Visual Worlds (International Library of Sociology)

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Visual Worlds

Visual Worlds was conceived to address a bold query: how, it asks, are our experience and understanding of vision and visual form changing under pressure from the various social, economic and cultural factors that are linked under the term globalization? To consider this question, the volume gathers together a diverse group of internationally renowned artists and scholars from a variety of fields including art history, literary theory and criticism, cultural studies, film and television studies, intellectual history and sociology. At issue for each author is what Lauren Berlant, in the volume’s first essay, calls “dense and radiant images of the politically saturated” world that are “employed as vehicles for shaping a collective sense of social belonging.” The other essays overlap in their considerations of the tensions between cultures and worlds, political life and everyday social experience, peace and war. The conversation that develops between the voices represented here touches down on points arrayed across many visual worlds and provides a unique opportunity for considering the changing character of visual experience today. John R. Hall is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis, and Visiting Professor at the School of Social and Political Studies, University of Edinburgh. He is author of Cultures of Inquiry (1999) and co-author of Sociology on Culture (2003). Blake Stimson is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of The Pivot of the World: Photography and its Nation (2006) and co-editor with Gregory Scholette of Collectivism after Modernism (2006). Lisa Tamiris Becker is Director of the CU Art Museum, University of Colorado at Boulder, where she has curated and organized exhibitions such as Techno-Sublime (2005) and Enrique Martinez Celaya: Poetry in Process (2004). Ms. Becker previously served as the Interim Director/Curator of the Richard L. Nelson Gallery and the Fine Arts Collection, University of California, Davis.

International Library of Sociology Founded by Karl Mannheim Editor: John Urry, Lancaster University

Recent publications in this series include: Risk and Technological Culture Towards a sociology of virulence Joost Van Loon Reconnecting Culture, Technology and Nature Mike Michael Adorno on Popular Culture Robert R. Witkin Consuming the Caribbean From arwaks to zombies Mimi Sheller Crime and Punishment in Contemporary Culture Claire Valier States of Knowledge The co-production of social science and social order Shelia Jasanoff After Method Mess in social science research John Law Brands Logos of the global economy Celia Lury The Culture of Exception Sociology facing the camp Bülent Diken and Carsten Bagge Laustsen

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Visual Worlds

Edited by John R. Hall, Blake Stimson and Lisa Tamiris Becker

Cover image title and description: Tendance Floue, Czechoslovakia, Prague, 23–27 December 2000, Antiglobalization demonstrations during the World Bank and the FMI annual assembly.

First published 2005 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group © 2005 editorial matter and selection, John R. Hall, Blake Stimson and Lisa Tamiris Becker; individual chapters, the contributors.

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006.

“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Visual worlds/edited by John R. Hall, Blake Stimson and Lisa Tamiris Becker. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Visual sociology. 2. Visual communication – Social aspects. 3. Visual communication – United States. 4. Visual perception. 5. Arts and society. I. Hall, John R. II. Stimson, Blake. III. Becker, Lisa Tamiris. HM500.V56 2005 301 – dc22 ISBN 0–415–36212–1

2005011703

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Contents

List of illustrations About the contributors Preface Introduction: visual cultures and visual worlds

vii ix xi 1

BLAKE STIMSON

PART I

Cultures

11

Political culture

13

1 Uncle Sam needs a wife: citizenship and denegation

15

LAUREN BERLANT

2 Televisual popular politics: Diana and democracy

45

JON SIMONS

3 Manufacturing dissent: challenges for activism and alternative voices in the post-9/11 world

57

M. KAUFFMANN AND L. STANLEY, RTMARK

Visual culture 4 Art at the intersection of social fields

69 71

ANDREA FRASER

5 Heart of darkness: a journey into the dark matter of the art world GREGORY SHOLETTE

91

vi Contents 6 Primetime art as seen on Melrose Place

109

THE GALA COMMITTEE

PART II

Worlds

113

Social worlds

115

7 Electronic habitus : agit-prop in an imaginary world

117

JENNIFER GONZALEZ

8 Los Angeles as visual world: media, seeing, and the city

139

DARNELL M. HUNT

9 Photography’s decline into modernism: in praise of “bad” photographs

151

MARSHALL BATTANI

10 Between the net and the deep blue sea (rethinking the traffic in photographs)

167

ALLAN SEKULA

Warring worlds

199

11 Witness to surrender

201

ROBIN WAGNER-PACIFICI

12 Under siege: Mona Hatoum’s art of displacement

223

ANNEKE VOORHEES

13 Mea Culpa: on residual culture and the turn to ethics

237

MARY KELLY

Epilogue: visual worlds, after 9/11

243

MARTIN JAY

Index

251

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Illustrations

Nils Ole Lund, The Tower of Babel, collage, 1960 1.1 2.1 2.2 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 4.1 4.2 4.3 5.1 5.2

6.1 6.2 6.3

7.1 7.2 8.1 8.2 8.3

Frank Goodwin, frontispiece for Ida Clyde Clarke, Uncle Sam Needs a Wife Crowds and screens in Hyde Park Prayers for Diana in Bradford Mosque RTMark, Bringing IT to You!, promotional image for industrial video, 1999 RTMark, gwbush.com, 2000 Barbie Liberation Organization, Barbie/G.I. Joe Home Surgery Instructions, 1993 Yes Men performance, Tareme, Finland, August 2001 InSITE97, San Diego Andrea Fraser, A Project in Two Phases, detail of Report Andrea Fraser, A Project in Two Phases, installation view Antiglobalization demonstrations during the World Bank and the FMI Annual Assembly 40-foot-long flow chart that drew connections between the public and “secret” players involved in the September 11 debacle The GALA Network GALA Committee, detail, Family Values Campaign, industrial vinyl on aluminum; video grab from Melrose Place GALA Committee, Food for Thought, Chinese Take Out: Human Rights/Turmoil (Dong Luan), Yin Yang/Equal Rights, National Treasures/Stolen Artifacts; video grab from Melrose Place Desktop Theater, waitingforgodot.com, live production of Waiting for Godot Alpha World, view of “Sherwood” Los Angeles Representing Los Angeles: a conceptual model Santa Monica Freeway, Los Angeles, California

xii

14 44 50 56 61 63 64 70 75 79 90

96 108 110

111 116 120 138 144 147

viii Illustrations 9.1 9.2 9.3 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5 10.6 10.7 10.8 11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 12.1 12.2 13.1 13.2 13.3

Essential elements of the birthday snapshot Accidental snapshot of snapshooter Mis-timed auto-timed family portrait Allan Sekula, Dear Bill Gates Allan Sekula, from Waiting for Tear Gas, slide projection Allan Sekula, Titanic set, Popotla, diptych from Dead Letter Office Allan Sekula, Bilbao, diptych from TITANIC’s Wake Detail of frontispiece photo by Pat English for The Family of Man Re-installation of The Family of Man Postcard of the Global Mariner Installation views of the lower holds of the Global Mariner German civilians view corpses at Buchenwald, April 16, 1945 World War II servicemen on the decks of the USS Missouri during the surrender signing, September 2, 1945 Raphael (1483–1520), The Marriage of the Virgin Diego Rodriguez Velázquez (1599–1660), The Surrender of Breda, June 2, 1625 Mona Hatoum, Changing Parts Mona Hatoum, Under Siege “Peering Into the Abyss of the Future” Mary Kelly, Mea Culpa, installation view Mary Kelly, Mea Culpa, detail, Johannesburg 1997

150 153 161 166 170 178 181 184 186 192 195 200 207 211 214 222 224 236 238 241

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Contributors

Marshall Battani is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Grand Valley State University, Michigan. Lisa Tamiris Becker is Director of the CU Art Museum and the Colorado Collection, University of Colorado at Boulder. Lauren Berlant is Professor of English at the University of Chicago. Andrea Fraser is an artist living in New York City. The GALA Committee is a collaborative artist/activist/product design team comprised primarily of students and faculty from the University of Georgia and CalArts; its members are listed at the conclusion of Chapter 6. Jennifer Gonzalez is Associate Professor of Art History, University of California, Santa Cruz. John R. Hall is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis, and Visiting Professor at the School of Social and Political Studies, University of Edinburgh. Darnell M. Hunt is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for African American Studies, University of California, Los Angeles. Martin Jay is Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. M. Kauffmann is affiliated with RTMark. Mary Kelly is Professor of Art at the University of California, Los Angeles. Allan Sekula is a photographer based in Los Angeles and a member of the faculty of the California Institute for the Arts. Gregory Sholette is an NYC-based artist, co-founder of REPOhistory and PAD/D and a writer of critical essays on activist art. He is co-editor of The Interventionists: A User’s Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life, and is currently working on a book, Collectivism after Modernism about post-war collective art.

x Contributors Jon Simons is Lecturer in Critical Theory, Postgraduate School of Critical Theory and Cultural Studies, University of Nottingham. L. Stanley is affiliated with RTMark. Blake Stimson is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of California, Davis. Anneke Voorhees is Curatorial Assistant, Modern and Contemporary Art, Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University. Robin Wagner-Pacifici is Professor of Sociology at Swarthmore College.

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Preface

“Visual Worlds,” an interdisciplinary conference and concurrent exhibition at the University of California, Davis, provided the impetus for the present volume, which includes selected essays developed from presentations made there. The conference, held by the UC Davis Center for History, Society, and Culture, was organized by John R. Hall and Blake Stimson, and took place from 26 to 28 October 2001. The exhibition – curated by Lisa Tamiris Becker, Blake Stimson, and John R. Hall – featured artists who participated in the conference. It was held at the Richard L. Nelson Gallery and Fine Arts Collection, University of California, Davis, from 28 September to 31 October 2001. The editors wish to thank one another and the contributors to this volume for their engagement in issues that bridge academic disciplines in the humanities and social sciences and worlds of art practice. We are grateful to David Emery-Peck for his assistance in editing the manuscript. We are also appreciative of institutional support in the form of funding from the University of California Humanities Research Institute, Irvine, California, and the University of California, Davis College of Letters and Science’s Division of Social Sciences, Division of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies, and UC Davis Center for History, Society, and Culture. We dedicate this book to the Center’s vision of meaningful conversation across worlds.

Nils Ole Lund, The Tower of Babel, collage, 1960. By permission of the artist.

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Introduction Visual cultures and visual worlds Blake Stimson

This book was born from a series of discussions between a sociologist (John Hall) and an art historian (myself ) about the growing significance of the visual as a general category of experience. The initial proposition that stimulated our exchange was as bold as it was speculative: now, we postulated – as during the period when linear perspective was first developed, for example, or the times when photography or cinema first appeared, or during the first full flush of the experience of the TV nation – the emergence of newly dominant visual forms, new systems for the distribution of those forms, and new needs and markets for those forms are having wide-ranging social, economic, and political consequences. In other words, we imagined that we might speak now of a newer and farther-reaching “scopic regime of modernity,” as Martin Jay once termed it, emerging with the accelerated technological change and quickened cultural and economic globalization we have been experiencing over the last decade and a half. Our initial hypothesis seemed compelling, primarily, because of three related factors: first, visual form facilitates the cross-cultural communication necessary for all manners of globalization; second, it serves as a catalyst for the transformation of information into a commodity and hence serves as a necessary material condition for the development of those industries that were said to drive the (now very old) “New Economy”; and, third, it has become an increasingly plastic, increasingly modular form of data that can be stored, monitored, searched, analyzed, and tracked for surveillance and other governmental and managerial purposes. The broad sweep of our gambit was necessarily (and perhaps inevitably) complicated by the election of an old-economy US president and the beginning of a global economic downturn in 2000, and later by the geopolitical reorientation resulting from the attacks of September 11, 2001, but the central premise of a new and larger social, economic, and political role for the visual persisted, even as that role was being transformed and further elaborated in the hothouse environment of a rapidly changing present. This book, thus, emerged out of a desire to explore that new and changing role. In particular, we were interested in considering the status of the visual at the intersection of our respective fields, or, more broadly between the

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studies of culture and society or the domains proper to the humanities and the social sciences. How, we asked, was the visual newly social and the social newly visual? We discussed a variety of approaches for addressing this question ranging across two general interdisciplinary categories of analysis that might be broadly labeled “visual culture,” on the one hand, and “visuality” on the other. After some discussion we ended up with a primary emphasis on the latter. There is a good deal of overlap between these two categories, of course, and the essays collected in this volume draw from both, but I will begin our collective inquiry by raising the question of visuality and its distinctive analytical promise now. As a concept, visuality has a long history and, in many respects, it is part of our common-sense understanding of the world even if the term itself is not used regularly in everyday discussion. Generally understood, we might say that visuality is simply embodied vision expressed and experienced as a social and historical condition. One art historian has made the following (inevitable) comparison to illustrate this rudimentary point: “ ‘Visuality’ is to vision,” he wrote, “as sexuality is to sex”; it is, he continued, “cultural habits of viewing . . . layered upon the physiology of vision itself.”1 Thus, what might be said to differentiate the study of visuality from the study of visual culture, is not the analysis of objects of visual expression as culture – in this they are both roughly the same – but instead the attention to that moment of layering given by the concept of visuality, the moment when culture and body meet in the lived, affective experience of the beholder. Just as sexual culture and sexuality can be differentiated by some measure of embodiment, so, for our purposes, can visual culture and visuality. In this difference visuality claims a manner of materialist priority over, or antecedence to, visual culture: the social and historical foothold of any visual cultural expression is always located there, in that phenomenological moment of the meeting. It is the sociality and historicity of that affective grip given by the sensory experience of vision itself that is the object of study for visuality. In this sense, then, our ambition for this volume to engage an interdisciplinary exchange can be charted as a meeting between the aims of aesthetics (here representing the humanities and taken generally to be the analysis of the embodied affective experience of vision) and the aims of historical and cultural sociology (here standing in for the social sciences more broadly and taken to be the analysis of the social and historical context for the embodied experience given by visual culture). One classic example of this sort of mix of aims, at least for art historians, is Erwin Panofsky’s 1925 essay Perspective as Symbolic Form. In it he argued that the Renaissance development of linear perspective should be understood to be “by its very nature a two-edged weapon.” On the one hand, he wrote, it translates “psychophysiological space into mathematical space”; rendering “an objectification of the subjective.”2 On the other hand, perspective also accomplished the opposite aim – i.e., a subjectivization of

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the objective – by providing an experience of vision that is “determined by the . . . subjective ‘point of view’.”3 Vision, he noted, was articulated by grid and vantage point, by universal measure and individual perspective. This “two-edged weapon” that brought together both radically rationalized, objectified space (what another art historian has described as the space of a money economy becoming capitalist, a space that was “hard and businesslike, matter-of-fact and unromantic”)4 and radically personalized and subjectivized space in a common representational system provided a vehicle for the meeting of body and society in what would prove to be a profoundly influential experience of vision. Panofsky was probably not just pandering to his audience when he referred in this context to Vasari’s apocryphal report about the great perspectival purist Paolo Uccello who, in response to his wife’s request that he come to bed, resisted her invitation with the plea, “But how sweet perspective is!” In other words, the affective charge of visuality was indeed experienced in ways similar to that of sexuality: that sense of space as newly hard and businesslike, matter-of-fact, and unromantic brought with it a powerful affective charge that realized itself in the body. Perspective served as both acculturation and as bodily ego extension, as both societal control and visual pleasure, both what Panofsky called the “consolidation and systematization of the external world” and what he called the “extension of the domain of the self.” Vision was codified as a form of mixing between subject and object, a historically specific bodily experience that was as much about the subject absorbing the object of its gaze into the affective structure of its own ego as it was about objective social conditions imposing their peculiar sense of order on the viewing subject. For our purposes, there is one central lesson from this historical example that is useful for appreciating the forms of visuality emerging in our own late moment now. Panofsky’s most portable and, perhaps, greatest insight was that the total effect he described can only be understood if we consider this combination of subject and object determinations as adding up to more than the sum of its parts. More than simply a compatible interlocking of the normalizing aims of culture with the individualizing desire for autonomy of the beholder, Panofsky’s account of perspective as an exceptionally significant symbolic form was built on the methodological premise that subjective and objective views were necessarily antagonistic, necessarily contradictory. The contradiction was, itself, productive, he insisted: the contradiction was, itself, what was symbolized by perspective as a symbolic form. It is this insight and its corresponding methodological aim that we mean to invoke with our title “Visual Worlds” and, in this respect, the term “worlds” stands opposite to the other term – “cultures” – that might have been used in its stead. The concept of world bears much of this productive contradiction already in its etymology. We need think only of two everyday uses of the term to get a sense of this: the disembodied god’s-eye view of the world and all of its inhabitants, on the one hand, and the opposite idea

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of being in the world, of the cocked eyebrow of lived, embodied, beenthere-done-that, worldly or world-weary viewpoint.5 One philosophical entrée into this meeting point between objective and subjective or heavenly and worldly views, between the analytical expression of social form and the participatory expression of aesthetic experience, one that has served the social sciences and the humanities equally, can be found in phenomenology. A useful version of this distinction can be drawn from the opposition between systematic methods of making sense out of experience such as science or philosophy, on the one hand, and the concept of “lifeworld” that runs throughout the phenomenological tradition beginning with Edmund Husserl, on the other. For our purposes, Maurice Merleau-Ponty was clearest on this point: “My body has its world, or understands its world,” he wrote, “without having to make use of my ‘symbolic’ or ‘objectifying function.’ ” 6 The task of visuality as it is here conceived is to provide social and historical understanding to just such embodied experience of world separate from or anterior to its representation by language or other symbolic or objectifying functions. Its aim is to locate the body in history by determining that moment of contradiction between body and symbolic form, that moment which broadly falls under the domain of aesthetics conceived within the realm of social and historical significance. This question, as John Hall has rightfully encouraged me, needs to be considered directly in relation to the concept of worlds as it has developed within sociology (most familiarly for many of this volume’s readers, perhaps, in Howard Becker’s 1982 Art Worlds, a text that gives the concept specific sociological application). World as a theoretical problem was first imported to sociological theory from phenomenology in Alfred Schutz’s 1932 The Phenomenology of the Social World and later developed in a number of contexts, including in a 1955 essay by Tamotsu Shibutani titled “Reference groups as perspectives.” Generally, we can see two different approaches to this problem within sociology, one stemming from Schutz and the other evident in Shibutani, and they can be said to divide on what we will call here the “horizon” problem. Shibutani’s account provides a model of multiple, interacting, and overlapping social worlds each with its own semiautonomous conventions of communication and social organization. “Modern mass societies,” he writes, “are made up of a bewildering variety of social worlds. Each is an organized outlook, built up by people in their interaction with one another; hence, each communication channel gives rise to a separate world.”7 Here, the concept of horizon is conceived of as a soft boundary delineating separate “culture areas” or “reference groups” such that, the author insists: “Even the outlook that the avant-garde regards as ‘cosmopolitan’ is culture-bound, for it is also a product of participation in restricted communication channels.”8 The concept of world in the common sense of Shibutani’s account, thus, serves to demarcate and delineate informal group identification, participation, and self-definition that reaches out into and overlaps with other worlds but is understood to draw its world status from its sense of boundedness.

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World as a concept also has been used within sociology to understand the notion of horizon in the opposite manner, that is, not as a boundary but as an opening or a perpetually receding horizon in which all forms of experience and understanding mix and match, a horizon that is not limited to the perspectives of individuals or groups but instead expands outward to the world including all possible horizons. This latter account of world is the more properly phenomenological one, and it is the model developed by Schutz. The key, according to his perspective, is to be found in what we have been calling here the aesthetic or embodied moment of experience, which he describes in relation to time: “What occurs in the outer world belongs to the same time dimension in which events in inanimate nature occur,” he writes: It can be registered by appropriate devices and measured by our chronometers. It is the spatialized, homogenous time which is the universal form of objective or cosmic time. On the other hand it is the inner time or durée within which our actual experiences are connected with the past by recollections and retentions and with the future by protentions and anticipations. In and by our bodily movements we perform the transition from our durée to the spatial or cosmic time and our working actions partake of both.9 Schutz’s concept of world, like those of Merleau-Ponty and Panofsky, allows for a mix of multiple worlds, multiple horizons, experienced on the level of the body. Insofar as social analysis incorporates this version of horizon into its methodology, insists Schutz, “then science becomes again included in the world of life.”10 Given our founding ambition to consider the visual at the intersection between the humanities and the social sciences, between aesthetics and sociology, it is this latter concept of world that we will be trying to hold onto and develop here. If Panofsky’s 1925 text can represent a useful founding moment for thinking about visuality then we might also touch down briefly on one much more recent moment: the 1988 conference at the Dia Art Foundation in New York on the topic of “Vision and Visuality.” It is this conference that really brought the term into its present-day academic parlance. Conference organizer Hal Foster began his introductory remarks from exactly the juncture we have been pointing to in Panofsky: “Although vision suggests sight as a physical operation, and visuality sight as a social fact,” he said, “the two are not opposed as nature to culture.” Instead, as the conference worked to demonstrate, “vision is social and historical too, and visuality involves the body and the psyche.”11 The first presentation at this 1988 conference was given by Martin Jay who served to frame the papers that followed with an overarching historical dissection of various of the main forms of visuality using his category, already introduced at the beginning of this essay, “scopic regimes of modernity.” It is fitting, thus, that Jay concludes this volume,

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and does so in a manner that is very attentive to the peculiar affective and historical circumstances we find ourselves in now. To further the speculative gambit risked here about the contemporary importance of the visual as a general category of experience, we might also risk grappling with these questions in the shadow of the events of September 11, 2001. One way to initiate such an exploration is to consider existing thoughtful reflections on the changing status of the visual in the context of previous crises. One exemplary figure in this regard was Theodor Adorno writing in 1944, still very much within the emerging horror of the holocaust: “No work of art, no thought,” he wrote, “has a chance of survival unless it bears within it repudiation of false riches and high-class production, of colour films and television, millionaire’s magazines and Toscanini.” These words, of course, carry emotion specific to their moment’s sense of crisis and share in a period critique that could have been made by a whole host of other observers all of whom understood the mass culture of their period to be the inevitable flipside of its mass politics, who understood “millionaire’s magazines” like those of Henry Luce to have the same deleterious impact on the pursuit of understanding and freedom as Goebbels’ propaganda apparatus. Clement Greenberg might well have said the same thing, for example, or Dwight Macdonald, or even Leon Trotsky were he still alive. What may be more pointed for our purposes today, however, is to consider Adorno’s distinctive solution to this shared sense of the problem, his alternative to the problem posed by mass culture. His position has period charm too but it bears differently on our contemporary situation and on the promise of visuality as an analytical category. Like his fellow critics, Adorno sought a form of representation that could grapple with and transform the conventions of visuality exposed as corrupt by the horror of the war. Like his colleagues, he felt that the answer was to be found in authentic forms of artistic expression that formed against the corporate narcissism promulgated by mass politics and mass culture. Like his colleagues, he thought that such authenticity could best be found in “older media not designed for massproduction.” Such untimely forms of expression, Adorno’s colleagues would have agreed with him, had special capacity to “take on a new timeliness: that of exemption and of improvisation” that “could outflank the united fronts of trusts and technology.” Adorno’s position was distinctive, however, in that he did not have in mind painting or drawing or sculpture as his chosen “older medium not designed for mass production,” as Greenberg would have, or modern literary forms as did so many others. This shift in emphasis promised by modernism generally from object to subject, from the objectification carried out by mass culture and mass politics to the resubjectivization realized as a critical or artistic response, is indeed readily apparent in the return to great bourgeois forms such as the novel and the easel painting. However, with the sort of characteristically clever twist that

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distinguishes his modernism even now, Adorno proposed rather that, “If the invention of the printing press inaugurated [our] era, the time is at hand for its repeal,” not by painting or poetry, not by the novel or sculpture, but instead “by the mimeograph.”12 For example, Adorno and his friend Walter Benjamin were famously at odds over the issue of the social consequences of new technologies of representation and Adorno’s invocation of the revolutionary potential of the mimeograph might be read as a kind of critical rejoinder not only to the neo-bourgeois aesthetics of the Partisan Review intellectuals and the American mass culture critics more generally, but also to the more conventional technological determinism of Benjamin’s claims for photography and film. That said, the two did share a rich and well-elaborated sense of the dynamics of technological history. Both agreed that new technological forms of representation were fundamental to political history, or at least to the history of political consciousness, and only disagreed on specific instances of its consequence for that consciousness. Benjamin summed up this shared understanding in his inimitably elegant manner: It is true that political tendencies are implicit in every work of art, every artistic epoch – since, after all, they are historical configurations of consciousness. But just as deeper rock strata emerge only where the rock is fissured, the deep formation of “political tendency” likewise reveals itself only in the fissures of art history (and works of art). The technical revolutions are the fracture points of artistic development; it is there that the different political tendencies may be said to come to the surface. In every new technical revolution the political tendency is transformed, as if by its own volition, from a concealed element of art into a manifest one.13 Benjamin and Adorno disagreed only on the details of what technology generated which tendency, never on technology’s political consequence as such. But where Benjamin understood technological innovation to momentarily open up repressed political energies heretofore hidden beneath older forms, Adorno understood the newness of new technology itself to obscure that past. Repressed political energies could only be unearthed by new technology at the moment of its decay or becoming-old, he believed, only at the moment it enters into contradiction with its own putative progressive social claims. Following Adorno, thus, we might say that one general approach to the problem posed for this volume is to raise the question of visuality against itself. That is, how might we perceive in the essays collected here the role of timely contradiction operating both within and against the visual worlds that channel and superintend the affective experience of vision and the analytical understanding of that which we view? The mimeograph is a distant example for us now so, perhaps, to make this point more tangible we need

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think of more recent examples such as the fax machine as it was used by student protesters in the Tiananmen Square uprising or the video camera that recorded Rodney King’s beating. More timely still, certainly, is the far more complex and multifaceted role played by the internet. Now well beyond any residual utopianism leftover from the early, heady days of “cyberspace,” there may be more potential for the internet to take on the sort of untimeliness sought by Adorno.14 With its tremendous number and variety of publishers and potential publishers, the internet opens up a span of social possibilities that, at least in principle, range from the loss of freedom represented for Adorno in “millionaire’s magazines” to the promise of its return in the mimeograph. In this way, by thinking of the visual as most fruitfully a site of contradiction, as a historically specific mix of conflict and reconciliation between subject and object or subjectivization and objectification, between body and society or the aesthetic experience cultivated by the humanities and the social form analyzed by the social sciences, perhaps we might be able to make some further progress in grappling with the traumatic complex of powerfully ambivalent emotions, expectations, understandings, and resentments that are now progressively sinking into the backgrounds of those truly extraordinary visual images that remain from the events of September 11 and its aftermath. Addressing these images in any adequate way is still too much to ask, it might be said, and will no doubt be so for a long time to come. At minimum, however, the essays collected in this volume will aid us in developing improved means for understanding the changing ways the visual does its part to conjure new worlds and the way new worlds demand new forms of vision. Such an improved means, in turn, will certainly come to our aid as we continue to struggle with the changes brought by the dramatic history of our time. The essays collected here take up this charge in varied ways but all in one form or another grapple with Adorno’s hope for the mimeograph: each in its own way seeks out visual form or a relationship to visual form that speaks to “a new timeliness: that of exemption and of improvisation.” For example, all the contributors address in one way or another what Lauren Berlant, in the volume’s first essay, calls “dense and radiant images of the politically saturated” world that are “employed as vehicles for shaping a collective sense of social belonging.” Each essay in its own way assumes the founding premise of visuality – that the visual is most productively experienced and addressed when it is seen in conflict with itself – and develops it around a specific image or set of images that shape our collective sense of social belonging. In this way the incredible power that circulates in the realm of visuality – on the one hand, the tremendous immediacy and richness and visceral appeal of images, their capacity to affect our understanding before that understanding is even formulated, and, on the other, their tremendous capacity for abstraction, their capacity to persist “without a body,” as Berlant puts it, as “a zone of humanity without humans” – might be unearthed, exercised, and understood.

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What it might mean for visual form to take on the project of “exemption and of improvisation” in the context of our politically saturated visual world after September 11 has turned out to be the single most engaging problem that carries through the discussion developed by this distinctive set of essays. Several contributors openly grapple with the consequence of this history for their own sense of artistic and intellectual purpose and identity (Mary Kelly, for example, Kauffmann and Stanley of RTMark, and Gregory Sholette). Martin Jay concludes the volume with just this challenge to the contributors by asserting boldly that we are facing a full-blown paradigm shift in the “terms of visuality and the discourses surrounding it,” one that puts the old models of criticality – those rising out of the writings of Benjamin and Adorno that Jay himself, perhaps more than any other American scholar, has done so much to promote, for example – in crisis: “I cannot help feeling that we are in for a much rougher ride,” he warns, one in which “new and even worse wounds will be inflicted on us.” Critical inquiry, he concludes, “will not be able to fall back on the trademarked certainties of late twentiethcentury left pieties, which are insufficient to deal with religious fundamentalist anti-globalism of the twenty-first.” Such an undoing of trademarked certainties has surely become only progressively more necessary in the welter of geopolitical changes that have unfolded since 9/11 and Jay’s challenge, the challenge of our changing world, is precisely the task posed by this volume and grappled with by its contributors. Put into Berlant’s terms and into the concerns we began with, the project undertaken here is not to affirm this or that piety, this or that identity, or this or that culture but instead to look at the ways in which accelerated technological change and quickened cultural and economic globalization is legitimated through processes of (Berlant writes) “linking opinion to right consciousness or feeling,” linking, that is, the kind of understanding that is the proper domain of the social sciences to the sort of experience that is the realm of the humanities. Opening up this linkage to critical understanding is the promise of visual worlds as a conceptual frame and it is this that distinguishes it from the limits given by the concept of visual culture. That 9/11 and its aftermath have helped to highlight the ideological failure of this linkage by calling attention to the limits of the old forms of critical understanding (inverting, for example, Benjamin’s maxim about technical revolutions serving as the fracture points through which different political tendencies come to the surface) only proves Jay’s point. The question we face now is only how to make the most of such fracture points, how, that is, to reevaluate the intersection of feeling and opinion as it is given form as a visual world in order to give it new hope and purpose.

Notes 1 Larry Silver, review of Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance, CAA Reviews. Online. Available HTTP: www.caareviews.org/reviews/nelson.html.

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2 Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, translated by Christopher S. Wood, New York: Zone Books, 1991, p. 66. 3 Ibid., p. 67. 4 Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, vol. 2, New York: Vintage, 1985, p. 8. 5 This connection is made directly in Allan Sekula’s contribution when he describes “the function of the photograph as a universally exchangeable ‘abstract equivalent’ of its worldly referent . . . the circulation function of paper currency.” 6 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, translated from the French by Colin Smith, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962, pp. 140–141. 7 Tamotsu Shibutani, “Reference groups as perspectives,” American Journal of Sociology, 1955, vol. 60, pp. 562–569, 566. Thanks to John Hall for this reference. 8 Ibid. 9 Alfred Schutz, “On multiple realities,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 1945, vol. 5, pp. 533–576, 540. 10 Ibid., p. 575. 11 Hal Foster, ed., Vision and Visuality, Seattle: Bay Press, 1988, p. ix. 12 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, translated by E. F. N. Jephcott, London: New Left Books, 1974, pp. 50–51. 13 Walter Benjamin, “Reply to Oscar A. H. Schmitz” (1927), in Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999, pp. 16–17. 14 Even leading cyber-utopian manifesto writer John Perry Barlow has recanted: I came to feel that I had been promoting a society that was not turning out to my satisfaction. . . . I used to think that the Internet was going to be a great organizing tool. And it isn’t. Because it gives everybody the right to dissent, but individually – it doesn’t give any incentive to collective dissent. . . . The big mistake I made and a lot of others in my line made was saying that what was happening in the short term was really happening in the long term, and fuelling the business hysteria. I should have been a lot more careful about my pronouncements. Barlow, quoted in Doug Saunders, “Mr. Internet Utopia,” The Globe and Mail, 8/10/2002, p. F5. See a summary statement of the original position in his “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” widely available on the internet; online, for example, available HTTP: www.eff.org/~barlow/ Declaration-Final.html.

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Part I

Cultures

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Political culture

Figure 1.1 Frank Goodwin, frontispiece for Ida Clyde Clarke, Uncle Sam Needs a Wife (Philadelphia: John C. Winston Co., 1925).

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1

Uncle Sam needs a wife Citizenship and denegation1 Lauren Berlant

At some level, Presidents aren’t supposed to have feelings. Bill Clinton, 9 August 2000

Introduction: bodies politic “Body politic” suggests an indefinite mass, but it is more like a steer displayed on a poster already segmented into the commercial names of beef – with some cuts more valued than others. Embedded in its various parts are signs suggesting that these divisions and hierarchies of value emerge naturally from the beast’s flesh. But in the imaginary register, the idea of the beast, the body politic, persists without a body. It is abstract and impersonal, a zone of humanity without humans. This is its promise and, indeed, its utopianism. It achieves shape only by association with particular state projects and kinds of person (the “cuts” of meat). From this perspective, political identity is a relation, not a thing: a relation not among things, but among repetitions. What looks like “the people,” “the citizenship form,” or any type of politically identifiable person is really an after-effect of reading events in a certain way. Thus the question, “what makes something an event or a non-event?” is the counterpart of two other questions: “what makes someone a person or a non-person?” and “what makes a norm into a form?” Many scholars, including myself, have described this tripartite relation in terms of an antinomy between abstract universality and embodied particularity. These discussions tend to focus on the mirage of universality, so figured because the national subject, legally protected as an abstract individual with human rights, has had privileged material access to land and wealth precisely by virtue of his body, or should I say bodies – his hereditary body, his racial one, his masculine one, his heterofamilial one.2 In contrast, the story goes, categorically embodied or particularized subjects, who are initially members not of the electorate but of what we might call the particulate, have long experienced having a legally zoned body that is an obstacle to the privilege of abstract valuation, whether in the form of full citizenship, social membership, or both. Recently, I have been rethinking this distinction

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between the universal and the particular in order to provide more heft to “particularity,” a category that has been enumerated ad infinitum and yet whose swelling with detail has not amounted to its conceptualization except as the Other to the universal. Detail seems to be an obstacle to conceptualization just as, historically, embodiments have organized the impediments to full citizenship. This essay argues for a different understanding of political form, seeing it more as an outcome of repetition and convention than as an emanation from, or projection onto, things such as institutions and persons. Its purpose is not to elevate the particular over the universal as a value – here I agree with Balibar and others that the content of the “human” of which liberal universalism is the theory must not be ceded to those who already benefit from it. Instead, this essay focuses on the formalist pedagogies of liberal democracy, which train citizens to bargain for political optimism by consenting to read the details of national/democratic failure as evidence of successes said to be imminent in its political form. I attend to the relationship between the normative affect of liberal optimism and ongoing structural violence, and tell some stories about a wish behind citizenship and other metacultural or nationally unifying forms that have long organized democratic will, struggle, and imagination. This desire (liberal formalism) is shaped by a phantom model of an unconflicted yet complex world, which heralds a good life that is yet to be made by law, by capital, or in social practice. In this liberal world of sovereign states and individualities, we witness the alchemical fantasy of concepts such as the “nation,” “citizenship,” “family,” or the umbrella notion of “the good life” itself. Through these terms, opposing realities are supposed to find mechanisms for negotiating and neutralizing potentially threatening contradictions. This essay focuses on two such mechanisms, on the promise of which national futurism depends. It tracks a broad shift from mass political investments in the juridical form of the vote to the current norm in which the collective witnessing of mass-mediated violence performs the body politic for itself. The first originates in the rule of liberal law, and is evidenced in the expansion of enfranchisement to include historically subordinated groups in the USA. The second taps into more archaic and more modern ways of experiencing national belonging, ways that neither enforce the equation of universality with the “human” as such, nor locate material history in the codified qualities wrought by subjects’ repeated encounters with power. Instead, I argue, national collectivity is now marked in a movement across the sacro-political, organized around a sacred iconicity of the political body, and the sarco-political, organized around the flesh of those deemed not to have the capacity to overcome their historic banishment from normative social membership. At the extreme, neither the sacro- nor the sarco- subject is deemed an ordinary human: yet in mass projections onto their destiny can be read concepts of ordinary personhood in the polis. Such a formalist genealogy will enable us to tell a conceptually quite different story about

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citizenship in the USA than the one that adjudicates universals and particulars. Its terms will link the long story of citizenship’s privatization to the differential in scale that measures the consequences of bodily jeopardy for the overlapping but distinct populations of the US body politic. I am not concerned, then, with authoritarian regimes that admit violent hierarchy as a given in collective life, but with forms of the liberal-hegemonic, those structures of consent that require ruling alliances to affix citizens to a political world that passes as worthy of optimism and self-idealization. Gramsci calls these consensual sites the machinery of “passive revolution,” and one might add that formalism – the belief in the intelligibility of the liberal nation/state and promise/privilege of rights – is central to the reproduction of democratic sovereignty in the hegemonic mode.3 The forms that are deemed indexical to an agreed-upon standard of the good life might derive from popular memory, opinion, or the state: their proximity to the promise of protective and reparative law is central to the attractiveness of liberal-hegemonic devices. In the USA, juridical fetishism upholds the possibility of reparation for what look like the uninevitable harms of democratic culture – harms that are deemed not forms of repetitive injury, but accidents of history, or personal failures, or something. Legal logic requires as well that harms be represented through “events,” which means that particular instances of ordinary violence linked to structural subjection must be phrased as discontinuous from the political world in which these events take place. Even class action suits require individual participants to make, and potentially benefit from, a claim based on a particular unjust event. Likewise, the proactive or transformational effects of liberal law require citizens to encounter it one conscience at a time. From this perspective structural violence can appear only as a bad event in a domain of good theory. Just as the state has to be seen as like a person who has good intentions, the good citizen appears as the subject who wants to rid the world of the bad, merging political viscera into political sense, which then seems like a true feeling or instinct.4 The truth of the disciplined and educated political instinct, and its simultaneous equation with, and superiority to, rational self-reflection, is in this sense central to the optimistic affective norms of national liberal-hegemony. What does it mean to argue that the formal guarantee of the liberal nation/state, with its assurance that the good life both has been achieved and is imminent in the sovereignty of just law, atrophies the critical desire to interfere with the reproduction of ordinary violence, violence that cannot be summarized but only symbolized in the discrete event? By ordinary violence I indicate actual and social death as well as the taken-for-granted negation of subordinate populations, those outcomes of social hierarchy that are a feature of capitalist democracies, but which are rarely deemed a hardwired feature. Historically subordinated populations are always marked with the expectation that subordination is their destiny. Indeed, democratic fantasy – the thought that anyone in the USA can overcome a default

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(structural) adversity – presumes structural inequality. Partly this has to do with the capitalist and monocultural terms in which “overcoming” is measured. Even if it is true in theory that class mobility and “minority” absorption into a general mass are possible, structural subordinations generally provide the content to the default story that one overcomes. But overcoming as a process of historical transformation – achieving a life beyond what is probable according to the event of identity – means something different at the scale of the individual rather than the social “detail.” The relation between material, symbolic, and individual transformation is ever mutable and uneven in any case. I open my archive with woman suffrage, a moment of tremendous optimism for the power of national culture to repair its own juridical errors. Particular states in the USA allowed women to vote in all but federal elections starting around the turn of the century. Not until 1916 were most women deemed full citizens (whites and African-Americans – not Asians, for example) of nations and states and permitted to vote federally. Uncle Sam Needs A Wife (1925) is a citizenship-training manual published almost a decade after women received the vote. Its purpose was to reshape women’s feelings about the privilege of their hard-won citizenship,5 not seeing the vote as citizenship achieved but as citizenship now possible. This manual, like so many produced during the century’s first three decades, narrates incoherently the myriad ways that the entry of women into the body politic might transform both the nation and women. Incoherence itself does not invalidate the power of the franchise, though: political and social worlds are inevitably built across fault lines of contradiction and bad conceptualization that seem somehow not to threaten the general project. In the USA, the vote became the prize agreed to by a coalition of radicals, reformers, and social conservatives, even as they imagined a quite divergent range of social transformations to be the consequence. In contrast, in the contemporary USA the political event of the vote and the citizenship form it expresses no longer organizes citizens’ and national inhabitants’ optimism for, or sense of, national belonging.6 Instead, citizenship is now measured in the broader sense of social membership and is more likely to be enacted in responses to events in mass culture, especially those signifying evidence of democratic “accident” or ongoing violence – for example, Rodney King, Thomas-Hill, O. J. Simpson. The centrality of sarco-political – racial and sexual – identities to this grouping is overdetermined but not haphazard. In these scenes universalist law is challenged to overcome itself, to do the right thing. At the same time the law is being judged by the entire body politic – which may disagree violently as to the terms of that judgment, but which is seeing the same scene – as to whether the law can respond adequately to what can only be implied in the event, its exemplarity. This disjuncture enables broader discussion of the relation of structural violence to individual instance, and at the same time places pressure on conscience to generate the right opinion that might be obscure

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to the law. Does this mean that the body politic now “votes” for national continuity by investing in events of violence and death? What relation can we track between the democracy of death and the hierarchy of events that seems not, in the end, to verify universalism as abstraction but as the relative weight of the embodied detail made generally visible through suffering? In other words, what does the post-political citizenship form suggest about the destinies of the particulate, whose bodies now possess the franchise but not, as it were, its full promise of abstraction? Arguing that the contemporary subject becomes at its most collective post-politically by reanimating the more archaic logic of sacred embodiment, this chapter suggests that woman suffrage was a key switch point between an electoral model of legitimacy to the privatized sentimental one.

Making up (women) citizens Between 1865 and 1920, the US political public sphere was cracked open like a fresh egg whose purpose was to leak sovereignty onto the then formally excluded occupants of the USA: then, the model of political and social membership that dominated the formalist public imaginary was enfranchisement.7 To be enfranchised was to be free to vote, to self-alienate a political opinion; it was to be deemed a citizen who could self-represent autonomously and therefore be represented. Etymologically, suffrage indicates the capacity to express oneself in public; to receive suffrage was to be deemed competent to full participation in national culture as a holder of property and opinion. The capacity to hold and to alienate these private properties was what democracy seemed to secure. This is to say that the franchise was the form of alienable expression that confirmed a subject’s political existence, like breath on a mirror. It established the citizen as evolved beyond the flesh – not dead, politically speaking. The history of civil rights in the US shows that gaining the franchise is both an event and a process, a zone of individualization that always crackles with contingency. Thus it is that the African-American men who were enfranchised as abstract individuals by the 14th amendment struggled for another century until the “qualifications” to vote were no longer read right off of the body.8 Despite having the formal franchise, gays and lesbians remain excluded from many of the property protections allowed to American heterosexuals. Reproductive and labor safety laws formally speak to generic rights of citizens while actually designating women not of childbearing age, proletarian whites, and people of color as relatively disposable. Still, the franchise is the precise difference between zero and one for members of a historically excluded population: it changes the conditions of survival in relation to the domain of justice. No matter how small an event or gesture of agency, the vote not only signals something like full formal belonging to the body politic, but registers a grounding that enables subjects to move across time and space, regardless of their particular or individual genealogies.

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I mean this concretely. The vote means that someone lives somewhere both local and national, and that the experience of one’s life matters in that sense, potentially reverberating within the expressed self-interest of “a constituency.” It also provides a kind of paper identity, verifying for local, national, and international law the individual’s distinguishing marks. Like the signature, the fingerprint, and the photographed right ear, the voter’s registration confirms that someone was, in fact, at a jurisdictional place at a proper official time (at birth and at naturalization, for example).9 Since the 1840s, thousands of citizenship-training manuals have been generated in the USA, for the purpose of making both native born and immigrant occupants literate in national culture and its various locales: states, townships, counties, school districts, villages, and so on.10 Produced by federal, state, and local governments for immigrants, students, and the military, and by private organizations for immigrants and new citizens such as women and children, these manuals provide for us an image of the nation as it is imagined to be. What kinds of citizen subjectivity do these texts generate, and what images of a common culture are enfranchised by the vote? A manual is a pragmatic pedagogic genre: a transformational environment in which abstract and bodily knowledge actually merge to change an object into something different and yet more itself – in this case, into a socially intelligible form of person whose politico-ethical sensorium is in the right order. The citizenship manual’s technologies of the self are manifested through inculcated gestures and taken-for-granted repetitions that enable the emerging subject to seem continuous with her intention, her identity, her public qualities, and her agency, in the intelligible terms and values of civil society. Thus, one might say that the law of the genre is to teach the subject how to pass as having always been a full citizen. Of course, the authors of these texts dedicated to women are as likely to argue that women’s enfranchisement will change nothing socially as they are to envision an imminent feminine revolution in national morality and purity. But to work either of these scenarios the woman citizen must make her practice of mental and practical discipline so habitual that it will appear as the unity of her character and her essence. The genre performs the desire to effect this appearance in a number of ways, rhetorically and ideologically speaking. Since it is a didactic form, the primer does not have to hide its pedagogy. But while focused on information communication, its pedagogy amalgamates many other normative associations as well.11 For example, in terms of explicit tonality and audience the manuals addressed to a generic citizen tend to conflate women, children, African-Americans, and immigrants. They are all deemed to know nothing about the political world into which they are entering, presumably because such knowledge is inculcated only on a need to know basis. Rhetorically, these civic texts evoke a combination of baby talk and the image of an English speaker who, on encountering a foreigner, tries to communicate

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by yelling loudly and slowly in English. These are not merely metaphoric associations: just as immigration law placed pressure on the status of nativeborn enfranchisement at the turn of the century, so too was newly compulsory public education of previously excluded minorities and women, cause and effect of constitutional change. Frequently, when the handbooks presuppose their utility as textbooks, they presume such multiple audiences, whose differences become nullified through the metacultural form of the nation and the juridical form of the vote. But the dehumanizing species associations among women, the poor, and the black continue to emit a powerful vibe as well, as their ignorance and “inclination to measure everything in terms of the personal” suggests subcivilization, the negative reign of instinct over thought.12 At the same time, the citizen comes increasingly to be viewed as a psychological subject: especially the middle-class woman. The majority of the early century citizenship manuals addressed to women come forth just as therapy culture begins to saturate the periodical culture addressed to “woman” as already expressing “her interests.” Many suffrage manuals, plays, and novels, for example, associate the politically uninformed or disenfranchised woman with severe states of lethargy and depression, the turning inward of atrophied social energy.13 “The social diseases and the economic diseases from which women are suffering are as distinctly women’s diseases as are those of the physical body.”14 Uncle Sam Needs a Wife critiques women soundly for their political passivity, calling it narcissism: “See [women] plunging idly through superficial studies of superficial subjects under hypnotic headings while wars and strikes go on!”15 It argues that as a result women become masochistic and bitter toward each other, refuse the challenges of difficult knowledge, and attach to trivial pursuits and other dissipation. This is why education was deemed so central to the political cultivation of women’s practical expertise. Women’s impractical lack of knowledge engenders an image of what Uncle Sam Needs a Wife calls a political “moron” and an “idiot.” In this hyperbole resonates a longer struggle within the movement about what it means to be constructing a citizen as someone who is formally educated. During the suffrage struggles of the late nineteenth century, the phrase “Educated Suffrage” marked a compromise developed by white middle-class suffrage activists. The purveyors of this model of suffrage meant to sacrifice working-class women of all races in order to gain patriarchal approval. It tapped into the hegemonic embrace of particularized universalism by admitting the presumption of “qualifications” to notions of the abstract individual with rights.16 Despite this resonance, however, African-American activists who refused such a compromise nonetheless lectured widely on the need to educate black women to the demands of citizenship. For some, education did not mean separation from the totality of black people but uplift for all, while for others, suffrage activism involved elevating black women over black men deemed incompetent to citizenship during the nightmare of reconstruction. In any case, all understood the

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importance of the deliberate dissemination of the tools that would promote African-American social and political legitimacy.17 Across these different motives to teach women how to be citizens, then, there was the common thought that women are presumed to know nothing. It is astounding to read, over and over, elaborate definitions of the city, the state, the village, the school board, the ballot, the ballot box, the political party, and so on. The she-citizen is deluged by responsibility for the most minor details of bureaucratic process and public sphere codes of behavior, such as how to write a letter to a congressman (the advice is: be polite). Uncle Sam archly notes that men never took classes in citizenship, while citizenship training schools are being run for women, and that women are wasting their time studying what men have taken for granted. At the same time as it hectors women, it elevates what they know. Female complaint rhetoric by women turned toward women, then, is ultimately sympathetic, despite the shaming tone. Uncle Sam calls the bodily consequences of women’s trivialization their mass “inferiority complex,” and spends multiple chapters imagining its undoing. This political development in the terms of therapy culture is itself a product of many forces. First, there were significant transformations in modes and norms of privacy and publicity in these early days of what I’ve called the “intimate public sphere.” Among these would be: the invention of national consumer markets in post-World War I culture, whose particular incitement to expertise is addressed – usually implicitly – to middle-class women and mothers. Deploying a distinction typical of the period but unusually explicitly defensive, one manual notes that: In this connection it is an interesting fact that the woman most interested in voting appear to belong to the respectable middle class [sic]. Thus, in a fall election in 1912 the election commissioner of Denver found that in three small, prosperous or rich districts, 2,774, 2,496, and 909 women voted, respectively, while in the crowded “Red Light” district of those days only 143 women voted and many of these were respectable wives of working men whom necessity forced to live in that section.18 Respectability was the key. Respectable women would produce a respectable world: as this example shows, respectability was evidenced more readily through proper sexuality than class location. But above all the therapeutic ghost in the citizenship machine emerges in its normative neutralization of what the structural transformation of women’s political legitimacy might mean. “It is up to every woman to get her ballot’s worth,” one manual writes: And how do you get your ballot’s worth? By application of the very principle you employ in the purchases you make . . . you are an experienced shopper; you are a recognized expert on values; you know quality

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and how to get quality; you can bargain skillfully; you know how to avoid being cheated. And I’ll wager you did not learn to cook without a good cookbook at your elbow.19 This author calls her text the Fanny Farmer of citizenship, a place where practical feminine knowledge is simply put to new use. It becomes a commonplace that woman’s practical agency gives her both an interest and an expertise in engaging the political public sphere as mothers of the race, home economists, managers of money, crisis, desire, and moral leadership. As a new citizen of the world she will be too busy adapting to the urgencies of consumer desire to have surplus or unwieldy desires that register beyond the normative machinery. The very existence of Uncle Sam, indeed, published in a panic that women had not sufficiently developed into full citizens even after the franchise was achieved, signals that other stories of socio-cultural bargaining might be divined from the minor event of these pamphlets. One of these links the question of women’s practical and visceral citizenship education to the pressure placed on US cultural reproduction from the postwar influx of European immigrants, whose women were deemed to be in a better juridical situation than native-born women. Second, the return of underemployed military veterans, already decimated by the war’s unprecedented brutality, conflicted with the transformation in the greater experience and expectations of the metropolitan women who had taken on greater public responsibility during the war, both in industrial and white-collar contexts. This latter element, usually associated with the post-World War II project of national remasculinization, actually played crucially in the formal political advancement of women, just as John D’Emilio has argued that it did for gay men and lesbians in less politically formal ways.20 Additionally, at this moment woman suffrage became a part of a general expansion of the conditions of thinkable democratic form in the US political public sphere. An intense education in a variety of potential US socioeconomic destinies was made available. The Mary Sumner Boyd volume The Woman Citizen (1918) spends 50 of its 250 pages describing the platforms of the Socialist, Anti-Saloon, Prohibition, and National parties, along with the Democrats and the Republicans. Each of them is described with dignity, as though creative non-normative political thought was deemed integral to patriotism itself. In addition, throughout this and many other manuals of the moment, arguments for cross-segment alliances especially around issues of class are central to the reparative work woman suffrage was claiming it would do for industrialized worker populations, both in the USA and elsewhere. “We are the realists of the sexes,” A Political Handbook for Women typically observes, explaining women’s deeper understanding of more varieties of work.21 The right of workers to tolerable work environments and adequate pay merged with the older sentimental rhetoric about women’s essential and practical linkage to children and to the everyday. As often is

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the case, sentimentality returns here as a mode of realism that asserts women as best placed to ameliorate the harsh conditions of survival for the economically and politically subordinated. The rise of the international labor movement was crucial to the vitality of woman suffrage in this domain, as the depleted bodies of children and the poor were recognized as kindred symptoms of capitalist democracy’s failure. At the same time, the federal or state governments of western democracies took up competitively championing the cause of woman suffrage, if not feminism.22 A progressive stance on woman suffrage would demonstrate a nation’s moral and economic superiority to the nations and peoples they seek to dominate: “Woman suffrage is preeminently a war measure,” one manual avers. It notes that “Great Britain and Canada have extended suffrage to women . . . [that] France and Italy have virtually promised to do so” and that even Woodrow Wilson recognized it as crucial to any representation of democracy as the most humane and morally evolved political system.23 As many historians have shown, and as Gayatri Spivak would have predicted, the tableau of white men saving brown women from brown men in the colonial context was a site for the enunciation of this strategy of US imperial publicity.24 In any case, by 1920 there is a general consensus that the emancipation of the oppressed woman into formal participation in US democracy is crucial to the conversion of what one manual calls women’s unused “Social Capital,” their knowledge and expertise, for the global advancement of national life. These tropes sound rather patriotic. The citizenship manuals authored by and directed toward the white middle classes are critical of national/capitalist violence toward workers, children, and weaker countries. But they express little ambivalence toward the promise of the national, and at a moment where the trauma of world war could easily have made other positions plausible. To some degree, the ironies of strategic universalism were not lost on the white middle-class suffragettes. The author of Uncle Sam Needs a Wife, for example, self-mockingly appropriates a flirtatious mode of patriotic critique: We love you Uncle Sam! Of course we do! Haven’t we brought you into the world, and nursed you, and petted you, and spoiled you, and flattered you, and adored you? Haven’t we taught you all you know? Haven’t we lectured you and tried to reform you when you haven’t turned out to be all that we expected you to be? . . . [W]hat better fate can befall a likely, promising, but unstable and spoiled young man than marriage to some wise, comprehending, intelligent, devoted woman!25 Jokes and lightness of speech are central rhetorical forms of female complaint. Uncle Sam is unusual in the lightness of its heavy-handed ridicule of men. But whether ironic or sincere, the citizenship manual directed to women inevitably mediates its critique with consoling references to the

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ongoing proprieties of married life. Heteronormativity remains the fundamental contradiction in the internally and externally directed pedagogy of the women’s citizenship manuals. In the USA, heteronormativity should be understood to describe both white middle-class and “respectable” workingclass aspirations to national universality. I do not mean by this that white and African-American suffrage workers had no critique of the patriarchal family and capitalist inequalities: quite the contrary. But as a site of consent that secures the intelligibility of a particular image of a universalist national culture, the franchise is to citizenship what heteronormativity is to social membership. They are particular means to an end that register as neutral, the taken for granted. Whereas the sovereignty of the individual is a central magnetizing figure for the generalized citizenship manuals, women’s training in US citizenship links their education to the production of more and better intimate normalcy in general as well as to a better “America.” Historians of suffrage love to point out that other historians of suffrage overvalue the importance of the vote in telling the story of women’s complex entry into the national/capitalist public sphere. They emphasize what I have emphasized, that a wide range of reform movements – anti-poverty, anti-racist, anti-child labor, anti-liquor, anti-exploitation, anti-patriarchal – were linked by the time woman suffrage turned into modern feminism. Still, in all accounts scholars argue that anti-feminism was so strong in the USA that it was deemed necessary to articulate coalitions across vectors of difference around the form of the vote. The vote became the least common denominator in a variety of political struggles for greater racial, sexual, and economic equality. Alas, as it will, the least common denominator came to saturate the popular political imaginary, rather than becoming the basis on which a transformational politics could then be shaped. Focusing on the form stalled genuine institutional transformation. For these reasons, women’s voting came to be seen as a confirmation of US political superiority. This additive model is as visible in the citizenship manual as it is in the title Uncle Sam Needs A Wife. Adopting a breezy tone of voice toward the vote’s simple rationality, this political female complaint rhetoric stops at the heteronormative door, neutralizing the depth charge it might actually have detonated in the way it expresses its critique. Heteronormativity is offered up as a barrier not only to sexually heterodox movements but to economically and racially unorthodox ones as well. Such bargaining neutralized what so many activists actually knew about the centrality of the vote to the ongoing project of withdrawing consent from the hegemonic “promise” of national formalism, universalist humanism, and a politics of the future that ought to have been heard as a demand of the present.

Sacro-politics To the degree that they were ironic or knowing, the rhetorical registers of political bargaining during the women’s enfranchisement struggles cannot

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be read entirely as motivated by expediency. The consoling image of an intimate sphere with strong but strongly differentiated men and women that enabled the victory of woman suffrage while minimizing what might be scary about it, deployed a standard means of hegemonic persuasion. It is common to hold constant a beloved social norm so that other changes can seem less threatening. Sexuality frequently plays this role, the role of the potentially anarchic force that must be bound conservatively so that additions might be made to the hegemonic field. Repeatedly during the twentieth century, political struggle around rights and practices not explicitly sexual have deployed the institutions and rhetoric of intimacy to threaten and promise citizens about the destiny of the good life for which they are aiming. The binding is achieved largely through the discourse I have called National Sentimentality, with its location of the ethical citizen less in his/her acts than in his/her proper feelings.26 Sentimental politics risks the running out of control that sexuality also risks, but locates the problem of passion mainly in the subject’s heart, addressing citizens as isolated subjects, and charting their capacities for social membership through the manifestations in conscience of empathic identification and proper self-management. Where woman suffrage was concerned in particular, ideals of heterosexual difference preserved by the fetish of the vote required deprecating the political in the popular public sphere in favor of the high moral ground of right feeling. This expressed a long-term association of the political sphere with manliness, a paradoxical space in which men were deemed to act unfeelingly according to abstract principle and were deemed to act corruptly, in terms of vulgar instrumentality and dissipation. What Ann Douglass called the “feminization” of American culture emerged from the paradox of women’s response to this double view of political men. Both anti-abstract and anti-vulgar, this feminized “culture” elevated a view that the capacity to feel pain and empathy is the central qualification for personhood and for citizenship. Pain is a universal but not abstract; empathy is embodied but not undisciplined. In the contemporary USA, the women’s view – intimacy politics, the politics of the higher viscera – has at last become a cultural dominant/ least common denominator, with mixed results, as we shall see. Let us take a recent event as our example of what we might call the new formalism of liberal citizenship. At the place where she was killed in Paris, there is a statue now associated with Princess Diana – an arm, perhaps the Statue of Liberty’s arm, jutting out from a stone foundation.27 Tourists come to this statue from all over the world, leaving offerings and writing graffiti on it that testify to Diana’s ongoing significance, marking her death as a vibrant event that continues to teach something about something to someone. When John F. Kennedy Jr’s plane crashed in 1999, the statue of Diana became a means for his secular deification: throughout the weeks following tourists left notes and signs and other traces of homage to Kennedy on Diana’s monumental body. The iconic proximity of these two figures creates a linked destiny for them. World citizens by accident of family, their lives ended tragically “before

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their time.” They are joined somewhat like the famous picture of Elvis and Nixon shaking hands that made its way into Thomas Pyncheon’s Vineland or, more soberly, the photo of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King that Spike Lee features in Do the Right Thing. These startling images of public figures in figural intimacy circulate not only as evidence of lost personal futures but also as histories unfulfilled. But whose history, and how many? Capturing unlived potential, the imaged pressing of posthumous celebrity flesh comes to signal for a certain segment of its public a broken engagement with a better destiny. It is embodied, yet resonates impersonally; it is unreal and yet experienced emotionally. These image/events are not official propaganda for a political good life circulated to enhance anyone’s power. Partly, they are produced to generate reliance on media so that people come to define collective experience as a dense web of mediatized events. They can also be seen as evidence that in the USA celebrity attachments are preferable to a reality in which ordinary human relations seem less worth investing in, as intimate domestic and work situations become less likely to stretch over lifetimes. One could return, additionally, to Fredric Jameson’s argument that celebrity or non-human icons such as the shark in Jaws mark at least a collective sense of lack and longing for an underdefined something.28 I want to focus here on the proximity of the mourned-for personage to the political world. Is the deadtoo-soon celebrity citizen, like the shark, an event that calls out what would otherwise be political optimism, the form of the attachment that, at one time, would have circulated through the promise of universalism? What does it mean that an optimistic visceral politics seems most to resonate in this afterlife-laden affect world of post-political signs? Kristin Ross argues that the post-World War II period in France (and, I think, generally, in the west) was distinguished by a retreat from identification with national history, an emptying out of public memory as a suturing device.29 What replaces it is a national-universalism organized by the privatized concerns of the everyday: homes, family, tactile experience, and an interest in augmenting hygiene everywhere. This shift in the domain of national identification, she argues, shaped the postwar critical interest in everyday life as well, serving the interests of nations and capital by distracting citizens and intellectuals from feeling accountable for the nation’s ongoing imperial and capitalist relations. 1968 was a direct challenge to this shift and yet also extended its new focus on the subject and experience as the site of history. If this is so, critical theory rooted in the subject and in modes of psychoanalysis and interpretation uncoupled with materialist politics must continue to carry the traces of the privatization of experience, the inculcated view that subjective cultures are the apolitical real that must be protected from the political surreal. In the USA, the continued emphasis on moral feeling as the center of political value continues the postwar pattern while also tapping in to the longer tradition that elevates proper feeling as the ethico-political norm.

