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Sep 06, 2009

What Is a Revolutionary Idea?

Conservative reactions to the Wall Street protests have been hilarious, even if you don’t think of where they were with the Tea Party.  House majority Leader Eric Cantor called the demonstrations “mobs,” as if he were wearing spats.  Herman Cain said they shouldn’t blame the banks but only themselves, the losers who had failed–conveniently forgetting that it was the banks that failed, not the workers and students who are paying for the bailout.  David Brooks chided the movement for being “small thinkers” who lack big ideas.  Frankly, a just, equitable, sustainable democracy is a pretty big idea, but I’ll let that go, because a lack of ideas has nothing whatsoever to do with the current crisis.  Instead, perfectly adequate ideas are being blocked at every turn by a Republican party determined to defeat Obama, destroy financial and environmental safeguards, and otherwise continue to serve the lords of capital.  Small minds–and small hearts–are a problem, but it helps to get the names right.

And when all else fails, the pundits have insisted that the demonstrators are merely venting emotion, because they lack an agenda for getting out of the economic crisis.  That criticism is not only lame, but just wrong.  In fact, the New York Times had no trouble figuring out exactly what issues were on the table–and the Times is not exactly one of the hip new media sites.  But even so, the choice need not be between protest and policy or emotion and reason.  Maybe there is something else at stake.

There are many reasons to question whether the recent protests in the US–and, perhaps sadly, elsewhere–are revolutionary.  In fact, it’s easy to mock them on those terms.  More seriously (and as I’ve suggested before), there are good reasons to question whether those should be the terms for social and political change in the 21st century.  That’s one reason I like this sign: “the new paradigm” may not be a slogan to die for, but you get the idea that we are talking about something beyond policy fixes.  I’ll leave it to David Brooks to measure the size of the thinking (although see Novus Ordo Seclorum), but the idea is that if the principle of compassion were really taken seriously, we could have another refounding of American democracy to achieve a better, more decent society.  (One also thinks of Gandhi’s comment when asked what he thought of Western Civilization: “I think it would be a good idea.”)  But why compassion?

Neo-conservatives have been bashing compassion and (most recently) “empathy” for a couple of decades, so that’s one clue.  (Their hostility to the ideal is a telling marker of their radical departure from the conservatism of Edmund Burke, and no less a figure than Adam Smith argued that compassion was the most important “moral sentiment” and essential if a capitalist society was to avoid descending into vicious self-destruction.)  I can’t cover all the philosophical and political issues here, but suffice it to say, in a society given over to greed and arrogance, compassion could be a revolutionary idea.


Photographs by Velcrow Ripper and Paul Stein.  Slides shows on the demonstrations are here,  here, here, and elsewhere, if you want to dig around.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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The In/visibility of the Warrior-Citizen

Much of what we experience as war photography focuses attention on the manner in which war is fought.  And whether the photographs we see shows soldiers conducting military campaigns, interacting with local children in occupied territories, experiencing the boredom of war that punctuates the time between skirmishes, suffering from wounds both physical and psychological, or returning home to the hugs and relief of friends and families—or worse, in flag drapped coffins, the focus is always on what we might call “the conduct of war.” And because wars are typically fought in the name of collectivities the role of the individual is played down—not erased entirely, but nevertheless minimized, as such photographs underscore the archetypal quality of the scenes displayed.  Individuals tend to stand in for something larger than themselves.  And yet for all of that, one of the genres of war photography continues to be the individual portrait.

The most common portraits of soldiers tend to be taken prior to battle and usually feature the soldier in full uniform.  This is of course a practice that is as old as the Civil War.  And whether taken by the military itself or by friends and family members, such portraits veil the identity of the individual beneath the uniform and mark the soldier first and foremost as a representative of the nation-state.  In recent years a number of photographers have begun to challenge such work and in a ways designed to remind us of the individuals doing the fighting (here and here).  Among such work is the photography of Suzanne Opton.

In a series of projects beginning as early as 2003 Suzanne Opton has been photographing individual soldiers, emphasizing the artistic conventions of portraiture designed to help us engage and understand the individual qua individual.  And with stunning results. Taken “at home,” rather than on the war front, the soldiers she photographs are all out of uniform.  And thus there is a sense in which their status as “citizen” is accented, rather than their status as “warrior.”  And yet at the same time they are unmistakably marked by their experiences as warriors.

