Why I Love our Commenters
Yes, we disagree. Yes, most of you even fight amongst yourselves. Our voices and opinions are as diverse as the people in our community. So be it. This is how we learn from one another.
Sometimes you challenge us (the bloggers). Most of the time you challenge each other (the commenters). Do I wish the level of discussion with each other could be raised? At times, yes. Do I appreciate that you take the time to engage? ABSOLUTELY! Why? Because you care enough about the community, about Gurbani, about our collective future to engage.
In the latest spat, there are differences in perspectives. About the events in the UK, guest bloggers like Naujawani Sardar and commenters such as Blighty Singh see the events from the perspective of the besieged Sikhs in Southall and other locales, and see the actions as just that – riots, failure by the police, and actions filled by the Sikhs in the UK. They give special place to the role played by Sangat TV. They are basking in the special prominence and goodwill the community has generated, unseen in the UK, where Sikhs have rarely attracted much attention, especially much positive, in the post-Satanic Verses UK political geography.
Other commenters such as DeepH, Sahneval, and others are those of the open-minded Sikhs in other countries throughout the world (but not in the UK). They are questioning the structural issues that led to the rioting in the first place. Like Blighty, they have a special place for issues of the dispossessed, although it goes beyond only the Sikh community. Again though, they are not in a besieged circumstance at present.
Despite romantic ideas of solidarity (although the actions of the Sikh community, especially towards the Muslims and other groups, proudly goes far beyond the romantic!), I have a gut feeling that should the events of the UK have occurred in Canada or the US, Sahneval and DeepH would be standing with the Sikhs to protect those spaces, rather than with the uprising (or looters, depending on one’s perspective).
I think both positions can be held and respected, as they are BOTH the product of contingency and circumstance. Randep touches on this, but in typical fashion is ambiguous and vague. One can continue to push for the cause of the dispossessed and challenge the structures that oppress. One can also stand behind one’s community (also oppressed) and make sure that their right to life and liberty is also not trampled upon. The tent of Sikhi is big enough for all. That is the Guru’s Grace. The space of the The Langar Hall is big enough for both views at all. Let us continue to learn!
58 Responses to “Why I Love our Commenters”
Having spent enough time distilling your entries, presenting arguments, and actually engaging you and other bloggers, this brings a smile to my face. Take a look at some of these posts in which put up lengthy and structured posts, trying address you and other bloggers on this website:
http://thelangarhall.com/sikhi/gurpreet-kaur-bhat… http://thelangarhall.com/sikhi/no-longer-a-silent… http://thelangarhall.com/general/the-peddler-of-s… http://thelangarhall.com/general/sharing-the-guru…
But you folks don't roll. You give up, sticking your fingers in your ears. It's all good on my end, cuz' there's a dearth of sincerity with which blogging on this site gets done. At the end here, all you have is religious sloganeering, stuff like, "The tent of Sikhi is big enough for all. That is the Guru’s Grace," which although may me a nice sound-byte, flies in the face of the entire post. That's alright.
The underlying problem that seems to pervade TLH thinking is that errant assumption that Sikhs form a community, the trap you are unambiguously ensnared by at the end of your post, in which you say "One can also stand behind one’s community…" That is the defensive instinct that is present in this post, the defensive instinct that pervades the blog itself and what has gone on for Sikhs certainly in the West. So, I leave you with some ideas from the last blog-post I linked to above about the your idea of community:
But what if we even questioned the very assumption that Sikhs owe allegiance to any communities, even their own. What if we questioned whether Sikhs should even be a community, or whether we have ever been a community. What if we shouldn't even want to be a community. John Caputo, a very brilliant and charitable Christian philosopher, sees this very clearly. He speaks of the philosopher Derrida, saying:
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"What he [Derrida] does not like about the word community is its connotations of "fusion" and "identification". After all, _communio_ is a word for a military formation and a kissing cousin of the word for "munitions"; to have a _communio_ is to be fortified on all sides, to build a "common" (_com_) "defense" (_munis_), as when a wall is put up around the city to keep the stranger or the foreigner out."
–from Deconstruction in a Nutshell, by John Caputo
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What this brilliant remark shows is that your allegiance to "Sikh" community is part of the process which itself is responsible for being insular and inbred. After all, there is a reason why community and "communalism" are so close together. As long as you are primarily engaged in "simply knowing who we are and what we believe", you make a boundary between you and others. It involves saying "who we _aren't_ and what we _reject_", which will happen to be Christians, Hindus, tyrants, capitalists, the bourgoise, greed, lust, evil, the middle-class, etc. This, in turn, reinforces a sort of insularity and ego-ism, so long as we continue this process of pushing the stink outside our walls, outside of our communities. But, this sly tactic, this "sianpa" will ultimately never succeed.
