Citizenry and citizenship in the era of new medias, especially imaging medias, is a thread that weaves all three readings this week together. Starting with Beltrán, it is clearly proposed that medias have been serving as mobilizing forces in order to create participatory politics modes for a long time. When conventional media such as prints, flyers, news and verbals are still dominate, it was common for undocumented to blend themselves in the crowd. Through public spaces, the undocumented enact with a larger group, while at the same time find themselves disguise and protection of some extent. However, the advent of Internet and social media no doubt took things a step forward, it helped creating an alternative queer public sphere that is highly interactive, collective and peer based, allowing the voice of the undocumented to travel far beyond the geographic or physical boundaries and transform into a real difference. They “reject secrecy in favor of claiming membership through a more aggressive politics of visibility and protest” (Beltrán, 87) that include a vast variety of social issues, with the action known as “coming out”.
This voluntary exposure of one self indicate the bold efforts to become civically legible and politically speakable (Beltrán, 89), which lead to the discussion of image and spectatorship centered in Rancière and Azoulay’s discussions. Azoulay argues that photography has provided a new logic of performance and a new method of action, of which there is never a true stopping point. Photography create a contract that binds all three parties – the objectives of the photo, photographer and spectators – into a citizenry, where the seen as well as the “unseen” deliver and generate. The interpretation does not end by the moment of capture, but gets prolonged and repeated with differences. Therefore, spectatorship should not be passive as it has been defined anymore. Spectators surely participate, and it’s their participation made the whole new citizenry a possible and accessible sphere for the unseen to be revealed, for the silenced to speak, and for actions to be encouraged. In such way, the power of a general visibility (including the seemingly missing or invisible) is highlighted within the world making of images.
This is also the reason why the intolerability of images becomes of great importance. As Rancière explains, for a certain awareness or identification to be triggered by images, for example the guilty of being part of imperialism, one has to already know what guilty is and what should be ashamed of. “For the image to convince, the spectator must already be convinced” (85) of certain premise, which largely rely on common knowledge, one’s morality and political perspective, which comes from socialization. Then Rancière poses the question of whether the images should be abolished as they do not always convey the truth as they are meant to, with the ideal answer of “what we need is images of actions, images of the true reality or images that can immediately be inverted into their true reality” (Rancière, 87). Images never stop as they are, be them still or moving ones. In the era of highly mediated images, the truth may not be presentable, but it is the framing that actually leads what is presented forward into actions, and it is the actions made that truly matters.
1. Beltrán, Cristina. “Undocumented, Unafraid and Unapologetic.” In From Voice to Influence, edited by Danielle Allen and Jennifer S. Light. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
2. Azoulay, Ariella. “The Spectator Is Called to Take Part.” In The Civil Contract of Photography. New York: Zone Books, 2008.
3. Rancière, Jacques. “The Intolerable Image.” In The Emancipated Spectator. London, New York: Verso, 2009.