No Man’s Blog

What’s between the Hamas astonishing triumph in the Palestinian elections and Google’s launch of its self-censored Chinese version? Both events reminded me the notions of carnival and grotesque as articulated in the writings of one of the most compelling philosophers I have ever encountered – the Russian linguist and philosopher Mikail Bakhtin. For Bakhtin, every social moment in every society is like a carnival in the sense that it is an occasion for a staged dialogue in which multiple levels of power and resistance are operative, each responding to different forces in the world at the same time that they accommodate themselves to one another, thus they involve re-negotiations of power. The grotesque, argues Bakhtin, ‘discloses the potentiality of an entirely different world, of another order, another way of life. It leads man out of the confines of the apparent (false) unity, of the indisputable and stable’ (Rabelais p.48). Carnival and grotesque thus turn the old hierarchies upside-down, erasing old differences, producing new and unstable ones.

The Hamas, a defiant radical Islamic militant group, largely known for its fondness of blowing up buses and restaurants in Israel, unnerved the world with its landslide victory in the Palestinian democratic elections. This event has shaken up previous conceptions of democracy, by allowing a radical religious terrorist organization to play, and triumph in inherently contradictory rules of game.

Similarly, the launch of the overtly self-censored google.cn, which filters out results from sites that are considered “sensitive” by the Chinese government, entails huge contradictions to previous conceptions of the Internet, freedom of expression and google’s declared motto of ‘do no evil’.

In both cases where different ideas, ideologies and meanings collide, the result is a novice, hybrid creation that stirs great debates

Should the USA and Israel prevent the Hamas from participating in democratic elections? Should google give up its business instinct/evolution and refuse to enter the Chinese market altogether? Personally, I think not but who’s asking me…