The camera is a weapon

"He is dead and he is going to die ..."

Gardner's photographs of Lewis Payne are portraits, documents not photojournalism as such. Payne may not have had a choice but he had the opportunity to confront the camera. The same applies to the portraits from Cambodian genocide. Photojournalism is voyeurism. There are going to be a lot more photographs of the last moments of life: the view of the weapon. It's something new.   

Granta, "Once Again, Germany Defines Who Is a Jew | Part I"

 "Forensic Architecture".  I said I was going to write more, but I'm not sure I have the patience.

Weizman:  I don’t think it’s controversial to say that freedom of expression needs to be measured in relation to hate speech, and the safety and dignity of survivors. 

It's not controversial unless you defend freedom of speech. Giving the state the right to measure speech led to the censorship that he opposes. But of course he follows the German idea of freedom, which is also the academic model for permissible speech.

Kant: A lesser degree of civic freedom, however, creates room to let that free spirit expand to the limits of its capacity.

And this becomes scholastic perversity of Forensic Architecture's "investigative aesthetics", which is the model of journalism as art, and the parallel fantasy that art is "truth".

And we're back the this. 

Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability, published by Zone, of course. 

But the most offensive thing about he piece in Granta is the pathological blindness to things at the core of German- and European-Israel relations. Herzl was right."The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies", once we leave. Weizman and EDB are too close to their German and Zionist roots, too loyal to both, to see the obvious.  

The photographer is no stranger to history; he knows it is something that happens later. In the actual moment history is made, it is usually made in terror and confusion, and so it is up to people like him—paid witnesses—to have the presence of mind to attend to its manufacture. The photographer has that presence of mind and has had it since he was a young man. When he was twenty-one years old, he was standing right behind Bobby Kennedy when Bobby Kennedy was shot in the head. His jacket was spattered with Kennedy's blood, but he jumped on a table and shot pictures of Kennedy's open and ebbing eyes, and then of Ethel Kennedy crouching over her husband and begging photographers—begging him—not to take pictures.

Richard Drew has never done that. Although he has preserved the jacket patterned with Kennedy's blood, he has never not taken a picture, never averted his eye. He works for the Associated Press. He is a journalist. It is not up to him to reject the images that fill his frame, because one never knows when history is made until one makes it. It is not even up to him to distinguish if a body is alive or dead, because the camera makes no such distinctions, and he is in the business of shooting bodies, as all photographers are, unless they are Ansel Adams.

Journalism is utilitarian hackwork: it's important because it's necessary. Pretension undermines what makes it serious.

Sinatra with a cold is Picasso without paint, Ferrari without fuel—only worse.

But photojournalism is just porn. 

The 9-11 story I remember before others, among those I've read—I watched the second tower fall while standing on a bridge—was told by Maurice Sendak. I've only found two references to it on the web and neither is in the context I remember. but it doesn't matter

“Children,” he says, “are not ‘regular people’. Children are punched into regularity; they have to be, I guess: you can’t have them being what they are forever, running around like maniacs, terrorists, saboteurs. They are closer to death, they are closer to the whole thing. They know a lot. They feel sorry for their parents. When the Twin Towers fell, I have a friend whose daughter is in a school down there – and when it all happened, they go down, and there’s all the fire and the smoke, and they ran and grabbed her and said, are you all right? And she said: ‘Oh, it’s so exciting, with all the fire engines, and Daddy, I saw something I’d never seen before – I saw little birdies on fire and they were flying all around’. And they took her home, and calmed her down, and put her to bed and he kissed her goodnight and then she called him back. ‘Daddy,’ she said, ‘I have a secret. I know they weren’t birdies, Daddy.’ She had protected him for as long as she could from her knowing; knowing what that would do to him. That’s what they do. They are capable of that.” 

As long as I started down this road:"Uncontroversially" George Bush's crimes "vastly exceed bin Laden's". 

My review of Zero Dark Thirty

3/24
It was going to be new post, but they make a nice pair.

