The Raqs Media Collective is a group of media practitioners based in Delhi. Raqs has moved from strict documentary film to inter-media installations based on an exacting visual literacy. All of them interrogate aspects of ghostly matters that lies underneath and outside our world. Here, together with Raqs, we will ponder upon whether the critical understanding of modernity and its inflections are a productive project.

[b]Cédric Vincent:[/b] A critical assessment of modernity must start with the revelation of its hidden faces. What are the hidden faces of modernity?

[b]Raqs:[/b] Perhaps modernity, like capital, is faceless. When you think you have glimpsed the face of modernity, it is in fact a series of masks. Somewhere, the cubist face is also an African mask. This means that when we demand a critical assessment of modernity, it is more to reveal masks than to uncover faces.
Let us consider one such mask that modernity wears: that of property. The consolidation of property as the singular form of »owning« is contemporary with the rise of modernity. Today, property is both an exclusive system of ownership and a system of exclusive ownership, whereby a person, corporate entity or state can claim the right to benefit from, manage, and transact land, material goods, money, services or immaterial resources.
The situation on the ground, however, is much more complex and contradictory than a relatively recent, and specifically juridical, understanding of property allows for.
Consider the complexity of historically evolved, negotiated and customary tenural forms and practices. There is a diversity of usage and occupation practices, particularly with reference to land and built forms, from squatting to camping to harvesting to the setting up of kiosks, patches and pitches where people may be living, farming, fishing, selling their services or seeking shelter for different durations. All of these practices complicate and fragment the question of property.
At the other extreme, there are contemporary instruments like loans, leases and mortgages that striate proprietorship with counterfactuals. These have to do with the way in which state regulations and the activity of global financial institutions impact on ownership. For instance, when someone says they own a house, or a corporation (or a state!), they neglect to mention that what actually obtains is the fact that they have loans, leases and mortgages from financial institutions and funds, to which they pay installments in order to keep functioning. Should they default, the paramount owner or guarantors will seize the property for the next round of auctions.
The idea of property has a powerful fictive presence and charge that enables the mobilization of enormous productive energy even as it perpetrates intense violence on all that stands in its way. This fiction – this idea of a »face« to property – helps some people and classes simplify the task of representing to themselves, and of imposing on others, a narrative that flattens intricate webs of claims and counter-claims within the single trope of exclusive ownership.
Further, in the domain of intellectual labour and goods, it creates in a single stroke an infinite space for the expansion of exclusivist control while simultaneously converting abundance into scarcity. The mask of property endows the facelessness of capital with authority, velocity and currency.
This mode of seeing property can enable us - analogously - to arrive at a method for understanding the fictive charge of modernity.

[b]Vincent:[/b] What do you mean by this »fictive charge« of modernity? How do you engage with this in your practice?

[b]Raqs:[/b] The fictive charge of modernity relies on the construction of hierarchies based on chronology, provenance and location. It renders suspect all things that cannot be identified along the binaries that modernity brings in its wake. So you are called upon to make decisive choices between the old and the new, between faith and doubt, affect and reason, West and East, self and others. There is an insistence by the standard bearers of modernity on validation through dating (things are good because they are new, or at least the very latest re-discoveries of the very old), through affixing certainties of provenance and origin (things are good because they are original, not unauthentic copies), and location (things are good when they take place within institutionally rationalized spaces, not when they occur in the »wilderness« of unregulated space).
In practice, the dynamic life of culture upsets all these arrangements. There are no cultural materials that exist without shadows, echoes, reminders, replicas and resonances from other times and places. The discourse of purity, whether in the name of the old or the new, has only an atrophying effect. The actual life of culture is about continuity, contact, copying and contagion, not just about ruptures and breaks. Even subaltern appropriations of modernity, for occasionally and usually limited emancipatory ends, follow well-established patterns that point not so much to new beginnings as to traditions of rejecting tradition.
The fantasy of a sui generis modernity, with clear lines that demarcate the old from the new, and which creates »reserve forests« of those aspects of antiquity that are appropriate to the nation-state building project, has obsessed »national-cultural« and revolutionary elites in many parts of the world for much of the twentieth century. In each instance this attempt to manufacture modernity out of thin air has been accompanied by violence, and met with varying intensities of resistance, basically from people wanting to be left alone to fashion their destinies for themselves.
In constantly fashioning and thinking through concepts and ideas that are embodied in residues, blurs, impostors, waiting and retiring rooms, we are basically attempting to find antidotes to the amnesiac tendencies within modernity. We are trying, if you like, to remind ourselves that it is more productive for us to live with uncertainties and ambiguities than to consign ourselves to the binaries built on chronology, provenance and location. We have also attempted to disturb accepted chronologies and the »cult of the new« by pointing out the way in which the past haunts much of what is spoken of as »new«. We are invested in the process of telling »ghost stories« hidden deep within the histories of modernity because they enable us to explore the way, say, a fingerprint impression taken in rural Bengal in 1858 can continue to »possess« a discussion of contemporary biometric technologies. The exploration of haunted narratives allows us to form unexpected and uncanny associations between processes that might superficially appear to have occurred in spaces and times at great distances from each other.

