Living in a quake

by Ashraf Jamal

I

Published 22 years ago, Michel Serres’ Le Contrat Naturel – The Natural Contract – prophetically reminds us of the dark consequences of urban densification and the interior life, a life sound-proofed, locked in chat rooms, the better to affirm our blithe yet catastrophic separation from the world all about us. Trapped within the yeah-saying language of science, the normative language of bureaucracy, and the sensational language of the media, we, today, “communicate irrepressibly,” notes Serres. “We busy ourselves only with our own networks. We have lost the world. We’ve transformed things into fetishes or commodities, the stakes of our stratagems; and our a-cosmic philosophies, for almost half a century now, have been holding forth only on language or politics, writing or logic.”

Ashraf Jamal: … living in a quake …

I
The most commonly used phrase in Japanese, expressed in moments of parting, is ganbatte kudasai – “please endure it.” Testimony to a human condition at once gritty and staggeringly inconsolable ganbatte kudasai nevertheless clings to a collective empathy and connectedness in the instant of a rupture. Despite its austerity, therefore, the endurance which the phrase appeals to reminds us that life is nothing without mutual care. That this care is at once human, cultural, industrial, and technological is both fitting and strange given the complex interconnectivity that informs and defines contemporary global life. In the case of Japan, a society, culture, and current catastrophe, we find an in-road into our debate on matters technological and mortal. While this essay turns on the current disaster that afflicts Japan, it is the global impact which this disaster invokes which, primarily, informs this rumination. To live in a quake one need not suffer the specifics of that world; nevertheless it is that world, which is also our world, which allows for the empathy, connectivity, in short the experience which accounts for a radical unsettlement experienced worldwide. Japan functions, therefore, as a coda for the sheer gravity that informs this discussion: a discussion that happens after, because of, and within the trauma that exists as I speak.

Ashraf Jamal: Colours of Wakefulness

“It is necessary to strain one’s ears, bending down toward the muttering world, trying to perceive the many images that have never reached the colours of wakefulness.” — Michel Foucault

Brent Meistre, Blind, 2001, colour print, 40 x 40cm

A curious slippage occurs between ear and eye in Foucault’s reflection. One strains the ear to source an inchoate muttering the better to perceive a menagerie of images. The effect is synesthesic, folding sense within sense, to arrive upon a consciousness ablaze with colour. This moment of consciousness is also a moment of sensation,reminding us that acts of listening and acts of seeing require that we upend what seems obvious, divert logic, run rings around the order of representation,the better to listen and see again. The wakefulness which Foucault asks of us is what Nietzsche terms the wakefulness of being. For South Africans, who traffic in somnambulism, or in received sense, this wakefulness is not easily sourced. Sleepwalkers in our own stories – there is never one, though dogma would have us believe that we are one – South Africans have had a vested interest in sustaining this big sleep. We may walk the walk, talk the talk, and yet at every instant of this showboating and brouhaha we have remained actors, as if our bodies and minds were already snatched, preordained. As a consequence it is the secreted mutterings of our world, the hidden images that could explain ourselves to ourselves, which has remained not only beyond our ken but also beyond our grasp.

Colours of Wakefulness by Ashraf Jamal

Colour as palette has peremptorily served its aesthetic demands in South African art but, substantialy, remained peripheral. The reason for this is that South African art has consciously or unconsciously been mired in responsibility. As a consequence SA art has damagingly deviated itself from the reckonings of art expression. So much so that SA art has come to define itself according to the received dictates of “justice,” “rightness,” “propriety.” SA art, therefore, has been declamatory.

While the process made sense as an idea it bizarrely failed to access that protest and outrage in the realm of colour. Why this was the case was perhaps because SA art was driven by the will to make a statement. The need was precise. But the need in the context of this debate was not sufficient. Why, because the monochromatic dominated SA aesthetics. By this I suggest that an overdetermined morality consumed the complexities of living here, and, as a consequence, how we have told our stories has damagingly inhibited the very rub of complexity. Aesthetics as a reactive and preordained energy has diverted the concern with colour-as-palette in this country. This has everything to do with how the perceptual register has been constructed, how we as South Africans have been tutored to see the world.