risky bodies

&
Techno-Intimacy

s
es
Pr
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 risky bodies
&
Techno-Intimacy
reflections on sexuality. media. science. finance

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es
Pr
on
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G E E TA PAT E L
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as
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of
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an associate of
kali for women
 risky bodies & Techno-Intimacy
was first published in India in 2016
by
Women Unlimited

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(an associate of Kali for Women)

es
7/10, First Floor, Sarvapriya Vihar

Pr
New Delhi 110016

on
www.womenunlimited.net
n gt
hi

Geeta Patel, 2016

as
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of

ISBN: 978-81-88965-94-6
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rs
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Cover design: Neelima Rao

Cover painting: Nilima Sheikh
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All rights reserved

Typeset by Manmohan Kumar, Delhi-110035

and printed at Raj Press, R-3 Inderpuri, New Delhi-110012
 Contents

s
es
Acknowledgements vii

Pr
Introduction: paths to inquiry, pathways for the inquisitive 1

on
1. Techno-homo: translating mayonnaise at home 65
n gt
2. Heisenbergs Bodies: Ismat Chughtai in a marital 94
hi

fix, or homely housewives run amok

as

3. Firing Time: techno-intimacies of the cinematic 130

W

4. Times Travails 196

of

5. Memorial Figurations: temporality, cinematic 237

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realism, and finance

rs

6. Risky Bodies: life-finance, labour and domesticated 277

ve

technologies of intimacy
ni

Prelude after the Fact: photographic techno- 339

U

intimacies and the question of method

Bibliography 353
Index 368
 Introduction
paths to inquiry, pathways for
the inquisitive

s
es
Pr
on
I am well aware that I have never written anything but fictions. I
gt
do not mean to say, however, that truth is therefore absent. It seems
n
to me that the possibility exists for fiction to function in truth, for
hi

a fictional discourse to induce effects of truth, and for bringing it

as

about that a true discourse engenders or manufactures something

W

that does not as yet exist, that is fictions it. One fictions history
on the basis of a political reality that makes it true, one fictions
of

a politics not yet in existence on the basis of a historical truth.1

Michel Foucault
ity

Archives of memory: necessary fictions

rs
ve

Composed of six chapters on which I have been working

alongside many other projects, this book flows in and out of
ni

transitions. One such litany of transitions led me to coin the term

U

techno-intimacy. Fiscal technologies such as insurance garnered

attention, accrued value, and became subject to rancorous debates
in the Indian parliament, even as the film Fire became a flashpoint
in 1998, on the street, in cinema halls, in news accounts and in
the halls of government, as well as in the diaspora through the
Web. Both the film and insurance provoked tussles over where
national sentimental attachments lay, who spoke on behalf of a
religious majority, who claimed the national commons and voiced
 introduction
2

the state when their geopolitics were being contested by unruly

financial forms or sexual proclivities supposedly leaking across
or breaching their borders.
Bringing the two, finance and the film, together suggested a
curiously fecund confluence of technae, an invitation to pursue
technologies in their most capacious, allusive but also everyday
sense. It became clear that technologies were incitements to

s
closeness of various kinds. Some forms of closeness emerged

es
from technologies like the Web that were slimmed down into

Pr
forms that allowed them to serve as extensions or prostheses
of bodies. When people accessed the Internet to converse,

on
they often did so through appliances such as phones and computers
gt
that fused users to machines. Space and time were cramped or
protracted, brought nearer or pulled apart in such enterprises
n
hi

refashioning the so-called scaffold of the physics of temporality.

One might envisage technology in other keys as well, as ways of
as

engendering people and things through the law, through finance,

W

through governance, through political conventions or social

mores. So the very idea of technology itself was fattened up or
of

prolonged; it could encompass corporeal habits, castes of mind,

ity

and the proprieties of disciplinary etiquette. Even nature could be

technologically produced, in a constant reordering of bodies and
rs

landscapes. From the iconographies of theory and political fables

ve

to seemingly mundane fiscal devices such as insurance policies or

ni

bank accounts, technologies, in this extended sense, create techno-

intimacy by finding or releasing or fostering ties, tentatively forging
U

and transiently mobilising communities, then dashing them to bits.

Newly delineated risk pools, national or religious conglomerates,
and other disciplinary constituencies become the emboldening
neural pathways that summoned fervour, apathy, or indifference
and that invited camaraderie, conviviality, chumminess, rapport,
cosines, amity, converse, or disagreement, incompatibility.2
The nitty-gritty, the gears and mechanisms of technologies,
including the places where they often reside, are to be found in
 Introduction3

the chapters that speak to and across one another in the ways
that I will go on to show in the Prelude After the Fact, using
an installation by the artist Sheba Chhachhi as an allegorical
entre, parable or fable. In this introduction towards a book I do
something quite different. Here I track what shows up and shores
up techno-intimacy, what underwrites the transitions or events
through which its lineaments sometimes suddenly balloon into

s
view or fall away into the bedrock of convictions.3

es
This book, then, is a montage of events, a curiosity cabinet filled

Pr
to the brim and overflowing with transitions. In it, I vivify events
as spaces in time that provision a hiatus or a shift in the intimacies,

on
intercourse, communitas, sympathies, liaisons procured through
gt
political economies, through national ideologies, through the
beliefs embedded in everyday practices of thought, through the
n
hi

matter of habits, some so seemingly pervasively mundane that

they often elude notice.
as

Thus, many of these moments in space have to be archived

W

in a book such as this one, to understand them as watersheds

or transitional road signs that gesture towards an elsewhere
of

or to nowhere in particular.4 Even as they transpire, all such

ity

instances vary in their importance to us. In other words, their

momentousness or insignificance sometimes seems to glimmer
rs

into view only when they become retrospective. Are they passages,
ve

do they transform or merely pass by? Are they incidental like a

ni

disquiet whiff of breeze that brushes skin, or smallish shifts that

call out to history as a horoscope which portends pasts swelling
U

into saltier presents, archives scrounging genealogies to tell fate?

They may appear to argue for a surety of a changeover: such
as the nuclear tests at Pokhran, or the responses to Fire that
became aesthetic eventualisations themselves. Through them, the
film morphed into other performances that, like stones tossed
nonchalantly into a pond, startled something uncommon into
shape, recognised as such even as groups gathered in hurried
numbers to plaster posters on walls in the dark, or letter writers
 introduction
4

were mobilised to argue for a right to view the film. Others,

such as the emerging ubiquity of insurance, or my own folding
into the analytics around transgender, or the stories of Ismat
Chughtai, offer me unusual avenues into the ordinary. Here,
poising diaspora and domesticity through each other, I traverse
subtle shunts in the nuances of commonplace assumptions,
whose semiological flows, or even untimely unhomeliness,

s
would otherwise pass by, unheeded.

es
Especially in the case of transgender, translation across

Pr
life worlds seizes up and turns what is otherwise prosaic into
something that is noticed unexpectedly at the very moment

on
when it mislays or eludes its common sense. As Ian Hacking
gt
puts it, The revelation of the obvious is not to be despised, for
often the obvious is blinding. Having noticed the forgetting and
n
hi

remembering embedded in everyday affairs, one also notes that

it is possible to remember and forget the same thing, sometimes
as

at the same time. Or, one can remember as lived practice in one
W

place and translate that remembering into a forgetting in another.

Each one of us the constant archivist.5
of

Looking back over it, I see that the structure of Risky Bodies
ity

& Techno-Intimacy can be imagined as both inadvertent and

deliberate. It is an artefact of the prolonged interval over which
rs

its mobile materialities were moulded to what I found myself

ve

lingering on or browsing overthe sticky intransigence of habits

ni

of mind, analytic inclinations and impulses, technologies of the

flesh, the sinews of political economies.
U

Rather than imaging or visualising the failings of practices

in order to command something new, rather than cutting apart
textual tendencies under the knife of critical edginess, rather than
honing in sceptically on attachments that people have held in
their everyday intellectual or political lives, I have found myself
returning, in each chapter, to a form of the hermeneutic I learned
as an undergraduate through Martin Heidegger. Hermeneutic, for
Heidegger, is not an analytic, not a breaking apart, a sundering,
 Introduction5

but seeing each cluster of events, objects, things, folk from the
inside outwards. To use a version of his language: this sort of
attentiveness brings something into being in time and calls
for a softening in relation to what one notices so that what is
heeded comes alive. In the essay Building, Dwelling, Thinking,
Heidegger calls this techne, tracing the word, as he often does,
back to Greek, here to tikto, letting appear: so that feeling ones

s
way into understanding as techne brings whatever flowers into

es
presence close, without grabbing at it, groping it, or shredding

Pr
it apart.6 Namely, another passage of techno-intimacy. And one
that is peculiarly suited to what this book doesto appreciate

on
the innards of habits that sink tenaciously into skin. So much so
gt
that ones skin itself tells the story of a double bind, where one is
compelled to clutch something that one must let go of.
n
hi

In the process one does not shed adamantine questions from

ones repertoire of reading customs, but they assume other
as

avatars. Questions then are not the sharp edge along which
W

intellectual inquiry travels to dismember the heart of a project,

in other words discontinuity for its own sake, or disambiguation,
of

or dissection, deliberate disarticulation, carving limb from

ity

limb, are not the protocols I follow in the book. Rather, as in

my culminating chapter on risk and fiscal technologies, I rely
rs

on them to tease open spaces to observe what is at stake or to

ve

account for merely what is going on. The responses to those

ni

questions, when they are fashioned, as in that chapter, neither

purport to fully flesh out dailiness nor are they collocations of
U

the fat of everyday life.7

Each chapters inception and composition, perhaps even its
archival substance, lives in matrices of interrogative pauses, in
constellations of questions that I return to again and again over
the arc of the chapters which overlay palimpsestically, tissues in
rhizomes that imagine outwards into impossible configurations.
These attempts to parse, sift or tease or bring to life amalgams of
practices, technologies if you will, through questions without
 introduction
6

culminating in consummation are not the outgrowth of nouveau

theoretical imaginaries; they were immanent in the books
conception in 1990, a bit before caveats to withhold closure
had become de rigueur. They owe a debt to the philosopher
Ludwig Wittgenstein, my linguistic philosopher of choice
as an undergraduate, who invited unhurried attentiveness,
speculation and reflection through questions that were never

s
meant to be answered, and composed his notebooks as a series

es
of overlapping mise en scnes, some of which felt as though they

Pr
did not belong in the same movie. But taken together they trace
out or tack along ways of looking anew at familiar practices and

on
philosophical forms. gt
Risky Bodies & Techno-Intimacys theory and incitement to
disciplines then can be said to be jugd, cobbled together for use
n
hi

in an almost surrealist bricolage, yet serviceable enough in the

sense that analysts such as Donald Winnicott imagine a good
as

enough mother.8 Jugd theory might fall under the imprimatur

W

of poor theory, conceived by the Humanities Institute at the

University of California as piece-meal theory at hand, making the
of

theoretical out of the bits and pieces and putting into the service
ity

of theory, found materials that are close by.9

The most convenient and perhaps more comfortable
rs

nomenclature for what happens to disciplines in the book could

ve

be trans-disciplinary, in the sense in which it is sometimes

ni

deployed: disciplinary genres are called and culled by the

concerns that animate a chapter, peculiar to them and enlivened
U

in and through pauses. Where rather than an amalgam of

preordained disciplines constructing a carcass or skeleton into
which the chapters are fitted and fashioned, the context relays
genres of method culled from different disciplines.10
Risky Bodies & Techno-Intimacys jugd practices demand then
what should rub most English teachers the wrong way: a lively
suite of possible analogies, which jostle and tug and seem all at
 Introduction7

odds with one another, which hint at the shape of its architecture.
Analogies for the books miscegenated design and unpredictable
confluences include contemporary Native American short story
collections where the narratives strut across one another in
unexpected juxtapositions, such as those by Sherman Alexie in
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist-fight in Heaven, or the novellas
of Louise Erdrich in which characters vivify into familiars as

s
they resurface in different guises across tales, and the timing of

es
their arrivals and departures is conducted askew in relation to

Pr
one another. Or the South Asian magical story cycles such as
the Dastn of Amir Hamza, or epics such as the Mahbhrata,

on
or compendia such as the Dev Mahtmaya that transport or
gt
enchant listeners into worlds whose belonging to one another
is intermittent, and even while their characters swap scenes and
n
hi

shapes they must be recognised as themselves.

