After an 11-year-old girl died while being chopped at a private medical clinic in southern Egypt.
Author: Ophelia Benson
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‘Honour’ Killing in the UK [audio]
‘This is about murder in the name of the father, the son, the blessed male members of the family.’
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Ian Buruma Says No Problem
‘The prospect of an Islamised Europe is remote’ – and that’s all that matters?
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Politics, People and the Spectacle
Democratic politics is essentially the politics of rational dialogue in which language, thought and persuasion play key roles. At least that is what we have over the decades learnt to believe. But recent electoral battles in India appear to have fundamentally shifted the ground on which our democratic beliefs have stood so far.
It is not being argued here that the theatre of politics has moved unprecedentedly and dangerously away from reason and towards emotion. Emotion has always been an indispensable appendage of democratic politics, whether for good or for bad. What is new is something else. It is the rise to predominance of affect vis-à-vis reason and emotion. This has shifted politics on to an entirely different ground. What is most disturbing is that on this ground the rules of democratic politics as a rational discourse do not seem to apply.
When reason employs or contends with emotion, it has a support or a rival. That is why it not only survives but even flourishes. Affect, on the contrary, preempts reason. Its appeal is sub-rational. In the prevailing culture of the spectacle, it finds a particularly conducive environment to flourish because the images can bypass reason to speak directly to the senses. In our culture of the spectacle, we are everywhere surrounded by images which solicit our attention ceaselessly. Even words get pared down to mere letters and numbers to reduce communication to a transmission of images and symbols: look at the practice of using SMSs and instant messaging. The space of reading, listening and reflection gets usurped by images. You do not say but show. Not that the images are anything new. What is new is that there are too many of them, moving in too quick a succession, and the succession can be rather baffling. In the good old days the image was an extension of speech; now it is becoming a substitute.
It is the rational foundations of democratic exchange that carry in them the promise of freedom, justice and a better world for everyone. And reason survives on reflection. Images, on the contrary, derive their force from immediacy. In a media-saturated culture, they wield tremendous power to seduce people with their raw, sensory urgency. This explains the transformation of politics in our times, which has come to resemble cinematic fantasy. Indeed the distinction between politics and entertainment can be no longer sustained on the other side of the line either, as films like Lage Raho Munna Bhai and Rang De Basanti exemplify. Politics minus memory and context is the best current recipe for instant entertainment. Ideologically drained and historically evacuated, such compromised cinematic narratives perhaps announce the arrival of an ironic postmodern nationalism.
It is not a mere coincidence that both politics and cinema should have discovered the force of the visual impact only at this particular historical juncture when India is staking its claim to the status of an emerging global superpower while seeking, ironically, a frictionless integration into the global order. From the viewpoint of global capital however, real histories and people are the most stubborn impediments in the way of integration. Since democracy forbids overriding them, technology would help in finding ways to make them effectively disappear.
And people and histories do effectively disappear in a culture of the spectacle, even though the superficial impression may be to the contrary. Images as stereotyped representations increasingly replace real people and real histories. The process involves what can only be called a high-tech primitivism: a mix of high technology and primitivist appeal to affects. But it also means the destruction of the whole legacy of rational dialogue on which democracies have grown.
It is not often noticed that the recent empowerment of the visual in Indian cinema has come at the cost of the narrative, which suffers a proportional disenfranchisement. This illustrates the direction and motivation of the change that is sweeping through the world. The tendency of the change, clearly, is to marginalize reflection and memory in favour of pre-reflective, affective impact. This is as true of politics as it is of cinema. When the interests of democracy as a rationally engaged community conflict with those of global capital, affective impact can short-circuit democratic reason and carry the day. The short-circuiting is a high-speed operation and relies, appropriately, on powerful media technologies. These technologies include real-time communication, extreme close-up, assembled ‘reality’ and invisible spatio-temporal disjunction. Repetitive and artificially abrupt use of the affective impact delivered through images preempts a fair exercise of reason. The insidious triumph passes off silently and uncelebrated. And expectedly so.