In one set of images, titled “Many Wars” she photographs veterans in treatment for combat trauma, but what marks the series is that they cut across every American war from World War II to the present.  As with the photograph above, they are shrouded in cloth, and generally distinguished by age, though only somewhat incidentally by the particular wars in which they fought. And the point seems to be that we need to see them as one, even as they are portrayed as individuals—a paradox that underscores the in/visibility of war as it crosses generations (and more).

 

In one of her most recent works, titled “Soldiers” she photographs veterans returning from Iraq, by asking them to lie on the ground with their faces at rest, almost as if they were preparing to go to sleep.  The pose not only resists the typical conventions of portraiture (showing the individual sitting or standing up straight, shoulders back, emphasizing their strength and agency) but locates them in that liminal state between full and active consciousness and the dream world of sleep. The pose surely operates as a visual metaphor for the condition of such individuals.  There is also a gesture here to the “two thousand yard stare” that recurs as a convention of war photography, made all the more haunting by the fact that these individuals are out of uniform and thus that much closer to us as citizens on the home front.   These photographs were part of a provocative and controversial “Billboard” campaign which, in their own way, demonstrate the sense in which the soldier has become more or less in/visible.

Whatever one makes of Opton’s work, it is clear that she is challenging us to think about the conventional representations of war and the warrior-citizen, and more, the implications for how we experience and engage such representations as we go about our daily lives.  Suzanne Opton will be lecturing on the Indiana University campus in Bloomington, IN on Monday, October 3, 2010.  The title of her presentation is “Many Wars: The Difficulty of Home” and it will take place in Fine Arts 015 from 7:00-8:30.  If you are in the neighborhood I encourage you to attend.

Photo Credits: Suzanne Opton

Note:  My colleague Jon Simons and I are co-hosting the 2011-2012 Remak New Knowledge Seminar on “The In/Visiblity of America’s 21st Century Wars.”  As part of the seminar we will be bringing eight speakes to campus including Michael Shapiro, Roger Stahl, Diane Rubenstein, Nina Berman, David Campbell, Wendy Kozol, and James Der Derian.  Suzanne Opton is the first speaker in the series.  In April 2012 we will be hosting a conference on the same theme that will include presentations by Robert Hariman and Michael Shaw.


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Sight Gag: “Behind Every Great Fortune Lies a Great Crime.” — Honore Balzac

Photo Credit:  Zoe Strauss

Sight Gags” is our weekly nod to the ironic, satiric, parodic, and carnivalesque performances that are an important part of a vibrant democratic public culture.  These “gags” may not always be funny or represent a familiar point of view, but they attempt to cut through the lies, hypocrisy, shamelessness, stupidity, complacency, and other vices of democratic life.  Of course, we invite you to comment … and to send us images that you think might deserve a laugh or at least a wry and rueful look by those who are thinking about the character of public life today.

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Brian Ulrich: Copia—Retail, Thrift, and Dark Stores, 2001–11

Copia—Retail, Thrift, and Dark Stores, 2001–11

Cleveland Museum of Art

August 27, 2011–January 16, 2012

Nobody has captured the emptiness at the heart of American consumer culture better than Brian Ulrich.  For those fortunate enough to be in the area, his work will be on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art  from August 27, 2011 to January 16, 2012.  The exhibition features 50 color photographs from the artist’s Copia series (2001–10), a three-part project labeled Retail, Thrift, and Dark Stores.  Initially using a hand-held camera with the view finder at waist level, Ulrich remained anonymous while documenting shoppers engrossed in navigating the abundance of goods found in vast enclosed malls and big-box stores. The second phase focuses on thrift stores, the collecting places for discarded and unwanted consumer products, yet a primary destination for a growing segment of the United States’ population. The concluding group features haunting images of the impact of the 2008 financial crisis, highlighted by the exteriors and interiors of dark stores, ghost boxes, and dead malls.

And be sure to get the book: Is This Place Great or What.

