August 2015 – Page 4 – Beyond Capital

1. In India, decolonisation did not reconstitute the State, rather it was a refurbishing of the same colonial state, now free from any remote controlling by the British. In legal terms too, all legislations and judicial pronouncements made prior to Independence continued to hold unless challenged and proven to be in contravention to the new constitution. The same bureaucratic structures and personnel – army, police, civil services, judiciary… – continued to manage the state of affairs and affairs of the state. The only thing that really changed after Independence and which was definitely a radical change was that for the first time this state could acquire popular legitimation and could rule in the name of the Indian people. Therefore unlike the French, Russian or even Chinese situations, we could never talk about a revolutionary state emerging on the ashes of the old one. An interesting comparison could be made with Pakistan, where despite all failures and difficulties, some real efforts were made to reconstitute the state.

2. State principles, written and unwritten rules regulating the state machinery remained the same in India. Its social engineering principles and mechanisms which were essential to stabilise the colonial rule continued to stabilise the postcolonial rule. What changed perhaps was their renomination – efforts were made to resignify them in terms of the modernist ideas and ideals of the nationalist leadership, which was now at the helm of the State. Therefore the ideal of secularism, for instance, was attached to the state’s management of communities through institutionalisation and accommodation of their hegemonic leadership. So what we find today designated as secularism is simply the state’s ability and efforts to manipulate and control various social agencies to reproduce itself. The word secularism was, of course, added to the Indian Constitution only in the 1970s and that too during one of the most authoritarian phases of the Indian polity.

3. Secularism here is essentially a state ideology that monolithises religious discourses, externalises and neutralises every internal threat to hegemonies within religions. In other words, it institutionalises religious leaderships and strengthens religious conservatism, thus helping the State to accommodate them and manipulate their agencies to create and disseminate its legimitation. It is in this regard, one can say that the liberal-secular forces in India have aligned with the religious conservative or right to foreclose any possibility of the emergence of a Religious Left which seeks to deinstitutionalise religions.

The recent ban on pornography, and the liberaliser’s discourse of outrage it has triggered, proves yet again the problem of sexual/libidinal economy is too serious a business to be left either to the ham-handed ways of the fascistic moral-police or the knee-jerk exertions of the terrorists and (academic) merchants of desire. Truth be told, they are the obverse of one another and are mutually constitutive of the neurotic subjecthood of capital in its late, crisis-ridden, neoliberal moment..

Marquis de Sade’s affirmative conception of an anti-procreative sexuality with its basis in revolutionary republicanism (see his ‘Philosophy in the Bedroom’), together with Wilhelm Reich and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s concerted engagement with the question of sexual economy as an economy of desire — and its productivising regimentation, and psycho-somatic and psycho-social segmentation in capitalism –, point us in directions that are much more fruitful in terms of strategising a politico-sexual revolution that will unleash an emancipated, anti-hetero-normative sex-economy of free association of direct producers.

The government decision to ban pornographic sites on the internet is, therefore, not an occasion for spectacles of outrage and liberal exhibitionism. It is, instead, to be seen as an opportunity to work towards instituting the thinking and discourse of a radical sexual/libidinal economy. For, it’s precisely the absence of such discourse and thinking vis-a-vis the concrete historical circumstances of the conjunctural crisis of capital as manifest in its sexual moment that has led to the consolidation of repressive sexual morality. It is this sexual morality that is the molecular basis of the current ban.

All concerned would do well to realise that the BJP-led Union government’s decision to ban internet pornography is a step forward for the project of politico-sexual counter-revolution. Such a move is counter-revolutionary precisely because it seeks to validate itself by drawing upon, instrumentalising and mystifying objective sex-revolutionary possibilities posited by psycho-social segmentation and psycho-somatic stratification (which includes “genitalisation of desire”) of desire and sexuality in their moment of precarity and crisis. It follows, therefore, that a politico-sexual counter-revolution kicks in and accomplishes itself precisely when objective revolutionary possibilities exist without being subjectively actualised as such.

In such circumstances, to envisage opposition to this ban in reactive terms — without lending even half a thought to how such opposition can be orientated to transform the structure of social relations of production, which in its historically concrete mediation makes possible and indexes psycho-social segmentation and psycho-somatic regimentation of desire — will just not do. Such liberal reactive politics of opposition to the consolidation of repressive sexual morality effectively amounts to no more than demanding the preservation of a given regime or order of socio-sexual privileges that the politico-sexual counter-revolution tends to alter only by preserving and reinforcing its basic structure of psycho-social and psycho-somatic segmentation of desire through its formal recomposition.

Clearly, such reactive politics of opposition to the ban is as implicated and invested in the structure of psycho-social and psycho-somatic segmentation of desire as the counter-revolutionary move to ban pornography. Therefore, the reactive politics of sexual liberalisation — as opposed to the transformative revolutionary politics of sexual liberation — reinforces the discursive-moral paradigm, which provides sustenance and support to the fascistic politico-sexual counter-revolution. Something the proponents of sexual liberalisation apparently oppose with much sound and fury. The reactive, all concerned would do well to realise, is also reactionary. And no less reactionary — probably more — than naked reaction itself because it deceives by the apparent vigour of its oppositional claim with regard to what is openly reactionary, all the while reinforcing the latter’s condition of possibility.