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Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 IST 2008
The disjunction lies in the manner in which appropriated, distorted, unrevolutionary sentimentalism (it has travelled wherever there exists a middle class; should we thank Charles Dickens for it?) is today unleashed as sublimatory vehicle to Global Aeducated Indian invested indifference to, and deliberate disinterest in, the fascisisation (ugh! what a noun!) of the Indian polity. (Khaa! what a sentence!) The forwarded Farah Naqvi article turns me into Nirupa Roy: everytime she comes into the scene, buckets fill up with tears. Naqvi wants to touch my sensitivities. In the process, she enjoins me to bring in 2 buckets, one under each eye. Precisely because of its sensitivities, her article is a perfect example of how to assuage false (comfortable) anxieties.
[I can quote ad infinitum over here. If you want, readers, I'll do it]
The continuity lies in always finding the Self as victim, and so implicilty and explicitly not bothering about the shape, size, visage, predilections, of the perpetrator.
Please, please, please, please, please, please. Can I be informed about the perpetrators? Ms Naqvi, others, tell us the truth about Gujarat?
To talk incessantly, in sentimentalist fashion, about the victims of the Gujarat unfolding-massacre, is to silkily aeducatedly masturbate.
Who pissed on Muslims in gujarat? Who crapped on them, wilfully and with full and guaranteed freedom? Who's gorged, and are still gorging, on them? When will I read an ethnography of the Perpetrator, beautifully written?
Tell me. Please, please, please, tell me. I am already angst- and guilt-ridden. Don't flog me. I don't need you to throw victim-shit on me. I am doing that all the time myself. Throw perpetrator-crap at me. I will revel in it. Investigate the criminals. Tell me about them. I need to know about them.
To hell with sentimentalist coverage and commentary on Gujarat. Get real.
Miley sewer meraa tumhara
to sewer baney humaraa
yours,
pp
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<P>Dear All,</P>
<P>Sentimentalism is an ethic, a posture, a mode of representation, a narrative style, a gargoylic closure that emerged in the foment leading to the French Revolution. (I am regurgitating, with tears forming in my eyes, my inability to possess or even read Peter Brooks' classic text on this. I place a bucket under each eye.)</P>
<P>Every human being is equal. Why? Because they cry.</P>
<P>This is a re-statement of: Every human being is equal because they eat, piss, and crap. </P>
<P>[Sentimentalism's relation to Menippean satire is extremely interesting. In Menippean satire, everyone is equal because everyone gorges, and pisses and craps by the litre and the tonne. In medieval, and even early modern Europe, till the time the peasantry possesses the ability to pamphleteer, Menippean satire is the mode in which the excesses of the rich are represented. With the supersession of mercantilism into primitive accumulation of capital, came a new regime of representation that excluded such expressivities. In an enlightened universe and emergent burgher culture, it was difficult to tell such enteric truths. Refinement was everything.</P>
<P>In a time of the transformation of the peasantry into labour, refinement relegated Menippean satire, and peasant celebration, to the sphere of obscenity. Fathers had banned Rabelais; sons were told to read the later Dryden, or Racine; grandsons, Shaftesbury's moral philosophy. Of course, you could read "well-written" satire. It was witty and intellectual; it never crossed boundaries, Voltaire notwithstanding.</P>
<P>The appropriation of Menippean satire is then filled in in the form of the emergence of sentimentalism. Repression, or the excess of it, finds a new outlet.</P>
<P>There is a change here, in how "excess" is defined. There is an attempt to shift from a fantasy of control to a fantasy of agency.</P>
<P>The latter fantasy, too, is appropriated.</P>
<P>And how. It is turned into a regime of absolute victimisation, an invitation to recognise the absolute overtaking of the subject by external forces not under control. This eminently suited the 19th century European bourgeosie, which drew its strengths from a belief in permanent victimisation. It suited, even more, the ever-in-flux petty bourgeosie, which based its lifestyle on an ethic of humiliation] </P>
<P>From the French Revolution to commentary on Gujarat is really jumping the gun (what does this idiom mean?). Yet I cannot but help see a disjunction, and one continuity.</P>
<P>The disjunction lies in the manner in which appropriated, distorted, unrevolutionary sentimentalism (it has travelled wherever there exists a middle class; should we thank Charles Dickens for it?) is today unleashed as sublimatory vehicle to Global Aeducated Indian invested indifference to, and deliberate disinterest in, the fascisisation (ugh! what a noun!) of the Indian polity. (Khaa! what a sentence!) The forwarded Farah Naqvi article turns me into Nirupa Roy: everytime she comes into the scene, buckets fill up with tears. Naqvi wants to touch my sensitivities. In the process, she enjoins me to bring in 2 buckets, one under each eye. Precisely because of its sensitivities, her article is a perfect example of how to assuage false (comfortable) anxieties. </P>
<P>[I can quote ad infinitum over here. If you want, readers, I'll do it]</P>
<P>The continuity lies in always finding the Self as victim, and so implicilty and explicitly not bothering about the shape, size, visage, predilections, of the perpetrator. </P>
<P>Please, please, please, please, please, please. Can I be informed about the perpetrators? Ms Naqvi, others, tell us the truth about Gujarat?</P>
<P>To talk incessantly, in sentimentalist fashion, about the victims of the Gujarat unfolding-massacre, is to silkily aeducatedly masturbate.</P>
<P>Who pissed on Muslims in gujarat? Who crapped on them, wilfully and with full and guaranteed freedom? Who's gorged, and are still gorging, on them? When will I read an ethnography of the Perpetrator, beautifully written? </P>
<P>Tell me. Please, please, please, tell me. I am already angst- and guilt-ridden. Don't flog me. I don't need you to throw victim-shit on me. I am doing that all the time myself. Throw perpetrator-crap at me. I will revel in it. Investigate the criminals. Tell me about them. I need to know about them.</P>
<P>To hell with sentimentalist coverage and commentary on Gujarat. Get real.</P>
<P align=center>Miley sewer meraa tumhara</P>
<P align=center>to sewer baney humaraa</P>
<P align=left>yours,</P>
<P align=left>pp </P><p><img src="http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/icon/auto.gif" height=17 width=28>
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