The 'Bare Act' is an expression used to specify the content of law, bereft of any interpretative gloss. In a legal library in India and many parts of the English-speaking world, a Bare Act is a document that simply codifies a law without annotation or commentary. The 'Bare Act' is legality pared down to its textual essence. It expresses only what the law does, and what it can do.
The enactment of law, however, is less a matter of reading the letter of the law, and more a matter of augmenting or eroding the textual foundation through the acts of interpretation, negotiation, disputation and witnessing. The law and practices within and outside stand in relation to a meta legal domain that can be said to embrace acts and actions in all their depth, intensity and substantive generality. This too is a stage set for the performance of 'bare acts', of what we might call 'naked deeds' - actions shorn of everything other than what is contained in a verb.
The 'Bare Act' that encrypts the letter of the law, the wire frame structure that demands the fleshing out of interpretation, and the 'bare act' that expresses and contains the stripped down kernel of an act, of something that is done, are both expressions that face each other in a relationship of tense reflection and intimate alterity. Bare Acts generate bare acts, and vice versa.
"Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts: Trespassers and Enforcers in Precarious Times" proposes to be a considered examination of this troubled mirror image.
We are interested in looking not only at what happens in law courts but also at customs, conventions, formal and quasi formal 'ways of doing things' that are pertinent to communities howsoever they may be formed. Thus the conventions and codes evolved by the practitioners of a juridically 'illicit' trade or calling or way of life, such as that of software pirates, or 'illegal' migrants, or squatters on government land, fall within the ambit of our concerns. We want to speak of the relationships of conflict, co existence and accommodations between different kinds of codes that make claims to our ideas of what is right, or just, or functional, or even merely appropriate.
To see 'actions' arrayed across a spectrum in this manner is also to see a range of ways in which laws, codes and a variety of formal and informal arbitration mechanisms act on us. Sometimes this may take the form of executive force and fiat, but crucially it may also rely on the powers of persuasion that characterize a host of quasi formal interactions between state and non-state actors, and between non-state actors and individuals. Typically, this for instance is the way in which non-legal entities like informally constituted councils, political formations outside the state, customary bodies and traditional councils act to enforce their will or influence those within (and occasionally outside) their ambit.
The landscape of actions and deeds covers a far more subtle, slippery, nuanced and ambiguous ground (than the codes that seek to index, define or govern them). Actions have gradients, they ascend and descend on to each other much as peaks emerge from and plunge into troughs in a three dimensional graph. The political, ethical and semantic facets of acts shade off, and slope into each other, now revealing, now concealing hitherto unknown aspects of themselves and their consequences, often in unexpected ways. Laws are attempts to understand, interpret and govern action, but their enunciative capacity is bundled up with executive authority; they are words that decree what must be done. But just as the way in which a map is drawn can have consequences on the ecology of a terrain, the phrases spoken as law too can transform and erode as well as irrigate the ground of action.
Laws are a creature of habit, of pattern, rhythm and repetition. The exceptional singularity of an action, which is precisely what law seeks to tame to the rhythm of the predictable, leaves us with a strange situation where the "bareness of an act" is precisely what is sought to be clothed by a 'bare act'. This gives rise to many tensions and aporias, which we invite contributors to reflect upon and report, from their locations in the real world, whatever be their locus standi.
You may be a human rights lawyer, or an intellectual property attorney, a philosopher, an artist, an activist, a combatant or peace maker in a conflict situation, a person who lives and works with ideas and words, a person who saves lives or takes them, a person who has custody of others, or who may be in the custody of an institution; in addition, you may be someone who either is, or identifies with, or sympathizes with, a hacker, a pirate, a re-distributor of intellectual assets, an illegal emigrant, a non-heterosexual person, a compulsive traveller, a squatter, a sex worker, a terrorist of the imagination, you may be free or in confinement, you may be healthy or unwell - whosoever you may be and whatever you are, you have to act, and deal with the actions of others, and all that you do, or do not do, is framed by a structure of bare acts of the law. Yet, you shape the world with the things you do to be yourself, to act in concert with others, to defend yourself and to pursue what you see as liberty and happiness, or simply, to survive.
We would also like to invite investigations into the production of 'legal subjects' through judgements (communiqués to the citizen/denizen) and petitions (appeals from the citizen/denizen) as well as through mechanisms like recording and registration mechanisms such as census records, land records, municipal records, forestry regulations, registers of citizens and aliens and other instruments that define and enumerate the person addressed by the legal-formal apparatuses that govern day to day life. What is the language, the rhetoric, the tone of these acts of address? How are they scripted, rehearsed and staged? All these are things for us to explore when we look at the law, whether in the courtroom, in a village council meeting, or in the performance of a 'courtroom drama' in a film. Crucially, here we want to explore the figures of authorised and unauthorised interlocutors, expert and wayward witnesses and the myriad characters that constitute the theatre of the courtroom.
