Showing papers in "Comparative Technology Transfer and Society in 2002"

A Second Look

Abstract: Rise of the Picture Press: Photographic Reportage in Illustrated Magazines 1918-1939 International Center for Photography New York, New York March 27 - June 16 "Rise of the Picture Press: Photographic Reportage in Illustrated Magazines 1918-1939," held at the International Center for Photography (ICP) in New York City, took as its subject large-format illustrated magazines produced in Europe and the United States between the World Wars, including examples of well-known publications such as Harp Harper's Weekly, Life, Picture Post, Match and Vu; as well as lesser known publications such as USSR In Construction, Let's Produce!, BIZ (Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung), Muncher Illustrirte Presse, Voila, Lilliput, Look and Regards. Work by several now-canonized art photographers appeared in the exhibit, including Bill Brandt, Brassai, Alexander Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, Andre Kertesz, John Heartfield, Man Ray, Margaret Bourke-White and Robert Capa, to name just a few. However, the work of these photographers blended relatively smoothly into the larger context of the exhibit, which is to say that name-recognition was, for the most part, sacrificed to the social, historical and formal contribution of illustrated magazines. In fact, the exhibition organizers, Christopher Phillips and Venessa Rocco, and the exhibition designers Julie Ault and Martin Beck highlighted the collaborative nature 'of illustrated magazines by defining the different roles played by photographers, writers, editors, layout designers and various press agencies in determining the look and content of the end product. They also included wall text showcasing Stephan Lorant and Henry Luce, the most prominent and influential editor and publisher, respectively, of illustrated magazines at the time. The most provocative example highlighting the collaborative nature of magazine work, however, was the wall-sized mural of marked-up contact sheets from a photo-essay entitled "How the Picture Post is Produced" that ran on December 24, 1938. The enlarged contact sheets show editor Stephan Lorant sorting through newswire photographs at his desk; men and women working the printing presses, collating the pages and finally bundl ing up the finished product. Next to the wall mural, in a small case, the issue in which the story originally appeared was opened to reveal the first two-page spread of the essay, in which one of the pictures of Lorant, circled in yellow on the wall mural (and thus probably selected by Lorant himself), leads the story. This kind of innovative exhibition design was unfortunately not consistent throughout the entire show. Most ineffective was a large section of the exhibit in which framed spreads from the magazines jutted out from the wall. Some of these displays appeared beneath a row of images at eye-level, placed flush with the wall, but others were placed above those at eye-level, making the images, and especially the print, barely legible. At first I dismissed this slight annoyance and vowed to have my eyesight checked until I noticed several other visitors experiencing the same difficulty. A quibble hardly worth mentioning except that it raised questions about how one might ideally display such printed matter without doing irreparable damage to the essential character and context of the magazine format. This commentary is not meant to diminish the accomplishment of "Rise of the Picture Press," for it takes on a body of material often neglected by museums and galleries. While there have been several major exhibits in the last five years focusing on photojournalism or the work of particular photojournalists, the material selected for this exhibit is different. Primarily because the photographs on display are shown in their original context of the magazine, rather than reprinted and framed as single images hung separately on the wall without text, save the typical wall-label identifying artist, title and date. …

