[Reader-list] Dreams and Disguises, As Usual

[Monica Narula]

(This is an essay that we - Raqs - wrote recently 
to accompany the installation "The Impostor in 
the Waiting Room", presently still on at the 
BosePacia Gallery, Chelsea, New York. Hopefully 
those of you in that city can take the time out 
and see it :-))


Dreams and Disguises, As Usual.
Raqs Media Collective


"Fantômas"
"What did you say?"
"I said: Fantômas."
"And what does that mean?"
"Nothing Š Everything"
"But what is it?"
"No one Š And yet, yes, it is someone!"
"And what does this someone do?"
"Spread Terror!!"

(Opening lines of Fantômas, the first novel in the Fantômas series
by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain, popular in 
early twentieth century Paris)

In a painting titled Le Barbare (The Barbarian) 
(1928), René Magritte showed what seemed to be 
the shadow of a masked man in a hat. The shadow 
is seen against a brick wall, and it is unclear 
whether it is appearing or fading away. Magritte, 
always particular about the eccentric rhetoric of 
his practice of representation, was careful 
enough to have a photograph of himself (in a hat) 
taken next to this image. His face, quizzical, 
makes us wonder as if he is keeping secrets from 
us.

There are two particularly interesting things 
about this image: the first that it should be 
called Le Barbare, and the second, that it is not 
in fact the first or even the last appearance of 
a hat, or a man in a hat, in the work of 
Magritte. Men in hats, and hats, crowd the images 
made by Magritte. They refuse to go away. (1)

What does a man in a hat have to do with 
impostors and waiting rooms? Perhaps, like the 
narrator in the first novel of the Fantômas 
series of fantastic crime novels, we could say, 
"Nothing ... and Everything".

Perhaps one of the secrets that Magritte keeps in 
this image - paraphrasing the title of another of 
his paintings - could be that just as the image 
of a pipe is not a pipe, so too, the image that 
suggests a suave, urbane man in a hat is actually 
of someone else.

The shadowy visage in a hat in Le Barbare belongs 
to the figure of Fantômas (2), the archetypal and 
perhaps primal urban delinquent, the 'lord of 
terror', the master of disguises who appears and 
disappears, takes on many personae, and refuses 
ever to be identified. In The Impostor in the 
Waiting Room and this text we seek to continue 
the dialogue that Magritte began with the shadow 
of Fantômas, and to investigate what it means to 
conduct a dalliance with the imperative of 
identification.

The imperative of identification, and its 
counterpoint, the dream of disguise, are impulses 
we find as central to the story of our times as a 
threatened assassin, or a murderous corpse, or a 
missing person who leaves no trace, are to an 
obstinately intractable pulp fiction pot boiler.

In L'Assassin Menacé (The Threatened Assassin), 
another of his paintings from the same period, 
Magritte shows Fantômas attentively listening to 
a gramophone beside the corpse of his female 
victim, unaware that two detectives in 
bowler-hats are hovering outside the door with a 
net and cudgel, even as similarly attired voyeurs 
peer through the window. It takes a while to 
figure out that that all of them - murderer, 
corpse, police and spectators are the same 
person. The question as to which one is the 
'real' Fantômas refuses, like a recalcitrant 
cadaver, to lie low. Magritte's fascination with 
a tableau in Louis Feuillade's third Fantômas 
film Le Mort qui Tue (The Murderous Corpse) is 
evident in the composition of this picture.

This dialogue with the figure of Fantômas that 
Magritte initiated was a thread that ran through 
much of his work. In one of his occasional 
fragments of writing, titled A Theatrical Event, 
Magritte outlines the following arresting 
scenario: Fantômas the quarry, and Juve, the 
detective in pursuit, mesh into each other as 
disguises, reveries, pursuit, the loss of 
identity, and the impossibility of capture 
(except through self-disclosure) are woven 
together.

"ŠJuve has been on the trail of Fantômas for 
quite some time. He crawls along the broken 
cobblestones of a mysterious passage. To guide 
himself he gropes along the walls with his 
fingers. Suddenly, a whiff of hot air hits him in 
the face. He comes nearer Š  His eyes adjust to 
the darkness. Juve distinguishes a door with 
loose boards a few feet in front of him. He 
undoes his overcoat in order to wrap it around 
his left arm, and gets his revolver ready. As 
soon as he has cleared the door, Juve realizes 
that his precautions were unnecessary: Fantômas 
is close by, sleeping deeply. In a matter of 
seconds Juve has tied up the sleeper. Fantômas 
continues to dream - of his disguises, perhaps, 
as usual. Juve, in the highest of spirits, 
pronounces some regrettable words. They cause the 
prisoner to start. He wakes up, and once awake, 
Fantômas is no longer Juve's captive. Juve has 
failed again this time. One means remains for him 
to achieve his end: Juve will have to get into 
one of Fantômas's dreams - he will try to take 
part as one of its characters." (3)

Fantômas continues to dream of his disguises, 
perhaps, as usual, and the pursuer will have to 
get into the dreams of the pursued, he will have 
to participate as one of its characters Š the 
disguise may blur the line between Fantômas and 
Juve.

