Bread, Pen, Power 3
She was right. The wild part of me always opposed the prepared ordered and regulated situation. I was really suffering from the police force that was mustering strength in my head. I asked Janette to let me be on my own one hour a day, before we go to bed every evening. She was scared and asked me what for? I just wanted to send the cop away for a one hour break, and for one hour a day say whatever I wish and write what ever I want, “produce” without taking care of day's currency markets and so forth.
Janette looked at me suspiciously: - You're a free man, "Darling". Every body has right to ....
I begged her to stop repeating this expression.
Finally she accepted my demand with reluctance but actually she broke her promise, again and again. She entered to my “one hour solitude” every evening with some excuse. When I protested one evening, she said: - This atmosphere belongs to both of us, darling! When I in some stage feel saying some thing, you have no right to stop me talking.
- But honey, can't you write down your thoughts some where and talk about it later on? Janette looked reproaching to the man coming from Middle Ages; -I'm a talking kind of person, she said. If I wanted to write "things" on papers, I could be a writer.
How I can describe the situation? There in my previous land, my body was in chains but my soul was free. Here, my body is free but my soul ... Sa'adi our poet of 8 centuries ago has a verse saying: "My father sold the garden of paradise for an apple. I would not be a son worthy of his father if I don't sell it for a plum".
Janette left me a few months later. It's been a while since I became unemployed, living in a rented room in a compatriot's house, trying hard to not pass over any bridge at late evening. I'm a perfectly multicultural man, living in so-called “democratic world”, writing in dictators’ language. Now I'm also becoming convinced that my brain is not formed and my body has not matured enough for “Free World”.
One day, my counsellor in the "Arbejdsformidling" (Job office) who's a very kind and honest man advised me compassionately that I'd really better drop writing and try to get a day job -- “learn something more practical” ..".
What a feeling to greet the sunshine tired and lonely, once the king and the death have once more fallen into sleep. But as the day drew to a close and towards evening time again, a terrifying anxiety grew up in Sheherzade. She struggles to think up another story as a pathway through one more dark valley of death.
Until the night ends again, the dawn appears and the fear gives way to one more morning, Sheherzade is paler and older. This is the price that she pays for guarding the lives of the women of the city. The soul of the whole world is bound to her lips for one more night.
The whole world is creating stories to keep Sheherzade's mission alive. When pens stop writing and tongues stop telling tales, death is awake at nights and hungry. “Noon, va-alghalam va ma yastaroon”!
April 1998 Copenhagen
END NOTES:
Power is external and visible in Iran and internal and invisible -- and thereby possibly even more intensive -- in Europe:
Since The Second World War, when ever people felt that they were lacking something, they demonstrated to show that they need this "something". But in time this "wanting some thing" and not the "the thing" itself, became an institution. (wanting justice), (asking for human rights), (demanding for amnesty) etc. etc.
So the protest itself (and not the result, what people asked for) stays there as an institution to convince people that there is "no need to rise up again, we're thinking of you". And the protesters stayed dutifully at home as clients -- convinced that their goals, were being fought for by their various agencies of.
"Human Rights", "Amnesty International" and thousands of local institutes, and clubs such as "Customer protection", "Tenancy protection", "Retiree protection”, "Single Mother protection", "Animal Protection" etc. In each country these non governmental organisations are highly integrated into the system, by sponsorship and funding, but they position themselves and have the outward appearance of the REAL thing; of being authentic "popular, grassroots organisations" formed spontaneously from the ground up in an institutionalised democracy.
In another words people have been loosing their direct ownership over the democratic process and are convinced that these chains of organisations are doing the job for them. Politics and whatever relates to people-power according to "Democracy", have been drawn far away from the people by systems of brokers and agency's by all the middle men. And people are becoming disempowered by the very institutions that are supposed to be run by "The People". And the media and other administrative technologies carry with them the hegemonic, explicit and implicit message that all this is "what is good for us" and "what 's correct for the society" .Even when people started to protest that these institutions in turn were controlled by system, the word "NGO's" or "non government organisations" came into being.
People in so-called democratic societies are directed by the media (system) to be proud of what they are as compared to the rest of the world which is not democratic, does not have a well established civil society and is therefore somehow less free.
Thus top Denmark Radio journalist Connie Hedegaard at a recent conference meeting between Asian & European artists and dignitaries, [run by the Danish Centre for Culture and Development” (DCCD) at “Louisiana, Museum of Modern Art], in her opening speech informed the Asian guests that: "What Denmark could teach the rest of the world was about strengthening democracy and civil society"
We always knew and still know what is best for us -- and for everybody else as well!
1- "Cops in the Head"
Collaborative theatre practitioner, theorist and founder of "Forum Theatre" methodology, Augusto Boal made similar observations when trying to import his "Theatre of the Oppressed" workshop methodology to Europe.
For a while Boal was quite baffled -- how could Europeans be oppressed? --where was the power? Shouldn't they all be going about feeling liberated empowered and deliriously happy?
Gradually he began to realise that the "Cops" that were to all pervadingly present in his homeland Brazil had been internalised in Europe -- had become "Cops in the Head" -- internal hindrances to subjective agency. It was almost as though the development of a harsh and disciplinary super ego [over-jeg] among Europeans, was proportional to the rolling back and relaxation of autocratic state-discipline and the democratisation of the external environment.
I will return to Boal's theatre practice below. His observations about "Cops in the Head" however, draw immediate links to the writings of two other theorists -- Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu:
2. Michel Foucault has documented the development of ever more sophisticated technologies of surveillance and social discipline in Western societies, from the crude brutality of the dictator, to the far more effective disciplinary mechanisms and technologies of the state administration in liberal democracies.
The Educations system, the Health service, the Map, the Transport system, all these institutions serve to "police the boundaries" for what is and what is not conventional and accepted social behaviour.
Moreover, Foucault is concerned with a subjective internalisation of discipline. And he draws upon 18 century architect Jeremy Bentham's model prison -- "The Panopticon" to argue his case:
The walls of the cells were of glass so that all the prisoners could see each other and be seen. The watch tower in the centre of the building however was made of darkened glass so that the prisoners could never be sure whether the prison guards were looking at them or not - and as such they policed themselves, without there even needing to be a prison guard there at all.
The Panopticon is used by Foucault as a literal example and as a metaphor for how technologies of surveillance become technologies of self-surveillance as an idea that one is always already being watched is internalised. Self-surveillance is the most effective form of discipline as once subjects discipline themselves, state violence becomes invisible--goes indoors.
3. The idea that self surveillance polices the boundaries of what is and what is not possible for subjects in late capitalist societies relates also to sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's " Theory of Practice” and what he calls "Doxa":
The basic physical and psychological experiences of early life -- our daily practices, the textures of the materials we touch, the spaces we inhabit, the height of our front door --all contribute towards the structuring of "doxa" a conscious and unconscious system of inner rules and regulations determining what is and what is not "Right for Us". For Bourdieu, doxa is an inner template governing all aspects of daily life, and while it is possible to improvise -- in the way that a jazz museum may improvise with his instrument -- one cannot escape or improvise beyond the capacity of the instrument itself -- beyond the laws of "Doxa".
Bourdieu's determinism, bordering upon essentialism has of course been contested.
4. However a combination of self surveillance and morally self-satisfied notions of " What is Right for Us" perhaps explain why Danish pedestrians wait in the middle of the night in front of the red man at traffic lights, even when there are no cars to be seen for miles around. The way that the "Cops in the Head" police the boundaries for what is and what is not "Right for Us" in our increasingly symbolic economies means that Danish children discipline themselves not to stop look and listen for traffic, but to follow the significatory order of the red and green men, controlled by an invisible imagined hand.
Self surveillance and "what is right for us" could also be read into the "enforced relaxation" of Danish university students in the 1980's where blue jeans were a uniform and deviants (those who wore more sophisticated dress) were regarded as overly ambitious, materialistic or bourgeois. The way of being relaxed and laid back becomes an authoritarian code of behaviour that is disciplined into a collective by self-surveillance, I'd better dress in the RIGHT relaxed way -- like I don't really care about how I dress. If one deviates from the rule of being relaxed (i.e. for women, wearing make-up and dresses and bras to university, for men dressing smartly), then one is -- "not of us" ; and in a woman's case, one is "non-liberated" or "non-emancipated".
Another example of subjective self discipline and the way that what is right for us becomes limiting to creative expression in Denmark, is the way that journalistic TV language in Denmark has gradually been policed to a series of 10-15 standard sentences, reiterated according to different situations in different news contexts -- that is sentences like "SOM ALDRIG FØR", "OG NU HJEMME IGEN"
Now of course there are other forces at stake here in a struggle between on the one hand, a self -policing, global Homogenisation -- a CNN-ification of our symbolic world (the ways that we regulate ourselves to fit in with global culture) and on the other hand, an equally self-policing Heterogenisation where equally defined and disciplined frameworks of "difference" are advocated as being "right for us" by still "Other" "Cops in our Heads".
(Advocates and guardians of "difference"; the local specific identities also police themselves to fit a framework of what a "truly marginalised immigrant" should act like, or what a "true feminist" should act like or what a truly authentically "local" should look like) The "define and rule" struggle between what are perceived as universalising cultural forces on the one hand, and heterogenising forces of specifity, cultural difference and identity politics, on the other is an ideological struggle that clouds for the underlying material and class antagonisms at stake -- and how the late capitalist ( the information and media economy with multinational companies and money not tied to nations any more) machine.
The late capitalism machine carries on merrily, empowering some and disempowering many others, while we all fight our specific identity battles over who is more marginalised, who has the purest identity, who is most local, most authentic, most different ...
To draw a rather banal conclusion from all of this, Ideology is alive and kicking in Europe as in Iran, only in a less visible, internal and possibly more intensive manner.
But "What Is To Be Done?
As a writer, and necessarily romantic arts practitioner, I would like to return to our friend Augusto Boal.
Can literature / art save or change the world? Probably not, but arts do have their part to play in provoking ruptures in the symbolic orders that discipline "What is Right for Us"
Augusto Boal tells of a humorous story from his early years as political theatre activist in Brazil and his "theatre's of the oppressed". One day he and his group of actors arrived in a village, much as they had in many other villages before and set up a number of role-play, theatre games that were aimed to both reveal the oppressions at stake in the villagers lives and to brainstorm for possible solutions to these oppressions.
The villagers took quickly to the "play" and soon identified the Hacienda landowner up on the hill as the main cause of all their problems. No sooner had they done this than a particularly-eager villager appeared from his home carrying a stack of sawn off shotguns.
"Thank you so much for helping us to identify our problems he cried, now come with us up to the Hacienda owner's house and let's do away with him right now.. he cried"
The terrified actors from Sao Paolo then had to desperately explain, to the immense disappointment of the villagers that this was "only" a hypothetical theatre GAME, and as actors -- as "PLAYERS"-- they had no intention to take up arms"..
Boal tells this story laughingly in the introduction to a recent publication "Rainbow of Desire" where, recounting the folly of his earlier experiments, he now advocates more therapeutic and slightly less-direct workshop projects aimed at exorcising the "Cops in the Head" of Europeans and contemplating a spectrum of new and previously-unthinkable possibilities "For Us".
However, it would appear that even his newer "Rainbow of Desire" methodology carries with it all the dangers of his earlier work -- as both the Lords of our inner Haciendas, and their extra-cerebral Allies do not promise to go away quietly -- even in a sensible passionless, liberal democratic West. At some stage the choice between firstly, THEORISING power, ideology and oppression, secondly. "PLAYING", and thirdly PRACTICING empowerment and liberation, inevitably seems to meet up with VIOLENCE-- even the violence that is so sophisticatedly concealed inside our heads.
===============================
Augusto Boal, " A Rainbow of Desire"
Michel Foucault, " Discipline and Punish", The Birth of the Prison, trans Sheridan Pantheon London 1977
Pierre Bourdieu, " A Theory of Practice", Polity Press, London 1990
I am grateful for e-mail exchange with Lucy Davis, Associate Artist of "The Necessary Stage" Singapore, from which I have formulated the above theoretical breakdown in a more precise English codes from above mentioned sociologists / theorists.
**********
I am grateful for e-mail exchange with Lucy Davis, Associate Artist of " The Necessary Stage" Singapore from which I have drawn the above theoretical breakdown..
