February 2010 – Page 2 – NO CAPTION NEEDED

Decoration and the Distribution of the Sensible

Decoration has been deemed inferior to serious art, philosophy, and political thought since Plato, and especially so within modernity and the aesthetic regime of modernism. In my lifetime, it has been commonplace among educated people to snub some things by labeling them “decorative,” with the term (or its synonyms) designating superficial or excessive display. There is some irony–or not, perhaps–in the same slights reinforcing hierarchies of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and empire, as there is a robust history of representing people of color, lower classes, women, gays, and subaltern peoples as too caught up in adornment. So it is that one might wonder what is being shown here:

truck Pakistan

I get a real kick out of this photograph, and not only because the truck would stop traffic where I live. The man’s head sticks out as if the vehicle is a carny show or a clubhouse (though hardly for a secret society), or perhaps the carapace of some kind of exotic social creature that you might find in an art house film. Closer to reality, you have to admit that someone has a lot of pride in that truck, and justifiably so. But even so, it may be too easy to let the image activate the old binaries: those people are exotic (of course) and thus devoted to social display rather than rational analysis and organization, and so necessarily less productive than those of us who would keep our trucks completely functional. To challenge that conclusion, you could point to the care lavished on the chrome pipes and rich paint on many an American 18-wheeler, but we can do better yet by quoting from the photograph’s caption: “A Pakistani truck driver enters a distribution point carrying relief supplies for internally displaced civilians.” The decoration fits right into a scheme of modern administrative organization, and that gaudy piece of folk art is functional after all.

But surely this curiosity has no real utility:

Shanghai sculpture

Again, I love the photo for both its eye-catching quality and its sense of strangeness. What is that thing? Well, it’s a giant floral sculpture shaped as if it were itself a flowering plant or perhaps a vase holding flowers, and, for the most part its just too damn big, isn’t it? And that distortion in one’s sense of scale is a key to the photo’s artistry. One can’t be sure whether the man is to provide the measure for the artwork, or the artwork for the man. As in the photo above, the human being is both very much a part of the scene–perfectly at home in it–and yet also dwarfed by the artifice. And as before, the decoration seems completely out of place and yet obviously is completely intentional–just what is supposed to be there and is being carefully tended.

The second photo is from Shanghai, and the caption verges on comic understatement: “A gardener waters plants near a giant flower-shaped sculpture.” I imagine adding, “a giant flower-shaped sculpture that will reproduce across the land and become objects of worship for you pitiful creatures, you humans with your pathetic love of pretty things, your fear of the blank surface and the empty space, your need to be ruled by what delights the eye.” But that would be the modernist talking; ok, a slightly bent modernist, but a modernist.

The philosopher Jacques Rancière distinguishes between two senses of the aesthetic: the traditional idea of it as the modality of the sensible which then is contrasted with rationality, and his definition of the aesthetic as a distribution of the sensible: that is, as both a given arrangement of sensation and reason and an additional disturbance of that relationship that neutralizes the hierarchy and so opens one up to alternative arrangements, including those that seem excessive but are still a part of one’s world.

And that’s why I enjoy the two photographs above. Although they draw on a given distribution of the sensible that denigrates the human mania for decorating the surfaces of the social world, they also trouble that distribution. The photos portray popular and public artistry that is at once trivial and superfluous, but they also capture a combination of familiarity and strangeness that merits attention. Neither the artifacts nor the photos are great works of art, but they suggest that nothing can be merely decorative.

Photographs by Aamir Qureshi/AFP-Getty Images and Nir Elias/Reuters. For a recent summary of Rancière’s argument, see “The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, and Knowledge,” Critical Inquiry 36 (2009), 1-19.

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"Whooooo …. Are We?"

Okay, so the simple fact is that your NCN guys took the night off to watch the Super Bowl. Why? Maybe because one of us is from Indianapolis and wanted to root for the Colts … or maybe out of some primitive desire to remember what rock ‘n roll once was. We could say we were disappointed on both counts, but not really. The game was well played (despite the outcome), and even while Roger Daltry couldn’t hit all of his notes and watching an aging Peter Townsend prance about the stage was something of an embarrassment, the halftime show was nevertheless a reminder to us aging, academic baby boomers who too easily think of nostalgia as little more than an ideological problematic that … well … even we can be sucked in by its charms.

All of that aside, there is one other point to be made: As Carrie Underwood completed her rendition of the Star Spangled Banner there was an (almost) perfectly timed military fly over and no one seemed to notice. No one mentioned it on the CBS broadcast, the audience didn’t react, and I couldn’t even find a single photograph of it at any of the slideshows that appeared on various U.S., national media websites following the game. I’m not entirely sure what to make of that fact given how much hype as been given to the military presence at such events since 9/11, though my worry is that it is one more piece of evidence in support of the normalization of war thesis which suggests that we are altogether inured to the presence of the military in both our ritualized and everyday lives. Maybe that’s what accounts for this photograph that showed up at the Guardian (though nowhere else as far as I know):

And so the question has to be, “Whooooo are we … who, who … who, who …?”

Photo Credits: Robert Carr/AP’ Charlie Riedel/AP

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Sight Gag: "We the Peo …" Opps …

Credit: Mike Lukovich

“Sight Gags” is our weekly nod to the ironic and carnivalesque in a vibrant democratic public culture. We typically will not comment beyond offering an identifying label, leaving the images to “speak” for themselves as much as possible. Of course, we invite you to comment … and to send us images that you think capture the carnival of contemporary democratic public culture.

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Ready to Do Violence: War Games or Simply Modern Warfare?

By guest correspondent Christopher Gilbert:

“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” —George Orwell

On December 1, 2009, President Obama deployed 30,000 troops to Afghanistan. Neither of the soldiers above is one of them. Indeed, neither is real, but rather digital representations found in the new video game, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, released late last year, one day before Veteran’s Day. I wonder if, when you looked at the picture above, you thought it was an actual picture taken from the battlefield, as did I.

War has long been the shadow cast on the backdrop of American life, a part of us, varying in degrees of prominence the brighter or darker it becomes, so it chilled me to read a review of this game titled, “Modern Warfare 2 Kills Well With Others.” The implications of the title notwithstanding, the author of the review, Gus Mastrapa, reinforces an “us v. them” perversity, writing: “the game cribs its morality from post-Vietnam Hollywood: War is bad, except when it’s not. Soldiers who fight for freedom are good, except when they’re not.” At least he attempts to moralize the game. Yet a game itself has morals per se as much as war, capitalism, or even journalism, which is to say “not at all.” It is not the concept or pursuit or game that has the morality, but the human subjects who impel it, create it, and play it. And increasingly more individuals are playing these first-person shooter military simulations—whether for pleasure, recreation, catharsis, or even combat training—trying to “get a taste” of war. One commentator goes so far as to say that “[MW 2] makes you feel every ounce of [it]” as if “you are there, doing it all.” Not only is it violent and graphic, but “realistic,” capable of “building community,” while showing that “violence has a real cost.”

Modern Warfare 2 may be realistic, but it is absolutely not real. Indeed, as a genre video games are inherently detached from any obligation to represent reality. Despite the fact that digitized blood spatters across the screen when the gamer is shot, the game itself—and any violent game for that matter—is clean (as is much of our conception of real modern warfare, my own included). Thus, such virtual simulaitons can house the “perfect enemy,” since it is imaginary, and can be justified as such (especially against those who condemn it for its violence, realism, vulgarity, even pathology) insofar as it is “just a game.” Though it is graphic and realistic, it is merely a digital portrayal, a simulacrum—blips on a screen, pure fiction. As such, the only “real cost” that it incurs to the gamer is $59.99 paid to purchase it. In real-life images, too, we can see but a glimpse of the “costs of war,” of its materiality. Consider below:

As numerous NCN posts have reminded us, we generally see relatively clean images of war. We also experience war from a distance. In the video game, the imagery is dirty (though you can “turn off the blood”), but the player is unsoiled. The images are close, but the horror is at a remove. Indeed, in an important sense the problem is not the video game per se, but that war/violence is not clean, and attempts to make it appear otherwise are inherently dissimulating.

The fact is that the video game player really loses nothing. At the end of the game, his or her violence is not real. He or she can simply turn off the device, feeling only satisfaction, disappointment, excitement, perturbation, or some other virtually induced emotion. The real soldier, however, stands to lose much, much more. You or I can play a video game or look at photographed soldiers, but we can never truly know the horror that is war. All the more reason that we renew and review our collective senses of community, of humanity, of war, while remembering what Kenneth Burke said: that getting along with each other—and not fighting, defaming, victimizing, or killing each other—is the essence of the good life.

Photo Credit: www.broadbandgenie.co.uk and Joe Raedle/Getty Images.

Christopher Gilbert is a graduate student in rhetoric and public culture in the Department of Communication and Culture, Indiana University. You can contact him at cgilbie@gmail.com

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The Two Faces of Military Occupation

February 3, 2010February 28, 2013
Hariman
visualizing war
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There’s a fine video criticism of Avatar making the rounds, thanks in part to a boost from the Huffington Post. The author is Jay Bauman at redlettermedia.com, and he absolutely nails an important point: “The Na’vi were a little too perfect and harmonious for a primitive culture, and the military were a little too simplistic and destructive for an advanced culture.” He’s certainly right on the first point–and “little too” actually means “way too”–and he is correct on the second as well, once you distinguish between the destructive potential and the actual conduct of the U.S. military in the field, and remember that the distinction is meaningless to those who actually get nailed by modern firepower.

