Law and Disorder/Looking Backward

Oh, radio...Following on from here, and for all you libertarians out there, a fascinating discussion of surveillance cameras from WBAI.  (Who are the real paranoiacs, those thinking and talking about the implications of public surveillance, or those putting the cameras there in the first place?)  It's an hour long mp3, but worth it.

Update:  If you'll permit me a lengthy side note, I thought I'd share some excerpts from an essay John Berger wrote in response to Susan Sontag's book On Photography.  It seems rather pertinent.

Update II:  See also this issue of Surveillance and Society (courtesy of wood s lot).

But first let me just remark that "The Truman Show", with Jim Carrey was on again last night, and it made us laugh.  For some reason, though, I am always fascinated by the pat endings of these "high-concepty" films (however funny and entertaining they may be), how the horizon of their promise of "happiness" seems simultaneously ambiguous (subversive to a certain predictable degree) and still contained within the bubble of, well, of the initial concept itself.   

I'm tempted to argue that these films constitute something of a genre, linked by a common cultural anxiety.  Here one theme would seem to be a culture's anxiety in the face (quite literally) of an omnipresent, omniscient surveillance.  An anxiety, I think, that these films in some sense seek almost to naturalize away.  You could argue, I suppose, that the caricature of culture here is a form of satire.  But it does seem to me a satire rather hopelessly marked in advance by formulae, and of the sort that remains in significant ways still difficult to distinguish or critically separate from the caricatured commercial-world that is its object.

You'll recall the final scene where Jim Carrey, having bumped his storm-drenched, epic little primal scene sailboat up against the mural of the blue horizon which is really a wall of the ecosphere, having walked up the stairway to...the Real World, finally, Really!, repeats as his farewell––and in the best, most timeless and jubilatory, televisual spirit––the morning slogan of his former suburban mecca, his thoroughly plastic, sterilized, saturated and sponsored and programmed, PC SIMS life-world:  "And in case I don't see you, good afternoon, good evening and goodnight!"  (After all there is always the concomitant anxiety about not being seen.  If we, and John Carrey especially, aren't being watched with rapture, do we even exist?)

Much like certain modernist novels, these words at the end ring at once profoundly hollow and sort of banally touching.  The audience (yes that audience) is in tears, their complicity as humane voyeurs in the whole affair granted some kind of dignified closure––hope!  The human spirit triumphs, we can endure the comfortably bland, unspontaneous world of advertising SIMS!  It's hard not to read this ending without sarcasm.  The audience, their purely vicarious spiritual sustenance (we work for a paycheck, but we watch TV in the bathtub to really live), via the sheer persevering powers of their enthrallment, of their projective (or is that introjective) imaginations (we no longer care which), are released from the burden of their Show (from the suspense that it might all end in uncertainty or disappointment).  (And then the cops, in their most habitual and anesthetized tones, ask each other what else is on with all the enthusiasm of two college potheads).   

Well, I thought this passage from John Berger might if nothing else be at least provocatively tangential, make of it what you will.  It comes from the collection of essays entitled, About Looking, published in 1980, and the paragraphs he quotes are Sontag's.

I am not saying that memory is a kind of film.  That is a banal simile.  From the comparison film/memory we learn nothing about the latter.  What we learn is how strange and unprecedented was the procedure of photography.

Has the camera replaced the eye of God?  The decline of religion corresponds with the rise of the photograph.  Has the culture of capitalism telescoped God into photography?  The transformation would not be as surprising as it may at first seem.

The faculty of memory led men everywhere to ask whether, just as they themselves could preserve certain events from oblivion, there might not be other eyes noting and recording otherwise unwitnessed events.  Such eyes they then acredited to their ancestors, to spirits, to gods or to their single deity.  What was seen by this supernatural eye was inseparably linked with the principle of justice.  It was possible to escape the justice of men, but not this higher justice from which nothing or little could be hidden. 
Memory implies a certain act of redemption.  What is remembered has been saved from nothingness.  What is forgotten has been abandoned.  If all events are seen, instantaneously, outside time, by a supernatural eye, the distinction between remembering and forgetting is transformed into an act of judgement, into the rendering of justice, whereby recognition is close to being remembered, and condemnation is close to being forgotten.  Such a presentiment, extracted from man's long, painful experience of time, is to be found in varying forms in almost every culture and religion, and, very clearly, in Christianity.