The current obsession of political parties with images needs to be understood in the wider context of the history of the global present. This obsession seems to have reached pathological proportions in the acts of computer-aided simulation and morphing of which various political parties accuse their opponents from time to time. But it is more than pathological, being also the displaced symptom of a grave threat that emerges unsuspected and looms over democracy.
We can try to locate this threat with the help of a typical photograph that most Indian newspapers and websites carry when reporting on the daily movement of the electoral juggernaut. It is the photograph of a political rally. The politicians are sitting on a high podium, their heads turned back, their eyes looking into the camera, and the audience looking at the politicians posing for the picture. The audience is all eyes, a strange audience of pure spectators, with hearing and speech suspended. Between the audience (which is far off and below) and the high podium, there are still more cameras. The politicians are thus, essentially, perched between cameras on either side, with the audience providing only the background, whether visible or not. Anyone who looked at the photograph with a sense of wonder (like someone from another world) would only conclude that the whole show is by the politicians and for the cameras. The people are there just as a prop or nuisance, a crowd that has rallied to see a movie being shot. The real scene of action is the taking of the picture. In other words, the real transaction is between the politicians and the media.
The truth, however, lies somewhere between the utter absurdity of the situation described above and our knowledge of the real demographics of political rallies these days. We would be fooling ourselves if we compared these rallies with those organized by people around the world against America’s attack on Iraq, or with those which took place before and after the imposition of Emergency in India. The rallies today are manufactured shows, consisting mostly of party workers and paid crowds. It is doubtful if anyone goes to them to really hear the politicians and to choose the right candidate and party to vote for.
The truth probably is that these rallies are no more than dead relics of a bygone politics in which public exchange of opinions and judgements used to matter. Instead they have become photo-ops for feeding the media, which then will prepare its pre-electoral verdict with the help of media-savvy psephologists (who will inevitably go wrong). It is as if democracy has left the polis and settled down in the studio, to be touched now and then with Photoshop. At its heart there is a hole, indicating the exit of real, flesh-and-blood people, of the kind who, like thousands of debt-ridden farmers in India, drink a pesticide and die. They are the people who have ironically understood their dehumanization, their transformation into pests. But democracy, strangely, does not understand what they have understood.
This being the situation, we are not heading towards better democracy but towards simulated democracy. In this scenario the only way to protect a politics of the people might be to take politics back to those sites where sustained rational discussion can still take place among people themselves, and not merely among their self-styled media representatives. These would be the micro-sites of mohallas and bazaars, of dhabas and tea-shops, of nukkads and chaupals, of tubewells, and of shops, offices and factories.
Rajesh K. Sharma teaches literature and theory in the Department of English, Punjabi University, Patiala (India). His interests include technology, philosophy and education. Email: sharajesh@gmail.com
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Petition to Congratulate PM for Rushdie’s K
This honour stands as a symbol of our commitment to ignoring Rage Boy.
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Paul Davies on the Goldilocks Enigma
We will never explain the world by appealing to something outside it that must be accepted on faith.
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Let’s Stop Channeling Rage Boy
We may have to put up with the Rage Boys of the world, but we ought not to do their work for them.
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Islamist Groups Prompt Some ‘Honour’ Murders
‘They told her husband that if he didn’t put his wife in her place then they would do it themselves.’
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Belated Move to Ask Muslim Women to Speak Up
‘Oh, right – some of them are women, aren’t they; let’s ask them.’
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Real men don’t eat quiche or coddle women
So what matters to the rage boys? Putting women in their place, that’s what. Their place is either slavishly obedient, or dead; those are the choices; and it’s Rage Boy who gets to decide which rules women are required to obey.
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said Islamist terror groups were behind one murder, as well as a case where a woman was threatened and is in hiding…Nazir Afzal, the CPS’s national lead on honour crime, told BBC Radio 4’s File on 4 programme the threats to kill a woman known as Miss B, who is now in hiding, came from her family but originated in an Egyptian terrorist group. He said: “They told her husband that if he didn’t put his wife in her place then they would do it themselves.”
