This week’s readings relate to two modes of representation—speech and image—and the pitfalls, limitations, and interconnectedness of each within the field of politics.
In The Civil Contract of Photography, Azoulay rescues the original, democratic project of photography as a tool for the practice of plurality, of active spectatorship. Azoulay foregrounds an “original” conception of photography—which motivated the French state to support the creation of patents and to promote photography as a democratic tool, as a new method of civic engagement, in which anything can become an image and anyone (with the right tools) can participate. In this (Arendtian) sense, photography resembles action in that photography was originally purported as a tool available for the masses, inaugurating “a new form of civil relations… not mediated by a sovereign power” (134), which had unpredictable ends, which did not end with the click of the shutter or the printing of the surface of the image. Therefore, within the citizenry of photography, the space depicted on the surface of a photograph, every non/citizen within the frame has equal rights, establishing civil contracts of photography. This opens the potentiality of images as a political tool because photographs do not simply depict “what was there”, for there are always external factors imbuing the photographic moment with power relations. As a democratic tool, Azoulay proposes analyzing political images by becoming citizens of the citizen of photography, which means to not take the image as a finished representation of “what was there” but as a stepping stone towards changing the conditions in which a photograph was taken, the very situation which compelled the photographer to share the photograph in the first place.
In “The Intolerable Image”, Rancière dissects the political praxis of photography by asking what makes an image intolerable, under what conditions, and what are the pitfalls of photography which aims to represent the intolerable. Stemming from Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, Rancière claims that within the society of the spectacle, the image has come to represent reality itself, because which an image of appearance can be just as shocking (or intolerable) as an image of Reality, making all images complicit in the same system of images that makes them all equivalent, incapable of moving affects for political means. In my view, according to Rancière, the effect of the society of the spectacle interrupts the conquest of the world as image according to Azoulay: because so many images occupy so much of our time coming at us from so many angles and so many citizens depicted therein, “it now seemed impossible to confer on any image whatsoever the power of exhibiting the intolerable and prompting us to struggle against it” (84). Therefore, instead of “inviting the participation of others in the negotiations of what and how that image signifies” (Azoulay 143), we are trapped in the constant substitution of one image for another, never achieving a true or total image of Reality.
Therefore, this massive influx of images is enough to interrupt the civil contract of photography by bombarding us with images of an ever-increasing detachment from reality. In the maelstrom, how can we not inject ourselves with percepticide, nor be complacent in the predigested journalistic teleprompters and talking heads spewing a curated flow of sometimes violent, always consumer-friendly, images of reality? Within this framework, Rancière dissects action as the response to “the evil” of the image and “the guilt” of the spectator who is compelled to action by what is represented in certain images. If the only response to evil is action, Rancière assumes that a main goal of images interpreted as intolerable and/or political is to move affects in the spectator through guilt—which is already such a loaded term.
Therefore, this massive influx of images is enough to interrupt the civil contract of photography by bombarding us with images of an ever-increasing detachment from reality. In the maelstrom, how can we not inject ourselves with percepticide, nor be complacent in the predigested journalistic teleprompters and talking heads spewing a curated flow of sometimes violent, always consumer-friendly, images of reality? Within this framework, Rancière dissects action as the response to “the evil” of the image and “the guilt” of the spectator who is compelled to action by what is represented in certain images. If the only response to evil is action, Rancière assumes that a main goal of images interpreted as intolerable and/or political is to move affects in the spectator through guilt—which is already such a loaded term.
For her part, Beltrán purports new political movements by DREAMers and other undocumented youth that do not care for the guilt of spectators, which is motivated by a paternalistic view of pity and which moves the body to action through charity. The Undocuqueers exemplify how combativeness, visibility, unapologeticness, produce their own speeches and images, their own written and bodily languages, their testimonies, to spur action through solidarity, through the visibilization of the violence of the invisibilization of mass deportations. Her recount of undocumented youth coming out of the closet of being documented, queering democratic processes by foregrounding contestatory methods of representation through speech, text, and image, that defy normalization and assimilation in favor of a new arena of political representation. If we are to be citizens in the citizenry of photography, we are to face the same stark and intolerable reality that these noncitizens throw in our faces. If. according to Rancière, the true witness is they who share their testimony despite the horror they have faced, who are compelled by the voice of an Other to share their take on Reality, then these DREAMers are an even truer witnesses to their daily horrors of racist and xenophobic violence. Because of the injustices they have suffered, they cannot continue to tolerate their intolerable reality: they aim to move the public not through guilt, but through a collective call to solidarity, through newer and queerer bonds of kinship outside the heteronormative realm of American assimilation. In an interesting reversal, despite being compelled to not speak, they choose to speak up in so many ways, to resist and transgress. Thus, this imperative to share the intolerable, to make their story intolerable, to spur action through solidarity, could prove to be more effective a political tool than to simple make a spectacle of the horrors of society and incite action through a passive relationship to image and speech.