That is why The Langar Hall, as you have just demonstrated, is never interested in asking deep and tough questions. But, instead, it is interested in pushing this simplistic ideology of communal identity worship. I am not here saying that Sikhs should no longer be religious. I am saying that Panth is something that requires more risk and less self-worship, something that is beyond the petty matters of "what we believe" that have tortured Christian ideologies and factions. Panth requires more commitment and humility than the self-worship in claiming to be an "ambassador on behalf of sikhism".
I'm more than a little valium-ed up right now, so I apologize for any vagueness in my post.
If I have grasped your post correctly it appears to say that building and maintaining a Sikh community will lead to failure. What is your criteria for success here?
You write of "communal identity worship" – I think you see something that isn't really there; having shared values and practices does not equate to worship.
The insularity of TLH blogging, i.e. the communal identity worship, is I believe beyond merely sharing values, practices, etc. The reason I equate the posts here with "titillation", "worship", etc. is because Jodha and co. are unable to step beyond the strands of liberal thinking about human rights, religion, culture, and a whole array of interrelated concepts that revolve around the Sikh identity. By liberal, I don't mean it in the sense of liberal vs. conservative – I mean it in terms of the humanistic interpretation of life that centers man's own thinking and self-interpretation as the ends of thinking. That's where I think some of the comment-ors take a mistep. The counter-argument to the narrow, liberal stance, which is indeed just as conservative, fundamentalistic, and overbearing as American conservatism is not to return to a conservative, tradition-oriented Sikh intellectual space. That orientation which looks back at the past for inspiration will run into corners in the same way the self-described progressive TLH.
What I suggest is something wholly new. Can we even begin to think in a new way? If the riots are going on, can we even begin to think about what Sikh politics could be? I mean Sikh political visions that are not liberal, or conservative, not progressive, nor traditional. I mean Sikh political visions that break away from time itself- one that is sovereign in that it isn't obsessed with how it is perceived and judged by those with power. Can we even begin to take a step forward into a space which we can't see it, a space where we're not sure what will come of us? Or can we only move to where it's safe, where we can take a safe position as liberal or progressive, or traditional, or conservative? Do we have the guile to be foolish?
Perhaps a truly new way of engaging politics, one that shatters and blows up the pre-conceived categories can have no prior criteria for success. I am suspicious of pre-conceived criteria, in that they tend to limit the future, in that they already bind down a potentially radically new moment in terms of the confines of the now. We can't let the future be determined by the now, because the future has the possibility of profoundly departing from the now and being totally emancipatory in itself. For a case, were we to say that a proper criterion for a Sikh community will be that it must be democratic, that it must treat its constituents as equal in say and vote, this seems like something that is intuitively appealing. But what if the Sikh political orientation that is beyond the confines of humanism, progressivism, conservatism, etc. were to surpass democracy itself? After all, with democracy comes the crooked politricks that even this blog can point out, one in which it isn't merit and the character of the few that leads by inspiration, but rather a metaphysical assumption that everyone is equal, that everyone has the same rights, that everyone is ultimately the same underneath it all. All of these are lies. Everyone isn't equal, but rather different. There are no such things are rights, and decency outstrips any rights-based discourse in every-day life. So, in a way, we must be skeptical, suspicious, and cautious about our own criterions, our own vision, our own ability to assert and project our own ideas. This is a hell of a lot more paradoxical, nuanced, and risky than simply being progressive or anything like that. This is more fraught with care, emotion, and feeling. It is vague – like everything valuable is anyways.
Here you get the answer – Obfuscation is to protect the status quo.
Continue to call for Sikh to think 'deeper'…should Sikhs have their own state? No says Randy, think deeper! Jaswant Khalra and ENSAAF have uncovered and documented tens of thousands of dead bodies and there is continued impunity? Randy says, well if we think deep enough that will be enough.
Where should we think? Who is our Guru? Do not turn to the Guru Granth Sahib or to Sikh history would be Randy's suggestion – he states looking to our past would be a mistake. No, says Randy your Guru is Prabhsharandeep, Derrida, and Said. Viva la Revolucion!
Sorry, I didn't actually say any of that here. I will try to reconstruct an argument on your behalf.
From what I gather, you are trying to say that there are actual, practical political projects worth pursuing, albeit mired within the constellation of discourses that play a hegemonic role in controlling Sikh thought. In this case, the human rights work of Ensaaf and Jaswant Khalra have been important beyond human-rights scene internationally. Their work is existentially profound for the Sikhs, especially the families of victims. Ensaaf and Jaswant Khalra furnish a space for catharsis, to address the present with emotion, feeling, existentially.
I want to first buttress what you're saying here. It is really profound, I think, how far Khalra was able to take his enquiries. His speeches on youtube are gut-wrenching, totally abundant with subjectivity, with desolation and emptiness. They are works of art in themselves and I not for a moment would try severing the subjective bond Sikhs have with the fruit of his labor and the spirit with which he toiled.