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Symbols of Change When Nothing is Changing

A slide show at The Big Picture emphasizes that political demonstrations are breaking out all over the place.  And so they are: Argentina, Bolivia, Egypt, Greece, Haiti, Indonesia, Russia, Spain, Syria, and many more countries are becoming defined by people taking to the streets to denounce ruling elites.   And the familiar iconography of raised fists, massed demonstrators, colorful banners, painted faces, and police violence suggest that all the protests are much the same.  As institutions fail and political leaders temporize, we can imagine a common revolutionary impulse surging through the streets around the globe.  The winds of change are blowing, and can the revolution be far behind?

Well, yes, there can be a bit of a delay.  Which is why I like this photo from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. An organization named Rio de Peace planted hundreds of brooms “to symbolise the need to ‘sweep away’ corruption in the Brazilian National Congress.”  If all you care about is eye candy, this is the photo of the month for you.  If you want to make light of the recent demonstrations on Wall Street or anywhere else, this image could be your poster child.  Although it’s a genuinely novel and almost enchanting remake of a very tired cliche, it also seems to hover somewhere between art for art’s sake and a Disney animated movie.  More to the point, it could have been designed and funded by a corporate sponsor–“OK, people, we’ve got to do something creative about corruption.  How about brooms at the beach?”

In short, if demonstrations are to be more than mere symbolism, they have to be about putting your body on the line, and so the brooms seem to capture exactly the wrong kind of attention.  But that may be too harsh, even without knowing a thing about the situation in Brazil.  The important thing to recognize about most of the protests occurring this year is that they are not going to change much, and that they are going to continue anyway, and should.  Likewise, many of them will be misunderstood if they are seen as revolutionary actions, or even as steps toward a revolution.  Taking politics to the streets may have that potential, but it also is a hallmark of political systems defined by endemic divisions between mass and elite, rich and poor, the people and a ruling oligarchy.  Thus, the symbols of change can also be indications that things already have moved in exactly the wrong direction.  Instead of a return to social democracy, they can be symptoms of how much democratic institutions have been captured by capital.

And so maybe symbolism isn’t so incidental after all.  There is no better icon of capitalism than the Merrill Lynch bull on Wall Street.  (And note that there is no corresponding bear, so fair and balanced is no part of the story.)  These cops have to do without their doughnuts, but otherwise this isn’t exactly tough duty.  That bored banality while manning the state’s barricade is priceless.  The likelihood of revolution is slim to none, but even so police power will be spent on keeping the symbols intact.

The brooms can remind one that the global protests are not all alike: each will involve complex local conditions, constraints, and possibilities.  The barricaded bull can remind one that the symbols do matter–not least to those with the most to lose.  Both images suggest that “revolution” may be the wrong term for describing the need to change a system that has become highly adaptable at resisting systemic change, even as it becomes increasingly dysfunctional and unjust.

Photographs by Felipe Dana/Associated Press and David Shankbone/Flickr.

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The Good War in Reverse

The point of comparison is apparent.  The visual quotation is to what is arguably one of, if not the, most famous, recognizable, and reproduced photographs in all the world.  And more, it is the photograph most often pointed to as the icon of “the good war,” a total war fought against unregenerate, totalitarian evil in the name of freedom and democracy.  And what made that photograph taken in February, 1945 so incredibly powerful was the way in which it transcribed and coordinated commitments to egalitarianism, an embodied sense of nationalism, and a civic republican ethos within a single image. What makes the photograph above so distinct—and in its own way quite important—is how, despite its obvious gesture to the original, it resists or erases everyone of the original three transcriptions.

The Iwo Jima photograph depicts the war effort as essentially egalitarian.  We see six men, all wearing identical uniforms, with no indication of rank, engaged in common labor for a common goal. They are a working class equal to the task because they are working equal alongside one another, no one straining more than another, no one more at risk than another. The sacrifice is thus collective, the individual subordinated to the common good. In its way, the egalitarianism of the photograph modeled the egalitarianism of the overall war effort, not just on the battle front, but on the home front as well, where rationing, Victory gardens, and the purchase of war bonds were the order of the day.  But in the photograph above, shot at Camp David in the Helmand province of Afghanistan, there is no egalitarianism because there are no equals.  Instead of a collective effort to raise the flag we have a single individual struggling against the wind to put the standard in place. The effort and the sacrifice are solitary. He alone does the job.  And if the photograph gestures to the original icon of the “good war,” where the sacrifice was egalitarian, it also points here by implication to a war fought by individuals rather than by the nation as a whole. Perhaps that is why he seems to struggle so hard and why it is not altogether clear that he will overcome the force that opposes him.

