Disruption of political norms inevitably requires a queered imagining of the future. This future is never entirely contingent on present-tense conditions, but rather, becomes emboldened by what some day may be witnessed; a consequence of audacity, a notion that reality is never truly momentary, but continuously pieced together by social edits to a preconceived script handed down like tradition. These traditions strive to establish a framework capable of haunting an individual into a ritual submission, at once invisible and omnipresent. This perceived invincibility spurs a collective champing at the bit, a population ever gazing for the invisible horror they would rather bask in than subjugate.
Here- witness a population transfixed by plurality lest they risk isolation. This shared watching of the political condition has become tantamount to citizenship, in that it asks for specific membership criteria of the inevitable spectactor while depending on their renewed sanction to the agreement. This cyclical, aesthetic horror story gleams an abdication to Doom whenever minoritarian subjects encounter this hegemony and are incapable of becoming neatly fixated within its framework. Our readings this week expose what it means to exist in this zone of displacement, noticeably in relation to the image and its modes of confession.
Like an action, you cannot take photography back. In this way, Azoulay by way of Arendt, contends that photography ontologically resembles action more than work (129). Moreover, if space of plurality in necessary for a condition of action, we must expect the same of photographs. Modernity has turned the image and photography into a valuable currency capable of undermining stability in its capturing of a moment, and in turn, the perception of a reality. And yet, the dominion photography thrives on a horizontal plane, its conquest dependent on the photographer with the camera in hand, the subject within the photograph itself, and anyone who dares look (Azoulay 138).
“This is X” is the implication of an image, and at the same time, an unfeasible rendering of a moment (Azoulay 141), if we consider the vast apparatus of time and space and the mess they make of history. The image skillfully asserts its nature as gestural identification while assuming the role as mere convention, which Azoulay reminds us is “first and foremost a gathering” (143). A get-together is truly only as inspiring as the compliance of its guests, and yet, the image is clandestine, filled with discursive eruptive pockets often times only felt by specific groups or in specific instances, out of sight, but nonetheless still present.
What struck me most intensely from each reading was this concept of “BECOMING A SPECTATOR, BECOMING A CITIZEN,” bookended by Azoulay. Ranciere asks us to consider the differences between becoming and representing, differences that leave a gap wide enough for contestations of identity to be exploited for the biopolitical:
“The image never stands alone, it belongs to a system of visibility that governs the status of the bodies represented and the kind of attention they merit…Representation is not the act of producing a visible form, but the act offering an equivalent…The image is not the duplicate thing. It is a complex set of relations between the visible and speech, the said and the unsaid. Not just what is in front of the photographer/filmmaker. It is always an alteration that occurs in a chain of images which alter it in turn” (96-99).
Therefore, the image as commodification, as public conversation and agreement, is drafted in the reflection of the rulers in society, aesthetic gatekeepers who, with great nerve and audacity, keep the information machined well-oiled by churning out political spheres in which the masses should identify, lest they fall by the wayside, out of bounds, indiscernible: non-citizens.
Ranciere prompts us to “construct different realities, different forms of common sense…different spatiotemporal systems, different communities of words and things, forms and meaning” (102). This resilient queerness is exemplified in modern times by DREAMers, undocumented youth whose appearance calls into question the limitations of citizenship. Beltran describes how “coming out” for undocumented youth is “an effort to become civically legible and politically speakable” (87). DREAMers assume the role of moving image, avoiding both the promissory fragment of the photograph and its stable gaze as well as the faulty sheen of representation. In concordance with the Gay Rights Movement, “coming out” implies leaving one foot within the inverted spectacle, while the other makes a mad dash from restraint, knowing the other can soon follow with enough velocity- such successive images mark continuity. This new domain of spectactor-ship, created via routes of new media and online assembly, carves out a vantage point that anticipates a queered, future-oriented, political-consciousness, its authorship in the hands and the eyes of the oppressed, intolerability making way for emancipation.