Presence Documents

(This essay brings together one of the main threads of this blog so far. It primarily looks at the attempt to defy representation via historical examples and a few clips from Syria)

All what I want from you is that you shoot a small video and put it on YouTube, stating your name and your unit, and saying we are part of the Aleppo military council…then you can do whatever you want. I just need to show the Americans that units are joining the council.[i]

A chronicler who recites everything without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as a lost for history.[ii]

Instant historicization (product of ubiquity of digital means of representation) does two things at the same time, one, the perpetuation of the present in the visual flow, and, two the immortalization of the past as an eternal relic. While seemingly moving in two disparate directions, the two present a singular image.  In the face of contemporary machinery of destruction, the location of history has shifted to the instant past and immediate future collapsing on the present. While before one could look back at history from the vista point of the present, that vista point now looks at its visual echo, with the delay of broadcast time. The historicization of presence responds to an impulse to secure a spot outside of history. This is achieved by removing the self from the site of the event, turning the event into the subject of visual investigation, by recounting it not as the affected subject, but as a narrator, and as a historian. The eternity that was assigned to the represented subject, is conferred to the producer of the image; it is the absence from representation that is immortal. But the fate of image that is emptied from eternity remains obscure. To have no agency in determining one’s position vis-à-vis the viewfinder, is the position of the victim. A hero commands the representation of his annihilation, a victim who defines the conditions of representation.

It is almost a cliché to highlight how the advent of digital technologies of representation has transformed the landscape of photojournalism—and visual production at large. The gap between the production and reception of the image has shortened into a livestreaming of life. The technological shift has been gradual, but effects indisputable as today not much can evade camera viewfinders. The 2009 protests in Iran and later the Arab Spring, represented apropos the landslide in photojournalism and the convergence of the figure of reporter and civilian/demonstrator. Yet, it is in Syria that in the absence of international media correspondences, indigenous media has incessantly captured the war since the early days of a civil protest turned civil war.

From July 18, 2011, the youtube channel SyrianDaysOfRage has uploaded more than ten thousand videos from the Syrian conflict. Up dated hourly, it is only one of several online platforms hosting video documentation from Syria, mostly provided by civilians and the opposition fronts in the country. Watching the war online, there is no shortage of documentary evidence shedding light on the humanitarian crisis at hand and the increasing violence as the death toll rises above 30,000 (according to the UN) under the gaze of digital cameras. The footage include detailed documentation of wounded civilians and casualties, men and women from infants to elderly. It is a horrifically rich visual repository for forensic experts to investigate the impact of various types of weaponry on the human body and human creations. Buildings, machines and people are shattered into a mesh of destruction of the machinery of war. The cameras in the hands of civilians—at once the target and reporters of the war—have meticulously recorded the battle from all sides and angles, covering all the possible tropes of photojournalism, an industry dedicated to representing the victims. Ever since Mathew Brady photographed the human detritus of the Antietam battle, bodies started to pile up before the cameras, in battlefields, on sidewalks, in mass graves, and turned into evidence of atrocities of war. In the increasingly ambulant and mechanized war zones, only those who could no longer move posed before the wet plates of early photography. Now, while the lo-fi phone cameras of citizens in Syrian cities barely capture the bomber planes, they promptly capture and represent what remains of the bombings. Stationary and/or traumatized, the victims have no command over their condition of representation. They can only represent the extent of the violence, and the more horrifying the visualized violence, the greater the truth-value within the global network of big and small media. Violence demands representation.