At first the secularisation of the capitalist world during the 19th century elided a judgement of God into the judgement of History in the name of Progress.  Democracy and Science became the agents of such a judgement.  And for a brief moment, photography, as we have seen, was considered to be an aid to these agents.  It is still to this historical moment that photography owes its ethical reputation as Truth.

During the second half of the 20th century the judgement of history has been abandoned by all except the underprivileged and dispossessed.  The industrialised "developed" world, terrified of the past, blind to the future, lives within an opportunism which has emptied the principle of justice of all credibility.  Such opportunism turns everything––nature, history, suffering, other people, catastrophes, sports, sex, politics––into spectacle.  And the implement used to do this––until the act becomes so habitual that the conditioned imagination may do it alone––is the camera.

"Our very sense of situation is now articulated by the camera's interventions.  The omnipresence of cameras persuasively suggests that time consists of interesting events, events worth photographing.  This, in turn, makes it easy to feel that any event, once underway, and whatever its moral character, should be allowed to complete itself––so that something else can be brought into the world, the photograph."

The spectacle creates an eternal present of immediate expectation:  memory ceases to be necessary or desirable.  With the loss of memory the continuities of meaning and judgement are also lost to us.  The camera relieves us of the burden of memory.  It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us.  Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.

Susan Sontag locates this god very clearly in history.  He is the god of monopoly capitalism.

"A capitalist society requires a culture based on images.  It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anaesthetise the injuries of class, race and sex.  And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit the natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats.  The camera's twin capacities, to subjectivise reality and to objectify it, ideally serve these needs and strengthen them.  Cameras define reality in two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrialized society:  as a spectacle (for masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers).  The production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology.  Social change is replaced by a change in images."

Her theory of the current use of photographs leads one to ask whether photography might serve a different function.  Is there an alternative photographic practice?  The question should not be answered naively.   Today no alternative professional practice (if one thinks of the profession of photographer) is possible.  The system can accommodate any photograph.  Yet it may be possible to begin to use photographs according to a practice addressed to an alternative future.  This future is a hope which we need now, if we are to maintain a struggle, a resistance, against the societies and culture of capitalism.

Berger goes on to attempt a description of this resistance, one irreducible to mere "formulae" or "prescribed practice."  Namely, how might we "incorporate photography into social and political memory, instead of using it as a substitute which encourages the atrophy of any such memory"?  Berger suggests that the solution lies in a reversal, of sorts, of the common public/private distinction we tend to make concerning photographs (the latter––an example of which would be the family album, say––is always appreciated and read "in a context which is continuous with that from which the camera removed it", something which the former fundamentally lacks).  The public photograph, according to Berger, is "torn from its context, and becomes a dead object which, exactly because it is dead, lends itself to any arbitrary use."  So what is the solution?  Berger suggests that,

For the photographer this means thinking of her or himself not so much as a reporter to the rest of the world but, rather, as a recorder for those involved in the events photographed.  The distinction is crucial.

One question (if you've gotten this far) might be this:  In what sense, if any, is Berger being sentimental?  Is he falling prey to the myth of "the oppressed" with his messianic talk of the "underprivileged and dispossessed"?  Or is there a genuine need to locate in the very act of witnessing, in looking from/of a future at those, or in a sense for those suffering most...a source of hope? 

Comments

[John]

I am struck in this connection by a quote from the Godard interview that you recently linked from your own blog:

"People would rather talk about something than really look at it. What I’m saying is, let’s look at the images. I would rather look [first], then talk about it afterwards."

