Foucault, the Individual and Midnight Madness

Since the sixteenth century, a new political form of power has been continuously developing. The new political structure, as everyone knows, is the state. But most of the time, the state is envisioned as a kind of political power which ignores individuals, looking only at the interests of totality, or, should I say, of a class or a group among the citizens. That’s quite true. But I’d like to underline the fact that the state’s power (and that’s one of the reasons for its strength) is both an individualizing and a totalizing form of power. Never, I think in the history of human societies – even in the Old Chinese society – has there been such a tricky combination in the same political structures of individualization techniques, and of totalization procedures.

[Foucault, Subject and Power: 13]

Power then works through the individual – it gets consolidated on and through the ‘class’ or ‘group among citizens’ or ‘population’. However, there is never any given or pre-existing population; population always comes after the individual. So when power needs to govern the population, it has to inevitably work its way up through its smaller units, namely the individual, then the family, then the community. This leads to the following situation: the state concentrates on its totalizing procedures and is thus focused on the larger group, the population. The sterilization drives, immunization programes, literacy mission, NREGA (National Rural Employment Guarantee Act), NRHM (National Rural Health Mission), RCH (Reproductive and Child Health) policies, dai training programmes and so on – all focused on the ‘total’ – the total over-reproducing group to be sterilized, the total under-5 group of Indian children to be immunized, total mass of illiterate people to be educated, total BPL group to be provided work, total rural mothers to be given diet supplementation, total number of untrained dais to be clinically trained, and so on.

However, each of the initiatives must necessarily work through the individual, else there is no group, no total outside of her/him. Yet, the paradox is the attention is not on the individual – the state is not bothered if one dai remain untrained, if one woman remain illiterate, if one infant dies too soon, if one woman does not get the 100 day job (barring perhaps the vaccination drive, especially the one to eradicate small pox and polio, and that too probably because of the potential of the left-behind child to contaminate others, something that would not happen so directly in other instances of education of 100 day work). This then becomes the strange phenomenon when the individual is focused on but not attended to – she is only a conduit for the state to pass knowledge and at the end consolidate a mission. The mission is never to attend to the individual but to make the power/knowledge pass through her. The state needs a human body, a citizen-subject body, a willing body and this body is not the material body but a symbolic agentic body that willing to lie under the scanner and let the knowledge pass through her. The materiality of the body is required only when it comes to injecting her with contraceptives or vaccinating her. At most other times it is a different fragment of her biological body – the capacity to learn to sign when it comes to adult literacy missions, the willingness to go to the polling booth and cast the vote, the workability of the hands and feet necessary to toil for 100-days, the womb that can be sterilized.

This is a wonderful predicament for the modern subject of the state; she is there and is also invisible. Even in genocides and major calamities (like the Bhopal Gas Drama) the bodies are counted and enumerated; the individuals are kept as a list for relatives to claim. The state comes closest to the dead individual when it comes to providing compensation, to prepare the cheque. But at the end it is again a narrative of the population, the population of deads – 152 killed and 1 lakh per dead.

And even now, with the “internal threat” menacing our trains and train lines every passing hour, the state is possessed with ‘Maoists’ – again a collective category…we are still not bothered to reach the individual, to talk, to listen, to try to settle scores. And we are still saying, “tribals are getting caught inbetween”. And the tribals, the natives of free-secular-democratic-India are still not individual humans beings to us, individuals who are living the life of deads, who are living under the threat of death – from the state (police) or the Maoist – every single minute (even as I am happily typing this on my gadget, knowing only too well that neither the state nor the naxal will barge into my room and rape me and shoot me down). They are still a vague collective for us, who are either all with the Maoists and thereby eligible for encounter deaths or poor souls whom we shall pity for and then displace en bloc as we build the 100th mine on their homelands...