The Life of the Party

Abstract: In the ongoing push for consumer ease that characterizes the history of popular photography, the Polaroid Corporation stands as the undisputed champion of the later twentieth century Among its many successes and numerous patents--including the process of polarization from which the corporation adapted its name--the development of one-step photography remains its crowning achievement In the words of Polaroid founder, president and chief inventor Edwin H Land upon the release of his SX-70 system, "photography will never be the same after today," (1) If Land was right, and I believe that he was, why has our historical understanding of popular photography not shifted to accommodate the Polaroid snapshot? Surely it warrants investigation, especially now, as the Polaroid Corporation struggles through a bankruptcy that threatens to render these photographs more ephemeral than instantaneous (2) The SX-70 Land camera, released in 1972, revolutionized instant film photography by transforming the photograph into a unitary, sealed packet containing negative, positive and processing chemicals Through a complex system of lenses and mirrors the camera maintained compactness without sacrificing print size It employed a custom motor and battery system to eject the print, which developed in direct sunlight before the user's eyes (3) Ultimately the consumer attained a color print, without the peel-apart layers of earlier Polaroid films This print formed in less than a minute, from a camera controlled almost exclusively by cutting-edge micro-circuitry Later models, including the Pronto! (1976), One Step (1977), 600 Sun (1981) and Spectra (1986), improved film speed along with exposure control and added automatic focus systems, exploring new dimensions in photography as a leisure activity In its quest for an easier consumer-oriented photographic process, Polaroid contributed to a widespread devaluation of the photograph itself Entrepreneurial and technological innovations in consumer photography increased the distance between the photograph and the work that produced it, even as the snapshot's infinite reproducibility had dispersed its value over an infinite number of replicas But photographers realized the snapshot's real worth in the private, not the public, realm The snapshot was both worthless and irreplaceable, discarded and desperately coveted Polaroid aggravated these circumstances by quite literally cutting all labor from the process of taking pictures In the SX-70, Land outdid the infamous Kodak dictum of "you press the shutter, we do the rest" by placing "the rest" back into the consumers' hands His grand achievement of "absolute one-step photography" therefore established a new low in the relative production value of a photograph Yet here, at the depths of ease and depreciati on, the Polaroid print turned on a dime, As if by accident, the prints made by the SX-70 and its descendants possessed a preciousness unparalleled in snapshot photography The film used by Polaroid did not depart from the traditional duality of negative and positive, but the two were inseparably fused through its instantaneous processing The SX-70 print was therefore unique, and while not reinstating its production worth, this did render the print less disposable than a "normal" snapshot Also, the Polaroid's integral packet system transformed the picture into "as much a photographic object as had existed since the velvet-ensconced daguerreotype A plump, satiny, perfectly proportioned little pod, the SX-70 print was extremely lovable" (4) With convenience, however, comes limitations: the Polaroid snapshot demands unparalleled previsualization of the image and, by eliminating the negative/print duality, refuses traditional editing Created "by the photographically untutored, motivated by the simple wish to record and perpetuate their life and times," the Polaroid snapshot resembles a sort of unconsciously driven yet technologically enforced "straight" photography …

"All That Is Solid Melts into Air": Notes on the Logic of the Global Spectacle. (Feature)

Abstract: All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto The revolution will be no re-run brothers; The revolution will be live. Gil Scott-Heron, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised In his 1974 song The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Gil Scott-Heron sings of the ways that the dominant genres of television (the news, the soap opera, the commercial, the sitcom, etc.) prevent any oppositional political content from being represented there. In his view, the chief political function of television is to represent the interests of the white ruling class as natural and inevitable, while distracting us and turning us into passive consumers by "entertaining" us at the same time. The person whose structure of feeling is built around the experience of consumption, Scott-Heron suggests, is not the person who engages in radical political action: "The revolution will not go better with Coke/The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath." The song concludes with his insistence that the revolution will not be televised, it will not be a "re-run," it will be live." In his insistence on liveness, on the necessity of revolution responding to and participating in reality itself, Scott-Heron updates a longstanding Marxist tradition anxious about our ability to represent and thus apprehend historical reality. Without a map of the historical situation in which we find ourselves, how can we possibly develop a plan for changing that reality? Our inability to map out our historical situation is frequently seen as the result of a stubborn melancholic intrusion of the lost past into the present. For example, in The 18th Brumaire Marx famously laments that: "The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living." Just when people seem ready to revolutionize themselves, they "anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service." Thus, they keep betraying themselves because they mis-recognize themselves, their real conditions of existence and their relations with each other. The revolutionary task is to be present to the present--to s ee the world as it is and act accordingly. I take this to be Lenin's suggestion when he remarks that," one can never be radical enough; that is, one must always try to be as radical as reality itself." We are always playing catch-up in relation to reality. There is a persistent time lag that we are always trying to close. The difficulty of the task lies in the effort to determine what kind of a fluctuating "thing" reality is. This perpetual transformation is perhaps the one constant of modernity. In a phrase, which has since come to signify the ever-shifting, changeable and volatile character of modern life, Marx and Engels exclaimed in The Communist Manifesto that "all that is solid melts into air." (1) They referred first of all to the fact that capitalism by its nature is constantly expanding and therefore needs to constantly revolutionize itself in order to create new markets, leaving nothing solid or permanent in its wake, both destroying and conjuring into existence everything from cities to human populations along the way. They were also speaking of the way that capitalism reduces everything to the shadowy abstraction known as money. Both of these processes have accelerated and transformed themselves in the twentieth century. New technologies have greatly expanded the human capacity for both creation and destruction, an d the universality of money as a standard of value above all others has been supplemented by the (much discussed) process through which everything, if it is to be felt to exist at all, must also be able to be transformed into an image. This is the situation of which Jean Baudrillard has written: "The very definition of the real has become: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. …

