Panel 3B Politics of Transcodification
Session 3 – July 2, 11:00 – 13:00
Unclothing the Emperor: Remediation and Resistance
This paper foregrounds the idea of immersivity of verbal and visual language to understand the process of transcodification as part of the movement for the rights of citizenship in the course of which the participants refigure and remediate existing hegemonic tropes that construct their private and public lives. The immersivity of visual and verbal language works, i will argue, to hide the primary codification of media image from conventional practice by claiming (unmediated) referential representation of reality. Moving from one medium, language, to visual presentation of newsevents, directly reported from the “field” we may discern hypermediation and remediation as contexted processes. I explore the remediation of political rhetoric and image-messaging as part of the resistance against the citizenship law. The dominant ideology within the structure of feeling in which this struggle for remediation is being waged functions through a discursive reduction of identities to visible markers, enabling categorisation and foreshadowing easy mechanical identification facilitating mass-operations. Remediation politically contexted, emerges as a political tool, as verbal and visual media unclothe the fixed codes of patriarchy, remove the protective covering of “norm” or “nature” characteristic of capitalist and fundamentalist homogenisation of difference that keep the institutionalised hierarchies in place. An area inaugurated but left unexplored here comprise the possibilities and technologies of remediation and ethical questions that impinge upon the ideas of truth and lie and the powers and possibilities of language, crucial to Humanities scholarship.
Bio
Dept of Comparative Literature and India Studies. School of Literary Studies. English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad