Off Modern: A Conversation with Raqs
1. Moinak Biswas: Your recent show in Calcutta, ‘Premontions’, seems to speak of the fractures within the flow of time that we all inhabit. An internally anomalous time has engaged you as artists for some time now (‘The Imposter in the Waiting Room’, the clock project, the factory project at Bolzano). What makes it important for you to address this question now? What does an apprehension of ‘our time’ have to do with this inquiry? In ‘Premonitions’ I felt there was an attempt to inflict an arrhythmic pulse of sorts on the viewer. Is it possible to talk about the politics of this? Raqs Media Collective (Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Jeebesh Bagchi): Lets try responding to your question with a query of our own, a speculation. What if we could fold time in the same way as we can fold a piece of paper? Supposing we could fold it into a boat or an airplane, what kind of voyage would we find ourselves embarking on? Would we realize that our sense of our time, the time(s) we live in today, are also amenable to being folded in a way that can make us sense other times in a way that is suddenly up close and personal even as they retain their chronological distances? Premonitions is one manifestation of our ongoing engagement with time and temporality. We are interested in how the present instant comes to us striated with other times (real and imagined pasts, possible alternatives to the present, anticipated futures, and loops that connect the three times) and other ways of thinking about time. What this does is to keep a window in our collective consciousness perpetually open. This helps us avoid the claustrophobia of thinking that just because things are the way they appear now all discussion and questions about how else things might be – how things might have been – and how things might yet become – are void. As you can see, this is not so much the question of introducing the viewer to an ‘arrhythmic’ pulse, of creating gaps (that is what happens when you have an arrhythmic heartbeat or arrhythmia in respiration) as it is of creating contrapuntal rhythms, of inserting a different pace and temporal signature alongside what you might call the countdown of the present. So that just before things are down to zero, somewhere else, some other count is beginning to pulse out a different sense of time. This can free us from the heaviness of inevitability, destiny, and the arrow of time that gets exhausted by travelling forever in one direction alone. MB: We see affinities with modernism here. Is it possible to say modernism lives within the imagination of contemporary art? This modernism incorporates a critique of historicism, the inevitability you mention. Your sense of the ‘contrapuntal’ echoes the principles of Soviet montage. I was thinking of how Lev Manovich looked at the New Media through Vertov’s Man with the Movie Camera. Spatialization dominates the vision of much contemporary critical theory and aesthetic practice. But criticality often seems to return through what we can largely call montage, a typical modernist method, where the vertical and the synchronic continue to play a role. Would you like to talk about this? Raqs: Let’s think momentarily of modernism as a four lane highway, let’s say – a ‘national highway’ that claims to take you from A to B, and then let us imagine a few tracks off the high road – that meander alongside, and cross the highway, some-times in a disorderly, zigzag fashion. These tracks are always within hailing distance from the highway, but may not always be visible; sometimes they rise above and run below it. We see our journeys taking place sometimes on the high road, and often, when we need to get to destinations that the highway ignores, on the off-tracks. The off tracks, like most paths that come into existence because people have persistently walked them into being, have been built over peripatetic centuries. And they carry on their surface – the depth, the layers, of centuries of footprints. You could call this a layered, continuing archive of walking, extending itself into the future. Unlike the highway, where there is never any turning back, except at sanctioned u-turns, the off-tracks are meant for Janus-faced journeymen and journeywomen, (which is what we aspire to be) who know well the ruses of the archive and the contingencies of the present but have also equipped themselves with an open-endedness towards the dilemmas of the future. This means that we don’t necessarily have ‘role models’ to follow, even though we are aware of the velocity and the trajectory of passengers on the high-road. Our encounter with the dust of other times – modern, non-modern, off-modern – is laden with our sense of their out-of-joint presences. Faced with the complexity of these presences, the modernist celebration of unidirectional speed, fueled by the necessity of arousing everyone and herding them towards the future seems