For me, this goes back to that post I wrote about comic books a while back: watching a sequence of images that flow into and thereby justify each other is now our most natural mode of acquiring information about the world. So this brings up (old) questions: 1.) will any sequence of images justify each other in some sense, i.e., is there any way to disrupt this process? 2.) if so, will creating sequences of images that make the viewer aware that any given sequence of images is constructed to some purpose have the effect of moving us toward Berger's better future? and 3.) if not, is there something wrong with the photographic image (I assume all images in our culture are related to photographic images or are destined to become them) itself?

The answer more directly your final questions, I don't see that one who is an outsider can bear witness for a suffering group unless one is a witness for others. Even if those others are our happy progeny in a future of peace, they are still other. A photograph, it seems to me, is never for its subject. Even the subject regards it through the imagined eyes of the other.

But I don't think there is any "myth of the oppressed"--if you define "oppressed" as people who are starved, murdered, deprived of rights, then plenty of people are oppressed. You can be their witness to the world, but you had better be wary of how your images will be used. And you'd better remember not to...I don't know how to finish this sentence, so I'll just say that you'd be better off not putting on Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo.

Well, sorry these thoughts are such an unphilosophical jumble, but I liked this post and wanted to acknowledge it.

[Matt]

"watching a sequence of images that flow into and thereby justify each other is now our most natural mode of acquiring information about the world."

Yes, and as you suggested in that post, as far I remember, one way in which comics *might* pose a resistance is in their rather unique thematizing (or at the very least, structural use) of precisely that which most often gets either ignored or neglected: namely, the frames. Or more precisely, the act of framing.

Of course TV newscasts use frames all the time too. Not in the same linear, narrative way but also as a sort of genre, sensationally, the dualing boxes of talking heads, meant to blow up into cartoon images of themselves some "disagreement" or other.

Anyway thanks, John, your comment meant a lot. In particular I liked this sentence:

"A photograph, it seems to me, is never for its subject."

[Matt]

With regard to the Godard quote:

"People would rather talk about something than really look at it. What I’m saying is, let’s look at the images. I would rather look [first], then talk about it afterwards."

It strikes me as an accurate indictment of the blockbuster film in general. That "The Truman Show" for instance, or indeed *all* of Jim Carrey's films, do not ever permit this looking, nor time for silence to begin speaking (those uncomfortable pauses of the endearingly clunky films of the French New Wave, say) in the first place, so concerned as they are to *say* (even if it's only to say, "look at me!")

There has been an American and British adaptation of this "existential" clunkiness, I think, in Hunter S. Thompson, Terry Gilliam (to a lesser degree maybe Johny Depp) for instance, that stands in something of an opposition to the much-heralded "blockbusters" of Speilberg, et al. (those heroes of American capitalist cinema lauded for making the shift to entertaining but still serious films that didn't also always "feel like homework").

[Az]

Parts of the John Berger remind me of Sontag in Regarding the Pain of Others, where she says, "The problem is not that people remember through photographs but that they remember only through photographs."

But I disagree with his formulation of the public/private distinction, and the way 'we' read private, family album photographs as a continuation of their moment and read public photographs differently. It seems to me that this public/private distinction is very culturally specific. And any image can become a dead object: isn't this what Google Image demonstrates? Aren't even 'dead' images, especially those subject to detournement, sometimes politically useful or capable of being harnessed to a particular, transformative kind of remembering?

And I don't know about the possibility of photographers thinking of themselves as recorders for anyone. Doesn't this just objectify 'the oppressed' more fully, in its separation of the agent from those 'who are suffering most'? Actually, on more thought, I think that attitude reveals massive hubris. Unless it's accompanied by a set of practices that involve really deep consultation with people about permission for use, etc. And even then, there's no guarantee that an image will continue a 'life' in the context in which it's created. I like John's comment very much: such a succinct way of saying it.

[Matt]

It should probably be mentioned that Berger punctuates his text with images, of Soviet wartime, etc. that to some degree support his assertions, though you'll have to buy the book to see them. Also "for those suffering most" was my own phrase, intended more or less to provoke. In fairness to Berger I do think he's rather sensitively probing, in the essays composing this book, the strange boundaries between such things as "looking," "judging" and "recording".

