Inscribing Subjects to Citizenship: Petitions, Literacy Activism, and the Performativity of Signature in Rural Tamil India

By Francis Cody

“But for the women who had come to the office that day from Katrampatti, my sense is that they would only have been satisfied that they had performed the act of petitioning at grievance day if they had been able to see the collector and plead with him orally using generic conventions compelling superiors to act on behalf of the weak, not unlike those found in the praise language that had been erased from their petition. Their ambivalence is a product of having been denied the chance to make an affective claim through eye contact, ensuring that the collector would feel with their suffering. Karuppiah and I had tried to make it up to the petitioners by taking them all out to lunch after submitting the petition, but the bus ride home was certainly marked by disappointment and uncertainty about what had just taken place at the collector’s office. They all knew that it would be very difficult to collectively take yet another day off of work and come back to town.

Any governmental claims to rationalized and disenchanted Weberian bureaucracy remain particularly vexed in this context, because the collector does in fact sit in the erstwhile king’s seat, in his palace. In fact, he collects petitions in the old darbar hall where the king of Pudukkottai would have met with the court and those who had come to plead before royalty. Such a dense semiotic environment does not lend itself easily to a bureaucratic ideology of directness, or “reduced,” “logical” communication in the eyes of petitioners or even petition writers. The collector does appear to act like a king. It took so much pedagogical work just to get the group from Katrampatti to come to the collector’s office and it seemed somehow incomplete, in part because after such effort they simply turned in the sheet of paper at a small office without being able to see and talk to the collector at grievance day. The petitioners’ idea of seeing the collector directly (neratiyaka), a face-to-face encounter with a powerful patron, conflicts with the ideals of directness as the simple transmission of a communication in written form in which a petitioner has no face. Beyond this sense disappointment at not connecting visually or orally with their addressee, these petitioners have repeatedly been deceived or disappointed by the state, as by other higher powers. They know they are dealing with a realm of power that is in some sense beyond their control. This was, after all, an act of faith (oru nampikkaitan) as much as it was an exercise in citizenship.”

Read it at Cutural Anthropology

Honduras: a military coup in the era of governamentality

In Honduras, One-Sided News of Crisis

Critics Cite Slanted Local Coverage, Limits on Pro-Zelaya Outlets

By Juan Forero

“Several countries condemned the events of June 28 as a military coup. But in Honduras, some of the most popular and influential television stations and radio networks blacked out coverage or adhered to the de facto government’s line that Manuel Zelaya’s overthrow was not a coup but a legal “constitutional substitution,” press freedom advocates and Honduran journalists said.

Meanwhile, soldiers raided the offices of radio and TV stations loyal to Zelaya, shutting down their signals. Alejandro Villatoro, 52, the owner of Radio Globo, said soldiers broke down doors and dismantled video surveillance cameras.

“They grabbed me and put me face down and put six rifles on me, with a foot on my back holding me down,” he said. “It was like I was a common criminal.”

Such allegations underscore the one-sided nature of the news that has been served up to Hondurans during the crisis. According to results of a Gallup poll published here Thursday, 41 percent of Hondurans think the ouster was justified, with 28 opposed to it.

The de facto regime headed by Roberto Micheletti cited such support as he began talks Thursday in Costa Rica with that country’s president, Oscar Arias, who has agreed to mediate. Zelaya met separately with Arias, who said representatives of the two men will continue meeting in the days ahead.

In Honduras, though, the country’s new leaders, the security forces and the clergy argue that Zelaya’s removal had legal justification the rest of the world does not understand. Local media largely “slanted coverage” to favor that position, said Carlos Lauría of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.

“The de facto government clearly used the security forces to restrict the news,” Lauría said. “Hondurans did not know what was going on. They clearly acted to create an information vacuum to keep people unaware of what was actually happening.”

Micheletti’s spokesman, René Cepeda, and other officials in the de facto government did not return phone calls seeking comment. But Ramón Custodio López, Honduras’s human rights ombudsman, who investigates violations of press freedom, said he has received no official complaints from journalists. “This is the first I have heard about an occupation or military raid of a station,” he said. “I try to do the best job I can, but there are things that escape my knowledge.”

