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 not really racial, this ‘thought’ or politics can allow a wider class based solidarity cutting the race barrier. Sometimes however this politics gets intertwined with the fact of this underclass’s complicity in the shadowy world of gangs and criminals. The result is what we witnessed: a violent consumerism and looting alongside the anti-authoritarianism of ‘fuck the police’, ‘fight the feds’ – an unmediated direct confrontation with the police and social/public order.

 Totally oblivious of any of this, those at the top echelons, those at the helm of affairs, gloating on their success, feel suddenly swept away by a hurricane which they are striving to name as looting, criminality, vandalism and so on. This mish-mash of a protest/riot/looting surprised both those on the right as well as those on the left. So let us make sense of this hurricane and try to retrieve what is political in it.

The struggle against the cuts, it is pointed out, was legitimate but not these protests/riots by the looters and yobs living off social benefits and carrying guns. But consider this: aren’t we told that cuts are an attack on the working people? So, will the working people always do no more than merely demand that these massive cuts be withdrawn from implementation or repealed. Will they not at some point counter-attack, stop marching in an orderly manner to Westminster, and resort to other ‘means’? Moreover, those who face not just the brunt of the cuts, fee hikes and other economic hardships, but also undergo the humiliation of police brutality, might do more than join marches and protests. Here are those who get kettled every day and perhaps for generations – they need not go to a demonstration to experience it. Getting kettled might be part of your heady, radical student days, to be recounted in sober years of your maturity. But getting ‘stopped and searched’ your entire life till you reach the grave, is something altogether different.

 The structural violence of poverty and unemployment is combined with subjective, personalized, targeted daily torture. Hence the reaction to ‘stop and search’ cannot be only a planned and peaceful demonstration. Something of the hurricane will be part of the reaction. No wonder then that those involved are the poor black youth and the white underclass at the forefront of this war – youth who are no radical anti-establishment rebels reading Sartre and watching Ken Loach, but who just feel like ‘turning the shit up’, hitting and punching back. It is not radical thought leading to radical action bt it is primarily action coming out of life experience. As somebody said, “these kids are telling their life stories”. Looking at it from the inside, the protests/looting do not quite match David Cameron’s description as “criminality, pure and simple”.

Crucially, this counter attack by the poor could never be an orderly business since the Order of the oppressive system is much wider and includes almost all of social life, including, let us say, the small businesses that got attacked. Didn’t some Sorbonne-educated French philosophers tell us how the prevailing norms of the status quo, the social order and its ritual practices, get normalized as neutral norms and hence are against the interests of the working people? Or is it that when members of the upper middle class and intellectuals violate social order they are counted as radicals, poised to become a venerated writer or public intellectual in later life, whereas the poor would be treated as mere criminals.

 In any case the law and moral norms that supposedly apply to all somehow allow the bigger looters to get away. Ah, how can we not recall: ‘The law locks up the man or woman, Who steals the goose from off the common, But leaves the greater villain loose, Who steals the common from off the goose’. Now that the court cases against the protestors/looters are proceeding we see what they are accused of stealing: two mobile phones, pair of jeans, a TV set and so on. Don’t we know of far bigger loot happening in this country? Looks like, you need to loot really big in order not to be seen as a looter or criminal. The smallness of the loot strangely does not work in their favor – nobody wants to excuse since they were after all stealing just a few things. Instead this smallness works against the accused – they appear really mean and petty. The media is of course going overboard highlighting these ‘horrible crimes’.

In short, normal, everyday, routine life with apparently no looting and based on hard work and responsibility and so on, automatically reproduces capitalism and its inequalities. So much so that the direct coercive power of the authorities and the raw power of big corporations are not always necessary. Indeed, in a ‘leisure society’ where you ‘either buy or die’ it is no longer the old Parliament or the Home Office buildings that symbolize ‘order’. ‘Order’, ‘the good life’ is now symbolized by the high streets and fancy stores lined up with rows of gleaming products that seduce and speak to you through transparent glass panes – such 24/7 transparency that shops in high streets have long since done away with iron shutters. This transparency is only as real as the false apparition of fair competition, the rewarding of hard work and so on.