In the Ground of the Image, Jean-Luc Nancy describes how the image is the battleground between the violence of truth and the truth of violence. Violence wants to leave a mark, wants to erupt into the field of vision and reveal itself in form of an image. Similarly, truth also wants to become visible, it also wants to display itself on the picture plane, it wants to unfold into an image. “The difference is that the true truth is violent because it is true, whereas the other type, its thick double, is ‘‘true’’ only insofar as it is violent. In the second case, truth is reduced to the mode of violence and exhausted in that mode, whereas in the first case, violence is unleashed in truth itself, and thus contained in it.[iii]” This violence has a communicative, or pedagogical dimension to it, sustained, as Eyal Weizman describes, by the gap between the actual destruction inflicted by an army and the possible destruction that an army is able to apply. “It is through the constant demonstration of the existence and size of this gap that the military communicates with the people it fights and occupies,” writes Weizman, “restraint is what allows for the possibility of further escalation.[iv]” How much the documentary apparatus that is capturing the violence in Syria can define and act as a measure of the aforementioned gap, and whether the production and consumption of the visual material can also develop a capacity for resistance and a threshold for intensification of violence. That is, in each phase of this conflict, the visual material surpassed what was considered or believed as tolerable, and yet the receivers of the violence have managed to document and distribute the atrocities. It is important to reemphasize that unlike many previous contemporary conflicts, it is the receivers of the violence who are also acting as documentarians instead of the professional journalist. Thus an analysis of the visual material can help the military to adjust the forces of destruction according to the degree of tolerance exercised in the act of documentation. Yet, it does not end here. There is another dimension to the war and that is total destruction, and here the gap between possible and actual violence is closed, and war becomes a “total war… stripped from semiotics.[v]” At this level, war is not about conviction of the subjects of violence, but rather about the reconstruction of the desired subject or the total annihilation of the surplus.

On July 3, 2012, based on more than 200 interviews with former detainees, including women and children, and defectors from the Syrian military and intelligence agencies, Human Rights Watch released “Torture Archipelago,” a report on torture and ill-treatment of Syrian dissidents by the ruling army.[vi] In one of the featured interviews, after recounting the case of a captured rebel who was beaten to death with batons, a former soldier noted how his face was completely different before he was taken away. “No one looks the same after we have arrested them,” states the interviewee. In everyday conversations, ‘to look differently’ implies an implicit change in one’s personality; it is a symptom of a change, however insignificant or ephemeral. We are used to deduce from the way one looks if s/he is tired, happy, excited, sad, anxious etc. Ultimately, the changes in the dead body and its gradual disintegration into nature, is the final transformation of the human figure: it becomes non-human.

Torture, divorced from its religious and spiritual functions, is the attempt to dehumanize the subject by use of force, turning him/her into something that does not have the same features and thus the same rights as a human being. This is achieved by disfiguring the subjects and in its absolute iteration, annihilating them. Once the subject looks visually different before the torturer, s/he becomes unrecognizable as a member of the same species. The transformation of the physical features of a person takes place in the surface of the image, it is there that violence visualizes itself, as Nancy suggests. Torture is thus used to proclaim the enemy non-human and as such exempt it from humane treatment as it “looks totally different,” according to the defected soldier.

The visualization of violence, on the one hand creates a public arena that acts as a vessel that communicates the extent of inflicted violence while at the same time opens up the possibility of further escalation by defining a degree of tolerance in production and viewership. The image however, constantly reconstitutes the subject that the violence attempts to obliterate. But yet through this dialectical relationship between violence and the image, a different subject is created. This subject is different from one of representational politics where the constitution or existence of the subject is contingent upon its representation. This visualized undefined subject is no longer completely the subject that it used to be (before reception of violence), and neither is the new subject that the perpetrators intend to construct. This subject is an a-historical one, existing as an image that defines the limits of representation.

There is an overabundance of images of Syrian war atrocities piled over internet websites and printed in magazines and newspapers worldwide. These images depict the transformed torsos, mutilated children, disfigured victims of the war. Sontag noted that images cover as much as they reveal; here when buildings are diminished into rubble and city blocks into gravel, the image effaces everything that used to be and replaces history with its two-dimensional surface, blocking the access to what once was. The documentation defines and redefines the aforementioned gap between actual and possible violence. The quantity of images does not increase what is known of a given situation, rather reroutes the situation into a quest for additional evidence, into the obscure impossibility of the panoramic view. But a mass grave documented from all angles remains a mass grave, “photography transforms reality into tautology.[vii]”

Ever since Capa (allegedly) captured the fall of a loyalist militiaman in the Spanish Civil War at the moment of death in 1936, photojournalism has been accused of beautifying violence, of turning it into a subject of aesthetic pleasure, commodifying it for the news media, sacrificing the evidential proof for sentimental effect. Photographers have been charged with apathy, giving up basic humanitarian values to capture the most definitive image of the event. These allegations for the most part remain cogent, as questioning politics of representation, ethics of photojournalism and the position of the photographer vis-à-vis the event remain essential questions of the discipline, one that every professional in the field has to inexorably raise. Yet, the advent of affordable digital technologies of representation and their global omnipresence promised a new possibility of visual justice, one that is unchained from the economy of professional photojournalism.

