
of Calcutta’s 19th century urban history achieve this
aim. For that what I need to do is to historically
recover, theoretically establish, culturally debate 
and politically deploy the personal in order to fix it
as a category. And subsequent to my first posting
expectations could be rife that I might just begin
with the suppressed history of the personal. But in
order to be accompanied by  the readers in this
narrative journey, I’ll take a different route. I’ll
start with that part wherefrom I started traveling
towards such a thesis. This will be concurrent also
with SARAI-CSDS’s archival aim which intends to
know—and quite justifiably—the raw materials which
went into  conceiving the project. But curiously, this
proposal had come down to me as a methodological
objection and suggestion by one of my very famous
teachers. Partha Chatterjee—at least a year ago- had
raised an interesting objection to this endeavour; his
argument was (synoptically) this, " I agree with the
basic thesis of what you are saying but not the way
you go about  it. It seems you've already made this
distinction and then have gone outside to seek
support. It is better to show discursively how you've
arrived at the distinction and then posit a historical
and a theoretical project for the same -that will
become more plausible." Now, I disagreed with this to
the extent how much of this objection could be
generalized. Recall for instance-- there have had been
historians and theoreticians of the public/private
divide; has it been incumbent upon them to present a
narrative of how the dichotomy was real and how they
arrived at it?  If not then why? One might answer that
that is because the public/private divide is real and
operative, it is not a matter of simple heuristic
construction. Feminists will go further and argue that
women live this ( real)  divide in their lives and it
is also a construction and since the construction is
gendered , they need to unpack it. ( They want to have
it both ways). But in the same manner it is possible
to show that the personal, even though it is mixed up
with the private, is delicately real and even in its
mistaken contours and make-up,  is recognizable. The
personal therefore –like statistics is demonstrated by
the example of “a bikini: what it shows is suggestive,
but what it hides, is vital”.  It stands to decry and
render redundant  a narrative of discovery. ( And
after all there are internal realist arguments as
well). 
      But to tell you the truth, I could not buy my
own  argument.  My  pessimism of the will won. And
now—after a year or so--, I’m convinced, it is better
to take your audience through your struggle and
failings, smelling and hints, and through this detour
they come to appreciate your project better than
usual. This has now become my standard approach. And I
urge you to experiment with this method: show how you
teased an idea  out of a thought before you go on with
your secondary rambling.
      It was in 1999 when I was asked by Anirban
Chattopadhyaya-the edit page editor of Anandabazaar
Patrika—to write an article on a bizarre incident
which involved the arrest of one Samit Khemka for
running a hate site which had heaped severe ‘personal
attacks’ on none other than Jyoti Basu—the then chief
minister of West Bengal.   Subsequent to 15 July, 1999
I pursued this theme for a number of years  to come to
a significant conclusion :  Personal attacks are not
always an assault on our privacy; they may be directed
to a person—and in this sense –personal but different
from an attack on one’s  privacy as such. The catch
lies in that a semblance is always   given as if it is
just that.; it is not. But these claims and counter
claims  gain legibility against a background of more
crucial assumptions. The personal has to be purged off
in order to emerge in an impersonal, public sphere;
instead of personality based politics we need to
pursue a principled, issue based politics.  Now,
having examined	these basic premises ( where my
inferences are just the reverse) I specifically pick
up the question of personal attacks to show
that—having settled preliminaries-- it enters a
dangerous domain which have been called the ‘politics
of dirty hands’, ‘pure politics’, or a kind of
political pornography. It brings into visibility more
than that is visible; and therefore it is obscene.
This is not a matter of justifying invective ridden
speech but to show how the personal register runs riot
in our everyday life  and we are unable often to speak
about it. It floods the gates of the private and
public and you are kept on as trembling before the
real. To simplify and to begin let me refer to a
recent interview given by Amit Kumar—the  singer who
has lost. His interlocutor asked, “what went wrong
Amit?” Somewhat ponderously Amit Kumar remarked,
“nothing, now I repent,  with Music I should have
learnt a bit of politics too.” Having had been a
victim to attacks and tricks directed against his own
person and which has finally won him over to defeat
him, Amit repents his ignorance of  the techniques to
repel them. Alas it is too late. But not for us since
we would like to know  what is at stake. ( The word
real-politick let me tell you is a tabloid rubbish and
means nothing.) Amit could have named a few persons.
But as I told you giving names to  persons or things
beyond a threshold is pornography. And this is the
reason why Irving Kristol in his REFLECTIONS OF A
NEO-CONSERVATIVE called Machiavelli a ‘political
pornographer’( the consequences of such a calling I
examine in the last part of the text); Derrida called
Kant a ‘categorical pornographer’ ( one who had
regulated a universal imperative without exceptions—a
sadist command as if). I’m sure that such uses would
not be addressed and covered by the usual feminist
overtures regarding what they understand by
pornography, and therefore any complaints ( if any)
about my deployment of pornography,  as will be
understood, would  be  miserably based on an
incompetence to understand the basic categories that
are called for.  


