With the introduction of X-ray body scanners at airports, there has been plenty of talk about how much of one’s personal life might be exposed. That roll around the middle, the glitter on the underwear, and Lord knows what medical or erotic devices–well, actually, more than the Lord will know, and that is the problem.  Once again modern surveillance technology is likely to prove to be a devil’s bargain: too much information that we don’t really need, to reduce privacy and promote anxiety, on behalf of security that probably is illusive.  One can’t help but feel exposed; like this, perhaps:

You are looking at an X-ray image of a payloader and operator that was taken by a cargo scanner.  Some viewers of a certain age may find themselves peering into the guts of the machine to see how many parts they can identify. Others might look at the driver and be a bit shaken, as there doesn’t seem to be much to the human being.  Small, thin-boned, almost insect-like, it seems more a sci-fi species than a person.  Indeed, the machine is the far greater animal, while the operator seems reduced to being part of the machine, and both are fused together by the uniform industrial imaging into a single cyborg.

This precisely articulated exposure of that is beneath the skin isn’t quite uncanny, although it is a bit strange, as X-rays typically are strange and we don’t often see large machines though that lens.  I think the full value of the image goes well beyond both its aesthetic qualities and its novelty, however.  Something else is being exposed: one of the porous borders of human being.  Or, to be a bit more up to date: one side of the posthuman.  Instead of defining human being as a fixed essence (as with a soul) that is fundamentally different from all other animals, on the one hand, and from all machines and other technologies, on the other hand, the posthuman considers how humanity is both more variable across time and other dimensions, and how it is more continuous with both nature and technology.  Again: humans are not defined solely by their intelligence and so are embodied creatures like all other species, and they are defined and changed by the technologies that they create to alter and control the rest of the world.

Photography has been celebrated for its ability to portray humanity and so to celebrate humanism.  Think of The Family of Man exhibition, for example, or the many celebrations of the human face.  And so it does, but I think it is time to start considering how photographs may occasionally be moving beyond humanism to reveal various hints of the posthuman.  Like this, to take another example:

The caption said that this Marine was washing his head during an operation in southern Afghanistan.  His head, of course, is nowhere to be seen.  Instead we have an acephalic figure, one still demonstrably human–we recognize the back and clothing as such–but also disturbingly not human–that is, as long as one grounds humanness in the possession of a mind rather than simply an animal body having a familiar form.  Until the photo above, this image seems to be all body rather than design, and all skin (literally and the second skin of his uniform)–but not quite, for the spine extrudes partially, signifying his skeleton and the cord of nerves than runs through every vertebrate.  None of this is particularly reassuring, however.  He is too much a brute animal in some primitive crouch at the water hole.  But, of course, that is a bottle of soap beside him, and he is cleaning himself, and he is human, but also posthuman, squatting, thanks to the photograph, at another border of the species, though not to lose his soul.

Photographs by Nick Veasey/Caters News Agency Ltd. and Maurico Lima/AFP-Getty Images.

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Among the sophisticated, raison d’état (“reason of state”) is the first principle of foreign policy.  Decisions are to be made on behalf of the national interest without regard to confounding values.  So it is that democracies can support dictators, to take one example that might apply to U.S. foreign policy now and again.  Although the idea has been the subject of extensive debate, it has at the same time become ever more deeply embedded in practices of state administration.  It should not be surprising, then, that those practices acquire the look of rational, efficient mechanisms of control.

This photograph of a common room at Guantanamo Bay prison is a study in rational organization, everything in its place.  The room is used for activities such as watching television, but its real purpose is obvious: maintaining comprehensive control of the inmates while they are out of their cells.  And, yes, those are leg irons on the floor; the prisoners are locked in while sitting at the table.  The photo may be intended to feature the functionality of the room: containment appears almost transparent–no dungeons here–while the asceticism and cleanliness double as substitutes for morality.

