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The Wire
25-05-2025
- Politics
- The Wire
What Tests the Ruse of Representation?
Menu हिंदी తెలుగు اردو Home Politics Economy World Security Law Science Society Culture Editor's Pick Opinion Support independent journalism. Donate Now Top Stories What Tests the Ruse of Representation? Geeta Kapur 12 minutes ago 'I find my articulation turn into a confessional device.' Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty Real journalism holds power accountable Since 2015, The Wire has done just that. But we can continue only with your support. Contribute now The following is an excerpt from Geeta Kapur's 'Introduction' to Speech Acts, published by Tulika Books, 2025. The title Speech Acts has a ring of immediacy with a claim to performative skills. At the same time, it is an extensively theorized term with nuanced and stylized transmission of meaning. Speech acts assume affective consequence – persuading, convincing or alerting your respondent in terms of feeling, thought and action. It is my intention that such articulation comes forth as speculative. Speech acts, driven by urgency, use abbreviation to skip doubt. In this mode there is need to place utterances in different contexts and see how the repetitions mutate. 'Speech Acts', Geeta Kapur, Tulika Books, 2025. I want to be able to do some of this in the cluster of texts that I have written or spoken, revisited, reiterated and contrasted, over the last two decades. Speech acts of artists, citizens and anarchist interlocutors who create frisson as they enunciate – this is the exigent force that we may track. Speech acts ignite overexposed forms; words, images and gestures are sworn to the demand of 'subjective truth-telling' by tricks of narrativization; the ruse of representation is tested in its political deployment. … In the first decade of the twenty-first century (after my book When Was Modernism was published, in 2000), I slanted my perspective to foreground the documentary genre as a form of enquiry and with it the concept of the avant-garde, relocated in mid-twentieth-century histories of decolonization. I formulated a critique of the homogenizing and authoritarian inclination of the nation-state as well as its inverse, the disempowerment of the nation-state within an enlarging vortex of global capitalism. As cultural practitioners we must be able to recognize the focal disorders – ideological, literal or surreal – of the very lens that 'documents'. This book of essays, talks and interviews does not engage with individual artists, in whose thrall I have written saturated but also dedicatedly formalist texts, included in a forthcoming (though impossibly belated) volume titled Critic's Compass: Navigating Practice. That volume is to be a palimpsest of material worked on over years, where I navigate shifts in the represented artists' work as also my own focal intensities. But for now, I have been hooked away by a set of tracking arguments that relate to the 'documentary turn'. In this smaller book (with no images), I test, in the form of speech acts, variously used terms within my expanded sphere of criticality. I try to develop a way to shape a witness position that the documentary vision multifariously offers. … In the first section of this book… [titled essays] there are two short essays, 'Proposition Avant-Garde: A View from the South' and 'Aesthetic Bind'. 'Proposition' and 'bind' are, in a sense, contrary terms. But they suggest a contrapuntal engagement involving ambiguity and traction which enables certain recondite forms to develop. My attachment to the terms proposition and bind may indeed describe my approach to the field of art and politics. … The second section includes lectures delivered in 2013 (at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Iniva, London), 2016 (at Haus der Kunst, Munich) and 2017 (at Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven). The text titled 'Notes on Practice' is a shredded outcome of these different talks. I have gained the gumption to stitch and weave these into a ragged banner. As I began to improvise on the lines and paras I had frequently spoken around the term 'practice', I figured a desire to play with my text-form as well. Referring to praxis, a complex materialist concept, I was also attracted to current discourses on practice that are playful, provocative and generative. From labour to craft to art to theory to governance to political action and, further, to subtly distributed features of being, doing, thinking and making. The result is what I call a ragged banner announcing my own (forthcoming) 'practice'; it also probably says something of my willingness (now) to risk failure within the template of meaning. … The interview is a form unto itself. You are asked to respond to someone else's preoccupations, and you find yourself inventing new modes of thought and utterance. Everything you say gets an inflection; it even savours imitation of the speech-form used by the interlocutor. The entry of another voice and the imaginative rendering of intersubjectivities may produce consolidated truth-claims, or, equally, a dialogue that deflects the two speakers further apart and provides a wrenched dynamic. … The last conversation with Ravi Sundaram and Ashish Rajadhyaksha puts me in a place where everything I have said is under review. … Beginning the dialogue, Ravi Sundaram from CSDS used a contrarian vocabulary and suggested that I go to the brink and see where, in the worldwide neoliberal contemporary, the 'ruins' of modernism stand; and where migration histories and the expanded concept of 'slavery' can be deployed to dramatize capital's devastating regime of disempowerment. He invoked Okwui Enwezor several times, seeing him as a curator of ideas and artworks that changed the order of things in contemporary cultural discourse. I couldn't agree more. Ashish Rajadhyaksha … believes that if you are inclined to work with modernism – historically and in the present – your method, even as it may enumerate disjunctures, counts as conciliatory. … My responses are engaged and emphatic. I appreciate the scraping down of my ideological and aesthetic assertions even as I continue to ignite them. I am impelled to see modernism at the stake, but with some of its passion and impunity smouldering still. … The terms modern and contemporary, radical and avant-garde; decolonization, migration and diaspora; demodern and decolonial, have all become polemical features of art history in academia … We also find the subject, indeed subjectivity, (re-)entering the discourse in ingenuous ways, rendering experience through phenomenological understanding and with the quest for dialogic articulation as itself a form of praxis. In his book Dissensus, Jacques Rancière says, This means that there is a certain undecidability in the 'politics of aesthetics'. There is a meta politics of aesthetics which frames the possibilities of art. Aesthetic art promises a political accomplishment that it cannot satisfy, and thrives on that ambiguity. That is why those who