YOUR TEARS ARE NOT POLITICAL, THEY ARE REAL
WATER—ADRIENNE REACH

ABSTRACT : Previously I’ve  charted the personal as an
unstable, dangerously indeterminate compared to
private or public which are legal-juridical categories
and have stable indicators. Here is an instance where
a demonstrative proof of this takes place. We know
that personal contamination is to be expelled; why? Is
it to stabilize  behavioral expectations ? How does
this take place? Is it at all successful? If  not why?
This contamination reaches its summit in what has been
called personal attacks. The central question in this
context is,  are personal attacks always an attack
upon a person’s privacy? If not then there are grounds
to suspect that the personal and the private meet and
argue at the site which is also  the agency of a
person. Secondly, the dangerously indeterminate and
unpredictable calculus of a person which plays upon
the private and the public through deception,
treachery, lies and back stabbing also shows how the
person and the personal emerges radically free from
the stabilizing constraints of behavioral expectations
that emerge out of  the generalizing  potentials of
public or private law: we’ve arrived at the person and
his political phenomenology—the way we experience the
political: I’ll use a simpler shorthand here—political
pornography. How does it implicate the private and the
public --now trembling before the personal to generate
a conclusion? Below I’ll try to engage with some of
these questions.


INTRODUCTON 

By stating the political  we  stand to approach the
question of the personal through the disciplinary
deployment  of  the former.  To go on with this I
first examine the  personally oriented politics as
against an impersonal issue based, principled politics
followed by that very famous register –and  that which
is  absolutely relevant and rehearsed in eternal
negativity -- is the notion of personal attacks 
condemned in the wake of an impersonal, objective,
issue based politics ( the question of civility added
to it) which  could be found to have been neatly
tailored to ground the public or public sphere in
terms of public reason and so on. And the temptation 
is understandable in as much as politics in modernity
with its concomitant notion of rights, public opinion
and  rational will formation  imagines to purge the
public, in order to refine it only,  of all personal
investments. Here we have apparently the classical
Weberian paradigm to guide us ; further and later it
was Habermas who refined these arguments at the level
of language by rooting this metaphor in a form of
systematically undistorted communicative practice. It
is with Habermas that we have the normative turn given
to  political modernity or in the words of Luhmann
what Habermas did was to show that all rational
considerations may be shown to have had a normative
content. In later chapters I shall show that the
undertaking to institute modernity in the colonies
exhibit much against their intentions the
personal-particular core in  the public-universal
garb. The present exercise will preface this moment in
a significant manner.
	 

(I)
 
PERSONAL IN POLITICS : FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF
DISCIPLINARY POLITICAL SCIENCE

The best description of modernity in terms of politics
is available in Max Weber through the paradigmatic
ruse of "political activity under Protestantism"
(Owen, p.118). With tradition, charisma and affective
forms of patrimonial monarchies ( Sultanism for
example) receding to the background, what emerged
is--to borrow Owen's brilliant capsule, " the
impersonal rationalisation  of the social organisation
[providing] an impetus towards the regulation of all
public spheres of life on the basis of formal legal
norms" [or "legal rationalism on the basis of a
contractarian conception of natural law"], and
secondly, "the maximisation of the utility of worldly
resources [requiring]  the facilitation of rational
activity in all the life-spheres which entails a
conception of the state  as providing the conditions 
of activity but not interfering in this activity" [ or
"liberalism"] . The maintenance of this regime is
ensured by a strict separation of the public and
private spheres where personal is an obvious symmetry
of the private. Even public communicative reason is
made up by, theoretically viewed,  private persons
transcending personal considerations. Now, shifting
the burden of this tangle  to the domain of
discussion, we see how persuasion or political
rhetoric is encouraged to become --in this discourse
--ostensibly--shorn of all personal benefits and
burden, personal mention and personal attacks through
our advocacy of principled politics
             

