Ani Maitra opened his talk with acknowledging that he used to be a student of Wendy’s at Brown University, where her guidance helped formulate first his dissertation, which has now become his book (available here), Identity, Mediation, and the Cunning of Capital. Maitra summarised the talk as an “examination of how capitalism keeps identity politics alive through a multiply mediated process of value production”. I would thoroughly recommend reading Maitra’s book in its entirety. In trying to capture the essence of his talk here, I necessarily omit many exquisite points that were so eloquently made, and really can only be done justice to by reading his words directly.
Maitra’s entry into his examination is through the protest by black artist Parker Bright about ‘Open Casket’, a painting by Dana Schutz of the disfigurement of Emmett Till following his lynching in 1955, which his mother chose to display by using an open casket at his funeral and then publishing a photograph of her son lying in his coffin. Bright drew attention to what he called the ‘Black Death Spectacle’ in Schutz’s painting,
and raised his objections to the commodification and exploitation of black suffering by a white artist at an elite museum in Manhattan. Bright’s protest was taken up by other artists, agreeing that when images of black suffering are “taken up” by non-black artists, they can only be exploitative. This was described as ‘wake work’ by literary critic Christina Sharpe, that the protests were drawing attention to the injustice, and further, that the violence and racism that led to Till’s murder were obfuscated by Schutz’s abstract interpretation.
In response to the protest, Schutz stated that the painting was never meant to profit from exploitation, that it was not meant to be sold, that she intended to create empathy with Till’s mother, and draw attention to the brutality. Supporters of Schutz agreed that the call to destroy the painting from protesters was a form of moral policing, and that instead it needed ‘aesthetic understanding,’ moving past moral judgments toward ‘international cooperation’.
So following that entry point, Maitra troubles both positions above by drawing on identity politics as a framework, arguing that “as a subjective and social experience, identity is a multiply mediated process, a continually unfolding aesthetic mechanism that is orchestrated and manipulated by capitalism”. As you can tell, Maitra does not shy away from controversial topics (!), and instead uncovers an analysis that aims to get to the heart of why these two views were so incendiary, when theoretically they had similar aims, in the book via this and a number of other aesthetic texts.
His central tenet claims that the mediation of identity is a function of capitalism, that through its global reach in both image and language based mass media, encompasses many forms which have inconceivable impact on how those identities are formed. He draws on the work of Frantz Fanon, and how anti-colonial identity serves to split the racialized body through cinema and radio in the first chapter of the book, later moving through multi-ethnic literary and cinematic texts including discussions on racial, feminist and sexual identity politics.
The key idea I understood is that media fragments identity, all the various kinds of media doing so in various degrees and by being related to one another as media. Essentially, the capitalist machine works through the different forms of media regardless of mode with the same aim—the aesthetic and economic regulation of identity as minoritized difference through exchange and value production. Simultaneously, capitalism accommodates aesthetic “resistance” as a solution or alternative to identity politics. As the title of the book captures, this staging of an “opposition” between identitarianism and anti-identitarianism is the “cunning of capital.”
This view enables capitalism to both support and bolster both sides of the identity argument – it allows for the artist to profit from exploitation, AND for the protesters to create awareness of their own agenda. Cynical this may be but the claim that the production of identity bolsters capitalism is clear from the result of Bright’s protest of Schutz’s artwork. Both artist and protester gained visibility and publicity, and the museum attracted more visitors.
Maitra’s talk then went on to unpack the various levels of mediation that were at work in the ‘Open Casket’ controversy but were, in fact, ignored by Schutz’s supporters as well as her critics. The protestors’ simultaneous identification with and alienation from the figuration of Till in the painting, Maitra argued, has a history. This history originates in African American viewers’ embodied relationship with the original photograph of Till’s mutilated body, the photograph that is at once absent and present in Schutz’s painting. Here, Maitra drew on Margaret Schwartz’s important claim that “[t]his context [of viewing Till’s photograph in the Jet magazine in 1955] allowed readers to bear witness to the suffering of one black body as the suffering of any and all black bodies.” While Till’s photograph exposed the fallacy of the Emancipation, the black viewers’ embodied relationship with it implies a splitting of black identity between the black body and the image of wounded blackness on the eve of the Civil Rights movement. This splitting, Maitra argued, continues in front of ‘Open Casket,’ as protestors continue to “see” the photograph in Schutz’s abstract painting.
Maitra also noted two other levels of mediation at work in this scene of identity production. Firstly, by promoting Schutz and other anti-racist art, the museum claims to function as a mediating exhibition space attempting to reconcile disparities, despite the fact that by charging a $22 entrance fee, it restricts the audience that can attend. As a result, the white patrons who make up the vast majority of the audience maintain the “institutional hegemony of whiteness” that actively excludes black and brown viewers. In the opposite corner, Bright’s protest was highlighted via Facebook, and the dissemination of it on that platform contributes to the participation of the audience through a form of ‘communicative capitalism’ (Jodi Dean). How do we value ‘success’ here – through engagement with Bright’s video, through increased visitation to the Museum, or through the raised awareness of Emmett Till’s murder? Maitra closed this section of the talk by detailing how Bright’s exposure from this protest enabled him to raise money on a GoFundMe campaign to fly to Paris to undertake a further protest, this time, ironically and somewhat contradictorily, an image of himself protesting against Schutz’s painting!
The second part of Maitra’s talk examined this multimodal fragmentation of identity in the postcolonial neoliberal context. This section offered a reading of ‘Logging Out,’ a 2012 short film by Nakshatra Bagwe, screened at the KASHISH Mumbai International Queer Film Festival. Maitra described it as “a short film that offers a campy and yet serious reflection on the mediated nature of erotic identifications and intimacies in the digital age.” It seems to speak to the queer fragmentation that the commodity image catalyzes in and through online dating sites and interfaces. In the film, the protagonist first finds a potential date, is ‘ghosted’ and then attempts to placate the insecurities that the rejection leads to by taking nude photographs of himself that, had he been brave enough to take previously when requested by his potential date, would have perhaps saved him from the prompt rejection. The protagonist’s attempt to create this new identity, however, only leads to further dissatisfaction and self-alienation. Even as KASHISH celebrates identity politics and (what Maitra sees as) a neoliberal identityspeak, as one of the films curated by the festival, Logging Out foregrounds, in Maitra’s words, “the experience of identity…as an intermedial aesthetic dissonance produced by the hierarchy between the use value and exchange value, between the body and the body image.” Here, Maitra drew on Jonathan Beller’s well-known argument—“to look is to labour”—to demonstrate how the commodification of the look, the image, and queer desire creates an identity that remains suspended between a marginalized body and its ideal-image.
I’d like to thank Ani for such a complex and provocative talk, and for his help with editing this review. The themes and ideas that he referred to in his talk felt so relevant for us to really think on in our current time. Again, I’m going to advocate for you to read his book in its entirety to really engage with the depth of ideas, and catch him at another talk where you can hear him discuss his thoughts and aims so wonderfully. We look forward to hearing about your next project Ani!