Vol. 4 2020 in the Presence of Others

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In The Presence of Others

Vol. 4 2020 \

An exploration of what documentary is, with an eye toward what it may become.

1 \ Volume 4 \

EDITORS ADVISORY BOARD Nicholas Gamso & Jason Fox Josetxo Cerdán Cíntia Gil DOCUMENTARY WORLD-MAKING Carlos Gutierrez DOSSIER EDITORS Rachael Rakes Toby Lee & Josh Guilford Lynne Sachs Shireen Seno PUBLISHING DIRECTOR Pegi Vail Christopher Cekay Allen Genevieve Yue

MANAGING EDITORS GENEROUS SUPPORT PROVIDED BY Jenny Miller Ford Foundation Colin Beckett VOL. IV SPONSOR WEB EDITOR The MDOCS Storytellers' Institute at Skidmore Xiaoya Yuan College

DESIGN & ART DIRECTION A PROJECT OF Christopher Cekay Allen UnionDocs Center For Documentary Art Alison S. M. Kobayashi Bartosz Gawdzik World Records Journal Volume 4 FRONT END DEVELOPMENT In the Presence of Others Lukas Steinman Copyright © 2020 UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art. INTERACTIVE ARCHITECTURE Danny Bowman World Records is published by UnionDocs Inc., 322 Union Ave, Brooklyn, NY, 11211. GRAPHIC DESIGN Bartosz Gawdzik Single print volume $18 Annual digital subscription (two issues) $28 EDITORIAL BOARD Institutional print subscriptions available Tarik Elseewi Benj Gerdes Subscriptions and correspondence to the Faye Ginsburg Editors, [email protected]. Jennifer Hayashida Please correspond before submitting. Alexandra Juhasz Jonathan Kahana World Records is distributed by UnionDocs. Alisa Lebow To place an ad in World Records Journal Martin Lucas Contact [email protected]. Scott MacDonald Ivone Margulies World Records (Print) Pooja Rangan ISSN 2640-0030 Tess Takahashi Published October 2020

2 \ Volume 4 \ Table of Contents \

7 Introduction: In the Presence of Others \ 147 Our Violent Commons: Witnessing the Nicholas Gamso and Jason Fox Worldly Within the Imperial Commons \ Kareem Estefan 15 Maia and The Boundaries of the Frame \ Ra’anan Alexandrowicz 151 Our Violent Commons: The Territory of Listening \ 27 Action Between Art and Citizenship \ Rachel Stevens Martin Lucas 155 Our Violent Commons: 41 To Have Many Returns: Loss in the Empathy and Codependency \ Presence of Others \ Irmgard Emmelhainz Rayya El Zein ↓ Documentary World-Making Dossier 55 Arendt in Jerusalem: Documentary, Theatricality, and the Echo of Irony \ 163 Introduction: Documentary Jonathan Kahana World-Making \ Josh Guilford and Toby Lee 69 Life, Documentary, and Decolonial Struggle \ 171 Disorganized Organization: Signs of Life Nitasha Dhillon in the Film-makers’ Cooperatives Paper Archive \ 81 Principles for Decolonial Film \ Josh Guilford MTL Collective 189 The Abominable Community: Notes on 83 Picking up the Power \ Independent Filmmakers’ Laboratories \ Gregory Sholette In Conversation with Mariya Nikiforova Tania Bruguera 203 Decolonizing Archives and Law’s Frames 93 Truth, Politics, Disintegration: of Accountability \ Forensic Architecture at the Whitney \ Helene Kazan Nicholas Gamso 215 Another Table: Black Women’s Cinema 103 Conditions \ and the Production of Community \ Warren Sack In Conversation with New Negress Film Society with Nuotama Bonnie Honig and Jenny Reardon Bodomo, Tchaiko Omawale, Chanelle Aponte Pearson, Kamilah Badiane, 117 Rewriting the Grammars of Innocence: Gessica Généus, Ja’Tovia Gary, Adepero Abounaddara and the Right to the Image \ Oduye, Cauleen Smith, and Nikyatu Miriam Ticktin 223 Before, Within, Around Beyond: World- 127 Can Rights Be Found on a Map? \ Making in the Digital Archive \ Jason Fox Diana Allan, George Awde, Kaoukab Chebaro, Jared McCormick, Christian 137 Visualizing The Rights Of The Dead: Rossipal, and Yasmine Eid Sabbagh Photography After Arendt \ Cecilia Sjöholm Many of the images and film clips discussed in this volume can be seen at worldrecordsjournal.org.

3 \ Volume 4 \ Contributors \

Ra'anan Alexandrowicz is a director, screen- performance and media in the Middle East writer and editor. His film The Law in These and its diasporas. Her multi-sited research Parts (2011) received the Grand Jury Award focuses on the embodied aesthetics of live at the Sundance Film Festival, a Peabody performances and activist practices, exploring award, and numerous other prizes. His earli- the cultural politics of contemporary media. er documentaries, The Inner Tour (2001) and Her work rethinks representations of Arab and Martin (1999), were shown in the Berlin Film Muslim youth and proposes different models Festival's Forum section and MoMA's New of subjectivity and agency attuned lived expe- Directors/New Films series. His single fiction rience in the contemporary Middle East. Her feature, James’ Journey to Jerusalem (2003), first book manuscript is a meditation on yearn- premiered in Cannes Directors’ Fortnight and ing as a political condition, explored through the Toronto International Film Festival. Ra’anan developments in experimental Arabic rap and served several times as an editing advisor hip hop. for the Sundance Documentary Fund and his film The Viewing Booth is supported by the Irmgard Emmelhainz is an independent trans- Sundance Art of Nonfiction initiative. lator, writer, researcher, and lecturer based in Mexico City. Her writings have been translated Tania Bruguera is a Cuban installation and into several languages and presented at an performance artist whose work creates the array of international venues, including the GSD conditions for collective political action. at Harvard, the Walter Benjamin in Palestine Bruguera has shown her work at several inter- Conference, the Curatorial Summit at the School national art exhibitions, including the Venice of Visual Arts in New York; and the Munch Biennale, Documenta, the Istanbul Biennial, Museum in Oslo. She is the author of The Sky and the Shanghai Biennale. Her work is also in is Incomplete: Travel Chronicles in Palestine the permanent collections of many institutions, (Taurus, 2019), Jean-Luc Godard's Political including MoMA, the Bronx Museum of the Filmmaking (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), and La Arts, and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes tiranía del sentido común: La Reconversión neo- de La Habana. Bruguera is a past Guggenheim liberal de México (Paradiso, 2016). fellow and recipient of numerous other awards. Kareem Estefan is a writer, editor, and PhD Nitasha Dhillon is a writer, artist, educator, candidate in Modern Culture and Media at and organizer. She holds a Ph.D. from the Brown University. He currently teaches media Department of Media Study at the University of studies at the American University of Beirut. Buffalo in New York. Along with Amin Husain, His art criticism has appeared in Art in America, Dhillon is the founder of MTL Collective, a BOMB, frieze, Ibraaz, Third Text, and the New collaboration that joins research, aesthetics, Inquiry. He is co-editor of Assuming Boycott: and action in its practice. MTL Collective, in Resistance, Agency, and Cultural Production turn, has founded Global Ultra Luxury Faction, a (OR Books, 2017). direct action wing of Gulf Labor Artist Coalition as well as MTL+, the collective facilitating Jason Fox is the Founding Editor of World Decolonize This Place. Dhillon’s writings have Records. been published in October, Artforum, Journal of Visual Culture, Hyperallergic, Dissent Magazine, Nicholas Gamso is the author of Art After Creative Time Reports, and the Brooklyn Rail. Liberalism, forthcoming from Columbia Books on Architecture & the City, which explores po- Rayya El Zein is a Visiting Assistant Professor litical crisis through readings in contemporary Anthropology at Wesleyan University. She art and media. He holds a Ph.D. from the City is a cultural ethnographer and scholar of University of New York and has taught at the