Inertia Reels: Mobility in Hong Kong Video

Abstract: It is hard to live in Hong Kong without becoming obsessed with mobility. One's status is measured by one's ability to migrate, travel, send one's children to elite boarding schools or maintain a residence abroad. The landmarks of Hong Kong, if they can be designated as such, are banks that facilitate the movement of capital, like I.M. Pei's Bank of China Tower, Sir Norman Foster's Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank Building, or modes of transport such as the Mid-Levels escalator or the Star Ferry. Mobility is largely configured as movement, and moving and transience, as a result, is the norm. Those who come to live in Hong Kong tend to do so because of persecution in their original home or, more commonly, because of economic ambition or necessity. As a result of such migration, the city has gradually become the quintessential expression, or perhaps caricature, of a kind of globalization most commonly associated with the exchange of capital. The space of Hong Kong epitomizes the transactional nature of globalization, and the portlike mentality of which Ackbar Abbas has written at eloquent length is made obvious in the ceaseless flow of goods and services. (1) The temporary is pervasive, even endemic, and as Christina Chu of the Hong Kong Art Museum points out, there is no commitment to the city as a home; everyone is here to get what they want and they eventually leave. (2) Even those who were born and raised in Hong Kong (the vast majority of the city's inhabitants fall into this category), it seems, are always on the search for privilege, usually translated into migration abroad. In such a space, an understanding of mobility beyond the process of getting from one point to another seems absent. It is simply enough to engage in this process and hopefully, partake of the privileges embedded therein. Yet the lack of any examination of the reasons or ramifications of this kind of mobility strikes one as problematic. One can easily travel to multiple locations and destinations from Hong Kong, but such portability of the self merely touches upon the surface of mobility. It does not translate into or account for an ability to negotiate disparate contexts and spatialities, a critical facet of the elusive idea and practice of mobility. Indeed, this surface mobility arguably points to Hong Kong as a space of erasure, as the tracks of arrival and inevitable departure seems to efface the impact that any individual might have on this space. Reflective of the actual spaces of the city, the video spaces that delineate the site of Hong Kong mirror this display of symptoms of the obsession with mobility. But the spaces as defined in these works often act as critiques of the single-mindedness of such obsession or, at the very least, depict mobility as a difficult and elusive condition. The video spaces of Hong Kong tend to revolve around fastness as a primary theme, and especially the excesses of such fastness, which is at the crux of the obsession with mobility. Here fastness, rather than speed, is more to the point for although Hong Kong has been popularly read as a site built on speed, these readings inevitably focus on acceleration and condensed time, characteristics of fastness as opposed to speed. Fastness is a highly differentiated quality encompassing slowness and deceleration as well as rapidity. (3) Though touted as a testament to the vanguardism of the city, or as evidence confirming the glorified borderlessness of globalization, this exce ss of fastness points more to a certain lack than it does to the exhilaration normally associated with the image of the bustling metropolis. The excess of fastness seems chaotic, a result of the anxiety of the obsession that forever attempts to attain the unreachable. More tellingly, the excess of fastness points to the paradox of the obsession with mobility: that the excess degree to which mobility is pursued leads to a kind of intellectual or psychological paralysis. Rephrased, those who are obsessed become paralyzed for they cannot think of anything other than going from one point to another. …

