Sudeep Dasgupta

Policing the people: Television Studies and the problem of 'quality'

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Conjunctive Times, Disjointed Time: Philosophy between Enigma and Disagreement

The time of politics is a moment of interruption, undoing a subject that accedes to responsibility in an encounter with incalculability, and alterity. The relationship to incalculability undermines the subject, and its potential to reason, and the moment of this encounter, and this unbinding, is the time of politics. How does this formulation of Derrida’s sit with Rancière’s argument that politics happens at the moment when the subject practices a particular form of reason and establishes a relationship that disorders the social? By staging an encounter between these two theorizations of politics, two specific conceptions of Time emerge, firstly through a close reading of some texts of Derrida, which is then related to a consideration of how time functions in Rancière’s oeuvre. What is this ‘Time’ of the Political, and more importantly, what are the consequences of its specific theorization by Derrida for thinking politics as the exercise and undermining of reason? And how does this ‘Time’ relate to the centrality of temporalities in Rancière’s understanding of politics? Two of the epigraphs clearly establish a distance in their conception of reason. Derrida is obliged to construct an origin, a super-powerful origin of reason, which separates itself absolutely from the subject of reason. Rancière, however, rejects the ontologization of both origin and power in his understanding of politics. Are these mere differences or do they constitute a fundamental disagreement?

Permanent Transiency, Tele-visual Spectacle, and the Slum as Postcolonial Monument

With their makeshift structures and seemingly itinerant inhabitants, slums suggest transiency. Yet, like monuments, they acquire a paradoxical permanency in the context of continual social upheaval, the historical ebbs and flows of the nation-state, and the economic transformations engendered by global capitalism. Like monuments, then, they mark a politics of history and memory in their changing spatial dimensions and political valences. The spatial dimensions of this complex historicity of the slum are analyzed through the narratives, structures, and temporal plotting of the much-lauded if controversial film Slumdog Millionaire (2008). While the structural dynamic of the film mirrors the temporality of globalization as a teleological dynamic, by reading the film against the grain the essay constructs a double temporality of the postcolonial nation where teleology is interrupted by the fractious contradictions inherent in the figuration of the slum. The films teleological narrative functions as a tele-vision, fixing the slum as a far-off object of aesthetic contemplation and visual pleasure, while the televisual formatting of the film through the TV quiz show fragments this visual narrativization of poverty and produces a counter-temporality of interruption. The interaction of history as preservation and transformation, exemplified in debates around monuments, produces a negative dialectic whose remainder is the slum as a recalcitrant reminder of the contradictions of monumental time.

The Aesthetics of Displacement and the Performance of Migration

The essay takes migration as both the content of a film, and the mode through which it is constructed. Aesthetics becomes the practice of constructing displacements between forms (poem, theater, film, song) and the manipulation of their materiality, in order to render the complexity of migration in all its specificity. Migration is thus both of the form and of the content, and indeed undoes the distinction between them. Framing the analysis of Ritwik Ghataks Komal Gandhar (1961) through Hegels understanding of aesthetics, the essay insists that the aesthetic rendition of migration and the migrations of aesthetic forms cannot be separated. Rather, it is their continual, often conflictual intertwining, which renders the politics of form crucial to the politics of migration. The essay thus intervenes in cultural critique which often takes the theme of migration and displacement while inadequately attending to form, while at the same time insisting that a simple reflection model where form mirrors content is inadequate. The critical (and political) stakes of the argument are predicated on attending to aesthetic forms as social ciphers which intervene productively in the growing literature on migration and its (re)presentation.

The visuality of the Other: the place of the migrant between Derrida's Ethics and Rancière's Aesthetics in 'Calais: the last Border'

The relationship between migrancy and human subjectivity remains a fraught one, particularly in contemporary theorizations of globalization. At one extreme, this relation installs a privileged subject of resistance through theorizations of hybridity and liminality. Here, the image of the migrant underlines the importance of mixture, catachresis, and impurity as a necessary critique of racist and exclusivist notions of identity. However, in other circumstances, which become increasingly visible in political discourse, the position of the migrant is one of painful indeterminacy, of a desire for the very stability secured by citizenship. Within this fraught field of multiple theorizations and subjective desires, much attention has been paid recently to the question of ethics, in particular the possibility of establishing an ethical relationship with the Other. In this essay, I discuss the relationship between migrancy and visuality. I address this relationship through a close reading of Marc Isaacs’ documentary film Calais: The Last Border. By looking at how the film actively produces Calais as the place of the migrant, I emphasize the disjunctive and conjunctive work that words and images perform. The productive doing and undoing of the relationship between word and image reconfigures the place of the migrant, and indeed of Calais. In addition, my analysis of the film will be brought into relation with two influential theoretical formulations of the bond between ethics and aesthetics. The specific place of visuality within the relationship between ethics and the Other will be at stake here. Critiquing one influential argument of the place of ethics in the relationship between migrancy and visuality, the one proposed by Jacques Derrida in Of Hospitality, The Politics of Friendship, and other works, I argue that a reformulation of aesthetics along the lines of Jacques Rancière’s provides a more productive and politically revealing understanding of the stakes that The Visuality of the Other: the Place of the Migrant between Derrida’s Ethics and Rancière’s Aesthetics in Calais: the Last Border

Constellations of the Transnational

In the wake of proliferating discourses around globalisation and culture, some central questions around cultural politics have acquired a commonsensical and hegemonic character in contemporary intellectual discourse. The politics of difference, the possibilities of hybridity and the potential of multiple liminalities frame much discussion around the transnational dimensions of culture and post-identity politics. In this volume, the economic, political and social consequences of the focus on ‘culture’ in contemporary theories of globalization are analysed around the disparate fields of architecture, museum discourse, satellite television, dub poetry, carnival and sub-national theatre. The discourses of hybridity, diaspora, cultural difference minoritization are critically interrogated and engaged with through close analysis of cultural objects and practices. The essays thus intervene in the debate around modernity, globalization and cultural politics, and the volume as a whole provides a critical constellation through which the complexity of transnational culture can be framed. Thinking through the particular, the essays limn the absent universality of forms of capitalist globalization and the volume as a whole provides multiple perspectives from which to enter the singular modernity of our times in all its complexity.