#ashis nandy

[firstoccupier]

The Complex Legacy of War: A Year of Reflection

By: Cliff Potts & Staff Writers, WPS NewsBaybay City | December 31, 2025 Over the past twelve months, WPS News has explored the multifaceted philosophies surrounding war and its justifications. While many would prefer to ignore the realities of conflict, it is undeniable that war has played a significant role as a social institution, often serving as a method to resolve deep-seated issues that…

The Complex Legacy of War: A Year of Reflection

[once-in-a-blue-moon2021]

THE P(L)ANDEMIC PANDEMONIUM: THE ONE WITH THE VACCINE

THE P(L)ANDEMIC PANDEMONIUM: THE ONE WITH THE VACCINE

Compiled By Akhar Bandyopadhyay Debaprasad Bandyopadhyay Hum Hain Ke Hum Nahin??? Abstract The compilation deals with the aporia on the SARS COV-2 Vaccine(s). As there are many contradictory or even antithetical views on this issue, the authors of this compilation have tried to amalgamate the major information regarding the ethos of medical science. The authors, being academic sceptics,…

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[josieandthepussycatsofficial]

The only progress we have made in 500 years is that today the Others have the option either of an "authenticity" constructed by the dominant, or living on as a parody of their former selves.

Ashis Nandy et al, Barbaric Others

[future-post-magazine-blog]

New Post has been published on http://www.futurepostmagazine.com/bystanders-look-people-get-stabbed/

Why do bystanders look on as people get stabbed?

New Delhi, Sep 24 Earlier this week, Delhi’s residents witnessed two completely different versions of crimes of passion. The suppressed rage of a spurned lover and a psychotic stalker spilled out into the streets and left everyone stupified.

On Tuesday, a 34-year-old jilted lover, Sanjay Singh, stabbed a 21-year-old woman for an incredible 22 times in a rare act of brutality.

A day before, another woman, married and 32 years of age, was chased and knifed repeatedly near her house, by an ex-lover who had been stalking her for years.

Both died. And both cried for help as passersby who, either out of fear or indifference, chose to mind their own business and walked on or just stood and gaped.

The explanations for such apathy could be as varied as there are minds. But for reputed sociologist and clinical psychologist Ashis Nandy, it’s proof of the increasing brutalisation of our society.

“We are getting more and more brutal. Very little is left in India in the way of culture and as a society, we are on our last legs,” one of India’s foremost public intellectuals, told.

He cited large-scale cultural change as a reason for this societal breakdown — in the process, sketching out the average Indian male these days.

“People these days are very, very manipulative, vile and calculative in their approach. This self-centeredness is the result of rapid cultural change and the change in education standards. Those days, when one would stick his neck out for his neighbor, are over,” Nandi contended

“Our society is leading to anomie, or normlessness, in simple words,” he added.

“If it was Calcutta (Kolkata) that man would’ve been lynched, people wouldn’t have waited for police to come and no-one would say anything against such justice,” he said, commenting on the passivity observed on the part of passersby in both the instances.

Some experts describe the phenomenon as a matter of survival and protecting oneself from harm.

S.K. Khandelwal, Professor and Head, Department of Psychiatry at All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), explained: “People don’t want to get into hassles. When you are met with such a situation, it either makes you aggressive or defensive. You either resort to violence yourself, or, if your very survival is at risk, you get into a defensive mode. We call it a fight or flight scenario.”

“It can be a moral issue as well, I’m not denying that. But we all are selfish beings and it is wrong to put the blame squarely upon bystanders’ shoulders for their apathy,” he added.

Another expert had a different take on this.

“Looking at group mentality, when such acts happen in a crowd, no-one dares to act alone, since he’s not sure whether others will come forward to help him or not. We call it diffusion of responsibility,” Kamna Chhibber, Clinical Psychologist and Head of Mental Health Fortis La Femme told.

“Another factor is the fear of retribution. One tends to think how interfering will impact him. If he fears a negative outcome like some harm or injury, then he will back out,” she said.

She also listed the efficacy of an individual oneself in changing the outcome of the situation as one of the reasons for making or not making a move.

“People assess their ability before making a move. They think whether they are strong enough to overcome the opponent or whether they are trained enough to fight back… it’s a combination of all these factors. We have no reason to think that it’s only our society where people seldom interfere. It’s a universal phenomenon,” she explained.

There’s another aspect of our, and possibly of any society, which needs to be considered.

As Surendra Nath Dubey, a retired professor and now the Editor-in-Chief of the Indian Journal of Community Psychology (IJCP), pointed out: “No-one wants to get into other people’s matters; mainly out of fear of police harassment. We have seen it countless times, even in incidents of road-accidents, that no-one stops to help the victims. The attitude of police officers is a major cause in forcing people to become apathetic.”

One thing is for sure: This is not the last one has heard of such incidents.

[lasmaracuyas]

In many cases, [Western universities] have already begun to interpret the growing sensitivity to the dying little cultures of the world as a passing fad and begin to use subterfuges that would allow them to project a politically correct image, while allowing them to do business as usual. Three of the more popular and, at the same time, sophisticated subterfuges are: 

-Openness to traditional systems of knowledge, combined with a cost-benefit analysis that decontextualizes the systems entirely and fits them into the existing institutionalized structure of commonsense on pragmatic grounds; 

-Acceptance of a cultural relativism that sees every culture as having its ethnic versions of knowledge…while at the same time holding the modern systems to be universal and transcultural, so that the former can be partly neutralized as an object of scholarly inquiry and expertise of the latter; 

- Emphasis on equitable, just distribution of ‘universal’ epistemic and technical knowledge in the expectation that such redistributive justice will redeem the alienating, oppressive aspects of some systems of modern knowledge and to divert the alienating, oppressive aspects of some systems of modern knowledge and divert the criticisms of the contents of these systems to their contexts, specifically to the control exercised over them by organized vested interests.