want to isolate it from politics are somewhat beside the point. It is also why those who want it to fulfil its political promise are condemned to a certain melancholy. I would like to believe that melancholy is part of what I, as perhaps many others, understand to be the process of critical 'becoming': that which recognizes the stutter and wager of subjectivity, produces split vectors of doubt and claim, and places us at the precipice of choice. With increased volatility driving the contemporary – and my own advancing age – the ground trembles. And I find my articulation turn into a confessional device. Geeta Kapur is a critic and curator. Her essays are extensively anthologised; her books include Contemporary Indian Artists (1978), When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (2000), Speech Acts (2025), Critic's Compass: Navigating Practice (forthcoming 2025). Make a contribution to Independent Journalism Related News Five 'Asanas' Modi Has Perfected To Deflect and Distract From Real Issues Second Speech in 24 Hours, Modi Invokes Religious Figures But No Mention of Trump Mediation Claims Supreme Court's Bail Condition on Ashoka Professor Mahmudabad: Has Dissent Become Disorder? 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Business Standard
07-05-2025
- Politics
- Business Standard
The SITA factor: Yechury's essays defend socialism as real choice
This posthumous volume distils Sitaram Yechury's lifelong case for socialism as a path to dignity and justice Aditi Phadnis THE FIGHT FOR THEREPUBLIC Author: Sitaram Yechury Publisher: TulikaBooks; SAHMAT Pages:120 Price: ₹250 At least since 1996, when India got its first Communist home minister, the Indian Left has been trying to establish that there is something beyond TINA (There Is No Alternative) in Indian politics — and that it could be SITA (Socialism Is The Alternative). Till he was taken from us far too soon, strengthening the foundations of this premise was the burden of CPI (M) General Secretary, Sitaram Yechury. And this is the case he makes in a collection of his essays, put together after his death in a slim volume with an extensive and scholarly introduction by respected Left economist Prabhat Patnaik. Dr Patnaik's essay provides the theoretical underpinning for Yechury's articles. He explains that India's anti-colonial struggle was inclusive and sought to unite everyone in a common struggle. This was the vision that was the basis for the Constitution and the idea that India was a secular democracy committed to social justice and federalism. But to defend this edifice, India needed an economic trajectory that would break asset concentration, especially land. Dr Patnaik concedes that this line of thought could not acquire dominance both during and after the Independence movement. So, India remained semi-feudal, with capital asset concentration in the hands of a few — a process that accelerated after 1991 in a form of neoliberalism. This in turn led to deepening income inequality, a slower rate of job creation as the state retreated from economic activity, and a crisis of consumption that reached its height in the collapse of the housing bubble in 2008, leading to stagnation. He reminds us that worldwide, these processes were in evidence in the decades of the 1980s. As monopoly capital saw threats to its empire, it sought to divert the attention of people from their material conditions into other directions. Dr Patnaik sees the rise of Marine Le Pen, for instance, as a result of these moves and sees a similar situation elsewhere in Europe and in India. Neo-liberalism dislikes taxing the rich and is critical of a fiscal deficit. What is more, finance is globally mobile now. So, no government can increase employment by using the tools neoliberalism offers. Which is why forces like the ones unleashed by Ms Le Pen (and similar ones in India) find roots; but simultaneously, these forces cannot survive endlessly, because at some point people will rise up against these governments like they did in the case of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil or Donald Trump in his first term. However, till structural solutions to livelihood crises are offered by succeeding governments, neofascism will remain a global threat. Interestingly, Dr Patnaik says alternatives to ward off impoverishment, such as welfare schemes of the sort both the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have offered, are not backed by any fiscal guarantees and are placebos at best. For instance, what is the point of transferring money to the female in the house in the belief that this will pay for the children's school fees, if there are no schools nearby? All that happens is private schools raise fees if they know such transfers are imminent. His solution is to provide constitutional guarantees and place the responsibility on the state. The whole thing can be paid for via taxes such as an inheritance tax. Not everyone, even in the Left, would agree. Outside the Left, given the steadily receding electoral imprint of the Left parties among the people, there appear to be even fewer takers for the argument. But in his essays, Yechury makes a powerful case for fighting the BJP, a line the CPI (M) adopted at its 16th Party Congress in Calcutta in 1998 shortly after the BJP came to power at the Centre, that it must become the main force in mobilising democratic forces. To the point that when in 2004, Sonia Gandhi decided she would not become Prime Minister, it was Sitaram Yechury who tried to convince her otherwise. Why should the BJP be fought? His article, first published as a CPI (M) pamphlet in 1993, days after the Babri Masjid was razed, reflects both rage and pain and contests all the reasons for the demolition, citing Vivekananda and Adi Shankara. It also challenges many assertions about Muslims, such as polygamy (more Hindus do it), the rate of growth of the minority population in India (the fears that minorities can ever overtake the majority numerically are unscientific), and mosque demolition in Islamic states (they're theocratic, India is not). In another article on 'What is Hindu Rashtra?', published in Frontline, he quotes extensively from M S Golwalkar to point out that many premises about the Hindu Rashtra are actually ahistorical. And the last piece, 'India at 75', published in 2021, takes a look at the BJP-led government's record. It says: 'The new narrative suggests that while we achieved our independence on 15 August, 1947, India's real freedom was achieved with the abrogation of Article 370 and 35 A of our Constitution, the dissolution of the state of Jammu & Kashmir on 5 August 2019, and the formal launching of the Ram temple construction in Ayodhya on 5 August 2020'. Till the end of his life, Yechury believed that there could be a future free of exploitation, inequity, injustice and denial of human dignity to millions. He believed the state must have no religion and every individual must be free to practise any religion they liked. Many will continue to find his ideals illuminating and inspiring. This book is for them.