In this books constantly mutating theatre, then, one set of
as

characters stages technologies as science, which shows up in

W

different avatars that may appear almost monstrous or grotesque,

or perhaps merely unfamiliar to some of the more inordinately
of

conventional science seekers, even though my incarnations of

ity

the scientific should be eminently recognisable as the real deal.11

Instead of science that is fleshed out, tricked out, as process,
rs

project, or discipline, I rely on the vectors my questing hiatuses

ve

assume to angle my intellectual conduct and to direct the montage

ni

of sciences as genres that I mix and match to suit, into syncretic

improprieties and actants that surface in sometimes seemingly
U

improper ways.12
I array portraits or pictorials from quantum mechanics to
speak to the ways in which objects refute shape even as they are
called into presence by readers who long for the queer subject in
Chapter 2 on Ismat Chughtai. I filter chemical emulsions such
as mayonnaise to pose and configure colonialism, neo-colonial
anthropological desires, body accretions, auto-ethnography,
 introduction
8

hybridity and transgender through one another in the first

chapter. Or in Chapter 5 on Sri Lankan film, I winnow the post-
Maxwellian physics of space-time into a skein of fiscal promises
woven through insurance capital. As a supplement that binds the
body of a soldiers corpse into his fathers and sisters melancholic
invigoration of their lives through the insurance money
promised to them, it sows reproductive proprietary sexuality

s
through the field of cinematic realism. In the final chapter on

es
risk, I counterpoise the animating storehouse of food, seeds,

Pr
relationships gathered by farmers who forge compacts with the
land to the double binds people face when lives they had thought

on
well lived are squeezed out through the statistical clasp of risk
gt
technologies that command them to summon up money that
they once thought they might have had.
n
hi

Through time
as

As I began to compose this opening into the book, to give it

W

some semblance of substance, I decided to collocate it through

some of the conditions of production that quickened many of
of

the chapters that follow, first drafted alongside the events that
ity

they trace. But retrospective projects such as this pathway into a

book, written after the fact, are so often tugged and wrestled out
rs

of fantasmatic archives from which we feel we want something

ve

more fulsome than mere notations bared naked, laid flat.13 We

ni

imagine in them worlds that we wish into being, which settle

into some sort of gravitas. I push and pull the emergences and
U

emergencies that invigorate various chapters that follow into some

sort of consistent musical mode invested with the solemnity of
history. Despite this in the composition as a composite that stands
in for the labour of thinking over the many years this book has
been fashioned, fiction and history also collude in the ways that
Foucault intended in the epigraph. Perhaps my histories ought to
be nothing but fictions, trompe-loeil truth lying ambient, supine,
on their surfaces.
 Introduction9

By the early 21st century many narratives, such as mine that

source the past, are expected to cultivate a kind of coolness, a
theoretical sang-froid with respect to that past as explanatory or
originary resource. It has become commonplace to partake of
what appears now to be a truismthat this sort of deployment
of narratives of origin is suspect. We seem to feel that when we
do resort to beginnings, when we open our salvos with a this is

s
where it started event, moment, even a possibility, we have to

es
detoxify all of them, cleanse them of, or release them from, those

Pr
desires that imagine them as legacies. So that legacies are meant
to be brokered down, read or willed away. But they continue to

on
raise their inevitable heads, reappear in many other guises,
gt
and when they do the bequests linger on in unexpected places.
And the frisson of here is how and where it all began keeps
n
hi

on trucking because we still cling to stories that invent how we

came to be. Stories that provide some zest, some zst, some zing
as

either to spice up the boredom or tedium our present seems to

W

hold, or to plot out possible causes that make sense of a present

when it carries more than can be borne, and lay out how we might
of

have arrived at such a dire state, such an impasse. An almost

ity

causal storyline that sifts through how we got here if our present
carries more than it can bear.
rs

Narratives that manage or render the historical are peculiarly

ve

prone to originary explanatory inclinations that loiter like a

ni

bad habit, a not particularly potent double bind; you cant let
them go nor can you quite hold on to them. They cling because
U

its as though if you have a past, have brought it to hand, have

expended labour in mining it or bringing it forth, the past really
ought to have some sort of purchase on the present or future. At
the very least, everything you have stuffed into that time ought
to be able to pose at the corner of a road, whistling seductively
at the futurein Indian English, eve-teasing it, harassing it
wilfully. These older genres, such as bildungsroman, original sin,
horoscopes, have legacies that slumber oddly in contemporary
 introduction
10

artefacts infused with the political such as national economic

forecasting (horoscopes), or risk imbued with immoralities in
the guise of moral hazard (original sin).
Nationalism, rendered through the historical and political,
lives on the loan of the bildungsroman. Almost human
and felicitously troped on anthropomorphisms, nationalist
bildungsromans route the formative politics of the nation

s
through the prolonged agonies of birthing (from a colonial or

es
earlier state form), when the baby was pushed out of a state, goop

Pr
and afterbirth slopping out in a bloody mess. After which the
nation-state goes on a road trip through its youthful foibles and

on
follies, learning to live a hopefully better livelihood along the way.
gt
Making that scrappy, unruly birth the necessary opening stanza,
a mutated profane propagator of original sin, seems to lend a
n
hi

consolatory credence to quotidian practices of violence that so

often follow immediately or even much later, in adolescence or
as

middle age. Stars in place, years after its birth is done and gone,
W

the nation-state is set up for a future anterior, secular karma

charted out, detected by its lay economic and political spiritual
of

gurus, legate theorists of the national state.

ity

Histories of finance download proper systematic investigations

of finance onto national territoriality, which in its stead becomes
rs

the site of generativity for financial instruments. Theorists of

ve

Indian Ocean trade have methodically attempted to unplug this

ni

cord to nationalism as one inexorable historiographical framing

technology, to disinter other forms of territoriality, to unmoor
U

the national from vessels such as promissory notes, coins, ships,

routes, attachments, that link mercantile networks.14
One familiar nationalist fiction prospected for its imaginary
nuggets of antiquarian value is a gendered one. Girls are baked
into their incarnations as housewives after they have been
marinated in the vinegar of postcolonial patriarchy. In this story,
the figure of tradition frequently makes an offstage appearance
to decree that, sui generis, boys hold the reins so that girls must
 Introduction11

be girls, however much we all know (sotto voce) that tradition is

contemporary design and innovation run crazy.
Origins are absorbed into habits, in which the incipient
originary soldiers on. And perhaps this is why they have been
recuperated in recent writing as the repositories where people
imagine they locate their longings for all sorts of registers, for
beginnings that matter. Backwardness: Heather Loves renditions

s
of looking backwardly, gazing in a direction that must in a

es
melancholic historiography be left behind, visitations that come

Pr
alive as figures under a longing to turn around again. Spurred by
mythic modes of turning into stone: not quite Walter Benjamins

on
angel of history. gt
Against this one can set certain South Asian neo-nationalist
commands to the past that it must always only live anew in the
n
hi

present. Renditions, which linger on places of return where

some collectivities plot immediacies of the now that they
as

wanted to re-inhabit, such as the Gomantak Maratha Samaj in

W

Anjali Arondekars recent work.15 As both Kavita Philip and

Anil Menon have suggested, pasts are soaked in the possible,
of

grammars of possibility: the narrative past in many South Asian

ity

languages ferries along the if then, then what? Places where we

once met up with what feels as though it was a self, excavatory
rs

modulations that Kath Weston and Anjali Arondekar sift through,

ve

sort into their lineages. Postcolonial politics parsed along lines

ni

where times gone by must not be tenanted if one traverses Dalit

historiographies, for example, where the past must be shed,
U

shaken off brutally to the ground like clothes worn down, face
turned to the future. But as Lucinda Ramberg has shown so
poignantly in her work on the gendered subjects of Dalit political
futurity, women whose lives are domesticated by such openings
that shunt the past aside often turn back to religious lineages to
claim places of desire, to hold close in the confinement of cleaned
up households. Or politics may be tracked along paths that proffer
pasts as a time where certain precursors, Hindu, Muslim, queer,
 introduction
12

might become contemporaneous with themselves. Each gilts

a different era, and as it leaves throws off someone elses past,
simplified into stories that enable political presents, clichs that
cusp small sharp shards from archives, blown into glass that cup
political intoxicants. Foucauldian fairy tales, when the we or
they waking up, were once what we wanted to be, or not as the
case may be. Not quite an archaic present. Not the present that

s
many scholars see as a History 2 of Dipesh Chakarbartys now

es
rambunctiously quoted Provincializing Europe.

Pr
In this book I turn to temporalities again and again, and I will
come back to them in a bit. But, for the moment, I would like

on
to prism my questions through compulsions to return to what
gt
feels as though something might have been archived away. To
tease open or perhaps filter those questions again, to remainder
n
hi

the conditions for another networked series of narratives. The

recursive in this form is where I want to fall for the present. Habits
as

of analysis, either plummeted into the dense gravitation of mise

W

en scnes, or telescoped backwards into minutiae, both refracting

through habits of practice. Habits as small things tucked away
of

without seemingly noticeable impress. But what is of import for

ity

me is their repetitive return, their supposedly endless recurrence

in double binds.
rs

Recursive itself as a habit? A literal revisitation of something

ve

in the same form or a repeated form used again. Its value when
ni

one deploys it carries the value placed on it or put into it in other

places. Is there a further step from writing the recursive proof
U

to the generalization? Doesnt the recursion schema already say

all that is to be said? asks Ludwig Wittgenstein in Philosophical
Grammar.16 Here, in this book, I return again to what feels
originary. But not something sitting in the this is where it all
began. Rather in the idea of the origin as the this is what we
need to understand through its conditions of production, what
is sedimented into it, where it lives. Does Jacques Derrida, in
 Introduction13

On Grammatology, sieve logocentrism in this way? Even as he

does so, might sloppy readers reinstate or reinstitute logos as
a habit from which they begin? What happens when you start
somewhere such as this? So that stranding an analysis in what
seems inevitable poises that inevitability as a birthing moment,
as one that must never be let go if one is to follow that analytical
thread as though it were a bildungsroman.

s
In plainer speak, we often produce origins that dont quite

es
feel as though they are. One instance includes the places from

Pr
which we forge (ahead with) an inquiry that seems to suggest
another take, another way of looking, a radical revision. We

on
imagine we can fling ourselves into that somewhere else, one
gt
which appears more suited to our purpose. The older places that
once bound us are then sometimes abandoned on the road, shed
n
hi

as though they were old clothes, because they had been called
into question and are out of fashion, out of joint. Each gesture
as

of leaving carries a semiotic charge: we throw something away

W

casually, or deliberately toss it into a garbage heap, detritus to

be collected or expunged. Or it can be sorted or recycled, be
of

reanimated as pleasure, as oddity, as pirated fashion statement,

ity

recycled booty, sometimes because that is all you have when you
have no purchase on the au courant, and sometimes when you
rs

provide a life those goods might not have had otherwise. The
ve

process of leaving can be much harsher, more virulent, modes

ni

of thinking are searingly targeted, advocated as a problem,

expelled from practice or deliberately flung off. I would like to
U

pause at acts of leaving as embodied times, to take stock of what

leaving does or might entail. As many analysts have pointed out
so poignantly, leaving can paradoxically embroil you in holding
on to that which has been released, lead to clutching at the places
that came before. Acts of leaving can retrospectively birth, as
temporary or perhaps even heuristic origins, those situations
that have been renounced.
 introduction
14

In time: out of science

To flesh out the thickened abstractions I have posed, Id like
to delve further into an example that has be come one of my
origins, a recursion to which I am peculiarly addicted. Time,
other times, some of whose political incarnations appear in
the previous section; that is to say, I have been fascinated by
the almost obsessive, might one say almost eternal, return of

s
es
abstract homogenous time.17 By this I dont mean that abstract
homogenous time returns in the many guises through which

Pr
critics turn to it or deploy it. Rather, I am attracted to its
seductiveness for critics who grab it as the starting point for

on
other ventures into time, the necessary prelude for their tangos
gt
with other assortments of temporality. Homogenous time is often
n
invoked as the tediously regular monotony of one minute, one
hi

second, one hour separated from the next in precisely delineated

as

intervals, leached of content. As such, it can be rehabilitated as

a metaphysical origin, the static almost sublime technology of
W

a habitual opening salvo in the struggle to find other, messier,

of

less abstract, less constrained versions of temporality, time and

temporal schemas. As this sort of habit it cant just be parsed or
ity

explained away as an apropos historical analysis, a precursor to

a literature survey of the field of temporality.
rs

One recent instance framed through cinema is Bliss Lims

ve

nuanced but conventional critique of the old familiar tropes

ni

for homogenous, empty time (the technologies of the clock and

U

the calendar), a critique Lim marshals to fold open venues for

multiple temporalities that might shape themselves into other
technologies: as fantastic cinema, the supernatural, the occult,
the religious. In large part, Lim, like many other contemporary
critics who contest the reach of homogenous time, carts her
analyses on Chakrabartys historical dualisms.18 Lim picks up on
Chakrabartys separation between two genres of the historical.
The first, History 1, can be thought of as a kind of universalist
history whose demeanour, underwritten by capital and crafted
 Introduction15

as abstraction, is that of empty space and homogenous time.The

other, Chakrabarty names History 2. History 2, in contrast to
History 1, encompasses heterogeneity: everything that has been
shed, everyone who has been excised (in the poet Mir Taqi Mirs
inimitable lyric language, they are the rind aubash, bnke, tere,
tirche, tkhe, the crooked, the bent, the perverse, the wanton)
from the history of abstracted capital. More simply stated,

s
History 1 could be said to be the history of nationalism or of

es
movements that wish to bring their denizens into new egalitarian,

Pr
everyone is the same, citizen shape; what Homi Bhabha once
called the pedagogical. Here lies the soul of the bind for scholars

on
whose epistemological and ontological projects are devoted
gt
to providing spaces of possibility that cater to communities
composed of Mir Taqi Mirs others, by ungluing them from
n
hi

the homogenised curtailments of nationalist expectations for

belonging. What do such scholars do, if History 1 is their only
as

line of entre? This is when they turn to History 2, or what Homi

W

Bhabha once called the performative, as the temporal domicile

for folks such as these. According to Chakrabarty, rather than
of

running on parallel tracks, this is how History 1 and 2 merge: the

ity

heterogenous, everyone and everything that has been discounted,

is translated backwards in a sort of future past, into regimes of
rs

smoothed-out homogeneity that they leak out of even as they

ve

are tugged and tussled into them. In Lims work, translation

ni

holds to its old hoary shapes, so that she speaks of Language 1

or some sort of faux nationalist lingua franca as History 1/time
U

1, and Language 2 embraces all the dialects. Both waltz together

yet again in a macabre not-quite-dialectic between 1 and 2 with
nowhere else to go but across a flat floor patterned in the usual
squares. In other words, Lim cannot escape the bind out of which
she wishes to slip.
Lim is a useful foil, her conundrums a debut into the habits
that theorists, pushing and pulling at temporalities, seem to
inexorably fall, despite their best efforts to evade, circumvent
 introduction
16

or duel them. Beginning here, I offer some of the details that an

analysis such as hers reaches out towards; these are the binds that
underwrite or bolster projects of political salvation that struggle
with the catchments or dead-ends thrown up by temporal double
binds. Despite all the subtlety arrayed in interpretive ventures
such as these to establish their credentials and argue their case,
what really seems to drive them is something like the repressive

s
hypothesis: History 1 suppresses (the hypothesis), and those of

es
us who can marshal History 2 for our purposes use it to win a

Pr
place at the table for radical difference (salvific antithesis). The
hypothetical becomes a fable, an originary fictional true story.

on
Foucaults opening pages in History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (The
gt
Care of the Self)19 offer an analogue of similar binds within the
double bind. What are the conditions under which such binds
n
hi

come to make sense, so much sense that they slip into the sort of
commonsense that is not even noticeable anymore, the granular
as

smoothness of the everyday?

W

Endeavours such as these, such as Lims, hold somewhat

to presumptions that are expropriated from the history of
of

sciencefrom Isaac Newtons mathematical fictions that plotted

ity

the physical world along straight lines, and laid the groundwork
for ripostes such as these that Foucault would call or designate
rs

as in the interests of the speaker (in other words, the person

ve

providing the vantage point of History 2 rides in to the save the

ni

day from the restrictions imposed by History 1).