References to the nation here are not incidental, for in the iconic image the commitment to egalitarianism was inflected by a pronounced appeal to nationalism.  It is notable that captions for the original photograph emphasized “Old Glory” or “the flag,” underscoring the symbolic significance of the standard being raised.  As one of the original flag raisers commented years later, “You think of that pipe.  If it was being put in the ground for any other reason … Just because there was a flag on it, that made the difference.” The caption for the above photograph, however, virtually ignores the national significance of the flag itself, as it notes that “U.S. Army  SPC Jeremy Stocks … restores a flagpole back in place after the flagpole fell in a night sandstorm (emphasis added).” The flag is there, to be sure, but it is reduced in significance to the pole itself; the banner could symbolize anything as far as the caption is concerned—a regiment for example—and it would not seem to matter to the task at hand.  But there is more, for you will no doubt recall that in the original photograph the flag raisers were turned away from the camera, leaving “Old Glory” as the face of the image.  Indeed, it was not insignificant in this regard that the flag raisers were initially anonymous and thus capable of standing in for an anonymous national public.  But here the flag raiser’s face is fully recognizable and he even has a name.  The opportunity for collective or national identification is thus doubly removed.

Appeals to nationalism typically operate in an heroic register, and in the U.S. this often manifests itself in a civic republican style that emphasizes (among other things) monumental sacrifices by ordinary people.  The Iwo Jima photograph manifests this larger than life heroism with its monumental outline and sculptural qualities, the massed figures cast as if cut from stone, powerful yet immobile.  No doubt these features and their corresponding sense of “timelessness” made for such strong extension into posters, war bond drives, and, of course, a memorial statue. And one can see how this was achieved visually. In typical reproductions of the original photograph the scene is cropped vertically, as if a portrait, and shot slightly from below; the effect is to magnify the flag raisers against the scene which they dominate.  Contrast this with the more recent photograph, cropped horizontally, as if in a landscape, and shot on a more or less level plane; the corresponding effect is to minimize the flag raiser who is now  dwarfed by a scene dominated by the sky and the flag pole.

The scene, of course, sets the stage for action, and here, once again, the caption is telling, as it describes the lone flag raiser as fighting against the wind.  It is not insignificant in this regard that in the Iwo Jima photograph the wind is to the back of the flag raisers, thus  evoking the sense in which nature—and perhaps, by extension, providence—is on their side.  Here nature is the enemy, and again, perhaps, with all that that entails.  But more to the point, there doesn’t seem to be anything particularly heroic about replacing a flag pole knocked down by a sandstorm.  If anything, the effort here seems more futile than monumental.  Indeed, it is hard to shake the thought that this flag pole isn’t destined to be knocked down by many more sandstorms in the future.   It is certainly hard to imagine anyone ever using this photograph as the template for a statue to memorialize the war.

It would be easy to conclude that the image above is the cynic’s answer to the war in Afghanistan, the longest war in U.S. history by a factor of two and going strong.  And we should not be too quick to exclude that possibility or its implications.  But at the same time we should be careful to take account of how our representations and remembrances of the “good war”—a war that ended in atrocity with the dropping of two nuclear bombs—goads the ways in which we think about our place in the world and thus inclines us to impose our own, idealized egalitarianism, nationalism, and civic virtue on other peoples.

 Photo Credit:  Denis Sinyako/Reuters

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Sight Gag: Economic Trends

Photo Credit: Herman Krieger

Sight Gags” is our weekly nod to the ironic, satiric, parodic, and carnivalesque performances that are an important part of a vibrant democratic public culture.  These “gags” may not always be funny or represent a familiar point of view, but they attempt to cut through the lies, hypocrisy, shamelessness, stupidity, complacency, and other vices of democratic life.  Of course, we invite you to comment … and to send us images that you think might deserve a laugh or at least a wry and rueful look by those who are thinking about the character of public life today.