Custodio added that he thought Honduran media coverage of the overthrow and its aftermath has been “very good”. “

Read it full at Washington Post

Budgets by the People

Participatory democracy, Brazil-style, is running into problems

By Michael Fox

“Although the Workers’ Party lost control of the city government in 2004, Mayor Fogaça (who was re-elected last year under the centrist Brazilian Democratic Movement Party) promised to maintain the process.

On its 20th anniversary, this year’s assemblies had surprisingly high participation thanks to the federal “Minha Casa, Minha Vida” (My House, My Life) program, which promises to finance a million homes across Brazil by 2010. City officials told Porto Alegre residents that if they were interested in enrolling in the program, they should participate in the PB process. Residents came out in record numbers. “It has become part of the city. It is not a political process,” says Ernani Mário da Pereira, the city’s Participatory Budgeting Transportation theme coordinator. “The process is not part of the government—it is part of our residents.”

But with cronyism, a drop in funds and almost everything behind schedule, long-time participants worry the process could be headed toward extinction in Porto Alegre.

“The projects that we prioritize aren’t carried out,” said Roberto Oliveira, president of the Vila São Judas Neighborhood Association, in the region of Partenon. He strongly denounced the system’s shortcomings during a regional assembly in May. “In the last three years in Partenon, not one road was paved through participatory budgeting … Health, which was one of our priorities, didn’t get one cent.”

Like many city residents, Oliveira blames Mayor Fogaça for the process’ “half-dead, semi-vegetative state.” Porto Alegre residents are clear that any mayor who attempts to rid the city of Participatory Budgeting would quickly find himself without a job.

“So it’s easier not to eliminate [participatory budgeting], but in reality it doesn’t work. It’s propaganda,” Oliveira says. Oliveira’s comments are echoed by the non-governmental organization Cidade, which has been following Porto Alegre’s participatory process from the beginning. Its statistics show that only one percent of the city budget is now debated in participatory budgeting, a tremendous drop from its heyday when all budgeting decisions were discussed and as much as 10 percent was decided directly by residents.

Nevertheless, participatory initiatives across the planet continue to look to Porto Alegre. In 2007, Cidade held an international conference on the future of participatory democracy. Some are now calling for a profound analysis of the system.”

Read full report at In These Times

IL GATTO, IL TOPO, LA CULTURA E L’ECONOMIA

By Anselm Jappe

“In una società basata sulla produzione di merci era inevitabile, a lungo andare, che il narcisismo diventasse la forma psichica prevalente. Ora, è evidente che l’enorme sviluppo dell’industria del divertimento sia allo stesso tempo causa e conseguenza di questa fioritura del narcisismo. In questo modo, tale industria partecipa a quella vera e propria “regressione antropologica” cui ci porta ormai il capitalismo: un annullamento progressivo delle tappe dell’umanizzazione in cui stava l’essenza della storia antecedente. Anche qui, il discorso da fare sarebbe molto lungo. Mi limito a ricordarvi le tappe per cui ogni essere umano, secondo le conclusioni della psicoanalisi, deve passare nel suo primo sviluppo psichico. Deve superare quel senso di fusione rassicurante con la madre che caratterizza il primo anno (si tratta di ciò che Freud chiama “narcisismo primario”, una tappa comunque necessaria) e passare attraverso i dolori del conflitto edipico per arrivare a una realistica valutazione delle proprie forze e dei propri limiti, rinunciando ai sogni infantili di onnipotenza. Solo così può nascere una persona psicologicamente equilibrata. L’educazione tradizionale mirava, più o meno bene, a questo: sostituire il principio di piacere con il principio di realtà, ma senza uccidere del tutto il principio di piacere. Le tappe non correttamente risolte dello sviluppo psicocologico dell’individuo danno luogo a nevrosi e addirittura psicosi. Il bambino non dispone dunque di una perfezione originaria, né abbandona spontaneamente il suo narcisismo iniziale. Ha bisogno di essere guidato per poter accedere al pieno sviluppo della sua umanità. Le costruzioni simboliche caratteristiche di ogni cultura svolgono evidentemente un ruolo essenziale in questo processo e costituiscono a questo titolo un patrimonio prezioso dell’umanità (anche se non tutte le costruzioni simboliche tradizionali sembrano ugualmente atte a promuovere una vita umana piena, ma questa è un’altra questione). Al contrario di questo, il capitalismo nella sua fase più recente – diciamo dagli anni settanta in poi -, in cui il consumo e la seduzione sembrano aver sostituito la produzione e la repressione come motore e modalità dello sviluppo, rappresenta storicamente l’unica società che promuove una massiccia infantilizzazione dei soggetti, legata a una desimbolizzazione. Ormai, tutto cospira a mantenere l’essere umano in una condizione infantile. Tutti gli ambiti della cultura, dal fumetto alla televisione, dalle tecniche di restauro delle opere antiche alla pubblicità, dai giochi video ai programmi scolastici, dallo sport di massa ai psicofarmaci, da Second life fino alle esposizioni attuali nei musei contribuisce a creare un consumatore docile e narcisista che vede nel mondo intero una sua estensione, governabile con un mouseclick.”

