Oil, we are often told, is the lifeblood of late modern, industrialized civilization (here, here, and here) and certainly there is plenty of evidence that we behave as if we believe it.  But as the photograph of Iceland’s Kolgrima River shot from somewhere in the heavens suggests, the real lifeblood of any civilization on earth is water. I say shot from the “heavens” because it is less realistic than what might be the most recognizable photograph shot from outer space, William Ander’s iconic Earthrise, a clearly mechanically produced image that implicitly foregrounds the technology that enabled it.  Here the image has something of an abstract expressionistic quality to it that nevertheless underscores the naturalistic blending of land and waterways, a surface manifestation  of an underlying essence accented by the soft contrast of the muted pastels.  One can almost imagine the earth as a living entity, the blue veins throbbing in unison as they work to carry the nutrients necessary to bolster and sustain the ground.  It is a beautiful and compelling—almost utopian—God’s eye view.

70% of the earth is covered by water, but 97% of that is found in oceans and seas, with another 2.4% in glaciers and polar ice caps.  That leaves very little fresh water for all of its various needs, including most importantly consumption, sanitation, and agricultural production. This has not yet proven to be a disasterous situation in the United States—despite some scares as the recent drought in the southeast—where the average resident consumes 100 gallons of water a day.  But to put it in context we need to note that in some places in the world the most indigent people subsist on 5 gallons of water a day—when they can get it.  Nearly 50% of the people on earth do not have water piped into their homes, and in some developing countries women walk an average of 3.7 miles a day to get what they need.  And the most sobering fact of all is reported by the Water Resources Group (sponsored by the World Bank Group and a number of global financial, industrial, and agribusiness concerns), which notes that by 2030 water demand will exceed supply by over 50% in some developing regions of the world effecting over 1.5 billion people.

And so, to return to earth from the heavens there is this image of a reservoir in China’s Yunnan Province:

The contrast between the two images could not be more stark.  Here the earth is dried and cracked, its parts broken and fragmented rather than blended.  There is nothing that approximates movement in the photograph; indeed, there are no signs of vitality at all.  One of the often claimed effects of such desertification is a dangerous reduction in biodiversity, but here it is hard to imagine any biology at all.   Of course, even the slightest accumulation of moisture might change that, resulting in a dessert oasis, but the extreme close-up of the photograph locates the image in the here and now.  It is a human’s eye view,  and it underscores the immediacy and palpable effects of the threat.

Water, not oil, it would seem, is what is most essential to life on earth.  One can only imagine what the world will be like in 2030 if we don’t come to terms with that sooner rather than later.

Photo Credits: Hans Strand/National Geographic; Ariana Lindquist/Bloomberg.  March 22, 2010 was World Water Day.  The April issue of National Geographic features the importance of water to life on earth.  We thank The Big Picture for calling our attention to the topic.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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The trope of “youthful innocence” is a common photojournalistic convention, often marked by photographic representations of children playing as if they were adults.  Such images can range from the somewhat ordinary and everyday—a young girl selling lemonade to passersby for 10¢ a cup—to the extraordinary—a young boy saluting the passing caisson of his assassinated father.  But in almost every instance what we are being invited to see is a glimpse into a generational future animated by a nostalgia for the purity and  innocence of youth unencumbered by the world of experience.  And even when the world of experience insinuates itself, as with the John-John salute, the point of the photograph seems to be that what these children will become is forecast by how they manage the tension between innocence and experience.  In recent time we have been inundated with images of Middle Eastern children “playing” with guns and other weapons of war, and in this context the trope has become a harbinger of a threatening and dystopian world.

I emphasize the word “playing” in the last sentence because, as with the photograph above, the romance of youthful inexperience is transformed into a tragic mythos in which all sense of the child as behaving “as if” an adult has been obliterated, and with it, all hope that the next generation can see its way to a better or more peaceful future. The above image is of a group of “young supporters of the Islamic Jihad movement,” marching at a rally in Gaza City to show “solidarity with the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.” The toy guns and uniforms are clearly pronounced and thus underscore the potential militancy of the image, but they are not the key signifiers of the shift from romance to tragedy.  To take the full measure of force of the symbolic transformation you have to look at their facial expressions, and more specifically their eyes, which teeter between being altogether vacant and deadly serious, and in either case are wholly dissociated from our expectations of an otherwise idealized world of youthful innocence.

What clearly marks this and other such photographs from the Middle East is the presumption of their sheer otherness.  These simply could not be “our” children for they lack any and all sense of the purity or carefree joy of childhood that presumes to define the western world.  Their experience is not ours.  The conclusion is wrong, or perhaps more accurately, wrong headed, but what is important to  remember is that the idealized, romantic mythos of the relationship between worldly experience and youthful innocence is every bit as much a fiction as its tragic transformation, and that indeed, the former is ever at risk of morphing into the other.