Modern regimes of control rely heavily on assumptions about reason and necessity in the use of power.  They can’t be less powerful or more moral, we are told, because the rational consequence will be that a more powerful and less moral opponent will triumph.   They can, however, apply instrumental rationality and modern technologies to maintain security, and that competence becomes sufficient justification for administrative sovereignty.   If they can’t be moral, democratic, or otherwise defined by anything other than the use of power to maintain security, at least they can be systematically organized to achieve their one objective.

Fair enough, but for one problem.  The result of this mentality has been not the enlightened use of reason, but rather ever more well-financed stupidity.  Massive expenditures on prisons don’t reduce either terrorism or crime.  Funneling billions of dollars to dictators doesn’t build states or economies, but instead wreaks civil society and produces great swaths of poverty and dependence.  Trammeling democratic values (and others as well) doesn’t win hearts and minds while it does feed cynicism and hatred.  But we knew that.  And that knowledge doesn’t change much, in two senses: it hasn’t influenced those in charge of the state, perhaps because it hasn’t itself become more insightful or articulate.

I want to suggest another, perhaps odd approach to the problem of state stupidity.  Let me ask, when can we see stupidity?  Would we know what to look for?  This is not a matter, at least for the moment, of defining the term, but rather of considering how behavior and practices known to be stupid can be seen as such.  The culture provides a few cues: some, such as slapstick comedy may not be too helpful unless analyzed rather than simply applied.  Other sources such as Kafka’s Trial and Castle might be important sources, but they are highly literary rather than directly visual.

I’m running out of time, but as I look at the photograph above, an architecture of stupidity begins to emerge.  For example, the extreme functionality of the space that actually inhibits any reasonable use, much less any use that might lead to resolution of the larger conflict.  Also perhaps the overdesign of the security apparatus: tables bolted to the floor within a cage will have their rationale, but there is something so excessive here that it has to be a sign of arbitrary rules, endless procedures, and near-complete inattention to anything else but the literal replication of the machinery of power.  Nor is that a dynamic process, but one that depends on stasis, on the inactivity, boredom, and habitual resignation to routine evident in the guards’ postures.

The prison is a monument to stupidity.  It is not enough to reform the prison, however.  My point is that the national security state produces stupidity because it depends upon stupidity.  The national interest of a democratic people may be served well by reason, but the modern state, to the extent that it is a regime of coercive control, will rely on another mentality: stupidité d’état.

Photograph by Tim Dirven/Panos Pictures.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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It’s Holy Week and Passover, so naturally I thought of the river Ganges.  A crescent moon over the river would have been a nice touch, but that’s not a picture you see often.  With this bit of irreverence, we have four great faiths and secularism in play, but the question of which image to use didn’t get any easier.  That’s when convention comes to the rescue, and there is a typical image of the Ganges as a spiritual symbol.  This photograph provides one version of that stock image.

Someone is walking into the great river for a devotional immersion.  The human being is naked or nearly so.  The river is calm, dark, and expansive.  The human being is vulnerable, small, singular; the river appears enormous and eternal.  It is easy to imagine it as “The swarthy water/That flows round the earth and through the skies,/Twisting among the universal spaces” (Wallace Stevens).  This cosmic flow of being envelops all, and we see ourselves standing apart from it only briefly, while lost in illusion.

This photograph captures that sense of isolation and yearning against a horizon of eternal being.  It adds a somewhat darker inflection as well: the birds can suggest that the body below them is so much carrion, while the murky clouds imply a universe that is pitched toward obliteration rather than salvation.   The river is eternal, flowing outward and back, absorbing all of creation, and the best the individual human being might find is calmness, serenity, the peace that comes from passing into nothingness.

