The creation of the image is an attempt at the creation of movement. One can see this in contemporary political marketing of causes. Take the example of the pro-life poster created and showcased by protesters that displays the remains of a first trimester abortion (please be aware if you follow the link to the article there is graphic content) in Chicago in 2018: remnants of fetuses were scattered in a circle alongside coins that provided size reference. The images were meant to shock and provoke, and were described as “disturbing and violence.” While there were reports arguments and the protesters wore GoPro cameras presumably in case of an incident, the protest was described as “peaceful.” The “intolerable image,” to use Ranciére’s term, provided no rush to response as intended (and anticipated) by the organizers. As he goes on to point out, while an image may be “difficult to tolerate” it subsequently failed to succeed in prompting us to struggle against it” (86). Art, then, fails to create the movement that it was created to spur, so what, then, is the purpose of art? Ranciére attempts to liberate art from the constraint of potential action and instead posits that “The images of art do not supply weapons for battles. They help sketch new configurations of what can be seen, what can be said and what can be thought and, consequently, a new landscape of the possible. But they do so on the condition that their meaning or effect is not anticipated” (103). Yet, Azoulay see a different kind of potential in the image (specifically the photographic image) in its naturalization of all subjects in its citizenry, but in it citizenry creates its own demands. The kinds of violent images seen in the pro-life protest are an example of “horror” photography that Azoulay speaks to which warrants its own repetition:
“The concept of “insensitivity,” which a number of critics employ today, participates in the acceleration of the horror. If we are not to be reconciled with death, so as not to be insensitive to it, the photo must be more and more shocking each time. As if horror itself were not enough, it is called upon to assumed a new form each time” (155-156).
Within this endless consumption, we fall into the same paralyzation that Ranciére speaks to: the intolerable image that becomes a pitfall to resistive action. Azoulay adds that this isn’t a simple cause and effect pattern, but is, in fact, a cycle that citizens repeat, as “photography exposed the performative content of his [Agassiz’s] claim and documented the cyclic manner in which it produced the required results [proof the inferiority of the photographed]” (173).
Looking to Beltrán, then, we have presented to us a particularly grounded route of liberation through the image. Within the proliferation of self-made images that you subject others to, one is able to self-realize as well as shape politics. Taking the lessons of Ranciére and Azoulay, Beltrán shows the ability to create new words for DREAMers within the social media image which reverts the “acceleration of horror” into an “acceleration of humanity” in the new worlds created. The online image – mostly characterized by an attitude of regulation through algorithms and government surveillance – then creates the world and provides steps for action whose force was shown in the political work created. The image, then, is extended as not only a spur for action but is action itself, and therefore creates new political possibilities.