Because they don’t want any sissy rage boys in their outfit, the kind who are too wimpy and girly to be willing to murder their wives. What kind of Rage Boy Brotherhood would that be?! Who is frightened of rage boys who won’t even murder their own wives? Get real.
Mr Afzal said honour violence was not confined to fathers and grandfathers, but was carried out by younger relations too….”They get their identity and their ethnicity from these traditions. We know they are bizarre and outdated but they get their identity from those traditions and they feel very strongly that how you treat your women is a demonstration of your commitment to radicalism and extremist thought.”
Oh do they – how inspiring. What an interesting idea of ‘radicalism.’ There was a whiff of that in the sixties, too, but then that whiff is what blew into second-wave feminism; men who wanted to hang onto any idea of ‘radicalism’ dropped the whole ‘barefoot chick in the background’ routine pretty fast.
However, Reefat Draboo of the Muslim Council of Britain told the BBC she disagreed with Mr Afzal’s comments.
And the BBC asked someone from the MCB what she thought why, exactly? The BBC talked to someone at the MCB and no one else why? The BBC felt it had to ‘balance’ what Afzal said with what someone else said so it asked – the MCB and no one else, why? Because it always does? Because it’s so lazy it can’t be bothered to find a different organization or a more informed view? Draboo’s comment is supremely irrelevant, because ‘honour’ murder doesn’t have to be condoned by Islam for Islamist terror groups to approve of it. Why couldn’t the BBC get its feet underneath itself long enough to find someone with something of value to say? Because if it asks the MCB then Rage Boy may get a little peeved but he won’t go into full red alert fury mode? Or is it because it makes people at the BBC feel kind of vaguely sympathetic and diverse and right on to turn to the MCB all the time. Do they all have their heads wrapped in thick bales of attic insulation there or what?
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Ask not why Rage Boy is in such a snit
Is it a fatwah? Is it a copy of the Quran allegedly down the gurgler at Guantanamo? Is it some cartoon in Denmark? Time for Rage Boy to step in and for his visage to impress the rest of the world with the depth and strength of Islamist emotion.
Hitchens is talking about much the same thing as I was talking about a couple of days ago – this business of the depth and strength and profundity and vehemence of emotion, and the work it does – the way it impresses some people in the rest of the world and prompts them to reason backwards from the intensity of the emotion to the magnitude of the crime committed by the person or persons who ’caused’ the emotion. Look at Rage Boy: his staring eyes, his gaping mouth; he is clearly upset to the very depths of his soul; let us frown heavily on the source of Rage Boy’s rage, be it novel or cartoon or free woman walking abroad on the public highway.
The acceptance of an honor by a distinguished ex-Muslim writer, who exercised his freedom to abandon his faith and thus courts a death sentence for apostasy in any case, came shortly after the remaining minarets of the Askariya shrine in Samarra were brought down in shards…But what does “Rage Boy” have to say about this appalling desecration of a Muslim holy place? What resolutions were introduced into the “parliament” of Pakistan, denouncing such shameful profanity? You already know the answer to those questions.
Well…you see…er…Rushdie was living in London at the time! That’s it. He’s an apostate, and an Orientalist, and a leave-homer, and a neocon. Yes he is, don’t try to deny it! He’s a neocon, he is, he is! The people who blew up the Askariya shrine, say what you like about them but at least they’re not neocons. So of course Rage Boy’s reaction is not a bit disproportionate or just plain barking up the wrong tree, it’s a reasoned political analysis translated into a loud scream, and hence to be respected.
We may have to put up with the Rage Boys of the world, but we ought not to do their work for them, and we must not cry before we have been hurt. In front of me is a copy of this week’s Economist, which states that Rushdie’s 1989 death warrant was “punishment for the book’s unflattering depiction of the Prophet Muhammad.” There is no direct depiction of the prophet in this work of fiction, and the reverie about his many wives occurs in the dream of a madman. Nobody in Ayatollah Khomeini’s circle could possibly have read the book for him before he issued a fatwah, which made it dangerous to possess. Yet on that occasion, the bookstore chains of America pulled The Satanic Verses from their shelves, just as Borders shamefully pulled Free Inquiry (a magazine for which I write*) after it reproduced the Danish cartoons. Rage Boy keenly looks forward to anger, while we worriedly anticipate trouble, and fret about etiquette, and prepare the next retreat. If taken to its logical conclusion, this would mean living at the pleasure of Rage Boy, and that I am not prepared to do.