Ashis Nandy

[aftereverydaylife]

The Everyday Life of International Relations by Matt Davies

Working draft – please do not cite without author’s permission

What is the problem with International Relations? Why is it important to think about everyday life in order to understand international relations? What justifies examining everyday life in a study of International Relations? What problems of International Relations does turning to or examining everyday life address? The answers to these questions, or even the approaches to formulating an answer, are not obvious.

Yet there is a real need for clarity on this point. The “international” in International Relations, including International Political Economy, is typically conceived as a level of social and political relations; indeed, it is the “highest” level, the level that aggregates and authorizes the levels “below.” The level of the everyday, in contrast, appears as banal. The substantive problems that preoccupy scholars of international relations – war, conflict, interstate negotiations and international organization, security, diplomacy, the logic of systems – have exceptional and technical characteristics; the substance of everyday life is routine and by definition entails ordinary concerns. The two realms present themselves not only as different but also as ontologically opposed.

Concern with the relations or connections between the international and the everyday are not new, nor are they necessarily the exclusive province of critical scholars. International Relations has frequently, if often implicitly, turned to the everyday to discover the foundations that support its practices and to manage these practices. In The Essence of Decision (1999 [1971]), his seminal study of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Graham Allison set out to demonstrate how decision-making in the face of an international crisis was shaped by quite banal matters: established organisational procedures, bureaucratic conflicts, individual capacities of decision makers – which in turn can be affected by everyday life: too much coffee, too many cigarettes, too little sleep. Game theory generally sets out to discover the rules governing the gestes répétés of interstate relations. In a more critical idiom, Robert Cox in Production, Power, and World Order (1987) demonstrated the dependence of world orders on the mundane exercise of power at the point of production. Similarly, Cythia Enloe’s study Bananas, Beaches, and Bases (1990) demonstrated that for anything we take as “international relations” to occur, there are unacknowledged, often invisible, women working precisely in terms we would describe as everyday. Enloe’s contribution was not merely to discover that women too can “do” international relations; it was an exploration of the deep ontology of international relations: whatever we think international relations are, they can only be as a result of activities that occur at the level of the everyday.

If we abstract from the substantive concerns of International Relations, there is a common and fundamental problem that organises its premises and motivates its arguments. As R.B.J. Walker (1993) has argued, the founding premises of International Relations theory depend on how we distinguish between the inside of a political association, such as a sovereign territorial state, from its outside, such as other territories or the exterior anarchic system of states. Drawing the lines that distinguish or connect here from there or now from then is an authoritative act. This procedure – of distinguishing in space and in time, and of authorizing those distinctions – is in turn dependent on a series of other distinctions: of self from other, for example, or of subject from object; but notably also of politics from economics, of culture from political economy, or, indeed, of the international from the everyday. Drawing lines distinguishes different kinds of space that can then be brought into relation with each other. Not only are territorial states brought together in interstate relations, but also the state is distinct from and is brought into relation with the international system – just as the country is separated from and brought into relation with the city, and the workplace separated from and brought into relation with the home. Similarly, different temporalities can be distinguished and brought into relation with each other: thus developed countries are said to represent the future to the less- developed countries, or “-ation” processes – democratisation, financialisation, liberalisation, globalisation – describe change and homogenisation in international systems and their units, describing “pre” and “post” conditions and defining the attributes that distinguish them. The fundamental process of International Relations is simultaneously to distinguish a self-identical inside from an outside other and then to bring the exterior “inside” by predicting and managing the exterior units and the system.

Following a similar logic, Inayatullah and Blaney (2004) argue that the problem of International Relations is heterology or the problem of difference: the relations of the self to the other and the hierarchies that these relations produce and entail. For International Political Economy, the problem of difference can take many forms. Political economy’s preoccupations with wealth and its increase have been firmly situated within the political logic of expanding the system of wealth production both spatially and temporally. From Locke’s assertion that colonization was justifiable inasmuch as it brought “unimproved” land into the system of private property (Locke 1988), to contemporary efforts to integrate the “human capital” of poor women into the financial system through microcredit lending (Weber 2002 and 2006), increasing the capacity to create wealth has always meant distinguishing between exemplary places where wealth is created from those places that are “not yet” efficient – the First World and the Third World, or the global North and the global South. This highlights the way that spatial differences are also temporal differences: thus we distinguish the civilised from the savage or the developed from the less developed. But it also highlights the way that the distinctions that political economy draws and the links it connects are efforts to erase difference. Thus development comes to be a forced march towards cosmopolis: liberal democracy for each and all. Political economy, including International Political Economy, is primarily concerned with the sphere of circulation – with trade and exchange. Circulation connects the disparate and far-flung but exchange depends on abstract equivalence: different things can only be exchanged insofar as they can be expressed through a common measure of value. The sphere of circulation thus obscures the realm of production just as exchange value displaces use value in the economy: production entails transformation and is the realm of difference; exchange presupposes equivalence and is thus a zone of indistinction. Exchange expresses the international, such as in the notion of globalisation, but for exchange to take place, underlying differences – different use values, for example – must persist. But where (and when) do they persist? Just as exchange expresses the level of the international, use – production and consumption – resides and is hidden away in the everyday. As we will see below, there has been a steady increase in studies in International Relations and International Political Economy that seek to bring the international into contact with the everyday, with a variety of intentions and results. However, whatever is to be brought together must have been separated first. Before turning to a review of that literature and the debates germane to this present study, we must examine the logic of this separation of the everyday from “higher” levels of activity.

Separation anxiety

What lies behind the separation of the sphere of the international from the sphere of the everyday? For Henri Lefebvre, everyday life takes its characteristic form in modernity. Lefebvre asserts that in pre-modern daily life, religious rituals, magic and superstition permeated the rhythms and activities that organised day-to-day life. With modernity, philosophy increasingly abstracts itself from the everyday. The Cartesian cogito starts with scepticism towards the external and objective world, finding certainty only in its reflection upon itself. The reflexive nature of specialised activities follow this path, reinforced by the separation of the functional logic of mental labour from increasingly beast-like manual labour as the division of labour becomes more extensive; by the concentration of administrative roles in the city through urbanism; by the spatial and social separation of classes.

