Two Cheers For Corruption?

What is Corruption? 
Corruption, I was once taught, is the the use of public office for private gain. It is allegedly illegal and immoral, besides being harmful to a nation's economy. But why, I've always asked, does it persist in most of the world for most of human civilization?

The most common answer is that corruption is akin to theft, and the reasons for corruption ultimately boil down to selfishness, greed and a host of other human vices. But if this tragic account of human nature holds any validity, we are all corrupt (or potentially corrupt), though lacking in the same opportunities to indulge in it. This line of reasoning may even cause some of us to pity ourselves: if only we had more opportunities to be corrupt, our natural vices would take care of the rest...

But this moral argument explains too much as well as too little. If everyone is equally corrupt in theory, nothing remains to be explained. In that case, cause and effect coincide: people are corrupt because they are innately so. This is a non-explanation.  Clearly, we must look for answers elsewhere.

An Alternative Hypothesis
Let me propose an hypothesis that runs counter to conventional wisdom: private gain is one of the chief purposes of holding public office. Shocked? I expect readers to be so. We are all so used to thinking about public office in the exalted terms of civics textbooks that we typically fail to understand that the "state" is not a mythical sea-monster, Leviathan. The state, instead, ought to be better understood as the sum of power relationships in society that are deemed legitimate in the eyes of the law. To the extent that a nation's laws buttress patriarchal authority within a family, the monarch-like rule of the father-husband is as much a part of the constitutional order of things as legislatures or courts. For our purposes, therefore, the classical liberal distinction between the public and private realms needs to be put aside.

Defining the state in this manner avoids reducing corruption to a simple matter of individual virtue and vice. We now see the state as embedded in society with its messy power equations ready to upset any technocrat's grand institutional designs. For no one is above board entirely, except, as the ancient Greeks and Romans believed, the mythical lawgiver in a society. The everyday reality of society is, then, a series of overlapping struggles for wealth, honor, and virtue. It is not only about the rich fighting the poor, but also rich women positioning themselves above their poorer counterparts. Insofar as the state endows laws and policies with an official sanctity, the overlapping struggles in a given moment influence the distribution of power and resources in the future. Victory in one sphere of struggle may be reinforced in others just as easily as they might be undercut in others. Public office is thus nothing more than a means to a pre-determined end.

However, the distribution of power in society varies across time and place. In pluralistic or "polyarchic" societies, the same elites do not win every battle. Instead, power is distributed widely across multiple nodes in society. Capturing power in one sphere of the state does not imply that the winner takes all. Winning the battle for gay rights does not necessarily mean you will also be able to raise taxes on the rich. The use of public office for private gain is rampant in such societies as are accusations of the same. Absolutely no one is above suspicion.  In "monoarchic" societies, however, this is not the case. Oligopolistic interests concentrate power in closed circles, and social policies and laws reflect these interests. Public interest ends up being defined by the ruling oligarchs of the day, and the few individual deviations from this definition of public interest is denounced vociferously and even criminalized.

The Curious Modernity of Corruption
Now, corruption is an interesting term. It simultaneously functions as a modern economic term as well as a term of moral opprobrium. The modernity of corruption is not unsurprising. Its origins lie in the rise of Protestantism in Europe, which saw, among its principal tasks, a vigorous attack on the corruption of the Catholic Church. In western Europe, the triumph of Protestantism is inseparable from the triumph of capitalism over the medieval church, the aristocracy, and the peasantry. Whether in Germany, the Low Countries or in England, the modern attack on corruption accompanied the ultimate victory of the bourgeoisie on the Continent. With imperialism, the Protestant ethic at the heart of capitalism came to assume a global form. On this view of global society, heathens in Asia, Africa, and the Americas were corrupt and depraved creatures in need of salvation. The Bible held the key to salvation as much as markets and the modern state did. Corruption was backward, pre-modern, medieval. Salvation lay in the modern doctrine of progress.

We may not be all Keynesians now, but we are possibly all Protestant capitalists now. Economics is the study of capitalist markets today. Political science concerns "governance" of these markets. Anthropology studies the primitive Other, whether in Papua New Guinea and Nebraska or in car factories in Detroit and Gurgaon. Philosophy is the logical apparatus that binds together the modern bourgeois disciplines. Taking a step back from the indoctrination that lies at the heart of the modern civilizing mission, we can appreciate how Euroamerican modernity, based on the triumph of the Protestant bourgeoisie over the old feudal order, involves a decisive shift towards the rule of a single class. Knowledge and the state reflect this concentration of power in the hands of the few.

Champions of Euroamerican modernity, however, exist in the non-West too. In societies as different as India and Egypt, the last eighteen months have seen strong movements led by the urban bourgeoisie to take over partial welfarist regimes and remake them in their own image. To label these movements "popular" and "national" uprisings is very much part of the game. Paid news and intellectuals have filled out newspapers and magazines with their rants against the corruption of the state. What we need is efficiency and transparency, they say, but what they do not say is that they want to redefine public interest vis-a-vis their own private interests. For this noble cause, it is not at all puzzling that new-age religious leaders and foreign-funded social entrepreneurs have joined hands. Neither is it puzzling that the proudly apolitical youth of Gurgaon and Cairo   have discovered the pleasures of collective effervescence in virtual worlds.

Monoarchy versus Polyarchy
Corruption, our new-age reformers tell us, is rife at the lower levels of the state, especially in the countryside.   By this, we must understand that the urban bourgeoisie in these postcolonial societies have little control over rural power dynamics. Particular ill-will has been directed in India, for example, against elected politicians in the government. They are not just corrupt, but criminals too. Instead of seeing these politicians as simply conduits or brokers in a larger con-game, they are being presented before us as the ringleaders. Of course, this is only to be expected when leading corporate houses fund the anti-corruption crusaders and award paid leave to their employees to facilitate protests. Tellingly, the corporate crusaders have offered an extra-constitutional solution in which they and those they handpick will have the power to override all elected and non-elected officialdom in the land. This is the ultimate prize: complete control of the state by a class in the ascendancy. Monoarchy, in short.

