In Conversation: Aruna D’Souza

IMPORTANT NOTE ON READING THIS ARTICLE: This conversation is from November 5th, 2020 — Due to the pandemic of Covid-19, we were only able to publish the article 6 months after the conversation originally took place. Thank you for your understanding.

Philo Cohen for Speciwomen: I recently was reading Whitewalling. How does someone know to push themselves to rethink, to push in situations, to push your own projects too and to reframe your thoughts constantly. Could you speak a little bit about that and critical thought?

Aruna D’Souza: I think that one of the things that is the hardest to do is to be aware of the frameworks that we lock ourselves into, right? To be aware of the kinds of limitations we have. To be aware of the histories, of the narratives, and of the stories that we tell. And thinking about how to constantly question those. I think that some people are gifted enough that they’re constantly self-critical and able to question themselves along the way. But, I think that for most of us, we need to be pushed and we’re often pushed by people who are coming and saying “Hey, what about me?” “What about this?” Or, “Hey what about these histories that are not told?” 

In the art world we’re working within institutions. We work within a sort of genre about writing about art or thinking about art. We work within frameworks, methodologies, historiographies. And these make it hard sometimes to be responsive to those other challenges. Right now, both individually as people and as institutions, we have to find better ways of being responsive to those critiques and those challenges. And now more often, these histories of exclusion are becoming more and more apparent. Even to those of us who haven’t been paying attention for a long time. There has been work that’s been done over the years to bring to light the histories of those who’ve been excluded from mainstream narratives. Work to bring to light artistic practices, to study artistic practices, to create a context for understanding practices that have not been allowed into the largely white-centered canons. 

The challenge is then for us to be able to shift gears and rethink and revise our old narratives. Or to just simply walk away from those old narratives. To say and recognize that those old Eurocentric narratives are largely white and largely male and limited in myriad other ways. And actually say “Ok, so now what other ways of narrating the world do we have?” And I think that one of the hard parts is that we interpellate ourselves so much into those narratives, right?  We find our purpose in reiterating those old narratives so that when someone says “Hey you’ve been missing the boat, you’ve not been paying attention, you’ve been excluding all of these things,” it’s really hard sometimes for people to not be defensive and want to double down on those old stories. I think in a way I see the whole process of doing this as much about the really difficult processes of self-analysis and self-awareness as much as anything else. It’s not just “What do I train my historical eye on?” It really is, “What kind of a person do I want to be?” 

PC: I’d like to take a concrete example. Let's look at the opening of the new MoMA. I read a little bit about your thoughts on that on your website. Can you tell me more?

AD: With MOMA, it really is I think a very well-meaning effort, well-intentioned effort to really think about what kind of stories you’re telling and how to reframe your lenses so that you can see a different kind of perspective, whether it’s a more global perspective or a more gender and/or racially diverse perspective. So instead of thinking about American post-war, forays into and responses to European art, you have a room that’s about responses to the war itself. It changes the narrative, changes the people that you can include in that space. And both things are historically true, right? After the war, artists were responding to European modernism, but they also were also responding to war. Those sorts of reframings give opportunities to remix things in different ways, cut through the data in different ways, and cut through the histories in different ways. 

But at the same time, the new MoMA is doing this rethinking  in relation to its own history and its own collection and its own entrenched ideas. So there are ways in which MoMA will never conceive of itself outside of a narrative that hinges on Picasso’s Demoiselles, Pollock’s drip paintings, with Surrealism acting as the hinge. It will never quite dislodge that teleology because it’s an institution that was built on the value of those particular objects and that particular history. So as much as it tries to reorient itself, that still will kind of remain a kind of background. And so then the question is ok, so to what extent then is what the museum is doing just a matter of solving  a problem it has created itself, right? [laughs] It is, it’s a loop right? 

There’s this great wall panel  that they have at the entrance to the galleries on each floor  where the museum  explains that the hanging is roughly chronological, organized around themes rather than artistic movements.  But it includes a line that says, more or less, that the choices for what appears in the gallery were made by curators from all levels and multiple departments. I read it and thought,  I bet three-quarters of museum goers would look at that sign and say, well isn’t that how museums operate normally? You know what I mean? The idea that they have to say junior and senior curators were collaborating and curators from different departments were collaborating—ok, congratulations MoMA on getting past one of the worst aspects of your own history but I’m not sure it’s a great museological leap? So a lot of it is I think it’s a great object lesson. How much of this work that we set for ourselves is just getting out of our own way, getting out of the problems that we’ve created for ourselves because we have failed to try and imagine the world differently for too long. 