archaic and naïve at times. We are still coming to terms with the turn that compels us to undertake close readings of the peripatetic archive of the off-tracks. This seems to us to be a tendency that we see spreading across the last two decades in many practices, both artistic and otherwise, as a renewal of what it means to ‘sense’ the world, and to render it ‘sensate’ and ‘sensible’. These moves are not direct and unidirectional. They have ambivalences, they are equivocal, as befits the task of moving on a surface as jagged as that of the contemporary world. They resemble the crooked move of the knight in chess. Interestingly, the post-Soviet aesthetician and writer, Svetlana Boym, often speaks of “lateral move of the knight in a game of chess. A detour into some unexplored potentialities of the modern project” to explain what she means by her call to fully inhabit the “off-modern” condition. This search is not to obliterate the near past. On the
Annunciation
Subha Mukherji Possibly the most delicate rendering of the Annunciation in visual art is, to my mind, Fra Angelico’s rendering (Figure I), the one that suddenly gleams upon the visitor in the little museum of San Marco in Florence, as s/he turns the corner at the top of the winding stair leading straight to this painting. And even its poster reproduction in my study surprises me with harmony and serenity. Figure I (Beato Angelico, Annunciation, circa 1438–1445) Gabriel has stepped into Mary’s balcony, their space is symmetrically divided as well as joined up by the central pillar, the two figures are united in their gesture of cross-armed, reverent bowing. They are caught up in the same world of colours, his wings picking up the green of her cloak, her hair-band reflecting the pink of his robe, and her green uniting the indoor space with the grass beyond the balcony, the enveloping zone which shades off into the outer space from which the angel has appeared. That world and hers seem to be in the process of generative continuum, not in opposition. The threshold at which this encounter happens is figured as a space of union. Mary’s reception of the word seems beatific, accepting, and instinct with the numinous in this moment. The angel is clearly bent in the posture of salutation. It is a picture one wants to live with. The peace it breathes, however, is conditional upon what Derrida would call ‘absolute hospitality’: ‘The law of unlimited hospitality’, which displaces and overrides ‘the laws…which are conditioned and conditional…across family, civil society, and the State’.10 It is premised, in other words, on a ‘strange hierarchy’, but it is visually translated into symmetry. Look now at another Annunciation (Figure II) – an image one would hesitate to invite into the habitable fantasy of one’s living space precisely because of its flagrant denial of this peace. Its vivid and visual acknowledgement of the incipient violence of absolute hospitality, with the muscular Gabriel (and his troop of sturdy little winged angels) breaking through the fragile roof of Mary’s abode, places this image in a counter-beatific tradition of representing the moment of arrival. This is Tintoretto’s Annunciation, bleeding through the darkly luminous surface of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice, a vast canvas that bursts upon the guest, the visitor, the stranger, surprising her not with the harmony and containment of Beato Angelico’s vision, but with Dionysiac ravagement. There is a subtle transference here: the violence of the ‘foreigner’ is turned upon the observer who has come in from outside to partake of the moment of approach; the visitor, or foreigner, at the Scuola who, expecting consummation, finds confrontation. For ‘crossing the threshold is entering, and not only approaching or coming’ (Derrida, Of Hospitality, 123). Figure II (Jacopo Tintoretto, Annunciation, 1581/2.) It does more than acknowledge, and does something more violent; it questions the very process of entry. It is, of course, the very first canvas facing one as one enters the Scuola. Derrida offers a suggestive exploration of the ambivalence of hospitality, a crucial theme at stake in representations of the Annunciation. For him, it is at once a profoundly emotive and political metaphor, and one which, like the threshold the guest steps across, is Janus-faced: …there is no politics without…an open hospitality to the guest as ghost, whom one holds, just as he holds us, hostage. The first, more obvious implication is that of the power of the host. This power and the ceremony through which it is tempered and controlled, when abused, can cause a tragic rupture in nature: witness how, in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the Macbeths betray the unspoken bond and hold Duncan in their castle inescapably – inescapably both for Duncan and, as they will realise, for themselves. But the even more painful betrayal is the one in which the host takes over, and