Purple Dotted Underlines: Microsoft Word and the End of Writing. (Features)

Abstract: Microsoft Word is fundamentally different from other word processors. Word treats "information an entire page at a time, rather than as a stream of text and codes," according to the "Microsoft Word 2000 Reveal Codes White Paper" by Microsoft Product Support Service. The "White Paper" adds that Word is "based on a hierarchical formatting system that allows you to format based on the entire document, a section, a paragraph, or even one character. The hierarchical architecture of Word does not allow stream-based formatting, as does WordPerfect, but Word does allow you to control, understand, and manipulate formatting." (1) The concept of the document is hardwired into Word. Controlling the appearance and hierarchical structure of this document is what the Word interface does. Meanwhile, the Word file format remains a company secret, Friedrich Kittler's recent program of software discourse analysis reminds us that the domination of Word and Its hierarchical infrastructure cannot easily be separated. Kittler calls for us to "abandon the usual practice of conceiving of power as a function of so-called society, and, conversely, attempt to construct sociology from the chip's architecture." He continues: "it is a reasonable assumption to analyze the privilege levels of a microprocessor as the reality of precisely that bureaucracy that ordered its design and called for its mass application." (2) The functionality of Word is a mirroring and repetition of the hierarchical document structure its interface implies. Every use of Microsoft Word will invoke the differential discursive structure of the printed document. The world runs on Microsoft Word documents. Word's WYSIWYG interface between screen and printout--which remains the software's major selling point--puts our world Into writing. Microsoft Word Is the latest onionskin layer of historical inscription surfaces-spread on top of paper, parchment, papyrus, stone tablets, cave walls, sand.... Our institutions--legal, educational, cultural and so on--are supported by the masses of paper printed from computers running Microsoft Word under the Windows environment. In fact, the historical status of these institutions is inseparable from this process of word processing. The beauty of Word, if we are to believe the marketing literature, is that it allows you the flexibility to format and edit until you arrive at the perfect printed product. Word displays a simulation of a written page, and a poor one at that. You toggle between Normal, Print and Outline View, fiddle with margins and headers, and hope for the best when you print. The hyper-mediated framework of the interfac e, with its buttons and pull-down menus, offers simple verbs that transform the basic ontology of the written page: File, Edit, Format, Help and so on. Word processing means that writing is infinitely flexible in the service of print; Word extracts and puts on display exactly what writing always meant. But what did writing mean? Writing meant producing an image. Writing was an appearance machine. The word processor provided a convenient materialization of this appearance machine, letting the operator manipulate symbols and formatting in order to print. Microsoft Word orders a stream of markings--in this case keystrokes or mouse movements, or even the voice commands so badly implemented in Office XP--into the linearity of writing. The line of writing leads to an image. A document is an image formed by extracting a line of writing from a stream of marks. (3) Hegel already made the point in his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), where writing supplies the example of the material and specific reality that cannot be referred to by language. When we seem to mean "'this' bit of paper on which I am writing, or rather have written--'this,'" we in fact do not mean what we say. If we actually "wanted to say this bit of paper...then this is impossible, because the sensuous This that is meant cannot be reached by language, which belongs to consciousness, i. …

Mirror, Mirror. (Grapevine)