Thus banality and the routine of everyday life come to be increasingly unreflected and unworthy of reflection. Everyday life is degraded to the level of the mundane, banal, and prosaic. It is the “reality without truth,” counterpoised to the “truth without reality” of philosophy (Lefebvre 1984, 14). It is the “soil” in which the “flowers and trees” of creative human activity grow (Lefebvre 1991a, 87). It is the object of programming in a “bureaucratic society of controlled consumption” (Lefebvre 1984). “In appearance, it is the insignificant and the banal. It is what Hegel called ‘the prose of the world,’ nothing more modest” (Lefebvre 1988, 78). International Relations has always positioned itself as a “higher” activity. As noted above, the level of the international appears as a level “above” the state, domestic politics, and the particular characteristics or capacities of individual men – almost always men. The mundane or common sense of International Relations situates it outside the realm of politics: politics “stops at the water’s edge” because the international is serious and threatening enough to supersede the petty squabbles of domestic parties. This anti-politics of the international cements its exclusive reserve to elites and elite activity: diplomacy involves both esoteric rituals and technocratic knowledge and technique. One of the core principles of international law is diplomatic immunity, which insulates the diplomat from the legal attention paid to disruptions, disputes, and litigation in everyday life. The controversies surrounding the leak of diplomatic cables by Wikileaks highlight the effort spent to maintain this separation of the international from the everyday. Previous leaks documenting possible war crimes did not provoke so severe a backlash because in war, we expect violence. The leaking of the diplomatic cables exposed the recognizably prosaic and mundane practices of diplomacy to a broad public, threatening the separation that justifies the power and privilege of diplomatic activity.

As Walker (1994) notes with respect to social movements and International Relations, bringing these realms together presents conceptual and theoretical problems. They not only operate at different levels, but also at different scales. The international subsumes everything; it resides at the systemic level and the worldwide or global scale. Social movements, in contrast, present a minor politics, domestic in scale and at the level of the social. Walker undermines these distinctions by attacking the reification of hierarchical “levels” in international thinking, by demonstrating how International Relations are a particular solution to the problem of what and where politics is, and by examining the politics of connecting (distinct from the logic of separating) that mobilizes social movements. Similarly, Pasha (2011) highlights the Davies, peculiarity of Western International Relations: a conceit that denies its peculiarity by making all other conceptualisations peculiar and marginal.

And yet, just as we saw that everyday life is an aspect of the problem of difference in International Relations, everyday life is also becoming a problem for International Relations. International Relations as a “higher activity” has found itself increasingly concerned with substantive problems of everyday life. Some of the most obvious examples can be found in the ways that in order to respond to problems from the international level and scale, states increasingly overtly intervene in everyday life. The international debt crises that have shaped the global economy since the 1980s have given rise to ever more sophisticated and generalised versions of “structural adjustment” and austerity, instrumentally reshaping the state, citizenship, and economic behaviour to secure the conditions for the unfettered operations of global finance. Similarly, the securitization of all airline travel in the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington is a very specific case of re- programming habitual, routine behaviour in an extremely intimate manner, governing mobility through what Amoore (2006) calls “biometric borders”.

To see why the everyday could become problematic for the international, we need to consider two more of Lefebvre’s conceptual arguments about everyday life. First, from his earliest considerations on everyday life as arising from the development of capitalist modernity, it was clear that for Lefebvre, everyday life is historical. First in 1947 (reprinted in 1958 with a new introduction, English translation 1991a), then in 1962 (English translation 2002), and finally in 1981 (English translation 2005), Lefebvre published three volumes specifically titled “Critique of Everyday Life” and each began with a lengthy re-consideration of what he had written before and what historical events had transpired. In the wake of the Liberation of France from Nazi occupation, Lefebvre was very optimistic about the possibility of changing life, of a revolution in everyday life. To begin his second volume, which launched a major research project into everyday life, Lefebvre “clears the ground” by revisiting his previous arguments in light of the changes that had taken place in everyday life in France through the 1950s. This research and the university courses in which it was pursued and developed were summarized in 1967 in Lefebvre’s most pessimistic appraisal, Everyday Life in the Modern World (1984), in which everyday life now appeared as an object for “bureaucratic programming of controlled consumption.” Life was indeed being changed, but by the extension of capital into the deepest recesses of everyday life. By 1981, with Thatcher and Reagan in power at the dawn of the neoliberal age, Lefebvre incorporated considerations on the permeation of everyday life by the media, what this meant for mediation, and how it opened new avenues for critique. Philosophy had changed as well: no longer able to sustain itself in scholasticism and repeated histories of itself, philosophy had begun to seek relevance in the everyday. The flowers were beginning to recognise the importance of the soil. Thus the everyday is a moving target: the concept of everyday life that emerges from Lefebvre’s theoretical investigations is dynamic, not static; one in which as some possibilities are foreclosed, others open. Thus the second argument Lefebvre provides for us in his conception is that the critique of everyday life is not to be conducted from the elevated, “higher activities” of philosophical reflection; everyday life is itself the critique of everyday life. In other words, everyday life is not merely positive: it is not an inert, objective matter shaped by interventions from “above” or “outside.” Descriptions of everyday life as passively absorbing the demands placed upon it by “higher” authority (public or private) or as subversively detourning these demands are valuable analytically but they remain one-sidedly positive. The separation that scars the everyday is also a negation and the everyday is therefore a site of negativity: this is what enables it as a critique and what makes it a problem for those who would seek to manage it.

Finally, just as Walker and Pasha have emphasized the peculiarity – that is, the non-universality – of International Relations, everyday life also has its limits. Seen from the perspective of “higher activities,” everyday life may present itself as either a distraction to be ignored, as a problem to be addressed, or as a justifying ontology. However, seen from a different perspective a routine, however mundane, or even the prospect of simple reproduction is at best an aspiration and often well out of reach. As Mike Davis argues: the “labour-power of a billion people has been expelled from the world system, and who can imagine any plausible scenario, under neoliberal auspices, that would reintegrate them as productive workers or mass consumers?” (Davis 2004, 27).

The State of the Art of Everyday Life: a review of the literature

How has International Relations research incorporated reflections on everyday life? In 2002, Michael Niemann and I published an article in New Political Science on everyday life and International Relations in which we argued that to uncover an emancipative potential in IR Theory, it would be necessary to find new ways of framing questions for IR that could engage with everyday life. Following Henri Lefebvre’s account of everyday life from the first volume of his career-spanning studies of the topic, we examined how international relations were shaped by and in turn shaped work, family life, and leisure. We were not the first to notice that international relations might have a necessary relationship with everyday life: Cynthia Enloe’s ground-breaking book Bananas, Beaches, and Bases had shown that for the activities defining the field of International Relations to even take place, women had to work hard at activities that the field itself made invisible and irrelevant not only to the “high politics” of diplomacy and war making, but also to the “low politics” of trade deals and foreign direct investment. In 1992, Jim George examined the conditions behind the resistance of Australian International Relations scholarship to engage with the then emergent critical scholarship in the field; he found that the “givenness of everyday life” (that is, the everyday of theorists of International Relations) in the dominant realist and positivist approaches was understood in terms of security dilemmas and sovereignty problematics.

Since these early efforts, references to everyday life have proliferated in analyses of international relations, especially in critical IR Theory but also in related disciplines such as geography and sociology, especially as these latter disciplines concerned themselves with “globalisation.” Some of this literature examines the effects of international or global scale processes on people’s daily lives. Others look to everyday life as a site where international relations are constructed, performed, or enabled. As we will see, these various efforts have contributed to increasingly sophisticated and interesting theoretical conceptions of international relations but they have tended to leave everyday life itself untheorized. [Where I’m going with this is to note how this untheorized reliance on everyday life as a site for IR reproduces the separation of higher activities from the space of everyday life as unreflected upon, which Lefebvre notes at the outset of his theory of everyday life.]

Everyday life makes an explicit appearance in Arlene Tickner’s (2003) critique of the exclusion of Third World perspectives from International Relations theorizing: for her, the everyday experiences of violence, decolonisation, and relative deprivation shape theorizing the international in different, and ignored, ways. Anna Agathangelou and Lily Ling (2004) make a very different argument about the relationship between the international and the everyday. Assessing the foregrounding of new problems posed by the 9/11 attacks and the responses to them, they point to ways that everyday life becomes an object for international political forces in the state-led responses to terrorism. For Agathangelou and Ling, “[transnationalizing] insecurity militarizing daily life” (p. 525); “Neoliberal economics enables globalized militarization.” (p. 531); and “...elite privilege ... underpins such violence” (p. 533). Most efforts in the theoretical practice of International Relations to engage with everyday life could be classified in this way, that is, as either emphasizing the capacities of the powerful to guide, constrain or programme the lives of ordinary people or emphasizing the constitutive force of the everyday in contingent global or international relations. Interestingly, I have found no work at all in the field that attempts to confront one approach with the other or that would argue for the greater validity of one approach. However, I would not describe this as a failure of the field. Indeed, I would say that the material reviewed so far makes important observations and arguments and rests on a shared intuition that giving priority to the international or the everyday in this relationship weakens the critical force of the effort to confront one with the other. What might be described as a failure, or at least as a lacuna in these efforts, however, is the lack of any effort to theorize the everyday. In other words, however sophisticated the theoretical critique of international relations that emerges from these writings, this critique rests on a highly descriptive understanding of everyday life as what “ordinary” people do in their daily lives.

There is a third body of critical scholarship that attempts to overcome this dichotomy between the everyday and the international through a theoretically informed conception of everyday life. Kevin Dunn (2009), on contesting state spaces, is exemplary in this regard. In a critique of reified conceptions of the state that have produced poor understandings of state power in Central Africa, Dunn emphasizes the performativity of the state, especially near its borders. State power, for Dunn, is most evident in the habitually enacted performances of state power, such as those of the military units deployed to be visible to tourists visiting national parks. The everyday here is not a separate and externally related realm from the international; rather, the international also appears as performers of everyday routines connected to state practices – routines such as monitoring, visiting, supplying aid.

The notion of everyday life is given one of its most explicit and sophisticated formulations in the essays gathered in Hobson and Seabrooke (2007), where “everyday politics” confronts the global in the guises of the “weapons of the weak” in trade unions, peasant organizations, and the like. It is important to note that at the outset (pp. 16-17) they work with a binary in which the “Regulatory IPE” of the study of institutions and global processes is set in opposition to their “Everyday IPE.” “RIPE” is oriented towards the study of coercion and conformity, “EIPE” looks instead at “defiance”, “mimetic challenge and hybridised mimicry”, and “axiorationality” as sources of “bottom-up” change. Hobson and Seabrooke set out their three categories of “everyday politics” to encompass the breadth of the concerns of the contributions to their book. “Overt defiance is commonly stressed by those who seek to understand how everyday actors repel elite coercion through their overt resistance activities” (Hobson and Seabrooke, 16, emphasis in the original). This first conception is indeed relevant to their project of opening the field of IPE up to agents and actors that remain invisible to the concerns of “RIPE”, but it hints at the first problem in their conception of the everyday: once agents take up overt resistance, in what ways can they be saidto be engaged in everyday activities? “Mimetic challenges” come closer to speaking to a concern with everyday life: Hobson and Seabrooke link these approaches with the “weapons of the weak” approach to politics of James Scott. The idea here is that the normative discourses of the elite are mobilised for the purposes of the subordinate actors. This then entails a weakening of the elite/marginalized or coloniser/colonised dichotomy.

Both the “overt defiance” and the “mimetic challenge” approaches nonetheless identify “everyday” with resistance and with the subaltern, where instead the notions of resistance and of the subaltern ought to be conceptualised with reference to everyday life. In other words, the politics of “everyday politics” appears here as a given: everyday life is reduced to the politics of resistance of the subaltern. In analytical terms, as understandings of everyday life these approaches foreclose the questions of how subalternity is produced in everyday life or why – or whether – resistance is the characteristic form politics takes amongst subaltern actors. The everyday cannot be identical to resistance or subalternity not only because the connotation of “everyday” is in part a suggestion that the social relations are reproduced, rather than resisted, but also because for many of the global poor and dispossessed, the predictability and routines of everyday life would be at best an aspiration. Hobson and Seabrooke’s strongest conception, or at least the conception of everyday action that comes closest to preserving the sense of “everydayness” in everyday life, is their idea of axiorationality: “...axiorationality provides a contrast with systemic constructivism’s emphasis on temporary moments of radical uncertainty/crisis. Rather, ‘axiorationality’ is habit-informed, reason-guided behaviour within which an actor still retains a concept of interest ... axiorational behaviour is where an actor uses reason to reflect upon conventions and norms, as well as the interests they inform, and then chooses to act in ways which are in accordance with broader intersubjective understandings of what is socially legitimate” (p. 17). With the notion of axiorational behaviour, Hobson and Seabrooke seek to examine the broad aspects and experiences of everyday life not necessarily characterised by resistance. Axiorationality as an approach to everyday life enables an understanding of politics that is not contingent on the actions and systemic determinations that are generated by the dominant. It is also important insofar as it enables an examination of values – an axiology of everyday life opens the field of research and analysis to the ethical and aesthetic considerations that shape everyday actions, which in turn opens up political and aesthetic possibilities beyond domination and resistance. However, by introducing the notions of rationality and of interest and through their Weberian suspicion of “systemic” approaches, Hobson and Seabrooke put forward a methodologically individualist understanding of everyday life. In axiorationality, everyday life becomes a screen on which are collected an aggregation of value- informed rational decisions. It yields a positive, objective account of the everyday; it does not capture the negativity of everyday life as messy, fuzzy, shifting.

Martijn Konings (2009) examines the current financial crisis as a means to investigate global finance’s connections to the mundane world of ordinary aspirations to economic security and independence. Konings’ theorization of everyday life, however, does differ from Hobson’s and Seabrooke’s. Where the latter two writers emphasize the constitutive power of the everyday, Konings deploys a conception that emphasizes the power of the powerful: “Bringing the everyday back through the deconstruction of our most abstract categories is therefore often less about making visible the efficacy of everyday agency and resistance than about showing how the habitus of accepting and rationalizing particular institutions results in the creation of networks of connections of which the particular actors are unaware and serves to bolster the capacity of dominant actors to control the dynamics of social life” (Konings 2009: 77). In other words, while the efforts of these authors all surely represent advances in the critique of International Relations through their sophisticated efforts to theorize the realm of the everyday and the resulting de- naturalizing of the reifications of International Relations, they do not overcome the dilemmas of whether to prioritise the international or the everyday in the critique.

In contrast to both Hobson and Seabrooke and to Konings, Paul Langley’s (2008) account of the everyday life of global finance does not hinge on rationality, interest, or an identification of the everyday with subalternity. Langley turns to everyday life as a setting where globalised financial systems and societies have begun to interact in novel ways. He critiques the binaries that preserve the reified conceptions of power usually deployed to explain the epochal emergence of global finance. Langley focuses instead on the changes in the everyday practices of saving and borrowing in Anglo-American banking and how these are constitutive of the social networks of finance, its power, identities, and the possibilities for dissent.

Langley notes that in order to understand the importance of everyday life for finance, everyday life must be given conceptual definition rather than being deployed as a descriptive label. As in Hernri Lefebvre’s formulation, for Langley everyday life appears initially as a “residue” of social life confronted by the specialized and abstracted activities of Wall Street and the City of London. However, this residue is not inert: it brings together commonalities and differences, homogeneity and hierarchy. Thus the everyday practices of borrowing and saving, while substantiating the operations of global finance, also sort people according to financialised identities and situations of credit-worthiness. Thus the category of everyday life also brings political and normative concerns into the analysis of finance. In the first instance, and again following Lefebvre, the everyday practices of borrowing and saving become objects for programming in a “bureaucratic society of controlled consumption” (Lefebvre 1984, cited in Langley 2008: 13); but in the second instance, the persistence of inequalities and difference indicate political possibilities that emerge in the practices of dissent that reveal the “incomplete, fragile, vulnerable, and contradictory” (Langley 2008: 37) power relations produced and reproduced in programming. [Add discussion of Langley’s notion of financial dissent here in order to clarify his conception of politics and how everyday life addresses the politics of IR.]

The first set of literature discussed above, the literature that rests on “top- down” or “bottom-up” relations between externally related realms of international relations and everyday life, was critiqued for not theorizing everyday life. This critical move reproduces one crucial element of Henri Lefebvre’s theory of everyday life. One of Lefebvre’s notable early descriptions of everyday life was as the “residue” that remains once “higher activities”, such as philosophical reflection, are separated out. Notably, International Relations constitutes itself as a higher activity, even after the “high politics” of diplomacy and war-making are made to share the stage with the “low politics” of international economics and institutions.

This residue is not the object of reflection or philosophical contemplation; it is habitual, mundane, banal. Lefebvre himself gave various accounts of the relationships between the “higher activities” and the everyday: at times, the everyday is an object of technocratic programming and manipulation in the reproduction of the social relations of production; at other times, the everyday is the resource of people’s struggles to disalienate their social lives. This ought not be read as ambivalence on Lefebvre’s part: the everyday is both of these, at once. To engage in a debate over which should take analytical precedence – whether the analysis should be “top-down” or “bottom- up” – weakens the critique of everyday life (and thus of International Relations) by making it one-sided. However, the underlying problem in the more theoretically informed accounts of everyday life and international relations is their tendency to dissolve the international into the everyday. Surely, it may be objected, this is the point: however difficult it is to theorize power rigorously and account for the micropolitics of everyday performances and for the macropolitics of dominant agencies and institutions, the point is to undermine the reifications that sustain the illusion of a “top” or a “bottom” in the relationship. If International Relations, through its self- understanding as a realm “above” the practice of everyday life and if everyday life, in its lack of self-understanding as a realm of unconsidered banality, if both of these work together to deny the possibilities for a politics at a scale other than the territorial state, then the practice of theoretical critique surely must be to relocate politics to politicise both the international and the everyday. This objection would be correct and furthermore, it displaces the question that this chapter opens with – the question of why the theory of international relations should be concerned with the practice of everyday life – and provokes a more serious concern: does politicising everyday life entail politicising the international, or does it constitute a different world politics?

The response to this latter question will depend on a fair amount of theoretical and practical investigation, which is the point of this book. Whatever suspicions of International Relations have been suggested so far, and however much is appears as a reification in its own efforts to describe itself as a specific field, it is the effect of the separation of this aspect of politics and of sociability from the everyday. Thus to dissolve the international into the social and the everyday is not so much an error as it is merely premature. The task in hand is to continue the critique taken up by scholars such as Dunn, Hobson and Seabrooke, Langley, and Konings, that is, to produce a theoretically informed account of everyday life for the critique of International Relations. But this task has two components which have not been addressed to date: first, the logic of separation is also constitutive of the everyday so theorizing everyday life has to account for the real but artificial separation of the international (and other “higher activities”). Second, a theoretically informed account of everyday life has to come to grips specifically with the everyday character of everyday life: everyday life as rhythms, repetitions, habits; banal, mundane, unreflected upon.

The International and the Everyday: Did Everyday Life Replace the Colonies?

Thus everyday life is not itself the totality, it is not universal, and it is not merely positive as an object of investigation and theory. If the separation of the level of the international as a “higher” activity from the level of the everyday as banal leaves gaps in our ability to comprehend the international, so also does it leave lacunae in the conception, perception, and practices of everyday life. Indeed, while a theoretically-informed conception of everyday life is necessary to address International Relations’ core problem, that of difference, then by the same token International Relations theory might be interrogated in terms of whether it can have something important to add to our understanding of everyday life.

It was suggested above that, as R.B.J. Walker has shown, theories of International Relations start by distinguishing a self-identical “inside” that relates to an other, “outside.” For there to be a relation, this outside must remain other but the nature of the relation is such that the outside is brought inside. More prosaically, for International Relations theory, sovereign territorial states enter into international relations with other states and external agents as well as with the logic of an anarchical system. Both are distinct from and outside of the particular state. To secure the “inside” of the sovereign territorial state, however, the task of International Relations theory is to bring external agents inside the system and to bring the logic of the system inside the strategic capacities of the state. Outside is distinguished from inside in order to bring the outside back in, under control or at least managed. The other outside is thus made, in theory, to be like the self-identical inside. This reproduces a practical logic of colonization. International Relations theory presents itself as a universal theory and history, projecting the peculiar logic of the formation of national, territorial states and the development of capitalism in Western Europe onto the governing practices of the relations with the other. Inside the logic of International Relations theory, the Western capitalist and territorial state is the standard by which the external other is measured and with which it must be brought into conformity. Dissident voices, many influenced by postcolonial theory, have highlighted how this colonial relation has been decisive in the formation of the identity of the capitalist territorial state. As Pasha argues: “The ontological primacy of imperial domination/colonial subordination in the making of modern subjectivity cannot be overstated. Coloniality radically alters the way modern sovereignty is conceived” (Pasha 2011, 221).

The notion that International Relations is always at least implicitly a theory of colonization hints at how it might be relevant to understanding everyday life. Two of the most noteworthy observations from social theory on the colonial relation and everyday life come from Guy Debord, the Situationist and sometime collaborator and colleague of Henri Lefebvre, and from Jürgen Habermas. In The Society of the Spectacle, Debord argued that the commodity colonizes social life: “The spectacle is the stage at which the commodity has succeeded in totally colonizing social life” (Debord 2002, §42; emphasis in original). Colonization appears in The Society of the Spectacle as a metaphor for dominance. Debord makes passing references to the ongoing domination of post-colonial states by imperialist powers later in his text, but strikingly for a claim so central to his conception of the spectacle, Debord does not bother to specify the colonial relationship theoretically.

In the Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas makes a similar claim to Debord’s. In Habermas’s terms, the social system, characterised by instrumental rationality, is un-coupled from the lifeworld, which is characterised by communicative rationality. Modernity involves the colonization of the lifeworld by the system. Habermas does give more analytical purchase to his notion of colonization than Debord did. For Habermas, “colonization” refers to the closure of the spaces for free communication responsible for transmitting culture, for socialisation and for the integration of the lifeworld, by strategic and instrumental forms of economic and legal action characteristic of the system. Habermas’s highly abstract formulation, however, can be criticised for its Eurocentrism, for neglecting the specificity of the colonial forms of domination. Colonialism is not merely the expansion of a logic from one sphere into another: it uses specific methods for subordinating and securing the subordination of the colonial subjects; it occupies and produces specific forms of space; and it deploys and shapes particular temporalities.