Newton, like many other adventurers who voyaged in
U

universes they created out of what they learned from the physical
sciences, tacked his paths through objects from sticks, boards
and springs to orreries and barometers. However, what appears
to be left behind from all this amassed corporeal stuff of science
are the abstractions, the idealised technae that supply the skeletal
musculature for time, temporality, history, the propositions that
order the world, or underwire it, and have now come to feel
utterly hospitable and are embraced as such by many scholars. 20
 Introduction17

One such proposition (if you will) that is commonly attributed

to Newton: absolute time. A fabular figure that balloons out of
the bounds that ought to contain it; and with it, absolute space.
Both are physics heuristics for open-ended cubic portraits of
the world. Spread out along three-dimensional axes, the world
along which objects float without will, their travels measured
and parsed into movement, gravity, and other features are now

s
so commonplace, we use them without notice. These features are

es
bankrolled by the sanction of physics as a hard enough science

Pr
that appears to offer a guarantee of real value.
One might see in Newtons contributions one probable

on
origin of the conditions for a new world order stamped with the
gt
imprimatur of science. However, the sort of world makeover that
Newton proposed seems to make sense to those who subscribe
n
hi

to it as the real story or deal, because an entire armature of

other practices appeared to subsidise and augment it. By the
as

nineteenth century, every properly set-up, up-to-date town had

W

clocks ensconced in public places and fob watches were bought as

more than a fashion accessory for the well-dressed cavalier or as a
of

necessary tool in a scientists kit box. And, of course, neo-Marxists

ity

and those who write certain histories of capital resort to time,

apportioned into regular snippets, as the essential component
rs

in the formula for abstract labour as they describe and illustrate

ve

the vagaries of capital.21

ni

So there has been something utterly and ironically compelling

in this particular schema of organisation, a technology installed as
U

a grid that parcels the universe into empty well-arranged snippets

that follow upon one another with dreary symmetry.22 But the
question of what the compulsion has entailed remains open
to question. One response, as I have hinted at above, might lie
here: the idea of a kind of constriction, a restraining of the world
(what Chakrabarty thinks of as a translation backwards, that Lim
picks up on and explores). A form of repression that opens up a
place for a writer who wants to rail against such confines, who
 introduction
18

wants to show how much this sort of regularity fails at its task.
The writer, or Foucaults speaker, can then go on to offer better,
more tumultuous, tempestuous temporalities, and in doing so
reveal the ways in which these have been shut down, carved into
repressive restraint by national and capitalist formations invested
in the control of time. And, of course, since these out of control
temporalities are inevitably the ones lived out by people who

s
have been rendered politically marginal, subjected to political

es
subjugation, Mirs torqued subjects, the reordering of time shapes

Pr
up as a very fine epistemological political project.
A political project convened through epistemology, redolent

on
with enchantment, with the rapture of released worlds. All the
gt
others whose beings have been conscripted by the orderliness of
clocking, imprisoned by nationalist temporalities that package
n
hi

them away, are now somewhat lighter and freerand this is what
keeps their practioners, the architects of new, funkier, temporal
as

worlds, in thrall. Through all the frills and furls with which smart
W

and savvy versions of the story doll up the pattern, the story still
returns. Whether the story is one that makes good sense or fails
of

at its task is not merely what calls out to me. I am also seduced
ity

by habit itselfthe habit of telling particular stories, habits, as

I have indicated earlier, that flow through double binds, which
rs

show up with such assiduous, diligent, banal consistency, like

ve

the old uncle who always arrives at every wedding with the same
ni

parcel of ageing hoary jokes.

Let us consider for a moment what it might mean to not
U

live the interests of the usual teller of this fable, so that the
heterogenous were not always poised to offer political salvation,
stave off, argue against or reconfigure this particular origin?
What if one were nonchalant about homogenous time, as Kavita
Philip is in her recent work, or as I am in several chapters in
this book, or as Anjali Arondekar has so recently described in
Timepass?23 So that the register of temporality appears only
as oddity when questions are posed to us by interlocutors of
 Introduction19

our work invested in the ontological stolidity of homogeneity as

an epistemological trick. Does turning to a clock set down on a
table, or orchestrating the chaurast, the square, in the middle of
a small town necessarily imply that lives, even labouring ones, line
up in equally allotted chunks tolled into a far future? What if the
clock was merely a mechanical metaphor for memory, a reminder
of relationality, or allegory for forms of self-governance, or just

s
a time-pass: arrive when the clock strikes . . . , leave when the

es
hands show . . . . What if time took on some of Edmund Husserls

Pr
gathering under tone emptying out, teeming and congealing,
swilling that composes both temporal objects, time that saturates

on
them, and the temporalities in which they show upall of these
gt
under the duration of perception wreathed into the perception
of duration.24
n
hi

Chapters in this book are inundated by, or composed

through, the ambit or compass of temporal technologies
as

that seam events together, evince episodes, garner spacings,

W

become circuits of connectivity, growl like currents, or creep

into different registers of material. In them, temporalities crop
of

up in listless sensings, sharp happenstances, languid retorts,

ity

fraught passersby. So they negotiate, meander past or funnel

through the time-binds that I parsed above. Only jugd theory,
rs

in the ways that I have described it earlier, suffices to tangle

ve

with times procured as so protean, so supple, that they begin

ni

to beg the question of what goes into making up time, making

it, making out with it, perhaps even faking it. In Chapter 5 on
U

Prasanna Vithanages film, Death on a Full Moon Day, I turn

to the clock and to Einstein to corpus or embody temporality
and to incorporate time that thickens sluggishly in mourning
or while one labours, and that eventually congeals in the empty
coffin of a dead soldier. Insurance protections that the soldier
purchased against his death can balloon into futuresthey are
genres of reproductivity that in the immediate future of a claim
can pay off his familys debt and pay for the prayers that lubricate
 introduction
20

his passage through death, and, in the longer term, buy a marital
future for his sisterall futures which his blind father does not
want should arrive, without seeing his sons corpse. These are
laid against the ambient slowed down filmic realist pacing of a
blind man tapping his way across a screen field with a stick, or
swinging in and out of a frame with a spade as he digs up the
coffin to disinter his son, or sensing on his face turned up the

s
sirius of an anticipated drizzle. Taken together, they turn time

es
corporealand flesh the sinews of queered time.

Pr
In Chapter 6 entitled, Risky Bodies: Insurance, Life-Finance,
Labour and Technologies of Intimacy, time management

on
translated into financial management to clock a future in your
gt
grasp, is one pedagogical seduction that makes risk quotidian.
But risk itself, filtered through the forms of finance, credit, debt,
n
hi

insurance, pensions, that have been amalgamated into what I

call life-finance, a genre of technology invested with the charge
as

of making a good life possible and securing a person against

W

always imminent loss, promises futures that must constantly be

held out as hope. If a person reaches a point of danger, either
of

their future has failed them or the future of the company that
ity

assures the risk has dipped. If a person arrives at the purchase

seeded through a loan, their future is still not finished, their
rs

loan ensures continuing compensation for a bank that must

ve

keep selling a loan to hold out a profit. This chapter invokes the
ni

sense of near and distant futures that can be borrowed upon

for a purchase, or when the future is pushed outward into an
U

almost-there moment of a present awaiting its arrival as someone

comes close to paying off a debt. Or the promised prospects of
agrarian collectives plucking the not-quite-there in their labour
with ecologies they do not want to bump off. Risk, then, as I
show at the end of the chapter, catches communities such as
these invested in transforming difficult life circumstances into
more viable ones in various binds. This chapter, then, works
them through so that nothing is tolled methodically in any of
 Introduction21

these situations, and when temporality is dragged up it hankers

for or ambles towards futurities constantly filling up, heavy with
promises, debt and death; life willed beyond itself.
What if, in stories such as these, other fictions offered
heterogenous time (perhaps modulated through references to
Bergson or in sotto voce to Derrida or Heiddeger or Husserl,
or even to the seasons birthed and laboured in from South

s
Asian aesthetic pedigrees) as the solo performer, the only actor,

es
as all there was, rather than as a critique poised in the wings,

Pr
awaiting its chance to seize the stage from the song that opened
the musical?25 In Chapter 4, Times Travails, I tug at the small

on
moments into which various approximately linear timelines, none
gt
of which promises homogeneity, interleave the sorts of ways that
clock-time which one attends to for mere seconds, rubber-bands
n
hi

the temporal elasticity of the ordinary. Clock-time and linear time

do not disappear but stage their arrivals in ways that cannot be
as

codified in a grid. Attending to such unruly confluences unravels

W

the unholy messiness of temporalities lived through political

economies that are leaky and sodden with feeling. Constituencies
of

regale temporalities that sometimes appear at odds with their

ity

avowed politics. Hindu nationalisms comported through religion

avail of what they ostensibly repudiate or imagine as having
rs

nothing to do with them: laying out a temporal scale to plot Indian

ve

Hindu pasts, tracked along timelines from Christian and colonial

ni

historical narrativesthe narration of transformations broken

down into eras. This is also the repository of the sort of time-scale
U

picked up and brokered by nationalists, one where temporality is

poised, awaiting a golden age epoch, one that had come before
and is expected to reappear as though it were a saviour sans the
less fettered messianism of Walter Benjamin. Picked up by parties
with a wide roster of political leanings, golden times capitalise
and underwrite fantasies of progress curving through the bodies
of farmers, science and soldiers. As a domestic insinuation such
evocations marry out of their time, selling or carrying dowries
 introduction
22

of allegorical temporal figures like prosthetic consumables

glued to a presentist future. Farmers, science and soldiers were
the centrepieces of Atal Behari Vajyapees rhetoric in 1998, a
peculiar version of which has resurfaced and been revitalised in
the so-called model of development promulgated and bruited
about by Narendra Modi for the 2014 elections, animated corpse-
like, as he sells off mountains, rivers, rifts, in parcels. Even as

s
the science of calendrical technologies was grinding computer

es
clocks, comfortable in their then domesticity, to a halt right

Pr
before the millennium, I wrote this chapter to carry the voices
of historians through the archives they offered, pain lingering

on
long beyond their limits into the stories they told of the times
gt
that orchestrated every domestic day, organised chkr or labour,
filtered into the chronicle.
n
hi

The messy conclaves of these stories makes it impossible to

shove time outward into a frame narrative so that it can line up
as

comfortably as one side of an axis; the temporalities offered up

W

cannot even mesh together. Fleshed out in multiple political

economies, the chapters corporealise inchoate, dissonant, yet
of

sometimes strikingly startling jugd harmonies. In Chapter 3

ity

Firing Time, I space out the events that surround the various
showings of the film Fire both in South Asia and the diaspora
rs

along the timeline of a chronicle. And even when one attempts

ve

to force events into linearity in this way, the linear doubles up

ni

on itself, folds and pushes apart to tear. In noticing the overlays

of temporalities in this way, one can only travel, I suggest here,
U

as a time travelling mystic, attuned to the play of rasa or feeling

taken from the corpus of South Asian aesthetics, letting ones
body take over time.
What if one were to absorb into the stories of time, Marxs
delicate yet brutal nuancing of temporality in the Grundrisse,
between infinity and nullification, between something that must
not come to be and something that flies into a horizon without
end?26 What if one were to take time through the rga, time
 Introduction23

brought to life and death through scent lifting off the skin of sound,
seasons spinning into swaths of colour? Such a relationship to
vivifying my own times seems to refuse me the place of the one
who saves the world from itself even when the earth is dying; the
messianic of the people of the book proves elusive.
How does one inanimate an insistently wilful desire to squat
in an analytic that is not just bizarrely inept, but denuded of

s
substance even where it is meant to belong?27

es
Time may be spatialised, but must space be empty?

Pr
Nationalism might tie itself together through shared news tales,
but as I show in Chapter 4, so many of them escape or evade

on
any Newtonian time-frame or scape or even a mise en scne of
gt
events strung up in a convenient evenly apportioned sequence.
Even in this metaphoric mess of re-telling, might some events not
n
hi

roll away into the corners of rooms that are dense with ruckus?
In the fabular fiction of consistent time, well after quantum is
as

done and living, Newton returns like a lost bead, repeated habit,
W

as though his picture of the world was not just one in an entire
array of portrayals. This, then, is not repetition with a difference,
of

is it, instead, recursive as self-repeating, redesigned to scroll

ity

backward to where one began, constant re-enchantment?28 How

does one come to terms with, or explain, something so stickily
rs

intransigent that it glues itself to everything it appears to touch?

ve

Is this Wittgensteins certainty, the unspoken ground on which

ni

language itself appears to rest in particular places? Can Foucaults

framing scenes for the speakers benefit in the opening pages of
U

The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (Care of the Self) offer ways

to prise open and reanimate the intransigence of this repetition
compulsion, as I have suggested? Foucaults assay, after all,
preludes with the repressive hypothesis. Might Freud then also
prove useful here?
Something about the oddities with which I am trying to
grapple, lends itself, as in the story cycles by Alexie or Erdrich
to which I alluded, to messy metaphoric collusions, harvests an
 introduction
24

English teachers terror scape, images slipping by unattached to

one another like the frames in nightmares.
How does one propose shifts in seeing: do Lauren Berlants
petitions to disassociation, not as a pathology but as a letting
go, perhaps even as a genre of radical inattention that allows a
possible life to flourish from it, suggest one possibility; or does
Paul Krugmans appeal to disinterest, where what once seemed

s
so very potently present no longer holds it charge for us, so much

es
so that it lets go of meaning, offer us avenues for release?29 In the

Pr
simplest expository poesis that an earlier generation of English-
speaking Urdu scholars outside South Asia were fond of using

on
to describe the formal framework of the Urdu ghazal, which I
gt
have twisted to my own ends here, one description might look
this like: How does one string beads together unevenly, clumped,
n
hi

loosened, rather than meticulously threading them in even

increments? How to let the beads go entirely so that they roll
as

away into corners lost in dust-bunnies? How does one collect all
W

these ways of imagining under a theoretical rubric?

of

Repose in habit30
ity

I came to habit after the facta wonderfully old-fashioned,

antiquated, antideluvian word. One that was so capacious that
rs

it glutted with content, and yet so ordinary that it almost slipped

ve

by without notice. Both trivial and fraught with meaning; not

ni

worthy of attention and unpacking, a throwaway, but also

something we glom onto as having the kind of import that it
U

magnetises, draws and seizes analytic impetus to itself. The word

has got some publicity and traction, has been assigned and been
allocated value because it has come into an intellectual commons
through Pierre Bourdieus habitus, and I will skite Bourdieu, to
open with a broader discussion of it and then hone down on
suggestive deployments of habit which anticipate and perhaps
predecease Bourdieus.
 Introduction25