If your argument is that because it is obvious that the political projects of Khalra and Ensaaf are clearly important, therefor Sikhs need not bother questioning themselves and their practices, I don't think that follows. Why not both? Why can't Sikhs question the vocabulary, modes of reasoning, and genres of discourse that are coercive of Sikhs and non-Sikhs, while being able to employ these very things for their own ends as well?
Consider the case of human rights. Human rights discourse already imports a wide swath of assumptions about human beings that are hard to swallow. For instance, consider how the United Nations and the West leverage the idea of human-rights to undermine third world nations and enemies of the West. Consider how the World Bank and IMF have proliferated the idea that there is a human right for people to have the "freedom" to consume McDonalds, Starbucks, and other corporate goods. According to them, humans are born with the right to have access to the world's goods. Human Rights are always a malleable tool for certain key nexuses of thought to determine what is human itself- it is that thing that pursues happiness, food, water, healthcare, but also has the God-given right to Starbucks. So human rights discourse is not only the conceptual apparatus by which Jaswant Singh Khalra uncovered and documented tens of thousands of dead bodies that were slain with impunity, it is also the discourse that paved the way for the invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, and now perhaps Iran. It is a discourse that betrayed Sikhs at the very creation of India itself. You claim to care about a Sikh state. Do you expect to establish one given the demand that nation-states construct themselves according to a framework that first assigns citizens such a thing as rights? How "Sikh" can a Sikh state be if it is already hijacked and given shape by humanism before it is even born?
Once again, we are faced with ambiguity, vagueness. I suggest that perhaps sovereignty and self-determination requires embracing this vagueness. While being vigilant, cautious, suspicious, and incredulous, while being thoroughly philosophical through and through, while being intellectual and scholarly, we can also be on the ground, working for practical ends. That is why i refuse to buy into your binary black and white depiction of the options.
OK, so you mean creating a Political Sikhism outside of the existing schools of political thought? For one, Sikhism is a religion, not a school of political thought. Secondly, to what outcome? One outcome of developing such a system with no reference to "the now" is that you create an utterly irrelevant vision of Sikhism. People, not political textbooks carry a religion and give it relevance and meaning- that will be the case as far into the future as you are willing to look. The opposite outcome is theocracy – for all of the faults of democracy, concentrating power in the hands of the few (who statistically tend to be or become nutjobs anyway) would certainly be the wrong direction to take.
It appears that you view Sikhism as little more than a thought exercise occuring in a vacuum rather than something tangibly rooted in people's lives and informing their values, beliefs and aspirations.
I am a little disappointed that you dismiss TLH's "sianpa" approach to identifying its community as something that will "ultimately never succeed." You must be measuring success with some yardstick, yet when asked for this criteria you say we "can have no prior criteria for success."
This is a conversation, not a slanging match – we have to be honest if we are going to make any progress.
Nowhere in my writing will you find anything to do with divorcing Sikh praxis from the "now". To the contrary actually, because the "now" is already departed. As soon we say "now", that moment is already gone, it is already fleeted and no longer changeable, it's beyond our grasps and passed away. So in that I want to look beyond the now, I mean they should be able to exist without being shackled by history, the history of colonialism, the history of orientalism, the history of multiculturalism and the bureaucratic machinery that has ghetto-fied and marginalized Sikhs, which has waged wars against Sikh self-representation and creativity from Mughals to colonialists to the Indian nation state to first-world governments. In other words, if Sikhs can blow up the now from the inside, maybe they can break free of these histories. So you can see, working beyond the now isn't to work in a vacuum, but to live in the moment truly, to be tangibly rooted in peoples' lives while dissolving the shackles those histories that control, determine, and limit Sikh response.
This might seem really abstract and intangible, but it's actually the very opposite. What I'm talking about is everywhere, especially in music. The work of art always surpasses the now, even bad art to some degree at least. The work of art, the painting, all of these try to say something new, something that hasn't been said before, they try to exceed and surpass the conditions of their existence. An example I have in mind is the television series The Wire, which is the most raw, real, depiction of the War On Drugs ever seen on television. Set in Baltimore, the series refuses to confine itself to the Abrahamic good-vs-evil duality, nor does acquiesce to the official government line. The series blows up even television series themselves, refusing to alter its pacing/plot. It remains almost anti-climactic, under spoken, and replete of fancy fireworks and sex appeal. The main women have glaring flaws barred from most other television: too big noses and crooked teeth. David Simon, the artist-thinker, in other words in this way breaks beyond the now, he breaks beyond the history and structures of power that determine and fix the artistic response. The series is genius for how actually raw it is, how it faces up to the gritty questions without taking easy shortcuts, without taking progressive ideology or conservative ideology. Let me be clear. I'm not holding this art as the paradigmatic political response, nor any such art. I don't think there can be a political action that is paradigmatic.