Contributors \ 4 Pratt Institute, San Francisco Art Institute, and Art and Technology in New York, the New Stanford University, where he was a 2018-2019 York Film Festival, and Ars Electronica in Linz. Creative Cities Fellow. Nick’s writings appear He is a Director of the Integrated Media Arts in journals such as Afterimage, ASAP, Social MFA Program of the Film and Media Studies Text, Texte zur Kunst, and Third Text. Department at Hunter College, City University of New York. Bonnie Honig is Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Political Jenny Reardon is a Professor of Sociology Science at Brown University. Her most re- and the Founding Director of the Science and cent book is Public Things: Democracy in Justice Research Center at the University of Disrepair (Fordham, 2017). Her books Antigone, California, Santa Cruz. Her research shows Interrupted (Cambridge, 2013) and Emergency how questions of identity, justice, and democ- Politics (Princeton, 2009) draw on the works racy are often silently embedded in scientific of Hannah Arendt in asking how to think and ideas and practices. Her most recent book is act in emergency settings. She is an affiliate of The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Justice, the Digital Democracy Group at Simon Fraser Knowledge After the Genome (Chicago, 2017). University and Senior Research Affiliate at the She is the recipient of fellowships and awards American Bar Foundation, Chicago. from, among others, the National Science Foundation, the Max Planck Institute, the Amin Husain and Nitasha Dhillon are MTL, a col- Freiburg Institute of Advanced Study, the lective that joins research and activism with Humboldt Foundation, and the United States artistic practice. MTL’s work has been curated Congressional Committee on Science, Space in major international art exhibitions and fes- and Technology. tivals around the world including the Athens Biennale and the Venice Biennale. MTL col- Warren Sack is a media theorist, software lective is a core member of Gulf Labor Artists designer, and artist whose work explores Coalition. MTL is also a founding member of theories and designs for online public space Decolonial Cultural Front and Global Ultra and public discussion. He is Professor of Film Luxury Faction. MTL is founder and managing + Digital Media at the University of California, editor of Tidal: Occupy Theory, a printed and Santa Cruz where he teaches digital arts and online movement-generated theory magazine. digital studies. His artwork has been exhibited by SFMoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Jonathan Kahana was Professor of Film + Art, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, Digital Media at University of California, Santa the Walker Art Center, and the ZKM | Center Cruz and Professor of Cinema Studies at NYU. for Arts and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. His He was the author of Intelligence Work: The recent book The Software Arts (MIT Press, Politics of American Documentary (Columbia, 2019) is an alternative history of software that 2008) and the editor of The Documentary places the arts at the very center of software’s Film Reader: History, Theory, Criticism (Oxford, evolution. 2016). He was a member of the editorial board of the journal World Records. Gregory Sholette is a New York City-based artist, writer and core member of the activist art Martin Lucas is an artist, educator and media collective Gulf Labor Artist Coalition. He is the activist. As a founding member of the Paper author of Delirium and Resistance (Pluto, 2017), Tiger Television Collective, Martin was one Dark Matter (Pluto, 2010) and co-author of It's of the producers of The Gulf Crisis Television The Political Economy, Stupid (Pluto, 2013). Project in 1991. His work has appeared at He is Professor of Sculpture, Critical Theory, Buena Vista Arts in San Francisco, Eyebeam and Social Practice in the Art Department of

Contributors \ 5 \ Volume 4 \ Contributors \

Queens College, City University of New York. at McGill. She is an anthropologist and film- Cecilia Sjöholm is Professor of Aesthetics at maker who received her training at Harvard’s Södertörn University. She is the author of Doing Sensory Ethnography Lab, and is the creator of Aesthetics with Arendt: How to see Things two grassroots media collectives in Lebanon, (Columbia, 2015), Kristeva and the Political the Nakba Archive and Lens on Lebanon. Her (Routledge, 2005), and The Antigone Complex: ethnography, Refugees of the Revolution: Ethics and the Invention of Feminine Desire Experiences of Palestinian Exile (Stanford (California, 2004). Her latest project, Descartes University Press, 2014) won the 2014 MEMO at the Crossroads: Cartesian Perspectives on Palestine academic book award and the 2015 Aesthetics is funded by the Swedish Research Middle East Section Award at the American Council. Sjoholm has published widely on Anthropological Association. She was a re- contemporary art in journals, magazines, and cipient of a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship in exhibition catalogs. anthropology and film, and her ethnographic films Chatila, Beirut (2001), Still Life (2007), Rachel Stevens is an interdisciplinary artist Nakba Archive Excerpts (2008), Fire Under Ash based in NYC. Her work engages socio-mate- (2009), Terrace of the Sea (2010), and So Dear, rial systems, ecologies, moving images, and So Lovely (2018) have screened in internation- archives. Other recent projects include a year- al film festivals and as gallery installations. long residency with iLAND and a public project commissioned for Paths to Pier 42 in Lower George Awde is a visual artist currently based Manhattan. Stevens has presented work at in Doha, Qatar. He is the co-founder/co-direc- Socrates Sculpture Park, ISEA, i-docs, Visible tor of marra.tein in Beirut; Assistant Professor Evidence and the NEH Summer Research at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar; Institute on Space, Place and the Humanities. and recipient of numerous awards and fellow- Stevens is the associate editor of Millennium ships, including those from the Aaron Siskind Film Journal. She teaches in the Hunter College Foundation and a US Fulbright Scholar Grant. Integrated Media Arts MFA program and belongs Awde’s work explores the formation of kin- to the curatorial collective Two Chairs. Stevens ship, masculinity, the “state,” and the self. His holds an MFA in Visual Art from UC San Diego. work explores human corporeality and how we reconcile ourselves with the world. He earned Miriam Ticktin is Associate Professor of an MFA in Photography from Yale University, Anthropology at the New School for Social and a BFA in Painting from the Massachusetts Research and Eugene Lang College. She is College of Art. the author of Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France Kaoukab Chebaro currently serves as the Head (California, 2011) and co-editor (with Ilana of Global Studies at the Columbia University Feldman) of In the Name of Humanity: the Libraries. She previously served as Associate Government of Threat and Care (Duke, 2010). University Librarian for Archives and Special She is a founding editor of the journal Collections at the Libraries of the American Humanity: An International Journal of Human University of Beirut, and as the Islamic and Rights, Humanitarianism and Development. Middle East Studies Librarian at the Columbia University Libraries. Kaoukab has served on DOCUMENTARY WORLD-MAKING DOSSIER numerous Library, archives and cultural heri- CONTRIBUTORS tage committees in or about the region.

Diana Allan is Assistant Professor in the Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh is an artist and re- Department of Anthropology and the Institute searcher who combines arts-based research, for the Study of International Development conversational, image, and (meta)archival

Contributors \ 6 practices, to reflect on the agency of photo- Toby Lee is an anthropologist, artist, and graphs and notions of collectivity and power. Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at New One of her long-term projects explores the York University. She is the author of The Public impossibilities of representation, through a Life of Cinema: Conflict and Collectivity in negotiation process around a potential digital Austerity Greece (University of California Press, archive assembled in collaboration with inhab- 2020). She works across film, video, drawing, itants of Burj al-Shamali, a Palestinian refugee and text, and her work has been exhibited camp near Tyr, Lebanon. In 2018, she received at the Locarno Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film her PhD from the Institute of Art Theory and Festival, Camden International Film Festival, Cultural Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Anthology Film Archives, Museum of the in Vienna. Eid-Sabbagh has been a member of Moving Image (NYC), and the Whitney Biennial the Arab Image Foundation since 2008. (2014).

