The Blind Art of the Concrete
Pothik Ghosh The real when it has reached the mind, is already not real any more. Our too thoughtful, too intelligent eye. —Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer Modern man is cursed with too much of seeing. His every waking moment is suffused and saturated with objects, images, concepts and signs. Such is this profusion of forms that he neither has time nor the inclination to really see what he has to see. And he is oblivious of the virtues of blindness. But can blindness be a virtue? The work of painter Benodebehari Mukherjee – who had a congenitally defective vision, went completely blind in 1957 aged 53, and yet continued to paint for another 23 years – alludes to the visual richness that blindness, and its seeking, can sometimes yield. There is a lot of variety in Mukherjee’s art. But what brings them together is the unity of his aesthetic approach, which sought tirelessly to overcome the world of objects and optical verisimilitude and penetrate their essence. Much of his work, post blindness, is characterised by an almost complete disappearance of opticality, with objects being reduced to their archetypes. Not surprisingly, the human and animal figures of his paper-cuts and collages lack eyes. Two of his post-’57 lithographs – Curd Seller and Kitchen – are examples of how objects are merely alibis for the artist to explore various interactions among certain essential forms and structures. But his creations, even before he lost his sight, are marked by a struggle to escape objects and their sheer optical presence. From the very beginning, Mukherjee, as his art indicates, was interested not in things but in relationships among them. Even his self-portraits explore relationships between physiognomy and the character of his inner being. Mukherjee was also drawn to forces that constitute figures and objects rather than the finished ‘things’ themselves. His Artist Observing a Frog is more about capturing the state of two human figures looking at a frog than the visual event per se. This yearning for non-opticality brings Mukherjee close to Anglo-Irish painter Francis Bacon, in spite of their distance in space and tradition. The field of Bacon’s paintings, as philosopher Gilles Deleuze has accurately pointed out, lacks depth, and he situates his figures in a way that it appears they are dissolving. Clearly then, Mukherjee, an important member of the Bengal school, was not the only one to have quested after artistic blindness: a metaphor for capturing the unseen in art that is all about seeing. But his loss of vision became a dramatic, physical culmination of this search. Orhan Pamuk, who is preoccupied by this aesthetic of ‘non-seeing’ in his My Name is Red, gives a detailed account of the tradition of blindness-seeking among the 12th-13th century masters of Perso-Islamic miniatures. They considered blindness to be the supreme accomplishment of their artistic métier so much so they would often pierce their own eyes with needles specially designed for the purpose. For them, blindness implied the victory of sacred timeless vision over profane human gaze. The human eye is a compulsive ejaculator of meaning. It is also a repository of pre-conceived notions and ideas. Objects are rendered meaningful only within cages of concepts and forms cast on to them. There is no room for the object to show itself autonomously. Blindness, in such circumstances, is the decimation of the predetermined gaze, if only to set the object free. It is driven by, what French philosopher Gaston Bachelard chose to call, “material imagination”, something that he contrasted with what he called “formal imagination”. The former seeks to shun all formal preconceptions to experience the world directly in its essential and elemental materiality. Mukherjee’s attempt to penetrate the visual realm to get to the essences chimes with Swiss painter Paul Klee’s. The deliberate infantilism and primitivity in Klee’s paintings allude to the elemental world beyond the realm of our fabricated modern reality. Klee’s search for essences was driven by a desire to go back to the roots of the “art image”. Mukherjee’s ‘blind search’ resonates with the ancient mystic traditions of Bengal: of Ramakrishna, the Bauls and Lalanpanthis, Chaitanya and Aatish Dipankara, the 10th-11th century Buddhist monk from erstwhile east Bengal, who journeyed to Tibet to revive Tantric Buddhism. Such mysticism emphasised the dissolution of the individual and his gaze into the world. The idea of non-seeing, which emerged from such mysticism, is not as simple as seeing or saying nothing. It is, in fact, seeing and saying much more than eyes and language can afford. It is faith, not in the sense of submitting to an impenetrable reality, but a state of absolute transparency between the human being and his world so as to preclude any attempt by the former to invade and know the latter. Mukherjee’s decision to paint the 8-foot high, 80-foot long Life of Medieval Saints mural on the three walls of Visva Bharati’s Hindi Bhavan was not pure chance. The mural, a seamless tapestry of Surdas, Kabir, Ravidas, Tulsidas, Guru Gobind Singh and other medieval Bhakti figures, is an expression of his historical vision that has little to do with the nationalistic grand narratives of his time. In its compositeness, the mural is shot through with the history of Bhakti, not only in the choice of subject but, more importantly, in its vision. History in this mural – which brings together the lives of various medieval saints separated in time and space – is not a mere chronology of events that were seen by human eyes as having unfolded in time. It is an experience, elusive to human eyes, of a timeless emotion. The emotion of “bhakti”. In his Shilpa Jigyasa (Art’s Quest), Mukherjee privileges the world of the primitive anonymous craftsman, ready to dissolve into his tradition, over that of the modern artist with his individual’s ego and gaze. However, his return to the ‘blind’ tradition of the artisan was much too ironical, and thus modern, to replicate the ‘repetitiveness’ of artisanal craftsmanship in