What I do suggest is that there is need to re-evaluate the habits of response that are now very-well engrained in Sikh politics. Can we recover a Sikh center? That is what I'm after. Can we be centered as Sikhs, and therefor show the man-made theories, schools, and ideologies are indeed false, are indeed oppressive and thrive on the subjugation of peoples' pysches, their sense of freedom, their own self-worth? If you really think that the coming into being of Sikhs was a revolution, can we have such a revolution in the moments, in the upcoming? If we can admire past braveries of Sikh sovereigns, can we work actually work towards that in the upcoming present? Can we do that? Are we confined to glorification of the past? Or can we make anticipate a future, the very next moment to be glorious too? The political ideologies of the present not only not offer that, they don't even promise it.
I hope this answers your question. Vesting Sikhism with meaning, or forming a Sikh school of political thought- those are the very sets of problems that have ghetto-fied Sikh institutions. It isn't theocracy or democracy. It isn't any of these pre-given answers. All answers on the multiple-choice test are wrong. In this way, the game is rigged from the start, whether it's theocracy of the shallow progressivism of the TLH. So the question is how to break though? How can one reside in an as-of-yet unseen dimension? I ask these questions.
It is telling Randep that you point to people like Caputo, Derrida, etc. and never to Sikh scholars such as Bhai Gurdaas, Bhai Nand Lal, or even the shabads of the Guru.
It is a nice philosophical excursion, one which even the Guru would have found entertaining, but probably pointless.
Dhan Guru Baba Nanak who had a fitting reply: http://sikhitothemax.com/page.asp?ShabadID=1711
That you claim mastery over what the Guru would or would not find entertaining shows the depths of your nihilism. I need not prove how religious I am, nor the degree to which I am Sikh to you or any other person on this earth. This is the inbred communalism par excellence that I've been trying to point out.
I didn't ask you to prove how Sikh you are, I just found it interesting that you never talk about the Guru.
Seems far higher for you are your Ustaads – Derrida, Prabhsharandeep, and Caputo. You are their chela. No one else needs to follow them, just because they are your Mursheeds.
Your answer betrays your escapism. Nice try!
It is telling, Berkeley Singh, that rather than divulging a single, substantial point to counter any of the posts to which you've responded, you've taken to leveraging personal attacks to attempt to dupe the reader into believing that these (absurd) claims are a legitimate counter-argument in themselves.
Perhaps you can at least try to lend an ounce of credibility to your slightly amusing personal attacks by replacing Berkeley with your actual first name (since you insist that you know Randep so well).
If Randep doesn't use his/her actual first name, why should Berkeley Singh?
It is exactly this sort of that snideness that prevails on this site. Again and again, we are enlightened by remarks such as this one here, which dramatically (as if revealing something shockingly insightful) points to the fact of the absence of a single letter in "Randep" rather than address my (and other's) concern about the "quality of the discourse [that] only seems to deteriorate exponentially with each successive comment from anyone other than Randep", as so truthfully stated by Stanford Kaur.
I only suggest that if we don't sincerely wish for the quality of discussion on this blog to be raised, then at least the name-calling, dirt-slinging, mocking, etc, should be done in a transparent fashion so as to somewhat dismantle the idea that has been put out there that this (progressive) blog tolerates (to the point of promotion) internet gangster/bullies and bullying as the standard for discussion.
How stupid do you have to be to make the above comment? Wow!!!!!! Insulting someone who's quoting works of philosopher you yourself will never comprehend is evidence alone of your stupidity Mr. Berkeley Singh. And then to sit there and make an assumption on what the Guru's reaction would be to this is the dumbest thing one can say even in THEIR OWN HEAD let alone on a public website. What audacity. Slap yourself.
Gurbani addresses this exact thing – the prattle and poverty of philosophy
http://sikhitothemax.com/page.asp?ShabadID=1711
first bit sounds like http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjami…
"The underlying problem that seems to pervade TLH thinking is that errant assumption that Sikhs form a community"
that only works in your "introduction to postmodernism" class, randep. go out to anandpur sahib in the middle of april and stand on a step and make that pronouncement and see how far it gets you.
if sikhs don't form a community, then why have you chosen this particular forum to unleash your manifestos? if there is no community here, then who are your posts here being addressed to exactly?
If you had carefully read my posts, then you would know that "communities" as such exist only insofar as they establish a core of identity, a core that is monotonous and unable to allow for difference. If you disagree, I would love to hear an alternative viewpoint from you. I am suspicious that Sikhs should even want to form a community, which must necessarily be homogeneous. In that TLH and Jakara and co. are indeed working tirelessly to create a community, you will face frustration at the fruit of your labor. That's what I'm saying. If I am posting here, my posts have reached you. They have reached others. That's who I am addressing my posts to. Once again, if you want to actually address some of my ideas, please do. I'd love to have a discussion.