Needless to say, these designs have not been successful until date. Ultimately, their lack of success boils down to a single reason: the competition between the urban bourgeoisie and other sections of society in the domain of the state. In India, for instance, the upper-caste bourgeoisie are not so preponderant as to obliterate powerful rural and anti-capitalist interests. Multiple competing political interests acting in the name of "the people" and accusing each other of the worst possible crimes, thus remains the norm. Corruption is thriving, as it rightly should, in a polyarchic society in which the state becomes the site of myriad struggles for power and justice alike. The nature of modernity in these polyarchic societies refuses to be a mere replica of Euroamerican originals. Nor does a CCP-like party emerge to produce a prostrate public to do its bidding. The shift to a monoarchic social order remains a distant dream for our bourgeois reformers in the postcolony.

The battle is far from over yet. I fully expect the urban bourgeoisie to try harder next time, and co-opt a few farmers, barbers, and cooks to display their "democratic" commitments. I also expect them to work within the government to award bailouts to wealthy individuals and corporations rather than reserve them for "wasteful" social expenditures. Nonetheless, I am quite hopeful for the future. While capitalist interests may grow stronger, their social rivals are likely to match them blow for blow. Above all, one may repose faith in our common apathy and cynicism towards those who seek to reform us. What for, we ask, and how much is it worth to you? We can still see and point to the Emperor's nakedness in ways that our peers in the West have long lost. Two cheers for corruption, then? 

The Ugliness of the Indian Cricket Fan

Consider the following excerpt from the chat client of an online cricket streaming website:

Desi_dude: INDIA WILL WIN TODAY!!!
Maakichoot: Sachin n Sewag will score century
ABC: bharat mata ki jai...angrezon ki gaand maro!
PakiBoy: Losers...totally overrated team.
Maakichoot: ur country is a loser...fuck off pig
Desi_dude: I WILL FUCK U SISTER PAKIBOY!!!

This exchange will sound typical for anyone who follows live cricket online. Now and then, the moderator intervenes to kick out someone from the chat room. But more often than not, such exchanges continue unabated on one side of your screen until you turn off the chat client. I certainly turn it off whenever I watch cricket. But that does not shut me out from the wider set of exchanges among Indian cricket fans that circulate in the virtual and real worlds. It must be admitted that I take a perverse interest in these exchanges, but only because they regularly demonstrate to me the ugliness of the modern Indian cricket fan, and more generally, the depressingly disgusting nature of metropolitan Indian life today.

After all these years of watching cricket, it is clear to me that most online viewers are males between 18 and 35. They watch mainly the games that India play. Usually, they cheer for boundaries and sixers. Occasionally, the bowlers receive praise, though they usually cop as much abuse as the opposition. Statistics offer solace and a sense of community: how else would you know that Virender Sehwag missed Gary Kirsten's record for the highest score by a batsman in a World Cup by fourteen runs? The slightest provocation, real or imagined, invites a torrent of four-letter words directed at Pakistan. English or Australian or South African teams fare slightly better for these young male viewers, partly because they offer alluring models of sporting success and partly because most of these viewers live in one of these countries or the US/Canada. Abuse invariably takes traditional North Indian forms of expression: mothers and sisters feature prominently, of course. Graphic descriptions of the female sexual anatomy, similarly, become the canvass for projecting fantasies of rape. Sexual aggression is closely allied to fervent nationalism: to win is to rape one's opponent's mothers and sisters. To win repeatedly implies total domination of others. This is, therefore, the goal of the typical online cricket viewer.

It seems easy to diagnose what's wrong here. These kids, some would say, need to be taught some manners. But I have no doubt that these viewers are lovely, well-mannered middle-class youth studying or working to further their mundane ambitions. And by their own admission, they eat and breathe cricket. Moreover, they view themselves as patriots defending the nation's pride at every opportunity. Their parents and families are surely proud of them. And they will grow up to be successful at work and financially. So what's wrong then? Am I just being curmudgeonly? Perhaps, but I'd argue that jingoistic nationalism stands for a wider malaise in modern India, and its implications for sports and life are equally pernicious.

Jingoistic nationalism is arguably the bane of modern sport. Orwell wrote of "war minus the shooting." But a tough sporting contest does resemble a war to its participants and a gladiatorial battle for spectators. It is only when politics that matter little to the sporting contest enter the fray that things get ugly. It is purely a matter of historical contingency that nation-states exist and that too in their present forms. The West Indies are not even a nation-state. England competes on its own instead of calling itself Great Britain. Both India and Pakistan have split into separate nations and cricket teams. Where is the need to get so riled up over national identities and rivalries? The IPL T20 tournament, modeled on the English Premier League, is divided into ten franchises, each associated with an Indian city. Supporting one's favorite cricketers across cities is commonplace there. Yet the Indian cricket team is the object of endless praise and ridicule, agony and ecstasy.

This paradoxical state of affairs is understandable only if we see the wider context for nationalist assertion over the past decade or so. The idea that India is a global superpower-in-the-making haunts the urban imagination. There is a restlessness, bordering on insanity, that desires a never-ending stream of glory and wealth. The metropolitan Indian obsession with the national GDP and its growth rate are worth noting in this regard. There are global cricket rankings, much like there are global GDP rankings, and success is defined narrowly as rising up the rankings. The anxieties and insecurities of the rising middle classes in urban India thus get projected onto sport. Personal anxieties intertwine with national ones, and a toxic mix is produced indeed.  For those living outside India, the problem is even more acute: the louder and more brashly one expresses one's love for one's country/culture/civilization, the more nationalistic one imagines oneself to be. A seamless garment knits together personal aspirations and anxieties with the desire to assert civilizational pride and national success. Do not be surprised to hear about "black Madrasis," "Habshis," or "Aussie convicts" when watching cricket. They are part and parcel of the new Indian identity: vulgar, insecure, and rotten to the core.