Abstract: In conjunction with the exhibition "ID/entity: Portraits in the 21st Century," November 23, 2001--January 15, 2002, The Kitchen organized a discussion moderated by Judith Donath, an Assistant Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT. The exhibition was initiated by the Sociable Media Group (SMG), which is directed by Donath, and produced by the MIT Media Lab. It premiered in Cambridge, Massachusetts in October 2001. Donath introduced a diverse panel that included: Richard Kostelanetz and Hyun-Yeul Lee, who presented their "Alternative Autobiographies" (2001) installation; Marshall Reese and Raffi Krikorian, who collaborated on "Van Eyck's Mirror" (2001), a project that also Included Nora Ligorano and Stefan Agamanolis; and Paul Kaiser, Shelley Eshkar and Marc Downie talked about "Loops" (2001), the portrait they developed of the dancer Merce Cunningham. Donath first outlined the background of the Sociable Media Group, which began with a mission to address the question of how technology is changing what it means to be human. As one aspect of this inquiry, the identity pieces on display in the exhibition were developed over a period of months to Investigate the idea of portraiture and how media are changing how we may "capture" a person. Technology has given us the ability to create portraits from sources ranging from a person's financial history to their DNA, and the purpose of the portraiture project was to explore how technology has expanded the artist's ability to create a portrait, and how it is changing the way we see artwork and view ourselves. The first speaker, Richard Kostelanetz, is an artist trained In intellectual history who became interested in alternative forms of history and autobiography. He and Lee, a graduate student who is part of SMG, worked in a collaborative style based on the John Cage model of chance/trust, Kostelanetz allowed Lee free access to enter his world and creative license to design his portrait. Lee had always been interested in expressive typography. In reading Kostelanetz's writing she found "that he had written extensively dedicated to one subject: himself." She decided to create a textual portrait, a physical installation that would allow the viewer to become immersed in his world. She got to know Kostelanetz, "what he was wearing, his living style," and went through a process that began with digesting his work and ended with finding a physical form that conveyed this information while leaving room for the viewer. She pulled ideas from his books and organized them into the fundamental categories of birth, death, rela tionships and his self-perception as a writer. Her installation took form as a sparsely furnished room: window, fireplace, desk, computer and typewriter. The flame In the fireplace represented the motion of birth; ink in the inkwell stood for continuous prose. The window was the interface between Kostelanetz and the world, while the typewriter and computer chronicled a transition from the historical to the modern. People were able to email Kostelanetz and access updates to his autobiography, which he posts on the Web regularly. Going beyond a static representation, the interaction with the viewer created a dynamic and evolving portrait. Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese developed "Van Eyck's Mirror" in collaboration with Raffi Krikorian and Stefan Agamanolis. Ligorano and Reese's previous works have included a video clock project where parallel times and parallel technologies make a statement about changes in language, literature and information. They proposed "a mirror at the back of one's head...[since] likeness in an electronic age is as much about identity as it is about anonymity," finding inspiration in Van Eyke's painting The Arnolfinl Marriage (1434), which pictures a convex mirror showing the backs of the subjects and a tiny portrait of the painter. In their installation, a sensor detects the approaching viewer and triggers a projected image of Van Eyck to appear in the mirror. …

Performing the Moment. (Essay)

