Indian Sociology-Land

  As Gautam Bhan documents, while the general notion of the word ‘sarkar’ which means ‘government’ but literally, according to Bhan’s work translates to ‘executive’ obfuscates the fact that people living in irregular colonies and ‘pavement-dwellers’ though officially part of the vision of Delhi's three Master Plans that have looked to acquire land for the construction of government owned housing, are marginalized repeatedly by Court judgements that evict them from settled or semi-settled sites of dwelling. Courts, according to Bhan, also produce, amongst residents of irregular colonies in Delhi, a drive to produce documentation to verify their ownership of land. He argues that such ‘irregularities’ do not lie outside the domain of planning, but are the products of planning. The Delhi Development Authority, charged with constructing government-owned housing, has never really catered to low-income housing, although this is a clearly marked part of repeated plans.  What happens t...

' Is it only you alone who fails to find the self or everyone? You could never be sure about what all others do or do not perceive. As to your own non-perception that is no invariable sign of the self's nonbeing '. Udayana agsint Buddhist arguments for non-perception and non-existence (in Arindam Chakrabarti's ' Realisms Interlinked' pg 17  ' Consciousness, in its observing, learns that what things are in themselves, it itself is .' - Hegel, THe Phenomenology of Consciousness At the start I want to say straight up that Hegelian theme of 'observing reason' which has eastern correlates in the idea of a 'witness' to consciousness is in fact one of the few genuinely productive startegies produced by ancient and medieval philosophy. By anti I don't (obviously) mean a simple negative but rather what my friend D calls a 'retentive negation' : a negation that preserves what it negates.  In fact the theme of 'the witness' in ph...

In Proust's book on Ruskin 'On Reading' he takes on Ruskin's metaphor from the essay 'Seasame' of reading involving both a reading of a book and a reading of a world. While many suggestions in Proust and many descriptions seem to fetishize objects as commodities, his reading of Ruskin remains challenging and fascinating. Ruskin initially suggests the analogy between 'reading a building' and 'reading a book'.  Proust himself was a translator of Ruskin, though he hardly spoke any English, he heard Ruskin as he himself said, he heard his language and meaning emerged secondarily from this process. Again here we see the same contradiction between reading a language and hearing a sound. Here I provide an extensive description from the first part of Recherche du temps... the famous description of 'the three steeples of Martineville': 'They had had me climb up next to the coachman,  we were going like the wind because, before returning to Com...

 The consequences of an individual human's action are rarely soverign even if in a phenomenological (first person) sense they are made based on an assumption of sovereignty.  Really the Schmittian idea that the Soveriegn decides on the state of exception, on the conditions that merit war in society, itself are undermined when we consider that a lot of decisions today in war or for war are made by automated decision making systems, preciely because the strategy employed in modern warfare exceeds tactical considerations that can be encompassed by human intelligence. Particularly from the point of view of nations with established armies, fighting nations with irregular armies that create asymmetric situations for warfare.  Tim Blackmore in his history of military technology used by tactically advanced military units, describes how the only way to combat asymmetric warfare for a conventional army is through technology that provides a panoptic vision of the landscape. These mi...

Between the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Judgement Kant produces at least two senses of the term judgement, on the one hand a system of reason that through a kind of grammar, produces the world in relation the self-conciousness or in Kant's terms the unity of apperception and on the other we have judgement from the first half of COJ, referring to Aesthetic Judgement.  Beauty as a popular idea has it, is based on symmetry, proportionality etc. However Kant's question to this judgement would be, what kind of systems of values are the values 'symmetry' and 'proportionality considered beautiful. Is it a system where the utilitarian is judged in majoritarian terms, that is the larger part of mankind agrees on it, rather than being judged by something inherent in the value itself, a virtue.  In any case of late a sufficient amount of ink has been spilt on arguing that forms of the modern internet, through mega corporations have prdoduced a kind of centraliz...