The wider post-liberalization context of jingoistic nationalism in India today goes far beyond Orwell's notion of sports as a kind of war between nations. This is because it rests fundamentally on the sexual insecurities of young men who band together to participate in exhibitions of hyper-masculinity. Try watching a cricket match with a bunch of men in their 20s, and you'll know what I mean. "Mardangi" (masculinist assertion) holds the key to understanding the cricket fan's love of the motherland. For, in this view of nationalism, fighting for the nation means fighting for one's mother and land simultaneously. Logically, this kind of nationalism means destroying others' mothers and lands. Cricket victories are analogous to rapes and imperial conquests. All three terms (victory, rape, conquest) are used interchangeably in popular parlance. Asserting national pride goes hand in hand with a deep fear of what might happen if one were to lose a cricket match. Effigies are burned, cricketers are stoned, and their parents' homes vandalized or burned. Losing a match is akin to betraying one's nation and mother. The traitors must be punished for their crimes.

These extreme responses suggest deep-seated and unresolved sexual tensions in the minds of the male cricket fan. The graphic descriptions of the female body and violent sexual activity suggest more than a passing familiarity with the standard modes of pornographic representation of women. They represent a deep personal sense of sexual frustration/persecution or a thwarted desire to master the female body. The chasm between unsatiated lust and boundless desire accounts largely for the sexual politics of the jingoistic cricket fan. Winning is experienced as a bodily pleasure that partially offsets the frustrations of everyday life. The self and nation thus get braided together, and the desire for sexual recognition gets caught up with the quest for national glory in cricket and much else. The basic dictum for the Indian cricket fan thus appears to be "do unto others before they do unto you." In short, let's conquer the opponent on and off the field before they do the same to us.

When cricket or any sport is reduced to a mere assertion of jingoistic nationalism, does it really matter intrinsically? Can one really be so intent on personal/national conquest and yet admire a freakish leg-break or a sumptuous cover drive? I doubt it. The modern fan's experience of cricket is mediated more by statistics than ever before. This is obviously so for those who follow cricket in the form of text commentary on Cricinfo or the BBC. But even for those who watch on television, stats are constantly shoved down one's throat, but the viewers demand even more. Sehwag's average or Harbhajan's strike-rate have now become common knowledge. In an age of player auctions, these statistics are also an "objective" basis for evaluating cricketers. When I cast my mind back a couple of decades ago to the days of Mohinder Amarnath and Sunil Gavaskar, I shudder to think what might have occurred if those players were judged solely by their batting strike-rates or averages. Or if Ian Chappell's captaincy could be compared decisively to Clive Lloyd's after reducing both of them to a set of "objective" numbers. Statistics have always mattered in cricket, even in the nineteenth century, but they did not serve until recently as the principal basis for evaluating cricketers or experiencing the sport. And woebetide us all for the blight that rots our imaginations and blinds us to the many pleasures of the game.

All sport is, ultimately, a metaphor for life. It is meaningful only within the context of rules that seem entirely arbitrary and nonsensical to those who do not follow the sport. The virtues of fair play, courage, concentration, cunning, skill, athleticism, and leadership, to name only a few, are inextricably tied to sports. Cricket has arguably been an exemplar of sporting virtues insofar as its Victorian origins and colonial provenance made it a model of moral conduct long ago. As Thomas Arnold, the schoolmaster at Rugby told Tom Brown a century and a half ago, cricket is more than a sport, it's an institution. Cricket is a demanding game for a viewer. There are many moving parts, so to speak, and for the most part, the movement is rather slow. The extraordinary feat or heroic performance is the exception to the humdrum rhythms of bat and ball. Cricket's rules, too, are perhaps more complex than any other sport. Try teaching cricket to an American, and you will realize soon that the game is meant for men and women of higher intellectual qualities. This does not, of course, make it a patrician affair, since the plebs have always taken a keen interest in outdoing their social superiors at batting and bowling alike. As one social historian put it, had the French noblesse played cricket with their serfs, they would not have had their chateaux burnt. If sport is a metaphor for life, then cricket is a most intricate metaphor to unravel.

Still, millions have unravelled the metaphor of cricket. The English aristocracy has always had a tender spot for the underdog, so it is hardly surprising that cricket has never been an exclusively bourgeois sport. Working-class Englishmen, and later, colonials in the Caribbean, Australia, and the Indian subcontinent partook of the myriad joys of the game. To deceive one's colonial masters with a well-bowled googly or to impress the patricians at Lord's with a century has always been a key part of the game. It is wrong to believe that the spread of the game to the postcolonial world has rid cricket of its peculiar virtues. It has only broadened the range of skills and talents exhibited on the cricket field. It is hard to imagine cricket today, for instance, without the definitive contributions of the West Indian teams of the 1970s and 1980s. In India, the spread of the game beyond a small princely elite have given us the likes of Kapil Dev, Sachin Tendulkar, Anil Kumble, and Mohammed Azharuddin. Most of our cricketers today come from fairly humble backgrounds, outside the big metropolitan cities, and work hard to hone their cricketing skills and achieve fame for their exploits on the field.

My own introduction to cricket came from a man born and raised in Bankura in West Bengal, who came to work in Calcutta, as it was called then, and kept alive his passion for the game by transmitting it to others such as myself. Joydeb knew the value of Dean Jones' quick singles, David Gower's stylish on-drives or Inzamam's towering sixes. He knew the personal idiosyncrasies of every player even before he had set eyes on them on television. Radio commentary had told him all he needed to do about Richards' imperious manner or Srikkanth's twitchy nose. Once, on a trip to Eden Gardens, he had found himself surrounded by nearly a hundred thousand  Bengalis cheering wildly for Kapil and Azhar. He couldn't make out most of what happened on the field, but he remembered Chris Lewis, the forgotten English all-rounder outdo the much-touted Pringle and Botham with a century and a bagful of wickets. It reminded him, he said, of the manner in which he had imagined Alvin Kallicharan sent the hapless Indian bowlers on a leather hunt all those years ago. On another occasion, Joydeb despaired that the rain-rule in one-day games needed to be revised drastically so that it could be a fairer contest for the team batting second. He rued the 1992 World Cup semi-final between South Africa and England as a classic example of justice denied. And he despaired that Kapil Dev had prolonged his career needlessly to overtake Richard Hadlee's bowling record.