However, following the civil-protest-turned-civil-war that is Syria, where videos of half burned torsos of children stacked side by side are hoarded on web archives, updated daily, one wonders how the so-called professional photographer would have treated the subject. Moral questions of professional journalism aside, the repletion of the web with images of dismembered human beings, brutally tortured and killed or blown into pieces by mortars calls for a broader question of representational ethics. Here, the decapitated human bodies decomposing on sidewalks, equal to the ruble before the lens, are reduced to evidence. Evidence that (for the most part, unless meeting certain requirements) is hardly adjudicated in the war tribunals. One wonders if they call for aestheticization.

This immense repository of war images at times contains more than instant historization of events. In between the mountains of evidentiary material, there are clips and images that function differently, or have additional layers on top of the evidentiary one.

In youtube video The video Over Rubble, The Brave Continue to Stand for Freedom, we see a group of civilians staging a performance over rubble from a recent shelling in Talbiseh near the city of Holms. Holding placards with slogans and information, the group chants La Ilaha Illa Allah, and “Assad is God’s enemy.” The person on the top right in what used to be the kitchen holds a sign that reads “home of martyr Jalal aldin Latoof,” others signs are either asking for God’s mercy, or include messages to Assad. In the middle of the image someone is waving the Free Syrian flag. In the group of four on the left one is holding a sign, another a flag and the two children are each holding a smaller placard. Upon closer scrutiny it becomes clear that the two children are both masked.

The video at once shows the destruction of the city, it includes information about its location, but also by turning the site of destruction into a stage it implies a consciousness with regards to the spectacle of the war and directly points to it. It shows that not only the rebels are using the media to disseminate information and as a documentary tool, but are also aware of the medium and its possibilities and complexities. The video is showing not the dead, but the survivors, it commemorates the dead, but does not turn them into evidentiary material, it acknowledges their presence, or rather absence, but not by victimizing them through the image. Inserted in the vast visual online database of the conflict, the video is similar to the songs in epic theater. It is made to go on the flow of clips and appear on the side bar, and momentarily disrupt the stream of violence, by addressing the theater of war.

In Child taping what remains of his house available via SyrianDaysOfRage, we see a boy filming a pile of rubble, which, according to the title, used to be his house. While difficult to corroborate if the house belongs to the child and his family, but for the moment we take the title for what it suggests. The camera/man who is filming the child filming the house approaches the boy as a traditional news media reporter approaches a subject of interview in a war zone.  As he walks toward the boy he asks: can you tell me what you see? Which also could be read as “can you tell me what you are filming?” The child responds to the question and other questions posed by the man. Both the boy and the man filming him are clearly acting a premeditated, or internalized scenario.  Further, the footage implies a spoof on official/traditional television reportage (they even laugh at some point to a joke that the child makes).

Before the era of citizen journalism, the coverage of a similar scenario in the news media would show the child in front of the rubble talking to the camera, recounting the events, while being questioned by a professional war correspondent. Responding to his mistrust of news media outlets’ coverage of the conflict in Kosovo, artist Phil Collins traveled to the war zone to investigate their practice in close proximity. In How to Make a Refugee (1999), Collins follows a group of journalists around Kosovo, covering them covering the war. The piece shows how the group choreographed a family displaced and wounded by the war to produce a news reportage. Capturing the subject’s unease with the process, Collins meticulously documents how the journalists examined a wound on the boy’s stomach, made him take off his shirt and covered him with flashes. In the video from Syria, both the child and the other camera are filming. The child reflects on the destruction of his house via the camera, similar to a tourist in front of an ancient a ruin. Here, in the words of Adorno, one can witness the triumph of representation over what is represented. The boy does not want to be the represented, but rather the one who represents. Not unlike the journalist, the child is interested in dissecting the site of destruction with a camera, to show the extent of the damage, describe what he can see and highlight the economy of access (as he is as close to the event as one can be), but this time to his own rubble.

