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{ Category Archives } Imaging the City

The Bronze Lions Outside the HSBS Headquarters

Following comments and an exchange of emails from my previous post about the bronze lions outside the HSBS headquarter in Canary Wharf, London, I am extremely pleased to publish this amazing series of photographs about Hong Kong and the bronze lions there. Mr. Hagan’s two black-and-white photos were taken in the 50′s, and the two colour ones very recently, when he re-visited China with his youngest grandson. An amazing story, as it follows:

I was a 20 year old marine attached to the USS Princeton, the first US commissioned anti submarine carrier. This Essex class carrier was built in 1945, one of the last to be built (in background of b &w Hong Kong harbour). A buddy took my pic sitting beside “Stephen”, the lion in front of the bank of china in 1955. There were two such bronze lions cast in 1935 in Shanghai, then brought to Hong Kong, the lions were taken to Japan during WWII to be melted down for war materials, but this never got done, as gen. MacArthur ordered them back to Hong Kong. Bullet impacts are still visible from the battle of Hong Kong in the 1970′s the original bank was torn down and rebuilt, thus the different backgrounds. The colour pics show Hong Kong as it is today, a huge city of towering buildings and commerce. Stephen was not difficult to find last year when i took a tour of China. A fellow traveller took the shot.

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2010 07 09 pa_card Dreaming the City
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The Community Plaza?

I have been invited to take some pictures of Peninsula Square, outside the O2 (ex-Dome, of course), as part of my practise-based research strategy, or ‘fieldwork’. The ‘informant’ for my visual tour stressed out the particularity of the night, as it would have been very busy and lively with kids and teens coming out Britney Spears’ concert. Maybe, we thought, I could have taken some photos of people lounging around the fountains, or having a few drinks around the steps, we would have heard loud laughs and cheers.

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I managed to get there just on time for the youngish audience to come out, and after a few photographs, about ten I would say, I was addressed by stewards who were busy channelling the concert crowd to the public transports (along the trendy canopy). They warned me that I could not take any photo, risking of being ‘arrested’. To my surprise, they were really determined to stop me doing ‘the photographer’. After some polite responses, I was soon surrounded by two gorillas, the tough guys of the security, threatening of physically removing me from the ‘private property, belonging to O2′: apparently, any enquiries and permissions for photo-activity there has to be approved by the owner ((Beware, I just sent a request to the O2 customer service, and they replied: “I would suggest you contact our press office prior to your visit. They will need to approve your photography and notify our security”!)) . Still shaking for indignation, I went away and published these pictures from the unhappy night (from my research perspective, instead, it has been very productive indeed!).

A quick browsing on the Net gave this incredible outcome (all the italics are mine):

“With everything under the actual roof of The O2 being so spectacular, you won’t be surprised to hear that we’ve applied the same ethos to the outside space. Peninsula Square features a stage for free concerts and large digital screen for video displays, making it a superb space to socialize” (theO2 website). “It’s a great place to meet with friends and relax before a show or at lunchtime” (planners’ website). “London’s newest, and highly popular, public square is already a lively gateway to The O2. It will become an important hub for the entire community at Greenwich Peninsula, a place on the making” (Resource for Urban Design Information (RUDI), “an independent unbiased service”).

Blimey! It looks like the future space of the developers, politicians, designers, architects, planners, and alike does have a completely different ‘depth’ compared to the same space seen from the perspective of an urban dweller, especially when it comes to security, policing, and controlling of that  space. For instance, we don’t know for sure if this space is public, what kind of public is allowed in there, or at what time of the day the much celebrated ‘community’ can make use of that space, and above all, what type of activities are allowed to take place beyond the ‘spectacular’. Would the same ‘ethos’ of the teflon structure be applied to the outdoor space, in the sense that the Square becomes an extension of the Mall, that is, a policed semi-public outdoor space?

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Maybe it’s me that is biased, but let me try to make this right:

a) I am a local resident (well, -ish as I live in East Greenwich, on the other side of the physical rim of the A102), I therefore should be part of that ‘entire community’, usually understood by these very people as ‘the local’, ‘the neighbourhood’; b) I met there with a group of researchers and artists, to talk about the regeneration of the area, I therefore belong to an interested network, or ‘community of interest’; c) I am out and about doing my own business of visual research on the area, I therefore participate in my own way, and by producing my own representations, to a sense of place, a place ‘in-the-making’.