PC: This makes me think of Judith Butler’s writing and her thoughts on the difference between the politics of precarity and the politics of empathy. She was talking about how empathy was passive in a way and how trying to understand the suffering of someone else is trying to control them. 

AD: I think I’m very much of Butler’s mindset when it comes to the problematic nature of empathy as a political tool. I think that one of the biggest canards in our political discourse is that somehow if we come to understand each other, we will act in more kind and just ways towards each other. I think that misrecognized first of all how racism works. Racism is something in which the sort of social mechanisms of racism preceded actual racist ideas. Racist ideas were developed in order to justify the social mechanism. Take for instance how the Portuguese wanted to become slavers. The Catholic church had said that slavery isn’t justifiable under church law because you can’t enslave another human being. Well the Portuguese came back and said Africans aren’t fully human beings. And that is the definition of racism, right? That someone is not fully human because of biological traits or characteristics. And it wasn’t that people turned Africans into slaves because they had racist ideas. It’s that people wanted to turn Africans into slaves so they came up with this whole pseudoscientific ideological kind of array of terrible thinking in order to justify this practice. So, partly I think when people say we need to understand each other, we need to break down our racism so we can undo structural racism, it reverses the order of how this work has to proceed. Structural racism is precisely the set of ideas that constantly reinforce that some people are less worthy than other people. That’s what structural racism does. It’s a way of engineering those social attitudes as much as anything else. 

So that’s one objection I have to it is that it’s just illogical. But also what does it mean for us to say love trumps hate? We just have to come to an understanding of our fellow man, woman, or person in order to act in just ways? What that does is two fold. One, it makes me or you or whoever is in the position of the subaltern, it puts us in the position of having to wait for that other person to achieve some sort of personal transformation in order for me to see justice. I don’t want to wait for every asshole in the world to come to a better understanding in order for me to be treated as a human in my society. I don’t want other people to have to depend on my personal transformation because that could take as long. These fundamental things shouldn’t have to depend on anyone’s kindness or understanding or whatever.  Those things shouldn’t have to precede...those acts of justice. 

But also it transforms what should be a collective movement towards justice into an atomized individual sense of individual responsibility. That’s the other part that really bothers me. That racism doesn’t happen because of a whole bunch of individuals acting badly, it happens because collectively certain things are or are not happening. As I said, even if I am not as kind, as just, and as empathetic that I should be about all of my fellow human beings, I should still be able to have the sense and the humanity to know that it doesn’t matter if I think that you’re a great human being or not, you should still be treated as a human being. I think that sort of emphasis, that devolving of our political practice onto an atomization of the individual is really problematic. I think of empathy as akin to us trying to translate other people’s experiences into terms that we can understand. And in translation, something’s always left out. In translation, you’re always trying to adopt something else into your own terms whether it’s linguistic terms or conceptual terms. Then there are parts that are erased and parts that have to be ground down in order to fit this other system of communication. So, I want to think about the untranslatable and mistranslation and the ability to sit with things that we don’t fully understand and say I don’t understand it but it doesn’t matter if I don’t understand it because it still needs space to breathe. Is it possible for me to fight for the rights of the people not that I hate, but fight for the rights of people who I don’t understand as much as the people who I think I do understand?

PC: I wonder what the difference of transmission is and the translation of thoughts in education, in the media and in cultural spaces. How are they different?

AD: I found that for me, my personal education into issues around anti-black racism in this country was long coming, and happened in informal ways as much as through reading experts in the field and getting to know the experiences of individuals. I’m Canadian. I’m not born and raised into this culture.My education has very much happened via social media, via watching people hash out issues, discuss issues, raise concerns, develop humorous responses to those concerns in the form of memes and so much more. 

All of those things for me, that’s a space of learning. Seeing the way in which people, especially black writers and cultural commentators, engage on Twitter and absorb their writing practice into their social media practice. It’s been a way to understand a set of political positions that have been really important to me. It’s allowed me to gain access to a kind of conversation that would be hard for me to access otherwise, right? Given where I live (an extremely white corner of Massachusetts) and what I do (write about a still quite segregated art world). 

I think there are so many important conversations around how we understand our histories, how we understand current cultural production, and how we relate those to histories of our chosen fields. And obviously that’s the work of institutions like colleges, and institutions like museums as well. So for me, there’s the space of writing which includes social media, the space of the university, the space of the museum.

