The Globality of the Global: A Reflection on Art and Finitude

As a graduate student participant of the Global Past Research Initiative, the concept of the Global Past continues to confound me. Understanding globality can be challenging. How can the past ever not be local? Moreover, the term “global” has acquired mixed connotations in recent decades. What could it mean for the past to be global? Furthermore, since our recent Cairo workshop had us exploring the past through works of art, what could it mean for art to be global?

A pivotal aspect of the workshop involved intimate group collaborations with faculty researchers and fellow graduate students to facilitate curated, on-site discussions at the various historical landmarks we visited. My group was assigned to the Mosque-Madrasa-Tomb complex of Sultan Hasan. Our presentation engaged with Rita Felski’s “‘Context Stinks!,’” one of many assigned articles we were asked to read. The paper highlights the need to imagine context not as a socio-historical box in which the text is stuck, but to envision the possibilities that it engenders for its audience. Since the text is situated in literary criticism, the parallels between the text and the monument were not immediately obvious.

Near the end of her paper, Felski, paraphrasing Bruno Latour, states that “emancipation does not mean ‘freed from bonds,’ but well-attached” [1]. At first, I was baffled by this declaration. For a paper that argues against the injustice of grounding a work of art purely in its context, there appears to be a complete shift here: the author is instead arguing for a more “grounded” understanding of the text, albeit grounded not in its social/historical/cultural context, but the context-networks of its possibilities. It would appear that Felski is merely shifting the context from a text’s history to its futurity as a bundle of possibilities for meaningful human engagement.

In response to Felski, the reader is compelled to ask: what does it mean for a work of art to be well-attached? It does not mean grounding the work of art in the socio-historical or material contexts that give rise to it: Felski is clear about that. Perhaps we might instead pose the question the other way round. What could it mean for a work of art to be well-detached? Let us consider, for instance, a work of art that has completely lost its context. The original context of the pyramids – ancient Egyptian society and culture – no longer exists.

On arriving at the site of the pyramids, Professor Ajay Rao asked us, “Is this art?” Well, is it? How do we understand the pyramids today? We are struck by the architectural or technical prowess they exhibit, along with the aesthetic appeal of the material building itself that one can touch. We also behold their majesty, their grandiosity: they stand the test of time. The phrase “built for eternity” appears repeatedly in souvenirs and signs and hoardings around the site.

The pyramids, then, are immortal; and they are sensuous, physical things. Firm and material: you can touch them, and you can imagine countless people doing the same in the forty-plus centuries that stand between you and the construction of the pyramids. Contrast this with the intangible, non-sensuous majesty of a house of worship that is actively in use. Its majesty is not purely material; its majesty has to do with the infinite, but not as a linear stretch of historical time that awes you with its sheer breadth. Its majesty lies instead in the manifestation of the Infinite within its halls through the act of worship. Its majesty lies in the will of the faithful: it reminds them of their finitude by humbling them before the Infinite.

To be well-detached is to be immortal, and this immortality, in art, signifies a scholastic reduction of the work of art to the realm of the material and the technical. The contrapositive of this dictum informs us that to be well-attached is to be mortal. The philosopher JL Mehta, characterising scholastic work that takes a clinical stance on its subject matter as a form of “understanding as an instrument of the will-to-power” [2], argues that “no method, no supra-historical or transcendental point of view…can lift us out of [the] circle of understanding and of our finitude” [3]. The circle of understanding – the hermeneutic circle of human existence – is therefore the realm of human finitude.

Salīm Ahmad – a twentieth-century critic, poet and philosopher – notes that great philosophy and great art have one thing in common: their subject matter is always death [4]. Not merely an anxiety about death, but an attempt to come to terms with the reality of human finitude and of the hermeneutical latitude that our finitude affords us. He writes:

Life looks good when ’tis through death appraised
Grass looks greener when it grows on the grave [5]

Coming to terms with our finitude makes our lives richer, more meaningful. Art, in its turn, can help us come to terms with our finitude. More than the art object, art can help us – the audience – become “well-attached” and become who we already are, i.e., to live our lives like the finite beings that we are.

Thinking about the monument my group was assigned, I realised how stark – almost farcical – a reminder it served of human finitude. The ruler who commissioned the complex, Sultān Al-Nāsir Badr ud-Dīn Hasan, ruled during a turbulent time. He almost drove the state to financial ruin in his zeal to complete the monument. The only reason he was able to pursue the construction was because his subjects died heirless to the bubonic plague, bequeathing their wealth to the state [6]. Even so, the complex was left incomplete when Sultan Hasan was assassinated by one of his close confidants in 1361, at the tender age of 27. One must wonder if Sultan Hasan had an inkling of his end and that he commissioned his tomb within this complex with the desire to have some legacy he could leave behind. Alas, his plan was foiled by fate. After his death, his body was lost. In his stead, an ʿamīr was buried in the tomb a century later [7]. It is not so much the mortality that concerns us here, as human limitation. We are finite beings insofar as we can – and do – fail. Death humbles us, but the failure of our ambitious plans to defy death by leaving behind legacies humbles us even more.

This brings us back to the question raised at the beginning: what do we make of the “globality” of global pasts? How can we access art as a global phenomenon, from across cultural divides? Perhaps finitude furnishes an answer to both these questions. What we all have in common is that we have nothing in common, since we stand de-fined – i.e., rendered finite – by our situatedness. We can speak of global pasts and we can speak of global art because art, in one of its sundry possibilities, can help us become who we already are: finite beings, humbled by our failures, bound by the terms of our contract with death.

NOTES

[1] Rita Felski, “‘Context Stinks!’” New Literary History 42, no. 4 (2011): 573–91. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41328987, 589. Italics in original.

[2] Jarava Lal Mehta, “Problems of Understanding,” in J. L. Mehta on Heidegger, Hermeneutics, and Indian Tradition, ed. William J. Jackson (1988; repr. Leiden: Brill, 1992), 267–77, 271.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Salīm Ahmad, Iqbāl: Ek Shāʿir (Lahore: Naqsh Bandiya Manzil, 1978), 32.

[5] Salīm Ahmad, Untitled Ġhazal in “Charāġh-e Nīm Shab,” in Kullīyāt-e Salīm Aḥmad (1985; repr., Islamabad: Alhamra, 2003), 334. Translated by me from the original Urdu:

zindagī maut ke pahlū meñ bhalī lagtī hai
ghās is qabr pih kuchh aur harī lagtī hai

[6] Howyda N. Al-Harithy, “The Complex of Sultan Hasan in Cairo: Reading Between the Lines,” in Muqarnas: An Annual on the Visual Culture of the Islamic World vol. 13, ed. Gülru Necipoğlu (Leiden: EJ Brill, 1996), 68–80, 69.

[7] Doris Behrens-Abouseif, Islamic Architecture in Cairo: An Introduction (1989; repr. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 1998), 122.