Indeed, even though CCTV cameras peer down on the high streets, the immediate experience is one of transparency and seamless mobility. Such trusting, transparent cityscape already assumes that you are not one of those who will break in and loot, already in that sense eliciting your complicity – the insufferable axis of the willing. But then the rabble from the bottom of society comes and smashes this ideal world, targeting areas of ‘fair exchange’, of buying and selling and not really overt symbols of authority or power. No wonder authorities in London are referring to what their counterparts in Philadelphia have done: impose an evening curfew to prevent neighborhood kids from entering the main high streets. The BBC ran a story on this.

Thus what looked like disorderly looting and ‘yobs gone wild’ was still well-directed. It carried some unarticulated thought or insight and was more than just stealing things. Nor were these merely a stimuli-response effect of an adverse context. Hence the feeling – how can they do this to ‘our London’? Obviously, it seems like the handiwork of what Cameron calls ‘broken and sick’ society. No excuses for this. That which surreptitiously and cleverly assumed our complicity, without really taking our consent, has been smashed – it is this which pinches and agitates those in power rather than that things were stolen or looted. It was really not about ‘theft’ but the boldness, subversiveness and explosive charge involved – the underlying challenge to authority and the dominant order. And that it was those at the bottom of society marching into and smashing ‘our’ high streets. Hence it was far more than theft or criminality, or far more than what adverse socio-economic context can possibly warrant. Cameron said in Parliament today (August 10, 2011) that “what happened had nothing to do with politics or protest but was theft”. He is in denial.

What must be pointed out however is the cheap, violent consumerism all too evident in this intifada – also opportunistic, often highly individualistic, aggressive, macho and acquisitive. And yet at that moment of the mass protest/looting on Clarence Road the rest of normal society, Big Society seemed so misplaced and unjust. It felt as if from now on, from this spot, one might finally be able to tell just how repressive society as it normally exists is. The freedom the rabble was enjoying seemed to offer one a handle from which to critique the regimentation and repression that constitutes society. Seeing the sheer joy among the looters carrying the goods, it felt as if the fetishistic powers of the commodity have been proletarianised, or, sadly, the proletariat commodified – not just lumpenised. The poor seemed more under the spell of the magical powers of the commodity than the rich. Looting not as the redistribution of wealth, as some anarchists have opined, but as testimony to the enslavement of the proletariat to the commodity. Can London be stopped and searched without being enslaved to the commodity?

Saroj Giri is Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Delhi.

“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 exposed as fiction by Resnais and its testimonial veracity juridically denied. The man does not bear witness in the film, he is the function of judgement, while the woman is the witness whose recollection-image of the WW II we are given access to in the film. We see her recollection-image of France during the German Occupation in association with the present Hiroshima.

Actualisation of time in cinema is technically done through editing, changing the pace of the shots – acceleration or deceleration – and flashback, with identifiable markers of shifting between the present-time and the past-time. Montage can be used to indicate the presence of two parallel times. And with the movement from Hiroshima to Nevers, it is such a parallel time that the cinematic image creates. Resnais does not use conventional markers of the flashback such as fade-in or fade-out or dissolve. The visual text moves seamlessly from the present Hiroshima to Nevers, where she witnesses the killing by French snipers of her German lover. The montage moves from the twitching fingers of the sleeping Japanese man to the spasmodic movements of the dying man by the banks of the river Loire.

The montage here can be seen as the persistence of time, the continuum of time, which is where the ‘real’ can be said to be located – not as separate co-ordinates on the “sheet of time”, but in the co-existence of images in a continuum. Gilles Deleuze, while discussing Resnais’ films writes, “Throughout Resnais’ work we plunge into a memory which overflows the conditions of psychology, memory for two, memory for several, memory-world, memory-ages of the world…What are the sheets of the past in the cinema of Resnais?…In the first place, each sheet of the past is a continuum” (Cinema 2. Pp.119). The montage that works almost like a tracking shot between two “sheets of time” seems to indicate the persistence of one in the other, that of Nevers in Hiroshima. Here are two time-images coming together, colliding, to create a new cartography of time, the essence of which is the persistence of time that has the plausibility of changing and transforming with each colliding encounter with another memory-age, another site on the crystalline architecture of time, this is perhaps what Deleuze calls “the series of time, which brings together the before and after in a becoming, instead of separating them” (Cinema 2. pp.155). This coming together, instead of serving an effect of disorientation, instead orients us towards the inherent nature of the simultaneity of co-ordinates on different sites of time, the time of the world.

The conflation of Hiroshima with Nevers here coincides with the Japanese man referring to the Nazi lover as “I”. While she is narrating her story, he asks her, “When you’re in the cellar, am I dead?”. Time here moves from the memory of one into the memory for two, thus making possible a world of time that can come into being with two memories colliding with and segueing into each other. It is also the possibility of fiction to inhabit the ‘I’ of the other where through the power of the false, ‘I’ can go out of itself and by fictionalising itself can come to be, in another’s site of time. It is what the art of Jean Rouch’s documentary cinema does, this going out of oneself, the time of oneself into that of another, of the Other, in the possessed and parodic self-fictionalisation in Les Metiers Fous, where what is manifested is what Deleuze calls “not the cinema of truth, but the truth of cinema” (ibid. Pp. 151).

What we see in the visual narration in answer to his question whether he is dead while she is in the cellar, is her story, of falling in love with a Nazi soldier, the innocence of their furtive meetings, her witnessing his death (that is where her story starts, in medias res), being ostracised from society for falling in love with the enemy, her father’s drugstore closing down due to the ‘dishonour’, her being incarcerated in a cellar, her trauma and the possibility of her having gone temporarily insane, when she loses track of the passing of time. She does not register time anymore and is frozen in one moment, one dot on the sheet of time.

What we see here are close-up shots of the textured walls of the cellar, and her bleeding fingertips scratching that surface. The images are almost tactile. This parallel sheet of time comes into being where ironically the protagonist loses sense of the passage of time altogether. Time ceases to be chronological and what we see is time as phenomenological. The decelerated long shots of her in the cellar changes the pace of time, slows it down, almost stilling time. She remembers having been there for “Eternity”. It is when she starts noticing the markers of time that she comes out of her state of shock. The soundtrack is that of church bells that she says she started hearing again. The consciousness of time brings her back from the limbo in the cellar. The decelerated pace while she is in the cellar and the textured wall and close-ups of her scratching fingernails remind us of the rich tactility of the long shots of the lovers’ bodies at the beginning of the film.

The texture of the close-up shots of the lovers’ bodies creates a lingering ambiguity about what it is that is represented – is it sweat or dust or ashes? All these possibilities are visually present in the images. The camera here is not ‘documenting’, but evoking parallel poetic possibilities. The fragmented close-ups of the lovers covered with a texture that can be sweat or ashes suggest alternative probabilities of the ‘real’, thus coalescing temporal probabilities in the topography of bodies. The camera plays neither the role of the witness, nor that of the voyeur. This ambiguous opening shot itself interrogates the documentary status of the image and its stability as a sign with an identifiable referent. When the woman asserts the veracity of the referent ‘Hiroshima’ that she has seen, the man negates the truth of that assertion. The Hiroshima that she attests to is entirely spatially locatable: the hospital, the museum, the Peace Square, the streets that she walks, the hotel where the lovers meet.

After she finishes her possessed narration of her ‘story’, she feels she has betrayed her German lover. In a scene where she has an internal monologue looking at the mirror she confesses to her absent dead German lover that she betrayed him with the Japanese man. It is not a sense of sexual betrayal, but a betrayal of sharing that sheet of memory that only belonged to the two of them. She says “I told our story to him tonight. You see, it was a story that could be told”. This telling of the story in Hiroshima makes possible the coalescing of separate memory-images where the Japanese lover, in the course of narration of the story can become the German lover. It  is an enabling illusion, the illusion of this fictionalisation, just as she earlier compared the illusions in the museum to the illusion of love. That is perhaps where the Deleuzian “power of the false” lies, in this illusion of the ‘real’ that is acknowledged and asserted as an illusion, as fictional. Her sense of betrayal also alludes to the inherent falsity of narration. Deleuze quotes Nietzsche in Cinema 2: “Even the truthful man ends up realizing that he has never stopped lying” (‘The Powers of the False’, Cinema 2. 133). In the woman’s haunting and persistent sense of betrayal can be seen the inherent fictionality of the ‘real’. The ‘real’ as an unstable topography made up of constantly transforming and modifying time-images.

While Nevers exists as a separate sheet of time, we do not see Hiroshima in a sheet of past-time. It is the Hiroshima in the here and now of the cinematic time and space that we see. In the sequences of her walking the streets at night, the camera itself becomes the flâneur, walking and seeing the city. We see the neon-lit bill-boards, the night-lamps on the streets, the desultory traffic, the tea-rooms, the bars; and then in one shot, again a seamless montage that fits in with the flâneur-camera shots of the city, suddenly we see a quick glimpse of Plâce de la Republique inserted into images of the buildings on the streets on Hiroshima. Nevers and Paris continue to persist in Hiroshima. Resnais brings together, in the site-seeing of the camera, different cartographies of time, both spatially and temporally. The space of the past of Nevers seems to persist in the space of the present of Hiroshima.

