The Abused Goddesses and the Fissures of Referentiality
Prasanta Chakravarty The Abused Goddesses advertising campaign (http://www.buzzfeed.com/regajha/indias-incredibly-powerful-abused-goddesses-campaign-condemn) has given rise to strong reactions in the virtual space. While some initial reactions on the campaign were cautiously positive, albeit with some amount of unarticulated unease, soon the discursive feminist space on the internet articulated its reservations against the campaign powerfully and in no uncertain terms. If the advertising agency and the people behind it think that all publicity is good publicity then it is entitled to think so naively. That is hardly the point—that is, merely making an ‘impact’ through bad publicity or controversy. The success and failure of the campaign depends on many variables and the jury is still out. But it is not just about whether those images are ‘reaching a target spectatorship’ but about trying to understand the context, timing and also the modes of representation. In this case, the detractors tell us that using such battered images and narrative in order to make a case against domestic violence is shady and untrustworthy at several levels. First, contextually, the organization behind this campaign is a deeply conservative one which is trying to cash in on drawing our attention to such retrogressive images of womanhood, women as distant and glorified goddesses. The organization funding it: Save Our Sisters—the very name betraying the worst kind of infantilizing and patronizing NGO activity that is rife when such organizations, flushed with funds and a civilizing missionary zeal undertake to save backward, unenlightened nations such as ours. Taproot, the advertising agency behind the campaign seems to be playing right into the hands of people having such disturbing motivations. In addition to patronizing, in this case the narrative is orientalised rather crassly, it would seem. This is a problem that the feminists have been alive to right from the initial stages of the movement: that the latent codes of protective chivalry and spin thereof not only fortify established domestic structures and hierarchies but may hide within themselves a culture of perversity against its victims privately. Such secret perversity is perpetrated by highlighting the exaggerated, hyperbolic mode of socially representing women as unattainable and chaste creatures. For example, one may ask whether a lascivious hunter mentality lurks beneath when the god-man highlights chastity in women and concomitant asceticism in men, taking quick protective cudgels on behalf of the entire womenfolk. There is something dubious in the very language that argues for such purity. Even as such false glorification goes on in public, battering, maiming and abuse may go on unchecked within. As it often does. The reprehensible nature of such enterprise needs to be marked, identified and brought to notice. Again and again. In some parts of the West, (particularly in Northern Europe and the Low countries) democratization and reformed modes of Christianity have been able to exorcise such forms of ‘medievalism’. Until forms of irrationality and monstrosity erupt again. Individual acts of violence and passion sometimes take collective shape from time to time. They surprise us with their staying power. But just like these advertisements are not just about their impact, they are also not necessarily and purely about the motivations of this or that dubious organization. I wonder whether there is more to it than to be ‘for’ or ‘against’ such representations; representations that are likely to come back to us in future too in new ways. And not necessarily from such missionaries either. How can this event and act of representation be historicised by not radically separating the practices of social agents from their multiple identities in their dynamic, active culture but by prolonging personal and collective memory? This is something that I wish to talk about, namely, the simultaneity of presence, absence and anteriority in a chain of a narrative about memory in acts of representations. And what might be the secrets of the represented object with the operations of representing? Is it of any use to the feminist discourse if we are able to read the discourse of infantilizing by taking it to its logical extreme, that is, by marking the traces of the monstrous and perverse within the interstices of representation and history? The Mnemonic Image The idea of mythical images taking a full shape would appreciate its Janus faced double-handedness: on one hand is the enactment of the mimetic art of likeness, by giving proportion and depth to the models and thus claiming a certain kind of iconic realism. But images of worship, the miraculous eruptions that sustain the validity of such images also simultaneously produce an appearance and simulacrum—a metaphysical excess by which proportion no longer remain natural. Images spill over. Images of worship then may become monstrous or sublime or serene which may again be accompanied by simultaneous forms of monstrosity. There are times when the mimetic may exceed its original purpose and become expressive or both tendencies may create a productive tension within an act of representation. It is here that eikestic art may relate to the fantastic. History marries form. It is upon this wilful deception, relying on a Coleridgean sense of willing suspension of disbelief, that the whole idea of relating to images and icons and relics and symbols stand or fall. The binary division of history and mythography is suspended and the material nature of irrationality is brought before our senses in its full force when the idea of the mnemonic image begins to take shape. If it happens purely at the terrain of the image, it sidesteps the temporal, historical dimension. That is private aesthetic. But if we provide history with movement and simultaneity then the mnemonic may serve other functions. Many cultures live in simultaneous time. So, we say that such and such person has a feudal mindset or such and such is thoroughly modern in her outlook or in fashioning herself. Many temporal varieties of people make our world and therefore, each one of us may hide multiplicity of temporality within us too. What happens to representations when we come to them from our various selves? Carlo Ginzburg