Liturgical Architecture
Dennis R. Mcnamara We live in an era that is not known for making beautiful churches. In fact, the sensus fidelium seems to indicate that something is indeed severely wrong with the unprofane architecture erected in the last few decades. Sometimes modern churches claim a vague Christian symbolism or association through shape or general motif, which is nonetheless found largely unsatisfactory. In other cases, purposeful attempts are made to avoid eschatological sacramentality. Many churches of the last half century seem to live up quite well to Hans Urs von Balthasar’s (who, along with Karl Rahner and Bernard Lonergan, sought to offer an intellectual, faithful response to theological modernism) claim, adapted from Karl Barth, that without enthralling pangs of beauty, theology does not inspire. If it is in the very nature of beauty to transport us to rupture, Balthasar asks, how could we then possibly dispense with the concept of the beautiful that is sharp and yet tangible, something that abstract modernism undermines? This description certainly fits much of the church architecture of recent years. Yet, an unconsidered return to the Romantic historicism of nineteenth-century architecture cannot be a solution to today’s problems, despite the calls for traditional architecture appearing today. Even Ralph Adams Cram, twentieth century’s great proponent of a renewal of liturgical architecture through a return to medieval precedent, critiqued the nineteenth-century revivalists for their history-driven formalism. He called the Modernist “revolt” against the period’s parade of styles a laudable thing, but could not agree with its solutions, since “they were measurably inferior to what they have decried.” We find ourselves in a similar dilemma. A return to a purely Romantic approach to architecture is not a true solution though the romantic spirituality of the Christian artists and aesthetic philosophers of the last two centuries (from 1860 to the present) is strongly brought out by their preserving a sense of the unity of beauty and religion, art and religion, when they had almost no support from theology. A Balthasarian approach to liturgical architecture can avoid the pitfalls of both Romanticism and Modernism. To canonize a particular “style” of architecture only because of a historical association is an architectural aesthetic theology. However, the Modernist denial of historical styles precisely because of their historicity is also an architectural aesthetic theology. A Balthasarian solution beckons: begin by conceiving liturgical architecture as the form of Christ (Christus totus) in his sacramental, ecclesiological dimension in the liturgy. Liturgical architecture can therefore best be evaluated in light of its ability to bear the Christian message, that is, the “ontological secret” of the liturgical event, which by definition reveals beauty and results in joyfully rapturous discovery. Balthasar writes about the apologetic nature of his “fundamental theology,” saying “the heart of the matter should be the question: ‘How does God’s revelation confront man in history? How is it perceived?’” One could ask the same question in architectural terms: “How does God’s revelation confront man in liturgical architecture? How is it perceived?” Here we have an architecture that is claimed to reveal the divine, and that, on the basis of this claim, demands that we should believe and therefore expend our resources in a certain way despite the clear, rationalistic overarching demands of economy, functionalist utility, and the Zeitgeist. What basis acceptable to the liturgical-architectural establishment can we give these authoritative claims? Although the answer may seem redundant at first, it is worth stating that liturgical architecture is first and foremost liturgical, a bearer of the mystery of the anticipated eschatology of the Banquet of the Lamb. Balthasar speaks of the Church as an “event” in which the “power of the Christ-form expresses and impresses itself,” in which “the Lord becomes present in the assembly manifesting himself within it.” Both the Eucharist and the scriptures are described as making no sense unless enjoyed as a means of “impressing the Christ-form in the hearts of men.” Liturgical architecture can be understood in a similar manner. Liturgical architecture (and of course, figural art), as symbol of the Wedding Feast of the Lamb of the Heavenly Jerusalem, would make no sense without the Christian’s partaking in the invisible liturgy that it represents. As part of an architectural theological aesthetic, liturgical architecture is not primarily an example of the trends popular in Architectural Record, a neutral setting for the horizontal activities of an improperly understood “People of God,” or a “skin for liturgical action . . . which need not look like anything else.” Rather, liturgical architecture should be capable of becoming part of the cluster of symbols that make up the liturgical rite. In other words, it should be considered sacramental, making present by way of foretaste the Wedding Feast of the Lamb in the Heavenly Jerusalem. “If beauty is conceived of transcendentally, then its definition must be derived from God himself.” This emphasis on the sacramental, eschatological nature of Christian worship and its liturgical architecture finds a decided sympathy with Balthasar’s writings. The liturgy is certainly one place where the encounter with Christ is made available to us. In fcat, liturgy is made up of two distinct movements. “First God is made present through words, signs, and symbols,” then “people respond to God’s presence in their midst through word, song, and action.” This second movement is not a separate event, but a spontaneous response to the first. If architecture is part of the system of symbols that make God known, then it is not simply the neutral beige background common to the post-conciliar era, but part of the “eschatological orientation” that “endeavors to make the divine present through a type of eschatological anticipation.” Through its positive, beautiful images and sounds, and by its confident celebration of the eschatological banquet, it steps beyond the present-day signs of the kingdom’s distance and anticipates the time of the kingdom’s fullness. Thus, liturgical celebrations avoid the chaos, contingency, moral confusion, and existential anxieties that mark our transient lives. Liturgy needs the kind of eschatological anticipation implied by these characteristics if it is to offer