Richie Benaud or Neville Cardus could not have understood the game better. Joydeb knew and loved the game without malice or contempt for anyone. I sometimes wonder nowadays what he might have made of the IPL or T20 cricket more generally. I cannot tell, to be honest. But I do know that he'd have detested the ugly jingoism that the Indian fan brings to the game today. It is true that he enjoyed an Indian victory on the back of some fine performances by his favorite players, Kapil and Azhar. But it did not happen often, less so outside India. To see, however, Viv Richards or Shane Warne in action was, for him, a marvel to behold. That men could push the frontiers of possibility by batting or bowling the way Richards or Warne did, seemed to him to be the primary reason for following the sport. No matter what we do or how much we earn, there is an unspeakable sense of exhilaration every time one's hero comes to bat or bowl. Words cannot capture what the mind and heart do instinctively. In those brief, flickering moments, the world comes alive with wondrous possibilities, and all else is forgotten. But when the hero is caught at slip or smashed for six, you sigh and realize they -- and you -- are mortal, after all. Therein lies the magic of sport. I can only feel sorry for those who can never experience it. 

On the Delhi Metro

As the grey train hurtled towards me on that gloomy day, I stood still and waited in anticipation of what lay in store for me aboard. I felt muscles twitch as a general air of uneasiness spread around me. Soon, the grey train opened its doors to us and exclaimed, "HUDA City Centre." My fellow passengers ran helter-skelter and sought desperately to seat themselves. Confused, I read the bright green signs that urged me not to sit on seats reserved for women, the elderly, and physically challenged persons. I wandered down to the next compartment. It was almost empty. I wondered why others didn't join me. Perhaps there's nothing like the warmth of humanity in winter.

In two minutes, we were at the next station, IFFCO Chowk, and in another two minutes, at MG Road station. Office clerks, call center employees, college

students, housewives, children, and senior citizens scrambled in through the doors to find places to sit. I pulled out a book and pretended to read. On my left sat a couple eager to know each other better. This quiet, brooding call-center employee sat listening to his partner's endless explanations for what she perceived as her inadequacies. "You know I feel my English and Hindi are worsening here in Gurgaon. I really did speak well in Bara Banki." Hmmm, muttered her boyfriend. "You know I don't really drink. It was just that one time when my Assamese flatmates forced me to drink and I got so drunk that I puked all night. These Assamese girls do it every week. I just don't know how they manage!" Hmmm, muttered her boyfriend again. "I hope you don't believe all the rumors about me in the office. They're all lies." Let's go, he said this time, the station's here.

"Guru Dronacharya," the announcer screamed. What a delicious irony that the ancient Mahabharata tale about Gurgaon has found favor with the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation in 2010!

In walked Old Father Time himself through the gates. Dressed in a yellow silk kurta and a Nehru jacket, Father Time smiled and seated himself next to me. "Where are you going?" he asked. "Patel Chowk," I replied. "Long way to go, my boy. These coaches are old, you see, but the new ones they've got will be faster and smoother without the jerkiness we have now." Hmmm, I responded, wondering how he knew about the DMRC's plans. I suppose my laconic responses put off the old man. So he began talking to a rotund gentleman who seemed intrigued by the tidbit about the new coaches. "Bhaisahab, there is no hope for us Hindus nowadays. See how the government equivocates when it comes to terrorism. They didn't even want to hang Afzal Guru." Bhaisahab concurred: "And now they speak of Hindu terror. What a travesty!" That comment clearly struck a chord. It promised to pave the way for a long discourse on minority appeasement and Hindu insecurities in contemporary India. But nothing of the sort happened because a young, bespectacled man in a skullcap and sherwani stood beside us. The joys of Indian secularism!

If you look outside from the window of your metro coach

on the Delhi-Gurgaon route, you will discover much that had been hitherto hidden. Greenery everywhere with only small shanties breaking up the verdant landscape. Hardly any people to be seen in this bustling metropolis bursting at its seams. The orderliness of the armed forces inside their residential colonies. The opulence of farmhouses that are exposed now to the public eye. And the elegance of the Qutb Minar towering over Mehrauli. Thereafter, we are creatures of the dark in the underworld. Who knows what's happening above us? A mosque had been demolished that day, in fact, and Mathura Road and its vicinity were jam-packed with cars. But we couldn't know that inside our metro compartments. What we did see and know, however, is that we were packed together with a motley bunch of human specimens with different colors and smells enveloping us. The rough-and-ready manner of democracy, Indian-style.

Aboard the Metro, we were left to decide whether to offer seats to ladies and older people.

Every time someone offered his seat to a lady (not often!)he seemed positively pleased with himself. The elderly were not so lucky. They had to request seats, explaining that they had a long distance to travel, and even then, sitting could not be guaranteed. When an old lady came in at Jorbagh, ostensibly after cleaning some posh houses there, no one bothered when she asked for a seat. She deserved a seat under two of the three categories of the "abnormal" (old and female), but she apparently did not know that the unwritten class dynamics of Delhi had permeated underground into the Metro too. Unwritten also meant unspoken since no one offered an explanation for their rudeness: they simply looked away or continued talking as if they had not heard the woman at all. When I offered my seat to the lady, a young student with his ears plugged to his I-Pod threatened to shove his way ahead of her. I had to physically block his way to let her sit. Everyone looked displeased. An unwritten, unspoken law of the city had been broken.