My sixth sense is telling me that this hyper-real place will be soon rebranded ‘Plaza’ or ‘Piazza’, don’t ask me why. On another front, I was warned (in conversation with Jon Prosser, Leeds University) that the Visual Culture in which we are is almost as determinant as the technology we choose: in the UK, at the present, visual sociologists feel that we are entering a ‘police state’, in which civil liberties are shrinking day by day.

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2009 06 17 pa_card Blogging the City
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Sniffing the City

What happens if some people decided to take control, in different ways, of their own images taken in public space by the millions of CCTV, by becoming conscientious actors and protagonists of the never ending film of the city (in London, there are more that half million of CCTV, 1 every 14 citizens)? What if some people started reclaiming, under the Data Protection Act, their own ‘performances’? To the extent, for instance, of making a music video, or an art installation? Or even a youth community project in alternative media practices thanks to ‘video sniffing’, that is, the hacking of loose digital videos from unencrypted cameras and their remixing. With a bit of poetry, we might even think to drifting through the policed city following the unpredictable waves of ethereal signals (Inspired by the praxis of the Situationist International, some of these art projects invite to disrupt the hegemonic power of capital-driven urbanism and to re-fresh our understanding of the city by exploring civic relationships through play, in order to bridge personal and public space, individual and collective experience, and physical and historical condition, into a rhizomatic generative urban drift).unusual_image CC

Media commentators are quick at condemning the increasing practice as illegal, but this is at very least a gray area: who does my picture, captured in public space, belong to? Whatever the techniques, it seems clear to me that what is at stake here is the narrative of CCTV as uncomplicated and self-evident. On the other hand, media and criminologists (alongside the expanding industry of the digital surveillance systems) make no mistake on the goals of this unprecedented mapping coverage of the urban population: the ideological and politicized program of urban restructuring must go on in the name of a “safer” public space. Moreover, there is an increasing attention to the effects of video surveillance on people’s behaviour. As Hille Koskela (2000) maintains:

“video-surveillance changes the ways in which power is exercised, modifies emotional experiences in urban space and affects the ways in which ‘reality’ is conceptualized and understood. Surveillance contributes to the production of urban space” ((Hille Koskela, The Gaze without Eyes, Sage, 2000)) .

The counter-surveillance of the alternative video-practice attempts to do the same. You might want to check this post out, as well.

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2009 05 18 pa_card Framing the City
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“I am the picture”, notes on Lacan ‘s epistemology

A definition of identity: ‘In order to vehicle the image, the subject own position must be fixed [as in the classic account of optics as geometrical diagram, the eyes must be fixed in order to be reached by the cone of multicoloured light that represent the field of vision]. It is from this fixity, and the images that are thus produced, that the subject is able to postulate objects of permanence and identity in the world. The mirror stage is therefore the focus for the interdependency of image, identity and identification (namely, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image) ((J. Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision, Verso, 2005:173)) .

According to Lacan, the knowing subject is secured by the conscious. ‘This knower cannot recognize itself other than the I. Because the knower takes up a defensive position against its unconscious other, it cannot know itself in its refusal of the unconscious’ (rejection of the Cogito). The knower perceives ‘its self and its other in relation to narcissistic and objectifying identification in which they appear as objects to be controlled. In that position the knower projects consciousness, self, and subjects as a unifying identity and claim mastery and presence of self, producing its relation to others as aggressive relation of masterful ego to masterful ego’.
The knower’s representation of the world is confined to conscious material. ‘It fixes the relation of signifier to signified, giving it an imaginary permanence and stability and producing the illusion of univocal meaning [as] an effect of the knower’s refusal of the unconscious…The knower reproduces its symbolic economy, because it does not produce a new relation between signifiers, and so cannot produce new signifieds or meanings. However, the signification of the knower is also marked by what it cannot represent, because its signification is always in (unconscious) excess of that which it (consciously) intends to represent. For Lacan, the unconscious is ‘a chain of signifiers which…is repeated, and insists upon interfering in the breaks offered it by the effective discourse and the cogitation that informs. The knower mistakenly perceives itself as consciousness, and its consciousness as reality. This misrecognition produces the relation of the knowing subject to its known object. That relation is an aggressive, objectifying and distorting mastery of its object, which refuses its difference.’ ((K. Campbell, ‘Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology’, Routledge, 2004: 37-39)) .

