Arsh K.S | University of Ljubljana (original) (raw)

Drafts by Arsh K.S

The question of the relation of signs to what they signify, and our processes of nomination over ... more The question of the relation of signs to what they signify, and our processes of nomination over them is as old at least as the discipline of linguistics. Yet can all we really say about them already sealed in the Sassurean observation of the arbitrary relation between the two? Brassier's paper here seeks to answer vital questions: 1. What a name is and how it relates to what it names 2. Why there is a difference between names and things 3. What kinds of things there are, and what kinds are.

This si his engagement with Sellarian critical ontology; a figure whom he earmarks as perhaps the most significant if underappreciated philosopher of the 20th century.

I treat Modi and Ms Roy as bodies of work, whose respective coteries or rather target market, whi... more I treat Modi and Ms Roy as bodies of work, whose respective coteries or rather target market, while politically distinct, do infact engender each other. This is about the hidden relations in Indian political life that will not be visibly apparent to a newspaper reading outsider. See them as positions or poles and not merely as characters.

Experimental writing on naming and the attributability of predicates. And what the does to the ph... more Experimental writing on naming and the attributability of predicates. And what the does to the phenomena being named itself in terms of its ontological relation to us. Written in axioms, one following the other. Interspersed with biography. For the autobiography of a philosopher is a work of philosophy.

India's unemployment crunch and the unlikely savior that could be tourism Unemployment Gaged Our ... more India's unemployment crunch and the unlikely savior that could be tourism Unemployment Gaged Our nation is in the severe grips of mass unemployment and there doesn't seem to be any easy ways out. To put things into perspective, we have 31 million unemployed citizens which is almost the population of Canada. Perhaps even more worryingly, according to an OECD report (Organization of Economic Coordination and Development) 30% of India's youth (aged between 15-29) are neither employed nor in any sort of education or training. The foreseeable future does not look bright as the estimated number of jobs which will be created in 2018 are speculated to be around 600,000. Tourism's Revenue There are paths ahead however which we could take and it would be well advised to heed indicators from the rest of the world. Tourism for instance, has emerged as the largest employer of labor power in the world. It is estimated, that by 2019, tourism will emerge as the second largest employer of labor power domestically. The sector has created employment for 40.3 million citizens in 2016, accounting for 9.3% of the total jobs in this country. We are however far behind international standards. Receiving approximately 10.18 million foreign tourists every year, ranking us 40th out of 136 countries by the Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Report. The industry leader, France receives 82.6 million tourists every year and this disparity is reflected in our gross earnings rather starkly. Our annual revenue from the sector being 22.427 million $ pale compared to the US which grosses over 205 billion $ annually from international tourists, which is almost 2/3rd of our annual budget. There are crucial factors that are dampening what tourism could bring to our economy. To begin with the cost of travel and accommodation in India is often more expensive than flying to a neighboring country. We need to lower taxes on commercial airlines and build more hotel rooms. This is a crucial area if we are to become an attractive destination. The whole country for instance has just 100,000 hotel rooms while the city of New York alone has around 80,000. Underbelly of the Industry Worryingly, market constraints aside we have harbored the dark legacy of terroristic violence-the 2008 Mumbai attacks by the Lakshar-e-Taiba stand out as the instance which is seared into popular perception. That said, there are governmental decisions which may have dissuaded prospective travelers. The implementation of GST for instance may have solved the nuisance of a number of indirect taxes by levying a standardized direct tax, however it also seems to have affected the decisions of high end tourists because of the raised air fares and the increased cost of holidaying. A grimmer aspect of the picture is the fact that the social unrest which grips this country is now is spilling into vacation havens. The rape and murder of Danielle McLaughlin, a 28 year old British woman by Vikat Bhagat being the most recent reminder of a sickness that plagues the psyche of this nation. Far from being an isolated incident in a tropic paradise, Goa bears in its recent history the rape and murders of Scarlett Keeling,15 and Denyse Sweeney 34. These incidents

In this brief monograph, I weigh the advantages and difficulties of the world adopting a universa... more In this brief monograph, I weigh the advantages and difficulties of the world adopting a universal currency. I do this bearing in mind three key economic factors 1. The function of reserve currencies and their history 2. Historical precedents of a group of nations in the adoption of unified currencies 3. Contemporary impetuses in the adoption of a new global currency and its politico-economic repercussions.

