Reading some posts from a fragment of the Indian political Twitterati I discovered a peculiarly hyperbolic arrangement of modren Indian alt-right cerebral life. Between them the Indian
copycat alt-right have ostensibly managed to govern the entire subcontinent
without leaving X. I am, however, concerned here with a narrower operation. How
does the vocabulary of economic improvment, prosperity, technology and
effeciency acquire the voice of a small political tyrant? And why does the
tyrant suddenly begin to speak like an infrastructure consultant?
I want to call this operation ‘the match’. Two langauges meet, and for a moment
the words of one can be made to perform the work of the other. “Development”
arrives as a fairly harmless public ambition. Most people prefer a working
railway to a railway which is on fire. But fasten that ambition to a second
demand — that the people who obstruct the railway, question its cost, object to
its route, or fail to admire its ribbon-cutting are somehow dirtier, inferior
or less properly Indian — and a different speech begins. We have gone from the
construction of infrastructure to the construction of a public which deserves
to be bulldozed out of the conversation. The train has yet to arrive. Its moral
passenger list is already complete.
Bakhtin gives us a considerably better
account of this procedure than the ordinary search for an Ideology hiding
behind each tweet. In Bakhtin's reading of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment,
Raskolnikov never possesses the solitude required for a cleanly original
thought. His mother speaks inside him, Marmeladov speaks inside him, Sonya
speaks inside him, and later Porfiry discovers how to ask a question which has
already been troubling Raskolnikov for several chapters. Their words are
repeated with another accent. They collide in the same sentence.
Pyotr Boklevsky's Imagination of Dostoevsky's Character Raskolnikov from the novel 'Crime and Punishment'
Raskolnikov's consciousness is a very poorly managed parliamentary session, with the
important difference that at least some of the speakers have actually thought
about what they are saying. This is what I mean by dissonance: different socail
langauges sounding through one another, neither reducible to the tidy author of
a single opinion. Polyphony names the irreducibility of these voices;
heteroglossia, the different social idioms they carry. Dissonance is my name
for what happens when their encounter becomes audible.
Raskolnikov tries to stabilize his inner polyphony of voices by constructing theories that explain his actions. Much of what I saw on twitter follows this format. I have analysed 5 posts here. The links precede the post.
Post I
https://x.com/UJJAVALSHAH2/status/2027784513154331012
What a marvellously reasonable beginning.
“Agree PR is there.” The writer makes a concession which gives the rest the
solemn air of an indepedant audit. There may be publicity, yes, but we must
have the Expressway. Of course a bullet train is not a fascist instrument. I
imagine even Bakhtin would have preferred one to the Petersburg transport
arrangements of his time. The question is what kind of authority the noun
“development” is asked to produce. The bullet train, Dholera, the Expressway:
these become proofs of a Prime Minister’s personal indispensability, as though
every bridge were a telegram from the Leader addressed to History. The
economistic langauge of delivery allows political power to appear as the
inventor of things which must now be defended against politics itself.
This is our first half of ‘the match’. The
neoliberal idiom offers performance, investment, competition, infrastructure
and the terribly handsome word *efficiency*. The authoritarian idiom offers the
man who will deliver them without the wearisome company of disagreement. One
need not read the sentence above as a fascist manifesto; the post alone does
not establish that. What is intresting is its capacity to be borrowed by a more
agressive langauge. The moment the citizen becomes merely the grateful reciever
of Projects, he may be instructed that criticism is a form of economic
sabotage. He is no longer opposing a politician. He is delaying the Bullet
Train, and has presumably never considered the feelings of its engine.
Post II
https://x.com/real_mahalingam/status/2109868648697393660
Here the match is almost indecently
visible. The speaker begins with the Renaissance. Economic prosperity, ancient
values, religious art. Florence is preparing to enter the chat. One expects
Brunelleschi, perhaps a lecture on patronage, certainly a few beuatifully
proportioned domes. Instead we are delivered the phrase “Congressi
Street-shitting Rāj”. A strange fragment of Indian civilisation has somehow
made the journey from Botticelli to the latrine in a single breath. I do not
say this to make fun of sanitation, which is an actually serious achievement,
if actually achieved. I am interested in how its lexicon becomes an instrument
for rendering a political enemy ‘disgusting’. The Congress government is no
longer a party with a record to investigate. It has become a historical smell.
One need only ask where the dung is, and an election has apparently been
settled.
The exact hinge lies between the
modrenising claim and the word “Raj”. Raj supplies the longue durée of an enemy
regime; “street-shitting” supplies its bodily degradation. A technical problem
of urban infrastructure is dressed in civilisational language so that its
solution resembles the purification of the Nation. This is an extraordinarily
useful formula. Drainage becomes restoration. Roads become rebirth. A
government which builds public toilets may claim it is also rebuilding the
Ancient World. One wonders whether the Roman aqueducts were constructed
principally to discredit the Carthaginian opposition. The great attraction of
this vocabulary is that nobody needs to defend an argument about history. One
has merely to point at a lavatory and ask the voter to admire the Renaissance.