Material Love
Nandini Chandra and Jesse Ross Knutson Indeed, love is a many splendoured thing! Different categories of age and class appropriate romantic literature offer a guide to this tremendous variety. There is a virtual caste/class system operating in the love industry whereby some people feel real/authentic love in contrast to more debased others. But despite this hierarchy, love is for everyone, like in the Mira Nair film Monsoon Wedding. What is shared across this class system is a desire for another human being for sure. But the sexual feeling aroused in romantic hetero-normative love is a specialized one not to be confused with sex qua sex. The sex here has to be constantly negotiated and differentiated to a point where it is no longer sex, but a suitably inflected synonym for it. So while the Valentine’s day lovers may relate to each other via loud commodities, like heart shaped balloons, Archies’ greeting cards and red roses that have been frozen for weeks before February 14-the magic date, our subdued low-profile love in defiance of this blatant commodification is no less a type in the many splendoured index file of the culture industry. It was the Marxist theorist Theodor Adorno who pointed out that the dominant form of love under capitalism is romance. His exact words: love downgraded to romance! What is so debased about romance? Is there nothing beautiful or transgressive about it? How do we make sense of our defiance of love and, defiance in love in the same breath? One minute we are distancing ourselves from a love that needs the aids of the shopping plaza, and the next minute we are buying more things to shout to the world that we will love despite all the sri ram senas and the khap panchayats. Is that schizo or not? The answer must lie in the deep structure of alienated love that affects us all whether we like to acknowledge it or not. By alienated love is meant a love that has been taken away and then sold back to us, a love appropriated from our bodies’ capacity for sensual pleasure and then returned as a mechanism to mediate that sensuality—ways of loving, ways of kissing, ways of fighting and ways of making up via the market place that any reader of Cosmo or popular ads can immediately appreciate. This is not merely a market place of things, but also a market place of ideas and we would do well to believe Marquez, when he reiterates that there is a lot of cross-fertilization between the high and the low. At the same time, sexuality—the embodied experience of love—cannot be completely regulated by the moral police. The very fact that they are trying so hard must be reason to explore what it is that is getting their goat. For one, when people feel pleasure, it is a dangerous thing because they allow their bodies to come out of fear and start questioning the repression that is cajoled into them. Who to love, how to love, who absolutely not to love are some of the edicts laid down by the enemies of love. But the defenders of love, the liberal bourgeoisie, who have surrendered to the lure of the market and allowed their daughters and sisters to enter dating sites, marriage bureaus, internet chat lines, are not so different either. These exchanges of love are rife with caste and gotra markers apart from an implicit injunction for class and religious inbreeding. It is therefore important see the defenders or tolerators of love and the enemies of love not as opposite camps, but allied (maybe disparate) units trying to come to grips with the new products of sexuality, inaugurated by advanced capital. While the fanatics are merely crying foul at the loss of their hold over the women who are daring to marry outside caste and religion, the more entrenched capitalist class, who embrace modernity with riders, want to teach women lessons in self-censorship, so that they know the boundaries within which their pleasure is permissible. After all, romantic love is not necessarily liberating. It works very much within the auspices of patriarchy and accepts women’s subservience to men. Given the uneven development of capitalism, what we have are different faces of the same thing, rather than modern love versus barbaric opposition to it. The sooner we understand the different encroachments upon our sexuality, the better we will be able to fight the constant attempts to incorporate it for the love industry. For ultimately we need love—not for happy little families who can watch telly on increasingly upgraded technology, serving up programmes that perpetually leave them on the brink of a promised pleasure so close and yet so far away—but instead to create a pleasure that can truly belong to us, and then to learn to mould the world in the image of this pleasure. The question is not the content of this pleasure, the alternately authentic or debased love that we started with, and whether one should love this way or that. The question is the trajectory. The violence against those who would love in a socially unsanctioned or defiant way (which we can now begin to recognize as fascist) comes from precisely this: the uncharted territory where an economy of unpredictable, creative pleasure might lead. It could lead to the demand for a world of pleasure, a world in the image of desire, with full stomachs and moist throats, with freely moving bodies, and social relations that we want and invent, instead of those that we suffer for lack of any other available option. Sexual repression and frustration teach one to live with lack and invest one’s libidinal energies in the reproduction of lack that capitalism represents. Socialism put simply would start with the reproduction of plenty, which the spark of pleasure in its unpredictable eddies might begin to capture in microcosm before the pigs are ready. Nandini Chandra is Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Delhi. Jesse
