[Reader-list] Ways of Life and Transgressions

[Aarti Sethi]

A few thoughts on an interesting discussion.

One term I think that has remained unexamined in this discussion is "hurt"
or "sentiment". By this I mean not an assessment of whether that hurt is
justified, valid etc, who is to decide whether this offends or not, whether
this is offensive or not, the relative self-sufficiency of value systems and
speaking across them. But the inherent value of hurt as a positive force in
itself. Let me try and explain what I mean.

Why is "hurt sentiment" a bad thing in itself? Can having one's sentiments
hurt, sometimes quite badly, not be a positive force? Might it not impell me
to re-think, or think, about my sentiments in a manner that is creative?
Maybe those sentiments are better discarded. Maybe my outrage alerts me to a
violence I have been commiting without realising it. Maybe if more people's
sentiments were outraged a little more forcefully, then we would be living
in a far more democratic and tolerant world.

Further, I do not see why only religious communities have a monopoly on
sentiments which can then be hurt. As a feminist, my sentiments are
assaulted on a routine and regular basis. As someone who believes in a
version of social justice and equality, once articulated by, but not only
by, Marx for instance, my feelings are continually trampled over. As someone
who believes in a secular vision, the discussions on this list offend me
everyday. However i do not see this being taken very seriously. And it
needn't, that is the point. It is up to me to alchemize this outrage, hurt,
sadness in a manner that enables me to live and act in the world.

This is actually how we live our lives generally. My mother, or father, or
lover, or friend might say something that hurts me terribly. Not always is
this clarified, discussed, put in its right perspective. All our lives are
all littered with silent archives of hurts we have never expressed. There is
no heroic moment in which resolution is sought for hurts. And no one can do
this for anyone...

The recent Vogue advertisements doing the rounds, around which there has
been some discussion on this list, have hurt the sentiments of many people.
A few years ago another set of advertisements for brand equity in which two
tribal women are shown discussing the tans they have got in Monte Carlo to
an accompanying snide and contemptous copy which said something about how
advertisers need to accurately reach their consumers, also outraged many of
us. Having thought about this, I realised that though both the Vogue ads and
the brand equity ads trouble me, they do so in different ways.

The Vogue ads can be read in one of many ways - that it posits a horizon of
desire that is unachievable for the people it uses for the ad. In some sense
then the frisson of the ad derives from the discrepancy in what is desired
and what is possible. Further it assumes that their horizon of desire will
follow the trajectory laid out by Vogue. But most interesting to me is that
both Vogue and the critics work with a fixed definition of poverty in the
first place, and  certain trajectory of the direction a life can take.

The second set of ads function on precisely the opposite principle. Rather
than positing an eventual horizon of desire, they deem a present life as
failed, and urges us to recognise its failure. It presumes and makes me
complicit in a social consensus in which we can use languages in a manner as
if we are all agreed on the terms in operation.

Can you see the difference in both ads? They both trouble me deeply, but
they trouble me in different ways. How is this at all useful, or valuable? I
think it is. I think to be able to carefully work through how and why and in
what ways something arrives to me and what it disturbs is a critical thing,
if we are to fashion any sort of language to deal with the violence of the
present.

with regards
Aarti