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The maybe-future President and the quasi-princess were said to have touched “ordinary” people even though they were already in a space beyond that even when they were living. Like the centaur that intermixes gods and humans, they seem, mainly after their deaths, to mediate alterity and intimacy, ordinariness and greatness, without fully embodying either. This is why they can represent mass futures along with tragic and farcical repetitions of power’s chaos. But the collective investment in the strangely animated icons now hovering both beyond and within the political is not just an effect of postwar mass culture. As Claude Lefort, Mick Taussig, Louis Marin, Marina Warner, and most recently Giorgio Agamben30 have demonstrated, dense and radiant images of the politically saturated and especially the governing body have long been employed as vehicles for shaping a collective sense of social belonging. It is as though an aesthetic of fascination or absorption by the image is the fulfillment of the promise of belonging that an icon holds out. Taussig tracks the posthumous cultural destiny of the state icon he calls “The Liberator”: But as we look at the fate of this body of the father stronger in death than when he was alive, we discern another body forming, not only of joy as well as of sorrow but of an underground grotesque as the body comes to be divided between the state and the people, interlocking entities hovering indeterminately between being and becoming in the glow of each other’s otherness, irradiated by increasingly sacred remains.31 In other words, attachment to a collectively held thing marks, among other things, a fantastic transpersonal intimacy, rendering a seam at the place where performativity and tautology almost meet. Marina Warner links this to ancient and Catholic assumptions that a god’s human embodiment is not mimetic but representation plus, a scene of encounter with numena, not of masochism, anesthesia, or overreading. Agamben extends this story, arguing that it is wrong of Ernst Kantorowicz to compress the King into the two bodies human and political, a bifurcation dedicated to explaining how it can be that the sovereign is the law and yet does not take the law with “him” when he dies.32 The political body becomes the sovereign’s, Kantorowicz argues, when he comes to embody the articulation of the human to the transhistorical right of law. When the sovereign dies, however, the right of law does not die with him, but transfers to whoever replaces him at that conjuncture. Agamben argues that this model does not account for the element of the sacred that imbues the sovereign with something inhuman, impersonal that becomes his quality and not that of the formal office. For example, he points out that the murder of the sovereign is never deemed a homicide, because the sovereign is not an homme. His murder is not a sacrifice either, although the language of sacrifice might be deployed to distract from the fact that the law cannot be sacrificed to the law. Even when the modern representative politician transgresses, he cannot be laid bare to the law as

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such while he is in office, merely exposed to the pseudo-law of, say, the impeachment trial, which can remove him from office. But even then he would only be human in a juridical sense, continuing to carry in his person the sacred illumination that derives from his embodiment of law as such. This is perhaps why the courts yielded to President Clinton’s oft-asserted refusal to testify in real time: they were trying to preserve something of his inhumanity, his sacred superhumanity. What difference does it make to think of the sacred aspect of contemporary mass iconicity, especially where it intersects with the political? Agamben’s, and my own, main interest is in understanding the relation of democracy and state violence. He wants to shatter the paradigm that claims the law’s rational sovereignty to itself according to the engines of interest that drive the Rousseauian general will. He uses the inhuman body of the sovereign who can be killed but not sacrificed to establish the performative consecration of law’s absoluteness as in fact the “operative presupposition” of nations, democratic and otherwise.33 This does not mean that there is no difference between sacred and secular states, or sovereign kings and representative Presidents, but that the sovereignty of law in modern political worlds retains the traces of the logic of hallowed embodiment. Agamben and Lefort associate the seduction of spectacular political embodiment with fascism and fascistic tendencies within capitalist democracies: whether or not one accedes to the ahistoricism of this bodily analogy, however, the analysis fortifies the mass cultural context of explanation for the phenomenon of overvaluation of the dead-too-soon icon whose popular appeal I have been tracking. It links them to the sublime and ridiculous ghostly representations of dead presidents, such as the now queerly supervalent nineteenth-century image of the heavenly George Washington taking Abraham Lincoln in his arms, and the ghostly homosocial utopia of the 1969 Dion song “Abraham, Martin, and John.”34 Both of these scenes now can be read to show that the President has never been human, but circulates in a realm of principle, desire, and sacred autonomy that turns the democratic ideal of representation and representative democracy somewhat on its head. The sovereign, as embodied law, sublates the fallen flesh, taking it to something beyond ordinariness or the human. Diana and JFK Jr, in turn, represent this hallowed aspect of publicness that citizens and subjects are trained to desire, but they go the politician one better, as celebrities in the political sphere who possessed only symbolic power, and so whose death is not accompanied by the ambivalence of the memory of their power over life and death. To love the law in this displaced yet sacred way is to ratify its irrationality, its auratic linkage to the beyond of history and humanity. This is one reason why the language of love is never out of place enough in the discussion of law, its fulfillment is also ultimately confirmed in a beyond of life in which it cannot be experienced. These figures, then, at once human and superhuman, circulate as an achieved intimacy, a performative condensation of a collective desire to be

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possessed by a future that the ordinary person has no access to living, and the opportunity for which has now passed on. These figures displace attention to questions of the efficacy of social movements, politics engendered not around repetitions of spectacular failure and optimism but around political claims. In particular, the doubled ghost seems to speak of an attachment to public figures who move in undivided and undivisive realms beyond politics. It is as though these dead-too-soon personae represent a hole in the historical fabric through which the hierarchies of violence and alterity that we associate with the lawlessness of the law might, finally, not be reproduced. In their estrangement from sovereign normativity they might represent something like a lost revolutionary wrinkle in time, as the articulation of the sacred against the political, here seen not as sovereign but fallen law. In this way a post-political celebrity culture of mourning expresses a critical political position indeed. But it can only find negative articulation as personal loss and narcissistic wound, as well as a political relation not to the nation/state, but to other spectators of the failures enfigured by these dead-too-soon ciphers. What else does one make of the repetition of Dianalike mourning in the mass precipitation of flowers onto the New York City sidewalk right where Kennedy lived? Offerings like these constitute the mode of social participation du jour, for sure. But the gesture is a way of marking that one has been touched by the optimism of an attachment to the pre- and post-political, now made into the intimacy of belonging to an impersonal collectivity organized by loss that can serve as a topic for intimate conversation among strangers. Needless to say, this is a time of strange intensities, if vigils and flowers dedicated to celebrity deaths and big suffering are gestures toward salvaging civic optimism. In short, America loves its dead objects, and why shouldn’t it? Death and democracy are the two great levelers. By naming, marking, and marketing a fatal event, by making it big and of long duration, citizen-mourners meld, sharing feelings that confirm the very sense of cohesion promised but not delivered as experience by political form. Collective mourning means that there is a “we” who witness senseless not sacrificial death, confirming an unenumerated something in the common holding dear of a hard story. This is a scene of sentimental education; for like sex, public death must be meaningful, engendering knowledge that, in moving us beyond the finality of another ending, performs and confirms a future in which we are not abandoned to the beyond or the beneath of history. The privileged and nightmarish anonymity of the mass subject is played out in the privileged and nightmarish hyperpublicity of the icon whose death makes him or her now a non-person too, not anonymous but entirely figural. This subject-forming, habit-forming aesthetics of attachment to disaster is what Michael Warner describes in his essay “The mass subject” and Mark Seltzer describes by the phrase “the pathological public sphere,” in his book Serial Killers.35 Warner and Seltzer hold that the US mass subject becomes intimate impersonally with a larger world by virtue not of commonly held

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principles or desires, but by the visceral experience of publicity organized by someone else’s trauma. But trauma is a big word inappropriate for many species of negation. When the public adores the dead-too-soon political celebrity, the disaster form takes the measure of what might have been superhuman citizenship. But when the public invests in a non-celebrity tragedy as its own trauma, the logic of the inhuman plays itself out differently. Let me first distinguish fascination with disaster from the experience of trauma itself. Clinically speaking, one can experience trauma indirectly, which is to say, through senses other than the skin, but it is fundamentally a negation – not a death and rebirth, exactly, but an experience in which a particular sense of continuity is lost forever to the traumatized subject. In contrast, the normative value of identification in mass society designates your empathic response as evidence that you are human in a way that animates others – it is evidence that you belong. This is quite the opposite of feeling isolated and over particularized by trauma per se: mass cultural scandal or disaster engenders publics of opinion, identification, and social membership. This affective structure of collective identification permeates the US public sphere to such a degree that one reads about exhausted compassion now, about the flattening out of a public capacity to take seriously the publicized pain with which it is also fascinated.36 Thirty years ago John Berger made the same argument about the exhaustion of authentic impersonal affect.37 Then, the referents were pictures of atrocity from the Vietnam War: the transmitted image of the generic traumatized body of the Vietnamese victim was all too easily consumed when published in a series of reports from elsewhere. The desensitizing effects of televisual seriality, he argued, lead to political irresponsibility, the refusal of the spectator to take on the trauma except as a kind of mirror on the wall of one’s own desire to be morally worthy, if that. Susan Buck-Morss calls this response an aesthetic of moral anesthesia, and claims its centrality to the reproduction of fascism.38 Such a distinction marks the sublime’s difference from the beautiful: the sublime ejects you from the comfort of your sensibility, while the beautiful absorbs and confirms you, your sensitivity, your consciousness and conscience. Even if conscience links you to others by virtue of your recognition of their pain, to the degree that it remains a story of their pain and your compassion for it, the prosthesis of the image keeps you and your world safe from risky transformation. This is to say that right feeling turns the repulsive into the beautiful. Such homeopathy through consumption of the wounded image is central to the liberal aesthetics of political experience, in which atrocity and the therapy culture that now subsumes politics redemptively draw out lessons from lesions, weaving gold out of straw. Only the events that remain open, signifying beyond themselves, count as historic. This is also a quality of the traumatic narrative: it is traumatic because it cannot be stopped by the rational will, resonating much like a horror story. Yet liberal national culture has long hailed citizens through

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scenes of empathic identification with less fortunate others, risking the unending reverberations of publicized violence to deliver a sense of general moral propriety to the privileged. It is not that empathic rhetoric has to have this effect: I am talking about a pattern that has emerged from 150 years of events in the USA. As a result, the “less fortunate others” make claims for justice in the language of the harmed who need reparation, because this is a language in which a self-defined “good person” is emotionally literate. In this sense, sentimental national culture educates the viscera so that citizens can meet across death and disaster in a way that’s personal and impersonal. The feeling is personal and ethical: the structure of feeling remains impersonal, and the conditions of exemplarity for the event remain tacit. Publicity serves as a pseudo-neutral domain in which one’s principles and one’s affect are trained normatively, such that one takes one’s responses as the expression of one’s true capacity for attachment to other humans rather than as effects of pedagogy. Foucault has called this belief and these practices around the affects of self in community “sexuality.” In The History of Sexuality, vol. I, he argues that the cluster of feelings with which you identify the expression of your true self links you to a racial, a sexual, a religious, and a political imaginary as well, giving you a blood-organized reproductive feeling of continuity over pasts and into futures.39 Characterizing the processes of impersonal but subjective attachment I have been describing as “sexuality” might feel like a stretch. But if we see the education of the viscera as central to the production of modern sexuality, the political world of feeling culture I am describing plays a central role in what constitutes not only erotically oriented meanings but the normativity social attachment generally. I am claiming, then, that the heteronormativity of woman suffrage and the hegemony of intimacy politics that extends from it are just the beginnings of what we might rephrase as “sexuality.” In the democratic culture of empathic identification there is a shadow politics of violent exemplification. Racism is displayed in spectacles of normative sexual difference, while the romance of class mobility links the working classes of all races and genders to images of disordered enfleshment. The bodies are too much; the people are not enough. Paradoxically, these structures of sexualization are dehumanizing, machines of the inhuman – that is, except where particular persons can be shown aspiring to the abstraction that would discipline, individuate, and privatize their drives, assuming a correct (sexual/class) orientation. In short, no matter how empathic the privileged are to subordinated classes, as a social form the particulate remains absolutely inassimilable to liberal democratic ideology. Diana and JFK Jr put the optimistic face on this formation: mass empathy might express something optimistic about a political world that does not exist yet. In contrast, as I argue in the Queen of America, the notion that subordinated persons need to be given a “face” says it all about what they are otherwise presumed to be: all body.40

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This is a complicated claim to rest on the shoulders of well-intentioned feeling, or national sexuality. We might turn, here, to Stjepan Mesˇtrovic´’s insistence that the USA is a post-emotional society.41 This counterintuitive observation makes a kind of uncanny sense, in that one so often sees performances of empathic attachment that can, one feels, barely resonate beyond the moment in which a confirming recognition happens. Mesˇtrovic´ dryly refers to President Clinton’s capacity to “feel your pain”: but while he has no sympathy for the formal norms of collective intelligibility I do, whether or not I deem them to be inauthentic, shallowly felt, or sadly not followed through. Who is to say that artifice is insincere, or when it is? In short, I do not mean to trivialize the democratic urge to pay attention to death by choosing the Princess and Kennedy as cases of recent mass witnessing. Nor do I think that sentimental nationality is in itself false consciousness. I use these recent examples to talk about technologies of feeling, the pedagogy of the viscera that organize a mass national experience of structural violence into a form that gets sensed as ordinariness. Historically viewed, national sentimentality has legitimated imperial and internal violence by linking opinion to right consciousness or feeling. It is not that empathic feeling is itself a bad thing, as the desire to feel inside of an intimate impersonal collectivity can have many different effects. It might ground resistance to political powerlessness; it might be a counterhegemonic drive that survives on small objects until the right one comes along; it might confirm what we already know, that publicity marks danger while private but collective spectatorship protects. One can spin a dozen optimistic and dark stories about the traffic in violence with which citizens of mass society are trained to identify: from Schadenfreude, pleasure at the suffering of others, to self-confirming pain, to an experience of the unlivable event that induces a will in someone or a public to take risks for change. But the repetition of empathic events does not in itself create change. Nor do all violent events take on an equivalent logic of importance. Different forms and scales of articulation are taken on by the formal events of public mourning. For the superhuman icon, special issues of paper and broadcast magazines generate a buzz and a memory of the excited feeling behind the frenzy of mournful attention. For those whose violent destinies also distinguish them from the ordinary human, other sites and practices of mourning mark the ongoing and painful life of what Elspeth Probyn would call outside belonging.42 These spaces tend not to be capital intensive, and the events they commemorate are barely relevant to the almanac, the calendar, and the official time lines that are constantly reconstructed to provide national and global historical continuity. These minor forms are also authorless quasimonuments, but not made legitimate by mass cultural performance that absorbs much collective energy and value. Instead, they are irreducibly and painfully localized in zones of political anonymity not in the sacred beyond but the sordid beneath.

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Sarco-politics Anyone paying attention during the last fifteen years will, no doubt, have seen the AIDS quilt, with its series of fabric tombstones that make portable and public lives otherwise anonymous. Perhaps you have seen the Clothesline Project as well, which uses empty shirts on a line to designate women marked by domestic violence and rape.43 Link these with the masses of empty shoe pairs that newspapers reproduce to illustrate popular protest against the traffic in guns.44 Track the number of candlelight parades that erupt to witness any number of things, such as the burgeoning carceral culture of the USA, which now imprisons millions of the poorest and blackest occupants, or the proliferating number of hate crimes against gays and lesbians. In Point Richmond, CA, where I run in a park next to the beautiful San Francisco bay, two benches recently appeared, covered with cheerful ceramic squares. Each square is a message from an area youth to a sibling who was killed on the streets of Richmond, one of the poorest historically AfricanAmerican communities in the state. This archive of precarious signs evokes Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, which locates the import of its present moment in a catastrophic event: the “four little colored girls” “blown out of a church” by anti-civil rights agitators on “September 16, 1963.”45 Central to the novel is a struggle for the destiny of African-American history and the congealed economic value of the African-American labor on which that history is built. It places Milkman Dead at loggerheads with his ex-friend Guitar. Milkman views and wants to possess history as his personal symbolic and economic property, while Guitar wants the money Milkman seeks to fund a regime of counter-violence inspired by this haunting historic event. Every night now Guitar was seeing little scraps of Sunday dresses – white and purple, powder blue, pink and white, lace and voile, velvet and silk, cotton and satin, eyelet and grosgrain. . . . The bits of Sunday dresses that he saw did not fly; they hung in the air quietly, like the whole notes in the last measure of an Easter hymn. His personal vision of tattered fabric contrasts to the fractured icons newspaper readers might have seen: A stained-glass window. Fragments of images dangle from its leaden boundaries. The face of Jesus is ruined. Dark space where the bomb has torn it off. His hands and crook intact. The legend of the window – willing workers – half there, half absent. Small girls generate small monuments in memorial tatters and the stained glass window of the church, already fractured by design, is refragmented by political violence. Like the anonymous ceramics of surviving siblings and the rotting flowers and melting candles of witnessing and protest, these tatters

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demonstrate the peculiar contingency of minor histories and lives. As we picture these squares and shreds of wasted personhood, we remember the promise that humans are to be protected as generic subjects within liberal democracies. So the question arises: which kinds of life engender ordinary anonymity and, in contrast, which unhistoric lives are exemplary only as waste, uncanny in trauma, and perfected in death? A rupture with the dominant story leads to a momentary fold in space, and in a few hours the minor fold is reabsorbed into the concrete organizing signs of the built and more permanent world. Can the language of sacrifice, which presumes sacrifice for, actually be used, when the dead are constituted by a prior negation? For whom is the rhetoric of sacrifice a call to arms, or a consolation rhetoric, or a sentimental form of mourning and self-confirmation? This contrast between monumental styles of the mass public and scenes located in majority and subordinate publics, in big pieces and small scraps, and in iconic and hieroglyphic writing speaks volumes about the politics of anonymity or what Agamben calls “bare life” in a universalist culture that traffics in flesh. Here the privileged economy of the inhuman returns as social negativity, which marks its subjects out for a sensually violent destiny that is somehow made to seem almost random. There is nothing random about it. The populations that have been variously excluded from the US franchise – African-Americans, Asians, white women, criminals, and unnaturalized immigrants – have been negated in particular ways and at particular junctures. Yet they/we have had much in common too, linked to the gestures of denegation I list here and the ambiguities of social value they represent. Counter-hegemonic activity like this measures the scale of negation any subordinated people negotiate, but many different vectors of subordination are measured therein. The contingent memorial is at once a gesture of internal affiliation and collective belonging, a performance of discontinuity with the privileged world, and a reaching out to the promise of democratic praxis, and to alliances yet unmade. Engendering publicity about violence, suffering, and death, the makers of these memorial moments redeploy the technique of making publics through sentimental identification. Yet they also express not privilege but what’s personal about impersonal and depersonalizing violence. Socially negated populations are marked definitionally by proximity to death and survival, by a sense of being too alive and not alive enough.46 These survival subcultures are all associated with flesh, sexuality, and labor, and as such their gestures of denegation mark the impossibility of their absorption into the liberal machinery that also thrives on their availability to be negated, mourned for, regretted. No doubt other contradictory claims will be made about the conditions under which particular minoritized groups can survive in liberal democracies. What’s at stake here is the status of a violent non-event. Can we also say that the liberal ideology of the additive population, of the capacity of the vote form to absorb economic and social antagonism and contradiction, is enabled by developments in the modernity of sexual culture?

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Woman suffrage offered a challenge to the structure of people’s fantasies and intimacies, and everyone knew that. Insofar as it was organized by desires to change the rules of property in the self and in things, the new voting population’s transformation into a non-dangerous collectivity essentially required the sacrifice of the counter-knowledge women of all classes and races knew they brought to the political public sphere. The least common denominator ex-nominated women from making their vote a new kind of political event. I am suggesting that the mechanism for fashioning this impossible position is the sarco-political. By the turn of the twentieth century, the already immense imperial, capitalist, legal, and therapeutic investment in heteronormative institutions of intimacy and modes of regulation of labor value were faced with an overdetermined demand to change the mode of formal political membership referenced by the concept “legitimacy.” At the same time the smaller the unit imagined the less likely were these structural expansions to engender greater instabilities. Heteronormativity kept the system stable through a species logic of social reproduction so that structural change could be experienced untraumatically, more like a deep breath than a surgical incision. When African-American men were enfranchised, the abstracting ideology of free labor was appropriated to saturate the definition of freedom, muting out more radical critiques: meanwhile, the bodily mixing aversive to sarco-politics/heteronormativity was maintained by zoning and miscegenation law that constrained black political participation until the civil rights moment of the mid-1960s. Thus, though the content of the shift wrought by woman suffrage involved different semiotic elasticities – such as the deployment of sentimental realism and comic distraction to resolve the anxiety that women and men would become even more averse should women experience legal autonomy – the structure is much the same. Sarco-politics not only provides a way to read the hegemonic patterns of structural domination in the USA but is the heteronormative mechanism itself, using a species logic to mark the dominated as both too alive and not fully human, therefore not relevant to notions of sovereign individuality – whether or not they have the vote. Ranciere points out that the proletarii are etymologically “those who do nothing but reproduce their own multiplicity and who, for this very reason, do not deserve to be counted.”47 This is why I have adapted the philosopher Sue Golding’s language of denegation to substitute for the democratic discourse of rights and legitimacy. In a universalist culture whose units of inclusion and exclusion are formally legal, the incommensurateness between legal standing and social membership (between formal inclusion in the law and informal domination by it, for example) militates against the citizenship of the sarco-subject.48 He may become politically denegated but this has never yet erased the genealogy of inhumanity his body represents for its privileged others in so many symbolic, institutional, and economic contexts of production.

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Conclusion: flesh and the maidens This essay is the beginning of a thought about the scales and styles of domination that justify democratic violence, involving a productive contradiction between formal political inclusion and the relegation of entire populations to a dehumanized domain of liveness and violence.49 The nation manages privilege according to a fantasy of privilege that involves merging into the ether of bodiless universality. In the USA, dominant modes of universality have worked, by and large, according to three logics: the appearance of white maleness, the possession of property, and the capacity to feel pain. The abstracting effect of pain has been counter-deployed effectively as a universalist rhetoric of public seduction and demand by numerous countercultures since the early republic: this tactic seeks to affirm the deep identity of a humanity defined by its proximity to death and expiation. Yet we have seen that this tactic has not ameliorated the negation of the very people who adopt it as a sign of their actual humanity. When women sought the franchise, they wanted so many things. What they got instead was the formal vestibularity of the vote, which has spawned now seventy years of further struggle to make claims on the modes of justice that got left behind when citizenship was reduced to the slightest possible event. It always seems like the generous thing to do, to find the smallest already available site of consensus and to organize the world around that site, promising that nothing will change except for the better life that can be already imagined. But we have seen that giving up the big claim on behalf of moderation moves the center to the right. We have seen that valuing pain as the only source of humanity that dissolves the specular and economic relays to citizenship, splits the subaltern into ruined bodies and dismembered demanding voices. It has ended up reproducing the bodily logic of domination, which links the sarco-subject of citizenship to the body that is both too alive and too close to death to entrust with the future of history. Thus those associated with not the ownership of capital but the reproduction of life’s material and tactile things are linked by the notion that one is reduced to the body, one becomes all surface, like flesh. Paradoxically, there is no homeopathic solution to this problem, either more body politics or less. The negated populations who cannot be absorbed into the normal without threatening to change its terms seem to increase their symbolic negativity, their association with subpersonhood, whenever they make a claim on the neutralizing structures of consent. I recently saw the original Island of Lost Souls.50 In this film animals are transformed into men in a room they call “the house of pain.” “Take me to the house of pain,” they plead, where through unanesthetized suffering and cutting they became more human. To be more human is to understand pain as the pedagogy that engenders respect for the law – it’s an ethics of cruel optimism. Abstraction is held out as an ideal to which the men can aspire. Meanwhile, though, bodily pain is a burden the animal-men seek proudly to bear, as if submitting their bodies to the law, becoming cuts of

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meat for the body politic, were almost as good as enjoying the conceptual freedom of the law. Maybe it is. Nevertheless, the scientist cannot make more than one woman, and she cannot be a man before the law. The female animal is even more embodied than the animal-men by becoming a person; yet she is even less human than they are because she attracts the law, bringing it down to the shameful sensation of its own bodily particularity. Of course, this is the standard critique of the embodied: they reduce the world to their level. Flesh begets flesh. This story about sexuality and its unshakable species logic cannot be dissolved, only sublimated, and barely that, within the liberal regime of juridical fetishism. The “pacifying procedure”51 of liberal inclusion, through the vote, gay marriage, and so on, works as a hegemonic lure only at the moment that it becomes an end in itself, not part of a larger world-changing project. The vote, for example, was not the opposite of the disenfranchisement of which it was a foundational part. Beyond the tactical embrace of liberal sovereignties it must become a democratic project to engender the flesh as the human, not as its opposite. This essay tries to demonstrate the complexity of such an aim. Subjects associated with the reproduction of life – with sexuality, manual labor, racial distinction – would then be imaginable within the intimate and economic imaginary of the social. The privileged individual, no longer optimistic, then, about the mobility made possible by normative universality, would also no longer feel confirmed while mourning the ongoing violence to women, people of color, queers, and workers whose bodies are deemed expendable. Finally, bodiless, or sexuality, would no longer define the political value of the negated citizen.

Notes 1 This essay was originally published as Lauren Berlant, “Uncle Sam Needs a Wife: Citizenship and Denegation,” Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics, Russ Castronovo and Dana D. Nelson, eds. Copyright 2002, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission. 2 For a comparative argument that also links heterosocial kinship models to national ideologies of abstract universalism, see Jacqueline Stevens, Reproducing the State, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. 3 Central to my thought about hegemony and formalism is Stuart Hall, “Gramsci’s relevance for the study of race and ethnicity,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, eds, New York: Routledge, 1996, 411–440. 4 For the extended argument concerning US pain culture, see Berlant, “The subject of true feeling: pain, privacy, and politics,” in Austin Sarat, ed., Cultural Pluralism, Identity and the Law, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997, 49–84. 5 Ida Clyde Clarke, Uncle Sam Needs a Wife, Philadelphia: John C. Winston Co., 1925. 6 E. J. Dionne, Jr, Why Americans Hate Politics, New York: Touchstone, 1992; Thomas J. Johnson, Carol E. Hayes, and Scott P. Hayes, eds, Engaging the Public: How Government and the Media Can Reinvigorate American Democracy,

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8 9 10

London: Sage, 1999; Albert H. Cantril and Susan Davis Cantril, Reading Mixed Signals : Ambivalence in American Public Opinion About Government, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Secondary texts on this topic that ballast my general representation of the period context and the contemporary historiography of it are Kristi Andersen, After Suffrage: Women in Partisan and Electoral Politics before the New Deal, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996; Mary Jo Buhle, Women and American Socialism, 1879–1920, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981; Nancy F. Cott, ed., The History of Women in the United States, vols 19 and 20, Munich: K. G. Saur, 1994; Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987; Janet M. Cramer, Woman as Citizen: Race, Class, and the Discourse of Women’s Citizenship, 1894–1909, in Journalism and Mass Communication Monographs 165, March 1998; Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: the Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978; J. Stanley Lemons, The Woman Citizen: Social Feminism in the 1920s, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973; Sara Evans, Born for Liberty, New York: Free Press, 1989; Barbara Green, Spectacular Confessions: Autobiography, Performative Activism, and the Sites of Suffrage 1904–1938, New York: St Martins Press, 1997; Aileen Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920, Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1971; Janet Lewis, Before the Vote Was Won: Arguments For and Against Woman’s Suffrage, New York: Routledge, 1987; Martha M. Solomon, ed., A Voice of their Own: The Woman Suffrage Press, 1840–1910, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991; Suzanne M. Marilley, Woman Suffrage and the Origins of Liberal Feminism in the United States, 1820–1920, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988. See Roger Rouse, “The nightmare paper,” unpublished manuscript. Among the myriad manuals read for this essay are: Mary Austin, The Young Woman Citizen, New York: The Woman’s Press, 1920; Hayes Baker-Crothers and Ruth A. Hudnut, Problems of Citizenship, New York: Henry Holt, 1924; Raymond F. Christ, Teacher’s Manual. Arranged for the Guidance of Public-School Teachers of the United States for Use with the Students Textbook to Create a Standard Course of Instruction for the Preparation of the Candidate for the Responsibilities of Citizenship, US Bureau of Naturalization, 1918; DAR Manual for Citizenship, Washington, DC: National Society Daughters of the American Revolution, 1981; C. F. Dole, The Young Citizen, Boston, MA: D. C. Heath, 1899; Eve Garrette, A Political Handbook for Women, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, and Co., 1944; Shaler Mathews, ed., The Woman Citizen’s Library, vols 1–12, Chicago: The Civics Library, 1914; Victor P. Morey and Fred T. Wilhelms, Organizing and Conducting a Citizenship Class: a Guide for Use in the Public Schools by Teachers of Candidates for Naturalization, US Government Printing Office, 1945; Joy Elmer Morgan, ed., The American Citizen’s Handbook, 1941, Washington, DC: National Council for Social Studies, 1968; William E. Mosher, ed., Introduction to Responsible Citizenship, New York: Henry Holt, 1941; Howard Washington Odum, Community and Government: a Manual of Discussion and Study of the Newer Ideals of Citizenship, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina extension leaflet, 1921; Elizabeth Fisher Read, Citizenship and the Vote: a Statement for the Women Citizens of the State of New York, Americanization Committee of the New York State Woman Suffrage Party and the New York City Woman Suffrage Party, 1918; Benjamin D. Scott, Citizenship Readers: Notable Events in the Making of America, Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1930; Justina Leavitt Wilson, Woman Suffrage: a Study Outline,

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11 12 13

14 15 16

17

18 19

20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Lauren Berlant White Plains, NY: The H. W. Wilson Co., 1916; Citizenship Education and Naturalization Information, US Department of Justice, 1997; Edwin DuBois Shurter, ed., Woman Suffrage: Bibliography and Selected Arguments June 1, 1912, Austin, TX: University of Texas; Edwin DuBois Shurter, American Citizenship and Government, Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1930; US Army Studies in Citizenship for Recruits, Washington, DC, 1922. Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Rachel Bowlby and Geoffrey Bennington, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992. Clarke, op. cit., 207. See, for instance, the multiply authored novel The Sturdy Oak. The Sturdy Oak was serially published in The Pictorial Review, the same magazine from which Uncle Sam Needs a Wife was derived. One of the novel’s authors, Mary Austin, was also the author of her own citizenship manual, The Young Woman Citizen, op. cit. See also Elizabeth Jordan, ed., The Sturdy Oak, Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1998. Clarke, op. cit., 185. Ibid., 136. See Rosalind Turborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. For general discussions of the concept of an informed citizenry in the USA that address the relation of woman suffrage, see Richard D. Brown, The Strength of a People: the Idea of an Informed Citizenry in America, 1650–1870, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996, and Robert Wiebe, Self-Rule: a Cultural History of American Democracy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Turborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, passim; Ann D. Gordon, with Bettye Collier-Thomas, John H. Bracey, Arlene Voski Avakian, Joyce Avrech Berkman, eds, African American Women and the Vote: 1937–1965, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997. Mary Sumner Boyd, The Woman Citizen, New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1918, 160. Garrette, A Political Handbook for Women, 2–3. A consent-soliciting linkage between the vote and the commodity form suffused the twentieth-century suffrage and feminist movements, which made them look tactically more like mainstream politics than not. See also Anderson. John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970, 2nd edn, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Garrette, op. cit., 2. On the distinction between the suffragette and the feminist, see Nancy F. Cott, op. cit., passim. Cott argues that feminism, a more modern formation, was less focused on the vote and more broadly based politically in terms both of class and sexual activism than was suffragism. Austin, op. cit., 8, 3. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the subaltern speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. and with an introduction by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988, 271–313. Clarke, op. cit., 19. For an expanded explication of national sentimentality, see Berlant, “The subject of true feeling.” Much thanks to Marita Sturken for this “personal communication.” Fredric Jameson, “Reification and ideology in mass culture,” Social Text, 1979, vol. 1, 130–148. Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.

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30 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereignty and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller Roazen, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998; Claude Lefort, Democracy and Social Theory, trans. David Macey, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988; Louis Marin and Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: the Allegory of The Female Form, New York: Atheneum, 1985. 31 Michael Taussig, The Magic of the State, New York: Routledge, 1997, 102. 32 Ernst H. Kantorowicz with William Chester Jordan, The King’s Two Bodies: a Study in Mediaeval Political Theology, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. 33 Agamben, op. cit., 106. 34 John Sartain, “Abraham Lincoln the martyr,” 1865; Dion DiMucci, “Abraham, Martin, and John,” 1968. This song’s remarkable staying power as a mnemonic for national desire can be verified in any web search: thousands of hits register a vast number of usages: from memories of 1968 to personal patriotic expression to its potential classroom uses as a tool for teaching history and citizenship. 35 Michael Warner, “The mass public and the mass subject,” in The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993, 234–256; Mark Seltzer, Serial Killers, New York: Routledge, 1998. 36 Susan D. Moeller, Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War, and Death, New York: Routledge, 1999. 37 John Berger, “Pictures of agony,” in Berger, About Looking, New York: Pantheon Books, 1980, 37–40. 38 Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s artwork essay reconsidered,” October, Fall 1992, vol. 62, 3–41. 39 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. I: an Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. 40 Lauren Berlant, “The face of America and the state of emergency,” in The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997, 175–220. 41 Stjepan G. Mesˇtrovic´, Postemotional Society, London: Sage, 1997. 42 Elspeth Probyn, Outside Belonging, New York: Routledge, 1996. 43 The Clothesline Project began in 1990 when members of the Cape Cod Women’s Agenda hung a clothesline across the village green in Hyannis, Massachusetts with 31 shirts designed by survivors of assault, rape and incest. Women viewing the clothesline came forward to create shirts of their own and the line just kept growing. Since that first display the Project has grown to 300+ local Clothesline Projects nationally and internationally, with an estimated 35,000 shirts. The Clothesline Project has become a distinctive resource for healing from violence and creating social change. Lines have been displayed at schools, universities, State Houses, shopping malls, churches, and women’s events. The first National Display took place April 8–9, 1995 in Washington D.C. in conjunction with NOW’s Rally For Women’s Lives. Similar to the AIDS quilt, the Clothesline Project puts a human face on the statistics of violence against women. The Project increases awareness of the impact of violence against women, celebrates a woman’s strength to survive, and provides an avenue for her to courageously break the silence. Families and friends of women who have died as a result of violence can make a shirt to express their deep loss. From website, online, available HTTP: www.canes.gsw.peachnet.edu/~gswnow/clothesline.html. 44

A Millennial March of Empty Shoes. Like the AIDS quilt, the Silent March is a deeply moving way of showing the human toll taken by the gun epidemic. In election year 2000, the Silent March will mobilize Americans

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Lauren Berlant to call for comprehensive federal regulation of firearms, just like cars, pharmaceuticals and other consumer products. Our fourth national campaign will again portray the terrible human toll taken by guns through a “silent march” – rows and rows of silent, empty shoes, some with personal notes tucked inside sent by family members of victims. This sea of shoes represents the tens of thousands of Americans who lose their lives to guns every year. From website, online, available HTTP: www.silentmarch.org/noguns/data/who.html.

45 Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon, New York: Plume, 1987. This segment extends the work on the aesthetic of representative fragments in minor literatures in Berlant, “ ’68 or something,” Critical Inquiry, Fall 1994, vol. 21, no. 1, 124–155. 46 See “Pax Americana: the case of Show Boat,” in Cultural Institutions of the Novel, ed. W. B. Warner and Deidre Lynch, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997, 399–422. 47 Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998, 121. 48 Sue Golding, The Eight Technologies of Otherness, New York: Routledge, 1997. 49 Liveness describes a continually negotiated quality of sexuality and citizenship in “Live sex acts (parental advisory),” in The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997, 55–81. 50 Island of Lost Souls (Erle C. Kenton, 1933) is a remake of H. G. Wells’s Island of Dr. Moreau. I choose not to name the characters here because names humanize, and their subhumanity is the point both of the film and this anecdote. 51 Jacques Ranciere, On the Shores of Politics, London: Verso, 1995, 11.

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Figure 2.1 Crowds and screens in Hyde Park. BBC TV live broadcast, 6 September 1997. Source: BBC Television.

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2

Televisual popular politics Diana and democracy1 Jon Simons

Media technologies are an integral and vital element of democratic governance. I begin this essay by outlining the theoretical presuppositions of the contention that media are central to democratic politics, then go on to use Princess Diana’s funeral to illustrate the issues at stake.2 From the print culture of the early modern period to the televisual culture of today, media technologies and institutions have been the means by which democratic principles of popular sovereignty, representation, and accountability are put into practice. At the same time, media technologies have been the main means by which political leadership has governed the political public as it expanded under universal suffrage to include almost the entire adult population of any given polity. The political public of representative democratic regimes are mediated publics, in that they exist and are constituted as publics through the mediation of technologies of mass media. The public sphere of democratic politics is thus part of, and central to, the mediated sphere of popular culture. Putting the same point in other terms, the political publics of democratic regimes are governed through popular culture, by means of technologies of mediation. Many political theorists have regarded the mass media and communications technologies as hindrances to the proper functioning of democracy. Perhaps the paradigmatic statement of such suspicion is Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,3 which posits the implicit principles of non-coercive, egalitarian debate embedded in the bourgeois public sphere as normative criteria against which to measure the distorted communication of commercialised publicity. Significantly, the trajectory of decline in the levels of public debate possible in the mediated public sphere described by such theorists tends to coincide with extension of suffrage and hence also with the implementation of popular sovereignty. Many commentators share the view that “the crisis of communication for citizenship . . . [u]ltimately . . . inheres in the massification of Western societies.”4 Yet, the massification of Western societies is also their popularisation, mass culture being also popular culture. The debate within critical theory and cultural studies between “populists” and “pessimists” about popular culture is central to considerations of the role of media technologies in democratic

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governance.5 In my view, as in dialectical understandings of popular or mass culture, both sides of the dispute are part of the bigger and contradictory picture, such that popular culture is both “where hegemony arises and . . . one of the places where socialism might be constituted.”6 It is only when the link between “popular culture” and “popular democracy” is acknowledged that the media can be recognised as necessary conditions for democracy. To put it bluntly, democratic politics is necessarily conducted within and as an aspect of popular, or mass, culture. Media technologies are the means by which democratic publics are governed, yet also the means by which publics can govern government. The public is not simply the adult population considered as an electorate, but a political subject that has to be constituted by technologies of government in order both to be governed and to govern. Communications technologies are technological not only in the obvious sense of the various technological means of producing, transmitting, receiving, and storing texts or messages. They are also social and political technologies of immense significance to the mass societies of modernity and their institutions. It is thus regrettable that social and political theory has, as John Thompson notes, paid so little attention to the communications media that involve “new forms of action and interaction.”7 Communications media are technologies for acting and responding at a distance, rather than through face-to-face interaction. I regard as non-controversial, yet significant Peter Dahlgren’s statement that: “The development of mass-based democracy in the west coincided historically with the emergence of the mass media as the dominant institutions of the public sphere.” He adds that media are “central agents in the shaping of publics” which “emerge in the discursive interaction of citizens,” such that “audiences . . . should be realistically seen as a moment, a step in the process of being a member of the public.”8 The public spaces in which we engage in politics, as well as the active publics of which we are members are all thus, to greater or lesser degrees, mediated entities constituted by media technologies. A great deal of that public space is constituted by media with major visual rather than typographical elements. The mediasphere at the heart of our culture is what Régis Debray calls the “videosphere,” which has succeeded the “graphosphere” in which print-based media predominate.9 Yet it must be borne in mind that the “videosphere” is as much aural as visual. Since the telephone and the radio, contemporary culture has not depended on the written word alone when acting at a distance, but on the recording and transmission of the spoken word. Media technologies govern the public by means of popular styles that combine visual and verbal elements in media such as film and TV. In this essay I analyse the popular style of TV coverage of Diana’s funeral to demonstrate how a hegemonic public as a “nation in mourning” was constituted around Diana. But I also look at the difficulty of constituting a counter-hegemonic public using the elite style of print culture, as a result

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of which that counter-public felt marginalised and silenced. From this case study, we can see how different publics are constituted by different types and clusters of the media, and by different media styles. My conclusion is not that the reasoned, verbal styles and printed communications are the embodiment of the properly democratic public, while on the other hand the populist public is manufactured and manipulated by the televisual mass media. Nor do I claim, as perhaps a thoroughgoing populist might, that the temporary televisual public that emerged around Diana is the true, authentic representation of the democratic will. Rather, my points are: first, that no democratic will exists, to be represented or manipulated, outside of its constitution by communication technologies; and, second, that it is entirely appropriate for the democratic public to be constituted by popular rather than elite styles. To put that another way, I regard as elitist the Habermasian view that democratic will formation should be the result of verbal argument, or deliberation.

Diana’s mediated publics The death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997 undoubtedly set off a series of huge media events, but opinion is divided as to whether these were anything more than media events, or what Daniel Boorstin would call “pseudo-events.”10 At the heart of the dispute over the significance of those media events is whether or not the mass media (in particular the tabloid press and the main terrestrial TV channels, BBC1 and ITV1) manipulated their readers and audiences to such an extent that they manufactured a mood of national mourning that peaked at Diana’s funeral. My focus here is on whether or not the media constituted a genuine political public in the week leading up to the funeral. Was that mediated public merely an audience, or should it be understood as a political subject? My question is rather different from trying to figure out whether the mourning for Diana was genuine, or why Diana meant so much to so many people. I am more interested in the relations forged between people in Diana’s public than in their relations to her. There are two kinds of “public” to consider in drawing out the distinction between passive audience and political agency. First, there were those who immersed themselves in the media output, boosting audiences. The tabloids sold a lot of copies – an extra million for The Sun the day after the accident, but also a 20 per cent rise for the liberal-left Guardian over the week. The TV viewing figures were high – 32 million for the funeral, which is 56 per cent of the population. Significantly, most generally heard the breaking news on the radio on Sunday morning, but switched to the TV, with both main stations providing marathonic coverage. (It is worth noting that when the commercial network, ITV, resumed its normal schedule at 7.30 p.m. with a popular soap opera, it got much higher ratings than the Diana tribute broadcast on BBC1.) From a sample of 450 people who

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had previously participated in a long-term British Film Institute Audience Tracking Study, one-third watched that coverage all day. It should be noted that the sample over-represents mature and female viewers, such that 70 per cent of them watched the funeral, above the 56 per cent national average.11 Then there is another type of public, the public who did not only participate in the public spectacle by viewing it privately, but also ventured into the public space. Millions participated in events preceding the funeral, queuing for hours to sign books of commemoration, laying flowers at sites all over the country as well as at the royal palaces in London. Many thousands appeared as willing extras at the funeral itself, lining the procession route, filling public spaces next to Westminster Abbey where the service was held, or viewing on huge screens erected in Hyde Park. Of the tracking sample, 30 per cent participated in one of those ways. There are two temptations I wish to resist in this sort of distinction between a public in the sense of a seemingly passive or manipulated audience, and a public of people coming together to act in the public sphere. The first temptation is to dismiss the difference on the grounds that “all the public’s mourning of Diana was vicarious and mediated – even those who went to London did so only as a result of messages conveyed to them by newspaper, TV and radio.”12 First, that view is too simplistic an appraisal of the way people report their responses. Forty per cent of the tracking sample said they were shocked when they first heard the news, and 25 per cent admitted that the coverage of Diana during the week changed their views about her. While 10 per cent reported that they did want to join in after seeing the pictures of others, most who did do something other than watch TV said the coverage did not affect them. Nor does it make sense to suggest that people reacted in ways that they were not disposed to do because of the media coverage, given that the counter-hegemonic public did not join in (more of that later). On this occasion, media leaders judged their audiences fairly well, tapping into a groundswell of feeling which, when disseminated, generated a bigger groundswell. That, however, does not amount to manipulation, unless it would also be considered manipulation on the part of the newspapers at the time of the French Revolution that so many people took to the barricades.13 Second, this reduction of the active public to the same level as the audiences at home is premised on the assumption that genuine mourning and participation must be “immediate” or spontaneous, in which case even those acting publicly are no more than “the spectators [who] became the spectacle.”14 Such statements undermine the agency of Diana’s televisual public. To be sure, Diana was already a media star, so it is true that “the death and mourning of Diana occurred within the context of a pre-existing media audience of enormous dimensions.”15 Yet, as Homi Bhabha notes, Diana was both an agent in the construction of her own image and active in the creation of a constituency around herself, using verbal as well as visual art.

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Significantly, the image as well as the constituency was contradictory, “combining the attributes of a Princess Margaret and a Marilyn Monroe,”16 and turning “the Princess at one moment into the saviour of a people made frigid by Tory rule, and at another, the guardian angel of a people set free by the ‘social marketeers’ of New Labour.”17 Moreover, Diana as a popular image involves “extravagance and excesses” that should not be too quickly normalised.18 Contradictions and excess are among the main characteristics of popular culture. John Fiske describes the necessary features of popularity in television. From the side of the audiences, he notes their activity in producing a range of meanings and pleasures in relation to a variety of social positions. He also notes that television can only be popular, appealing to many different audiences, if it is polysemic and prone to semiotic excess. The contradictory nature of popular culture means that the very same TV programmes or cultural events can be instances of both containment and resistance, both regressive and progressive, and thus truly dialectical. Mass cultural products are only popular if they allow for meanings that show the contradictions of capitalism or the antagonisms that fissure any hegemonic articulation. Fiske says that television “promotes and provokes a network of resistances to its own power whose attempt to homogenize and hegemonize breaks down on the instability and multiplicity of its meanings and pleasures.”19 One is reminded of Foucault’s dictum that “where there is power, there is resistance.”20 The second temptation is to think of those who “took to the streets” in one way or another as a genuine public, and to think of the viewers as a virtual and passive public. It has been suggested that people went to London because the media could not give them the sense of solidarity they wanted and which the media said existed.21 They wanted to be co-present, not to act at a distance. These distinctions between “real” and “mediated” publics are not useful or appropriate for contemporary society in which there can be no large political public that is not mediated. Political action, whether from above or below, cannot be limited to unmediated action, as so much of it is action at a distance. In this case, first, spontaneous reactions to the news from among the sample were to radio news, but then people turned for confirmation, more information, even reassurance, to the TV. Of course, people cannot interact with the TV in the way they can with neighbours, but it does give people a way to gauge how others are reacting to the situation and so also an idea of how to react themselves. In other words, going to place flowers by a palace gates is no less authentic if it is done after seeing it done on TV than it is if a neighbour says they have done it or are thinking about it. It is thus not incorrect to characterise the events around Diana’s death as a “set of events which were absolutely explicable in their media presentation and reception.”22 But if the implication is that the events were not real or genuine because they were mediated, then the implication is misplaced.

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The televisual publics in action The British media did not so much fabricate a national mood as transmit a variety of moods between their audiences. A good indication that the media leaders were not imposing a mood on all their audiences but sharing one between substantial sectors of them was the relative absence of expert opinion in contrast to high reliance on “vox pop” journalism. In the BBC evening news the day before the funeral, there was evidence of both. The “vox pop” coverage symbolically included both Protestant and Catholic voices from Belfast. As well as expressing a closeness and affinity with Diana, even though she was surely a distant, unreachable figure for those speaking, they expressed national unity around Diana, as well as giving their individual reasons for involvement in the national mood of mourning. The broadcast also linked marginalised groups into the mourning public. In the video grab seen in Figure 2.2, the cameras visit a mosque in the northern city of Bradford in which race riots have occurred in more recent years. The inclusion of Muslims was, of course, prompted by Diana’s partnership with Dodi Fayed who also died in the crash. But well before 9/11, Islam was generally associated with fundamentalism and extremism in the British media, so perhaps even then without the verbal commentary many viewers might

Figure 2.2 Prayers for Diana in Bradford Mosque. BBC TV evening news, 5 September 1997. Source: BBC Television.

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assume that this is a depiction of militant extremism rather than national mourning. For this moment, however, Muslims were admitted into the national public. The worshipper looking at the camera acknowledges his role in the construction of consensus. In the days before the funeral, then, the media built on Diana’s existing image and constituency to construct a national public. The ultimate political aim when using media technologies to construct political constituencies is to constitute popular audiences as a “nation,” a “oneness of imagination that binds citizens to states,” even though some audiences are transnational.23 The media’s visual and verbal interweaving of different groups, regions, and individual voices into a national public succeeded momentarily in achieving a hegemonic effect. The distinction between the “physical,” co-present public and the virtual, mediated public was undone in a key moment of the BBC live coverage of the funeral service itself. During the service the “official” funeral participants sat inside Westminster Abbey, while crowds outside listened, and in Hyde Park watched on large screens, as shown in the video still in Figure 2.1. During the service, then, the people outside the Abbey became a public, connected through the mediation of loud speakers or visual screens, yet, like a viewing family, they were able to interact with those around them, each assessing their own reactions against those of others. It was reported that the crowds outside applauded first Elton John, then Earl Spencer’s powerful speech. The second time, the applause caught on in the Abbey, breaking funeral protocol. In Hyde Park, the crowd gave Elton John a standing ovation and then remained standing for the rest of the funeral.24 From that point on, the editors of the live coverage switched eight times between the Abbey and the crowds outside, who were both a viewing and listening public, as well as a public being watched by viewers at home. In the scene depicted at the beginning of this essay, the crowds in Hyde Park are watching themselves, spectators in their own spectacle. Through them, the viewers at home could picture the whole viewing public watching (see Figure 2.1). Almost from the start of the coverage, TV was focused as much on the public as on Diana. The crash site was deemed to be an inappropriate site around which to broadcast the first day’s “catastrophe” TV, because the busy road was already reopened.25 So, the cameras switched to the floral tributes in London, to the symbolic sites of royal palaces. TV made the public spaces visible, not the site of death. A tight link was woven between the “public” represented in these scenes and in vox pop material, and Diana as represented in the vast amount of footage of her built up in her 16 years in public, or media view. This connection was nicely captured by Tony Blair’s press secretary, Alastair Campbell, who provided the Prime Minister with the key phrase of his short speech on the day after the accident: “the people’s princess.” The resonance of that “sound bite” among Diana’s televisual publics is an indication that a hegemonic effect had been achieved.26 But if Diana became, even if only for a short time, the people’s princess, then who were the people? Below I will look at the “counter-hegemonic”

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public as a way of defining the people negatively, according to the outsiders. At this point the crucial question is whether the “people” was a political public in the sense I have suggested, not only governed through media technologies, but at the same time an active public, not only amenable to representation but also able to “govern” in some sense. In some very obvious ways Diana’s televisual public was constituted as an agent amenable to representation. Mediation in this case was not only a matter of mediation between a “viewing public” at home and political and social leadership, but also between the former and the “participating public.” The TV coverage not only mediated between the “official public” inside Westminster Abbey and the viewers at home, but between the people on the streets, in Hyde Park, and those at home. The “participating public” thus represented the whole public, who participated through them, much like sympathetic viewers of a televised demonstration. With the benefit of hindsight, and contrary to some of the more utopian analyses of the time, Diana’s public was not participating in a “floral revolution,” a new wave of inclusiveness and democratisation directed against the emotional remoteness and unresponsiveness of the royal family and the political establishment in general.27 Diana’s televisual public did not last, and hence did not transform the emotional character of British politics or even the monarchy. Diana’s image and popular constituency were too polysemic and contradictory to sustain or provide the basis for a political movement. My point is not that the sense of solidarity experienced at the time was illusory, but that it was momentary and fragile. Significantly, it formed around an absence rather than a presence, in acts of mourning for what had been lost. Yet this was not an aesthetic community of shared feelings of grief at the loss of a loved one, but a shared feeling of feeling; or, perhaps, not a community of feeling, but a feeling of community. Momentarily, there was a utopian expression that a form of public solidarity was still possible. Diana’s televised, mediated public demonstrated the possibility rather than the actuality of a democratic public acting in concert.

The typographic public and counter-public Diana’s televisual public was hegemonic, and thus also contested. The contradictions involved in the identification of popular solidarity with her image were significant enough for there to be a considerable, if marginalised, counter-public. Moreover, the strength of feeling of exclusion on the part of those who did not share the feeling of community is evidence of the hegemonic effect. Ninety-eight per cent of radio listeners calling the BBC’s Feedback programme complained about the excessive extent of BBC coverage. Among the tracking sample, just over half expressed dissatisfaction with one aspect or another of the first day of marathonic coverage, while dissatisfaction with the excessive extent of TV coverage rose during the week. Ten per cent of the sample avoided watching the funeral altogether. But

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more significant is the depth of feeling of those who did not understand the level of feeling of others, who did not believe it could be genuine, or who blamed the media for creating an atmosphere of conformity. Some people reported being made to feel guilty about not being saddened by Diana’s death or for deliberately distancing themselves from the prevailing mood. Others felt that the media were trying to whip up mass hysteria, which for some people prompted associations with totalitarian manipulation through the media.28 For those not caught up in it, the solidarity of Diana’s public was threatening. To a large extent, the dissenters were silenced, but in so far as they were constituted as a counter-hegemonic public, it was a typographic public connected together by print media. The letters page of The Guardian expressed the views of those who found themselves feeling like an underground movement because they did not share the supposedly popular sentiment.29 Moreover, the counter-hegemonic voices found themselves largely restricted to the “quality” print media, certainly not the tabloids. Given the media by which this alternative public was constituted, it is easy to fall into the trap of regarding this critical public that resists hegemony as a reflective, literary public. In contrast, the gullible public of Diana was seduced by visual images. On the face of it, there appears to be a direct correlation between the reasoned criticism of an active public constituted by typographic media and the mass deception of a passive public constituted by televisual media. That trap is one I wish to avoid for its elitist assumptions. Diana’s televisual public was also a reading public of broadsheets and academic journals as well as tabloids. The counter-public to Diana’s hegemony is not a counter-public because it is typographic rather than televisual. There is a counter-public because the contradictions and polysemy around the Diana phenomenon mean that not everything can be articulated, even in the moment of hegemony. But as it remained outside the videosphere, it was not an effective political public.30

Conclusion There is certainly something too simplistic and even optimistic in the view that the coverage of Diana’s death was an unproblematically democratic event and popular revolution. Yet, as a set of media events it should be read dialectically, not as either an ideological manipulation or an episode of true solidarity, but as one in which the potential for a democratic public to emerge from its constitution by media technologies was demonstrated. There is a structural and necessary relation between the popularisation of culture and the democratisation of politics. Democratic theorists as well as practitioners should embrace that necessity, the alternative to which is a Schumpeterian advocacy of democracy as a competition between elites in which the mass public is relatively uninvolved. The cost of that attempt to restrict democracy

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is the legitimacy of the regime, reflected in low voter turnout, which should be as worrying to political elites as democratic theorists. Yet, the popularisation of politics in the videosphere provokes concern that popular consent can never be real, as it will always be mediated. But how could appeals for popular consent not be couched in popular cultural forms? How could the publics of mass democracies be constituted other than through media technologies that depend on and disseminate popular culture? Democratic politics in this media age should not be dismissed for being in a fallen state, but acknowledged as a potential realisation of democracy. A key aim of democratic politics is to achieve popularity (in order to be elected), and that in turn requires that politics be conducted in terms of, and on the level of, popular culture. Even if a great deal of politics can be communicated in terms of what might be called elite culture, the broadsheets rather than the tabloids, NPR rather than commercial radio, Sixty Minutes rather than The Simpsons, if political elites cannot address the audiences of the latter outlets, they will either fail in competition with other elites who can or collectively face public apathy. Democratic government works through popular culture. No doubt, then, that genuine popular democracy did not exist, fully formed, in Diana’s hegemonic public constituted by the televisual and print media that also constitute popular culture. But if genuine democracy is to flourish, it will most likely be in popular culture and through media technologies. Democracy has more to do with Diana than deliberation.

Notes 1 Earlier versions of this chapter were presented as papers at Visual Worlds, University of California, Davis, 26–28 October 2001, and at the Canadian Political Science Association Meeting, Toronto, 29 May 2002. I am grateful to the organisers of Visual Worlds for their invitation and financial support, and to participants at both conferences for their insightful comments on the paper, to which I fear I have done insufficient justice in this revised version. 2 I discuss in greater detail the theoretical positions outlined here in three earlier essays: “Aesthetic political technologies,” Intertexts, 2002, vol. 6, 74–97; “Governing the public: technologies of mediation and popular culture,” Cultural Values, 2002, vol. 6, 167–81; and “Popular culture and mediated politics: intellectuals, elites and democracy,” in John Corner and Dick Pels (eds), Media and the Restyling of Politics, London: Sage, 2003, pp. 171–89. 3 Jürgen Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Cambridge: Polity, 1989. 4 Jay Blumler and Michael Gurevitch, The Crisis of Public Communication, London: Routledge, 1995, p. 221. 5 John Storey, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, 2nd edn, London: Prentice Hall, 1998, p. 429. 6 Stuart Hall, “Notes on deconstructing ‘the popular’,” pp. 442–53 in John Storey (ed.), Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, 2nd edn, London: Prentice-Hall, 1998, p. 453. 7 John Thompson, The Media and Modernity, Cambridge: Polity, 1995, p. 4.

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8 Peter Dahlgren, “Introduction,” in Peter Dahlgren and Colin Sparkes (eds), Communication and Citizenship, London: Routledge, 1991, p. 1, pp. 16–17. 9 Régis Debray, Media Manifestos, London: Verso, 1996. 10 Daniel Boorstin, The Image, New York: Vintage, 1992. 11 Unless otherwise indicated, all my figures as well as much other useful information is taken from Robert Turnock, Interpreting Diana, London: BFI, 2000. 12 Peter Ghosh, “Mediate and Immediate Mourning,” in Mandy Merck (ed.), After Diana: Irreverent Elegies, London: Verso, 1998, p. 41. 13 For an analysis of the role of the often scurrilous press in disseminating the ideas of the French Revolution, see John Hartley, Popular Reality, London: Arnold, 1996. 14 Mandy Merck, “Introduction: after Diana,” in Mandy Merck (ed.), After Diana, p. 7. 15 Ghosh, “Mediate and Immediate Mourning,” p. 42. 16 Ghosh, “Mediate and Immediate Mourning,” p. 44. 17 Homi Bhabha, “Designer creations,” in Mandy Merck (ed.), After Diana, p. 105. 18 Bhabha, “Designer Creations,” p. 109. 19 John Fiske, Television Culture, London: Methuen, 1987, p. 324. 20 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978, p. 95. 21 Turnock, Interpreting Diana, p. 79. 22 Ghosh, “Mediate and Immediate Mourning,” p. 47. 23 Toby Miller, Technologies of Truth: Cultural Citizenship and the Popular Media, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998, p. 28. There was, of course, much international coverage of Diana’s death and funeral. This chapter is limited to an analysis of the case as it pertains to Britain, though it should not be overlooked that many tourists participated in the events in London. 24 My thanks to Katherine Swallow for her account of being a participant in the crowd. 25 Turnock, Interpreting Diana, p. 25. 26 Much has already been written about the possible factors contributing to this hegemonic identification of “the people” with Diana. I do not have the space here to assess the various arguments, many of which (including my own) can be found in Theory & Event, 1997, vol. 1, no. 4; Mandy Merck (ed.), After Diana; and Jeffrey Richards, Scott Wilson, and Linda Woodhead (eds), Diana: The Making of a Media Saint, London: IB Tauris, 1999. 27 Martin Jacques, “The floral revolution,” The Observer, 7 September 1997. 28 Turnock, Interpreting Diana, pp. 82–3. 29 The Guardian, 6 September 1997. 30 The number of people in Britain with internet connections has increased substantially since 1997, so perhaps today the counter-hegemonic “underground” would have been constituted more effectively through that medium, in the same way as US dissidents since September 11 have found their electronic public space.

Figure 3.1 RTMark, Bringing IT to You!, promotional image for industrial video, 1999. By permission of RTMark.

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3

Manufacturing dissent Challenges for activism and alternative voices in the post-9/11 world M. Kauffmann and L. Stanley, RTMark

In August 2001, one of the prime challenges for artists, activists, and others working for positive social change was that of addressing the effects of globalization upon the world’s populations. Popular sentiment against the exploitation of labor, displacement of native peoples, and environmental degradation by corporate abuse of local laws, among other practices, was growing on the international level. Support for critics of the infliction of corporate abuses of power upon the global community was becoming ever more present in the Western mass media, suggesting that the community backing these dissenting viewpoints was expanding to levels not seen in decades. Evidence for this solidarity became clear with reports that the protests at the IMF/World Bank summit in Washington DC had been broader than anticipated, and more diverse in regards to demographics and the various types of tactical engagement that groups were planning. These efforts gained unprecedented institutional support from labor groups such as the AFL-CIO,1 lending the anti-globalization movement even greater legitimacy. There had been setbacks during other interventions, such as the unfortunate shooting death of a protestor and the detainment of Susanna Thomas and the Austrian Publix Theater in connection with the protests in Genoa.2 These events made global news. Initially, this essay planned to discuss the challenges to the community of dissent in terms of fads, fragmentation, effectiveness, and tactics to continue addressing issues of social justice. None of these issues had gone away, but the global terrain of dissent was to change in the span of a few hours on the morning of September 11, 2001 with the destruction of the World Trade Center. To say that the contextual frame in which activists and interventionist art can critically engage social issues has been radically altered would be an understatement. Since that event, Western society became simultaneously hyper- and desensitized to any perceived threat as the images of destruction and carnage reverberated throughout mainstream news media. The series of simultaneous and banalized hyperbole continued through the October 2001 anthrax scares, and the seemingly paranoiac musing of President Bush’s statement

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about tens of thousands of Al Qaeda terrorists lying in wait to attack hapless Americans.3 This has translated deeply into the art world. On the one hand, irony and subversion could be considered from one end of the social spectrum as quaint or banal, when viewed in context of the East Coast events. On the other hand, the same politically driven works of art could be seen as threatening or even criminal in the new social context. In fact, many museums have chosen to avoid the controversy that engaging with alternate viewpoints would bring upon them. The effect of simultaneous de- and hyper-sensitization is an effect of what theorist Patrick Lichty calls “social bandwidth,”4 which suggests the freedom or impediment of public discourse at a certain time. After the destruction of the WTC, the social bandwidth available for the articulation of human and civil rights issues has been narrowed, compounding the challenges for the pursuit of the ideals of social justice through public interventions. In the time after, not only does the activist have to contend with the issues at hand before 9/11, but the psychic backlash of that event has taken center stage in global culture, to the obscuring or obfuscation of other issues (although the Enron bankruptcy scandal became the first other event to take center stage after 9/11).5 However, many sources of critical inquiry are now non-sequitur, absent, or marginalized in the Western mediascape. Before any consideration of art as activism or the broader genre can take place, it would be beneficial to denote agendas that have been conflated in light of the New York events. On 9/11 media sources like CNN made the word “terrorism” synonymous with Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda’s network. Furthermore, the use of polemic terms such as “weaponization” were utilized in many different representational modes and contexts during the October anthrax scare, resulting in a “wilderness of mirrors” confronting anyone trying to glean any form of coherent meaning from televised events. This indiscriminate usage of terms expanded as Attorney General Ashcroft labeled e-hippies, virtual squatters, and hactivists as “terrorists” under his rhetorical frame of reference.6 And, even though groups like RTMark have used terms like “cultural terrorist”7 in the past in the most playful of terms, these polemics now seem hopelessly banal, and such tactics are now questionable, given the current situation. The key issue is that the interest of the anti-globalist activist or interventionist is improvement through reform of the standard of life (human or otherwise) as a whole under some version of the extant system. This can be through interruption of more harmful interests through media intervention, whereas the space in which the terrorist operates becomes visible in the disruption or destruction of the system itself, often with the disregard for loss of life or collateral damage, and has no basis in any agenda of reform except in the most radical sense. One of the primary tenets of the contemporary anti-globalist activist movement asserts the sanctity of human life. This is one of the “primary key issues” reiterated throughout RTMark materials, performances, and videos (such as “Bringing IT to YOU!,” see Figure 3.1).8 Even in the case of the

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Oregon Black Bloc during the Seattle WTO riot, the goal of the minor collateral disruption was that of media spectacle, and not of personal harm.9 The relatively innocuous nature of such interventions when contextualized in terms of the World Trade Center is clear. Although such comparisons may be reductive, the loss of human life as a result of a given intervention constitutes a major distinction between activist practices based on the premise of creating media awareness to spark reform in the extant socioeconomic system and the tactics of fear and destruction that work to destabilize those same social structures. In the current rhetorical atmosphere, those dedicated to the reform of the extant social system (and the emphasis on reform cannot be over stressed), must be far more careful with their content, the context under which it is expressed, and the way in which their message is articulated. Steven Dubin, in Arresting Images: Impolitic Art and Uncivil Actions, places the effects of varying degrees of “activism” in clear perspective: Deviance signals that something is awry, and can contribute to society’s flexibility and growth. But if society mobilizes its defenses to stave off challenges to the status quo deviance may also unwittingly lead to rigidity. Deviance therefore has a dual character. It is transgressive, yet positive. Within it are the seeds for rigidity, but also the potential for social inflexibility and stasis.10 The cultural effects that emerged in the entertainment industry briefly after 9/11 in cinema, radio, et al., suggested the backlash of Dubinian rigidity. The ClearChannel Communications internal memo suggesting “songs of poor taste,” as well as the suspension of movies like Collateral Damage and video games such as SpiderMan,11 are clear evidence of the sensitivity of American society to the threat of terrorism. After 9/11, mainstream media such as the New York Times and PRI reported a “culture of unity,”12 the death of cultural relativism and postmodern intellectualism,13 and a doubled public approval of government agendas.14 Although in the six months between the WTC destruction and this writing, some of the suspended projects have again been chosen for release, the 9/11 events are still very much a point of contention. The detrimental effects of this culture of unification consist of obfuscation and distraction. The implication of a “unified America” is that deviance from the majority consensus is exactly that – deviant, and possibly subversive or even “un-American,” thus smacking slightly of neo-McCarthyism. The danger is that in times of such implied consensus, emergency actions to enact programs to address immediate concerns also open the possibility for former agendas, once seen as in conflict with American civil liberties, to be placed in effect, such as greatly expanded governmental surveillance, detainment, and information control. The somewhat Orwellian overtones that echo through Capitol Hill play into US isolationism, and overlay

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another template of fear upon society in addition to those caused by the terrorist attacks, marginalizing alternate viewpoints even further. Not only is the artist and social activist confronted with the issues of global human rights in regards to commerce, but also in regards to institutional and governmental abuses of power. The compounding of social issues in the time between 9/11 and the 2002 Bush State of the Union address elides the fact that previously extant issues of corporate abuses of power still exist, such as globalization and the violation of human rights on a national and international scale. Through the focusing lens of fear as seen though CNN and White House press conferences, magnified further by media recursion, the implication is that all of the social ills in existence before 9/11 are all but forgotten. And, when taken into context with the current “cultural unity” that has arisen from the heralded death of pluralism and the rebirth of the Real, one of the few democratic checks and balances left in the current climate is that of the critical theorist, artist, and social activist. In light of recent events, can it be said that activism or artistic intervention is passé, or even inappropriate? We would disagree. Critical inquiry, artistic intervention, and social activism based on the premise of positive social change yield a cherished form of liberty, and resonate with the very foundations of American democracy. These forms of public discourse have a strong history in the US in one form or another, and activist events such as the Haymarket Square riot, the Birmingham, Alabama marches, and the Kent State protests brought issues to public attention that laid the groundwork for beneficial social change (to call these artistic interventions would be a conflation in terms; better examples might be early political video experiments of the 1960s, such as TVTV). In a time when at least the media images, if not the social contracts that constitute American society, are in question, strong critical and activist engagement is needed more than ever. The need to maintain forms of public discourse can be seen from RTMark’s particular history with the G. W. Bush administration, when taken in context with the New York events and Dubin’s reflections on activism and the social sphere. Early in the 2000 primary campaign, RTMark sponsored a doppelganger website called www.gwbush.com. The site mimicked the George W. Bush exploratory committee site, but contained “alternative” content considered “highly polemic” by the press, including texts that hinted at personal histories other than those portrayed in the mainstream media (see Figure 3.2). This attention was not appreciated by the candidate, and public epithets came forth stating that the creator(s) of gwbush.com was a “garbage man,”15 and going on to say that there should be “limits to freedom of speech.”16 Clearly the desire for the embodiment of these sentiments came, through legislation such as the Patriot Act, which greatly expanded federal eavesdropping authority, and the creation of posts like the Office of Secretary of Cyberspace Security.

