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Sight Gag: Military Industrial Complex

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Credit: Tony Auth/Philadelphia Inquirer

The “Sight Gag” 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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The Mechanical Icon

The Mechanical Icon

We are pleased to welcome Marshall Poe’s “Mechanical Icon” to NCN.  Mechanical Icons is an experiment in historical interpretation and dissemination.  Think of it as something like a “book” of video essays that seek to historicize many of those photographs we are all familiar with but probably know very little about.  When the site is completed it will have 200 videos.  To view the site go here or click on the image of Geronimo. To view the video essay on the famous image of Geronimo above click on the thumbnail of the image on the Mechanical Icon home page.

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"… the conquest of the world as a picture."*

The recent G-20 meetings were the occasion for thousands of anarchists, and anti-capitalist, anti-war, and pro-environmentalist protestors to converge upon London, as has become something of a ritual for such international events.  No one seems to know exactly how many protesters there really were, though various media reports range from 20,000 to 35,000.  The Guardian reported that 5,000 police were deployed for the event, most of them in the financial district.  By conservative estimates, then, the ratio of police to protesters was somewhere between 1:4 and 1:7.  Protesters, of course, are meant to be seen, why else show up!  And most of the pictures reported by the mainstream media obliged by toggling back and forth between images of the carnivalesque and the clash between protesters and police, often resulting in dramatic images of bloody violence.

We can find all of this at the Boston Globe’s “Big Picture” website, but we find there as well an additional set of photographs that points to a different and more interesting phenomenon: images that accent what Ariella Azoullay refers to as the “civil contract of photography.” The citizenship of photography that she calls attention to is animated by the logic of photography—an agreement as to the relationship between the photograph and “what has been” or what might be in the image—and the ways in which it functions as a mechanism of social interaction (and control).

The scene above is a wall of CCTV screens in a command and control center in London from which the police can monitor live security feeds of “prominent areas” of the city.  It has an Orwellian quality to it, to be sure—Big Brother is watching—not least because the heads viewing the scene are back lit and thus cast in dark and foreboding shadows that provide a stark contrast with the daylight of the screens. As such, the image directs attention to its own technology, and thus the visual grammar that animates it; in short, what we are looking at is itself a photograph—a visual representation of the command and control center once removed—that relies upon the logic of photography as it displays a site for interpretive resistance to the mechanism of surveillance that is being exacted by the state precisely by making it transparent.

Nor are the broader implications of the civil contract of photography lost on the protesters themselves, who were armed not with guns or nightsticks or other riot gear (like the police) but with cameras.

There are numerous photographs that make the point (see photos 11, 12, 19 and 20 at the Big Picture), but I like this image the most, in large measure because of how the police appear to react. Their purpose is to protect the bank from the protesters, and of course they are doing that, but it all seems so out of proportion: they are larger in number and size, and in any case they are girded for battle; the protesters sit and squat awkwardly on the ground as they take pictures or stand about nonchalantly with their hands in their pockets.  On the face of things they certainly don’t seem to be much of a threat.  Change the context just a bit and we might imagine them as tourists out for a day in the city.  And that is precisely the problem for the police who seem literally stopped in their tracks, as if they don’t quite know what to do.  Indeed, it could be a scene out of a Monty Python skit.  Should they pose for the camera or charge? Caught in the gaze of the lens—and thus the implied civic contract of the photograph—their power seems mitigated, if only for a moment.  But that moment is enough to shift the ground of agency and control, if not for the people in the image itself, then at least for those who see the photograph, i.e., those cast in the role of spectators who, by the virtue of the civic contract, are nevertheless called upon to render judgment.

*The fragment here is from Heidegger and reads in full, “The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture.”  It appears in “The Age of World Pictures” published in Electronic Culture, ed. by T. Druckery. New York: Aperture, 1969.  I came across it in Ariella Azoulay’s “The Ethic of the Spectator: The Citizenry of Photography,” Afterimage, September/October 2005, 39. For a more detailed discussion of her ideas see The Civil Contract of Photography, MIT Press, 2008.

Photo Credits: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP, Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty Images

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Holocaust in the Furniture Business?

A state decrees that its pure stock is being diluted and displaced by inferior populations, many of them from Eastern Europe. The situation is becoming intolerable, and drastic steps must be taken. A Bekämpfung (fight) is declared. The world is notified and even asked to help the state assert its legal right to protect its property and identity. A systematic program of extermination begins.

In this photograph, a shipment of the impure element is being assessed for disposal after having arrived at the processing center.

I’d understand if you think I’ve got a screw loose. Chairs are not people. Manufactured objects are recycled all the time–and it’s considered virtuous to sort your cans and plastic containers to that end. But I was paraphrasing the statements made by the Fritz Hansen furniture company at a weird web site where they display their efforts to collect and destroy copies of their signature lines. If their declaration of a struggle to maintain the purity of their brand had been nothing but text, I might have skimmed right over it. But then there are the images: the site includes two slide shows and a video of chairs being destroyed, along with a video of the company president justifying the program. The stiff demeanor, Germanic accent (it’s a Danish company), bureaucratic prose, and gray modernist architecture could all come from a movie on the Final Solution. Or so it seems when you look through the slide show.

