Shanta Halder :
“Every end of the iron plate is projected upwards due to the heavy load it constantly sustains at the center. As a wheel reaches at any end of the plate, other ends are lifted and as the wheel leaves the plate, the lifted end falls heavily on brick built border of the manhole opening, generating loud bangs.” Some days back, I was describing to a friend the manhole just by my residence.
Could the description be understood in a reductionist manner? That would, under circumstances, be absolving.
I fear, however, that the description is also about the endangerment of the classical concept of state.
It is about the leftover state.
In consequence of exploitation of shadows of the classical ideas that guide foundation of states, when the ideas suffer persistent dismantlement.
It is a way of defining the leftover state. The diluted concept of state.
The promiscuity of the sounds is remarkable. They visit every ear around the epicenter of the loud bangs, equally. Another concept, termed equality, getting enforced by the leftover state! Residents around the epicenter, individually and silently, strain every nerve to lock the windowpanes of their respective homes, only to come to terms with the infallibility of bangs, in assaulting.
The bangs force something graver into the ears. That only individual labour can afford deliverance. The residents have seen how language fails. How possession of feelings can depend. For them, defensive maneuvers to ward off the aggression of bangs and dust are the only way, as the aggression is led by the state itself. Individual efforts though confirm defeat of collective ones, individuation allows them just to breathe. A persuasion into a living of somehow kind.
Segregation of individuals, since is rendered by the leftover state, realities regarding his birth determine his fate. It is to be wasted, debilitated and silenced into oblivion, as a confirmation of birth. It is a fate that rests on the certainty of further inexpressibleness tending constantly to aggravate, yet must be left in that aberrant way, for the unassailable self-evident reason: birth with untoward consequences. It is a fate, of remaining muddled. In an age when the market is seemingly all powerful and claims even to possess meaning, the state turns out to be a spectacular implement of the market, siding only with value. Individuation of efforts is bound to produce ‘value’ that in turn will seek ‘maximisation’, contributing to a wilderness where the individual himself is a context less stranger. Individuation does not just sustain the market. It creates the leftover state. The leftover state, therefore, must not intervene in the consequences of birth. It is forced to leave the aberrant consequences as they are, to avoid disruption of the market. Conservation of aberration! What does birth, however, mean? It means desperation that inspires foundation of institutions.
French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann once said “Fiction is a transgression”. Concrete attempt at portrayal of the irredeemable therefore, insults imagination. Irredeemable sufferings, if are portrayed, lose their pristine capabilities. Finding subverted solace in the fact that birth does not necessarily side with preexistent ‘accumulated value’ and, in acknowledgement of the irredeemable void that Lanzmann suggests, society is born. State, as a part the society was supposed to achieve equilibrium between ‘birth(s)’ and ‘pre-existent value’ through the deployment of classical political theories.’ State’, which was prescribed for the diagnosis of hopelessness of human condition, is regressing to rhetorical accustoming of the ‘birth(s) with untoward consequences’ to the ‘birth(s)’ that have taken place within ‘value’, obstructing acknowledgement of the true condition.
Does value signal degeneration? Preexistent ‘value’ since herds births into homogeneity, it stifles human spontaneity. As value is a rarefied form of labour, labour has tangible consequences. Value, since has physical repercussions, without having to be forced to do so, mass internalization of the implications of value is possible. Belief in value, therefore, possesses more possibilities to turn extreme, enough to pervert growth. For it must be possessed, value is immediate, and to conserve itself it must not permit us to look beyond.
To perpetuate itself, value must bridge the gap between itself and human tendencies. Language, which’s a process of becoming relevant, lives by creating determinacy, the lifeblood of variations. Only an apparent sense of determinacy can sustain the market. Words, therefore, are tendencies seeking perpetuation of value.
Anything described, is bound to stir convergence seeking its possession. Siding with ‘value,’ which is a historical reality, can give birth to plurality of realities. Despite ‘value’ being disproportionate historical process, and since history is associated more with force, ‘value’, however, can seek its proportionate imposition and enforcement backed by crude force, therefore, generating grave collateral implications.
Markets, it seems, are rooted in opaque human tendencies. Value, if can possess historical force which is confirmed by the market, will be whispered in the ears of famished and threatened beings, for they have no other way but to listen. Sufferers of ‘value’, as an immediate consequence, must confuse dignity with their individuated struggle for deliverance. It is such an inhuman struggle that it breeds and needs tales.
As value can be traced back to the past, it has the sobriety and patience, and therefore is manipulative enough, to listen to such redemptive tales, rendering blunt and irrelevant the effects of barbarity of the tribulations undergone. The leftover state seems to be a Public Relations Officer, entertaining complaints of collateral damage on a mass scale, who is employed by certain historical tendencies. It is no wonder, therefore, why words are losing essence. Were such attention with proselytizing effects not present, the peaceful façade of value wouldn’t be able to persuade such individuated sufferers of historical tendencies of value, into seeking an illusory sense of deliverance.
As I see aggression of dust from the hapless street laying siege to the covers of my books, distant impressions dawn on. A feeling of helplessness that is not sudden. As the bang caused by the makeshift manhole lid continues to torture my attention, I, however, feel an urge. An all-consuming urge beyond sanity. Yet, getting accustomed to the insanity does not help me remain rational. Behind every windowpane around the epicenter, there is an individual’s translucent struggle for redemption from degenerative circumstances. As any end of the plate is raised, so is the intensity of movements, of hands trying to lock the windows farther, into suffocation. Frantic hands being herded hysterically, to labor. I try to understand the billions of dust particles that waft about devoid of any obvious direction and then, settle down on anything corporeal. They are fated, only during their downwards motion. Just before being reduced to stability. I wouldn’t feel any compulsion to act, seeing their unhurried precipitation into permanent state, were the uncertainty that much sincere. They reveal to me a pattern, of the futility of my efforts in fending them off, repeatedly. After all, they are from the leftover state!
Their arbitrary moments of stability signal to me of the possibility of chaos if be understood with time, implying my exhaustion, and fast aggravation.
(The author is an LL.M student at University of Dhaka. He can be reached at [email protected]).