In the original Fantômas novels, Fantômas was at 
the very centre of a gang of 'barbarians' who 
lurked in Paris, called 'The Apaches'. It is as 
if his wearing the accoutrements of bourgeois 
civility, the hat, the coat, the occasional 
umbrella, or walking stick was a careful 
disguise, a combat camouflage cloaking a raging, 
rampant otherness. While it throbbed closer than 
the jugular vein of the modern metropolis of 
advanced capitalism, it was at the same time at 
its farthest remove. Fantômas is a barbarian in a 
hat, or an impostor waiting to be recognized.

Looked at in another way, the disguise of the man 
in the hat and the overcoat is the only effective 
passport that the 'barbarian' can have into the 
world enclosed by the modern citadel. The 
disguise is a means to travel from a world 
apparently in shadow, to a world where the sharp 
glare that brings visibility in its iridescent 
wake is not without the threat of capture and 
confinement.

The liminal zone where roles can be rehearsed, 
different patois perfected, the various grades of 
personhood that lead up to the man in the hat and 
the coat tried on for size, the turban or the 
loincloth discarded is a waiting room. One awaits 
one's turn to go into the arc lights.

The figure of a person biding time in a waiting 
room helps us to imagine the predicament of 
people living in societies often considered to be 
inhabiting an antechamber to modernity. In such 
spaces, one waits to be called upon to step onto 
the stage of history. Most of the world lives in 
spaces that could be designated as 'waiting 
rooms', biding its time. These 'waiting rooms' 
exist in transmetropolitan cities, and in the 
small enclaves that subsist in the shadow of the 
edifices of legality. There are waiting rooms in 
New York just are there are waiting rooms in New 
Delhi, and there are trapdoors and hidden 
passages connecting a waiting room in one space 
with a waiting room in another.

Fantômas is a denizen of these spaces. Which is 
why he appears in Mexico City, in Calcutta, in 
Caracas, and why he, before Superman or Batman, 
found his way into short stories, comics, 
novellas and films in languages spoken in places 
as far away from Paris as possible. If the 
'Apaches' brought Fantômas with them to Paris 
from some forsaken wilderness, then Fantômas 
travelled right back to the places where he came 
from to the urban nether lands of places that had 
not yet made it in the map of arc-lights.

The passage from 'waiting rooms' to the 'stage' 
often requires a person to go through intense 
scrutiny. This happens at airports and borders. 
It also happens in streets, homes and workplaces. 
The art of the impostor becomes a guide to 
survival for people negotiating this rough 
passage. Waiting Rooms everywhere are full of 
Impostors waiting to be auditioned, waiting to be 
verified, waiting to know and to see whether or 
not their 'act' passes muster.

The Impostor is an exemplar for a kind of 
performative agency that renders a person capable 
of expressing more than one kind of truth of the 
self to the scrutiny of power. The figure of the 
impostor offers a method of survival that meets 
the growing intensification of scrutiny with a 
strategy based on the multiplication of guises 
and the amplification of guile. At the same time, 
the term Impostor is also an accusation. One that 
power can fling at anyone it chooses to place 
under scrutiny. It is this double edged-ness, of 
being a way out as well as a trap, that lends it 
the capacity it has to be a heuristic device 
uniquely suited for a nuanced understanding of a 
time in which criteria such as authenticity, 
veracity and appropriateness take on intense, 
almost paranoiac dimensions in the conduct and 
governance of life's most basic functions. As 
concepts, the  'impostor', like the 'waiting 
room', can signify both thresholds meant for 
quick, sportive and easy crossing, portals into 
unpredictable futures, that come laden with the 
thrill that only unintended consequences can 
bring, and, for some, a bleak and eternal 
purgatory tinged with its own peculiar anxiety, 
distrust and fear.