Another such law concerns women. The DMRC has recently extended North India's zenana culture into the public transport system of the future. A reserved coach for women essentially means segregation. It is quite obvious that the majority of women will choose to avoid getting

their butts pinched or breasts grabbed in the other coaches. But with the new reserved coach for women, the "normal" passengers (male, aged 15-60 years) can rule the roost elsewhere and ignore the bright green signs that dare to impose a kind of civility in the early days of the Metro. Butt-pinching and breast-grabbing are now perfectly acceptable in three-quarters of every Metro train. Indeed, they are vital to maintaining the new zenana culture: "segregate, or else we'll, molest you" is the message to women.

On my way back, two call-center employees sat beside me all the way to Gurgaon. They seemed less-than-thrilled by their jobs. But they were even less thrilled by their friend Raghu, who seemed to them to be engaged forever in long telephonic conversations with his girlfriend. "What's there to talk to these bitches? They're good to fuck now and then after work. And it's great on the weekends. But there's nothing really to talk to them about." His misogynist co-worker agreed heartily: "I don't waste my time like that. Better to go out drinking with your buddies. Or stay home playing video games. These bitches are so demanding: if you get talking to them, they won't let you do anything else in life." This is how the "normal" passengers of the Metro are expected to behave. The misogyny of the streets is normalized now as it gets braided with the zenana culture of the old courtly elites. This is the culture of neoliberalism: selective appropriation of cultural pasts to reinforce existing power equations.

But neoliberalism is not simply trade liberalization and privatization,as many are wont to believe. The Delhi Metro is a dramatic statement by the Government of India in an era where the rotten core of private sector corporations has come to the fore like never before. Leviathan, too, can be efficient and profitable as it builds critical infrastructure and breathes life anew into the city. The state, as entrepreneur as well as regulator, is the new face of neoliberal reforms in India. If M-NREGA

is its most visible face in rural India today, the Delhi Metro is the blueprint for urban transformations in India today. Move over, Narayan Murthy and the BATF. Metro coaches are awash with public sector advertisements for yoga and naturopathy from the Health Ministry and mobile and internet plans from MTNL and BSNL. The state continue to enforce the writ of the law throughout the metro station. If you spit or travel without tokens, be prepared to pay a hefty fine. If you enter the women's coach forcibly, be prepared to be pulled out by a cop policing the gendered borderlands between the coaches. And don't urinate on the platform or clamber atop the train! The government hopes to impose a distinctly bourgeois civility on those whose notions of morality are characteristically different. It is not clear yet who or what will prevail.

There is no doubt that the Delhi Metro is the best thing to happen to the Capital for decades. Delhi lacks the planning apparatus of Mumbai or Bangalore. It is a segregated city that offers innumerable opportunities to the new migrant even as it blocks off many others. The Metro re-engages the energies of young aspirants to middle-class rank and privilege. It brings the city together in unprecedented ways, yet re-inscribes older prejudices of gender, age, and class in a neoliberal garb. In the stations and trains, the democratic populism of the streets battles the neoliberal moral order directed by the government. Little wonder then that the mall-going India Shining public shies away from the Metro: it is too plebeian for their tastes. And yet their college-going children may well end up sweating and scrambling beside less-privileged passengers who look and smell so different from them. In this tortured, tortuous way, the promise of the modern city comes alive and the century-old legacies of the colonial capital threaten to fall apart.

The Seminar Mode of Production: A Critique

Economic categories are only the theoretical expressions, the abstractions of the social relations of production...Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist. The same men who establish their social relations in conformity with the material productivity, produce also principles, ideas, and categories, in conformity with their social relations. Thus the ideas, these categories, are as little eternal as the relations they express. (Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, Chapter Two: "The Metaphysics of Political Economy")

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. (Karl Marx, 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy)

Introduction

I begin with my favorite lines from Marx's corpus of writings in order to set the tone for my argument here. This argument concerns what I call the "seminar mode of production," which, I believe, ought to be seen as a set of economic and social relations that are associated with particular forms of consciousness in our world today. This mode of production may be observed primarily in universities and research centers, but its influence is not merely confined to these peripheries of modern society. Indeed, insofar as a university degree is widely considered a necessity by middle and upper classes worldwide, the influence of the university, and by extension, of the seminar mode of production, may be seen everywhere. This mode of production, therefore, along with the social relations of production associated with it, is the object of critique in this post.

So what exactly is the "seminar mode of production"? It is the sum of the productive forces and social relations that exist between administrators, donors/funders, professors and students in the contemporary world, whose perpetuation depends, in the final analysis, on performing erudition in the physical setting of a seminar room. This definition needs to be parsed a bit. Note three key elements here, each of which will be elaborated upon subsequently.

1. The seminar functions as the crucial setting in which erudition is expected to be performed by students and professors alike. Secondary performances of erudition (by-products?) such as published articles, edited volumes and books, reviewed by peers, are also derived from the same productive relations established within the university. Performance, however, does not necessarily imply feigning erudition since it is quite possible that some performances are genuinely good.

2. The seminar is nestled in the framework of the university, which has increasingly being seen in the postwar era as a knowledge factory to be managed and run by professional administrators. As I shall explain below, this is a fairly recent development in the institutional history of the university, characterized as it is by medieval norms and rituals even today. In other words, what we are witnessing nowadays is the fruition of a post-WWII process of incorporating academia into the larger social relations established under the capitalist mode of production, albeit in a somewhat peculiar way.

3. The production of "knowledge" in seminars across the modern university system occurs parallel to the formation of particular kinds of consciousness among students and professors. These forms of consciousness, as I shall argue, are essentially apolitical, despite appearances to the contrary, and geared to the preservation of bourgeois society and its interests. Moreover, these forms of consciousness (note the plural!) may be associated with distinct socio-cultural processes, most notably (a) co-option into existing power structures of some claiming to represent the subordinated classes, (b) a stable supply of skilled workers for the labor force, whose intrinsically petty bourgeois nature favors preserving the status quo above all else, and (c) the rise of a global neo-brahminical elitism that values higher education degrees as markers of social distinction despite the irony of "subalterns" acting strategically as objects of research.