defies the understood relation. When Tarquin turns rapaciously upon Lucrece in Shakespeare’s Lucrece, or Iachimo in Cymbeline, in a differently sinister way, upon Imogen who has housed him with grace, we have examples of this. The idea of ingratitude and betrayal implicit here finds a painful extension in Lear’s image of his Pelican daughters (3.4.71), and an equally vivid expression in the all-licensed fool’s jingle: For you know, nuncle, The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long That it’s had it head bit off by it young; So out went the candle, and we were left darkling. (King Lear, Folio, 1.4.188–91) In the same play, the guests in Gloucester’s house, Cornwall and Goneril, gradually become trespassers: first they order him to shut up his doors – a command that could be protective, but verges on the tyrannical; then the sisters have him blinded and ‘thrust him out at gates’ – his own gate, the threshold of his own house, becomes the site of tragic reversal (3.7.93). As Heather Dubrow, in a recent article on land law and Lear puts it, ‘The guest taking over the house, effecting a Bakhtinian reversal of roles, is of course a familiar and transcultural comedic turn. But to Shakespeare’s audience the situation would also have signaled the insecurity of dwelling places in their own historical moment.’ Dubrow offers a rigorously historicist interrogation of what becomes, in the play, a tragic insecurity and dispossession, rather thana comedic topsy-turvydom. What Shakespeare dramatises and Dubrow historicises, Derrida theorises. But crucially, Derrida is engaged with both sides of the fragile equation, though one takes the other over as his imagination progresses. He does not simply conceptualise the unconditionality of letting the guest in, but dwells, himself, on the threshold between addressing ‘the violence of the power of hospitality’ – and this belongs to the patriarch, the familial despot, the father, the spouse – and the subtle reversal through which ‘the guest becomes the host’s host’; and from host to hostage is one small step for the inviting host, as from guest to parasite. That threshold is
Like Elvers in Seaweed
David Wagoner Muse Cackling, smelling of camphor, crumbs of pink icing Clinging to her lips, her lipstick smeared Halfway around her neck, her cracked teeth bristling With bloody splinters, she leans over my shoulder. Oh my only hope, my lost dumbfounding baggage, My gristle-breasted, slack-jawed zealot, kiss me again. **************************************************** The Burning Bush A quick flare takes the leaves, And they rush together up through galls and scales, To a crook of smoke, thinning and whitening, And the brief red skeleton glows to a clear char. From the ends of twigs, the ashes drift like seeds. The bush stands bare at the edge of the silent prairie. ****************************************************** Worms When the spade turns over, the worms In their sheared gangways, turning tail, go thin Among clods or blunt out in the open, Half-hitching in fishermen’s knots and flinching At sunlight, the pulsing line of their hearts Strung out to be abandoned, sinking backward And forward among the roots, like them, Like elvers in seaweed, mouthing the darkness, All taken in by the darkness of the mouth. ******************************************************* David Wagoner’s Collected Poems was nominated for the National Book Award in 1977 and he won the Pushcart Prize that same year. He won his second Pushcart Prize in 1983. He is the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (1991), and the English-Speaking Union prize from Poetry magazine. He has also received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. adminhumanitiesunderground.org
Psychiatry: A Gendered Microhistory
Amitranjan Basu Amitranjan Basu [First Look : Ajita Chakraborty, My life as a psychiatrist: memoirs and essays. Kolkata: Stree, 2010, pp. 220, index+references, hard cover, Rs. 500.00. ISBN 81-85604-92-4 978-81-85604-92-3.] For the last two decades, since I started reading critically psychiatry and psychology from the cultural perspective, I had the opportunity to engage myself with colleagues from both humanities and human sciences, and this engagement has enriched me a lot to understand and describe the complexity of cultural practices called psychiatry and psychology. There seem to be a growing interest in the humanities that deal with human mind, but more with psychoanalysis than with psychiatry, psychology and psychiatric social work. There is a renewed interest with Frued, Lacan and a range of post-modern and post-colonial scholarships emerging from Euro-American societies. While these efforts have been productive to re-view south-asian society, culture and politics, I can hardly recall about any serious work based on resources that developed in the South Asian mileu in the last four to five decades! There are few exceptions like Ashis Nandy and Sudhir