The Impostor figure also comes to us by way of 
another lineage, one closer to home than the 
bleak sky of Magritte's Brussels and its drizzle 
of bowler-hatted men. We speak here of the 
tradition in northern and eastern India known as 
'Bahurupiya'.  A 'bahurupi' is a person of many 
forms and guises, a polymorph, a shape-shifter, a 
fantastic masquerader and pantomime, a primal 
'Fantômas'. 'Bahurupis' make their living by 
masquerade, by the performance of different roles 
by itinerant practitioners, for the 
entertainment, edification and occasionally, 
defrauding of the general public. They might 
dress up one day as a god, another day in drag; 
one day as a holy mendicant, another day as a 
monkey, and a third day as a somewhat comical 
police constable - and expect to earn money by 
merely turning up at doorsteps, or hanging around 
in public spaces, and being offered money or food 
or shelter in exchange for nothing more than a 
glance, or a brief stare. Here, disguise, and a 
degree of necessary ambiguity about the self is a 
way of life, a calling, a means of subsistence 
and ordering in a world otherwise deeply invested 
in certitude.

									* * *

What lies at the origin of the distinction 
between the 'citizen' (and here we mean also the 
'world citizen' who feels at ease and has a sense 
of entitlement everywhere) and the person who 
neither belongs nor feels entitled to belong to a 
city, or state, or the world at large, a person 
who is in the wrong place at the wrong time for 
the wrong reasons, everywhere? When does a class 
of people begin to think about the distinction 
between themselves and others in terms that 
require barriers to the circulation of presences? 
What makes them arrogate to themselves the status 
of being the exclusive subjects of history?

What is it about the spaces of vanguard 
capitalism that produces the peculiar anxiety of 
the contamination of its sanity, or its 
sanitariness, by the uncomfortable proximity of 
that which lies outside it or perforates it with 
an insisting presence? Why is that which itself 
is so invasive so afraid of contagion?

Or, as Magritte might have it: Why is Juve so 
afraid, and of what? Of Fantômas - his quarry - 
or of his own reflection or shadow?

This inchoate fear is underpinned by a 
furiously-held telos of manifest historical 
development, which both demands, and provides the 
wherewithal for, the construction and enforcement 
of hierarchical taxonomies of people, space and 
ways of living and being - of those who have 
'arrived' onto a notional centre stage of human 
achievement, and others that have been made to 
leave the stage, or are yet to make an appearance.

Those who have left the stage, or who are yet to 
make an appearance, are consigned to the waiting 
room of history, a notional antechamber in 
relation to the notional centre stage. And as the 
figure of the 'citizen' tests his paces, he also 
becomes confident that he cannot be upstaged so 
long as the motley restless crew in the waiting 
room is deemed 'alien'. As long as the denizens 
of the waiting room are seen as unconvincing in 
their claim to a place in the arc lights, the 
figure of the citizen can stay on stage.  (4)

But citizenship too is a template and a score, 
much more than it is an actual human condition. 
And an exacting template at that; the successful 
performance of which is always a matter of an 
ongoing test. One achieves citizenship, one loses 
it, one's performance is either applauded or it 
fails to live up to the demands, requirements and 
standards that accrue to it. To live with these 
conditions is to be always on trial, to know that 
in the eyes of the examining authority one is 
always, and necessarily, an impostor, unless 
proved otherwise. It is to know that one has to 
carry one's credentials at all times and that 
identities must be produced when they are asked 
for.

The bargain that is struck at the very heart of 
our times is the understanding that for the 
citizen, for the legal, for the authorized 
version and the eloquent oxymoron of the 'true 
copy' to be understood as such, the apparatus of 
authentication requires the lengthening shadow of 
the implied 'offstage' presence, or menace, of 
the 'alien' being, the unlawful act, the fake 
item, the impostor, as someone or something that 
anyone or anything can be shown up to be. This is 
why the chase never comes to an end. The eye of 
the state always stays open lest the impostor 
slip by and disappear into the night and fog of 
the city and its shadows.  (5)

Juve must enter the dream of Fantômas to learn to 
distinguish himself and the part that he has to 
play.

									* * *

A girl and her brother enter a deserted military 
airstrip - an overgrown concrete and tarmac ruin 
of a recent but already forgotten war, where 
rusting fighter planes lie scattered and waiting 
as if for the return of their dead pilots. The 
girl traces the path that the cracks in the 
tarmac make with her steps into the wind that 
suddenly blows in a terrifying vision of Kali, 
the goddess of destruction, who towers over the 
small child on the desolate airstrip. The girl 
stands frozen, struck dumb with fear. Her brother 
rushes in, discovers that the goddess is only a 
bahurupi, a thin itinerant impostor with a scowl, 
a set of wooden goddess arms, tinsel weapons and 
a garland of papier mâché skulls. He asks the 
impostor angrily who he is and why he must scare 
children so. The bahurupi-impostor-goddess 
replies, "I did nothing; she came in the way".

