Strategies of Visualisation: State-Corporate-Military Power and Post-Photographic Interventions Nicolette Barsdorf-Liebchen, BA(Hons), MA PhD in Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies Cardiff University May 2018 Table of Contents Page Acknowledgments Abstract 1 Introduction 1 Overview and Aims of the Enquiry 3 1.1 Time Frame 5 1.2 Selection of Image-makers 6 2 Questions and Objectives, Contexts and Literatures 11 2.1 Making Distinctions: Visual Studies, Visual Culture, Critical Visuality 14 2.2 Note on Methodology 18 3. Critical Review of Literatures, Debates and Concepts 27 3.1 Historical Background 39 3.2 Grasping the Socially Abstract: Visualising the Post-photographic 47 3.3 Traditional vs Social Media? 48 4. Key Concepts 49 4.1 "War": a Fare of Mediality, Media Ecology and Mediatization 49 4.2 Plexus: on the Search for a Term 54 4.3 Corporate Personhood and the Corporate Veil 60 4.4 Visualisation and Ostension 67 4.5 The Post-photographic 69 5. Chapter Outlines 75 Chapter One: Complicity, Secondary Witnessing and the Journey from Atrocity to Facelessness 1.1 Introduction 82 1.2 Themes and Structure 86 1.3 Note on Extant Literature, Frameworks and Debates 89 1.4 Complicity in historical context: “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” 90 1.5 Secondary Witnessing and "Gegenwärtige Bewältigung" 94 1.6 The Watchful Gaze and Complicity as Biblical Trope 95 1.7 Whither Complicity for the Post-photographic? 99 1.8 In Conclusion 104 Chapter Two: The (an)Iconic Challenge and Post-photographic Discontents 2.1 Introduction: Aims, Themes and Questions 107 2.2 Note on Historical Background and Debates 111 2.3 Iconic vs Aniconic 115 2.4 "Accidental Napalm" and the Person as Proxy, Paradox or Rhetorical Figure 117 2.5 The Violent “Event” and its Post-photographic Curation 126 2.6 The Kevin Carter Case: System and Sensibility 130 2.7 In Conclusion 135 Chapter Three: Performing "War": Strategic Visualisation, or Aesthetic Vacuity? 3.1 Introduction 138 3.2 The Day Nobody Died 142 3.3 Vis-à-Vis Framing 148 3.4 The Event, the Performance, and the Evidential Curse 149 3.5 Abstract Absurdity, the Mundane and Mediatization: a Missed Opportunity? 158 3.6 The Gaze of the Image 166 3.7 In Conclusion 170 Chapter Four: The Military Sublime: "War," Plexus and State-Corporate Exception 4.1 Introduction 173 4.2 Background Orientation: Norfolk's Turn to the Technological Non/Inhuman 175 4.3 Death and Limited Liability 179 4.4 IBM BlueGene L and Bull's Tera-1 182 4.5 IBM's MareNostrum 186 4.6 Astra 3B 191 4.6a Astra3B and "Arrested War" 194 4.7 The State-Corporate Exception and the Trojan Horse 200 4.8 In Conclusion 202 Chapter Five: Visualising the Open/Public Secret: the Transparent Opacity of Plexus 5.1 Introduction 206 5.2 Limit Telephotography 215 5.3 What lies beneath 229 5.4 The Other Night Sky 235 5.5 In Conclusion 240 Chapter Six: The Cadastral, and the Proxy Measure: Towards a Visual Forensics of "War" and Plexus 6.1 Introduction 246 6.2 Edmund Clark and Negative Publicity 255 6.3 Lisa Barnard and Whiplash Transition 268 6.4 In Conclusion: a Visual Forensics of (De)cadastral Mapping 279 Conclusion 281 Appendix One: Ed Clark Interview: Saturday, 15 October 2016 310 Appendix Two: Illustrations 315 References 386 Acknowledgements My supervisors, Prof. Stuart Allan and Dr. Nicola Foster, have been a stalwart source of guidance, encouragement, support and patient forbearance throughout the research on (and agonising over) this dissertation over the course of the last seven years. I am immensely grateful to both Stuart and Nicola for this. Without their sage insight and kind, constructive criticism, I doubt I would have been able to bring this journey to a satisfactory conclusion. ABSTRACT This thesis contributes to current scholarly debates concerning the witnessing and visualisation of twenty-first century systemic and "socially abstract" state-corporate-military power and its in/visible forms of violence. The nexus of neoliberal democratic hegemony, global corporatization, digital technologies of communication, and modern warfare have produced radically evolving contexts of war photography. This includes the engendering of art- documentary practices which mark a significant departure from socially "realistic" representations to more abstract and conceptual visualisations. In this context, "post- photographic" imagery is not adequately served by recent ethico-political debates regarding the image-making/viewing of direct and/or symbolic violence, which tend to neglect that which is not seen in contemporary news frames (of what is being referred to here as traditional media), namely, the in/visible systems, structures and processes of state-corporate-military power. Accordingly, this thesis argues visual culture scholarship requires