Abstract: * As the documentary role (or capacity) of photography continues * to be debated, the relationship between performance art and * photo graphic media continues to evolve. The advent of "new media" broadens the horizon of these discussions, particularly vis-a-vis the concept of telepresence. * MARISA S. OLSON is a San Francisco-based artist, writer and * curator whose temporary site-specific installations have been * seen throughout North America and Europe. She is Associate * Director of SF Camerawork and serves on several boards, including the SF MoMA Media Arts Council, Gen Art, and the EMMA Foundation. She has written for Mute, Wired, Rhizome, Camerawork and others. In what is, perhaps, the most-quoted essay in the world of photographic arts, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Walter Benjamin discusses the decontextualization of the work of art, as it is reproduced. By now, most of us are familiar with his passionate argument that the mechanical reproduction" of the work of art--as exemplified by photography--increases the "auratic distance" between the viewer and the "authenticity" of the work; its unique presence in time and space coupled with its historic testimony and place within tradition. Benjamin's argument hinges on the idea that the work, an experience as much as an object, comes into being as the product of ritualized behavior. Benjamin, then, ascribes performativity to work in all media. As the documentary role (or capacity) of photography continues to be debated, the relationship between performance art and photographic media continues to evolve. The advent of 'new media' broadens the horizon of these discussions, particularly vis-a-vis the concept of telepresence. When Chris Burden carried out his performance 'Shoot' in 1971, only a handful of people were present. We are told that the event entailed a friend shooting young Burden in the arm with a .22-caliber rifle. The only remaining traces of this action are the scars on Burden's arm and the few photographs taken after the shooting. Ironically, the etymology of the word trace (a term we often ascribe to the documentary photograph) is rooted in the action of etching upon the body. The 1960s and 705 were ripe with instances of artists underscoring this double entendre, so much so that even the corporeal traces became more and more temporary, from Vito Acconci's shaved head to Dennis Oppenheim's sunburned chest. The performance works carried out three or four decades ago seem now to be more action-oriented, with the photograph standing in only as document or "proof" of the action. Today, the term "action" seems to be employed more in the sense of the on-set utterance meant to mark the beginning of a performance for the camera. A new generation of artists claims to be more interested in carrying out an Intervention that will lend itself to the creation of a particular image. In the recent show, "Slowdive: Sculpture and Performance in Real Time," at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Tony Labat showed his "Hooters Project," a video installation based on a 1998 performance in the parking lot of the buxom restaurant chain. Labat hired four stuntmen to stage a violent fight and three videographers filmed the action: Labat, someone posing as a TV reporter, and a third cameraman posing as tourist. At Yerba Buena, the piece was installed on various screens within a four-part fence fashioned after the one i n the Hooters parking lot. The precise physicality of the installation reminded gallery-goers of the distance between the viewer and the original work, whether that work is located in the action or the various filmic incarnations of its documentation. Similarly, the Surveillance Camera Players (SCP) treat Manhattan's 10,000 surveillance cameras like television cameras, before which they perform theatrical relics, like Alfred Jarry's "Ubu Roi," and stage protests. …

A Race about Race: Race, Inter-Race and Post-Race in the Study of Human Genetics

Abstract: In 1929, Charles B. Davenport, Director of the Biological Laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor in New York, co-published Race Crossing in Jamaica, a 512-page study on the "problem of race crossing, with special reference to its significance for the future of any country containing a mixed population." (1) The island of Jamaica was chosen for its isolated pockets of "pure-blooded negro, mulatto and White" of similar economic class. The method of evaluation entailed primarily anthropomorphic and psychological examinations of hundreds of subjects from these three groupings. Anthropomorphic examinations included 60 measurements of body regions, including face breadth, cranial capacity and relative height in varied positions. Psychological tests included the Knox moron test and the criticism-of-absurd-sentences test. The book concluded that Blacks and Whites differ in both physical and mental capacities and that among the Browns, while some are equal to or superior to their progenitor races, "there appear[s] to be an excessive per cent over random variation who seem unable to utilize their native endowment." (2) In a concurrent solo publication of the same title, Davenport states this conclusion more forcefully. A population of hybrids "will be a population carrying an excessively large number of intellectually incompetent persons." In this publication he also suggests one method to make cross-breeding permissible: "If only society had the force to eliminate the lower half of a hybrid population then the remaining upper half of the hybrid population might be a clear advantage to the population as a whole, at least so far as physical and sensory accomplishments go." (3) Davenport is probably the most influential and prolific eugenic scientist in the United States, but his texts were hardly the forerunners of racist science. An often discussed, early predecessor is Paolo Mantegazza, whose iconic Morphological Tree of the Human Races (1890) is a branching timeline of human development reaching its pinnacle with the Aryan race. In 1883, Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, actually coined the term "Eugenics" (good in birth) as a science dedicated to improving human stock by getting rid of so-called undesirables and increasing the number of desirables. In its contemporary usage, Eugenics is defined as "a science that deals with the improvement (as by control of human mating) of hereditary qualities of a race or breed," (4) a distinctly more encompassing concept than Galton's. Yet, it is ultimately the socially conservative approaches of its main promoters (separation, segregation and sterilization) that we associate with the term. "Negative Eugenics," as it has been terme d, is concerned with limiting who can breed and with whom. For example, as Davenport laments, because of racial intermixing: "The standard races of mankind are rapidly disintegrating." (5) Improvement and conservation were key contradictory goals in many of the early eugenic writings on race. (It should be noted, however, that Eugenics was in no way limited to racial concerns, and, indeed, many of the most heinous sterilization campaigns in the U.S. involved persons convicted of crimes or deemed "feebleminded.") Davenport's Jamaica study sought to definitively disprove the theory of "hybrid vigor," which was espoused by laissez-faire social Darwinists who felt that, in keeping with the theory of evolution, the fitness of the human race would be ensured because weaker, recessive genetic material would naturally be weeded out. Hybrid coupling, in Davenport's opinion, is only viable if undesirable offspring can be eliminated, whereas conservative inbreeding produces more reliable results and preserves the integrity of the existing racial groups. As theorist Paul Gilroy has noted, the concept of race was invented during colonization to justify sub-human treatment of enslaved and colonized peoples and to reify concepts of nation and national identity. …