I’ve worked both in museums and for a long time in universities as well, and I excused myself from both types of institutions. I think one of the reasons was that institutions ultimately rarely see themselves as actively promoting one point of view. They want to see themselves or imagine themselves as neutral. As neutral spaces in which people gather to debate and hash out issues and this and that and the other. But, rarely do museums understand their neutrality as itself a sort of political position of wanting to continue and promote the status quo. And I realized that the only way in which I think institutions can sort of genuinely operate, can honestly operate is for them to understand their role as an active one and not a passive one. They’re being activists even though they’re pretending to be passive. That sort of declaration of neutrality, the position of being neutral, itself is a very reactionary position. 

For the last decade, I’ve increasingly become aware of my choosing not to engage in a position. Do I want to have that position? Do I want to be the person who chooses not to engage? No, I don’t want to be that person. 

So how do you operate within an institution that sees itself as neutral? I think the contradiction of that became at a certain point untenable to me. This is not to say that people cannot find a way to reconcile those two things. You can be an activist within institutions. I think there are fantastic people who really take active roles in shifting conversation and changing institutions and transforming institutions from within the institution. Those people are just much cannier thinkers that I am in a certain sense. I just don’t have the skills for what the artist Lorraine O’Grady calls the “need to play thirty dimensional chess.” And I’m just not a chess player so for me it was easier to do what I wanted to do outside of the space of the institution. That can be more or less useful depending on what I’m trying to do. 

PC: It’s interesting because you still write about institutions and in some ways that’s part of you. I was thinking more about social media and Facebook and how institutions are claiming to be neutral. I wonder about the degree of neutrality of social media and the discussion around empathy. Could you speak more about that?

AD: I think it’s interesting that you’re turning again to social media because I think one of the things that I’ve been talking about more lately is the way in which museums are to the open exchange of ideas the way Facebook is to free speech. In other words, they are one of the few sites we have available and our almost entirely privatized culture in which certain kinds of conversations can happen. Universities function in broadly the same way, I think. 

Social media sites and museums and universities  also present themselves as public platforms. Yet, they’re ruled partly or entirely by private interests, as the case may be.Wee tend not to talk about museums that way because they’re funded by philanthropy,  but if the museum is funded by fifty extremely rich people for the lion’s share of their budget, that makes them an essentially private institution, beholden to the stated and tacit desires of the people footing the bill. And I think that increasingly museums like the MOMA are choosing not to take money from government bodies so they don’t  have to adhere to the financial transparency and other strings attached to such public funding—they’re essentially withdrawing from the obligations that comes with public money. And I think that universities aren’t that far behind. Likewise, universities in the US, even those we think of as public universities, receive very little of their funding from public sources at this point. The funding for public education has shrunk extraordinarily  in this country. 

We are all in a position of having to figure out our relationship to these places—o museums, to universities, to social media—knowing that they are served by private interests and therefore the conversations that one can have there are curtailed in ways that are occasionally obvious, but mostly are not so obvious. Sometimes they are explicit and sometimes are very, very deeply buried. 

There’s no donor that’s going to public programs and saying “You can’t put on this lecture.” However there are a lot of ways in which the head of public programs are going to know that there’s no way they can keep their job if they do a certain event. It’s very much sub rosa. So for most of us at all levels, we have to figure out how to relate to that reality. And many of us are asking ourselves how we are trying to form publics in private space? We’re trying to have conversations that challenge that power but we are doing that in spaces that are beholden to power. And that raises super complicated questions. It doesn’t mean that every conversation happening in those spaces is somehow tainted because of its institutional frame, but it does mean that it’s much more complicated to say what needs to be said. And have it heard in ways that it needs to be heard. I think that when we can understand that those conversations are being manipulated by the platforms even as we think we might be speaking freely. 

PC: I think it’s also interesting how with social media we can forget about that because we’re in charge. It’s an interesting dynamic.

AD: Exactly and we often forget about that. Facebook has admitted -- I think this was five years ago -- to working with researchers, right? And they’ve published their results and they’ve worked with researchers and psychologists to test reactions from Facebook users. And for some Facebook users they dialled up the negative and anger provoking posts on their feeds and for some people there’s actually real manipulation going on. There are days when I get off Facebook and I’m like what the hell just happened to me today? And I ask myself, I wonder how much of that is just everyone was pissing me off, and how much was  Facebook ensuring that everyone was pissing me off? 

I think that social media is a really complicating factor in all of this because as you say so much of our political discourse is happening via social media. We have the Twitter presidency as well now, right? As much as anything else and so for us too...I think we all need to get much much more savvy in terms of the limitations and possibilities that Facebook offers or Twitter or Instagram or whatever it is that we’re using or whatever these sites are offering.