What is habit? Why habit? Habit has had a long illustrious

literary and everyday lineage; it is a word that, because of its
peculiarly doubled resonances that seam it as both extraordinary
and unnoticeable, has insinuated its way into the ruminations of
an extensive panoply of thinkers and so has accrued a heritage of
transactions in meaning. Theorists as varied as Michel de Certeau
who renders his lineage through Wittgenstein and habit; Jacques

s
Rancire whose invocation of dissensus carries it; Jacques Derrida

es
who poises it uncertainly in the idea of presence and Michel

Pr
Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Paul Krugman, George A. Akerlof,
Thomas Kuhn, Karl Marx, Joseph Schumpeter turn to it. Its been

on
done beforein so many ways. gt
Habit shows its face in South Asian languages through two
lineages. One is obeyed by the linguistic philologist who might
n
hi

track it down from the Arabic datiya, customary, habitual,

or the Farsi dat, a way of behaving that has become usual, an
as

established custom (rasam o rivj). And in these cases translation

W

into English feels almost seamless. But habit has another

grammatical resonance as well, it appears in the catalogue of
of

tenses, and here it is uneasily rendered in English: main kart

ity

hn. I (habitually) do. The present indicative verb form, main pn

kht hn, I eat pn on a regular basis can tighten into a habit as
rs

stubborn practice in sentences such as mujhe pn khne k dat

ve

hai. I have a habit: eating pn, eating pn has become usual for
ni

me. And I use pn because one can become attachedone might

say using a contemporary idiom even addictedto pn eating.
U

Idhar pn khne k dat hai: eating pn is customary here. When

the word dat is used it often has, as in the case of relishing pn,
an almost moral frisson scrubbed into it: dat as something that
is bad, as something perverse, as something that one must seek
release from.In this key, as a manager of morality, dat stages
its ground on kahvaten (proverbs) or muhvaren which means
idiom, common speech (perhaps coming from its root in the
 introduction
26

Arabic hvar dialogue, or back and forth in conversation), but

the word muhvar also translates as habit and practice. So the
language of idioms is the vocabulary of commonplace habit. And
one well-known idiomatic deployment: dat bur bal hai. Habits
are a blight, a misfortune, a disaster in the making. Llach bur
bal hai: greed will ruin.31
In this vein, the poster Bur daten (bad habits) itemises,

s
enumerates and catalogues things that children ought not to

es
do.32 This poster designed specifically for schooling is squared

Pr
off into comic book style mise en scne, each encapsulating a
curtailed activity, such as running in the street, gambling, tossing

on
garbage out of ones window, beating up other kids (quarrelling),
gt
playing with electricity. Its correlative obverse is the poster Acch
daten, good habits (called Ideal Boy) that inculcates properly
n
hi

regularized behavior and rivj: bathing daily, praying to God

(with appropriate symbolic coverage for a roster of religions
as

floating gently above the heads of a remarkably light-skinned

W

girl and boy, neatly accoutred in what are obviously school

uniforms), bowing to parents, joining the national corps, playing
of

games, participating in school activities. The backdrops in these

ity

posters are the soft urbanity of a small town. Their effect is a good
enough child, schooled into contemporary nationalised civility,
rs

playing properly with the dangers attending infrastructural

ve

change (schooling and electricity and garbage collection and the

ni

organic turned to use), coloured with the appropriate touches of

tehzb that is reminiscent of better times, an earlier tehzbiyt, a
U

more genteel, more cultured past. dat then is about repetitions

dinned into children through pedagogy or habit that shows up
sometimes only when it has to be repudiated.33 And whether the
posters pull children towards propriety or establish the proper
through marking out what must not be done, other semantics
are inaugurated as incipient habitualsthe nation, accession
to the use of infrastructural palliatives (dams funneling water,
agroeconomics) as necessary to a good enough life for a citizen,
 Introduction27

the ordinariness of citizenship in the face of its failures for so

many communities, even the notion of a specifically established
time for learning, that is childhood.
But the idea of habit can also assume a lighter, wilful, floating
form that does not clamp down on the idea of custom or
compulsion so completely if one just says: main pn kht hn.
A gentle observation (here on oneself) that merely leans slightly

s
towards the possibility of something that happens on a regular

es
basis. A quiet verb form that speaks something ordinary.

Pr
What then does habit ferry over from fabrication to
naturalisation, from dressed up to suit to comportment, from

on
costumes to technologies? From Indian languages, if we carry it
gt
through the tense any verb can assume as it moves through time:
habit resides between custom, compulsion and the quotidian
n
hi

sitting in nerves and sinews. I want to hold to the idea that a

cover-up that identifies the wearer as someone in a particular
as

relationship to belief-practice (nun or monk or school-going

W

child) is also taken into fleshed out regularity, insinuated into

the political economies of everyday lives, clasping a skin-like
of

closeness so that bodies are ordered without notice. Clothing,

ity

a nuns habit or a childs uniform: what you wear signals who

you are, from the coverall to the repeated practice. The cloth
rs

gestures towards the proprieties of a regulated rhythm of the

ve

day, without the simple attachment to a clock face, shared lives

ni

in communities with which you are conjoined, each bodys

difference only tangible under certain conditions. The readability
U

of the worn object beckons belonging to a world, and perhaps

also to a putative moral character. Transformations in habit are
marked as difficult departures, which mangle the workaday that
seems set into place, crisis moments that can be lackadaisical or
inspired and resourceful or calamitous, toxic.
What is it that takes me to habit? Can I offer another way of
unpacking differently than I have ventured so far? The series
of chapters that make up the book are bound together in their
 introduction
28

address. Each chapter lingers into the others through its judicious
or unscripted invocation of habit as musical leitmotif that
saturates the resonances that might sound through the concept.
The intertwined nexus between habits of life and being with habits
of analysis, not just as intellectual nubs that can be parsed, but
as explanatory modes that make some sense of everyday lives.
Habit becomes a technology that presages intimacies, so that

s
its dailiness in the mundanity and sparked exceptionalism that

es
attends it are reminiscent of the ways in which transitions weave

Pr
and contour.
This book is an address to habit as technology. Not just address

on
as in addressing, as in voicing to, a speaking towards a particular
gt
fantasmatic audience, provoking them into presence, but address
in a speaking to constellations of intransigence, which float into
n
hi

view through the hermeneutic attentiveness that karun, heedful

solicitous compassion taken from another South Asian lexicon,
as

brings with it. There is no secret ensconced in the chapters,

W

they are not about bold uncovering or buoyed up visions. Each

speaks either pointedly or more subtly askance to places where
of

ways of thinking seem to get stuck, where they assume very

ity

literal recursive forms, closed feedback loops that lead back

to the metaphors that composed them, without the constant
rs

transformations that sometimes pull loops out into spirals or

ve

springs. Newton and time are apochryphal instances; each chapter

ni

probes these places in a non-hypothetical fashion, lyrically,

teasing out threads like notes in a rga, the aesthetic pre-empts
U

presuming that some answer, precursed in the question, will lie

waiting in the assay. All speak gender, sexuality, desire, either on
the surface of the questions that are exposed, laid belly-up along
the way, or as something that comes up as questions are laid
bare. Almost all the chapters ply domesticities as habits of living
desires, but also as habits of filtering, technologies of intimacy,
which are endemic to desires that readers ferry along with them.
The book begins and ends with hijrs as tropes embedded in the
 Introduction29

ordinary: the first chapter speaks to foregoing what was once

ordinary, the final chapter brings risk as an emergent ordinary
into domesticity and sexuality.
The most self-evident exponents of habit, those for whom
habits are a form of address, for whom habits sit on the surface
of their writing are anthropologists and sociologists; for them,
habits are the meat and blood they slice, dice, observe, parse,

s
and interrogate. Marcel Mauss, Norbert Elias, and, finally, Pierre

es
Bourdieu whose work on habits as habitus is the best known

Pr
among the three: their research situates them somewhere between
anthropology and sociology, and they angle their theoretical

on
inclinations towards something that might fall between the
gt
English meanderings of the word and its South Asian forms.
Of the three Mauss is probably the most pertinent to my own
n
hi

projects. Elias and Bourdieu focus primarily on Europe, though

Bourdieu has written an essay on Algeria and habitus that might
as

seem apropos. But in the essay, Bourdieu speaks to habitus

W

almost as though it were a diseased capitalist contemporaneity

slowly infecting what was once solidly an elsewhere, mutating
of

that elsewhere into a simulacrum of Europe. So that habitus is

ity

something that comes from a western political oikos. Mauss, on

the other hand, in a talk from the 1930s, poses the question of what
rs

is done at or partaken of at home through what is commonplace

ve

in an elsewhere, so home filtered through descriptions of habitus

ni

is desanctified, defamiliarised.34 Mauss is more appropriate for my

task also because, in his own archiving of his habits of looking,
U

teaching and thinking, in exploring the lineaments of those that

he cannot let go easily, he narrates himself without marking that
narration as one of progenitors of habit recursed in this way.
Habitus, for Mauss, comports, almost cavorts through a history
of the word in use.
In his essay Techniques of the Body, written for the French
Society of Psychology, and presented before an audience of
psychologists about ten years after the book he is usually cited
 introduction
30

for, The Gift, Marcel Mauss telescopes habits of bodies, coagulates

them and collates them, as a way of imaging disparities across
regions. His term for what he is collecting for the essay is habitus,
i.e., practices that are not merely contained in the crucible of
one body but shared, lived across social fields. He wants to
bring together, to group what he poses initially as miscellanea,
a capacious corpus of incidental things which people do, and

s
as he stockpiles them under the rubric of his talk, he gathers

es
together the many words that come into play, each differently

Pr
anatomised, but somehow belonging with one another. Mauss
says that for the time in which he writes and speaks, since these

on
details have not captivated the imagination of anthropologists,
gt
they could be collated instead under the rubric of things without
import, without intellectual cache. Mauss considers such events
n
hi

and practices heteroclite, anomalous, eccentric. About them he

says: I teach in the shadow of the disgrace and opprobrium of
as

the miscellaneous . . . in ethnography, this rubric miscellaneous

W

was truly heteroclite.35

The heteroclite falls under what people do in their run-of-the-
of

mill lives, the unremarked ordinary. I say unremarked because

ity

for anthropologists or sociologists, as Mauss makes clear, what is

marked as ordinary captures an intellectual eye, and is underlined
rs

therefore only because it has value in the field (ethnologists in

ve

India in the 18th century, such as Francis Buchanan, were often

ni

enticed by the heteroclite as they traipsed across naturalised

geographies and people they were mapping for use)assembled
U

around what anthropologists annotate as ritual, as special, such as

Mausss earlier research on potlatches and gifts, money, insurance.
Mausss essay gives me leverage on habit on which I wish
to focus and that embrace those that would otherwise slip by,
unremarked, as technologies of little value, as the underlying
wash in a watercolour or as factual flushes or angles of natural
light in a photograph, even though in other situations they may
be scrutinised for their specialness. Newtonian mechanics, for
 Introduction31

example, or the almost transcendent allusion to normativity,

or gender not just as an analytic but as a ground through
which seemingly routine or inconspicuous tendencies, such as
domesticity or homeliness, become the habits of analysis into
which femininity is cusped.
How then does Mausss essay allow us to unravel or disinter the
unremarkable? Mauss leaves the usual topics of anthropological

s
import aside in his lecture. For him, those verbs that might fall under

es
the tense of the the indicative without being particularly special

Pr
such as walking, eating, shitting, breathing, spitting, swimming,
marching, dancing, fill out the contents of his miscellany. All

on
those moment-to-moment things a body does that animates it,
gt
the unremarkable everyday acts that flesh and blow a body into
life. It is their specificities for a region, a place, a community,
n
hi

a group, a nation, a time that he attends to: these are gathered

by him into a bodys carnal intimacy with itself as technae, as
as

somatic technologies. Breathing, eating, shitting, spitting, dancing,

W

digging, walking, swimmingan anthropologists incidental

arsenal of difference. When Mauss gathers the heteroclite, the
of

anomalous, to come to some understanding of what is common,

ity

what is then called habit/habitus, he includes more than just

things we do consistently a certain way, footpaths we follow in
rs

closed loops as though our feet were stuck to their tracks, unable
ve

to unglue themselves. He is curious about recursivity as an open

ni

loop, as a spring that takes people somewhere else, about the startle
that propels mutations, about the laboriousness, the frustration, the
U

awkwardness, perhaps even the quandaries; the hard labour

that letting go of a habit that is pulling us into our places of
adroitness, or even just into familiarities, however incompetent,
takes. That is, binds which appear to slip away, or which we just
cannot loosen.
What is striking in this essay, given that it has been composed
as a presentation for psychologists, is that Mauss forsakes the
question of what the person doing might be thinking or saying
 introduction
32

as they do something. Instead, he wends his way through flesh

skeletoned away from word. Mauss wants to collect the muscled
indicative tense as it is happening or as it comes to attention. How
does all this chime with Wittgensteins idea of language games,
the ordinary things one learns to live through? Mausss cabinet
of ordinary moving curiosities has laid out on its shelves things
that might intrigue Wittgenstein: grammars of body languages,

s
those that one might find in the blueprints of the architectonics

es
of certainty perhaps. Practices that then have sounding through

Pr
them Wittgensteins notion of certainty, the bedrock of belief that
one begins to see when one is faced with things falling apart.

on
Perhaps bten brought through into czen is a more apt phrase
gt
for these things that are the bedrock on which lives are lived. In
bton se, in czon se mer tluq hai. To bring up habit again, in
n
hi

Hindi and Urdu dat, which feels so ordinary, which registers

as familiar fluency.
as

And something that might feel familiar to us now as an

W

intellectual truism is what Mauss traverses: that which we come

to feel as flesh, live as visceral, as in the gut is lived in this way
of

precisely and only because it is profoundly social, political,

ity

economic, because it is dinned in and imprinted by pedagogy

and acquired painstakingly; technologies of the soma. In other
rs

words, corporeal technae (not in the Heideggerian sense). Some

ve

of these technae that fill out the habitus are seen in the poetics of
ni

bodies that dont do the real job, but are truly inconsequential,
superfluous to the project of training to task (the binds that tie
U

double binds into place). Perhaps this is why Mauss includes

in his arsenal of descriptions laid into a historical archive
from Europe the ars technae, the techniques of a body not
specifically drill-oriented to fighting but moulded to labour at
the supplementary movements that craft a soldier at war. Here
he speaks about the differences between French digging practices
with their own peculiar tools, and English soldiers struggling
to master a French spade in order to hoe, [t]his plainly shows
 Introduction33

that a manual knack can only be learnt slowly. Every technique

properly so-called has its own form. So, for Mauss, what might
fall under the aegis of the natural is the culmination of training
flesh (organs, blood, bone) that itself may be a sort of prosthetic
technology that lives as its phenomenological technae (Maurice
Merleau-Ponty). I made . . . the fundamental mistake of thinking
there is a technique only when there is an instrument. . . . All these

s
modes of action were techniques, the techniques of the body.

es
. . . The body is mans first and most natural instrument. Or more

Pr
accurately, not to speak of instruments, mans first and most
natural technical object, and at the same time technical means,

on
is his body. In his recourse to the quotidian, to think through
gt
somatic technologies, Mauss might be considered the precursor
to Merleau-Pontys work on the phenomenology of perception,
n
hi

but Merleau-Pontys use of the pathological to ferret out a lineage

for prosthesis feels a bit less radical. Mauss, then, bequeaths me
as

my iconographies for techno-intimacy.