You want to talk about communities at Anandpur Sahib? Name one. Find me the vocabulary by which people at Anandpur Sahib speak. Seriously. Name one. Hint: 'Community' is an English word. It comes from Latin.
The term ‘teesra Panth’ (juxtaposing Hindus and Muslims) is used, as is Qaum. Quit your silliness.
[COMMENT EDITED BY ADMIN]
Wait a minute… you guys replying are from Berkeley?! Holy roti of Jalandhar it all makes sense now! Dudes, before you get ready to whack each other out, I was at the conference last year and it was good to meet you all, albeit briefly over the few days. None of you were this confrontational in person so why on the net? Let's be a little more friendly with each other and play nice.
Naujawani, I think part of the lack of passionate discussion at the conference came from the disparity of academic training between the 3 or 4 Sikh Studies oriented Berkeley students, and the majority of participants who were being asked to digest Decartes to Derrida in the span of a few days. Those same participants, some 18-year-old kids barely starting university were asked to understand what "ontotheological" meant when doing the required reading before the camp. Rest assured, you might be seeing more of it closer to home.
(The conference last year was a smaller group than the previous year.) Not all ucberkeley students commenting here attend/ are affiliated with that berkeley conference
Sman how do you know?
I thought the conference was a good event, but then I'm biased because I went along to see my fellow Englishman who convened it! All I meant to say above was that you can argue as passionately as you like with one another, really rip each other's ideas to shreds, but surely that can be done without naming people (as above) and insulting each other personally (other comment threads)… Isn't it sweeter to poke holes in someone's logic and then smile?
"Rest assured, you might be seeing more of it closer to home." This is England my friend! There is a reason anyone remotely academic in the UK left for North America! It's not a tougher society here, far from it, but certainly one that doesn't give you time to explain yourself. It will take either millions of pounds or connections of great proportions for something like the Berkeley class to take hold in the UK. Can you email me off board? I gave out like a dozen business cards at that conference and nobody ever messaged me. Says a lot about the impression I made, I think. Or maybe I didn't chew enough gum?
slap yourself too
"Nowhere in my writing will you find anything to do with divorcing Sikh praxis from the now."
Sleight of hand. Nowhere have I you said that you have. You appear to ignore praxis entirely. That's my point.
One of the many purposes of religion is to give people a rooting in the world. You see this beneficial anchor as some kind of millstone to be cast off – you are not fully grasping the role religion plays in people's lives, prefering to equate religion with art. This equivalence you draw is false.
Moving on to The Wire. Honestly? I could debate the demise of the Wire due to season 5 being a vainglorious wasted opportunity but we digress. The glaring plotholes and decision to cast the "artist-thinker" as the missing piece of the puzzle were truly risible. There's a moral in there for you.
You appear to be using sophistry to skirt around my points rather than address them. Either that or I am not "getting" you. This is probably a conversation better had face-to-face, but we won't get that opportunity. This became pointless a long time ago. I'm off.
"trying address you and other bloggers on this website:……….
But you folks don't roll. You give up, sticking your fingers in your ears. It's all good on my end"
^ No Randep. We don't 'roll' with you because you talk like a crazy person. We've all been to university. We've all got degrees. But, unlike you, the rest of us don't imagine we are submitting a thesis to be marked when writing informally here. We talk to each other like normal balanced people using normal language. We don't imagine we're playing a game of scrabble where we have to try and use the maximum amount of 10 and 11 letter words.
A Sikh should be a man for all seasons. He should be able to function in society. Lets be honest here…..if you talk to everyday people in society the way you write here and you'll probable get a well deserved slapping. Its no wonder you're on valium fella…….you're a social misfit. Try writing like a normal person for a change.
Perhaps he doesn't roll with you because instead of engaging with the substance of what he's saying commenters such as yourself quickly descend into school yard name-calling ("you talk like a crazy person", "you'll probable (sic) get a well deserved slapping", "you're a social misfit").
But perhaps this is just the discourse of "normal balanced people using normal language".
Not sure what the hell you are talking about but human nature is based on being part of a family unit, group and community at large. What we need are people who are going to bring us together not render us apart. I am not surprised you are on Valium, perhaps that is where you truly deserve to be.
Can there ever be such a thing as human nature? Can there ever be such a thing as A, one, single, solitary, human nature? Can anything have a nature at all? I'm not so sure. You say that human nature is _based_ on being part of a family, group, and community. This sounds like the Republican obsession with family values to me. But what if there are only disparate properties, fleeting practices, and ever-changing arcs of art that we can recognize human? For those renunciates who've abandoned family, who see the falsity in truly basing one's life on material possessions including communities and groups, are they not human? Are ascetics, mad-men, and hermits not human? Wherefore is their human nature? Aren't the varieties of people are so diverse, so different, that there can never be such a thing as human nature, some invisible essence contained by each person, same and monotonous throughout?