Revulsion and Pathos: Covering the War in Afghanistan. (Features)

Abstract: Since September 13, clusters of postage-stamp portraits of those who died on September 11 have been published in the pages of The New York Times, as the paper gives little obituaries to each person who lost her or his life. They extend and magnify the tradition of pathos and sentiment in memorial portraiture, help focus hatred on the prime suspect behind the attacks--Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida regime--and they serve as a daily reminder to American citizens of the necessity of George W. Bush's escalating war on terrorism. As the world's greatest military power bombs one of the world's poorest nations, however, war seems a somewhat inappropriate description of what is going on, since war implies a dual relation between adversaries. Like the Gulf War it is more an act of domination than war. (1) Media coverage of the bombing of Afghanistan, both in the United States and in Britain, could not have been more affected by the particularly charged context of feeling in the West after the events of September 11, when atrocity and terrorism was brought suddenly and shockingly home to the world's greatest power. In beginning to understand the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center (WTC) towers that triggered the military response, as Slavoj Zizek has pointed out, we should have the courage to see the attacks not as a threat from a "purely evil Outside" but recognize in this Outside "a distilled version of our own essence. For the last five centuries, the (relative) prosperity and peace of the 'civilized' West was bought by the export of ruthless violence and destruction into the 'barbarian' Outside: the long story from the conquest of America to the slaughter in Congo." (2) The relentless and repeated video and still images of the exploding WTC towers, the succession of portraits and stories about those who died, the pictures of Ground Zero, have been followed by a generally controlled and limited photographic coverage of the war in Afghanistan. While abject images of dead Taliban in the British press disrupted any idea that this is a clean and sanitized war, there is much that has remained absent or underrepresented after over four months of bombing. Portraits of Osama bin Laden have been a recurrent subject and focus of revulsion in the British press, from his appearance on a mock "Wanted: Dead or Alive" poster in response to Bush's frontier-style ultimatum to the blurry stills from the video showing him talking to an unidentified Saudi sheikh about how he masterminded the attacks of September 11. The most explicit headline, in relation to a still from this video that appears to show him grinning at the camera, was The Mirror's "YOU GLOATING BASTARD," December [4. Following the Pentagon's release of his most recent video broadcast, a subsequent article in The Times, December 28, compared the appearance, gestures and posture of bin Laden with earlier pictures and video footage of him. He is said to look tired and undernourished in the video, harrowed by eight weeks of bombing. That he still remained uncaptured at that point, his whereabouts unknown, is never discussed. Visible evidence of his change in bearing is sufficient for the writer to suggest that the B52 bombers have "knocked the stuffing out of bin Laden, stripped him of his arrogance." Arrogant, smiling, taunting, gloating, even gaunt, bin Laden's face in the media provides the focus for public contempt and helps maintain the illusory sense of a simplistic binary between a fundamental "evil outside" and a "just" and "civilized" West. But as the war continues and the longer he appears to have escaped and eluded the United States military forces, his face can also begin to serve as a reminder of the failure of one of the main objectives of the bombing of Afghanistan. While initial coverage of the war was controlled and limited--night images of explosions over Kabul, a fascination with the weapons and military aircraft used, aerial "before and "after" images intended to confirm "surgical" strikes--as early as the second week into the conflict, The Mirror showed us the first faces of children wounded by a U. …