This fragment of film, the 'bahurupi in the 
airstrip' sequence in Ritwik Ghatak's Bengali 
film Subarnarekha (The Golden Thread, 1965), is 
laden with strange encounters. A terrifying yet 
banal masquerade interrupts a child's 
exploration, a girl crosses the path of a 
goddess, a military airstrip built in the second 
world war invades a remote corner of Bengal, 
rust, time and the obstinate fertility of vegetal 
undergrowth encroaches upon and encircles the 
abandoned airstrip and its forgotten fighter 
aircraft. Everything comes in the way of 
everything else. Collisions bring collisions in 
their wake. The girl, her brother, the goddess, 
the impostor, the airfield, the aircraft, the 
undergrowth - all seem to be saying, at once, "I 
did nothing, she came in the way". (6)

When two worlds collide, one asks the other, "Who 
are you and what are you doing in my space?" 
Usually, the question brings with it an 
assumption that the questioner has the authority 
to ask it in the first place, and the confidence 
or the knowledge that space, and the means of 
circulation, can also be property. That the 
'space' is his to enable the asking of the 
question to the person immediately categorized as 
the interloper, the encroacher, the 
not-quite-the-right-thing or 
right-person-in-the-right-place. Usually, what is 
being asked for is an explanation for what is 
seen as a trespass. When two worlds, or spaces, 
or beings or things collide in the course of 
their trajectories, and one is cast as the 
trespasser, there is a clear understanding that 
only one of them can have the right of way.

The itinerant bahurupi-goddess-impostor and the 
military airstrip. Which is the trespasser? Why 
is the sudden apparition of the goddess of 
destruction in an abandoned theatre of war so 
strange and so natural at the same time? Is she 
encroaching, or is she staking out her own 
territory?  Is she in the way, or is everything 
else in her way?

Who must give way?

The building of a military airstrip or a highway 
or a dam or a resort or a housing estate 
sanctioned by a masterplan can suddenly turn 
people into trespassers, and their way of life 
into a culture of trespassing. The masterplan has 
the right of way, as well as the means, to 
translate that fact into real control over space 
and circulation.

Sometimes this means that the 
inhabitants-turned-trespassers make themselves 
invisible, that they disappear into the cracks 
and folds of the plan; that they pretend that 
they are not there. They become impostors of 
absence, actors of vanishing acts. Sometimes it 
may mean that the trespassers may be present and 
visible and pretend to be what they are not, and 
that it is they who have the right of way. This 
makes them impostors of presence, pretenders in 
place.

									* * *

Many contemporary methods of spatial intervention 
necessitate the hollowing out of ways of life, 
ecologies and habitation practices from a space, 
and then filling it in with a one-size-fits-all 
imagination. Architectural plans, interior design 
catalogues and real estate brochures determine 
the 'value' of a location. To have a design on 
space is half the battle won in terms of the 
possession and control over that space.

Everything that is in the way - people, settled 
practices, older inner cities, nomadic routes, 
and the commons of land and water - disappears 
into the emptiness of the un-inked portions 
between the rectilinear inscriptions on the 
surface of the masterplan. As masterplans cordon 
off greater and yet greater swathes of space, 
they begin to come up against each other, leading 
to meta-masterplans that stitch different 
masterplans together, until more and more 
stretches of territory end up looking and feeling 
like clones of each other. The suburb, the gas 
station, the condominium, the supermarket, the 
highway, the underpass, the airport, the parking 
lot, the leisure centre, the school, the factory, 
the mall, the barbed wire fencing that protects 
and controls a plot of land from trespass, are 
the alphabets of a urban language that end up 
making the same statement everywhere, as the 
masterplan considers what it sees as waste land, 
or that which in its view is an urban terra 
nullis - "It was in the way".

What is it that disappears when the ink on the plans has dried?

Millions of people fade from history, and often 
the memory of their disappearance also fades with 
time. With the disappearance of ways of life, 
entire practices and the lived experiences and 
memories that constituted them vanish, or are 
forced to become something other than what they 
were accustomed to have been. When they make the 
effort to embrace this transformation, typically 
what stands questioned is their credibility. They 
are never what they seem to be, or what they try 
to say they are. The annals of every nation are 
full of adjectives that accrue to displaced 
communities and individuals that begin to be seen 
as cheats, forgers, tricksters, frauds, thieves, 
liars and impostors, as members of 'criminal 
castes, tribes and clans' or as deviant anomalies 
who habitually attempt to erode stable 
foundations with their 'treacherous' ambiguities 
and their evasive refusal to be confined, 
enumerated, or identified.