Post III
https://x.com/real_mahalingam/status/2104389121066303543
The next statement is much more intresting
because it tries to explain the very possibility of dissatisfaction. Again here
we find this couched pseudo-academic ‘aesthetic’. What appears in the indexed
portion is a movement from childhood deprivation to economic growth, in which
the imrpoved conditions are assigned to Modi. This is an empirical proposition
and ought, like any other, to be argued with data rather than a certificate of
personal devotion. But what if for a moment we ‘listened’ to the verbal scene.
The children are introduced through the repeated image of excretion and
disease; the Leader arrives bearing “basic needs”. We have a public health
narrative, a development narrative and a paternal narrative occupying the same
sentence. There is a mother, a child, a state, an economist, and an officer in
charge of historical gratitude. Only the last is permitted to finish speaking.
It reminds me of Raskolnikov’s famous
effort to turn another human being into an entry in his moral calculation. He
thinks that a very large good can be secured by a small, unpleasant
intervention; his arithmetic is rather less satisfactory when it comes to the
actual human being lying on the floor. I am obviously not suggesting that a
development post is a murder. The likeness is in the langauge of moral
calculation, which allows the speaker to treat a determinate person as an
example of something else. There is no need to ask what the child now thinks,
whether the school functions, whether a local clinic has a doctor. The child
has become a before-and-after photograph of Sovereignty, and is expected to
remain grateful for the rest of his working life.
This is where neoliberal and fascistic
vocabularies may interlock rather than merely coexist. The former describes the
citizen as a recipient of measurable benefits; the latter asks for a unified
moral Body whose debt to its benefactor cannot be discharged by criticism. A
good road is still a good road, and public health remains a public good. ‘The
match’ occurs when those goods are appropriated as reasons why certain voices
should no longer count. To say that the beneficiaries may answer back would be
the ordinary condition of democracy. To reply that answering back proves they
are ungratefull is the begining of a rather diffrent system of accounts.
Post IV https://x.com/SanghiPrince/status/2009289304565006520
At last, having completed our course in
macroeconomics, we can meet the animal responsible for implementing it.
“Singham” is a particulalry elegant innovation, since it converts the
politician into a ready-made cinematic police officer and the voter into a
member of the audience. The Lion “roars” about a municipal election. A
municipal election! Here one might expect a few questions about drains, ward
budgets, road repairs, property tax, perhaps the alarming cost of repairing a
streetlamp. Instead a large carnivore has been introduced into the
proceedings. The candidate is merely the occasion for his roar. I should very
much like to hear the municipal commissioner reply that the drains are blocked
but the roar has been forwarded to the appropriate Department.
The neologistic device is neither just a
compliment nor a harmless zoological error. It provides the strongman grammar
into which the vocabulary of competent adminstration may be inserted. Imagine a
politician who must always “roar”: he cannot reasonably propose a committee
with representatives of the people he disagrees with. Lions who ask for public
consultation rarely retain the leading part in a film. This is the other half
of the match. Development supplies the accomplishments to be demonstrated; Singham
supplies the figure who must be imagined capable of doing them. The result is a
fantasy of administrative violence without the embarassment of calling it
violence. A manager in the costume of a policeman; a policeman in the costume
of a lion; a lion applying for permission to lay a pavement.
Post V
https://x.com/SanghiPrince/status/2071877105529618511
There is, howevevr, no peace even amoung
the lions. The same account accuses somebody else of operating Annamalai’s
“paid PR team”. This is a very revealing quarrel. In an ordinary political
dispute one might ask about public commitments, electoral numbers or a
programme. Here the rival claim is discredited as marketing. The supposed
future Prime Minister is being handled by a publicity agency, his very futurity
has a media budget. The accusation shows the managerial vocabulary through
which heroic legitmacy is tested: organic loyalty versus manufactured PR, the
authentic saviour versus the man from the Advertising Department.
Could one hear, in this Twitterati, a
demand that Modi is insufficient and must be replaced by somebody more
developmental. A possibel movement within this register, it is worth
following. Suppose the Nation has been trained to demand not a political
representative but a CEO of Civilisation. Every project becomes a performance
metric. Very soon even the present hero can be found wanting: insufficient
growth, insufficient discipline, insufficient speed, insufficient heroism, too
much compromise with those infuriating citizens who keep asking questions. The
wish for MORE development can therefore become a wish for less politics. And
the next Leader, being still more businesslike, must naturally be allowed to do
with the electorate what a particularly impatient consultant does with a badly
performing department. He closes it.
It is essential, however, to see that
“more developement” does not entail “more fascism”. A demand for cleaner air,
functioning hospitals or better wages can be THe opposite of this fantasy. The
hinge snaps shut only when improvment is made conditional upon the exclusion or
disciplining of persons who refuse the National story. And the register can
break apart again. Another one of these accounts says that Indians ought to
demand “freedom and prosperity together”, using comparative GDP-per-capita
figures. For a moment, the two words refuse to collapse into one another. It
would be absurd to treat that sentence as fascism just becuase it contains an
economic statistic. The interesting question is whether the freedom survives
the next argument about who is permitted to enjoy the prosperity.