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Figure 3.2 RTMark, gwbush.com, 2000. By permission of RTMark.

This ominous Bush missive foretold that administration’s distaste for critique, which was clearly evident in the case of Bill Maher’s referral to a prior Susan Sontag commentary on US military policy on his program, “Politically Incorrect.” On the program he reiterated opinion regarding the relative courage of “lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away.” The comment did not escape the notice of White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, when he replied that Maher’s comments were “a terrible thing to say,” and that “Americans need to watch what they say, and what they do, and that this is not a time for remarks like that, there never is.”17

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Producers of critical social discourse such as RTMark are placed in a difficult conundrum. After the WTC destruction, society is sensitized to the point where even implied issues of terror can interrupt the functioning of major institutions, transportation hubs, and information channels. Although the initial governmental call was for a return to normalcy, mass media engage in the mass spectacle of fear and uncertainty. Although the entertainment industry has stepped back from the production of staged carnage by stalling the release of terror-based media content, it is cashing in on nationalist fervor through the promotion of movies such as Behind Enemy Lines and Blackhawk Down, revealing the overt nature of the military–entertainment complex. But within this context, what is the cultural impact of Chris Ofili’s paintings that once caused such uproar at the Brooklyn, Johan Gimonprez’s Inflight magazine for onboard terrorists, or even RTMark’s Barbie Liberation Organization intervention (see Figure 3.3)? The contextual frame of what was once deemed as subversive or controversial shifts, and the artist as social activist is left with the challenge of delivering cultural content to the same audience, but in a way that they might still hear the message. A new kind of war emerges: infowar. For the pursuit of social engagement in the current cultural milieu, what is the function of the artist as cultural activist, and from a more exact point of discourse, how can RTMark engage with its conceptual base of questioning imperatives of corporate power? Although it remains undetermined how the shifts in the cultural markets will affect RTMark as a producer of blacklisted cultural capital, there are some speculations as to how such a group might function through a repurposing of its existing agendas. One of the primary functions of RTMark has been that of interrupting corporate concerns through the promotion of key issues by sponsoring cultural interventions which, in turn, receive mass media press coverage. The ubiquity of mass media was evident in the days following the WTC attacks, as the events and the corresponding governmental responses constituted almost the entirety of programming on television, radio, and in print for nearly two weeks, even though the aforementioned “calls to normalcy” continued to issue forth. How can things be normal? The power of media representation and the reality of televised coverage are still as powerful as ever, and they afford excellent opportunities for activists and Adorno’s “committed” artists.18 The activists can still deliver their message via the internet, relatively unfettered by institutional agendas. With a minimum of tools, given chutzpa, the proper media image, and a good URL, a group of individuals can assume a media image possessing the sophistication of a global NGO. The nature of the internet is still such that a small group of individuals can assume an image value as powerful as any global corporation. For example, an RTMarksponsored group of over 300 World Trade Organization impostors called The Yes Men19 has been operating the gatt.org site, which is a derivative WTO site similar in nature to gwbush.com. The Yes Men have been

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Figure 3.3 Barbie Liberation Organization, Barbie/G.I. Joe Home Surgery Instructions, 1993. By permission of RTMark.

approached repeatedly for appearances, most of the requests coming in the form of keynote invitations for WTO President Mike Moore for various trade summits. Of course, Mr Moore is “quite busy with his schedule,” and a “suitable replacement” accepts the invitation. The representative arrives and delivers the WTO message, represented on the gatt.org site, with mixed reactions. Of course, the message of The Yes Men is clearly stated on the gatt.org website, if those making arrangements had read the online text. An August 2001 Yes Men “performance” involved representation of the WTO at a textiles conference in Tareme, Finland. During the Yes Men (as WTO) keynote address on the future of textiles, “representative” Unruh Hank Hardy spoke regarding the historically troubled intersection between commerce and human rights. Hardy regaled the audience with proclamations that sweatshops would not have been necessary if slavery had not been abolished in the US, and mused upon Mahatma Gandhi’s disastrous effect on the British fiber industry. To cap off the presentation, Hardy ripped off his suit to reveal a gleaming gold spandex “management leisure smartsuit,” which incorporated sensors and a telepresent sweatshop control interface in the shape of a meter-long phallic structure that inflated upon the suit’s unveiling (see Figure 3.4). The crowd erupted in applause, but the irony is that some in the audience still were under the impression that Hardy was

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Figure 3.4 Yes Men performance, Tareme, Finland, August 2001. By permission of RTMark.

an actual member of the WTO, which was a source of amusement and dismay for The Yes Men. Returning to the idea of conceptual communication and cultural context, the Yes Men message might have been received differently only a few weeks afterwards. As mentioned before, the changed context of the cultural terrain has altered the viability of the communication of any engaged message other than that relating to any implied security threat. RTMark’s task is further compounded by the necessity to address sensitive social issues of abuses of power in the private sector and compromises of civil liberties, while still engaging in that discourse in a non-threatening fashion. How does RTMark address these issues without seeming at least unsympathetic, and possibly even threatening? Tactics that were cutting edge in August 2001 became obviously inappropriate in October, and more radical “diverse tactics” such as those employed by the Black Bloc are in question, as the sound of broken glass is one that can be used by the mass media to invoke fear, and could result in even sterner reprisals by governmental structures. RTMark has proven through its corporate initiatives of cultural interruption (it is now problematic to use the words “sabotage” or “hacktivism”) that satire is an effective part of the communication of social criticism. Projects like the homoerotic SimCopter Hack, Barbie Liberation Organization,

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and sponsored interventions like The Yes Men and the Quebec City Stuffed Animal Catapult underscore this point by passing on the messages related to RTMark’s “key intrinsic issues,”20 and illustrating the farcical nature of corporate abuse of power through equally bombastic satire. This permits the artist/activist to deliver cutting-edge social commentary without the perceived threat to safety. Although such tactics are not a call to all activist organizations to suddenly become stand-up comedians, they do indicate an increase in the magnitude of the challenges of crafting cultural stealth technologies that thrust the message of critical inquiry deep within society while preserving popular sentiment and avoiding the landmines of the current social sensitivity. Perhaps some of the roles RTMark can play as part of the “loyal opposition” essential to democracy could be found in the revealing of hidden agendas and the promotion of e-civil liberties. An even more radical position would be to consider RTMark as a force for counter-subversion of the current atmosphere of America undermining its own democratic libertarian values. For the past few years, and as made obvious by the aforementioned Bush comments regarding freedom of speech in response to the gwbush.com site, it is clear that civil liberties and electronic freedoms are targets of American public and private sectors. Internet web server flooding strategies called “virtual sit-ins” employed by groups such as the Electronic Disturbance Theater, electronic cultural interruptions by groups like Hactivist.com, as well as other innocuous hactivist interventions that may interrupt traffic temporarily but do not damage sensitive information, would be considered as acts of terrorism under Ashcroft guidelines. Therefore, when post-9/11 rhetoric and legislation like the Patriot Act are taken to their logical extreme, American fringe culture is in jeopardy from an electronic Cultural Revolution where high-profile online activists and even their ISPs can be branded as agents of terrorism, and persecuted/prosecuted at will. And in that event RTMark, in its role as sponsor of blacklisted cultural activities, as well as other groups embodying similar values, could support efforts championing the restoration of lost civil rights until such time as the American government reinstates broader guidelines of electronic and public freedom. As stated in our 1999 video, “Bringing IT to YOU!,” US corporations have been subverting individual rights under corporate law through the laws of limited liability and personhood for over 100 years. Nationalist and hard rightwing post-9/11 political climates in the US suggest the threat under the rubric of anti-terrorist measures of subversion of many of the civil rights contained within its own constitution, including free speech, assemblage, and many electronic liberties like email privacy and encryption. Conversely, that same government has made paradoxical “calls to normalcy,” which again obfuscate the reality that the very concept is quite ironic, given the times, and acts as a diversionary measure as politicians pass restrictive legislation that would have never stood a chance before September 2001. That being said, it is hoped that RTMark, by promoting the transmission of plural social discourse and

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opposing institutional disinformation, may create forms of counter-subversion so that open alternative discourse may flourish. In a way, such an effort could have restorative effects for the spirit of those who wish to further the agendas of positive social change. Perhaps by illuminating the absurdity of the backlash of cultural restrictions with our own brand of bombast, at least some alternative public discussion may remain a viable option. To summarize in more “corporate” terms – as our collective is a corporation – RTMark has been at the forefront of interrupting abuses of power from the private sector through the promotion of cutting-edge blacklisted cultural products for the millennial markets. Now, with the short-term future of the cultural markets being as questionable as those of their financial counterparts, producers like RTMark must adapt in order to weather the adversities caused by the effects of the destruction of the WTC. The critical issues scrutinized by the activist movement – whether relating to globalization or otherwise – up to 9/11 have not disappeared. However, the social terrain of spectacle in which the activist must deliver ideas is one awash in competing messages. In such an environment, the voice of the socially engaged must be heard without metaphorically shouting so loud as to appear to be the person screaming “FIRE,” or worse yet, “ANTHRAX,” in the auditorium. As we can see in the six months following the WTC destruction, some political and social structures have begun to reestablish themselves, such as political partisanship. Even so, there will still be the challenge of an environment that is simultaneously somewhat numbed and hypersensitized to the voice of critical inquiry. In addition, the issues of civil liberties, global violence, and social mistrust will require the activist and critic to be ever more vigilant in protecting the standard of life in the public sphere. To address the challenges of an expansion of issues and a public in the midst of crisis, activists and artists must continue to strive to be sensitive to those concerns while understanding that the need for the alternative voice is essential in the post-9/11 world.

Notes 1 Source: Mobilization for Global Justice website. CNN Online, Online. Available HTTP: www.cnn.com/2000/US/04/16/dc.protests.02/ (accessed April 16, 2000). The AFL is listed as a sponsor of the protests. 2 CNN Online, Online. Available HTTP: www.webactive.com/pacifica/demnow/ dn20010810.html (accessed August 15, 2001). 3 George W. Bush, State of the Union address, Washington DC, January 2002. 4 Patrick Lichty, “The narrowing of social bandwidth,” Future Tense, Minnesota Public Radio, December 12, 1996. 5 This is an observation taken from ABC, CNN, Fox TV, NPR, and other sources during February 2002. 6 Kevin Poulsen, “Hackers face life imprisonment under ‘anti-terrorist’ act,” SecurityFocus.com. Online. Available HTTP: online.securityfocus.com/news/ 257 (accessed September 24, 2001). 7 RTMark presentation, Ars Electronica 1998–INFOWAR, Linz, Austria.

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8 RTMark, “Bringing IT to YOU!,” 1999. 9 L. A. Kauffmann, Salon.com, “Who were those masked anarchists in Seattle?”. Online. Available HTTP: www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/12/10/ anarchists/ (accessed December 10, 1999). 10 Steven Dubin, Arresting Images: Impolitic Art and Uncivil Actions, New York: Routledge, 1992, p. 2. 11 Stephen Schaefer, “‘Damage’ control: Schwarzenegger discusses delayed release of new flick and plans for ‘T3’,” Boston Herald, February 3, 2002. 12 It is only remarkable that the New York Times and National Public Radio offered a number of entries echoing these homogeneous sentiments during the 45 days after 9/11. 13 “Marketplace,” Public Radio International, September 25, 2001. 14 “Morning Edition,” National Public Radio, October 1, 2001. 15 This was telecast through the mainstream media, and is documented in the RTMark compendium, “Bringing IT ALL to You,” 2000. 16 Associated Press, “Bush camp miffed over parody site,” USA Today, May 27, 1999. 17 Bill Maher and Ari Fleischer, “Politically Incorrect,” ABC Television, September 26, 2001; Bill Carter and Felicity Barringer, “In patriotic times, dissent is muted,” New York Times, September 28, 2001. 18 Theodor Adorno, “Commitment,” in Andrew Arato and Eike Gerhardt (eds), The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, New York: Continuum, 2000. 19 The Yes Men. Online. Available HTTP: www.theyesmen.org. 20 RTMark, “Bringing IT to YOU!”

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Visual culture

Figure 4.1 InSITE97, San Diego. Video still. Courtesy of the artist.

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4

Art at the intersection of social fields Andrea Fraser

Like Mary Kelly (see Chapter 13), when I was invited to participate in “Visual Worlds,” I wasn’t sure what I was expected to contribute. Like Mary, I am an artist who has rejected, for the most part, not only what she refers to as the “iconic signifier,” but material production in general. Well, I thought, as a so-called institutional critic (that’s my primary artistic designation), I have focused most of my work on at least one “visual world,” that is, the world of visual arts. I could also say that my work has been about visual art as it appears in the world of museums and galleries, foundations and corporations, international exhibitions and the media. Now, however, I realize that all of the artist participants – and I use the term “artist” advisedly, thinking primarily of the framing that the “Visual Worlds” exhibition provides – have either eschewed or problematized material production, visual representation, or both. I realize that what we all have in common is precisely the fact that we are working at points of intersection between different “visual worlds” or, I would say, between different social fields: between art and politics or activism or corporations or media or academia. It may even be that the point of this “artistic” grouping is to argue that the very possibility of working, and being able to intervene, at such points of intersection is not only a question of representation. Rather, it is a question of the working itself: a question of the structure of cultural labor and cultural practice; of engagement, action, and interaction. In this, I would like to commend the conference and exhibition organizers for resisting what I see as one of the pitfalls of visual studies, that is, a tendency to remove the “visual” from the “worlds” of cultural practices and material conditions in which the visual finds its meaning and its function. Most of the models that the participating artists have presented for working at points of intersection between different worlds, or social fields, have been collective and activist. The practice that I can introduce into this discussion is an individual practice, although one that exists within often extensive and complex forms of interaction and participation. It is also a practice that, while often explicitly political in its content, is motivated more by an ethical than a political imperative. That may be a problematic distinction, and I hope no one tries to engage me in a discussion of the philosophy

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of ethics, a discussion for which I’m hardly qualified. Within my own framework, however, to say that my work is motivated primarily by an ethical imperative is to locate that work within a position defined not by a condition of being dominated, but by a condition of being dominant. To put it another way, it is a practice that attempts to engage the power of cultural capital, the form of capital that I – and, I would suggest, that we all, as artists and intellectuals – invest in our activities. And it is a practice that is engaged, above all, with the homologies between cultural capital and other forms of capital, or power, particularly economic and political power. Such homologies, according to Bourdieu, are central to the dynamics of the field of cultural production, which occupies what he called a dominated position in the dominant field or the field of power: in the field of power because it is the site of monopolies of cultural capital; in a dominated position because cultural capital itself is dominated in relationship to economic and political capital. It’s important to add that, according to Bourdieu, these hierarchies are the object of constant struggle and never fixed. In his analysis, however, the condition of being dominated among the dominant is the basis for the fundamental ambivalence of the field of cultural production. The status of cultural producers as dominated within the field of power may give rise to cultural politics rooted in identifications with the subaltern. However, the position of producers within the field of power means that despite or even within such politics, cultural producers may not only be pursuing their own interests in struggles against economic and political power, but also working in objective collusion with such power, to the extent that their interests include reproducing their own position within the dominant field itself.1 It is according to this ambivalent condition of the cultural field that I have come to believe that cultural producers need not only a cultural politics, but also a cultural ethics. And that is how I have come to define Institutional Critique: as an ethical practice of reflexive investigation of, and intervention on, the ways in which we, as cultural producers, participate in the reproduction of relations of domination.

I As an artistic practice, Institutional Critique is usually understood as a tendency within Conceptual Art that emerged in the late 1960s. It is most often associated with the work of its “first generation,” including the artists Michael Asher, Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, and Hans Haacke, and with the writings of the art critic and historian Benjamin Buchloh. Although Institutional Critique is sometimes reduced to “art about art institutions” such as museums, I understand it rather as the historical and social form of the critique of the autonomous artwork – a critique that, over the past 40 years, has redefined art. As a practice, Institutional Critique was never simply defined by its object – not by “art institutions,” the institution of art, or

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even the field of art – but also, fundamentally, by its relation to its object, that is, by a methodology that is at once site-specific and self-reflexive. I began doing work that could be identified as Institutional Critique in the mid-1980s. That early work involved appropriating art historical images and texts and museological formats in order to produce a critical reading of the ways in which the meanings of artists and art works are constructed within art institutions. A few years later I began appropriating positions and functions as well, moving from image/text work to performances. These included performances in the form of museum tours such as Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1989; commercial gallery sales presentations, with May I Help You? in 1991; and, with the performance group The V-Girls, academic panel discussions at many venues in the late 1980s and early 1990s.2 In the early 1990s, I moved away from performance in the sense of scripted “live art” and began focusing on what I considered another kind of performance. I continued performing different functions within institutions, but often out of public view. Performing, for example, the functions of a curator, I created an exhibition from the permanent collection at the University Art Museum in Berkeley in 1992, called Aren’t They Lovely?, which involved mapping domestic space within the exhibition space. Aren’t They Lovely? presented a bequest by an early graduate of UC Berkeley who left every single thing she owned to the museum. Through hundreds of wall texts quoted from archival sources, the exhibition traced the process through which the museum sifted through the contents of her home, transforming domestic culture into public culture by isolating objects determined to be art from all the other remnants of her life. After having a number of often difficult experiences working within institutions in this way, in the mid-1990s I began trying to develop a framework for a kind of artistic activity that was coming to be called “project art.” “Project art” was a generic term that emerged to describe a whole range of “post-studio” practices such as site-specific art, public art, community-based art, and cultural activism, among others. Because “project art” often involved labor in excess of, or independent of, material production, I proposed that such work could best be understood as a form of service provision, as opposed to commodity production. In collaboration with the curator and art historian Helmut Draxler, I developed a project called Services that began in 1994 in northern Germany at the University of Lueneburg and traveled to seven different locations in Europe. We called Services a “working-group exhibition.” It involved bringing together a dozen artists and curators to discuss issues relevant to the new relations emerging around “project art.” These issues included the very practical questions of contracts and compensation, as well as how the resolutions of such practical questions were impacting the conditions of artistic practice, particularly in terms of autonomy and instrumentality. Videotapes of these discussions were paired with documentation contributed by the participants, as well as historical

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material documenting instances in which artists, individually and collectively, have sought to redefine their relations with institutions and the social status of their activities.3 At the same time, I was beginning to define my own activity as a form of service provision. I wrote up “prospectuses” for my “artistic services” – one for corporations, one for individuals, one for what I called “cultural constituency organizations,” and one for general-audience institutions. These prospectuses were, for me, practical documents with which I hoped to save myself and the institutions I worked with from some of the trouble that I had gotten into in the past. But they were also an ambivalent performance in which I appropriated aspects of the discourse and structures of corporate consulting. The first project that I undertook within the framework of these prospectuses also happened to be the first and the only project that I ever completed with a corporation.

II In 1994, on the basis of my prospectus “For Corporations,” I was invited to do a project for the EA-Generali Foundation, the art program of the Austrian-based group of the multinational Generali insurance corporation, a corporation that then had assets of over $48 billion. At that time, the Foundation’s activities consisted primarily of developing two corporate collections: one for public relations purposes, the other to decorate the new corporate headquarters. However, when the Foundation began installing art works in the headquarters, where about 600 people worked, the art produced (or brought to the surface) a lot of conflict. One of the reasons I was invited to do a project was the idea, based on some of my previous work, that I might be able to help resolve some of that conflict (although it had pretty much subsided by the time I arrived). Largely through the work of Hans Haacke, Institutional Critique has been strongly identified with a critique of corporate sponsorship and a defense of artistic autonomy from the instrumentalization that such sponsorship is seen to entail. My interest in working with the EA-Generali Foundation was to investigate corporate sponsorship from inside a corporation and to find out how, in fact, artistic autonomy functioned and did not function within that context. According to my prospectuses, my “artistic services” would be rendered in two phases. The first was called “Investigatory” and the second “Interventionary.” With the EA-Generali Foundation, the first phase consisted of a year of research at the corporation, including archival research as well as interviews with the managing board of the corporation and the Foundation, representatives of the employees of the corporation, and the professional art advisors of the Foundation. This research was published in a report that was designed in the same format as the corporate annual report and was printed by the same company. Visually, the main difference between my Report and

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Figure 4.2 Andrea Fraser, A Project in Two Phases, EA-Generali Foundation, Vienna, 1995. Detail of Report. By permission of the Generali Foundation.

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the Generali’s annual report was that, while the corporation had taken to decorating its annual report with glossy color images of art from its collection, my Report was black and white and included no art. This deaesthetisization extended to all of the material I generated for the project, including posters and ads. Most importantly, it defined my own “performance” within the corporation. To the extent that I could, I tried to strip all of my work within that context of what might be seen as artistic, in order to refuse to supply the aesthetic gloss that corporations seek through art sponsorship. In doing so, however, I also subjected myself to an extreme self-instrumentalization. Therein lies one of the fundamental contradictions of artistic autonomy and its defense, as I tried to elaborate in my Report. The Report is divided up into two sections. The first is called “Public Image Transfer/Symbolic Profit” and the second is called “Corporate Culture/Symbolic Power.” Each of these sections is laid out in four columns that run discontinuously. The first column, in normal type, consists of a descriptive text, written in my closest approximation of figureless corporate prose. The third column, in gray type, includes a critical, interpretive text written without conscious self-censorship in my usual, pseudo-academic artist-intellectual voice. The second and fourth columns contain quotations from the interviews I conducted for my research, with quotations from the “corporate field” of management and employees in the second column, juxtaposed to quotations from the “artistic field” of Foundation staff and art advisors in the fourth. My interview strategy in all my interview-based work between 1992 and 1995 was not to “dig deep,” imagining that I could reveal hidden interests. I’m not sure hidden interests exist. I believe, in any case, that the most effective interests are on the surface. These are the interests, or the articulations of interests, that are produced by a particular field, that draw people into the competitive struggles that constitute that field and are the motive force of its reproduction. My intention was to record the subjective presentations of such institutionally constituted interests and then, with this kind of fractured, multi-column layout, to structure a dynamic, relational reading of those presentations. My goal was to produce a graphic representation of a field or of relations between fields by mapping positions on a page, representing both the contradictions between apparently consistent interests and the homologies that underlay apparent oppositions. Those contradictions and homologies were also analyzed in the text of the Report. In the section on “Public Image Transfer/Symbolic Profit,” I considered the apparent opposition between artistic autonomy and corporate instrumentalization. Rather than functioning as a form of resistance to instrumentalization, I found that such autonomy was, in some sense, the very condition of the symbolic profit the corporation derived from art sponsorship. The value of the collection for the corporation depended on its legitimacy within the art world, which in turn depended on the freedom of its art advisors to apply specifically artistic criteria in their decisions,

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in accordance with their professional judgment as art experts. In effect, the value of the Foundation for the corporation would decline in direct proportion to its instrumentalization, and vice-versa. One of the things that was most surprising to me was that, in a corporation that carries out marketing surveys on a monthly basis, no effort had ever been made to find out how many times its name had appeared in the press as a result of art sponsorship. From the standpoint of a number-crunching factory like an insurance company, expenditures on art were shockingly unrationalized. This was even more surprising given that, internally, such a basic justification in terms of public relations would undoubtedly have lessened the employees’ hostility to the Foundation – a point I will return to below. There seemed to be an unconscious recognition that any such rationalization of the Foundation would undermine the profit in moral legitimacy produced by the pursuit of “disinterested” cultural activities. The second part of the Report, “Corporate Culture/Symbolic Power,” looked at how the autonomy of the Foundation functioned within the corporation. My interviews revealed that the kind of instrumentalization that worried the art professionals most was not political or economic, but the threat of being reduced to interior decorators and constrained by the taste of the corporate staff – employees and management alike. While the executives didn’t like the art any more than their secretaries, they did see that the corporation had an interest in maintaining a polished, coherent, professionally put together interior. The result was the establishment of various workplace regulations (no curtains, no private plants, no private art, etc.) that protected the Foundation from employee expectations while at the same time effectively excluding workers from certain decisions about their workplace. As far as the employees were concerned, the “autonomy” of the Foundation was just another management directive. The authority of the art advisors was perfectly homologous to the authority of management, with one important difference: it appeared much more arbitrary and therefore much more violent. It appeared more arbitrary not only because, once again, any rationalization of the Foundation would contradict its public relations function, but also because such resistance to rationalization is fundamental to the structure of artistic autonomy itself: to the definition of artistic competence and the valuation of artistic labor. At a moment when the corporation was taking its first steps toward introducing a neo-liberal regime of performance-based compensation, putting ever more pressure on employees to produce profits, it was spending large sums of money on objects that it did not, and could not, explain in terms of the bottom line. One of the only conflicts I had over the content of the Report was when I wanted to include a graph comparing the average cost of a sculpture bought by the Foundation to the average starting salary of a secretary. They wouldn’t let me do it. Instead, I ended up using for comparison the average cost of maintaining an executive car and the average cost of a computer terminal, not including software.

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The second, “interventionary” phase of the project resulted in two “installations.” One of these installations happened to be the first exhibition in the Foundation’s new public exhibition space. The Foundation’s collection had been conceived as having two parts. One was described in Foundation documents as a “museum-quality collection of Austrian sculpture,” a collection intended for public presentation. The other was a collection of “works on paper,” which the art advisor who conceptualized the collection had basically written off as office furniture. The concept I developed for the exhibition was simply to move all of the art out of the corporate headquarters and into the exhibition space. However, what was accomplished with this simple displacement was a rather mortifying reversal. Most of the art in the headquarters consisted of “works on paper” and not “museum-quality Austrian sculpture” – the latter being too fragile, expensive, or large to install in a workplace. Consequently, what ended up being presented in the inaugural show of the new exhibition space were precisely those works that were not particularly representative of the autonomous judgment of art experts in the application of specifically artistic criteria. It was, one could say, the “heteronomous” collection that I re-presented in the “autonomous” space of the art gallery. According to artistic criteria it was a pretty bad collection – as was duly noted by an unforgiving Austrian press. This heteronomy was further emphasized by the installation. I installed the art in the exhibition space in the same order in which it was installed in the corporate headquarters. The exhibition started with the office of the chairman and wrapped its way around through the executive offices, executive foyer, cafeteria, and down to the sixth floor, fifth floor, fourth floor, etc. The art appeared without the support provided by the usual artistic principles according to which installations are organized (formal, thematic, historical, etc.). It looked a bit like an inventory. The only text on the wall was a floor plan of the exhibition space identifying corresponding spaces in the corporate headquarters. As in the Report, my intention was to produce a kind of visual presentation of a hierarchically structured social space: in this case a mapping of corporate hierarchy in the distribution of objects in a physical space. In addition to the installation in the exhibition space, there was also a second “installation” – the corporate headquarters without art. We scheduled public tours of the headquarters-without-art led by a member of the Foundation staff. Not very many people went. As I mentioned, when the art was installed in the headquarters, the employees weren’t very happy about it. The art was vandalized. Memos were sent around about the “art terror.” One of the employee interventions took the form of a green object that appeared on the floor one day – you can see it at the end of a hallway in Figure 4.3. The Foundation had purchased a work by Heimo Zobernig, an Austrian artist who works in a neo-Minimalist mode, making objects that look like they’re in the process of production or destruction, often with very cheap materials. This particular work consisted

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Figure 4.3 Andrea Fraser, A Project in Two Phases, EA-Generali Foundation, Vienna, 1995. Installation view, Generali headquarters, Landskrongasse 1–3, Vienna, with the copy of Heimo Zobernig’s Untitled, 1989, produced by employees, visible in the background. Photograph by Werner Kaligofsky, by permission of the Generali Foundation.

of two chipboard panels inserted into each other to make a freestanding cross and partially painted black. One morning an almost identical structure appeared next to it, but painted green. The Foundation appropriated this work by the employees, removing the original from the headquarters while leaving the green one there instead. Because it wasn’t officially part of the collection, it ended up being the only artwork left in the building for the duration of my installations.

III It took a couple more years of working within my “prospectus” model before I realized that as a framework for investigating artistic autonomy, it had pretty much been exhausted by my project with the EA-Generali Foundation. I became increasingly interested in returning to live performance. An invitation to participate in inSITE97 provided a perfect opportunity and resulted in a performance called Inaugural Speech.4 Officially, inSITE97 was a binational exhibition of public art works in the San Diego and Tijuana area. The border area straddling California and Mexico is, of course, an extremely political site. Perhaps because of these politics – and the fact that the Mexican government was involved in funding the exhibition – speeches by politicians were scheduled as part of the opening

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events. These speeches included the US Attorney for Southern California reading a letter from President Clinton, and the Undersecretary of State for Foreign Relations of Mexico reading a letter from President Zedillo. And then I made a speech, which was my contribution to the exhibition. Just as my project with the EA-Generali Foundation allowed me to work at a point of intersection between the artistic field and the corporate field, the scheduling of these speeches provided a small window of access to a point of intersection between the artistic field and the political field, and perhaps also, given the composition of the audience, to other “subfields” of the field of power as well. As in my project with the EA-Generali Foundation, my intention with Inaugural Speech was to produce a representation of the relations between a set of positions delimited – and to a certain extent structured – by a particular cultural site. However, instead of mapping these positions with an arrangement of objects and texts in space, I performed them in time, one after another. The performance attempts to enact the relations of mutual recognition and legitimation that link apparently opposed positions in the field of art and that result in a kind of pyramid of power supported at its base by the participation of publics produced and incorporated by artists themselves. Here are two excerpts from Inaugural Speech.5 Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. On behalf of the participating artists – who have, actually, been seated way in the back . . . Hi! [The speaker waves.] Good evening and welcome to inSITE97. As an art exhibition, inSITE97 is focused on the exploration and activation of public space. I think I can speak for all of the artists when I say that this is an extremely important aim. Especially now, when here and throughout the Americas all aspects of the public sphere are under attack, when the public sector is being downsized, public services privatized, public space enclosed, public speech controlled, and public goods of all kinds exchanged for the currency of private goals, be they prestige, privilege, power, and profits. Public art cannot forestall the forces foreclosing on our public lives. But it can remind us of what we are losing, like the casual democracy of everyday encounters, when we find ourselves equal before places and things that needn’t be paid for and can’t be purchased, or the practical democracy of forums of public speech, where differences of status do not determine our places at the podium. All the more reason why it is such a special opportunity for me to address you here this evening. This is a perfect example of what makes inSITE97 so rewarding for its artists. As an exhibition of public art works and community

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engagement projects, it gives us the opportunity to address people who would otherwise never stop to look or listen. There are all of you here this evening, but that’s just the beginning. There are the tens of thousands of people expected to tour the exhibition sites. There are the hundreds of thousands who will just happen upon our work, unawares, in their parks and plazas, on their streets. You will encounter our work as you walk along beaches, sit in cafes, go to elementary schools or see adult films, wait for buses, get tattoos, fish, cruise and, of course, cross the border. You are residents, tourists, students, sailors, migrants; you are young and old, gay and straight, US, Mexican, and Chicano; you are upper, middle, and working class, you are unemployed; you live in walled estates, gated communities, condominiums, trailer parks, shanties, and doorways. inSITE97 depends on the active involvement of its audiences. You are our audience this evening, and it is with great enthusiasm that I thank you for your participation. Finally, I think that I can speak for all of the artists when I express my gratitude for the tremendous support that we have received from the exhibition’s organizers. Thanks to them, we will achieve a new level of recognition – locally, nationally and internationally, within the art world, and beyond. [The speaker turns to her right.] Thank you. [She turns back to the audience.] Thank you very much. [Applause.] Thank you. And thank you, Andrea, for that thoughtful introduction. As one of the exhibition’s organizers, I can say that Andrea is truly exemplary of the artists participating in this event. An internationally recognized and emerging talent, she has delved into the commotion and poetic pause of this discontinuous urban sprawl, probing, digging, tracking, traversing and intervening in public space, discerning domains of dialogue and reverie. And, Andrea is only one of over 50 artists and authors from 11 countries participating in our exhibition and events. As a group they represent the most influential cultural figures of the Americas. It is their extraordinary achievements that we celebrate here this evening. [Applause and cheers.] You can get a sense of the structure being established, I think. After speaking as one of the exhibition organizers, I thank the trustees. I then go on to speak as a trustee. The second excerpt begins with the trustee thanking the public sponsors:

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Andrea Fraser Of course, we could not approach these goals without the support of governments here and abroad. That is why I want to say a special word of thanks to our friends at city, state and federal agencies who have helped to make this effort a success. Representing our public sponsors this evening, I am delighted to introduce a man who was elected and overwhelmingly re-elected by a small minority of the voting-age population. Throughout his career, he has shown optimism and courage. He is the national leader in the drive to stop illegality. He has made tough choices necessary, cutting our income taxes. His toughness was proven yet again when, recovering from a burst appendix, he was wheeled onto the floor to cast a tie-breaking vote on budget reduction. He enjoys reading history and cheering for the Chargers. I think that we all owe him a vote of thanks. [The speaker turns to her right.] Thank you. [She turns back to the audience.] [Applause.] Thank you. [Applause.] Won’t you all sit down, please? Thank you very, very much. Thank you. It is a high honor and a rare privilege for me to join you in kicking off this tremendous effort. And, I have to say that am quite intrigued with many of the art projects that I have seen so far. But I can only begin by acknowledging my wife. A “career volunteerist,” she is a shining example of just how much one woman can achieve – and achieve with grace, with style, and with class. She’s been so active, in fact, that I haven’t seen her in months. It is wonderful to have her with us here this evening. Gayle and I are strong supporters of the arts, and we applaud you for your efforts to bring quality art reflecting our diverse cultures into all of our lives. It is our exciting and distinctive art that keeps us on “the cutting edge.” And there is no better place to be on “the cutting edge” than here. Our region is a diverse region, populated by many different kinds of people. There are people who work in our fields and flower shops, hotels and factories. There are people who vote. There are people who pay taxes. There are people who establish foundations. There are people who send their children to public schools. There are people who vote. And yet, despite this diversity, we are held together by our belief in diversity. We are devoted to that myth. It’s our myth. It’s all that many of us have.

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Throughout our history, we have always answered adversity with a dream. West! over desolate prairie and frozen mountains, we risked our lives crossing the mighty, until one day we found ourselves gazing down from the heights upon a golden valley of promise, inviting us to partake of the good life. Quality communities, quality lifestyles, prime location. Benches and landscaping. Family-friendly neighborhoods and vibrant, multipurpose districts. California Casual, Renaissance England and Palazzo Italiano in 49 different colors. Multilevel. Stunning. Within the next three years, no single race or ethnic group will make up a majority of this region’s population. We know what we’ll look like. Just look around at this crowd tonight! Yes! That’s right! I’m the redneck son of a poor dirt farmer! But even I can understand the benefits of cultural diversity our new global society. With just 5 per cent of the world’s population, but 20 per cent of the world’s income, we must sell to the other 95 per cent just to maintain our standard of living. Because we are drawn from every culture on earth, we are uniquely positioned to do it. We will meet the challenge of building the first society to embrace every ethnic group on the planet. We will share a common future. We will invent that future – and export it. We are now the world leader in television set production and golf course design. 117 golf courses in our city alone. That’s good news! We have made your lives more livable, with tougher penalties for graffiti taggers. We now prohibit young people from loitering in public places. There’s the Juvenile Curfew Enforcement Policy and the AntiCruising Ordinance. We confine demonstrations to parking lots! We listened to what you wanted. We heard what you said: Stop the raw sewage flows that have plagued our residents! We are now an advocate for business, not an adversary. We cut business taxes in half and then in half again. Ours is a growth economy, built on the low-wage labor of people motivated to perform. With little or no unemployment and welfare benefits, a job is their only chance for survival. That equals a savings to you of up to 80 per cent on your labor costs. Our success is because of you. You: business, hotel and restaurant owners, investors and professionals. Legitimate members of the community. You are the ones who have made it happen and I thank you.

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Andrea Fraser Our corporate sponsors also deserve a special word of thanks for our success . . .

I think you can guess where that one is going. The last “speaker” is the corporate sponsor: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Discussion RTMark representative: You have this institutional critique through your media and curatorial satires, but I’m wondering what the cultural effects were upon the institutions that you were critiquing through your work, in other words, not so much the effects of the processes that were made visible within the groups. Were there any effects that happened through your actions within the corporations and the media groups that you worked with, while you were doing them? And I’m curious about how the shifts happened. Fraser: I never really tracked “effects” in that sense. I was invited to do the project with the Generali partly on the basis of an earlier project with the Munich Kunstverein where I also interviewed the board. That project was called A Society of Taste and it was a very difficult process, but one that actually ended up fostering a very good relationship between the director and his board. The director of the Generali Foundation may have thought that I might also have a positive effect on her relationship with her board or with the employees. Did I? In terms of the relation between the Foundation and the board, if I had any effect it was probably negative. At one point during the opening of the exhibition the director seemed to think that she was going to be fired. However, the project did initiate a dialog between the Foundation and the Staff Council. In the eight years of the Foundation’s existence, the director had never formally met with members of the Staff Council. My project initiated a dialog simply by virtue of the fact that she went with me to all the interviews. My intention was to set up a dynamic triangulation. I gave them an opportunity to talk to her through me. That did lead to some changes in the relations between the Foundation and the employees. Martin Jay: I wonder if I could try and smoke out the normative assumptions, let’s say, the critical point or brief from which your presentation proceeded. Your paper was, I think, deeply indebted to Bourdieu, and your other work, I think, has used Bourdieu’s categories with enormous skill. [Your essay,] “A ‘Sensation’ Chronicle,”6 for example, undercuts lots of the simple “good/bad” versions of the two sides of his work. Bourdieu, of course, is extraordinarily critical of the notion of aesthetic

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autonomy, seeing it as simply part of a game of symbolic cultural power. And his own point of view is, in a way, not terribly anti-ideological, because he doesn’t really have a category beyond ideology, except perhaps his own sociological scientistic stance. And yet, of course, clearly, there is a kind of energy in your work that suggests you are being critical. So what I want to do is to get from you a strong sense of what the “nonideological” would look like. How would we defend it? In other words, from where are we making these critiques? What are the normative alternatives? How do we know them when we see them in the “visual world”? Fraser: I think Bourdieu’s position on autonomy is very complex. I also think it changed over time. Distinction is very much as a critique of artistic autonomy in the sense that term is usually used in the art world, that is, the “distance” from the social and historical world claimed by or ascribed to works of art. On the other hand, in The Rules of Art and Free Exchange in the early nineties, Bourdieu is clearly writing as a defender of artistic autonomy. I believe that some, but not all, of the apparent contradictions between these phases of his work can be resolved within the framework of his thought. It’s important, for example, not to collapse aestheticism, which is a primary object of critique in Distinction, and the theory of relatively autonomous social fields that he develops in The Rules of Art and elsewhere. According to Bourdieu’s theory of fields, all fields are “relatively autonomous” – this is what allows one to identify them as fields, as specific social universes – to the extent that they have the capacity to impose specific norms and values on the agents functioning within them. For the artistic field, what complicates the relationship between these two different notions of autonomy is that the specific norms and values that allow one to describe it as a specific social universe are historically and institutionally linked to that other form of autonomy, to the distance from the social and material world imagined by aestheticism and that produces, as Bourdieu says, “an interest in disinterestedness.” One can speak about at least five different dimensions of artistic autonomy. There is the autonomy of art as a social field, as Bourdieu describes it, defined by the dominance of cultural capital and the ability to exclude competing forms of capital, particularly economic capital and economic criteria. Then there is the aesthetic autonomy of art, its freedom from rationalization with respect to specific functions. And then there is an economic autonomy that emerged with the relatively anonymous bourgeois art markets. Then there is political autonomy: the freedom of expression guaranteed, supposedly, by democratic traditions. Finally, there is the logic of professional autonomy, which I see as gaining ground these days, particularly within art institutions. While I don’t think it’s possible to consider these forms of autonomy separately, I also see them as irreducible.

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I see Bourdieu’s notion of habitus as one of his answers to the question of ideology, and particularly to Althusser. Habitus is the socialmade-body, the social-made-mind, the social internalized as schemes of perception and practice. Fields produce habitus, but agents produce fields – above all in the competitive and contestatory struggles through which they pursue the aspirations, or interests, produced as legitimate within specific fields. Real critique within this framework would be made possible by a break in the complicity between field and habitus, between social positions and internalized dispositions, which would allow agents to step back from those reproductive, competitive struggles and engage in potentially transformative struggles. I would say that my conception of critical practice is a combination of my engagement with Bourdieu and my early engagement with psychoanalysis. If Institutional Critique emerged as a kind of ideology critique, my interest in psychoanalysis led me to formulate it as a kind of transference analysis. With Bourdieu I began to think of transference in more specifically social terms. I tried to find my own little point of intersection between, for example, psychoanalytic notions of the displacement of desire in demand and Bourdieu’s notion of the displacement of structures of value in competitive struggles. I would still like to think of my work as an intervention in a psychoanalytic sense. But I understand the object of my intervention, or better, the relations in which I would intervene, in Bourdieuian terms. So, from where am I making my critique? Not from outside the institutions or field of art: that’s the first principle of a site-specific, reflexive Institutional Critique. Like transference analysis, the “participant objectivation” required by Bourdieu’s reflexive analysis can only be carried out in situ. Question: You are using art of other artists. Did you have problems with these artists? I see your work as a discourse in the way you use material of other people, other speakers, politicians, and so on. And in a way you use your body and your identity – or you as a person – to make that art, and the performance itself becomes an art piece in a way. Would it be a problem for you if somebody were to take your tape and reuse it in the way that you do that? Fraser: I’ve never had any direct response from artists whose work I’ve installed or included in a tape. When I produced an audiotape tour for the Whitney Biennial in 1993, how my piece would reflect on the other work in the show was certainly a concern of the curators. I do see it as an ethical question, but one that’s not very different from how one uses interviews. I try not to use individual art works, or individual interviewees, against themselves, or in an illustrative way. I see my work as being about representing, or mapping, the relations between different positions, whether they are represented by art works or by interviews.

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I’ve never had the experience of other artists using my work so I can’t say how I would feel about it. In a way, art works are always being appropriated and used in one way or another by curators and museums and collectors, etc. But those people are supposed to have an interest – scholarly or economic – in adhering to the artist’s “intention.” There’s plenty of evidence, however, that artists’ intentions, even when artists explicitly articulate them, which is rare, are very often disregarded. Sitespecific art like mine developed, in part, as a strategy of resisting that kind of appropriation. Allan Sekula: One thing that has always interested me about the strategy of institutional critique is that it can tend to constitute an implicit reproach to other artists. The categorical distinction that establishes that terrain on which the institutional critic works implies that there are a lot of other people who are going along with the game, without a kind of self-consciousness. So, it’s a kind of privileging of – and territorializing – privileging of a kind of higher self-consciousness. And I’m quite sympathetic to most of the work, so I’m saying this out of a kind of self-doubt, for the things I’ve done certainly have aspects of doubt as a general strategy. It’s certainly true that the market has produced art of enormous emptiness and banality, but I wonder if the strategy of institutional critique doesn’t at some point end up being the doppelganger of that banality. That is to say that the possibility of complexity – and the ground for some kind of recovery of that aspect that refuses commodity status – get somehow occluded or obscured. Because after all, the commodity being of art is not a total ontological identity. There is a kind of banalization of art, in which the artwork becomes wholly identified with its commodity status, but in fact, for most works of art historically, their coming into market being has been partial, and there’s been something else, which has been beyond that. And I wonder, to put it in the most severe terms possible, if [in] the commodity-critique version of institutional-critique art and let’s say, Jeff Koons, to pick a specific example, the two terms of the polarity end up banalizing the whole sphere of art, and make it impossible for us to actually then recover, let’s say, something we might call complex visuality that exceeds the market, and that constitutes something beyond the market. Fraser: Well, I think your work is a great example of exactly that. I honestly can’t tell you how to distinguish Institutional Critique from the competitive struggles that lead artists to develop strategies to differentiate themselves from other artists. Maybe it’s not really possible. While most of the work I’ve done has been about other positions within the field of art – collectors, curators, trustees, et cetera, I’m starting to focus more on the position of the artist. For me this move may partly be about recognizing the historical specificity of Institutional Critique. Institutional Critique emerged when museums were professionalizing

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Andrea Fraser and museum professionals were pursuing their own autonomy in relation to trustees. Those phenomena were themselves also linked to what one might have called, at that time, the social and economic transformations of late capitalism. Cultural institutions are now undergoing another dramatic transformation, this time marked by corporatization. Strategies developed under the rubric of Institutional Critique during that first phase can be criticized as having played into the bureaucratization of the museum. In this second phase, they are also being appropriated for spectacle and marketing, as more and more artists doing site-specific work become institutional stylists and event contractors. Under these conditions, the idea that one can resist commodification simply by refusing to produce art objects becomes increasingly false. On the other hand, I do see Institutional Critique, and particularly the rigorously site-specific approach represented by Michael Asher’s work, as rooted in an ambition to escape the trap of avant-garde ambivalence, to escape the cycle of opposition and incorporation, by creating another model for practice and relations to the market. I still see that as an extraordinarily important ambition – even if it may be impossible to realize. Institutional Critique may no longer be viable as an historically specific artistic practice. But I mentioned in my talk, I also understand institutional critique more generally as an ethical practice of reflexive analysis and intervention. Institutional Critique in that sense is a practice I would continue to pursue under any institutional conditions, and in any number of fields.

Notes 1 2

3 4 5 6

See Pierre Bourdieu, “The field of cultural production,” in The Field of Cultural Production, New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. For “Museum highlights: a gallery talk,” “May I help you?,” and other performance scripts, see Andrea Fraser, Works: 1984–2003, Cologne and Hamburg: DuMont Buchverlag and Kunstverein in Hamburg, 2003. See also The V-Girls, “Daughters of the ReVolution,” October, 71, 1995, 120–140 and “A conversation with The V-Girls,” October, 51, 1989, 115–143. For material on the project “Services,” see October, 80, 1997, including Andrea Fraser, “What’s intangible, transitory, mediating, participatory and rendered in the public sphere?,” and “Services: working-group discussions.” The videotape of Inaugural Speech was part of the 2001 “Visual Worlds” exhibition at The Nelson Gallery and Fine Arts Collection, University of California, Davis. The complete script of Inaugural Speech, along with sources, can be found in Fraser, Andrea Fraser, Works: 1984–2003. Andrea Fraser, “A ‘Sensation’ chronicle,” Social Text, Fall 2001, vol. 67, 127–156.

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Figure 5.1 Tendance Floue, Czechoslovakia, Prague, September 23–27, 2000. Antiglobalization demonstrations during the World Bank and the FMI Annual Assembly. Credit: Mat Jacob/Tendance Floue.

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Heart of darkness A journey into the dark matter of the art world Gregory Sholette

We can measure the waste [of artistic talent] not only in the thousands of “failed” artists – artists whose market failure is necessary to the success of the few – but also in the millions whose creative potential is never touched . . . This glut of art and artists is the normal condition of the art market. Carol Duncan1 All men are intellectuals one could say: but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals. Antonio Gramsci2

Invisible worlds An estimated ten thousand hopeful artists entered graduate level art programs within the USA in 1998.3 Assuming a modest graduation rate of sixty percent, the total number of academically trained professional artists holding Master of Fine Arts degrees between the dates of that statistic and the time of this writing must hover around twenty-four thousand individuals. The MFA was initiated under the GI Bill in 1944. Extrapolating from these past four years we might therefore expect the total number of artists with such degrees to top several million people.4 But this number would be greatly amplified if we add to it individuals who received a non-degree certificate in programs such as the Art Students League in New York or the Philadelphia Academy of Art. The size of this pool of cultural producers grows larger still if we include artists who only hold undergraduate degrees, and the figure virtually explodes beyond enumeration if amateur and selftrained practitioners are included in the statistics.5 Clearly, the size of the art-producing masses in the USA is nothing less than astronomical and like other informal regions of social life may prove impossible to gauge.6 What is unequivocal, however, is the way this multitude greatly exceed the small coterie of artists visible within the formalized region known as the art world. This is true even if we focus only on those practitioners who have received graduate level training in the past four years. Is it the case, therefore, that the majority of creative activity in our

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postindustrial society remains invisible to the institutions and discourses – the critics, art historians, collectors, dealers, museums, curators and arts administrators – that manage and interpret contemporary culture? If we set aside the standard art historical explanation that significant cultural production takes place only within a narrow zone inhabited by visionaries, several additional questions arise. First, just where are these other practitioners, these informal artists and shadow creators, and what impact might they have on contemporary culture, if any? Second, how would the hegemony of the art world be affected if scholars began to discuss, classify, and assess the work of “Sunday painters,” amateur artists, and hobbyists in terms similar to those used for “professional” artists? It is worth noting that specific examples of this work are far from invisible, we encounter them far more often than we do “serious” art. Rather, what remains out of bounds is any consideration of this work as complex or compelling or forming its own cultural category. This taboo extends especially to the sort of irregular systems informal culture has evolved for circulating work outside the dominant art market. This chapter will not only address these issues, it will argue that the gravitational force of this indefinite shadow realm is already having a definite effect on the elite art world. If this essay seeks to open up these questions for examination however, it does so not with the aim of expanding the hegemony of the art world into this shadow zone. Instead, the hope is to find within this nether world what Walter Benjamin understood as the explosive power of the inconspicuous and overlooked.7 The term I choose to give to this vast and heterogeneous pool of conspicuous yet unseen artistic activity is “Dark Matter.” It is a term borrowed from the science of cosmology. Dark Matter is what cosmologists call the enormous quantity of non-reflective material predicted by the Big Bang theory. Theoretically, this unseen matter makes up most of the universe and provides an explanation for why the universe will not continue to expand indefinitely. In a sense, cosmic Dark Matter serves as a sort of counterweight to the powerful thrust of the Big Bang explosion that initiated time and space eons ago. Yet, despite the omnipresence of DM, so far its presence has only been inferred indirectly by observing the motions of visible objects such as planets, comets, stars, and nebulae.8 Like its astronomical cousin, artistic Dark Matter makes up most of the cultural universe in contemporary, postindustrial society. Yet, while cosmic Dark Matter is actively being sought by scientists, the size and composition of artistic Dark Matter is of little interest to the men, women, and institutions of the art world. This apathy would be of little significance if it were not the case, or so I shall argue in this chapter, that the art world is highly dependent on its Dark Matter much in the same way the physical universe depends on the presence of cosmic Dark Matter. By the term art world I mean the integrated, transnational economy of auction houses, dealers, collectors, international biennials, and trade publications that, together with curators, artists, and critics, reproduce the market,

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as well as the discourse that influences the appreciation and demand for highly valuable artworks. I prefer this admittedly stingy, even economically determined notion of art world to the often-cited definitions coined by sociologist Howard S. Becker or philosopher Arthur C. Danto respectively. Becker explains his term art worlds as: “The network of people whose cooperative activity, organized via their joint knowledge of conventional means of doing things, produces the kind of art work that the art world is noted for.”9 And while I agree with Becker that there are multiple, overlapping art worlds more or less collaboratively organized, he loses a great deal of analytical power by ignoring the historical and class-based antagonism between different conceptions of art that make up these “art worlds.” Danto’s coinage of artworld on the other hand, from his influential 1964 essay “The Artworld,” states that “to see something as art requires something the eye cannot descry – an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld.”10 Danto mystifies art practice. He does so when he emphasizes the accumulation of specialized information a viewer must possess in order to recognize what is and what is not art rather than the key role played by the highly privileged art market in defining its products and services. Ironically, by providing credibility to the hermetic expert culture surrounding art he contradicts the claims of avant-garde artists who once sought to democratize culture under the slogan, “art into life.” Because I am interested in socially critical and activist art I perceive the role of engaged artists, scholars, and critics as an interventionist one within an already antagonistic field. The initial focus of this chapter, therefore, is on the relationship that Dark Matter has to the most visible of art worlds, more accurately understood as the elite art world. The latter is dependent on the accumulated wealth of the economically privileged, and it has hegemony over the very idea of culture. But why, if forms of cultural Dark Matter are already successfully operating outside this hegemony, should one bother intervening in the art world at all? There is no easy answer to this question. In fact, to a large degree many artists are self-consciously doing just that, turning their collective backs on the formal art world and exploring alternative and somewhat autonomous systems of exchange and production of art. However, there is a danger in thinking that one can achieve autonomy in a cultural environment as rapacious as ours simply by ignoring the obvious forms of institutional power. From my own experience in New York in the 1980s, it did not take long for the art world to selectively choose its political art “stars” during a similar wave of collaborative and socially engaged art activism as that of today. Nor am I proposing that one merely work “within” the art world. It is, instead, a question of, first, knowing where the existing pitfalls of building alternative operating platforms lie, and second, finding ways to leverage both the actual and symbolic power of the elite art world for purposes other than the aggrandizement of art collectors and large art institutions. In other words, it is a matter of historical analysis coupled with a strategic practice.11

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At the very least the elite art world is a significant site of critical intervention because of the near-virtual hegemony it wields over notions of “serious” cultural value. Such values may be generated by a relatively small group of individuals including collectors, dealers, and curators, but the influence on everything from public policy to the direction of art education takes its cue from whom and what the elite art world draws into its inner circle of light.12 It is key to my argument, however, to understand that the line separating prominent artistic value from all other artistic production is, in theory, an arbitrary one. I will return to this important point in more detail in the section on value. But first, what might the general lack of interest, even selective contempt, expressed by the art world towards this realm of informal art suggest? Is it the case as I am suggesting that within Dark Matter there is a hidden, counter hegemonic potential? Considering that a once socially dissident avant-garde now asserts itself as a marketing prototype for hip fashion designers, advertising agencies, and information technocrats, even the possibility of critical opposition is refreshing. I hope to do more than intimate such an appearance while avoiding the typically dispassionate forms of “academic insubordination.” Indeed, this essay asks that we not only understand the subordinate ranking of informal artists as equal to the “glut” of professionally trained artists who remain in the shadow of the mainstream art world, but it insists we take careful aim and overturn the way cultural values are generated. One weapon in this destructuration is the theoretical and practical mobilization of Dark Matter. And this means doing more than challenging the exclusion of specific groups of people from the art world, which has been the dominant “oppositional” practice of the last ten to fifteen years. Rather, it means defining the possibility of an inclusive and liberatory artistic practice that: (1) moves beyond the elitist discourse of the art world and its markets, and (2) constitutes a politically radical challenge to the increasing privatization of the public sphere in general. This chapter will examine several specific “shadow” practices in light of this agenda. First, however, there is one additional aspect of the Dark Matter phenomenon that is important to my argument: Dark Matter, it seems, is getting brighter. The demise of modernist formalism and the legitimation of vernacular and “outsider” art are no doubt two reasons for the increasing visibility of informal art. It is my argument, however, that these are minor reasons and do not account fully for the shift in status we are seeing for some forms of Dark Matter. Instead, the visibility of informal art is due in large part to the increasing accessibility of inexpensive digital technologies that allow for the precise replication, appropriation, and virtually free distributing of information and images. However, before expanding on this assertion I want to explain why the increasing visibility of non-professional art has not yet brought about the undermining of the elitist art world as promised. Let me start with a definition of the way the elite art world produces artistic value in the first place.

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Art worlds The art world is structured like a pyramid. This much is obvious. Most practitioners are massed at the base, and a select group of artists occupy the apex nearest the light. Superficially, it is similar to other competitive fields that employ highly educated workforces. Specialized filters regulate upward mobility. Those who reach its summit are well rewarded and find themselves made extremely visible to those beneath. In this sense, the art world is not greatly different from the culture of academia or politics or other professions such as medicine, science, engineering, or law. However, if we look more closely at the structure we find striking differences. For one thing these other professions provide most of the many individuals gathered at the base of their salary pyramid with reasonable employment in the field. Not true of the art world. Unlike these other highly educated professionals, artists typically work two or three jobs, often in other areas than art, just to make a living wage. In 1990, as many as half of all artists earned less than $3,000 from making art. A quarter earned only $500 from art sales.13 Not surprisingly unemployment is chronic among artists with a “dropout” rate far higher than in other specialized professions. Remarkably, those who give up making art actually tend to earn more money than those who continue to practice it.14 All of which indicates what many of us knew already: that artists are overeducated, overworked, and structurally unemployable. But just what differentiates the practice of the small number of successful artists from the many who “fail”? According to the economic anthropologist Stuart Plattner this phenomenon can be explained by applying what is known as the Tournament Model to the art world. It works like this. In many sporting competitions just one athlete’s performance will be recognized even if it is a mere fraction of a second faster or better than that of other competitors. This one individual wins “the prize” and many others lose despite achieving outstanding athletic performances. Plattner insists that, “this model is relevant to the art market because it describes a situation of workers receiving payments that don’t seem related to their input of effort.”15 In other words, given a group of similar looking aesthetic products there will ultimately be just one that is considered truly significant in art historical and, therefore, art collectible terms. However, if this “winner takes all” formula offers an explanation for why nearly identical objects or activities can wind up at radically different locations on the sloping sides of the art world pyramid, it does not explain how this happens. In other words, how are often minute differences in artistic practice evaluated by the art industry thus producing profoundly dissimilar values? Unlike in the Tournament Model, in the art world there are no clear goal posts or records to compete against. Therefore, what criteria are used in the art world to judge winners? This question becomes especially interesting when we think about the pricing of art works. Unlike other commodities, the cost of an art object

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Figure 5.2 40-foot-long flow chart that drew connections between the public and “secret” players involved in the September 11 debacle on display at The Autonomous Territories of Chicago, Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, October 2001. The weekend-long event was organized by Emily Forman, Josh MacPhee, and Ben Rubin and included dozens of local activist groups, artists, and community organizations. Reprinted by permission.

cannot be evaluated simply by using patterns of supply and demand or other, traditional means of determining market value. Once again Plattner’s work is useful as he applies the notion of Consumption Capital to explain the paradoxical nature of the art commodity. Consumption Capital is the accumulated knowledge one requires in order to become an efficient consumer of a given commodity.16 One way to explain why artists with similar looking work are valued differently, or why well-crafted and labor-intensive work is often less costly than an informal installation made on the cheap, is to consider the way accumulated consumer knowledge or Consumption Capital is used for determining what art is collected and what is critically rewarded. A collector, who compiles a great deal of Consumption Capital about an artist, not only increases the pleasure of purchasing a high-end, luxury item such as a painting or installation, but this informational accumulation also helps insure the long-term value of an acquisition. Since every consumer inevitably wants to economize the process of gathering knowledge about what they consume, most collectors inevitably focus more attention on those

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artists frequently referred to within the art world itself. This “insider knowledge” is circulated among other collectors as well as critics and curators who are known to already hold substantial amounts of Consumption Capital. Curiously, however, the art world’s dependency on Consumption Capital also leads to a paradox in which the artist who lowers the price of a given work loses value in the market because a drop in price signals to collectors not a bargain but a loss of demand. Compare this quandary to purchasing almost any other commodity such as groceries or computers but also most luxury items such as high-priced cars or even stocks. This paradox means that in the art world, a large dollop of oily fat scooped into the corner of a white room, or a stitched together clump of discarded dolls can command a higher price in the art market than a skillfully rendered realistic painting or sculpted bronze. Note that if we revisit for a moment Arthur Danto’s artworld in light of this Consumption Capital model we can see that his ideal artworlder, the expert who knows when they are in the “presence” of art, has acquired a different, more realistic countenance – that of commodity speculator. Far more insightful is the work of artist Hans Haacke whose installations offer a more precise definition of the art world. For the purposes of my argument, however, it is enough to assert that establishing value in the most elite strata of the art industry has very little to do with the quality of workmanship, the caliber of materials used, or the amount of labor time invested in making the art. Instead, it is dependent on such intangibles as the network of journals, dealers, and institutions most highly regarded by the wealthy collectors of contemporary art. Returning to the question of Dark Matter: in what specific ways is the art world dependent on the realm of informal art, and does this have significant consequences? In order to answer this question, let us imagine that cultural Dark Matter, including hobbyists and home crafts-people as well as “failed” artists, simply ceases to exist as of tomorrow morning. In other words, the shadowy base of the art pyramid is disappeared. In order to offer a picture of why this would be a problem for fine artists let me turn to an important study by Columbia College of Chicago entitled “The informal arts: finding cohesion, capacity and other cultural benefits in unexpected places.” The study asserts that the formal and informal arts operate on a two-way continuum, upon which information, personnel, financial benefits, and other resources flow back and forth . . . the informal arts create employment opportunities for professionally working artists, play a “research and development” role, and provide knowledgeable and committed audiences for the formal arts sector.17 The report admits that, “despite its popularity, informal arts practice remains largely hidden from view.” And certainly what I call Dark Matter does provide professionals in the arts with opportunities such as teaching all those artists who feel they are not yet professional enough or who simply

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want to learn more about a specific art technique. The visual arts, in particular, offer a unique set of employment positions ideally suited to people with some art skills already in place. These include the studio assistant and the art fabricator, two niche jobs that take advantage of Duncan’s “glut” of trained artists within the marketplace. Another aspect of this co-dependency involves those artists who make a living photographing the work of other artists for portfolios and for grant applications. And there are artists who take on administrative tasks such as grant writing or curating. One can see why the Columbia study uses the phrase “two-way continuum.” To look at this question of how the formal arts are dependent on Dark Matter, consider the impact on the availability and cost of art supplies if hobbyists, Sunday painters, and “failed” artists stopped producing work. Should the demand for art supplies suddenly become limited to the small group of successful artists, inevitably the cost of canvas, pigments, and brushes would skyrocket.18 There are still other ways Dark Matter directly and positively affects the art world and its institutions including subscriptions to art journals and museum memberships. All of which leads the Columbia College study to finally recommend that these shadow practices be brought into the light and be recognized as vital to the entire cultural community. Among the study’s specific recommendations include a call for further research into the informal arts as well as the suggestion that informal arts receive direct assistance from cultural foundations and public arts agencies. In light of this apparent symbiosis you may ask where is the radical conflict between formal and informal art that I have insisted upon? What became of the potential for sweeping change that Dark Matter secretly harbors? To answer this, I offer a passage in the same Columbia College study. It reads as follows: “It will be helpful to understand the ‘informal’ in informal arts as involving the ‘process’ and the ‘context’ of art-making, not, as a threshold matter, the ‘product’ of the activity, nor the characteristics of the artist’s training.” How to read this inelegant sentence? For one thing it appears that the members of the research team had difficulty agreeing on some definitions and key aspects of their findings. More importantly it asserts that before informal art can hope to shed its pejorative associations embodied in words such as amateur, unskilled, and dilettante, those who mold cultural values will have to shift their emphasis away from a reverence for collectible objects and brand names and towards the far more ephemeral practices of creative activity itself. The shift proposed here is nothing less than radical. It challenges the very heart of the modern art market and its roots in capitalist society dating back at least to the eighteenth century. With our attention now hopefully drawn to the potential “oppositional” charge hidden in Dark Matter’s gravitational field, let me next offer an explanation for how the formal and elitist art world is already being contorted by this dimly seen mass, this Dark Matter.