Josh Guilford is Assistant Professor of Jared McCormick is the Acting Director, English in Film and Media Studies at Amherst Director of Graduate Studies, and Faculty College. His essays have appeared in Fellow at the Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Alternative Projections: Experimental Film in Studies at New York University. He complet- Los Angeles, 1945-1980 (John Libbey, 2015); ed his dissertation in Social Anthropology at The Global Sixties in Sound and Vision: Media, Harvard University (2016). He is the co-director Counterculture, Revolt (Palgrave Macmillan, of marra.tein in Beirut, Lebanon. 2014); and other publications. The New Negress Film Society is a core collec- Helene Kazan is a research-based practi- tive of black women filmmakers whose priority tioner, whose work investigates risk as an is to create community and spaces for support, integrated limit condition of conflict and exhibition and consciousness-raising. The capitalism, analysed at the intersection of group is formed by Chanelle Aponte Pearson, international law and architecture. Kazan Nuotama Bodomo, Dyani Douze, Ja'Tovia Gary, was a 2018-2020 Vera List Center Fellow at Stefani Saintonge, and Yvonne Michelle Shirley. The New School, New York. Kazan received her doctorate at the Centre for Research Born in Saint-Petersburg, Russia, in 1986 Architecture, Goldsmiths University of London Mariya Nikiforova received a BFA from Emerson (2019) and was a Research Fellow at Forensic College (Boston) in 2009 and a Master’s de- Architecture (2012-15). And is a Lecturer at gree from the Sorbonne-Nouvelle (Paris) in Oxford Brookes University. Kazan’s film works 2016. Nikiforova is currently pursuing a PhD at include series Frame of Accountability (2021), Université Paris 8 (Saint-Denis), working at the Under Multiple Suns (2019), Engineering distribution cooperative Light Cone, and pur- Shelter (2016), Masking Tape Intervention: suing film projects at L’Abominable. Lebanon 1989, (2013). Kazan has shown work at Ashkal Alwan/Digital Earth, Beirut (2019), Christian Rossipal is a filmmaker and PhD stu- UnionDocs, NYC, The New School, NYC (2018), dent in Cinema Studies at NYU’s Tisch School Goethe Institute, Lebanon, Arab Center for of the Arts. His research interests include Architecture, The Serpentine Gallery, London media and migration, minor cinemas, and (2017), documenta 14, Kassel, Strelka Institute biopolitics. He is part of the artist-activist col- for Media, Architecture and Design, Moscow lective Noncitizen. (2016), Ibraaz (2015), Tate Britain, London, Mosaic Rooms, London, The Showroom, London (2014), the House of World Cultures (HKW), Berlin, and the Beirut Art Center (2013).

Contributors \ 7

\ Volume 4 \ Reality is what we make of it—at least in principle. So argued Hannah Arendt, the political philosopher whose brilliant and sometimes troubling ideas frame the many contributions gathered in this issue of World Records. Arendt returned again and again to her core philosophical concern: a common world experienced in the presence of others. In Arendt’s estimation, to recognize one another, and to do so on equal terms, was an essential human practice. “The reality of the public realm relies on the simultaneous presence of innumerable perspectives and aspects,” Arendt writes in The Human Condition, “in which the common world presents itself and for which no common measurement or denominator can ever be devised.”1 When such a world appears, humans are no longer forced to accept the givenness of reality. Suddenly, they may realize their own IN THE PRESENCE OF OTHERS \ capacity to make it anew. This issue of World Records investigates NICHOLAS GAMSO AND JASON FOX how documentary film and video, performance art, curatorial frameworks, digital social media platforms, and photojournalism provide grounds for collective action. Arendt’s writings on modern politics frequently emphasized the attenuating effects of mass media on public life. But she didn’t think it had to be that way, for Arendt believed critical journalism to have real value. Her own Eichmann in Jerusalem stands as a significant documentary report in its own right, one which attests to the power of collective judgment. It’s just that, as she observed in Eichmann, mass mediation technologies were too often mistaken by modern governments as solutions to the difficulties, digressions, and disagreements that necessarily arise from political interaction. Media, Arendt thought, is way more than just messages. Media becomes a useful concept when it is recognized for its role in conducting and binding worldly relationships, thus modeling democractic processes. Consider Arendt’s analogy: “a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it.” The table facilitates the relational form of political life. She continues, “the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time.”2 The indeterminate role Arendt assigns

Gamso & Fox \ 9 to media, a term that could refer to any number citizens alike. Jonathan Kahana was one of the of infrastructures that simultaneously relate first documentary theorists to engage Arendt’s and separate people, upsets more normative understanding of the public as a sphere of ideas within liberal discourse—namely one conflict and comparative experience. Kahana that understands media as a neutral means of remarked that a lack of engagement with representation, transparency, or the production Arendt was odd, since Arendt’s approach to of group sentiment. Liberal appeals to tech- publics “brings together the themes of reali- nological progress to solve human afflictions ty as a social construction, of human labor as assumes that mediation will not interfere, or an art form from which a life-world is shaped, be made to interfere, with the transmission and of the agency of collective thought and of messages. Such faith proves, in Arendt’s perception.”5 Arendt argued that the social words, “simply unrealistic.”3 and political conditions through which people Arendt’s commentary appeared in the recognize themselves as constituent parts of mid-century context of emerging computation- an imaginary are expressed “through sensible al and mass communication technologies. The medium(s) of public experience.” Updating celebration of these technologies, epitomized Arendt’s assertion, Kahana moved beyond the for Arendt in the overarching narratives of the immediate space of the town meeting hall Cold War, expressed a banal deference to the meeting to the ways in which documentary be- narrative of progress in the resolution of so- comes a constitutive public experience. cial ills. Arendt lamented the ways totalitarian Arendt’s conviction that reality is a funda- regimes and corporate power seekers alike mentally aesthetic and social phenomenon put such deference to use in the decades to forged by collective action offers a dynamic follow. Their desire to instrumentalize, pos- approach to the making and reception of doc- sess, and control provided the background umentary media. As Kahana argued, Arendt’s for Arendt’s conviction that what counted as attention to collective labor was considerably realism was in fact the numbing of humans’ more generative than the model of individual political imaginations. Despite the potential of consciousness associated with the American public life to reconstruct the world, in Arendt’s progressive school of public opinion, which regretful analysis, the world itself—the modern emerged to address anxieties about mass cul- world, which Arendt experienced personally as ture during an early twentieth century period a series of expulsions and border crossings— of rapid urbanization and population growth. seemed beyond repair. Modern progressive thinkers saw documentary Forty-five years after her death, as digital as a corrective to mass commercial enter- technologies have become the in-betweens tainment, piecing together a rational world of so much of our intimate, social, and political outside the Hollywood fantasies and sensa- lives, we believe that the apparent contradic- tional newspaper columnists. Documentary, so tion between her philosophy and the facts of one narrative goes, models rational citizens her life renews the purchase of Arendt’s ideas by presenting them with empirical evidence of today.4 The particular conditions at the mo- the world around them.6 Arendt, by contrast, ment we write this introduction—physically re-envisions social action away from rational, distanced from others and all the more reliant linear movement, and towards improvisatory, upon digital telecom platforms that heighten intersubjective experience of shared worlds. race and class stratifications between irl and Her ideas thus provide auspicious grounds for url workers—puts the stakes of these investi- thinking about the relationship between docu- gations into sobering relief. ments and democracy. Documentation does not simply index the DOCUMENTARY CONDITIONS real through representation. Rather, it provides an ensemble of practices through which Documentary needs a public, but defining a public can shape and deliberate meanings public is a vexed business for scholars and and effects. When and where this occurs—in