1.1 PERSONALITY BASED POLITICS VS. PRINCIPLED
POLITICS: A HISTORIC-THEORETIC VIEW 

         Before we start to address principled
politics, let us try to inquire what do we mean by
‘principles’. A strong and interesting formulation is
found in Kant where principles are outlined as ‘the
subjective formal condition of judgement in general’ 
meaning “the laws by which judgement judges itself”
and which “ become principles through which it” [i.e.
judgement] “discriminates between the conflicting
claims of history.”  To reckon with this legal
metaphor is to consent to Kant seeking  “the discovery
of a principle through an analysis of the tradition of
judgements and the constitution of a system of
judgements from a principle”  In short, if we adopt
Kant for the moment, a principle is that which enables
us to judge a judgment and by which the judgment
judges itself.
Taking cue from this, it may wisely be argued that a
principled politics is that kind of politics which
denies to compromise or undermine its founding
principles which is evidently not  compatible with the
culture of reaching  compromises—thus is absolutely
not in harmony with what we call democracy. It may 
further be  argued that an issue based principled
politics would be that which considers political wants
according to universalizable or widely shared ultimate
considerations which - in turn, would cater to public
interest rather than  personal interests.  This would
require making large assumptions rather than local or
individual ones which in some sense is comical 
because  moral principles in contrast  to ethical ones
emerge not from individual standpoints and are urged
to be universalized. Ethical standpoints suit them to
particular life projects but are also  susceptible to
pragmatic questions. The classic discussion opposed to
 this speaks about something called mediate political
principles which are open and subject to personal
adoption and rejection, i.e. they have the capacity of
becoming my principles or your principles.  (However, 
principle based politics  in a capitalist political
culture is but expected to serve in reality privately
oriented wants rather than publicly oriented wants—
not withstanding the fact that  the private
individuals are still within the formation of  the
public. ) But consider this final argument which says
that it would not be unjust to ask somebody his
political principles. Because

“ To ask of someone, ‘‘What are his political
principles?” is not to ask for the irreducible,
ultimate considerations that weigh with him; but to
ask for indications of the line he would take on any
of a great number of possible issues. A difference in
political principles between two people will normally
be open to further argument since each will  be
willing to justify his political principles in terms
of more general considerations. In particular, a
difference in political principles may stem from
differing estimates of the effects  that policies (
nationalization, neutrality) or elements in states of
affairs ( inflation, independence of trade unions)
would have.”    

Therefore  as a starter it may be judged that
principles can be adopted personally and politically
can be productive when asked or examined. Therefore
the  binary that charts principled politics vs.
personal interest based politics is rendered empty.
And even from within the realm of our political
culture, Gandhi, believing in the force of the
exemplary would choose to go without principles. 
--That we shall know does not undermine but transcends
principled politics in unforeseen ways. 

1.2 ISSUES AS STATES OF AFFAIRS: A PERFORMATIVE  VIEW.
 
Having clarified so called ‘principle based politics’,
we may now legitimately ask, what are issues? “Issues
can be understood as states of affairs  where persons
are not used as means.”  Where persons are a means to
promote states of affairs there it can be observed
that “promoting one  state of affairs for the sake of
another, where the second state of affairs is a
special one, it importantly involves the person in
some way and  the value of a person intrinsically
involves states of affairs”.   But the performativity
of this construct would not be as simple as this. It
has also to be examined why particular issues have
been more useful in personality based representative
politics than others. No person can be fully informed
and no one can fully inform as well, we lack an
absolute informant and therefore s/he would lack the
ideal authoritative and normative force of the
hypothetical orator who internalizes issues and draws
neutrality from the depths of within. This begs the
question: would  s/he be neutral towards issues also?
What would it mean to be personally oriented towards
issues or impersonally oriented? To be impersonally
oriented towards issues would be to step back from the
point of view we occupy as persons and critically
reflect upon them (“ reflect on lives and our
selves”). But “our attempts to design vantage points
outside of us spring from our distinctive capacity as
persons for self-reflection and from a desire to move
beyond the limitations that come with occupying a
particular point of view.”  In this sense it could
equally be argued that  the impersonal is perhaps the
second personal of the first person. And with such a
self distancing self interest is best pursued. Briefly
put, remember that the philosophy of language  debates
 on sense and reference raised the question: do  I
refer to myself when I sign? Likewise, is it possible
for me to go against  myself? “We can neither be laid
low by our own cutting remarks about ourselves nor be
buoyed by the thought that at least we care for
ourselves.”  Darwall makes the point that one can 
adopt an impersonal concern to promote one’s own self
interest.  Self interest maximization is not possible
when one is so passionately engaged with one’s own
self without a distance that it  results  in the 
standpoint being consumed. Therefore the easy
dichotomy that posits issues as impersonal concern of
the agent and vouches for objectivity as neutrality
rarely stands rigorous examination. 