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Home Again, Again

Guest post by Lisa Carlton

Literary and visual tropes of homecoming are essential to narrating war.  Take, for instance, the timeless Greek war mythology of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.  Both of these poems invoke the theme of “nostos” or homecoming.  Or we might think of the iconic WWII image of the Times Square Kiss. Typically, homecoming tropes signify an end to a time of national conflict and strife—a relative return to normalcy.  But the wars of the new millennium are perpetual.  They resist narrative’s conventional markers of a beginning, middle, and end.

The image above was taken at a homecoming ceremony for the South Dakota Army National Guard’s 196th Maneuver Enhancement Brigade on May 3, 2011.  It appeared in the Memorial Day collection of “In Focus,” The Atlantic’s news photography blog.  According to the caption, the little boy in the photograph is four-years-old and the little girl is two.  This means the boy was born around 2007 and the girl was born in 2009.  By then, the war in Afghanistan had been underway for over five years and almost ten.  These children were born into a culture where war is the norm.

The uniformed father figure is identified by the caption as Major Jason Kettwig of Milbank, South Dakota.  An officer-level rank suggests that Kettwig has been in the Army National Guard for quite some time; Probably before his young children were born.  The photograph’s caption explains that this particular “group of approximately 200 soldiers has been serving in Afghanistan for the past year.”

One year ago the little boy in the photograph was three; and the little girl was just one-year-old.  In the image her hands lovingly and gracefully cup her father’s neck.  She is not clinging to him, as we might expect a young child to do to her father.  Instead, her head is pulled back from his.  She gazes at his face with a mature, furrowed brow, a look of relief, concern, and wonderment, commonly identified on the faces of adults.  She has not seen this face in one year and she appears to be studying it, searching for traces of change since the last time she saw it.  It reminds me of the way parents look at their teenaged children after their first long stint away from home.  But her father does not return her gaze.  He appears to be looking at his son.

The son, who is four-years old, stares off into the distance over his father’s shoulder.  His facial expression is less engaged than his sister’s.  His lips part and turn upward, but the smile looks almost hesitant.  Perhaps he has experienced this homecoming scenario before.  Maybe, by his ripe old age of four, he has experienced his father’s deployment and return once already.  The boy wears a green tee shirt, almost identical to the color of his father’s desert camouflage.  And his short, clean haircut adds to the father-son likeness.  As the father looks at his “mini-me,” the reader is invited to wonder if military service is in this little boy’s future.  So as the father looks at his son, and the son looks off into the distance, and we, the viewers look at these children, all of the gazing that animates this image is oriented toward the future.

While the children are the most salient figures in this photograph, with their adorable, round faces and the light bouncing off their shiny, sandy blonde hair, the father figure is positioned as central.  However, it is the back of his shoulders, neck, and head.  We cannot see his face, and as such, we have a harder time identifying emotionally with him.  We can only imagine what his face looks like.  Does it express happiness?  Relief?  Melancholy?  The back of his head does not provide cues for how we should feel.   Perhaps the absence of his visage marks a loss of his humanity while at war, or perhaps it symbolizes an anticipation of his death, or maybe it’s a social commentary on what has been described as a faceless war effort.

The photograph’s composition is an uncanny inverse of Dorthea Lange’s Migrant Mother.  Instead of identifying with the mother — or the absent father figure — as we might have with Lange’s image, this photograph turns our attention to the children’s faces for a model of how to feel and how to interpret the action in the scene.  This important shift in subjectivity positions the viewer as childlike—an infantile citizen who, like the four-year-old and two-year-old in the photograph, has become a little too acclimated to a culture of perpetual war.  When we take on the gaze of the confused and bewildered child, we as citizens are invited to remain complacent and uncritical.  Again.

Photo Credit: Eisha Page/Argus

Lisa Carlton is a Ph.d student in Communication Studies at the University of Iowa.  She can be contacted via e-mail at lisa-carlton@uiowa.edu.

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Human Waste Disposal

Both Patti Smith and Don DeLillo have said that something to the effect that the key to civilization may lie in the transformation of waste.  I assume they were talking about shit and bad food and everything else that might come under the label of garbage–except human beings.  But people are called garbage and treated worse.  Like this.

