Humanities Underground

London Stopped & Searched

 Saroj Giri The black youth, together with the ‘feral scum’ of other colours, has always been stopped and searched, detained. But what happens when he stops and searches, detains the city? Clarence Road in Hackney, on Monday night ( August 8 ) saw mass participation in looting in the presence/participation of large sections of the community from Pembury estate. Perhaps unlike in other areas, here the looting looked less like ‘criminality pure and simple’ and more like people breaking into a shop and quietly, with a tacit understated mutual understanding, walking away with what they needed for free from the store – looting as the expression of some kind of a general will. At least two hundred people were present and participating. With wheelie bins smouldering in the road and police helicopters droning overhead, a group of black women holding hands burst into Bob Marley’s ‘Rastaman chant’ as a car went up in flames. For a moment I thought it was Marley’s ‘Looting and Burning Tonight’ but it wasn’t. Complete with this fitting music, the disorder seemed orderly, particularly considering the hundreds of people collectively participating in it without any violence to each other. At one moment someone climbs up a lamp-post and tries to pull down the CCTV camera – the crowd below obviously cheers and applauds.  Large sections of ‘responsible’ society, including its progressive sections, feel violated by this mass looting, illegality and, some would say, immorality. And yet the underclass seemed to establish and assert themselves precisely in and through their worthlessness and illegality. The ‘cheap thrill’ element of looting petty consumer items was there. And yet there was something else going on too. Hence even though some of those in it did feel moral compunctions about looting as something immoral, they would still go along with the overall spirit and ‘idea’ behind it. Indeed, in some cases, people went ahead with the collective wisdom of looting and arson even when it posed a danger to them and their property. Was it irrationality, or acting politically? Consider this: “A middle aged Iraqi political refugee clutched to his chest his valuable personal documents that he’d salvaged, and worried that the car burning in the street might ignite his flat just above, but was torn by sympathy for the youth, who were up against the very same forces who’d turned his own country into a killing ground” (http://www.revcom.us/a/242/AWTWNS_london_burning-en.html). This only means that the looting and arson was on the whole, and through associations not so obvious, somehow placed on the side of those fighting power and the repressive machinery. The main thrust of it was subversive and anti-authoritarian even if far from being formally anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist and so on. It is to suppress this that those in power have whipped up so much hypocritical affect to invoke so-called moral values and responsibility to denounce it as mere looting and criminality. This approach criminalizes the ongoing protests/looting, treating them as a problem of crime in general and the breakdown of parenting in particular. The other so-called left or progressive approach is no better. Apparently opposed to the first one, it views the protests/looting as a by-product of poverty, unemployment, cuts and so forth – it says, let us look at the context. Both approaches however deny the protests/looting their specificity. Let us take the ‘context’ argument. While cuts and unemployment do provide the context, the angry youths seem to be castigating ‘public order’ and ‘society’ in more fundamental ways than is warranted by such economic hardships. There is an excess in these actions which refuses to be reduced to some prior set of explanatory factors. It stands out, reconfiguring things in new ways. For contrast, take the student protests last year. Very militant and sometimes violent too – and yet they had a clear demand and could be referred back to specific government policies, so that the dominant fabric of society as such was not their target. They represented particular organizations and the agents were identifiable as students and so on. Not this one though. This time it is more like an anonymous ‘rabble’ attacking no identifiable body and no demands have been put forth – nothing and no one, in short, for the powers-that-be to engage with. The so-called community leaders (calling for an end to the protests/riots) themselves appear so out of touch with this ‘rabble’, thereby completing the picture.  Far from making demands and seeking upward mobility, there is instead a rejection of society, a conscious violation of public order. And nobody saw this ‘intifada of the underclass’ coming, even if everybody knew the ‘context’ – of poverty and marginalisation. Like proletarian shock troopers appearing from the forgotten inner recess of society, they seem to castigate and violate ‘our way of life’ and social norms.  Here are those at the bottom of society no longer wanting to suffer or undergo the regimentation and socialization and discipline (what Cameron calls ‘learning to take responsibility’) in order to go up in life, become decent citizens and so on. Many of them refuse to be integrated and assimilated – while this often means that they then get hired/used to do the dirty criminal work for those in power (Fanon’s ‘lumpen proletariat’), the consequences are not always so grim. For there is also an unmistakable political tendency here going back to the Black Panthers (well, you had the British Black Panthers too) of refusing to get assimilated in/by mainstream society – part of what the Panthers called ‘self-determination’. These political ideas circulate in various forms, often very incoherently, in the black community, in popular memory, as a line in hip hop lyrics, a random quote from Malcolm X (‘by any means necessary’) – often as thought, an ‘unconscious’ response or deeply ingrained leaning, a propensity. To say that the protests and riots are mere objective effects of a bad socio-economic context is to take away the thought, the politics or subjective leaning suffusing them. In being arraigned against capital and