In other words, enough of the time the truth about modern warfare is complicated. When the U.S. military has been successful in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is because they are both highly destructive and regularly engaged in careful interactions with ordinary people caught in the war zone. Thus, the military has two faces. Here’s one of them:

Marine gunner Afghanistan-

The caption for this photograph tells us that a Marine turret gunner is inside an armoured vehicle in the Pech Valley, Afghanistan. OK, he’s a turret gunner, and he also is War incarnate. The death’s head, his physical bulk poised for action even within an enclosed space, his uniform that seems like some infernal skin, and his effortless ease and conformity with the metal and machines all around him all communicate one thing: this guy is capable of wreaking total violence on anything that gets in his way.

I am not going to say that the photograph is misleading and that actually the gunner is there to hand out candy to kids. This is one of the true faces of empire, and one that rightly terrifies those who see it. But there also is another side of military action:

afghan man and marine

This photo was on the front page of the New York Times yesterday, and so one can easily read it as an attempt to help the U.S. put its best face forward. It is as accurate and as representative as the one above, however. Here the Marines are on a sweep through Helmand province, which has lead to this interaction between two individuals, each of whom is taking care to show that he is not as dangerous as he might be. The photo positions the two men as roughly equals, and while it emphasizes the gulf between them, that space does not appear to be a battle space. The gulf symbolized by the blank wall could include cultural differences, political objectives, or social trust, but in any case it seems clear that the work to be done has to involve communicating rather than firing the Marine’s weapon. In fact, it becomes easy to see each of them in civilian terms, as if the one on the right were a local businessman (which he may be) and the one on the left were a small town bureaucrat (which, in a way, he is).

Part of the current struggle regarding the imperial project is between these two alternatives of overwhelming, indiscriminate violence and tactical negotiations that can translate “politics by other means” into politics. Photojournalism is needed to show us the two faces of war–and not either one alone. It is up to others, however, to decide whether the balance will tip one way or the other.

Photographs by Brennan Linsley/Associated Press and Tyler Hicks/The New York Times. The Times story is here, along with a slide show of photographs by Tyler Hicks.

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Polarized Visions of the Post-Human

February 1, 2010December 3, 2013
Hariman
fashion/fiction
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Polarization seems to be the flavor of the year in Washington, cable networks are cashing in on polarized gender roles, and so there should be little surprise when encountering extremes during Fashion Week, where they never go out of style.

fashion week red cyborg

“Fashion Week” lasts for months, like a perpetual party of fin de siecle decadence on a yacht floating around the globe. Two recent shows, one in Paris and the other in Hong Kong, provided polarized examples of where humans might be at the end of this century.

According to one caption, the first photograph presents “creations” by French fashion designer Romain Kremer as part of his Men’s Fall Winter 2010-2011 fashion collection. I guess in the summer this cyborg would switch to something in aquamarine. Or perhaps the weather will no longer matter, although not for this creature:

tree model Mountain Yam Hong Kong fashion show

This design by Mountain Yam at the Hong Kong show achieves one of the ends of art, which is to transform perception to see the potential in things. Here what we know to be part of the dress seems to be a natural part of the model herself, and so we can see one morphological possibility for a post-human species that has blended its genetic code with others. The first design did the same when it made the conjunction of human and machine (and within that, of the human body and the mechanical imitation of an insect eye) appear to be a perfect fit.

Side by side, the suggest two different paths: one toward a cyborg species where ordinary senses can be replaced by powerful electronic systems (or dispensed with for the same reason), and another where the human form returns to nature, part of a brachiated genetic ecosystem that intertwines species in organic harmony. If you think these two visions are merely my own strange extensions of the designer’s art, look at the background in each photo: in one, the dark tonality and structured designs of an industrialized urban scene; in the other, soft, pastel colors of a reorganized, blended spectrum of light.

By projecting forward, these creations also evoke ancient forms. The woman could be a Dryad, a tree nymph in Greek mythology, and the robotic figure in his institutional uniform evokes RoboCop, who channeled the Medieval armored knight whose faceplate reproduced the Greek helmet of antiquity. Even when trying to be highly unconventional, it is difficult to escape the pressure of cultural memory and symbolic form. Escape isn’t really the point, however, even when considering the post-human. Moving into that world will only reveal what was always available, both for good and for evil.

With that in mind, we might look again at the two faces above. They are merely models, of course, but both visions, however polarized they might be, seem to lead to the same docility. That could be a mere artifact of the fashion show, but it also might be thought of as one result, however ironic, of polarization.

Photographs by Jacques Brinon/Associated Press and Mike Clarke/AFP-Getty Images.

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