Jane Mayer

I joined the NRA at camp, won sharpshooter medal, was 8 when JFK was shot, 13 when MLK & RFK were shot, as a reporter I observe & don't join anything, but have seen enough innocent slaughter: I'm joining my daughter and the other kids at the march today.

repeat

Political scientists seek to understand politics, not engage in politics. Yet our profession has always had strong normative commitments at its foundation: a conviction that peace is preferable to war, freedom to tyranny, justice to injustice, equality to inequality, democracy to authoritarianism. As John Adams wrote in 1780, in the Massachusetts Constitution, the fundamental premise of American self-government is that it “be a government of laws, and not of men.”

It is in this spirit that we are voicing our collective concern about Donald Trump.

"I asked a Marine if he was a soldier first or citizen. He said 'Semper Fi'."

Objectivity is impossible, and the ideal of objectivity ends in passivity. I've said it a thousand times. I've watched people beginning to come to terms with it. I've said that a thousand times too.

After the inauguration, Washington DC

---

Anchorman, etc
imdb

Because people are saying it's going to win a Pulitzer.

partial repeat

Art is intimate empiricism. It's what makes you cry over a picture of a dead baby while another picture would simply make you a sad for a moment. It's the illusion of proximity. Why were people so upset by the pic of the dead kid on the beach? Because he was physically intact. He looked like he was sleeping but he was stiff, like an abandoned doll, a lonely image of death. That's what "aesthetics" means. But the photos themselves are crap illustration, because they aren't made to show you how they work.

Photojournalism is manipulative and voyeuristic. A mature work of art with an image of a dead child teaches you to respect the distance between you and others. You don't believe the fantasy that you're the child's parent; you know you're not and you know you're feeling the wish you were, and that's where it leaves you, in your own world, re-centered of your own world but with a respect for the experience even the tragic experience of others.

Photojournalism is cheap sentiment and cheap politics. It's pity and self-pity, not concern.

From 2004

On the front page of the NY Times this morning, below the fold, is a photograph taken be a camera hovering two feet above the ground, of a naked emaciated child with her head leaning on her mother's thigh.

Get up and walk away from the keyboard, into the middle of whatever room you're in. Bend forward and put your hands in front of your face as if holding a camera; close one eye and look towards the ground with the other and imagine that child at your feet. Move your index finger downwards toward your thumb and make a clicking sound, and see if you can understand what you've become

And as long as we're on the subject, meet the men behind The White Helmets [archive.org]
"Edward", no last name.
The donors page lists the UK, Netherlands, Japan and Norway, but not USAID.
USAID lists them.
https://www.usaid.gov/political-transition-initiatives/syria
"politcal transition initiatives". The words don't appear on the page itself.

Program Highlights
SRP provides assistance to moderate civilian entities at the national, provincial and local levels. All activities include robust outreach components to amplify the efforts of moderate actors and strengthen public support for moderate values. Illustrative examples of SRP programming impacts include the following:

• Increasing popular support for moderate actors and values in Syria. Assistance to provincial and local councils to provide basic municipal services including keeping schools and hospitals open, electricity and water flowing, and trash and rubble off the streets. SRP also assists the councils with records management, repairing small infrastructure and rehabilitating public spaces such as cemeteries and schools.  

• Saving lives through support to emergency responders. More than $23 million in assistance to civil defense teams which act as impartial emergency responders to everything from indiscriminate regime barrel bombings to winter storm relief and firefighting. To date, Syrian emergency responders have saved over 40,000 lives.  

• Preserving moderate space and deterring extremist influence. SRP helps moderate actors remain relevant through community events such as clean-up initiatives, graffiti campaigns, local council outreach events and youth activities. 

"Moderate actors", includes Al Qaeda, and others who behead children and post the video on youtube.
See previous.
Compare Yemen

The June staff withdrawal, which U.S. officials say followed a lull in air strikes in Yemen earlier this year, reduces Washington's day-to-day involvement in advising a campaign that has come under increasing scrutiny for causing civilian casualties. A Pentagon statement issued after Reuters disclosed the withdrawal acknowledged that the JCPC, as originally conceived, had been "largely shelved" and that ongoing support was limited, despite renewed fighting this summer.

