Ashoak Upadhyay
“The simulacrum is never what hides the truth – it is truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true. –Ecclesiastes¹
T
wo essays in recent times are worthy of close attention and an engagement because both in their own ways urge an examination of the darkness in which we flounder aimlessly or viciously, looking for a hole to get sick in or a face to slam into oblivion—even in these days of safe distancing.
The first of these is by Sankarshan Thakur in The Telegraph newspaper (02-09-2020) the title of which foregrounds the theme he will develop. Compliant and Complicit. “We are living a repetition of lies — malevolent lies, constructed lies, deliberate lies; blatant, unembarrassed lies.”
Lies and the complicit participant. Not those surrounding the fount of those lies but us. Distanced from the corridors of power and happy at the display of its ostentations: the proposed grand palace of the patriarch, the exotic peacock feeding from his generous hand, the remaking of that dirty city Varanasi. We watch and what do we think?
The other essay that prompts an engagement is by Sayen CHowdhury and Rajendran Narayanan an epistolary plea tinged with complaint to the “urban affluent voter” who has, by virtue of that complicity in two elections brought upon this land unmatched agonies. Very tersely and precisely they indict the voter: “Your silence gave him confidence, your conformism fed his conceit, your approval gave him wings.”
Complicit participant? “Dear voter, you cheered when your leader who thundered about the benefits of “minimum government, maximum governance”, not because governance was efficient but because your interface with the government was, in fact, minimal barring one-off needs such as getting a driver’s licence or registering an apartment.”
What do we take away from these two essays other than the usual litany of mis-governance through lies that we are resigned to, hammered as much as we have been by the pandemic and its mishandling? What can be worse than the ignominy of even death permitting no salvation from misgovernance, as Avay Shukla pointed out? What we can take away is a list of absences, of what has not been said though perhaps hinted at: that the package of lies by which the current dispensation sustains itself has deeper roots than one might think, having taken hold of not just the public discourse but our ontological selves. These “lies” evasions, falsehoods may vary in impact and influence only because of the place they occupy in our consciousness and their capacity to determine our actions and thoughts. ‘Vikas’ and acche din may resonate with the promise of a great future because we also have respected policymakers and economists and industrialists assuring us of a turnaround; others may snigger at its vacuity and still others may feel impatient with its delay. But we will remember that neither Vikas nor its promise of a better future are new; they are the more violent representations of the old development paradigm that has been the hallmark of government till 2014. Let us also suggest that since 1991 and the neo-liberal reforms of the Congress, the development agenda had been increasingly shorn of of its social democratic tradition with finance ministers increasingly seduced by the market as arbiter of progress for all. Post-2014 ‘Vikas’ is an echo of that increasingly hollowed out development discourse, an echo trying to come to life as the trumpet-sound of a new apocalypse peddled as a rosy-hued dawn.
Lies, falsehoods, half-truths surround us. The post-2014 paradigm of Vikas was a fading echo of the old paradignm of development as it dispensed with the rhetoric of distributive justice in its embrace of the superiority of maximizing production guided by the market. And there were buyers for this Vikas wiped clean of the tainted fingerprints of corruption that the old distributive agenda had engendred. Too much government it was said. And we cheered the commitment to drive the GDP up through a clean government handing over the tasks of raising the Little Big Number to a clutch of oligarchs-in-the-making.
Complicit. As Thakur points out, Vikas-inspired demonetization and GST benighted those already dispossessed. The lies, falsehoods of Vikas ought to have been buried right there; the trumpet had cracked. But we did not hear the deafening silence because we were heralding another falsehood: the age of the digital cashless economy. That too was peddled as acche din and bought by the urban middle class, not just the affluent voter that Choudhary and Narayanan berate. As believers in the development discourse and the telos of of a brighter future could they have done anything else?
