It seems like barely a week goes by that we don’t see a photograph somewhere in the mainstream press of individual Palestinian youth twirling a sling or hurling a stone at an Israeli military patrol, usually somewhere in or around Gaza.  The images have become so regular and ordinary that the biblical irony seems to have lost all resonance.  What was once a potentially poignant comment on a tragic situation has become something of a pitiable commonplace.  And yet the visual trope of the stone thrower persists as a common representation of  political unrest throughout the nonwestern world.

The most recent examples come from anti-government protests in Thailand and, as above, in Kyrgzystan.  The particular issues at stake don’t usually matter—or at least they are typically not featured or explained—as the point of such photographs seems to be to dramatize the difference between a more or less disorganized group of grassroots protestors—“the people”—and a rationally organized and heavily armed and armored military or riot police. The odds against the success of the protestors under such circumstances is enormous, almost incalculable.  But of course in the West we “know” that when “the people” arise as if with one voice and a common will to challenge the military might of the state with little more than stones and brickbats that a serious challenge to political legitimacy has been tendered.

And therein lies an important moral.

No matter how rationally organized or far better equipped the military arm of the state might be, and no matter from where it derives its political authority, it cannot succeed without huge costs—or maybe succeed at all—when the will of the people it would fetter and control is enraged.

Photo Credits: Vyacheslav Oseledko/AFP/Getty Images; Ivan Sekretarev/AP

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With the introduction of X-ray body scanners at airports, there has been plenty of talk about how much of one’s personal life might be exposed. That roll around the middle, the glitter on the underwear, and Lord knows what medical or erotic devices–well, actually, more than the Lord will know, and that is the problem.  Once again modern surveillance technology is likely to prove to be a devil’s bargain: too much information that we don’t really need, to reduce privacy and promote anxiety, on behalf of security that probably is illusive.  One can’t help but feel exposed; like this, perhaps:

You are looking at an X-ray image of a payloader and operator that was taken by a cargo scanner.  Some viewers of a certain age may find themselves peering into the guts of the machine to see how many parts they can identify. Others might look at the driver and be a bit shaken, as there doesn’t seem to be much to the human being.  Small, thin-boned, almost insect-like, it seems more a sci-fi species than a person.  Indeed, the machine is the far greater animal, while the operator seems reduced to being part of the machine, and both are fused together by the uniform industrial imaging into a single cyborg.

This precisely articulated exposure of that is beneath the skin isn’t quite uncanny, although it is a bit strange, as X-rays typically are strange and we don’t often see large machines though that lens.  I think the full value of the image goes well beyond both its aesthetic qualities and its novelty, however.  Something else is being exposed: one of the porous borders of human being.  Or, to be a bit more up to date: one side of the posthuman.  Instead of defining human being as a fixed essence (as with a soul) that is fundamentally different from all other animals, on the one hand, and from all machines and other technologies, on the other hand, the posthuman considers how humanity is both more variable across time and other dimensions, and how it is more continuous with both nature and technology.  Again: humans are not defined solely by their intelligence and so are embodied creatures like all other species, and they are defined and changed by the technologies that they create to alter and control the rest of the world.

Photography has been celebrated for its ability to portray humanity and so to celebrate humanism.  Think of The Family of Man exhibition, for example, or the many celebrations of the human face.  And so it does, but I think it is time to start considering how photographs may occasionally be moving beyond humanism to reveal various hints of the posthuman.  Like this, to take another example:

The caption said that this Marine was washing his head during an operation in southern Afghanistan.  His head, of course, is nowhere to be seen.  Instead we have an acephalic figure, one still demonstrably human–we recognize the back and clothing as such–but also disturbingly not human–that is, as long as one grounds humanness in the possession of a mind rather than simply an animal body having a familiar form.  Until the photo above, this image seems to be all body rather than design, and all skin (literally and the second skin of his uniform)–but not quite, for the spine extrudes partially, signifying his skeleton and the cord of nerves than runs through every vertebrate.  None of this is particularly reassuring, however.  He is too much a brute animal in some primitive crouch at the water hole.  But, of course, that is a bottle of soap beside him, and he is cleaning himself, and he is human, but also posthuman, squatting, thanks to the photograph, at another border of the species, though not to lose his soul.

Photographs by Nick Veasey/Caters News Agency Ltd. and Maurico Lima/AFP-Getty Images.

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Among the sophisticated, raison d’état (“reason of state”) is the first principle of foreign policy.  Decisions are to be made on behalf of the national interest without regard to confounding values.  So it is that democracies can support dictators, to take one example that might apply to U.S. foreign policy now and again.  Although the idea has been the subject of extensive debate, it has at the same time become ever more deeply embedded in practices of state administration.  It should not be surprising, then, that those practices acquire the look of rational, efficient mechanisms of control.

This photograph of a common room at Guantanamo Bay prison is a study in rational organization, everything in its place.  The room is used for activities such as watching television, but its real purpose is obvious: maintaining comprehensive control of the inmates while they are out of their cells.  And, yes, those are leg irons on the floor; the prisoners are locked in while sitting at the table.  The photo may be intended to feature the functionality of the room: containment appears almost transparent–no dungeons here–while the asceticism and cleanliness double as substitutes for morality.

Modern regimes of control rely heavily on assumptions about reason and necessity in the use of power.  They can’t be less powerful or more moral, we are told, because the rational consequence will be that a more powerful and less moral opponent will triumph.   They can, however, apply instrumental rationality and modern technologies to maintain security, and that competence becomes sufficient justification for administrative sovereignty.   If they can’t be moral, democratic, or otherwise defined by anything other than the use of power to maintain security, at least they can be systematically organized to achieve their one objective.

Fair enough, but for one problem.  The result of this mentality has been not the enlightened use of reason, but rather ever more well-financed stupidity.  Massive expenditures on prisons don’t reduce either terrorism or crime.  Funneling billions of dollars to dictators doesn’t build states or economies, but instead wreaks civil society and produces great swaths of poverty and dependence.  Trammeling democratic values (and others as well) doesn’t win hearts and minds while it does feed cynicism and hatred.  But we knew that.  And that knowledge doesn’t change much, in two senses: it hasn’t influenced those in charge of the state, perhaps because it hasn’t itself become more insightful or articulate.

I want to suggest another, perhaps odd approach to the problem of state stupidity.  Let me ask, when can we see stupidity?  Would we know what to look for?  This is not a matter, at least for the moment, of defining the term, but rather of considering how behavior and practices known to be stupid can be seen as such.  The culture provides a few cues: some, such as slapstick comedy may not be too helpful unless analyzed rather than simply applied.  Other sources such as Kafka’s Trial and Castle might be important sources, but they are highly literary rather than directly visual.

I’m running out of time, but as I look at the photograph above, an architecture of stupidity begins to emerge.  For example, the extreme functionality of the space that actually inhibits any reasonable use, much less any use that might lead to resolution of the larger conflict.  Also perhaps the overdesign of the security apparatus: tables bolted to the floor within a cage will have their rationale, but there is something so excessive here that it has to be a sign of arbitrary rules, endless procedures, and near-complete inattention to anything else but the literal replication of the machinery of power.  Nor is that a dynamic process, but one that depends on stasis, on the inactivity, boredom, and habitual resignation to routine evident in the guards’ postures.

The prison is a monument to stupidity.  It is not enough to reform the prison, however.  My point is that the national security state produces stupidity because it depends upon stupidity.  The national interest of a democratic people may be served well by reason, but the modern state, to the extent that it is a regime of coercive control, will rely on another mentality: stupidité d’état.

Photograph by Tim Dirven/Panos Pictures.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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