But, later Lacan develops a new form of epistemology based on the Four Discourses (Master, University, Hysteric, and Analyst), which produce four correspective apprensions to knowledge. ‘Reality is a function of discourse, for discourse produces both the world that is known, and the only world that can be known. Knowledge is contingent upon the discursive position of the knower. However, that subjective structure is necessarily an effect of discursive structure. By taking up a speaking position, the knower thereby is enmeshed in the fundamental relations of discourse…

…Discourse produces the known object, since the object can only be represented through signifying structures. The act of knowing is an act of representation that the stable structures of signifying chains produce. Therefore, knowledge itself has a discursive structure and thereby is rethought as the product of signification. [Crucially] in later Lacan’s epistemology what is know is inseparable from how it is known’ (cit: 54-55).

In other words, Photography is always a way of organising the symbolic and its elements. The symbolic order is a fiction, which masters the relations to Others. The image is, for Lacan, the scopic field and because we see ourselves in there, its imaginary is also its real: it creates us as subjects.

As Marianne Hirsh (1997) puts it: “The subject exists in time always as ‘other’ in one of several ways. On one hand the subject constitutes himself visually by way of a false identification with the misapprehended imaginary ‘other’ of Lacan’s mirror stage – the mistaken jubilant belief in the bodily wholeness and self-identity apprehended in the mirror. On the other hand, the subject constructs what Lacan calls the ‘moi’, the self as externally, socially, given and recognized – as a projected and therefore absent self/other, a personne in the double sense of person and no one. Third, existing in time, the subject is also always temporally other, that is, always, in addition to the present self, a previous or subsequent and anticipated self. By selecting one instant out of the subject’s temporal existence, the photograph stages the subject’s own specular self-encounter as an encounter with otherness: the subject represented in the photograph is always other to the one looking at the picture” ((M. Hirsh, Family Frames, Harvard UniPress, 1997:89)) .

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2009 04 25 pa_card Blogging the City
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Pineal Eye

The pinnacle was the cupola of the temple in Jerusalem, notably a hole in order to allow the symbolic ascension of Christ. For Bataille, the pineal eye will mark the hole at the top, the highest point not only in the panorama but also in the hierarchy: pinea derives from pine cone, cupola. ‘The pineal eye is not an organ but a “fantasy” or a “myth”: it is neither a model, nor a copy: it is an image with no resemblance. According to this reading of Battaile, then, the pineal eye cannot be made object of communication, and as a result, it is inscribed ‘outside the the structures of transmission of knowledge whose rules imply that only the repeatable can be thought’ ((D. Hollier, The writings of George Bataille, 121)) . Moreover, this image occupies a phallic position produced by the dialectic erection/castration: on one hand, the human form lends itself to complete erectness; on the other, the panoramic view, the eyes on the horizon are excluded from the movement of vertical erection. In his own words “Man’s gaze is emasculated”. There is in fact a premium for the positions at the edge, or for the taller ones, from which the view is not obstructed by other office buildings, it is unconditionate on the city as abstract, from above and at distance: ‘The demand for a long view means that the symbolic capital of a building is linked not only to its site but also to the tower as a building type with a service core surrounded by a rim of rentable space…corporate culture seeks to inhabit tall buildings in lower rise districts. The towers grow ever upwards and outwards, the quest is for both height and dispersal’ (Dovey, cited; 115-119).

‘It is this failure of virile verticality that the pineal eye would come to fill in for [as experience of] castration, which therefore is not an absence of virility. It is rather something that constitutes virility. Sexual emasculation comes to atone for the emasculation of the gaze…Although it menaces the phallus in reality, castration, thus, is what constitutes symbolic phallocentrism’ ((D. Hollier, cited: ‘Castration, no doubt, makes the phallus disappear, but at the same time this disappearance provides its real status, because it is the very essence of the phallus that it be lacking. The phallus is produced by that which it denies it. It is only a reappropriation of the negative)) .

So, how does this symbolic element manifest itself? More pragmatically, Kim Dovey applies discourse analysis to 72 brochures, phamphlets, and advertising spots, about office towers and tall storeys, as an entry point into global corporate culture. If towers above 10-20 storeys started exceeding their functional efficiency and the dominant views are lost as more towers occupy the skyline, she asks, how can we justify in economic terms their erection (lapsus)? Drawing on Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic capital, in fact, we can make up for the difference, that sense of distinction given by the symbolic (literally power, hierarchy, fertility, height), aesthetic (uniqueness of form, landmarks), or mythological ‘aura’ (timelessness: past and future are magically blend together): signs which need to be built in a chain of signifiers by way of, for instance, reflecting the primary values of those towards whom they are directed, that is the corporate elite. Advertising is in fact the primary circuit through which the symbolic capital manifests itself. Again, as Bataille before, there is a need of decoding the myths of advertising as ideology, to articulate the experience into which the corporate executive is induced. On this there are a few pictures in my photoblog, a series called “You Can”.