These 'missing persons' who disappear, or appear 
with great reluctance, with their names, 
provenances, identities and histories 
deliberately or accidentally obscured in the 
narratives of 'progress' and the histories of 
nation states, are to the processes of governance 
what the figure of the 'unknown soldier' is to 
the reality of war. The only difference is: there 
are no memorials to those who fade from view in 
the ordinary course of 'progress'. The missing 
person is a blur against a wall, a throw-away 
scrap of newspaper with a fading, out-of-focus 
image of a face, a peeling poster announcing 
rewards for wanted or lost people in a police 
post or railway station waiting room, a decimal 
point in a statistic, an announcement that some 
people have been disowned or abandoned or evicted 
or deported or otherwise cast away, as residues 
of history. No flags flutter, no trumpets sound, 
nothing burns eternal in the memory of a blur.

The blur is not even an image that can lay a 
claim to original veracity, but a hand-me-down 
version of a reality that is so injured by 
attempts at effacement that only a copy can have 
the energy necessary to enable its contents to 
circulate. The patchwork of faded fakes, 
interrupted signals, and unrealized 
possibilities, which does not read well and which 
does not offer substantive and meaningfully 
rounded off conclusions, is sometimes the only 
kind of manuscript available to us.

Our engagement with the Impostor is an attempt at 
coming face-to-face with this world. We would 
like to do so in a manner that makes anxieties 
about 'who comes in the way of the reading' 
appear, at the very least, superfluous, and at 
best, attenuated, by a desire to listen to 
stories (and histories) that some might consider 
incomplete. We are beginning to recognize that we 
ourselves might appear, occasionally in them, 
occasionally against them.

* * *

The collision of worlds (that happens, for 
instance, when an empire-building sensibility 
suddenly stumbles upon its grand object, the 
colony-to-be) is fraught with the trauma of the 
dispersal of the assumed monadic unity of the 
self, even of the one we presume to be the 
victor. The impostor always lurks in the shadow 
of the unknown to claim the territory of the 
unsuspecting self, even if that self comes 
attired as a world conqueror. Sometimes, it is 
the notion of the unitary, monadic self, with its 
unique unassailable identity (its 'it-ness', 
which it witnesses solemnly to itself), that 
constitutes the biggest obstacle: the fundamental 
scotoma that makes the image in the mirror so 
opaque and so elusive at the same time.

The early epoch of the ascendancy of the English 
East India Company (when it was still a minor 
'Indian' power jostling with the Marathas, the 
Sikhs, the Hyderabad Nizamate and Mysore 
Sultanate, and the French and Dutch East India 
Company for slices of the crumbling Mughal 
imperial cake) in the late eighteenth and early 
nineteenth century India is full of English, 
Scottish and Irish adventurers turning their 
backs on Albion and embracing, to the horror of 
their superior officers, what were called 'native 
ways': converting to Islam, renouncing the world 
and becoming itinerant holy men, or thugs, 
cohabiting with Indian women (and on occasion 
with Indian men), siring 'half-caste' children, 
endowing temples and mosques, wearing turbans and 
tunics after the prevailing Mughal fashion. 
Sometimes they even forget the English language.

Their counterparts within the 'native' 
populations of the presidency towns of Calcutta, 
Bombay and Madras make moves in the other 
direction. Young men full with the heady 
intoxication of strangeness learn to wear hats 
and clothes that make little sense in humid 
weather, break dietary taboos, cross the seas, 
become fervent Christians, learn to write 
sonnets, fall in love with English women (and 
occasionally men), becoming in every way 
possible, 'sahibs'. The word 'sahib' in Persian, 
Urdu, Hindi, Bengali and Marathi, meant 'master', 
or 'lord', but also began shading off at about 
this time into standing for the white man. In the 
long torrid summer that stretched over decades 
while the Mughal Empire dissolved under its own 
weight, until the conflict of 1857 finished the 
careers of both the last Mughal emperor and the 
East India Company, white Mughals met brown 
sahibs, while xenophobic Englishmen and new, 
nervously nationalist elites denounced them both 
as impostors. (7)