“You Have Seen Nothing in Hiroshima, Nothing”: Evidence & Cinematic Image

T.P. Sabitha Alain Resnais’ film, Hiroshima mon amour (1957), makes an audacious claim when the Japanese man makes this remark repeatedly to his French lover when she claims to have “seen” Hiroshima: “Tu n’a rien vu á Hiroshima, rien.” This denial is the possibility of the text of narration that cannot be done with the image. When the camera ‘sees’ something, it cannot be ‘nothing’ that it sees. The image can only assert, not functionally serve as a denial or negation. What is negated is the truth of her claim that she has “seen” Hiroshima: the hospitals and the museum. When she says this, the camera takes on a documenting role, moving through the corridors of the hospital and ‘recording’, almost without a witnessing agent, the exhibited objects at  the museum – stones, human skin, human hair, as well as the ‘recreated’ performances of the Hiroshima bombing, the actors apparently on fire, their skin peeling off, the enacted deaths. We see the ‘documented’ people at the hospital often startled by the camera; they look directly at it, thus the cinematic image is made in the convention of the documentary film, moving through spaces and creating a cartography of the ‘real’ that she claims to have seen. However, the man denies that what she has seen is the ‘real’. What she sees is not testimonially adjudicated as Hiroshima, hence we can perhaps think that Hiroshima exceeds this, it is not containable in representation. The representation does not attest to the reality of Hiroshima, with the text of narration breaking down and negating the ‘reality’ of what is shown. What we see here, through these images, is not Hiroshima. Compare for a moment, Renè Magritte’s painting “This is not a pipe”, with the image of a pipe and the text that denies that it is a pipe. On the one hand, it is quite obvious that it is not a pipe, but the picture of a pipe. On the other it is a radical pictorial statement (since the writing in cursive hand is within the picture) about the limits of attestation or the impossibility of re-presenting the ‘real’, about the inherent fictionality of pictorial art, and perhaps too, on the function of art which is not to re-“present” anything outside of itself. This is what Michel Foucault writes about the scrawled text “This is not a pipe” within the painting: “Yet perhaps the sentence refers precisely to the disproportionate, floating, ideal pipe – simple notion or fantasy of a pipe. Then we should have to read, ‘Do not look overhead for a true pipe. That is a pipe dream. It is the drawing within the painting, firmly and rigourously outlined, that must be accepted as a manifested truth’” (This is not a Pipe. Pp. 16-17.) Resnais does something similar here, while showing us images of Hiroshima, the narration denies that it is Hiroshima that we are seeing. Hiroshima here signifies an absence that the cinematic image cannot show us, a manifestation outside of itself. It can, though, show us Hiroshima from his point of view, Hiroshima as his recollection-image. However, the Hiroshima that must exist vis-à-vis that which is not Hiroshima, is not shown in the film. That is perhaps the ideal, the ideational Hiroshima that cannot be actualised, through what Gilles Deleuze calls the “false piety” of the image of “actualitè”, the documenting image that bears a certain reverence for the evidence of the “real” (Cinema 2, Pp. 122). But Hiroshima as an experienced event in time is never shown in the film. The question “if this is not Hiroshima, then what/when/where is Hiroshima?” is never answered. The only fictionalising of the Hiroshima bombing is what she and the camera see in the hospitals and museums, the re-creation, the re-collection, the re-gathering perhaps, of the event. The fiction of documentary is also seen in the reference to the “Peace Film” to act in which the French woman has come to Hiroshima. Marguerite Duras’s script says of the Peace Film: “It is not necessarily a ridiculous film; merely an enlightening one” (HMA, 39). We never see that “Peace Film” within Hiroshima mon amour. All we see are sets being dismantled and carried away and she removing her makeup. The sets and the makeup emphasise the ‘falseness’ of the documentary film, its fictiveness. The referential and signifying linkage between image and text is broken when, just as we are shown images of the Hiroshima that she has seen, he negates it and we are told we have seen nothing of Hiroshima. Is there a possibility of thinking that nomination (‘Hiroshima’) is impossible as an effect of the visual? The two protagonists too, significantly, are not named in the film, until the end when they call each other by the names of cities/sites of a sight that is not attested to in the film. Can the image attest to/ name anything by itself? The ‘real’ in the documentary is ascribed as the ‘real’ by a certain usage of technique or visual grammar. Resnais seems to deny what Carl Plantinga calls “Asserted Veridical Representation” while discussing the ‘documenting’ status of the documentary film. (“What a Documentary Is, After All”). Resnais denies this assertion, the ability of the image to nominate what it shows, and instead fictionalises her recollection-image, a powerful sequence of the ‘false’, her story that is actualised in this fiction film. The Hiroshima that she has seen and he denies as being Hiroshima, is partly the fiction of Hiroshima through documentary images and hyper-real museums; Resnais inserts some newsreel footages into the images of what she has “seen” in Hiroshima that, fast-edited, almost work  as a parodic pastiche. However this ‘false’ Hiroshima is acknowledged as capable of affective power when she says: “The reconstructions have been made as authentically as possible. The films have been made as authentically as possible. The illusion, it’s quite simple, the illusion is so perfect that the tourists cry”. The fiction of the ‘authentic’, the ‘actual’, is

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