Could they have cried for the poor, the mqrginalised, the informal workers now stripped of their cash earning possibilities? They could, probably they did but recovered their gilded-cage indifference with the help of another lie: India was on its way to a developed-country status, a post-modernist digitised market driven state and. You cannot make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. The weak, the poor have to be weeded out. Garibi Hatao becomes Garib Hatao. Gated affluence and consumption are no longer an embarrassment but an accomplished fact.
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In 1945, a little-known Russian philosopher and historian of religion and science wrote an essay titled “The Political Function of the Modern Lie” that would go on to prove seminal as Hannah Arendt would use it in her study of totalitarianism. Alexandre Koyre (1892-1964) came straight to the point in the vry first sentence of his intuitively reasoned dissection of the modern lie. “Never before has there been so much lying as in our day. Never has lying been so systematic, so shameless, so unceasing.” Korye acknowledges that humans lie, have been lying all the time. “Certainly, man is defined by his faculty of speech, inherent in which is the possibility of the lie; and-with apologies to Porphyry-it is the lie,much more than the laugh, that characterizes man.” (p290)
Korye is concerned about the political lie in modern times, in totalitarian regimes he had lived through, times when the lie as a weapon of war, but most in peacetime when it becomes the weapon against perceived enemies. In war, lying is helpful, misguiding the enemy is a strategic weapon. But what if totalitarian regimes or democratically elected ones take to lying to retain power to hammer the Other? What if the trope of war is carried into peacetime and used to identify “enemies” that need to be dealt with? The lie creates and its perpetuation seals the rupture between “them” and “Us even within societies.”
But how do regimes that resort to the lie to deceive the Other (as perceived or manufactured enemies) get away with the idea that their Lies will work? Korye’s idea of “totalitarian anthropology” provides the clue. “In totalitarian anthropology man is not defined by thought, reason or judgment, because, according to it, the overwhelming majority of men lack just these very faculties. Besides, can one speak In terms o£ man altogether? Decidedly not. For totalitarian anthropology denies the existence of any human essence, single and common to all men. Between one man and “another man” the difference is not one of degree but of · kind, says that anthropology.“
“Thought, that is, reason, the ability to distinguish the true from the false, to make decisions and judgments-all this, according to totalitarian -anthropology,is very rare”(p 299)
Can we extend this idea of totalitarian anthropology to liberal democratic societies? Koyre offered hints we could build on: “The written and spoken word, the press, the radio, all technical progress is put to the service of the lie. Modem man—genus totalitarian–bathes in the lie, breathes the lie, is in thrall to the lie every moment of his existence.” Koyre took this further, almost stepping into our own frightened darkness of gross fabrications:
“Moreover, the intellectual quality of the modern lie has deteriorated as the volume has increased. The distinctive feature of the modem lie is its mass output for mass consumption. And all production destined for the masses, especially all intellectual production, is bound to yield to lower standards. Thus, for all its subtlety of technique, the content of modem propaganda is of the grossest, manifesting an absolute and total contempt for truth, or even for verisimilitude, a contempt equaled only by the contempt which it implies for the intellectual capacities of those to whom this propaganda is addressed.” (p291)
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How are the lies packaged and reproduced? Through the Spectacle. The image represents a reality that is made undeniable, that acquires its verisimilitude through the industry of the Spectacle. This need not be just the jingoism that is transmitted out of New Delhi about the vileness of Pakistan, the war-cries and violence-inflected speeches that cheer the hearts of millions of Indians for reasons that may not have anything to do with their personal lived experiences of that country. The lie succeeds because a war-like hostility, indeed enmity, is created that permits the totalitarian lie to flourish in an ambience of drummed-up fear manufactured. What inflects the lie with a seductive quality, the illusion of reality, is its manufacture as Spectacle.
Guy Debord’s notion of the Spectacle extends beyond the obvious reference to images and simulacra that tell outright lies. The Spectacle also obfuscates, confuses surfaces with substance, plays Humpty Dumpty asserting his words can mean whatever he wishes them to mean because the real issue is “which is to be master, that’s all” The Spectacle of voting, of parliamentary/representative democracy can manufacture consent to an alienation that turns the people into vote banks. Fed on the illusion that their “right” to vote ensures hem guardianship of their destiny, representative democracy turns the subject into objects of manipulation—by the Spectacle.