-x-
There are many smaller parts in the
machinery. “Same to same”, written above someone else’s image, converts a
politcal relation into a mirror. “Your hero / Our Hero” turns the public world
into two football teams who seem condemned to exchange precisely the same
photograph until one of them has run out of battery. “Biraadars” can produce a
warmth of address, but in some contexts its kinship intimacy may become the
ready-made border of a political public. And “turbowoke”, from a poster who
identifies himself as technocratic centre-left on economics, reminds us that
technocratic self-description is hardly the exclusive property of the Right.
Each of these words is double-voiced in Bakhtin’s sense. It arrives with its
prior speaker, an opponent, a borrowed sneer, a social setting. A single tweet
can contain a festival greeting, a caste joke, an investment thesis and a
little imaginary courtroom in which its author has already won.
Raskolnikov is useful here for one reason.
He is not simply a man with an ideology. His thoughts are visited by the speech
of people he cannot satisfactorily digest into himself. Even Porfiry’s
apparently polite questions enter the concealed conversation. The real drama is
that their voices will not remain examples in his theory.
What Bakhtin calls polyphony or the multiplicty of voices in Dostoevsky's texts (of course voice has a technical meaning in Bakhtin that gets later carried into Sociolinguitics most notably by Asif Agha to describe a theory of linguistic registers) describes precisely what I have been glossing in this series as 'dissonance'. However here I'm forced again to take a step back before I declare dissonance 'all-right' and some morbid version of it 'alt-right'. The problem I've been noticing while writing this blog is slippage in ideological positioning. How to distinguish the alt-right from everyday banter on twitter?
This is what I was also getting at in the blogpost on Antigone in this series, it is Antigone's absolute ethical maxim that stands against any dissolution of ideological position. In this sense the position becomes more than merely 'ideological'. It becomes something we stake our bodies for. I pointed to Antigone precisely because the non-violent ethics of the current protests in India reminded me of this kind of Absolute ethical position. In the protests polyphony became immovable, absolutely determined 'play' whereas in alt-right language, in the codes of its forms of mimesis, dissonance is made to find 'matches'. It is a completely analogy-centered, it is the 'analog' quite literally, eating away at the mimetic heart of the digital.
Virality I find is not inherently majoritarian. And this is actually a deeply counter-intuitive sentences if you pause for a moment and think about it.
Anyone who's followed recent academic (cross-disciplinary debates) on the subject will see the question of the correlation between virality and majoritarianism is often regarded as a strong one.
What makes the copycat political register
so dark is its repeated effort to do to create reification and 'interpellation'. Each word has been borrowed
from an existing socail langauge, but the resulting chorus is instructed to
sing only one note: majority, majority, majority.
Dissonance, properly heard, is the
possibility that the singer may be obliged to listen to somebody else.
Simulacrum A would allow an image, phrase or face to escape the identity
allocated to it. Simulacrum B is the enormously efficient business of putting
every escaping word back to work for the same sovereign Self. In this case the
escapee is caught before reaching the next junction, by a Lion with an
Expressway tender.
The fascist feature here is
therefore not an isolated bad word, nor the presence of an economic argument.
It is a particular form of ‘the match’ (or a form of identification basically
ala Simulacrum 2 if you have been following the theorical parts of this blog):
the claim that progress requires the destruction of those forms of difference
through which progress itsef might be disputed.
We have managed to combine the market’s
promise that everybody may compete with the strongman’s instruction that nobody
may disagree about who has won. A man announces the Renaissance. Somebody asks
about a sewer. Somebody else produces GDP data. The Lion roars. The public is
asked to keep quiet until the construction work is over. I rather fear this
will not end too easily.
Modernity has become a building site which
cannot permit the builders to take a lunch break, let alone vote on the
architect. This, I think, is the literal darkness of the Indian alt-right
Twitterati. All the lights are on. The entire city is illuminated by its own
magnificent progress. Yet the people who must live there are being told that,
for the purposes of development, they should stop appearing in the picture.
Where are we in all of this? Dear reader, if there is one thing this whole blog has implored of you, it is for a moment, to suspend your morality. It doesn't matter if you do this through Hegel's analyses of 'The beautiful soul' or Nietzsche's incredible 'Genealogy of morals' or just by being struck by the beauty of the moment, which stands in both Hegel's absolute and Nietzsche's time-atom, apart from the progress of time. Nothing matters, neither the terminology nor the book nor anything at all, but for once to suspend your judgement and destroy your previous self, to affirm the moment unremittingly. This is Antigone's Absolute ethics, these are the fragrances of your own garden of thought, which will live in eternal human memory, in the virtual, in the absolute, forever.
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