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The Practice of Domination in Everyday Life

Amidst the many images of hostility, conflict, and destruction that come out of the occupied territories in Palestine, this one is truly shocking.

settler-aggression

The photo appeared on page A8 of the morning edition of the New York Times with this caption: “Tinderbox In Hebron, a Jewish settler threw wine at a Palestinian woman.  The city is a center of tensions between settlers and Palestinians.”  The complete set of images, which included a photo on page 1 of an Israeli child being bathed and three other photos on page 8 labeled “Veneration,” “Remembrance,” and “Preparation,” clearly favored the Israeli settlers.  Even so, the photo above gives the lie to the myth of taming the frontier in the Holy Land.

But why does it shock?  He is not hitting her, and surely spraying her is less of a crime than, say, razing a house with a military bulldozer.   Or blowing up a bus with a suicide bomber.  Since there is violence enough on both sides, why make so much of a minor incident of teenage insolence?

I think that there are at least three reasons for the photograph’s impact.  One is that it reveals what is rarely shown: the small acts of personal viciousness and humiliation that make up the practice of domination in an occupied land.  Second, it is clear that both the boy’s aggression and the woman’s protective reaction are often-practiced, habitual responses.  Were he taunting an older woman for the first time, he would be likely to look much more ragged, uncoordinated, and either furtive or overly demonstrative.  Instead, he could be a figure out of Whitman: throwing his weight around without breaking stride, a figure of youthful grace on the city street.  Likewise, she isn’t being caught by surprise.  Her head is already turned, her body hunched against the impending blow.  She’s been through this before, and she’s learned that direct confrontation is not an option.  This may be her neighborhood, but it’s his street.

The third dimension of the photograph’s power derives from its capacity for analogy.  Look at the woman’s coat and hat, and at the Star of David scrawled on the storefront; she could be in the Warsaw ghetto, and all it takes is a change of costume to see him as a German soldier.   Or they could be an African-American woman and a young white teenager in the Jim Crow South, or any other tableau that depicts the small details of domination.  One picture isn’t enough to nail down such comparisons, but it should make you think of them.

Photograph by Rina Castelnuovo/The New York Times.  The accompanying story is here.  Note that the caption at the online slide show is less vague than in the paper edition: “A settler tosses wine at a Palestinian woman on Shuhada Street in Hebron. The approach of some settlers towards neighboring Palestinians, especially around Nablus in the north and Hebron in the south, has often been one of contempt and violence.”

Update: Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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The Elderly Voter: More Health Insurance Than Sense?

In contrast to the many images of right wing demonstrators disrupting town hall meetings, this photograph of elderly citizens listening to a discussion of national health care appears to be a model of thoughtful deliberation.

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They are old, yes, but not incapacitated.  Indeed, this is just what an audience is supposed to do at a democratic forum: listen carefully.  The individuals here appear by turn skeptical, reflective, and (in the background) critical, and in every case attentive.  Isn’t this what everyone should be doing when thinking about the momentous questions of whether and how to reform health care?

Well, yes and no.  The problem is that, as a group, the elderly are tilting against reform, despite not being out of synch with the rest of the electorate on  other issues.  But is that a problem?  Obviously not if you oppose reform, but otherwise it is indicative of several ironies within the health care debate and at least one paradox within democracy itself.

Needless to say, all of the elderly have the government health insurance that some of them would deny their fellow citizens.  It’s called Medicare and not “the public option” or “socialized medicine” or “government interference in the doctor-patient relationship,” but it’s all of those things–and a good thing, too.  And, of course, the vast majority of those who have it like it and assume that they are entitled to it.  Nor do many of them know that those politicians and organizations that oppose the current reforms also opposed Medicare.  Most tellingly, this group watches more TV news than other voters (something that oddly is often described as being “more informed”), and some of them go so far as to claim that they oppose reform because then don’t want the government involved with Medicare.

A more vexing problem is that, because democracy depends on the secret ballot and aggregated decisions, any voter can behave with a very skewed sense of responsibility.  One can vote against government benefits while remaining assured that you will continue to receive government benefits.  So it is that Red States that vote against “big government” receive more government money than they spend in taxes.   Obviously, if the state’s net take was dependent on the political philosophy it endorsed, voters might think twice about their decisions; but, of course, they don’t have to.   Likewise, if those elderly voting against the public option had to give up their public health care, they might think differently, but that’s not an option.  This disconnect between political rhetoric and government policy has become second nature to all of us.  We accept that politicians can rail against the government while securing government contracts and services for the home district, and that you don’t have to be held personally responsible for your vote.

In other areas of life this would be seen as rank hypocrisy.  Imagine saying that everyone in the family has to eat vegetarian, except me; or that everyone in the congregation ought to pledge, except me; or that everyone in the office has to observe the dress code, except me.  Whereas in private life we take it for granted that pronouncements and actions should be consistent, democracy seems to make hypocrisy a virtue.  What is not readily acknowledged is that this hypocrisy is characteristic not merely of politicians, but of the voters as well.