This Reader invites you to reflect on actions, yours as well as those of others, to act with your words, thoughts and images to contribute to our understanding of the world, as we know it today. We are committed to an elaboration of positions that often find themselves identified with the interloper, trespasser and the proscribed, not because we have any special affinity for the illicit, but because we feel that the growing constriction of the domain of the do-able by the letter of the law (which we all face in societies where the state and para state institutions lay increasing claims to our fealty) leads to a situation where those committed to a modicum of social liberty, to expanding the territory of what may be creatively imagined and acted upon, have to invest in knowing and understanding an ethic of trespasses. Interdictions need interrogation, and this Reader is a call for such interrogations.
A 'bare act', as we said at the outset, can also be taken to mean action divested of everything other than its essence as a deed. Encountering the naked deed, action in and of itself, on its own terms, means facing up to difficult and occasionally challenging ethical questions. What constitutes violence? What is generosity, or hospitality? Why does altruism have to be hedged in by qualifications and constraints?
It also means asking - what it is to become someone through action? What is it to act, or play a part, in the theatre of social life? What is the border that separates action from expression? What connects the act to gesture and to performance, as much as it does to deed?
Moreover, what accounts can we give to the 'act' of witnessing, or bearing witness to a course of action, or to an event? Law or codes of action of any kind seem untenable without the notion of the witness. The presence of the witness is crucial to any notion of credence, the foundations on which arguments, petitions and judgements have to base their thrust and parry. We would like this collection to provoke reflections on the nature of the evidentiary and narrative protocols that frame acts of 'speaking' or 'speaking out' in the face of, or in the aftermath of, or in the memorialization of, acts and events that leave a mark on our times so as to instigate a more complex unravelling of the relationship between persons, actions, narratives and codes of behaviour,
To carry this argument further, we want to point out that in languages such as Arabic, Persian, Hebrew and Urdu, the roots for words as disparate sounding as 'martyr' and 'witness' (shaheed/martyr and shahid/witness) devolve to a common source. This suggests to us a febrile tension between the reality of a precipitate, even violent action, its consequence (the shaheed) and a recording presence (the shahid). In other words, given the fact that acts do speak for themselves (and sometimes make the claim to speak for others), we consider it necessary to take stock and reflect on what might be considered the heritage of the 'propaganda of the deed' - a doctrine that underpins violent terrorism, as well as non-violent civil disobedience and militant passive resistance, to see how such modes of acting stretch and challenge consensual notions of the relationships between means and ends.
As we have said in calls for contributions to previous readers, on themes and subjects quite different from the ones that we have sketched here, these are open questions with no satisfactory and coherent answers. But Sarai Reader 05, like its predecessors, would like to take them on, so as to map new territories of thought about the things we all do and the things that are done to us.
Today, there are different images of naked legality that we have grown accustomed to. We know that the law is often the last resort that the poor and the marginalized can turn to in some societies to appeal for redress and comfort from having to face obvious and naked oppression. Thus the slum dweller facing demolition sees in a high court stay order, a breathing space in which to try and muster some means of continued survival in the city as a householder. A person on death row can have little hope but to argue for an acquittal or a pardon. There are also occasions when international criminal courts may be seen to be effective instruments of redress for victims of genocide and war crimes. These are but the bare facts of a case for the law, and for a conscientious practice of the legal calling as a continuing good in human societies.
However, we have also seen pictures of naked human beings in judicial custody in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. This too is naked legality. We have seen migrants waiting to be deported. We have seen the banal playing out of the script of domination and violence, on streets, in educational institutions, in homes. We have seen attempts at the foreclosure of cultural and intellectual commons. We have seen attempts at surveillance and control, and we have witnessed, resistances to each of these - quiet subversions, cunning negotiations and outright rejections as well as attempts to scale the walls erected by the threat of interdictions, sanctions and prohibitions.
Sarai Reader 05 seeks to register these matters in their puzzling ambivalence, with intelligence, acuity and close attention to the pulse of our times.
