Flight from Followers

HAVING BEEN FORCED TO KEEP MY eyes closed for nearly a fortnight, I have had to rest my trust on the auditory. I had imagined a playlist, mostly podcasts that I hadn’t had the time to listen to—The Point magazine’s series on the essay, Si­mon Critchley’s twenty episode-series on Being and Time, and a few others I can no longer remember. Instead, quite fortuitously, I found myself listening to a man reading Friedrich Nietzsche during this period of convalescence. While I longed to be free of this temporary en­chainment to my room, to its bed, to this fixed perimeter of feet and light, I also felt grateful for something I hadn’t quite expect­ed—a freedom from the business of the world, its serve and volley, its signs and signals, radars and responses. In the freedom brought by my closed eyes, I was spared from the nervousness of entering a room and guessing the mental weather from the faces of the people in it, I no longer needed to read emails or messages and feel apologetic for my typos, typos not of the script but of the heart.

I had forgotten so many things—how funny Nietzsche was; that laughter muscles, too, need exercise; the difference between reading a book and someone reading it for me. As I heard a male voice read the first chapter of The Twilight of the Idols, I became aware that I hadn’t laughed in a long time. Grief paralyses most of our muscles. It is also attention-seeking, and, no matter how much we try to distract ourselves, the mind and the body return to the wound. It is perhaps the nature of the wound to demand worship. The wound becomes an idol. No, Nietzsche does not say any of these things. It is my mind that produces these thoughts as the voice of the audiobook moves from thought to thought.

The style is aphoristic, a manner of thinking that has been a favourite for as long as I can remember, much before I even knew what an aphorism was. It is perhaps the availability of truth in them as much as the condensation of form that I find attrac­tive. It is hard to lie in an aphorism or an epigram. As I listened to the ‘epigrams and arrows’—Nietzsche’s title for the first section—with my eyes closed, this exile from seeing made me wonder whether the epi­gram or the aphorism exists in the nat­ural world: had I seen it in a flower or a spider’s web? I don’t know. I’m never sure about the analogical tendencies of my imagination. The mind is a great follower—what exactly it pursues one can never be sure of.

I returned to Nietzsche. He was talking about followers.

‘Thou seekest followers? Then thou seekest ciphers’.

In another translation, the word used for ‘follower’ is ‘disciple’. It was impossible to think of the word ‘follower’, after X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram, without the commerce that had come to attend its usage. It’s unnerving to hear a stranger introduce them­selves as a ‘fan’; to hear someone say that they are one’s ‘follower’ is as bizarre as it is hilarious and scary (in Hindi, this would sound ridiculous: ‘Main apka chamcha hoon’).

What might be our first intimation of being a follower? It might be the newborn’s eye, turning towards a speck of light, inaugurating a career of seeing—the eye is a follower of light. It might be the ear, trying to detect the music of a bell, an anklet or the mother’s voice. All of this is to say that human life—as I imagine all other forms of life—is a career of attention to the natu­ral and elemental world. Someone can spend a life following the idiosyncrasies of stars and call oneself an astronomer; another can spend their days following the changing colour of liquid inside a beaker and be paid a scientist’s salary; one can follow the behav­iour of money and earn a living. What is it, then, that makes being a follower of a human feel slightly awkward when stalking the el­ements and even abstractions have the status of a nobler pursuit?

As someone who lacks the genetic disposition of a ‘follower’, I’ve only watched the phenomenon from the window, not very different from the way I watched Laurel and Hardy as a child perhaps—an unending series of falling and following and ris­ing and walking. How is a following created? I remember the actress Alia Bhatt sharing her father Mahesh Bhatt’s advice to her—“Don’t become the first member of your fan club.” It’s a seemingly casual statement, but in it is hidden the story of origin—that there might be people who might want to wear their own names on their tees. What makes someone wear the name of a favourite football club or singer on their T-shirt? This is not a phenomenon limited to popular culture alone; it’s there in our pedagogy—think of the number of times a student has to hear the phrase ‘role model’ or read abridged biographies of men whose choices, routines and actions they should follow. Students of religion-affiliated schools often turn into lifelong devotees and defendants of the Great Men tradition just as students of seemingly more secular environments become followers of ‘star’ teachers and disciples of institu­tions in which they can see no wrong. I’ve heard a colleague declare, with all good intentions in a faculty meeting, that our students ‘should want to be like us’, and that part of the reason for their unsatisfactory performance in the university exams owed to them not being good followers of their teachers. I cannot remember the rest of what they said—I kept hoping that my students had happier and fuller professional trajectories than I have had, that they did not make the mistake of ‘following’ me.