(…)

“Non si possono chiamare i prodotti dell’industria del divertimento una “cultura di massa” o “cultura popolare”, come suggerisce per esempio il termine “musica pop”, e come affermano tutti coloro che accusano di “elitismo” ogni critica di ciò che in verità non è altro che la “formattazione” delle masse, per utilizzare una parola contemporanea assai eloquente. Il relativismo generalizzato e il rifiuto di ogni gerarchia culturale si sono spesso spacciati, soprattutto nell’epoca “postmoderna”, per forme di emancipazione e di critica sociale, per esempio in nome delle culture “subalterne”. A me sembra evidente che sono un riflesso culturale del dominio della merce. Come abbiamo già visto, la merce è una pura quantità di lavoro e dunque di denaro, sempre uguale, incapace di distinzioni qualitative. Davanti alla merce, tutto è uguale. Tutto è solo del materiale per il processo sempre uguale di valorizzazione del valore. Questa indifferenza della merce per ogni contenuto si ritrova in una produzione culturale che rifiuta ogni giudizio qualitativo e per cui tutto equivale a tutto. “L’industria culturale rende tutto uguale” sentenziò Adorno già nel 1944.

Qualcuno accuserà un’argomentazione come la mia di “autoritarismo” e affermerà che è “la gente” stessa che spontaneamente vuole, chiede, desidera i prodotti dell’industria culturale, anche in presenza di altre espressioni culturali, così come milioni di persone mangiano volentieri nei fast-food, pur potendo mangiare, per gli stessi soldi, in una taverna tradizionale. E’ facile controbattere ricordando che in presenza di un bombardamento mediatico massiccio e continuo in favore di certi stili di vita la “libera scelta” è alquanto condizionata. Ma c’è di più. Come abbiamo visto, l’accesso alla pienezza dell’essere umano richiede un aiuto da parte di chi già possiede, almeno in parte, questa pienezza. Lasciare libero corso allo sviluppo “spontaneo” non significa affatto creare le condizioni della libertà. La “mano invisibile” del mercato finisce nel monopolio assoluto o nella guerra di tutti contro tutti, non nell’armonia. Ugualmente, non aiutare qualcuno a sviluppare la sua capacità di differenziazione significa condannarlo a un infantilismo eterno.”