No, nor am I. If I’m going to consult anyone about how to live, it won’t be Rage Boy or anyone like him.
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That’s the Scale of the Error
Creationism is equivalent to believing that the width of North America is 7.8 yards.
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Pakistan Says Rushdie K Breaks UN Resolution
Claims Britain acted against the spirit of UN resolution 1624.
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Nick Cohen on the Anti-Rushdie Alliance
It remains astonishing how many people who profess liberal sympathies don’t get it.
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‘This is a man who’
I finally got around to watching ‘Question Time’ and Shirley Williams doing her party piece. The man in the audience asked the first question: is the knighthood given to Rushdie an insult to Muslims? SW was the first to answer: ‘I think it’s a mistake,’ she said. Then she went on. ‘This is a man who has offended Muslims in a very powerful way,’ she said in an unmistakable tone of indignation, then pointing out, absurdly, that he’d been protected for years at great expense to the taxpayer. Then she said it wasn’t Blair’s doing, it was the committee, and they should have etc etc etc. That’s when Hitchens said, quite rightly, ‘That’s a contemptible answer.’ Well so it damn well is.
‘This is a man who’ – in a tone of controlled anger. Excuse me? Excuse me? This is a man who wrote a novel, in part of which he expressed some ironic views about the p. M. What is wrong with that? What possessed Shirley Williams to say that as if he’d committed sodomy on Princess Beatrice’s pet rabbit? Would she say that about an academic – as it might be a well-known philosopher, such as her former husband – who wrote something critical about the p. M.? I certainly hope not, but perhaps she would. But what is her operating assumption there? That it is forbidden to write something critical about the p. M.? Well if so, that’s an end to scholarship of many kinds – comparative religion, history, politics, and quite a few related fields. Then perhaps she thinks it’s forbidden only for novelists? But if so, why? On what grounds? And where is that rule written down? Why haven’t all potential novelists (which would be all of us) been told?
Perhaps she thinks, as some cowering people said in 1989, that he ought to have known, or he must have known, or he did know. But if he ought or must have or did – again, so what? So.the.fuck.what? What follows from that? So does Irshad Manji know, so did and does Ayaan Hirsi Ali, so do Maryam Namazie and Homa Arjomand, so does Ibn Warraq, so does the Council of ex-Muslims, so does Gina Khan, so does Necla Kelik, so do a great many people; and they bravely don’t let that stop them. What is Shirley Williams saying – that they ought to? That they ought to know that Muslim men (much more men than women) will be offended and therefore shut up? Does she really think anything so contemptible? Or has she just not thought it through.
What people apparently do with these ‘offended’ claims is reverse engineer: they reason backwards: they look at the magnitude of the ‘offence’ and then assign guilt accordingly – but that’s wrong. If that rule held no one would ever criticize or dispute or tease anything because of the risk of ‘offence’ out of all proportion to the intent and to the harm done. Instead what people should be doing is coldly examining the merit of the putative grievance, independent of the quantity of fuss made.
Human arrangements, practices, customs, habits, institutions have to be open to discussion – family and marriage included, George S to the contrary notwithstanding. ‘This is a man who’ is not an appropriate response to such activities. (As George S notes in his very next post.)
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Tonight on Irrational Scare Program: WiFi Routers
After eating babies, the WiFi Routers will grow to enormous size and attack our cities.
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The New Physics Exam
1) Here is the equation; how does it make you feel? 2) Suggest how the two scientists could compromise.
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Do They Have Effigy Shops in Pakistan?
Jesus and Mo discuss the blasphemous knighthood, or is it the chivalric blasphemy.