The Performance of Erudition

By erudition, I mean literally e(x)-rudis or the Latin root for the expulsion of rudeness in personal manners, primarily by the acquisition of what is commonly known as “polish.” In the seminar room, “polish” is typically demonstrated by a combination of everyday strategies: dropping names of famous individuals both alive and dead, references to fashionable theories and tools to suggest a deep familiarity with these, and/or appeals to the rhetoric of science (hypotheses, data, sampling, testing, etc). Jointly or severally, these strategies are used regularly by students and professors across seminar rooms to demonstrate proof of erudition to other participants gathered therein. Taken together, they constitute a collective performance of erudition in the seminar setting.

This collective performance, in fact, lies at the heart of the seminar mode of production. Indeed, the success or failure of productive forces may be judged on the basis of these performances. This holds true not only for students who are graded on their performances, but also for professors, who are evaluated by universities on the basis of their performances of erudition. These evaluations of performance create distinctions of note between students (an “A” student is regarded as different from a “C” student) and professors (a full professor is viewed differently from a junior faculty member). The distinctions created thus are not restricted to classroom settings because students with higher grades end up being hired in better-paid jobs or attending better graduate schools. Likewise, professors promoted to higher ranks of the pecking order enjoy substantive social and material privileges not enjoyed by those below them. Socio-cultural distinctions thus reinforce and are reinforced by material ones.

Of course, performances are not only oral. Performances in written form, such as papers, reports and the like, are just as vital in demonstrating erudition in the seminar setting. In written as well as oral performances of erudition, it is not always possible to distinguish between “genuine” and “fake” though it is possible to separate better from worse performances according to established criteria. Occasionally, I have found it possible to expose a student or faculty presenter (yes, this is true!) at a seminar who has referred to, say, Foucault without actually reading the primary texts. But in most cases, it is exceedingly difficult to tell whether someone quoting Foucault has actually read the relevant texts or has simply faked erudition by reading a few pages of summary online. Faking erudition in this manner is anything but uncommon in seminars. Students do it routinely at both undergraduate and graduate levels. But what is less known is that faculty members do it only slightly less frequently, albeit in more sophisticated or “polished” ways. Usually, professors do so by using the rhetoric of science to cloak their research findings, or by claiming authority based on their privileged access to a particular text or context. Both rhetorical strategies are persuasive enough for most audiences, and erudition can be performed easily under such circumstances.

The emphasis on performance has an obvious casualty: learning. There is no guarantee that the dialogues between student and teacher or between peers lead to a genuine understanding of the topic at hand in a seminar setting. In most cases, the objects of performance are discarded much like fancy dresses as soon as the student (or professor) exits the seminar room. A peer who took a graduate seminar with me in African Politics, therefore, found it easy to make a number of carefully-orchestrated statements on North Atlantic racism hampering serious scholarship on politics and society in Africa. Yet the same student told me outside the classroom on the very same day that she considered Africa as a continent to be “beyond repair” because she deemed its inhabitants to be too corrupt and lazy in general. One can come up with dozens of similar examples after even the slightest acquaintance with the performance-based regime of the seminar room. What is noteworthy is this: whether the student has actually internalized or imbibed what is read and discussed is not deemed as relevant as performing erudition, whether authentic or fake. This, as I shall argue next, is only to be expected in the knowledge factory or the higher education industry, the common names for learning and scholarship regimes in the contemporary world.

The Knowledge Factory

The knowledge factory is, in many ways, akin to a sausage factory. A delivery line of sausage-like products are produced periodically in fixed quantities under clearly-defined quality criteria. These sausage-like students are then absorbed into the capitalist economy based on pre-existing job descriptions and selection criteria. It is a wonderful system, of course, devised in the United States over the post-WWII era to meet the growing demand for goods and services by an expanding “affluent society.” By the early Sixties, the rudiments of the current system were in place. College graduates began to be churned out in large numbers by the assembly line of the knowledge factory. As demand for commodities grew over the past fifty years, the demand for skilled labor rose correspondingly, and the university system came to be streamlined to meet these labor demands. Of course, as the demand for college students grew, so too did the demand for teachers. Accordingly, the number of graduate programs and doctoral degrees rose exponentially over the postwar era. Since quality control of sausages and students is vital to the success of a capitalist economy, the descendants of Puritans sought to “professionalize” various disciplines, generally by making gratuitous use of the rhetoric of science, which is, of course, the religion of our secular age. And thus it came to pass that administrators, managers, and clerks came to find a comfortable home in the university.

The potted history I have just described may be regarded as a brief account of the absorption of academia into the capitalist economy. It seeks to explain why economists, for instance, have come to acquire so much prestige in the corporate sector. Or why economics has become a default standard for the other social sciences, which have striven fruitlessly to “mathematize” or quantify their research despite their actual results being closer to those of astrologers and numerologists than to those of real scientists. Or why those in the natural sciences have focused their energies on devising technologies of different sorts that are socially and ecologically wasteful instead of producing ecologically-sustainable technologies that serve communities and preserve natural resources. The transformation is hard to appreciate today because one is tempted to believe that it was always so. But it wasn’t. That is exactly why it is important to understand the socio-historical changes over the past two generations, alongside an appreciation of the underlying material basis of these changes.

However, the transformation is a peculiar one, certainly not identical to that occurring outside the academic groves. Being a medieval institution, the university could never have undergone an easy transition to modernity. It was elitist, even aristocratic, in its very substance, not merely in the paraphernalia of scepters, robes, gowns and caps. The very structure of academia has always been true to its feudal origins that sought to make numerous marks of distinction within the professoriate as well as the student body. The feudal order also sought to keep out, in the words of a former adviser, the “riff-raff.” To participate in the modern world without becoming an anachronism did indeed seem to be a great challenge to Western universities in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. No less an authority than Adam Smith suggested that lecturers at Edinburgh ought to be financed by their students instead of being funded publicly, ostensibly to weed out outdated and unfashionable subjects not demanded by the student body. One can imagine how the protectionist racket that is academia must have reacted to Smith’s maverick suggestion. Those were difficult times for the aristocrats in Western European universities (though not in the securely racist, aristocratic milieu of New England universities at the time). By the early 19^th century, however, the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie had kissed and made up, a union symbolized definitively by the Great Reform Act of 1832. The compromise ironically involved inventing new forms of snobbery that could be blended imaginatively with older forms. British and French universities ended up creating a new class of pseudo-aristocrats at home and in the colonies abroad. In Victorian Britain, one could certainly buy one’s way to becoming a peer or a civil servant in the East, but universities provided the surest and most secure means to climb up the social ladder and thus, to perform “erudition” in its etymological sense of expelling rudeness.