"The cooperation that we've extended to Saudi Arabia since the conflict escalated again is modest and it is not a blank check," Pentagon spokesman Adam Stump said in a statement.

U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the reduced staffing was not due to the growing international outcry over civilian casualties in the 16-month civil war that has killed more than 6,500 people in Yemen, about half of them civilians.

I had a little fun today with a geek academic, a black nerd PhD. He was earnest and irate, angry and moralizing, but missed the point entirely. Cops are now mil-geeks. They saw the woman as a threat, because she couldn't be anything else. The result is comic. As I said later, someone should find out the cops' names and send the pic to their mothers, and ask each of them what they think of their son's behavior: scared of a girl.

The image has spread because of the absurdity. Little military rationalists, rendered impotent.
The only appropriate response and the best response as a matter of politics, is laughter.
---
The image is comic, but it's a shot of motion, and one of a series. The cops moved in a grabbed her and walked her back behind their lines, under arrest. It's all pathetic theater. And the woman was playing her part.

I just need you people to know. I appreciate the well wishes and love, but this is the work of God. I am a vessel! Glory to the most high! I'm glad I'm alive and safe. And that there were no casualties that I have witnessed first hand.

"I am a vessel!".  It's all political cosplay, teenage boys and teenage girls.

Terry Turner is dead.

More at Survival International

I first read him when I was living with Graeber in Chicago in 87.  He didn't publish much. He gave his students copies of unpublished manuscripts.

repeats

Guardian "Amazonian tribe take initiative to protect their lands from dam project"

In September, a group of Munduruku made one last attempt to put pressure on the authorities. Making another long journey to Brasilia, they met Maria Augusta Assirati, then president of Funai. In an exchange filmed by one of the Indians on his mobile phone, Assirati conceded: “You are right. It is essential that your land is guaranteed because the land is under pressure from loggers, miners and a series of other elements.” 

However, in a tacit admission that she was being sidelined, Assirati added: “But I can’t dictate the priority interests of the government.” Nine days later, she left office. A few weeks after that, the Munduruku started the long process of digging posts in the ground to mark out their land.

Terry Turner, Chicago and Cornell, on the history of tribes with cameras.

"I realized that this is a way a very material way in which you can study the process of the formation of representations. It's a material… it's an objective correlative as TS Eliot might put it of that process and it it's a it was profoundly interesting. I thought it's an interesting …it's a field method. You know, my one contribution to I think the literature on methodology or field methods: become an assistant film editor of an indigenous cameraman as he edits footage. If you’ve done a shot record you have a total inventory of what the raw material, of the representation is, and then you cans see how he plays over this raw material and shapes it into a finished construction."

When he refers to people giving cameras to the Kayapo before he got there, I assume he's referring to visits in the 80's. He's been working with the Kayapo since 1962.

"You know, my one contribution to I think the literature on methodology or field methods: become an assistant film editor of an indigenous cameraman..." He's not laughing when he says that. He's smiling; I cracked up.
---
Terry Turner: The Kayapo against the dams again

This will not be the first indigenous encampment organized by the Kayapo in their effort to stop the building of dams on the Xingú. In 1989, when the government first set out to implement its plan for a giant hydroelectric complex on the Xingú, with financial support from the World Bank, the Kayapo led a great rally of 40 indigenous nations at Altamira against the scheme, setting up an encampment of several hundred Indians at a Catholic retreat center just outside the town. The five-day rally was extensively covered by national and international media, and succeeded in persuading the World Bank to withdraw its planned loan for the construction of the dams.

I don't like anthropological films. Turner put himself in the position of an anthropologist studying filmmakers.

Art and The Auschwitz Album

Humanity is in particularity and partiality; the universal is literally inhuman, and there's no way to resolve the contradiction without sacrificing one or the other. ...

It's inhuman to deny intimacy, even the illusory intimacy of art.

The top two photographs will be remembered. The bottom one won't. Some people have said the only reason is context.

