“Picture-Thinking”: Sovereignty and Citizenship in Bangladesh

This article offers insights into the classic impasse of citizenship and sovereignty in post-colonial South Asia. It focuses on two public texts, a national identification card and a censored photograph, both generated during a state of emergency in Bangladesh, from 2007-2008. By “impasse,” I point to the ideological loop that paternalistic authority resorts to in the name of governance, where a repressive, corrupt, and/or un-democratic governmental apparatus is blamed for the underdeveloped political rationality of its citizens. For the very same reason, sovereignty as domination is justified in order to protect these masses from their own unruly nature, that is, from becoming members of crowds as opposed to proper citizens. Examining the humor surrounding the electronic circulation of an identification document, amidst attempts to roll out a national ID card during the Emergency, I draw attention to the limits of the non-ancestral mode of political power that attempted to interpellate a new kind of citizen. My analysis of a photograph, that was later censored, of a man kicking an official in military uniform suggests that the crowd forms the always-threatening backdrop against which a range of individual and collective identities of the citizen are articulated. On an analytical level, I develop a theory of “picture-thinking” as a key function of sovereignty. I take the formulation from William Mazzarella who, following G. W. F. Hegel and Gustave Le Bon, historicizes the purported opposition between so-called rational citizens and affective crowds. Ultimately, I argue that the post-colonial sovereign, quick to blame the crowds for “picture-thinking,” more often than not, partakes of this very act.