The context for Debord’s assertion about the colonisation of social life includes both his friendship and collaboration with Lefebvre in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and France’s own experience of decolonisation. The loss of territorial control over the colonies in Sub-Saharan Africa, South East Asia, and perhaps most traumatically Algeria had profound effects on cultural and political life in France. The effects of colonisation and decolonisation on the metropole have been examined elsewhere (see especially Kristin Ross’s lucid analyses, Ross 1995). Furthermore, Lefebvre’s family home in the Pyrenees had long been a periphery subject to metropolitan control – in the past through Absolutism, then through industrialisation, and later through urbanisation. When in the second volume of The Critique of Everyday Life (first published in 1961) he begins to set out the notion that everyday life “replaced” the colonies, the idea was that capitalists had turned their attentions to the domestic market, treating “daily life as they once treated the colonized territories: massive trading posts (supermarkets and shopping centres); absolute predominance of exchange over use; dual exploitation of the dominated in their capacity as producers and consumers” (Lefebvre 2005, 28). However, this conception still lacks a serious engagement with the particularities of the colonial relationship: none of these characteristics spelled out by Lefebvre is peculiar to colonialism. We will return to Lefebvre’s observations about the colonial relation below but before the usefulness of his ideas can be made clear, we need to turn first to thinkers who have attempted to specify colonial forms of domination. For Frantz Fanon, who we might have expected to be one of Lefebvre’s interlocutors in this intellectual context (see Kipfer 2007), colonialism had to be seen in the first instance in terms of the relation between the settler and the native and by extension, the relation also between the settler and metropole. The settler mediates the relationship between the colony and the home country. Colonial control is exercised and accomplished by the external and internalising political, economic, and social actions of settlers. The settler is the agent who defines the native – in particular, defining the native as a different species: inferior and to be judged against the standards of the metropole. Thus the effort to decolonise cannot only be directed at an abstract, external signifier of empire: the settler, as both mediation and agent of colonial domination, necessarily becomes also an agent of violence and a target for counter-violence. Thus Fanon emphasizes the importance of violence in the colonial relation and especially in decolonisation. “National liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the people, commonwealth: whatever may be the headings used or the new formulas introduced, decolonization is always a violent phenomenon” (Fanon 1963, 35). This violent context indicates another limit of everyday life: It is understandable that in this atmosphere, daily life becomes simply impossible. You can no longer be a fellah, a pimp, or an alcoholic as before. The violence of the colonial regime and the counter-violence of the native balance each other and respond to each other in an extraordinary reciprocal homogeneity. This reign of violence will be the more terrible in proportion to the size of the implantation from the mother country. (Fanon 1963, 88) Fanon’s emphasis on the violence of the colonial situation helps give greater analytical concreteness to Lefebvre’s assertions that in turning from the colony to the internal organisation of everyday life, capital employs such tools as trade, exchange, and consumption. Furthermore, Fanon’s analysis of violence helps us to see how contingent everyday life would be in the face of colonisation. However, Lefebvre further developed his assertion with respect to internal colonialism, giving the concept a distinctly spatial turn. Recognising the collapse of colonialism in the colonies, Lefebvre highlights the processes of colonisation within the metropole: “There are no longer colonies in the old sense of the work, but there is already a metropolitan semi-colonization that subjects rural populations, large numbers of foreign workers, and also many French workers and intellectuals, to a concentrated exploitation through the methods and maintaining the elements of a state of spatial segregation” (Lefebvre 2009/1970, 181). In his extensive study of the State, he is even more direct: “wherever a dominated space is generated and mastered by a dominant space – where there is a periphery and a centre – there is colonization” (cited in Kipfer et al. 2008, 294). Kipfer and his co-authors see in this spatialization of the concept of the colony the possibility of sharpening the critique of domination in space by freeing the concept from its dependence on the delimited historical referent of European territorial expansion and giving it multi-scalar purchase: “colonization refers to the role of the state in organizing territorial relationships of centre and periphery, with the alienating, humiliating, and degrading aspects such relationships entail” (ibid., 294). These aspects of the colonial relation are precisely those that inform Fanon’s theoretical and analytical interventions and it is by spatializing the concept of colonialism that we can begin to look for their consequences in everyday life as an object of colonisation.

Thus undoubtedly, the spatialization of the concept of colonialism allows it to be deployed analytically in the way hinted at by Debord and by Habermas. At the same time, the concept is much thinner analytically if by spatializing colonization, we neglect time. In other words, if the temporal dimensions of colonialism are reduced to the historical time of European territorial expansion and emphasizing the spatial relations that define colonialism supersedes this specific reduction, then the other temporalities at work in the colonial relation will be neglected. In part, Lefebvre’s concept of the production of space anticipates this problem. The historical dialectic of spatial forms, in Lefebvre’s analysis, proceeds not by eliminating one form with a new form but through the subsumption of historical forms into the dominant forms. For example, the emergence of what Lefebvre refers to as “abstract space” does not eliminate the intrinsic spiritual or ritual attributes of “absolute space”; it subsumes them under an emergent potential universal equivalence of spaces mediated by market exchanges. The analysis of the production of space is not merely the specification of the relations between different forms of space, it is also the analysis of the relation between different temporalities – just as the critique of everyday life entails conflicting temporalities and rhythms.

Ashis Nandy is the theorist who has been perhaps the most lucid in his critique of colonialism not as a merely historical form but as a temporality in contact and conflict with other temporalities. Like Fanon, Nandy’s background is in psychoanalysis. He finds in colonialism homologies with both the psycho-sexual production of gendered identities and with the developmental theories of childhood and adulthood. The colonised subject lives with intolerable psychic pathologies as the colonial project begins to ascribe cultural meanings to domination. Regarding the first homology, Nandy demonstrates how the assertion of colonial identity in India was conditioned by accepting the forms of ascetic masculinity and sensualised femininity projected by the colonising subject. The negation of masculinity in this sexual universe was not femininity but a fluid, plural, and thus degraded androgyny. To accept the disciplined, militaristic vision of masculinity projected by the colonizers not only provided an explanation of the colonial situation – defeat in a contest between masculine subjects – but also confined resistance to colonialism to terms set by the colonising subject.

The second homology is more explicit with regard to temporalities. Childhood came to be defined by the British coloniser either in Calvinist terms, as evidence of sin to be contained and corrected, or as a tabula rasa to be inscribed with the proper values. Nandy gives a telling account of Rudyard Kipling’s ambivalent childhood, split between relative freedom and affection in his Indian context where he identified with Indian people around him and the neglect, bullying, and discipline he suffered in England. But as the child becomes something to be shaped through discipline and the instilling of correct values, so also the colonised subject is put into the place of the child. Metaphors of development only serve to perpetuate this image of the colony or the post-colony as progressing through a necessary childhood before becoming capable of full autonomy – whether that autonomy is that of the liberal subject, or that of socialism, or that of national independence. In any case, the colonised subject has been first identified as an outside to be brought inside by colonial administration, then identified as other and incapable or not yet capable of full self-hood.