The edifice of Empire, which relied so heavily on 
the adventures of impostors to lay its 
foundations, also required their marginalization. 
The normalization of the state of power requires 
new garbs, even a new dress code; a new script 
and new persona that can help better distinguish 
the rulers from the ruled. It required new 
impostors, broken from a different mould. George 
Orwell speaks of "well-meaning, over-civilized 
men, in dark suits and black felt hats, with 
neatly rolled umbrellas crooked over the left 
forearm" who, sitting in Whitehall, could rule 
the world with their mastery of the global 
network created by the telegraph. They had made 
the earlier phase of empire building, the 
adventurous career of going east of Suez to 
discover a new self, redundant, ridding the world 
forever of the confusing 'White Mughals', and 
situating in their place, clones of themselves 
whenever it became necessary to impose "their 
constipated view of life on Malaya and Nigeria, 
Mombasa and Mandalay".  (8)

With the ascent of the man in the hat, the Empire 
may have lost something by way of its shine, its 
élan and its energy, but it gained a great deal 
in staying power. And the apparatus of mature 
Empire stayed intact far beyond the accidents of 
changes in the pigmentation of those who grew to 
rule. Over time, the shape of headgear may have 
changed to that of a white cap that looks like a 
lopsided, upended boat. The cut and the cloth of 
the coat may have undergone transformations, 
Colonial cuts may have given way to Nationalist 
styles, even as the dull Khaki of the blunt edge 
of power retained the hue of the dust of hot 
places. What remains constant is that something 
is marked as the costume of rule, the dress suit 
or uniform of the master, the leader, the office, 
the 'sahib', the 'neta' (leader). This too is an 
imposture. But it is a guise marked by the 
verifying authority of power. An attested true 
copy.

In modern, republican nation states, power is a 
function of representation. This is as true of 
states normally thought of as democratic as it is 
in states where a single centre of power (an 
individual, a family, a party, a military elite) 
holds power, metaphorically, 'in the name of the 
people'. The legislator, the tribune, the one who 
makes law, represents the populace.

We can think of this as an aesthetic problem. 
More specifically, as a visual, even an ocular 
problem. Whenever the question of representation 
appears, we know we are speaking of a likeness, a 
'fit' between an object and its image, its 
referent. The representative of the people is 
also a likeness of the abstract generality of the 
people. This likeness between the citizenry and 
its representatives is always a question plagued 
by provisionality. Features alter: power gains 
adipose, loses hair; the citizen sometimes grows 
pale and thin.

How then does the figure of the citizen acquire a 
semblance of stability? How do the various 
ambiguities and inconsistencies, the combination 
of historical and biographical accidents that 
make up a life, cohere to form a uniform, 
monovalent image and narrative? How does the 
person moult into the citizen? How do the various 
performative stances and experiential realities 
that add shades and depth to personhood lose 
rough edges and find points of equilibria that 
can yield the regularity and predictability 
necessary to the figure of the citizen? How does 
a person become a political entity capable of 
being represented?

What garb, which guise, which face, is required for the ruled?

* * *

The production of the citizen is, among other 
things, an exercise in the making of a face. Just 
as the skilful operation of a forensic identikit 
system can help reconstruct the face of an 
unidentified, missing or wanted person that can 
then be printed on 'Hue and Cry' notices and 
stuck on all the messy surfaces of a city, so 
too, the apparatus of identification that is 
necessary for the maintenance of governmentality 
must register, record and reconstruct the figure 
of the citizen from a mass of inconsistents.

The tension, however, between the image and its 
shadowy referent, between the identikit photo and 
the missing person, remains. This tension between 
citizens and denizens, subjects and aliens, is 
historically resolved through the approximation 
of a person's visage to an administrable image of 
the citizen. The passport, the identification 
card, the police record, the census datum and the 
portraits that these instruments build of 
personhood, are key to this. The frontal portrait 
makes a claim to be the distillate of truth. This 
reduction is all that is necessary for him or her 
to be known as a person with a valid claim to be 
in a place; all else is superfluous. The man in a 
bowler hat is a man in a bowler hat. 
Correspondingly, the barbarian, the alien, the 
pretender, must be unmasked. (9)

This necessarily involves an operation on and 
with images. These images may be photographic 
likenesses or biometric codes or iris scans or 
fingerprints, but in essence they are the 
condensations of personhood in a manner that 
lends them to being distilled by the apparatus of 
power.

Consider the formal compositional and aesthetic 
requirements of portraiture as laid down by a 
United States passport or visa application form.