Cinders of Life

Abstract: I. When I was still very young, my father used to write the names of deceased relatives on long narrow pieces of rice paper for the annual memorial ceremonies With due care, often referring to the book that contained many examples of appropriate phrases, he wrote something like, "May we wish that Mr. or Mrs. so-and-so stay in peace in another world" in Chinese. The writings were then stored in small cabinets, twenty different kinds of food were placed on the table, and all male members of the family did a traditional vow three times in the direction of the writings while all the women stood nearby. Under the heavy air, filled with an intoxicating smell of incense, my mind was occupied with two things; one was to stay awake and the other was the closing ritual that always struck me with its indescribable beauty. After the vows and wine offerings, my father gathered the papers with the names written on them, held the edge of each paper, and then burnt one corner after another before throwing it in the air. Then he caught the crumbled ashes in a bowl filled with water and returned those to the soil inside an urn. I was always moved, watching thin crusts of paper landing on the surface of water with a faint glow on their tails, like falling meteorites. It was the arch that those flying ashes drew in the air before landing that I imagined to be something similar to death itself, a finite gesture in an infinite circle of redemption. Around 1994, this ritual of burning papers faced its end when we started a ceremony for my long lost grandfather, with whom we had lost contact four decades before when the North Korean army kidnapped him during the Korean War. After a long and futile wait for her husband, my grandmother finally gave up on his return--or, more exactly, his life--and wished for a ceremony to be held in his name. This was not so surprising to us since nobody thought he would have survived until then anyway. Modifying the normal procedure of the ritual, my father decided to use a photograph of grandfather for the ceremony, and that was effectively the end of the burning rituals. Though nobody really talked about why the photograph should not be burnt like the other papers, all of us understood it from a very practical point of view; there were, in fact, only a few photographs of my grandfather left to us. Yet, it was also not hard to imagine why we silently agreed that we could not burn "him" as in a proper funeral process. So, after three vows and a fake offering of wine, the photograph went back into the family album for next year's use. I did not realize what our first ceremony for my grandfather had installed in our psyche until later. It was not about the morbid encounter with my "dead" grandfather, but about how we had come to terms with his death--how it had to be reasoned and pronounced, with and against our lingering belief in his life elsewhere. It seemed that his death stood at the impasse of our days, unfittingly harbored in his ghostly life. And that life was already being discussed in the past tense, even when he could possibly have been living somewhere only [50 kilometers away from home. It was therefore meaningless to now sentence him to death, as if we were adding a punctuation mark at the end of a sentence that had already exhausted its meaning. If it was not another death for him, it was a new life for us, a life accepted in place of the concreteness of the missing corpse. My grandfather's death has never actually taken place; it has always been speculated about and sentenced (as a logical conclusion of that speculation) by our family, but we never witnessed the event itself. His absence has been like a birthmark on our life, whereas his life has been less familiar to us than his death. His life, by default, has never occupied his own body in any moment in our life (except my grandmother's), and it has taken our bodies instead, inhabited our eyes looking at the photographs of him, our minds imagining him, and been on our tongues as we pronounced his name. …