Radhika Subramaniam: RE: Image as Event
Yesterday Palestine. Today Iraq. I, like Susan Charlton, can’t help but read it as saying: Tomorrow, it will be us. And what does that warning (hope to) achieve? To follow on Negar's closing comment, what is Tehran’s pre-occupation?
What I can see a glimmer of here is what strikes me continually in my New York world and that is the wagging finger that governs our daily life now. That warns and threatens and keeps us confused, suspicious, careful and obedient. Surveillance, ID cards, fingerprinting, toothpaste gels – yes, from the video camera in a bank to what I use on my teeth – are all part of this fantastical construction of fear and control. I have learnt to press my index finger hard at the airport counter knowing my prints never show up at the first try. I no longer rail against building regulations that ask Carlos to greet me by name while refusing me entry to my office because I can’t find my ID in my bag. For so many living in the U.S. there is just the enormous, dare I say, silly, web of poking and prodding that transform the everyday – and it seems that it is really for this, after all, that havoc is being wreaked half way across the world. For this “security” which now serves as a substitute for peace. Can anyone really speak of “peace” anymore – the sort of peace whose originary affect is compassion, as Bracha Ettinger suggests? The sort of peace based on reciprocal knowledge, even a churlish tolerance. Of course, there are more violent systems of policing – the detentions, renditions, surveillance – that are but a step away. I have often wondered how one sort of terror and violence (arbitrary searches) comes to substitute for another sort of terror (al-Qaeda) while making invisible the experience of that substitution. Why aren’t we horrified? Why aren’t we terrified? And I can’t help but feel that a component of it lies in these asinine daily rituals which confirm our participation in the broad network of policing – as the policed – which then allows a certain smugness to paper over what could have been that horror of what is taking place.
Is it really possible, then, to counter violence and terror without fundamentally imaging the very forms that are being opposed? How can one deploy the Abu Ghraib image of the hooded man with any certainty anymore, for instance? Do notions of “good intentions”, “context” etc matter when in this age of internet promiscuity, it’s no longer possible to claim that those borders can be drawn?
And isn’t there a question here for Under Fire as well: even if we have no illusions of our remove from the apparatus of violence, how do we astutely, craftily construct an alternative, a response, an expression of outrage that doesn’t partake of the same murky stuff that seeps and unsettles zones of fear and terror?
> Radhika Subramaniam
What I can see a glimmer of here is what strikes me continually in my New York world and that is the wagging finger that governs our daily life now. That warns and threatens and keeps us confused, suspicious, careful and obedient. Surveillance, ID cards, fingerprinting, toothpaste gels – yes, from the video camera in a bank to what I use on my teeth – are all part of this fantastical construction of fear and control. I have learnt to press my index finger hard at the airport counter knowing my prints never show up at the first try. I no longer rail against building regulations that ask Carlos to greet me by name while refusing me entry to my office because I can’t find my ID in my bag. For so many living in the U.S. there is just the enormous, dare I say, silly, web of poking and prodding that transform the everyday – and it seems that it is really for this, after all, that havoc is being wreaked half way across the world. For this “security” which now serves as a substitute for peace. Can anyone really speak of “peace” anymore – the sort of peace whose originary affect is compassion, as Bracha Ettinger suggests? The sort of peace based on reciprocal knowledge, even a churlish tolerance. Of course, there are more violent systems of policing – the detentions, renditions, surveillance – that are but a step away. I have often wondered how one sort of terror and violence (arbitrary searches) comes to substitute for another sort of terror (al-Qaeda) while making invisible the experience of that substitution. Why aren’t we horrified? Why aren’t we terrified? And I can’t help but feel that a component of it lies in these asinine daily rituals which confirm our participation in the broad network of policing – as the policed – which then allows a certain smugness to paper over what could have been that horror of what is taking place.
Is it really possible, then, to counter violence and terror without fundamentally imaging the very forms that are being opposed? How can one deploy the Abu Ghraib image of the hooded man with any certainty anymore, for instance? Do notions of “good intentions”, “context” etc matter when in this age of internet promiscuity, it’s no longer possible to claim that those borders can be drawn?
And isn’t there a question here for Under Fire as well: even if we have no illusions of our remove from the apparatus of violence, how do we astutely, craftily construct an alternative, a response, an expression of outrage that doesn’t partake of the same murky stuff that seeps and unsettles zones of fear and terror?
> Radhika Subramaniam