Dreaming of Other Spaces to Play
The Concept
Being in India is always a wonderful opportunity to reframe my practices around the relationship between culture and consciousness. I am particularly interested in cultural citizenship. This I see as an antidote to nationalist citizenship which reduces people to bodies needing to be managed and energy needing to be harvested. The citizen is both a liability and a resource to the nation state. This is the biopolitical world described by Foucault and developed by Giogio Agamben as part of his analysis of power.
Cultural citizenship offers a vision of people as creatively interacting with their cultures in living processes of sense making. A cultural citizen is not a prisoner of their culture but rather a participant in its maintenance and evolution. Most critically they have a sense of their living relationship with this process — thus their sense of agency is strong and reflexive.
In practice, this means that the cultural citizen is actively working towards alternative preferred futures. These can of course be both narrowly understood as generating futures that support vested interest groups, or broadly understood as opening spaces to play with culture and explore alternatives to current accepted cultural norms. Cultural citizens are always partisan and working towards their preferred future.
The Dreaming
So, I’m on the train to Shantiniketan and much is happening around me. The chai man is wandering down the aisle calling our ‘Chai Chai’ — we buy two and receive our tea in two small wax cups with the word ‘Innovation’ on them. I remember with nostalgia the earthen cups we used to get everywhere on trains in India. I tell Dante (my son and travel companion) about this. Later, another tea vendor comes along and he has the earthen cups. We happily buy a cup each. Holding and drinking from the earthen cup feels — rightly or wrongly — better.
There is a tactile relationship at work here along with associated memories and this congeals in the train experience around contested pasts, presents and futures. It is a sticky association and by this I mean it clings to my mind and evokes physical responses that trigger associative emotions. The past is certainly very sticky. In fact, it holds many of us prisoner.
The past is the ground of culture and acts like a series of programs that work like fractals across the collective-personal territory of Being. This reminds me of Heidegger’s concept of dasein in which the present — any given resent — is thrown into the world and is constituted by the unique conditions of any given moment (who is present, the weather, time of day, memories along with macro forces such as the politics, economics, histories, epistemologies).
So, on the train I meet not just a range of pasts but also futures. The wax cup speaks of a certain kind of modern world, an emergent future that is increasingly intruding into the train journey. Yet as I look out the window an ancient landscape still prevails, however strange trajectories criss-cross it in the form of huge electric pylons.
An old story comes to my mind, when the Buddha was walking across India he came to a hilltop and looked out and compared the view with an old monk’s threadbare cloak, a patchwork of fabrics. The Indian landscape of 2500 years ago was already fully developed in many places and has remained under cultivation to this day. This ancient world sits alongside the modern world, standing as a living ruin — just as memories themselves are living ruins — as a counter to modern hubris.
Shantiniketan
Of course, this tension was very much alive in the thinking and dreaming of Rabindranath Tagore who at times took refuge in an imagined past, a romantic pre-raj space whilst simultaneously being ultramodern and working towards a post-raj world in which the colonial was rolled back, contained within the broader sweep of the Indian imaginary.
This is why he established a university at Shantiniketan and set a template for a gurukula — the ancient school system where disciples and guru lived together in a learning community — experience that was grounded in tradition but also alive to it. This form a creative traditionalism is a key resource for cultural citizens working with culture to break the trance that holds us captive to given, highly unequal presents.
I see the cultural citizen as a hacker at work on cultural programs. Tagore used his culture to undermine colonial attacks on memory, the future and the Indian ability to enact alternatives. He found in his culture resources for optimism and the mystic yearning for spiritual expansion. We can all find these things in culture. Yet sometimes a trip out of our skin-culture into another’s culture allows us to see this more clearly.