‘The advertising portrays an ideal rather than a reality; it distorts as it mythologizes. Distorsions are also indications of the ideals and values that may be driving the image-making process’ ((K. Dovey, Framing Places, 1999: 108, Routledge))

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2009 02 25 pa_card Dreaming the City
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The Face of the Other

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…Is this person gay? Is s/he British? Is this person happy? Intelligent? These are some of the strong questions participants were asked to cast their vote about when faced with the anonymous picture of a stranger in latest Christian Nold‘s provocative installation. Over 14,000 people in one month cast their vote in the ‘Community Metrics in Nottingham (UK) and decide ‘live’ who of the volunteers should be deported: a sort of ‘friendly fascism’, a dystopian version of Facebook, a tease out of many reality TV shows.

The installation prompted me to read again (that’s what is good about radical art!) Emmanuel Levinas’ ideas on ethics: for the French philosopher, whose family was wiped out by the Holocaust, ethics begins with the direct encounter with the face of the Other. This action is ethical because, rather than knowing, and hence objectifying the other, by way of static representation, in the face-to-face encounter,

‘The face of the Other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves in me…the Other signals but does not present themselves’ ((E. Levinas, cited in R. Durie. Face to Face: directions in contemporary women’s portraiture’)) .

There is a sense in which, by making an image of this overflowing, by reducing the Other to a set of conventions, a-priori categories, and image-repertoire, we might be perpetrating a form of violence, which hence denies the alterity expressed by the face of the Other.

For Skeggs (2004) ((B. Skeggs, Class, Self, and Culture, 2004: 155)) , rather, in the urban context that brings people into contact, “these encounters force a reading of proximate bodies and, in some cases, generate a need for boundary maintenance. It is not just the encounter, but the relationships generated from the encounter between bodies that rely on prior systems of inscription – rhetoric, representation, discourse – that…positions some groups as the ground of fixity, otherness, strangeness and danger”.

This opens a big problem for representation, especially visual, to the extent that the object of representation always falls under the power of thought. Jacques Lacan notoriously develops a new form of epistemology based on the Four Discourses (Master, University, Hysteric, and Analyst), which produce four respective apprehensions to knowledge. As Kirsten Campbell explains it ((K. Campbell, ‘Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology’, Routledge, 2004: 37-39)) :

‘Reality is a function of discourse, for discourse produces both the world that is known, and the only world that can be known. Knowledge is contingent upon the discursive position of the knower. However, that subjective structure is necessarily an effect of discursive structure. By taking up a speaking position, the knower thereby is enmeshed in the fundamental relations of discourse…Discourse produces the known object, since the object can only be represented through signifying structures. The act of knowing is an act of representation that the stable structures of signifying chains produce. Therefore, knowledge itself has a discursive structure and thereby is rethought as the product of signification. [Crucially] In later Lacan’s epistemology, what is know is inseparable from how it is known‘ (cit: 54-55, my emphasis).

But, what is the nature of this objectification? According to Derrida ((Jacques Derrida: ‘Right of inspection’, photographs by Marie-Francoise Plissart; New York, Monacelli Press, 1998)) , there is an unequal exchange between the viewer and the subject portrayed: the former holds a position within which is inscribed the power to dominate, whilst the latter, the photographed face, is silent because it cannot express or represent itself, the source of its significance is then placed in the viewer. There is then an intrinsic rhetoric, a grammar, a symbolic practice, a pose of the act of taking photographs of others, a division of positions between ‘looking at’ and ‘looked at’, a structural binary determination that is not easily broken. How can we achieve a grammar of non-violence in visual representation?

‘A true photograph of the face – one which is not objectifying, one which does not deny the faciality of the face – would be one which ‘represents’ the unpresentable look of the face’ (Durie, cit:38).