recalibrated vocabularies as well as revised conceptual and methodological frameworks for the critical exploration of the subject of systemic, socially abstract power/violence. This thesis strives to advance its contribution to theory-building by way of crafting an alternative approach to critically understanding art-documentary photography and its viewing/reception within a state-corporatist and military-mediatized dispensation. It takes a co- creative and forensic approach to the selected imagery of the UK/US-based photographers Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Simon Norfolk, Trevor Paglen, Edmund Clark and ~ 1 ~ Lisa Barnard, critically deploying the trans/interdisciplinary conceptual constellation of, inter alia, "Plexus", "war", complicity, “Vergangenheitsbewältigung”, "Gegenwärtige Bewältigung", corporate personhood, the open/public secret, the State-Corporate Exception, the "cadastral" and the "proxy measure". The concept of a "dispositif" (Rancière) is engaged in the analysis of the imagery, taking into critical account the heterogeneous elements beyond their visible content and framing. By its close, this thesis demonstrates why its refashioning of these concepts to serve as methodological and theoretical tools recasts pertinent aspects of current debates, affording critical and co-creative "ways of seeing" power, its violence, and its visualisation. ~ 2 ~ INTRODUCTION 1. Overview and Aims of the Enquiry This thesis is about state-corporate-military power and the strategies contemporary photographic image-makers1 are developing, and with which viewers are engaging, to "witness" or "visualise" it. It concerns not the direct, raw violence of the state "at war", but the in/visible2, intangible violence of modern warfare and power in a globalized, neoliberal, transnationally corporatized, militarized and digitally hyperconnected dispensation. Instead of power's manifest forms of violence - physical (war/conflict/crisis) and symbolic (ideological/linguistic/cultural) - which has been since the advent of photography its critical focus, this thesis attends to forms of violence which been identified as "systemic" (Kotz, 2009; Žižek, 2009) or "socially abstract" (Roberts, 2014). Žižek defines systemic violence as 'the often catastrophic consequences of the "smooth" functioning of our economic and political systems' (Žižek, 2009: 1). John Roberts, taking his cue from Žižek, identifies the "socially abstract" nature of systemic violence, elucidating it as 'the amnesiacal and catastrophic "smooth" functioning of the capitalist system, based on the normalizing and dehistoricization of conflict.' (Roberts, 2014: 148). It is the kind of violence productive of/by modern capitalist democracy and the twenty-first century "perpetual war" (Kennedy, 2016) in which we are daily immersed. The focus of contemporary photographic witnessing and visualisation on this insidious, elusive and intractable power and its covert, less visible - or in/visible - forms of violence is what, in ~ 3 ~ my view, distinguishes it from traditional or more conventional war art-documentary photography which still cleaves to a largely (art-historically speaking) realist3, figural photojournalistic aesthetics. Since the advent of photography as a recording medium, it has been the witnessing and representation of direct violence and its consequences which has dominated war photography/photojournalism. This latter kind of war photography is archetypically represented by Robert Capa (Spanish Civil War), Lee Miller (World War 2), David Douglas Duncan (Korean War), Larry Burrows and Don McCullin (Vietnam War), and James Nachtwey (Northern Ireland to Rwanda and beyond), et al (Roberts, 1998; Griffin, 1999; Feeney, 2015). Apart from the likes of Martha Rosler and Allan Sekula in the 1970s who sought to represent the less visible or publicly "unseen" (unattended to) effects or conditions of possibility of war and state violence, conflict and socio-economic exploitation, there has until fairly recently been a dearth of photographic attention to the systemic and more socially abstract aspects of neoliberal capitalist democracy and its forms of violence. Contemporary, dissenting image-makers have begun to evolve their practices to visualise and expose what established kinds of war photography were not: the publicly in/visible, socially abstract forms of violence which accrue within the nexus of neoliberal capitalist democracy, global corporatization, digital media and modern warfare. It is for this reason that the works of the fore-mentioned and salubrious lineage - in either their photojournalistic or art/documentary prowess - is set aside here in the interests of the critical and creative exploration of what is now referred to as the "post-photographic" (or "post- documentary")