Kakar, who probably entered the reference list when appreciation of their work started being audible from the Euro-American academia! No study tried to include the works of those who tried to raise a critical voice within these disciplines. No serious reading has been done with the ‘internal’ discourses of mental ‘sciences’ that can strengthen our intellectual culture to offer alternative views on our society, politics and culture. In this context, the book under review can provide an entry point for my colleagues. It links up with the threads of knowledge that the early scholars of our psychiatry, produced in a context where these disciplines were more marginalised. And again, much of this knowledge is useful once we consider history is a way to access past for the present. In this backdrop, Ajita Chakraborty’s book takes us to nuanced narratives of a microhistory of Indian psychiatry and Indian Psychiatric Society. Ajita, one of the first two woman psychiatrists (the first perhaps is Saroja Bai) in India is more known for her serious concerns about the social and cultural aspects of psychiatry, an area less travelled by majority of her fellow colleagues. Who else could write the foreword of this book other than Ashis Nandy? A street-fighting public intellectual, who convincingly transformed his training in psychology to create a discourse of political psychology as a powerful social critique. Nandy in this original piece, opened by saying that “no account of a society is complete without a profile of its subjectivities. This is particularly true for India, which has for centuries lived with diverse, highly developed theories of the mind and techniques of intervention in human consciousness” (p. vii). He notices the paucity of data on those pioneers who tried hard to adopt this new science in a culturally diverse non-modern society to make their profession meaningful in its new social context, and laments that: “we are now left with predominantly de-cultured, asocial, overtly medicalised psychological disciplines studying subjectivities in this part of the world” (p. ix). Nandy noted that, Ajita did not try to blur the distinction between normality and abnormality like her ‘Guru’ Ronald Laing and his anti-psychiatry group. Rather, “she retains the difference as a therapeutic reality and a tool of social criticism” (p. xii). Nandy has pleaded to read this book keeping this context in the mind. Ajita’s book is divided into two parts: memoirs and essays. Memoirs are organised in seven chapters (‘My Early Days,’ ‘Time Abroad,’ ‘Life and Work in Calcutta,’ ‘Psychiatry and the Indian Psychiatric Society,’ ‘Transcultural Psychiatry,’ ‘Deconstructing and /or Analysing Myself,’ and ‘People and Organisations’). In the essays section she has provided eight essays where the last two (‘My Views on Psychiatry in General’ and ‘Cultural Psychiatry, and Understanding Self and Identity’) are being published for the first time. The reader will realise that her autobiographical narrative is theoretically argued and evidenced in her essay section making the volume a well organised narrative. Starting with her birth date she commented: I was born on 31st October, 1926, 9 pm, Sombar, Sashthi. Mother [Tamalini Devi] had written that information in a tiny handmade notebook of some antiquity that I have preserved. The year of birth written by my mother is 1927; I had disputed and corrected it to 1926 when I was 11 years old, after having checked it with cousins near my age. The birthday came under a strange cloud some years later. (p.1) An astrologer, who visited her as a client persuaded her that he wants her horoscope prepared by his guru and with much hesitation she provided her birth information to him. A few days later he came back to report her that the date is faulty: Kartik 14 did not match either Sombar (Monday) or Sashthi (the sixth day since the new moon) of that year. I told him about the confusion over the year of my birth. He came again; saying, that the day and date recorded by my mother matched neither the Greǵorian nor the Bengali year…Confusion and missing out became a part of my life, while the ‘real’ things eluded me. Even my birthday was a contentious issue. (pp. 1-2) Her father, Khirode Behary Chuckerbutty came from a humble family of Jajmans (village priests) who, having committed the sin of eating chicken ‘fell out with his family and ran away from his village. He became a khalasi in a ferry service, and later purser with a coastal shipping company.’ However, he managed to get a BA degree and switched his career as a resident tutor in affluent families. He used the dowry for his marriage to start an electrical goods manufacturing which later on became well known as Clyde Fans. In spite of its initial success, Clyde Fan sank and Ajita’s father moved to the shade of the factory calling himself sansar tyagi (one who has denounced the family life) and put his wife and children in a small rented