My review of the HBO silver screen production - Westworld.

Childhood in Anglo-American Fiction: The Subversion of the Disciplinary in Aldous Huxley One cann... more Childhood in Anglo-American Fiction: The Subversion of the Disciplinary in Aldous Huxley One cannot approach American literature today in ignorance of the significance which Deleuze imparts to our understanding of temporality and what-let us call for now, the mode of narratorial production, in its variance from the traditional style of the novel as enshrined in the 19th and 20th century European bildungsroman. In such an approach, a student of literature notices that the unfolding of the narrative begins neither in an existential soliloquy as in classics of the form such as the underground man's self loathing exegesis in Doestoevsky's 'Notes From Underground' (1864), nor in a narratorial microcosm which underlines the beginning of English Victorian fiction in works such as Jane Austen's 'Pride and Prejudice' (1813). What we notice instead in 'The Genius And The Goddess' (1955) by Aldous Huxley is a dialogic character of narrative that isn't grounded in the interiority of a thought, theme or character but which emerges between personas who are introduced impromptu via a get together over Christmas Eve; John Rivers and the unnamed interlocutor, as they recollect the Maartens family whom John Rivers once worked and lived with; they are to emerge as the real subject of the novel. The characters who thus constitute such an oblique and tangential subject, via the two interlocutors retroactively frame our vision of the interlocutors themselves. This transition is crucial, to notice how the reader of the novel is no longer one confessed to, the inner world of the narrator is hence now distinct from the idea, the topos of the novel, yet what accompanies this is not a refrain of a lost idyllic innocence so often found in laments of childhood in Victorian novels, a trope whose self indulgent 'tragedy' is perhaps exemplified in George Elliot's 'The Mill On The Floss' (1860)...

This is a brief introduction to how feudalism, as a mode of production situated itself in the Ind... more This is a brief introduction to how feudalism, as a mode of production situated itself in the Indian subcontinent. It elaborates the economic differences between the classical conception of feudalism in Europe and how fiefs in India remained trade-able assets for Samantas. It also compares the conditions of the peasants from the two realms while predicating their varying relation to the land they tilled.

In continuing a line of flight opened up earlier in discussing the zombie as a symbolic device1, ... more In continuing a line of flight opened up earlier in discussing the zombie as a symbolic device1, a metaphor that frames our relation, not to human labour in it's vitalistic and artistic affectivity, but to the congealment of it's creditory mediation as Capital which grows only as it feeds of living labor, it is worth considering how this symbol's deployment and becoming into a generic staple has presented us with a vision of what in it's immediacy appears to be a post-apocalyptic dystopia. Within the genre of zombie cinema, the horde of zombies themselves feature as the background of antagonisms, dangers and mutating threats which foregrounds human ingenuity and the drama of survival. The stage however is set almost always in a post-apocalyptic period which has already witnessed the fears we know of yet keep at a distance today. Questions such as a real post-scarcity economy, problems regarding the regulations and control mechanisms of biogenetic experimentation and the climatic consequences of our actions are what is retroactively posited to as signs from a future that we fear, but do not believe will really happen. The most recent rendition of such a horizon drenched in the symptoms of our pathologies today is enfleshed by the popular television series, 'The Walking Dead'. What dawns on us as spectators is not merely the horror and carnage that the undead in their lifeless hunger seek to inflict on the living. Actual conflict, unlike other Hollywood productions takes up considerably less reel time than the organizational formations of the pack of survivors and the arguments regarding the decisions they are to take. Whether to stay close to the forrest, which provides resources and is away from the confines and traps of the city, yet risk an ambush by night from the trees? Questions such as these arise in the immediacy of the threat they pose, and while our batch of survivors act also as farmers and scavengers in the meantime, the real anxiety and struggle that unfolds in a world without a demarcated organizational structure and division of labour takes it's toll on them. Friends, and even family turn against one another and this churning of the human will in it's struggle against the hunger that haunts it, among themselves-AND from of the remains of their brethren, animates the real drama of the series. Yet, and here I believe that it is important to insist on the historical genesis of such a metaphor-Frankenstein's creature, the original 'undead' figure, from Mary Shelley's novel, assembled in a laboratory and brought to life, expressed, from within the finitude of his being, an experience of tragedy that to the reader appears more 'human' than the actions of his persecutors who are merely stunned into aggression by such a being's appearance. Tortured thus, and abandoned by his creator we cannot help but ....