        
          				 II
2.1 POLITICAL RHETORIC AND THE PERSONAL : PERSONAL
VIRUS AND THE HEALTH OF DIALOGUE IN POLITICS.

While inspecting the personal in the discourses of
politics, we have addressed ourselves to  a personal
orientation to politics as against principled politics
or issue based, impersonal politics where issues are
understood as states of affairs. Subsequent to the
completion of examining the  objection which
prioritizes a principled, “issue based politics” over
personal issues and personal attack based politics, we
must reckon with the fact that it  also invokes and 
locates the personal at the level of rhetoric and
states--  political rhetoric unless healthy and
respects the other participant, violates the rules of
debate and deliberation. It entails  albeit implicitly
that democracy being a procedure to peacefully and
procedurally disagree, personal attacks imply more
than disagreement: by trying to impeach the
credibility of a democratic witness, it denigrates
democracy itself, because what is democracy if not its
culture! Let us see whether this argument stands the
test of scrutiny. Also note we are entering,
discretely though, the slippery terrain of  personal
attacks and politics.
                                                      
                                   
2.2 DISAGREEMENT ( DEMOCRACY) AND THE QUESTION OF
CULTURE.
                             
 The question could be rephrased thus:   -- in a
democracy  which intends to be— “ deliberative” in
nature i.e. wants to see the major issues that have
consequences for the public settled by free and
rational deliberation of all concerned, could
political invectives at all be  productive? This is
the question.
 Let us try in brief to examine the theoretical
problems involved. The claim is of course made firstly
(and perhaps lastly) from the stand point of 
civility.  And a certain reference to the norms of
deliberation in a ripening, “developing” democracy is
often made too. But is it possible to sustain such a
claim? For this it will suffice to review the position
espoused by Gary Shiffman  where he forcefully argues
and with much justification that consensus seeking and
civility in constitutional debate cannot be obtained
at the same time. He concludes  that 

“would be-arbiters of  public deliberation like Rawls,
who simultaneously insist on consensus seeking and
civility in constitutional debate, cannot have it both
ways. They can-—and should—endorse a norm of consensus
to govern constitutional deliberation, but must also
not insist that such deliberations be conducted
according to norms of civility. Serious public debate
of constitutional questions necessarily runs the risk
of rhetorical vehemence, of mutual castigation by
adversaries. Demanding pursuit of consensus while
hewing to civil comportment amounts to insisting on
two incompatible norms at once, consensus and
dissensus.”  

And now perhaps we are convinced about the legitimacy
of the  formulation for nation states with colonial
histories-- that civility is the stuff of modernity;
disagreement is the stuff of democracy. Given the
hiatus and the bastardization of apposite growth of
these two entities historically noticeable in
postcolonial societies like India, they  are not
compatible in a foundational sense. Therefore for an
Indian case the argument for the difference between
modernity and democracy is made at another remove.
Here both modernity and democracy are imputed unlike
the west European cases. ( Or is it possible to read
so much against the grain that democracy can be shown
to have been imputed even in the classical modular
formations?) However, all along, the colonizing logic
or ruse of colonial governance was to bring the native
to some kind of deliberative and decisive competence
for self ownership. Here therefore the deliberative
competence that is often asked for  is seen with some
justifiable and historically evolved suspicion. This
is not unfounded.. The communicative competence to
insert civility into political questions would have to
undergo perhaps for always a hermeneutics of
suspicion. This historically correct caveat would
precede any requirement for an  impersonal civility to
be instituted through  impersonation and smuggled to
the domain of  democracy.
	That is again enough to give debates particularly
among political executives in the Indian democracy on
constitutional questions a specific and undecidable
turn eternally subject to the contingencies of local
party politics and the decisive imagination of
professional  politicians; same applies for complaints
against misbehavior. Incivility can then feature only
as a political question and as a kind of original
contamination felt by constitutional questions.
Byaktigat or personal inscribed within the norms of
bhodrotabidhi or norms of civility is very differently
political here. And this difference can be
historically recovered when the moment we push the
question of personal attacks to higher degrees:
political pornography where the political and the
erotic interrupt each other at the moment  when power
erupts and corrupts even the absolute. 