Gamso & Fox \ 10 groups of two, twenty, or twenty million—a Arendt believed Israeli prime minister David public can be said to have formed. “Nothing Ben-Gurion mounted the 1961 trial of the [can be] public about the members of a Nazi “architect of the Final Solution,” Adolf public,” Kahana argued, until they self-con- Eichmann. Arendt’s well known “report on the sciously consider the technological, thematic, banality of evil” found that Eichmann’s cold and aesthetic terms that have brought them disinterest was at every step legal and that together, and what uses might be made of Eichman himself was something of a stand-in them.7 Documentary objects such as photos for the actually quite widespread and bu- and films should be understood as contested reaucratic responsibility for the genocide of artifacts with multiple, contingent meanings European Jews. By insisting on the narrative of that emerge in a productive tension with Eichman’s bad conscience, Ben-Gurion relin- particular social and cultural conditions. In quished the fledgling Israeli state's capacity the space between making and meaning—the for rational judgement. The prime minister struggle against the managers of meaning and was thus freed to author a national origin the bonds that are forged by those linked in story, grounding state power in the fiction of that struggle—is where one finds politics. retributive justice. “Only good people are ever “The event of photography is never over” is bothered by a bad conscience,” Arendt later the way media theorist Ariella Aïsha Azoulay reflected with mordant insight.10 Evil is con- refers to this ongoing struggle.8 In direct constructed in the image of a singular foe. versation with Arendt’s writing, Azoulay argues In her commentary on Ben-Gurion, Arendt that documentary images can forge a “civil decried what she saw as the use of Jewish contract” between spectators and photo- identity to secure political legitimacy and to graphed people when photographic discourse exclude the Arab majority from governing. suspends a dominant viewpoint (in Azoulay’s Arendt was appalled by the evocation of af- case that of the Israeli state) and offers a per- finity—what she describes as an ethic of “like spective outside of the sovereign categories attracts like”—as the foundation of a polit- such as citizen or refugee. Azoulay’s admo- ical community. Talk of empathy in politics nition does not dissolve these distinctions. also concerned Arendt because it privileges It only proposes a potential space to redress citizens’ individual moral investments in the them through forms of imagination and soli- suffering of others at the expense of the delib- darity that state-based citizenship categories erative political judgments that might reduce do not allow.9 suffering or find means of doing justice.11 Photographs provide a common set of The form of judgment that Arendt advocates objects around which spectators may ex- presupposes a community of equals who share press critical judgments and thus position and critique each other’s claims and opinions. themselves with regard to what they are In The Viewing Booth (2019), filmmaker Ra’anan witnessing. By self-consciously drawing Alexandrowicz stages a conversation between comparisons to shared conditions, viewers of himself and Maia Levy, a Temple University photography illustrate Arendt’s observation student, concerning videos recorded in the that to judge is to generalize—and individual context of the Israeli occupation of Gaza and judgments may become political because they the West Bank. Alexandrowicz is interested generalize. Judgment forces viewers to make in how “we try to find our own position in the determinations about particular content and world through critical engagements with the to place that content in a broader social and images and sound that portray that world.” historical framework. Yet, when asked to narrate her reactions to Arendt thought judgment to be the pin- video fragments produced within the context nacle of political activity. She also thought it of contested Israeli settlements, Levy avoids disastrous how quickly people relinquished imagining “a wider image that includes the oc- their willingness to judge. It was to such an- cupation.” Instead, Alexandrowicz argues, she esthetic effect, as Kahana’s essay argues, that “discovers the person shooting, the camera,

Gamso & Fox \ 11 the memory card, which was transferred to the connecting the knowledge they already have to human rights organization, the computers that new knowledge. Everyone is of an equal intel- were used to post the video online.” In other ligence. Learn something and relate everything words, she discovers the videos’ construc- else to it. The Communards realized not that tion, and from that construction, she infers everything was political, but that anything that the imagery is meant to deceive, and is could be the starting point for politics once thus too political. By dismissing the videos as they reflected upon how objects and condi- too constructed to take seriously, she is also tions mediated their social relationships. As able, in an Arendtian sense, to dismiss her civil the political theorist Bonnie Honig observes, responsibility.12 nothing is intrinsically political in Arendt’s Groupthink defines itself against strangers outlook, but neither is anything protected and newcomers, grounding political belonging from being politicized. Issues become political in the specter of what Miriam Ticktin refers to when they are mediated, or made to appear in as the trope of “invasive others.” As Ticktin public.14 The Communards, like Arendt, saw po- argues, depicting migrating peoples with either litical emancipation as possible only when “the anxious distrust or sympathetic moral invest- universe of daily experience becomes translat- ment structures xenophobic hostility and its able.”15 Media provides a means of translation progressive twin, humanitarian sentiment. between many minds, bridging the interior Ticktin sees documentary as a space to do life of an individual and the world in which battle against invasive images. She praises the she lives. Political equality—the equal right to Syrian film collective, Abounaddara, for “chal- appear before others and to disrupt power’s lenging the visual and affective vocabularies monopoly on expression—was for Arendt the of humanitarianism,” and refusing “affective project of media’s relational character. responses such as pity or compassion.” In lieu Political equality operates through what of such representational clichés, the group Arendt calls the right to have rights—the ba- asserts the “right to a dignified image” to re- sic human right to act as a political agent in claim some of the aesthetic terrain of politics. shaping a common world. The right to have Reclamation will always remain an open proj- rights exists everywhere, though it’s typically ect, for it resides in the space of media and it only fulfilled (and only for a few) by the liber- is subject to the indeterminacy that exists in al nation-state (Fox). Arendt’s construction relation between people. illustrates the power of the speech act—the convocation of politics through the assertion THE LOCATION OF POLITICS of rights—and a normative idea of the moral good, which allows entities to exist in dynam- Politics necessitates judgment, but political ic relation to one another. But what she didn’t activity does not necessarily equate to justice. think is that simply shouting I am free would Arendt’s celebration of agonistic dramas of then make it so. It’s more that she thought that political life over specific ideological content given a choice, it would be better to rely on raises serious concerns about whether her collective will rather than a beneficent ruler to ideas can address questions of racial and eco- secure one’s freedom. She then sought to de- nomic justice.13 Because our interest in Arendt fine the conditions that make possible mutual is hardly disinterested, we echo a concrete regard, deliberation, and collectivity. example celebrated by Arendt for the glimpse In these pages, several authors appeal to of transformational politics it offered. The com- the right to have rights in order to consider munards of the short-lived Paris Commune of representations of and by those who have 1871 had a maxim which they used to guide been expelled from an existing political frame- their revolutionary pedagogy in pursuit of a work. Cecilia Sjöholm, for example, discusses society shaped by equal political participation: the specter of border violence and the rights Everything is in Everything. From that principle of the dead, arguing, in an analysis of works by followed a few others. Everyone is capable of the Mexican artist Teresa Margolles, that new

Gamso & Fox \ 12 visual strategies for asserting lost personhood, of feminism and Black liberation movements as opposed to the convention of numerical both, which she held to be politically unsound records of mass disappearance, can radically because they brought private life into the alter our understanding of political violence public realm. We follow authors Bonnie Honig in the world. For Rayya El Zein, communities and Seyla Benhabib in arguing that Arendt’s long denied national sovereignty can find new evident disdain for social movements needs to means to conceive of a politics around dias- be reconceived as a call to politicize our un- poric cultures of loss and remembrance. Her derstanding of feminism and racial capitalism. discussion of the Palestinian Right to Return Arendt’s evident anti-blackness—including explores the layers of meaning and experience her resistance to the integration of US schools that make such a politics possible. El Zein on grounds that schools are part of the so- cites Jacques Rancière’s critique of Arendt— cial rather than public realm—might also specifically his argument that human rights be taken as grounds for correction, an idea is something of an open work to be fulfilled which Arendt acknowledged in a well-known through relational activities—and thus explores exchange with the novelist Ralph Ellison, ex- the political potential that resides in expres- pressing regret for her failure to “understand sions of dispossession across the Palestinian the complexities of the situation.”17 diaspora. Then turning to the work of media artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, POLITICS AND THE CULTURAL ECONOMY she articulates how such an aesthetics of diasporic recovery might be visualized. To some readers, Arendt’s belief that politics Politics, El Zein and Sjöholm make clear, are comes before social concerns like labor and always particular to place and time. And it is reproductive issues renders her arguments particularity that is missing from an Arendtian mostly irrelevant to this particular moment.18 approach to politics as a “relationship of Others find Arendt eminently useful to track simultaneous difference[s] and interdepen- the dissolution of the boundaries between dence[s].”16 Arendt’s approach is useful culture and politics and between private and because it is general, but it is only useful when public life in the neoliberal age. The autono- it is applied within the particular economies mist philosopher Paolo Virno, who argues that that shape politics. The events that char- “labor has acquired the traditional features of acterize the political economy in which we political action,” falls into the latter camp.19 He assemble this issue include escalating opposi- wonders: If capital can parcel speech, action, tion to police violence against people of color, and collective experience just as easily as it an expanding security state, and the ongoing does pasture, how can we create space for occupation of Palestine. anti-capitalist politics? And, are too many of us In this context, Arendt’s many conservative too busy performing creative labor as content writings on American racial politics, poorly jus- producers of one form or another to provide an tified with strict boundaries as to what counts audience for others’ speech? as political action, were decidedly unreceptive Several essays in this volume consider the to economic or social analysis. Arendt wished potential—something of a recurring theme in to distinguish action (where she locates pol- the avant-garde tradition—for creative actions itics as displays of personal and collective to subvert their status as labor and recuper- agency) from labor (which gives life to human ate political meaning. Filmmaker Martin Lucas, populations) and work (which builds and main- starting from the idea that “what we live with tains the shared world we inhabit) in order to now is a world where our creativity is where preserve a meaningful space for private life. capital derives value,” turns to site specific Public life is the site of action, private life and social practice projects of artists Jeanne van an intermediary social sphere are where work Heeswijk and Tania Bruguera. Van Heeswijk and labor take place. This hierarchy provid- makes use of the surplus cultural capital ed the basis for Arendt’s well-known critique contemporary art museums provide to chart