Alva Noë: How Art Reveals the Limits of Neuroscience

my comment, on the fly.  Noë is an idiot.

Discussion of aesthetics is silly. Actors don't discuss the aesthetics of a performance of Hamlet. Consistency, nuance, dynamics, yes. Aesthetics no. Lawyers don't talk about aesthetics when talking about how to seduce a jury. Martin Luther King didn't talk about the aesthetics of religious oratory.

Art is the communication of experience, not of ideas; it's the communication of subjectivity. An actor's job is to make you feel emotions; their job is to manipulate. They don't have to feel a thing. But as artists and not simply con men their job is to lie while demonstrating how they're doing it, to make you cry while reminding you that you're crying for nothing, while still making you cry, so that you understand. They lie to you and smile at you and you thank them for lying and they bow.

Art is intimate empiricism. It's what makes you cry over a picture of a dead baby while another picture would simply make you a sad for a moment. It's the illusion of proximity. Why were people so upset by the pic of the dead kid on the beach? Because he was physically intact. He looked like he was sleeping but he was stiff, like an abandoned doll, a lonely image of death. That's what "aesthetics" means. But the photos themselves are crap illustration, because they aren't made to show you how they work.

Photojournalism is manipulative and voyeuristic. A mature work of art with an image of a dead child teaches you to respect the distance between you and others. You don't believe the fantasy that you're the child's parent; you know you're not and you know you're feeling the wish you were, and that's where it leaves you, in your own world, re-centered of your own world but with a respect for the experience even the tragic experience of others.

Photojournalism is cheap sentiment and cheap politics. It's pity and self-pity, not concern.

What really disgusts me about all this happy-talk-philosophizing about aesthetics is that it says nothing about the importance of art as describing pain and moral ambiguity as experience. It's not art it's "design". It says nothing about The Wire or The Sopranos or Breaking Bad, and that's just American TV. I won't even bring up the stuff you've never heard of.

The difference between design and art is the difference between the optimism of the makers of Grand Theft Auto and the moral pessimism of gangsta rap.

Of course neuroscience can explain it. It can explain away your entire life and the life of the condescending ass who's explaining it to you. Determinism means there's no difference between Alex Rosenberg and Lady Gaga. What then?

Tell me about it, assholes 

on and on...

If visual art were taken to be like other arts, and stripped of the association with philosophy and finery, the age of mechanical reproduction would have begun with Gutenberg. The sense that a photograph can be said to act as an index, in Peirce’s terminology, now a ubiquitous reference, is the end of photography as art. It’s the definition of photography as illustration, the model of Gerome and Winterhalter and Madison Ave.

Using the terms of Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotics, though the photograph appears to be an icon (through resemblance) and though it is to some extent a symbol (principally through the use of the camera as a codifying device), its proper sign type, which it shares with no other visual representation (except the cast and, of course, cinema), is the index, i.e. a sign causally related to its object.

The viewer is said not to be looking at the photograph, but at the thing depicted. To repeat what I wrote above: a Holbein portrait is first a painting, second a Holbein, third a portrait, and fourth a portrait of. According to the art theorist Thierry de Duve writing in the journal, October, in 1978, -theorists being neither historians nor critics but both and more - photography has succeed where all others failed in reversing that order. And what’s left?

How does one relate to a space of such precision? One thing is certain: it doesn't give way to a reading procedure. For an image to be read requires that language be applied to the image. And this in turn demands that the perceived space be receptive to an unfolding into some sort of narrative. Now, a point is not subject to any description, nor is it able to generate a narration. Language fails to operate in front of the pin-pointed space of the photograph, and the onlooker is left momentarily aphasic. Speech in turn, is reduced to the sharpness of a hiccup. It is left unmoored, or better, suspended between two moorings that are equally refused. Either it grasps at the imaginary by connecting to the referential series, in order to develop the formerly into a plausible chronology, only to realize that this attempt will never leave the realm of fiction. Or it grasps at the symbolic by connecting to the superficial series, in order to construct upon the here a plausible scenography; and in this case also the attempt is structurally doomed. Such a shock, such a breakdown in the symbolic function, such a failure of any secondary process -as Freud puts it- bears a name. It is trauma.

de Duve ends on a high note of grand intellectualism and cheap melodrama.