Paradoxes exist for a reason, and this one probably leads to good outcomes as well.  What is needed, at least in the hear term, is more attentiveness and more imagination.  Look again at the photograph above.  One can see democratic deliberation, and also the frailty and mortality that is the core of our human condition.  One can see, in other words, not only a civic habit but also the fundamental purpose of government.

Note also how each of the individuals is in a defensive posture.  They are protective of themselves, and understandably so.  And keep in mind that none of the press reports defines the elderly in terms of experience or wisdom, but only in terms of the demographic power at the polls.  Given the lack of respect typical of a traditional society, they know that they have to mobilize according to shared interests.

What they, and we, must understand is that self interest can only be fully realized by taking care of others.  From that perspective, the problem is not that the elderly are in the picture, but that they are solely among themselves.  The better understanding will come not by carefully addressing their problems, but by putting those problems in a wider context, one that is at least wide enough to make the high costs of hypocrisy apparent to all.

Photograph by Alex Wong/Getty Images.

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Sight Gag: Mapping the Terrain

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For full size and to read the legend click here.

Credit: Unanonymous (Linked from SchizoAmerica)

“Sight Gags” is our weekly nod to the ironic and carnivalesque in a vibrant democratic public culture.  We typically will not comment beyond offering an identifying label, leaving the images to “speak” for themselves as much as possible.  Of course, we invite you to comment … and to send us images that you think capture the carnival of contemporary democratic public culture.

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Global Reflections on a National Treasure

We have written here at NCN on numerous occasions about Joe Rosenthal’s iconic “Raising Old Glory on Mt. Suribachi” (here, here, here, here, here, and here).  While there is much to be said about the photograph our basic approach has been to call attention to how it operates as an eloquent inventional resource (by some accounts, a national treasure) for performing civic identity.  The power of the photograph, we maintain, is in large measure its aesthetic capacity to transcribe three related but nevertheless different (and sometimes competing) commitments to egalitarianism, nationalism, and civic republicanism.  This transcription animates an  expansive public emotionality that opens the image to to a wide array of interpretations and subsequent appropriations or usages that range from reverential civic piety to a deeply seeded public cynicism.

A month doesn’t go by that we don’t encounter new appropriations of the photograph (and we are much indebted to the many readers who direct our attention to them), and interestingly enough, increasingly many of these appropriations come from sources outside of the U.S.  Sometimes such appropriations seem to be reflecting directly on U.S. foreign policy (as with the first two images below), but in other instances the appropriation seems to speak to a more transcendent meaning that the image invokes as it appears to have little or no connection to the location of the photograph in the symbolic economy of U.S. public culture(as in the last image).  We are not entirely sure what to make out of all of this just yet and we will return to the subject of the global appropriation of U.S. iconcic photographs in a subsequent post.  But for now we leave you with three of the most interesting recent appropriations of the Iwo Jima icon and invite your reflections.

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Die Burger: Iwo Jima (FCB Advertising Agency, Cape Town, South Africa)

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Raising the Flag at Museumplein (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam)

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Raising the Flag in the U.K.

Photo Credits: Chad Henning, Zoran Koracevic, drawgood

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Sight Gag: You're In Good Hands …

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Credit: Branch, San Antonio Express

“Sight Gags” is our weekly nod to the ironic and carnivalesque in a vibrant democratic public culture.  We typically will not comment beyond offering an identifying label, leaving the images to “speak” for themselves as much as possible.  Of course, we invite you to comment … and to send us images that you think capture the carnival of contemporary democratic public culture.

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Encyclopedia of Life

If you think Wikipedia is a good idea, you might also want to look at the Encyclopedia of Life.  This is an online collaborative project to document all living species.  If short on taxonomic skills, you might still be able to enjoy and perhaps contribute to the photo archive.  Here’s looking at you, kid.

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Photograph of the eye of a European Green Toad, Bufo viridis, © Matt Reinbold via the Encyclopedia of Life media image page.

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Monumental Visions

When raging wildfires threaten a city, the imagery quickly acquires an allegorical tone.   Apocalyptic horizons suggest that much larger catastrophe looms, and civilization itself can seem exposed, unprepared, unprotected. At that moment, the public art of photojournalism becomes capable of both revealing vulnerability and meeting the need for reassurance.  Like this:

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As fires engulf one side of Athens, Greece, the Parthenon arises above the city in magnificent splendor.  Marble bathed in electric light, the monument anchors the image.  One could almost image a cosmic battle between firestorm and enlightenment.  Culture rises up against Nature, a glorious past against a chaotic future, continuity against conflagration.

In between lies the city.  Although hundreds of thousands of people will live and work there, it is subordinated between the monument in the foreground and the ring of fire on the horizon.  Set in a natural crater, in the middle distance, with small lights scattered across it as if they could wink on and off, the city seems to lack both significance and power.  Actually a dynamic achievement greater than any monument or natural event, here its fate seems poised between two alternatives, one of which is no longer possible while the other is terrifying.  It becomes merely a firebreak between past and future, between a lost world and the task of staving off disaster.