Perhaps the state will never attend to individuals, we shall always remain a conduit for democracy and the good-citizenship stories to flow through…

Perhaps it’s only the individuals who can be of some help to the other…

Perhaps it’s time the Self met the Other… perhaps there’s some promise in it after all…

Of Scientists and Birds

Richard Feynman said: “Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.” While the wit and humor is well-taken, one realizes (with some degree of pain too) that that precisely is the problem dear Watson!

My mother used to read out selected editorials to me when I was lingering between don’t-yet-find-the-newspaper-appealing-enough-to-take-it-up and sufficiently-infatuated-by-certain-forms-and-genres-of-information that came out in the vernacular newspaper that we take at home. It was from one such piece that I first heard the name of this Nobel winner physicist and his autobiography (Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!) and the anecdote of how, while sitting under a starry sky, he had looked up and muttered to his ladylove that the stars twinkle for all humanity underneath but only he knows precisely why they twinkle. At that young impressionable age, when I was half in love with almost any man who would take the trouble of looking up at the sky and sigh out loud, I found this piece of muttering fascinating (what conviction!) – and yet a subtle, almost hidden within some corner of my mind, nagging feeling remained (did the words contain some sort of arrogance?). I could never be sure.

And now, confronted with the former expostulation of the great 20th century scientist, I was almost sure that it was the latter, even if one were to give him some passage on account of his sense of (masculine) humour. But for a few like George Canguilhem, Bruno Latour, Thomas Kuhn, Sundar Sarukkai, Donna Haraway, C. K. Raju, most scientists have indeed thought of HPS (History and Philosophy of Science) and HSS (History and Sociology of Science) as almost meaningless and a substantial waste of time, almost as relevant to them as astronomy is for the existence of the stars, or the knowledge of cellular biology for the cells. The point is that they have continued considering themselves as faraway stars and flying high birds and nondescript and invisible cells. Well, if their work and they themselves were indeed thus – tiny, minute, microscopic, invisible and somewhat inconsequential – we (that is, we who consider HPS and HSS important and relevant enough) might have granted them their whim and their witty quotations. But the problem is that they crack the “mystery of life” – the genome – and plan to clone human beings, us, and crack the “mystery of death” (am referring to E. F. Keller’s essay) by coming up with the fundamentals of atomic fission and then they decide to experimentally drop the “baby” (their code for the A-bomb) on two Japanese towns (I say experimentally because by then Japan had surrendered to Russia and it was decided between the three great powers that it would still drop the bomb since millions had gone into its construction – so why not check the workability? And actually the two sites had been not targeted in anyway whatsoever during the war, since Oppenheimer’s strict instructions were that they needed to see and measure the exact impact the “baby” would have on a fresh site! Taking away a lady’s virginity and measuring the exact degree of shame and pain? Well, so much for science.

Smaller cases: Dams are built on rivers and inevitably only the farmers, the adivasis and the dalits are displaced. Contraceptions are devised and inevitably the subaltern and working class women are targeted. When mines are built and minerals appropriated by big companies and the state, it is inevitably the tribals whose homelands are evacuated. Yet no 'design'?

History is not a leveler... it shores up power gradients and guilt and anger...

Class, caste, economy, history and sex …. They exist and no one scientist on this planet till now has been born who was not born into few of these affiliative categories…and these categories precisely exist to perpetrate and perpetuate difference. And to do just science, ethical science, one is bound to be bothered. It needs to be taken as the Hippocrates’ Oath. It should matter more than ornithology does to birds, because the scientists is not the transient bird, the little bird that can come and go without altering basic human life in anyway (and that too we know, it does…it does lie in a netted relationship with human species). But, granting the scientists their male egos, if they want the Nobel unlike the sparrow or the duck, or want patents unlike the crow or the robin, or want to be immortalized unlike the ostrich or the cuckoo, they had better take both ornithology and history of science a little more seriously.

The bird at best will shit on our expensive dress and we can shoot it down with an air-gun and fry it for dinner … red wine…

They might press a button and the world might go up in nuclear smoke … we’ll all be dead long before we can put them to trial …

So, it’s best they realize, and we remember it.