This is a review and critique of Prabhat Patnayaks position vis-a-vis Zizek as posited in his int... more This is a review and critique of Prabhat Patnayaks position vis-a-vis Zizek as posited in his interview with the Wire last week. It seek to clarify and brush against the grain the prevalent nationalist consensus in the country regarding its relation with the world.

The symbolic device of the re-animated cadaver has been deployed in the elucidation of social com... more The symbolic device of the re-animated cadaver has been deployed in the elucidation of social commentary in a multiplicity of ways. The archetype, in some respects, of such a deployment was Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein' (1818). This brief monograph attempts to interrogate what was, almost necessarily subtracted from such a device in it's congelation into the multi-platform Zombie franchises today. Most noticeably, the capacity to explain oneself, the loss of sensibility and faculties of reason, and with it the very pathos that made this character able to bear a subtitle as allusive of an epochal vision as 'The Modern Prometheus'.

The first of what perhaps may be a series of short monograph's situating a reading of Friedrich N... more The first of what perhaps may be a series of short monograph's situating a reading of Friedrich Nietzsche's magnum opus, 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' from both, the tradition of German Idealism that he militates against as well as his reception by contemporary 'Postmodern' thought. This one focuses on what we may yet call an allegory of the 'child' from the series of the metamorphoses of spirit. Such an allegory, I claim - is the key to reading his reaction against the Hegelianism that permeated the philosophical school's of his time, while also positing an alternative to the narratorial force of the dialectic which historicizes negation as exemplified by Hegel's greatest student, Karl Marx.

Surveying Lenin's theorization of the aggressions between Capitalist Empires leading to WWI in it... more Surveying Lenin's theorization of the aggressions between Capitalist Empires leading to WWI in it's relation to the class struggle and it's implications for the future of Left Praxis. This is where he postulates the split of the workers movement via a tendency within those in advanced imperialist countries to form alliances of 'mature opportunism' with rentier capital as the mode of production now facilitates a complete bifurcation between the productive function of capital and it's ownership.

S. Sumita's paper submitted to the Centre For Development Studies, Tiruvanantapuram is geared tow... more S. Sumita's paper submitted to the Centre For Development Studies, Tiruvanantapuram is geared towards accounting for how plantation economies can be brought under and used to fuel inclusive growth as well as generate employment. Key points which are emphasized are the extent to which plantation economies generate foreign exchange via cash crops. And how this sector was badly hit by globalisation and trade liberalisation leading to a fall in prices in many of the plantation crops and fluctuating exchange rates. Plantation economies themselves serve as perfect examples of the vestiges of colonial economies. Economies which relied on land and labour from the colonies and capital and management from the imperialist countries. These hierarchies have continued to exist in many ways, including the condition of indentured labour.

A review of Shankar Gopalakrishnan's text Neoliberalism and Hindtutva; it explains the nature of ... more A review of Shankar Gopalakrishnan's text Neoliberalism and Hindtutva; it explains the nature of the political alliance between the two within the historical context of the mode of production and politics in India. Of particular value to me was the archeology of political formations that preceded this alliance and how it has emerged as the hegemonic force that it is today in arrogating the space left by the political discourse in India from the eighties, notably the rise of regional parties and the new farmers movement. Converging at the point of the liberalization of India's markets in ninety one.