Photo Credit: Ali Ali/EPA/WSJ

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Credit: Nate Beeler, Washington Examiner

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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If you even saw this photograph you probably didn’t pay much attention to it.  After all, it looks like many of the images that have come out of places like Lebanon and Iraq in recent years.  One more terrorist, suicide bombing carefully planned and executed by a group of political extremists and religious fanatics.  What more is there to say?  Nothing, perhaps, until we discover that the explosion is in Austin, Texas, not the war torn Middle East, and it was caused by a lone U.S. citizen who flew a small airplane into a building that housed the IRS as an expression of his rage against corporate profits and the U.S. government in general.

The key thing to notice is how quickly the whole event seems to have slipped from national consciousness despite the sense in which it might be characterized as a small scale 9/11 attack: an airplane flown into a government building, animated by a dissident, vengeful desire to bring the political system down.  That’s not the story we got, of course, as most reports focused on the bomber as a deeply disturbed, single individual animated by an inarticulate fury, despite the fact that he left behind a somewhat lengthy political manifesto explaining his long smoldering (and not irrational) anger at what he perceived to be an unjust political system. The above photograph is telling in this regard.  Shot with a long lens and tightly cropped around the point of the explosion shortly after impact, the building is consumed by billows of smoke that shroud the intense flames that burn just below the surface awaiting to erupt. It is in its own way a picture of latent affect that serves as an allegory for the predicament of expressing anger in contemporary times: The smoke can serve as a screen to mask the raw affect for a time, but ultimately it is incapable of giving it a productive form or containing it for very long.  The result is either dangerously explosive or sheer futility—and sometimes both.

Too often, it seems, we treat anger as an inherently irrational and inchoate expression of political engagement, typically representing it in the roar of an inarticulate mob.  But as Aristotle made clear, anger is not madness.  Indeed, it is and can be a legitimate and rational political emotion, quite necessary as a motivational resistance to the forces of injustice, and made effective in the careful and deliberate performance of the cultural norms of appropriate social and political recognition.  The problem is that in contemporary times we lack useful models for the effective expression and enactment of productive political anger. Either we get the silly rants of groups like the “tea-baggers,” which function as little more than a parody of anger, or we get the truly irrational futility of individuals flying planes into buildings or going on shooting rampages.  Neither serves the purposes of a robust democratic public culture.

What we need are exemplars of the performance of political anger that animate the demands for justice and restitution in pointed but measured ways.  Where we will find them, it is hard to say,  but in the meantime it is important to keep in mind that the political scenarios in which we frame enactments of anger carry a powerful normative force that should never go unmarked as transparent expressions of affect.

Photo Credit: Trey Jones/AP

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The holidays are a distant memory, snow is falling again, and ordinary activity can seem frozen into work and routine.  What else is there to do?  Days are short, there is too little sunlight, depression lurks amidst the layers of heavy clothing, and just getting about can be a series of chores.  One’s options, it seems, are limited.

But don’t tell this woman:

The caption read, “Shenyang, China: A swimmer jumps into icy water at a park.”  Really?  You’d think the writer had seasonal affective disorder; doesn’t “jump” suggest suicide?  As it is, however, she is not jumping but diving, and instead of going to her death she is throwing herself into life.

The tension between death and life suffuses the photo. The snow shrouded treeline along the field of whiteness could be the frozen shore of the netherworld, and the cold, dark, glassy water seems a catch basin for dead souls–like the shadow solidifying under its surface.  But suspended against this there is the incredible vitality of her strong, beautiful body, and even the puff of snow testifies to her quick kick up into the air. And all this for one reason: the amazing shock of slicing into the cold water, the sharp gasp, the radiant fire of skin alive.

In 1872 Christina Rossetti penned a beautiful poem that many encounter as a Christmas hymn.  The first verse speaks to anyone regardless of faith–to anyone, that is, who has known winter.

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

There is more than one kind of winter. Too much in American national life at the moment seems locked into bleak patterns of dysfunction and stasis.  Too many people are hoping to settle for what is safest, and too many are resigned to simply making do or getting by.  Who can blame them?  When leaders are abdicating right and left and the future looks bleak, it makes sense to pull the blanket close around yourself and not take any risks.

Stuck in the middle of winter, perhaps one should simply wait for spring.  I’d like to think, however, that somehow each of us could take the plunge into a better life.  This might mean nothing more than doing something unexpected or otherwise out of season.  Who knows how much that could change?

Photograph from Reuters.

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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:

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:

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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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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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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Credit: RJ Matson, St. Louis Post Dispatch

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Credit:  Matt Davies

“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.

 0 Comments