Hegel's prophecy that art was about to come to an end was published in 1839, the very same year in which Talbot and Daguerre independently made public the invention of photography. It might be more than mere coincidence.

His piece is a discussion of long and short exposures, time and snapshot, which he treats as distinct up to a point. If he were more of a historian and less of a philosopher he’d have noted that the advances that made the snapshot possible did the same for cinema and collage, both of which returned language to photography even accepting the limits of photography itself as he describes them. Long exposures have a compressed but visceral sense of narrative, and that narrative quality returns expanded exponentially in film. Photography though ubiquitous even after acceptance as an art was still kept apart, as a smaller form; collage was accepted as immediately as any of its competitors, while film emerged as the most important visual art of the century. Finally although it’s easy to blame the market for novelty for photography’s place now in contemporary art it makes more sense to argue that photography would never be fully integrated into the model of art comparable to painting until it was seen as independent from its role as index. It’s a sign of just have much we’ve changed, and how much we haven’t that the contemporary exemplars of the honesty of Manet’s Olympia are Cindy Sherman’s portraits of herself.

Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida, includes a photograph from 1865, of one of John Wilkes Booth’s collaborators before his execution. Barthes’ caption reads, "He is dead and he is going to die ..." That is the base ground on which any photographer has to build if they want to make anything that will be remembered as anything other than one anonymous image among others. Barthes certainly would never wish that anonymity on his own writing. A couple of years ago as I was walking out of the annual show put on by the Association of International Photo Art Dealers, AIPAD, in NY, a well dressed couple were hurrying in, the man obviously on the prowl. As they walked by me the man turned to the woman, “Remember, it’s it not the image… It’s the material!” No serious connoisseur of photography, rich or poor, critic or collector, has ever been interested in photographs as index as opposed to art: the relation of formal construct to the world. Photographs on paper are physical things; until recently the prints were made by hand and eye, and nothing like the images in a book or on a screen. Film and video are immaterial, intangible, but made of thousands of images in series. Different forms have different capacities, strengths and weaknesses. Philosophers like to claim now to find exceptions, to discover or invent. Mechanically produced images and words are now the rule. Before saying they do new things you should be able to show they don’t do old things in new ways.

Also here.

Alexander Gardner: Portrait of Lewis Payne 1865
"He is dead and he is going to die ..."

The above approximates the layout of one page from Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida.

I've never forgotten seeing it for the first and only time, leafing through it at a bookstore in the mid 80s. It's the first time I understood the taste for cheap melodrama underneath all the pretensions of high theory. I was amazed. I was shocked.
Rewriting the paper. Nothing new except I'm reading the stupidity I avoided reading years ago.

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Fuck the war.

Journalism is ambulance chasing, it's an important part of democracy, but it's not an art. Serial is "true crime" theater, trying to make art out of the living whether those depicted like it or not. It's the moral equivalent of photojournalism, war or trauma photography: poeticizing, voyeuristic "artistic" illustration. Serial was cheap before it was offensive—illustration before it was soft-core porn—but it became popular for the same reasons critics saw problems. Its popularity was based in prurience, and in getting away with prurience under the guise of seriousness. Without pretension, cheap is just cheap, and harmless, or even in the case of journalism important as a trade. It's possible for journalism or photojournalism to become art -as I've said before it was an old standard among journalists that the best writers were sportswriters- but that that has nothing to do with seriousness of purpose; it's the ability to recognized when it might be needed.

The affirmative form of the assumptions of the makers of Serial are in their own self-images, and it's safe to say that many critics of the show are equally as optimistic about themselves

It won a Pulitzer.

In retrospect especially, this post by Eric Rauchway, who's bemoaned "our anti-elitist day and age" [I've quoted it enough] is pretty funny.

