The Indian Social Bond
In Pune, India, life can be overwhelming for an American/Canadian.
There is constant stimulus, and an over-proximity of not only people but their personalities. The environment constantly makes decisions for the subject, effectively erasing the subject from the scene.
Georg Simmel once discussed the overwhelming effects of modernity (e.g., of globalizing processes associated with urbanization, crowding, the loss of belief in God, and so on), as one which produces a blase attitude in the individual. This blase attitude — a “whatever” attitude, an attitude of indifference to the stimulus — is important for the subject to achieve some distance and to thereby sustain himself against tremendous pressure. In other words, it is as if the subject has within himself a metaphysical organ, a make-shift ‘stimulus-shield’ within which he can deposit all of the excesses that pervade and penetrate him.
However, the mistake is to assume that globalization is an advancement of civilization.
What is the difference between the Indian social bond and the so-called modern or Western social bond?
In India you have the same mechanisms at play but without the requisite “modernity,” that is, without the more Calvinist capitalist relationship that sustains the West.
Might we hazard the following hypothesis (a hypothesis that is a reworking of the one made by Marshall McLuhan about the “global village” some decades ago)?: the processes of modernization advance through a simultaneous regress. Though the modern social bond achieves the dignity of interconnection it nonetheless reintroduces the subjective survival mechanisms of ‘distance-defence’.
We run and we run but modern civilization does not escape the primordial trauma of humanity.
Put in psychoanalytic terms, Indian society is a place without the name-of-the-father. Yet, at the same time, it circulates many names-of-the-father which may be put to use. It seems to me that without the name-of-the-father the only practice left, in order to maintain some sanity (for myself!) is a daily ritual of self-separation, self-distancation, self-withdrawal, and so on. This can be achieved through meditation, through a heightened assertiveness when confronted with the overbearing environment, through barricading oneself within the home, or through hiking in the mountains, and so on.
In other words, if I will survive in Pune, India, I will need to begin the ritual practice of saying “no” for myself.