Those neat pseudo-aristocratic arrangements were nonetheless rend asunder by the two world wars. In WWI, for instance, it is estimated that roughly a third of Oxford’s graduates departed the earthly realm without encashing their privileges of education. Furthermore, the geopolitical shift across the Atlantic had effectively ended the heyday of the traditional Western European university. Oxford and Cambridge were merely vestiges of the Old World in the new scheme of things. Still, Neo-Gothic spires and gargoyles continued to provide solace to cultural conservatives and snobs in the United States. Medieval markers of privilege could be conveniently accommodated within the knowledge factory in order to keep alive the pretense of a continuous Western tradition. Consequently, status and prestige are still determined by medieval norms and rituals even in an overwhelmingly capitalist world. Tenure, that great aristocratic vestige, thus continues to sit uneasily with the modern capitalist dictum of hire-and-fire. And minorities, women, and the subordinated classes of society continue to be poorly represented in universities. In retrospect, none of this is actually paradoxical: modernity depends fundamentally on the strategic use of traditional idioms and icons, and capitalism too needs institutions that transform wealth into status and power. The social relations appropriate to the seminar mode of production are thus somewhat different from the idealized Marxian abstraction of capitalism. The social relations corresponding to the seminar mode accommodate the pre-modern within the modern, the feudal within the capitalist, and the aristocratic within the bourgeois. This is because the university produces not only sausage-like students, but also cultural capital that enhances status and power. The knowledge factory is, in this sense, also a producer of aristocratic badges that awards considerable privileges to their wearers.

Forms of Consciousness and the Social Dynamics in Bourgeois Society

If the university today were merely a knowledge factory in which workers and their apprentices performed erudition, it might have been a fairly innocuous affair. In fact, it is not. The production of “knowledge” in the seminar mode gives rise to particular forms of consciousness among students and professors that are fundamentally apolitical, despite appearances to the contrary, to the extent that they seek to preserve bourgeois society and interests, that is, the status quo. There are three forms of consciousness that deserve to be highlighted. Firstly, there is the worldview of the privileged minority or the “creamy layer” as middle-class Indians call these determined seekers of upward social mobility. In this worldview, education is an input in the production of erudition, literally the expulsion of rudeness, which provides new avenues for employment, wealth, power and status. First-generation college-goers feature in this group as do racial minorities in the United States. What is most interesting is that these minority seekers of privilege actually believe the dominant elite mythology of sophistication, at least outwardly, and act as if it were true. The logic here is pragmatic: the status quo is certain to remain, so it’s best to make peace with the powers-that-be and grab a piece of the power-status-wealth pie.

Secondly, there is the weltanschauung of the plain-vanilla petty bourgeois students, who arguably are the most numerous on any university campus. For these types, education is a “given,” since their parents and grandparents most likely partook of it en route to careers as professionals in the service sector of the economy. These are the men and women who, in due course, comprise the core of the capitalist workforce in any country. Like all young people, petty bourgeois students too are attracted to pop radicalism, usually expressed in the form of peace marches, tree-hugging, anti-war protests, and so on. These are low-risk declarations of their moderately radical temperaments. More intrepid adventurers, of course, choose to volunteer at soup kitchens and churches or even to travel abroad as Peace Corps volunteers. Learning a foreign language, usually a European one, or studying abroad for a semester in a suitably exotic location are fairly common for this type of student. It is not so much that the petty bourgeois types lack a sense of adventure or genuine intellectual interests, but that their worldview is fundamentally limited by an everyday conservatism inherited from their parents and by their own mediocrity that makes every course and every assignment challenging. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge sounds quaint; radical politics seems outrageously risky; public service can be no more than an occasional hobby. In the final analysis, therefore, courses end up being about grades more than intellectual interests, education ends up being a mere cog in the wheel that preserves (or slightly enhances) social status and privilege, and the route from the seminar room leads firmly to the corporate desks of our modern-day Bob Cratchits and Bartlebys.

Finally, there is the oddest of the three forms of consciousness produced and sustained by the modern university system, the neo-brahmnical. It enjoys the greatest prestige because it is the preserve of those who “beat the system.” Professors and students alike share this neo-brahminical consciousness, mainly because the better, brighter students appear to mimic their teachers in the most sincere manner. In this milieu where the feudal/aristocratic is blended smoothly with the modern/capitalist, higher education is recognized principally as a means of acquiring cultural capital, not as an input in the production of erudition. Often, this recognition is linked to the privileged backgrounds of students, who consider themselves to be high-status creatures already, albeit in search of the right kinds of gloss. These kinds of gloss are material, verbal and rhetorical. In material terms, gloss takes the form of the latest and most fashionable gadgetry, cosmetics and clothing, preferably from brands such as Apple, Sephora and Neiman Marcus. In verbal terms, it means an accent that is free from plebeian sounds, pronunciation that is free from colloquial influences, and diction that is free from grammatical errors. In rhetorical terms, it means posturing as champions of the downtrodden and oppressed; forcefully employing the language of rights to side with causes such as genocide in Darfur, sweatshops in Asia, and animal rights; acquiring a vocabulary that readily references academic terms such as “subaltern,” “indigenous peoples,” “deconstruction,” and “social construct.” Dressing and owning certain articles, speaking in a certain way, and using a well-defined set of jargon words are, therefore, the surest means of asserting one’s superiority over others in this “game.” The social relations of production pertinent to the seminar mode entail precisely such markers of sociocultural distinction that definitively define high and low in the university system. These Bourdieusian distinctions exist in the student body on every campus, but interestingly enough, similar markers of differences are to be found among the professoriate too (comparing the average senior and junior professors around you should drive home the point forcefully!). This status game is neo-brahminical since cultural rather than economic capital is its basic currency though the game as a whole is supported by the capitalist economy (thus the prefix “neo-”). The cynical and ironic uses of the underprivileged and their legitimate needs are, of course, intrinsic to the neo-brahminical status game, which is, in its highest form, an elite competition to establish oneself as a supreme do-gooder without actually doing any good. In other words, a form of politics that is actually anti-politics insofar as claiming, without authorization or authenticity, to speak for the subaltern ultimately neglects, even mocks, any attempt by subalterns to speak and act as meaningful agents of social change.