2.4 PERSONAL ATTACKS TO HATE SPEECH : THE EMERGENT
TOPOS OF  POLITICAL PORNOGRAPHY IN INDIA
             

                 Or otherwise how do we reckon with 
the hatching of a political pornography-the
theorization of which is derivatively derived from
porno-theorists ? ( Sometimes called low life
litterateurs of the French Revolution and  excavated
by  Low Literature Historians like Darnton. )
Researches reveal that intense personal-political
attacks based on pornographic ‘scatalogical imagery’
in pamphlets performed a historical and revolutionary
role    against Marie Antoinette during the late
eighteenth century; while the Bourbon Kings--Louis XV
was dubbed as sexually promiscuous - libertine,
pornographic pictures of Louis XVI  were circulated
among the population showing him as impotent. These,
according to an author, went on to “discredit the
monarchy as an institution and to desacralize the
King’s body...the aristocracy, and clergy.”  To
instantiate the emergence of political pornography in
India, one such essay by the anthropologist Lawrence
Cohen titled ‘Holi in Banaras and the Mahaland of
Modernity’.  could be considered in which Cohen
documents an interesting cartoon among numerous  
others  showing a man labeled as the sikhandin janata
(meaning eunuch or helpless people) having in his
mouth the member  of a man with a politician’s
congress cap ( labeled as the  ‘gandu neta’) while
being sodomised by a man standing behind in police
uniform (with the label  ‘jhandu police’) The
circulation of these thin booklets particularly during
the immensely popular holi festival in Benaras
exhibits its incorporation within the ritual paradigm
of festivity and the element of obscenity, -that is
well taken. But what is remarkable about these are –
the common motif of condemnation  where the victim is
the member of the ordinary public, and which overrides
all party lines. The assaultive speech debate is taken
a step further by this. Should usual feminist
condemnations and critiques  of pornography be applied
on these? And could they be successful? I have grave
doubts. Well then the way these have been received in 
the Indian case tersely is hereby available  by the
well known political commentator A.G. Noorani. 

“Foul language is the jargon of fascists who detest
free debate. ..True enough that sheer abuse or racial
or communal libel is not permissible. The true test is
whether the speech is a real provocation to violence.
The sensitivities of the listeners are relevant only
in this context. As the supreme court of India has
ruled, it is the duty of the state to uphold the
exercise of the right to free speech and to suppress
violence intended to stifle it.” 

But as we have noticed, abuses at times have been
deployed as opinion; but even opinions loose their
immunity, if we agree with Noorani, when the
circumstances in which they are expressed are such as
to constitute their expression a positive instigation
to some mischievous act or violence. This as we could 
see  – is totally in agreement with the classical
liberal formulation of John Stuart Mill; who outlines
a grave example.

“An opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the
poor, or that private property is robbery, ought to be
unmolested when simply circulated through the Press,
but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally
to an excited mob, assembled before the house of a
corn-dealer”.  

Only sheer propositional, issue based statements are
not enough, they should not be delivered before a corn
dealers house: i.e. much will depend on the mediation
that will render it objective, harmless without a
bite.  An aesthetics of reception will matter more
than its production.
There we have the abusive or assaultive paradigm in
some other form  (excitable speech:  to use the proper
word). To answer the contemporary as well as the
classical tenet of non-violent speech advanced here as
permissible, we could  take recourse to another
thinker when he was commenting on the impossibility of
deriving the right to kill the vanquished from the
state of war; there he concedes that “Men living in
their primitive conditions of independence have no
intercourse regular enough to constitute either a
state of peace or a state of war; and men are not
naturally enemies. It is conflicts over things, not
quarrels between (men)  which constitute war, and the
state of war cannot arise from mere personal
relations, but from property relations”.  An extension
of this Rousseauistic finding will lay to rest any
theory formulating violence as aberration or
disturbance as ‘injury by design’, since the state of
peace can similarly be construed as imputed from the
outside, or having been imposed  - resembling an
aberration.  Even this second  is also available in
Rousseau, “What do people gain if their very
conditions of Civil tranquility is one of their
hardships? There is peace in dungeons, but is that
enough to make dungeons desirable?”  From this we
could argue that, in the wake of “personal attacks”
being understood as a generic speech figure and 
articulated as disturber of peace, it urges us to look
at the varieties of peace available in the political
market.


					III.