One way of representing the face of the other respectfully is in the radical involvement of the subject within the dynamics of representation. That is, in a process that goes beyond the “shooting back” techniques of the recent years. For instance, the different techniques of self portraiture might instigate a loop of signification between the looker and the looked at, ‘a loop which excludes any possible interruptions from an outsider, who might want to determine the meaning of the subject, and hence objectifying her, from a privileged position beyond the frame’ (ibidem: 50). Or something deeper, that question the overall image of ourselves as founded on particular images which are stored in our memory and which are the product of various photographic practices (first of all the photo album, or the family portrait). Jo Spence’s and Rosy Martin’s phototherapy seems to address this difficulty: the subject is invited to re-enact their own perceptions and memories , retaining maximum control on the representation. Photo-therapy is not just about performances, but involves a relationship with the other ((“Family snaps: the meanings of domestic photography” / edited by Jo Spence and Patricia Holland. London: Virago , 1991)) . ‘The aim of the practice is to interrupt the objectifying influence of these images on our self-perception, reconstructing or reinventing the images in order that they might work with the subject in the creation of her or his self-image’ (in Durie, cit: 30). But is it there a ‘real’ face? An image of oneself to be held upon against the performative? In what sense Barthes declared: ‘The mask is the meaning”?

What these examples might imply is that, if ‘discursive structures delimit what is thinkable and signifiable as knowledge, [then] to change those structures is to change how we know the world’ (Campbell, cit: 55). In this sense, we might say with John Berger  that the relationship between what we see and what we know is never settled. Meanings exist only at risk, they are never fixed, never arrested.

Simmel wrote a brief and very important article ‘The Stranger’ (1908), in which the notion of ‘estrangement’ has some flexibility, according to the shifting notion of ‘human commonness’. As I read it, he makes a crucial link between the alterity of the stranger and the affective bond of community. I think Simmel’s position embeds the discourse on representations of types, very similar to the one highlighted in the post. Playing with the concepts of nearness and distance, he links the ’stranger-danger’ discourse to the symbolic construction of community. The ‘estrangement’ happens “when the consciousness that only the quite general is common, stresses that which is not common” ((George Simmel, ‘The Stranger’, 1908/1950: p. 3)) .
But, I ask, how do we get to that consciousness? What role has photographic representation in the construction of the symbolic community? What notions of homogeneity and togetherness are we prioritizing when we attempt to photograph what we see as a ‘community’? And, what kind of idea of community this discourse imply in the first place?
Others, like Richard Sennet, privilege the encounter with strangers as at the very heart of urban living, from which an incomplete sense of personal identity, as well as re-assembled communities (I think here of Jan-Luc Nancy and Iris Marion Young), might emerge. Others, so to speak, might refuse a blase’ attitude to the metropolis. I think there is hope in Levinas’ ethics.

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2009 02 08 pa_card Framing the City
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A place for art in place-making?

[keywords: art integrated in urban design, modernist art, permanent features of the landscape, agents and commissions]

There is a sense in which the extensive use of arts in public development helps to marginalise communities rather than regenerate them. Urban development for instance has been increasingly creating ‘sharply delineated (geographic and conceptual) zones of success which define counter spaces of failure, and separate monolithic corporate culture, which increasingly stands for the city, from the diversity of street culture…set up an adversarial social model: good affluence against defiling deprivation’ ((M. Miles, ‘Arts, Space and the City’, 1997, Routledge)) . The issue of the audience is of course central, so it is the question of who might feel as part of it (remember J. Jacob’s New Urbanism and S. Zukin’s ‘pacification by cappuccino’?). Besides, arts-led regeneration has often the side effect of increasing property prices, and further  can cause residual residents to be priced-out (gentrification). Finally, arts can provide a helpful hand to the problem of image, recently associated to mega projects (e.g. Canary Wharf), in which the ‘beautiful’ is often mixed up with the ‘opportune’ and the ‘good’. Professionals of the place-making, art experts, space designers, are often brought in, increasing the sense of detachment of locals.

‘Art in development aids this socially divisive process by aestheticizing it, in ignoring the social impact of development, art is complicit in the consequent social fragmentation’ (cited: 106).

Generally speaking, most of the commissions are given either to make a place or a community (sometimes even give them a heart!), or to give a sense of visual cohesion to the whole: in this context, art is used as instrument of pacification, filtered by funding structures and their sanitizing effects. ‘No one seems to propose art as adding difference, or what Sennett terms ‘disorder’, to a site’ (Miles, cit: 127). There would be no funding, no commission, no residency! Imagine that!