It is not difficult to appreciate that these three forms of consciousness associated with privileged minorities, the petty bourgeoisie and the neo-brahmins are linked to three distinct sociocultural processes in the North Atlantic world. The privileged minority consciousness leads to a gradual co-option into existing power structures of those claiming to represent traditionally-subordinated groups on the basis of their ascriptive identities. The petty bourgeois worldview leads to a steady supply of skilled workers into the capitalist workforce due to the limited talents and ambitions of this population. Lastly, the neo-brahminical consciousness leads to higher education continuing to be a means of gaining cultural capital, status and prestige through the strategic use of high-minded rhetoric concerning the oppressed and the suffering, and the subsidization of traditional privileges by the capitalist economy.

Each of these three social processes, it must be understood, buttresses and reinforces the other. The co-option of privileged minorities into power structures supports the status quo, whether in the capitalist economy or in the university system, by preventing radical pressures from below to rise to a boil. The steady supply of petty bourgeois workers into the service sector is the engine of growth and/or stability in the capitalist economy, which thereby makes it possible to write off the costs of co-opting privileged minorities and supporting the neo-brahminical status game. And the neo-brahminical emphasis on cultural rather than economic capital legitimizes the entire capitalist system by invoking an imaginary, unbroken elite tradition of Western civilization. There is thus a neat complementarity to these three seemingly distinct forms of consciousness and social processes that owe their origins to the seminar mode of production.

Conclusion

In a functionalist vein, one might be tempted to argue that the seminar mode of production nourishes a social system that is stable, self-regulating, and internally coherent. Such a perspective, however, neglects the considerable imperfections in the social relations of production established within the knowledge factory itself and its relationship to the wider capitalist system. Within the university system, one ought to acknowledge the presence of a limited set of dissenters and heretics who do not toe the line defined by the authorities. Their everyday conduct is transgressive in subtle and not-so-subtle ways though open confrontation is hardly a prudent option for either students or professors. These transgressors may choose to use the grading system subversively to reward genuine learning rather than mere performance; to enable students to partake of the sheer joy of reading poetry, understanding how the past illuminates the present, or making scientific discoveries rather than to preoccupy themselves with jobs or jargon; and, to avail of the advantages of experiential learning to silently challenge received wisdom, and perhaps even the seminar mode itself. In sum, we are not in The Matrix, and it is quite possible for teachers and students to be subversive/ transgressive in covert and less overt ways. Whether they do so or not, in fact, thus becomes a matter of individual choice that we should not wish away via a structurally over-determined explanation.

Just as there are crevices for dissent, subversion and transgression within the knowledge factory, so too are there contradictions in the relationship between the knowledge factory and the capitalist economy. The overproduction of doctoral students relative to available jobs in the humanities and social sciences is one symptom of these contradictions. Another symptom is the growing joblessness of college graduates in depressed economic conditions. Yet the most obvious symptom of the uneasy place of the seminar mode of production in the capitalist economy is the commonplace notion that universities are ivory towers that promote outdated or other-worldly thinking ill-suited to the needs of contemporary capitalism. This is a rather amusing notion when one considers the tortured history of a medieval institution trying to reform itself in the modern world. After all, the modern university or knowledge factory owes its existence to private and public capital, and in turn, keeps the wheels of the capitalist economy moving by releasing a steady supply of inputs for productive activities.

The contradictory, awkward relationship between the knowledge factory and the capitalist economy also point to a larger malaise within contemporary capitalism itself. This has, of course, been revealed most dramatically over the past couple of years in the form of a protracted economic depression worldwide. The causes of this depression are essentially structural, as the likes of Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz and David Harvey point out repeatedly. The hyper-speculation that generated super-profits to sustain and expand the financial sector does not correspond to any actual productive activities or production that is measurable in terms of GDP or GNP. Anyone familiar with the economic history of the North Atlantic world over the past three decades is familiar with the astonishingly low levels of national income growth and the structural need for “bubbles” of speculation to temporarily forget the structural crisis at hand. The collusion between the knowledge factory and the global financial sector has been well-documented and justly criticized in recent months. But it isn’t stated often enough that particular theories and models emanating from the quiet groves of academia were, in fact, responsible for the unseemly rush to collude with the financial sector, and subsequently, to bring about the worst economic crisis in the postwar era. The delicate underbelly of the golden goose has now been gently slit open. It is only a matter of time before the creature, gasping for breath at the moment, dies and the golden eggs of the capitalist economy cease to be laid. Whenever that auspicious hour arrives, we shall see the end of the unholy nexus between financial speculators and their economics-trained numerologists/astrologers. In the short run, there is thus much to be hopeful: on the horizon is a wholesale renegotiation of the social relations of production in the capitalist economy as well as in the knowledge factory. How exactly these future developments will affect the seminar mode of production is anyone’s guess, but I, for one, am confident that snobs, prudes, and wannabe feudal lords will not vanish into thin air like the hard-earned salaries of so many capitalist workers. The medieval past thus seeps into the post-modern future in insidious ways long after it has outlived its usefulness.