The Spectacle of democracy creates another set of illusions about institutions designed to hold executive ambition and power in check. The Institution stands above the individual it is held especially by liberal political thought. When Donald Trump assumed power, liberals such as David Runciman were confident that America’s institutions of democracy would rein in his wild ways and greedy ambitions. The same sentiment ran through liberals in India when Narendra Modi was set to launch the great future. As Praveen Donthi pointed out in Caravan magazine, not too long ago the trio of liberals, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Sadanand Dhume and Ashutosh Varshney were fulsome in their praise of Modi’s capacity to turn India’s destiny with his Gujarat model of Vikas and confident of this country’s democratic institutions to keep him on the straight and narrow path of good governance. As Donthi showed us by quoting from Mehta’s columns as far back as 2012 when Modi took over for the second term as Gujarat’s Chief Minster, the great liberal intellectual justified his potential to lead India out of the ruinous corruption and “racuous democracy” of yester years and more.
“Mehta encouraged an extreme faith in the strength of the Indian democratic system, a belief that its institutions and conventions would inevitably bend Modi to their demands, instead of Modi bending them to his.”
Donthi points to an unstated belief Mehta was proposing about the capacity of the candidate to change once he took over. But equally Mehta was also showcasing his confidence in the institutions as the last-resort defender of India’s democracy. Not before long he would be radically altering his views becoming Modi’s fiercest liberal critic as those very democratic institutions are being twisted and bent to the patriarch’s will in a way never experienced even during those days of “raucous democracy” and corruption. Dhume and Varshney would follow in Mehta’s footsteps, from endorsing Modi as the leader for a brighter India to critiquing him for throttling the liberal order and democracy.
Let’s stay with Guuy Debord a while longr. Is it possible that the liberal’s criticism through the print media and in forums frequented by like-minded liberals is constitutive of Spectacle consumed by its ‘target’ audience? Is it possible that such ‘consumption’ creates the illusion of protest in the act of reading? An illusion, mind you precisely because it is a part of a series of images being consumed? We read Pratap Bhanu Mehta and flip the pages to the Sports section. The front page of the progressively inclined print medium contains a welter of information-as-images that we consume; satiated with words-as-images, we move on, comforted by the thought that we are on the right side of the fence, the side of righteous anger that may linger as aftertaste long enough for us perhaps not vote for the current dispensation. So we think as we consume our modernity. But other images impinge upon us; other ‘lies’ and obfuscations; complicity snuffs out any flicker of discontent and unease. Not just the representations of materiality but of cognitive discourse, such as the belief in a democracy nesting in those constitutional institutions created by our founding fathers.
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Sankarshan Thakur ends his provocative essay thus:
“We are living the funereal carnival of our dispossession. And we probably do not know. Successor generations might turn to ask: What were you applauding?”
Funereal carnival? Yes. But complicity has a doppelganger and it is a silent scream. Edvard Munch’s screamer comes to mind. And we remember Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche’s warning of the “danger of a single story. And we cast our eyes at the borders of Delhi, where geography is creating history; we remember those Muslim women of Shaheen Bagh who led the anti-CAA movement and broke through the lies of gender bias in Islam; and we must spare a thought for those sants of Matri Sadan that wage lonely satyagrahas, against the ravages visited upon the Ganga; and must travel down our inland waterways in North India to understand how the lies, the illusions and spectacle of Vikas is being opposed by locals in Varanasi, Bihar and in the North East through collective, non-violent resistance to the destruction of the ecologies of their sustenance
A joyous carnival of dissent defining democracy that presages alternative Presents.
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Notes 1. Cited in “Simulacra and Simulation” by Jean Baudrillard Guy Debord’s quotes are from The Society of the Spectacle. Chapter 1. 1967
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