(…)

“Dunque, il successo delle industrie del divertimento e della cultura del “facile” – un successo incredibilmente mondiale che travalica tutte le barriere culturali – non è solo dovuto alla propaganda e alla manipolazione, ma anche al fatto che questi vengono incontro al desiderio “naturale” del bambino di non abbandonare la sua posizione narcisista. L’alleanza tra le nuove forme di dominazione, le esigenze della valorizzazione del capitale e le tecniche di marketing è tanto efficace perché si appoggia su una tendenza regressiva già presente nell’uomo. La virtualizzazione del mondo, di cui tanto si parla, è anche una stimolazione dei desideri infantili di onnipotenza. “Abbattere tutti i limiti” è l’incitazione maggiore che si riceve oggi, che si tratti della propria carriera professionale o della promessa di eterna salute e di eterna vita grazie alla medicina, delle esistenze infinite nei video-giochi o dell’idea che un’illimitata “crescita economica” sia la soluzione a tutti i mali. Il capitalismo è storicamente la prima società basata sull’assenza di limiti. E oggi si comincia a prendere la misura di che cosa ciò significa.”

Read full article at Exit

Governing Global Slums: The Biopolitics of Target 11

By Tim Di Muzio

“The technologies of the self found in global slums aim to cultivate the capacities of the poor and range from educating the self about sanitation and hygiene to undertaking skills training and learning to be responsible debtors, savers, and entrepreneurs. For instance, one of the most widespread modes of subjectification in informal settlements is entrepreneurial. Associated with the microcredit revolution, this approach encourages poor women and men to give their lives an entrepreneurial form as a way of generating income and securing the livelihood of their household. Although microcredit, over its thirty-five-year history as an antipoverty strategy, has been heralded as a panacea for people living in deep poverty—and one of its key spokespersons, founder of the Grameen Bank Muhammad Yunus, won the Noble Peace Prize—there has been little evidence of microlending’s success. What is certain is that microlending schemes help privatize and individualize peoples’ responsibility for earning a livelihood, thus lessening their dependence on the state or subnational governments. In this way, encouraging the poor to participate in their own survival strategies by accumulating personal debt and creating small businesses displaces any sense that poverty and unemployment may be structural or that the state has any responsibility for collective welfare.”

(…)

“The built environments of global slums are a testament to the ongoing dispossession of people around the world and to a more commodified, liberalized, and marketized world order facilitated by neoliberal policies. Thus,any discussion of biopolitical campaigns must take care to recognize how these interventions to improve life are informed and ultimately constrained by neoliberal policies and the forms of capital accumulation they are meant to encourage and secure. In some senses, this twenty-first-century indictment of neoliberalism is reminiscent of Karl Polanyi’s condemnation of an earlier period of economic liberalism. Polanyi argued that a rationality of rule centered on the belief in free markets, and the price mechanism implied a “stark utopia” where the natural and human substance of society would inevitably be annihilated if society did not take measures to protect itself. For Polanyi, this stark utopia was averted only after World War II, when governments abandoned economic liberalism in favor of social planning and collective welfare schemes. The growth and proliferation of global slums could be taken as both the spatial instantiation of this stark utopia and the apartheid of life chances that has accompanied neoliberalism. The scale of this problem is tremendous and represents one of the key governance challenges of the twenty-first century—one that seems increasingly unable to be met without a radical turn away from neoliberal policies and an overreliance on nongovernmental and community-based organizations.”

Read if full at Global Governance

Capitalism and Social Rights

By Ellen Meiksins Wood

“In fact, we could just as easily say that the history of rights has
been a contraction, not an expansion, of political rights — not an
expansion from one set of rights to another but a contraction of
political rights to exclude the social and the economic. Political
rights have certainly expanded in the sense that they’ve become more
universal. More and more people have achieved the right to vote. But at
the same time, political rights have contracted in the sense that they
now exclude so many aspects of life.

There was a time when fewer people had political rights, but the
rights they did have were economic and social powers at the same time.
Today that isn’t true. People with political rights may not have any
social or economic power; and that’s one reason we’ve had to invent new
kinds of economic and social rights.

Let me explain what I mean. I’ll give you the punch line first: we
live today in a capitalist world, and capitalism has completely
transformed the meaning of political rights and their relation to
economic and social rights. The distinctive relation between political
and economic power in capitalism is fundamentally different from
anything that existed in the world before the system came into being.
Capitalism has created a separate economic sphere with its own rules
and its own forms of power; and political rights have been emptied of
economic and social content.