 “PERSONAL ATTACKS” AS ITEMIZED WITHIN A PURE
POLITICAL IMAGINARY

Let us have a quick recap before we enter armed by
political pornography into the domain of pure
politics—which is just another name for the same .
Having explored the  concrete counter discourse whose
registers of complaint are--1) personal attacks push
out issue based, public interest related impersonal
discourse of ‘principled governance’, development and
administration. 2) Byaktigat arowp pollutes  a
democratic political and a growing, albeit good civic
culture. It was revealed among other things that in a
moribund capitalist political culture the so called
impersonal issues are in the end used to serve grand
private interests. And philosophically it was shown
that an impersonal or critical self distance is best
tailored to serve  private self interests. Now in such
a context where the personal-political subverts and
transcends the public-universal garb, it is often that
personal attacks try, with or without success to
pierce this silencing, civil veil and address  the
illegitimate. And for the second objection 2) it was
easily concluded  that the notion of civility in India
today is a matter of political sphere and not at all
of civil society, therefore an advice of civility has
to be politically negotiated than received as
‘unmediated’ discourse on civic virtues. In short,
civility and violent disagreement could never go
together. How  peace and civility could be seen as
being complicitious with an “un”fairly ( I’m
remembering Rawls here) unjust system was also
examined in the wake of the phenomenon of agreement 
with approved ways of protest. While we do a lot of
lip service against violence, let us not forget to
examine peace too. This paper in  the wake of so
called “personal attacks” proposes  a theory ( or
theories?) of peace while declaring that vulgar,
obscene issues at the level of the personal could not
be handled by the disciplinary study of political
science. It is the stuff of what some folks in the
west have thinly called “the politics of dirty hands”
and what we call “pure politics”. 

                 
While the legal juridical discourse and the
bureaucratic-administrative apparatus do administer
various  applied notions of the person, public or
private, the political deployments of such categories
–that  too with the cultural unconscious in action
–would be fluid, strategic and success oriented: The
question of distant, objective, impersonal reflection
on value-neutral questions and disagreement in both
politics and culture are always already delivered to
be governed by  practical political imperatives—at
least in India- whether it entails  instances of
political deliberation or cultural expectancy. (And
normative deliberation can be practiced only when it
is freed from empirico-practical and
practical-political considerations.)
                   Now, to subject everything to the
practical and eternally immediate as well as deferred
exigencies of party politics, we approach what I’ll
call a pure political imaginary of the person: this
cannot be restricted to the mere “publicalization” of
private problems. ( I use pure in the sense where an
object’s  form and content cannot be distinguished and
imaginary in its now established usage as “not a set
of ideas; rather
what enables,, through making sense
of, the practices of a society” .) Contextually, a
political scientist commenting on violence and its
relation to Sadat Hasan Manto notes, 

“Manto’s uniqueness lies in the fact that he refused
to accept the parameters of either ethics or economy
in talking about the violence of 1947. He had no
recourse to a morality that was given to him either by
god or by transcendental reason. Nor would he allow 
himself to be seduced by the economic calculations of
governmental violence. For him, the violence of
partition called for a response that was, if I may put
it this way, an act of pure politics, where morality
and economy had to be created all at once, all by
oneself, de novo, from the bare elements of human
interaction.” 