‘Art in urban development is a case of hegemony [in Gramscian terms] in which the status quo, that is, freedom for capital to increase and the unfreedom for the majority of the population to determine the conceptualization of the city, is preserved, it locates art in a domain which is outside political contantion…perhaps this is exacly the kind of function for which modernist art is suited’ (Miles, cit: 131).

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2009 02 04 pa_card Framing the City
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Trans-photography

A very interesting lecture indeed by photographer and activist Sara Davidmann, PhD and Researcher at LCC London, who showed us ((MA in Photography and Urban Culture at Goldsmiths)) many photos from her collection of visual ethnography with transgender and transsexual people. Her fairly recent paper, Border Trouble: photography, strategies, and transsexual identities, offers a good background to the discussion and gives an idea of the very important issues at stake. Last, but not least, ethical issues around visual representation, power relationships in portraiture photography, the potential for photography to constitute a critical/technological intervention, and performativity in public and private (e. g. studio) spheres.

But, I want to highlight two other things that particularly struck me: the issue of in/visibility and the conundrum of language vs. practise. The former opens on a consideration of symbolic representation and ownership of own image in the visual public sphere. Transgender people are willing to become invisible, Davidmann maintains, in order to be accepted in the social norm, which wants a strict binary distinction between genders.  The issue of safety in public space here, I guess, is crucial – hence the urge to comply with the visual stereotype of the male or of the female. As it is the issue of ‘medicalization’, that is, the tendency of western culture to push deviance to the safe border of psy-disciplines as well as towards surgery: the idea being of ‘fixing’ the wrong bodies. The paradox is completed when, looking at the incredible series of pictures taken over years by Davidmann, the private sphere is then perceived safe enough to let the proper self be as it wants to be.  Which one is the social performance for transsexual people, the public ‘norm’ or the ‘passing’? Thus, unsettling dramatically notion of performance.trans-ition

The other issue I found particularly poignant is the insistence on the inadequacy of our language categories (most notably written texts) to describe and hence make acceptable – so at least it would sound – situations at the border, in-between binary constructions. Yes, it is true we need to equip ourselves of a new language, and to go beyond the binary distinction of gender, as well as of sex, but I think this is not enough. I borrow an expression from Thrift (2008), according to whom: ‘Practices are property of the practises themselves, not of the actors’. Let’s look at the problem of the public toilets, the embarrassment or difficulty of going to the loo in a gendered world: two signs on the door of the cinema or the pub, no other chance. The  action, which any of us has to perform at least a few times a day, and to which most of us do not pay attention as it is taken for granted, might become a big issue for some people.

Pace Judith Butler, the social construction of gender is a practical experience lived day by day, and involves all sort of conflicts, misunderstanding, resistance, defences, and so on. Davidmann’s critical and militant photography seems to me to do more and better.

Very interesting stuff, provocative and problematic, but full of insights…

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2009 01 22 pa_card Framing the City
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The Body at War

I was daring thinking about a densely packed city under heavy attack from air strikes and cannons. I have tried to do this exercise for the last couple of days, sometimes at night time, in the almost absolute silence of our sleeping city. Will the market be there? Would I sleep comfortably ever again? How big is my grief? Would I ever recover from the death of my family members, my neighbours, my friends? Who keeps me informed of the events?

But, more importantly, and consequentially, I have been trying to imagine how everyday life gets distressed, changed, and adapts to the new dramatic regime. How would I go to the loo? Is there any water? How would I post my blog without electricity?  Could I send my children playing outside during the few hours ceasefire? How could I take my son to school? Is there any school?
I just cant get it, without the risk of falling into rhetoric, or worse, into a patronising attitude.  I cannot but think in fact I belong to that privileged minority in the western world. I can only be a spectator or worse watch the event on telly. But on the other hand I do believe that it is not just spectacle: the reality of the war out there needs some deep thoughts, reflections, and critiques. I do agree with the latest writing of Susan Sontag’s on the subject of the grief, the pain, the representation of the wars of the others. She writes:

‘To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism. It universalises the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment. It assumes that everyone is a spectators…[and then, discussing Jeff Wall's famous transparency 'Dead Troops Talk', 1996]… “We” – this “We” is everyone who has never experienced anything like what went through – don’t understand. We don’t get it. We truly cannot imagine what it was like. We can’t imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is – and how normal it becomes. Can’t understand, can’t imagine. That’s what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer stubbornly feels. And they are right’ ((S. Sontag, ‘Looking at War’, The New Yorker, 9/12/02))

