Contemporary painting and Indian politics

[dhu]

The Modernist Project attempts to disembody Identity from Culture; It is this Atomised Identity which can be interchanged between societies, which is malleable to technique's requirements, and which in an advanced state can be recontextualized to the old culture with all the past subjectivities in place. This project stems specifically from the -Concept- of the Alienation of the essential self from one's work - this is the specific (manufactured/constructed) "problem" which needs solving and around which all efforts are focused. This, in turn, is only a secularization of Religion which is the "essence of Man alienated from himself." These modernist Indian painters are attempting to problematize indian culture along these lines, so that it can be fitted into these frameworks of alienation.

The problem is that the concept of alienation originally manifested in response to the depredations of post-Dickensian Europe and has never been applicable to India or China or the East in general (where it is actually nonsensical). Our native efforts have always been directed at 'Suffering'.

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Religion, it has been said by many, is the essence of Man alienated from himself. </b>The task of criticism of religion is, correspondingly, one of giving Man’s essence back to himself. This is an incomplete thought, and, if I am correct, we can complete it thus: if religion is the alienated essence of man, then by being alienated, it has become an alien essence as well. <b>Giving this essence back to Man is not to give him his original essence back, but to provide him with an alien essence. </b>You may want to say that God is the alienated human essence. But you cannot return this to man without making all men into gods. When men become gods, they cease being the humans they once were!<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->The ‘Alien’ in Alienation

When the Sovereign gets secularized and becomes many sovereigns, and, consequently, when crea-tion and production can be translated into empirical actions of these many sovereigns, the religious pronouncements about labour (as an atonement for Sin) fall by the wayside. (There are other reasons as well, but we need not bother about them now.)

In these secular versions, it is said that one elaborates one’s self in the world by creating things, etc. What a human being creates belongs to his self, truly and essentially, because what he creates is part of his self. Man looks at his self when he looks at the world he has created. A secularized theological belief ends up acquiring the status of a psycho-anthropological fact.

As an illustration of this theme, take Marx’s notion of alienation. In his Paris Manuscripts, he identifies four dimensions of alienation, one of them being the following: the producer alienates his self from himself, when his products belong to someone other than himself, i.e., when the product is alienated. This self-alienation, i.e., alienation of one’s self from oneself, can come about if and only if, what one alienates, viz., the product is a part of one’s self (or, even, one’s entire self). In the Marxian anthro-pology, not only must there be a self with parts, but the objects which one creates must also constitute such a part. Otherwise, alienation of the product, no matter how it comes about, cannot be a dimen-sion in the self-alienation of the worker (or the producer). The idea that production is the objectification of man’s self is retained by Marx in Capital as well, where he compares the “worst of the architects to the best of the bees”. And yet, this is the irony I spoke of in the section on self, Marx claims that Man’s self is (the ‘is’ is one of identity) a set of social relations. At first sight, there does not appear anything amiss about it: after all, as Marx claims, social relations in capitalism are mediated by rela-tions between things, or, better still, capitalist social relations are material relations. Consequently, man’s self in capitalism is composed of material things. Thus, the “reification” of human self can be attributed exclusively to capitalist social relations, precisely because human self is a set of social rela-tions. This argument squares with the sentiment that Marx expresses else, where (Capital, Vol.3. Har-mondsworth: Pelican books, p.911), thus:

“From the standpoint of a higher socio-economic formation, the private property of particular indi-viduals in the earth will appear just as absurd as the private property of one man in other men. Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations, as boni patres familias (Good heads of the household).”

A “higher socio-economic formation” is not necessary to realize this absurdity that Marx refers to; another world-model, a different one, will do just as fine. The American-Indians just could not com-prehend that the European settlers would want to buy land from them. “How could we sell what is not ours to sell, or yours to buy? How do you sell a Cheetah or its speed?” they asked in one of the most moving and memorable documents ever composed (It is called the “Speech of Seattle”). The idea is equally absurd to the world models of the Asian Indians as well. The difference between these two Indian communities is their degree of adaptation to the European demands: one adapted and survived; the other did not and was wiped out. One did not understand, but acted as though it did; the other failed to simulate, and paid the price for it.

Be it as that may, let me return to the argument. It appears neat, but it is not. The reason for it is that Marx needs to speak in terms of ‘objectification’, in order to give sense to ‘reification’; he has to speak of embodiments of labour-as-an-activity in order to get his critique going. If it is not possible for the products to embody the activities that produced them, money could not arise out of the circula-tion of commodities. This may appear an abstruse point. Besides, there are many thinkers who are also critical of the idea of “embodied labour”. What is strange about this situation is that those who criti-cize the idea of “embodied labour” when it comes to Marx’s theory, and those who would not know the difference between Das Kapital and Mein Kampf continue to talk of embodied labour nevertheless. To see how this could be, we have to widen the scope of the discussion.

All kinds of humanistic psychologies (not just C. Rogers’ version of it), and anthropologies which stress the dynamic nature of human self and speak in such terms as “self-actualization”, “self-expression”, “unfolding the potentials of the self”, etc., are confronted with the following problem: what is the relationship between, say, a painter and his painting, a poet and his poem, and an author and his book? Without exception, they would have to say that the product is an “actualization”, or an “expression”, in some way or another, of the person performing such an activity. But in which way pre-cisely? One answer would be to say that in such activities human beings express themselves. A human self, it could be said, grows “richer”, or “unfolds its potential”, etc., accordingly as the activities it per-forms. (We are familiar with this theme from an earlier section where the self expressed itself in its actions, etc.)

But, this is not a full answer. Suppose we ask, more specifically say, the following question: what is the relationship between Rembrandt and his paintings ? Do his paintings “express” his self (his “feel-ings”, his “perception of the world”, his “thoughts” or whatever else you want to use), and continue to do so long after the activity that created them has ceased? From within the ambit of these theories and from the world models of the West, there is only one possible answer one could give: yes. (Be-cause consider the next question that would ineluctably arise, if the answer is in the negative: whose self is being expressed in the paintings, then? Nobody’s? Such a stance would be flatly incoherent from within the Western model of self for obvious reasons.) How could a material object express your self unless it embodied the action which expressed it initially? It could not.

Look at what has happened as a result of this answer though. A material object, painting in this case, embodies, or expresses your self. That which embodies, expresses, or actualizes your self is, by the very definition, a part of your self. Rembrandt’s paintings belong to Rembrandt’s self (‘belonging’ should not be thought of here as standing for the juridical relations of private property), because they express, actualize, or embody his self.

We have a situation, then, where material objects constitute spatial parts of a self. An action can ex-press a self because such an expression can be objectified. Matter, put differently, traps human actions, human self-expressions. They are the “practico-inert” of Sartre, as he made them into an eternal condi-tion of human existence.

I hope that some amongst you are feeling a bit uneasy, because what I have said so far must be seen as flying in the face of “commonsense”. Indeed, it does. There is a problem involved here.

In no culture, including the Western culture of today, does one go around saying, “I am a table, a house, a bench, a painting, etc.” because one has produced them, and still be counted as a sane human being. The charitable might see such talk as being “metaphorical”, while the uncharitable may have such an individual committed. But, theories of anthropology, psychology and philosophy which pro-claim precisely this can hardly be considered as being metaphorical. Or, again, it is not as though a fal-lacy is being committed here, i.e., it is not the case that these theories are talking about the property of the “species” which is not attributable to the individual members of the species. They are not talk-ing about the “self-identity” of the species, but of our individual human selves. Everyone who speaks of “self-actualization”, etc., is accepting as self-evident what, if put explicitly, would be denied as be-ing true. Why, then, do both ideas not appear paradoxical when taken together?

The answer, I suggest, is in their world models. Both the obscure notion of “objectification” and its mundane counterpart “self-actualization” are intuitively familiar ideas. In and of themselves, they ap-pear both plausible and acceptable. But their familiarity and plausibility arise from the religious con-text where God is “everywhere” and where everything is a part of God’s self. In the process of secular-izing the Sovereign into many sovereigns, everyone has carried over the predicates ascribed of the Sovereign as the attributes of the many sovereigns as well. It cannot be any other way, because the predicates that I am talking about explicate the very meaning of the word ‘sovereign’ itself. The secular version appears intuitively satisfying not because it is so, but because the religious original, whose secular version it is, is satisfying. That is why they would deny the secular version, when confronted explicitly with it (Man is not God, is he?). Nevertheless, the secular version acquires, if you will, the status of a self-evident, banal and commonplace truth (and that is why it goes unexamined).

<b>Religion, it has been said by many, is the essence of Man alienated from himself. </b>The task of criticism of religion is, correspondingly, one of giving Man’s essence back to himself. This is an incomplete thought, and, if I am correct, we can complete it thus: if religion is the alienated essence of man, then by being alienated, it has become an alien essence as well. Giving this essence back to Man is not to give him his original essence back, but to provide him with an alien essence. You may want to say that God is the alienated human essence. But you cannot return this to man without making all men into gods. When men become gods, they cease being the humans they once were!

Neither Marx nor the humanists can be accused of being Christians. But the world models from within which they operate(d) and which, consequently, lend intelligibility to ideas like , ‘objectifica-tion’ are profoundly so. And yet, how many of us have not gone around talking about “alienation” as though it was clear as daylight to any but the perverse?

That a theological belief about the nature of the Sovereign has ended up becoming a psycho-socio-anthropological fact is evidenced and underscored by the discussions about ethnic groups and nation-hood – the theme of this section. In the following pages, I will try to provide you with some of my reasons for thinking so. It requires to be stressed, if it is not obvious by now, that the reasons I give are not the same as the justifications that the theorists provide during the course of the discussion. What I am trying to do is to show, to the best of my ability, why they could think that these ideas are plausible enough to require justification. That is, why the idea of “sovereign nations” (in its modern day versions) appears intelligible at all.
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