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Violence as message
The opposition in Syria is documenting the war from all angles and sides, creating an immense online repository of images of destruction, updated by the hour on the internet. A survey of the images from the start of the uprising in March 2011 to date show the changes in the landscape of violence and its intensification. Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman (see Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils)note about the communicative, or pedagogical dimension of violence, sustained 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.” Now with this in mind, the question is 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 have 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 note 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. But yet, 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.” 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.
The visualization of violence, on the one hand creates a public arena that acts as a vessel that communicates the representation of the actual inflicted violence and thus also opens the possibility of further violence by defining a degree of tolerance in production and viewership. The image constantly reconstitutes the subject that the violence attempts to erase. 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 inflictors of violence intend to construct. This subject is an a-historical one, existing as an image that defines the limits of representation.
Aspiring reality
In artist Mark Leckey’s Pearl Vision, the drum stick penetrates the snare drum’s vent whole, the player’s crouch reflects onto the silver side of the drum, the beats in sync with the music that defines all the movements of the image, an image that is so pristine that only the digital depth of the beats match the density of its pixel rates. In the piece desire, image and reality infuse, the image defies the desired reality, desire is soaked in the high density of the pixels.
HD is the retinal critique of the real, it is what the real attains to be. It proclaims that unless you (or the event) have the condition to be represented high-def then your reality will remain limited to the pixels of your phone camera. The lo-fi image is a mere representation without transcendence to the ultra-real. Here the conditions of the image define the reality on display. The pop icon whose drop of sweat sliding down her skin is more water like than the river running down the creek. The commodity that is transcended to the image of the represented commodity, applying living beings to attain to its image, while always countering them with their incapability.
The indigenous journalists’ videos interspersed in the newscast showing the atrocities of the army shelling civilian quarters or of a hurricane hitting land, show the immediate real, the poor image, while the newscast’s high-definition is that which reality aspires to be. The pixel rates of the image correspond to the quality of the event, that if only could be produced under certain circumstances posing before the hi-def camera, it could then transcend into the ultra-real.
FNA Presence Documents 