A drug cartel has dumped two truckloads of bodies on a road in Veracruz.  The New York Times emphasized that bystanders provided updates on Twitter during the traffic delay.  Really.  That kind of moral and emotional insulation isn’t free, but there is plenty available.  The unusually long distance between the bodies and the viewer helps as well.  Perhaps for that reason, I find a forensic mentality also seems appropriate.  Look closely and you can see that some of the men have their hands tied behind their backs, while all have been partially stripped.  Criminal executions are fodder for a brazen display of power against an ineffectual state, while the yellow curb stands in for the tape that will mark the crime scene when the authorities do arrive.

Like the police, the spectator may want to dote on literal details: Have the bodies been moved?  Was anything moved before the photo was taken?  These questions can be the key to successful prosecution, but for those of us not working in criminal justice, they also become another way of distancing oneself emotionally from the horror, loss, indecency, and threat to civil society that this image represents.

Others may not have the luxury of distance.

The caption at the Guardian said that “a rebel fighter looks at the charred remains of burnt bodies at the Khamis 32 military encampment” in Tripoli, Libya.  True enough, but the text is also a euphemism.  He is looking, and he also is gagging, and that is the more important gesture here.  He may be a young man, but it is more to the point to say that he is someone capable of an honest, humane reaction to the horror of war.  His soft, civilian clothes and shoes and lack of a helmet testify to his amateur status, and, frankly, he is lucky that he is not yet battle-hardened enough to be insensitive to human remains.  The question remains whether that has happened to us.  By not being able to smell the charred flesh or stare into the body cavities while still glancing at the photograph, it becomes easy to react without feeling.

Sure, war is hell, including drug wars, but what about the steady destruction of human beings because of larger political, social, and economic failures?  Think of the continuing violence in Mexico, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Congo, and many more areas where drug cartels, civil wars, mercenary armies, and the rest of anarchy’s legions are turning people into human waste.  If nothing else, disposal could become a problem.  Burnings don’t last long enough, mass graves can be dug up, drowned bodies wash ashore–you might as well let people live.

But they don’t let people live.  One of the challenges civilization faces today is not becoming habituated to the insidious, localized, but persistent and awful ways that human beings are being transformed into waste.  One could do worse than following the example provided by the ordinary individual in the second photograph: that is, to look at the carnage and choke on the close encounter with inhumanity.

Photographs by Veracruz en Red/European Pressphoto Agency and Louafi Larbi/Reuters.  You can see more of the Libyan photos, along with comments that support my point that literalism can be a means for moral and emotional denial, here.

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“Out, Damn Spot!”

Fighting a war against terrorism is one thing.  But apparently there’s no good reason not to maintain personal hygiene. And what better way to do that than to brush one’s teeth after a tasty MRE while on duty?  What is striking about the photograph, however, is not just the fact that we have a U.S. soldier massaging his gums while poised in a bunker between two machine guns, but that he seems somewhat—but only somewhat—nonchalant while doing so.  Leaning relaxed against a wall of sandbags, his right hand comfortably in his pocket, he seems to be without a care in the world.  But of course he is wearing a vest and a helmet, which suggests that the risk to his safety might be a little more serious than gingivitis or bad breath.

And so the question is, what exactly is the point of this photograph?  I must admit that in some ways I don’t have a clue.  He is part of the “No Fear” task force of the 2-27 Infantry in Kunar, and so there might be something here about looking death in the eye and laughing.  But there is also this:  If you work your way through the very many slideshows of the U.S. military stationed at outposts in faraway places like Afghanistan or Iraq you are bound to come across more than a few photographs of U.S. personnel washing or shaving or cutting their hair in what might otherwise be understood as primitive field conditions.   “Cleanliness is next to godliness,” and we should not ignore the sense in which the display of such behavior even under the harshest of conditions subtly visualizes a cultural commonplace that gestures to an Americanized, Christian sensibility.  But more than that, it points to something more subtle still.  Yes, such soldiers might be stationed far from home and under less than normal circumstances, their lives may be at risk and they might even be called upon to kill or die in the name of God and country, but for all of that the basic habits of a civilized people abide.

Put differently, such photographs in general serve as a reminder that war is dirty business even as they feign to suggest that one can fight a war and still maintain clean hands.  The presence of the guns that frame the scene above, and to which the soldier is destined to return, make this photograph unique in this regard, for they stand as a reminder that, as with Lady Macbeth, one cannot completely avoid the tragic stain of war’s inevitable ignominy.

Credit: Erik De Castro/Reuters.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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