I know my reaction is not unique because a reader tipped me off to these images, which have an uncanny resemblance to Holocaust photographs. At first, the allusion is very faint: a sense of vulnerable bodies being exposed, assessed, and destroyed in an industrial setting. The second image goes a step further: those flesh-colored torsos could be naked bodies being readied for the gas. The next image goes further still, evoking the skeletal corpses being stacked like cord wood in the concentration camp yard.

I’m not going to show the originals; one reason is that I’m assuming they already can be called to mind. And that raises another issue, because the company insists that “A copy has nothing to do with an original.” That assertion of radical difference among similar things cuts in several directions at once: back to fascism and across the contemporary digital world–where, for example, my copies of their images apparently have nothing to do with the original–and forward to a future when more and more of human life and capabilities will be copied into other things. Fortunately, however, the “Republic of Fritz Hansen”–they really say that–is ready to take a stand for the industrial equivalent of racial purity.

I would not endorse dismantling copyright laws, but there is something disturbing about producing photographs of destruction. Perhaps my sympathetic reaction is what is really out of place–an example of the emotional response typically evoked by the photographic relationship but rightly applied only to people. Because chairs are shaped to conform to the human body, they become accidental copies of the body, and that also makes misplaced identification a likely response. On the other hand, I wonder about the emotional condition of those who take pleasure in destroying things that are so much a part of the common human world.

You can see the Fritz Hansen display and one of the slide shows here. The videos, including the interview, and the written statement and another slide show are here. A site that mourns “Endangered Machinery” is here, which I learned about after an earlier post on When Machines Die.

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Sight Gag: And You Thought O'Hare was Bad!

Click here or on the picture for the full story.

Credit:  The Onion (with thanks to Jessica Rudy)

The “Sight Gag” 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.

 0 Comments

Conference: Seminar on Rhetoric and Politics in Contemporary Discourse

Persuasion: Seminar on Rhetoric and Politics in Contemporary Discourse

A seminar organized by the Goldsmiths’ Centre for the Study of Global Media and Democracy and the Centre for the study of Culture and Politics, University of Swansea

May 5, 2009, 2-5 pm

Small Hall Theater, Richard Hoggart Building

Goldsmiths, University of London

Persuasion is one of the most fundamental of democratic political activities. But it is also one of the most ambiguous. Does democratic development and expansion require the slow substitution of persuasion or rational conviction or, on the contrary, the proliferation of opportunities for rhetorical contestation? Where is the line between persuasion and force? Are there standards of truth or consent that guarantee the democratic character of a persuasive activity? What forms of rhetoric distinguish a democratic polity from tyranny? What happens to political persuasion in an economy and culture dominated by commercial persuasion? How can we best understand and analyse the forms, modes and locations of contemporary political rhetoric as manifested in visual and media cultures?

This interdisciplinary seminar explores the modes of democratic persuasion, the methods for its explication and interpretation and the prospects for rhetoric both in the academy and in the contemporary multifaceted polis.

Speakers: Aleatta Norval (University of Essex), Michael Carrithers (Durham University), Rochana Bajpai (SOAS), Alan Finlayson (Swansea University),  James Martin (Goldsmiths).

The event is free and open to all, but please contact James Martin (j.martin@gold.ac.uk) if you’d like to attend.  Seminar to be followed by a wine reception in the SCR.


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Wall Street Bankers Battle Fargo Flood

Exhausted emergency crews and volunteer workers building the dikes in Fargo, North Dakota had their spirits lifted today as hundreds of executives from Wall Street arrived to save the city from the worst flooding on record. As the grateful residents looked on, one financier after another picked up shovels, sandbags, and whatever else was needed to hold back the mighty river.

After he had slogged knee deep through ice-clogged water to hook a towing chain to a semi that was stalled in a flooded parking lot, this hardy banker said that he was happy to be able to help. “We couldn’t stay home when we saw people just like us having to struggle. Besides, I like to get my hands dirty.”

Fargo residents have become used to offers of help in the past week, but they were impressed nonetheless by the crew from Wall Street. “These guys have a lot of practical know-how,” said Jim Johnson of Johnson and Johnson Motors, “and they make really good decisions–especially about managing risk downstream.”

The bankers were a bit surprised by the fuss being made over their contribution. “We really couldn’t do otherwise,” said one, “because this was such an obvious call on our commitment to the common good. We have been fortunate lately, and we really appreciate the opportunity to give something back to the community.”

“After all,” said another, “that’s what it’s is all about, right?”

Photograph by Michael Vosburg/Fargo Forum Photo Editor, March 27, 2009. You can see additional photos of the flood control effort at the Fargo Forum and The Big Picture.

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