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"The
whole world is tormented by words
And there is no one who can do without words.
But only in so far as one is free of words
Does one really understand words".
-Sarahapada:
Dohakosha (circa 850 A.D.)
Transformation
has been a key concept in the mythology of progress which we, as a
`developing' economy, have adopted. Interpreted in the narrow
terms of technological change, this enterprise has quite ignored
the spiritual and cultural dimensions of transformation, or
distorted these into reactionary meanings. The managerial
conjurers who govern India's `development' have forgotten, it
would appear, that metamorphosis is not a process that guarantees
fixed and invariable results: that where you might produce
marvels, you might just as easily give birth to monsters.
It
cannot, for instance, be an illusion that certain of our basic
notions of what constitutes that human province, have undergone a
radical change. Having invited a piper to rid us of the rats of
hunger and poverty, we have paid him for his wonders in a currency
we can ill afford: we have paid for our consumer culture with our
basic claim to being a human, humane society.
Allow
me to make an inventory of some of the elements which go into this
claim: first, a compassionate political ideal assured by such
guarantees as democracy, secularism, and liberty of expression.
Next, the mode of communication known as encounter, in which
mutual attention and concern bring fellow citizens into proximity
rather than distancing them from one another. And related to
these, the third element of a human, humane society: the critical
temperament, the intelligent, informed ability to discuss, debate,
question, analyse, appreciate, meditate, and share views. Only a
combination of these three conditions can ensure that ideal of
humanist thought, a society which fulfills the needs of the
individual without negating the needs of the group.
In
contemporary India, it would seem that the first of these
conditions has been greatly eroded by the pressures of a rapacious
polity and exploitative market: the coalition elite of industrial
and agrarian interests which governs this country, has little use
for, or patience with, the marginal populations, the subalterns,
displaced, and dissidents who become the victims of its grandiose
projects. As for encounter, such an attentive mode of
communication has lost its value entirely. Indeed, human value has
been co-opted by the notion of rate, and human exchange is
programmed in terms of its utility. Moreover, we have lost the
mental frame that conduces to such a mode of communication; the
imperialism of the mass media networks has imposed an agenda
which, whilst seeming to offer a vast array of choice to the
viewer, in fact seduces the viewer into a captivity of the senses
and intellect. The loss of dialogue that follows from this
conditioning of the mind to passive one-way communication, has
been instrumental in bringing about a cessation of concern and
conversation in the `90s. Turning inward rather than outward, the
contemporary individual consciousness seems to have renounced the
critical temperament, in a celebration of hedonist ambitions.
It
is surely crucial and significant that communication should be so
central to this issue of being human. After all, our chief
assertion to supremacy over other animals, rests on the faculty of
speech we possess. What then seems to have gone wrong, in this
century, with the unique magic of the spoken sign and the written
glyph? What can explain the exhaustion of these indices, and with
them, the lassitude in the reflective and restless aspects of
human expression?
Perhaps
it would be instructive to examine this problem in relation to the
arts. The problem of communication, simply stated, is this: Can we
no longer engage in the collective activity of sharing opinions,
ideas, and discoveries? Can we no longer converse as humans to
humans, as sentient subjects to sentient subjects?
Why
is it that much of the art being produced today - painting,
poetry, film, installation, architecture - bears the character of
monologue, of soliloquy? Why can contemporary art not recover the
ancient power of flight - why can it no longer chart a trajectory
across the territory of the usual, re-imagining what it crosses
and transmitting these dream realities to an audience? Why has art
now become, instead, the path of a bullet ricocheting off the
polished inside surface of a sealed chamber?
Contemporary
artists often seem to stage their work in a solitude without
interlocutors, without an identifiable public. The text and the
world draw boundaries against each other; no urgent stimulus
passes from world to text, no passionate response greets the world
from the text. The retreating voice of the art-work, composed from
solitude, addresses itself to silence. There was a time when
silence was a form of total participation, a sign of the
respondent's complete immersion in the art-work. Today, it more
often signals the absence of an audience: no one is tuned in to
the broadcast. The monologue, however, goes on - it is, after all,
the classic text of the solipsist.
Can
artists lay the blame entirely on the indifference of audiences?
Can they mount works as departures from conventional practice, and
then denounce people for responding, if at all, in fragments
rather than collective strength? The form of post-modern art is
the fragment; and to expect the fugitive and momentary fragment to
arouse the same response in an audience that the chorales of
tradition would, is an exhibition of blindness. In a polycentric,
segmented, multi-dimensional society, there is no Great
Public, only a series of interlocking but free-floating specialist
publics.
Have
artists seriously attempted to construct a bridge between their
idioms and their audiences, however segmented and transitory these
audiences might be? Have they sought to hold dialogue, again, with
their viewers and listeners? Or have they resigned themselves, not
without self-congratulation, to being misunderstood? It would be
tragic indeed, if we were to abandon all efforts towards creating
a climate, a culture, a republic in which fruitful
conversation in and about the arts is possible. In the words of
Sarahapada, the ninth-century siddha, we seem no longer to
understand one another's languages; we seem no longer to know
"who
speaks, who listens, and what is confided?