Friedrich Kittler mentions a 1902 German Reich law that gave every man and woman the “right to one’s own image,” here the camera gives the child the right to his own rubble. This video shows the rise of a new figure of victim, one that is distanciated from his own destruction by his/her digital camera. A victim who removes himself from the ruin, whose “rejection of experience can provisionally embody a legitimate defense,” in words of Agamben. [viii] A generation that grew up looking at monitors from the point of view of first-person shooter games can now experience its own habitat as the game zone.

Beyond recent examples such as these clips from Syria, evading visual victimization and camera exposure at large has a history as old as photography itself. Signifying “to leave without shelter or defense,” from Middle French exposer “lay open, set forth,” expose-ing oneself to the camera was cautiously refused. “The same Balzac who claimed to have drawn up all of his fictional figures like daguerreotypes” writes Kittler, “also said to his friend Nadar, France’s first and most famous portrait photographer, that the himself would dread being photographed. Balzac’s mystical tendencies led him to conclude that every person consists of many optical layers – like an onion peel – and every daguerreotype captures and stores the outermost layer, thus removing it from the person being photographed. With the next photograph, the next layer is lost, and so on and so on until the subject disappears of becomes a disembodied ghost (see Nadar, 1899). Edgar Allen Poe, who also wrote about photography as one of the wonders of the world, made this phantasm universal by positing the thesis that images in general are deadly for their object. Poe’s painter creates a portrait of his beloved without noticing that she grows increasingly pale the more that her oil painting acquires the color of human flesh. Painting, with its extensively discussed handicap of aging pigment, thus uses a photochemical effect against people as if it had become photography. As soon as Poe’s fictional painting is completed, the painter’s beloved drips dead.[ix]” Therefore, Collin Powel’s infamously fraud presentation before the UN Security Council—representing an epistemological transformation of the photographic index to military target– that eventually lead to eight years of war and over 100,000 casualties, merely confirmed a historical suspicion: images can kill.

A decade after his work in Kosovo, Collins traveled to Palestine where he stages a disco dance marathon in Ramallah for the making of the piece They Shoot Horses. After a series of auditions, Collins chose nine dancers and divided them into two groups, filmed them separately in two days. Both groups danced to the same soundtrack for eight hours without breaks, from 10am to 6pm, and received a day’s wage per hour. The camera, for the most part, is a full frame shot that holds all of the dancers, who dance against a pink wall. About it Collins writes: “In the finished film they do aerobics, they do folk dancing to Gina X. Someone starts dry-retching at Aretha Franklin. They do belly dancing to The Smiths. Later on, they fall asleep to ‘Fame’. They’ve almost had it, stumbling about like drunks, bags under their eyes as Irene Cara rattles on in the background.[x]” In a place under constant gaze of cameras—from news media to aerial surveillance to citizen journalists—the piece exhausts the possibilities of human motions before a camera. For the dancers, the presence of the camera is part of living under the limelight of the occupation. In the age of live televised war, the victims are those who cannot choose not to be on camera, while the perpetrators, invite it in, wave at it, and expel it as they see fit. The victims have to keep dancing until the music is over.

In The Spam of the Earth, Hito Steyerl writes how the immaculate, horny anorexic omnipresent beauties of hyper-capitalism, are bearing the cross of representation for the rest of us, so we can live a life camera free.[xi] They supply the industry with the required flesh to anthropomorphize the commodities that we are applied to later on. This visual tabloid-lumpenproletariat divide lens-attention with the other over-represented but invisible crowd who are condemned to dance before the cameras until they stop rolling. Together they divide our emotion spam between pity and envy, empathy and stimulation, charity and over-consumption.