 This I think is a Machiavellian moment . The moment
has approached all politics—slowly but decisively. 
And  to address this question of the Machiavellian
moment where the content of the experience and the
experience cannot be distinguished, we need a
political phenomenology. To exemplify such a
phenomenology, to capture this moment and illustrate
what is pure politics, here is  an example; better
said, here is a narrative and a figuration. I quote
parts of  the news report which appeared in The
Statesman on 4 Feb. 2000. “Bhubaneshwar, Feb.3.- Mr
Navin Patnaik today expelled BJD political affairs
committee chairman, Mr Bijoy Mohapatra from the party.
He also snatched Mr Mohapatra’s  Assembly nomination
and gave the ticket to a local journalist instead. Mr
Mohapatra was left too stunned to react. All he could
say was he had been back stabbed. BJD leaders and
workers were outraged. Mr Patnaik’s completely
unexpected move was described state wide as
“treacherous”. 
The move that removed the ground from
under Mr Mohapatra’s feet was obviously planned
meticulously and timed brilliantly by Mr Patnaik. The
rebel leader with whom Mr Patnaik  had ostensibly
signed a truce, was sacked and debarred from the polls
at the eleventh hour
.too late for Mr Mohapatra  to
file papers as an Independent, and the outwitted 
rebel had no choice but to watch helplessly... No one
could read the BJD chief’s mind. Mr Mohapatra had been
the party’s key negotiator during the tortuous seat
sharing talks with the BJP. He had had a major role in
selecting candidates for various seats. Even Congress
and BJP circles who consider Mr Mohapatra as the lone
political leader of mettle and strategist in the BJP,
were taken aback”. 
With all italics mine, what kind of political science,
political sociology would explain this enchantment?
All such disciplinary categories as civil society,
political society, family and the State just vanish
into thin air before this. Because we all have had
such moments in our lives but rarely have felt that
those narratives would be included in  political
science textbooks. Those losses were ours and they
will remain ours, those secrets will die with us lest
mentioning them would amount to “personally attacking”
 some nice people. ‘Too stunned to react’ is an
adequate description because reaction could  be a
meditation on a prior act. Here is an action without a
reaction. In the disciplinary study of politics and
criminal offence stabbing being a metonymy of murder 
and violence has often been mentioned or studied;
where do we get to know what is ‘back stabbing’? The
third phrase  in italics is  ‘timed brilliantly.’ What
does this mean? Is this football or cricket? It is
more dangerous than both. Punctuality is to go 
according to other’s time. Passive timing. Timing in
politics is the dominative monitoring of others
according to one’s own time where he himself is the
frame of reference. Active timing. I’m waiting for the
right moment to teach you a lesson, I know it, you 
don’t, I’m waiting for you to  enter my duration. Here
time is a trap and emerging as a “means of
orientation”   is destructive of other’s time: the
space in which the victim thrived and swam along his
moments. So I ‘ostensibly sign.. a truce’, give him a
show of importance to mislead him and then ‘remove 
the ground from under’ his ‘feet’. Notice the word
truce: a signifier of peace and how it has been
deployed. When we were dealing with speech generating
violence, this is the point we wanted to argue: let us
look at the varieties of peace and how they are being
used for what purposes. Truce used to back stab? -Here
is the moment. 
                                Where do we end then?
What is the use of studying this phenomenon called
personal attacks? ( Someday with the liberal noose
tightening around our necks,  we may be able to invent
separate names for them.)We shall be stunned when we
are cheated, betrayed, fired, suppressed, deprived,
raped or  murdered. ( and be ‘too stunned to react’)
Those are the moments when we shall feel the hand of
politics on our back, but nothing will save us, no
category; they will be moments of pure experience. The
politics of dirty hands will cleanse everything,
remaining residually and strictly alive on the
borderlines of our everyday being. We might feel
exploited but that will remain only as a moral
feeling, because the apparatus required to structure
the feeling has been  slowly but evenly
de-contextualised:  the state socialist project was 
criticized as being one of the most ruthless regime of
techno-scientific, objective, impersonal, 
instrumental rationality where human beings without a
personal touch were simply lost in loveless ness. The
grand narrative of only liberal capitalism ought to be
 alive; the death of the  revolutionary grand
narrative thereby has  been conveniently announced:
fine! The theoretician of pure politics will argue,
with the death of grand narratives, let us start
talking about each other’s sexual lives then! No? Why?
Embarrassed? How? Because to pure politics - the
fragment or the micro-local is not a metaphor of
place; for him, the fragment is that what you resist
from being publicized, that what you want to repress
and hide. Then - abandoning grand  investigations  we
need to undertake studies of  the  micro politics of
dirty hands: office politics, the politics within a
feminist group, or  how does the cunning mediocre
rule? How do we read the narrative of manipulation
between two singer sisters in the film Saz? Why before
a one month ( extendable) contract, all laws of sexual
harassment fail? Why nobody in Bollywood talk about
the casting couch? “Power thus relies on an obscene
supplement – that is to say, the obscene nightly law
(superego) necessarily accompanies, as its shadowy
double, the ‘public law’. 
Obscene unwritten rules
sustain Power as long as they remain in the shadows;
the moment they are publicly recognized, the edifice
of Power is thrown into disarray.”  Pure politics
deals with this obscene underside of public law and
for it personal attacks are the primary raw materials.
We need to have then narratives of manipulations,
machinations, intrigues and malice---more sinister,
more ghostly than violence causing speech: here is
Kant, “He who openly declares himself an enemy can be
relied upon, but the treachery of secret malice, if it
became universal, would mean the end of all
confidence. This type of wickedness is more detestable
than violence;”  In this context, it  would be
interesting to  investigate in future the role of
excitable speech in legitimate forms of violence
including the declaration of war or torture in police 
custody. Have they been products of violent Speech?
And for those idiots who are in the habit of repeating
‘personal is political’ let me remind them we need to
repeat it  with caution—since  I believe -  everything
that is personal is not always political. A genuinely
personal, in the absence of a private language, cannot
be communicated. But still this experience could be
narrated. And that is the stuff of pure politics.

CONCLUSION: If you’ve been this far with me; what does
it seem? Now please do not be mistaken about the fact
that I’m engaged in that childish tryst to justify the
personal through personal attacks. Not really! They
can be feigned, they can be staged and they might just
be deployed to override the propositional form of
public reasoning. It can be used as a convenient form
of silencing.  My argument is not at all this. I was
just trying to show personal attacks did reveal to me
the overriding nature of the personal over the public
and the private. It helped me arrive at the
examination of the public nature of political
modernity itself. And the moment I ventured  into so
called ‘political pornography’ dangerous vistas
appeared. 
        