Guardian "Amazonian tribe take initiative to protect their lands from dam project"

In September, a group of Munduruku made one last attempt to put pressure on the authorities. Making another long journey to Brasilia, they met Maria Augusta Assirati, then president of Funai. In an exchange filmed by one of the Indians on his mobile phone, Assirati conceded: “You are right. It is essential that your land is guaranteed because the land is under pressure from loggers, miners and a series of other elements.” 

However, in a tacit admission that she was being sidelined, Assirati added: “But I can’t dictate the priority interests of the government.” Nine days later, she left office. A few weeks after that, the Munduruku started the long process of digging posts in the ground to mark out their land.

Terry Turner, Chicago and Cornell, on the history of tribes with cameras.

"I realized that this is a way a very material way in which you can study the process of the formation of representations. It's a material… it's an objective correlative as TS Eliot might put it of that process and it it's a it was profoundly interesting. I thought it's an interesting …it's a field method. You know, my one contribution to I think the literature on methodology or field methods: become an assistant film editor of an indigenous cameraman as he edits footage. If you’ve done a shot record you have a total inventory of what the raw material, of the representation is, and then you cans see how he plays over this raw material and shapes it into a finished construction."

When he refers to people giving cameras to the Kayapo before he got there, I assume he's referring to visits in the 80's. He's been working with the Kayapo since 1962.

"You know, my one contribution to I think the literature on methodology or field methods: become an assistant film editor of an indigenous cameraman..." He's not laughing when he says that. He's smiling; I cracked up.

I don't like photojournalism; the photograph is cheap and voyeuristic. But to articulate is to estheticise; that's one of the aporias we live with. Art communicates: it sharpens and it softens. How do you communicate and respect the otherness of others and of events?

There's a difference between caring for someone, in the sense of emotional attachment, and being attentive to them, to their wishes or their pain. Pain itself is lonely and expressions of sympathy are often theater used to hide incomprehension and fear. I'm watching the old watch their friend die. They have become professionals at this. They are honest actors: the most aware both of the distances between people, and the similarity of their experience.

I wrote that watching my mother's friends watch her die. It's the most profound Fuck You I can think of to the celebrants of American liberalism.

repeat and update. obvious.


The woman in the top image is Bettie Page.

"War photographers are voyeurs of trauma, paparazzi of death, the intimacy in their images the illusory intimacy of porn." I wrote that and then realized what I'd missed before, so I added the third photograph above.

In 2001 at a show of Letizia Battaglia photographs at Aperture, an eye fundamentally perverse.  In the last room there was one photograph taken by a colleague of her dancing at a street festival, her head spinning, her hair away from her face like cables of a carnival ride, her expression a mixture of panic and ecstasy, in love with death.

Weegee wasn't a photojournalist, he was a photographer.  Photojournalists like the members of "camera clubs" want to be "artists", so in there own imaginations somehow doing something moral. The dishonesty means their work is passive, and passivity is the death of art. If art were moral in itself then killers wouldn't know how the dance or play the violin. Art is moral because honesty is moral.

repeat
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NYT: Rome Priests heard confessions Friday in the Circus Maximus in Rome where people had gathered to watch the funeral of Pope John Paul II, broadcast on a giant videoscreen.

Look at the expressions on the faces of the woman and the priest in the foreground: at the informality of their relationship; at his clothing and unshaven face; at the seating arrangement, in the open air; at the figures in the background repeating the action but on the ground, and talking even more as equals. It's so well done I have a hard time thinking it wasn't staged entirely with actors. It's the most beautiful -meaning complex- modern use of Catholic iconography I've seen in a long time, though I haven't seen anything by Almodovar recently. In Hail Mary Godard described the Annunciation as a jet plane flying over a basketball court and managed to have the film condemned by the Pope and win the best Catholic film of the year in Germany.

note taking. more on Sahlins. comments elsewhere

From Dorothy Thompson’s introduction to The Poverty of Theory

“Of course it produced responses. Some of these emerged at an extraordinary evening at a History Workshop conference in Oxford in December 1979. This was for some reason held in a dimly-lit ruined building, and had been set up as a discussion. It ended up however as an emotionally-charged event whose repercussions continued for months if not for years. 