And also for the above excerpts from her Magister thesis " Making Difference -- So Easy to Enjoy, So Hard to Forget -- Political Aesthetic Strategies, Visual Culture & Culturalist Ideology In Singapore".
Janette looked at me suspiciously: - You're a free man, "Darling". Every body has right to ....
I begged her to stop repeating this expression.
Finally she accepted my demand with reluctance but actually she broke her promise, again and again. She entered to my “one hour solitude” every evening with some excuse. When I protested one evening, she said: - This atmosphere belongs to both of us, darling! When I in some stage feel saying some thing, you have no right to stop me talking.
- But honey, can't you write down your thoughts some where and talk about it later on? Janette looked reproaching to the man coming from Middle Ages; -I'm a talking kind of person, she said. If I wanted to write "things" on papers, I could be a writer.
How I can describe the situation? There in my previous land, my body was in chains but my soul was free. Here, my body is free but my soul ... Sa'adi our poet of 8 centuries ago has a verse saying: "My father sold the garden of paradise for an apple. I would not be a son worthy of his father if I don't sell it for a plum".
Janette left me a few months later. It's been a while since I became unemployed, living in a rented room in a compatriot's house, trying hard to not pass over any bridge at late evening. I'm a perfectly multicultural man, living in so-called “democratic world”, writing in dictators’ language. Now I'm also becoming convinced that my brain is not formed and my body has not matured enough for “Free World”.
One day, my counsellor in the "Arbejdsformidling" (Job office) who's a very kind and honest man advised me compassionately that I'd really better drop writing and try to get a day job -- “learn something more practical” ..".
What a feeling to greet the sunshine tired and lonely, once the king and the death have once more fallen into sleep. But as the day drew to a close and towards evening time again, a terrifying anxiety grew up in Sheherzade. She struggles to think up another story as a pathway through one more dark valley of death.
Until the night ends again, the dawn appears and the fear gives way to one more morning, Sheherzade is paler and older. This is the price that she pays for guarding the lives of the women of the city. The soul of the whole world is bound to her lips for one more night.
The whole world is creating stories to keep Sheherzade's mission alive. When pens stop writing and tongues stop telling tales, death is awake at nights and hungry. “Noon, va-alghalam va ma yastaroon”!
April 1998 Copenhagen
END NOTES:
Power is external and visible in Iran and internal and invisible -- and thereby possibly even more intensive -- in Europe:
Since The Second World War, when ever people felt that they were lacking something, they demonstrated to show that they need this "something". But in time this "wanting some thing" and not the "the thing" itself, became an institution. (wanting justice), (asking for human rights), (demanding for amnesty) etc. etc.
So the protest itself (and not the result, what people asked for) stays there as an institution to convince people that there is "no need to rise up again, we're thinking of you". And the protesters stayed dutifully at home as clients -- convinced that their goals, were being fought for by their various agencies of.
"Human Rights", "Amnesty International" and thousands of local institutes, and clubs such as "Customer protection", "Tenancy protection", "Retiree protection”, "Single Mother protection", "Animal Protection" etc. In each country these non governmental organisations are highly integrated into the system, by sponsorship and funding, but they position themselves and have the outward appearance of the REAL thing; of being authentic "popular, grassroots organisations" formed spontaneously from the ground up in an institutionalised democracy.
In another words people have been loosing their direct ownership over the democratic process and are convinced that these chains of organisations are doing the job for them. Politics and whatever relates to people-power according to "Democracy", have been drawn far away from the people by systems of brokers and agency's by all the middle men. And people are becoming disempowered by the very institutions that are supposed to be run by "The People". And the media and other administrative technologies carry with them the hegemonic, explicit and implicit message that all this is "what is good for us" and "what 's correct for the society" .Even when people started to protest that these institutions in turn were controlled by system, the word "NGO's" or "non government organisations" came into being.
People in so-called democratic societies are directed by the media (system) to be proud of what they are as compared to the rest of the world which is not democratic, does not have a well established civil society and is therefore somehow less free.