Flâneuring is a contingent activity, where the flâneuse throws herself open to chance. This element of contingency is where Resnais locates the ‘real’ in cinema. The movie-camera here is nomadic, and the ‘real’ that it attests to is the transient and the contingent. Guiliana Bruno in her essay “Site-Seeing: Architecture and the Moving Image” writes that the affinity between cinema and the city street pertains to the transient: “The [im]mobile spectator moves across an imaginary path traversing multiple sites and times. Her navigation connects different moments and far apart places. Film inherits the possibility of such a spectatorial voyage from the architectural field” (Pp. 14).  Bruno quotes Eisenstein from his essay, “El Greco y el cine”: “An architectural ensemble…is a montage from the point of view of a moving spectator…Cinematographic montage too, is a means to ‘link’ in one point – the screen – various fragments of a phenomenon filmed in diverse dimensions” (Bruno. Pp. 14). The architectural spaces of time persistently coalesce in the final long sequence of ‘street-walking’ in Hiroshima mon amour.

Perrault thinks of cinema veritè that cinema must become akin to walking. In that contingent movement we see the document-image located. In the final scenes of Hiroshima mon amour, the long shots of her walking the streets of Hiroshima at night and throwing herself as well as the cinematic image open to chance, cinema is located in the contingency of the movement-image — the motion-picture — and its temporal veracity validated through the architecture of time – the layering of different, parallel, persisting sheets of time, the buildings suddenly become unlocatable. Are they in Hiroshima or in Nevers or in Paris? What kind of montage is it where another site of memory persists in short glimpses, erupting into the present of Hiroshima? Hiroshima comes into being in these capricious contingencies of imaginary sites of time. The ‘real’ in Resnais’ film perhaps comes into being at the transient interstices of these persistent cartographies of time that the camera takes a walk through.

Works Cited

 

Bruno, Guiliana. “Site-Seeing: Architecture and the Moving Image”. Wide Angle. Vol.19, No. 4, 1997. Pp – 8-24.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. London: Athlone Press, 1989.

Duras, Marguerite. Hiroshima Mon Amour. Trans. Richard Seaver. New York: Grove Press, 1961.

Foucault, Michel. This Is Not a Pipe. Trans. and Ed. James Harkness. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1982.

Plantinga, Carl. “What a Documentary Is, After All”. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 63, No. 2 (Spring, 2005). Pp 105-117

 T.P. Sabitha teaches English Literature at Hansraj College, University of Delhi. She is an art critic & poet and is currently working on her doctoral studies on a Commonwealth Scholarship.

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 contrary it is a detour to revisit it as a site of abandoned routes, of experiments, of imaginations, of thwarted attempts. This pre-occupation of searching through the archive of the abandoned has also had it moment, particularly in the heyday of early modernism, where it has been played out as a grand idea of the march of time expressed through the trope of the rise and fall of civilizations. The march of time idea easily lent authority and intellectual and moral legitimacy to the subjugation of peoples and communities all over the world. Our sense of the diachronic is different, what we can see taking place around us (at all times, actually) are – polyphonic searches in the minor scales undertaken by a multitude of actors. These processes add up to something totally contrary to the march of time and the rise and fall of civilizations. Instead of a smooth fabric, they produce a perforated image of time; they spin a web or lattice of time. In fact, they constitute an image of patient time that can hold within itself the plural unfolding of complementary as well as contestant claims on the experience of duration itself.

 So, to come back from this detour into the terms of your question – our sense of what you call the contrapuntal does not necessarily ‘echo’ the principles of montage in early Soviet cinema. Instead, perhaps the relationship may be better understood in the terms of what the vocabulary of your suggestion contains implicitly. It is ‘contrapuntal’. An echo is a delayed, and weakened transmission of the same signal, arising due to acoustic resonance. We are neither a delayed, nor a weakened transmission of the signals of montage, or of the early twentieth century avant-gardes. Our moves may constitute at times a counter-signal, a horizontal, diagonal and diachronic interference into the dialectical-epistemological certitude of what you rightly characterize as the vertical and synchronic principles of montage.