My mother had a teacher in college who would, every few minutes in her lecture, ask “Do you follow?”. That meaning of ‘follow’, of comprehension and understanding, has almost disap­peared, and the verb has become far less important than the noun. “I follow you everywhere,” a woman declared in a live interac­tion with Kartik Aaryan, to which the actor said, “Yes, I know … Sometimes she follows me even when I’m going to the airport, and I wonder—how did she get to know that I’d be here?” The follower as paparazzi, the follower as a portmanteau hashtag, the follower as control unit, with the power to decide the fate of someone’s career—we see iterations of this everywhere, and, per­haps unconscious to our own selves, we cringe, not necessarily as moral reproach but from concern, for the sublimation of honesty from what has come to constitute our arts and literary culture.

The follower as paparazzi, the follower as hashtag, the follower as control unit, with the power to decide the fate of someone’s career—we see iterations of this everywhere, and, perhaps unconscious to our own selves, we cringe, not necessarily as moral reproach but from concern

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Followers on social media are now bought, like people from outside the city were once brought in trucks to attend political rallies. The ‘show of strength’, which is actually a show of num­bers, has crippled the contemporary imagination—it has become impossible for us to believe that support can be invisible and not a statistical spectacle. Imagine the solitary Robinson Crusoe on Instagram—the horror of his account showing zero followers. Since publishing decisions are—I hear—now often made on the basis of the number of social media followers, what might have been the fate of Defoe’s novel?

THE IDEA OF A SCHOOL, OF A FOLLOWING inaugurated by a person’s words, their ‘teaching’ or their art, is dependent on the ease of their shareability. I mean the obvious—all kinds of writing, creative practice, aesthetic, po­litical and philosophical thought do not lend themselves to a mass following. This owes as much to the form and subject as it does to the originality of thought. The most original thinkers do not nec­essarily become founders of a school. Quite often, it is their first followers—‘disciples’—who circulate their work in a baby food-like format. Originality, because it usually resists paraphrase, is hard to disseminate—it often falls by the wayside, not rejected consciously but ignored because it resists propagation. There’s another path— originality travels when it emerges casually, from the anonymous, as it did in the case of recipes of making bread, cooking hilsa with mustard or the creation of leather shoes. Such a following is more natural, and continues as ‘tradition’, an unspoken inheritance. It is not just the difference between following a phenomenon versus following a person that I mean here—it is also the difference in the temperament of the thought and knowledge system itself.

Two thinkers, once classmates, can have different characteris­tics of following because of this. While Jacques Derrida would go on to create a generation of scholars who would, with great affili­ation, display their status as followers by calling themselves after a word— ‘deconstructionists’!—Michel Serres, his classmate at École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and, to my mind, one of the most origi­nal thinkers in the last half century, would continue to write and teach without an institutionalised following, without an -ism at­taching to him or his work. Serres himself was acutely aware of this: “I do not have the equivalent of this idea attached to the name of cer­tain philosophers as if it were their treasure: the clinamen for Epicu­rus, the lump of wax for Descartes, the general will for Rousseau, the flesh for Merleau-Ponty, deconstruction for Derrida, mimetism for René Girard, etc. I have no logo, no brand. But a philosophy does not spread without a logo,” he writes in Pantopie, de Hermès à Petite Poucette. This ‘treasure’, this USP that turns a person into a brand or their thoughts into the system of an -ism, is the DNA that at­tracts followers—it is not very different from going to an Iranian cafe for bun maska, occluding other possibilities besides the easily identifiable and smoothly replicable.

Freedom from being what Serres calls the ‘logo’, and conse­quently from both a following and the urge for followers, is, in my understanding, the only true space of creative and political practice. So much of both is a mix of performance and exhibition­ism in the public space today that one is forced to conflate persona with personality. The idea of fol­lowing derives its axis from the personality cult, of course—why else would perfectly reasonable and intelligent adults identify themselves as ‘Swifties’, why else would thousands of men wear a Narendra Modi-looking mask, why else would someone tattoo Ta­manna Bhatia’s face on their chest? In the 1980s and 90s, remnants of which are still occasionally visible, Mithun Chakraborty’s hairstyle was to be found on a large majority of men in Bengal’s small towns and villages—admiration and aspiration had created a base of followers who had turned the hair style into the ‘logo’. It is now difficult to tell one from the other—the followed and the follower, who look alike, like a candle placed between two parallel mirrors, resulting in infinite reflections. It’s a phenomenon that the writer Hugh Behm-Steinberg wanted to capture in their short story ‘Taylor Swift’, where every character has more than one Taylor Swift for their personal use. This idea of following is not a simplistic difference between the ‘original’ and the ‘copy’, but about the loss of honesty and control, about gradually becoming an employee of one’s followers. It’s a process where the ‘original’ has to keep producing copies of themselves in an endless loop of repetition so as to keep their ‘logo’ in circulation—the ‘fan’ and the ‘follower’, quickly conditioned to recognise only what Serres calls the ‘brand’, is uninterested in anything besides what is easily iden­tifiable. The consequence is the loss of the artist’s independence for commerce, the sad transition from artist to content creator. The Hindi film Fan, where Shah Rukh Khan plays both the actor and his fan, reveals the other-directed and cloning nature of follower power by making the follower a doppelganger of the actor. This is the power of the follower—to control what Nietzsche calls ‘idol’, the subject of their adoration and, of course, their narrative. (‘Fan’, ‘fawn’, ‘follower’, I wonder about the ‘f’ sounds.)