[b]Vincent:[/b] You have elsewhere shown an interest in the concept of »off modern«.1 Is being »off modern« more than an attitude? Is being »off modern« a way to escape from modernity or a way to be differently modern?

[b]Raqs:[/b] The notion of »off modernity« needs to be deployed with a certain lightness (and deadly intent) in order to be able to fully realize its potential as a defence against the certainties and authority of categories like modernity and tradition. Rejecting the authority of modernity does not mean a move away from modernity. Where, anyway, would one move away to?
Rather, what we are interested in is what Svetlana Boym calls »detours into unexplored potentialities of the modern project«.1 This does not mean a search for »alternatives« or »different modernities«. That would be the case if they were different models that one could pick and choose from, rejecting »this« modernity for »that«.
The idea of »unexplored potentials« has an interesting temporal connotation. It suggests something that exists or has existed, somewhat contingently, and is at the same time waiting to be acted upon. Something that could have been and may yet be again - an intersection of the possible past and the contingent future on the ground of the present continuous.

[b]Vincent:[/b] Does this suggest a kind of »waiting in the wings« attitude towards modernity? Trying out moves, an eternal playing out of possibilities?

[b]Raqs:[/b] Yes: the idea of a continuous rehearsal. Of trying on different guises, doing and becoming different things in anticipation of different ends. The rehearsal is always a process, never a product; it is never able to meet the demand of completeness or comprehensiveness. When you rehearse, you do not perform. Instead, you wait to perform, and while you wait, you practice your moves. The »unexplored potentials of the modern project«, the might-have-beens of modernity, are akin to rehearsals and improvisations.
We have found it useful to think of the spaces of this rehearsal and improvisation as the »waiting rooms«, or »antechambers« or »green rooms« of modernity. The relationship between these spaces and modernity is not however marked by chronological lag alone. Rather, it could also be qualified by perennial anticipation, or eternal nostalgia, or perpetual regret, or enduring scepticism, or sustained enthusiasm, or continuing bewilderment - or combinations thereof. What you have then is the possibility of a nuanced and fluid spectrum of attitudes towards modernity that can be rehearsed ad infinitum in these »green rooms« or »waiting rooms«.
It might sound odd to insist on the nomenclature of the »waiting room« and yet abjure chronology. We are insisting that there is no escape from modernity, but at the same time, we are also saying that once you consider the pull of modernity to consist in its fictive charge, then it becomes possible to put modernity in its »narrative« place. To lie in wait for the moment where the »fiction« is revealed and the mask seen for what it is. Once something is revealed as being essentially a manner of telling a story, then it becomes possible to do all sorts of things to the plot. Instead of reducing, possibilities multiply.
Modernity in the waiting room is a script that can be re-written, primarily because there is no pressure to perform the modern, only to rehearse it. Rehearsal is a form of critical practice, because it involves a dialogic and playful, improvisatory scrutiny of a set of moves. The process of continuous rehearsal can deliver a modernity ridden with interpolations, annotations and all kinds of interventions into its body, and even be made to do things that it was never meant to do. Modernity, or at least a provisional enactment of it, can actually become interesting within the safety of the waiting room.
The waiting room can then become a place where one can wait for something that one knows may not arrive in the way one expects it to, just as one can rest indefinitely in the interval of an unconcluded journey.
Railway stations in India also call their waiting rooms retiring rooms« and the two terms are used interchangeably without a thought as to the fact that »waiting« and »retiring« seem to suggest two radically different attitudes to time. The fact that the same space can be used to »wait« and »retire« in is more than a happy lexical accident.

