[Reader-list] Is painting a currency note which can not be forged unless you act illegally?

[Taha Mehmood]

Dear Inder,

Thank you for your response.

Your reflections, I think in a way, opens up a range of possibilities, which
may enable us to probe further into the idea of identity in general and
fake/original in particular. I believe, with respect to the proposed
national identity cards across the globe these two issues are going to be
contested within the domain citizenship.

I quite agree with your suggestion that in so far as the question of
finality of opinion regarding 'fake/original' is concerned we must allow
ourselves to let it be, I think for every researcher this is perhaps a more
desired state to be in. To suspend judgment in order to re-search is perhaps
the only motto with which a lot of people, I know, live by.

A statement like 'to be concluded...' also feeds into a wider debate about
what must the most apt position for a writer of social sciences, be it a
historian, any historian for that matter, a sociologist or an economist. And
looking at your response I think any artist will fit in here too. The
argument, back then, was simple, that till 19th century, there was a
division between the subject and the object in so far as the physical
sciences were concerned. Man was trying to decipher nature, by inventing
tools of calibration, forming processes of measurement and trying to arrive
at some sort of a meaning which was of course endlessly negotiated. But in
every case the subject was at a distance from the object. The object was
looked into. The gaze was always outwards. In social sciences this
distinction was not there, primarily because, one was a part and parcel of
larger historical, sociological and economical currents. The paucity of
distance, I think makes any inquiry into the question of identity a
difficult process but at the same time an interesting one too.

You mention the inevitability of change in art even after it is considered
as a final product. I find this interesting as, if we take inevitability of
change as a premise then could we imagine all art to be organic, like a
human being? If we can then how are we to understand that a particular piece
of art in say year X, was that same piece of art in say X+60 years? You term
it stagnation if the answer is in affirmative. One wonders if indeed it is
stagnation or decay then why is it decaying or what is stagnating?

I see a direct analogy between a piece of art authored by an artist and a
tag of citizenship authored by a nation state. In a way, one can sense a
claim, that both the art work and the citizen belong to those who author
them. Of course this claim is always contested, always negotiated. But there
seems to be something very patriarchal in this exercise of lending ones
identity, a meta identity to those who/which are considered as one's
product. This anxiety is to name, to mark, to tag, to code, to assign, to
signify, to brand, to embellish, to blot, to imprint, to smudge, in a sense
seems like an act of an insecure father, who can perhaps, never ascertain
otherwise his children as his own children.

A mother, on the other hand, always knows who her children are.

A national identity card, it seems, may further complicate the imagination
of nation, particularly in the Indian context, as that of a mother. If
Bharat is indeed a Mata even in a metaphorical sense, then do we really need
a tag to be ascribed as her children? Because if we do then, she cannot
certainly be called a mother in the truest sense of word, she has to located
in a patriarchal cosmos, which is governed by larger, older and bigger
galaxies of gender, caste, class, region, religion, state, nation state,
welfare state and of course the market.

You hint at moving away from Dada and Duchamp while imagining art, I think
if we look at national identity cards closely we might find traces of not
only Duchamp and Dada but also Paul Eluard. There is something uncannily
common between the careful randomness of Dada poetry, for instance, and the
national identity number with which a national identity card will, perhaps
identify us all one day. Please allow me to borrow words of philosopher of
statistics, Ian Hacking: 'Think of Paul Eluard, king of Dada, composing and
publishing poems that consist simply of words, first written on slips of
paper, and then, drawn from a hat. We have really escaped necessity here,
publishing purely random words! Yet in exactly the same decade, L.J.C
Tippett first collected and finally published tables of random sampling
numbers under the auspicious, of Karl Pearson's journal, Biometrika. These
were systematically random numbers, taken from digits of dates of births and
deaths in parish registers. These cradle and tombstone digits of pure chance
were intended to increase the efficacy of data analysis, to bring order into
chaos, to derive firm bounds, for any error that might be produced by chance
fluctuations. Dada and Biometrika: two sides of the same coin we might say.'
[From, The Taming of Chance, by Ian Hacking, Cambridge University Press,
1990, p-149]

There seems to be something eerie in the fix-randomness of a National
Identity Number which tends to be inhuman primarily because it does not seem
to decay, it can perhaps never become stagnant. So while you may decay and
die your number will always be still in its infancy. Because a national
identity number will always remain in the same condition as it was born.

Statistical sampling followed art a century back to give us an imagination
of random numbers, a philosophy of chance and a ready tool of distant
governance; I wonder how will statistics respond to a call for a shift in
the art world now?

At a level more abstract than the abstraction of numbers, I find the
invocation of the question, Who are you?, with respect to the questioning of
an individual self- disturbing. Maybe because this question overrides a more
fundamental question in a Descartean sense, 'What are you?'. But What then
am I? writes Descarte and then attempts an answer, 'A thing which thinks.
What is a thing which thinks? It is a thing which doubts, understands,
conceives, affirms, denies, wills, refuses, which also imagines and
feels'[From, Descarte, Key Philosophical Writings, On Meditations,Wordsworth
Edition, p-143].

It seems,by foregrounding the question 'Who are you?' and providing a
National Identity Card as an answer, we are asked just to affirm, will and
understand and not given an opportunity to doubt, conceive, deny, imagine or
feel. But then, I may be wrong here, for, identity as an idea and as an
entity still remains to be concluded...

Warm regards

Taha