But like I said, that’s a conventional view of the river.  And here’s a different view:

This view of the river was taken during the Ganga Dussehra festival in Haridwar, a city whose name means “Gateway to God.”  One might title it “I sing the river electric,” except that some of the lights are oil lamps.  It is ablaze with light and energy of every sort, and so seems to be a very different river from the one above.  Thronged with people, this is no place for solitude.  Lights, pavilions, and other delights clamor for attention, and the river becomes a conduit for the many flows of social life: commerce, religion, entertainment, arts, technologies, and sheer human hubbub press against the banks and surge down the channel.  This river carries civilizations, each of which will continue in some way in those that supersede it.

Some will want to point out that the second river already is encompassed by the first, and that any celebration of the vitality along the banks is only another example of being distracted by the veil of illusion.  But one also could say that the first river is a part of the second, one of the many ways to understand life, but not the only way of life available.  Rivers have birthed many cities, and the cities themselves become great channels of human energy, and human diversity.

It may be reassuring, even a source of spiritual solace to imagine the Ganges as a river of eternal return.  That is not the only Ganges, however, or the nature of India.  During a time of spiritual reflection, let’s also marvel at the vitality of the human world this side of eternity.

Photographs by Rajesh Kumar Singh/Associated Press and John Stanmeyer, VII/National Geographic.  The Stevens’ quotation is from his poem, Metaphor as Degeneration.

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Oil, we are often told, is the lifeblood of late modern, industrialized civilization (here, here, and here) and certainly there is plenty of evidence that we behave as if we believe it.  But as the photograph of Iceland’s Kolgrima River shot from somewhere in the heavens suggests, the real lifeblood of any civilization on earth is water. I say shot from the “heavens” because it is less realistic than what might be the most recognizable photograph shot from outer space, William Ander’s iconic Earthrise, a clearly mechanically produced image that implicitly foregrounds the technology that enabled it.  Here the image has something of an abstract expressionistic quality to it that nevertheless underscores the naturalistic blending of land and waterways, a surface manifestation  of an underlying essence accented by the soft contrast of the muted pastels.  One can almost imagine the earth as a living entity, the blue veins throbbing in unison as they work to carry the nutrients necessary to bolster and sustain the ground.  It is a beautiful and compelling—almost utopian—God’s eye view.

70% of the earth is covered by water, but 97% of that is found in oceans and seas, with another 2.4% in glaciers and polar ice caps.  That leaves very little fresh water for all of its various needs, including most importantly consumption, sanitation, and agricultural production. This has not yet proven to be a disasterous situation in the United States—despite some scares as the recent drought in the southeast—where the average resident consumes 100 gallons of water a day.  But to put it in context we need to note that in some places in the world the most indigent people subsist on 5 gallons of water a day—when they can get it.  Nearly 50% of the people on earth do not have water piped into their homes, and in some developing countries women walk an average of 3.7 miles a day to get what they need.  And the most sobering fact of all is reported by the Water Resources Group (sponsored by the World Bank Group and a number of global financial, industrial, and agribusiness concerns), which notes that by 2030 water demand will exceed supply by over 50% in some developing regions of the world effecting over 1.5 billion people.

And so, to return to earth from the heavens there is this image of a reservoir in China’s Yunnan Province:

The contrast between the two images could not be more stark.  Here the earth is dried and cracked, its parts broken and fragmented rather than blended.  There is nothing that approximates movement in the photograph; indeed, there are no signs of vitality at all.  One of the often claimed effects of such desertification is a dangerous reduction in biodiversity, but here it is hard to imagine any biology at all.   Of course, even the slightest accumulation of moisture might change that, resulting in a dessert oasis, but the extreme close-up of the photograph locates the image in the here and now.  It is a human’s eye view,  and it underscores the immediacy and palpable effects of the threat.

Water, not oil, it would seem, is what is most essential to life on earth.  One can only imagine what the world will be like in 2030 if we don’t come to terms with that sooner rather than later.

Photo Credits: Hans Strand/National Geographic; Ariana Lindquist/Bloomberg.  March 22, 2010 was World Water Day.  The April issue of National Geographic features the importance of water to life on earth.  We thank The Big Picture for calling our attention to the topic.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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