Yes, I think Sontag is absolutely right. We don’t understand the direct experience of suffering, but we are eager to represent it. And images are the trickiest medium of all, inexorably real but incredibly able to be bend to this or that party. One example: pictures of dead children at war. They have been used many times either to arrest or to provoke a military action. Again, Sontag:

‘Awareness of the suffering that accumulates in wars happening elsewhere is something constructed. Principally, in the form that is registered by the camera, it flares up, is shared by many people, and fades from view. In contrast to a written account, which, depending on its complexity of thought, references, and vocabulary, is pitched at a larger or smaller readership, a photograph has only one language and it is destined potentially for all…The photographic image [on the other hand] cannot be a simply a transparency of something that happened. It is always the image that someone chose; to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.’ (ibidem).

Following these and other issues about representation, truth, and realism, that I preferred to turn my gaze to the pacifist movement (or I shall say demonstrations) rather than the conflict itself. It feels like there are two binary, parallel, different worlds. A Here and There. A space of suffering and one of representation of this suffering. On the other hand though, the possibility offered by the Internet are now wider, I mean, the chance to communicate, listening, interacting with the Others much more developed and sophisticated than ever before. For these reasons, I started reading, researching and annotating blogs from the warzone, mostly from Gaza, sometimes from people directly connected to the denied citizens (exiles, relatives, aid workers). I believe that in this way the spaces of representation and the representation of spaces collide to some extent. The pain of the others might be reflected and reproduced, bounced back and fro to Others, participated to some extent at last. What I am interested into is the direct experience of ordinary people under attack (rhetorically referred to as ‘civilians’ in the death toll), the emphasis being on the actual description of their daily life, rather than the much talked about political issues. I slowly started to feel a sense of grief, a general anxiety of mourning, and an inexorable sliding into the character of the sympathetic pacifist, rather different thing from a Palestinian Father under siege: this would have been at very least pretentious (a sort of Butlerian discursive magic spell).

In particular, I found incredibly inspiring and touching a blog from a Palestinian journalist, with a foot in the States and the mind in Gaza, as many exiles on the border, in-between identities and statuses. The reason I chose it from the many is that it comes from a mother and talks about the everyday life of exiles as well as continuously reminding us of the terrible situation in Gaza. The title is exemplar and I invite anyone to have a read:

Raising Yousuf and Noor: diary of a Palestinian mother.

Also of particular interest and full of ‘hands-on’ information from the Occupied Territories, a blog from Sharyn Lock, a human rights worker based in Gaza.

http://talestotell.wordpress.com/

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2009 01 08 pa_card Blogging the City
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Capitalism’s meltdown and the Body (II)

Another comment on my post ‘Capitalism’s meltdown and the Body’ allows me to expand further on these issues. The commentator remarks that the shot is not candid, since the people are smiling back to the camera as they are aware of the presence of the photographer. As such there is an element of performance or -as I read it – of artificiality in the shot which, in turn, reminds of a ‘symbolic interactionist’ encounter rather than a non-representational one.

My reply is two-fold: on one side, I need to rehearse the issue of poor visual literacy in Sociology, and I will use the artist Jeff Wall to challenge the possibility of ‘true reality’ and objective shots in photography. On the other hand, I will briefly engage on a more sociological terrain of theoretical debates around different notions of performance, which will foreground a discourse on identity. In order to do that, I will use Judith Butler idea of postmodernity applied to gender analysis, the array of criticisms that this position has arisen in Sociology and Gender Studies, and finally I will open to the non-representational idea of performance.

Jeff Wall is famous for grand tableaux, which he shoots in sections over several months before stitching together the final image using computer montage. He has been known to spend almost two years on a single picture, with actors and crew to shoot scenes of the everyday ((“And I like to work with commonplace material because I think It’s magical to be able to make a picture that imparts a strong aesthetic experience in spite of unprepossessing subject matter. It’s much more interesting to conjure something out of nothing.”)) . He has used the term ‘cinematography’ to refer to his work, emphasizing the ways in which it has been affected by the various production processes normally identified with filmmaking rather than still photography. He teases out the myth of reality outside perception to the point that he is able to re-create in studio the ‘decisive moment’ of Cartier-Besson, in which the elements of an external world join together at a decontextualized point, outside time, a pure aesthetic moment ‘when form takes on an essential meaning and used to provide an individualistic rationale for a visual coherence or equilibrium within fragmentary instants’ (( Celia Lury, ‘Prosthetic Culture, 1998:167)): the photographer’s ability is an intuitive gift of the individual, not brought into being by socio-biological and temporal circumstances. “There’s a fine line between fact and fiction, between a moment and a perfect representation of that moment” – Wall said. His best work comes from never having to choose ((“Once I understood that there was a means to introduce a form of theatre, or artifice, into photography, it also open the door to understanding that this theatricality was compatible with the ‘documentary style’ of street photography. Mimic (1982) was my move to try to bring street photography and ‘cinematography’ together.”)) .