A Preliminary List of Themes (these are not chapter or section headings, but point to areas of interest) could include:
The Pure Act, the Impure Gesture and Bare Presences: A Sceptical Guide to Acting in Today's World
Barely Human/Naked Power: Critiques of Contemporary Injustices
Punishments in Search of Crimes: Histories and Practices of Illegality
Authorised and Unauthorised Interlocutors
The Human Right to Copy and Paste: Culture, Law, Conflict and Intellectual Property
The Letter of the Law: Glossing Gender, Class, Race and Caste in the Courtroom
In Camera: Courts, Prison and the Justice System in Cinema
Rough Justice and Gentle Persuasion: Non-legal Forms of Arbitration
To Be Done and To Be Seen to be Done: Legal Action and its Media Representations
Despatches and Communiqués: Reflecting on Media Representations of Direct Action
Private Matters in the Public Domain: The Law and Sexuality
The Encounter: Terror In and Out of Uniform
Caught in an Emergency: The Ethical Dilemmas of Humanitarian Intervention in War Zones and Conflict Situations
The War Against Error: The Normalization of Surveillance and Identification
Bearing Witness
Citizens, Denizens, Aliens, Others: Taxonomies for Our Times
Altitude Sickness: The Activist on Higher Moral Ground
What is (not) to be Done: Understanding the Limitations of Action and Activism
The Right to be Wrong: In Praise of Political, Ethical and Legal Uncertainties
What it Takes to Be... Accounts of Becoming and Choosing to Remain Marginal
At A Loss for Words: Talking about Things Perhaps Best Left Unsaid
Utterance as Action: How Speech Acts Change the World Sometimes
The Word as Violence: Interpretative Acts in the Field of Life and Death
Politics beyond the Law
"Sarai Reader 05: The Bare Act" seeks to engage with this situation by inviting a series of reflections. We are looking for incisive analysis, as well as passionate writing, for scholarly and theoretical rigour as well as for critical and imaginative depth. We invite essays, reportage, diaries and memoirs, entries from weblogs, edited compilations of online discussions, photo essays, image-text collages and interpretations of found visual material.
Finally, we would like to see texts that draw attention to the curious and unfolding relationships between acts, actions (especially what is called 'direct action'), activism and the domain of media practice: namely between acts and representations, and on representations as acts. What are the trade offs involved in transmission of an 'action', how does the possibility of transmission help script an action before it is staged - these are urgent questions, especially at a time when the relationship between deed and representation tends to blur in the form of what we can call a 'media event'. This is not to evaluate such instances negatively or positively, only to register the fact that they occur, and to call for an attempt at an informed understanding of their contents and ramifications. We invite activists, media activists and media practitioners to revisit and reflect on the instances of the encounters between deeds and mediatization in their own practices, and on the relationship between media and action in a general sense. In doing so, we are revisiting and continuing a discussion on some of the questions that have already been raised in "Sarai Reader 04: Crisis/Media".
The Sarai Reader 05, like the previous Sarai Readers, will be international in scope and content, while retaining a special emphasis on reflection about and from areas that normally lie outside the domain of mainstream discourses. We are particularly interested in contributions from South Asia, South and Central America, East Europe, the Arabic Speaking Countries, Central and West Africa, South Africa, South East Asia, China, Tibet and Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Australia.
The Editorial Collective
*Guidelines for Submissions*
Word Limit: 1000 - 6000 words
1. All submission, unless specifically solicited, must be in English only.
2. Submissions must be sent by email in as text, or as rtf, or as word document or star office/open office attachments. Articles may be accompanied by black and white photographs/other visual material submitted in the .tif format.
3. We urge all writers, to follow the Chicago Manual of Style, (CMS) in terms of footnotes, annotations and references. For more details about the CMS and an updated list of Frequently Asked Questions, see -http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/cmosfaq/cmosfaq.html For a Quick Reference Guide to the Chicago Manual of Style, especially relevant for citation style, see - http://www.library.wwu.edu/ref/Refhome/chicago.html
4. All contributions should be accompanied by a three/four line text introducing the author, with email address and a relevant url.
5. All submissions will be read by the editorial collective before the final selection is made. The editorial collective reserves the right not to publish any material sent to it for publication on stylistic or editorial grounds.
6. Copyright for all accepted contributions will remain with the authors, but Sarai reserves indefinitely the right to place any of the material accepted for publication on the public domain in print or electronic forms, and on the internet.
7. Accepted submissions will not be paid for, but authors are guaranteed a wide international readership. The Reader will be published in print, distributed in India and internationally, and will also be uploaded in a pdf form on to the Sarai website. All contributors whose work has been accepted for publication will receive two copies of the Reader.
If you are interested in contributing, write to monica at sarai.net or shuddha at sarai.net with a brief note saying what you want to write about, or an outline. You can take time to write up a more substantial outline, but please make sure that they are in by September 30, 2004. Outlines can be up to 500 words.
The Editorial collective will write back to all those who have submitted the outlines in early October 2004, informing them whether their proposal for a contribution has been accepted.
Deadlines for the Submission of Articles is - November 15
The Editorial Collective of Sarai Reader 05 consists of the following -
Awadhendra Sharan, Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, Ravi Sundaram, Ravi Vasudevan and Shuddhabrata Sengupta (Sarai-CSDS, Delhi), Lawrence Liang (Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore) and Geert Lovink (Media Theorist and Critic, Amsterdam)