1. Counter Relations

Central to the Sikh discursive tradition, however, is contestation—debate about authorizing Sikh life, which is necessarily messy, refusing to be sutured into any singular moment. Contestations refuse the settling gestures necessary to enframing the Sikh community. This does not mean we can get away from pictures since, as WJT Mitchell (2005) writes, a picture “refers to the entire situation in which an image has made its appearance” (xiv). As phantoms and disembodied motifs, images appear, retract, and linger in this picture, which is, Mitchell continues “a very peculiar and paradoxical creature, both concrete and abstract, both a specific individual thing and a symbolic form that embraces a totality” (xvii).

It is a comprehensive view that remains particular even though it wishes “to hold, to arrest, to mummify an image in silence and slow time” (72). Messy, as we said. Therefore, we are not here to destroy images, provide order, expose, praise, or clarify. Our goal is not to present a better picture of Sikh life in the United States, but to consider a different relation to images themselves—a relation that does not dream of getting beyond them or distinguishing definitively between true and false images.

Reorienting this desire toward images is a difficult task. Still, as Mitchell writes, “we need to reckon with not just the meaning of images but their silence, their reticence, their wildness and nonsensical obduracy (10).” Are images even powerful or are they much weaker than we think? Against arbitrated truths and falsehoods, we want to embrace the meaninglessness of images of Sikh life; the lack of Sikh life in the contemporary United States. Perhaps, then, our project is not so different from the Sikh Coalition’s. Spotlighting life is, one can imagine, also a sign of something wanting—a sign of a form of life that is lacking. “Look at me,” the refrain goes, “I am not impotent.” A biological metaphor could be coupled with a national imagining to make the biopolitical logic clear: peacocking. “Let me in. Please.” This is, of course, but one elocution of the ephemeral image; destroying the picture’s harmony. It, too, is not the true image though it might be one.

In this temporal obstinacy where causality itself subsides, we want to pause and ask ourselves what happens when we display our particular progressive vision as the correct mode of Sikhi: when we present an accurate image concretized in our modern picture? What happens to Sikhs that do not fit in the arc we wish to compose? Cognizant of such questioning, our goal is not to present an alternative future; a more authentic life; or to determine false life. Again, the Sikh Project does display a form of Sikh life and we are not looking to win a phantom war of representation. Instead, we simply want to dwell in an impasse to, as Lauren Berlant (2011) writes, “suspend ordinary notions of repair and flourishing to ask whether the survival scenarios we attach to those affects weren't the problem in the first place” (49). Put another way, we must ask if those pictures of legible Sikhs, the image of surviving and flourishing in the United States, might be the problem itself rather than the solution it portends to be.