MB: We need to re-affirm this in the face of an academic discourse where ‘art’ has become anathema, where it has been decided that everything is culture. Commitment to art is equated with elitism. South Asian critics believe in this more than others. Is the critical/discursive aspect of your work a conscious reaction to the populism this tendency harbours, a demonstration that critical reflection needs to connect up with creative adventures rather than feed into culture industries? If that is so, how would you deal with the perception that, unlike film or theatre, visual arts still occupy a physical space that finds it difficult becoming public?

Raqs: A mathematician friend always argues that the value of the work of mathematics in society does not have to demonstrate through its ‘popularity’. Mathematical creativity is valuable regardless of how many (or how few) people understand it because it is generative of new ways of thinking. Can we apply the same criterion to discussion of art? Let us keep this question unanswered, for now. Instead, we could ask, why do we not see art as a condition/possibility for everyone in life?

We live in the time of the twinning of “the industrialization of creativity” and “a meltdown of culture”.  Clearly, for the elite there is a loss of confidence in culture as the site of its unquestioned dominance. The parameters of hegemony are now blurred. It is becoming less clear as to how they can undertake cultural “adventures” as they used to be taken. Moreover, the drives to accumulation and expansion are increasingly running counter to the slower rhythm of the cultivation of practitioners. This anxiety runs too in the minds of plantation managers. They get impatient, and thus the Amazon gets cut down everyday.

The word “public” these days has become a placeholder for impatience, profit and consensus, with little interest in the actual formation of public/s. The  patronizing – yet hopeful – idea of the public that was first deployed perhaps in the 1920s by early social democracy stands betrayed today. Nowadays the ‘public’ can neither be easily conjured up nor can it be simply constituted. It has escaped its patrons. We see this as an opportunity to rethink the contours of contemporary contestations in public space.

We would prefer to call ourselves, ‘amidst’ and ‘in-relation’ to crowds. The crowd incorporates the possibilities of things bursting open, unpredictably, in unknown directions. It can be an egalitarian space, it can allow for movement. It is also an idea that can be imagined and played with. It can change over time. To be part of a great crowd is an achievement.

Also, we often find ourselves working with and towards the idea of a ‘missing crowd’, a gathering that is yet to collect itself, a crowd that will get constituted. 

MB: It is interesting how you visit your own intellectual development through the real metaphor of technology. The source of the metaphor in this case is a machine that strives to erase the borderline between materials and consciousness. How far do you see your work being made possible by a technological revolution?

Raqs: It would be a mistake to assume that any machine can erase the borderline between materials and consciousness. We are comfortable with inhabiting a technological milieu, but we are far from being techno-positivists, or techno-determinists of the kind that believe that computers, or digital technology per se – determine the content and shape of culture by their very presence. If that were so, every regional engineering college in this country would be a hub of creativity and cultural innovation. That is far from being the case. The use of computers can instill conformity just as easily as it can inspire creativity. It all depends on what use we make of them.

In the early ‘90s we set up our studio (inside our then living quarters). We had just bought a computer, and they were not as common as they are today. It was a machine that was used by many of our friends and comrades. It was a modest production site for research notes, for writing proposals, projecting scenarios, for producing booklets on work and political economy, essays, criticism, correspondence, catalogues, etc.  Among other things, it contained our growing address book and the early eclectic notes for Sarai. This poor, overworked machine went through various disruptions – crashes, version changes, incompatibility issues, upgrades and new software. Through it we made our first forays into list cultures and the internet. It saw us through what must arguably have been the most exciting and foundational decade of our realizing the immensity of the zone of work and ideas that we would go on to inhabit.

During the course of one of the crashes we found that the data in the machine became progressively ‘chewed’ with each successive attempt to re-start the computer. The machine got slower. The complexity of possible commands and actions and even the capacity to effect an upgrade began to falter. What became available to us with each re-start were twisted, broken data threads and snatches of unrealized proposals. Later most of even this got lost and we had to take the hard disk out of the computer. The machine, got gifted to someone else, who kitted it out with a new hard disk. The ‘original’ hard disk itself remained packed away, becoming unusable over time due to the incompatibility of languages. Eventually, it must have found its way to some toxic dump. Almost a decade of work lost in a day.

All we have today from that world are inchoate memories, the beginnings of a few processes, a few completed works and scattered printouts of the twisted thread of productive acts. We are still coming to terms with the fact that the readings, arguments and practices of a decade are now only a bit of illegible digital residue. So, as you can see, we have experienced the fact that time does not move in a smooth linear transition from the past to the future at first hand. The loss of the hard disk meant having to go back in time, into a fragile memory, to reconstruct a damaged thread that connected our past to our (then) present, and through it to the future.

We know that this can happen again, at any moment, and of course, now we try to make back ups. But it has made us sensitive to the concrete fragility of memory (both corporeal and machinic) and to the care that one has to take in the maintenance of the history of one’s own practice. Were it to happen again, we would certainly experience a certain déjà vu, a feeling of ‘we have been in this place before’. But at the same time, we would also feel its opposite, jamais vu, the sense that though this is not an unfamiliar experience, it can still feel as strongly as it would if it were to happen for the very first time.

Navigating between the uncannily familiar and the uncannily unfamiliar, which can be two faces of the same experience, means that one has to actually learn how to deal with a temporal breakdown: where all your senses of what was available to you as ‘past’ and what you have at hand as the ‘present’ can be up for radical reconfiguration. This can happen during a data crash, or during a time of social upheaval, or during and in the wake of a sudden disaster like an earthquake or a tsunami. In our time, getting grips on this will be a survival skill.

Wherever we have found ourselves in, we have had to figure out a way to re-learn and reconstruct the amplitude of the passage of time. Sometimes, one has to recover in a flash what passes through (or has passed through) the poles of a decade, even a century.

Our intuition is that we are not alone in feeling this way. The people who become our co-narrators, interlocutors and translators are also alert to this incremental and conflicted movement. It is within this flux, around its tilts, crests and troughs that we try to create work, live and have our conversations.

MB: Your work occupies a space between media, not unlike other events of contemporary art. But there is a desire to make discursive lines occupy the intermediary spaces. One can see from the texts the allusions to contemporary scholarship in social sciences and critical theory. It also permeates the images involved. This is critical reflection. Does art afford you a freedom from the cut and dried frames of criticism, from its habits?

Raqs: Well, the way in which we have learnt to occupy the space of contemporary art allows us to go beyond either the habits of social science, the familiar tropes of political stance-taking and the affectation of purely formal concerns – hopefully, this is possible to do without having to jettison either the discursive depth of intellectual inquiry, the ethical ground of political commitment or the unpredictability and imaginative plenitude made possible by aesthetic engagements.

Of course, this is not a position we reached automatically. Nor do we claim that we have ‘arrived’ definitively at the place where we want to be forever. Like everything else, it has a history; it also has a future. Things have changed. Things will change.

Sometime In the late eighties there was a screening of Hartmut Bitomski’s film ‘The Autobahn of the Third Reich’ at the Max Mueller Bhavan in Delhi. All three of us saw it on the same day, but we did not really know each other then. What we do remember is the feeling of being unmoored by the film’s rhetorical stances from the compulsion of being within – or outside – the discourse of any particular discipline. 

What was Bitomski doing that we were so taken with? We can remember having several conversations about the space he had create in his mind with this film. It was not the space of facticity, nor was it pure speculation. It was not a slave to evidence or to fancy. He was reading archival images gathered from state and cinema archives, making new connections, using simple juxtaposition to cut through sedimented forms of viewing and yet he was not a slave of the archive.

He was arguing for a critical engagement with the construction plans and forms mobilization of energy and resources for the building of motorways during the 1930s and ‘40s in Germany and yet he did not have to spell out what he was saying. He was laying the foundations of our being able to ‘read’ the film, rather than telling us what to think. It was a film that could demonstrate what the concentration of power in the Nazi state meant without having to even refer to the familiar tropes of fascism. It also made them appear chillingly commonplace. So that Nazism could be seen not as an exceptional phenomenon, but as the concentrated instance of a general process.

 What impressed us was the confidence with which the film could inhabit multiple modes of knowledge production – the archival and the speculative, use different kinds of rhetoric, move between evidence and its shadow. This was not a work that held out its ‘knowledge’ on display, on its sleeve as it were. It did not suffer from what we know in social science to be ‘citationitis’ – the pathology of an anxiety of citation.

 Rather, it played a series of subtle moves that displaced the knowledge that its viewer took for granted. This meant that the viewer had to think for him or herself to get to the place where the film pointed towards.

At present, contemporary art allows for such an agility. It is today a space rife with conversation, in ferment, enriched by currents that emanate in diverse disciplines and practices.