The ‘show of strength’, which is actually a show of numbers, has crippled the contemporary imagination—it has become impossible for us to believe that support can be invisible and not a statistical spectacle. Imagine the solitary Robinson Crusoe on Instagram—the horror of his account showing zero followers

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There’s a loss of honesty on another count. The chain reaction cauldron of followers, whether on social or traditional media, has produced a dishonest review culture. How can Hanuman, the ar­chetypal follower, give a bad review to Rama? There’s the loop: the follower is celebrated for celebrating the followed. What we have therefore are not reviews but followereviews—sorry, I couldn’t resist the neologism. The religious character of this experience is emphasised repeatedly by the vocabulary used by followers: a ‘dar­shan’, a sighting of the followed one, a word used for a vision of god in a temple or a dream. What was once called ‘style’, a distinct aes­thetic, has been replaced by the name of the writer or artist, where X is praised for simply being X, as if their existence was enough.

IT IS THE FOLLOWERS THAT EVENTUALLY damage—perhaps even destroy—a person’s work more than their enemies, like his conser­vative followers did to Rabindranath Tagore’s songs, for instance. But there are only a very few among us who don’t like the idea of having followers. The freedom from following and being fol­lowed seems as revolutionary today as the Copernican world must have been to a Ptolemaic universe once— it implied a change in who was being followed after all, the sun or the earth. In a world where we like to imagine ourselves as sources of light, the power of the follower comes from their pow­er to be a reflector. We’ve lived with an anodyne expression such as ‘reflected glory’, used it to enjoy a laugh, without realising that it would come to extract its revenge, like almost ev­erything in history does. Now it is the reflectors that determine the perimeter of the reach of the light source. Ursula K Le Guin has often spoken about the stranglehold of such a power equation: “I hope you live without the need to dominate, and without the need to be dominated. I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people.”

Freedom from being what Michel Serres calls the ‘logo’, and consequently from both a following and the urge for followers, is, in my understanding, the only true space of creative and political practice

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AFTER LISTENING TO TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS, I turned to the playlists that Jeet Thayil had sent me to tide through this period of recovery. It included Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations and a standalone song of Thayil with a musician who calls himself The Burning Deck. ‘RiverundertheRiver’, basedonanoldThayilpoem, remindedmeof Nietzsche’s book from which I was just emerging. “Music now brings me sensations such as I have never had before. It takes me away from myself, it sobers me up from myself, as if I oversaw myself from a distance, it gluts my senses … Life without music would be an error, a hardship, an exile,” wrote Nietzsche in a letter to Köselitz at around the same time he was writing Twi­light. “Without music, life would be an error,” says Nietzsche, and then, being Nietzsche, adds, “The German even imagines God as singing songs”. The worship of idols also happens through song, the reason, for instance, the word for ‘praise’ in Bangla can be ‘goon gaan’, the singing of someone’s guna, virtues. A song from Nietzsche’s contemporary Rabindranath Tagore comes to my mind, a song that connects these thinkers writing on different continents without either possibly knowing the other’s work. It is about walking, walking about which Nietzsche famously said— “Only thoughts that come by walking have any value.” ‘Aekla chalo re’, if no one heeds your call, walk alone; Tagore’s song, appropriated opportunistically into an anthem by generations. Inside the verb ‘follow’ is coded the idea of someone who walks behind, and, in mu­sic, the inevitability of the Pied Piper whose survival is dependent on creating a following. Rabindranath, like Nietzsche who dismissed almost the entirety of ‘Europe’, was rejecting the idea of a following for a creative and spiritual freedom.

It is easy to forget that in a time when we long to be assured that “the third who always walks beside” us is our follower.

About The Author

Sumana Roy

Sumana Roy is the author of a work of non-fiction, a novel and two poetry collections

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