Thus top Denmark Radio journalist Connie Hedegaard at a recent conference meeting between Asian & European artists and dignitaries, [run by the Danish Centre for Culture and Development” (DCCD) at “Louisiana, Museum of Modern Art], in her opening speech informed the Asian guests that: "What Denmark could teach the rest of the world was about strengthening democracy and civil society"
We always knew and still know what is best for us -- and for everybody else as well!
1- "Cops in the Head"
Collaborative theatre practitioner, theorist and founder of "Forum Theatre" methodology, Augusto Boal made similar observations when trying to import his "Theatre of the Oppressed" workshop methodology to Europe.
For a while Boal was quite baffled -- how could Europeans be oppressed? --where was the power? Shouldn't they all be going about feeling liberated empowered and deliriously happy?
Gradually he began to realise that the "Cops" that were to all pervadingly present in his homeland Brazil had been internalised in Europe -- had become "Cops in the Head" -- internal hindrances to subjective agency. It was almost as though the development of a harsh and disciplinary super ego [over-jeg] among Europeans, was proportional to the rolling back and relaxation of autocratic state-discipline and the democratisation of the external environment.
I will return to Boal's theatre practice below. His observations about "Cops in the Head" however, draw immediate links to the writings of two other theorists -- Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu:
2. Michel Foucault has documented the development of ever more sophisticated technologies of surveillance and social discipline in Western societies, from the crude brutality of the dictator, to the far more effective disciplinary mechanisms and technologies of the state administration in liberal democracies.
The Educations system, the Health service, the Map, the Transport system, all these institutions serve to "police the boundaries" for what is and what is not conventional and accepted social behaviour.
Moreover, Foucault is concerned with a subjective internalisation of discipline. And he draws upon 18 century architect Jeremy Bentham's model prison -- "The Panopticon" to argue his case:
The walls of the cells were of glass so that all the prisoners could see each other and be seen. The watch tower in the centre of the building however was made of darkened glass so that the prisoners could never be sure whether the prison guards were looking at them or not - and as such they policed themselves, without there even needing to be a prison guard there at all.
The Panopticon is used by Foucault as a literal example and as a metaphor for how technologies of surveillance become technologies of self-surveillance as an idea that one is always already being watched is internalised. Self-surveillance is the most effective form of discipline as once subjects discipline themselves, state violence becomes invisible--goes indoors.
3. The idea that self surveillance polices the boundaries of what is and what is not possible for subjects in late capitalist societies relates also to sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's " Theory of Practice” and what he calls "Doxa":
The basic physical and psychological experiences of early life -- our daily practices, the textures of the materials we touch, the spaces we inhabit, the height of our front door --all contribute towards the structuring of "doxa" a conscious and unconscious system of inner rules and regulations determining what is and what is not "Right for Us". For Bourdieu, doxa is an inner template governing all aspects of daily life, and while it is possible to improvise -- in the way that a jazz museum may improvise with his instrument -- one cannot escape or improvise beyond the capacity of the instrument itself -- beyond the laws of "Doxa".
Bourdieu's determinism, bordering upon essentialism has of course been contested.
4. However a combination of self surveillance and morally self-satisfied notions of " What is Right for Us" perhaps explain why Danish pedestrians wait in the middle of the night in front of the red man at traffic lights, even when there are no cars to be seen for miles around. The way that the "Cops in the Head" police the boundaries for what is and what is not "Right for Us" in our increasingly symbolic economies means that Danish children discipline themselves not to stop look and listen for traffic, but to follow the significatory order of the red and green men, controlled by an invisible imagined hand.
Self surveillance and "what is right for us" could also be read into the "enforced relaxation" of Danish university students in the 1980's where blue jeans were a uniform and deviants (those who wore more sophisticated dress) were regarded as overly ambitious, materialistic or bourgeois. The way of being relaxed and laid back becomes an authoritarian code of behaviour that is disciplined into a collective by self-surveillance, I'd better dress in the RIGHT relaxed way -- like I don't really care about how I dress. If one deviates from the rule of being relaxed (i.e. for women, wearing make-up and dresses and bras to university, for men dressing smartly), then one is -- "not of us" ; and in a woman's case, one is "non-liberated" or "non-emancipated".