A passport photograph, in duplicate, must be as follows:

- 2x2 inches in size
- Identical
- Taken within the past 6 months and showing current appearance
- Full face, frontal view with a plain white or 
off-white background showing all facial features
- Brightness and contrast should be adjusted to 
present the subject and background accurately
- Photos without proper contrast or color may obscure unique facial features
- Color should reproduce natural skin tones
- Fluorescent or other lighting with unbalanced 
color may cause unwanted color cast in the photo
- Appropriate filters can eliminate improper color balance
- Between 1 inch and 1 3/8 inches from the bottom 
of the chin to the top of the head
- Taken in normal street attire (10)

The rigour of this aesthetic stems from the 
subjective methods that uninformed citizens would 
generally employ in the earlier half of the 
twentieth century while sending in photographs of 
themselves for passports and other identification 
documents. Cut-outs from family albums or 
reframed tourist snapshots, in which people 
smiled or otherwise expressed emotion, made it 
difficult to affix the face in the stable 
configuration of features so critical for quick 
and easy identification. The formal style of the 
'passport photo', which then becomes a generic 
template for all images made for the purposes of 
identification, emerges from the dissatisfaction 
that identification apparatuses had with 
thousands of instances of incidental and 
unintentionally ambiguous self-portraiture.

In a statement to the London Times in the year 
1957, Miss Frances G. Knight, Director of the 
United States Passport Office, said that "people 
looked thug-like and abnormal when sitting for 
their passport photographs". (11)

Ironically, this 'thug-like and abnormal 
appearance' stemmed from the effort to stabilize 
the visage in passport photographs. The very 
subject produced through a system geared towards 
the generation of greater credibility appeared, 
at best, suspect. Fantômas rears his head again. 
The man in a hat is actually a barbarian, and the 
more he tries to hold on to his hat, the more 
savage he appears.

More recently, another newspaper report on the 
introduction of new biometric passports in the UK 
says:

"Under new security measures all mugshots must in 
future "show the full face, with a neutral 
expression and the mouth closed". The advice is 
being sent to all applicants before the 
introduction next year of "ePassports", which 
make it harder for terrorists and criminals to 
get hold of fake passports. The facial image on 
the photograph will be incorporated in a chip, 
which will be read by border control equipment. 
But the high-tech machines need to match key 
points on the face - a biometric - and this only 
works if the lips are closedŠ. "An open-mouthed 
smile will throw the scanner off."

Eyes must be open and clearly visible, with no 
sunglasses or heavily-tinted glasses and no hair 
flopping down the face. There should be no 
reflection on spectacles and the frames should 
not cover the eyes. Head coverings will only be 
allowed for religious reasons. Photo booth 
companies, which supply most of the pictures for 
passports, have been required to update their 
equipment to ensure they are acceptable. Existing 
passports are not affected but the new rules will 
have to be followed when they are renewedŠ

Most people already think they look miserable 
enough on their passports. There is an old joke 
that if you look anything like your photograph 
then you need the holiday. A survey of 5,000 
Europeans last year suggested the British were 
among the most embarrassed by passport photos. It 
found that a fifth of Britons were so 
uncomfortable with their images that they hid 
them from their families." (12)

The passport, the ID document, is a script, the 
border is an audition, a screen test, an 
identification parade, a drill that you practice 
and never quite get right. Like the random 
slippage between a North Indian and a North 
American accent in the voice of a call centre 
worker in New Delhi talking to New York, the 
slippage reveals more about a person than the 
desperate attempts to maintain a flawless 
performance.

That slip, between who you are and 'more' of who 
you are, accompanies you as a possibility in all 
your waking and dreaming moments. Fantômas too 
inhabits Juve's worst nightmares. That slip in 
the accent, that gust of wind that blows the hat 
away, that blows your cover, is the give-away 
that won't let you go through. The spectator who 
is the policeman who is the assassin who is the 
corpse who is the god who is the prisoner who is 
the animal who is the man in a hat with a stick 
and an overcoat and the transposed head of a 
donkey... You move between one and the other. 
Your moves takes you back into the waiting room. 
Where can you, and your terror, of being everyone 
and no one, of being everywhere and nowhere, of 
being the bahurupi and the mug shot, Fantômas and 
Juve, belong?

René Magritte keeps his secrets. So must we.