…At the end of the evening a leading History Workshop character asked whether he would continue to publish relevant material. Edward replied that he thought he would not be publishing much of anything for a while, since he felt that his time would be taken up trying to organize opposition to cruise missiles in Britain. The answer was ‘Cruise what Edward?’”

“The answer was ‘Cruise what Edward?’” Rilly.
The rise of the neoliberal academy.

“I expect pissed-off lefties like Terry Turner to be ready to take the fight to the enemy. What I always find so depressing about these periods of academic blood letting is how poorly the ‘scientists’ behave as they extol an ideal of dispassionate objectivity while simultaneously savaging anyone who suggests to them that they may not be living up to their own ego ideal.”

It’s not just the ‘scientists’ Witness an author on this blog “Sahlins move seems to represent a transformation of the conflict out of the arena of measured debate and into the symbolic.”

Such wounded reasonableness. “Why is Sahlins getting so angry?” A question asked from tribal loyalty, except for the fact that its tribal loyalty while denying even the possibility that that’s what it could be.

Tribal loyalty is human. The model of collaborative reason denies politics, so that arguments from authority and dripping with condescension if not outright contempt are allowed against outsiders. “What do women want?” the concerned men ask each other. “Why are they so angry?” Should it mean something that men are all scientists? Should it help their argument? Should it hurt?

Language is politics. The academy needs more open argument not less. It needs intellectual bloodsport to counter bureaucratic politesse, the intellectual model of the courtroom to counter the model of the lab. Courts aren’t barbaric they’re necessary. The defenders of Chagnon, not only “scientists” but petty bureaucrats, pretend politics are beneath them, but they live by it.

It’s not a “kerfuffle” it’s a fight over the definition of moral responsibility. If you don’t want to argue about that, stop pretending you have any intellectual interests at all. You’re just a happy technician. The model of the neoliberal academy.

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I’ll add one more point before bowing out, since things are heating up, as they should.

I had arguments with David Graeber 30 years ago and later in Chicago when I realized. putting it bluntly, that anthropologists as academics no longer understand culture because they don’t understand their relation to the culture they’re a part of.

Any filmmaker will tell you that moral questions are the most important ones. To a humanist they’re the most interesting and most fun. They’re the good stuff. Everything else and you’re just a bricklayer or a file clerk of some sort or another. But here the good stuff is treated as a side issue that’s gotten in the way of science.”The Great Kalahari Debate” The moral questions are front and center. But the debate itself makes people uncomfortable.

The offense taken at Zero Dark 30 was that questions had gotten in the way of answers. What if torture works sometimes, as it did in Germany 10 years ago (Magnus Gäfgen) and it’s still wrong? In Lincoln and Argo it was the other way around. Too many answers not enough questions. And the CIA won the oscar for best picture. Chagnon would never have ended up as important as he is if moral questions were seen as interesting in themselves. Obviously they bored him a bit. And obviously also for some there’s a good career to be made in moralism. But reminding people of that is just another way of avoiding the questions of morality itself. And Chagnon is a moralist, isn’t he? The argument is that his moralism made him an incompetent scientist.

If you’re wondering about your relations with the people you study and you know you can’t treat them the way you treat your mother, just as an experiment spend a week treating your mother the way you’d treat the people you study. And when that makes you scared you know you’ve hit the sweet spot, until you get lazy and your subjects or your mother call you an asshole. And then you get scared again, as you should be. Anthropologists are part scholar and part scientist. Scientists are just plumbers. That’s my side of that argument. 

What do I know about science? I’m only an artist, but I know the only anthropological films that are more than visual file clerking are by Wiseman. He’s one of the most important filmmakers alive and he calls his films "fictions". He keeps his eye right in the sweet spot.

I’m with Sahlins. But I’m too young to feel this old.

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If questions of morality were only practical we wouldn’t need lawyers. As it is, give me the nihilism of lawyers, including and especially underpaid public defenders, over the idealism of philosophers. Lawyers have a formal relation to their clients. They’re paid advocates.
How primitive is that?