Another example of subjective self discipline and the way that what is right for us becomes limiting to creative expression in Denmark, is the way that journalistic TV language in Denmark has gradually been policed to a series of 10-15 standard sentences, reiterated according to different situations in different news contexts -- that is sentences like "SOM ALDRIG FØR", "OG NU HJEMME IGEN"
Now of course there are other forces at stake here in a struggle between on the one hand, a self -policing, global Homogenisation -- a CNN-ification of our symbolic world (the ways that we regulate ourselves to fit in with global culture) and on the other hand, an equally self-policing Heterogenisation where equally defined and disciplined frameworks of "difference" are advocated as being "right for us" by still "Other" "Cops in our Heads".
(Advocates and guardians of "difference"; the local specific identities also police themselves to fit a framework of what a "truly marginalised immigrant" should act like, or what a "true feminist" should act like or what a truly authentically "local" should look like) The "define and rule" struggle between what are perceived as universalising cultural forces on the one hand, and heterogenising forces of specifity, cultural difference and identity politics, on the other is an ideological struggle that clouds for the underlying material and class antagonisms at stake -- and how the late capitalist ( the information and media economy with multinational companies and money not tied to nations any more) machine.
The late capitalism machine carries on merrily, empowering some and disempowering many others, while we all fight our specific identity battles over who is more marginalised, who has the purest identity, who is most local, most authentic, most different ...
To draw a rather banal conclusion from all of this, Ideology is alive and kicking in Europe as in Iran, only in a less visible, internal and possibly more intensive manner.
But "What Is To Be Done?
As a writer, and necessarily romantic arts practitioner, I would like to return to our friend Augusto Boal.
Can literature / art save or change the world? Probably not, but arts do have their part to play in provoking ruptures in the symbolic orders that discipline "What is Right for Us"
Augusto Boal tells of a humorous story from his early years as political theatre activist in Brazil and his "theatre's of the oppressed". One day he and his group of actors arrived in a village, much as they had in many other villages before and set up a number of role-play, theatre games that were aimed to both reveal the oppressions at stake in the villagers lives and to brainstorm for possible solutions to these oppressions.
The villagers took quickly to the "play" and soon identified the Hacienda landowner up on the hill as the main cause of all their problems. No sooner had they done this than a particularly-eager villager appeared from his home carrying a stack of sawn off shotguns.
"Thank you so much for helping us to identify our problems he cried, now come with us up to the Hacienda owner's house and let's do away with him right now.. he cried"
The terrified actors from Sao Paolo then had to desperately explain, to the immense disappointment of the villagers that this was "only" a hypothetical theatre GAME, and as actors -- as "PLAYERS"-- they had no intention to take up arms"..
Boal tells this story laughingly in the introduction to a recent publication "Rainbow of Desire" where, recounting the folly of his earlier experiments, he now advocates more therapeutic and slightly less-direct workshop projects aimed at exorcising the "Cops in the Head" of Europeans and contemplating a spectrum of new and previously-unthinkable possibilities "For Us".
However, it would appear that even his newer "Rainbow of Desire" methodology carries with it all the dangers of his earlier work -- as both the Lords of our inner Haciendas, and their extra-cerebral Allies do not promise to go away quietly -- even in a sensible passionless, liberal democratic West. At some stage the choice between firstly, THEORISING power, ideology and oppression, secondly. "PLAYING", and thirdly PRACTICING empowerment and liberation, inevitably seems to meet up with VIOLENCE-- even the violence that is so sophisticatedly concealed inside our heads.
===============================
Augusto Boal, " A Rainbow of Desire"
Michel Foucault, " Discipline and Punish", The Birth of the Prison, trans Sheridan Pantheon London 1977
Pierre Bourdieu, " A Theory of Practice", Polity Press, London 1990
I am grateful for e-mail exchange with Lucy Davis, Associate Artist of "The Necessary Stage" Singapore, from which I have formulated the above theoretical breakdown in a more precise English codes from above mentioned sociologists / theorists.
**********
I am grateful for e-mail exchange with Lucy Davis, Associate Artist of " The Necessary Stage" Singapore from which I have drawn the above theoretical breakdown..
And also for the above excerpts from her Magister thesis " Making Difference -- So Easy to Enjoy, So Hard to Forget -- Political Aesthetic Strategies, Visual Culture & Culturalist Ideology In Singapore".
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