[b]Vincent:[/b] I could argue following the anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot that modernity is a geography of management that creates places for political and economic purposes and, simultaneously, a particular mode of imagination, which privileges chronological primacy.2 I find this kind of geography referred to in your work in ‘28’N / 77’15’ E::2001/02, The Coordinates of Everyday Life (2002) and With Respect to Residue (2004).

[b]Raqs:[/b] We agree. And by way of response, would like to share with you a text embedded in a set of table-maps from With Respect to Residue that feature ornamental maps of the world, overlaid by images of the residue of four primary commodities, tea, tobacco, peanuts and fish. Here is the text that accompanies the table map with tea bags:
»The extraction of value from any material, place, thing or person, involves a process of refinement. During this process, the object in question will undergo a change in state, separating into at least two substances: an extract and a residue.
Tea leaves and tea dust, tea dust and a tea bag, a tea bag and a cup of tea, a cup of tea and a shot of caffeine, a shot of caffeine and a slight spike of energy, a spike of energy and a decision, a decision and its consequences, the consequences and a fragment of history, a fragment of history and a tea economy, a tea economy and tea leaves, tea leaves and tea dust, and so on.
With respect to residue: it may be said it is that which never finds its way into the manifest narrative of how something (an object, a person, a state, or a state of being) is produced, or comes into existence. It is the accumulation of all that is left behind, when value is extracted.
Large perforations begin to appear in chronicles, calendars and maps, and even the minute agendas of individual lives, as stretches of time, tracts of land, ways of being and doing, and entire clusters of experience are denied substance.
There are no histories of residue, no atlases of abandonment, no memoirs of what a person was but could not be.
Everything is valuable, yet all things can be laid waste.
The sediments that precipitate at the base of our experience of the world can, however, decompose to ignite strange sources of light, like will o’ the wisps in marshlands by night. Sometimes, this is all the illumination there can be in vast stretches of uncertain terrain.«

[b]Vincent:[/b] Modernity is also an expression of an implicit understanding that we are all part of the same global cultural process? Would you agree? What about globality as a contemporary condition?

[b]Raqs:[/b] We think it is time we re-examined the easy conflation of the terms »modern« and »global«. Barring the case of those few isolated communities of people who survived for very long without a first »contact« with the outside world, it is difficult to sustain the argument that any societies or cultures have in fact been insulated in any significant way from the condition we clumsily name »globality«. The routes that all our ancestors have taken across continents are inscribed into every little detail of everyday life: in food, language, attire, sensibility and sentiments. This is not a uniquely contemporary condition. Most people have been »global« in more ways than we care to imagine for much of human history.
This does not however mean that we all participate in the same global cultural process. We participate in different global cultural processes. The »global« processes available to a football fan are different from the »global« processes accessed by religious zealots, or fashion victims, or software programmers, or contemporary artists - but each one of these is a distinct global process. It is no more or less global than any other. Similarly, the world, as a whole, looks and feels different in a pirate electronic goods market in Delhi from the way it does in a mall in the same city. And the world looks very different again, in a container port in northern Europe from the way it does in a coffee plantation in Southern India. However, all these places are intensely connected, through commerce, through the movement of goods and people, through what happens to the coffee that gets picked in the plantation and offloaded in the container port. Each place is a centre of the world. Same world, different centres.
There are many different ways of drawing a map of the world, and many different kinds of wills, impulses and desires connected to the acts of drawing such maps. There has never been, a monad of global realities. Coming to terms with the contemporary condition requires us to understand this very simple fact - we inhabit not one, but many intersecting, overlapping and also disconnected maps of the world. We always have. The thing to do is to plot different routes that people take in different worlds, and see where these journeys intersect. This means looking for the encounter that the football fan has with the religious zealot, or the contemporary artist has with the knowledge worker, in the course of their different journeys. The contemporary condition actively requires us to construct maps of maps, routes made up of different routes, journeys that are the consequences of many different acts of travel. We also need to consider the large distances that we travel within our selves on a daily basis.

 

 

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