Sculpture itself as a form of art provides insights into the functioning and outlook of its indig... more Sculpture itself as a form of art provides insights into the functioning and outlook of its indigenous society at large. The focus of this piece being women in Greek sculpture has displayed the cultural positioning of women vis-à-vis men in Grecian society. In doing so it has come across aspects of their respective gender roles such as attitudes to nudity and sexuality as practiced during the classical period.

This was my first essay for a M.A. It critically engages with Peter Hamilton's reading of the gen... more This was my first essay for a M.A. It critically engages with Peter Hamilton's reading of the genealogical moorings of Sociology, while historicizing its genesis between the Renaissance and the following Romanticism. This intellectual history attempts to disentangle the unilateral notion of the Enlightenment invoked by Cultural Studies, Anthropology and Post-Colonial Studies as a harbinger of a totalitarian prescription of mechanical reason. It does this by pulling out the disciplinary threads that wove what was identified as the beginning of a society questioning the foundations of it's beliefs. Threads which were, arising out of the medieval ages - distinctly theological.
It is from within this antagonism that we see the emergence of the philosophical schools that we now identify as French Rationalism, German Idealism and British Empiricism. This unpacking of the Enlightenment allows for a better appreciation of the depth and rigor of thought and discovery that characterized Continental traditions of Philosophy at the time, which were the foundations of modern Social Science.

This short note seeks to chart the extent and direction of Friedrich Engels project in the 'Diale... more This short note seeks to chart the extent and direction of Friedrich Engels project in the 'Dialectics Of Nature' (1883). While summarizing the overarching scope of Engels' insight, liberated from ecclesiastical and academic authorities, I focus on his encounter with the role played by labour in human evolution.

Critique in India, in the hands of Left Liberals if often irresponsibly diluted to a juvenile umb... more Critique in India, in the hands of Left Liberals if often irresponsibly diluted to a juvenile umbrage with the 'discourse' of business communications and an ill sighted yet sustained advocacy of Protectionist policies. This paper is directed to the oversights of such a perspective via the exploration of an encounter between the film maker Michael Moore, and the economist Milton Friedman in their taking up the Ford Pinto case. It seeks to situate this encounter within the context of how disagreements regarding principle are often avoided by left liberals.

This si his engagement with Sellarian critical ontology; a figure whom he earmarks as perhaps the most significant if underappreciated philosopher of the 20th century.

My review of the HBO silver screen production - Westworld.

The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up a... more The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again. "The truth will not run away from us": in the historical outlook of historicism these words of Gottfried Keller mark the exact point where historical materialism cuts through historicism. For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably. (The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.)-Walter Benjamin, On The Concept of History, 1919 Origins To begin I think it may be best to circumscribe the contexts and circumstances within which these reflections found spaces to gestate and germinate within. Along the way some of these reflections may offer some insight into the milieus which I have sought, what I hoped to find there and how I have lived. Fresh out of school, and in a new city (Delhi) which I sought out to escape the imagined and real confines of parental cohabitation, the choice of a discipline was what initially vexed my imagination. I was clear that I wanted to study the humanities, being an avid reader of literature throughout my earlier school life. An interest which was nurtured by the happy coincidence of living with two professors in Calcutta while studying for my ISC board exams. These two were my father, Selvyn and an old college friend of his, Mrityun-both were teaching in Universities then and living in what was effectively a bachelor pad, which was both alien and exciting for me who had for the past 6 years lived with my mother, Anjana in Hyderabad. I remember being interrogated in the evenings by these two men over three decades older than me as they nursed their drinks about questions such as the role of the state after a political science class in the afternoon. My initial reticence to engage in such debates was slowly shed away as well as the inculcation of a critical attitude towards textbooks which developed out of the inadequacies I encountered in my understanding when standing up to such scrutiny. My choice of selecting literature as a discipline to study, was finally guided however most evocatively by a classmate who shared my interest in poetry. This was Nishant, we would sit at the back of the class and write poems in between classes, we shared, critiqued and encouraged our poetry between us. A literature student however does spend an inordinate amount of time in solitary reading and my more historical interests generically were strongly guided by studying late modernist prose, particularly Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and the verse of T.S Eliot who I often attempted to imitate in my own poems. The Nebula of Nationalism Conrad however was crucial to me in his ability to give voice to the suppressed archaeological encounter which constituted the dilemma of modernity, the encounter between a rapidly industrializing Europe in its quest for raw materials and markets for its Imperialistic conquest represented in the figures of Kurtz and Marlowe as they grapple and negotiate with