Notes

(1) The figure of a man in a hat first appears in 
an image called "The Menaced Assassin" in 1926, 
and re-appears several times, including in "The 
Usage of Speech" (1928), where two men in bowler 
hats speak the words 'violette' and 'piano', in 
"Les Chausseurs de la Nuit" (1928) where a man in 
a hat with a rifle slung across him is seen as if 
leaning against a wall with his companion, 
another gunman, both with their backs turned 
towards the viewer, in "The Therapist" (1939) and 
"The Liberator" (1947) where he appears with a 
cloak and a walking stick, in "The Return of the 
Flame" (1943) where the man in a hat looms across 
a burning city,  in "The Man in a Bowler Hat" 
(1964), with a dove flying across his face, in 
"The Time of Harvest" (1950) , and its variant 
"The Month of the Grape Harvest" (1959) where the 
man in a bowler hat is an assembly line 
prototype, an edition made in multiples, in "The 
Song of the Violet" (1951) where two men in hats, 
one with his back to us, and the other profiled, 
stand petrified, in "Golconda" (1953), where it 
rains bowler hatted men from the sky, and in "The 
Schoolmaster", and its triune variant "Les Chef 
d'Oeuvres" (1954-55) where the man/three men 
appears with his/their back(s) to us against a 
sea, under a crescent moon, in "The Presence of 
Mind" (1960), framed between a falcon and a fish, 
and finally, in "The Son of Man" (1964), which 
Magritte did tag as a self portrait, where the 
hat-wearing man's face is obscured by a green 
apple.

The hat appears independently in "The Reckless 
Sleeper" (1927) and "The Interpretation of 
Dreams" (1930), along with motley other objects, 
and it appears as if the man has momentarily lost 
his hat while looking at a mirror (where he sees 
himself as an frontally inverted reflection) in 
"Reproduction Prohibited: Portrait of Edward 
James" (1937).

(2) For more information on Fantômas, his career 
as a character, and his remarkable influence on 
twentieth century avant garde literature, art and 
cinema, see the website dedicated to the Fantômas 
phenomenon http://www.fantomas-lives.com

(3) Translation by Suzi Gablik, from "Magritte", 
Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1976

(4) The 'waiting room' of history is a metaphor 
used most eloquently by Dipesh Chakrabarty, who 
in "Provinicializing Europe" discusses the 
importance for people outside Europe, and the 
metropolitan West, of stepping outside the trap 
of considering themselves forever to be 'waiting' 
for the arrival of the contemporary moment, even 
of modernity itself. See "Provincializing Europe: 
Post Colonial Thought and Historical Difference", 
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Princeton University Press, 
2000, also, "Alternative Histories: A View from 
India", Shahid Amin, SEPHIS - CSSSC Occasional 
Papers, 2002

(5) The 'Impostor' figure, particularly the 
notion of the state treating its subjects as 
impostors unless proved otherwise, was suggested 
to us by a reading of Partha Chatterjee's usage 
of the trope in his recent book "The Princely 
Impostor". See, "The Princely Impostor: The 
Strange and Universal History of the Kumar of 
Bhowal", Partha Chatterjee, Princeton University 
Press, 2002

(6) 'Subarnarekha', direction Ritwik Ghatak, 
produced by J.J. Films Corporation, 1965. For 
more about 'Subarnarekha', see 
http://www.upperstall.com/films/subarnarekha.html

(7) William Dalrymple in "White Mughals" looks at 
the phenomenon of cultural and physical 
miscegenation in eighteenth century India. See 
"White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth 
Century India", William Dalrymple, Harper 
Collins, 2003

(8) To read the full text of "The Lion and the 
Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius", see -
http://www.george-orwell.org/

(9) For an exhaustive history of the Bowler Hat, 
see "The Man in a Bowler Hat: His History and 
Iconography", by Fred Miller Robinson, University 
of North Carolina Press, 1993

For an interesting online profile of the Bowler 
Hat, and a very arresting image of a crowd of 
bowler hat-wearing men, see 
http://www.villagehatshop.com/product1687.html

(10) For guidelines on the specifications for 
correct composition, lighting, exposure and 
printing of photographs of US Passport and Visa 
applications see the website of the US State 
Department Passport and Visa Photography Guide 
http://travel.state.gov/visa/pptphotos/index.html

(11) Quoted in "The Passport: A History of Man's 
Best Travelled Document", Martin Lloyd, Stroud, 
Sutton, 2003.

(12) "Look Miserable to Help the War on 
Terrorism", Philip Johnston, Home Affairs Editor, 
The Telegraph, London, 06/08/2004

--
Monica Narula [Raqs Media Collective]
Sarai-CSDS
29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054
www.raqsmediacollective.net
www.sarai.net

--
Monica Narula [Raqs Media Collective]
Sarai-CSDS
29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054
www.raqsmediacollective.net
www.sarai.net