D
Kumkum Sangari
as Kumkum does with her Saturday Times example, for instance. I think Lacan's reading of Holbein's Ambassadors painting gives a value to surface and depth in terms of sexualized desire that resonates through this tradition, but I can't imagine such a reading finding a place in your presentation. So then, even when we come to let's say Indian art and the problem of, for example, nineteenth century popular painters having a problem with depth, and reworking several traditional modes of signification into industrial technology, I wouldn't know from your presentation just what the 83 stakes were. Despite the fact that colonizing discourse was the problem you were explicitly addressing yourself to.
KKS: I think it's a very curtailed argument. That is very much a part of how this presentation was produced. I think it would be dissatisfactory to me too, as anything more than a discussible proposition. Secondly, I feel that when you attempt to talk about a method, or in however small a fashion, to suggest a reordering, then it is difficult to do more than sketch an ensemble, suggest a rearrangement.
AR: This is a problem of practice we face time and again, but you don't curtail your arguments. Just the fact that you do not have the time or the energy to follow them through does not mean that you curtail them. More important is the vitalizing insight that someone else can carry on from to something else.
KKS: I think what is at issue here is that for you Lacan, for instance, is an immensely usable and enriching thinker, from whom you would make numerous useful connections. So you feel that something is wrong here, that there is no space being left for the way you see Lacan. And I think you'd be perfectly right in saying that. Quite apart from material reasons of time or energy, I think that in setting out to reorder a particular set of referents there is always a preliminary ideological act of stripping them of their usual resonances, the surrounding academic accretions. I think this is a necessary preliminary step.
ST: I'm rather dissatisfied with all this; I don't think we have still addressed the basic methodological shift that Kumkum has been proposing. I don't think she has curtailed her argument as she says she has. Ashish means curtailed in the sense of foreshortened, reduced in importance. His formulation is unfair, I think, in the sense that he is not acknowledging the shifts that have made Lacan himself arrive at his discourse. The question is, even as one curtails one thing, always of what one is opening up by the same process. And this also relates to our discussion last night with Kumar, when he said that I was reducing the scope of my work. I would also agree that this is so, that the questions that have been raised have been set aside even as they are, hopefully, being rearticulated elsewhere. You cannot keep asking the bourgeois questions again
Numbers 20 - 21