How to do things with attention?

By Amit Rai

How do we attend to subaltern techniques of ethical refusal such as hacking and piracy in participatory action research? What criteria can we use to help us decide what to make public and what to withhold when working with and about illegalized populations? My wager is that solidary researchers must develop anti-colonial and collective practices of attention that can negotiate the lived complexities of everyday hacking and refusal. These collective practices of attention can take the form of deep listening without academic judgment or extraction of racial capitalist exchange value, hacker skill-sharing, participatory encounters with subaltern hacker communities, co-creating diagrams and programs for tactical sabotage of racial capital value chains, and developing sustainable pirate care networks for mutual emancipation.

Racial and caste capital presents itself as natural, rational, legally legit, morally righteous, etc. It’s all a bunch of bollocks, as we all know from the racial capitalist state’s response to the 2008 economic meltdown—everything was done to save the corporations from facing their own ethical bankruptcy, even as the forces of oligopoly and monopoly were further strengthened and morally legitimated by scapegoating working-class women of color and Black people. Racial and caste capital is an upside-down world in which an ideological apparatus and media assemblage sell alienated, indebted life as if it were right side up. This is another name for racially stratified socio-economic “reason.” How can we attend to such an upside-down world for the benefit of collective emancipation to come?

My participatory action research co-creates forms of attention to the everyday refusals to be governed in this way, and to the proliferating illegalisms (everyday hacking) in subaltern lifeworlds throughout the Global South. To do this is to be in solidarity with the subaltern’s “right to opacity.”¹ This right to opacity for subaltern communities of hackers is akin to the necessity of becoming indiscernible to the algorithms of surveillance capitalism. We should all disappear for the capitalist algorithm, emerging only surreptitiously in other forms for our tactical, collective, and contested gardens of pirate care.

Solidary researchers must refuse the extractive circuits of academic value, but not merely to celebrate the molecular triumphs of everyday plebeian illegalisms, autonomous pirate care networks, transnational hacker collectivities, Dalit jugaad (work-around) ecologies. Another kind of political attention is needed today. To attend to the intersectional complexities of class, gender, ecological, racial, ableist, and caste struggle is, in some sense, an infinite and prefigurative task: we common our resources as we attend to complex entanglements of power to prefigure an emancipation to come. Such an attention is also an infinite affirmation of a revolutionary joy that reactivates a certain etymology of the Indo-European word “attention”: the Latin attendere means to bend to, to notice, to turn/stretch towards, and to apply, while the Sanskrit word adhyana (अध्ययन) means meditation, concentration, study, and learning. Decolonising attention is a stretch of perception opening learning toward an unfolding horizon of everyday illegalisms, insurrections, and emancipation².

Solidary attention to plebeian illegalisms such as jugaad and hacking is rooted in the affirmation of the necessity of radical prefigurative politics. Researchers in the contested and policed domains of hactivist practices of social reproduction and in subaltern struggles for intersectional emancipation within and against racial-caste capital, domains in which visibility is a trap must honor the opacity of the lumpen.³ Prefigurative politics can be thus both reactionary and emancipatory, and is discerned in ecologies of “pirate care” or jugaad (informal) economies of social reproduction, in anarchist and communist organising practices, in nonlinear, collective, opaque, and subaltern agencies of laboring subjects, who take up class-caste wars of position, simultaneously in and beyond the postcolonial city, in and beyond Europe, and within and against the India-Israel-Germany-USA alliance of settler colonial apartheid, extractivisms, and democratic fascisms.⁴

In the research that went into Jugaad Time: Ecologies of Everyday Hacking in India, I collaborated with Dalit songwriters, feminist psycho-geographers, and communist Muslim media researchers to deconstruct what is known in bourgeois economics as the “informal sector.” We considered, together and in diverse contexts of study, the question of the everyday illegalisms of jugaad, a hacker practice of working around obstacles common to subaltern communities throughout much of South Asia. This research was furthered through my engagement with the work of the Precarious Workers Brigade in London (PWB came to workshop with a group of young people I was co-creating a film festival with in East London, the Cutting East Film Festival) and at the Common House in Bethnal Green, a radical organizing space for sex worker collectives and their queer, anarchist, and socialist allies, complete with a risograph and data server where communist media was produced and disseminated, and where I was the key warden for five years, and involved in co-founding with Cliff Hammett and Alex Jonsson, a hacker group called Autonomous Tech Fetish; and where I met, among many other inspiring groupuscules, the Feminist Fightback collective, and the organizers and theorists Valeria Graziano and Camille Barbagallo, at whose house I had the pleasure to meet Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis some twelve years ago. All this taught me several things that I have tried to common in all that I do and affirm in my politics and social reproduction. The first was about making labor visible, de-alienating, and de-fetishising labor as a prefigurative act of emancipation of the commodity labor power, in its precise and complex relation to sexuality, gender, ability, and (less often) race. The second was the importance of community, however fleeting and fugitive. The third was the necessity of prefigurative self-organizing for authentic liberation. And finally that revolutionary becomings happen as event and process simultaneously. This allowed for an understanding of the abstract diagram of illegality that also facilitated a decolonisation of the bourgeois ethics of attention.