Like
the dust in a dusty tunnel,
that
which arises in the heart,
goes
to rest in the heart."
Once
upon a time, the artist too had a well-defined role in society. He
used, then, to be a productive member of the community: a producer
of cultural meanings, his calendar was marked by seasons of
turmoil and peace; his writings and paintings commemorated the
events of the life of the tribe.
The
market has changed all that irrevocably. In its instrumental
capacity, the market establishes a pattern of production and
consumption, assigns sites and roles to people, and designates
them with relative values on the basis of their utility. As a
metaphor or condition of mind, the market works more insidiously:
by privileging value in exchange, it negates the multiple and
autonomous nature of art. The work of art becomes a commodity,
just as artists, and indeed, all humans, are reduced to
commodities.
In
such a situation, the artist ceases to be a prophet, dreamer,
critic, visionary. He is enslaved, forced to serve as a decorator,
an illustrator of other people's ideas. As a marginal entity and
parasite, he no longer functions as a privileged producer of
cultural meanings. The circumstances being oppressive, the artist
must either give in to the pressures of the market, or else resist
them by escaping the standardisation prevalent in the public
sphere. He strikes back at the consumers of culture by speaking in
cryptic private languages; forced in aesthetic self-reliance, he
assumes the roles of producer, audience, critic, all in one.
But
even the private languages of protest can be co-opted and
neutralised by the market. One thinks of the Dadaist Marcel
Duchamp's impetuous, revolutionary commode, a porcelain insult
hurled in the faces of the bourgeois art-patronising public of his
time. Today, it stands in a hallowed museum, as an altar piece, an
object of worship at which admirers of art may gape. Similarly,
there are artists whom the market has taken over, treated to
adulation and the success of arrival; by an irony, some of these
continue to play the old role of prophet. But the mask is stuck on
askew, and the comedy conceals a failure of nerve. Solzhenitsyn in
his final American days was little more than a tragic buffoon,
going through the motions of oracular delivery, but rendered
harmless by a publisher's advance.
And
what becomes of the work of art? It ought to be as rich as the
degrees of freedom it allows its interpreters. Instead, the
contemporary work of art collapses into calculation, strategy,
gambit, or gimmickry. Pomposity of intention unsupported by vigour
of accomplishment, flamboyant references to tradition without the
gravity of a probing contemporary art.
And
so, the state of communication in the arts becomes a model for the
state of communication in society. In both spheres, the notion of responsibility
has been forgotten: the duty of an artist, or of any human, to answer
the world's haunting questions. Not in facile, platitudinous
replies, but by first confronting and internalising those haunting
questions. Instead of which, artists today hide behind the
secondary texts of intention and projected aim, behind the
manifesto, the statement of intent, the veil of the to-have-been.
The
first questions are evaded; reportage, masquerade, bibliography
stand in for art and writing or speaking about art. As if the
pontifications of artists were not adequate, critics too establish
themselves as theologians of the arts: they write commentaries on
paintings, and glosses on poems. They end up commenting on
commentaries and glossing glosses. The living text is finally lost
to view. All you have is an espionage of words, where words watch
art, build up dossiers on it, pass sentence on it. Finally: towers
of bibliography, cross-referenced indices and critical quarterlies
laid down in grids. No paintings. No poems. No plays. No novels or
short fiction or films.
Artists
and critics too often take up the defensive position of the angel
in the crystal citadel, who imagines that he can speak to his
fellow-angels inside the walls, and this is sufficient. He can
ignore the asses and the parrots crowding outside the walls.
Unfortunately, the citadel is a house of illusion: and sometimes,
it is the angels who are outside, and the asses and parrots
chatter excitedly within.
There
still remains a core of aesthetic experience, which can be freed
from behind the earthworks of theory and indifference. And it is
important to dig it out again, to restore it. Our confidence in
desiring a communication of aesthetic experience is only one form
of our faith in the possibility of restoring human communication
at the popular and interactive level.
This
is neither an argument for transparent communication, nor is it an
argument against criticism or interpretation. We have on our
hands, a crisis in which the discourse on the arts has divorced
itself from the passion and delight, the distress and disturbance,
the human responses which a work of art provokes. Instead of this
inward reception, this critical awareness of text in context, we
are offered a panoply of easy posturings, neat deconstructions,
theoretical dead-end streets.
In
assembling a cage from current terminology and stylistic
definitions, have we not lost the quality of samvad - the
ability to address the arts without taking them captive? In
proposing this emancipatory form of discourse, which would
liberate meanings like a flight of birds from the text, one is
aware of having proposed an utopian project. This is, however,
unavoidable: only by rejecting the fossil fuels of closed codes
and assumed roles can we discover the renewable resources present
in the intuitive encounter.
Above
all, the transmission lines between text and context, artist and
respondent must be kept open. In its sporadic, intermittent way,
this would be the one permanent revolution of consciousness to
which the writer and the painter may fully contribute, without
impairing their duty to their art. They have nothing to lose but
the chains of solitude and silence.
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