Figures for the 'Unconscious1 by certain historical and political processes. What is ironic about this — this is what I want to emphasize — is that in order to break the hold of this you inevitably have to go back, to show forms of actual differentiation. GK: I don't know if this intervention is called for, but I do believe it necessary to fragment these East West monoliths, to suggest the internecine battles that must have 82 taken place even to establish the monolith... ST: It seems sometimes that even as one allows for the fragmentation, there could be no end to the contestatory discourses that one can recover. But surely something needs to be said for a political point where you need to characterize whatever you are opposing, despite its own richness or traditional purpose. Evidently the bourgeois or colonial tradition is a tremendously varied one with many cross- currents. But politically — and in this I include even art practice — there is a need, sometimes, to characterize what you are positing something against. There is the constant effort to survive at the edge, to undermine the object you have to address, and while I agree completely that one doesn't create such an impoverished object, that you are fighting a bogus enemy, on the other hand, if you don't create an object that you can address then you can't fight that. KSh: There is the problem there, because not only do you appauverize the object, imagined and real — and such appauverization is necessary for so many groups to find their identification in the appauverized object — but it is regression. You don't need to do this in order to be able to work. If one were to take the work ofNasreen Mohamedi, and apply all the notions that we have today arrived at today it would not be so easy. How does she deal with the problem of the surface? But in fact I — Vivan and Geeta and I have been tremendously taken up by her work, including her photographs — I have not found it immediately apparent that the strategy is to do with suppressed rationality. This work may be immediately dismissed as formalism and so on. Unless we are able to translate this into our own intervention we will appauverize our own efforts... AR: I think there was a problem that was inherent in the manner in which Kumkum fashioned her presentation. Obviously one thing that has happened is that we have all been recalled to our own areas, where the issues she raises are all present if in several forms* But there is also some difficulty I felt with respect to some of Kumkum's references — in particular the two extremely cursory references to Freud. Now, if we assume that from Marx onwards to Freud, the question of the irrational and the unconscious was a running political battle as well, a battle that say Thomas Mann presents so forcefully, we wouldn't find it as easy to structure an all-enveloping 'west' Journal of Arts & Ideas