W

In addition, for Mauss, training and pedagogies are not

neutral things like a car idling along, something everyone
of

does without thought, learns as though they are being merely

ity

animated, through a puppet body-prosthesis into subjecthood

from the earliest moments of waking into the social, however
rs

much gestures might be mandated by place and time. These

ve

habits do not just vary with individuals and their imitations,

ni

they vary especially between societies, educations, proprieties

and fashion, prestige. Habits, then, are not stray practicesthe
U

posters I spoke of before are a case in point, as is the training in

music, art, dance and theatre. Sitting, perhaps uneasily, at the
heart of schooling into them is value or prestigeone dogs
the habits of those who have been given authority. One learns,
collectively, canons of habits from people one has learned to
scrutinise, authorise as teachers because of the social or political
value they have stacked up. Mauss says, The child, the adult
imitates actions which have succeeded and which he has seen
 introduction
34

successfully performed by people in whom he has confidence

and who have authority over him . . . it is precisely this notion of
the prestige of the person who performs the ordered, authorised,
tested action vis--vis the imitating individual that constrains
all the social element.
A compacted series of terse paragraphs, apochrypal insertions,
less than a fully plotted narrative, more than a mere instantiation

s
in which the body then becomes a natural technical object, in

es
which Mauss makes the natural unwieldy, inclines it towards

Pr
orientations (Sara Ahmed) that direct the path of making
something unnoticed or heteroclite unnatural through the

on
technological: this is how the essay opens. Only when the ordinary
gt
is denaturalised and Mauss angles their orientation to direct
the passageways to denaturalisation, will he assign incidentals a
n
hi

nomenclature. Now he knows how to range the heteroclite and

shape a sort of argument. The word that Mauss prefers to use is
as

habitus, from the Latin, rather than habitude (from the French
W

habit or custom, something that is known mysteriously), and he

tracks his reasoning through the usual roster of Greek thinkers,
of

first Aristotle who says that, these things are acquired and then
ity

through Plato who suggests they are technae.36

For Mauss, habits are first disposed under the analytic
rs

heteroclite and then reformatted to belong to habitus. I take the

ve

poetics of bodies and the technologies that are ensconced in them

ni

to habits of practice that underwire habits of analysis. Or more

clearly stated, I take Mausss rhetorical charge to himself seriously.
U

In other words, to attend to habits of analysis as technologies that

are incidental to the real practices of social science or humanities
tucked away even when they are highlighted.37 Again, nothing I
say here has not been said before. Habits of analysis that I speak
of in the chapters in this book might be networked38 or perhaps
nested, one inside another, but they are often stuck together in
place as though by a hardened glue.39 And some of the questions
that arise for me about habits of analysis are: can we imagine
 Introduction35

assumptions as a series of habits or are they the certainties that

undergird something? Nested habit perhaps, but is there a relation
between outside and insidedo we think possibilities for life may
be produced through a habit?

Habits as repose
Oddities of memory. This work is bookended by chapters that

s
speak to transgender. The two invocations to transgender

es
questions are woven together musically like rgas ferrying notes

Pr
into different modulations, opening into seasons that are poised
against one another precariously. Considering both through

on
Mauss is particularly apropos: both chapters attend to habits,
gt
as Mauss does, as dat, habitus as technology, habits that float
n
into view because they are under the sign of difference. Why
hi

do we see things? may be asked as a Wittgensteinian, perhaps

even Foucauldian, rather than a methodological, ontological or
as

even epistemological question. It is certainly a materialist one:

W

what are the conditions under which something ordinary feels

invested with oddity, so that one can look at it head cocked, a
of

tourist in ones own beinga memory cache, an archive. These

ity

concerns were immanent in the first chapter when I wrote it. At

the time, transgender had hit the intellectual stands, a cluster
rs

of texts leavened the intellectual cornucopia. Transgender

ve

politics and organising, voyages of discovery and the accidental

ni

occidental tourist.
In the first chapter and for the last one, I went back to The
U

Transgender Studies Reader as a way of imaging myself as an

archive. In one of the two introductions to the first volume
of the collection, Susan Stryker lays out some scenes that
imagine the openings for transgender studies, they come from
two conferences that I either helped to organise or in which I
participated, both in 1994. In the ways in which one can live
shared spaces, and in the ways that the political histories that I
address later when I speak about Sheba Chhachhis installation
 introduction
36

can be thought of as commons, each of Susans scenes are mine

too. Mine and not mine. How? Along with a group of people,
Kevin Kopelson, Mickey Eliason, Brad Beemyn, Fred Moten,
Herman Rappaport, I helped put together the conference in
Iowa in 1994the site where transgender folk from different
locales came. And the first version of Chapter 1 was presented
at a conference on sexuality at New York University, to which

s
Susan refers, and to which I allude in the beginning of that

es
chapter. The urgency of transgender activism permeated both

Pr
conferences, Susans accounts reverberate with it, she and other
transgender folk, standing behind floor mikes, challenged

on
the floor with questions, pressing against the conventions of
gt
sexuality that had been invested with capital. Their tenacity
pointed to the opaqueness of the habits against which they posed
n
hi

their difference.
The seminal moments for me at the time were encapsulated by
as

the stark contrast between the pleasures of reading Sandy Stones

W

work and Anne Fausto-Sterling, and the irritation that attended

my perusal of Serena Nanda. That incongruity between two
of

scholars whose lives were vested in their own sexuality, taken in a

ity

remarkably pungent and penetrating yet poignant fashion to their

intellectual trajectories, and the anthropologist tromping blithely
rs

through lives that she thought she grasped in their fullness, sent
ve

me to press on the genres through which my own management

ni

of sexuality had been organised.

That initial rendition of this opening chapter was animated
U

by the spirit of Sandy Stone, who commences her book on

technology with noticing her boots, and that moment is akin for
me to channeling the spectre of Mauss as he comes to grips with
his styles of swimming and breathing when they begin to turn
arcane and archaic. A self-translation as catachrestic technae: an
impulse to find oneself in and when ones own ordinary moments
morph into an elsewhere. Against Stones impulsive recollections,
transgender activists in the US followed yearnings to find oneself
 Introduction37

elsewhere, by turning to narratives that were being circulated

through anthropologists such as Nandas descriptive accounts.
Transgender history floats to the surface.
For scholars such as I, this search which excavated figures
like hijrs from South Asia wilfully ferretted away by scholars
like Nanda from nuances of location, religion, class, history and
caste, marked what had been both ordinary and startling. So that

s
the tourist eye that scanned for transgender provided me inroads

es
into my own roving childhood fantasies in India, and the ways

Pr
in which they had been thickened into possibilities for a child
chancing another byway into gender precisely because hijrs

on
were so much a part of my domesticated every day, precisely
gt
because that eye commuted my living present in the United
States into an archived childhood laid aside to another timea
n
hi

presentist archive.
Instances such as these are enabling even as they are profoundly
as

disturbing. They reveal seams in the fabric of habitations: analytics

W

as technologies in a tussle. For me, they showed me my habits

as sundered, rendered in the US into translation as catechresis,
of

produced as technologies of embodiment, available as cyborg

ity

subjectivities. In other words, concatenations of difference.

More than a mixture, less than a compound. So to image this
rs

anachronistic present turned into untimely coincidence I turned

ve

to mayonnaise, as cooking technology and as artifactual science,

ni

emulsified from molecules that cannot pull apart, even as their

faces, oriented in opposition, tug them away from one another.
U

Translation theory: translating which drags languages that are

yanking against one other into enmeshment, mediated through
histories of science but not through biology or the usual vested
form of the hybrid, rather through emulsions.
In this chapter I was propelled towards transgender not
to marshal facts, scrounge for bodies. Not even to the sort of
body-scavenging ventures where what is excavated or foraged
is a more carefully solicited corpus composed of intersections
 introduction
38

that coagulate various strands of identification such as class,

race, nation, sexuality, gender into a hybrid person. Intersections
have long become a habit, a technology of composition, if you
will, underwritten by the value assigned a good enough model
of complex characters. But, as Stone explains so clearly in many
pieces she has written, sexuality is differential, not just a matter
of fact moulded out of intersections. And for the moment,

s
differentials have not yet become habitualdifferential might

es
turn into another such but for the moment it serves.40

Pr
So, in this first chapter I churn habits of analysis in the crucible
of habits of practice, cutting across one another in differential.

on
This chapters initially envisioned audience included translation
gt
theorists, sexuality studies sojourners, postcolonial studies
atavists, anthropologists, literary theorists, social scientists,
n
hi

all of whom went elsewhere to look for difference, emboldened

by the social, political and cultural capital that such time travel
as

might accrue. Since then what the chapter seems to have

W

attracted, looking at the spate of citations, is activists, intellectuals,

academics, ordinary folk on the hunt for differences, the differences
of

encased in lines of these pages. A sort of ordinary mixed bag

ity

of readers tracking and torsioning habits of analysis that had

become so familiar.
rs

Transgender and translation tacked back and forth between

ve

this chapter and the book I was writing at the time on an Urdu
ni

poet, Miraji (19121949); each informing the other. Miraji was

a Muslim man who had taken the name of a Hindu woman,
U

who theorised translation as impossibly lived habit for himself

through his name, through his modernist poetics and through
the essays he wrote on lyric and on poets. Tracking my questions
through the transactions embedded in translation as colonial
practice, I was led, as were a wealth of researchers to the gruelling,
intractable, obdurate forms that that the demise and desecration
of literary of lineages under colonialism provoked into possibility.
These were forms of capital moving into South Asia through
 Introduction39

translation, ferrying along with them what capital often does,

the idealisation or veneration of radical political transformation
as the repository of value (the compulsions to change wrought
by colonialism as dominance or through hegemonies make
these sites particularly amenable to Mausss reading of habit).
But Mirajis metamorphoses, by a person whose literary voice
was toned through lyric translations, are rarely conducted with

s
ease and, ironically, often wrought from canonic conventions

es
such as composing as a woman poet or singer, which are kept in

Pr
place as the conduits through which they pass. Speaking from
behind the grave as an echo that resuscitated a womans corpse,

on
via translation, gave Miraji a tonguecolonialism had stolen
gt
his lyrical forebears, spirited his voice away, and poets long dead
gifted him speech. In the process, however, Miraji passed by the
n
hi

dogmas that launched refurbished canonic creeds for aesthetics.

The virulence which established the canons viability, habits that
as

staked their claim in the face of competing ones, showed up

W

in how Mirajis compatriots repudiated his queer transgender

practiceshe was made over in medical parlance as mad, losing
of

in the process an older nomenclature that would have allowed

ity

him his madness with impunity as the berserk mangled lover,

wandering in an imaginary desert, unglued from his own socius.
rs

Between one madness and another lie political differentials

ve

the paradoxes of shunting transformation aside by deploying

ni

narratives wrought out of contemporary genres weighted towards

so-called health.
U

I close Risky Bodies & Techno-Intimacy with a chapter written

after my monograph on Miraji, carrying into that final chapter the
ironies that makeovers often suture over. This chapter grapples
with the intertwined-networked nexus between musings on
technae: habits of life and being, and habits of analysis. Here my
material, as I have shown earlier, devolves explanatory modes
for daily life that come into their own under the rubric of risk,
and become more ubiquitous as the Indian economy opens up
 introduction
40

to penetration by insurance as protective finance married to

equity. Risk is a technology that practices explanatory modes
and a way of accounting for ones life seeps into ordinary moral
injunctions. One begins to ventriloquise ones life through
risk, at risk, producing risk, so that risk mutates into a genre
through which one capitalises the ordinary. Under a risk regime,
people are enticed into buying insurance and into credit to

s
protect themselves from possible futures of everyday as well as

es
catastrophic loss; risk as danger salves or appeases habituated

Pr
futures that might never come. People buy into term insurance as
a saving scheme for a child whose education they might not ever

on
need to finance. People purchase a loan, a debt, as a deposit on
gt
hope to finance a life that provides them a mirage as fantasmatic
habits, a good enough one replete with house, a car, a holiday, a
n
hi

few seeds, all paid for by another loan at usurious rates whose
repayment dogs every next breath. What would it mean to finance
as

a habit whose everyday near futurities keep being ferried off into
W

a mirage? People are expected to feel as though, if they have

taken risk enough into account, something that matters has been
of

addressed almost fully on the surface. Financial technologies

ity

are more than just the fiscal, other things worm their way in
through them, places where social and political capital lodge,
rs

dogmas about life and death, portraits of ordinary or better lives,

ve

conventions of domesticity around collectivities that agglutinated

ni

and cohered in the process. These are precisely the lessons, which
I allude to as incidental in my discussion of Mauss, that were
U

drummed into students inadvertently, but also quite deliberately,

while they were being trained into propriety by a bad habits
posterGramscian hegemonies leaking through ones veins into
habits that feel bad or good enough in the temporal dregs of the
subjunctive.41
In this final chapter, I appraise the pedagogies that cultivate
the lineaments of newer habits, enabling people who have been
sold these habits as novel and proper paths to find life, to live.
 Introduction41