Politics and Ethics in Communist Practice:From the Margins of the Indian Left
Rajarshi Dasgupta Let me begin by explaining the subtitle, which should be relatively easier than the title. Who or what exactly belongs to the margins of communist politics in India? First, let me tell you about certain practices – activities and forms of activism that are no longer paid much attention practically nor thought through in theoretical terms by the dominant communist parties today. In fact, it is doubtful how far communists will currently like to identify the core of their work with such activities. Secondly, I am going to look briefly at a history, or rather micro histories of a movement, consigned to anodyne hagiographies in places like West Bengal, where communist memories primarily dwell on the heroic nostalgia of creating a hegemonic regime. Thirdly, my attempt is to tackle these issues and frame them conceptually in such a manner, which the available communist vocabulary does not allow. It does not possess the resources, which are necessary for a critical hermeneutic of the political and the ethical in the field of everyday practice. That is why I would like to turn to a different set of categories and reading strategies sidestepping the familiar Marxist methodologies here. But is it not paradoxical to study the communist movement in terms that are distant and alien from its own forms of discourse? I would say no, for we are going to study these very forms of discourse – the practice of putting them together, constituting them, building them word by word, act by act, point by point. The specific problem I have in mind is the practice of speaking the truth – its implications for the self and its relation to other/s. There is little doubt that the question of relating with the other is of paramount importance to a communist. I have discussed on other occasions how an entire set of maneuvers – physical and mental – ascetic exercises were geared to a passage of ‘becoming declassed’ which ensured a normative identification with the masses – the workers and peasants as communists saw them. This was an extremely fraught process – what we usually describe as rooted in the ordinary people, having to compete with other models like that of the satyagrahi, not always successfully but often ending up in a subterranean conversation. Unlike Gandhi’s soulforce and karmayoga, the Indian communists traded in historical materialism and labor. But the question of speaking the truth was never too far from the political performances across the spectrum. How did communists see the status of truth-speaking as an activity intrinsic to politics? What were the kinds of truths invested in such contexts? This is where we must leave the customary communist pedagogy behind and look for other kinds of truth and, as we shall see, other kinds of relation to truth. Speaking the first type of Truth: Utopian Broadly, I would say there are three significant kinds of speaking the truth in communist practice. The first kind of truth is very strictly speaking what is not true in an objective sense – that is, it is not out there in the reality around us but symptomatic of a possible future – a truth that is teleological – that states what is to come as per the law of history tomorrow. But this does not mean it is a determinist thing, a rhetorical article of mechanical faith in progress. It is in fact a far more unpredictable and complicated move that arises out of trying to understand the other. And its function is to fiercely combat accepted wisdoms, in particular, the cynicism of the common sense that wryly explains why certain things never change in a desirable manner, why the status quoist inertia finally comes to win the day. This is of course the truth about utopia – which is not based on the existing state of knowledge but on its profound subversion – the place of an ‘as if’ which breaks down and reassembles the sense of reality in a way that makes it more meaningful and productive. Let me give you a concrete example. For much of the middle of twentieth century communist activists and intellectuals have racked their minds to understand why the peasants – reduced to dying of hunger in thousands in the infamous famine of forties – never rebelled. Was the very impulse of rebellion basically alien to their class character as peasants? The question is actually not very distant for us at a time of mass suicides and predatory dispossession of land today. However, one of the ways in which the communists sought to address the question is to search for something like an organic intellectual – a poor peasant cum Marxist theorist who would be able to answer the riddle. The question took many shapes within the communist movement and became the subject matter of a number of cultural productions – plays, poetry and short stories. I want to draw your attention to one particular short story, titled ‘Chhiniye Khayni Kano?’ roughly translatable as ‘Why did they not loot and eat?’, given the well-known fact that there was widespread hoarding of foodgrains at this point. The communist author of the story, Manik Bandyopadhyay, plotted the story around a conversation between a bhadralok babu communist who wonders if the peasant is submissive by nature and an old robber, Jogi dakaat, who explains to the babu how hungry bodies can only rebel after a square meal and how they give up when the hunger multiplies: there is no energy left, the body survives at the bare limits of life. The important point to note is not this reason that is no doubt worth serious consideration but the character of Jogi dakaat. What we are looking at in such a character is precisely that organic peasant intellectual that was not there to be found in reality. Jogi dakaat is more of a horizon than an esoteric social bandit dear to Eric Hobsbawm. He is coming from the future into a short story that turns