Bishnupriya Ghosh’s new book Global Icons: Apertures to the Popular is a thorough but at times confounding account of the Icon in our media-saturated global age.
In her book, Ghosh treats dominant and popular representations of three women — Mother Teresa, Arhundhati Roy, and Phoolan Devi — to see what kind of politics they might provoke once they’ve become iconic objects of devotion. She argues convincingly that these figures register at the levels of the global, where they are sensationalized by mass media, and the local, where they are constantly taken up and repurposed, imbued with new, insurrectionary meanings. Icons such as Teresa, Roy, and Devi are immediately affective even if they reside in collective imaginaries, and just as they may act as smokescreens for abominable politics, they may catalyze radical and surprising social practices. It’s the “magical” interplay, Ghosh contends, between devotees and more dominant powers that enables icons to become what she calls “apertures to the popular.” In this respect, global icons can be alluring artifacts that help scholars traverse that well-worn but still precarious rift between the global and the local. They may also help activists and artists identify referents charged with popular power. But as often as not, these objects are stages for scholarly and journalistic invention, apertures only, depthless and partial, to be assigned meaning from above. What Ghosh reveals is the Icon’s relation not to the people but to the critic who chooses to speak on their behalf, and who, in this case, does not produce many challenging or provocative conclusions.
It is undeniable that the iconic figures Ghosh treats exist in the social imaginary and that their meanings are fluid: Devi, the outlaw, the “bandit-queen,” became a member of Indian parliament only to be assassinated in 2001; Mother Teresa was dubbed the “living saint,” her charitable ethos lauded by some and condemned by others for its social conservatism; and Arundhati Roy, the Booker Prize-winning author, became internationally famous not only for authoring The God of Small Things but for turning to radical political activism after its success. These three women — their narratives and reputations — are the subjects of books and films and of reportage; placards bearing their images are held aloft at protests and stuck with wheat paste to city walls throughout the global south. They are resonant, saturated with political capital.
Ghosh argues that such icons become sufficiently volatile once they have been volleyed across gradients of power and indeed across the uneven global mediascape; only then do they adopt an aura that might dramatically stir the people:
The Icon, once territorialized, drifts adored or desecrated in multiple and contingent performances. Its undisclosed auratic itinerary, the affective intensity it garners, leads the critic to the particular populations or publics who adore or revile it. (258)
When the Icon is loaded with affective signifiers, Ghosh says, the figure itself recedes and what’s left are traces, secretions, of what she calls the Icon’s “magical efficacy”(70) — its allure and its appeal, that mysterious, indefinable characteristic that might transform it into a catalyst for social praxis or of new forms of living:
In disenchanted secular times, the imaginal identity of the divine can be replaced by another imaginary, a liquid social in which the gaze of an unlocalized collectivity locates us as subject. I have been suggesting such a place, a there that exists but cannot be grasped by cognition alone (77).
This is the magic of religion, the magic, as Durkheim reminds us, of the collective. But it also sounds suspiciously like the magic of the commodity form, a therapeutic magic that as many critics of capitalism have observed is most often a false promise of liberatory pleasure. Even as Ghosh rightly warns us against “quick dismissals of fleshy fetish objects” (70), she is engaging in a program of mystification — and she’s doing so in expert language. This might be why Ghosh’s depiction of a “there that exists but cannot be grasped by cognition alone” sounds like it came from an advertisement.
The question is not whether these objects can be recursive or provoke political action; it is whether Ghosh’s explanations for why they are recursive and provocative are adequate. Ghosh points to a handful of riots and protests that erupted after Devi’s assassination and the disorderly crowds that surrounded Teresa’s body during her funeral as examples of popular deviations from the sanctioned modes of iconic consumption. But there’s little here about what other conditions might have really spurred the riots, and no (apparent) effort to engage with the people whose affect Ghosh prescribes — no effort to ask, in other words, why Devi was so important or why the protests seemed apt and not to divine an answer through the procedural, distant protocols of critical theory.
Ghosh, who has written materialist critiques of international media and postcolonial literary production, is tremendously smart about the nature of hegemony. She sees its inherent instability and the potential of even the smallest gestures to corrode its underlying structure. She’s right that we would be naïve to dismiss the politics of representation or the small acts of love and labor that affect our daily lives. And she is right that mainstream, consolidated media should be targeted by activists worldwide. However, aside from the case of Devi — who is most in line with Ghosh’s theory but who may be the least globally iconic of the three women who comprise her study — the ongoing reassembly that constitutes the lives of icons is exactly what any reader of this book will expect: they are derided by handfuls of critics and their likenesses are recycled by artists to express, perhaps, a politics. These gestures have not proven themselves to be an adequate base for a political program, or even its articulation. In fact, in a less generous reading, they might be perceived as conciliatory byproducts of mainstream media’s tiresome and self-interested ubiquity.
These are very serious challenges, and Ghosh is happy to acknowledge them. She devotes the last section of her book to parsing debates over critical denial and the politics of creative and distant scholarship. These are the most interesting chapters and might be read alone as a meditation on the politics of newly dominant academic fields linked to communications and media. Much has been said about the ways globalization has compelled scholars to adopt a distant, sovereign perspective; but this is especially crucial as the image becomes one of our most resonant, global critical subjects. Ghosh seems earnest in her concern over the routine way that scholars confront their own social and cultural positions. But as a reflexive afterward — and not a prerequisite for research and for writing, for the development of the new fields and even of new academic language — these sections do very little.
After all, Ghosh’s primary sources are photographs, news articles, and political polemics created in most cases in accordance within established media protocols, and the debates they chart tend to be reductive and predictable; they are just the kinds of debates that circulate so widely, especially in depictions of the global south from the developed north. In lieu of interviews, which might have provided some empirical basis for some of Ghosh’s more illusory theoretical claims, she locates these icons’ affective appeal through what she admits is “critical divination” (279). Yet the theories she assembles fail to cohere and offer little about what kind of affective magic these icons do or do not secrete. Instead, Ghosh’s theoretical overlay obscures the immediacy of the social crises against which she claims she is writing; the results are either underwhelming, familiar compromises about potentiality and negotiation or the substitution of myth or sign for the beings they supposedly represent.
I think that as scholars our energies would be better spent investigating truths that might supplement dominant narratives, that might challenge and correct them — and not merely theorizing the way they appear. We should think twice before devoting ourselves to myths about Devi rather than the truths that such myths refuse to disclose. We should be less concerned with the image of Roy — even the idea of Roy — than with Roy’s writing. Otherwise, we might fall into generalizing claims and modes of analysis that seem to live in argumentation alone:
Roy’s mass-mediated sign is a recursive trace, de-familiarized, fragmented — an unenclosed graphic mark opening “us,” the wired youth (may of whom constituted the Obama vote bank) to a social imaginary where “we” disconnect from rogue governments, rapacious corporations, and a compromised media. Through the homage “we” relocate. (228)
This passage, which clearly substitutes “we” for “they,” is telling. It demonstrates the way scholars are trained to rehearse established narratives, the way we adopt the reductive logics of journalists and the patronizing posture of politicians. It demonstrates the way we tell the people we study why they adore the Icon, the way we tell them about their collective will and reasons for devotion, instead of just asking.