The question of freedom is a difficult one. It does allow us to explore differing stances and moves. How free are our moves can only be evaluated in conjunction with other such moves being made by other practitioners in the arts and other fields.

We think that the space of making art today is a generative site. A site that can produce different forms of knowing about the world, in the world. But this form of knowing must not be confused with a mere “evidentiary” mode that sets out to build platforms for the launch and defense of arguments. To know in art is not to know in order to win or lose an argument. It is to access a plenitude that does not care about having to defend the necessary fragility of the contingency of our intellectual positions at any given moment.

 MB: I find myself in agreement that we need to return to a mode where a) we do not produce finished messages, and b) we arrive at forms that work on the meeting lines of argument and art, scholarship and creative work. The first takes on some urgency in the face of the emergence of consensual politics and culture – the typical effect of post-ideological projects. In Indian cinema, for instance, you cannot have irresponsible films anymore. Everyone preaches, every theme is an ‘issue’, and crass reformism rules. Criticism of the work is forestalled by consensus on the issue. But when you say art keeps alive a space where one does not have to make statements you remind me of the world-wide resurgence of another kind of cinema where the audience is allowed to make their own images and connections from the order of things on the screen. From Kiarostami to Haneke to Apichatpong, this has emerged as alternative form of speech and politics across a range of styles. Do you think it becomes difficult to imagine this in the Indian context because of a continuing expectation from art of a certain kind of social communication, e.g., ‘development communication’?

Raqs: We live in the  age of a fractured and confused consensus. We might as well call it ‘dissensus’.  Given that “dissensus” is all around us, the agencies that are supposed to maintain consensus seem overburdened and at their wit’s end. To generate consensus of any kind, no matter how short-lived and contingent it may be, these agencies have to work very hard.

You can get a sense of how hard they have to work when you see the angry commentaries around a few recent Supreme Court judgments that have deviated (even if slightly) from the ‘consensual’ script. (See for instance the pious editorial grandstanding  and op-ed sabre rattling in a few national dailies on the ‘ideological’ tenor of the Supreme Court judgement in Nandini Sundar and others v. the State of Chattisgarh . As if judgements that favour the status quo were free of ‘ideology’.

This disequilibrium is also in the arts. Not everything that is happening in the arts in our milieu is as per the consensual cycle of celebration and mourning of the ‘boom and bust and boom’ scenario. There are gaps opening up. Gaps, that can also be seen as creative opportunities, are opening out in all disciplines and sites, especially as practitioners distance themselves from their prescribed functions as the shapers of  “pedagogic” formation or as generators of consensus. There are options and opinions other than the ones in the newspapers, and they are beginning to be seen and heard.

What is it that lends these sites and disciplines the charge and electricity of ruptures and new openings? At certain historical junctures, where the experience of life is harder to smoothen out, things become sharper. In the space of contemporary art, we can see this charge. But it is a fragile thing. It needs custodianship and argumentation. It needs real, and imagined, crowds to mingle in.

Developmentalism is deeply anchored within the terms of a master-pupil relationship, in the transaction mandated between the know-all and the ignoramus. We think it is time to retire this relationship, but we know that it will not go out quietly. It will stay with us, at least for the foreseeable future. It is indeed at the heart of the distribution of time and space (we only need to look around us in our cities). It is the ground on which the superiority of the ‘expert’ is asserted. But its unwillingness to shake from its grounds makes it all the more necessary to propel the charge that will dislodge it; from art into new kinds of cinematic experience, from fragile spaces into wicked ones, from melancholic margins to distributed networks.

MB: Your example of Bitomski’s use of the archives triggers some thoughts. With digital media we are all veering close to your basic techniques, of mining and juxtaposing not only disparate elements but also media. Could you take on the question of politics that I raised once more, keeping this condition in view? Isn’t it now necessary to rethink the art- and- politics question as scholarly (research and archiving, for instance) and creative work (digital databases themselves throw up questions for form and aesthetics) veer close to each other, almost by default?

Raqs: Absolutely, it is a very good time to rethink the relationship between art, politics, ethics and knowledge. The ‘archival turn’ that a lot of art making is currently in the process of undertaking emphasizes the crucial role that a deeper philosophical engagement with questions of memory, amnesia, recall and re-inscription will play from now on. This is a time when the distinctions between art and research, between scholarly play and playful scholarship will gradually cease to matter. We look forward to this happening.

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