You may have to look at the image for awhile to notice the city at all.  The monument dominates the scene, and there is reason to be suspicious of its prominence. Is Athens only the conservator of the Golden Age of Greece (and, according to the standard narrative, the West)?  Are we to be reassured that the shrine still stands, despite whatever havoc is being experienced by ordinary people whose houses are in the fire zone?  If the photograph reveals a deep tension between civilization and catastrophe, it also may be helping some return to a false sense of security.

One might ask, isn’t that what monuments are supposed to do?  Yes, but then there is this image:

washington-monument

I won’t dote on this unusual shot of the Washington Monument, but it is a remarkable example of how the conventional view–and experience–of a public work can be altered by a change in angle and lighting.  Instead of the white tower rising in sublime simplicity amidst the capitol city, we see what could be ancient ruin.  Stragglers wander about the obelisk on a dark plain under a threatening sky.  We could be on a moor near Stonehenge as pilgrims pass by on the way to  another destination.  The pennants in the background could be from a temporary fair in some dark age yet to come.  Again, the future seems much less promising than the past.  The difference here is that, instead of using the monument to anchor collective experience against disruption, now the public icon has been turned against that conventional experience.  Instead of security, the monument anchors a sense of foreboding about the national project.

Two monuments, two visions.  The photographs in each case contain no news, but they do provide allegories of collective life.

Photographs by Milos Bicanski/Getty Images and Jewel Samad/AFP-Getty.  For other NCN posts on wildfire images, go here, here, and here.

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Bearing the Public Pall

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Bearing the pall is an honored ritual in western funerary traditions according to which typically the most intimate friends and family members of the departed carry the casket that cloaks and contains the bodily remains. Until recently I thought of this as a rather instrumental ritual, activated largely by the pragmatic need to transport the body from one place to another in solemn and decorous fashion. This past spring, however, my mother passed away at the age of 83 and I came to realize the larger symbolic significance of literally touching the coffin, of making physical contact with the deceased, even if only by proxy and separated by the ritualistic container. I can’t say that I have the words to describe the actual feeling accurately, but there was something powerfully transcendent about it—almost as if I was making contact with a different plane of existence.

My experience was personal and private and I haven’t discussed it with anyone until now. Nevertheless, I was reminded of it by this photograph of Senator Edward Kennedy lying in repose at the JFK Presidential Library in Boston. The individuals kneeling at the coffin are five female family members, but in the visual tableau of the photograph they function as faceless surrogates for the thousands of anonymous members of the public who stood in line for hours just for the opportunity to pass the casket on the other side of a velvet rope and to pay their last respects to a life dedicated to national public service. The photograph underscores the solemnity of the occasion—heads bowed, hands folded, and notice how the pall is illuminated in a space otherwise shrouded by shadows cast by the backlit scene—but more than that it channels an ineffable, transcendent, affective sense of belonging that is arguably essential to communal life, animated here by decorously “touching” the coffin with our eyes.

The photograph above was the first image in the NYT’s “Pictures of the Day” for August 25, 2009. The second picture in that slide show was of the funeral procession for Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, an influential Shiite theologian and the leader of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq who had died of lung cancer.

abdul-aziz-funeral

The NYT employs the two photographs to make the point that “very different” leaders—one quintessentially western, the other quintessentially eastern—were mourned in “very different ways,” contrasting the rational and decorous “solemnity of the public farewell to Senator Kennedy” as “thousands of visitors continued to line up to pay their respects,” with the unfettered “emotion of the public farewell” to Abdul Aziz al-Hakim marked by the “thousands [who] poured into the streets amid tight security.”

And indeed, the normative differences and implications of the two photographs are surely pronounced, as one displays a scene that is apparently stately and reserved, a modicum of order and restraint, while the other purports to reveal a dangerous mob “pouring into the street” and warranting “tight security.” In one image the facial markers of emotional expression are hidden from view as the faces of the individuals cannot be seen, either turned away from the camera and directing attention to the coffin or veiled by distance and dark shadows. In the other image, however, shot in the harsh light of day, facial expressions of intense emotion are prominent and pronounced, not least the man in the very center of the image who appears to be bearing much of the weight of the coffin and crying out in grief. And there are other differences as well, as one image genders the public it displays as passively female, the other aggressively male.

And yet for all of the differences what stands out most in need of comment is the profound similarity between the two photographs as each indicates a ritual of mourning predicated on making a direct, affective connection between a surviving public and its deceased leaders as a performative, transcendent marker of civic identity.  Call it “solemnity” or call it “emotion,” the simple fact is that communal life demands affective connections.  If we are going to come to terms with the profound tensions between east and west we might not find a better place to start than in acknowledging and taking  account of this radical similarity.

Photo Credits:  Damon Winters/NYT; Loay Hameed/AP

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