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Slack art and the illumination of Dark Matter In his book Avantgarde and After: Rethinking Art Now, the British art historian Brandon Taylor adopts the term “slack art” to describe the way certain younger artists use ephemeral materials, a marked disinterest in skilled craftsmanship, and an extemporaneous approach to organization and display in their installation works. Unlike the conceptual artists of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the new disinterestedness in artistic craft does not appear aimed at either democratizing the practice of art or a rejection of the art object’s status as a valuable commodity.20 Taylor describes the politics of this self-consciously adolescent slack art style as an anarchy that percolates but “never exceeds a slow boil.” In other words, this new species of deskilled artist (to borrow a term from the late Ian Burn) may, indeed, be aware that rejecting formalism once implied a political act on the part of artists. Nevertheless, today, at least prior to the events of 9/11, there has been little desire to move one’s artistic focus beyond the self-absorbed and seemingly autonomous art world itself. In this sense at least, slack art is a recent, conservative reaction to the informally constructed but highly political work of artists such as Martha Rosler (garage sale), or Mierle Laderman Ukeles, or more recently the art of Renee Green.21 To restate my earlier contention, if informality is one of the outstanding features of contemporary art, this fact is due to the increasing visibility of the creative activity I am referring to as Dark Matter. Indeed, could we not just as accurately describe the direction that artists including Mike Kelley, Julie Parsons, Jason Rhodes, Sarah Luckas, or Thomas Hirshhorn, to name only some of the better exemplars of slack art, as an amateurization of high art practices? As if what is taking place is some form of mimicry by which the art world responds to the danger of Dark Matter by reflecting its appearance if not its substance. In order to put a finer point on the arbitrariness of where these lines are drawn I will turn to a specific form of visual culture that appeared in the streets following the tragic events in New York City on September 11, 2001. A month after the destruction of the World Trade Center towers I visited the Fireman’s Memorial on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It is a limestone monument designed by H. Van Buren Magonigle in 1913 to honor those fire fighters killed in the line of duty and several miles from ground zero. What I discovered was that the memorial had become host to a spontaneous shrine for the victims of 9/11. Like numerous other sites around the city, this shrine consisted of flowers, candles, and children’s drawings not unlike those that appear at the sites of automobile accidents along highways. Attached to the side of the monument is a plastic covered photographic depicting some of the New York City fire fighters lost when the towers collapsed. For the purposes of this essay I want to call attention to a grouping of soft toys, bunched together like silent mourners in the middle of this informal memorial, that included a frayed teddy bear and at least one

100 Gregory Sholette character from the television series, “Sesame Street.” All of the toys had become soiled and stained from a month of sitting out of doors. In spite of, or perhaps because of, this desolate condition they managed to reflect quite powerfully the theme of the Fireman’s Memorial itself: the veneration of civic responsibility even at the price of personal sacrifice. Now the unambiguous, signifying force of this informal display is an important reminder that the art world holds no monopoly on expressiveness, even if this particular kind of statement is dismissed by “serious” artists and critics as mere sentiment or kitsch. (I hope to deal with the role played by sentiment in the informal arts in more detail in a future essay.) More importantly for my argument here, however, is to consider exactly how this impromptu shrine with its polyester-filled homunculi differs from the stitched together stuffed toys displayed by the well-known artist Mike Kelley in museums, and prestigious art galleries. Specifically, why is there a volume of art writing about the way someone such as Kelley produces significant cultural and artistic value while the display of toys by grieving neighbors is relegated to the status of, at best, noteworthy social phenomena noted by journalists or anthropologists? Now the aim of this chapter is not to open up another tired discussion about high versus low art or the use of Duchampian irony by the neo avant-garde. To do so means uncritically accepting the same narrow conditions set up in Danto’s version of artworld. My interest in comparing these outwardly similar arrangements of commonplace objects is to raise what I hope is a broader set of questions, including why the elite art world requires the separation between “professional” and amateur art, and how precise is the partition? What if there exists work by artists who have “professional” credentials, yet who extol not merely the look, but also the less visible value structure of Dark Matter? Consider as an example of this self-conscious informal art practice the project “One Week Boutique.” It was produced in July 2000 by a group of Chicago-based artists that goes by the name Temporary Services. Like the work of Kelley and company, “One Week Boutique” (or OWB) was “rendered” in an informal, amateur-like mode. But unlike such “slack art,” it did not aim for an ironic, artistic naivety or sink into an intellectual melancholy or play at radical politics by indulging in “lukewarm” anarchism. Rather, OWB self-consciously stepped outside the exchange economy of the art market while seeking an audience indifferent to the self-reflexivity of contemporary art. “One Week Boutique” was promoted via email, word of mouth, and photocopy flyers, and consisted of donated clothing, neatly hung within the small office space the group rented at that time in the Chicago Loop area. It is important to note that the Loop is the city’s office district. It is located far from Chicago’s art gallery scene. During the OWB exhibition, Temporary Services invited the public to “come by, drink coffee, look at our booklets, try on clothes in our dressing room and take whatever clothing they want.”22 OWB actually wound up lasting several months with a constant stream of

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visitors, many of whom apparently came because they needed clothing more than craved “art.” This attention prompted Temporary Services to realize several other versions of the project including one in the streets of San Juan, Puerto Rico. As Temporary Services member Brett Bloom explains, the intent of OWB involved a conscious decision to make “One Week Boutique” hard for the art world to participate in – not so much to discourage them, but not to cater to their expectations. OWB wasn’t an installation . . . we didn’t steal the aesthetics from these situations “found in the world”, but used them to create a unique and interesting social situation. OWB was intended to exist somewhere between a high-end boutique and a thrift store. The clothing was all in good condition. . . .We talked about the project in terms of the aesthetics of expected situations . . . [and] tried to articulate things in terms of applied aesthetics of daily, lived experience. People up off the street interacted immediately as they would in any clothing store. The questions and strangeness of the situation came only when the economics were discussed.23 It is crucial to my argument to understand that the reason OWB does not fit comfortably within the current bias of the art world is not because the work lacks “quality,” at least as this is defined by current art world discourse. Nor is it because the project looks radically different from what is currently being exhibited in established museums and leading art galleries. Temporary Services’s project “One Week Boutique” is less recognizable as “art” because it focuses on the process and organization of creative work itself rather than the production of objects. It is my contention that such self-governing yet still experimental practices are most similar to the kind of creative selfvalidation typical of much amateur and informal art but no longer conceivable within most of the contemporary art world. Nor is Temporary Services unique. A partial list of artists and organizations operating in the various shadow zones of the art world include the on-line collaborations of RTMark and Critical Art Ensemble; counter-globalization activists and urban interventionists such as Reclaim the Streets (located internationally), Ne Pas Plier (France), Las Agencias (Madrid and Boston), and The Reverend Billy (NYC); the list also includes organizations that focus on re-mapping space such as Ultra-Red, The Center for Land Use Interpretation (both LA), and REPOhistory (NYC); in addition there are educational activists such as Jim Duignan and The Stockyard Institute, as well as Video Machete (both Chicago); and finally there are groups centered on alternative forms of exchange or institutional infrastructure including Collectivo Cambalache (London) and Dan Peterman’s Experimental Station (Chicago). All of these informal institutions challenge the uniquely authored collectible art necessary for sustaining art world hegemony. Furthermore,

102 Gregory Sholette these informal, politicized micro-institutions make work that infiltrates high schools, flea markets, public squares, corporate web sites, city streets, housing projects, and local political machines in ways that do not set out to recover a specific meaning or use-value for either art world discourse or private interests. To put this more succinctly: the work of informal, collective, politicized artists, including Temporary Services, might be seen as structurally closer to the anonymous installations I witnessed at the Fireman’s Memorial than to the very similar looking work made by any number of highly visible, contemporary artists recognized by the art world. In this sense, I offer Dark Matter as an alternative narrative to the now conventional genealogy of avant-garde and neo avant-garde art. At the center of this counter-interpretation are the informal and often perverse social exchange systems Dark Matter spawns for circulating work.

Dark matter as a gift economy Today, one can hardly escape an encounter with informal art. It is a vast and heterogeneous bounty of production radiating from homes and offices, schools and streets, community centers and cyberspace, especially in cyberspace. Furthermore, Dark Matter exhibits qualities that are anathema to notions of serious or high art including fantasy, nostalgia, and sentiment. This informal artistry ranges from the whimsical to the inspired, from the banal to the absurd and to the obscene. And it is incontinent. Unlike the art world’s market Dark Matter does not impede its own production in order to create a fictional scarcity. Most important to my argument are those species of Dark Matter that partake of what Georges Bataille described as a “principle of loss,” a pathological economy of expenditure without precise utility. Bataille borrows some of his perverse anti-capitalist concepts from the anthropologist Marcel Mauss whose concept of gift giving among Native American cultures is focused on strengthening social relations rather than optimizing one’s position in a market. In many instances the gift economy serves to level off differences of power and wealth among individuals in the same social group.24 An example of Dark Matter built around the form of a gift economy is Elfwood. Elfwood is an on-line art gallery that serves non-professional artists who produce images and stories about dragons, witches, wizards, and of course elves. An amateur artist named Thomas F. Abrahamsson hosts the site. Abrahamsson lives in Sweden and makes a living as a computer specialist. Elfwood claims to host some 14,968 artists. (That is more than half the number of estimated MFA graduates in the US since 1998.) Not unlike Temporary Services and the other groups mentioned above, Elfwood is financed with enormous amounts of in-kind labor as well as donated cash. Nor does it appear to provide any direct income to Abrahamsson or any of the artists who use the site. Several additional features make Elfwood relevant to my discussion of Dark Matter. For one thing it has several levels

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including one called Lotherlorien that is named for an imaginary place described in the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien. Lotherlorien is governed by a stringent policy whereby the only art accepted onto the site is made by amateurs who make no money from their work. The rules for Lotherlorien state, “you may not use Elfwood to promote yourself.” At the same time Elfwood imposes few “aesthetic” filters on the art stating, “we are not the ones who judge if art is good or bad.” The Elfwood mission statement reaffirms this commitment to a judgment-free exchange of ideas and images, stating: Showing pieces of art from the wonderful world of fantasy to the general public. Letting all amateur fantasy artists show their work for free, helping them to get a name and reputation. Helping other artists with inspiration by giving a chance to look at fellow artists’ art.25 One lesson drawn from this is that the capacity of the Internet to host a large volume of images and information in an interactive format has made it possible to create a virtual art community that is the size of a large museum. Because the cost and skills required for capturing and processing images, sound, and text from a wide variety of sources continues to spiral downwards, the growth of Dark Matter such as Elfwood is inevitable. One last example of Dark Matter offers still another form of gift giving only made possible by this increasing accessibility of digital technology. The fan cut is made by, and for, the viewing pleasure of aficionados, who share an interest, some might say an obsession, with a particular film or television program. If the better known fanzine takes advantage of the first generation of copying technology such as photocopiers and facsimile machines, the fan cut consists of a digitized copy of an original media product reedited to suit a particular group of fans. One of the largest fan networks centers around George Lucas’s Star Wars series. Participants occupy hundreds of web sites and chat rooms as well as meet in person whenever possible. Recently a fan cut known as the Phantom Edit circulated within the Star Wars fan community as a free download. The Phantom Edit is based on Lucas’s Star Wars episode, The Phantom Menace. According to reports it eliminates twenty minutes of the studio version of the film including most appearances by one animated character uniformly disliked by Star Wars fans. According to one on-line Star Wars web site the new version has “fixed a large number of things the fans are upset with in Episode One.”26 Significantly this unauthorized cut was made on a Macintosh G-4, 400megahertz computer using Final Cut Pro, a professional quality program for editing digital images that is nevertheless relatively inexpensive and “user friendly.” Elfwood and the Phantom Edit indicate how digital technology can amplify the social networking and gift economy typical of informal art practice. Elsewhere, I connect these qualities to certain activist and oppositional

104 Gregory Sholette cultural practices including the growing counter-globalization movement.27 I conclude here with a summation of the key points outlined in this chapter.

Summary High art values The elite, high art market is stabilized by the routine production of minor differences. These differences are based less on formal characteristics of art works than on a systematic segregation of non-commodifiable practices such as those I have detailed in this chapter. Seemingly identical products are valued in radically different ways in a process that, from the perspective of a nonparticipant, seems entirely arbitrary. However, as I have attempted to show, there are ways to account for this activity if we understand the economy of the art world as predicated on the concentration of knowledge and capital rather than a wholesale expansion of the market for artistic goods and services. The emergence of the Dark Matter At the same time, it is clear that most of the people who graduate with professional degrees in art as well as all of the people who identify themselves as hobbyists or amateurs, represent a far larger and heterogeneous mass of creative activity than that which appears within the limited sphere known as the art world. It is this vast pool of largely invisible art making that I have provisionally called Dark Matter. Meanwhile, this nebulous region is getting brighter thanks in part to ever more affordable information-related technologies. And not only does this increasing visibility permit informal art to be seen by art world institutions, but it permits informal artists to better see one another. Art in the shadows By contrast, the work of Temporary Services and the other groups I have presented perceive not only the visual intensity of these “informal,” amateur practices, but also the economic subversiveness they theoretically exemplify. And it is this engagement with how Dark Matter behaves rather than what it looks like that segregates such practices from those of the elite art world, no matter how similar they superficially appear. Meanwhile, this simultaneously forces the work of Temporary Services, REPOhistory, RTMark, and other nonconventional groups into an alignment with the vast majority of cultural practices unrecognized by the art world described here as Dark Matter.

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Notes 1 Carol Duncan “Who rules the art world?,” in Duncan, Aesthetics of Power: Essays in Critical Art History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 172, 180. 2 Quoted in Carol Becker, “The artist as public intellectual,” in Becker, Surpassing the Spectacle: Global Transformations and the Changing Politics of Art, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002, p. 14. 3 Andrew Hultkrans and Jef Burton, “Surf and turf,” Artforum, Summer 1998, pp. 106–9. 4 The MFA degree was initiated under the “Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944,” better known as the GI Bill. See MaLin Wilson-Powell, “After they’ve seen Paree,” Art Issues #64, Sept./Oct. 2000, pp. 23–6. 5 According to the 1997 National Endowment for the Arts Survey entitled Public Participation in the Arts some 31 million people paint, sculpt, or draw pictures while 33 million make photographs. Compare this very statistic to the just under 2 million who self-identified themselves as “artist” for the 1997 US Bureau of Labor Statistics. All figures taken from Columbia College Chicago Center for the Arts, “The informal arts: finding cohesion, capacity and other cultural benefits in unexpected places,” research brief, Chicago, Spring, 2002. 6 Compare the problem of defining the informal art world with that of economists facing the informal or “shadow” economy. To some degree the questions raised can be equally applied to culture: The lack of consensus in formulating a unified theory of the shadow economy, or even a precise definition of the components that comprise it, suggests that important questions remain unanswered. To what extent does the exclusion of shadow economic activity distort official estimates of macroeconomic variables, including output, employment, and inflation? What are the policy ramifications of these exclusions? What is the distribution of shadow economic behavior between unrecorded, but legal, and illicit activities? Can the overall size of the shadow economy be estimated, and is it changing over time? Do countries at different stages of development possess different types of hidden economies? What is the relationship between regulatory (in)efficiency and the size of the shadow economy? (Matthew H. Fleming, John Roman, and Graham Farrell, “The shadow economy.” Online. Available HTTP: www.britannica.com/ magazine/article?content_id=171785&query=currency) 7 See Walter Benjamin, “Traumkitsch,” in Benjamin, Selected Writings: Volume 2, 1927–1934, Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, eds, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. 8 See the excellent piece by Vera Rubin, “Dark matter in the universe,” Scientific American. Online. Available HTTP: www.sciam.com/specialissues/0398cosmos/ 0398rubin.html. 9 Howard S. Becker, “Introduction,” Art Worlds, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982. 10 Arthur C. Danto, “The Artworld,” The Journal of Philosophy, 1964, vol. 61, pp. 571–84. 11 For more on these themes I humbly refer the reader to the following: Gregory Sholette, “Interventionists and the historical uncanny: or; can there be revolutionary art without revolution?,” pp. 133, 143, in Nato Thompson and Gregory Sholette, eds, The Interventionists: Users’ Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004; as well as the co-authored essay, Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette, “Periodising collectivism,” Third Text, no. 6, November 2004, pp. 573–83.

106 Gregory Sholette 12 Not only do we find more museums displaying exhibitions of popular art and commercial art including Armani fashions, Star Wars props, and even Hip Hop culture, the latter dispossessed of its potentially abrasive, socio-economic context, but according to a 1992 National Endowment for the Arts report, US museum attendance figures topped 164 million in 1992. Nevertheless, it is important to note that the national as well as even international art market remains anchored in a handful of global cities, including most prominently London and New York. According to the economic anthropologist Stuart Plattner, “only elite-gallery exposure in New York creates historical significance.” Plattner points out that over 80 percent of US artists do not live in New York City, despite the fact that what he terms the “gatekeeper galleries” are located there. Furthermore, even most artists in New York are not significant sellers of work in the high-end, elite market. “To drive home the idea of [New York City] hegemony: it seems clear that most of the thousands of art world actors in New York have more in common with their St. Louis counterparts than they do with the well-publicized, but extraordinary few, art stars represented in the national media”; see Stuart Plattner, High Art Down Home: An Economic Ethnography of a Local Art Market, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996, pp. 3, 8. 13 Neil O. Alper and Gregory H. Wassall, More Than Once In a Blue Moon: Multiple Jobholdings by American Artists, Research Division Report #40, Washington: National Endowment for the Arts, 2000, p. 97. 14 In a study, 300 graduates of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago were tracked between 1963 to 1980; Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Jacob W. Getzels, and Stephen P. Kahn, “Talent and achievement,” Chicago: unpublished report, 1984, p. 44. 15 Plattner, pp. 12, 13. 16 Plattner, p. 14. 17 Columbia College Chicago Center for the Arts, “The informal arts: finding cohesion, capacity and other cultural benefits in unexpected places.” 18 According to the Craft & Hobby Association’s Nationwide Craft & Hobby Consumer Usage and Purchase Study, from 2002, 60 percent of US households report that at least one member participates in a craft or hobby. Meanwhile, the total sales of hobby supplies were $29 billion in 2002. Inevitably, manufacturers of high-end art supplies depend on sales to less demanding hobbyists simply to remain in business. See the Research link on the Hobby Industry Association website. Online. Available HTTP: www.hobby.org/index2.html (accessed September 1, 2002). 19 Columbia College Chicago Center for the Arts, “The informal arts: finding cohesion, capacity and other cultural benefits in unexpected places.” 20 Brandon Taylor, Avantgarde and After: Rethinking Art Now, New York: H.N. Abrams, 1995, p. 153. 21 For more on the connection between informal art practices and radical feminist theory, I refer you to a short yet provocative Heresies no. 4 essay (Winter 1978) that parallels some of my arguments here, Lucy R. Lippard, “Making something from nothing (toward a definition of women’s ‘hobby art’),” reprinted in Lucy R. Lippard, Get the Message, New York: Dutton, 1984; see esp. pp. 97, 104. 22 All quotations about OWB are taken from a founding member of Temporary Services, Brett Bloom, “Re: more questions,” e-mail (October 16, 2001). The booklets Bloom makes reference to are self-published, zine-like brochures the group produces about each of its public art projects. A selection of these photocopied booklets includes the documentation of a stealth installation involving artists’ books that the group inserted into shelves of the Harold Washington Library in Chicago. Another booklet describes a one-day “give away” of donated art called Free For All. And still another brochure details the results of the group’s

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23 24

25 26

27

Public Sculpture Opinion Poll in which citizens were given the opportunity to respond “in the street” to an abstract public art work sponsored by the city. (One copy of this booklet of mostly negative opinions was sent to the city’s Public Art Department.) Brett Bloom, “Re: more questions,” e-mail (October 16, 2001). Georges Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure,” in Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–39, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. See also Bruce Barber and Jeff Dayton-Johnson, “Marking the limit: reframing a micro-economy for the arts,” Parachute #106, April, May, June 2002, pp. 27, 39. See Elfwood. Online. Available HTTP: http://elfwood.lysator.liu.se/ (accessed September 4, 2004). While the maker of Phantom Edit distributed his fan cut for free, others were not so “gift” oriented. Bootleg copies of the Edit were soon being made and sold. Meanwhile, Lucas has taken legal action against the distribution of the new edit and formally requested eBay, the largest online auction site, to voluntarily not list the Phantom Edit, an action that further underscores the potentially destabilizing power of Dark Matter especially when it collides with the formal, cultural economy. Gregory Sholette, “Dark matter, activist art and the counter-public sphere,” excerpts in Journal of Aesthetics and Protest (Los Angeles, CA) 1, #3, 2004, pp. 12–25.

The communication network of the GALA Committee consisted of thousands of facsimile transmissions of “Product Updates” and notes on the scripts. Ideas were developed through this extensive thermal-paper network. When deemed acceptable by the team, the products were fabricated and shipped to the set for insertion. The artworks and the points of view represented in this project are the expressions of the GALA Committee. They do not reflect the views of Spelling Entertainment Group Inc. or any of its affiliates or subsidiaries including Melrose Productions. Neither do they reflect the views of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, California Institute of the Arts, the University of Georgia, or any other sponsoring organizations of In the Name of the Place. They do represent the efforts of individuals who have voluntarily and cooperatively been a part of this project to find new venues and methods of support for expression in the worlds of art, television and education. Figure 6.1 The GALA Network. Courtesy of The GALA Committee.

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6

Primetime art as seen on Melrose Place The GALA Committee

Update It is 2021, a quarter century after the GALA Committee initiated its viral infection of the global electronic net. As we now know, that world historic event started humbly enough with the GALA Committee’s gentle invasion of its first host, Melrose Place, a kitschy if surprisingly clever soap opera destined for the recycling bin of syndicated nostalgia, which instead found itself not only remembered but revered for its pioneering effort to creatively fuse the worlds of art and television. Who could have known that this small yet unprecedented collaboration between the television veterans who produced Melrose Place for Aaron Spelling (mega-producer Tori Spelling’s father) and the GALA Committee artists would lead to a profoundly radical transformation of worldwide art, entertainment, communication, and government? GALA’s noncommercial PIMs (product insertion manifestations) began to take hold with the introduction of HDTV (now obsolete). Popular VVs and F2B/B2F parties (a.k.a. Vice Versas and Foreground to Background) were the way to watch PIM-affected programs. Meanwhile, in the academic world, multidimensional conceptual perceptual field dynamics grew more powerful as CPOs (Conceptual/Perceptual Oscillations) produced a cascade effect of democratic expression and desires. The worldwide fan net, once under the control of consumer/media marketing professionals, had no choice but to rethink their strategies to match the yearning for ideas provoked by the new forms of intelligent simulevel entertainment. From the perspective of twenty-five years, it is easy to see the GALA Committee’s historical predecessors (it also helps being wetwired in the Global Instant Database). Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, ACT UP, the slashers, Paper Tiger Television, the Tape Beatles, Emergency Broadcast Network, the Barbie Liberation Organization, local TV pirates, and indigenous media groups made guerrilla raids on television. Using the cultural terrorist tactics of poaching, hacking, slashing, and jamming, these groups of artists and activists created a new electronic folk culture out of the materials of mass-produced culture. The GALA Committee tweaked those tactics to develop a more viral strategy of infection and mutation that eventually spread through the whole electronic/digital realm.

110 The GALA Committee MELROSE SPACE, as the collaboration between the GALA Committee and the television producers came to be called, soon sparked similar projects as people around the world began to reinvent their relation to television and the public sphere. Some projects worked with the existing shows while others created new public spheres for art within the world of broadcast television. The Hollywood film industry, by contrast, remained impervious to any art influences and eventually withered away. In the USA, President Clinton’s leadership in folding the FCC into the NEA showed yet again that her vision of the role of the arts in American life went far beyond anything that either of her parents had been able to accomplish. We used to watch television. Now we live in it. Improbably, it was the GALA Committee’s fuzzy-grained millisecond presence on Melrose Place that inspired the new forms of truly interactive virtual environments that we inhabit today. As Amanda Woodward often said, there’s no predicting the future.

Figure 6.2 GALA Committee, detail, Family Values Campaign, industrial vinyl on aluminum; video grab from Melrose Place, Billy Campbell wins the product placement award for his Roadside Family Values Campaign. Images courtesy of The GALA Committee, reproduced with permission of The GALA Committee.

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Figure 6.3 GALA Committee, Food for Thought, Chinese Take Out: Human Rights/ Turmoil (Dong Luan), Yin Yang/Equal Rights, National Treasures/ Stolen Artifacts, ink stencils on paper boxes and paper bags, various sizes; video grab from Melrose Place, a dying Kimberly is carrying Food for Thought when she runs into Matt. Images courtesy of The GALA Committee, reproduced with permission of The GALA Committee.

The GALA Committee David Adams Elizabeth Adams Eric Andersen Emily Arthur Katie Bauman Cameron Bernie David Blanchard John Borthwick Barron Brown Alan Bush Heather Champ Heeyeon Chang Mel Chin Lance Clarke Roymont Clements Kathleen Hillseth Clinesmith Karina Combs Melissa Conroy John Crowe John Cupit Lesley Dill Heather M. Eastman Diane Edison Brian Ellison Evan Firestone Mark Flood Joe Girandola Terry Glispin Nuala Glynn Jason Grier Garrison Gunter Elizabeth Huber Chip Hayes Frank Irving

Kim Jensen Bryan Jernigan Karin Johansson M. Dana Jones Cheryl Kaplan Kendal Kerr Kat Kinsman Koichi Kimura Jeff Knowlton Leo Knox Bernie Koersen H. Lan Thao Lam Ed Lambert Elizabeth Langford Jon Lapointe Tom Lawson Kristi Leonard Donna Marcantonio Diana McIntosh Mara Lonner Wendy Lundin Steve Maleski Thomas Mann Stephen McRedmond Carol Mendelsohn Georgia Metz Tamara Mewis James Millar Steve Miller Tam Miller Tess Miller Dallas Moore Margaret Morgan Jerry Murphy

Helen K. Nagge Yana Nirvana Gail Patterson Kim Patterson Constance Penley Joseph Pizzorusso Chuck Pratt Elizabeth S. Puckett Dan Pugh Martha Rees Carl Robertson Guadalupe Rodriguez Sandra Rodriguez Jeff Roe Kathleen Rogan Haun Saussy Sanjit Sethi Maura Sheehan Jocelyn Shipley Eric Shriner Deborah Siegel Rachel Slowinski Frank South Rachael Splinter Eric Swangstu Troy Swangstu Janice Tanaka Valerie Tevere Joseph Tucker Kathy Vargas Tony Velasco Jim Wade John Watts David Wilson

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Part II

Worlds

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Social worlds

Figure 7.1 Desktop Theater, waitingforgodot.com, live production of Waiting for Godot in Palace chatroom, September 1997. Credit: Screen capture from the Jenik/Brenneis Desktop Theater archive.

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7

Electronic habitus Agit-prop in an imaginary world Jennifer Gonzalez

It is because the imaginary offers the mind no resistance that the mind, conscious of no restraint, gives itself up to boundless ambitions and believes it possible to construct, or rather reconstruct, the world by virtue of its own strength and at the whim of its desires.1

Given the sordid and often tragic history of power that inflects the most ambitious forms of “world” building (colonialism, fascism), it is informative and perhaps imperative to examine claims concerning both the production and the discovery of “new” worlds whenever they arise. Calls for “new world orders” rely heavily upon the idea that worlds exist to be ordered. It is therefore not a trivial pursuit to study the cultural contexts within which fantasies of world ordering take place. Here, I am using the term “world” in its broadest sense, implying both the philosophical or cosmological models produced in the interest of comprehensive knowledge or comprehensive theology, as well as the colloquial connotations of the word, suggesting a local or historical sphere of activity and influence. The relatively recent proliferation of artificial or virtual “worlds” on the Internet testifies to the frequent conflation or interdependence of these definitions: invented cosmologies take on the characteristics of social clubs; vast imaginary territories reproduce ideologies of containment; and behaviors and bodily attributes can lead to acceptance or banishment. Each “new” world necessitates a discourse of visibility that circumscribes the boundaries of that world, its population, and its epistemological structure. Both local and global, these online “virtual” meeting spaces perhaps epitomize the notion of a “visual world.” They are social artifacts that render a world through visual signs. Avatars stand in for human subjects, and a creative compendium of digitally rendered graphical environments serves as the stage for a relatively new and undeniably “public” life mediated by the image. Most artificial worlds also produce an internally sophisticated form of imagined habitation. By “imagined habitation” I mean the construction of a space that cannot be physically inhabited, but which nevertheless interpellates or addresses a subject as an inhabitant. In particular, I am interested

118 Jennifer Gonzalez in the optical politics of this kind of interpellation, and how it creates what might be called an imaginary habitus for participants. How are human subjects, as participants, invited to live in these worlds? How are freedom of expression, property rights, and economic class articulated? How does one engage politically and pragmatically within the constraints produced by these new fantasy spaces? What social, ethical, and epistemological role do vision and visibility play? Each of these questions deserves a thorough analysis, but in this preliminary examination, I respond only with preliminary answers. The social phenomenon of artificial worlds continues to develop in dramatic ways with every passing year, and the information gathered for this essay is no doubt already out of date. Experienced participants, and the artificial world-builders and programmers themselves know the origin stories and transformations of these worlds in greater detail than I do. And sociologists are certainly better equipped to assess the long- and short-term cultural impact of these artificial worlds. As a scholar of visual culture, I am rather more intrigued by the philosophical and theoretical implications of an artificial world structured around a set of visual protocols. In short, how is a politics of representation made literal in such spaces? And, equally pressing, how is it possible to construct a critical voice within this new and growing public domain of imagined habitation?

Visible worlds Rendering the world in visual form is not a novel enterprise. Even discounting cartography, there have been numerous attempts to encapsulate the heavens and the earth in images. In an encyclopedic gesture in 1777, Johann Amos Comenius produced a compendium of aphorisms and small woodcuts titled The Visible World. Intended as a Latin primer for boys, the text claimed to offer a nearly comprehensive representation of the “chief things” to be found in the universe. Its full title – The Visible World, or, The Chief Things Therein: Drawn in Pictures: Originally written in Latin and High Dutch: Now Rendered Easy to the Capacities of Children – reveals its effort to encode the universe for the novice in a lightweight portable device: the book. Comenius’ visible world is a moral text, and, like all moral texts, it offers an outline of a theory of practice (how to act), a presentation of history (what has been), a taxonomy for proper social relations (who one is), and an ordering of spatial discourse (where things are). The book begins with the world in its totality, represented in a single cosmological image. The heaven hath fire and stars, the clouds hang in the air, birds fly under the clouds, fishes swim in the water, the earth hath hills, woods, beasts, fields and men, thus the greatest bodies of the world, the four elements, have their own inhabitants.

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Heaven, air, and water, are subsequently represented individually to better illustrate their individual components, then animals of all kinds, ordered by their terrestrial or celestial habitats. Agriculture and other methods of human sustenance are described, along with tools and architectural forms. Workers, from the blacksmith to the cobbler, are depicted in their workshops. Master and servant are described as a related pair, their relative class positions confirmed by the moral obligation of one to the other. Abstract human traits, such as “diligence” and “temperance,” are represented allegorically and whole religious doctrines (Christianity, Judaism, Islam) are visually summarized and compressed onto a single iconic page. All the knowable and thinkable world, it seems, is represented here, with the important exception of political dissent. In its desire to be comprehensive, The Visible World succeeds in drawing attention to the ideological mapping that structures the book, at least as much as to the things it supposedly represents. A rather crudely formed pedagogical text, it nevertheless reveals a boundless ambition: to reconstruct the world, its components, categories, and concepts visually and linguistically. The text engages “the visible” as that which not only appears to the eye, but also to the mind and to the moral imagination. The visible world for Comenius is the conceivable world. The book suggests a system of values such that inclusion within its pages is somehow equivalent to having a place in the world, to having an existential legitimization. The Visible World serves here not as a point of origin, but rather as a frame of reference for the general social and historical impulse to visualize worlds – an impulse that takes inhabitants and habitation as central organizing principles. It is revealing to compare Comenius’ vision to the online virtual environment Alpha World. Part of a larger universe of graphically rendered virtual worlds supported by Activeworlds.com, Alpha World is an “active world” built and populated by citizen inhabitants. Originally designed by Ron Britvich in 1995, Alpha World was unique among virtual worlds for its hands-on approach. Users were given the tools and techniques necessary to design their own 3-D graphical “objects.”2 These objects, such as walls, doors, fences, waterfalls, windows, plants, textures, colors, and so on, can be placed on any unoccupied space of the 429,025 km2 world (roughly equivalent to the size of California). Since its inception Alpha World’s population has grown exponentially. Now thousands of participants have constructed a remarkable landscape of buildings and streets, rivers and streams, grass and trees, mountains and deserts, homes and castles. Creative variety and innovative vision abounds, and yet the majority of Alpha World space looks remarkably like a suburban or rural landscape surrounded by a vast field of green grass, blue sky, and distant mountains. Populated by avatars – the graphical representation of participants – the space of Alpha World is not unlike an interactive animation. Avatars in Alpha World look like cartoon drawings of people of various shapes, sizes, genders,

120 Jennifer Gonzalez

Figure 7.2 Alpha World, view of “Sherwood.” © Activeworlds.com. Reprinted with permission.

and ethnicities. If one pays an annual fee, one is allowed to select an avatar from a generic group of about 15 or 20 possible body types. Otherwise, temporary visitors are assigned a default body shared by the other visitors (the current default avatar wears a body suit emblazoned with a Pentium commercial logo). “Inhabitants” spend much of their time building graphical objects (usually commercial sites, meeting spaces, homes, and gardens), traveling from place to place (avatars can fly more quickly than walking), or trying to strike up conversations (visible as text balloons) with other inhabitants while maintaining a discreet anonymity. All participants can choose between two points of view: either first-person (from the position of the avatar’s body) or omniscient (a view from above and behind the avatar’s body as it moves through space). This doubling of vision creates a cinematic effect, where one is both identified with the avatar (the self as protagonist), and identified as the director who manipulates or animates the avatar from “off screen” with commands on the computer. The avatar becomes a synthetic actor, a doll, or a mask, as others have observed. With only a limited range of gestures, expressions, and emotions such as smiling, waving, frowning, laughing, dancing, hitting, and jumping, the avatar’s visible behaviors are carefully scripted and constrained. This means that, unless one has the privilege (as a programmer) of inventing new actions or avatars, one’s bodily self-expression is reduced to a fairly narrow repertoire. Initially, there seems to be little or only superficial resemblance between Alpha World and Comenius’ Visible World of 1777. The virtual world is not designed to merely represent things that already exist in the world, but rather to offer visitors the opportunity to create an imaginary world to

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inhabit. Alpha World is participatory rather than pedagogical, and it has multiple authors, which ensures the space is visually dynamic rather than static. At the same time, both projects contribute to parallel discourses of world mapping and models of habitation. Both attempt to visualize a world (or worlds) through a kind of microcosmic or encyclopedic representation of the “chief things” to be found there – such as buildings and roads, trees and people, market places, and landscapes. Both construct artificial boundaries that are represented as absolute. Although its territories are still being “developed,” Alpha World has a finite amount of space, visible on topographical “satellite” maps. As Ron Britvich explains, the unit of measurement in Alpha World is a unit of visibility, not a unit of space (100 by 100 meters is the maximum frame of vision). Like Comenius’ Visible World, in Alpha World the conceivable world is the visible world. Visual presence is equivalent to existential legitimization. In both worlds, there are rules and modes of habitation to which one must conform. In Alpha World, as in many virtual worlds, there is an initial feeling of lawlessness for new participants, in part because there are fewer recognizable regulatory signs of power. But like an ideological state apparatus, the rules in artificial worlds are written elsewhere and passed on by behaviors and protocols of interaction. If one wants to look for the rules, of course, as with any discourse of law, they can be found. Inhabitants of Alpha World are warned: “(1) Do not under any circumstances divulge personal information about yourself such as your real name, email address, address, or telephone number to other members . . . (3) Do not use blatant expressions of bigotry, racism, hatred or profanity. . . . (8) Do not disrupt the normal flow of dialogue . . . (13) Do not provide instructions for illegal activities. . .”, and so on.3 Alpha World, and other artificial worlds, are thus also moral texts insofar as they offer an outline of a theory of practice (how to act), a presentation of history (what has been), a taxonomy for proper social relations (who one is), and an ordering of spatial discourse (where things are). It is clear from published interviews with the designers that Alpha World was conceived as an experimental domain where any kind of body, any kind of politics, and any kind of social structure might be possible. Ron Britvich commented: One of the keys, also, of Alpha [World] is that I want to enable a diverse form of government. So you can have a Wild West area where anything goes, where everyone can tear down each other’s property. And on the flip side, you’d have a very rigid, controlled space. You’d also have the entire range of responsibility and regulation in between the extremes. People could then choose which community they’re most comfortable with.4 Political pluralism appears to be the conceptual ground for Britvitch’s vision of multiple worlds, where each world has its own rules and regulations,

122 Jennifer Gonzalez aesthetic style, and ethics of behavior. This pluralist model of citizen participation operating within social monads, reveals its own inherent dilemmas. The so-called “Wild West” – where cattle commerce and railroad expansion clashed with indigenous communities and territories – becomes the domain where “everyone can tear down each other’s property.” Is this not a scenario that is all too familiar, too historically loaded? Whose property was sacred? Who continues to tear it down? On the Activeworlds.com website they also use the trope of the Wild West to announce a new feature for building home pages. The advertising rhetoric is similar to that of Home Depot, a chain of commercial home improvement stores that have become both ubiquitous and predatory in the USA. Emphasis is placed on the ease of constructing a home or a world, and on the pleasure of sharing your new home with your family and friends. World building becomes no longer a question of divine right or encyclopedic effort, but a question of 30-day free trials. Think building a 3D world from scratch is too hard? then try our New! 3D Homepages and get your own world in minutes. Once you step inside your 3D Homepage, you can move about, explore, meet relatives, hold family gatherings, and chat with any visitors to your site. [. . .] It’s fun, it’s cool and most of all it is accessible to anyone who wants one. [. . .] Create your own personal 3D Homepage today for a 30 day free trial! Just click the picture above and be on your way to experiencing one of the most innovative Internet concepts of the 21st century. You will be amazed at how quickly and easily your 3D Homepage develops. Within just a few minutes, you will not only have created your own personal 3D Homepage but you will find yourself standing right in the middle of it, showing it off to all your friends. 3D Homepages, it is not just a site, it’s an experience, try it today!5 What are the consequences of building a world in “just minutes?” What kind of experience is promised? The only way to find out is to have a PC computer with a fast hard drive and the funds to buy a membership. Despite the rhetoric, a new world and its imaginary habitation are not accessible (or inviting) to everyone. The picture to “click on” in order to “be on your way” has the rounded-square shape of a television screen of a past era. The view we see is a “Western” town in the USA circa 1880, the typical smalltown scene from a Hollywood Western film. One bright light glitters from a window across the dusty main street, otherwise devoid of human life. It is twilight, and the cactus in the distance lends an air of authenticity. The frontier is still the American frontier, the idea of home still tied to the history of homesteading. As a woman or as a Native American, would I be “comfortable” here? The technology may be new, but the fantasy offered by the marketing department is over 100 years old.

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Britvitch’s pluralist logic for artificial worlds structured around the notion of spheres of “comfort” ignores the inevitable challenge of dissenting views and moral “discomfort” that migrate, like people, between worlds. As Margaret Morse has argued, “The nature of the virtual environment as a symbolic field or externalized imagination suggests why action within it is not free nor lacking in emotional and social consequences.” If the ideological structure of artificial worlds comes to parallel that of communities in the “real” world, the emotional and social consequences of maintaining various levels of personal “comfort” are not insignificant. Inclusion and exclusion become more than simple acts of role-playing and fantasy that remain limited to a virtual domain. Instead, artificial worlds provide a particularly rich site for the visual mapping and elaboration of cultural models (and cultural stereotypes) that exist offline. They structure behavioral systems and regulate social interaction through visual cues strategically selected for this purpose. Hence avatar bodies are sometimes racially typecast, or they can be identified with iconographic symbols that reveal the avatar's social status within the artificial world. The worlds themselves have clear political agendas, social hierarchies, and architectural limits. In this context, a “unit of visibility” is a form of personal property that is created (or bought) by the user in order to occupy an essentially public space. Every pixel of the graphical interface – considered the internal anatomy or atomic structure of the artificial world – becomes a potential site for occupation and contestation.6

Spheres of representation The question of visual representation as the basis for social and perhaps even political representation is thus of immediate concern within artificial worlds. This fact runs counter to Roy Ascott’s utopian distinction between appearance and apparition in his 1993 article “From appearance to apparition: communications and consciousness in the cybersphere.” Writing about a then-new “telematic” art he asked: Can an art that is concerned, as Western art has always been, with appearance, with the look of things, with surface reality, have any relevance in our systems-based culture, in which apparition, emergence, and transformation are seminal? Can representation coexist with constructivism?7 He goes on to suggest that representation is no longer relevant to a culture that is progressively concerned with the complexity of relationships and subtlety of systems, with the invisible and immaterial, the evolutive and the evanescent, in short, with apparition. Questions of representation no longer interest us.

124 Jennifer Gonzalez He concludes that “Art is no longer a window onto the world but a doorway through which the observer is invited to enter into a world of interaction and transformation.”8 Alpha World, as a popular, commercial venture, is not what Ascott had in mind when writing about telematic art. Ascott’s essay is a call for artistic transformation, not commercial applicability. Nevertheless, his argument allows us to consider whether, a decade later, the networked system of the Internet does not, in fact, rely to a large degree on questions of representation. Part of Ascott’s vision about apparition and interaction is certainly imbedded in the early history of artificial worlds. In Alpha World, representation of the world becomes a constructivist building project; appearance in the world becomes a form of interactive apparition. This is not only the case with roles played by the participants’ avatars, but even the landscape itself; indeed, every object that takes on a visual appearance is also an animated “apparition” with existential significance. As Maggie Morse has observed in her essay “Nature morte”: The virtual landscape is not just the ground or background or the landscape at which we look [. . .] It tracks our every move and constitutes itself as a display in response to the indices of intention and the vectors of body position, gaze, and motion – that is, virtual space itself is interactive.9 Thus, counter to Ascott’s earlier claims, representation in cyberspace is not merely a matter of appearance, but is also a matter of ontology and a question of systemic relations between elements in a complex mediated social structure. It may be that a Foucauldian model of pluralism can offer a framework for understanding power that is distributed into a complex and everchanging network of relations between social actors. Power for Foucault rests as much in individual acts of submission or resistance to laws, rules, and regulations on a day-to-day basis, as it rests in the structural framework or social hierarchy of classes and political systems. Let us assume, then, that there is an obvious intersection between visual representation and political or social representation in online virtual worlds. To have a visible body is to have a social position, a social role, a right to speak, and the very basic possibility of physical agency. To be invisible in an artificial world is either to wield no power whatsoever, and to be relegated to oblivion, or to wield absolute power in the form of the master who controls the scene from afar, in short, the programmers and others who are responsible for the maintenance and the existence of these worlds. Visibility is therefore already a question of position in a hierarchy of values and levels of control. When we think of the way the word “representation” works in phrases such as “representative democracy” or “theories of representation” we can easily locate the first phrase within the discourse of politics, and the second,

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more likely in the discourse of film theory, art history, and media studies. With artificial worlds there is a merging of the two domains of representation, where theories of representation – regarding the structuring of images, their interplay, and their conceptual ground – run in parallel with the notion of a political or at least social representation where actions and power relations are tied to visible text and motion, but in an artificial space. In addition to two kinds of representation, there are at least two kinds of ontology. The most obvious and yet that which is essentially invisible is the programming language and the code that allows the world to exist. The second kind of ontology is that of the image, the visual tropology of the artificial world, which is also occasionally dictated by the exigencies of the machine but is more importantly shaped by a common lexicon of popular image types. For it seems clear that, in the same way we think about literary tropes, there are standard visual tropes that recur in many artificial and virtual worlds. Why would Activeworlds.com use the retrograde television screen as its default design, and the Hollywood Western as one of its key images? What kind of dominance, not only cultural but also visual, do these two frames of reference hold? Why is the primary landscape in Alpha World an empty green prairie with blue sky, snowcapped mountains and sunshine? Even if one can find all kinds of landscapes in Alpha World today, and even take a trip to Mars (which is also presented as a landscape of discovery and exploration), it seems worth interrogating the visual discourse that shapes these initial forays into world-building. Of course, not all artificial worlds share the same aesthetic, but many borrow from a familiar repertoire of images found in popular culture, in fairy tales, in cinema, in games, and in advertising. These are the well-established tropes or visual “spheres” of representation that are leveraged to create a sense of “home” and ultimately a “zone” of visual “comfort” for participants: an image-based or imaginary habitus.

Agit-prop in an electronic habitus For sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, the habitus is a name given to an acquired system of generative schemes, as well as a set of limits to operations of invention. The habitus defines the categories, modes of accepted behavior and systems of interaction possible in a given social context. It is “the universalizing mediation which causes individual practices, without either explicit reason or signifying intent, to be none the less ‘sensible’ and ‘reasonable.’”10 A habitus might be considered the necessary conditions for the maintenance of culturally specific ideologies, and the production of social subjects. The habitus both produces the practices of individuals and collectives, and it is that which individuals and collectives put into place. It is in this way that the habitus can be historical even when it operates largely on an unconscious level. A culture’s habitus is the testimony of the past that produced it, and it guarantees a kind of permanence against changes made by individuals.

126 Jennifer Gonzalez Habitus describes a social field of human skills where each practice receives its signification in relation to the whole. It is also a philosophy of the body that is essentially phenomenological insofar as it is dependent upon life as experienced through this body. Social life produces a number of rules that one must obey in order to participate, but because these rules are followed largely unconsciously, they become a system of habits. For Bourdieu, selfpresentation and representation are a central feature in the structure of the self; the masculine body, the feminine body, the black body, the white body, the bourgeois body, the working-class body all perform on a battle ground for social identification and positioning. Social agents should be understood as operating between their current social position and the direction of their inherent interests. But if the online worlds constitute a kind of imaginary public habitus, what is their relation to a “real” public habitus? There can be little doubt that virtual worlds work to activate subjects by mediating individual practices in such a way as to make them “sensible” or “reasonable.” In any virtual world, a habitus is generated to shape the possible forms of expression produced therein, and this virtual habitus will share characteristics and symptoms of other social spaces beyond the electronic domain. Ultimately, the space between zones of habitation – “real” and “virtual” – are imaginary, elastic, and porous. Here, I am in agreement with Elizabeth Grosz who wrote in her essay “Cyberspace, virtuality and the real,” If we don’t just have bodies, but are bodies, there can never be the threat of displacing body in favor of mind or abandoning the real for the virtual . . . This virtual is not a geometric, spatial, or technological concept, nor is it structured by phantasmatic or imaginary projections alone, rather it is the domain of latency or potentiality, given that the boundaries between the virtual and the real or the physical are unsustainable.11 Grosz reads virtual worlds as part of a rich continuum of social and cultural artifacts that suggest a mapping of potential human relations, a kind of “augmentation, a supplementation, and a transformation of the real by and through its negotiation with virtuality.”12 In short, virtuality is not a repudiation of the real, but rather its extension, its reconstruction. In this case, world ordering is about laying out the kinds of roles that can be played, either by setting the stage, offering the physical props, or delimiting the body types and even personalities of the social actors. To some degree it invites consideration of the very existential questions posed by Jean Paul Sartre, and rejected by Bourdieu, concerning the possibility of bad faith. For Bourdieu, we act out the roles that are ascribed to us by our social situation and the available resources around us, but, for Sartre, we are already in a conflicted relation with these ascribed roles, and act some of them out self-consciously, knowingly, and in bad faith. Is bad faith, in fact, the primary

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mode of inhabiting virtual worlds? Does one play at identity in these public spaces in the same way that Sartre’s famous waiter plays his required role, both with and against the systems and social structures already in place? Are not participants in artificial worlds inhabiting a gap between a factual existence and a transcendence of this existence? Although they were intellectual adversaries, I would like to propose that both Sartre and Bourdieu are useful for thinking about the operative mode of artificial worlds as systems of representation – systems that are potentially political and public – that rely upon conformity and theatricality simultaneously. All participants must automatically conform to a specific type of theatricality unique to the ordering of the virtual world in question. At the same time, they do so with a self-consciousness that is more than a passive acquiescence, given that the worlds are structured on the model of role-playing games. A virtual habitus has the potential to function efficiently as a cultural and political experiment in social engineering for both progressive and ideological ends. This is why critical performances in these otherwise conformist worlds constitutes an important and, indeed, radical public action. An early voice of critique within this new and growing “public” domain of imagined habitation was the performance group Desktop Theater. Since 1997 these artists have been engaging in an agit-prop theatrical intervention in graphical online worlds, such as The Palace, in order to draw attention to the social politics of the virtual space as well as the “real” world politics beyond. Adrian Jenik and Lisa Brenneis immediately grasped the political dimension of “acting” in artificial worlds, and quickly developed a series of staged vignettes that would engage the local habitus in a countervailing manner. One could say that they were acting in bad faith, but in good faith. Following is an excerpt from an interview I conducted with the artists in 2002. Jenik: Desktop Theater (DT) is the live performance of theatrical inventions on the Internet. The practice was developed in a concentrated manner from the spring of 1997 through November 2001 by Adriene Jenik, Lisa Brenneis, and a shifting troupe of artist/writer/performers.13 The work is part “intentionalized performance” and part sociological analysis, albeit without a well-grounded method, or the illusion of being “outside” of the culture. Our first performance was a compressed version of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” and the most recent was an enactment of “Chicana is . . .,” written and performed by five teenage girls in REACH LA’s computer club. Our archive holds documentation of more than 50 productions, of varying length and development. Some ideas “succeeded.” Some ideas “flopped.” Not all performances were worked out beforehand. Some elicited voluminous response (often very different from that intended) and others were tacitly ignored. Gonzalez: Why do you call Desktop Theater “street theater”? With what traditions are you in conversation?

128 Jennifer Gonzalez Brenneis: When DT performs in public Palace chat rooms, we don’t control the space where the performance takes place. This is the most important connection to street theater tradition. Jenik: It was clear from the beginning that these online arenas were seeking to fulfill the role of a public street. This was a particularly apt metaphor in the early “supported” years of the Palace community in which there was a “Downtown” of sorts in the Palace Mansion. This “downtown” area was a heterogeneous palace that was both controlled (by a scattering of wizards) and unpredictable due to the nature of being a crossroads. At any time of the day or night, you could count on a continuously shifting population of about 150–250 people distributed throughout about 30 [virtual] rooms. As we began to explore this space and imagine what was possible, I was curious to read more about street theater traditions, particularly as they related to social justice movements. I (though not necessarily Lisa, who balanced out my more didactic approach with her trickster presence) imagined these interventions to have a role in opening up public awareness of and dialogue around sociopolitical issues, so I began to read about earlier forms of theatrical interventions. A few friends pointed me toward Augusto Boal’s Forum Theatre and Image Theater, and I became interested in the idea of the spect-actor, which seemed to precisely describe the position of the “audience” for DT work. I also read the work and essays of Polish theater director Tadeusz Kantor, and studied the Living Theatre in the Lower-East Side of Manhattan, and other sixties performance/conceptual art practices like “Happenings,” the work of Adrian Piper and Eleanor Antin. Of course each of these movements/practices has its own goals. We looked at these previous works as examples of what had been done and began to develop our own strategies for what we might contribute to the particular culture of this place [The Palace] as well as the historical moment taking place beyond the screen. I should note that my background is in English literature and I had previously produced, directed, and participated in artworks that used language experiments as interventions into public discourse. Desktop Theater is in conversation with earlier media work as much as earlier theater work. It is also necessarily in dialogue with contemporary “gaming” culture – as a type of social performance hack. Gonzalez: Please describe some of the range and variety of avatar-actors you have used. Brenneis: Everything from single-pixel (invisible) avatars, to my own photo, to cartoon characters, to multi-avatar “expression sets” for a single character. Jenik: As Lisa mentioned, it is a broad range depending on the piece, the environment it is performed in, and what type of activity/dialogue we are hoping to instigate. We use commonly represented and traded avatars

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within The Palace (which have changed along with the shifts in Palace culture). We have also employed slightly modified versions of those cultural icons (as in FatGirls where Lisa added a few pixels to the expected width of the “normalized” teen girl avatar, or the widening of the “expression set” of the default roundhead avatars in “waitingforgodot. com” to include directional gestures and more subtle, complicated expressions of emotion than just happy, sad, angry). Many times our avatars are wholly “handmade” – when done well, we get attention for our technical prowess and inventiveness, which encourages screen-dwellers to linger in the room and respond to something perceived of as “different.” In Santaman’s Harvest, Desktop Theater’s most ambitious work, three acts are populated by a range of avatars – most centrally “farmer” and “Santaman” who both have “expression sets” employed by DT actors (along with movement and text) to achieve greater dramatic effect. Santaman is composed of a basic “corporate manager” outline, filled in with institutional green and collaged with eyes and lips cribbed from magazines, forming expressions of confidence, charm, shock, and irritation, among others. The farmer is a simply drawn character in overalls who can express wonder, confusion, and finally, deep sorrow and angst at the death of the butterflies and destruction of his crops by the Cropatistas who themselves are a “group avatar” – one glob of countercultural multi-cultural teens pasted together. Hubris is an exploding, flashing mushroom cloud. Nearsightedness is a pair of large spectacled eyes. We also script motion into characters, as in the case of the butterflies in Santaman’s Harvest. Each butterfly had three animated states, and was instructed to move the avatars through pixel-stuttering, which created a fragile, fluttering presence for an otherwise flat image. Bush/Gore featured (as one might expect) cribbed Internet photographs of the presidential candidates positioned in various ways. I created 3 Gore states (earnestly listening, abashed, and confident deliverer of message) a few of which pointed in two directions. As we trolled through the rooms stumping for primary votes and regurgitating pre-digested lines from stump speeches, we solicited complicated and various responses; excitement, political followers, naysayers, serious debates on immigration policies, etc. The “image” of the avatar somehow even elicited belief in the authenticity of the candidates’ visits on the part of the Palacians [Palace participants], something we never even remotely imagined. Chicana is . . . avatars (made by the REACH LA team of youth) consisted of very dynamic looking images of young Chicana teen heads on cartoon bodies pictured in strong stances holding a series of red flags. They stood out boldly from the rest of the cyber-environment they entered. Women in Black consisted of five staged vigils of three silhouetted women slowly and silently sliding through several palaces in the days

130 Jennifer Gonzalez directly following 9/11. The effective “presence” of the black figures was created through their visual image, their movement, and their silence. This activity, which is a part of a worldwide feminist antiwar protest of the same name, elicited a large number of responses from fellow global citizens, as can be observed in the logs of the events. Gonzalez: How do traditional or nontraditional conceptions of gender and sexuality figure into your interactions online? Brenneis: The Palace is a very gender-plastic society. You may see traditional sex roles in play, but you have no way of knowing the gender or orientation of the person who is animating the avatar you are interacting with. We’ve seen plenty of examples of gender stereotyping online, and an equal number of incidents of age stereotyping. I suspect I’m well above the average age in Palace society (of course there’s no way to know for sure). I found that revealing my true age (mid-forties) elicited fear and trembling among some younger (?) male (?) persons. Of course it’s easy to pretend to be younger – an irresistible lure for tricksters. Using big words in conversation had mixed results, depending on the current population in residence. Jenik: Though it could be argued that gender is everywhere and always present in the discourse of Desktop Theater, a few moments to concentrate this discussion might be the World of Park and Fatgirls performances. World of Park is a compressed performance of Yoko Ono’s play Grapefruit in the World of Park documented in her book Grapefruit. Lisa and I divided the text into a dialogue, edited it down to a tenminute performance and began to recite it in the Memorial Park room of The Palace mansion. The documented performance that remains (there were several others before and after, including rehearsals) includes two characters; Linc, a black 1970s Afro’ed paper-doll figure found and saved from an avatar-dispenser, and Trudi, a white freak-girl paper doll avatar who has been “stretched” a few pixels in width to make her appear overweight. Trudi figures strongly in FatGirls as well. The two characters speak, in different tones of voice, cryptic lines of poetry that seem to refer to objects and images in the frame of the screen, but also leak outside. An innocent denizen seems at first oblivious to their rambling and then annoyed at their address, their repetition, and their weirdness. There is a tension created between the two characters of Linc and Trudi, through their interracial engagement, the shared hallucination of their use of language, their proximity to one another and the other occupants of the room, and their use of crudely blocked space. One “woman” in the room tried to control us by calling us names and then, when others arrived, enlisting their help in shaming us. Below is a short excerpt of the compressed “script” from that performance. L: Is it too cold? T: It’s too warm

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L: T: L: T: L: T: L: T: L: T: L: T:

The sky’s too high People turning up their stomachs contentedly toward the sky Your voice sounds unusually small in the afternoon air We must live We must do something Something constructive I guess Let’s not leave the room Let’s stay Let’s live longer So we can drink tea together That would be nice But that’s a dream

World of Park confounds certain expectations of gender in that the conversation between Linc and Trudi is fluid and rhythmic, and not sexualized. Trudi’s body does not obey the “aesthetic rules” of the space, yet she is not presented as abject, rather, as an independent thinker. Often when gender is fixed in an avatar, there is not much room to move conceptually. In fact, one time when I was flipping through several avatars of different genders, onlookers responded with outrage, calling me a bisexual, shocked to see I was not authentically representing myself as one sex or the other. The performance Fatgirls uses Trudi again, this time putting her center stage, and focusing on her physical difference. Two characters, Patti and Trudi, engage in a long improvisatory visit to a series of avatar trading rooms. Here, surrounded by “idealized” white female forms, drawn with their hands clasped coyly behind their backs, Trudi and Patti hold a discussion about their weight problems, referring not solely to their “real” bodies, but expanding this heart-to-heart to include their avatars, which have gained a few pixels over Christmas (the piece was performed in mid-January). The avatars drew a number of abusive comments, with locals exclaiming about how grotesque they looked. They also provoked a short discussion about the fact that some people find larger women attractive, and revealed the homogeneity in the room, by appearing “other than” the rest. A few people in the room changed into pregnant girl avatars, which I had never seen before. In Desktop Theater, we are simultaneously mirroring and “performing” consciously and unconsciously our collective gender norms. Because we do not know who is really behind the mask, any analysis we make remains opaque. We often wonder, finally, to what extent angry responses to our provocations are really just performances of anger in the interest of provoking more drama. Gonzalez: What kind of thinking goes into choosing the visual form of the avatar? How significant is this visual form to the theatrical experience for actor and audience?

132 Jennifer Gonzalez Brenneis: You’re working with an extremely limited visual representation online. You have freedom in your choice of appearance, but your size and motion are quite restricted. So the visual form is very important. Choosing an avatar size relative to the society at large is important depending on your artistic/social objective. Large avatars can be threatening, small non-threatening avatars are helpful if you’re trying to draw others into a scene or activity. Gonzalez: Do you think of Desktop Theater as a form of agit-prop? Jenik: I can see a connection, though it is not a direct inspiration. Other projects I have worked on such as Paper Tiger TV have been similarly characterized. Gonzalez: How does race appear or disappear in performances and interactions of Desktop Theater? Is whiteness presented as an ethnicity? If so, how? Brenneis: Whiteness appears as an ethnicity as soon as avatars of another race make an appearance. One of the wonderful things about The Palace is that the range of avatars reaches far beyond the human, so there’s an ethnicity of Big Square avatars, a race of Little Fairy avatars, etc. A single person can wear an avatar that appears as an interracial couple. It’s possible for a single person to appear as an ethnic group. So race is elective. Of course most of the white kids on The Palace choose to appear as white . . . That’s assuming those are white kids appearing in those white teenager cartoon bodies. Jenik: Lisa’s response works well here. In the Palaces we visited, in an ongoing exploration from 1997 to 2001, we rarely saw “avatars of color.” Even in Palaces hosted in Mexico, or Japan. The “mostly white suburban” avatars traded and dispensed included vaguely Latino or Asian avatars, as well as some black avatars (boys come complete with guns and hiphop attire, girls with book-bags), but for the most part, race is normalized as white. As Lisa points out, many avatars are nonhuman, and therefore elide the question of race in their representation. Of course, the text that comes from the character reveals ethnicity over time. Often when we appear as avatars of color, not in DT pieces, but just informally, we are asked to share our avatar, perhaps because of its seeming “uniqueness.” I would add a few specific observations of ways in which race/ethnicity appear/disappear from DT performances. The World of Park, described above, is one example. Though Linc and Trudi do not have to be imaged black and white respectively, the fact that Linc is black and speaking in a lower voice shifts the meaning of the piece. Lisa and I do use the positions of the avatars, moving in relation to one another, as a type of language of flirtation, which certainly influences the way the piece is read. Gonzalez: What do you know about your audience(s)? How does this affect the preparation and planning of your projects?

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Jenik: We know very little about our actual audiences, though we assume in general that our audiences are mostly much younger than us. We have bumped into linguistics professors and have made “friends” with denizens like Astral Savage, who knows a lot about history. Through the Palace Developers Group list-serve, I can see that the server hosts are spread throughout North America, Europe, and Japan for the most part. We try to find out what’s going on in a room (over time is best) before we stage a performance in it. This is especially important now, since the bankruptcy of Communities.com and the loss of software support. The situation in most Palaces is more akin to a living room than a public street, so we need to be particularly responsive to the environment or we’ll be “killed” or “banned” from the server in a short time. Gonzalez: How does gesture figure into your work? What is an online gesture? (Why are text balloons sometimes called gestures?) Jenik: In visual chat rooms, though text is still a central part of the exchange, gesture can also move outside of the realm of text. If I think of gesture more broadly as expression or dramatic punctuation, I can outline several approaches we have used during the course of DT experiments. Movement from one part of the “stage” or window to the other is extremely important, both in terms of creating the relationship of the character to the space (Palacians naturally do this as part of their normal scene), but also to challenge the space of the other characters. There is a strong effect created when an avatar “sidles” up to another avatar. Movement, as noted above, in The Palace is achieved through clicking anywhere on the screen you want your avatar to go, or by using the arrow keys to move pixel-by-pixel in top/bottom/left/right directions. Besides movement, next in importance is directionality (shifting a character to focus his/her range of sight). This was particularly useful in the camera avatar DSX-2000 in Santaman’s Harvest. The camera was a silent character, but through her constant refocusing of direction was able to unsettle onlookers, or, alternatively, create a kind of “media spotlight” that focused the action of the scene. A text balloon can reach the status of a gesture (dramatic punctuation) when it is rendered in a fashion that calls attention to its emotional state. Throughout our performances we alternate between the default state cartoon balloon and a spiky balloon that indicates excitement or yelling, and a thought balloon (where we can play on another level of thought from the dialogue actually spoken). I discussed expression sets above, and these, of course, can incorporate physical gestures as well as expression. All of this, done live, is quite a bag of tricks for a performer. As such, we really do feel as though we are performing when we put on a show – we are even exhausted afterward (the practice is hard to sustain for more than an hour we’ve found).