You call it a wonderful diversity, I call it a reason to start labeling this site as the “The Slightly Regressive Hall.”
@DeepH – label as you like, but only engaging those with the same opinions seems rather limiting, boring, and narrow-minded to me. Conformity to the same positions that we are all to recite seems the antithesis of Sikhi to me.
That was the Sarbat Khalsa (or even The Langar Hall) – loud, cacophonous, boisterous, rambunctious, clamorous, and sometimes even obstreperous – still we are Sikhs and see the Guru in each one another, and engage with each other as we should.
Jodha – "but only engaging those with the same opinions seems rather limiting, boring, and narrow-minded" – AGREED!
Randep – Interesting line of thought, maybe will try to write more later. But really quickly – Caputo is wrong. Complete FALSE ETYMOLOGY for the word 'community.' If interested, here you go:
late 14c., from O.Fr. comunité "community, commonness, everybody" (Mod.Fr. communauté), from L. communitatem (nom. communitas) "community, fellowship," from communis "common, public, general, shared by all or many," (see common). Latin communitatem "was merely a noun of quality … meaning 'fellowship, community of relations or feelings,' but in med.L. it was, like universitas, used concretely in the sense of 'a body of fellows or fellow-townsmen' " [OED]. An O.E. word for "community" was gemænscipe "community, fellowship, union, common ownership," probably composed from the same PIE roots as communis.
see – http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=commun…
a really quick reply: The excerpt from Caputo doesn't purport to give an etymology, but the connotation of communities on the basis of its related morphemes. A more fleshed out excerpt here: http://books.google.com/books?id=ETbfOXdyd1EC&…
Hilarious! What a farce!
Morphemes can be used as evidence? Where have I seen this before?
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-april-7-201…
Why not? Words have histories, and therefor stories. Words have relatives, kins, and families. They have ancestors and children. Words evolve and die and are forgotten. In this excerpt, Caputo argues that the word 'community' is used in a way that is vicious, in a way that surreptitiously evades our knowing. Communities are in a way treacherous, and he wants to show that by showing how related words color the shares of its meanings. Once again, the quote is:
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"What he [Derrida] does not like about the word community is its connotations of "fusion" and "identification". After all, _communio_ is a word for a military formation and a kissing cousin of the word for "munitions"; to have a _communio_ is to be fortified on all sides, to build a "common" (_com_) "defense" (_munis_), as when a wall is put up around the city to keep the stranger or the foreigner out."
–from Deconstruction in a Nutshell, by John Caputo
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What do you disagree with here? Do you disagree that related words can tell us something about what a word means? If so, I'm very open to that argument and am open to developing reasons why this is not such a fruitful line of thought.
Does anyone actually moderate this site? TLH disclaimer regarding comments states “No profanity, name calling, or discrimination, please – we try to keep The Langar Halk a clean, open, and hate-free zone. We reserve the right to edit or remove inappropriate comments.”
What could be more inappropriate than the personal attacks by Blighty and the snide Berkeley Singh against Randep? Does TLH approve of such childish behavior? Is it encouraged?
In his OP Jodha states he wishes the level of the discussion here was raised but I see no evidence of any efforts from the site’s moderators to raise it. The quality of the discourse only seems to deteriorate exponentially with each successive comment from anyone other than Randep.
@Stanford – because we disagree with him. Where is the profanity? Where is the discrimination? I figure the bloggers actually have lives, rather than to spend all day censoring comments. Just because people disagree, now you are going to run and call for censorship. So much for the marketplace of ideas. If you want censorship, go to sikhchic.com
Thanks for your feedback Stanford Kaur. We do moderate comments, but The Langar Hall is no one's full-time job. Time is an issue when it comes to moderation, and we rely on readers like yourself to report comments you find offensive. We'll be sure to catch those.
That being said, we try to keep the discussion as open as possible and don't take a heavy editorial hand with moderation, which a site like SikhChic, for example, does.
i agree wholeheartedly with stanford kaur. the moderators here at the langar hall seem to have left the building while each new thread degenerates into mindless chaos. what are these if not name-calling:
"Sikhs who acted like little girls and sat at home while other's homes, property and businesses were destroyed have the nerve to call those brave enough to get out there and protect their communities a 'disgrace'."
"Deeph, you are without a shadow of an ignoramus of the highest order. Your bufoonery of a post reveals that you imagine you've read something before you actually have."
these are the type of comments one expects at the bottom of youtube videos, not on a community forum like this one. they cheapen the discourse and create an atmosphere that makes it impossible to carry on a reasoned discussion for people who are actually interested in such a discussion. the langar hall moderators should take heed and try actually enforcing the policies they have ostensibly put in place.
thank you stanford kaur for bringing in a voice of reason.
