A Clarion Call: Registering (against) certain symptoms of the 20th century

Speak, speak my friends. Lets speak up. For ourselves. For those who cant and wont and didnt. Lets speak for everything we lived by and for and through. Lets speak like the illegitimates we have been in a world of illegitimates. Lets speak like the saints we have pretended to be in a world of saints. Lets speak like men and women who have lost their vision but refuse not to give up their paltry sight. Lets speak like those who dont love losing anything except their meaningless voice in this universe. Lets speak. Speak if you think you are useless. Only a useless voice has finally become a voice which is worthy enough to be heard. Or else our voices will be put to use. They will use us the way they used up Gandhi in ashrams, Che in t-shirts, Lorca in bookshelves and Martin in statues. We are the napkins of their lives of shit. We are their backdoor entry of terror. We are what they hate to believe might be meaningful. Where are you? Where are we? What are your names? Tell me your names first. Nothing happens without names being uttered first. This is not the call for a party. This is not the call for revolution. This is a simple call for registration. Not into any institution. This is for those who are bored of writing their names again and again in pages where you are a name and nothing else. I am calling you to sign in a page where your name is everything. Your name can put fire on the page you are writing. Do you get me? I need your name. I need to know the shape of those letters which go to make your names. I want to hear the sound of your names. I want to know which kind of land those sounds come from. You come from.

I want to know how far you have been tossed by these bastard waves of history. Where are you? Have you become more lost than these city streets? Do you only see long empty streets in your dreams? Do the people you see have heads? People who ask such questions and imagine their answers need not only be comrades. They dont only have to belong to any party. They dont only have to be children of any manifesto or among those who distorted the manifesto to suit their ends. Lets forget that 20th century debacle. But Kundera cant forget it. The partys shadow. His confederate past. The hoodwinked names turned lists. Kundera writes against such disturbing matters. Dips his pen into his long-lost hiding place. Kundera is an icon of failed love: that is why he celebrates eroticism. In Kunderas world the body of the lover is a distorted reflection against the mirror of history. If anyone asks me the single most problem afflicting everyone, I would reply without hesitation, Its about organised sickness. But this isnt the most unique characteristic yet. The exceptional part of the news is: the organised sickness is nameless. Such an incredible phenomenon has occurred because of an aberration, best put to words by Eliot. The gap between the idea and the reality, the motion and the act, the conception and the creation, the emotion and the response, the desire and the spasm, the potency and the existence, the essence and the descent: that is where the shadow falls. The shadow however never falls any longer on isolated individuals. It falls upon the organization of people by organizations of non persons. What is hollower than hollow men is the hollowness of the organizations they live, work and die in. You look at the face of the person before you, and whether he laughs or keeps silent, you feel an uncomfortable

itch over your shoulders. Well, you just realized how sick he is. But you are too scared to check on the disease because you might end up digging reasons to find yourself afflicted by the same disease. It is a game of signposts that never tell you the address. It is a game of mirages that never show you the oasis. This disease is the disease of a certain universal but multiple crisis of namelessness. You cannot name the disease. You cannot tell what you are suffering from. Because organised sickness has mystified your aberrations and kept you unaware of contradictions Eliot wrote about. It has caused a potential disorganization of the subject: seized by the fractured charms and perils of organizing principles, his contradictions have intensified the contradictions of class: from alienation to hollowness fostered by a series of radical aberrations. We wont be allowed to exist without an organizing principle because otherwise we will fall out of the circle of reason. But any circle of reason will structure the worlds daily contradictions by putting them at war against each other. Take your own name for instance. The world has become a marketplace of names. Names pitted against each other names competing with each other. Names which appear or dont appear in lists differentiate a successful name from a failed one and tell you in one long and anxious glance whether you fit into the circle or not. Your name has become a name to win or lose in the marketplace of stories. But these are stories wearing straightjackets. Stories of reportage: stories of a rectilinear logic. Stories which climb or fall, going up or down through the elevator. Stories of excrete-and-flush: biological end-game. Stories where your name exists but you dont. You are the one missing in your stories. Your life resembles something similar to natures call. This is the mere biological nature which the English language throws up with such meaningless profundity. I dont know how English

philosophy describes nature but I am sure it is not as bad as nature being natures call. But the phrase exists in the English language and all the more better as I can use it to my satisfaction. I was talking about the disease which afflicts all of us. It is the disease which begins with our names being up for grabs or thrown by the wayside, according to our performance in the dangerous halls of self-examination. These are the two modes through which we gain entry to the enigmatic world called workplace. A workplace, we learn quickly, is also a fireplace. The heat is always on. On you. If you cant deliver things like a professional postman you feel the heat boiling you over. You touch fire and are consumed. You are fired. What begins in heat ends in heat. Whatever work you do the workplace has its own omniscient philosophy: It is driven by groin-centric impulses. You have to satisfy the groincentric workplace where the thing that doesnt count most is your own sexuality. What counts is the sexual impulse of a human-less metaphor where human beings are always less because the place is always more than you. The workplace is either your father or your mother depending on the sexual psychology of your boss. But you know who the patriarch is. In patriarchy, the name of the slave doesnt matter. Only the name of the master. Workplaces are so much like that. Anecdotally, I remember the countless number of times my boss used to take my colleagues name when she called out to me and vice-versa. In the first few times she was apologetic. But if I thought the apology meant she would take care next time I was mistaken. The apology meant she had now entitled herself to make the mistake again and again once the apology was rendered. One apology stands for a thousand. A thousand mistakes of the same thing. Each time she makes a mistake with your name you should remember the first apology and fill it up for her.

Your name is a pain for someone having to remember it. A name cannot be as important as the work being assigned to you. All work and no name can make you a dull guy. But if you get dull you know whats going to wake you up the heat. Our names are under attack and the relationship between us and our names is being systematically erased everyday. This is a condition no longer in erstwhile fascist times. Its happening now. Capital is as fanatically irreducible as fascism in its reductions of other objects and others into objects. We are always susceptible to what effaces us in the name of greater goals of an inhuman humanity. The moment we lose our love for the anonymous world we dont realise we turn ourselves anonymous and go against ourselves. In hatred names turn into a violent debris of anonymous objects. This groin-centric world has become one such phenomenon one which is slightly different. Here we hate the person we are competing against. But we cant do anything about it as we are both rendered incapacitated by the disturbing logic of schizophrenic capitalism. We become doubly powerless either to drive this other person out or take ourselves away from the race. We become passive haters. Someone else plays with our names as we stand and watch the humiliation without remorse. Because we need to sleep. We have been sleeping all the time. We are drugged everyday while we get up, take a bath, have breakfast and rush through the streets of honking metals, like zombies, hurrying to please someone else, someone who denies our face, our name, our organs, our fate and our right to live without effacing ourselves.

~ Manash Bhattacharjee (The writer is a poet and scholar, living in New Delhi)