134 Jennifer Gonzalez Gonzalez: What kind of “world” does Desktop Theater inhabit? What are the presuppositions about this world? What are its ideological boundaries? Can we properly call the “location” of Desktop Theater a world? Brenneis: My artistic impulses tend towards seeking out locations where social protocols and convention have not yet become metastasized, and there’s a chance to engage people before they have “figured it out,” and hardened their cool stance. It’s as much for me as for them. DT is a large sphere of possibility and surprise compressed into a small 2-D space. Jenik: Well, ideally, we understand Desktop Theater as a larger practice that is not bounded solely by our experiments in The Palace software/ community, but that extends out to include other examples of “intentional” performance in other online games and chat spaces. As such, it would not inhabit a single world, but rather multiple parallel worlds that are constantly changing. The presuppositions are the basic tools: access to computer, the Internet, and, perhaps most importantly, time to invest in involvement in such a culture. The need for these basic requirements means that its ideological boundaries, though porous, are shaped by the relatively wealthy people who inhabit it. The ideological boundaries of such “worlds” are in many ways clearly (though often unconsciously) outlined through the structuring of technical protocols, interfaces, security measures (often indistinguishable from technical protocols), and “rules” of game play. The way that the motive for profit is affecting the development of these tools is the subject of a video essay that Lisa and I are currently researching and producing (called Company Town). Gonzalez: What do you think the future will be for this kind of theatrical intervention? What new direction is Desktop Theater taking? Brenneis: The possibilities are there. The desire to do connected live theater is there. It depends on the future of the tools. The Palace is an underground tool now, the company that owned it went out of business. The Palace is unique in the representational freedom it offers users. It’s unique in that it does not impose a game structure on inhabitants, and it’s easy to learn so non-techies can participate. It’s unique in its lowbandwidth requirements and Mac/PC compatibility. Any future for this kind of theater depends on a future for these kinds of tools. Jenik: Lisa’s answer echoes my own. As a new form of social engagement, Desktop Theater has successfully worked to inject a sense of discomfort or dissent into otherwise comfortable online worlds that might otherwise be limited to the equivalent of “company towns.” As Lisa Brenneis points out at the end, the artists’ working conditions are determined by the available tools and platforms made available for creative interaction. In this context, it is slightly chilling to learn that another web site called “Worlds.com” has secured a US Patent

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on scalable 3-D multi-user, interactive, virtual world systems. Worlds.com states: Our intention is to market this technology to our current partners as well as to organizations, companies, and other sites that have been looking for new and unique ways to involve mass audiences in their products, applications and services. We will also review other 3D sites who may be using our technology to ensure we are fully compensated. Foucault observes that “we know from experience that the claim to escape from the system of contemporary reality so as to produce the overall programs of another society, of another way of thinking, another culture, another vision of the world, has led only to the return of the most dangerous traditions.”14 I am not so pessimistic, though I do think that the Worlds.com patent on virtual worlds is a symptom, a warning: the idea of the “public” in online virtual worlds will continue to be a contested issue. The members of Desktop Theater suggest that to be part of the “public” in virtual worlds includes the right to create representations and to transform the discourse of that space, even if it makes other members uncomfortable. The right to speak, the right to represent, the ability to form dissent in worlds on line is not a simple matter of pluralist pronouncements or creation of zones of comfort, but is finally, as with the political world outside it, a complex negotiation with systems – and rights – of representation.

Notes 1 Emile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1964, p. 17. 2 Before Alpha World, there were other virtual worlds, notably Habitat. Originally conceived by Randy Farmer and Chip Morningstar in 1985, Habitat became a marketed product when it was distributed by Fujitsu in 1990. When the original Habitat was upgraded to the newer Habitat II in 1994 it claimed to be: “An expanding world of virtual communities: You can design your own world in cyberspace, and enjoy communicating with other people in the virtual world. Since 1990, the Fujitsu Habitat multimedia communication service has been offering dreams to its users.” 3 Online. Available HTTP: //us1.worlds.net/3DCDup/help/FAQS.HTM (accessed September 23, 2004). 4 “Interview with Ron Britvich, Author and Programmer of Worlds Inc.’s Alpha World” in Online Magazine. Online. Available HTTP: www.online-magazine. com/britvich1.htm (accessed September 23, 2004). 5 Online. Available HTTP: www.activeworlds.com/3dhomepage/ (accessed September 23, 2004). 6 Margaret Morse, “Nature morte,” in Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments, Mary Anne Moser, ed., Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996, p. 227. 7 Roy Ascott, The Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology and Consciousness, Edward A. Shanken, ed., Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003, p. 277.

136 Jennifer Gonzalez 8 Ibid., p. 279. 9 Margaret Morse, “Nature morte,” p. 227. 10 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977, p. 79. 11 Elizabeth Grosz, “Cyberspace, virtuality and the real,” in Architecture from the Outside, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001, p. 90. 12 Ibid. 13 Jack Waters, Tania Kamal-Eldin, Stephen Ausbury, Sue Gautsch, Constance Samaras, Lindsay Browne, Michael Convertino, Peter Kramer, Helen Varley Jamieson, Leslie Sharpe, Andrea Slane, Nancy Reilly-McVittie, Jonathon Delacour, Elia Arce, Erwin Veytia, John Rouse, Sue-Ellen Case, Tony Allard, Kristine Diekman, and others have participated in one or more DT experiments. 14 Michel Foucault, “What is enlightenment,” The Foucault Reader, Paul Rabinow, ed., New York: Pantheon, 1984, p. 46.

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Figure 8.1 Los Angeles. Source: Darnell Hunt photo.

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8

Los Angeles as visual world Media, seeing, and the city1 Darnell M. Hunt

To think about urban places today requires considering a prior question of social epistemology about contemporary urban life: How do we come to know “the city?” Moreover, how might our constructions of knowledge shape other urban processes? In this chapter I explore these questions by considering Los Angeles – described by some as America’s city of the twentyfirst century – as a visual world. Los Angeles is, perhaps, the quintessential postmodern and globalized megalopolis, and considering the institutionalized mechanisms of its visuality contributes to an understanding of visuality in an era of globalization. Consider the following scenario, in which the process of knowledge construction is strongly oriented to the visual: a rush-hour drive from downtown Los Angeles to Santa Monica. You ease into bumper-to-bumper traffic on the 110 South, hoping to be able to merge into the right lane so that you can access the 10 West. Next to you, headed to “communities” further South, you assume, is an old Chevrolet, rap music booming from rear speakers. You momentarily flash back to images of the “riots,” the smoke, the flames. You find your opening and move over. Out of the corner of your eye, you catch a glimpse of familiar billboards advertising “Two Fat Mexicanz” and the “personality” known as “Angelyne.” You inch your way onto the 10 and turn on your radio in time to catch the weather report. You learn that the “forecast for the Southland is more of the same – 72 degrees and sunny.” The announcer also tells you with a chuckle that it is snowing “back East.” You begin to daydream about watching the sun set at the beach, the cool Pacific air blowing against your neck and face. The next thing you know, the flow of traffic has sped up a bit and you recognize the familiar change in the color of the freeway’s concrete near the Fairfax and LaCienega exits. You remember television images of the Northridge quake, the overpass collapse, and keep just a little closer to the car in front of you. Over to your right, you see the ever vigilant Hollywood sign perched upon haze shrouded hills, beyond which you know lies the Valley, and a countless array of movie studios and production facilities. You make a mental note to videotape the Academy Awards show that is airing this evening.

140 Darnell M. Hunt As you near the intersection of the 10 and the 405 freeway, you glance at a colorful, graffiti-soiled mural painted on a freeway retaining wall. It depicts several men and women – black, white, Asian, and Latino – as they run in the Los Angeles Marathon. You remember watching the marathon on television, the pride with which the mayor kicked off the event, his celebration of Los Angeles’ ethnic diversity and lively spirit. A sudden pang of hunger prompts you to travel by mind between various parts of the city to your favorite restaurants. As you pass the Bundy exit, your mind momentarily flashes to images of the bloody scene outside of Nicole Brown Simpson’s condominium, before reviewing memories of the palatial estates that you know line the quiet streets of Brentwood and surrounding areas. You look to your right in time to catch the “Santa Monica City Limits” sign and you are sure that the temperature has suddenly dropped a few degrees. You know you are close to home.

Images of Los Angeles The world we see before us is a complex construction. It is composed of interactions between the visual stimuli associated with the physical realm and the knowledge we take for granted about this space. Common-sense knowledge first tells us that “Los Angeles” is a place, a geographic location cradled by mountains to the north and east, and by the Pacific Ocean to the west. Indeed, our senses inform us that this physical space extends for hundreds of square miles, is engulfed in a desert climate, and dotted with palm trees. But we also know “Los Angeles” as an “urban environment”2 where large numbers of people live, work, and die. To many observers, this environment seems blessed with sunshine, but cursed with fires, mudslides, and earthquakes. It conjures up images of professional basketball’s Lakers, a few prominent universities, and Hollywood. It boasts one of the most racially and ethnically diverse populations in the world, one that is typically divided by freeways, socioeconomic status, and political access. It has been blemished in recent years by civil unrest, crime, and polarization, but celebrated in Olympic Games, marathons, and film locations. Given these apparent complexities and contradictions, how are we to understand the nature of what is commonly referred to as “Los Angeles?” The United States Bureau of the Census offers three rather divergent answers to the Los Angeles question. The first identifies an area known as the “central city” of Los Angeles. In 1992, this area consisted of 469.3 square miles, had a population of 3.5 million, and was designated the largest “place” in the Los Angeles/Long Beach Primary Metropolitan Statistical Area (PMSA). Meanwhile, the Census Bureau defined this latter area – our second answer – as a “large urbanized county or cluster of counties that demonstrates very strong internal economic and social links, in addition to close ties to other portions of the larger area.” In 1992, this area had a population of 9.1 million. Finally, the third answer identifies a “metropolitan”

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area with a population that dwarfs that of the third largest such area in the USA, Chicago (8.4 million), and approaches that of the largest, New York (19.7 million). That is, the Los Angeles/Riverside/Orange County Consolidated Metropolitan Area (CMSA) – the “larger area” of which the Los Angeles/Long Beach PMSA is a component – had a population of 15.0 million in 1992.3 Implicit in these images are issues of physical space, social relationships, and economic exchange patterns. Yet as these patterns have changed over the years, so too have official definitions of Los Angeles. But what of popular images? What does “Los Angeles” mean to those within and outside its boundaries – whatever they might be? Modern conceptualizations of the city present it as a bounded, knowable object composed not only of pavement and buildings, but of people and their day-to-day activities. In the Chicago School’s classic treatise on the city, Ernest Burgess outlined five discreet dimensions upon which we might come to know this object of inquiry.4 First, there was a geographic dimension, one defined by site, situation, topography, and density. Second, a historical dimension identified the city in terms of its political status, title, law. Third, a statistical dimension established the parameters of the city with the type of census data and definitions I described above. A fourth dimension rendered the city as an economic unit where exchanges regularly occurred between a multitude of interdependent buyers and sellers. Finally, a fifth dimension revealed the sociological core of the city, from which residents become “conscious of their membership in some larger group known as the city”5 and act accordingly. This final dimension comes closest to addressing our original problematic concerning urban space as an object of its participants’ knowledge. From this vantage point, we might understand “Los Angeles” as a state of mind, a body of customs and traditions, and of the organized attitudes and sentiments that inhere in these customs and are transmitted with this tradition. [Los Angeles] is not, in other words, merely a physical mechanism and an artificial construction. It is involved in the vital processes of the people who compose it; it is a product of nature, and particularly of human nature.6 In other words, real people interact with and shape a real object they know as the city. Moreover, this activity is somehow patterned by the meanings people associate with some identifiable geographic and social center. But postmodern analyses suggest that the center no longer stands as a referent. The city is instead conceptualized as an amalgamation of differentiated spaces held together primarily by structures of thought, structures that work to pattern action, but offer little closure. “Los Angeles” – often portrayed as the prototypical postmodern city – exemplifies these observations. Who can point to the center of “Los Angeles?” Is it marked by the downtown skyline? The “theme” building at Los Angeles International Airport? The Hollywood sign? Disneyland? Or is it better represented by

142 Darnell M. Hunt Watts, Little Tokyo, Koreatown, East LA, or Beverly Hills? Where should the boundaries of “Los Angeles” be drawn and what do they mean? Indeed, Baudrillard advances the provocative argument that “Los Angeles” as place is no longer real. Instead, “Los Angeles” has become a third-order simulation7 that relies upon the explicitly imaginary nature of surrounding tourist attractions like Disneyland and Magic Mountain to make us believe in its reality: Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.8 But “Los Angeles,” it seems, is all too real. While postmodern observations about the lack of center and closure sound compelling,9 blanket denials of reality discount the day-to-day experiences and memories of real people,10 blunt modernist attacks on normative structures,11 and serve conservative agendas by default. At the same time, however, classic conceptualizations of the city also seem to fall short. Even though the classic Chicago School statement on the city by Burgess assumed growth and development as a series of natural or evolutionary progressions,12 “Los Angeles” was born in 1781 of conquest, and nourished on real estate speculation and boosterism.13 Its phenomenal growth over the years is no more a “product of nature” or “human nature” than any other social construction. To the degree that “Los Angeles” is knowable, I propose, it is so as a collective representation,14 a common-sense, public understanding and explanation for the physical space, social relationships, and economic exchanges associated with the place in question. In other words, it is not that a real “Los Angeles” does not exist, it is that real people are engaged in an ongoing struggle over how to represent it. Thus, while “Los Angeles” is (re)constructed by official definitions such as those of the Census Bureau, it is also simultaneously shaped by and implicit in people’s day-to-day experiences with it. These experiences might be thought of as either direct or mediated – the former including those intensive, in-person encounters so central to classic understandings of community,15 the latter based on encounters with print or electronic media discourses of one sort or another. But in today’s increasingly mediated world,16 the line between the two has arguably blurred. Today, more than ever, our understanding of “reality” is filtered through our encounters with media discourses. As Fiske puts it: There is a nondiscursive reality, but it has no terms of its own through which we can access it; it has no essential identity or meaning in itself: we can access this reality only through discourse, and the discourse that we use determines our sense of the real.17

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Accordingly, the remainder of this chapter outlines the process by which people actively represent “Los Angeles” through their encounters with media, by which they experience this visual world as real.

“Los Angeles” as contested space and mediated place Postmodern insights emphasize the decentered nature of the real; critical theorists focus on power; and cultural theorists center their analyses on meaning construction.18 These seemingly diverse views can be synthesized, I submit, by conceptualizing “Los Angeles” as representation. Previous conceptualizations of the city have tended to either treat it as concrete and empirically bounded,19 or as a rather abstract concept that suggests few clues for how one might engage in the practical work of actually mapping the social terrain people experience.20 My proposed model instead depicts “Los Angeles” as a mediated “place” whose reality ultimately depends upon the meaning-making activities of social actors “there” and in other “places.” In other words, “Los Angeles’s” reality can only be accessed and evaluated through the discourses circulated in and about it at any given moment, discourses that are (have been) produced by socially situated people to be consumed by other socially situated people. Figure 8.2 presents an oversimplified schematic of the proposed model. In two-dimensional space, it points to a complex, iterative process in which the material context influences a host of social factors that interact with one another to (re)shape and/or (re)produce that context. In short, the (1) material context constrains and patterns the types of (2) social action that are likely to take place in “the city”; this meaningful action provides the inputs for (3) intertextual memory which, in turn, informs common-sense understandings of (4) “Los Angeles” (i.e., Los Angeles-as-representation); media workers encode these understandings into (5) media texts, which necessarily pass through the filter of (3) intertextual memory as they are (6) decoded by differently situated social actors; the model comes full circle as these actors’ local decodings pattern successive social actions, thereby (re)shaping and/or (re)producing the material context. An important conceptual note is in order here. Despite my numbering of the factors in the model – which I offer primarily to facilitate discussion – I conceive of the process as one that has no temporal beginning or end. The factors and related concepts, however, are ordered in terms of their direct and indirect linkages. The top third of the model outlines the factors that directly construct “Los Angeles” as “contested space(s)” – spaces defined by the intersection of material factors (e.g., scarce resources) and the social actions of divergent groups. The middle third outlines factors that directly contribute to the formation of “community(ies)” in the area – social groups who coalesce and splinter as people attempt to secure and justify their access to the scarce resources presented by the material context. The bottom third identifies factors that directly work to anchor and objectify

144 Darnell M. Hunt

1. Material Context

4. ‘Los Angeles’ as Representation

2. Social Action

3. Intertextual Memory

6. Local Decoding

5. Media Texts

Figure 8.2 Representing Los Angeles: a conceptual model. Source: Hunt, 2002, reprinted by permission of Sage Publications, Inc.

“place(s)” in “Los Angeles” – particularly the struggle between intertextual memories and media representations of Los Angeles that work to integrate/ cultivate the “Los Angeles” media market from above.21 This arrangement is designed to help us explicitly think about the linkages between the various factors so that none – as so often occurs in scholarly explorations into “the city” – fall through the cracks. Here, I briefly describe the factors of material context, social action, intertextual memory, Los Angeles-as-representation, and media texts,22 in order to focus in greater depth on the process of decoding, particularly as it concerns the social actor who orients on a visual basis to “Los Angeles.” By material context, I mean the objectively unknowable but nonetheless “real” array of ecological and economic factors that sustain and constrain life in the space(s) we refer to as “Los Angeles.” These factors include variables such as climate, population density, food supply, job market characteristics, freeway layouts, arrangement of architectural structures, and the standard of living. However, our only access to the material context is through the meanings we produce about it in the course of symbolic interaction. Shaped by competing discourses, these meanings, in turn, (re)produce the material context by informing the actions of social agents who work on it. In other words, social action and the structures that pattern

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the material context are always inexorable, mutually dependent spheres.23 Thus, the spectacular growth of “Los Angeles” over the last century can be traced directly to complex interactions between meaning and agency. Second, I define social action as meaningful action that is based on expectations about, or consideration of, the consequences of the action. Thus, a necessary precursor to social action is thought. And thought is informed by important cultural elements like values, norms, expectations, beliefs, common-sense explanations – representations. In contemporary times, to a degree unprecedented in history, these representations are circulated through media to social actors and to those with whom they interact. For example, my own research suggests that media representations of the 1992 Los Angeles uprisings provided important inputs for the meaning-making process by which observers made sense of the events and responded to them.24 Not surprisingly, perhaps, I found that both white and black informants generally embraced the standard media representation of the events as black–white antagonism. However, racial common sense seemed to divide how informants interpreted and used this representation of the events. White informants generally viewed the events as crime, while black informants spoke of the events as an unfortunate yet necessary attempt by the oppressed to be heard. The observation that different social groups may make use of the same media representation in radically different ways speaks to the power of memory, and how it inflects our understanding of the situations that confront us. I define intertextual memory as the fluid reservoir of prior direct and mediated experiences and meaning-making processes. Memory may be invoked by individuals as a precursor to social action, but actors do not develop it in isolation; rather, it is (re)negotiated over time as social actors interact with one another and encounter new situations. To return to the 1992 Los Angeles uprisings, my research suggests that social actors likely activated strikingly different memories of the events when engaging television news images of fire and mayhem. Moreover, these memories may have inflected, for the moment at least, understandings of their “place” in Los Angeles. For example, one black informant who lived near the infamous intersection depicted in most media accounts as the flashpoint of the events – Florence and Normandie – fondly remembered an unusual feeling of community that emerged among her neighbors the first night. However, the same images prompted a white informant from “West Los Angeles” to remember the climate of fear that he and his companions endured. By Los Angeles-as-representation, I mean the common-sense meanings that social actors “there” and in other “places” attribute to “Los Angeles” and its socio-spatial characteristics. That is, as representation, “Los Angeles” becomes a conventionalized object that is classified and categorized along with other “cities,” “urban areas,” and “metropoli” such as “New York,” “Philadelphia,” or “Chicago.” By these attributions, “Los Angeles” becomes

146 Darnell M. Hunt familiar and knowable. Becoming so, it imposes itself on us with irresistible force by providing a language for us to communicate what we think we already know about this place. As Moscovici points out, this process has been greatly accelerated in recent decades.25 The media’s ever more available depictions of the environment have led to the continual (re)adjustment and (re)constitution of common-sense explanations, of the representations we rely upon to make sense of our world. This function of media is highly pertinent to “Los Angeles” as contested space. Thus, mainstream media such as the Los Angeles Times circulate many of the representations that saturate the area. As is the case in media throughout the nation,26 upper middle-class white males are highly over represented in key decision-making positions in Los Angeles media. Accordingly, mainstream media tend to privilege a white and middle-class view of Los Angeles such that diversity and complexity is typically presented as part of a surveillance function that represents “communities” of color as threats to the established (white) order. Los Angeles-as-representation, of course, is sustained through a proliferation of media texts. I broadly define a media text as any construction of image – written word, picture, and/or sound – that is arranged by someone in order to convey certain privileged discourses. By “discourse,” I mean a network of ideas and statements constructed out of key representations, normative expressions of common-sense understandings. In the case of Los Angeles-as-representation, media texts might employ visual elements as disparate as area maps (e.g., city, county, region), famous landmarks (e.g., city hall, the Coliseum, the Hollywood sign), background murals for local television news programs (e.g., the downtown skyline), topographical features (e.g., palm trees, mountains, ocean), area labels (e.g., South-Central, Beverly Hills, East LA, Watts), graphically presented Census data (e.g., statistics on population density, immigration, or income distribution), public officials (e.g., the mayor, city council members, the police chief) as “talking heads,” as well as visually cued styles (e.g., casual dress, gang attire, college sweat shirts), and so on as signifiers of place (see Figure 8.3). In “Los Angeles,” of course, media texts are circulated on a continual basis throughout an area that constitutes the second largest media market in the US. While media purport to serve the interests and needs of some “community,” all are beholden to the logic of the marketplace. They thus all attempt to amass and cultivate the largest audience possible for sale to advertisers or for the sale of tickets. This logic sets many of the parameters by which “Los Angeles” is (re)constructed as place.

Local coding of Los Angeles as a visual world Before media texts can contribute to the (re)construction of “Los Angeles” as place, however, they must be decoded at the local level by real people. Local decoding can be defined as the micro-level process by which social actors make meanings out of their encounters with media texts. This

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Figure 8.3 Santa Monica Freeway, Los Angeles, California. Source: Darnell Hunt photo.

definition, of course, is informed by a vast body of literature that suggests that people are not passive dupes, that they are active constructors of the symbolic universe surrounding them.27 Thus, when real actors receive a media text, they consider not only the discourses and representations privileged by the text, but also the meanings arising from their past experiences, and their past encounters with other texts. In short, no text is ever selfcontained: intertextuality is a given.28 Moreover, local decoding is necessarily a social process. Social actors do not exist in a vacuum: they are embedded in networks of important others who themselves continually encounter and make meanings from texts. These social connections inflect how people find meaning in texts, even if they encounter these texts “alone.” The resulting meaning-making process contributes on a day-to-day basis to people’s basic image regarding the topography of the place in which they live. Indeed, this “mapping helps secure an individual or group’s relation to place, in part, by excluding or marginalizing other ways of imaging/imagining a relation to place.”29 For example, recall the rush-hour drive from downtown Los Angeles to Santa Monica that opens this chapter. A proliferation of topographical features, media texts, and intertextual memories construct a visual world ripe with meanings for the hypothetical traveler in our thought experiment (see Figure 8.3).

148 Darnell M. Hunt In the final analysis, only by empirically exploring the intersection of real people and texts, of seeing and power, can we truly begin to map the process by which “the city” is represented and continually (re)constructed. That is, we must look beyond the “illusion of opaqueness” where “spatiality is reduced to physical objects and forms,” beyond the “illusion of transparency” where “spatiality is reduced to mental construct alone,”30 to the points where the substance of these illusions interact and mutually construct one another. Only then will we begin to appreciate the increasing role that global mechanisms of visuality play in the construction of the local. Only then will we begin to understand the reality of Los Angeles as a visual world.

Notes 1 Portions of this chapter were originally published in Darnell M. Hunt, “Representing ‘Los Angeles’: media, space, and place,” pp. 319–42 in Michael J. Dear, ed., with J. Dallas Dishman, From Chicago to L.A.: Making Sense of Urban Theory, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, © 2002 Sage Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications, Inc. 2 Robert E. Park, “The city: suggestions for the investigation of human behavior in the urban environment,” in R. E. Park, E. W. Burgess, and R. D. McKenzie, eds, The City: Suggestions for Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1925, p. 1. 3 For the census definitions and the data, see US Bureau of the Census, 1994–1995, The American Almanac: Statistical Abstract of the United States, Tables 46 and 42; and US Census Bureau 1992, p. A9, Washington, DC: US Bureau of the Census. 4 Ernest W. Burgess, “The growth of the city: an introduction to a research project,” in R. E. Park, E. W. Burgess, and R. D. McKenzie, eds, The City: Suggestions for Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1925. 5 Louis Wirth, “Urbanism as a way of life,” in J. J. Macionis and N. V. Benokraitis, eds, Seeing Ourselves: Classic, Contemporary, and Cross-Cultural Readings in Sociology, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, [1925] 1995. 6 Park, “The city,” p. 1. 7 Baudrillard identifies four “successive phases” of the image: first, “it is a reflection of a basic reality”; second, “it masks and perverts a basic reality”; third, “it masks the absence of a basic reality”; and fourth, “it bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum”; Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” in J. Natoli and L. Hutcheon, eds, A Postmodern Reader, Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1993, pp. 346–7. 8 Ibid., p. 352. 9 For example, Jean-François Lyotard, “Excerpts from The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,” in J. Natoli and L. Hutcheon, eds, A Postmodern Reader, Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1993. 10 George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. 11 Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity versus postmodernity,” in J. Natoli and L. Hutcheon, eds, A Postmodern Reader, Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1993. 12 Burgess; cf. Robert E. Park, Race and Culture, Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1950.

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13 Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory, London: Verso, 1989; Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, London: Vintage, 1990. 14 Robert M. Farr and Serge Moscovici, Social Representations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. 15 Louis Wirth, “Urbanism as a way of life.” 16 Stuart Ewen and Elizabeth Ewen, Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. 17 John Fiske, Media Matters: Everyday Culture and Political Change, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994, p. 4. 18 Hunt, “Representing Los Angeles,” pp. 324–7. 19 Park, “The city.” 20 Soja, Postmodern Geographies. 21 See Serge Moscovici, “The phenomenon of social representations,” in R. M. Farr and S. Moscovici, eds, Social Representations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984, and also Theodor Adorno, “The schema of mass culture,” in J. M. Bernstein, ed., The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, London: Routledge, 1991. 22 For details, see Hunt, “Representing Los Angeles,” pp. 329–35. 23 Gary Alan Fine and Sherryl Kleinman, “Network and meaning: an interactionist approach to structure,” Symbolic Interaction, 1983, vol. 6: 97–110; Anthony Giddens, “Problems of action and structure,” in P. Cassell, ed., The Giddens Reader, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993. 24 Darnell M. Hunt, Screening the Los Angeles “Riots”: Race, Seeing and Resistance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 25 Moscovici, “The phenomenon of social representations.” 26 Clint C. Wilson II and Felix Gutierrez, Race, Multiculturalism, and the Media: From Mass to Class Communication, 2nd edn, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995. 27 For examples, see Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology, Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1967; Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984; John Fiske, Television Culture, London: Routledge, 1987; John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture, Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman, 1989; Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, New York: Anchor, 1966. 28 Fiske, Television Culture. 29 James Hay, “Afterword: the place of the audience: beyond audience studies,” in J. Hay, L. Grossberg, and E. Wartella, eds, The Audience and Its Landscape, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996, p. 375. 30 Soja, Postmodern Geographies, pp. 122–5.

Figure 9.1 Essential elements of the birthday snapshot. Photographer unknown, April, 2001. Author’s collection.

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9

Photography’s decline into modernism In praise of “bad” photographs Marshall Battani

The sun never looks through a photographic instrument that does not print a lie. The piece of glass it prints is well named a “negative” – contradiction – a misrepresentation – a falsehood. I speak feelingly of this matter, because by turns the instrument has represented me to be a lunatic, a Solomon, a missionary, a burglar and an abject idiot – and I am neither. Mark Twain, 18861 They make what they will of us, and the retoucher simply edits the review with an eye to the market. So history is falsified before our faces, and we prepare a lie for our grandchildren. H. G. Wells, 18952 Social change is replaced by a change in images. Susan Sontag, 19773

The relationship between the photograph and the world it depicts is an enduring theme in photo criticism. It is also a central concern in the popular experiences and uses of photography. Photographs speak with authority derived from an ability to deliver a more or less direct copy of the world presented to the camera’s lens. When this copy of the world “contradicts” expectations, the viewer of a photograph feels disappointed – or even betrayed – and all the more so precisely because the photograph, despite knowledge and experience to the contrary, maintains a direct, though ambivalent, relationship with the world before the camera. The ambivalent connection between the world and the world-in-a-photograph inspired the wry humor of Twain and the apprehension and mistrust of “retouched” history expressed by Wells, and it endures one hundred years later in criticism such as Susan Sontag’s, which expresses concern for the photograph’s potential to virtually eclipse reality. For Sontag, photographs capture fragments of the world, but those fragments always embody loss, and she describes viewing a photograph as a melancholy experience induced by the attempt to recover meanings from the photograph – to construct a meaningful bridge to a lost moment (see,

152 Marshall Battani for example, her definition of photographs as “melancholy objects”).4 Melancholia is a particularly appropriate way to think about the photograph’s strange connection to the world because melancholy creates, in those who experience it, a profound feeling of ambivalence with the world and one’s place in it. It often inspires nostalgia, a yearning for a more perfect time in the past, and photographs – because of their claim to reproduce a real vision of the world – provide a kind of evidence that bolsters nostalgic reflection and false impressions of history: “a lie for our grandchildren.” But will the grandchildren be taken in by the lie? Or will they acknowledge the strange space between the world and the world-in-the-photograph, and wonder about the photographer’s and the sitter’s effort to manipulate the image? Will they speculate on what leads a person to “retouch” an image? Will they wonder what sort of social norms guided the photographer’s interaction with the subject at hand or how the sitter felt about his or her self-presentation? After all, on the day he visited the photo studio, perhaps Mr Twain was an “abject idiot.” Maybe the camera reveals that the world itself, not just the world-in-the-photograph, fails to live up to expectations. Maybe it freezes that very moment when the individual (the one photographed, the one taking the picture, or the one viewing it) confronts his or her relationship to the larger social order and sees the effects of posing, composing, and interpreting. How might we think sociologically about these questions? One fruitful approach to considering the ambivalent relationship between the photograph and the world it represents (misrepresents?, lies about?, replaces?) is to think of this enduring central theme of photo criticism – the duality of photographs on one side and the “world,” the “social,” or “reality” on the other – as analogous to an equally enduring theme in critical social thought; the duality of agency and structure. This central problematic – how to conceive of the dynamic and mutually constituting give and take between agency and structure, often formulated in terms of individual action and social constraint, is a source of ongoing theoretical debate in sociology. While social structure is well theorized, agency, until recently, has not been. Much sociological study treats agency as “practice” – more or less routine action that tends to reproduce and legitimate already existing social structures. This is what Emirbayer and Mische call the “iterational element” of agency.5 One might very well think here of the disdainful attitude of critics who look disparagingly at the vast numbers of photographs that romantically and nostalgically capture “Kodak moments” at birthday parties, family reunions, and vacations – images in which people compose themselves and their surroundings in ways that reproduce previously received meanings for the events and relationships presented to the camera. But Emirbayer and Mische have added further “temporal–relational” dimensions to the concept of agency. What they call the “projective element” recognizes futureoriented social actors imaginatively generating possible trajectories of action, and the “practical–evaluative” element is both future and present oriented,

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recognizing how social actors make judgments regarding possible lines of action while responding to the demands and ambiguities of the present. Photographs – posing for them, making them, viewing them – may well create social-psychological contexts conducive to one or more modalities of agency and more importantly may have critical functions in making social actors aware of the agentic processes. The photograph interrupts agentic action (primping, posing, etc.), recontextualizes that action (later viewing the photograph), and engenders evaluative actions (does one include it in the family album, frame it, throw it away, or save it somewhere out of sight for reasons that may not be altogether clear). The critical potential being discussed here is associated with a particular kind of photograph – what Musello calls the “home-mode” photo.6 This kind of photo created through rank amateur practice is, of course, exactly the kind of photography that is systematically devalued and trivialized by expert criticism. This is photography’s “decline into modernism,” a theorization of photographic meaning that valorizes the role of the artist in transforming the world through his or her use of the camera while trivializing and discounting the nostalgic uses of photography as an amateur practice. A full accounting of how this approach to photographic meaning emerges from the nineteenth-century profession of photography and becomes institutionalized through twentieth-century museum practices is beyond the scope of this essay.7 Instead, this essay traces important expert

Figure 9.2 Accidental snapshot of snapshooter. Photographer, Marshall Battani, 2000. Author’s collection.

154 Marshall Battani criticism of photographic meaning – the decline into modernism – to illustrate how the critical potential of photography has been continually passed over and how nostalgic practices have been cast as regressive and “structure reproducing.” By returning our attention to the early critical conceptualizations of photography developed by Siegfried Kracauer8 and then to later manifestations of his ideas, we may be able to rescue the critical potential of the medium from its decline into modernism in order to argue that, sociologically speaking, nostalgia is not such a bad word.

Critical realism Kracauer recognized the revolutionary potential of the photograph in its ability to make things transparent by simultaneously documenting and decontextualizing aspects of the life world. Wrenching people and their objects out of context and transporting them through space and time are acts with the potential to create an alienating experience in whoever views the photograph. This alienation, coupled with the realism of the photograph, may facilitate a critical interpretation of the relationship between the viewer and what has been photographed. Dagmar Barnow identifies Kracauer’s ideas with critical realism – a set of ideas more typically associated with the sociologically informed literary theory of George Lukács and perhaps the musicology of Theodor Adorno.9 If Kracauer was a critical realist he was a much different sort than was Lukács or Adorno most notably because Kracauer’s theories take more seriously the role of the viewer of the photograph rather than focusing exclusively on the art object and expert critic. The role of the artist as expert social critic is paramount in the critical realist writing of Lukács and Adorno. For example, according to Lukács, to understand the nineteenth-century realist novel was to understand bourgeois society and to understand more generally the subject/object, or individual/society, relations central to the concerns of critical theory. In the words of Robert Witkin, “In Lukács’s view, the great bourgeois novels were at once a flowering of bourgeois idealism and at the same time a critical insight into the contradictions of bourgeois society.”10 Lukács drew a contrast within the realist form between “critical realism” – exemplified by the writing of Balzac as well as other novels created during the 1840s and 1850s – and a post-1850s style of “naturalism” of which Flaubert was emblematic. The natural realist, like Flaubert, describes the bourgeois protagonist’s world in detail – in a way often described as photographic. But for Lukács this was a mere flat description of surfaces. The description “photographic” here has a negative connotation as it sometimes did in the work of Walter Benjamin.11 Mechanical reproduction created a realism either devoid of much meaning or at great risk of being made too meaningful through the manipulations of the (economic and political) propaganda machines of mass society for inevitably totalitarian ends. The critical realist, by contrast, described a more completely textured reality – a social one in

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which the mutual constitution of individual character and the society was thrown into sharp relief. The degree of progressiveness in art, then, is the degree to which an artist is able to manage the part and whole of his or her composition in a way analogous to the critical theoretical conception of the relationship between individual and society so that society (structure) appears to develop from the actions (agency) of its members. Of course, the artist stands outside this process and orders the artwork from outside or above. As such, the freedom of action and interaction from which the social structure emerges is always an illusion. Consequently the realist work actually represents a totalitarian order because it is always fully structured and has only the appearance of agency. Structure only appears to respond to the unfolding interactions of its characters. For Lukács this theoretical sticking point is unstuck through the use of irony. Through irony the realist could become critical by revealing some ultimate inability to reconcile individual will with bourgeois social order so that the integration of society is revealed, in the critical work, as an impossible illusion. While for Lukács the novelist manipulated representations of individuals in bourgeois society, Adorno’s concern with musical structure was less literal. For Adorno, like Lukács it was essential that the artist construct a utopian whole. In the case of symphonic music this involved working with the structures of tonal arrangements and progressions such that the part/ whole relations between the musical elements and the total composition were analogous to, rather than literally representative of, individual/social arrangements. Concern for the illusory nature of this utopian structure was also central to Adorno’s analyses of music, and it led him to valorize the late style of artists – Beethoven was his exemplary case – in which the artist deconstructs his or her earlier work. As the mature artist comes to more fully realize and reflect upon the expressive limits inherent to their chosen medium, harmony and order often give rise to dissonance and disorder. What Adorno’s and Lukács’s critical theories of art share is the notion that the artist is driven to create utopian order as he or she explores the expressive potential of the materials at hand – the structure of the music or the representational content of the novel – but then also has a social responsibility to reveal the illusory nature of that order. Kracauer’s theory, on the other hand, is much less deterministic as to what exactly the progressive nature of art should be. He, unlike Lukács and Adorno, is not ultimately concerned with the artist’s and expert critic’s supposed responsibility to create utopian order and then reveal it as an illusion. For Kracauer it is the myriad possibilities in a photographer’s interpretations and actions in making a photo as well as the reception of the photograph and interpretation of its meanings that becomes crucial. The photograph conceived this way is an example of what Witkin, arguing against the totalizing aesthetic of Adorno in another context, identifies as a key feature of modernism – “provocational art.”12 Provocational art sets up

156 Marshall Battani a reflective distance between the viewer of an artwork and his or her act of seeing. Think here of the Cubism of Picasso and Braque and how it collapses multiple perspectives and points of view onto one two-dimensional plane so that the viewer is forced to actively (re)construct a coherent image. Provocational art creates what Witkin calls “machineries for doing seeing.”13 Both Witkin and Kracauer look for meaning by focusing on the interactions among and between artwork, the artist, the viewer or reader, and the social world. This deep focus includes more than the critical theories of Adorno and Lukács which, in privileging the role of the expert critic, leave the image of the viewer out of focus. Incorporating the act of reception is an essential move for understanding a critical theory of the relationship between realism and photographic meanings.

Melancholy photographs Contemporary photographic critics and theoreticians, although offering different explanations about the limits of photographic meaning, are quick to recognize that the fragmentary and decontextualized nature of photographs requires that meaning be somehow given to photographs.14 Underlying much contemporary thought on this issue is the work of Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes who both incorporate, explicitly and implicitly, the notion of melancholy and nostalgia in their criticism but also fail to develop the possibilities of melancholy and nostalgia as a basis of social critique.15 Instead, the melancholy inspired by looking at a photograph is presented as emblematic of the variety of ways that photographs disengage viewers from the “real” world. But is this all? Is it possible that the very same phenomena that lead Barthes to conclude that photographic meaning is determined by debilitating sadness, and Sontag to nostalgic delusions, can lead in other directions? What is the relationship between melancholy, nostalgia, and social critique? Melancholia, nostalgia, and critical theory Bryan Turner argues that nostalgia – an experience closely tied to melancholia – was the impetus behind the development of critical social theory. Tracing a nostalgic discourse through western history, he argues that an ontology of nostalgia is a fundamental feature of human existence and that the notion of nostalgic yearning is a common theme linking the western philosophical traditions of Heidegger and Marx, virtually all classical German philosophy, French and English social theory, and much of contemporary politics.16 The path from melancholy, through nostalgia, and toward a critical engagement with the social world, is blocked by one major obstacle – acedia. Although often used as a synonym of melancholia or depression, acedia more accurately refers to the sinful behaviors of medieval monks who, amid the isolation of the monasteries, found themselves struggling against temptations of the flesh.17 Out of this early definition of the term, “heedlessness”

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is perhaps the one word that best captures the original meaning of acedia. It was Walter Benjamin who brought the somewhat obscure medieval relationship between melancholy and acedia into contemporary criticism.18 Benjamin believed writings of the nineteenth century on melancholy, like those exemplified by the work of Baudelaire, had promised a liberating critical alienation from the social world. But the melancholics of Benjamin’s twentieth-century Weimar Republic promised nothing but a politics of resignation. The irony of melancholic writing, as Benjamin understood it, is that the effort to foster critical interpretation through an embrace of melancholia creates a sense of meaninglessness that results in political apathy. For Benjamin, melancholy and acedia as personal maladies had their social parallel in the literary practice of melancholic writing that fostered a politics of resignation and inaction dangerously concealed under a veil of social critique. Benjamin saw, somewhat nostalgically, a retreat from the nineteenth-century melancholic writing – writing that had the potential to shock and foster critique – toward a twentieth-century version that, because it had become a commodity form of high art, effectively negated any critical stance it might claim to have. Benjamin’s dismay at the critical work of his contemporaries bespeaks his commitment to the idea of melancholy as a catalyst for change. In spite of Benjamin’s pessimism, and although a popular form of critical engagement with the world may be as yet unrealized, a deeper consideration of the history of melancholia, and of the sociology of melancholic experience, may illuminate critical possibilities engendered by the experience of melancholy and nostalgia. A deep discussion of such issues is beyond the scope of this essay but we can turn now to an outline of significant strands of thought useful for a sociological understanding of the phenomena. A sociology of melancholia A preponderance of black bile, excessive anxiety and depression, withdrawal, instability of moods, inexplicable fear and sadness without cause, a sense of loss and longing, ennui, anomie, ultimately, melancholia is a feeling for which a single and wholly adequate definition is impossible. But in even the shortest list of melancholic symptoms there exists a continuum of physiological and psychological diagnoses with personal maladies toward one end and more general experiences of temperament – fear, anxiety, depression, and ennui – toward the other. The drift between medical pathologies and temperament is accompanied by an equally important tension, one between pejorative and heroic conceptions of the malady. Melancholia received its most extensive treatment during Europe’s Renaissance when the construct traveled beyond the boundaries of medicine and philosophy, and made a successful migration into popular thought. The definitive work on melancholia from this period is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, first published in 1628. With his assertion that

158 Marshall Battani “kingdoms, provinces, and Politikal Bodies are subject in like manner to this disease,” Burton set the stage for a study of melancholy beyond the individual level of analysis.19 The most rigidly sociological theories of melancholy are the functionalist explanations of Robert Merton and Wolf Lepenies, who have asked what role melancholy plays in the maintenance of social order.20 Drawing from Merton’s work on deviance, Lepenies argues that melancholy is the latent concept undergirding Merton’s explanation of deviant behavior enacted by those facing a loss of role legitimacy. Lepenies argues that, throughout history, social changes that de-legitimate social classes cause a dysfunctional adaptation of retreatism – the functionalist incarnation of melancholy – that inspires utopian visions. The utopian visions of melancholics are, in the last instance, impotent nostalgic resignations to the impossibility of perfection in the present. Whether future-oriented, backward-looking, or not tied to any notion of time or place, the melancholia-inspired utopia is such a fantastic impossibility that Lepenies urges us not to confuse utopian minded social activists with the (in)activity of melancholics. The characters of Chekov’s plays, Mozart’s Figaro, and the nostalgic novels of Proust are emblematic of the boredom and futile antagonisms that reign in the melancholic’s world of resignation. Lepenies identifies nostalgic yearnings for a perfect world as a dysfunctional nostalgic outgrowth of the melancholic experience. But is nostalgia an inevitable outgrowth of melancholy, and is nostalgia always an impotent resignation from the world of social action? Is it possible for melancholia to lead to social change? Can it serve to foster new and critical perception? Melancholia, photography, and popular experience Literary critic and historian Ross Chambers reads the works of Baudelaire and Flaubert a bit differently than do Benjamin and Lukács.21 Chambers reads “oppositional truth” in the disorienting, centerless, modern world of change and upheaval. The melancholic detached voice of the Flaneur that Chambers reads in the nineteenth-century novel exhibits a “decenteredness” that questions the possibility of any longer having a fixed point of view.22 Photography, the ramifications of which were beginning to be felt, and written about, at the same time as the Flaneur became a meaningful type, transformed vision by making available new points of view through the fracturing of time and space. What some photo theorists and critics see in the development of photographic vision, and what literary historians and critics like Ross Chambers see in the voice of the novel, are part of the same historical development of consciousness marked by an increasing tension between a fragmented self and forms of representation that assumed a center. These developments of human perception are not merely the fantasies of literati and philosophers. Photography made the representation of self in a fragmented world the

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“problem” of the masses. Photography, as a popular practice rapidly expanding in the late nineteenth century, brought to the masses a new form of representation – one marked by the fragmentation of time and space. Inexpensive cameras, film, and photo-finishing helped bring about a new type of representation – one defined by the production of millions of images by amateurs without formal artistic training. The shear volume of images and the variety of different perspectives employed in their creation defy any authoritative center from which to construct a theory of aesthetics. Just one person’s family album can present a dizzying number of fragments and “slices-of-life.” How is it possible to construct and recover meaning from those fragments? Nostalgia, photography, and popular critique To understand how people’s nostalgic uses of their photographic fragments might engender critical meaning-making we turn to the social-psychological analysis of nostalgia by Fred Davis.23 Reacting to what he claims is a clichéd left-liberal denunciation of nostalgia, Davis argues that nostalgic yearning helps create and maintain collective memory, and that nostalgia contributes to a sense of continuity for individuals struggling to find meaning in the face of social change. His argument in many ways parallels Wolf Lepenies’s explanation of melancholy inasmuch as social changes are conceptualized as the driving force. In Davis’s case, nostalgia provides “anchors” for collective memory that assert a stable identity in the face of sudden or otherwise incomprehensible social changes. According to Davis there are three distinct “orders of nostalgia.” Firstorder or simple nostalgia consists of the evocation of a lived past in which things are perceived as better than the present. Simple nostalgia is “that subjective state which harbors the unexamined belief that things were better (more beautiful) (healthier) (happier) (more civilized) (more exciting) then than now.”24 Second-order or reflexive nostalgia adds a critical self-evaluation to the sentimental yearning of the first order. A person experiencing reflexive nostalgia will wonder if his or her perceptions of the past are accurate, whether or not “things really were all that different.” The third-order goes even further. In what Davis calls interpreted nostalgia, the nostalgic person asks analytic questions: Why am I feeling nostalgic? What may this mean for my past, for my now? Is it that I am likely to feel nostalgic at certain times and places and not others? If so, when and where? What uses does nostalgia serve for me? For others? For the times in which we live?25 Interpreted nostalgia renders the nostalgic experience problematic. In objectifying the experience, Davis claims, it is similar to the formal bracketing undertaken in phenomenological analysis. This is, of course, a sophisticated

160 Marshall Battani level of analysis; but Davis maintains that, although both the second and third orders of nostalgia involve complex cognitive processes, “all of us, once past childhood, because we are all reflective beings, are capable of experiencing and do experience all three levels of nostalgic reaction.”26 He discounts the idea that there might exist a “nostalgia elite” who have a more sophisticated and elevated set of remembrances. Davis admits that this is a rather odd statement, but in light of the history of conditions he examines it is less so: melancholy and nostalgia have long been considered the particular affliction of the pious, the scholarly, and the literati. The claim for a democratic notion of nostalgia is important for a critical theory of photography because, if the critical potential of nostalgia operates at a popular level as Davis maintains, then nostalgia, as critical engagement with the social world, is an appropriate way to think about the critical potential of a popular practice like photography.

Posing for photographs Mass photography as practiced by middle-class snapshooters accounts for the vast majority of photographic images created around the world. There is in this practice of photography the potential for a great deal of power: power to document one’s condition, to create alternative representations, to make arguments, and demands, and to produce rather than simply consume images. “Yet this enormous productive power is effectively contained as a highly conventional, passive, privatized, and harmless leisure activity.”27 Sociological studies of the picture-taking activities of the middle class most often portray photographic practice as serving an integrative function.28 For Bourdieu, photography, as practiced in the home, by professionals, and as an indicator of taste, serves as yet one more illustration of the middle class’s unwitting reproduction of its own dominated status in the class structure.28 How it is that a medium with such potential has been relegated to an ineffectual role can be seen, in the USA especially, as an accomplishment of the Eastman Kodak corporation. Beginning in the latter third of the nineteenth century, Eastman Kodak worked to monopolize the production of cameras, film, the photo finishing industry, and, significantly, the definition of photographic styles as well.30 Boerdam and Martinius, however, argue that the style and meaning of family photos is not finally determined at the industrial and institutional level but, rather, is a function of a complex interpenetration of actions and structures.31 At the micro-level, the making and displaying of family photos involves interaction rituals.32 These interactions take place within, and possibly in opposition to, institutionalized photographic production as well as the institution of family. Whereas Bourdieu illustrates how photographic practices affirm the institution of family and social structure, Boerdam and Martinius give us insight into how photography might help social actors to recognize the constraining nature of social structures acted out within the family.

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Figure 9.3 Mis-timed auto-timed family portrait. Photographer unknown, August, 1996. Author’s collection.

Boerdam and Martinius’s discussion of posing and the limits of believability in relation to ideal situations points to the discomfort associated with picture taking and with picture viewing. This discomfort may provide the alienation necessary to create “teachable moments” (“autodidactic moments”) in which an objective knowledge of the social context of practice is produced. In Emirbayer’s and Mische’s terms,33 the iterational element of agentic action might be interrupted or even frozen in the ill-timed or “poorly” framed snapshot that captures family members scurrying about to strike a pose. The later viewing and interpretation of such an image might open up possibilities for both the practical-evaluative judgment of the frozen event and for the imaginative generation of future possibilities of action. For example, in the melancholic distance between the viewer and the world pictured, the photograph may be seen to reveal the falsity of reality as it is supposed to show up on the surface of the image, so that while viewing him- or herself in pictures one might come to the realization that, for example, “This is a ‘bad’ photograph,” “Such an awkward pose,” “I was not that happy,” “Our family is not this ideal,” or even and perhaps most importantly, “I can make the ideal appear even when it does not exist for me.” The moment of interpretation in the display and use of one’s photographs, or the interactions surrounding the posing of individuals in group photos, or even the decisive moment when one chooses not to subject certain events to the camera’s gaze, are moments suspended between the orderly realm of

162 Marshall Battani ritual activity and the much less cogent life world of experiences. These moments may provide windows into the processes through which the world is symbolically ordered and reordered. The extent to which the making or viewing of a photograph makes these symbolic processes apparent is the extent to which the photograph becomes what Witkin described as “provocational.” The extent to which photographic practice provokes one to acknowledge the ultimately constructed nature of the relations between what Adorno calls the subjective (individual) and the objective (social) is the extent to which the photograph becomes, referring back to Witkin again, a “machine for doing seeing.” The extent to which processes of the social construction of knowledge become apparent to snapshooters through their own production of images is the extent to which the revolutionary power of the photograph – its critical realism – is realized.

Reactionaries It isn’t clear how likely machines for doing seeing will bring about a revolution – of consciousness or otherwise. Melancholia and nostalgia together create an ambivalent foundation for critical theory and for popular practices that inspires both critique and resignation. Applied to photography, the intellectual history of melancholy and nostalgia shows that the melancholic experience may lead in one of two directions. In one direction lies the “critical realism” of Siegfried Kracauer, Ross Chambers’s “oppositional truth,” and Robert Witkin’s “machines for doing seeing.” The other direction is that of apathy, inaction, and impotent utopian visions – the production of “Kodak moments.” Photography, so widely practiced and appreciated, holds out the promise of popularizing one or both of these possibilities. The lesson to be learned is that the transformative power of photography lies not so much in the fact that there are so many more photographs than any other kind of visual objects or that there are great artists who can show us what to do with a photograph but, rather, that there are ever so many “bad” photographs in the world. These strange, awkward, and too revealing “bad” photographic documents are most often crowded out of our family albums in favor of idealized and nostalgic images sold to us as “Kodak moments.” (Crowded out but not thrown away, instead saved in shoeboxes, drawers, and closets.)

Notes 1 Mark Twain, “Scenes in Honolulu – No. 15, July 1, 1866,” in J. M. Rabb, ed., Literature and Photography: Interactions 1840–1990, Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1995, p. 151. 2 H. G. Wells, “The art of being photographed” [1895], in J. M. Rabb, ed., Literature and Photography: Interactions 1840–1990, p. 127. 3 Susan Sontag, On Photography, New York: Dell, 1977, p. 178. 4 Sontag, On Photography, pp. 51–84.

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5 Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mische, “What is agency?,” American Journal of Sociology, 1998, vol. 103, 962–1023. 6 Christopher Musello, “Studying the home mode: an exploration of family photography and visual communication,” Studies in Visual Communication, 1980, vol. 6, 23–42. 7 For a discussion of the institutionalization of the photographer-as-artist in the US, see Marshall Battani, “Organizational fields, cultural fields, and art worlds: the early effort to make photographs and make photographers in the nineteenthcentury United States,” Media, Culture, and Society, 1999, vol. 20, 601–26. 8 Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, New York: Oxford University Press, 1960. 9 Dagmar Barnow, Critical Realism: History, Photography, and the Work of Siegfried Kracauer, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. 10 Robert W. Witkin, Adorno on Music, London: Routledge, 1999, p. 41. 11 Walter Benjamin, “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction,” pp. 217–51 in Hannah Arendt, ed., Illuminations, New York: Schocken Books, [1936] 1969. 12 Witkin, Adorno on Music, p. 188. 13 Ibid. 14 See Richard Chalfen, Turning Leaves: The Photograph Collections of Two Japanese American Families, Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1991; Julia Hirsch, Family Photographs: Content, Meaning, and Effect, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981; David L. Jacobs, “Domestic snapshots: toward grammar of motives,” Journal of American Culture, 1981, vol. 4, 93–105; Mary Price, The Photograph: A Strange Confined Space, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994; Allan Sekula, “On the invention of photographic meaning” [1974], in his Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works 1973–1983, Halifax, Nova Scotia: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984, pp. 3–21; and Sekula, “The traffic in photographs” [1981], Photography Against the Grain, pp. 77–101. 15 Sontag, On Photography; Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. 16 Bryan S. Turner, “A note on nostalgia,” Theory, Culture and Society, 1987, vol. 4, 147–56. 17 Stanley Jackson, Melancholia and Depression: From Hippocratic Times to Modern Times, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986. 18 For a thorough discussion, see Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning, Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993. 19 Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicolas K. Kiessling, Rhona L. Blair, eds, The Clarendon Edition of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989, cited in Wolf Lepenies, Melancholy and Society, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992, p. 15. 20 Lepenies, Melancholy and Society; Robert K. Merton, “Social structure and anomie,” in his Social Theory and Social Structure, Glencoe, IL: Free Press of Glencoe, 1949, pp. 125–49. 21 Ross Chambers, The Writing of Melancholy: Modes of Opposition in Early French Modernism, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987. 22 For discussions of the Flaneur, see Keith Tester, ed., The Flaneur, London: Routledge, 1994. 23 Fred Davis, Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia, New York: Free Press, 1979. 24 Ibid., p. 18. 25 Ibid., pp. 24–5.

164 Marshall Battani 26 Ibid., p. 27. 27 Don Slater, “Marketing mass photography,” pp. 245–65 in H. D. P. Walton, ed., Language, Image, Media, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983, p. 245. 28 Brian Coe and Paul Gates, The Snapshot Photograph: The Rise of Popular Photography, 1888–1939, London: Ash and Grant, 1977; Richard Chalfen, Snapshot Versions of Life, Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1987; Chalfen, Turning Leaves; Chalfen, “Family photograph appreciation: dynamics of medium, interpretation, and memory,” Communication and Cognition, 1998, vol. 31, 161–79; Jacobs, “Domestic snapshots”; Graham King, Say “Cheese”!, London: Collins, 1986; Pierre Bourdieu, Robert Castel, Dominique Schnapper, Jean-Claude Chamboredon, Luc Boltanski, Photography: A Middle-brow Art, Cambridge: Polity Press, [1964] 1990. 29 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. 30 Slater, “Marketing mass photography”; Michael Griffen, Amateur Photography and Pictorial Aesthetics: Influences of Organization and Industry on Cultural Production, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987. 31 Jaap Boerdam and Osterbaan Martinius, “Family photographs: a sociological approach,” Netherlands Journal of Sociology, 1980, vol. 16, 95–119. 32 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, New York: Doubleday, 1959. 33 Emirbayer and Mische, “What is agency?”

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Figure 10.1 Allan Sekula, Dear Bill Gates, 1999. Courtesy of the artist and Christopher Grimes Gallery.

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10 Between the net and the deep blue sea (rethinking the traffic in photographs)1 Allan Sekula

Dear Bill My subtitle recalls an essay I wrote more than twenty years ago, in an effort to understand the long-held belief that photography is a “universal language,” a language legible, as one enthusiastic early American press report on the daguerreotype put it, “in the courts of civilization and the hut of the savage.”2 The wording here was quaint, even for its time, as the whitesettler republic drove relentlessly westward, indifferent to the way a renegade Seminole, hiding out in the swamps of Florida, might have responded to the grim-faced daguerreotype portrait of the aged Indian-fighter Andrew Jackson. With the advent of neocolonialism, the language became less quaint, but the naive optimism persisted unabashed. Edward Steichen recalled the “rapt attention” with which Guatemalan peasants gazed at his traveling exhibition The Family of Man, not long after the 1954 CIA-backed coup that overthrew the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz: “The people in the audience looked at the pictures and the people in the pictures looked back at them. They recognized each other.”3 This conceit, that the globalized pictorial archive benignly conscripts subjects as members of a metaphoric “human family,” now seems quaint in its turn. It is hard (for many Americans, at least) not to look at Family of Man today without a tinge of nostalgia for an exhausted liberalism. And yet isn’t this notion of mutual recognition, of global connectedness and legibility, at the heart of the promise of the Internet? This promise gives a humanist gloss to the archival collecting of demographic data, much as Carl Sandburg did when he described Family of Man as a “multiplication table of living breathing human faces.”4 Communications technologies – photographic reproduction, linked computers – provide strong tools for the instrumental channeling of human desire. This instrumentalism can and indeed must be disguised as a benign expansion of the field of human intimacy. This is more true of communication technologies than it is of other technical forces, since, prenatal maternity excepted, contact between humans begins with the exchange of signs. In the age of the Internet, the liberalism of Steichen’s humanist credo – however flawed and compromised at the time – has been deleted, but a

168 Allan Sekula socially atomized version of the old idea remains. As middle-class American teenagers of the mid-1960s might have sat around, sipping cheap jug wine and listening to Joan Baez records and perusing the photographs of love and childbirth and peasants in the best-selling photographic book of all time, so today they retreat, usually in solitude, to their bedrooms, and log on to the World Wide Web, or to whatever virtual microcosm solicits their curiosity. This brings me up against my title. Recently I wrote a letter to a man who embodies the new paradigm of the global archivist, the facilitator of the new virtual and disembodied family of man. He’s no Steichen, since he refuses the role of the grand paternalistic editor, preferring in a more veiled manner to manage the global archive and retrieval system from which any number of pictorial statements might be constructed. In effect, he allows his clients to play in the privacy of their homes the role of mini-Steichen, perusing vast quantities of images from around the world, culling freely – but for a price – with meaning in mind. I made a point of typing the letter on an old manual typewriter and of sending it anonymously: both neo-Luddite gestures of sorts. The first gesture befits a world of slower communications. In the old days, messages contended with the weather, with “rain and snow and heat” as the old slogan of the US Post Office would have it. As you can see, my old-fashioned letter is appended to a documented action that pushes to an extreme this idea of meteorological resistance to communication: November 30, 1999 Dear Bill Gates, I swam past your dream house the other day, but didn’t stop to knock. Frankly, your underwater sensors had me worried. I would have liked to take a look at Winslow Homer’s Lost on the Grand Banks. It’s a great painting, but, speaking as a friend and fellow citizen, at $30 million you paid too much. HIGHEST PRICE EVER PAID FOR AN AMERICAN PAINTING!!! So why are you so interested in a picture of two poor lost dory fisherman, momentarily high on a swell, peering into a wall of fog? They are about as high as they’re ever going to be, unless the sea gets uglier. They are going to die you know, and it won’t be a pretty death. And as for you Bill, when you’re on the net, are you lost? Or found? And the rest of us – lost or found – are we on it, or in it? Your friend

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The date of the letter, possibly suspect in light of evidence yet to be introduced, underscores the neo-Luddite resort to the manual typewriter, since it marks the very day of show-stopping mass protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle, the hometown and current residence of Mr Bill Gates. A befuddled and slightly hysterical New York Times tried to minimize the significance of this new movement of resistance to corporate globalization, suggesting that the WTO talks themselves were inconsequential. The article had a revealing title, “Shipwreck in Seattle”: The administration chose a spectacularly bad moment to pick this particular fight. With the exception of agriculture, few American industries have a clear agenda for trade talks now, and many no longer believe that these long, endless “rounds” of negotiations are useful anymore. They involve too many countries, rich and poor, with radically different interests. In an age of email, they move like an aging cargo ship. The cochairman of the Seattle host committee for the talks, Bill Gates, barely even showed up – and his office is only 12 miles away. [emphasis added]5 In other words, the smart people, who also happen to be the rich people from the richest country, sailed safely just outside the proverbial twelve mile limit, unperturbed by the rusting hulk that had slammed unexpectedly into the Seattle waterfront. Throughout that week, many among the disobedient crowds in the streets, indulging in this fool’s theater of maritime anachronism, sought to protect their eyes from tear gas with swim goggles like those worn by the anonymous swimmer in Figure 10.1. As someone observed, it was a veritable fashion show, a parade of rain gear, a liquid circus. In an age that denies the very existence of society, to insist on the scandal of the world’s increasingly grotesque “connectedness,” the hidden merciless grinding away beneath the slick superficial liquidity of markets, is akin to putting oneself in the position of the ocean swimmer, timing one’s strokes to the swell, turning one’s submerged ear with every breath to the deep rumble of stones rolling on the bottom far below. To insist on the social is simply to practice purposeful immersion. The resort to tear gas serves not only to “control the crowd,” that is, to prevent the radical redefinition of the use-value of city streets, but also to produce through chemical means the exaggerated liquid symptoms of human empathy and grief. This chemically induced parody of extreme human emotion is in itself an assertion of robotic power. The harsh discipline of tears, mucus, sudden asthma leads the citizenry back to the dry regimen of the everyday. Only the markets are allowed to be fluid. Meanwhile, while all this is going on, the “citizen and friend” is either on the verge of drowning or about to descend for a desperate commando attack, treading water with a good kick in the cold dusk a couple of hundred yards

170 Allan Sekula

Figure 10.2 Allan Sekula, from Waiting for Tear Gas, slide projection, 1999–2000. Courtesy of the artist and Christopher Grimes Gallery.

from a guarded shore, waiting for an answer from the captain of disembodied industry. A brief self-portrait of the swimmer: a chilled Kilroy winks at the winking semi-submerged eye of the camera. Inside the gigantic Big House on the shore, it is dry, watertight, befitting a highly computerized environment, invisibly robotic in the efficiency of its hospitality. There is no need to greet the guest at the door. The butler now resides in the databank, programmed for the visitor’s taste in music and drink, turning off the lights in the guest’s wake, like the grandmotherly attendants in dank Romanian museums. Our host, the Disembodied Industrialist, waits offstage, a misanthrope or recluse either theatrically timing or neurotically delaying his appearance, like Captain Nemo. This time, leaving Jules Verne behind in the old leather-bound library of industrialism, it’s no longer a matter of the submarine as the fully appointed home of an exiled band of rebels, but of the private mansion as submarine: the villa-Nautilus. Verne imagined the submarine as rogue vessel, but the submarine now offers itself as one potential conference center for the powerful plotters who have been driven from the cities by the angry citizens of the shore. The plotters lurk like pirates just beyond and below the horizon. What minimum safe distance will these officials from the rich nations take from the polis? Twenty thousand leagues? Remote orbit? Perhaps, as they were forced to do in Genoa, they resort to less drastic measures and retire to a luxury cruise ship anchored in a barricaded port, protected from the eyes and shouts of the citizenry behind hastily erected walls of cargo

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containers. Nothing could be more instructive than this improvised metal barrier, for it is these mundane and omni-mobile boxes that make the global factory possible. The esoteric logos of the shipping companies painted upon the corrugated steel bespeak a hidden history of disguised extraterritorial ownership and bogus national sovereignty, the very prototype for contemporary capitalism in general. Behind the metal curtain, frogmen inspect hulls for improbable limpet mines, and police provocateurs prepare their costumes. This stage business clears the way for the unfolding of the drama of repression: the use of lethal weapons against protestors, illegal searches and confiscations, brutal beatings. At this juncture, Jules Verne yields to Joseph Conrad. It’s The Secret Agent we should be reading. Power is now defined as the ability to contain real and imagined terror. Even discursive challenges to power are reducible to the model of the terrorist threat. If the stealth of submarines has served the military, it can also serve the police, especially as the line blurs between the two. An expert in terror, Nemo sailed outside the network of communication, signaling to the world only through violent collision. The sophisticated modern submarine is tuned always to low frequency radio signals from underground terrestrial command centers, gifted with the remote eyes of satellites and drones, ever poised to launch cruise missiles against rogue cities, down the factory chimney, into the hotel lobby. Out of sight, but in touch and in the know: the very model of the secret agent. Smart, not at all the mere mechanical equivalent of a vengeful whale. That key difference aside, the old rebellious submarine and the new villa-Nautilus are both refuges from the often-angry surface of the sea. The well-heeled guests, taking a cruise off Hawaii, are lulled into complacency by the smooth and silent underwater functioning of the machine. Awed by the impressive display of their tax dollars at work, they are shocked by the violence of the breaking of the surface, the brutal and sudden encounter with boats, swimmers, denizens of the upper waters, and the dwellers of the shore. Society – the family of man – suddenly exists again, on the beach, in all its fragility. The anguished commander confesses to his laxity at the periscope: “Oh my God. We’ve hit – we’ve hit some kids.” Elaborate and careful and heartfelt apologies must be made, especially to our friends and allies, all this without compromising the exonerating function of official inquiries.6 Accidents are the price of preparedness. In compensation, our friends, who were once our enemies, receive special invitations to the premiere of the next big military spectacle film, which weaves an insipid romantic triangle around their long-ago surprise attack on our navy. A few months later the same entertainment company will, in further compensation, open a second amusement park in their country, this one devoted to the romance of the sea: Japan, long infatuated with American culture and Hollywood, is ground zero for the globalization of the theme park industry [emphasis added]

172 Allan Sekula . . . Disney chose to build its first sea-theme park because of the Japanese affinity for the ocean and marine life, and the site is surrounded by water.7 Anyone who has witnessed the final scene of Shohei Imamura’s film Dr Akagi will understand something different about this unthinking connection between “ground zero” and the “affinity for the ocean.” I will be polite enough not to give away the details. Meanwhile, off Pearl Harbor, the relatives of the victims are ferried by the solicitous Americans to the site of the sinking. They peer disconsolately into the blue tropical water, their grief photographed at a “respectful” distance with telephoto lenses. All of this official concern is consistent with a geopolitical objective, the lifting of constitutional restrictions on the former enemy’s discrete but powerful war machine. While apologizing, don’t fail to remind the Japanese that for now their security is in our hands. But in the long term, Japan will function yet again as a military power in the Pacific, against the vast new-old Chinese enemy to the East. A not-so-secret key to this diplomacy is that neither ally feels compelled to apologize for the atrocities committed in the last war, neither for Nanjing nor for Hiroshima. And the submarines of the other more recent old enemy, do they still lurk? (The newest and most advanced Russian model has proven to be disastrously unreliable. Here also, grieving relatives are photographed peering down into the waves, a colder and darker arctic sea this time, the photographers close and intrusive, like family.) Are most of their submarines merely rotting radioactive hulks, maybe rented out from time to time by cash-starved officers for the filming of pornographic movies? Or, even more frightening for the Americans, are unemployed Russian naval architects secretly working for criminal cartels, building an underwater drug-smuggling fleet, as suggested by a strange discovery in a nondescript warehouse outside of Bogota? Refusing to divulge the top-secret answers to these questions, upon which so much congressional funding depends, an American sonar specialist laments: “I loved the Cold War. I didn’t want it to end.” Far from the sea and underground, the documents accumulate. The overwhelming desire for dryness extends to the Disembodied Industrialist’s recent acquisition of a salt-mine in Pennsylvania to function as repository for all the world’s important photographs, a category that includes, for a few months at least, the pictures of the grieving relatives. There, deep inside a mountain, is the new tomb for older and less popular photographs of anonymous citizens of the last two centuries, photographs that, not having been deemed worthy of digital rescue from the moldy or brittle materiality of paper, are not offered for downloadable sale on the Internet. The selection proceeds slowly and parsimoniously, according to a logic of fame, celebrity, scandal, and greatest hits. Some pictures sell, and others don’t. A picture may be important enough to preserve, but that doesn’t mean anyone gets to see it.

