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The Museum of Vestigial Desire

Terms of Engagement

tags: wonder published on:

by Harmony Siganporia

What happens when
a blank page proffered
is returned with unscrupulous scribbles? I intend to find out.

A column is load-bearing: a conduit stabilising weight from above, relaying it below.
A column is structural: an element which orders and demarcates space and in so doing, time.
A column is an invitation: it is this I mean to hold out to you, by and bye.

A nation is imagined ere it can be constructed;
A nation is tautological -
A nation is, as she reminded us recently, a daily plebiscite (see Nivedita Menon's teach-in session at JNU on YouTube).

A nation is not a given.
A nation is not eternal.
A nation is not its borders.

A column is not merely decorative: it labours, as this one will.
A column is not at liberty to stage a walk-out: it must stay put, so that its world may cohere
A column is not always significant: I never said I was going for consistency.

I'm thinking of this page as a pas de deux: I make tentative forays onto it, and it dances back, fending off the characters I achinglylovingly place onto it in a bid to begin this, my first column for the museum of vestigial desires. I like manifestos, although I'm not a fan of the word 'seminal' which prefaces altogether too many of them. Less phallogocentrism, more revolution, please (see? I can be polite like that). Power. A useful word to muse on in a document fatuously titled 'terms of engagement'. What might these terms refer to? What is to be the nature of this engagement? Like an old imp I suspect you'll wind up reading a fair bit about in months to come, should you choose to subject yourself to these explorations, remember that I mean it when I say that I genuinely amn't interested in pursuing that chimera we call consistency. I've been offered this space/time ossified in the form of a monthly column to think out loud about the present and how we arrived at it. The beauty of an invitation to write about the philosophy of politics and the politics of philosophy is that it is carte blanche to write, literally, about most things since the (alleged) Big Bang. Which is why, here, I can't be certain for I'm no soothsayer, I suspect you'll read about poetry, film, music and graphic novels as much as you will about the banality of evil and the insidiousness of muscular political rhetoric because to me, they're closely allied. Everything is.

Let's just serve up the tritest and truest cliché you're going to encounter in this column right away and get it over with: the personal is the political. I must locate myself as a researcher for you, because you need to know what informs my meaning-making processes before you engage with them, should you be so inclined. I am a scrappy, intersectional academic mongrel, who will draw on her training in literature, culture studies and social history to try and decode the present moment, as much for herself as for you. Woof.

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