Shifting over from a kind of fiscal conservationism and holding

on to cash towards gambling with it, and becoming accustomed
to letting it fly away in the hope that if they accrue capital people
will be able to capitalise on it for an idealised future. Lives are
made over in new genres that account for them in numbers.
To accomplish their aspirations, these pedagogies are insistent,
omnipresent, underwritten by moral injunctions and soused in

s
marinade of a better, or best life. For once these habits are learned,

es
they are remarkably difficult to to let go of: as Mauss speaks about

Pr
so poignantlyhow he feels that reorienting his practice of taking
in breaths while swimming might never be accomplished. So,

on
pedagogies have their work cut out for them. And once a new
gt
avatar is born, it is hard to give its precursors their duethis is
as true for queer communities who use risk-pooling as the new
n
hi

canon for constituency building, or those who have acceded to

costing their services in charts. At stake, then, in this last chapter
as

that also offers an alterior image for constituencies that clump

W

together through enumerating their labour or pooling their loss,

are the costs: transgender subjects on loan, pooled habits of the
of

political, the ambient traps of double binds?

ity

For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at

rs

the turning points of history cannot be solved by optical means,

ve

that is, by contemplation, alone. They are mastered gradually by

habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation.
ni

This citation from Walter Benjamins essay The Work of Art in

U

the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, hitches transubstantiation

to habit and habit to the corporeal in the same ways that
Mauss indicates in his essay: in order to change, one must go
to materialisation, habits embedded deep in guts, where, like
rasa, the intangible is palpable. One might think something
different, trundle along the byways of modish theoretical forms,
theorise again, but when theory is fleshed into reading bodies or
texts, the vantage that emerges pulls back into earlier habits of
 introduction
42

thinking such as those we see with scholars working out regimes

of temporality. What would it mean, then, for these habits to fall
into disuse, to lose their purchase, for nerves to surrender the
usual synapses?42
Habits are never single, they are networked into modes
of being, forged, as Mauss shows, in the crucible of political
economies, desires for belonging in places one values. Pn

s
addiction, like an addition to a particular edition of time, the habit

es
of eating pn, is not a personal pleasure secreted away from ones

Pr
universes of habitation. Pn shops tucked along streets, sitting in
the corner one passes to other stores, deliberately placed so that

on
one encounters them along the way to somewhere else, magnetise
gt
communities that come together across class, sometimes caste
and region; in the Prelude after the Fact, they became the places
n
hi

where we halted to find our way. People take you to their favourite
ones and they stay open late attracting aficionados, like pubs in
as

the UK people gravitate to stalls, stop for a bit to buy pns from
W

their car, loiter at the street corner in front. In the 2014 elections,
shop owners, well aware of their centrality, worked the gatherings
of

disseminating information about candidates and voting. Pns

ity

consumed in households are shared in circles, women and men

chat casually as one person composes them carefully tailored to
rs

each connoisseurs requirements, one is never expected to get a

ve

pn this way and go quickly to the next event but dawdle savoring
ni

the taste. So, to let go of this sort of habit, to abdicate it might

cut the tether to ones life world, akin to dying again? Why does
U

it feel as though one would be giving up on ordinary life, a life

lived heedlessly or keenly dogging a particular course or orbit?
Is it so terrifying?
My partner and I were occasionally handed the care of an
autistic child whose pleasures resided in getting stuck doing
the same things over and over; he pressed buttons with an
assiduousness that seemed so intently profound, as though
the world could be made again every time that button went
 Introduction43

down. If the pressing pushed its way towards something else,

a door sliding open slyly or sharply, a light shooting on, a lift
whirring into movement, all the better. If one tried to stop him,
a huge rage ensued, convulsing outwards to hit and hit, perhaps
to hold at bay the end as he knew it, perhaps to restore some
authority over a universe pleated into the repetition, perhaps
because stopping him ripped him away from his skin fading

s
into the button which was a part of his flesh. Nothing salved

es
his anger. In the style, andz, of Merleau-Pontys analytic

Pr
inclinations coupled with Mausss, one might be able to see
something about habit through what appears to be a slightly

on
anomalous version of it. What feels like a breach of social
gt
protocolone should be able to halt a seemingly pointless
obsession midwayperhaps allows us to view habit askance,
n
hi

and notice something true about it. A handle on where and

how the assurances or convictions that are the root of living in
as

a world we are destroying might abide.

W

Habits are very hard to let go ofsomething feels as though

it might come to a dire culmination if one emancipates habits
of

from ones repertoire of being. What underwrites them is the

ity

sort of certainty lodged in beliefs, which are the ground for our
world and language as we live it, that Wittgenstein speaks about
rs

in On Certainty. But these beliefs are so deeply held, tucked away

ve

where one must not find them. If we move from parsing them
ni

through habit to the question of ordinary life, the unremarkable

ordinary entices us with its command to the quotidian that Anjali
U

Arondekar is beginning to describe in her recent work on the

Samaj. The place where something lost, because it is so humdrum,
is safely stashed away from retrieval. To even detect such a place
or thing suggests a melancholic dream, a routine that one follows
without notice, on the surface of ones life, maybe? Kart haithe
verb form in that brings the frisson of habit to the surface, like froth
to skim off, someones mundane world organising, to be able to let
it go only in a tsunami of rage or sorrow? When will renouncing
 introduction
44

melancholia, salvaging it, promise disinterest? Something about

when one uses yeh mer dat hai gestures outwards to familiarity.
Melancholics habits, as those that clothe nuns?

Double binds: routes to no ends

To grapple with what we have here, melancholia and rage, but
also pleasure, the rasa/dhvan of karun as expansive and tough

s
es
compassion that follows the habitual around, pressing against
it musically, I turned to Gayatri Spivak. In her newer work on

Pr
education, she goes to Gregory Bateson to explore habit and the
double bind. Though it is only here that Spivak explicitly alludes

on
to the double bind, her entire oeuvre is organised around it. Can
gt
the Subaltern Speak? is one such early place. For Spivak, the
n
subtle excruciation that makes the double bind so potent arises
hi

at the places where one lives in the condition of the undecidable

as

while simultaneously mobilising pragmatic responsible practice.

Crudely put, you are fucked if you can and fucked if you canta
W

constant ethical question that is the ordinary one for feminist

of

ethicists attempting to find a middle path through brutal

conundrums such as female foeticide and abortion.
ity

Batesons work on porpoises may provide an apposite pathway

to think through the inhumane housing that poises death and
rs

change in a virulent, exquisite, delicately perched balance, one

ve

that is forged in the soma and sounds out the impossibility

ni

of reading the predictable. A journey that is not just guided

U

through the exhaustion that drowns life as one chases a desire

for routine, or that arrives at a destination mandated by an object
of investment that no longer promises or regulates hope: these
carry their own pitiless endings in them too. Instead, dolphins
continue to hunt routines they cannot leave even when they
no longer make any sense whatsoever. Lauren Berlant might
imagine my analytical desires here as imbued with rage, but
perhaps rage is helpful as affective release, as the apropos bhva,
as feeling along the way?43
 Introduction45

Kavita Philip, a historian of science and technology, who, along

with me, has been attempting to grapple with the double binds
that face South Asian scholars writing in the between spaces, in
the ellipses, and finding oneself untranslatable, pointed me to
Orit Halperns retelling of Batesons experimental formulations.
The actor in this story which stages the double bind is a porpoise/
dolphin, and here is one recension of the tale:

s
es
This porpoise had been trained at a navy research facility to

Pr
perform tricks and other trained acts in return for fish. One
day, her trainers started a new regimen. They deprived her of

on
food unless she produced a new trick. Starved if she repeated
the same act, but also if she did not perform, the porpoise
gt
was trapped. This experiment was repeated with numerous
n
porpoises, usually culminating in extreme aggression, and
hi

a descent into what from an anthropomorphic perspective

as

might be labeled disaffection, confusion, antisocial, and violent

W

behavior. Bateson with his usual lack of reservation was ready

to label these dolphins as suffering the paranoid form of
of

schizophrenia. The anthropologist was at pains to remind his

audience that, however, before rushing to conclusions about
ity

genetic predeterminacy or innate typologies, the good doctors

rs

should recall that these psychotic porpoises were acting very

ve

reasonably and rationally. In fact, they were doing exactly

what their training as animals in a navy laboratory would lead
ni

them to do. Their problem was that they had two conflicting
U

signals. They had been taught to obey and be rewarded. But

now obedience brought punishment and so did disobedience.
The poor animals, having no perspective on their situation
as laboratory experiments, were naturally breaking apart
fissuring their personalities (and Bateson thought they had
them) in efforts to be both rebellious and compliant, but above
all to act as they had been taught. The motto of the story being
that to act rationally in a set pattern following given rules might
also be to act psychotically.
 introduction
46

This one porpoise, however, appeared to possess a good

memory. She was capable of other things. Bateson related
how, between the fourteenth and fifteenth demonstration, the
porpoise appeared much excited, and for her final performance
she gave an elaborate display, including multiple pieces of
behavior of which four were entirely newnever before
observed in this species of animal. These were not solely

s
genetically endowed abilities; they were learned, the result of an

es
experiment in time. This process in which the subjectwhether

Pr
a patient or a dolphinuses the memories of other interactions
and other situations to transform his or her actions within the

on
immediate scenario can become the very seat of innovation. The
gt
dolphins ego (in so far as we decide she has one) was sufficiently
weakened to be reformed, developing new attachments to
n
hi

objects in its environment and to memories in its past. This

rewired network of relations can lead to emergence through the
as

recontextualization of the situation within which the confused

W

and conflicted animal finds itself.44

of

This story curves itself around the technae of experimental

etiquette, but it could very easily be told, and has been, by poets
ity

such as the 19th century Urdu poet, Asadullah Khan Ghalib, about
rs

desire that reaches towards a beloved who will never be available:

ve

to stay is to die (because the beloved will not have you) and to leave
is to die (because you will not have the beloved). But for Ghalib,
ni

living with himself, self-intimacy in the double bind is the point,

U

the true heart of being a real lover. What it gives him is a peculiarly
angled style of composition, an andz-e bayn, a genre of poetics
peculiar to Urdu, whose metaphorics he exploits rapaciously.
Ghalib orchestrates the intransigent puzzle at the heart of faith:
Sren Kierkegaards waking dream, a nightmare soaked in passion.
Like Ghalibs ghazal universe with its repeated stock of theatre
actors, scenes and sets, the lover, beloved, the street in which
to loiter in longing, the garden whose unswerving illustrative
 Introduction47

death coordinates love which in Halperns version, must never

be resolved, Batesons tale of orchestrated dolphin torture too
has its characters emplaced: a single subject at a time, repeatedly
subjected to the same set of procedures. The keepers, feeders,
pond, food: the environment in which the porpoise lives out its
regimen. The story is both exceptional and ordinary at the same
time. That it is about food makes it bothstarvation and eating,

s
hunger and fullness its two polesheld in an elusive balance

es
between madness and sanity. Living successfully, dancing for

Pr
its dinner in experimental domiciles is seen as being in its right
mind, and its tussle with having its conventions unexpectedly

on
eroded so that it was kept from food, deemed insane. The tale
gt
of the dolphin-porpoise is a parable: about extracting a living
being from familiar ecologies and shipping it off to a place
n
hi

where it resides and is taught to live at the mercy of militarised

protocols that reorder its ability to keep aliveand here again,
as

Mausss folding of habit and the incidental into the routines of war
W

might prove expedient. The porpoise ventriloquises the planet,

or may serve as an allegorical insight for the earth bound into
of

conventions limned in analyses tied down by the Anthropocene.45

ity

As Halpern is at pains to point out, Bateson understood the

double bind as the ethical condition of the world that we, who
rs

are said to live in Euro-America, inhabit in the present: you are

ve

damned if you do and damned if you dontfrom consuming

ni

that kills our world to making decisions about abortion. It is

equally about scenarios from the global South.46 Each decision an
U

independent one, each settled on a particular subject, each facing

down one set of circumstances, each an ethical instance. And,
of course, somewhere in the background of this study are others
about folks in an elsewhere, the boring lives of primitivised
Indonesians who appear to live outside the borders of the double
bind, communities that Bateson and Margaret Mead banalised
pictorially in tedious detail, tedium as salve?
 introduction
48

The problem with the double bind as a psychological

pathological command or necessity is that it, in the guise of
technologies such as risk which one takes on seemingly by oneself
in a move towards fictive seclusion or isolationism, is commonly
lodged, networked into the socius of political economies.
However much one wishes to devolve the bind onto a single
person at a time, as though one were stripped bare of community,

s
collusion, double binds, la Gilles Deleuze, are knotty places,

es
actants in latticed assemblages, rhizomatic by their very nature,

Pr
perhaps even slime-mould like. Binds need theatres of space-time,
of memory, of archived consistencies to evoke the sentiment, the

on
rasa palate of torment. Spivaks woman subaltern and the double
gt
bind that entrenches us when we try and make her talk, speak
up for herself, are possible only in a particular colonial history.
n
hi

One where the speaking woman, as subject, is necessary to an

entire extra-judicial and legal edifice, and one where her speaking
as

is always, under those conditions, muted. Where speaking is a

W

proxy for colonial interventionism, or planetary annihilation.