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This much can be said of some of the photographs that can be conjured up electronically, the 2.1 million of the larger inert archive of 65 million. Many depict submarines and submarine actions, including a surprising number of pictures of torpedoed ships taken through periscopes. But overall, the submarine archive is weak on history; there is a reproduction of one of Leonardo’s drawings (attributed to “da Vinci”) and a few pictures of nineteenth-century prototypes and early U-boats. The bulk of the material is taken from the copious files of contemporary military–industrial stock photographers. Under “transportation,” the subcategory “most popular” offers a low-aerial head-on view of an American nuclear submarine breaking the surface of the sea. This picture can be purchased for “personal use” and sent as an electronic greeting card to friends, which suggests something of the moral economy of military Keynesianism. Pictures of whales are also popular. This may be no more than an apparent antithesis, since the archive is, by its very nature, undialectical. As the web page advises, with cheerful techno-economic optimism: “jump start your creativity with pictures.” The orders pour in from the web site, resurrecting over and over the jolly submarines that leap like happy fish and the scanned picture of mighty swinging Babe Ruth launching only one of his many home runs. Other gestures, workaday gestures of less famous individuals, the anonymous history of the times, are salted away in filing cabinets in the dimly lit corridors of the mine, tended by a skeleton crew. These pictures wait like slabs of dried cod for the revivifying water of the gaze, for the laser beam of the scanner. Their rediscovery is unlikely. Researchers are forbidden to enter. Specialists in conservation applaud the care and thoroughness of the operation. And yet, during a long drought in the usually rainy Pacific Northwest, the Disembodied Industrialist and his family and household retainers are – one hopes – embarrassed by reports in the local press that their water consumption exceeds that of any other household in the state of Washington. It is hard to escape the liquid requirements of the human organism. And indeed it is hard, in the city of Seattle, taking a taxi from the airport for example, not to hear stories from ex-gamblers who have taken their chances on the go-for-broke halibut boats, or aboard monster trawlers in the Bering Sea. In the lull of a traffic jam, one hand gestures with the mock indifference at the fishhook scar in the palm of the other. Does a memory of this remote everyday world, this salty Seattle, surfacing from the good old days when he used to take taxis, come to the Disembodied Industrialist as he communicates with his curators on the floor of the auction house?

Irrational exuberance Thinking back to the landscapes and seascapes of a century ago, with Winslow Homer we see a profound American turn toward the sea, consistent

174 Allan Sekula with a burgeoning imperial project, but also with American restlessness and idealism, with the earlier literary examples of Herman Melville and Richard Henry Dana.8 Consider D. H. Lawrence’s assessment from 1923, looking back at those two seafarer writers of the “American renaissance” of the 1840s and 1850s. For Lawrence, American writing lacked any tradition-bound sense of blood and soil, thus avoiding the oppressive legacy of feudal landrights and the mire of European nationalism. (Having chosen writers whose major works were written before the slaughter of the Civil War, Lawrence avoided contrary evidence, though his argument allowed implicitly for an American capacity to go to war over abstract principles.) Lawrence’s insight into American writing and the sea was echoed later by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who spoke of the sea’s offering of a line of flight to Melville, just as Lawrence, a romantic of an earlier late-romantic generation, saw in the passion for the sea an expression of democratic idealism, a utopian longing for a perfect world.9 Lawrence, a secret aristocrat, mocked Dana’s outrage at the flogging of seafarers. It took another American writer, the poet Charles Olson, to come up with a counter-reading of the sea’s connection to American business civilization, and to see Melville as the critical prophet of that connection: “So if you want to know why Melville nailed us in Moby Dick, consider whaling. Consider whaling as FRONTIER, and INDUSTRY. A product wanted, men got it: big business. The Pacific as sweatshop.”10 This was Olson writing in 1947, looking back a century to revive Melville’s radicalism with a renewed prescience, for the capitalist line of progress had not yet been traced from the Pacific sweatshops of the whale ship and copraplantation to the assembly lines of the computer and apparel and toy industries, or the modernized indentured servitude aboard the containerized vessels that bring these products to market. But what can Winslow Homer’s modern but not yet modernist painting mean for Mr Bill Gates of Microsoft, and for the faceless virtual power that he extols? The whole point of the information highway is that one is never lost. Technical command requires constant orientation within the global matrix of information flows. Through his Corbis agency, founded in 1989, Gates wants to collect, through reproduction, all the images in the world. This is a proprietary and profit-hungry ambition, he wants to control the traffic in images, and for this rights to reproductions are sufficient. He wants to own certain images as originals, however. What is the status of these select paintings, with their aura of uniqueness, their direct connection to the artist’s hand, to the larger archive of this cyber-iconographic omnivore? A recent visit to the Corbis web site, searching under the heading “Winslow Homer,” yielded the following results: 53 pictures for “personal use” and 97 for “professional” or licensed use. The majority are marine paintings. For $3.95, the home customer can download a watercolor, West Indian Divers, say, for use as a greeting card, a pictorial gift for the friend about to embark on a Caribbean cruise. Indeed, the entire area of the web

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site devoted to personal picture-shopping treats the consumerist work of purchasing and downloading images as if it were a seaside vacation, a fishing trip, or boating excursion: “Choose your dream yacht and experience the joy of sailing all-year-round . . . Reel in one of our favorite fishing prints . . . Transport yourself with a colorful, calming print of one of our scenic lakes.”11 The archive, with it presumably watertight bulkheads between iconic categories, is offered up as a space of vicarious liquid immersion, dry-land two-dimensional thalassa therapy. For all that, Lost on the Grand Banks is nowhere to be found. Despite the communitarian promises of the web – the archive of everything for everybody – unalienable private property asserts itself in the last instance. Rodchenko’s revolutionary call, “Soviet citizens, photograph and be photographed!,” can now be updated: “Everyone a picture researcher, but keep off the grass!” But the Seattle cabdriver with the fishhook-scarred hand is never far away. And the semantic bulkheads leak, seriously, especially if one is careless about limiting the terms of one’s search. A look under the heading “Jackson Pollock” in the professional archives yields over five thousand results. There are over two hundred pictures of Andrew Jackson, including the daguerreotype by Matthew Brady with which we began our story (IH 024498). The image trail leads yet again to a nuclear submarine, the USS Andrew Jackson, missile-launch technicians poised at the controls (RK 001223). There are 744 pictures of Michael Jackson, before and after his remarkable change of face, and a whole host of other Jacksons from the worlds of sports, entertainment, politics. For all the global pretensions, the selection has a parochial American flavor, more or less like a file of picture clippings from high school history textbooks and People magazine. A mere 12 are reproductions or installation views of paintings by Jackson Pollock, six are depictions of the actor Ed Harris, who portrayed Pollock in a recent film, two are images of two very different fishes, Pollachius pollachius and Gadus pollachius, and a full 49 make up a bracing reportage on factory trawlers fishing in the Bering Sea for one of the two, commonly known as pollack, the not-so-secret raw material for what the seafood industry labels as “imitation crab.” The web site visitor is assured by the digital archivists at Corbis that the Seattle cabdriver’s former comrades, clad in bright orange rough-weather gear – the better to be spotted should they be swept overboard in icy waters – have all signed model releases, thus allowing them to grace the pages of corporate reports or advertisements for sundry commodities likely to be associated with the rigors of fishing on the high seas. Every image appears on the computer screen overlaid with the anti-theft protection of the Corbis “watermark,” which resembles nothing so much as a satellite-radar view of a hurricane. We are entering the territory of Borgesian delirium here, and it is only the narrow instrumentalism of the picture researcher, targeted like a cruise missile on this or that category, that prevents a dive through the eye of the storm into the abyss, the deep, full fathom five.

176 Allan Sekula Winslow Homer was working on a specific sequence of images on the North Atlantic fishery of the late nineteenth century, paintings about work. In an exhibition originating at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, Nicolai Cikovsky and Franklin Kelly reconstruct a narrative sequence, moving from the inshore herring fleet to the deep sea halibut and cod fisheries on the treacherous Grand Banks of Newfoundland, and from tranquil, productive waters to looming disaster on the high seas.12 The three pictures, The Herring Net, The Fog Warning, and Lost on the Grand Banks were all painted at the same size in 1885, and they were shown together at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. You can see the matching of the volume occupied by the dories, despite their shifting orientation on the waves. The implicit triptych is a taxonomic series – the omnivorous and pleasing seriality of the fish market, with herring displayed here, flounder over there, and at the next stall, big green cod fish, jaws agape, waiting for the baking pan: the pseudo-disclosure of the agora. But it is also at the same time a narrative sequence, in which the hidden brutality of work on and against the sea is revealed. The narrative of doomed work tugs tragically downward at the buoyant illustrative productivism of the series. Being lost in a dory on the Grand Banks was the dangerous outcome of specific organization of extractive industry in hazardous waters. The lostness depicted becomes purely metaphysical in its passage into Gates’ possession. He finds the painting in order to lose its specificity, the depiction of lostness stands now as the antithesis of Gates’ instrumental program of total global connectedness. This is the otherness, and nonidentity, that makes the painting into a privileged aesthetic object in Gates’ hands, into truly private property. If I were tempted to connect this to a larger self-consciousness of contemporary elites, the finding of the painting of lostness in order to aesthetically isolate lostness from the tyrannical imperative of connectedness is consistent with a number of ways in which the sea returns, in both romantic and gothic guise, to late modernity. The promotion of cruise ships, the making of films like Waterworld and Titanic, Bill Gates’ purchase of Lost on the Grand Banks: these are all related. We are all invited to lose ourselves at sea. For most of us, this amounts to chump change in the supermarket of imaginary danger. But my guess is that members of financial elites, especially those investing in the intangibles of the “new economy,” imagine themselves in a special way to be venturing forth on stormy seas, lifted high by the irrational exuberance of the swells, only to risk being dashed down, disastrously, beneath the waves. In their bunkered isolation from the rest of us, the image of the solo sailor is paramount. And to the extent that broad sectors of the middle classes are being asked to partake on a lesser scale in the same risks, that image of the isolato is paradoxically rationed out for mass consumption. Market Ideology demands that everyone sail alone. This much can be said about the visual field of the ocean swimmer, or the rower in a small boat upon the open sea: in moderate to heavy seas,

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one is either low in the trough of the wave, or high on the bank of the swell. On the moving, folding surface then, fluctuating conditions of seeing, vertiginous, then enveloped, closed in by a shifting, sliding slope of water. Winslow Homer gives us this vantage point: not omnisciently above the waves, but high on the swell, as if sitting in another dory like the one we see in the foreground, better able to see what the fishermen in the boats depicted are straining to see, the moving haven of the schooner in the fogshrouded distance. Nonetheless, we see effortlessly, in a state of temporal suspension, what they see only fleetingly, what will be obscured momentarily. We see their danger. And it is theirs, not ours, since they are at sea, and we are looking at a painting with our feet planted on the ground. The sympathetic bond imagined is one of civic concern, a queasy morally troubling challenge to gustatory automatism. There is a line then, that connects Homer’s painting with the social documentary photography of Lewis Hine, two decades later, and even with contemporary documentary writers like Sebastian Junger, whose book The Perfect Storm narrates the contemporary working-class world of a New England fishing port and the loss with all hands of the sword-fishing boat Andrea Gail on the same Grand Banks in 1991. Junger appropriately begins his tale with an epigram from Walter Scott: “It’s no fish ye’re buying, it’s men’s lives.” When I wrote these lines, Junger’s book had not yet been translated into a turgid and overwrought cinematic parable on the crisis of male identity, directed by Ubootmeister Wolfgang Petersen. To understand something of the way the sea “returns” as pure media simulation, listen to this recollection by John Seale, the film’s DP (director of photography): I decided that we would probably go to Cape Town, South Africa, grab a couple of look-a-like long-liners, wrap the cameras in garbage bags and get out there amongst it. They looked at me like I was on drugs and said, “No, my boy – think Stage 16 at Warner Brothers.”13 So instead of renting out the frighteningly decrepit Chinese fishing boats that can be seen taking on provisions next to Cape Town’s perversely gentrified waterfront, one of the world’s largest sound-stage filming tanks had to be excavated in the Burbank studio floor. Above the tank, a vertical bluescreen allowed for superimposition of the digital storm. This Oz-like curtain of deep digital blue was larger than a football field. Despite the DP’s rueful lament for lost low-budget opportunities in the notorious seas off the Cape of Good Hope, expensive artifice is discussed in the film industry press as if it were an autochthonous triumph of the technological sublime, unrelated to nature as such. As the DP’s story tells us, Hollywood isn’t really interested in pursuing the challenge posed by fiction films actually shot on rough seas, such as Pierre Schoendoerffer’s lament for French imperialism, Le Crabe Tambour, photographed by Raoul Coutard. And yet it’s not as if

178 Allan Sekula brilliant films about the sea have not been shot entirely on sound stages: think of Hitchcock’s Lifeboat. But the simple claustrophobic fraudulence of Hitchcock’s approach is also beyond the comprehension of today’s mega-directors. The Perfect Storm is symptomatic in more ways than one, and like a hypochondriac, it borrows its symptoms from other films. The blueprint for its expensive simulation of the sea is taken from James Cameron’s remake of the Titanic story, a film of narrative triviality and dry fraudulence bolstered not only by the painstaking auction-house authenticity of Edwardian conspicuous consumption, but the director’s heroic descent to the wreck in a hired Russian submersible. The point-of-view of the film is ultimately that of the treasure hunt, cleverly disavowed in the film’s final gesture of tossing the world’s biggest diamond back into the deep. Thus Titanic is about nothing but the bracing discipline of the box-office, which bespeaks the desperate institutional narcissism of the entertainment industry, its inability to speak of anything but the economic conditions of its own existence, in what amounts to an unconscious parody of modernist self-referentiality. Love, rebellion, death, and the sea are mere pretexts. The sea is emptied of meaning. Or is it?

TITANIC’s Wake Early in 1997, I photographed the Mexican film set for Titanic, as part of an earlier project called Dead Letter Office, a title owed obliquely to Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener. Bartleby’s mysterious refusal to work may have begun with the psychic trauma of his job as a post office clerk sorting undeliverable mail. Re-reading the story, I suddenly imagined that it was difficult and even spiritually challenging to send a simple letter the short distance from Tijuana to San Diego, even if Hollywood movie making, a much more expensive way of sending a message, had already crossed the border.

Figure 10.3 Allan Sekula, Titanic set, Popotla, diptych from Dead Letter Office, 1997. Courtesy of the artist and Christopher Grimes Gallery.

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Seeking to profit from lower Mexican wages, Twentieth Century Fox built the set next to the poor fishing village of Popotla, on the Baja California coast about 40 miles south of the US border. This explains the long list of Mexican names that rolls rapidly by in small type during the film’s final credits. The production facility featured the largest freshwater filming tank in the world, bigger even than the one built later in Burbank to film The Perfect Storm. Mexican extras floated for many hours in the chill coastal winter, playing the parts of anonymous passengers on their way to an icy grave. The neighboring village, just to the south of the walls and guard towers of the set, has no running water. Efflux from the filming tanks lowered the salinity of the coastal tide pools, damaging the traditional mussel-gathering livelihood of the villagers, and giving rise to vociferous and sustained protests by the fishermen and their families. A portion of the set has now been converted into a theme park devoted to the making of the Titanic story. I haven’t visited, but presumably the walls between the set and the fishing village are still topped with shards of broken glass. The lugubrious arrogance of Titanic intrigues me. Is it a symptom of something larger? We peer morbidly into the vortex of industrialism’s early nosedive into the abyss. The film absolves us of any obligation to remember the disasters that followed. Quick as a wink, cartoon-like, the angel of history is flattened between a wall of steel and a wall of ice. It’s an easy, premature way to mourn a bloody century. Or maybe, more innocently, the movie is a bellwether of good-hearted American neoliberalism. When James Cameron accepted the first of his academy awards for the film, he thrust his Oscar statuette into the overheated air above the podium and bellowed out a line from the film: “King of the world.” (Later, looking slightly abashed after receiving what seemed to be a scathing glance from his wife, he asked for a moment of silence for the long-dead passengers and crew.) Curiously, Cameron borrowed his triumphal line from Benjamin Britten’s 1951 opera based on Herman Melville’s novella Billy Budd. Budd innocently exalts, even as he is shanghaied and set upon a path that leads to the yardarm. Could it be that Cameron secretly wanted to remake Billy Budd, or that he thinks of himself as the “handsome sailor” even more than he identifies with the cocky young artist played by Leonardo DiCaprio? It’s a strange thought: Melville’s (and Britten’s) bleak, womenless, and covertly homoerotic parable – a tale of goodness flawed, evil intractable, a guilt-ridden captain – reworked to attract a repeat audience of prepubescent girls. Five or ten years ago, I was confident that the sea had disappeared from the cognitive horizon of contemporary elites.14 Now I’m not so sure. The sea returns, often in gothic guise, remembered and forgotten at the same time, always linked to death, but in a strangely disembodied way. One can no longer be as direct as Jules Michelet was in his 1861 book La Mer, which begins with a blunt recognition of the sea’s hostility, its essential being for humans as the “element of asphyxia.” And yet Bill Gates buys Winslow

180 Allan Sekula Homer’s morbid Lost on the Grand Banks for more money than anyone has ever paid for an American painting. Frank Gehry builds a glistening titanium museum that resembles both a fish and a ship on the derelict site of a shipyard driven into bankruptcy by Spanish government policy, launching a new touristic future in the capital of one of the world’s oldest maritime cultures. It was the Basques, after all, who probably discovered America, but they preferred to keep a secret and return without competition to the rich cod-fishing grounds of the North Atlantic. Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum for Bilbao is a Los Angeles export product, a leviathan of California postmodernity beached on the derelict riverfront of the economically depressed maritime-industrial capital of the Basques. As such, it marks the first move in a projected campaign of economic “revitalization,” tied, as one might expect, to land speculation and tourist promotion. Kurt Forster, who is Gehry’s biggest defender, and who has stressed the protean, vitalist aspect of the architect’s fish-buildings, has gone to some length to exempt Gehry’s project from these sorts of vulgar and dismal economic associations: [Beginning] with his buildings of the 1980s Frank Gehry returned to an architecture possessed of powerful corporeal qualities. He does not think of the volumes of his buildings within the confines of abstract space (which is also the space of economics); rather, he engages these volumes in intimate relationships with one another.15 The bad objects here are legion: abstraction, economics, and by implication, bureaucracy and modernism. The crypto-baroque promise of redemptive embodiment – “corporeal qualities” and “intimate relationships” – is not unlike that offered by the virtual world of the Internet. One can of course travel a short distance along the Bilbao riverfront to the big city fish market, and see there evidence of the prodigious Spanish appetite for the creatures of the sea. Here the corporeal qualities of the fish that inspire Gehry are depressingly linked to the abstract space of economics: boxes of merluza, previously caught in great quantity off the Iberian coast, now imported from Namibia. But like James Cameron making sure that the diamond is tossed back into the drink, Forster wants to disavow and affirm the economic at the same time: Gehry “and his collaborators made use of programs that were originally developed for the design of airplane fuselages.”16 The fish is also an airplane, as the frequent references found throughout recent writing on Gehry to titanium as an “aerospace material” attest. The implied association of titanium cladding with the skin of advanced aircraft is somewhat inaccurate, since titanium is typically used internally, alloyed with steel for jet-turbine blades that must both be lightweight and capable of withstanding high temperatures. In fact, the most radical innovations in aircraft skin design have come through plastic-polymer composites, which are crucial to so-called

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“stealth” technology. In fact, titanium has become a meta-metal, a metal that refers to high technology metallurgy, especially in luxury consumer products like German-designed high-end autofocus cameras. For Forster, as for Gehry, the main breakthrough at the level of architectural practice is the collapse of the laborious mediation between drawing and executed design. On this point, Forster waxes utopian: “The age-old distinction between the hands that design and the instruments that execute has been overcome.”17 I would be delighted to see him deliver this argument with a straight face to the construction engineers and ironworkers who painstakingly translate the plan into the skewed geometry of the steel structure that is ultimately obscured beneath the glistening convoluted surface. Forster concludes by lauding the Guggenheim Bilbao as a “monument to the productive capacities that are now at our disposal.”18 In other words: a monument to the absolute hegemony of intellectual labor afforded by computer-based manufacturing. Having photographed Gehry’s building, I want to venture another sort of reading. For all of its acclaimed “vitalism,” its primal links to the doomed carp swimming in Gehry’s grandmother’s bathtub in Toronto, the Guggenheim Bilbao is more accurately likened to a gigantic light modulator. It introduces a new level of specular reflectivity into a rather drab cityscape previously restricted to tertiary hues. In effect, what it imports to Bilbao is an aesthetically controlled, prismatically concentrated version of the high specularity characteristic of the Los Angeles cityscape, the random and ubiquitous presence of shiny surfaces, glass and metal ricocheting sunlight in an inhuman, migraine-inducing glare. For this benign and restrained version of American aerospatial enlightenment, for this lighthouse and control tower far upriver from the sea, the Basques, who pay all the bills for the museum, are entitled to feel grateful. Thus far, there are no Guggenheims planned for Hanoi, Belgrade, Baghdad, or Basra. For insights into the less restrained version of American aerospatial enlightenment, I advise the reader to see Hartmut Bitomsky’s new film, B-52, about the venerable grey workhorse of the Pentagon.

Figure 10.4 Allan Sekula, Bilbao, diptych from TITANIC’s Wake, 1998–1999. Courtesy of the artist and Christopher Grimes Gallery.

182 Allan Sekula By coincidence, one notices a certain corrosive potential. In the container transfer terminal on the downriver flank of the museum sit large cylinders of hydrofluoric acid, the extremely nasty agent used to dissolve and etch titanium and its alloys. This powerful oxidant is always a handy chemical for the aerospace industry, since it can eat away at metal without causing the heat fatigue associated with traditional machining. The touristic postcard is smudged somewhat by this reminder of Bilbao’s lingering industrial kinship with Seveso and Bhopal. But there is no need to entertain apocalyptic scenarios: much to the architect’s dismay, the Guggenheim’s titanium cladding is already beginning to stain and darken from exposure to the relentless marine atmosphere of the Bay of Biscay. Up close, the building is beginning to resemble the wreck of an old bomber, stained with the greasy residue of burnt kerosene fuel. Given this protean litany of resemblances, we can revise another old slogan, this one from a staple of 1950s American children’s television: “It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s . . . Supermuseum!”

Refloating The Family of Man So maybe we should be looking back, not to The Family of Man, but to Edward Steichen’s earlier wartime project for the US Navy, Power in the Pacific, with its intense concentration on the cacophonous battle-platform of the aircraft carrier. Given what has already been suggested about the militaryKeynesian proclivities of the Corbis collection, this would make sense. A serious reminder of the wartime work also brushes against the current tendency to resurrect Steichen as a celebrity and fashion photographer, which subordinates his global humanism and his patriotic propaganda to a more contemporary and “fashionable” idea of the proper mission of aesthetically ambitious photography. This fashion-idea is pervasive in the artworld, and indeed can blithely take in even the most cutthroat and covert forms of military expertise, as evidenced by Vanessa Beecroft’s recent performance pieces featuring US Navy SEAL commandos standing at attention in their dress whites. Nonetheless, The Family of Man is more germane, since its humanism provides a prototype for the new post-Cold-War “human rights” rationale for military intervention. The exhibition, with its claims to globality, its liberal humanism, its utopian aspirations for world peace through world law, can be reread now in the context of the contemporary discourse of “globalization,” the discourse being advanced by the promoters of an integrated global capitalist economic system. The official American perspective on this system is that it requires the continued vigilance and command of a single global politico-military superpower, which always acts in the healthy interests of the system at large and is thus itself more or less exempt from any overarching concept of world law. In effect, the American state claims for itself the same operational freedom in world affairs as that demanded by

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multinational corporations. This is an inherently unstable and even illogical discourse. For example, the old Dutch corporate doctrine of the “freedom of the seas,” so crucial to the development of mercantile capitalism, is quickly invoked by US State and Defense Department planners when the supposed threat of the Chinese navy is being countered, even though the low-wage Chinese economy is crucial to the global factory system, and much of Chinese export production is capitalized through Taiwan, considered to be the principal target of the Chinese threat. A scenario in which American carrier battle groups, assisted by the Japanese, protect Chinese-crewed container ships bearing Chinese-made goods from torpedoes launched by Chinese submarines – a perverse replay of the Battle of the North Atlantic – would strain the imagination of a Tom Clancy, but I confess to not being up on my reading of that prolific and wildly imaginative writer of geopolitical airport novels. Speaking only of the discursive level, it is clear that economic questions are now paramount in the way that political questions were paramount in the 1950s. When I wrote about The Family of Man, 20 years ago, my overall aim was to locate universal language claims for photography within the historical context of universalized commodity exchange. Indeed, the homology between the function of the photograph as a universally exchangeable “abstract equivalent” of its worldly referent and the circulation function of paper currency had already been recognized in the 1850s, by Oliver Wendell Holmes. Today, the all-encompassing regime of the market, the global imperium of the dismal science, seems all the more pertinent to the discussion of archives and culture. As Margaret Thatcher so cynically and triumphantly put it, “There is no alternative.” On looking back again at The Family of Man, I was reminded that I had seen and noted but not yet fully comprehended that the exhibition and book are rife with images of aquatic immersion: “The final photograph in the book is quite literally a depiction of the oceanic state, a picture . . . of churning surf.” But at the same time an image is offered of a world territorialized and exploited on strictly terrestrial lines. The Family of Man gives us an earthbound workaday world, so that even fishermen are depicted, not as voyagers upon the high seas, but as peasants afloat, seemingly never far from the littoral spaces of the shore. For example, consider the striking absence of the remarkable work of the French photographer Anita Conti, an absence as striking as the fact of its current rediscovery by African scholars. There is no comparison between the rigor and intimacy and sensitivity to violence of her views of Senegalese shark fishermen, or of French cod fishers working the Newfoundland Banks, and the easy Alfred Eisenstaedt photo of Gold Coast boatmen chosen by Steichen. The key to her best work is her discovery of a point-of-view closer to the fish than to the fishermen. By contrast, The Family of Man reserves the image of immersion for Homo ludens and for the ultimate utopian telos of the story of humanity.19

184 Allan Sekula The exhibition toured the world, thanks to sponsorship by the United States Information Agency and corporate co-sponsors such as Coca-Cola. For all its globetrotting, The Family of Man failed to register the actual diasporic movement of populations – largely via crowded maritime transport – in the decade after the end of the Second World War. Think of the mass migration of former British colonial subjects from India and the Caribbean to Britain in search of livelihood. The invisibility of these migrants is all the more startling when one realizes that the sea of humanity depicted on the end papers of the deluxe clothbound edition of the book is in fact an apparently all-white, all-English crowd witnessing the coronation of Elizabeth II, a ritual not exactly linked to human progress or to concepts of citizenship. This is the family of man, not the rights of man. The invisible short people in this crowd, floating beneath the surface of this sea, could be immigrant children. But how can we know? All we can see are their handmade periscopes, searching for a submarine view of the young Queen. Leo Lionni’s abstract design for the cloth cover of the same edition bespeaks an even more programmatic adherence to earthly and racial boundaries: a more or less constructivist map-like array of embossed metallic pigmentation samples, ranging from black to silver-white through an intermediary zone of coppers, golds, and greys, all floating in a sea of blue, as if the world were one contiguous continental landmass, and each race its own nation, stepping forth into the global marketplace of neocolonialism

Figure 10.5 Detail of frontispiece photo by Pat English for The Family of Man. Photo of detail, Allan Sekula.

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with its own coinage. Lionni gives us the prototype of the post-literate, universally legible transnational corporate logos that would emerge more than 20 years later. It is no accident that Lionni was the chief graphic designer for Fortune magazine in the 1950s, where precisely this fusion of de-radicalized constructivism and the businessman’s imperative had a lineage stretching back to the 1930s. His array of rectangles and trapezoids also gives us an abstracted image of the mode of installation of the exhibition itself, of the comparative and contiguous visual ensemble derived from a process of archival selection. By implication, the archive itself is treated as a kind of earthly, mineral resource, to be mined for meaning, pointing the way to the Corbis salt mine in the mountains of Pennsylvania. The hidden telos of The Family of Man is to escape the dry compartmentalization of the archive, to imagine an erotic and utopian return to the sea, a solitary quest conducted in the name of humanity. The model for this can be found in Alfred Stieglitz’s retrospective remark on that monument of photographic modernism, The Steerage, a photograph that has come to stand out from all the rest as the very exemplar of the anti-archival image. Mixing tropes of modernism, the pastoral, oceanic rapture, and bourgeois selfloathing, Stieglitz spoke of his “new vision . . . of people, the common people, the feeling of ship and ocean and sky, and the feeling of release that I was away from the mob called the rich.”20 In The Family of Man, a small flotilla of images breaks loose from the filing cabinets on the shore. Gary Winogrand gives us a photo of lovers frolicking among bathers in the shallows, Steichen himself offers a god’s-eye view of a naked child belly-flopping with a joyful splash, and Ewing Kainin portrays a blond naiad bursting to the surface, her ecstatic smile and closed eyes half-visible through a cascading veil of water. And there is the large photograph by Nell Dorr of a Venus emerging from the waves, garlanded with hibiscus flowers. The regressive longing for immersion comes at us recurrently as we move through the exhibition. It is perhaps consistent with the pan-denominational religiosity of The Family of Man, reinforced by text editor Dorothy Norman’s predilection for pithy shards of timeless wisdom extracted from a wide range of sacred texts. Or, as Steichen himself put it, “Photographs concerned with the religious rather than religions.” The notion of the “oceanic feeling” – of an undifferentiated ego restored to a primal sense of oneness with the world – enters psychoanalytic discourse in the late 1920s, in an exchange of letters between Romaine Rolland and Sigmund Freud. Freud recapitulates the exchange in the first chapter of Civilization and its Discontents, crediting Rolland with the idea, but demurring at Rolland’s suggestion, provoked by reading The Future of an Illusion, that la sensation oceanique lay at the origin of all religious sentiment. Deeply engaged in the study of the Indian nineteenth-century mystic saint Ramakrishna, Rolland was certainly familiar with a range of metaphors for immersion and dissolution of the self, particularly those centered on the mother-goddess Kali, creator and destroyer of life. Freud’s intellectual bias

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Figure 10.6 Re-installation of The Family of Man, Château de Clervaux, Luxembourg. Photo: Allan Sekula.

toward the psychic logic of monotheism led him to a different notion of religious origins. Religious faith followed from the ego’s encounter with a hostile world, and religion was the search for a protective, “enormously exalted” father. Steichen’s overhead photograph of the diving naked child can be said to be poised between these two contrary views of religion: one monotheistic and the other polytheistic and “oceanic.” The photographer/ editor is the “exalted father,” but he longs to become again the child merging with the liquid element. (In Lacanian terms, Rolland’s “oceanic feeling” corresponds to the domain of the imaginary, while Freud’s “exalted father” stands on the side of the symbolic.)21 Freud’s earthbound predilections made him skeptical about transcendent claims for oceanic immersion. He concludes the first chapter of Civilization and its Discontents with a line from Schiller’s early romantic poem “Der Taucher” (The Diver). The poem is based on the fable of a Sicilian king who, offering his daughter as a prize, commands a youth to make a second dive into the abyss. Having triumphed once over the terrors of the deep, the diver laments before his second, fatal plunge: “Let him rejoice who lives up here in roseate light.” Freud, like Jules Michelet, understood that the sea, before it was anything else, was “the element of asphyxia,” the archetype of the hostile world, although Michelet was more sensitive to the nurture provided by the oceans. Freud’s meditation on the oceanic feeling led him, yet again, to the death instinct, already explored in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

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But this intellectual ground had also been traversed by Freud’s disciple Sandor Ferenczi, in a remarkable book called Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality, published in 1923 but dating back to interrupted speculations developed during his service as an army doctor during the First Word War, speculations with which Freud was familiar. Ferenczi’s basic argument derives primarily from the biologist Ernst Haeckel’s erroneous theory that ontogeny – the development of the individual organism from the germ cell – is a recapitulation of phylogeny – evolutionary history. Second, Ferenczi, like Freud, draws from the thermodynamic concept of entropy. From these source ideas the psychoanalyst, seeking the key to the formation of genital drives, intuits that the intrauterine experience of land mammals recapitulates their aquatic evolutionary prehistory. For male mammals, coitus is the expression of a regressive longing for an entropic return not only to the inert floating passivity of the prenatal state, but to the liquid origins of the species. The last sentence of the book sums it up, although along the way Ferenczi is forced by his own logic to admit that female psyche and sexuality are more complex, less “primitive” than that of the male: The male member and its function appears as the organic symbol of the restoration – albeit only partial – of the fetal-infantile state of union with the mother and at the same time with the geological prototype thereof, existence in the sea. [orig. emphasis]22 Thus can be discovered a key to the Schillerian “infant bliss” at the heart of The Family of Man. As I put it long ago without having fully developed the argument, “the exhibition moves from the celebration of patriarchal authority – which finds its highest embodiment in the United Nations – to the final construction of an imaginary utopia that resembles nothing so much as a protracted state of infantile, pre-Oedipal bliss.” This infantilism is consistent with the demise of political subjects in the classical enlightenment sense, and the emergence of new consumer subjects. For this reason, The Family of Man was received with great interest on Madison Avenue, even though it portrayed a world in which Fordist consumerism was largely invisible. The ecstatic bathers of The Family of Man were recruited as shills for menthol cigarettes and beer. The path that opened here has led, 50 years later, to Corbis.com and the non-judgmental fun of shopping for pictures and taking a cruise without an “enormously exalted father” leading the way.

Anti-Titanic Titanic, Waterworld, and The Perfect Storm tell an old story: men sacrifice themselves at sea so that women can nurture civilized values, or even revive civilization itself. The instincts, that are assigned no gender by psychoanalytic theory, are subordinated in these films to the traditional sexual division

188 Allan Sekula of labor. (This traditionalism cuts deeper than the superficial feminism found in Titanic and Perfect Storm, which allows bourgeois women to seek love freely and to be outspoken and prophetic patrons of the avant-garde and permits working-class women to be fishing boat skippers.) These melodramas pretend that the “male” death instinct serves the “female” life instinct, as if in optimistic rejoinder to Freud’s pessimistic conclusion to Civilization and its Discontents. It goes almost without saying that this traditional view, which can never be honest about the fact that its “morality” instrumentalizes the instinctual level of the psyche, has served as one of the principal ideological justifications for war, for organized aggression on a grand scale. Consider the motley crew of “smokers” in Waterworld, ensconced as post-apocalyptic galley-slaves and pirates aboard the rotting hulk of the Exxon Valdez under the command of a maniacal Dennis Hopper. On the one hand, we can be sure that this is an intentionally self-parodic projection onto the lumpenproletariat of the petroleum-consumption patterns of your average successful SUV-driving Hollywood screenwriter. But the smokers also epitomize the bad habits that qualify a society for rogue nation status, for elevation to the target-list for the next barrage of cruise missiles. In the film the “bad” deathinstinct of the smokers can only be thwarted (or, more precisely, gratified) by the “good” death instinct of the thalassally regressed mutant fish-man Kevin Costner, who is by virtue of his enhanced swimming ability a kind of human torpedo. It would be absurd for me to say that these are “militarist” films, but their therapeutic and homeostatic approach to the problem of human destructive energies puts them in line with the new rhetoric of state violence, which is always violence exercised in the interest of abstract human rights, or, more concretely, for the future of the children. Not long ago I was able to see the recently restored traveling-exhibition version of The Family of Man at its permanent home, the Château de Clervaux in Luxembourg, near the site of the Battle of the Ardennes. An old US Army Sherman tank, presumably a relic of that battle, welcomes the visitor at the entrance to the castle. What was most striking about the meticulous reconstruction undertaken by Steichen’s natal country is that now one can see how modest and slow-paced the spectacle-culture of the 1950s was by contrast with the Hollywood blockbusters, mega-exhibitions, and digital image-streams of today. By current standards, the scale of the photographs is far from superhuman, and I saw a group of German high school students slipping into a kind of solemn, attentive reverie as they moved patiently among the monochromatic panels, as if this were very different from their experience of going to the movies, playing a computer game, or clicking on a web link. Perhaps this is the ultimate museological destiny of The Family of Man: to become the immobilized relic of a global road show that provided the model for the traveling museum blockbusters of today. Does the very obsolescence of The Family of Man open up a plethora of possibilities? Just for a moment, imagine that the restored Family of Man had been installed instead aboard a ship, and that the ship sailed around the world,

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visiting all the port cities that had originally taken the exhibition, from New York to Cape Town to Jakarta, and maybe a few others that weren’t on the original itinerary. In some cities, a rich menu of competing cultural choices combined with general urban indifference to the waterfront would bring few visitors: maybe no more than 50 people in New York, despite the free admission. In other cities, maybe in Karachi, the ship would be so swamped with visitors that it would almost keel over and capsize at the dock: an audience of 30,000 in one day. In the richer countries, caps and T-shirts would be sold; in poor countries these would be given way as free souvenirs. It would be a simple no-frills cargo ship, so there would be none of the connotations of protected luxury that accrue to a chateau or to the cruise vessel commandeered in Genoa by the frightened leaders of the rich nations. In many cities, dissident and human-rights groups would be invited to convene public forums in a conference room built into one of the holds. These same groups would provide hospitality for the crew. A web site would track the vessel’s progress. The ship would fly the flag of landlocked Luxembourg, or maybe that of the United Nations, or perhaps an unrecognizable flag, unrelated to any known sovereign entity, perhaps bearing a portrait of Steichen’s mother holding a freshly baked apple pie. It would not fly the flag of the USA, nor would it display the ensign of the Museum of Modern Art, and there would be no Sherman tank lashed to the hatch covers. This would be the ghost ship imagined by the New York Times: the aging cargo ship in the age of email. What I am describing here, taking only modest license, is the 1998–2000 circumnavigation of the Global Mariner, an 18,000 deadweight-ton general cargo vessel carrying in its converted holds a remarkable exhibition about working conditions at sea, and – in a broader sense – about the hidden social costs and probable consequences of corporate globalization. Sponsored by the International Transport Workers Federation, a London-based umbrella organization of over 450 transportworkers’ unions around the world, the ship was actually the brainchild of a group of German and British seafarer-activists who also happened to be disaffected veterans of Greenpeace, interested in the problem of an international linkage of labor and environmental struggles. Their primary concern was the system of flag of convenience shipping, a lawyerly ruse invented by American shippers in the mid-1940s that allows wealthy ship owners to register their vessels in poor nations offering what is often termed paper sovereignty: a flag for a fee. The system is rife with abuses, and indeed its very purpose is abuse: shielding exploitative labor conditions and substandard vessels behind a bewildering legal maze. The ITF has been waging a campaign against this system for 50 years, trying to enforce minimum standards of pay and safety for seafarers. The solution of the ITF activists was to connect this venerable and not always very successful fight to the broader campaign against corporate globalization. Here it is worth noting that since 1995 key working-class resistances to neoliberal policies – reduced social security, casualization of

190 Allan Sekula work in the name of “flexibility,” union-busting, and privatization of public infrastructure – have come from workers in the transport sector: railway workers in France, dockers in Australia, Chile, and Brazil, bus drivers and airline crews in Mexico, delivery drivers in the USA. These battles against the doctrine of the untrammeled market predate Seattle. The Global Mariner was a floating version of the agit-train, reconceived in the context of an eclectic and decidedly post-Bolshevik left-wing politics. (The ITF had its origins in solidarity actions linking Dutch and British dockers and seafarers at the end of the nineteenth century, and remained close to the traditions of the old socialist Second International for much of its history.) The quixotic agit-ship was nonetheless indebted to the experiments of radical productivist art in the young Soviet Union, and also to the photomontages of John Heartfield and the workers’ theater of Erwin Piscator. Remember that Steichen had already borrowed from the big-scale presentational techniques of Russian designers and photographers of the 1920s for his thematic photo exhibitions of the 1940s and 1950s: there are ghostly shadows of El Lissitsky and Rodchenko in The Family of Man. Having witnessed the absorption of these once-radical devices into the toolkit of corporate liberalism and advertising, one could say that now the Global Mariner has reappropriated this tradition to forge a new-old weapon against the neoliberalism of the twenty-first century. But before the exhibition, with its big computer-generated photomurals and its eerie post-Stockhausen soundtrack, there is the fact of the ship and the voyage in and of themselves, readymade-like in the subtlety of their ambiguous status as already existing but transformed object and context. The Lady Rebecca (as “she” had been christened two decades before on the North Sea coast of Britain), had gone through five names, a series of superimposed reinscriptions of bow and stern, each prior name an increasingly obscure trace beneath the bright white paint announcing the new identity. The calculated amnesia of the world of international shipping offers a lesson to those who celebrate the postmodern flux of identity. One of the stranger stories of this common practice: in mid-passage a captain receives a telex noting that the ship has been sold and must be renamed. The captain politely asks the new name and is told to send a crewman over the side – risky business when under way – to paint out every other letter of the old name. What would Mallarmé make of this? The concrete poetry of the contemporary maritime world, the nominative magic worked out between the telex machine and the paint locker: here we return to Melville’s Benito Cereno, but confront not the ambiguities of insurrection and mutiny but a mastery that disguises itself. Whose ship? Which ship? A palimpsest of disguises and deceits, a deliberate muddying of the waters. Nearing the end of its/her working life, the ship formerly known as the Lady Rebecca entered a state of dangerous decrepitude, owned by a Hong Kong shipping company, flagged, I believe, to Panama, crewed by Filipinos, and finally – at the literal end of her ropes – moored at offshore anchorage

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in the bustling port of Pusan, on the southeast coast of Korea, waiting. For what? A shady buyer willing to squeeze out the last bit of profit from the laborious and plodding and dangerous journeys of an aging vessel, a death ship in the making. Or, the owner makes the final blunt decision, almost that of a farmer in its frank brutality, though less intimate than one based on veterinary observation, since this is a decision made at a distance – in Hong Kong or London or Zurich – without poking at the rust breeding on the ladders and the hatch coaming, or poking at the cracks in the hull, or reading the engine room log with its depressing catalog of failing valves and pumps. From the pasture of the anchorage, the ship embarks on the long voyage to the rendering plant. Send “her” to the gently sloping beaches of India, to be run ashore at high tide by a skeleton crew: engines full ahead onto the oily sand, to be broken by the sledges and cutting torches of vast crews of gaunt laborers, the abattoir of the maritime world, the ship remanned for the last time by the last toiling victims in the cycle of oceanic exploitation. Then miraculously – although here other metaphors, those of rescue and redemption, are also to be used as if this were fiction – the ship was purchased by the International Transport Workers Federation in the summer of 1998, reflagged to Britain and arduously refitted at the Mipo dockyards of Hyundai, just north of Pusan, and then sailed by a Croatian crew to the German port of Bremerhaven, where it was further fitted-out with the exhibition, and then, only a few months after the initial purchase – all this was done at breakneck pace – it embarked with a new name on a 20-month circumnavigation, setting out to visit 83 cities around the world. The crew was a polyglot mix: English, German, Icelandic, Filipino, Burmese, Scottish, Croatian, New Zealander, Ukrainian, Russian, Japanese, Dutch, Irish. Depending on the political situation of the local unions who invited the ship, the visits could be militant and combative. For example, the crew joined the dockers of Valparaiso in their fight against Chilean government plans for port privatization, demonstrated alongside exiled Burmese seafarers and other democracy campaigners outside the Myanmar embassy in Bangkok, and staged a protest in support of striking American shipyard workers in New Orleans. Two fast launches were stowed on top of the rear hatch cover, and these allowed for rapid, Greenpeace-style actions. In other instances, the ship was isolated from public contact by unsympathetic governments, as happened in Hong Kong, a city whose crypto-“market-Stalinist” chief executive happens to be the former head of an international containershipping line. An invitation to Greece scheduled for the very last day of the millennium was rescinded at the eleventh hour by a seafarers’ union unwilling to challenge powerful Greek shipowners. Faraway political events could change the tenor of the ship’s reception, as happened in Istanbul a few weeks after the Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization. For the first time, the ship was greeted at the dock by workers bearing banners specifically denouncing globalization. And indeed the ship’s visit to Seattle in the

192 Allan Sekula spring of 1999 had been one of a number of local events leading up to the November protests.23 If, as Michel Foucault has suggested, ships are the very exemplar of heterotopias (real spaces that call other spaces into question), the Global Mariner was the heterotopia of heterotopias. Or if you want, this was a meta-ship, representing and figuring within itself, within the exhibition that was its only cargo, all the other invisible, ignored, and silent ships of the world. The Global Mariner had to be a real ship functioning in an exemplary way, to be the Good Ship that social justice demanded other ships should and could be, but it was also an empty vessel carrying nothing but ballast and a message. This “emptiness” may have provoked the hostile captain of one substandard vessel targeted by the ITF to refer to the Global Mariner as a toy ship, as if it had been de-realized by the absence of heavy cargo. And yet this was a vessel of old-fashioned self-sufficiency, equipped with onboard cranes that allowed it to load and discharge cargo at terminals without dockside equipment, the sort of vessel commonly seen trading in more remote Third World ports. The Global Mariner functioned in marked contrast to the specialized container and bulk ships of today’s shipping world, which only work by being integrated into a larger machine ensemble of dockside cranes and conveyors. Its functional autonomy and versatility allowed the Global Mariner to become a large mobile art space that could efficiently install, transport, and display its exhibition.

Figure 10.7 Postcard of the Global Mariner. © International Transport Workers Federation, 1998. Courtesy International Transport Workers Federation.

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The Global Mariner was also embarked on what can only be seen as an ironic, counter-enactment of an older project dating back to the very origins of modern imperial dominion, namely the first circumnavigation of the globe by Magellan. This was Magellan in reverse. Indeed, the ritual significance of circumnavigation cannot be underemphasized. These epochal voyages were first reenacted in the epoch of high imperialism, serving as theatrical assertions of a naval power’s emergence on the world stage, as was the case with the circumnavigation of Admiral Dewey’s “White Fleet” after the decisive American victory over Spain in Manila Bay in 1898. In the American case, the grand, global naval parade, showing the flag, in naval parlance, put the muscle behind the geo-strategic ambition expressed by the naval theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan. In the later twentieth century, the solo circumnavigator ritually revitalizes the individualist underpinnings of the capitalist spirit of adventure, while simultaneously obscuring – through the drama of solitary endeavor and extreme self-sufficiency – the industrial and social dimension of the worldspanning project. The fascination with such voyages, manifested in the tragically ill-fated work of Bas Jan Ader, or more recently in a number of intriguing projects by Tacita Dean, is entirely consistent with a return to a seemingly exhausted romanticism, and an effort to divorce adventure from its historical linkage with plunder and conquest. That romanticism should only seek its survival in oceanic immersion, hyper-solitude, and the extreme extraterritoriality of the middle passage is a sign of the desperation encountered in its rescue from generalized cultural debasement. Today this postmodern, quasi-romantic “return” to the sea must be understood as fundamentally different from its Byronic precedent, since it contends with a sea that is both depleted of resources and sublimely threatening in a new way with the advent of global warming, a sea that kills and is being killed, a sea that is also subject – in the developed world – to a ubiquitous variety of hyperreal representations, from aquatic theme parks to the species-rich aquariums that have become a fixture of every urban waterfront leisure complex. The Global Mariner insisted, on the contrary, in its plodding ordinary way on the return to social questions. Speaking with the caution of a Cold War liberal, Steichen had claimed that The Family of Man was about “human consciousness, not social consciousness.” 24 The great strength of the Global Mariner experiment was to raise the question of society from the very space that is imagined to be beyond society. Nothing special: a ship like many others, so ordinary that one Seattle resident, seeing the ship being ceremoniously welcomed by the fireboats of that strong union city, wondered what the fuss was all about. In other words, here was the sort of welcome one would expect for an aircraft carrier or the QE2, but not for an old ’tween decker, presumably carrying coffee or pulp paper, or some other anonymous bulk commodity. It is all the more profound that this ship should seek to represent the workings of empire at a time when the global economy is assumed to be

194 Allan Sekula entirely virtual in its connectedness, magically independent of the slow maritime movement of heavy things. The arrogant conceit of the cybereconomy, for that matter of the very idea of the post-industrial era, is that we disavow our dim but nagging awareness that nearly all energy – whether converted to electricity or derived from direct combustion – comes from oil or other hydrocarbon fossil fuels, or on fissionable uranium refined from yellow-cake ore: solids, liquids, and gases that are extracted from the earth and transported in bulk. The very slowness of the Global Mariner’s voyage, the 20 months of its circumnavigation, reminds us of the duration of earlymodern seafaring under sail, and also of the contemporary persistence of slow, heavy transport flows. This was the anti-Titanic. The Glaswegian quartermaster aboard the Global Mariner, a wiry veteran seafarer by the name of Jimmy McCauley, made the point very succinctly, referring to the steady aggregate loss of life at sea, crews of 20 at a time on bulk ore carriers that mysteriously break in half, sometimes in calm seas, or the myriad Filipino passengers crammed onto decrepit ferries that capsize or burn in the Sulu Sea: “A Titanic happens every year, but no one hears about it.” The exhibition itself brought this home with a narrative program that took the visitor from a happy and optimistic view of seafaring – a mix of shipping industry propaganda and tourist fantasy – to an increasingly dark and dismal view of calamities and dangers at sea, culminating in a meticulous model of the ill-fated Swedish ferry Estonia underwater in a fish-tank vitrine. This last amounted to a morbid seafarers’ joke on the display techniques of maritime museums. As one descended from upper to lower holds, and moved forward toward the bow of the ship, the use of archival images – of injured seafarers and atrocious living conditions, of shipwrecks, fires, and oil spills – became more and more insistent, until one climbed to the upper hold dedicated to public discussion and debate. Many of the photographs used were taken by the ITF’s ship inspectors in ports around the world, who are themselves dockers and seafarers. This documentary imperative brings openness to an industry traditionally veiled in secrecy. In fact, the current tendency to extend forensic investigations to nonmilitary shipwrecks, using deep submersibles when necessary, is largely traceable to precedents set by the ITF. Miren del Olmo, chief mate aboard the Global Mariner, told me a story. A Basque from a poor fishing village on the outskirts of Bilbao, daughter of a retired shipyard worker, she recalled having crossed the Nervión River on her way to English class one Saturday in the late 1980s, preparing for the lingua franca of a life at sea. Hearing commotion in the distance, she glanced back at the bridge, just next to the soon-to-be-closed shipyard that would ten years later provide the site for Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim. The roadway and pylons suddenly disappeared in a fog of tear gas. Displaced welders and shipwrights – her father’s comrades – were battling with the riot squads of the National Police. She told the story as she stood watch late one December night on another sort of bridge, as the Global Mariner

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Figure 10.8 Installation views of the lower holds of the Global Mariner. Photos: Allan Sekula. Courtesy of the artist and Christopher Grimes Gallery.

196 Allan Sekula made its way west across the Black Sea. It occurred to me that we were doubtless crossing the course taken almost a century earlier by the mutinous battleship Potemkin, as it zigzagged from Odessa to Constanza seeking shelter from the Tsarist fleet. The ship shuddered through heavy winter swells, seemingly going nowhere. After a long silence, broken only by the intermittent crackle of radio voices speaking the terse and variably accented English of the sealanes, Miren remarked that she had yet to spend enough time at home in Bilbao to be able to visit the new museum. But in her unprofessional opinion, speaking frankly to an American, it looked like it had been built “from every can of Coke drunk in Bilbao.” As Melville’s Bartleby, broken by the post office, put it to his boss: “I would prefer not to.” On August 3, 2000, having completed its mission as a good ship, an exemplary ship, a ship representing all the other invisible ships of the world, the Global Mariner, bearing a cargo of steel coil, was rammed and sunk at the mouth of the Orinoco River in Venezuela, not far from the fictional refuge of Robinson Crusoe, a shipwrecked isolato from an earlier mercantile era. Thanks to Bill Gates and his minions, I received this news by email, but not in writing. Instead, without warning, a startling picture rolled downward on the screen of my computer: a ship I knew well, sinking, photographed from a lifeboat by one of the crew.

Notes 1 This essay was originally published as Allan Sekula, “Between the net and the deep blue sea (rethinking the traffic in photographs),” October, 102, Fall 2002, pp. 3–34. © 2002 Allan Sekula. 2 Allan Sekula, “The traffic in photographs,” in Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works 1973–1983, Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984, pp. 76–101. Originally published in Art Journal, Spring 1981. 3 Edward Steichen, A Life in Photography, New York: Doubleday, 1962, n.p. 4 Carl Sandburg, “Prologue,” The Family of Man, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955, p. 3. 5 David E. Sanger, “Shipwreck in Seattle,” New York Times, December 5, 1999. 6 “Collision at sea: the commander speaks,” Dateline, NBC News, April 23, 2001. 7 Richard Verrier and Mark Magnier, “DisneySea is joining wave of theme parks rolling abroad,” Los Angeles Times, July 30, 2001. 8 An earlier version of this section was first presented as part of the Third Annual Ian Burn Memorial Lecture, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, May 1998. 9 D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, New York: Penguin, [1923] 1977; Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1987, pp. 186–189. 10 Charles Olson, Call Me Ishmael [1947], in Collected Prose of Charles Olson, Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander, eds, Berkeley: University of California, 1997, p. 26. 11 Online. Available HTTP: www.corbis.com (accessed September 27, 2004).

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12 Nicolai Cikovsky and Franklin Kelly, Winslow Homer, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995, pp. 226–230. 13 Quoted in Pauline Rogers, “Hell and high water,” International Cinematographers Guild Magazine, July 2000, p. 21. 14 See Allan Sekula, Fish Story, Düsseldorf: Richter Verlag, 1995. 15 Kurt Forster, “The museum as civic catalyst,” in Frank O. Gehry: Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa, Stuttgart: Edition Axel Menges, 1998, p. 10. 16 Ibid., p. 11. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 See Anita Conti: la dame de la mer, Paris: Revue Noire, 2001. 20 Alfred Stieglitz, “Four happenings,” Twice A Year, no. 8–9, 1942, p. 128. 21 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents [1930], trans. James Strachey, New York: Norton, 1961, pp. 11–20. See also J. Moussaieff Masson, The Oceanic Feeling: The Origins of Religious Sentiment in Ancient India, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1980. 22 Sandor Ferenczi, Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality, London: Karnac, 1989, p. 107. See also Christopher L. Connery, “The oceanic feeling and the regional imaginary,” in Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake, eds, Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996, pp. 284–311. Responding to “Pacific Rim discourse,” Connery has developed a compelling argument linking Charles Olson’s idea of the Pacific as “world ocean,” Anglo-American imperial ambitions, and a Ferenczian psychoanalytic reading of the cult of swimming. 23 The visit of the Global Mariner to Seattle was sponsored by the West Coast dockworkers’ union, the ILWU, and by a number of other maritime unions. The ILWU also cosponsored the Seattle exhibition of my project Fish Story at the Henry Art Gallery, in conjunction with the Labor Studies Center at the University of Washington, an unusual occurrence in American museum practice, given the hegemony of corporate patronage. Between February and May of 1999, Fish Story became a focal point for a series of meetings and events – including the Global Mariner’s visit – addressing Seattle’s militant labor history and problems of working-class responses to globalization. The ILWU shut down all ports on the West Coast and in Hawaii during the subsequent WTO meetings, and rank and file dockworkers – men and women – took a big role in the street demonstrations, thus earning the scorn of apologists for globalization, such as Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. I first visited the Global Mariner when it made port in Los Angeles on its way up the Pacific coast, and subsequently sailed with it from San Francisco to Portland, from Durban to Cape Town, and from the Mediterranean up through the Black Sea, and back down to the Adriatic. On the Seattle protests, see Alexander Cockburn, Jeffrey St Clair, and Allan Sekula, Five Days that Shook the World: Seattle and Beyond, London:Verso, 2000. 24 Edward Steichen, “Introduction,” The Family of Man, p. 5.

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Warring worlds

Figure 11.1 German civilians view corpses at Buchenwald, April 16, 1945. Source: US National Archives and Records Administration.

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11 Witness to surrender1 Robin Wagner-Pacifici

Bolingbroke : Are you contented to resign the crown? King: I, no – no, I for I must nothing be. Therefore no no, for I resign to thee. Now, mark me how I will undo myself. William Shakespeare2

What is a witness? Where would history be without the figure of the witness? These figures never simply watch. They ratify and notarize, they escort the principals to sites of exchange and transition, they sanction deals and documents and signatures, and they so very importantly co-sign or counter-sign.3 Perhaps most crucial – witnesses survive, render, and remember. In all of these ways, witnesses give a lie to the distinction between action and observation in the sphere of history. Inasmuch as they play this crucial hinge role in moments of social and political transformation, witnesses are both necessary and an encumbrance. The central actors in a transpiring event must count on the witnesses to see what they are supposed to see, to record the event in a particular way, to sign their true name in the appropriate way on the right document. The quasi-autonomy of the witness is both required and a source of anxiety. What will the witness record? Will the witness attend to the scene or will he or she turn away? How will the witness recount and represent the act after its occurrence? In this regard, as we will see, artists and writers are particular kinds of witnesses. Their paintings, plays, poems, and songs are essentially their signatures by which they subscribe to (underwrite) the scene. The word “witness” has several etymological roots and historical meanings. Giorgio Agamben notes that, “The Greek word for witness is martis, martyr (derived from the verb meaning ‘to remember’). The first Church Fathers coined the term martirium from martis to indicate the death of persecuted Christians, who thus bore witness to their faith.”4 There is a paradox to this root meaning of witness. The act of witnessing faith, borne by the martyr in his or her very martyrdom, must rely on other, second-order,

202 Robin Wagner-Pacifici witnesses to record and remember it. This paradox draws out something key to this essay, namely what it means to bear witness to a scene of surrender. Wherever selves are undergoing processes that can be understood as undoings or abnegations, the task of the witness becomes doubly complicated. In such events as martyrdoms, resignations, or surrenders, it is not unreasonable to claim that witnesses are asked to bear witness to a disappearance. In his reflections, Agamben goes on to note that: In Latin there are two words for “witness.” The first word, testis, from which our word “testimony” derives, etymologically signifies the person who, in a trial or lawsuit between two rival parties, is in the position of the third party (terstis). The second word, superstes, designates a person who has lived through something, who has experienced an event from beginning to end and can therefore bear witness to it.5 First, let us consider witnesses as third parties. Third parties are crucial to the structure and progress of disputes. They stand outside of the intense standoff of the charge/countercharge that pits the main protagonists against each other. This “outside” is both temporal and spatial. Third parties can be figures linked to the past in their representation and embodiment of tradition and institutionalized authority. They can open an escape hatch to the future in their subscribing to a way out of the conflict. Or, given their structural position, they can simply operate in the present as a spectator with an autonomous vantage point. Credible testimony comes from third parties, or witnesses in this sense. And the variable dynamics and forms of testimony reflect the different kinds of demands placed on witnesses – moral, political, and/or legal.6 The report of the witness needs to be accurate to some standard (epistemological or political) of reality. And the witness must take responsibility for ratifying that this event happened in this, rather than in some other, way. Of course, the third party witness often finds a kind of situational zone of discretion – discretion in two senses of the word. There may be discretion in the face of action that undoes identity or is shameful. Can and does the discreet witness look away from a scene of degradation, humiliation, or exiling? Further, to what extent does the witness have the discretion of whether or not to testify, to sign, to subscribe? As vantage points turn out to be key for credibility and intelligibility of witness reports, it is important to locate third parties, spatially and temporally. Are they close enough to see or hear the exchanges and transactions at the center? Are they oriented correctly to the action? After all, it is the essence of the witness to be an acknowledged presence at the scene. Derrida writes that: The witness is the one who will have been present. He or she will have attended, in the present, the thing of which he is witness. Every time,

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the motif of presence, of being-present or being-in-presence, turns out to be at the center of these determinations.7 This presence of the witness must also be put in the context of situations that are ongoing and contingent. The role of the witness is a temporary one – witnesses are created or called forth in the context of actions that claim the center stage. Taking up the second Latinate meaning of witness, that of superstes, it is clear that this meaning emphasizes less the position and more the experience of the witness. The witness in this sense is one who has lived through an event and can bear witness to its having occurred. Thus, the witness is a survivor, one who bears the event within him- or herself. Under this rubric, witnesses combine experience with meaning, survival with judgment. Several dilemmas are associated with this meaning of witness. What, for example, happens when there are no survivors of an event, when no one who has had the experience lives through it to record and remember it? In his book, Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben addresses just this problem when he considers the Shoah: The Shoah is an event without witnesses in the double sense that it is impossible to bear witness from the inside – since no one can bear witness from the inside of death, and there is no voice for the disappearance of voice – and from the outside – since the “outsider” is by definition excluded from the event.8 Here is the deeply political and moral problem of absent testimony when presence is necessary. But the issue of presence suggests that of responsibility. Can witnesses ever be thoroughly implicated in the events to which they are called upon to bear witness? Or, are they always, necessarily, afforded a degree of freedom that we might call the zone of autonomy? In her detailed analysis of the emerging conventions of visual documentation upon the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps at the end of World War II in Europe, Barbie Zelizer draws attention to the foregrounded role of images of witnessing. These witnesses included American news journalists, American military officers, German camp officials, and German civilians. And they were called upon to witness the atrocities in and of the camps. Published photographs of these diverse groups associated them with different visual angles. For example, survivors were photographed frontally, staring directly at the camera, while German perpetrators were photographed in side views. Zelizer writes: Perpetrators were generally shown at odd angles to the camera, which showed large uniform bodies – angry stares, colorless prison garb. . . . German civilians were also frequently depicted witnesses, and they too were photographed in various encounters with the atrocities reburying

204 Robin Wagner-Pacifici the bodies of Nazi victims, looking at the cremation ovens, or “being forced to gaze” at stacks of corpses.9 In these photographs, framed, as Zelizer describes, in formal, conventionalized tableaus, the characteristic poses of civilians were the most elusive and ambiguous. In a photograph of German civilians viewing corpses at Buchenwald in April, 1945 (Figure 11.1), we see the backs of the civilians as they stand in a group organized to face either a horrific pile of dead bodies or a combined group of liberators and survivors. From the backs of the heads, it seems that very few are actually looking at the bodies – but their actual line of vision is, perhaps not accidentally, obscured. They exist in a kind of liminal zone of responsibility and the significance of the zone of autonomy they are now, as witness, at least temporarily being afforded, is built into the role of witnessing. Taken together, the third-party understanding of witness and the bearerof-experience meaning of witness may suggest an internal contradiction or pull in diverse directions. The former implies an outsider’s perspective, the latter that of one who bears the experience deep within the self. This pull will ramify across our examination of the location and actions of witnesses as they are called to witness surrenders.