At the same time, the system has produced a whole new set of social
problems. In fact, I think you could say that the very idea of a
distinct sphere of social problems belongs specifically to capitalism.
The idea of “the social question,” as it came to be called in the 19th
century, is very specifically related to the development of capitalism,
with its propertyless laboring class. And it’s specifically in the
conditions of capitalism that we’ve had to start thinking about social
rights, social justice, social citizenship, the social economy, and,
yes, social work.

In other words, just when political rights have been emptied of
social content, there’s a whole new range of social problems, and one
of the great debates of our time is how, or even whether, the political
power of the state should intervene to solve them.”

Read full article at Against the Current

The Iranian working class and the revolt

“The issue of class is important here, not because the workers are angels with whom we may not ever differ, but because their organised power is necessary to make even these democratic demands effective. Even if the protesters were all middle class, I would want them to win. Truth be told, I would want them to win even more than they bargained for – to win so comprehensively that they gave a shot in the arm to the working class and facilitated their rapid self-organisation outside of the Islamic Labour Council approved unions. Never mind a general strike: what is urgently needed is the reappearance of the shoras. And we have seen the riots spread chaotically to working class areas of Isfahan (see also), where the protesters drove out the police, and the southern city of Yazd. The protests have spread to workers districts in southern Tehran. Reports of working class turnout are appearing, albeit infrequently, in some of the English-language press.”

Read it full at Lenin’s Tomb

Negotiating identity – An excursion into the world of a business city

By Anna-Maria Murtola

Read if full here

“What Newtown actually is, is an interesting issue to consider. It is a new kind of retail-concept – a crossbreed between a shopping centre, an exhibition centre, and a travelling destination providing the visitor with an experience. It has also been presented as a green business city, the idea of which can be seen as an alternative to the much talked about overpower of the hypermarkets and shopping centres. The idea of Newtown has furthermore been presented as resembling a real city. A point has been made very determinedly of distinguishing Newtown from traditional shopping centres – the key PR-folder begins with the very words Newtown is far from any traditional shopping centres. In reference to Newtown the concept experience centre has also been brought forward as a contrast to traditional shopping paradises. (…)
Though a city can be many things, it is usually defined somewhere along the lines of size, population, culture and commerce, as in being a center of population, commerce, and culture; a town of significant size and importance. Newtown is certainly a centre of commerce, and it might even be thought of as some kind of a centre for culture, but it does not take a genius to figure out that Newtown actually lacks one very important aspect of urbanity – the residents of the city. At daytime it certainly crawls with life, but at night-time it is a desolate place. This does not, however, prevent the entrepreneurs of Newtown from talking about a population of Newtown. The inhabitants of the city, as alluded to in one of the PR-brochures, lack the permanence of inhabitants of a traditional city. The concept is nevertheless used.
In creating Newtown the city has been used as a guiding light. Newtown could actually be said to have been created in the image of a town or a city. As the architect of the project explains, a town must have a wall, a tower and be built around a town square. In Newtown these correspond to the semi-circular outer wall of the building, the planned -storey hotel to be incorporated into the building, and the central park (or central square) at the heart of it. At the heart of Newtown the Old Town can be found, which is where craftspeople of traditional arts have their small work/shops and where market activities take place in traditional style. This is also from where the city can be thought to have expanded.”