Conclusions

We began by recognising that turning to everyday life may be a compelling way to begin to address a core problem in international relations, the problem of difference. The logic that sustains their separation points to an incompleteness in our ability to understand everyday life as well and that we might look to the “higher activity” of International Relations for indications of how to better understand everyday life. International Relations per se, as an enterprise, does not fare too well on its own in this regard, as we saw in our literature review. However, insofar as theories of International Relations are always at least implicitly theories of colonisation – that is, of bringing the outside in – we can identify a strong suggestion of how to interrogate International Relations in ways that might indeed shed light on everyday life. Noteworthy social theorists such as Guy Debord, Jürgen Habermas, and Henri Lefebvre have intuited this when they assert that social life is an object of colonization. But this assertion has not yet been given sufficient analytical purchase to contribute to our understanding of everyday life. Thus we turned briefly to two theorists of the colonial relationship to clarify what we will need to ask if we are to investigate the specifically colonial forms of domination that may occur with respect to everyday life. From Fanon, we see that the colonial relationship is one that is mediated by the settler, who has particular social functions and identity with respect to both the colony and the metropole, and that violence is characteristic of both colonisation and decolonisation. From Nandy, we see that the colonial relation imposes cultural forms of identity that permit the colonised to find a place in the colonial order, shaping both the prospects for accepting or rejecting that order, and that it imposes temporalities that also constrain the colonised subject. Indeed, just as the space of the colony is not exhausted by the territorial expansion of European states, neither is the time of the colony exhausted by its historical boundaries. Each of these aspects of the colonial relation will need to be foregrounded in the analysis of everyday life and then brought back to bear again on the problem of difference in International Relations theory.

However, in the hands of both Fanon and Nandy, we see in decolonisation, or at least its prospect, something about life under the colony that cannot be extinguished or programmed away, just as for Lefebvre everyday life is not only alienated but also contains the potential for critique and disalienation. If everyday life is a colony, then it must be framed as always also something more than the residue remaining after the abstraction of higher activities – indeed, is it even possible to work or reproduce without being reflective? We cannot counterpose a pristine, authentic everyday life against the colonisers or settlers but rather we have to find ways to be attentive to “its spirit, as an open, anarchic federation of sub-cultures and textual authorities which [allow] new readings and internal criticisms” (Nandy 1983, 28).

REFERENCES Agathangelou, Anna M. and L.M.H. Ling (2004). “Power, Borders, Security, Wealth: Lessons of Violence and Desire from September 11.” International Studies Quarterly, vol. 48, 517-538. Allison, Graham T. and Paul Zelikow (1999). Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis. Longman. Amoore, Louise (2006). “Biometric Borders: Governing Mobility in the War on Terror.” Political Geography, vol. 25: 336-351. Cox, Robert (1987). Production, Power, and World Order. New York: Columbia University Press. Davies, Matt (2006) “Everyday Life in the Global Political Economy.” In Marieke de Goede, ed., International Political Economy and Poststructural Politics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 219-237. Davies, Matt and Michael Niemann (2002). “The Everyday Spaces of Global Politics: Work, Leisure, Family.” New Political Science, vol. 24, no. 4: 557-577. Debord, Guy (2002). 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Everyday Politics of the World Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1-23. Inayatullah, Naeem and David L. Blaney (2004). International Relations and the Problem of Difference. London: Routledge. Kipfer, Stefan (2007). “Fanon and Space: Colonization, Urbanization and Liberation from the Colonial to the Global City.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 25, no. 4: 701-726. Kipfer, Stefan, Christian Schmid, Kanishka Goonewardena, and Richard Milgrom (2008). “Globalizing Lefebvre?” In Kanishka Goonewardena, Stefan Kipfer, Richard Milgrom, and Christian Schmid (eds), Space, Difference, Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre. New York and Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 285- 305. Konings, Martijn (2009). “The Construction of US Financial Power.” Review of International Studies, vol. 35, 69-94. Davies, The Everyday Life of International Political Economy, chapter 1, p. 28 Langley, Paul (2008). The Everyday Life of Global Finance: Saving and Borrowing in Anglo-America. 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(1994). “Social Movements/World Politics.” Millennium: Journal of International Relations, vol. 23, no. 3: 669-700. Weber, Heloise (2002). “The Imposition of a Global Development Architecture: The Example of Microcredit.” Reviw of International Studies, vol. 28, no. 3: 537- 555. Weber, Heloise (2006). “A Political Analysis of the PRSP Initiative: Social Struggles and the Organisation of Persistent Relations of Inequality.” Globalizations, vol. 4, no. 4: 559-572.

[halfwaythruthedark]

Despite the charisma that the 'masses' as an abstract entity have come to enjoy in the last hundred years or so, thanks to what Edward Shils calls the dispersal of the charisma previously concentrated in the monarch or the ruling elite, the political idiom of the 'lower classes', as opposed to their politics, continues to sound meaningless, dangerous or sick. In fact, most well-wishers of these classes like to serve as the latter's mouthpieces in the belief that they use the wrong language to interpret their predicament. Indian popular cinema suggests that the language, though sometimes garbled, is not insane, and sometimes can even be moving. For it is after all only a distorted history of our own desires, lived out by others who acknowledge them. That is why the most absurd moments of popular cinema often can be its most poignant.

Ashis Nandy

(The Secret Politics of Our Desires. Introduction: "Indian Popular Cinema as a Slum's Eye View of Politics."

[lasmaracuyas]

[D]omination today is rarely justified through oracles, ritual superiority, or claims to birthrights; domination is now more frequently justified in terms of better acquaintance with universal knowledge and better access to universal modes of acquiring knowledge.

Ashis Nandy