Where is the witness? To the degree that witnesses must perceive the events to which they bear witness, the question of their location looms large. To what degree does true witnessing require proximity to the center of events? To what extent do the institutions set up to overcome distance (political institutions, technologies, and institutions of communication)10 mitigate this need for proximity? Does the question of proximity serve to differentiate witnessing from “mere” spectatorship? One key issue is that of perception and its various modalities. Events can be perceived tactually, visually, aurally, and so forth.11 Witnesses can be detailed to perceive events in very specific ways. Their location vis à vis the actions to be witnessed thus must provide a vantage point that allows for these ways of knowing. In his book Picture Theory, W.J.T. Mitchell parses these different ways of knowing, thereby suggesting some epistemological dilemmas of witnessing: The “differences” between images and language are not merely formal matters: they are, in practice, linked to things like the difference between the (speaking) self and the (seen) other; between telling and showing; between “hearsay” and “eyewitness” testimony; between words (heard, quoted, inscribed) and objects or actions (seen, depicted, described), between sensory channels, traditions of representation and modes of experience.12

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Witnesses must be in a position to hear oaths and other speech-acts, to see the exchanges of objects and people, to watch the main signatories sign their names. On the one hand, distance creates difficulties for knowing and observing others. Reports on distant conduct, exchanges, and transformations take time and may be lost or distorted. Distance undermines the sense of deeply existential knowing that comes from face-to-face interaction. On the other hand, Hannah Arendt’s theory of the political realm rests on a fundamental exigency of, precisely, “distance, the worldly space between men where political matters, the whole realm of human affairs, are located.”13 Political acts are those very acts of crossing distance, of founding institutions that create pathways across the previously unmediated space. In the case of the witness, who must perceive, and then sanction, notarize, record, and/or remember the witnessed actions through the sensory apparatus, how does that proximity relate to the political context? And further, how does such proximal witnessing reverberate outward into more distant concentric circles as second-order witnesses assay the renderings of the firstline witnesses? Finally, what becomes of the essential proximity of witnessing as these subsequent renderings communicate the event to the wider publics?14 The relay of rendering suggests a necessary focus on the diverse media through which the chain of witnesses record what they have seen. Distinguishing between spectators, observers, witnesses, and publics may be one approach to answering these questions. But such distinction proves difficult. Recalling Agamben’s etymological distinguishing between witness understood as the third party and witness understood as the survivor, we encounter a parallel tension between spectators without ties (objectivity reinforced by distance) and spectators with ties (for whom proximity is desired, and for whom spectatorship transmutes into compassion on the one side or enmity on the other). Concretely, where does the witness stand (literally and figuratively)? And where does the witness look? In order to answer these questions, attention must be partially deflected away from the witnesses and the main protagonists themselves. It needs to be shifted to the stage: “We need to remove the figures from the stage and examine the stage itself, the space of vision and recognition.”15

The visual order of the witness The eventful stage of historical transformation will be peopled by witnesses, one way or another. These witnesses engage in a series of exchanges and recognitions. A particular kind of exchange is that which I term “crosswitnessing.” Witnesses witness actors engaging in the actions on the stage. Witnesses also witness other witnesses witnessing the action. All designated16 witnesses must figure into a compositional structure in which their vision, intersubjective though it is, is unimpeded. As we follow their gestures and stances, do they point us inward or outward, are they attentive or distracted?

206 Robin Wagner-Pacifici In any of these variable configurations, the scene must cohere around and through a central focal point where the key commitments and performative actions occur. The witnessing of a coherent scene requires a complex perceptual apparatus able to comprehend the alternations of narrative action and moments of suspended time. In other words, the relation of the witness to the scene is a function of proximity, point of view, and perception. The witness is, critically and in ways that will be detailed, both in and out of the scene. But the scene must be conjured up out of the ongoing movement of social time and must be congealed (however temporarily) in order to be witnessed.17 The suspended and pregnant moments of tableaux, when vision is allowed to take clear form, suggest that witnesses must not only be located specifically in space but must also be located in time. They are positioned to observe something that happens in “real time” and yet must also attest to that happening by freezing time through their notarizing and sanctioning of it. They are called to bear witness to a vision of the world that is re-made at the very moment when witnessing becomes relevant. For present purposes, the connection between, on the one hand, the complex choices involved in rendering time’s ongoingness and rendering time’s stopping points and, on the other hand, the complex demands upon the witness, revolves around the witnesses’ position, orientation, and actions. The question is raised – what does it mean to testify to a vision of a world that is simultaneously being remade by (in part) the very testimonial actions of the witness?

What does the witness do? Witnesses who are called upon to perform their witnessing selves through taking oaths, giving testimony, and appending their signatures, move across the boundary separating insiders from outsiders, actors from observers. These witness actions ineluctably combine the performative (oath taking, signature appending), the demonstrative (giving testimony, indicating the scene to others from a specified vantage point), and the representational (recollecting the event for chains of third parties, rendering the event in textual or pictorial ways). But highlighting the unique actions of individual witnesses raises another conceptual issue – do witnesses signify and perform differently when they are constituted as collective rather than individual entities? The Greek chorus may be said to derive its voice from its nature as an assembly. This collective entity comments on the world of men and gods, laments the fates of men, but cannot enter the fray (perhaps because it is a collectivity). Scenes of historical transformation seem to draw crowds of witnesses. As the ceremonial moments of exchange and ratification do temporarily stop the flow of action in their tableau-like suspended moments, these crowds catch their own movements to attend to the scene. Figure 11.2 is a photograph of

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Figure 11.2 World War II servicemen on the decks of the USS Missouri during the surrender signing, September 2, 1945. Source: US National Archives and Records Administration.

208 Robin Wagner-Pacifici US servicemen on board the USS Missouri; the clusters of men proliferate, seeming to make the ship itself a witness to the signing of the surrender documents at the end of World War II. Of course, the mood of the crowd of witnesses will be differently inflected in different scenes of transformative entrances and exits. The degree of anxiety will be relatively greater or more diminished. But, even in the most uncontentious and uncontested of occasions, the collectivity of witnesses will demonstrate the edgy quality of a boundary event. Collective witnessing has a certain power. It is literally a public reckoning. But for witnessing to be responsible, it seems that it must take a singular, individual form. Individual witnesses are asked to commit themselves to a singular event by way of a performative act. While performative acts can be accomplished by a group of individuals simultaneously, they sign and swear as individuals.

Signatories to the scene It was, of course, J.L. Austin who, in his mapping of how to do things with words, drew attention to the way in which the signature acts as a tether, linking the written document to its source (something not so obviously necessary in the case of the speaker of an utterance).18 But the signature’s relation to its source is complex and contingent. Signatures are powerful – conventional and explosive at the same time. Signatures are both unique (only one original signature in each signatory space of each document) and repeatable (each signer must be thought capable of generating unlimited, “identical” future signatures); both autonomous and linked to all other signatures of all other real and potential signatories, present, past, and future. “Put your John Hancock here” links us and our contemporary mundane signings to John Hancock and other historically significant signings, founding something anew with each signing. Signatures create, as much as authenticate, the self.19 The signature is both an object and an event. It emerges out of a culture of alphabets, a culture of genealogy, and a culture of literacy. It constitutes a text of sorts. It also has elements of the pictorial and the iconic, with its distinctive loops and flourishes and its signal occupancy of very particular areas of papers and paintings. Finally, like the fingerprint (a stand-in for a signature on occasion) the signature metonymically contains and leaves traces of the body on the page. “I am here,” it says or, raising the issue of intersecting or confusingly cohabiting time-frames, “I was here.” In a related way, signatures act as a kind of ontological break. Their appearance announces their quality of being flung onto a surface from another dimension. They are often scrawled across the bottoms of documents that are otherwise orderly, pre-scribed, and based on formal scripts. They also signal a social commitment, breaking forth to take a stand.20 In the case of witnesses, the witnesses commit themselves to the event, to a certain

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vision of the event, to their role in the event through their signatures. They perform their witnessing through their signatures. As signatures tether written documents and painted scenes to their sources, they are in the business of buttressing and deploying identities. They link the world outside of selves to selves. But how do we understand signatures that commit themselves to a kind of disappearance, sometimes (in the case of principal, vanquished parties and to these parties’ witnesses) to a disappearance of the self ? How do we understand a signature that, like the signature of surrender, undoes itself in the act of its signing?

Witness to a disappearance Surrenders are perilous and dramatic transformations that must be witnessed. Both the victor and the vanquished must perform the surrender with their appending of signatures on the official documents. In surrender agreements, the victors sign and the vanquished re-sign, respectively claiming and relinquishing their sovereignty rights. These two sets of signatures of the opposing parties appear to be identical acts, yet they are radically different in terms of their performative force and their manners of construing identity. Witnesses must also sign the surrender documents. Typically, their signatures are second-order signatures, vouchsafing the identity and power claims of the primary signatories. They literally subscribe to, or underwrite, the agreement. Because the signature is so complexly tied to the identity of the signer, the signer’s sovereignty over him- or herself becomes key. As such, the signing of a document with a recognizable signature seems to be an act of unqualified sovereignty over the self. And yet, such an understanding does not pay adequate attention to the forced nature of the signing on the part of the vanquished and the enforcing nature of the signing on the part of the victor. For it is through this act of signing that the former enemies and the countersigning witnesses are deictically directed to the transformed relations of sovereign subjects and nations as all are reoriented in time and space. What was “ours” is now “yours.” What was our “here” is now your “here.” I am here but I would rather not be here in this condition. The signature is a conduit for the shifting pronouns of power and adverbs of territory and the signing vanquished is being asked to be a kind of witness – precisely against himself. At this existential level, the identity of the individual performing the surrender is undone in the act. Thus, as surrenders are dangerous in the practical sense of waiting to see if weapons will really be laid down, if peace really will be concluded, they are also dangerous to the sense of the self in that they require a contradictory assertion/negation of identity on the part of the defeated. For the vanquished, then, the signature on the surrender document acts as a very real kind of vanishing point.

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Looking at the vanishing point In the case of the flung-ink painting, Ch’an’s solution is to disfigure the image, the bipolar view, by opening on to the whole force of randomness. As the ink is cast, it flies out of the enclosure or tunnel of the frame, and opens the image on to the field of material transformations that constitutes the universal surround. The flinging ink marks the surrender of the fixed form of the image to the global configuration of force that subtends it.21

There is something instinctively right about the connection between surrender and the vanishing point. Surrenders entail a kind of vanishing – the vanishing of power or territory or autonomy and so forth in the submission to another. The exchanges necessary to transact the surrender bring the parties together at a point of demarcation and disembarkation. One of the parties to the surrender, the vanquished, does, in a deeply existential way, vanish, only to reemerge under different deictical rubrics. This notion of vanishing at the vanishing point of historical transformation, a vanishing that is both material and metaphorical, may be productively linked to the art historical notion of the vanishing point in paintings painted under the Renaissance optic of perspective.22 For such a linking demonstrates the working out of the subjecthood of participants/witnesses in moments of social transformation. While differing in their emphases, theorists of the visual sign called the “vanishing point” or “point of flight,” including Norman Bryson, Martin Jay, Brian Rotman, and Louis Marin, agree that this sign acts to position the viewer in front of the painted image, to organize the visual field for the viewer. Of course, the key and original viewer is the artist him- or herself: Thus, the vanishing point, by marking the artist’s horizon point, that is the spot he faces on the horizon of the scene he depicts, becomes the mark of the spectator’s horizon point. The spectator sees from the artist’s point of view.23 Yet, for all of its organizational capacity, the vanishing point is also ultimately unsettling, pointing to infinity, suggesting an escape hatch or a leak out of which the scene slides. Looking at the painting by Raphael of The Marriage of the Virgin (Figure 11.3), with its Renaissance piazza background and its cluster of figures in the center foreground, Bryson writes: The lines of the piazza race away towards this drain or black hole of otherness placed at the horizon, in a decentering that destroys the subject’s unitary self-possession. The viewpoint and the vanishing point are inseparable: there is no viewpoint without vanishing point and no vanishing point without viewing point. The self-possession of the viewing subject has built into it, therefore, the principle of its own

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Figure 11.3 Raphael (1483–1520), The Marriage of the Virgin. Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, Italy. Source: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

212 Robin Wagner-Pacifici abolition: annihilation of the subject as center is a condition of the very moment of the look.24 Bryson is correct in two senses here. He catches the contingent and dependent subjecthood of the viewer outside of the painting, who is forced to get his or her “bearings” from a vanishing point. But he misses the decentering of the viewers inside the painting, i.e. the witnesses whose own identity is contingent and dependent upon a different order of vanishing point – that of the vanishing at the center of the scene. In Raphael’s painting – a surrender scene of a sort as the Virgin surrenders to her husband, to the authority of the religious official, to God, and as the unsuccessful former suitors on the right side of the painting surrender their claim to the Virgin – the witnesses must bear witness to several vanishings. In doing so, they lose themselves as centered subjects. In a larger sense then, two vanishing points coexist in the same painting. One operates to establish and position the viewer of the painting itself and the other operates to establish and position the viewers in the painting, the witnesses to the deictical vanishings and reappearances in the center of the scene. Such considerations return us to the image and actions of exchange. In the case of the painting by Raphael, it is the ring that is launched across the gap of the social vanishings, the ring that hangs suspended in that point in the middle. Here is a key insight that connects visual theory, the theory of the witness, and scenes and ceremonies of surrender – there is no way to really look at the vanishing point. While it is a point of organization, subject positioning, and almost alchemical energy, it is also a point of danger and flight and mutability. Apprehending the horizon in a gaze, like capturing the vanishing moment (of transformation, of founding, of surrendering) turns out to be a difficult, if not impossible, task. Freezing the moment in a tableau-like suspended pause is one strategy of engaging that which is so hard to engage. Witnesses in every dimension (in the scene/out of the scene; in the painting/outside the painting; during the event/after the event) and witnesses performing a variety of tasks (observing, signing, pointing, painting) create a system of cross-witnessing. The witness-painter invokes the Albertian witness-figure of the history painting who, in turn, looks out at the witnessviewer and directs the viewer’s attention to the focal point of the istoria. In this way, sight lines are deflected and recast as the vanishing point loosens its organizational hold. The witness need not actually look at the scene; looking out at the painter or at the camera can actually constitute witnessing as well. Thus, this system creates a relay that moves across both space and time and returns us to questions about the responsibility and legitimating power of witnesses as they lock eyes with each other. More than any other witness, the artist is the witness with the greatest representational burden. The artist must find a way to reproduce and augment the network of cross-witnessing (co-signers and countersigners) that escorts an event across the threshold of history. And it is the artist who

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might best capture and reveal the dilemmas associated with witnessing in general and with witnessing surrenders in particular.

Bearing witness at Breda After a 12-year truce between the Spanish Crown and the Dutch Republic broke in 1621, the war in the Netherlands, a branch of the multi-state “Thirty Years War” in Europe, resumed. This war soon got bogged down “in the waterlogged fields of Flanders outside the walls of cities impregnable to assault.”25 In August, 1624, Spanish general Ambrogio Spinola encircled Breda, on the border of the southern, securely Spanish Netherlands. Breda, strategically important for its location on the main route to Utrecht and Antwerp, was a heavily fortified town, and a long and militarily complex siege began. This siege was a spectacle of military engineering and strategizing. As Brown and Elliot write: Distinguished visitors came from all over Europe to watch the progress of the operations, which were conducted with great skill and technical ingenuity by both Spaniards and Dutch. Trenches were dug, complicated engineering schemes undertaken, and both sides attempted to turn the rivers to their own account . . . The results of these various dyking and damming operations can be clearly seen in a later painting of the siege by Peter Snayers and less clearly in Diego Velázquez’s famous painting, The Surrender of Breda [Figure 11.4], although the famous Black Dike across the artificially flooded Vucht polder is easily visible in the line across the waters above the head of Justin’s horse.26 In the late Spring of 1625, the victorious general Spinola negotiated with Dutch general Justin of Nassau to effect a surrender of the town to the Spanish forces. The terms of the surrender were generous: Justin was allowed to leave the city with his officers and survivors of the garrison and, according to Gerrat Barry’s English account, did so “after the accustomed manner of war with their colors displayed, the drums beating, after the accustomed sound.”27 No Spanish soldier would shout invectives as the Dutch passed by and a personal escort was appointed to accompany Justin’s party. The terms of the surrender treaty at Breda were magnanimous, with the economy of the city basically left in the hands of its inhabitants, and a minimum of pressure to abandon their Protestant faith.28 Nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind that by the time Velázquez came to paint his painting, The Surrender of Breda (1634–35), Breda was on the verge of being retaken by the Dutch and Spinola’s prestige and power had dissolved.29 I have already mentioned the distinguished, even noble, visitors who came from afar to witness the siege. But it is important to stress the numbers and types of witnesses to this siege and surrender to get at something crucial about the settling in of the reality of transformative moments in history

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Figure 11.4 Diego Rodriguez Velázquez (1599–1660), The Surrender of Breda, June 2, 1625. Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain. Source: Erich Lessing/ Art Resource, NY.

more generally. We have seen that witnessing takes many forms and makes an action or event real in many media. Beyond the actual witnesses to the signing of the surrender treaty and the ceremony of surrender, other witnesses made the event reverberate through time and across space. Hermannus Hugo, Spinola’s personal chaplain, wrote an eyewitness journal of the siege and surrender called “Obsidio Bredana.” Its title page was designed by Rubens and consisted of an allegorical scene of Breda as a maiden being strangled into submission by Famine. It also contained etchings of maps and diagrams by the brothers Galle. The mapmaker Jacques Callot referred to the “Obsidio Bredana” in drawing his well-known “Map of the Siege of Breda.” Further, three years after Justin’s surrender to Spinola, in 1628, the renowned playwright Pedro Calderon de la Barca wrote a play titled “El Sitio

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de Breda.” In his play, Calderon has Justin offer the keys of the city to Spinola (something no other witness mentions and which probably did not occur) Spinola responds by saying, “Justino, I receive them, and I know how valiant you are and that the valour of the conquered makes famous the conqueror.”30 Finally, six years later, Diego Velázquez was commissioned to paint The Surrender of Breda for the Hall of Realms in the Palace of the Buen Retiro. It was to be one of 12 paintings of victories during the reign of Philip IV, hung together to symbolically reconstitute the Spanish Hapsburg empire, thus recreating the world, in a certain imperial sense, in a room. One can trace the trail of official and unofficial witnesses to this scene of surrender as it proceeds through a variety of textual and pictorial genres. Each successive iteration hands off its own version of the history of the event witnessed, and becomes drawn up into the larger sedimented History that aims to transcend its particulars. But each iteration in this relay also has its own generic conventions that constrain the kinds of actions and intentions they are capable of expressing. Here it is useful to think about the place of maps in the seventeenth century, particularly in Northern Europe. Art historian Svetlana Alpers makes the case for a historically unique coinciding of mapping and picturing in seventeenth-century Dutch art. This period saw the production and use of maps as wall hangings – part decoration, part geographical pedagogy, part domestic inscription of the world on the interior surface of the walls. I would argue that these maps operated in a similar manner to the history paintings of victory and surrender that lined the walls of the Sienese Palazzo Pubblico, the Sala Grande in the Medici hall of state of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, and the Hall of Realms in the Palace of the Buen Retiro in Madrid. Nevertheless, a map on a wall creates a different vision than a history painting on the wall. As Alpers writes, “such mapped images have a potential flexibility in assembling different kinds of information about or knowledge of the world which are not offered by the Albertian picture.”31 Expanding on the role of maps, art historians McKim-Smith and Welles note: From the frequent display of mapped imagery in Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one concludes that a map had a special valence, a truth value to the seventeenth-century onlooker that resembled the documentary value of a photograph to the modern viewer.32 This idea of maps having documentary value suggests that maps did more than help people find their way in space – they also assisted the process of finding one’s way in history: Here is where the battle took place; This was the landscape; Here are the walls of the town. Such processes of mental compassing suggest that maps and their makers (along with their eventual viewers) constitute particular kinds of witnesses, ones invested in what Svetlana Alpers calls “the art of describing.” Writing about this tradition of rendering, Martin Jay notes that it rejects “the privileged, constitutive

216 Robin Wagner-Pacifici role of the monocular subject, it emphasizes instead the prior existence of a world of objects depicted on the flat canvas, a world indifferent to the beholder’s position in front of it.”33 The two central figures in the painting, the generals Ambrogio Spinola and Justin of Nassau, convey magnanimity and gratefulness respectively. And yet, clearly, being grateful to one’s victorious enemy is at best an ambivalent attitude. There is a keen sense of dignified humiliation34 here that gives the scene its particular poignancy. Scholars have interpreted the gestures of Spinola and Justin as indicating that as Justin goes to kneel before Spinola, Spinola puts his arm out onto Justin’s shoulder to prevent him from doing so. Hierarchy, as expressed through mutual bodily alignment, is muted (though not altogether erased) as the vanquished is saved the humiliation of kneeling before the victor. In this forestalling, the exchange of keys to the city is also deferred, and thus the frame of magnanimity inserts itself into the conventional, if humiliating, operation of the act of surrender. It literally interrupts the surrender, interposing a new normative framework of conventions as the gestures seek to carry out the action. Two groups of soldiers stand on either side of the painting, flanking and buttressing the two generals. The Spaniards have their mass of lances straight up all across the back on the right, exemplifying the strength, resolve, and solidarity of the Spanish troops. The Dutch have their pikes and halberds tilted, staggered and akimbo, reflecting the disorganization and disorientation of the defeated. Even with all these lances and pikes clearly evident in the foreground and the background, we do not see this scene as one dominated by the weaponry and artifacts of war, especially of siege warfare. In fact, only two muskets are visible – one held by a Dutch soldier looking out at us on the far left side of the painting and one held by a Spanish soldier in the background behind Spinola. What is interesting about these muskets is that they are both held in the same manner, over the shoulder and pointing away from the central action of exchange. Conventions of war carefully calibrated the manners in which the defeated could carry weapons out of a siege, with the “at carry” position (sabers and muskets resting on the shoulder pointing upward) as the most honorable. In this case, the symmetry and lack of aggression of the position of the muskets held by both the Dutch and the Spanish soldiers reiterates the mutual recognition of the ceremony, the magnanimity of the terms and of Spinola himself. The soldiers are there to bear witness to the act of the rendering up of surrender, to the transmission of the key to the city from Justin’s hand to Spinola’s. Thus, former protagonists of the action must transmute into witnesses in order for the act of surrender to succeed. The soldiers may be understood as witnesses first under the superstes definition – they bear the experience of the war within themselves – and second under the terstis definition – they now act as the historically ratifying third party in this painting by Velázquez.35 In the network of cross-witnessing, we witness their witnessing of the exchange of the key to the city of Breda.

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The very presence of the Dutch escort for Justin of Nassau is noteworthy. According to Brown and Elliot: “A defeated commander customarily would have met his conqueror unescorted.”36 And yet Justin comes with a full, if beleaguered looking, escort. All of these witnesses are there to see the thing resolved. And yet, the resolution seems to hang in suspense as does the key to the city in Justin’s hand. Meanwhile, many of the soldiers seem distracted, looking out at us, talking to each other, looking back towards the scene of the anachronistically ongoing war. From one vantage point, this apparent distraction might be said to constitute the very network of cross-witnessing, setting up an intricate series of sight-lines and visual contacts. And yet, it is hard not to feel that many of these witnesses somehow resist their total involvement and alignment toward that neutralizing, flat, center space where the two generals meet. So it is precisely here, in the noticing of all this distraction and disalignment, that it is necessary not to look away ourselves, not to automatically subsume the distraction under an alternative analytic rubric.37 Why are so few witness-soldiers absorbed by this important scene? Why are so many distracted? The art historian Michael Fried took on the complicated and intertwining issues of absorption and distraction in his study of eighteenth-century French painting in the age of Diderot. Analyzing the great genre paintings of such painters as Greuze and Chardin, Fried points our attention to the states of absorption of the figures in these paintings of, for the most part, everyday life. Fried does mention that such seventeenthcentury painters as Velázquez can be seen as precursors to this thematic attention to attention and I want specifically to connect my own analysis of attention’s opposite, distraction, in The Surrender of Breda to Fried’s focus, with a twist. For Fried, the key to these paintings is their approving representation of absorption, as the figures in the paintings are caught up fully in the world of their families, their chores, their thoughts. What Fried notices, but does not dwell on, is that in almost every one of these paintings there is one figure, often a child, who is clearly distracted – who looks away, doesn’t pay attention, is not absorbed.38 How do we read this distraction? A semiotic analysis keyed to binary opposition would insist that we only recognize and feel the full force of absorption if its opposite, distraction, is also indicated. Thus, the distraction is there to set off or highlight the absorption. In the case of The Surrender of Breda one might claim that the distraction of the soldiers – looking out, looking back, looking down and across – draws our attention to its polar opposite, the quietly attentive miens of the two principals, Spinola and Justin, who have eyes only for each other. Alternatively, a more sociological analysis might find the distraction to be a form of resistance to the central authority of the main event. Certainly, for the Dutch soldiers in The Surrender of Breda such resistance is logical and the diverted gazes sustain resistance to a potential moment of shame in defeat. It is hard for the defeated to look the victor squarely in the eye (and perhaps vice versa). It is hard to be asked to bear witness to

218 Robin Wagner-Pacifici one’s own disbandment, one’s own undoing. One Dutch soldier even seems, with his pointing finger, to be admonishing his fellows to direct their gaze toward that center area of the deferred key exchange. Such unbearable witnessing might be said to short-circuit the cross-witnessing network. Eyes purposely do not meet each other. May such deflections and aversions, showing up in a rendering conceived by the victor’s court painter, not also be a way of introducing the vanquished’s point of view – a diffused magnanimity reflecting that at the painting’s center?39 And then there is the sense of disorientation at the historical vanishing point; in this case for witnesses at the boundary of a city that moves back and forth across shifting national frontiers, between the Dutch and the Spaniards, several times over the course of two decades. Finally, an analysis of the existential challenges, and inherent instability of scenes of transformation such as surrenders, foundings, and resignations, would find in The Surrender of Breda a mix of attention, absorption, and distraction that accurately reflects the multiple dilemmas and meanings of this type of witnessing. The burdens and responsibilities of history’s witnesses cannot be taken lightly. They are mediators in practical and epistemological ways. Witnesses work to ratify and convey the meanings of the exchanges and transformations of a mutable world, buffering that world from the sharpest points of the change, the midwives of its crossings.

Notes 1 I wish to thank John R. Hall, Blake Stimson, and Lisa Tamaris Becker for their editorial efforts, and for the original invitation to participate in the Visual Worlds conference. The present essay reprises and develops some issues previously developed in my chapter, “Dilemmas of the witness,” pp. 302–313 in The Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Culture, Mark Jacobs and Nancy Weiss Hanrahan, eds, Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Reprinting of previously published material by permission of Blackwell Publishing. 2 William Shakespeare, Richard II, act IV, scene i, 202–203, italics mine. 3 The difference between co-signers and countersigners is an important one for mapping the role of the witness. Co-signers share in the collective action of bringing something into being or of undoing something that exists. Countersigners guarantee the first-line signatures. In spite of these structural differences, witnesses can be either co-signers (in which case all signers may witness each other signing) or countersigners (ratifying the authenticity and authority of the firstline signers). In her careful consideration of Hannah Arendt’s and Jacques Derrida’s readings of the problem of founding a republic, Bonnie Honig notes that co-signers figure in Arendt’s analysis of the “we” in “We hold . . .” while countersigners are called forth by Derrida’s recognition of the need for “another subjectivity . . . to sign, in order to guarantee it, this production of signature. . . .”. See Bonnie Honig, “Declarations of independence: Arendt and Derrida on the problem of founding a republic,” in Rhetorical Republic: Governing Representations in American Politics, Frederick Dolan and Thomas Dumm, eds, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993, p. 212. 4 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen, New York: Zone Books, 1999, p. 26.

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5 Ibid., p. 17. 6 It is important here to note the distinction, remarked upon by Jacques Derrida, between testimony understood as an essentially moral act of “sworn faith” and testimony as evidence in a legal proof: “Bearing witness is heterogeneous to the administration of a legal proof or the display of an object produced in evidence. Witnessing appeals to the act of faith with regard to a speech given under oath,” p. 188 in “‘A self-unsealing poetic text’: poetics and politics of witnessing,” in Revenge of the Aesthetic: The Place of Literature in Theory Today, Michael P. Clark, ed., Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000, pp. 180–207. Consideration of the hybrid nature of witnessing as performative, demonstrative, and representational provides a way of analytically teasing apart these two, often co-present, understandings of the act of testimony. 7 Ibid., p. 187. 8 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 35. 9 Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera’s Eye, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998, p. 102. 10 Benedict Anderson’s discussion of the importance of the daily newspaper is directly relevant here. Overcoming spatial and temporal distance is precisely the task of newspapers. By dint of this overcoming, they make possible a solidary politics of the nation. See Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso Press, 1991. 11 In his analysis of referential practices of native speakers of Yucatec Maya, anthropologist William Hanks refers to these various modalities of knowing and referencing as Ostensive Evidential adverbs, the evidential basis of which “is reflected in the clear focus of the forms on the sensory access that participants have to referents – tactual, visual, auditory – olfactory, or known for certain without current evidence.” See Hanks, “Metalanguage and pragmatics of deixis,” in Intertexts: Writings on Language, Utterance, and Context, New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000, pp. 85–86. 12 W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, p. 5. Mitchell is, himself, attempting to move across the channels, to actually picture theory (as opposed to theorize in language about pictures). 13 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, New York: Viking Press, 1963, p. 81. 14 Conversely, distanced observation may take steps to meet the criteria of proximal witnessing. One might read Luc Boltanski’s adumbration of the spectator’s meeting the moral demands of spectatorship as a description of a spectator becoming a witness. In this case, he, “must not only observe on his own but also put himself in the position of reporting to a third party both what he has seen and the emotion the spectacle aroused in him, how he was affected by it”; Boltanski, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media, and Politics, translated by Graham Burchell, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 49. 15 W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory, p. 30. 16 Onlookers and eavesdroppers can become witnesses, but only if their observations of the scene are drawn up into its sedimenting meaning. 17 As Jonathan Crary has written in regard to the historically conditioned observer, “Whether it is a question of the stage, urban design, or visual imagery, the intelligibility of a given site depends on a precisely specified relationship between a delimited point of view and a tableau.” Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991, p. 52. 18 Where there is not, in the verbal formula of the utterance, a reference to the person doing the uttering, and so the acting by means of the pronoun “I” . . . then in fact he will be “referred to” in one of two ways . . . b) in written utterances (or “inscriptions”), by his appending his signature (this

220 Robin Wagner-Pacifici has to be done because, of course, written utterances are not tethered to their origin in the way spoken ones are). J.L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975, p. 60. 19 Bonnie Honig quotes Derrida as pushing on this paradox in his consideration of signatures on the Declaration of Independence: “The signature invents the signer. This signer can only authorize him- or herself to sign once he or she has come to the end, if one can say this, of his or her own signature, in a sort of fabulous retroactivity.” Honig, “Declarations of independence,” p. 212. 20 Witness signatures mark commitments in the legal sphere as they aid in the production of evidence. A front-page article in the New York Times discusses changes in strategies of witness identification of suspects in criminal cases. Photographs of suspects are shown to the witness in sequence. Once the witness identifies the suspect, the photographs must be signed. The rejected photos are merely initialed. The signed and initialed photos become evidence. “New Jersey trying a new way for witnesses to pick suspects,” New York Times, July 21, 2001, A1. 21 Norman Bryson, “The gaze in the expanded field,” in Vision and Visuality, Hal Foster, ed., Seattle: Bay Press, 1988, p. 103. 22 In characterizing the vanishing point of Cartesian perspectivalism, Martin Jay writes that: “The basic device was the idea of symmetrical visual pyramids or cones with one of their apexes the receding vanishing or centric point in the painting, the other the eye of the painter or the beholder.” Martin Jay, “Scopic regimes of modernity,” in Vision and Visuality, Hal Foster, ed., Seattle: Bay Press, 1988, p. 6. Further writings on the vanishing point include Norman Bryson, “The gaze in the expanded field”; Louis Marin, “Towards a theory of reading in the visual arts: Poussin’s ‘The Arcadian shepherds’,” The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, Donald Preziosi, ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. 23 Brian Rotman, Signifying Nothing, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983, p. 19. 24 Bryson, “The gaze in the expanded field,” pp. 89–90. 25 Jonathan Brown and J.H. Elliot, A Palace for a King: The Buen Retiro and the Court of Philip IV, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980, p. 178. 26 Ibid., p. 179. 27 Gerrat Barry, quoted in Brown and Elliot, A Palace for a King, p. 179. 28 Christine Smith writes: Spinola’s leniency in the treaty of Breda did not wholly meet with Spanish approval. We know that later, in 1630, when he had successfully besieged Casale and was about to negotiate peace, General Olivares deprived him of this power and fixed the terms himself. To this Spinola could only say: “They have taken my honour.” He is said to have been so broken by this that it was the cause of his death a few weeks later. Smith, “Sources for ‘The Surrender of Breda’ by Diego Velázquez,” Vassar Journal of Undergraduate Studies, vol. 20, 1966, p. 6. 29 Geoffrey Parker dates this Dutch retaking of Breda in 1637 (though there is some disagreement on this date); The Thirty Years War, 2nd edition, Geoffrey Parker, ed., London and New York: Routledge, 1997. 30 Quoted in Christine A. Smith, “Sources for ‘The Surrender of Breda’,” p. 6. 31 Ibid., p. 139. 32 Gridley McKim-Smith and Marcia Welles, “Topographical tropes: the mapping of Breda in Calderon, Callot, and Velazquez,” Indiana Journal of Hispanic Literatures, vol. 1, 1992, p. 194.

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33 Martin Jay, “Scopic regimes of modernity,” p. 12. 34 I thank T. Kaori Kitao for this apt phrase. 35 The transformation of soldiers into witnesses is a common aspect of surrender ceremonies. Brigadier General Joshua L. Chamberlain was the Union officer in charge of the surrender ceremony at Appomattox in the ending days of the US Civil War. In the journal that he kept of that ceremony, he wrote about the demeanor and experience of the Union soldiers, now dispatched as witnesses to the formal surrender of Confederate arms: On our part not a sound of trumpet more, nor roll of drum; not a cheer, nor word, nor whisper or vainglorying . . . but an awed stillness rather, and breath-holding, as if it were the passing of the dead . . . How could we help falling on our knees, all of us together, and praying God to pity and forgive us all! Quoted in Jay Winik, April 1865: The Month that Saved America, New York: Harper Collins, 2001, pp. 197–198. 36 Jonathan Brown and J.H. Elliot, A Palace for a King, p. 181. 37 Undisturbed by the distraction are the authors of the book, A Palace for a King. They note the disaligned witnesses and conclude: “For the onlookers, the ceremony seems to be one of those important but fleeting moments of history that come and go before you can take it in. A few of the soldiers turn toward the two main figures, but most of them seem to be caught by inner or outer distractions,” Brown and Elliot, A Palace for a King, p. 184. 38 Children often reveal themselves to be the purest and thus most recalcitrant of witnesses. They look where they want to and avert their gaze aggressively. Barbie Zelizer notes that, “German children were portrayed in a refusal to bear witness: one shot showed a small boy looking straight at the camera and away from the bodies that took up the majority of photographic space, his glance communicating an act of witnessing that was in essence not-witnessing,” Zelizer, Remembering to Forget, p. 104. 39 In his analysis of the deictic, or indexical, network of Poussin’s Arcadian Shepherds, Louis Marin considers the apparent absence of a source of enunciation for the painting. He writes: “Now, if the characteristic of the ‘historical’ enunciative modality of the events narrate themselves in the story as if nobody were speaking, this means that the whole deictic network has to be erased in the narrative message.” Louis Marin, “Towards a theory of reading in the visual arts,” p. 263. But this merely raises the question, in the context of historical painting, of who gets to be Nobody? Assuming that Nobody is the victor is probabilistically reasonable. Yet Velázquez’s painting seems, improbably, to incorporate both victor and vanquished in the Nobody of the enunciative modality.

Figure 12.1 Mona Hatoum, Changing Parts, 1984, video. A Western Front Video Production, Vancouver, duration: 24 minutes. Courtesy Jay Jopling/ White Cube (London).

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12 Under siege Mona Hatoum’s art of displacement Anneke Voorhees

Displacement is a powerful metaphor at the turn of the millennium. While migration is by no means a new phenomenon, it is one of the most formative experiences of our time, and central to shaping our sense of place and identity. Whether a result of war, territorial rearrangements, or statesanctioned religious and racial discrimination, millions upon millions of people have been uprooted, forced to leave their homeland on an unprecedented scale. The complex patterns of movement across national boundaries have resulted in increasingly complex forms of identity and have deeply influenced our sense of belonging in the world.1 How is art a response to, and space for, understanding the effects of movement across national borders? This chapter examines the relationship between the experience of exile and the forms of representation utilized by Mona Hatoum to bring into focus a condition that has come to face us in our globalizing world. This condition, to use the artist’s phrase, “is the feeling of in-betweenness that comes from not being able to identify totally with my own culture or the one in which I am living.”2 While Hatoum was visiting London in 1975, civil war broke out in Lebanon, where Hatoum resided with her parents. Unable to get Lebanese identity cards, her family became British nationals and Hatoum was subsequently exiled from Beirut. Moreover, Hatoum’s family, Palestinians by birth, had been displaced once before, as they were among thousands who fled to Lebanon during the Israeli occupation of Palestine in the 1950s.3 To express the conceptual and experiential effects of social displacement, Hatoum turned to live art for its ability to provide direct and unmediated communication between audience and performer. In 1982 at the London Film Makers Co-op, Hatoum performed Under Siege (Figure 12.2), which exhibited the artist repeatedly slipping and falling back upon the surface of a mud-filled tank over a period of seven hours. In a vain attempt to stand, her limbs hit the tank’s plastic walls leaving smeared and grainy imprints. Contributing to this atmosphere of frenetic agitation, a collage of three different audio tapes accompanied the scene, including fragments of revolutionary songs, news reports interrupted by short wave radio, and disjointed statements in English, French, and Arabic. The

224 Anneke Voorhees

Figure 12.2 Mona Hatoum, Under Siege, 1982, Aspex Gallery, Portsmouth. Courtesy Jay Jopling/White Cube (London).

spectator was forced to endure increasing feelings of frustration as the rigorous physical ordeal continued. Alluding to conflict in the Middle East, Under Siege took place, almost prophetically, one week before the Israeli army’s invasion of Lebanon that led to the siege of Beirut. When describing this performance Hatoum commented: “As a Palestinian woman this work was my first attempt at a kind of statement about a persistent struggle to survive in a continuous state of siege.” It was an “act of separation,” which meant “stepping out of an acquired frame of reference and into a space, which acted as a point of reconnection and reconciliation with my own background.”4 Belonging to not one, but to two places simultaneously, Under Siege was for Hatoum an attempt to locate identity in different geographies at the same time. Hatoum’s early performance work can be linked to a generation of artists working in London who were breaking ground in the articulation of transcultural identity. Artists such as Isaac Julien, David Mandella, Susan Lewis, and Su Andi, chose live art as a medium because it allowed for “the unruly polyvocality” required to express the experience of identity based on constant movement.5 Kobena Mercer’s influential essay, “Diasporic culture and the dialogic imagination,” likewise provided an important account of such developments by young black cultural practitioners and critics in Britain. He identified the emergence of a “diaspora aesthetic” in a cluster of films that emerged in the mid-1980s, such as John Akmofrah’s Handsworth Song,

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which excavated the counter-memory of exile and its formation in the postcolonial experience.6 Interwoven throughout Hatoum’s artworks is a visual dialogue with history – with the artist’s personal history of exile as well as that of London’s unique climate of cultural critique. Paul Gilroy’s influential text, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, and Homi Bhabha’s wellworn compilation of essays, The Location of Culture, emerged from 1980s London and share Hatoum’s focus on displacement and its impact on cultural formation and identity. In this chapter I aim to show that Hatoum’s early video, Changing Parts, both embodies and extends two theoretical concepts: Gilroy’s theory of “double consciousness” and Bhabha’s theory of the “in-between.”

Transnational frameworks: histories, politics, aesthetics Identity shaped by more than one history, language, or home was indispensable to the cultural and intellectual climate of 1980s London, and was embedded in the very fabric of its political and social history. Increased immigration from Britain’s former colonies in the Caribbean, the Indian subcontinent, and Africa progressively challenged notions of an essential national identity.7 The rapid increase in Asian, African, and West Indian immigration during the 1960s resulted in panic over Britain’s borders two decades later. Referring to new trends in Commonwealth and Pakistani immigration, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher explained: This is an awful lot, and I think it means that people are really rather afraid that this country might be swamped by people of a different culture. If there is any fear that it might be swamped, then people are going to be rather hostile to those coming in.8 The panic over the border wars in Britain and elsewhere was subsequently deconstructed by black British cultural studies and postcolonial theorists as a political product of the naturalization of race, ethnicity, and nation. The legacy of the loosely associated field known as black British cultural studies is rooted in the settled communities forged by postwar labor migrations. Drawing from the anti-colonial and labor struggles of their forebears,9 writers such as Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, and Kobena Mercer, came to voice in the 1980s to challenge concepts of nation and ethnicity as the basis of collective identity.10 They emerged from the British cultural studies tradition, founded in 1964 by William Hoggart and the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies, to question its founding premises.11 Unlike their predecessors, they rigorously reexamined how nationalism, imperialism, and racism were connected to specific ethnicities of Britishness.12 Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness aims to open up the general narrative of “nation” by re-siting and re-presenting

226 Anneke Voorhees Britain itself as a postcolonial territory.13 Focusing on how narrow national ideals constrict and distort individual and cultural forms of identity, he attempts to rehistoricize the construction of English subjectivity by locating it in the space and culture of the “black Atlantic.” He traces the interconnected histories of Britain, Africa, the West Indies, and the USA to locate the emergence of culture in a transnational nexus, which serves to dislocate a traditional fixation on English roots. A major objective of The Black Atlantic is to reveal that the history of the culture of the black Atlantic complicates our understanding of modernity. To Gilroy, it is not only integral to the unfolding of modernity but constitutes a “counterculture of modernity” that dates its discovery to the conquest of the New World. Analyzing the path of transnational cultural-political formation in black music and works by black intellectuals, Gilroy argues that the restlessly hybridized modes of culture expressed by the postcolonial diaspora are a collective “artistic practice” that is “sedimented together by the endless pressures of economic exploitation, political racism, displacement, and exile.”14 Because they are “unashamedly hybridic” in character and are constantly in flux, these forms are resistant to received procedures of sociological and historical investigation. The concept that Gilroy proposes as a means of representing the structure of black Atlanticism is that of “double consciousness.” Derived from the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, who opened The Souls of Black Folk with the observation that “One ever feels his twoness – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideas in one dark body,”15 double consciousness is employed by Gilroy to profile the subjectivity of diasporic and post-slave populations in general. Black British cultural studies initiatives were not, however, the only efforts to dismantle older notions of culture in 1980s London. The introduction of poststructuralism and its impact on postcolonial analysis played an equally significant role in introducing new ways of conceptualizing the transmission of culture in a changing world.16 In their aim to conjoin poststructuralism with postcolonial analysis, Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak have attempted to illuminate diasporic subjectivities through language and the signifying process. Although there are more points of difference between these theorists than there are similarities, they all share methodological affiliations to French theory in their analyses of the process of colonization and decolonization.17 Bhabha’s The Location of Culture is a key text that addresses diasporic cultural forms and their potential to reconceptualize the relationship between nation, culture, and ethnicity.18 His compilation of essays, devoted to psychoanalysis, colonialism, and identity formation, focuses on the “major social displacements of peasants and aboriginal communities, the poetics of exile, and the grim prose of political and economic refugees,”19 as a means to disrupt notions of national identity or origins.

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Employing poststructuralist strategies, which aim to reveal how the instability of textual meaning is produced as chains of signification, Bhabha establishes a terrain for elaborating diasporic selfhood “to show how historical agency is transformed through the signifying process.”20 He uses elements of poststructuralism to conceptualize the tension and disturbance within colonial discourse, and aims to elaborate the problems posed by colonial history, and inherited discourse of race, nation, and ethnicity for contemporary cultures. Engaged with the predicament of the postcolonial migrant in the Western metropolis, one of Bhabha’s main concerns is answering how identity of the contemporary migrant or the subaltern should be conceptualized, and how these constituencies should be expressed. The “liminality of the migrant experience,” “the migrant culture of the in-between,” and the “indeterminacy of migrant identity” occupy a significant portion of Bhabha’s writings. Analyzing borderline cultural articulations in novels, poetry, and films of transnational artists, he aims to lay the theoretical grounds for articulating the hybrid colonial subject, the split nation, and the transnational/transitional process of cultural signification. His examination of colonial discourse, as well as contemporary novels, is aimed to suggest that the same model of agency is evident in both the historical subaltern and contemporary postcolonial artist. These “narratives where double-lives are led in the postcolonial world, with its journeying of migration and its delving in the diasporic,” are conceived as a challenge to the binarisms of colonizer and colonized, self and other, first world and third world. The significant consequence of this “in-between” space, according to Bhabha, is a mode of analysis that can revise holistic forms of social explanation by encompassing more complex cultural and political boundaries that exist on the cusp of opposed political spheres.21 For Bhabha, hybridity becomes an historical necessity of postmodern thinking. Due to massive postcolonial migrations, which have characterized the past four decades, he concludes that the whole world has become restructured by a global cultural liminality. He argues that “the problem is not simply ‘selfhood’ of the nation as opposed to otherness of other nations. We are confronted with the nation split within itself, articulating the heterogeneity of its population.”22 Interrogating current theorizations of modernity, he aims to reinscribe the repressed histories and social experiences of the historically marginalized. Accordingly, Bhabha conceives of the diasporic migrant subject within poststructuralist conceptual language, and ultimately as part of a theory of agency for postmodern cultural politics.23 The Black Atlantic and The Location of Culture offer pivotal yet conflicting frameworks for reconceptualizing the formation of diasporan practices against notions of authentic national belonging. How we come to terms with such practices under the pressures of massive social displacements is critical, for, as Stuart Hall makes clear, culture provides the system of meanings from which peoples interpret and make sense of the world:

228 Anneke Voorhees The term “culture” includes the social processes, which produce meaning as well as the practices which are regulated and organized by those systems of meanings. Sharing the same “maps of meaning” gives us a sense of “who we are,” “where we belong,” a sense of our own identity. Culture is thus one of the principal means by which identities are constructed, sustained, and transformed.24 What is ultimately being struggled over is the best way to understand culture as an agent of social transformation. In response to the increasing pervasiveness of the growth of across-border movement of capital, commodity, and people, Gilroy examines the circulation of culture through various overlapping routes while Bhabha investigates the dynamic interactions between the local and the global occurring “in the nervous temporality of the transitional.”25 Yet, how effective are Gilroy’s and Bhabha’s models for elucidating aesthetic process under the pressures of massive social displacement and the pervasiveness of global cultural forms?

The aesthetics of suffering and the semiotic aesthetic Throughout The Black Atlantic, Gilroy argues that through its staging of the act of remembrance, through its mediation of suffering into aesthetic form, black culture is able to constitute itself as a vehicle of consolidation. In his critique of the development of modernity as a self-contained European process, based on Enlightenment principles, Gilroy positions slavery and racial terror as its counter-discourse. Within this framework, all diasporan practices are conceived in relation to slavery, and are thus bonded in political agency. To Gilroy, slaves and their descendants are established to occupy the place of humanity’s emancipatory subjects: This (slave) subculture often appears to be the . . . expression of some racial essence but is in fact . . . produced from . . . an alternative body of cultural and political expression that considers the world critically from the point of view of its emancipatory transformation. In the future, it will become a place which is capable of satisfying the (redefined) needs of human beings that will emerge once the violence – epistemic and concrete – of racial typology is at an end.26 This “alternative body of cultural expression” – the aesthetic activity of diasporan subjects and slaves – is understood as “communal liberation.” Here, racial slavery is not only the founding but the over-determined instance of black Atlantic sociality, in the present as much as in the past. It is the center of the rite of memory to recognize the “complicity or rationality, and ethnocidal terror”27 to which his book is dedicated. In Gilroy’s move to form a political solidarity of “multirootedness” in opposition to modern rationality, all diasporic practices are conceived as

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occupying an antithetical position, described as an aesthetics of suffering. To Gilroy, the turn toward death points to the ways in which black cultural forms have been able to “preserve and cultivate both the distinctive rapport with the presence of death which derives from slavery, and of a related ontological state that I want to call the condition of being in pain.”28 It is his assumption that all black Atlantic practices constitute “the condition of being in pain” that enables Gilroy to construct pantheons of black artists as being collectively and consensually engaged in a critique of rationality. Despite, or perhaps because of, Gilroy’s utopian futurism, there are several problems with his aesthetic model. Foremost is his inadvertent totalization of diasporan artistic practices. In his single-minded determination to construct a counter-culture of modernity, all diasporan practices are assumed to constitute a subculture that is untenable. To Gilroy, such practices cannot be accommodated within “the Procrustean logic of modernity’s master narrative,” and are thus understood as a “non traditional tradition, an irreducibly modern, ex-centric, unstable, and asymmetrical cultural ensemble that cannot be apprehended through the Manichean logic of binary coding.”29 Art signifies a marginal region that is instinctual, affective, and unable to be incorporated into rationality. In turn, the conditions of migration, slavery, and exile are made to express, in cohesive synchronicity, an expression of oppression. Contrary to an aesthetic of suffering bound to the history of slavery, the process of the aesthetic that Bhabha proposes occurs through temporal distancing: It must not be confused with the Kantian aesthetic, which is a mediatory process that brings existence to its fullest being in a revelation of self-reflection. Nor do I subscribe to the tradition of the materialist aesthetic that sees art as the displaced overdetermined symptom of social reification . . . In order to appear as a material or empirical reality, the historical or social process must pass through an “aesthetic” alienation, or “privatization” of its public visibility. The discourse of “the social” then finds its means of representation in a kind of unconsciousness . . . a psychic obscurity that is formative for public memory.30 The aesthetic that Bhabha describes here is obscured through temporal dimension, and is understood as a moment of transit. In this temporal space, meaning is drawn from the boundary in-between reality, and forms the basis of a new international space. It is in the autonomy of the temporal space called the “time-lag” that Bhabha locates new hybrid agencies: The process of reinscription . . . happens in the temporal break in-between the sign . . . in the realm of the intersubjective. Through this time-lag – the temporal break in representation – emerges the

230 Anneke Voorhees process of agency both as a historical development, and as the narrative agency of historical discourse.31 In this realm of symbolic interaction, the subject slips away from the Enlightened order of discourse, and into an indeterminate space filled with flows of images, words, and voices of the repressed unconscious. Migrant subjectivity is thus understood as hanging between different structures of thought and language, such that subjectivity fluctuates between the oppositions by which its identity is defined. To Bhabha, agency is the contingency that is ultimately “indeterminate” and “undecidable.”32 While Bhabha is able to produce a rigorous analysis of the possible psychic and cultural structures of the diasporic migrant in the “space of the beyond” it is not clear how the “temporal breakup” he describes as agency applies to material space, experiential history, or political practice. Once positioned in this temporal dimension, art becomes alienated from the pressures of history and its corresponding global power relations. Art takes on an outsider position within a poststructuralist framework, and ultimately functions as allegory whereby the epistemology of poststructuralism and the politics of diaspora become one without any mediation. While offering valuable critical frameworks for coming to terms with transnational identity formation, Gilroy’s and Bhabha’s aesthetic models represent two problematic extremes. On the one hand, Gilroy’s model is overburdened by the history of slavery and, as a result, diasporan practices are viewed only as an ontology of the oppressed. As such, Gilroy risks homogenizing diverse and disparate practices, distorting meaning, and ultimately engendering a false sense of aesthetic and intellectual unity. On the other hand, once Bhabha positions the aesthetic in the temporal realm, agency is removed from the fabric of social life and is propelled to the outermost limit. The “cross-cultural initiations” he examines are detached from the circumstances of their production, circulation, and reception. Within this model, the aesthetic is rendered an autonomous process distanced from the realities of history. What Gilroy and Bhabha overlook are the increasingly complex aesthetic dimensions of global cultural forms. Composed of a set of sensuous relations, the aesthetic implies immediate interaction, casting the viewer as participant and co-maker of meaning. Works of art are a form of critical thought, of concentration, and creative enterprise that offer a live arena specifically designed to activate certain issues. Through the aesthetic, visual culture has the potential to impact the terrain of lived experience and to invoke a critical space for imaginative reinvention. It is through this process that Changing Parts offers us a model of aesthetic interaction capable of advancing our understanding of the complex perceptual shifts formed by the experience of displacement.

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Changing Parts and the embodied transnational aesthetic The body plays a central role in Hatoum’s art. She has often remarked that when she first came to England, she noticed how the mind/body dualism of Western Europe contrasted with her upbringing in a Middle Eastern culture, which does not make a straightforward split between body and mind.33 In response to this distinction, Hatoum intends for her work to invoke a kind of embodied learning – a direct physical experience – from which we can respond to her art. She recalls: You first experience an artwork physically. Meanings, connotations, and associations come after the initial physical experience. I want the work in the first instance to have a strong formal presence, and through the physical experience to activate a psychological and emotional response.34 Communicating through direct physical engagement, Hatoum’s art aims to re-embody art’s production and reception. Set to the cello suite no. 4 by J. S. Bach, Hatoum’s video Changing Parts (Figure 12.1) begins by inducing in the viewer a state of tranquility. Initially, a series of stills of an empty bathroom fade into each other as they move from detail to detail. Here, a cracked mirror, a shaving brush, and a sponge, turn into tokens of an undisturbed equilibrium. The images read individually as abstractions – the pattern of floor tiles or the angle of the windowsill begins to take on a life of its own within a cool geometric space. Suddenly, a harsh sound intrudes, disrupting the conceptual space and startling the viewer. Ambiguous in origin, as if the video monitor or the videotape has malfunctioned, white noise and interference intermittently disturb the quiet serenity of the bathroom. Just as suddenly, a second sequence appears where feet, and then hands, become visible within the frame. Gesturing through a transparent screen, they flail against the surface of the tank. The static noise becomes more frequent, and is accompanied by a grainy image of a figure pressed against a plastic surface struggling to stand. A body, now fully visible, struggles and bites at the screen, falling backward upon a muddy ground. The still images used in the first sequence of the bathroom scene were shot in Hatoum’s family home in Beirut. Here, each still is formally manipulated to emphasize a sense of order and security. The tight framing of the interior, closed to the outside world, stages a series of abstract studies as the music lulls the viewer into a state of reverie. Like a Mondrian composition, the black and white wall tile becomes a study of geometric form. Similarly, the viewer patiently observes the play of light and shadow upon the windowsill as it unfolds into intricate patterns and abstract shapes. The power of these stills is derived from their focus on the objects of Hatoum’s childhood home; the bathtub and antique plumbing are tokens of memory, security, privacy, and equilibrium.

232 Anneke Voorhees In contrast, the second sequence of the struggling figure stages a scene of desperation and instability. Filmed during her live performance Under Siege (Figure 12.2), Hatoum appears nude, struggling to escape the confines of a mud-filled tank. Rather than stills of mundane objects, this sequence is of an indeterminate space filmed in slow motion. Here, a figure moves with blurred gestures as if submerged underwater; hands and then a torso hit the walls of the plastic surface leaving muddy, disjointed imprints. The grainy film quality and the harsh grating sound of radio static further distort spatial and temporal definition. In this chaotic sequence, specific actions are fetishized to exacerbate a sense of desperation and confinement; a mouth appears in closeup pressed against the plastic surface, or fingernails are shown continually scratching the wall in an attempt to pierce the filmy membrane. Although Changing Parts depicts the dichotomies of order and chaos, the formal procedures employed suggest, rather, the fragility of these oppositions.35 As the security of the bathroom scene and the sequence of the struggling figure switch back and forth, the two spaces become interchangeable. The chaos not only interrupts the tranquil space of the bathroom, but also displaces this space as an inherent condition. Once the site of security, the domestic space suddenly appears unstable, now susceptible to chaotic intrusions. Such interruptions, according to Hatoum, are intended to create a situation where reality itself becomes a questionable point, where (people) have to reassess their assumptions and their relationships to things around them. Having always had an ambiguous relationship with notions of home, family, and the nurturing that is expected out of this situation, I often like to induce a physical or psychological disturbance to contradict those expectations.36 No longer settled, closed, and internally coherent, the domestic space is now porous, intersects with opposing states, and is continually unsettled. It is a space that is as inviting as it is disorienting.37 Positioning the beholder between a range of contradictory spaces that coexist, Changing Parts creates a space of frenetic agitation that enacts a condition articulated by Gilroy as “double consciousness,” and by Bhabha as “the in-between.” Hatoum’s video, however, heightens our awareness of vision formed by two coexisting settings. Here, the space of refuge and the space of chaos are vivid, actual, and occur together. They are at once familiar and strange locked together as an irreconcilable pair. To Edward Said, this simultaneity of vision is expressive of exilic perception: The exile knows that in a secular and contingent world, homes are always provisional. Borders and barriers, which enclose us within the safety of familiar territory, can also become prisons, and are often defended beyond reason or necessity . . . Seeing the entire world as a foreign land makes possible originality of vision. Most people are principally aware

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of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions.38 In her aim to re-embody art’s production and reception, Hatoum offers us a model of aesthetic interaction that exists outside the weight of historical suffering or an abstract linguistic space. Performing a split and doubled vision, Changing Parts extends our understanding of the perceptual shifts shaped by the fractured existence of individuals who inhabit more than one home, speak more than one language, and have more than one identity. This perspective is intimately linked to the accelerated movement of people in our globalizing world.39 Traditional bonds that once rooted people to a specific place have been supplanted by a sense of identity based on movement where neither point of arrival nor departure is certain. As a result, spatial movement, interaction, and influence have become extended so rapidly that boundaries that once defined place as distinct and separate from each other are so often crossed that they become blurred. As the pervasiveness of globalization disrupts our history of experience it alters our perception, creating a new kind of uneasiness. Negotiating between here and there, and the familiar and the foreign, Hatoum’s video opens up a productive space of uncertainty that stimulates new insights into the practice of representation in a changing world.

Notes 1 Angelica Bammer, “Introduction,” Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994; Nikos Papastergiadis, The Turbulence of Migration: Globalization, Deterritorialization and Hybridity, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000; Stephen Castles and Mark Miller, The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World, New York: Guilford Press, 1993; Mary Kirtz, Lin Lean Lim, and Hania Zlotnik, eds, International Migration Systems: A Global Approach, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992; Peter Stalker, The Work of Strangers: A Survey of International Labor Migration, Geneva: International Labor Office, 1994; see also International Migration Review articles published in the 1990s. 2 Guy Brett, “Itinerary,” pp. 34–87 in Michael Archer, Guy Brett, and Catherine de Zegher, eds, Mona Hatoum, London: Phaidon Press, 1997, p. 36. 3 Ibid., p. 34. 4 Ibid.; Mona Hatoum, Under Siege, London, May 31, 1982 (Description of Work). From a leaflet published by the artist to accompany her first performance tour in Canada, 1983. Reprinted in Michael Archer, Guy Brett, and Catherine de Zegher, eds, Mona Hatoum, p. 122. 5 Catherine Ugwu, “Keep on running: the politics of black British performance,” P-Form: Performance Art Magazine, Winter 1995, no. 38, 6–14. 6 Kobena Mercer, “Diasporic culture and the dialogic imagination: the aesthetics of black independent film in Britain,” pp. 50–61 in Mbye B. Cham and Claire Andrade-Watkins, eds, Blackframes: Critical Perspectives on Black Independent Cinema, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988. In their last special issue for the journal Ten. 8, Stuart Hall and David Bailey referred to the 1980s as “the

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7

8

9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23

critical decade” for the emergence of new forms of artistic practice. According to Hall and Bailey, it was the crisis of traditional categories of race and nation that gave rise to a space in which the cultural identities in Britain have flourished. David A. Bailey and Stuart Hall, eds, “Critical decade: black British photography in the 80s,” Ten. 8, 1992, 2. Bernard Porter, The Lion’s Share: A Short History of British Imperialism 1850–1995, New York: Addison Wesley Longman, 1996, pp. 308–369. Stephen Castles and Mark J. Miller, The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World, New York: Guilford Press, 1993, pp. 55–56. Quoted in Robin Cohen, Frontiers of Identity: The British and the Others, New York: Longman Publishing, 1994, p. 58. A few years later, Thatcher’s fear of an alien takeover was echoed in the press surrounding the Brixton Riots of 1981. When 13 black teenagers died in a firebomb attack, protest erupted into a fullscale moral panic and newspaper reports again emphasized the inherently un-English “otherness” in the body politic. See Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies, New York: Routledge, 1994. Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, London: Zed Books, 1983. Timothy Brennan, “Black theorists and left antagonists,” The Minnesota Review, Fall 1991, vol. 37, 80–113, 89–90. While there are many points of difference among these writers, they nonetheless share a common aim to call into question British cultural studies’ “profound silence around issues of ideology, language, and the symbolic.” Houston A. Baker Jr, Stephen Best, and Ruth H. Lindeborg “Introduction: representing blackness/representing Britain: cultural studies and the politics of knowledge,” pp. 1–15 in Houston A. Baker Jr, Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H. Lindeborg, eds, Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, p. 3. Ibid., p. 3, and Stuart Hall, “Cultural studies: two paradigms,” Media, Culture, and Society, 1980, 2, 57–72. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, London: Verso, 1993. Ibid., p. 82. Ibid., p. 126. Since the 1970s, poststructuralism has occupied a significant place in the sphere of culture and aesthetic analysis in London. According to Francis Mulhern, the trajectory of British poststructuralism, drawing on French critical theory, applied both psychoanalytic writing and Marxism through the writing of Louis Althusser in the 1960s and 1970s. Francis Mulhern, “Message in a bottle: Althusser in literary studies,” pp. 159–176 in Gregory Eliott, ed., Althusser: A Critical Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, 1994, p. 166. Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics, London: Verso, 1997, pp. 5–18. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., pp. 213, 173. Ibid., p. 148. There are numerous skeptical accounts of postmodernism from a postcolonial or “minoritarian” perspective. See bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, Boston, MA: South End Press, 1991; Rey Chow, “Reading Mandarin ducks and butterflies: a response to the ‘postmodern’ condition,” Cultural Critique, 1986, vol. 5, 69–93; Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, and Literatures, London: Verso, 1992, chs 3–5; Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Is the

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24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

34 35 36 37

38 39

post- in post-colonialism the same as the post- in postcolonial?,” Critical Inquiry, 1991, vol. 17, 336–357; Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin, eds, Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991; Kumkum Sangari, “The politics of the possible,” Cultural Critique, 1987, vol. 7, 157–186; Arun Mukherjee, “Whose post-colonialism and whose post-modernism?,” World Literature Written in English, 1990, vol. 30, no. 2, 1–9; Neil Lazarus, “Doubting the new world order: marxism, realism, and the claims of postmodernist social theory,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 1991, vol. 3, no. 3, 94–138. Stuart Hall, “New cultures for old,” pp. 175–213 in Doreen Massey and Pat Jess, eds, A Place in the World? Places, Cultures, and Globalization, Oxford: Open University Press, 1995, p. 179. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 172. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, p. 39, first parentheses added. Ibid., p. 213. Ibid., p. 203. Ibid., p. 198. Homi K. Bhabha, “The world and the home,” Social Research, 1991, vol. 58, 141–153, pp. 143, 144. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 191, emphasis added. Ibid., pp. 186, 187. Sheena Wagstaff, “Uncharted territory: new perspectives in the art of Mona Hatoum,” pp. 27–41 in Mona Hatoum, Edward W. Said, and Sheena Wagstaff, Mona Hatoum: The Entire World as a Foreign Land, London: Tate Gallery, 2000, p. 29. Ibid., p. 28. Dessa Philippi draws out this observation in her analysis of Changing Parts in “Mona Hatoum, the witness beside herself,” Parachute, 1990, vol. 58, 10–15, p. 11. Janine Antoni, “Interview with Mona Hatoum,” Bomb, Spring 1998, vol. 63, 54–61, p. 58, parentheses added. For a discussion of home in black British women’s art making, see Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar, “Challenging imperial feminism,” Feminist Review, 1984, vol. 17, 9–12; and Gilane Tawardos, “Beyond the boundary: the work of three black women artists in Britain,” Third Text, 1989, vol. 8/9, 121–150, p. 145. Edward Said, “Reflections on exile,” pp. 173–186 in Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001, p. 186. See Robert Stam and Ella Shohat, “Narrativizing visual culture: towards a polycentric aesthetics,” pp. 37–59 in Nicholas Mirzoeff, ed., The Visual Culture Reader, London: Routledge, 1998. See also Nicholas Mirzoeff, ed., Diaspora and Visual Culture: Representing Africans and Jews, London: Routledge, 2000.