stage0051I want to use his work here to criticize the idea of performative aspects of identity as expression of never ending exercise of will, disconnected from the web of social practices, context and history, in which they are embedded, sometimes identified with Judith Butler’s postmodern critique of gender: “Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a rigid regulatory frame which congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a “natural” kind of being” (Butler, 1990: 33). Although Butler does not discuss language, it is easy to see how speech in particular might be analysed as a ‘repeated stylization of the body’.

As Lois McNay (2004) explains: ‘Essentially, the problem with J. Butler’s account of performative agency is that it is not an account of agency per se, but an account of some of the discoursive pre-conditions that must prevail for certain type of linguistic innovation to be possible. Butler posits agency as a property of language conceived as an abstract structure, rather than a situated type or action or interaction. [This notion of agency doesn't] address adequately enough how agency is determined by access to symbolic and material resources’ ((L. McNay, Agency and Experience, 2004)) . On the other hand, Bourdieu situates his agents in social and symbolic space, in which ‘actors occupy positions within the social fields that are determined both by the distribution of resources within a given field and also by the structural relations between that field and others’ (ibidem). Crucially the inscriptions of these social positions within and among fields are carried over by the bodies of the subjects (as well as material objects and their interactions with the subjects, I shall add), what is known as Habitus, a pre-reflexive disposition of the body. In Bourdieu’s dynamic model, the representation of the selves and of the others (the symbolic) informs the actions and interactions of the agents, but in turn, these representations are contextualised to the extent that are determined by the social structures.

And isn’t there a performative element in each of us which reflect our own subjectivity into a mirror of representational norms? What is often called mimesis? I think that, if would be unreasonable to deny this (babies as old as 41 minutes have been seen as imitating), on the other hand, it would seem superficial ((since agents are generally understood to identify with norms or, perhaps better said, an agreement between the dispositions of agents and the demands of a field is generally assumed’ Lisa Adkins about Bourdieu’s notion of practice, 2004)) not to consider the iterative interplay between these classifying norms and the ever emergent, incomplete identity (‘ambivalent mimesis’ for Lisa Adkins, 2004). Social imaginaries, in other words, cannot be contained (Thrift, 2008: 12). And would it be a good interviewing practice to prompt the informants, in order to make them come out from the shell of their representational selves? Isn’t the interview a process, rather than fixed scripts? In other words, we might want to think of the event itself as a disruption of the theoretical framework. Besides, most of social interaction is exactly that: a joint action, able to work across different social fields, often in an adaptive and unconscious manner. In other words, I maintain, practices are not propriety of actors but of the practices themselves. On the other hand, though, there is a sense in which the studio or the laboratory provides a very poor metaphor to be able to capture the complexity of the world: so to say, the body cannot contain all. There is always an emergent element of free-play, a ‘personal authorship’ ((Thrift, 2008)) that comes out from the ongoing creation of affects, through encounters. In this sense, performance is central for non-representational theory. As Thrift (2008) remarks:

‘Nearly every action is reaction to joint action, to being-as-a-pair, to the digestion of the intricacies of talk, body language, even an ambient sense of the situation to hand…this is why Non-representational Theory privileges play: play is understood as a perpetual human activity with immense affective significance…Practices are the productive concatenations that have been constructed out of all manner of resources and which provide the basic intelligibility of the world: they are not therefore propriety of actors but of the practices themselves. Actions presuppose practices and not vice versa… A non-representational outlook depends upon understanding and working with the everyday as a set of skills, which are highly performative’.

In this sense the metaphor of the mime is a pertinent one: the actors are going out in a specific place, they cannot use any words, just facial expression, their bodies and of course objects. We don’t know what and how they are going to perform. And especially what kind of audience they are going to meet: we can only guess.

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2008 12 13 pa_card Framing the City
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