Gamso & Fox \ 13 sustainable futures away from capital’s reach. exposure. Political theorist Seyla Benhabib Along the way, she also frames how cultural sees the distinction between labor and action, institutions too often exhibit the lifework of and between the poles of social and political people of color as artwork within the museum life, as soft oppositions rather than as discrete walls. items ordered à la carte: “a private dining room Recent museum demonstrations orga- in which people gather to hear a Samizdat or nized by Decolonize this Place—including at in which dissidents meet with foreigners,” as America’s most prestigious monuments to Benhabib observes, “becomes public space image culture, such as the Whitney Museum if they are the object and the location of an and MoMA—pose a similar set of questions, ‘action held in concert.’”22 The metaphor of revealing not only the extent to which imperial the shared table warrants special attention and economic violence are embedded in the because it evokes the themes of scarcity and production of culture, but also the ways that abundance, of domestic labor, all the activities culture is frequently leveraged to conceal the associated with private life. The table operates violence that underwrites their work. Physical, as more than a political centerpiece, in other worldly in-between(s) like museums and words. It is the culmination of reproductive monuments are “overgrown” by the social rela- action, a symbol of necessity fulfilled.23 tionships, including racial exclusion, tokenism, Media, in its expansive sense, traverses and extractive investments that these insti- public and private life, combines reproduc- tutions sustain.20 The project of Decolonize tive labor and action, and condenses social this Place is not simply to disclose what lies and material conditions. Media binds, but it behind the boardroom door—although such shouldn’t homogenize. Scholar and filmmak- admissions are integral to their actions. The er Nitasha Dhillon emphasizes this point by goal is rather to make visible the global frame- addressing the shortcomings of the Occupy work of financialized settler colonial violence Wall Street (OWS) rallying cry, “we are the hidden in plain sight. (MTL Collective) Arendt's 99%.” Although OWS is celebrated for show- work helps us to see how financialization ing how the neoliberal credit economy harms compromises art institutions' commitments actors from across social and institutional life, to public knowledge.21 Yet her ideas can also expressing this simple majority risks erasing help us understand how the contingent and how harm is dispersed unevenly across race, variable nature of public life—exemplified by class, and gender. In Dhillon’s view, occupiers the broad coalition involved in the Whitney can only forge the necessary solidarity to chal- protests—can turn museums themselves into lenge a global financial system once occupiers arenas for critical demonstration and direct acknowledge and honor the “horizontal debts action. that we owe to each other as a result of the Extending this thought, Bonnie Honig ar- legacies of colonization and enslavement.” In gues that the place of action in the modern other words, collective action is made possible world is often difficult to identify. Politics may by tending to the realms of labor and work—to indeed emerge in any kind of space or any the uneven forms of socialization and social form of activity, as the labor, feminist, and reproduction that structure real differences abolitionist movements have proven beyond among the 99%. Debt comes in many forms. doubt. But other arenas, those which bill them- Its violence marks people unevenly. Drawing selves as the widest possible public sphere, connections between such differences, under- offer no such assurances. Social media offers a standing how they play out at various levels of sense of individual agency within a community lived experience, and organizing through rath- of others, but private social media platforms, er than around them, is what sustains shared Warren Sack, Jenny Reardon, and Honig argue, trust in mutual life. Without such a trust, cannot make a citizenry out of users. More Arendt argued and Dhillon echoes, it is impos- generative spaces for politics might exist sible to act politically in and with the presence away from the glare of such nominal public of others.

Gamso & Fox \ 14 A NOTE ON METHOD (1932-1934), its concern with “progressive and regressive forms of For reasons outlined above, we believe that modernism,” and the ways it inherits Arendt’s persona has at times obscured her Walter Lippmann’s view of mass mediation arguments—a critique that we suspect Arendt as a process and an effect character- herself would approve, given her embarrass- ized by misinformation and distraction. ment at personal notoriety. She was adamant 7—See Kahana’s “Arendt in Jerusalem: that "no common denominator" should ever Documentary, Theatricality, and the be devised that precludes individuals from Echo of Irony” in this volume. participating in a space of political decision making—no affiliation, no specific background 8—Ariella Azoulay, The Civil or experience, no ways of knowing. As a re- Contract of Photography (New sult, some of the contributors to this issue York: Zone Books, 2008). demonstrate the riches that come with close 9—In a different context but similar spir- readings of Arendt. Other contributors engage it, Fred Moten and Stefano Harvey put her work obliquely, through secondary interloc- it this way: “The coalition emerges out utors, and some engage with core concerns of of your recognition that it’s fucked up Arendt without mentioning her own writing at for you, in the same way that we’ve al- all. What these essays share is a commitment ready recognized that it’s fucked up for to thinking politically across documentary us.” Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, art and media in the pursuit of a world worth The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning having. and Black Study (Wivenhoe, New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 140. ENDNOTES 10—Hannah Arendt, and Jerome Kohn. 1—Hannah Arendt. The Human “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” Condition (Chicago: University of in Responsibility and Judgment (New Chicago Press, 1958), 52. York: Schocken Books, 2003) 161. 2—Ibid. 48. 11—Hannah Arendt, “Reflections on Little 3—Ibid. 168. Rock,” Dissent 6, no. 1 (Winter 1959): 50. 4—Arendt, in fact, was something of a 12—Azoulay writes that “When a speaker’s connoisseur of contradictions. Where preference is for political art, she might one finds them, she thought, one finds criticize a political work for being “not the most basic perplexities of living with political enough,” consigning it to the pole others in equality. The oblique compliment of lack for demonstrating an excess of the she once paid the writing of Karl Marx, aesthetic. Similarly, when the preference that “such fundamental and flagrant con- is for art that does not yield to political tradictions rarely occur in second-rate considerations and that treats art itself writers; in the work of the great authors, as its explicit focus, an excess of “the they lead into the very center of their political” will be deemed a defect. These work,” applies equally well to the compet- judgments of taste achieve three things: ing Arendts that appear across her pages. 1.They determine the charac- 5—Jonathan Kahana, Intelligence Work: ter of the image under discussion: The Politics of American Documentary (New “aesthetic” or “political.” York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 19. 2. They point to the resultant suc- 6—For an example of this line of think- cess or failure of the image. ing, one might look to John Grierson’s 3. They express the affinity of the “First Principles of Documentary” speaker of the judgment of taste for

Gamso & Fox \ 15 work that identifies with one or an- 18—See, for example, Martha other side of the opposition." Rosler, Culture Class (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013), 144. Ariella Azoulay, Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography 19—Paolo Virno, A Grammar of (New York: Verso Books, 2013). the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life (Los 11—Hannah Arendt and Jerome Kohn. Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004) 51. “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” in Responsibility and Judgment (New 20—Arendt, Human Condition, 162. York: Schocken Books, 2003), 161. 21—Arendt makes explicit the con- 12—Arendt, “Reflections nection between finance and empire, on Little Rock” 50. observing that European imperialism was seeded by “the overproduction of 13—One might look to one recent laun- capital and the emergence of 'super- derer of Arendt’s writing, Samantha fluous' money, the result of oversaving, Power, the former U.S. Ambassador to which could no longer find productive the United Nations who invokes Arendt’s investment within the national bor- The Originis of Totalitarianism to justi- ders.” Origins of Totalitarianism, 135. fy the American war on Islam, in order to see how easily Arendt’s writings on de- 22—Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant mocracy are reduced to banalities about Modernism of Hannah Arendt liberal tolerance and attendant forms (New Haven: Yale UP), 125. of racial violence. See Powers’ forward 23—The object is not without its own con- to the 2004 Schocken Books reprint of tradictions. As Arendt points out, the terms Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. of political equality presuppose a prima- 14—Bonnie Honig, “Toward an Agonistic ry set of unequals whose labor supports Feminism: Hannah Arendt and the Politics the principal figures in the improvisatory of Identity,” in Feminist Interpretations of drama of political action. Arendt employs Hannah Arendt (University Park, PA: Penn certain exceptions and rationalizations State University Press, 1995), 135–166. to account for these gaps—for example approving Marx’s observation that 15—Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury: The hunger is provoked by human forces Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune while nevertheless underscoring that (New York: Verso Books, 2015), 77. life’s necessities come before politics. 16—Patchen Markell. "Arendt's Work: On the Architecture of The Human Condition," College Literature 38, no. 1 (2011): 34. 17—As Katherine T. Gines has argued, although Arendt amended her views of the Little Rock case on the basis of Ellison’s rebuke, she nevertheless repeated a variation of her misguid- ed thinking in subsequent writings on civil rights in education, particularly in her writings “The Crisis in Education” and On Violence. See Gines, Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2014), 22.