Figure 13.1 “Peering Into the Abyss of the Future,” The New York Times, September 21, 2001. © 2001 The New York Times Co. Reprinted with permission.

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13 Mea Culpa On residual culture and the turn to ethics Mary Kelly

As an artist best known for a radical non-use of the image,1 I found it necessary to rationalize my inclusion in a conference called Visual Worlds. At first, I thought, perhaps my interest in what lies at the liminal point of visuality is not necessarily “outside” of representation, but what relevance could it have, in this context, to focus on the invocation of something beyond the mimetic clarity of the iconic sign? This was before September 11. Now, there is an immediate and more imposing justification for doing so, that is, for interrogating the blind spot or, as The New York Times headline of September 23 put it, “peering into the abyss of the future.” After September 11, we are told, everything changed. After the clear and catastrophic iconicity of the towers exploding on television, came the precisely photographed yet strangely unfocused image of ashes that accompanied this headline; index of the accident? sign of emptiness? or symptom of something emphatically beyond representation – a missed encounter, as they say. In psychoanalytic terms, a missed encounter with the real defines the experience we call trauma. This close shave leaves a gap which, in turn, prompts a desire to grasp something “beyond.” So the same impulse that defends us in the divisive and traumatic moment of our initial entry into language, is reiterated in the collective instance of psychological shock, urging us to peer into the abyss of the future, precisely in order to forget the past. Significantly, Freud’s famous essay on “The uncanny” was founded on his observations of trauma in the survivors of World War I.2 One of the primary symptoms he noted was amnesia and this finding, introjected into the discussion of a broader cultural condition by someone such as Walter Benjamin, became a reflection on the loss of historical memory. This sense of trauma as both individual and social, psychological and historical, frames the argument of my recent work, Mea Culpa, part of which is included in the Visual Worlds exhibition at the Nelson Gallery. After September 11, much of what I have to say about this project may be all too obvious, but I hope, at least, it will seem timely. I began this project, as with all of my work, by making an archive. In this case I researched, collected, and catalogued material on war-related atrocities, not necessarily objective documentation, but a kind of interrogation of my own preoccupation with

238 Mary Kelly

Figure 13.2 Mary Kelly, Mea Culpa, 1999, compressed lint, one of four panels 17″ × 235″ × 2″, installation view. Postmasters Gallery, New York.

these events. This is probably why most of the stories are concerned with women and children. My idea of the archive is very inclusive. For instance, one of the narratives involves a photograph, a family snapshot that was found in the suburbs of Sarajevo and reproduced in The New York Times. But another was simply based on something that I overheard – a South African woman’s account of police brutality. It was on television while I was in the kitchen. Even though I was not actually looking at the image, a vivid impression of the voice remained. I think there is a mistaken idea that trauma has to do with tangible experience – when something actually happens to you – and we usually attribute a certain authenticity to the account of the survivors, although the accident (if you can call it that), is shaped in tandem with the person’s particular sexual disposition or fantasy life. Following Freud’s contention that it is not necessarily the real event, but the psychic effect that produces trauma, I started to think about the impact that atrocities could have, even when they are received secondhand through the media; they seem to induce different forms of identification with the victim, described variously as hysterical or megalomaniacal, which one I am not sure. But after September 11, no one could deny the traumatic effect of these representations and the way they infiltrate our everyday lives.

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Most of my projects have involved photographs, or photography as a medium, at the point of origination. Gloria Patri, for example, began with a television image of the Gulf War. Then I closed my eyes, so to speak, filtering out the figurative elements in order to work with the emotional residue. Also, in the first stage of Post-Partum Document, I did a photographic series that explored the mother’s subjective point of view. But as the project developed, I became more interested in representing the affective rather than literal form of the mother–child relationship. In the end, I moved away from the photograph to another mode of documentation, from the icon to the index. For Mea Culpa there was a long gestation period, about six years, in which I used a photograph of myself positioned in the place of the shrouded victim, a kind of acting out, that is, trying to experience the unimaginable vicariously in order to get some distance from it. Of course, this is not the same thing that Lacan described as the missed encounter with the real. Behind the fantasy of distance, of reparation, of peering into the abyss, there would be, in fact, nothing. In the production of Mea Culpa, then, there was a displacement, from the body to the folds of the sheet, and by association with a sense of material – something decomposed like dust, which I tried to translate into the image-making process. So what you are looking at here is compressed lint from the filter screen of a domestic dryer. The stories I wrote are short, but disturbing, and I wanted to “materialize” the experience of reading for the spectator by making the text in some way “anamorphic.” By materialization, I’m referring to anamorphosis not as a mathematical formula, but as a sensation of fading, fading in and out of meaning. The entire narrative cannot be seen from one position, you have to walk along the work. And the quality of the lint – something so ordinary yet ephemeral; it just seemed right. In terms of the print-making process, basically, the dryer produces a wind tunnel, blowing the lint through the screen and forming the letters in intaglio. Conditions like temperature, the kind of fabric being washed, the intensity of blacks and whites, are controlled in a way that resembles a photographic process. In another sense, it is extremely direct, almost what you would call a “readymade.” The existing shape of the filter screen is used to caste the lint and to give a certain rhythm to the piece. Continuous panels running over 16 or 20 feet are broken into intervals analogous to “four-four time” in music, that is, four beats, or lint units, to a measure. It sets a visual pace for the installation, a phenomenological sense of duration. But the concept of duration is significant in other ways as well: literally, the time it takes to do 4,000 pounds of washing, and, metaphorically, the sense of filtered lint as mnemonic trace; then, there is the historical reference to film, that is, the emphasis on “real time,” which, for me, was formative in the 1970s. I thought that the strategy of documented time, deployed by Huebler, Kawara, and others, could be extended to include the notion of diagetic space. This was the basis for my ongoing concern with narrative as visual form.

240 Mary Kelly Apropos the narratives of Mea Culpa, there was what could be called a set of procedures for the final selection of material from the archive. As I listed them in my notebook: not any act of violence, but specifically those that were politically motivated; incidents involving a human-rights action by the International War Crimes Tribunal, the World Court, or other commissions administering international justice, and only cases in which someone was indicted for crimes; then, incidents involving women and their children, and testimony displaying symptoms of trauma (hysterical blindness, amnesia). The protagonist of the story, the generic “she,” links the four narratives. They span three decades, but the mise-en-scène constructs particular national, ethnic, and racial contexts for the atrocities. There are phrases such as “slit their throats,” which is a common expression for a certain ethnic group; “rice paddy” obviously denotes geographical location; “no running water” is an economic condition. Also there is an implicit historical trajectory in the work, beginning with the Khmer Rouge massacre in the 1970s, through the bombings of the Palestinian refugee camps in the 1980s, to the atrocities in Bosnia in the 1990s, and ending, significantly, with the recent documentation by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of apartheid abuses in South Africa. The first is Phnom Pehn, 1975: She watched soldiers in a rice paddy beat her daughter with the butts of their rifles until she was dead. Then she had headaches and trouble with her eyes. To distract herself, she worked at the bridge of her nose with a knife. When the pain subsided, she could no longer see. Then Beirut, 1982: No running water, she washed the dishes near the pump and listened. Rockeye cluster bombs dispensed their sub-munitions: 247 eight-inch dart grenades, 262.4 pounds of high-density explosives, 200,000 shrapnel fragments. Armed with an aluminum pan, four unmatched plates, two glasses, three spoons and a kitchen knife, she held her child and waited. Sarajevo, 1992: A few bathroom tiles and the smell of burning; nothing else left. Probing the ashes, she retrieved a family photograph, the faces scratched out with a drill bit. She rocked back and forth on her heels, “What will we do?” “Slit their throats,” said her four-year-old son. Johannesburg, 1997: In the courtroom, she heard him describe the routine of releasing activists so that they could be picked up again outside the station, driven

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Figure 13.3 Mary Kelly, Mea Culpa, 1999, detail, Johannesburg 1997. © Mary Kelly. Photo courtesy of the Richard L. Nelson Gallery, University of California, Davis. Photo by Caroline Cardwell.

to a specified location, blindfolded, sedated and shot in the head just behind the left ear. “Then we burned the bodies . . . turning them frequently,” he added, “and buried the remains.” In conclusion, I would like to make some general remarks about the work’s discursive site. I think of this as the intersection of political events, cultural institutions, theoretical discourses, and art practices, including my previous work, in which the interrogation of subjectivity, ethnicity, and violence has turned to the question of ethics. For instance, human rights legislation, which was initiated in the postwar period, and which marked the transition, in juridical terms, to what Hardt and Negri call “empire,” has signaled a crisis for so-called democracies of the twenty-first century; that is, how to rescue the Enlightenment’s utopian legacy of entitlement in

242 Mary Kelly the form of global civil society rather than a society of control when the “refugee” and “the camp” have become the rule rather than the exception. In the wake of globalization, not only the financial and legal institutions are changing, but also “visual worlds” in which the exhibition as a system of meaning aimed at educating the “good citizen” has been displaced by the tendency to entertain him, either by replicating cinematic space in gallery installations or by promoting the architecture itself as spectacle. Although it is not a prescription, my response to this has been to go in a different, perhaps perverse, direction, to explore a certain kind of pleasure – the temporal, physical, affective, and often unexpected encounter with “things,” that defines the now archaic function of museums. When I say archaic, I mean in relation to the dominant cultural forms of our time: architecture, cinema, television, and the expanding field of technology-driven entertainment. Returning to the installation, it seemed appropriate to invent an outmoded medium. After all, washers and dryers belong to the industrial age rather than the information era. If there is a redemptive aspect to the outmoded, it is not found in a valorization of the past, but in the way residual cultural forms provoke an uncanny sense of “visual worlds,” haunted by the imagos of past generations or, as Benjamin said, “a secret agreement between past generations and the present one.”3 “This uncanny,” Freud insisted, is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is old – established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression; it is something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light. Hopefully what comes to light in Mea Culpa is not an invocation of the real thing to which the atrocities described refer, but a performative act of remembering. This, of course, is not about devising certain means as an artist to guarantee that end; it is more a matter of “gesture” as Giorgio Agamben suggests, a suspension of aims, on the part of the viewer, that opens the ethical dimension of human experience.4 Perhaps this implies looking inward or even away, rather than peering into the abyss of the future.

Notes 1 2 3 4

See Juli Carson, “Interview with Mary Kelly,” Art Journal, 59, Winter 1999, pp. 74–80. Sigmund Freud, “The uncanny” (1919), Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition, vol. XVII, James Strachey, trans., London: The Hogarth Press, 1955, pp. 219–52. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the philosophy of history,” Illuminations, Harry Zohn, trans., London: Fontana Books, 1973, pp. 255–56. Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on gesture,” Means Without End, Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, trans., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, pp. 49–59.

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Epilogue Visual worlds, after 9/11 Martin Jay

The owl of Minerva, as we know, is supposed to fly at dusk, allowing it to have a retrospective, high altitude view of the whole. But as we also know, pace Hegel, any attempt at a totalized vantage point above the fray, any instance of pensée au survol, will arouse the deepest of suspicions in our climate of anti-ocularcentric, anti-totalizing, anti-homogenizing, antimetanarrative celebration of particularity, difference, and otherness. So rather than assuming the role of the wise owl at the end of the day, anyone with the task of responding to essays as diverse as these will be well advised to pick another bird as his model. The cuckoo comes immediately to mind, although the dodo is a close second. But perhaps a more suitable choice, if we resist the temptation of seizing on the easy pun suggested by my own name, would be the magpie, who sits in trees and loudly scolds anyone who comes by from a safe distance. I like the magpie because, and I quote from an ornithological authority I found on the internet: field and laboratory studies strongly suggest that these birds have prospered because they are keen observers with remarkable memories; are impressively able to collate and retrieve information; create and reflect on abstract images; recognize and purposefully act on cause and effect sequences. They are, in other words, well suited to the role of witness, which, it turns out, is not merely that of someone in my position, but also an explicit theme of several of the present volume’s essays. It is particularly foregrounded in Robin Wagner-Pacifici’s stimulating rumination on images, photographic and painterly, of witnessing surrender. She borrows, you will recall, Giorgio Agamben’s distinction between the two Latin words testis and superstes, the former signifying a neutral third-party bystander able to give testimony, the latter a survivor of an event, who has lived through something to which he or she can then bear witness, combining, as she puts it, “experience with meaning, survival with judgment.” She then elaborates with great ingenuity the dynamics of cross-witnessing, collective witnessing, and representations

244 Martin Jay of witnessing, which involve complicated interactions between artist, viewer, and internal witnessing within the image itself. Among her many insights is the impossibility of coordinating the gazes of the subjects in the painting with that of the artist or viewer able to apprehend the vanishing point in a perspectival canvas. “There is no way to really look at the vanishing point,” she writes. While it is a point of organization, subject positioning, and almost alchemical energy, it is also a point of danger and flight and mutability. Apprehending the horizon in a gaze, like capturing the vanishing moment (of transformation, of founding, of surrendering) turns out to be a difficult, if not impossible task. As a superstes of the Visual Worlds conference, an experienced survivor rather than neutral third party, I feel this impossibility with special intensity. For what I also feel is that I, like all of us, have recently witnessed a moment of danger, flight, mutability, transformation, and perhaps even surrendering, which cannot but have its effect on my response. As a result, virtually all the essays, at least the written versions I was given before the conference, now seem to me documents of the late twentieth century, whereas we have now been forced by the events of September 11 into the twenty-first in ways that we are still only beginning to register. What I want to do here is speculate a bit about what this change might mean for the essays, indeed for our entire thinking about visual worlds. Let me take to begin the subtle and provocative analysis of citizenship and denegation, sacro-politics and sarco-politics, in Lauren Berlant’s “Uncle Sam Needs a Wife.” Contrasting what she sees as the empty abstraction of universal citizenship and heteronormative sexuality with the concrete particularities of often subjugated and abjected bodies, she argues that collective national identities are now constructed by means of a new kind of sentimental education based on the investment we have in mass icons, especially dead ones like Princess Diana and JFK Jr. “America,” she writes, “loves its dead objects: and why shouldn’t it: death and democracy are the two great levelers. By naming, marking, and marketing a fatal event, by making it big and of long duration, citizen-mourners meld, sharing feelings that confirm the very sense of cohesion promised but not delivered as experience by political form. Collective mourning means that there is a ‘we’ who witness” – note again the witnessing theme – “senseless not sacrificial death, confirming an unenumerated something in the common holding dear of a hard story.” Although protesting that she doesn’t want to claim such episodes of mass witnessing forge a sentimental nationality that is “in itself a false consciousness,” Berlant then says that “historically viewed, national sentimentality has legitimated imperial and internal violence by linking opinion to right consciousness or feeling.” Internally, moreover, the victims of this process

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are those who have been excluded by what she calls gestures of denegation in a sarco-politics of heteronormativity that serves the hegemony of the status quo. In the wake of September 11, however, this analysis will need some serious revision. For instead of being witnesses in the sense of disinterested third parties, testis, who are seduced into a virtual mourning by the manipulation of mass icons, we are witnesses in the sense of superstes, who have all been genuinely traumatized by the experience of surviving the very real megadeaths of normal people like us. Here the victims are not those who are outsiders to the heteronormativity of the hegemonic culture, but exemplars of every variety of that culture, white and black, young and old, rich and poor, straight and gay, men and women. And although it is true that an extraordinary flowering of national sentiment has been the outcome, it has not been produced by the mass media exploiting isolated celebrity deaths, but rather by the actions of an external aggressor, which chose its victims precisely because of their identity as Americans and for that alone. Not female Americans, or minority Americans, or gay Americans, but Americans tout court. Not a symbolic sovereign above the teeming masses, but the masses themselves. In short, we have a classical case of what Sartre famously called a “group in fusion” created by the gaze or, in this case, the actions of the external third man outside the group. Berlant may be right to claim traditional notions of citizenship are based on abstract universals, but in this instance a more concrete universal has been created by a shared sense of common vulnerability and real, not virtual, trauma. How long this will last is anyone’s guess, but I wouldn’t bet on it ending any time soon and the twentieth-century dynamics probingly examined in Berlant’s chapter being restored as before. One reason for the shared experience of the trauma was the extraordinarily diabolic cleverness of the perpetrators in getting it maximum visual exposure. No disaster in human history, I think it fair to say, was watched in real time by so many people and then reviewed from so many different vantage points and in both moving and still images in the days that followed. What might be called the ultimate “bad photographs,” to borrow Marshall Battani’s phrase, have burned their way into our consciousness and indeed, at least if my own dreaming life is typical, of our unconsciousness as well with a power that the most skilled of artists can only envy. Although it was possible for some to treat the act as an example of sublime aesthetic fiat – Karlheinz Stockhausen voiced this opinion to his everlasting disgrace – what made these images so disturbing was the impossibility of denying the real horror they conveyed. They were all punctum and no studium, all able to connect us viscerally with the thousands of pulverized and incinerated victims. Battani follows Kracauer’s argument that photographs can make the familiar strange and produce a dialectical tension with the world they depict,

246 Martin Jay an argument that he assimilates, following Dagmar Barnouw, to Lukács’s aesthetic of critical realism. He then ties this critical potential to the nostalgic or melancholic implication of photography stressed by Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, and concludes that in at least one of its guises, photography can have transformative rather than conformist implications. Although I would take issue with the claim that Kracauer, who hated Hegelianism in any form, was a critical realist in the way Lukács, the Hegelian Marxist, used that term, my main question about Battani’s stimulating essay concerns the adequacy of this analysis to the image repertoire produced by the events of 9/11. For, if anything, the world they showed was already rendered cataclysmically unfamiliar by what actually happened. And we certainly didn’t need photographic nostalgia to make us melancholy about the scenes we witnessed through the camera eye. Nor am I convinced that there will be that paradoxical reversal into utopianism that Battani, citing Wolf Lepenies, sees as a potential product of melancholic resignation. If anything, our imagination is resolutely dystopic these days, and, alas, with a great deal of justification. But perhaps the biggest casualty of the events, at least in terms of the discourse in cultural studies that subtends Battani’s chapter and many other papers presented in the Visual Worlds conference,1 concerns the assumption that we live in a world that can be adequately described as hegemonically dominated by all the evils we subsume under the rubric “late capitalism,” a world that needs to be critically challenged and, if possible, subverted, transgressed, or even overthrown. It has followed from this assumption that we must always be on the lookout for ways in which the seemingly systemsustaining can be turned around and used against the system, or, put differently, how the active reception of what seeks to render us passive can become counter-hegemonic. Battani rehearses precisely this choice when he says the melancholic experience of photography can lead in two directions: “the critical realism of Kracauer, Ross Chambers’s oppositional truth and Robert Witkin’s machines for doing seeing,” and alternatively, “apathy, inaction, and impotent utopian visions, the production of Kodak moments.” A similar logic informs Darnell Hunt’s stimulating essay on visualizing Los Angeles, which argues that the city is a collective representation, a virtual place “reshaped, reproduced and recirculated through a proliferation of media texts.” As such, he tell us, it functions as a site of struggle in which local decoding of the texts can resist as well as reinforce the status quo. Hoping to give this analysis an empirical foundation, he advocates what he calls “experience sampling” of individuals combined with network analysis to create a road map that will allow us to see more clearly the struggle for power and ideological hegemony. Although he wisely resists the total virtualization of the city – “it is not that a real ‘Los Angeles’ does not exist,” he tells us, “it is that real people are engaged in an ongoing struggle over how

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to represent it” – he is still working with the familiar dichotomy between the forces of mainstream homogenization and marginal difference. Thus, for example, he can characterize the views of the mainstream media in the following way: “area diversity and complexity is typically presented as part of a surveillance function that represents communities of color as threats to the established white order.” After 9/11, posing the choice in these familiar terms seems, however, inadequate, because the system that is being seriously challenged can no longer be dismissively reduced to “the established white order” and the surveillance of its enemies cannot be understood solely as a product of the negative stereotypes of minorities. It is not that we have happily resolved all the injustices of the twentieth century; God knows, they are likely to be exacerbated by the economic crisis now in the works. But focusing on them as the primary issue, the overriding concern, is now insufficient as a way to understand our twenty-first-century world. For, hard as it may be for some to admit, our way of life now seems more positive, more worthy of defense, more fragile than we previously acknowledged, and the forces that have attacked it as more problematic, and less on the side of anything remotely liberating, than we ever imagined. This is not to say that there are no longer any legitimate criticisms to be made of American society, culture, and economic practices, let alone our foreign policies, or that capitalist globalization is self-evidently progressive, just that their subversion, transgression, and destabilization, in and of themselves, no longer constitute a meaningful political program. For those tactics have been literally hijacked by real, not imagined enemies of that vastly complex, mixed bag we call Western Culture, many of whose core values we cannot now avoid defending. However much we may try to limit our analysis to a place as circumscribed as an urban environment, understood representationally or not, we have been forced to recognize that the boundaries of Los Angeles are entirely porous and the lives of its citizens affected mightily by the apocalyptic intentions of actual, not Hollywood terrorists hiding in caves half a world away. Yet another transformation has been wrought in the tensely balanced cultural/economic/political field so incisively explored in Andrea Fraser’s Bourdieu-inspired analysis of the controversy over Sensation. It is perhaps best symbolized by the unexpected metamorphosis of Rudy Guiliani from heavy-handed censor of allegedly blasphemous art, cynically playing politics by demonizing works he couldn’t understand, to universally praised leader of a city suffering an unprecedented crisis. What made Guiliani so effective in that crisis, ironically, was his unwillingness to sensationalize the events, his refusal to grandstand or act the demagogue. Instead, he displayed a rational and straightforward resolve that actually worked to help people cope with the events, in some ways showing us the possibility of transcending entanglement in the interest-defined fields to which Bourdieu reduces all

248 Martin Jay social interaction. Although I wouldn’t want to say that such an analysis is therefore rendered untenable, its limits are perhaps shown by the difficulty it would have accounting for that unexpected change. A similar sense of distance is produced by the events on my response to Allan Sekula’s evocative reverie on the relationship between land and sea, connectedness and wandering. At one point, he warns darkly against the repression of anti-globalization protests, writing: “At this juncture Jules Verne yields to Joseph Conrad. It’s The Secret Agent we should be reading. Power is not defined as the ability to contain real and imagine terror. Even discursive challenges to power are reducible to the model of the terrorist threat.” Like Lauren Berlant, he wants to make us attentive to the ways in which mass culture mobilizes our desires for community, in his terms, for a return to the sea in films such as Waterworld, The Perfect Storm, and Titanic, as well as Bill Gates’s purchase of Homer’s Lost on the Grand Banks. “We are all invited to lose ourselves at sea. For must of us, this amounts to chump change in the supermarket of imaginary danger.” In a piece I published last year in Critical Horizons called “Diving into the wreck,” I too focused on the fetish of virtual disasters that seem so powerful a lure in popular culture, so I fully understand his complaint, but once again, after 9/11, things look very different.2 First of all, it was from the air and not the land or sea that the real, not simulacral danger came – hijacked planes and airborne anthrax spores – and second the practical critique of globalization came not through idealistic demonstrations in Seattle or Genoa, agitating to protect workers from the loss of jobs or the environment from depredations, but rather from a religious fanaticism that disdained human rights not as wan abstractions left unfulfilled in reality, but as satanic affronts to the laws of God. The task now, it seems to me, is to imagine what the equivalent might be to the heroic voyage of the Global Mariner, that anti-Titanic as Sekula calls it, as an antidote to the airships of death hijacked by the followers of Bin Laden. “The great strength of the Global Mariner experiment,” Sekula tells us, “was to raise the question of society from the very space that was imagined to be beyond society.” He finishes his piece by recounting a somber image of the ship sinking into the Orinoco River, social questions presumably once again falling into oblivion. The sad truth is that they are even more deeply submerged by the aftermath of 9/11, and it is not clear how they can rise to the surface in the foreseeable future. Finally, some remarks on the role of politically engaged art in this new context. Let me say at the outset that no one has the right to dictate what artists should or should not do, especially someone who has not risked trying it himself. It is, moreover, hard not to sympathize with the confusion and discomfort of artists who are seeking to sort out what to do in the changed climate. I was thus favorably struck by the attempt of RTMark to respond to the new contextual frame constraining their efforts to challenge global-

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ization through dissident/activist art. It is, indeed, impossible to call oneself a “cultural terrorist” any more, and for good reason. But I was made a bit uneasy by the underlying assumption that only the context had changed and the “agendas of positive social change” remain unscathed. Those agendas, RTMark told us at the Visual Worlds conference, have not gone away, but the landscape of our society is wounded in the shape of a Pile and a Pentagon. Until time begins to heal those incisions in the collective psyche, there will be the challenge of an environment that is simultaneously numbed and hypersensitized to the voice of critical inquiry. What disturbs me is the faith that only time will be sufficient to heal our wounds and once again allow the progressive agenda to reemerge in its late twentieth-century form. Although I certainly share the hope that this will happen, I cannot help feeling that we are in for a much rougher ride, in which new and even worse wounds will be inflicted on us, and critical inquiry will not be able to fall back on the trademarked certainties of late twentiethcentury left pieties, which are insufficient to deal with religious fundamentalist anti-globalism of the twenty-first. Anti-business, like business, is, I’m afraid, not going to be “as usual.” In short, we are faced with a paradigm shift that is still in the making, which will affect all of the ways in which we conceptualize our work and its connection to the world of practice. In terms of visuality and the discourses surrounding it, it will force us to rethink – perhaps, even surrender, to return to Robin Wagner-Pacifici’s essay – some of our most cherished assumptions about issues of representation, disruption, surveillance, and the like. To borrow Mary Kelly’s terms, we have an anamorphosistic relation to the narrative that is now unfolding, one which produces a fading in and out of meaning. If, as she cites Lacan as arguing, trauma is a missed encounter with the Real, we are not so sure that in our next encounter we will be so lucky or that we will have the luxury of rendering trauma through pleasureinducing artistic installations. It is perhaps no longer relevant, to quote Juli Carson’s remarks in her interview with Mary Kelly, “to indict us for wanting the ‘real thing’ beyond the atrocities described.” Whether we want it or not, it may be coming our way. What the outcome of all this will be is, of course, impossible to say. Indeed, it is not at all clear whether or not we will be superstes, surviving witnesses able to judge and narrate the story when it’s over. We are, alas, a long way from the dusk of this dawning era, this confusing new world disorder of interminable war, and no Minerva’s owl is likely to spread its wings for a long time to come. But it is perhaps the moment for magpies to curtail their squawking to let other voices be heard, so now, let the real discussion begin.3

250 Martin Jay

Notes 1 2 3

The conference program for Visual Worlds, listing all presentations, can be found online. Available HTTP: www.chsc.ucdavis.edu/VisualWorlds/index.html (accessed September 30, 2003). “Diving into the wreck: aesthetic spectatorship at the fin-de-siècle,” Critical Horizons, vol. 1, no. 1, February 2000. For added reflections on these issues, see Martin Jay, “Fearful symmetries: 9/11 and the agonies of the Left,” Salmagundi, Winter–Spring, 2002, pp. 133–134.

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Index

Numbers in bold type refer to pages containing illustrations. Abrahamsson, Thomas F. 102 ACT UP 109 Activeworlds.com 119, 120, 122, 125 activism 57–67, 71, 103; AfricanAmerican 21; anti-globalization and 58, 60, 66, 101, 189, 249; art as 58, 62, 65, 73, 93; degrees of 59; democracy and 60; educational 21, 101; environmental 189; internet and 62, 65; media and 61, 109; September 11th 2001 and 57, 58, 66; South Africa 240; suffrage 21, 25; utopian 158 Ader, Bas Jan 193 Adorno, Theodor 6–7, 8, 9, 62, 154, 155, 156, 162 advertising 94, 122, 125, 139, 187, 190 aesthetics 2, 4, 5, 159, 224, 225–8, 228–30, 231–3 AFL-CIO 57 African-Americans, see United States of America Agamben, Giorgio 29, 35, 243–4; Homo Sacer 28; “Notes on gesture” 242; Remnants of Auschwitz 201–2, 203, 205 Agencias, Las 101 agency: as practice 152 agit-prop 125–36, 190 AIDS 34 Akmofrah, John 224–5 Al Qaeda 58 Alpers, Svetlana 215 Alpha World 119–22, 120, 124, 125 Althusser, Louis 86

amateur artists, see art: informal Andi, Su 224 Andrea Gail 177 Andrew Jackson, USS 175 anthrax 57, 58, 66 anti-globalization movement 57–67, 90, 248; see also globalization Antin, Eleanor 128 Arbenz, Jacobo 167 Ardennes, Battle of the 188 Arendt, Hannah: On Revolution 205 art: art world 91–107; collectors 96–7; conceptual 72, 99, 128; dealers 92, 94, 97; drawing 6; happenings 128; history 7, 125; informal 91–107; installations 78, 96, 97, 101; journals 98; market 85, 87, 88, 91–107; neoMinimalism 78–9; painting 6, 7; performance 128; perspective 1, 2–3, 209, 210–13; progressiveness 155; project 73; provocational 155–6; sculpture 6, 7; training 91; vanishing point 209, 210–13 Art Students League, New York 91 Ascott, Roy: “From appearance to apparition” 123–4 Ashcroft, John 58, 65 Asher, Michael 72, 88 Aspex Gallery, Portsmouth 224 Austin, J. L.: How to Do Things with Words 208 Australia 190 Austria 57 Autonomous Territories of Chicago, The 96 avatars 117, 119, 120, 124, 128–33

252 Index B-52 (film) 181 Babe Ruth 173 Bach, J. S. 231 Baez, Joan 168 Baja California 179 Balibar 16 Balzac, Honoré de 154 Barnow, Dagmar: Critical Realism 154, 246 Barthes, Roland: Camera Lucida 156, 246 Basques 180, 181, 194 Bataille, Georges 102 Battani, Marshall: “Photography’s decline into modernism” 151–64, 245–6 Baudelaire, Charles 157, 158 Baudrillard, Jean: “Precession of Simulacra” 142 Becker, Howard: Art Worlds 4, 93 Beckett, Samuel: Waiting for Godot 116, 127 Beecroft, Vanessa 182 Beethoven, Ludwig van 155 Behind Enemy Lines (film) 62 Beirut 224, 231, 240 Benjamin, Walter 7, 9, 154, 157, 158; “Theses on the philosophy of history” 242; “Traumkitsch” 92 Berger, John: About Looking 31 Bering Sea 173, 175 Berkeley: University Art Museum 73 Berlant, Lauren: Queen of America 32; “Uncle Sam needs a wife” 8, 9, 15–42, 244–5, 248 Bhaba, Homi: “in-between” 225, 232; Location of Culture 225, 226–8, 229–30; “Mediate and Immediate Mourning” 48–9 Bhopal 182 Bilbao: Guggenheim Museum 180–2, 194, 196 Birmingham, Ala. 60 Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies 225 Bitomsky, Hartmut 181 Black Bloc 59, 64 Blackhawk Down (film) 62 Blair, Tony 51 Bloom, Brett 101 Boal, Augusto 128 Boerdam, Jaap: “Family photographs” 160, 161 Bogota 172

Boorstin, Daniel: Image 47 Borges, Jorge Luis 175 Bosnia 240 Boston 101 Bourdieu, Pierre 84–6, 247–8; bad faith 126–7; Distinction 85, 160; Field of Cultural Production 72; Free Exchange 85; habitus 86, 125–6, 127; Rules of Art 85 Boyd, Mary Sumner: Woman Citizen 23 Bradford: Mosque 50; race riots 50 Braque, Georges 156 Brayd, Matthew 175 Brazil 190 Breda 213–18 Brenneis, Lisa 127 British Cultural Studies 225, 226 British Film Institute: Audience Tracking Study 48 Britten, Benjamin: Billy Budd 179 Britvich, Ron 119–22, 123 Broodthaers, Marcel 72 Brooklyn Museum, New York 62 Brown, Jonathan: Palace for a King 213, 217 Bryson, Norman: “Gaze in the expanded field” 210–12 Buchenwald 200, 204 Buchloh, Benjamin 72 Buck-Morss, Susan: “Aesthetics and anaesthetics” 31 Buren, Daniel 72 Burgess, Ernest: “Growth of the City” 141, 142 Burn, Ian 99 Burton, Robert: Anatomy of Melancholy 157–8 Bush, George W. 1, 57–8, 60, 61, 65 Byron, Lord 193 Calderon de la Barca, Pedro: El Sitio de Breda 214–15 Callot, Jacques: “Map of the Siege of Breda” 214 Cameron, James 178, 179, 180 Campbell, Alistair 51 Canada 24 capitalism 24, 246 Carson, Juli 249 celebrity 27 Center for Land Use Interpretation, The 101

Index 253 1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

Chambers, Ross: Writing of Melancholy 158, 162, 246 Chardin, Jean Baptiste Siméon 217 Château de Clervaux 186, 188 chatrooms, see internet Chekov, Anton 158 Chicago 101; Columbia College 97, 98; Haymarket Square 60; Hyde Park Art Center 96; Loop 100; population 141; World’s Columbian Exhibition (1893) 176 Chicago School 141, 142 Chile 190 China 183 Cikovsky, Nicolai 176 cinema, see film citizenship 15–42, 242; classes 22; training manuals 20, 21, 24 city, the, see urban society civil liberties 59, 64, 66; e-civil liberties 65; see also human rights Clancy, Tom 183 Clarke, Ida Clyde: Uncle Sam Needs a Wife 14, 18, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25 class mobility 32 ClearChannel Communications 59 Clinton, Bill 15, 29, 33, 80, 110 Clothesline Project 34 Coca-Cola 196 Cold War 172, 193; ends 182 Collateral Damage (film) 59 collective intelligibility 33 collective representation 142 Collectivo Cambalache 101 collectors 96–7 colonialism 117, 184 Columbia College, Chicago: “Informal arts” 97, 98 Comenius, Johann Amos: Visible World 118–19, 120, 121 concentration camps 200, 203, 204 conceptual art, see art Conrad, Joseph: Secret Agent 171, 248 consumer desire 22, 23 Consumption Capital 96–7 Conti, Anita 183 Corbis 174, 175, 182, 185, 187 cosmopolitanism 4 Coutard, Raoul 177 Crabe Tambour, Le (film) 177 Critical Art Ensemble 101 Critical Horizons 248 critical realism 154–6 critical theory 143, 156–7

critics 6, 7, 66, 71, 72, 87, 92, 94, 97, 100, 152, 154, 155, 156, 158, 224 Cubism 156 cultural studies 246; black British 225, 226 culture: cultural capital 72; cultural relativism 59; cultural theory 143; cultural unity 60; popular 45–55 curator 73, 86, 87, 92, 94, 97, 173 cyberspace, see internet Dahlgren, Peter: Communication and Citizenship 46 Dana, Richard Henry 174 Danto, Arthur C.: “Artworld” 93, 97, 100 Dark Matter 91–107 Davis, Fred: Yearning for Yesterday 159–60 Dean, Tacita 193 Debray, Régis: Media Manifestos 46 Defoe, Daniel: Robinson Crusoe 196 del Olmo, Miren 194–6 Deleuze, Gilles 174 D’Emilio, John: Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities 23 democracy: accountability 45; liberal 16; television and 45–55; see also politics Denver 22 Derrida, Jacques: “Self-unsealing poetic text” 202–3 Desktop Theater 127–35; Bush/Gore 129; Chicana Is . . . 127, 129; Company Town 134; FatGirls 129, 130–1; Santaman’s Harvest 129, 133; waitingforgodot.com 116; Women in Black 129–30; World of Park 130, 131, 132 Dewey, Admiral 193 Dia Art Foundation 5 Diana, Princess of Wales: death and funeral 26–7, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33, 44, 45–55, 244; Muslim prayers for 50 diaspora 224, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230 DiCaprio, Leonardo 179 Diderot, Denis 217 Dion: “Abraham, Martin, and John” 29 Disney 141, 142, 171–2 displacement 223–35 dissent 57–67 Do the Right Thing (film) 27

254 Index Dorr, Nell 185 Douglass, Ann 26 Dr Akagi (film) 172 drawing 6 Draxler, Helmut 73 Du Bois, W. E. B.: Souls of Black Folk 226 Dubin, Steve: Arresting Images 59 Duchamp, Marcel 100 Duignan, Jim 101 Duncan, Carol: “Who Rules the Art World?” 91, 98 durée 5 EA-Generali Foundation 74–7, 75, 79, 80, 84 Eastman Kodak 160 e-civil liberties 65 economics: economic equality 25; New Economy 1 Eisenstaedt, Alfred 183 elections, see suffrage Electronic Disturbance Theater 65 electronic media, see internet and virtual reality Elfwood 102–4 Elizabeth II: coronation 184 Elliot, J. H.: Palace for a King 213, 217 email, see internet Emergency Broadcast Network 109 Emirbayer, Mustafa: “What Is Agency?” 152, 161 empire 193, 241 English, Pat 184 Enlightenment 228, 241 Enron 58 Estonia 194 ethnicity 132, 225, 226, 227, 241 exhibitions 71, 242 exile 223–35 Experimental Station 101 Exxon Valdez 188 facsimile machines 8, 103 fairy tales 125 family, the 16 Family of Man, The, see Steichen, Edward fan cut 103 Fanny Farmer 23 fanzines 103 fascism 29, 31, 117 Fayed, Dodi 50

Feedback (radio) 52 feminism 24, 25, 130, 188; see also women Ferenczi, Sandor: Thalassa 187 film 1, 6, 7, 46, 81, 103, 172, 178, 227, 239; Hollywood 110, 122, 125, 139, 140, 141, 146, 171, 177, 178, 188, 247; theory 125; see also under titles of individual films Final Cut Pro 103 Finland 63 Fiske, John: Media Matters 142; Television Culture 49 Flaneur, the 158 Flaubert, Gustave 154, 158 Fleischer, Ari 61 Florence: Palazzo Vecchio 215 Fordism 187 formalism: liberal 16, 17; modernist 93 Forman, Emily 96 Forster, Kurt 180–1 Fortune 185 Forum Theatre 128 Foster, Hal 5 Foucault, Michel 124, 135, 192; History of Sexuality Vol. 1 32, 49 France 101, 190; 1968 27; Revolution 48; women’s suffrage 24 Fraser, Andrea: Aren’t they lovely? 73; “Art at the intersection of social fields” 71–88, 247–8; “For Corporations” 74; Inaugural Speech 79–88; Institutional Critique 71–88; May I Help You? 73; Museum Highlights 73; Project in Two Phases 75, 79; Report 74–7, 75; “ ‘Sensation’ chronicle” 84; Services 73; Society of Taste 84; V-Girls 73 Freud, Sigmund: Beyond the Pleasure Principle 186; Civilization and Its Discontents 185–6, 188; Uncanny 237, 242 Fried, Michael 217 futurism, national 16 GALA Committee, The: Family Values Campaign 110; Food for Thought, Chinese Take Out 111; GALA Network 108; MELROSE SPACE 110; “Primetime art as seen on Melrose Place” 109–11 Galle brothers 214 galleries 71, 78, 101 Gandhi, M. K. 63

Index 255 1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

Garette, Eve: Political Handbook for Women 22–3 Gates, Bill 168–9, 170, 172, 173, 174, 176, 179–80, 196, 248; see also Corbis and Microsoft gays and lesbians 19, 23, 34, 38 Gehry, Frank 180–2, 196 Genoa 57, 170–1, 189, 248 gift economy 102–4 Gilroy, Paul: Black Atlantic 225–6, 227, 228–30; “double consciousness” 225–6, 232 Gimonprez, Johan: Inflight 62 Giuliani, Rudy 247 Global Instant Database 109 Global Mariner 189–96, 192, 195, 248 globalization 1, 57, 60, 223, 242; see also anti-globalization movement Goebbels, Joseph 6 Golding, Sue: Eight Technologies of Otherness 36 Gonzalez, Jennifer: “Electronic habitus agit-prop in an imaginary world” 117–36 good life, the 16, 17 Goodwin, Frank 14 Gramsci, Antonio 17, 91 Greenberg, Clement 6 Greenpeace 189, 191 Greuze, Jean-Baptiste 217 Grosz, Elizabeth: “Cyberspace, virtuality and the real” 126 Guardian, The 47, 53 Guatemala 167 Guattari, Felix 174 Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao 180–2, 194, 196 Gulf War 239 Haacke, Hans 72, 74, 97 Habermas, Jurgen: Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere 45, 47 habitus 86; electronic 117–36; see also Bourdieu, Pierre hacktivism 64, 65; Hacktivist.com 65 Haeckel, Ernst 187 Hall, Stuart 225; “New cultures for old” 227–8 Hancock, John 208 Handsworth Song (film) 224–5 happenings 128 Hardt 241

Hardy, Unruh Hank 63–4 Harris, Ed 175 Hatoum, Mona 223–35; Changing Parts 222, 225, 230, 231–3; Under Siege 223–4, 224, 232 Hauser, Arnold: Social History of Art 3 Heartfield, John 190 heavenly/worldly view 3–4 Hegel, G. W. F. 243, 246 Heidegger, Martin 156 Hine, Lewis 177 Hiroshima 172 Hirshhorn, Thomas 99 Hitchcock, Alfred 178 hobbyists, see art: informal Hoggart, William 225 Holmes, Oliver Wendell 183 Holocaust, the 200, 203, 204 Home Depot 122 Homer, Winslow 173–4, 177; Fog Warning 176; Herring Net 176; Lost on the Grand Banks 168, 175, 176, 179–80, 248; West Indian Divers 174 Hopper, Dennis 188 horizon 4, 5 Huebler 239 Hugo, Hermannus: “Obsidio Bredana” 214 human rights 60, 182; see also civil rights humanism 25, 182 Hunt, Darnell: “Los Angeles as visual world” 139–49, 246–7 Husserl, Edmund 4 Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago 96 identity 225; political 15; racial 18; sexual 18 ideology 85; Bourdieu 86; Disneyland 142; free labor 36; Institutional Critique 87; liberal 32, 35; market 176 Image Theater 128 imaginary, the 19, 25, 32, 38, 117, 186 Imamura, Shohei 172 inequality 18 informal art 91–107 information: as commodity 1; highway 174; infowar 62 InSITE97 70, 79–88 installations, see art Institutional Critique 71–88

256 Index International Monetary Fund 57, 90 International Transport Workers Federation 189–96 International War Crimes Tribunal 240 internet 8, 62, 65, 102, 117–36, 167–97, 243; chatrooms 103, 116, 128, 133; e-civil liberties 65; email 169, 189, 196; information highway 174 intertextuality 147 Islam 50–1 Island of Lost Souls (film) 37 Israel 223, 224 Italy 24 Jackson, Andrew 167, 175 Jackson, Michael 175 Jameson, Fredric: “Reification and ideology in mass culture” 27 Japan 132; Disney and 171–2; surrender (1945) 206–8, 207 Jaws (film) 27 Jay, Martin 1, 5–6, 9, 84–5, 210; “Diving into the Wreck” 248; “Scopic regimes of modernity” 215–16; “Visual worlds, after 9/11” 243–50 Jenik, Adrian 127 Johannesburg 240–1 John, Sir Elton 51 Julien, Isaac 224 Junger, Sebastian: Perfect Storm 177 Justin of Nassau 213, 216, 217 Kainin, Ewing 185 Kali 185 Kant, Immanuel 229 Kanterowicz, Ernst: King’s Two Bodies 28 Kantor, Tadeusz 128 Kauffmann, M.: “Manufacturing dissent” 9, 57–67 Kawara 239 Kelley, Mike 99, 100 Kelly, Franklin 176 Kelly, Mary 9, 249; Gloria Patri 239; Mea Culpa 237–42, 238, 241; PostPartum Document 239 Kennedy, John F. Jr: death 26–7, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33, 244 Kent State University 60 Keynes, John Maynard 173, 182 Khmer Rouge 240

King, Martin Luther 27 King, Rodney 8, 18 Koons, Jeff 87 Kracauer, Siegfried: Theory of Film 154, 155, 156, 162, 245–6 labor 35, 38; African-American 34; anti-globalization and 57; artistic 71, 73, 77, 96, 97, 102; British migrant 225; child 25; environment and 189; exploitation 57, 189; free 36; intellectual 181; international labour movement 24; low-wage 83; safety laws 19; sexual division 187–8; value 36 Lacan, Jacques 186, 249 law, liberal 16, 17 Lawrence, D. H. 174 Lebanon 223, 224 Lee, Spike 27 Lefort, Claude: Democracy and Social Theory 28, 29 legitimacy 36 Leonardo da Vinci 173 Lepenies, Wolf: Melancholy and Society 158, 159, 246 lesbians 19, 23, 34, 38 Lewis, Susan 224 liberalism 167; corporate 190; neoliberalism 179, 190 Lichty, Patrick 58 Lifeboat (film) 178 Lincoln, Abraham 29 Lionni, Leo 184–5 Lissitsky, El 190 Living Theatre, The 128 logos 185 London 101, 224, 225; Hyde Park 44, 48, 51, 52; Westminster Abbey 48, 51, 52 London Film Makers Co-op 223 Los Angeles 101, 138, 139–49, 181, 246–7; Beverly Hills 142; conceptual model 143–6, 144; definitions 140–1; East 142; ethnic diversity 140; growth 145; International Airport 141; Koreatown 142; Lakers 140; Little Tokyo 142; Marathon 140; Olympic Games 140; origin 142; population 140–1; as representation 143; riots (1992) 139, 145; Santa Monica Freeway 147; universities 140; Watts 142; see also film: Hollywood

Index 257 1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

Los Angeles Times, The 146 Lucas, George 103 Luce, Henry 6 Luckas, Sarah 99 Lueneburg, University of 73 Lukács, George 154, 155, 156, 158, 246 Lund, Nils Ole: The Tower of Babel xii Luxembourg 188, 189 McCarthyism 59 McCauley, Jimmy 194 Macdonald, Dwight 6 McKim-Smith: “Topographical tropes” 215 MacPhee, Josh 96 Madrid 101; Buen Retiro 215 magazines, see print media Magellan, Ferdinand 193 Magonigle, H. Van Buren 99–100 Mahan, Alfred Thayer 193 Maher, Bill 61 Malcolm X 27 Mallarmé, Stéphane 190 Mandella, David 224 Manicheanism 229 maps 121, 146, 147, 184, 214, 215 Margaret, Princess 49 Marin, Louis 210; Monuments and Maidens 28 market, art, see art Martinius, Osterbaan: “Family photographs” 160, 161 Marx, Karl 156, 246 Mauss, Marcel 102 media 6, 27, 45, 238, 245; antiglobalization and 57, 58, 59; democracy and 45–55; Los Angeles as media text 139–49, 246–7; September 11th 2001 and 58, 60, 62, 64, 84; see also film; internet; photography; print media: radio; television; video; virtual reality media studies 125 melancholia 152, 156–60, 246 Melrose Place (television) 109–11, 110, 111 Melville, Herman: “Bartleby the Scrivener” 178, 196; “Benito Cereno” 190; Billy Budd 179; MobyDick 174 memory 17, 27, 29, 33, 173, 228, 229, 231; collective 159; historical 237; intertextual 143–4, 145

Mercer, Kobena: “Diaspora and the dialogic imagination” 224, 225 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice: Phenomenology of Perception 4, 5 Merton, Robert K.: “Social Structure and Anomie” 158 Mesˇ trovic´, Stjepan: Postemotional Society 3 Mexico 132, 179, 190 Michelet, Jules: Mer 179, 186 Microsoft 174 migration 223–35 mimeograph, see print media Mische, Ann: “What Is Agency?” 152, 161 Missouri, USS 206–8, 207 Mitchell, W. J. T.: Picture Theory 204 modernism 6, 7, 94, 142, 174, 180; photography and 151–64, 185; provocative art and 155; selfreferentiality 178 modernity 46, 176, 227; ‘black Atlantic’ and 226, 228, 229; ‘scopic regime of modernity’ 1, 5; sexual culture 35 Mondrian, Piet 231 Monroe, Marilyn 49 Moore, Mike 63 Morrison, Toni: Song of Solomon 34–5 Morse, Margaret: “Nature Morte” 123, 124 Moscovici, Serge: “Phenomenon of social representations” 146 Mozart, W. A. 158 Munich: Kunstverein 84 Musello, Christopher: “Studying the home mode” 153 Museum of Modern Art, New York 189 museums 58, 71, 72, 87, 88, 92, 98, 101, 153, 188, 194, 242; membership 98 Muslims, see Islam Nanjing 172 nation, the 16 National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC 176 National Sentimentality 26 nationalism, sentimental 26, 32, 33 Nazis 203 Ne Pas Plier 101 Negri 241 neocolonialism 167

258 Index neoliberalism 189 neo-Luddism 168, 169 neo-Minimalism 78–9 Nervión River 196 New York 101; Art Students League 91; Brooklyn Museum 62; Fireman’s Memorial 99–100, 102; Manhattan 128; Museum of Modern Art 189; population 141; Postmasters Gallery 238, 241; see also September 11th 2001 New York Times, The 59, 169, 189, 236, 237, 238 newspapers, see print media Nixon, Richard M. 27 Norman, Dorothy 185 North Atlantic, Battle of the 183 nostalgia 152, 153, 156–7, 158, 167 objectivity/subjectivity 3–4 Ofili, Chris 62 Olson, Charles 174 “One Week Boutique” 100–1 Ono, Yoko: Grapefruit in the World of Park 130 Orinoco River 248 Orwell, George 59 Osama bin Laden 58 outsider art, see art: informal painting, see art Palace, The 127, 128, 129, 132, 134; chatroom 116 Palestine 223, 240 Panofsky, Erwin: “Perspective as symbolic form” 2–3, 5 Paper Tiger Television 109, 132 Parsons, Julie 99 particularity 16 Partisan Review, The 7 Pearl Harbor 171, 172 People 175 Perfect Storm, The (film) 177, 178, 179, 187, 248 performance art 128 perspective 1, 2–3, 209, 210–13 Peterman, Dan 101 Petersen, Wolfgang 177 Phantom Edit 103 phenomenology 4 Philadelphia Academy of Art 91 Philadelphia Museum of Art 73 Philip IV of Spain 215 photocopiers 103

photography 1, 7, 98; accidental snapshot 153; “bad” 151–64, 245–6; birthday snapshot 150; “Kodak moments” 152, 162, 246; mis-timed auto-timed family portrait 161; retouching 152; traffic in 167–97 Picasso, Pablo 156 Piper, Adrian 128 Piscator, Erwin 190 Plattner, Stuart 95–6 pluralism 60, 121–2, 123, 124 poetry, see print media Point Richmond 34 Politically Incorrect (television) 61 politics: accountability 45; intimacy politics 32; political identity 15; popular sovereignty 45; representation 45; sentimental 26, 32, 33; television and 45–55; see also democracy Pollock (film) 175 Pollock, Jackson 175 Popotla 179 Portsmouth: Aspex Gallery 224 postcolonialism 225, 226, 227 Postmasters Gallery, New York 238, 241 postmodernism 59, 142, 143 poststructuralism 226, 227, 270 Potemkin 196 power 8, 16, 27, 28, 29, 33, 49, 57, 171, 209, 210, 212, 213, 230, 246, 248; virtual 174 practice 26, 32, 33, 71, 72, 73, 86, 88, 93, 94, 98, 104, 118, 121, 125, 226, 241, 249; agency as 152; diasporan 227, 228, 229, 230; experimental 101; habitus and 126; informal 97, 99, 100, 103, 104, 109, 113, 114, 153, 154, 159, 160, 161, 162; performance/conceptual 128 Prague 90 Presley, Elvis 27 PRI 59 print media 6, 7, 45, 62; art journals 98; broadsheet press 53, 54; magazines 6, 8, 33; mimeograph 7, 8; novels 7; poetry 7; tabloid press 47, 53, 54 Probyn, Elspeth: Outside Belonging 33 Procrustes 229

Index 259 1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

project art 73 propaganda 6 provocational art 155–6 psychoanalysis 8, 27, 226 Publix Theater 57 Puerto Rico 101 Pyncheon, Thomas: Vineland 27 QE2 193 race: identity 18; racial equality 25; racism 32 radio 46, 52, 54, 59, 62 Ramakrishna 185 Rancière, Jacques: Disagreement 36 Raphael: Marriage of the Virgin 210–12, 211 REACH LA 127, 129 realism, critical 154–6 reality: hyperreality 142; mediated 143; surface 123, 161; virtual 117–36, 180 Reclaim the Streets 101 refugees 223–35 religion 186 Renaissance 2–3 REPOhistory 101, 104 representation, visual 123–5, 135 respectability 22 Reverend Billy, The 101 Rhodes, Jason 99 Rodchenko 175, 190 Rolland, Romain: Future of an Illusion 185 Rosler, Martha 99 Ross, Kristin: Fast Cars, Clean Bodies 27 Rotman, Brian: Signifying Nothing 210 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 29 RTMark 9, 62, 84, 101, 104, 248–9; “Bringing IT to YOU!” 56, 58, 65; “Manufacturing dissent” 57–67; Barbie Liberation Organization 62, 63, 64, 109; gatt.org 62, 63; gwbush.com 60, 61, 62, 65; Quebec City Stuffed Animal Catapult 65; roles 65–6; Simcopter Hack 64; Yes Men 62–3, 64, 65 Rubens, Peter Paul 214 Rubin, Ben 96 Russia 172; see also Soviet Union sabotage 64 sacro-politics 16, 25–33

Said, Edward 226; “Reflections on exile” 232–3 San Diego 79 San Juan 101 Sandburg, Carl 167 Sarajevo 238, 240 sarco-politics 16, 18, 34–6 Sartre, Jean-Paul 126–7 Schiller, Friedrich: “Der Taucher” 186, 187 Schoendoerffer, Pierre 177 Schumpeter, Joseph 53 Schutz, Alfred: Phenomenology of the Social World 4, 5 scopic regime 1, 5 Scott, Sir Walter 177 sculpture, see art Seale, John 177 Seattle 59, 169, 173, 175, 191–2, 248 Second International 190 Sekula, Allan 87, 248; “Between the net and the deep blue sea” 167–97; Dead Letter Office 178; Dear Bill Gates 166, 169, 170; Serial Killers 30–1; TITANIC’s Wake 178–87, 181; Waiting for Tear Gas 170 sentimental politics 26, 32, 33 September 11th 2001 1, 6, 50, 57, 66, 96, 130, 236, 237–42, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248; visual culture and 8, 9, 99 Sesame Street (television) 100 Seveso 182 sex: sexual culture 2, 3; sexual equality 25; sexuality 26, 32, 38 Shakespeare, William: Richard II 201 Shibutani, Tamotsu: “Reference groups as perspectives” 4 Shoah 203 Sholette, Gregory: “Heart of darkness” 9, 91–107 Siena: Palazzo Pubblico 215 signatures 208–9 Simons, Jon: “Televisual popular politics” 45–55 Simpson, Nicole Brown 140 Simpson, O. J. 18 Simpsons, The (television) 54 Sixty Minutes (television) 54 slack art 99–102 slashers, the 109 slavery 63, 228

260 Index Snayers, Peter 213 soap opera 109–11 social fields 71–90; Bourdieu and 85, 126 sociology: cultural 2; historical 2; world/horizon 5 Sontag, Susan 61; On Photography 151–2, 156, 246 soundbites 51 South Africa: Truth and Reconciliation Committee 240 Soviet Union 190; see also Russia Spelling, Aaron and Tori 109 Spencer, Earl 51 SpiderMan (video game) 59 Spinola, Ambrogio 213–18 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty: “Can the subaltern speak?” 24, 226 Stanley, L.: “Manufacturing dissent” 9, 57–67 Star Wars (film) 103 Steichen, Edward: Family of Man 167, 182–7, 184, 186, 188, 189, 190, 193; Power in the Pacific 182 Stieglitz, Alfred: Steerage 185 Stimson, Blake: “Visual cultures and visual worlds” 1–10 Stockhausen, Karlheinz 190, 245 Stockyard Institute, The 101 street theatre 127–8 subjective/objective 3–4 subordination 17–18 suffrage: “Educated Suffrage” 21; universal 45; women 18–25, 26, 32, 36, 37 Sun, The 47 Sunday painters, see art: informal surrender 201–21, 207; Breda 213-18, 214; Japan 206–8, 207 3-D 119, 122, 135 tabloid press, see print media Taiwan 183 Tape Beatles 109 Tareme 63 taste 77, 160, 170 Taussig, Michael: Magic of the State 28 Taylor, Brandon: Avantgarde and After 99 technology 1, 6, 7, 204; copying 103; digital 94, 103, 122, 126, 135; film 177; information 104; innovation 7; media 45, 46, 47, 51, 52, 53, 54,

167, 242; political technologies 46; social technologies 46; stealth 65, 181; technological determinism 7; technologies of feeling 33; technologies of government 46; technologies of the self 20 telephone 46 television 1, 6, 31, 62, 109–11; Diana’s death and funeral 45–55, 44, 50; pirates 109; popular politics and 45–55; soap opera 109–11 Temporary Services 100–1, 102, 104 Tendance Floue 90 terrorism 248; Al Qaeda 58; American sensitivity to 59; civil rights and 65; cultural 58, 109, 249; definition 58, 65; Hollywood 247; Inflight 62; internet and 65; power and 171; see also September 11th 2001 Thatcher, Margaret 183, 225 theater 65, 134, 169; street 127–8; workers’ 190 theme parks 171–2, 179 third parties, see witness, the Thirty Years War 213 Thomas, Susanna 57 Thomas-Hill 18 Thomson, John: Media and Modernity 46 Tiananmen Square 8 Tijuana 79 time 5 Titanic (film) 176, 178–87, 194, 248 Tolkien, J. R. R. 103 Toscanini, Arturo 6 Tournament Model 95 trauma 31, 249 Trotsky, Leon 6 Turner, Bryan S.: “Note on nostalgia” 156 TVTV (video) 60 Twain, Mark: “Scenes in Honolulu” 151, 152 Twentieth Century-Fox 179 Uccello, Paolo 3 Ukeles, Mierle Laderman 99 Ultra-Red 101 Uncle Sam Needs a Wife, see Clarke, Ida Clyde United Kingdom 24 United Nations 187, 189

Index 261 1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

United States Information Agency 184 United States of America 190; 14th amendment 19; African-Americans 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 34, 35, 36; AntiCruising Ordinance 83; art world 91–107; blacks 21–2; Bureau of the Census 140–1, 142; celebrity in 27; CIA 167; citizenship 15–42; civil rights 19; Civil War 174; Defense Department 183; education 20; FCC/NEA 110; GI Bill (1944) 91; immigration 20, 21, 23; isolationism 59; Juvenile Curfew Enforcement Policy 83; moral feeling 27; Navy 182; Office of Secretary of Cyberspace Security 60; Patriot Act 60, 65; Pentagon 181; Post Office 168; presidential election (1812) 22, (2000) 1, 60; prisons 34; sensitivity to terrorism 59; State Department 183; suffrage 16, 18–25; “unified America” 59; women 18–25 universality 15, 16, 19, 20 urban society 139–49 utopianism 8, 15, 29, 52, 123, 158, 162, 174, 183, 241, 246 vandalism 78 vanishing point 209, 210–13 Vasari, Giorgio 3 Velázquez, Diego Rodriguez: Surrender of Breda 213–18, 214 Venezuela 196 vernacular art, see art: informal Verne, Jules 170–1, 248 V-Girls, The 73 video 8, 56, 60, 222, 225, 230, 231–3 Video Machete 101 Vietnam War 31 violence 17, 18, 32, 35, 37, 240, 241; counter-violence 34; depersonalizing 35; domestic 34, 38; global 66; hierarchies of 30; imperial 33, 244; internal 33, 244; mass-mediated 16; national continuity and 19; national/capitalist 24; political 34; state: 29, 188; structural 16, 17, 18, 33; traffic in 33 virtual reality 117–36 virtual sit-ins 65 visual world, see world visuality: complex 87; form 3, 5, 9; signs 210, 229, 237; theory 5, 6, 8,

9, 249; visuality, vision and visual culture 2, 4, 5 Voorhees, Anneke: “Under siege” 223–35 voting, see suffrage Wagner-Pacifici, Robin: “Witness to surrender” 201–21, 243–4, 249 Walzer, Michael 123, 124 war 6, 21, 24, 130; displacement and 223, 225; infowar 62; surrender 201–21 Warner, Marina: Monuments and Maidens 28 Warner, Michael: “Mass Subject” 30–1 Washington, DC 57; National Gallery of Art 176 Washington, George 29, 176, 187, 188, 248 websites, see internet Weimar Republic 157 Welles: “Topographical tropes” 215 Wells, H. G.: “Art of Being Photographed” 151 West, the 24, 27, 45, 46, 57, 58, 123, 156, 227, 231, 247 Western Front Video 222 “White Fleet” 193 White House press conferences 60 Whitney Biennial (1993) 86 Wild West, the 122, 125 Wilson, Woodrow 24 Winogrand, Gary 185 Witkin, Robert: Adorno on Music 154, 162, 246 witness, the 201–21 women: domestic violence 34, 38; rape 34; suffrage 18–25, 26, 32, 36, 37; see also feminism Woodward, Amanda 110 World Bank 57, 90 World Court 240 World Trade Center, New York, see September 11th 2001 World Trade Organization 59, 62–3, 64, 169, 191–2 World War: First 23, 187, 237; Second 23, 27, 172, 184, 200, 203, 204, 206–8, 207 world: art 58, 76, 81, 85, 94, 95–8, 99, 100, 101, 102, 104; concept 3–5; social 4, 18, 156, 157, 160;

262 Index virtual 117, 119, 120, 124, 125, 126, 127, 135, 180; visual 7, 9, 71, 85, 117, 242, 244 World’s Columbian Exhibition (1893), Chicago 176 worldly/heavenly view 3–4 Worlds.com 134–5

worldwide web, see internet writing, see print media Zedillo, President 80 Zelizer, Barbie: Remembering to Forget 203–4 Zobernig, Heimo: Untitled 78–9, 79

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