             How do we conclude then? The personal to
impersonal transit in modernity   proposed by Weber
undergoes an abortion  because of an illegitimate
marriage between Nietzsche and Machiavelli ? Or to put
more sharply, Weber destroyed by Nietzsche? Does the
text comment on the theory of modernity which harps
again and again on the private/public division wanting
to forget that a person and his personal  is capable
of playing with both? But Weber was not so naïve;  in
the wake of the scienticization of the public sphere,
he did see a withering away of the value- ideals with
rational scientific activity failing to fill the lack
of  what it has destroyed. What Nietzsche showed was
that these values, considered genealogically, could be
shown to have been inconsistent: altruism for
weakness, honeyed  words for wickedness. What
Machiavelli did was to re-state these facts as values:
destroy them who have helped you; wear a mask and
people  being always impressed by the superficial
appearance of things will rarely know what you really
are and such others. This was unnecessary since we
already live in the world of those facts. People
misunderstand Machiavelli by alleging that he had
documented anti-values wanting to regulate them as
‘virtues’; but this is mistaken: he was involved in an
impossible project where facts and values suffer a
reversal. But this is unnecessary and excessive, in
brief—giving names to things and persons beyond the
empirical threshold and thus pornographic. Irving
Kristol sensed it quite well but  touched the wrong
places when he called him a political pornographer.(
And Machiavelli having not had access to our modernity
addressed himself to the person of the sovereign— this
should be remembered well and all the time. The deeply
debated distinction between facticity and validity or
between facts and norms was not available to
Machiavelli in the contemporary sense. Nevertheless
one finds Althusser in his book on Machiavelli rightly
celebrating him for reasons that are our own. )
       	Finally, back to Weber again. While he was
charting the disenchantment of the personal world of
informal communities in modernity, couldn’t he sense
this? He did but he offered no solution. Through the
structure of ‘probity’ the person in an act of
self-legislation has to choose or abandon value-ideals
within a particular ;life-sphere: virtue or sin
nothing comes with a  guarantee any more; that
means---the person will tell Aristotle to end
preaching his catalogue of virtues; s/he will tell
Machiavelli or De Sade not to display their  table of
brute “facts” to be adopted as a value-ideal. No
general option can be regulated because and this  what
is interesting in Weber in as much  what he tried to
show was that modernity has entailed the
differentiation of life-spheres into irreconcilable
compartments : political, aesthetic, religious,
economic etc. Irreconcilable because as Weber and
Habermas have reminded us they have their own criteria
of  validity. But there is a twist here : Weber has an
interesting item to add here : the erotic. ( Habermas
a list too –science, morality and art but as far as I
remember—the erotic is missing and when he addresses
Bataille ( in the PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE
.) as far as
I remember he does not refer to the self criteria of
the erotic. Now this is interesting. The erotic is
then not reconcilable with the political.( Hannah
Arendt and Habermas would insist much against feminist
fury that  ‘take the private to the public’ for
redressal is finally meaningless in the face of their
own distinctive validity claims.) what happens to the
political pornography, pure politics etc etc. of which
I’ve talked a lot?

                                 I’ll end today just
by posing this question so that I can help bring my
own text to a crisis but as a resolution promise how
this will be dealt with in the future. 
It was Gandhi who made an experiment in reconciling
the private and the public at the level of the
personal ( and not what numerous cultural historians
or what Rudolph and Rudolph and Rudolph have claimed
that he wanted to make private and public meet—since
by their own distinctive validity claims they are
irreconcilable).  But while doing this we should not
be surprised to know why he excelled in the politics
of malice, back stabbing and the more conclusive
symptom of such an  experiment is his engagement with
the boundaries of the erotic and the rude  confessions
of the flesh.

    	Having fully outlined the elements of the
discourse of the personal thus, infact this was my
route to have arrived at it, we shall begin with the
history and theory of the personal vis-à-vis the
public and  personalist social work in 19th century
Calcutta. Thank you.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:  Parts of this text  were used   in
“‘Personal Attacks”, Assaultive Speech and Indian
Politics: Towards a pure political imaginary’” paper
read   at the Participatory Democracy conference at
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi  organized by
the Centre for studies in Social Systems, JNU on 22
Feb, 04. and  ‘From consent to permission: Towards a
post -conventional moral semiotics of assaultive
intimacy’ –paper read at ‘Reorienting  Orientalism’
seminar at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, on 14 August,
2004.





           			
 



		
__________________________________________________________
Yahoo! India Answers: Share what you know. Learn something new
http://in.answers.yahoo.com/