The Codification of Culture

Like most migrants, I insist, with moderate success, that my daughters speak their mother tongue (Malayalam), diligently expose them to Malayalam cinema (highly successful), feed them Kerala’s cuisine (Hobson’s choice), infrequently take them to temples (where they are as clueless as me) and often drag them to Carnatic music concerts (which they tolerate for my sake). Despite these piecemeal efforts, it’s clear to me that they’ll be less of a Malayalee than I am, just as I’m less of a Malayalee than my parents, who in turn were less than their peers, having emigrated from Kerala in the late 70s.

Thanks to Instagram and Facebook, all my friends living abroad take pains to post their Bharatanatyam, Odissi, and Onam Sadhya pictures. Whether in Chicago, Sydney, Berlin, Hanoi or Sharjah, the efforts to cling to one’s culture and project their heritage sometimes appear as a tragicomic spectacle.

Culture has always been against universalization. Uniqueness is a hallmark that every culture tries to cling on to, which is also the reason for the high premium being put on rituals. But despite this, culture is always in a flux. It can never be universal or static. And that is not a bad thing.

Continuing on my Olivier Roy binge, I picked up his ‘The Crisis of Culture’ which provided me some frameworks to think about culture. Roy argues that globalization, the internet and rise of free markets (which he irritatingly calls Neo liberalism) have resulted in a deterritorialization of humans which is a fundamental reason for the cultural flux that we see around us. This deculturation has been accompanied by the rise of subcultures – Japanese manga, Korean dramas, Turkish soaps, Bollywood, Swifties (my girls can belt out every song of her; no Yesudas in their lives so far) – which are now seen as markers of identity. For me, this deculturation was always there around us (Indian cinema and literature of the previous decades have engaged in these themes – the Angry Young Bachchan, Ray’s movies, MT Vasudevan Nair’s novels…)

For Roy, this larger phenomenon of deterritorialization, deculturation, and the rise of subcultures have resulted in the larger dominant cultures of social groups being reduced to a series of Codes – the five-second Instagram reel of the garlanded Ganesha (ofcourse with classical background music), the Facebook post of the Haldi ceremony, the Onam Sadhya pic – specific tiny components of what was once upon a time a part of a larger whole, and often of a dominant group, to which we try to assimilate/belong!  

For Roy, this phenomenon of codes is also visible in the domain of sexual relationships. He draws a compelling parallel between pornography and the increasing contractualization of sexual relations, especially in the era of MeToo, suggesting that both processes reduce complex human experiences to a series of discrete, codified acts.

Pornography is a caricature of the autonomy of sexual relations. It is constructed using a finite set of coded sequences in a module comprising positions, size, time and sounds, always leading to the same result: orgasm, with nothing after it (and almost nothing before). These sequences do not open the way to an imaginary (unlike eroticism). Pornography as the coding of actions and sexual vignettes has always existed (see the graffiti in Pompeii), but it is now freely accessible to all on the internet, and is no longer contained within the margins to which it was formerly consigned by the dominant culture (from toilets to brothels).

Consent forms the bedrock of sexual ethics these days. In the backdrop of the Julian Assange rape case, where the accusation was around specific acts that were not consented to, Roy argues that this codification of sexual relationships in the bed is also very much a part of the larger deculturalization ongoing around us:

The movement began in the United States and developed in Europe. It is neither linear nor always consistent, but over the long term there has been a trend to require explicit consent. But what is the object of this consent? Courts have considered not only the sexual relation itself but also its sequencing, as illustrated by the charges levelled against Julian Assange, accused of rape by two women. The issue is not simply to decide whether or not the complainant initially consented to sexual relations, but whether, at every stage (undressing, condom use, penetration while asleep), consent can be established or not. Why is it not enough to decide whether there was initial consent to the act? As often, this type of consent is hard to define: she didn’t really want to, but went along with it all the same, on certain conditions—condom use—that he did not respect, but agreed to spend another night with him anyway, during which he penetrated her while she was asleep. At this point there are two solutions: either we accept that sexuality cannot be contractualised, or, conversely, we regard it as a series of specific acts that are describable, in which every sequence can be accepted or refused. This would amount to renouncing the experience of sexuality as an undivided whole, in which dark and light are inextricably linked. Such sequencing is ultimately pornographic, in other words each segment of the sexual act is autonomous with respect to the encounter taken as a whole, and to any emotional relations that may exist between the protagonists. But, unlike pornography, each sequence is conceptualised with a value judgement intended to strip it of any relation of domination. The psychoanalyst and philosopher Clotilde Leguil notes the difficulty of making consent explicit: “There is no informed consent. This phrase, which relates to the legal and medical domains, masks the fact that there is always an element of darkness and enigma in consent.”

It is because consent engages the body, and is in fact a bodily experience rather than an act of reason, that it includes obscurity for the individual, which sometimes leads them to let things go further than they wanted.

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