What I would like to explore in this survey of concepts are a few principle themes which will be ... more What I would like to explore in this survey of concepts are a few principle themes which will be employed in the dissertation. The necessity of speaking in an economic idiom was created by the need to be able to effectively link some of the key concerns which were sought to be raised there. Here however I would like to speak at greater ease about how some of these keys have been fashioned. So allow me to begin by apologising for having spoken of the 'employment' of principle themes via a survey of concepts. This was a loose description and it is no more possible for me to truly 'employ' themes in writing as it is for words to become a repository of material value in themselves. There is a tendency today for some of our academic work to be reportive of the concerns of the world, of the fall of markets, of terrorist attacks, of xenophobic cultural nationalisms, patriarchy, poverty, communalism and the sufferings of people in a multiplicity of situations and their struggles through them. The plight of people and our relation to them must effectively constitute a basic and commonly agreed upon ethical minimum. Particularly in times where the fall of the global market in the midst of the election of the BJP led government on whom many were counting on as an impetus to industry and growth. This plight, in the form of its reporting is occasionally in the danger of serving purely per formative functions, in response to another line of argument hence becoming reactionary. I'm certain you may have come across television news debates where oppositional party spokesmen mud sling with incidents of malpractices traded in ascertaining who speaks from whatever notion of the higher ground which emerges from such a process. What I am more interested in however is the productive capacity of philosophy, its immense and rich history of being able to engender a dialogue which furthers a conversation. A constructivism which appears in the work of Gilles Deleuze for example and as I shall attempt to argue, is entailed in the very word 'comrade'. This being the step down genealogy. The word 'comrade' derives from Iberian Romance languages and can mean friend, mate, colleague or ally. A political use of this term as a form of address grew after the French Revolution upon the abolishment of the titles of the nobility such as "monsieur" and "madame". The political form of addressal however also entails, the meaning of collective work. I attempted to explain this in some detail in the dissertation proposal by elaborating how Karl Marx and Adam Smith differ in their conception of exchange value. Briefly, production can only be a social process-Marx acknowledges this and hence thinks of value as socially determined labour time or the duration required by collective labour power to produce a marketable commodity. Adam Smith on the other hand conceives of exchange value as value already in the ownership of someone and the potential value which it may be traded for. A 'comrade' is hence is someone who you work with, in whichever way and to what ends perhaps only you can decide. Here, I think it is important that we clarify what is meant by work. This is significant in an age where the casualness displayed in the appreciation of human labour can be unbearably

The selection of this topic for the dissertational requirements of this program have largely been... more The selection of this topic for the dissertational requirements of this program have largely been guided by my experiences of being a student involved in an ongoing process of learning through the last many years of my life. Most pertinently since taking an active interest in what constitutes an education through three years of studying literature, a semester studying philosophy and a year and a half of doing this masters in sociology. While principally this engagement is an activity which bears life in the classroom as well as the seclusion of writing in the evening, an essential aspect of this process has been my involvements with multiple study circles, student groups involved in labour politics and a university newspaper. This peripherally maps the milieus or fields from which I shall be drawing from apart from the University itself. What I seek to investigate and shed some light on are the prevalent and emerging practices in higher education from the perspective of the two prime parties concerned-teachers and students and what their experiences of learning and it's relation to their non-academic life has been. This is sought to be enfleshed within the frame of directive changes sought to be implemented by the UGC and the MHRD in education, as well as a comparative portrayal of public and private institutions and their differing pedagogical trajectories. I was a part of the last batch of students taught in the annual calendar in DU, studying literature at Hans Raj. The semesterization of the calendar has led to marked changes in how it is possible to engage with the syllabus and how to prepare, present, teach and study these courses in a situation where the anxiety of an exam is upon students fresh out of school in the first couple of months of their entry into college. Earlier, we were introduced to how and what say literary studies constitutes, what we could do with it and the importance of such a disciplinary practice in understanding our everyday realities by teachers who had devoted many years of their lives enriching the experience of studying varying aspects, niches and periods of historical and cultural production. This was quite bluntly swept aside with the need to prepare students for an exam almost immediately upon their foray into the discipline. Qualitatively this led to marked changes in how and what it was possible to do between students and teachers in a classroom. Even leaving aside dialogue; there were some fairly absurd rearrangement in how the syllabi was divided with novels, plays and poetry being taught in one semester and their supplementary historical and background readings being taught in another. Essential to what enlivened the course was its chronological trajectory which allowed us students to develop a sense of how these various literary movements related to each other historically and the impetuses and spurs which egged and facilitated the emergence of tropes, genres or themes. The value of this is something not easily expressible without its practice as literature is one of the best ways of understanding a people or a