I echo what my fellow-blogger, brooklywala, notes above. TLH is no-one's full time job and we are doing our very best to keep up with writing blog posts, responding to comments, and growing readership. we do our best to moderate these threads, but TLH is just that – a collective effort. if you find reason to report a comment, please do so – and we'll look into it.
Derrida as an original thinker within the mode of the philosophical tradition he was speaking to is fine and must have been truly exciting but the need for his manner of interrogation from within Sikhi and the body of thought from which Sikhi comes is not as great. He is not the same bolt of light and wonder when one is not reacting to the antecedents he spoke to within Christian Enlightenment and liberal philosophy. My dos rupiah (tell me which morphemes you find).
"If you had carefully read my posts, then you would know that 'communities' as such exist only insofar as they establish a core of identity, a core that is monotonous and unable to allow for difference"
what makes you think that, randep? i would contend quite the opposite. you would be hard pressed to point out a single community that is "monotonic". on the contrary, communities are always of necessity multitonic, various, and stratified. the notion that a community has to be monotonic is an ideological position (grounded in a herderian linguistic nationalism) that has no bearing or relation to any observable reality.
the fact that you are posting here belies your point. you are posting here to reach an audience that you perceive to share your interest in what you are writing about. that in itself implies a notion of community. in this case, the community is an online one, made up of persons who can read english, have access to internet, and are interested in discussion on topics related to sikhi.
the fact that the word 'community' has a latinate root is completely irrelevant here, since we are discoursing entirely in english. if you want to shift the discussion into panjabi, we could do that, and we would then find appropriate terms to describe the reality that we perceive around us. panjabi also various words for collectivity, including the gathering that occurs in anandpur sahib each year on baisakhi. the concept of collectivity or community is not the exclusive provenance of a latinate linguistic heritage.
You say the latinate history of the word 'community' is completely irrelevant, because we're talking in English. I'm saying the the connotations of violence associated with the word 'community' are completely relevant BECAUSE we're speaking English. You assume that "terms describe the reality that we perceive around us," but that's not the only view of language one can take up. The theory that "terms describe the reality we perceive around us," is often called "naive realism". The view takes it that 1) there is an objective world that exists out there in itself independent of us, 2) human beings have minds that directly perceive the objective world, 3) language exists as a way to transport 'meaning' from one mind to another. This seems like an intuitive view of things. The mind (if working correctly) mirrors reality and language transports what is communicated across the pond to other minds. This makes the the multiplicity of languages in a way redundant. The various languages are equally capable transporters of meaning, who just happen to have different sounding words many of which 'mean' the same thing because they transport the very same semantic content.
But I don't think this view is right. For one, were this view the case, learning a language whatsoever would be impossible. The child would have to already see the world partitioned into various objects: tables, chairs, sky, cloud, myst, dirt, semi-porous rocks, worms, buildings, doors, etc. etc. and THEN be able to assign a word to those things afterwords as it learns language. However, this already assumes that the child knows language, it already assumes that the child has a rich vocabulary (and concepts) with which it sees all these various distinct entities as cut off from one another. So, your view of language in which words merely describe the world, must already assume that children know language. They are linguistic beings since zygote. This view seems implausible to me in my honest opinion. But there are other ideas of what language is, of what words are and how we relate to them.
The question of the being of language is of utmost importance is what you care about is translation, Punjabi, reading Bani, and Sikh identity in general. You say the latinate history of the word 'community' is completely irrelevant, because we're talking in English. I'm saying the the connotations of violence associated with the word 'community' are completely relevant BECAUSE we're speaking English. If Sikhs more often than not exist between languages and the porous spaces within them, doesn't think complicate the relationship between one language to another? Is Punjabi just a type of English and visa versa?
What if language doesn't merely describe reality, but reality is constituted by the way we use concepts and language to make sense of it? What if language sets the limits of reality itself? This view deserves some consideration. The reason this is important is because if Sikhs want to be able to think politically, about Sikh institutions themselves, and Sikh thought in the West, they have to face up to the way religion, politics, and identity (indeed, life itself) is constructed in the space of Christianity, secularism, and Europe.
For example, the internal history of Europe, its own internal prejudices, racism, genocides, and dogmatism has forced it to confine religion to a merely private, psychological affair, right? If Catholics and Protestants can't stop massacring each other, the treaties of Westphalia in 1648 _tried_ to keep Europe from killing itself by quarantining religion, keeping it at bay, far from sight, and deep in the private sphere. This is the history of Christian politics in Europe. It is this internal history that is universalized globally.