Housewives invented feminism, railroad porters started the civil rights movement and teary-eyed drag queens mourning the death of Judy Garland started the public fight for gay rights. No one gave a damn about the Jews and until recently no one gave a damn about the Palestinians.
Practice precedes theory.

I haven’t seen that Downey vid in years, and of course I forgot about Rouch. That was stupid.

“Science is exciting, fun, and joyous…” Enthusiasm is more dangerous than heroin.

Another award-winning photograph from Paul Hansen


Swedish Photographer Paul Hansen Wins Premier Photo Contest Award

Mayu Mohanna, jury member from Peru, said of Paul Hansen’s winning picture: "The strength of the pictures lies in the way it contrasts the anger and sorrow of the adults with the innocence of the children. It’s a picture I will not forget.”

So who gets the Oscar for best actor, a dead child or a living pallbearer?

Photojournalism is hackwork because journalism is hackwork. Just because journalism is necessary doesn't make it art. Just because bureaucracy is necessary doesn't make it profound.
Zero Dark 30 has the morality of art. The image above is fundamentally corrupt, reducing emotion to artifice, rather than using artifice to communicate emotion.

The same misunderstanding, coming from the opposite direction in Bill Viola below.

Hypocrisy

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Thursday strongly denounced the mysterious anti-Muslim film tied to protests and deadly attacks on American diplomatic compounds. But she reiterated that America will not tolerate limits on its free speech — and challenged leaders in the Muslim world to immediately denounce violence in response.

...“I know it is hard for some people to understand why the United States cannot or does not just prevent these kinds of reprehensible videos from ever seeing the light of day,” she said. “Now, I would note that in today’s world with today’s technologies that is impossible. But even if it were possible, our country does have a long tradition of free expression, which is enshrined in our Constitution and in our law. We do not stop individual citizens from expressing their views no matter how distasteful they may be.”

The right to freedom of speech exists only under a system of rights. We don't support a system of rights in our client states; we actively support the opposite. If our clients had systems of rights they wouldn't be our clients.

In a globalized world the contradictions of power and freedom are made more and more obvious. For liberalism, as such, there's no difference between a Yemeni and an American, but legally they're separate. It's becoming harder for American liberals to ignore that their home state liberalism is predicated on the international political realism of a hegemon.

We're reliving the crises of the 19th century on a larger scale.

Much of modern intellectual life, and all of it that could be called Modernist (the best and worst), has been built by indulging "the intentional fallacy". [Only the phrase is recent, and one gets the sense it was  coined as a way to help the coiners declare themselves both above the fray and exceptions to the rule.]   

Claims of superior self-awareness have been used as a bludgeon; the model is endless oneupmanship. Even the study of history has been used to argue for exceptionalism, either of a state or of the present, of Modernism and “The Modern Project”.  What's amazed me more than anything as I've looked back is how often the empiricism central to art and to all communicative acts has been ignored in service to the desire for some sort of objective “truth”, even artistic or poetic truth, whatever that would mean.

The arts, engaging the language and forms of a society at any given time, are synecdochic for society. Reading Linda Nochlin on 19th Century French Orientalism, on Gerome and other artists of the Paris Salon, it was impossible not to see the parallel to Clem Greenberg’s claims to linguistic transparency and reason. Impressionism is best described as demanding no more than honesty as opposed to the hypocrisy of Salon culture, but the later claims of Modernism defend something closer to what Baudelaire called “philosophic” art, ending in Greenberg’s blank Apollonianism, and beyond that in other equally rationalized assumption of artistic or political value.

I don't think I've ever seen so much blood on the front pages of NY newspapers as there was today. I assume it was a collective decision. The language of the discussion -"compelling and powerful photographs"- is absurd. The pics are crap.

The images below are from this post.


Thinking about exceptions to my general dislike of photojournalism and contempt for war porn... Weegee photographed people gawking at dead bodies more than he photographed the bodies themselves.

Images of Buchenwald are another kind of exception. Those pictures could only have been made with a blankness.