Gamso & Fox \ 16 \ Volume 4 \ FROM THE FLATBED VIEWER TO THE VIEWING BOOTH

A decade ago I was engaged in archival research for my documentary The Law in These Parts (2011). I was searching for images that would visualize the history of the post-1967 Israeli military occupation in Palestine, which entailed viewing hundreds of hours of footage from Israeli and foreign archives in a variety of film and video formats. It was a jarring experience. I was suddenly compelled to gaze at the evolution of this painful and frustrating piece of history—one that I was not merely observing, but which I have lived through and for which I bear some responsibility. But it was not only that, I realized. The overall mental picture created by the accumulation of hundreds of hours of documentation was disturbing on a MAIA AND THE BOUNDARIES professional level. It made me doubt some- OF THE FRAME \ thing that as a documentary filmmaker I had taken for granted. It made me question the RA’ANAN ALEXANDROWICZ uses of documentary in advocating for human rights and social justice. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip—The Occupation, as it is referred to by both Palestinians and Israelis—has been heavily documented and widely reported in Israeli visual media since its very inception. If we were to take stock of the critical nonfiction media works about the occupation created during the last half-century, we would easily find thousands of such pieces. I had always accepted the paradigm that the more that people were made aware of injustice and oppression, the less that oppression and injustice can endure. But now, thinking back to these media objects—thousands of news stories, documentary films, witness videos, and even fact-based comedies—prompts a question: how can we reconcile this extensive critical documentation of an ongoing human rights travesty with the apparent failure to end it? This question leads to another one, wider, but no less disturbing: how is it that a period in which the pain of others, in a variety of contexts across the globe, is seemingly more easily exposed and its tactics of enforcement are made knowable to publics more easily than ever before, such exposure does not

Alexandrowicz \ 17 necessarily lead to increased global solidarity? been taught."1 The intended audience of such media objects It’s not only photography, but also cinema are the would-be link between the represen- and television that have cultivated a small but tation of reality and the change of reality. What stubborn lineage of work that turns the cam- did viewers see in the documentation of the era towards the viewer. Some examples are occupation? What did they understand from it? Chronicle of a Summer (1961, Jean Rouch and I felt compelled to turn my gaze away from all Edgar Morin) in which the participants of the those nonfiction films, reports, and videos, to film view it critically in the end; 10 Minutes the viewers who saw them. What if I could bet- Older (1978, Hertz Frank), which depicts a ter understand how the viewers see images of child’s affect as he watches an engaging the- the occupation, how viewers develop knowl- atre play; Reverse Television (1983, Bill Viola); edge through their engagements with them, Shirin (2008, Abbas Kiorostami); Visitors (2011, and how their sense of attachment to ethical Godfrey Reggio); and even Channel 4’s reali- and political commitments is strengthened or ty show Gogglebox (2013-present). While not challenged in conjunction with them? necessarily addressing social change or social I am not the first to ask this question. A justice, each of these works look back at their long tradition of thought and practice seeking viewers, exploring the mystery of the human to transfer the authority of explaining imag- gaze at the moving image. es from the experts, the makers and critics In the opening of Regarding the Pain of of images, to the non-professional realm of Others, Susan Sontag recounts a correspon- ordinary people precedes my own. One well- dence between Virginia Woolf and a prominent known work in this tradition, for instance, is London lawyer that occurred during the John Berger and Jean Mohr’s Another Way of Spanish Civil War. The lawyer wrote to ask Telling. In a chapter titled “What Did I See?,” Woolf, perhaps provocatively, “how in your Mohr presents his photographs to random opinion can we prevent war?”2 Woolf ques- spectators and asks them to describe the tioned the validity of the lawyer’s question, images in front of them. With this gesture, he and in lieu of an answer, she suggested they surrenders the position of authority with re- consider a hypothetical experiment: what gard to his own images and transfers it to the would happen, she asked him, if they both beholder. In most cases, what they articulated looked at images of the atrocities of the war, about the photos was not what Mohr expected images which were published weekly in those them to focus on. Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, whose times. “Let us see,” she writes, “if when we reflections on photographic spectatorship are look at the same photographs, we will feel central to this essay, critiques the lineage of the same things.” Inspired by Woolf’s thought work that begins with Berger and Mohr’s book. experiment, I wondered if there was a way for Ever since their book was written in 1982, she me to contribute to the tradition of cinema that writes: looks back at the spectator. I decided to try to use the tools of documentary to explore and the same feeling of “discovery” has been depict the way meanings are created in the expressed in other writings on photog- consciousness of viewers. raphy, and in different contexts. Often, In late 2017, I invited several people at these "discoveries" have been linked in Temple University in Philadelphia, PA, to partic- one way or another with the way “ordi- ipate in a filmed viewing of some of the same nary” people (i.e. people who are not recordings that had spurred these reflections: considered experts in photography) have documentary footage of the Israeli Occupation. been using photography. These people The idea of the project was to try to capture supposedly possess a certain kind of peoples’ experiences while they were im- knowledge regarding the photographed mersed in the viewing of nonfiction images. image which helps us to understand that For this purpose, I had set up a viewing booth “photographs do not work as we had of sorts in a lab-like basement space in the

Alexandrowicz \ 18 Film and Media Arts department at Temple. between themselves and figures of state The small booth was equipped with a would- power and authority—sometimes desta- be interrotron that displayed video on a screen bilizing the power dynamic in situations and at the same time, recorded the face of they are witnessing or engaged in and the viewer; as if from the point of view of the other times highlighting the asymmetrical screen they were looking at.3 When partici- relations of state power and the citizens pants entered the room in which the booth they are meant to serve . . . . these record- was situated, they could see multiple screens, ings often create new forms of attention as well as a small crew which they had already through performance, drama, and charac- been informed would be recording them. Once ter identification, as well as new forms of a participant entered the viewing booth, they witnessing and documentation that might were alone with the images, but remained in be capable of transforming public dis- dialogue with me through an audio system. course and the political landscape.5 I then asked them to familiarize themselves with a rudimentary interface allowing them to The nonfiction images that I decided to ex- choose videos and control their playback. I en- plore through the eyes of the participants of couraged them to verbalize the thoughts and The Viewing Booth were recorded in a different emotions that surfaced as they were viewing, geopolitical context than the ones that Skoller as unstructured, raw, and associative as those considers, but they nevertheless take part in thoughts may be. These thought-fragments, I the kind of work he names documentation of hoped, could capture something of the internal the contingencies of present-time.6 dialogue that accompanies the experience of The emergence of personal cameras and viewing. Listening in to a dialogue between a the increasing ease of online video sharing specific viewer and a specific image quickly in the past decade and a half has marked a demonstrates Woolf’s response to that lawyer: transition for Palestinians living under Israeli that people see images in highly idiosyncratic, occupation from more often being the subjects if still socially constructed, ways. Thus, follow- of documentation to themselves documenting ing a specific viewer’s internal dialogue allows their own conditions.7 To briefly recount this us to reflect on the messy and contradictory transition, we need to flash back to the ear- processes by which we try to find our own ly 2000s, when mobile phone cameras were position in the world through critical engage- still novel, particularly in the West Bank and ments with the images and sound that portray Gaza. Those that existed produced low-quality that world. images and could not record large quantities of footage. Handycams, on the other hand, SHOOTING BACK were becoming more and more affordable and grassroots activists as well as media organi- In an earlier issue of this publication, Jeffery zations were bringing them into the occupied Skoller investigates videos recorded by am- territories. Suddenly, the ubiquity of small ateurs in the context of confrontations with cameras allowed for the capturing of numerous US law enforcement, highlighting some of the incidents that were previously much harder to cinematic and social characteristics that link depict. News organizations (and film produc- them as well as the political potentials that tions) would publish such videos, exposing the might be found through them.4 Skoller takes harassment and assault of residents, illegal such videos, captured by happenstance film- use of force and weapons against demonstra- makers, as a new and valid documentary form. tors, and other human rights violations. This For Skoller: new kind of image seemed to be getting unprecedented traction, popularizing the notion, These happenstance filmmakers creat least among Israeli activist organizations, ate a new cinema of present-time, often that additional documentation would be a by turning on the camera and placing it useful mechanism for changing the situation