Capital and History

By Robert Kurz

“The confidence in capitalism is apparently unshakeable; also on the Left. Out of all crises it will rise like a phoenix from ashes and will start a new recovery. (…)
This understanding does not take the internal dynamics of capitalism seriously. There is also another conception. Accordingly, exploitation exists actually only in the historical dynamics of an ascending development of productive forces. It is not merely technological change, but, in this way, new conditions of exploitation are established. Therefore capitalism is not the “eternal return of the same,” but an irreversible historical process, which drives toward a point of culmination. Because in the process of the internal history of capitalism, the margin [Spielraum] for the exploitation narrows itself. The impetus for this is the liberation/redundancy [Freisetzung] of labor power, which is made superfluous/ redundant [überflüssig] to an always increasing extent by scientific-technological aggregates. Labor constitutes, however, the substance of the capital, since it alone produces real increases in value. Capitalism can compensate this internal contradiction only by an expansion of the credit system, thus through anticipation of a future increase in value. However, this systematic “snowballing” must press at its limits if the anticipation is stretched too far into the future. From this point of view, crises do not constitute a purely “corrective function,” but they historically strengthen and advance toward an internal barrier of exploitation.”

Read it full at Exit

Contours of the Neoliberal City: fragmentation, frontier geographies, and the new circularity

By Nasser Abourahme

“The slum in and of itself creates a different kind of governmentality;
AlSayyad and Roy point out that the apparently unregulated practices of
squatting are in fact a distinct form of regulation, “a set of tactics
that recreate informality as governmentality” [2006: 8]. This
informality operates through the constant negotiability of value (as
opposed to the fixing of value that characterises formality) and can be
seen as an expression of the sovereign power to establish the state of
exception – i.e. in the sense that the legal and planning apparatus of
the state enact suspension and define what is informal and what is not.
Informal squatting, then, is in fact a highly regulated practice with
distinct forms of governance and particular forms of negotiated
citizenship. This negotiation does not only, or even necessarily,
involve state actors: “non-state actors have emerged as the de facto
state in informal settlements in various world-regions” [ibid: 10].
Davis [2004] points to the role religious groups play in providing
urban services in slums across cities in the global South; in parts of
Cairo and other Arab cities Islamic groups provide almost all social
services as well as popular leaders, in Mumbai the Hindu
fundamentalists Shiv Sena are involved in acquiring and transferring
habitable land and in Latin American slums Pentecostalism has emerged
as the “main logic of governance and politics” [Alsayyad and Roy 2006:
11; Davis 2004]. Even when religious groups are not involved slums
develop their own distinct politics, regimes of rule and institutional
dynamics. Balbo highlights the example of Villa el Salvador, a famous
barriada of Lima “where the 300,000 residents have given themselves a
set of norms and laws of local bosses over which the state has hardly
any control” [1993: 25]. In slums the state, religious associations,
NGOs can all compete as different territorialized forms of association
and patronage [Alsayyad and Roy 2004: 12].
Gated communities embody
a similarly “distinctive territorialisation of citizenship” or a new
“spatial governmentality” [ibid: 6]. Key here is the fact these
enclaves are usually governed by private bodies as exemplified in
‘community associations’ or ‘common interest developments’. Both
involve “reciprocal rights and obligations enforced by a private
governing body” [ibid]; they are “contractual associations that deliver
some form of neighbourhood-level governance in the forms of regulations
and local civic good and services on the basis of assessments (fees)
collected from members” [Webster et al 2002: 315]. In this sense gated
communities, with their internal regulations and codes, represent new
forms of private government in which “contract law is the supreme
authority; property values are the foundation of community life; and
exclusion is the foundation of social organisation” [AlSayyad and Roy
2006: 6]. As such they are more than just the ‘effects’ of neoliberal
urban reform but active “technologies of subjectivation, sovereignty
and spatiality” [ibid]. Or as Jeremy Seabrook puts in a nicely sardonic
polemic: in “gilded captivity” Third World Elites “cease to be citizens
of their own countries and become nomads belonging to, and owing
allegiance to, a superterrestrial topography of money; they become
patriots of wealth, nationalists of an elusive and golden nowhere”
[cited in Davis 2006: 120].
Slums and gated communities, thus, can be read as part of a process
that carves up the city into different orders of citizenship in which
the “logic of patronage becomes the logic of rule” [ibid: 11-12].
Neither slum nor gated community fall wholly under the domain of
nation-state regulation; they both straddle a fuzzy inside-outside
nexus.”

Read it full at http://www.occupiedlondon.org/