Summary
This monograph takes on “modern art”as the location of modernity. This subject, in my view, holds potential for a productive multi-logue and not just a dialogue, between three binary socio-cultural categories: child and adult, normal and mad, and colonisers and colonised. Modern art raises very interesting questions, and as an area that is often ignored in the analysis of law and science, it forms a powerful field for exploring both, as well as their intersections. Exploring the psychology of colonisation/domination is an important objective of this monograph. In order to get at it, the monograph imbibes Appadurai, Foucault, and Nandy as offering complementary stances on modernity and subsequent globalisation of intra- European relations after the industrial revolution. In doing so the author relates aspects of semiotic theory by looking at theories of myth. This monograph concludes by applying their relevance to the strategy of signification deployed by international law and relations.
Keywords Ancient, Art, Beauty, Childhood, Colonisation, Racism, Mythological Materialism, Phenomenology, Modernity, Semiotics, International LawSee the full content of this document
Extract
Colonised's Madness, Colonisers' Modernity and International Law: Mythological Materialism in the East-West Telos
I. Introduction “Der Zeit ihre Kunst, der Kunst ihre Freiheit” Ludwig Hevesi, Vienna Secession of 1897 This German maxim translates as: to our era its art, to art its freedom. There is nothing new about the discourse on art, myth and modernity. But it is exciting nonetheless. Such has been the pervasiveness of modernity that new facets emerge every time an author takes on modernity. Today a discourse of modernity must not remain an exclusive preserve of anthropologists and sociologists; it should now engage as many international lawyers as possible. A series of thinkers first from the West and then from the East have spoken about modernity and capitalism. Michel Foucault,1 Arjun Appadurai,2 and Ashis Nandy,3 among many others, are some of the names that I personally find stimulating and revealing. They have spoken about modernity and colonisation, and its effects in shaping our consciousness about how modernity has altered societal relations producing conflicts within and outside colonised societiesthe contents of postcolonial studies. In more layman’ s term, modernity evokes hesitation, often timorous, as human conscience around the world has shown a fetish for its past. Appadurai’ s decisive discourse on modernity reveals modernity’ s ability to create five kinds of pasts. These are history, tradition, evolution, antiquity and civilisation.4 “India,”Ashis Nandy analyses, “has many pasts; depending upon the needs of each age, the nation brings a particular past into its consciousness.” 5 I am of the view that such choices of pasts are guided by two aspects of human psychology. They are: 1. A particular culture’ s obsession for particular mythology as the ‘real’history, and 2. Cultures’ abhorrence of science and technology that often create conflicting social situations, new modes of interaction, and new behavioural changes rekindling the “old-new”or “modern-ancient”debate. The political and cultural sphere of India has witnessed a fierce battle between forces that are folk and Sanskritic. The Constitution of India and the political turmoil of the 80s and the 90s amply reflect this.6 In its lived experience, the humanity has shown marked love for one or the other kind of past at different times. Therefore, the coloniser and the colonised held to different choices: of the types of past offered in Appadurai’ s analysis, coloniser chose civilisation, history and evolution whereas the colonised settled with tradition and antiquity as their authentic past. The psychological pull behind choosing a type of past lies in its ability to distract people, Eastern or Western, and offering relaxing co-ordinates which direct their imagination to glory, prosperity, happiness, wealth and good environment. Nonetheless, Appadurai identifies a minimal set of four formal constraints on all sets of norms about past. These are authority, continuity, depth and interdependence arguably present in all kinds of cultures.7 Says Nandy, colonisers saw history as reality as against myth: ...being a flawed, irrational fairy tale produced by ‘unconscious’history, meant for savage and children. The core of such a concept of time- produced in the West for the first time after the demise of medievalism - consists in the emphasis on causes rather than on structures, on progress and evolution as opposed to self-realization-in-being, and on the rationality of adjustment to historical reality ... 8 Thus a set of impromptu questions follow from this discussion: what is the relation of myth/mythology, antiquity, history and tradition with modern art and to the lived experience of humans? Can we use art and myth to see history and perceive reality in the way Marx perceived his, using historical materialism? Can we not see reality through the prism of what I call “mythological materialism?”Can modern art and myth become the explanatory coordinates of reality? In other words, can...
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