What purchase does the double bind give me? Why have I
of

turned to it in the closing section of my assay of my book? The

ity

double bind is the final habit, one that gives up an elliptical

sightline on habits that we refuse to release, the ultimate place
rs

where recursivity resides, coming back like a compact with

ve

pleasure and terror every single time. To let go of binds within

ni

binds one has to perhaps release oneself of commitments to

a life lead as it once was, to forgo the self one has. Time is
U

apochryphal. Domesticity, that catches our theoretical breath,

holds it to life, is one such place. Risk, as I have suggested at
the end of the book, is another, but since it is forged in the
crucible of capital, other familiars such as the volatile craving
for aspirational futures emerge from it, which capture us again
in double binds. They come back like bad pennies, and the 2014
election results in India are perhaps one ramification. Others
in South Asia include newer Supreme Court of India decisions
 Introduction49

in favour of transgender subjects who are still living under the

shadow of a colonial sodomy statute, or decisions to parcel out
territory to corporations determined to extract materials and
energy at any cost.
To surrender fantasies embedded in the physics of certitude
that underwrite projects which promise salvation from
Newtonian time or from some unitary national fable one has

s
to relinquish the interests of the speaker, shed some measure of

es
intellectual authority. Foucault has taught us to be wary of our

Pr
own yearning for mastery, but to do so requires that an entire
armature, a rhizome, be forgone. What might that take? Although

on
many intellectual collaborations have proposed options, habits are
gt
hard to discard, even when their meaning seems to have floated
away like an empty cylinder.
n
hi

The double bind encapsulates the curious and brutal

conundrum of the carnivore, the cannibal who masticates the
as

world that it must keep on producing to allow it to continue

W

its life. Risk is the habit of its heart, one becomes innured to
risk; so much so that it is possible to imagine that one can hold
of

off uncertainty indefinitely. So, closing Risky Bodies & Techno-

ity

Intimacy with risk as travelling ontological episteme for human-

ness is my attempt to grapple with where we are at present.
rs

Histories where Husserls mathematisation of the sciences or

ve

the standing reserve, Heideggers potent description of human

ni

nature, circuit through the human in narratives, characters,

plot devices, such as the Anthropocene, but without centering
U

the human. For if we do not do that, we are dumped into the

heart of the genocidal double bind that is gobbling the world
up, species lost, techtonics grumbling, air derelictthe ethically
mixed auguries and narrative mise en scnes scape of film after
film. Temporal ecologies are at stake here: some of them might
be seen in the last chapter. Compassion, as karun rather than
unadorned justice, might suffice but no subject will, whether it
is the self-willed Anthropocene, and no object will, even if it is
 introduction
50

the ambivalent one of climate change as a heuristic model that

must miscarry successfully.
Risky Bodies & Techno-Intimacy advocates a jugd method for
this time, without a subject and bereft of any proper objecthere
I suggest itineraries that traverse such impossible, irresolvable
catastrophic enigmas. Our usual disciplinary lineages or
intellectual genealogies, or consistencies of composition have led

s
us to domiciles of no reserve, so we need to transit to responses

es
that do not pile up into the conventions we often pursue, follow or

Pr
seek. And in them, we ought to gaze again with karun or sharp
immersed vigilance on the sightlines that tether, which lean in to

on
reassure us about the things we seem to know, those that entangle
gt
one in double binds, or forsake binds to consolatory ends. To
speak to the labour of translating across the disciplinary hitches
n
hi

that ensue, as I have done here, which call for different ripostes
in each chapter, I resort to genres of writing that cannot be folded
as

into one another and which must remain incommensurable:

W

massaging jugd theory. They should encompass interrogating

gestures enmeshed in the dogged brutality of the double bind and
of

a preoccupation with the archival form, attend to the volatility

ity

of finance, linger on science misplaced.

So, aesthetic practices of vulnerable incomplete reading that
rs

catch readers up in an epistemic caress. The importance of the

ve

niggle, the efficacy of small itch, rather than the portentiousness of

ni

a discovery: the process, the course, as this book will show, ought
to matter more than the advent of arrival. Perhaps a child whose
U

acumen about habits that we hang on to for dear life can teach us
about soma, whose bounds flow beyond skin without finishing up
in any one place. We are so used to the epistemic aesthetic frisson
of colonial settler narrativesI have found myself this new piece
of forgotten land that I can make over and am plunking a flag
down on it in my name, mapping it onto what I feel should inhabit
the map of monumental things. While at the same time we are also
so aware of the monumental as capitalised, and therefore under
 Introduction51

constant erasure. As the oddity, as the exception. I would like

to close with my own gestures throughout Risky Bodies towards
the counter monumental and a contradictory possibly incipient
monumentalisationin celebrating the vulnerability of the almost
not grasped. If one fancies, yearns for a synaesthetic story of a
ghost, the ashes of remaindered violence, one may do well to
fall back on the askance, the ellipsis, a slight shift in sensibility

s
at the corner of a hand, at the verge of which one almost stops

es
being able to sense.47

Pr
Notes

on
1
Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other
Writings 19721977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon
gt
Books, 1980), 193.
n
2 Though my writing and research on risk predates all the current
hi

incarnations of it, I would like to point out one recent journal

as

issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, Extraction, Logistics, and

Finance 114.1 (January 2015), guest edited by Sandro Mezzadra
W

and Brett Neilson, that has several articles on risk from different
of

geographical and political economic locations. I am indebted to

Anjali Arondekar for bringing it to my attention.
ity

3 This entire section plays off Langdon Winners oft cited article,
Do Artefacts Have Politics? Daedulus 109.1 (Winter 1980):
rs

121136; special issue on Modern Technology: Problem or

ve

Opportunity. A response to Winner that exposes his stories as

fables, especially the one about Robert Moses building lowered
ni

bridges on parkways, which then curtailed the passage of certain

U

sorts of vehicles and thus circumvented the access of certain sorts

of people to beaches, such as Jones Beach, moves the object of
the technological from the infrastructural to the narrative (as
technology invested with arguments in favour of seeing politics),
suits my purposes here, in conjunction with Winners original
intervention. See Bernward Joerges, Do Politics Have Artefacts?
Social Studies of Science 29.3 (June 1999): 411431. See also Kavita
Philips new research that brings together artefacts imbued with
and carrying lineages of the politicalsuch as data bases from
 introduction
52

different periodsbeginning with H.H. Risleys monumental

Castes and Tribes of India to the current Census to look at the
reproduction of caste as categorical political. Kavita Philip.
Databases as Politics: Reflections on STS in South Asia, STS
Colloquium, University of Virginia, September 2014.
The work the introduction does is to bring into conversation
what has been carried in, embodied in, enabled through,
promised as, advocated via the lineages of technologies that

s
es
the book describes or interpellates: each one of these places (as
artefactual) is saturated with, invested with, or manages value in

Pr
various lineages of the political, whether they are carried by statist,
disciplinary, alterior or party practices. The introduction is, thus,

on
generative and attentive to the political in, through, via, in the
gt
guise of, managed by, mediated by the artefactual. For the most
recent work on techno-intimacy see Kath Westons forthcoming
n
book, Animate Planet: Making Visceral Sense of Living in a High-
hi

Tech Ecologically Damaged World (Durham: Duke University

as

Press, forthcoming)
W

4 See Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the

Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011) for a
of

specific rendition of what I am attending to here: things that

pass, live without notice, incremental slowed down everydayness
ity

that can stock up towards a death spiral. The command of this

sort of attentiveness to non-exceptionalism is what drew me to
rs

unravelling the seductive ordinariness of risk and insurance and

ve

the technologies I began to call life-finance.

ni

5 The dilemmas provoked by Ian Hacking will return in another

avatar when allude to autism. Ian Hacking, Humans, Aliens &
U

Autism, Daedalus 138.3 (Summer 2009): 4459, 44. See also

Hackings description of Ludwig Wittgensteins method which is
particularly apropos for engaging with what is so obvious in the
commonplaces of language in Historical Ontology (Cambridge
MA: Harvard University Press) 215216. Or one can re-remember
in a key that makes not much sense in the place in which the
remembering is lived practice: such is the case with transgender.
Archives, as so many discussions have suggested, are about
 Introduction53

forgetting as well as turning memories into artefact. The issues

raised here are not about forgetting per se. One often forgets.
What is at stake, however, is how one forgets and whether or
not forgetting is an encrypted or long-lasting ontologies or state
for either the person forgetting or the thing forgotten. As Anjali
Arondekar shows so eloquently in For the Record: On Sexuality
and the Colonial Archive in India (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2009). Following upon Kath Westons article, Lesbian and

s
es
Gay Studies in the House of Anthropology, Annual Review of
Anthropology 22 (1993): 339367, re-remembering seems so tied

Pr
into practices of recuperating sexuality from lost archives.
6 Martin Heidegger, Building Dwelling Thinking in Poetry,

on
Language, Thought (New York: Perennial Classics, 2001), 141159.
gt
7 In this book, I attend to detail without it becoming the necessary
salvific form, the end in itself, the only proper avenue to a
n
sight line such as one sees in certain advocates of the Annales
hi

School, and in the rhetorical demands by particular feminist

as

constituencies. I often get asked, when I present work on the

W

writer Ismat Chughtai, whether I know everything about her,

as though knowing it all, or tracking every minute bit would
of

give me the appropriate traction to become an authority on

the subject or really get a handle on it. The granular project
ity

of tracing small things was the culmination of an important

historiographic intervention by the French historians of the
rs

Annales School (whose genre conventions echoed those of 19th

ve

century literary realists) that focused on social history and the

ni

ordinary, on general mentalities rather than decisions. See also

Lauren Berlants Elliptical Life (unpublished).
U

8
She provides a holding environment. . . . When she fails, she
tries again. She weathers painful feelings. She makes sacrifices.
Winnicotts good-enough mother is not so much a goddess; she
is a gardener. She tends her baby with love, patience, effort, and
care. This quote from Psychology Today provides a sufficiently
apt, slightly popularised description of what Winnicott intends
that gives some sense of what I intend here. Jennifer Kuntz, In
search of a good enough mother, Psychology Today, May 9, 2012.
 introduction
54

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/headshrinkers-guide-the-
galaxy/201205/in-search-the-good-enough-mother, last accessed
January 22, 2014.
Surrealist bricolage, in its strongest aesthetic form, is almost
appropriate for what I try out in several chapters, such as the first
one on transgender questions, science and diasporic embodiments
in story and theory. Each section in that chapter is not meant to
flow out of the prior one but be laid against it in a non self-evident

s
es
way, to incite readers to push and pull against the conventions of
representation in which sexuality folds into gender or otherness,

Pr
racialisation or science held in place for several different disciplines.
9 http://lexicon.ft.com/Term?term=jugaad-innovation. Jugd is now

on
commonplace enough that the Financial Times has included it
gt
in its business lexicon. See also Reena Jana, Indias Next Global
Export: Innovation, December 2, 2009, http://www.businessweek.
n
com/innovate/content/dec2009/id2009121_864965.htm. Perhaps
hi

it has come into its own in the era of flexible labour and time
as

shortages when one uses only what one can immediately lay ones
W

hands on. Anyone who has spent time in South Asia and seen the
vehicles, cars, motor cycles, machines, clothes, lovingly made over
of

from the parts at hand that were repurposed, has seen first-hand
the tender and pragmatic invocations of jugd at work; its other
ity

faces show up in the ways that politicians finesse solutions or a

buyer figures out how to acquire a supposedly unattainable and
rs

coveted object. For its current incarnation that is put to use to

ve

describe contemporary innovation as the good enough solution

ni

to get the job done, see Navi Rajdou, Jaideep Prabhu, Simone
Ahuja, Jugaad Innovation: Think Frugal, Be Flexible, Generate
U

Breakthrough Growth (London: Jossey-Bass, 2012). See also their

Harvard Business Review article, Jugaad: A New Growth Formula
for Corporate America, January 25, 2010, https://hbr.org/2010/01/
jugaad-a-new-growth-formula-fo.
10
See, as a collaborative counterpoint, writing on queer theory
which works with multiple social economies, but does not engage
sufficiently with the writings on jugd or other such engagements
that come out of the pragmatics of daily living, with scarce
resources endemic to political economies where making do is
 Introduction55

ordinary. David Eng, Judith Halberstam, Jos Esteban Muoz,

Whats Queer about Queer Studies Now? Social Text 20.3/4
(2005): 117.
11 I dont pretend to newness here. My lineages and interlocutors
are far-flung and capacious and include meta-epistemological
historians of science such as Lorraine Daston and her roving suit
of collaborators (Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology, op.cit.). But
I make science one of my opening references here because this

s
es
book would not usually be recognised as one about science. So
I am attempting to tease out what epistemological habits might

Pr
give rise to this particular misnomer, or mis-recognition. Forms
that would be more familiar to many science studies practitioners

on
include: historians of science tracking the protocols of a single
gt
sort of science, lab practices for a marine biologist, technologies
or armatures for techno-science, the metaphoric passages that
n
science might wend through other avenues (economies, or literary
hi

themes), or deploying what is considered the science proper to a

as

project, biology brought to bear on gender and sexuality (bodies

W

are, after all, about biology).

12 In my traversals across different forms that science assumes in this
of

book, I take my cue from Ian Hacking talking, in his introduction

to Historical Ontology, about the many ways in which he does
ity

philosophy. Stefan Helmreichs Alien Ocean: Anthropological

Voyages in Microbial Seas (Berkeley: University of California Press,
rs

2009) performs similar moves, and chances a range of allusive

ve

interventions.
ni

13 Freud reduxarchives are the animators of hours of therapy,

and without brain residue these would fail to hold their charge to
U

cure. The heart of the confessional for Foucault: its not just that
he is doing history, but for him excavating history is seminal to
knowledge/truth. For Derrida, the narrative of origins produced
after the fact goes on to explain the banality of present lives. All
of them play against a will to particular pasts that have been
dredged up to make sense of the lived future which produce a
kind of consolatory excitement embedded in a past, as though the
past were made up of stem cells that might give us new organs.
Archives excite this sort of sludge and dredge. Dead bodies and
 introduction
56

criminal cases: both of them live on the promise of the archive

that they track and unravel.
For Foucault, single stories are put to use for both the
emotional valences they carry and the rationalist explandums
they feed. Charged up by single stories we image ourselves the
best of saviours, salvation handed out like a salad on a platter
(Johns head on the plate offered to Herod). The potency vested in
the one story is a residue from the people of the book, from the

s
es
insinuations into the everyday of religions that follow the biblical.
See Chapter 4.