For instance, 100 pages later:

"A work like this is born of a vision which condemns the world *a priori*. The judgement does not arise out of what it shows; on the contrary, what it shows has been sought in order to confirm the judgement. [Again, the Truman Show comes to mind] Yet as an artist Rouault worked in good faith, for these images, if one looks at them with open eyes, reveal the truth about their motivation."

At the same time, I'm not sure he entirely escapes this hubris you mention, either.

Nice blog, by the way. You needn't worry about anyone here ripping off your Insights for some Higher academic paper, I don't think.

Though if there's a willing sponsor out there anywhere...

[John]

Matt--on the Hollywood film, yes. I think it was Peter Greenaway who objected to most film by saying it was just an illustrated narrative. The objection here is not so much to text, but the idea that cinema's task is to create just another way of transmitting narrative, of putting across and naturalizing a causal chain of events. The traditional answer to this, I think (no expert on film theory here), has been what I was just calling for: some act of framing--dialectical montage or something.

But your answer is interesting too: silence. Don't speak for/over the image. Don't subordinate it to a narrative.

But isn't it already part of a narrative whether it knows it or not? And aren't there others who will speak for it? What could it mean for the image to speak for itself in public? Is this possible? (Is public silence possible?)

By these questions, I'm not criticizing you; I'm just thinking again the limits of the image itself; its inability to unproblematically mean/be that which it refers to is so much more invisible to us than the similar inability of language, which is by now proverbial. And how the hell any of this will help the oppressed is anyone's guess...

[Matt]

"But isn't it already part of a narrative whether it knows it or not?"

I wonder if the answer isn't "yes and no"

[hugh]

I feel like there are at least two different problems with the camera. One of them concerns the fact that in the past, if a photograph was going to reach any kind of public, then the photographer had to be officially sanctioned. Thanks to the internet (and other widely- and cheaply-available technology for distributing images), this is no longer so true.

So we have, to name a couple of instances, indymedia recordings of demonstrations (bringing awareness that the event happened, documenting police violence), and the Kayapo making video recordings of their sacred rituals, as part of an effort to preserve their culture.

So I'm suggesting that the photographers needn't, in some artifical way, join themselves to the "oppressed" -- instead, whoever feels themselves oppressed can become a photographer.

This doesn't solve the other problem, which is about how a photograph automatically creates a certain distance from the event being photographed. This seems to me to be the kind of problematic being pointed to in the first paragraph quoted by Berger from Sontag. I like this second problem; I'm hoping it may be a bit clearer if detached from the first problem.

[Matt]

Hugh, thanks for your thoughtful comment.

I would like to think, in a philosophic sense, that it is important not to *limit* the potential or potential *resistance* of images to any particular project.

In a more Heideggerian vein, I suppose, there is maybe a sense in which all photographs contain an element of death. While not the same thing as a corpse itself, they are frozen in time and perhaps in a way corpse-like, or containing a not un-corpse-like potential to remind us of death, that death is loose in the world...?

I was re-reading something this morning dealing with Blanchot and Antelme:

"Is it appropriate to write of the *image* of the Other? To recall: the image foregrounds itself when the thing is cut off from the tasks and projects to which it is usually subordinated; the image thereby resists the basic impulse of our existence to create meaning, to 'exist' things by grasping them first of all as potential tools or as raw material. No longer does the thing offer itself to be deployed. Fascinated, I am as though pressed up against the image of the thing even as the image holds me apart at what Paul Davies calls '*its* distance'. It is as if what was revealed preceded the thing; as if the image were a condition of possibility of the thing and not the other way round.

What happens when we confront the image of the other person? She holds herself at a distance from any determination; she maintains herself at a distance. In the case of the corpse, this has happened too late; but the closed circuit of my interiority is interrupted as the Other comes to resemble herself. The unknown keeps me at a distance––at *its* distance." (Iyer, _Blanchot's Vigilance_, 129)

[Summer2221]

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