Now the question is, can Sikhs simply claim that Sikh praxis contains religion and politics? This has been the conventional slogan. But, I don't think it can be that simple. Sikhs must attend to the language of religion, to the word having been the object of a cleaving, of the word having been contorted, bound, and manipulated to fit a nice, clean box. So, in a way, Sikh thought more often than not resists being religious, insofar as being religious means being restricted and shrunk down to fit the tiny box of private, personal, internal feeling. That is why we must take seriously are words themselves, their texture and hue. Words, like all things, have dimension, extension, and force.
Returning to your point, simply saying that, " panjabi also various words for collectivity," is once again circular. Punjabi doesn't have words for English words, strictly speaking. No word has another word, no language has another language. Each word, each language, each act, each gesture, glance, and poem is always different from another, ALWAYS. Even the very same word spoken now and 10 minutes from now, even if exactly the same, will be totally different, because it will be said in a different place, with a different force and meaning. Or, to totally go another direction with it, there is no experiment or test we could ever do that would figure out once and for all whether two words "mean" the same thing. Right?
..continued
randep, i understand where your sentiments are coming from, but your analysis is misplaced. every argument you are bringing forth is a metacommentary underscoring the fact that sikhs *must* be community by your own logic. to wit:
1. you are addressing the participants of this forum in your posts. no one posts here to broadcast their thoughts out into the random recesses of cyberspace. we (you included) are posting here to reach a *particular* audience (i.e., a community)
2. when you use the nominal plural as in "that errant assumption that Sikhs form a community" you are, by the grammatical rules of english, obligatorily referring to a collectivity.
we can argue about the constitutive features of that collectivity are, or what they are not, or what they should be, but if there was no such entity, you wouldn't be able to refer to "sikhs" in the plural to begin with. your repeated denial of the fact that sikhs form a community does not match any empirical evidence on the ground, whether on this forum, in anandpur sahib on baisakhi, or in any gurdwara around the world on any given sunday.
i'm glad to see a young person like yourself vigorously engaging with these questions, but you need to account for all of the actual readily observable variability around us to make your arguments cogent.
The crux of the matter seems to be that you think a plurality, a grouping of more than one person, is to be a community. I'm saying a 'community' is much more than that. A community is much more than bunches of people.
no, the crux of the matter is that you're fixated on a single idea, that "communities as such exist only insofar as they establish a core identity, a core that is monotonous and unable to allow for difference".
not only are communities not monotonic, they cannot possibly be monotonic. as soon as a second is introduced, the relationship becomes by definition dialogic. a community can only arise through the dialogic perception of shared values.
the discussion on this page itself is a clear empirical demonstration that a community is quite capable to "allow for difference"
i don't know what else i can do for you.
interesting, instead of removing this comment:
"Deeph, you are without a shadow of an ignoramus of the highest order. Your bufoonery of a post reveals that you imagine you've read something before you actually have"
the moderators decided to remove my comment complaining about name calling on this forum!
interesting moderation policy. "we're not heavy-handed like sikhchic".
it's ok. you can't silence the truth.
It was a pretty well put together insult if I may say so myself. I have a good temperament. But, certain things should be and are moderated. I don't feel as if this post warranted it.
of course you would feel that way because you're engaged in the same activity that he is.
the moderation is for the rest of the readers here who don't want to be subject to your mutual mudslinging.
Do you seriously have conversations with yourself? Up the valium dosage! Your comments have been given as much air as anyone else. Jodha did not ‘exclude’ you from the TLH ‘community.’ In fact, I read his post as giving you props to an extent. I question his intelligence for even giving you that.
Still, I see your victim complex has not left you. I was hoping upon graduation, you would have left it behind. I guess not.
Much more interesting is to hear about your ‘political organizing’. I would love to hear about your grassroots efforts – get down and dirty with the people! [COMMENT MODERATED BY ADMIN] Let’s hear about the REAL activism of prattle and pontification.
If anyone’s intelligence is to be questioned it’s yours. The comment you felt compelled to respond to was posted by “guest”, not Randep. Apparently not all Cal grads possess minimal literacy skills. And if you’re going to continue to make personal attacks, be man enough to do so in person, not from the safety and comfort of your computer chair.
Yes, Emreen just as you have done here. Wow! Hopefully my literacy skills can be as immaculate as yours.
I was responding to Randep. He was the one discussing his 'political organizing.' I was interested if it has progressed beyond just walking around wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh?
[EDITED BY ADMIN – No name calling please]
When a person (deeph) falsely accuses another here of making a racist remark then please explain to us 'guest' what kind of post is that if not a 'bufoonery of a post' ?
When a person (deeph) is unable to read properly and misunderstands the mentioning of official USA policy and Commonwealth rights of entry as 'racist remarks' then please explain to us 'guest' what kind of person is that if not an 'ignoramus of the highest order' ?
This is not only part of this blog, Punjabi culture itself relies on mockery and social ostracism to enforce norms….probably this is so in other south Asian cultures