1. Speculative Dérive¶

A speculative prelude emerges from imagining a Bhopal of the near future, describing lines of escape from this ring of fire that is the postcolonial city under the totalitarian surveillance of a Hindutva-to-come:

In the Bhopal of 2182, from the benthic wastes of the upper and lower lakes, long dried by the desert sun, toxic storms of Methyl isocyanate dust blow through the Idgha hills. The unhinged doors and broken windows of abandoned NRI villas creek in mute protest to the poisonous miasmas of “MIC-dhool.” In underground communes, AtiDalit Panther groups, pluri-Muslim anarcho-communist cells, Neo-Darindic tantric cults, trans, hijra, and queewome collectives form opaque solidarities with post-tribalist indigenous communities of resistance. Together they survive “life” underground. In the day-to-day social reproduction of their self-organized communes, which they call inquilaab ki jadon (rhizomes for revolution), and across and through the many labyrinths of tunnels used in their periodic insurgencies, tactical sabotage expeditions, and pirate communication lines, these subalternized “surplus populations” were at war. These proleptic social configurations of prefigurative politics struggled with the contradiction of being and becoming within and against Pak-Hindutva® socio-ecological domination. Transmitting different resistant intensities and abstract rhythms through the hijacked frequencies of pirate radiowaves, they denounced the ossified Pak-Hindutva fascist military and creato-productivist exchange hegemony. But sometimes it felt as if only the MIC-dhool miasmas wafting through the empty white hills of old Bhopal were listening to their intermittent transmissions, mocking, waiting for them to inhale their poison which had, after centuries of chemical pollution, become indiscernible from the burning surface air. In entangled ecologies of pirate care they carve out a life worth living underground. This is not easy, as the negotiations in the people’s tribunals and horizontal assemblies have broken down again and again. Underground but still in between the locked machinery of algorithmic registration, surplus populations shield themselves from the merciless sun that daily pushes temperatures above 65 degrees in the shade. But there is little shade from fascist RSS-squads sent to police “insubordination” in these apartheid territories sealed shut with electrified fields of quantum info-matter in Pak-Hindutva®’s Laxman Rekhas.™ The pirate jad (rhizome) against the ati-fascist rekha (security firewall). Each surplus population had to submit members of their own communities to serve in the Pak-Hindutva® mines, police, or for the suicide missions in the military campaigns trying to secure the occupations in Kashmir, Palestine, and New Ceylon. The time of the Tribute was drawing nigh, and there was no line of escape. The self-organizing algorithms were long ago coded to automatically register each worker during the implanting of population-specific affect-chips, and through the meticulous tracking of each worker through the regulatory regimes of Pak-Hindutva®’s Sex-Police™. For these subaltern hacker communities, the future was still and forever “an emergent property of practice.”⁵ How are the conditions for their jugaad modes of life to be sustained?⁶ The nano-credit bots patrolling the empty maze-like streets around Moti Masjid sing their siren songs of easy financialization for backbreaking extractive work in the krïltïn mines down south, or for renting out what was left of the M-bodycaps of the newly indebted workers returned spent from laboring in those mines. The technologies were new but parasitic on past assemblages of capital, code, desire, financialization, resistance, and extraction . . .

What the critique of social reproduction in Marxist and anarchist feminist pirate care ecologies and their prefigurative permutations does is question the entire binary between use and exchange values. What then happens to the exchange abstraction in the prefigurative politics of pirate care or jugaad ecologies, and how is that abstraction refused in solidary participatory action research? Everywhere it seems market forces assert their dismal science on and over the heads of the subaltern bodies, classes, races, sexes, genders, ecologies, and castes. In practices that foreground the metabolisms of racial capital’s valorization, production, distribution, extraction, and accumulation regimes and circuits communist and anarchist pirate care upturn the seemingly natural distinction between use and exchange in racial and caste capitalist valorization.⁷ Here anti-fascist attention is a dangerous supplement to the critique of the value form in racial capital, which simultaneously both includes and excludes the history of African slavery, ongoing indigenous genocides, settler colonial regimes of accumulation, Dalit refusal and self-organizing, transgender becomings, and the care networks of South Asian coolies in the Caribbean. As Graziano, Mars, and Medak put it, “In a world ridden with ecological depredation, gendered violence, racial capitalism, and imperialism, not letting others perish and die is anti-systemic.”⁸

2. Notes¶