This paper attempts a preliminary appraisal of how students, activists, journalists, and professo... more This paper attempts a preliminary appraisal of how students, activists, journalists, and professors have been oppressed by the prevailing governmental disposition in India (BJP and its allies). Further, it tries to articulate the nature of this hegemony and gather what lessons it can from the attempts to think hegemony earlier by Laclau and Mouffe. It is argued that their lessons have been largely co-opted and repurposed by the Right. It also highlights how new laws such as the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act has been systematically abused by the BJP government and its allies to stifle any meaningful civil opposition to its ideological hegemony in civil society.

The question of the relation of signs to what they signify, and our processes of nomination over ... more The question of the relation of signs to what they signify, and our processes of nomination over them is as old at least as the discipline of linguistics. Yet can all we really say about them sealed in the Sassurean observation of the arbitrary relation between the two? Brassier's paper here seeks to answer three vital questions 1. What a name is and how it relates to what it names. 2. Why there is a difference between names and things 3. What kinds of things they are, and what kinds are.

These notes are my observations from a lecture delivered by Slavoj Zizek titled 'The Spectator's ... more These notes are my observations from a lecture delivered by Slavoj Zizek titled 'The Spectator's Malevolent Neutrality', which was delivered in Brunswick, Germany in 2004.

It is remarkably contemporary in its import and speaks to the manifestations of the gaze as operating in situations that transcend its obscene and artistic examples which have been drawn from.

I strongly recommend that any sociologists, philosophers, and psychoanalysts read this paper.

To fellow movie lovers and romantics I offer what is hardly any discernible (new)s in the world o... more To fellow movie lovers and romantics I offer what is hardly any discernible (new)s in the world of today's churning box office bloomers. There was a time where the idea of cinema reached beyond how a screening would do at the box office and the disappearance of dvd rentals in the dawn of torrents on the internet have yet not put to bed the idea of cult cinema. Yet even in leaving behind the Nolans and the Kubricks what I would like to raise a call for today is the re-invention of the chick flick.

Hope, can very easily be elbowed out of the way in departments of philosophy on the charge that i... more Hope, can very easily be elbowed out of the way in departments of philosophy on the charge that it is fundamentally a metaphysical category. This reading of Meisenhelder however seeks to explain how it is also a disposition that allows us to effectively meet the world. Its absence, as can be evidenced in instances of bad faith which Sartre alerts us to can have a crippling effect on social exchanges. As such, even for the development of a properly critical disposition - it serves as a necessary prerequisite.

https://mutteringsofthealley.blogspot.com/ (Arsh's Zimmer), 2022

In 2020 Zizek wrote a paper in the journal critical inquiry titled-' Apocalypse in a wired brain'... more In 2020 Zizek wrote a paper in the journal critical inquiry titled-' Apocalypse in a wired brain' which I believe is worth taking up today. In my presentation, I will seek to highlight its salient points as they appear to me and to offer a few comments on how I see this intervention fitting into significant theoretical positions held by schools of thought, most notably the Lacanians.