Power to Represent
2015
Display of the undesirable has been desirable from the time the thirst for being superior became unquenchable, and since then our thoughts have been colonised.
Power creates a handicap in society when acquired knowledge is dictated, rather than shared and built upon. Foucault believed that the phenomenon of ‘being seen’ relied on ones being ‘given to be seen’. During the colonial period, there were exhibitions in Europe displaying the developments that took place, and the cultural material that was found during their explorations. The Exposition Universelle (Paris) in 1867 was the first exhibition in which people from the colonies were displayed. In the British Empire Exhibition (1924-5) at Wembley, these people were told to showcase their usual activities there. [1] This was a method to bring to Europe another world for the Europeans to see. Since the people were museum representations, and were presented as ethnographic specimens, they were viewed as subjects, or rather objects that could become part of cultural studies. These people completely isolated from their regular surroundings were told to perform ‘regular’ functions in front of viewers who saw them through the same eyes that had seen these ‘savages’ in photographs on postcards taken and captioned by Europeans.
Through such exhibitions and other kinds of displays of this ‘uncivilised race’, the knowledge pertaining to them, and that which was once created for exploitative benefit, became the basis for the truth about the community. Exhibitions are always of those materials that are selected by the exhibitors and curators to show ways of representation, but when a country is exhibited, the scale of possibilities that is present limits the credibility of the representations.
For almost a century, India was kept on a slide under a British microscope, and studied and experimented on, like a specimen of a newly discovered species. At various stages of research about the people and culture of India, certain inferences were drawn, and the findings got a market in Great Britain, where there was an excitement about getting to know the people they ruled over.
People belonging to the colonising community acted like projectors, and the colony was their screen, the white wall. Piece by piece, the British created the projection, an image that was their view of India. This image was shown to Europeans who had never visited India, and for them, this image became the representation of India. Peeling of the white wallpaper, they found a layer under it, of a different colour. They documented it, and preserved the proof of their successful attempt in the process of decoding India. Then they peeled off more, and found several layers underneath it. With so many ideas and emotion related to India, they handpicked a few that benefitted them as rulers. They compressed the data that they found and projected India not as they had found it to be, with pixels of all shades, hues and tints, but as an object with flat colours. India had become a vector image on a postcard, much like Africa. These images had a market in Europe, not only because of curiosity about the other side of the world that was under their administration. Taking the choice of visuals to represent a community, the British had given themselves the power to fictionalise the lives of the people by placing them in studio-like created spaces, or by making them pose in certain ways with other objects carefully placed next to them, to exaggerate certain aspects of their lives. The images apart from being amusing and exotic were also repulsive. It listed down all the ways in which one could be a savage being. This had a positive impact on the British, because now they had with them, photographs to compare with, and highlight their superiority and civilised nature. There also were photographers like Jean Audema whose relationship with his subjects in Africa was more than just business. In his photographs, the natives seemed to be empowered, were present in their natural settings, and stood in postures that made them look strong and confident, unlike in the usual photographs taken by most photographers in which they were clearly submissive. Even with a different approach to photographing native Africans, Jean Audema’s work can still be observed with a questioning look, as he too was on the side of the colonisers. He already was in a position of greater hierarchy by virtue of being European, having a camera in his hand, and with it the power to represent the colonised in his own ways. It could be the keenness towards ethnographic practises of living with and understanding new people and communities, or a well thought out method of gaining acceptance and cooperation from people to be able to continue the real agenda of representing the natives. Deceptively posed photographs of the colonised became crucial to maintain a heightened level of power for the British, and they also served a purpose of entertainment in Europe, through amazement, disgust and fright, much like a horror film.
Humans have used their own cultural knowledge to study and colonise people with a different culture. In colonial times, individuals and communities in the colonies were typecast on the basis of whatever differed between the colonised and the colonisers. All observations led to the creation of the definitions of what was right or wrong, moral or immoral, generate or degenerate, and so on. From this rose colonial repression, and since moral, political and institutional grounds were set in the colonies by the colonisers, postcolonial misery was inevitable.
When people are caged in such rigid boundaries of intangible things like being civilised, being moral in looks, behaviour, and even emotions, then these concepts of power, knowledge, repression and representation do not remain isolated only to macro fields like governing a nation or colonisation. They then also work at micro levels of individuals. In late nineteenth century, Jean-Martin Charcot, a French neurologist was dealing with patients with hysteria. Since he was also a professor, to explain the disease in detail to his patients, he used to do live displays of his patients’ hysterical attacks in class. His subjects were all women, and while they had seizures, they were watched and studied, visually, like the savages in museums. ‘Hysteria’ is a word that has its origin in the word ‘womb’, and is also a disease that was displayed on women bodies, even though male patients with hysteria were also present. So, by just the act of using the body of a certain kind of subject, unnecessary meanings can get created. Now, one relates only to women, the exclamation of “Why are you getting so hysterical!”
Une Leçon Clinique à La Salpêtrière (A Clinical Lesson at La Salpêtrière), 1887
Jean-Martin Charcot is standing with the female patient in the middle of a siezure.
Jean-Martin Charcot is standing with the female patient in the middle of a siezure.
According to Foucault’s theories, the root of knowledge always emerges from the seed of power, so representation develops more layers that can be examined. Connotations arising from subjects are not separate from the sources from where these deductions and meanings have been arrived at. Exclusion and repression are aspects of society that are ruled by the play between power and knowledge.
References
1. Hall, Stuart. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. Sage in Association with the Open University, 2011.
2. Cohn, Bernard S. Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. Princeton Univ. Press, 2006.
3. MacDougall, David. “Staging the Body.” The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the Senses, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2006.
4. André Brouillet, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Une_le%C3%A7on_clinique_%C3%A0_la_Salp%C3%AAtri%C3%A8re.jpg