Alexandrowicz \ 19 because it would prompt more public debate culture. The captioning of such videos has a within Israel and it would increase internation- significant influence on their reception; they al attention and pressure from the outside. are often viewed multiple times, and they are The Israeli non-governmental organization responded to, verbally, on social networks, (NGO) B'Tselem, which has been operating sometimes in real-time. Moreover, these docu- under this media activist paradigm since 1989, mentary fragments are then often approached long before digital video and photography was by spectators in ways that are more similar available in Israel/Palestine, demonstrates to photographs than documentary cinema. this investment in the transformative poten- In films, moving images are typically situated tials of video. The organization’s mission is to within a structure that contextualizes them document and expose human rights violations and controls their meaning. Thus, the serial under the occupation. In 2005, the organiza- quality of film images provides for a continuous tion initiated a project called Shooting Back and adjustable process of meaning making, (which still operates today).8 B'Tselem dis- writes Ariella Aïsha Azoulay. In a photograph, tributed dozens of handycams to Palestinian however, “one cannot exceed the bordered residents of the West Bank and encouraged frame and that which is not contained in it, them to capture human rights abuses in their unless one can then refer to another photo- environment. The organization periodically graph (preferably one that either preceded or collects these recordings and tries to lever- succeeded it).”11 age them in the political, judicial, and public For participants in the viewing booth, I arenas in which the Israeli occupation is being organized an archive of forty videos from the challenged. Following their lead, other human occupation. In an effort to neutralize some rights groups and local Palestinians started of my own biases, I decided that half of the filming and disseminating similar materials videos would be ones that were shared by online. Filming became, for many of us, an B'Tselem, and the other half by conservative important aspect of the struggle against the organizations that explicitly claim pro-occupa- occupation.9 It shouldn’t have come as a sur- tion views.12 Then, in December 2017, I issued prise that in response, Israeli settlers and the an open call on the Temple University campus, Israeli army also began to record and distrib- soliciting people who are interested in Israel ute videos which sought to justify their own (but are not Israeli) to be filmed and recorded actions. Over the last decade and a half, thou- in the act of viewing. Seven students agreed sands of videos of the occupation have been to participate. posted online. These videos constitute some of the most raw and immediate representa- THE PREFERRED VIEWER tions of the occupation. And they are there, online, for anyone who wants to see them. The Viewing Booth takes a case study ap- Happenstance videos continue to trans- proach, ultimately focusing on the experience form modes of viewing nonfiction when they of Maia Levy, one of the seven participating resist claims of objective narration, instead viewers. I had never met Maia before filming, evoking a heightened reflexivity of the imag- but it was apparent to me from the start that es, provoking a response not only towards the the videos were engaging for her. She dis- image itself, but also towards the disposition closed that her parents were actually from of the person filming it. When such documen- Israel, but I couldn’t discern her immediate tary fragments go viral, they are viewed by disposition towards the images she chose much larger audiences than the documenta- to view. The first video Maia watched, Settler ries that I make can ever hope to attract, and Violence Continues (B'Tselem 2008), is a they make up an increasing share of many chaotic portrayal of an incident in the West people’s news consumption.10 The duration Bank city of Hebron. A Palestinian man who of the videos and the platforms on which they cannot be seen is holding the camera and are viewed create a different kind of viewing being assaulted, repeatedly, by a group of

Alexandrowicz \ 20 Israeli settlers who tell him to stop filming. As of her fundamental beliefs by portraying asym- the man asserts his right to film, he is pushed metrical Israeli aggression. She is, if to slightly around by military personnel who are present. distort Stuart Hall’s original term, an opposi- They demand that he stop filming. Taking in tional viewer of the B'tzelem videos.13 Arguably, the violent scene, Maia is speechless at first, for B'tzelem, as well as for myself, oppositional but then, after I encourage her to watch the viewers like Maia are actually preferred view- video again and verbalize her thoughts, she ers.14 Maia’s engagement with videos about says: the occupation is often referred to as moving beyond the choir, because it suggests an at- the Arab . . . civilian wants to film . . . I tempt to change rather than reaffirm "people's guess . . . freedom of speech in some perceptions and behaviours."15 Some of the sense . . . but the soldiers and the reli- other students who participated in The Viewing gious settlers are really negating that. Booth also had doubts about the B'tzelem Like they don’t want anyone else to see footage, but Maia's open hostility towards the what is going on there. organization, combined with her willingness to openly engage with the troubling images Maia’s first responses give me the impression makes her the most dynamic of the seven that she holds relatively liberal views regard- participants. Empathy, anger, embarrassment, ing Israel/Palestine. After a while, though, innate bias, healthy curiosity, and complex de- moving through a few more videos, her re- fense mechanisms—all played out before my sponses began to clarify that her political eyes as I watched Maia watching the images inclination was different than I had thought. of the occupation. This is why I decided to fo- In the midst of watching the fourth video, one cus my film, The Viewing Booth, as well as this that portrays Israeli soldiers preforming an writing, on my experience with her. unwarranted and seemingly arbitrary search in a Palestinian shop, Maia stops the video, and AN OPPOSITIONAL VIEWING then starts playing it again from the beginning. She explains that she is confused and that Over the course of the hour and fifty minutes she can’t concentrate on the video because that Maia Levy spends in the viewing booth, she finds B'Tselem’s logo in the corner of the she watches eleven out of the forty videos frame distracting. Before she starts the video that were available to her on the interface. This again, I ask her what this logo makes her think. essay focuses on Maia's responses to 2 out of She responds: the 11 videos she views. The first, published by B'tzelem, is titled Soldiers Enter Hebron That it’s going to be one of those pro- Home at Night (Da'ana, 2016). I will call it, for paganda, fake- not-real- skewed videos the purpose of this writing, Night Search. The that just don’t even show the entire story. second video is titled Israeli soldiers feeding Or something really sad . . . . That’s why Hungry Palestinian Children (maker and date I think twice before I watch these things unknown), and it was published by a right- . . . . You know . . . Having Israeli parents, wing online news outlet named 0404 News. these videos kind of confuse me . . . yes Night Search was filmed by Nayef Da’ana, . . . those videos they can really play with a Palestinian resident of the city of Hebron in your head. the Occupied Palestinian Territories and distributed by B'tzelem. Da’ana documents, in a The way Maia describes the B'Tselem human single eight-minute shot, Israeli soldiers raid- rights videos gives me a better sense of where ing his home at 3 a.m. He records as soldiers she stands in political debate about the occu- wake his family, search their home, and snap pation. For Maia, videos portraying Palestinian pictures of the adults, children, and the prem- suffering under Israeli occupation seem to be ises. They do not provide the family members hostile images, because they threaten some with a warrant, nor a reason for their actions,