Pr
14 One of the historians who had consistently turned to regions rather
than nations as the orchestrators of, or the ground on which

on
historiographical explorations rest, was Prasenjit Duara in his
gt
1995 work on East Asia. Indian Ocean studies now has a rather
robust set of practitioners; some of the early dissenters from the
n
nationalist narrative may be said to include: K. N. Chaudhuri,
hi

Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History

as

from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University

W

Press, 1985) and Kenneth McPherson, The Indian Ocean: A

History of People and the Sea (New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
of

1993). A very spare list of more recent exponents include Lakshmi

Subramanian, Engseng Ho, and Indrani Chatterjee whose
ity

seminal work on slavery troubled many habits of routinised

intellectual traffic. Histories of migration sometimes move away
rs

from nation-state analyses and sometimes come back to them in

ve

the guise of regions of belonging, or as places that communities

ni

leave to go elsewhere, especially if those regions are constituted

as the nation. Though Anjali Arondekar and I have designed a
U

special issue for GLQ Area Impossible, to come out in 2016 that
takes some of its theoretical cues from what area studies might
suggest for imagining non-national political economies, I dont
think of area studies as a salve for my questions here, because the
politics embedded in its design is about national protectionism,
which is akin to some queer studies formations in the US. See
also Philip Sterns 2012 seminal work, The Company-State:
Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the
British Empire in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press), which
 Introduction57

reformats theories that produce embodiments of the state (and

therefore also nation) in synoptic symbiosis with companies,
corporations, collectives, using the East India Companys history
from its inception as its palette. Sterns suggestive refigurations
are in keeping with those I have worked out in my own research
on pension funds and the East India Company.
15 In the Absence of Reliable Ghosts: Sexuality, Historiography,

South Asia, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies

s
es
25:3 (2015): 98121.
16 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar (Berkeley:

Pr
University of California Press, 2005), 34.
17 Anthropologists, Jane Guyer among them, are much less

on
wedded to homogeneity and emptiness than scholars from
gt
other disciplines; their engagements with the nitty-gritty of
everyday worlds, where neither homogeneity nor emptiness hold,
n
commands their temporal attention in other keys. Nor do many
hi

of them stalk science in conventional ways. My interrogations and

as

openings in this section are indebted to many of those intellectual

W

conversations.
18 Bliss Cua Lim, Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and
of

Temporal Critique (Durham: Duke University Press 2009), Dipesh

Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and
ity

Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press),

Chakrabarty has attempted, in his recent work, to think about
rs

the human as in the Anthropocene whose time cannot be

ve

confined to Histories 1 or 2, to image historical temporalities

ni

through humans as geo-physical entities (rather than merely

as beings attended by or constituted through some notion of
U

rights) roiling the earth, breaking stone and water apart, fusing
air, mutating light. But, in doing so, he forfeits the vigour of the
intellectual labour he might have put History 2 towards. Kaushik
Ghoshs incitements to revisit indigenous epistemologies which
are rigorously material worlds, knowing in the flesh, shared in a
networked fashion with other beings, plants, creatures, energies,
place the humans of History 2 (if one wants to invoke it here)
in nuanced ecologiesin other words, History 2 is or can be
human-geo-physical in a more subtle, dense, thorny, intricate
 introduction
58

way than Chakrabartys call to yet another temporality under the

current conditions of world decimation might envision. Therein
lie the assumptions coded into Chakrabartys production of
othersas haplessly available for the production of otherness,
without any historical heft. Both Husserl and writers such as
David Abram in The Spell of the Sensuous (New York: Vintage
Books, 1996), where he traverses many sites to garner a textured
grasp on humans in the eco-world, might serve as wayfinders

s
es
for thinkers such as Chakrabarty.
19 Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (The Care of the

Pr
Self). (New York: Vintage Books, 1990).
20 Domenico Bertoloni Meli, Thinking With Objects: The Transformation

on
of Mechanics in the Seventeenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
gt
University Press, 2006).
21 Takehiko Hashimoto, Japanese Clocks and the History of
n
Punctuality in Modern Japan, East Asian Science, Technology and
hi

Society: an International Journal (2008) 2: 123133.

as

22 The empty part of the homogenous is usually attributed to Walter

W

Benjamin.
23 Anjali Arondekar, Timepass: A (Queer) View from South Asia.
of

http://parlormultimedia.com/twitest/arondekar-2015-03. As
Kavita Philip does so poignantly in her recent manuscript, or
ity

as I do in several chapters here, one might consider takes of the

heterogenous through nationalist/colonial history and through
rs

realist film. In fact, Philip was asked a question that seized on

ve

her nonchalance with respect to what had seemed so inevitable

ni

to Lim; Philips casual indifference to opening salvos in support

of heterogenous time that began their forays by shooting at
U

homogenous emptiness. See also Kath Weston, Gender in

Real Time: Power and Transience in a Visual Age (New York:
Routledge, 2002).
24 Peter Galison, Einsteins Clocks and Poincares Maps: Empires of

Time (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2004). Einsteins

relationship to clocks is the apocryphal ur-story of relativity.
Engineers for the Indian Railways in the 19th century turned to
clocks, not to imagine the empty homogenous ticking away but to
 Introduction59

come to grips with incommensurable temporalities, to tangle with

the conundrum of speeded-up or slowed-own time and with the
time-stopping shock of the accident. Some of the many barrages
lobbed at it alluded to here, even at the time when homogenous
time supposedly established its dominion include Marxs nuanced
invocations of temporality. In the Grundrisse, Marx reveals the
constant annulling of time under capital, its conversion, if you
will, into lack, negation, and death, or the times of revolutionary

s
es
pleasure as crises in the time of money: as Casarino so painstakingly
shows. Others are Bergsons metaphors where time constantly

Pr
attempts to catch up with itself, which Muhammad Iqbal, the
masterful Urdu poet, philosopher and political thinker, picked up

on
on in his dissertation. We can also add Althussers return to the
gt
Greek materialist thinkers and turbulent vitality, contingency
as necessity, both feeding on each other in a rambunctious cycle.
n
Edmund Husserl suggests the phenomenological invocations of
hi

subjective temporality using sound, of collapsing or prolonging

as

as one moves, steps towards or away from the memory of a tone,

W

or where the perception of temporal object itself has temporality,

that the perception of duration itself presupposes the duration
of

of perception. Schumpeter invokes metaphors of expansion and

contraction which play out in the newer invocations of time along
ity

a geo-physical scale.
25 Cesare Casarino, Time Matters: Marx, Negri, Agamben and the
rs

Corporeal in (with Antonio Negri) In Praise of the Common

ve

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). Edmund

ni

Husserl, Elements of a Science of a Life World in Essential

Husserl (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 5859.
U

For Marx: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works.

26 Cesare Casarino, Time Matters, 239.
27 I notice the curious resilience of homogenous time even in the
analytics that fill up place with political physical geographies.
Needless to say, there are many thinkers such as Rob Nixon in his
work on slow violence; critical geographers and anthropologists
working the edges of time-space and space-time, fusing rather
than separating them, who refuse to re-orchestrate such analytics.
 introduction
60

Of course, the point I am making here is not just about alterior

modes or models but the orientations which undergird those
modes to replenish homogenous time.
28 Although in teasing out what I am grappling with here, I
choreograph stories with protagonists stuck in reiterating the
stories they live and tell, the protagonist I deploy for my purposes
is not a singular but an allegorical collective, a stand-in for
shared practices. Perhaps Tim Mortons work might serve as a

s
es
counterpoint, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End
of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013)

Pr
though I am not fully convinced of the efficacy of things such
as climate change as a hyperobject, it might provide a sufficient

on
heuristic. In any case, my protagonist as collective has some
gt
resonances with Mortons hyperobject.
29 Paul Krugman, The Fall and Rise of Development Economics
n
in Lloyd Rodwin and Donald Schn (eds.), Rethinking the
hi

Development Experience: Essays Provoked by the Work of Albert

as

O. Hirschman (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1994), 3958.

W

Bertant, Elliptical Life.

30 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the world begins its
of

travails as clothing, as apparel worn by monks and nuns, then

comes to designate outward appearance and external deportment,
ity

and moves into mental constitution, disposition, custom, moral

constitution. Habit can mean a settled disposition or tendency to
rs

act in a certain way, especially one acquired by frequent repetition

ve

of the same act until it becomes almost or quite involuntary; a

ni

settled practice, custom, usage; a customary way or manner of

acting. (The most usual current sense. Properly said of living
U

beings; in modern use, occasionally of inanimate things.) By the

late 1500s, habit is summoned into use as the condition of being
accustomed to something through having constantly to do with
it; familiarity, on intimate habits: on intimate terms, familiar. By
the 1600s it is mobilised towards custom usage, use, want. In
late 1700, the word is absorbed into the idea of something done
without notice that has been absorbed into biological attributes:
natural instinctive characteristics of plants and animals. By
the 1800s the phrase fall into the habit comes into use, and
 Introduction61

habit is psychologised more explicitly late in the century as

an automatic reaction. But some philosophical discussions on
Bourdieus habitus take the word as concept back to Aristotle and
the seventh chapter of the second book of Nichomachean Ethics
where Aristotle explores acts, virtues and character through the
materialised idea of hexis or deep-seated dispositions. From there,
they track habitus to the Summa Theologiae or Summa Theologica
of Thomas Aquinas, who picks up on Aristotles interweaving

s
es
of acts, disposition and character in exploring two concepts
dispositio and habitus. Many of these complex interlacings echo

Pr
the grammars of habit in South Asian languages, through none
of them sees Aristotle as a product of Islamic commentators

on
such as Ab al-Wald Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Muhammad
gt
ibn Rushdor Averros, from 12th century Crdoba, Spain.
See http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.2.ii.html and
n
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/aquinas/summa.
hi

All the phrases in quotations are taken from the Oxford English
as

Dictionary online at the University of Virginia.

W

31 http://www.glamsham.com/music/lyrics/namak-halaal-(1982)/
pag-ghungroo-baandh/1868/3842.htm
of

Bur dat hai yeh dat abhi badal dlo

Kyonke yeh dat to woh g hai jo
ity

Ik din apn ghar phnke phnke phnke re,

is a verse of the song, Pag Ghungroo Baandh, from the movie
rs

Namak Hall (2005). I am indebted to Ravikanth for this reference

ve

and the reminder that dat often shows up when one is expected
ni

to leave it behind and appears most frequently in idiomatic form.

32 Shirish Rao, V. Geetha, Gita Wolf (eds.), An Ideal Body: Charts
U

from India (Stockport: Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2001). See

also the website for the company that started in 1936, which
publishes these posters along with many others, such as lists of
animals and plants, as well as maps, that are familiar in an India
classroom. http://ibdmaphouse.com/ItemDetails.aspx?IID=549#.
UvddqPmSySo, last accessed May 5, 2014.
33 Bhavani Ramans book offers an apt case of the transformations
of habit in Madras Presidency in the late 18th and early 19th
centuries that enabled a writerly colonial state. Here the practices
 introduction
62

of governance travelled through recording transactions but at the

same time refused that record when it suited. Her full descriptions
of the transformations point out the elliptical nature of changes,
and include everything from the emergence of the signature and
its efficacy in verification protocols, to the significance of new
languages of record and the necessity of the idea of grammar to
new police procedures. The connections established between these
various protocols were tangential and sometimes brutal. Bhavani

s
es
Raman, Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial India
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

Pr
34 I am indebted to Richard Handler and his vast archive of delightful,

apropos and stimulating historical bric--brac that enlivens our

on
conversations over American football, for this reminder about
gt
Elias.
35 The essay is called Technique du Corps translated as technae
n
of the flesh, of the body. It was published in Mausss book, Les
hi

Techniques du Corps (1934). The essay was first published in

as

Journal de Psychologie XXXII: 34 (15 March15 April 1936), and

W

presented as a talk at the Socit de Psychologie on May 17, 1934.

It appears as Techniques of the Body in the English version of
of

Les Techniques du Corps edited by Nathan Schlanger, Techniques,

Technology and Civilization (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006),
ity

7796.
36 Ibid., pp. 78, 79, 82, 83, 80, 81, 83, 83, 80, 82.
rs

37 This, however much Mauss leaves aside thinking when putting

ve

bodies into play.

ni

38 Vinay Gidwani, Capital, Interrupted: Agrarian Development and

the Politics of Work in India (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

U

Press, 2008).
39 Or a kind of analysis that makes life over in a particular way

through fantasmatic analytics such as norm or heteronormative

assumptions? What does that mean when we point this out as
such? Is heteronormative an assumption that we attend to? Jasbir
Puar says that heteronormative is an assumption and I agreebut
instead of locating the heteronormative in different places and
pointing out how it is produced, I see that the person looking is
the one wedded to the assumption that they seek so assiduously.
 Introduction63

40 KathWeston, Render Me, Gender Me: Lesbians Talk Sex, Class,

Color, Nation, Studmuffins. . . . (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1996).
41 I have taken this felicitous phrase from Kath Westons comments
for a panel on Dematerialization and the Politics of Bare
Life, Society for Cultural Anthropology meetings, Detroit,
May 2014.
42 What Foucault might call norm I shift to habit. For Foucault norm

s
es
seems to carry an attachment to liveness and brings into presence
the very possibility of life itself (History of Sexuality, 135150).

Pr
Norms are shaped as recognisable conventions institutionalised
by architectures of pedagogies and matrices of practices that

on
bind power as knowledge. They are staged through constellations
gt
of characters peculiar to each organisation in which they are
shaped such as the school, hospital, army or prison, The History
n
of Sexuality is about changes in habit (or in Foucults parlance,
hi

norms) and about attachments engendered in the process. How

as

then does all this bear on the ways in which power and habits come
W

together? Might Walter Benjamins invocation of habit suggest an

avenue? How does one manage networked habits, using Foucault
of

as a conduit, or see ones way into or through the double bind?

43
Two juxtapositions that thicken this discussion might be the Urdu
ity

poet Mirajis invocation of mubham (murky, undecidable) in the

cusp of the violent ending of an era of aesthetics, post 1857, and
rs

Achille Mdembes work on necropolitics and the sovereignties

ve

made in a state of constant war (that Foucault also elaborates):

ni

both are perhaps the necessary conditions for post-colonies as

well as for the world eaten up alive.
U

44 See more at: http://sfonline.barnard.edu/feminist-media-theory/

schizophrenic-techniques-cybernetics-the-human-sciences-and-
the-double-bind/#sthash.81GgJ2io.dpuf
45 http://www.anthropocene.info/en/home
46 See Elizabeth Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging
and Endurance in Late Liberalism (Durham: Duke University Press,
2011) for the double bind that opens the book.
47 See Amanda Baggs, In My Language https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=JnylM1hI2jc. I close the introduction, too, with someone
 introduction
64

who might fall under the category of differently abled because I

have often lived here and it has shoved me into other sensoriums,
where the human in conventional keys fails to accrue sonic
sense, and here is where some of this book lives. For interventions
that take these themes into the purview of ecology manifested
variously, see Abrams early book, The Spell, as well as Weston,
Animate Planet, and Geeta Patel, Seeding Debt: Alchemy, Death
and the Precarious Farming of Life-finance in the Global South,

s
es
Cultural Critique 89 (Winter 2015): 137.

Pr
on
n gt
hi
as
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of
ity
rs
ve
ni
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