But by 1870, a non-taxpaying, unlevyable ‘Cochin- Chinese’ woman could live out her life, happily or unhappily, in the Straits Settlements, without the slightest awareness that this was how she was being mapped from on high. Here the peculiarity of the new census becomes apparent. It tried carefully to count the objects of its feverish imagining. Given the exclusive nature of the classificatory system, and the logic of quantification itself, a ‘Cochin-Chinese’ had to be understood as one digit in an aggregable series of replicable ‘Cochin-Chinese’ – within, of course, the state’s domain.” (Anderson, 2006, p. 118)
Whilst cataloguing my chosen set, I find myself drawn to the above except from Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities : Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (2006). I agree with Anderson’s emphasis of census-making as an intrinsically ideological process. Indeed, the act of cataloguing itself may be seen as a reductive practice by nature. A practice which necessitates the minimization of innumerable complexities to glib, simplistic data-fragments in the name of efficiency. Reflecting on Anderson’s writing further, I am reminded of Mark Fisher’s pointed critique of museums as vectors for the degradation of the sacrosanct towards mere profanity. Writing in terms of the omnipresence of modern capitalism and its effects, Fisher (2009) invites readers to
“Walk around the British Museum, where you will see objects torn from their lifeworlds and assembled as if on the deck of some Predator spacecraft, and you have a powerful image of this process at work. In the conversion of practices and rituals into merely aesthetic objects, the beliefs of previous cultures are objectively ironized, transformed into artifacts.”
It is this assemblage towards the artifactual that interests me as I sort through my chosen set. Each photograph represents a very real person, who lived, died, loved, suffered, and rejoiced; yet looking back on the set as a whole, it is very hard to grasp any of the common humanity that links us. By virtue of being catalogued as a set, each subject seems to lose something of their individual humanity and becomes but mere component to a whole. No doubt the vast gulf of history also plays a role in this, with the difficulty of identifying with historical figures being a well-documented phenomenon. Moving, I would like to explore ways in which this catalogue might be reconfigured and recontextualized to play with this gulf and help establish a dialogue between past and present.
Fisher, M. (2009, p. 4) Capitalist Realism. Winchester, UK : Zero Books.