Alexandrowicz \ 21 yet they do permit family members to record.16 Palestinian children being woken up. Though we see no physical violence, the video understandably shocks many viewers. That’s sad . . . . They’re sleeping, and they Images of sleeping children being woken up are cute kids . . . it’s sad . . . . That’s defi- to a house full of armed, masked military men nitely sad. who then interrogate them, rifle through their belongings, and photograph them without ex- Again, this emotion does not last long. Maia planation demonstrates the acute vulnerability suddenly complains that the video does not and precarious living situations that shape provide any context as to why this raid is everyday life for many Palestinians under oc- happening. cupation. The invaded Da’ana family does not physically resist (apart from filming) and at the The problem is that they don’t give any same time, it seems evident that the soldiers context. They don’t give you any context are taking no pleasure in the task they are as to why they are doing this and that just performing. In a way, the video is most shock- makes them look bad. I mean . . . what if ing for how mundane and routine the event there is a complaint about a bomb in this appears to be. house? Maia is taken aback when she sees the soldiers aggressively enter the family home, put on This swinging back and forth between empa- masks, and shout demands at the Palestinian thy and suspicion continues throughout the family. As the soldiers adamantly demand that first half of the video. Maia undergoes eight the parents wake up all their kids and bring such shifts of attitude, moving between empa- them out to the hallway, Maia responds: thy and doubt. Finally, in the last few minutes, she settles into a fixed attitude of disbelief and Immediately when I see these things it distrust of the image in front of her. In the sixth makes me feel sad . . . . They’re kids . . . I minute of Night Search, the soldiers seem to mean, I imagine someone coming into my conclude that they have accomplished what house and doing that . . . . It’s a little bit . . they came for. Without a word of explanation, . difficult . . . . It’s not difficult to see, I can they return the family’s IDs, and with a polite- watch it but it makes me sympathize. ness that feels wholly ironic to the situation, they say goodbye to the dazed family members Nayef and Dalal Da’ana (the parents) argue and leave. The door of the home, which was with the soldiers, attempting to prevent their barged through minutes earlier, is closed gen- children from being inspected. Dalal says tly by the last soldier to leave. Silence ensues. that the children are young, begging them to Then a surprising thing happens. The camera just look at them to confirm their age without does not stop filming. It remains trained on further disrupting them. The officer does not the door for a few seconds and then pans 180 agree and Dalal insists that it is too cold to degrees, moving us back through the home, take the children out of bed. Suddenly Maia’s passing Da’ana’s confused 8-year-old daugh- attitude changes. She pauses the video in the ter who stands frozen outside of her room. middle of their argument and says: Da’ana continues recording as he tries to calm his kids, telling them not to be afraid and to go But I also feel she’s lying . . . . I don’t back to bed. Here, Maia does not empathize. know, I don’t trust her, they lie a lot too . She says: . . it’s like she’s overdramatic . . . yeah it sucks but maybe you should just bring And they make sure to film this part too, them out and it will be over. the aftermath . . . (she mocks the image) the “don’t be scared” . . . . It’s to show, to Nevertheless, as Maia continues to watch, she draw out . . . it’s like a movie. It’s an acted seems to return to feeling empathy for the film. What would be the fun in cutting it

Alexandrowicz \ 22 right after they leave? What happens in based increasingly on unseen somethings that the family after? People want to see that, lie outside of the visible content of the frame and it makes you feel bad. (directing, subtitling, the mixing of audio). By A child’s crying is heard, and the camera imagining the circumstances of their produc- enters the bedroom where the kids were tion, Maia is able to reframe the images. A sleeping before the raid. Now we see that the confrontational image such as “a child being child who is crying is one who was questioned woken up in the middle of the night” might be briefly by the soldiers. As he notices his father reframed as “a man filming his child being wo- approach with the camera he hides under a ken up.” The image “a child crying after being blanket. Not wanting to be seen or filmed. Maia questioned by soldiers” might be reframed as continues to doubt the authenticity of the “a man filming his son crying.” The “reframed” situation. images locate agency more in the position of the father as film director, and less with the Of course . . . they are going to film a little armed soldiers raiding a family’s home in the breakdown of the kid after . . . . Added dead of night. In this way, Maia seems to be drama, very well played. articulating her political affiliations through an aesthetic language that alternately describes EXPANDING THE BOUNDARIES OF THE and challenges the visible content within the FRAME video frame. Maia’s interrogation of what rests outside Maia’s viewing of the Night Search is dynam- the frame resonates with the writing of Ariella ic. She moves back and forth between two Aïsha Azoulay, whose work also frequently en- dispositions, experiencing the video as it was gages the Israeli occupation of Palestine. For ostensibly intended by its distributors while Azoualay: also critically deconstructing in real time the elements that produce empathic affect. When I That which has been framed in the pho- viewed this video for the first time I found it to tograph stands for a certain type of event, be a heart-wrenching piece of documentation. some generic matter such as “torture,” Maia’s equivocal responses surprised me. She “expulsion,” or “refugees.” The bor- was not totally dismissive of the Da’ana fami- ders of the frame are the bounds of the ly’s suffering. It was as if she was negotiating discussion—one cannot exceed the it, to use Hall’s terms again. It was striking bordered frame and discuss that which is to see that whenever Maia moves away from not contained in it, unless one can then feeling empathy for the family whose home refer to another photograph (preferably was invaded, it was not because she trans- one that either preceded or succeeded ferred her sympathy to the invading soldiers. it). In the absence of such a supplemen- It was as if Maia distrusted her own feelings tary frame, one can only problematize the of empathy, moving her to then deconstruct frame and question it.”17 the video’s message. She reminds herself that she is missing context. She imagines possible While Azoulay refers to the viewing of still contexts in which she could accept the event photographs, her observation is nevertheless as justified (“What if there was a complaint applicable here. Maia criticizes Night Search about a bomb?”); she problematizes the way again and again for its lack of context. As Maia the video was produced, spotting missing repeats that response, I am tempted to sug- subtitles and speculating upon manipulated gest that the occupation itself provides plenty audio. Finally, she resorts to the assumption enough context to frame these images. And that the video was actually directed and that I am tempted to say that that in my view, the some of the moments of greatest pathos were, context of the invasion of a Palestinian home in her perception, acted. For me, what unites at 3 a.m. is clearly the total exercise of control her varied responses is that they become by the Israeli military of Palestinian society

Alexandrowicz \ 23 in the occupied territories. I don’t say any of of their makers’ ostensible intentions. Alas, this, of course, as my role in the setup of The things are not quite that simple. Viewing, we Viewing Booth is to listen to rather than con- should know by now, is a contradictory ex- test the participants’ observations of the video perience which is seldom reducible to binary footage. My hope is that Maia will zoom out to models. The more I try to understand Maia, the a wider image that includes the occupation— more I find it difficult to clearly define the lines namely, that Israel is holding the West Bank across which she and I differed in the way we under military occupation; that it is denying view videos of the occupation. basic human rights to the indigenous inhabi- Maia watches Israeli Soldiers Feeding tants of these areas, and that it is transferring Hungry Palestinian Children towards the end of Jewish Israelis with full citizenship rights into her viewing session. The video, filmed by an the same areas to live in guarded enclaves. I anonymous Israeli videographer, runs for forty want Maia to place the encounters portrayed seconds. It is a vertically oriented video of low in Night Search within this zoomed out frame resolution, suggesting it was likely recorded on in order to conclude that the political reality a cellphone. It was posted online by the right- which has been in place (with certain alter- wing Israeli media organization 0404 News.18 ations) for over five decades is what makes Recorded one evening in the West Bank city this violation of the occupied people’s space of Hebron, the video shows two Palestinian at 3 a.m. legally uncontestable. In my view, this children approach the camera from a distance. tangible, longstanding context seems much One of the children looks 3-4 years old, and more politically relevant to the video than the the second, perhaps the brother of the young speculative context about an imagined bomb child, looks to be 6 or 7. The children are threat that Maia provides. called from offscreen by a young male voice One of the ironies of this moment is that who seems to know one of the kids’ names— while I wish for Maia to step outside the Ibrahim. As Ibrahim and his brother come boundaries of the frame in order to see a wider closer, the camera pans to keep them in the picture, she is in fact doing exactly that. Maia frame. Now, we see it is an Israeli soldier (who is stepping outside of the boundaries of the had called out to the kids). He is holding what frame, but in a different way than I hope for. seems to be some bread and sliced cheese, It is as if instead of stepping back and seeing which he is taking out of a bag while saying a wider image that includes the occupation, “Come over here, Ibrahim . . . we’ll divide it like Maia is stepping back to discover the person brothers.” Ibrahim, waiting for the food, sud- shooting, the camera, the memory card, which denly hugs the soldier’s leg lovingly. A second was transferred to the human rights organiza- soldier steps into the frame and pats Ibrahim tion, the computers that were used to post the on the head fondly. The soldier with the food video online, etc. I am wishing that Maia would now gives both Ibrahim and the other child a zoom out to expand the boundaries of the sandwich each. The older boy starts devouring frame on the X and Y axis—the political and his piece of bread hungrily and they both turn historical context—while what she is doing is to leave. The person holding the camera (most rather moving her vantage point back on the Z likely a third soldier himself) says: “Ibrahim! axis—revealing only the production context. Say thank you!” Ibrahim stops, looks back at the camera and responds in his young, ear- THE IMAGE IS STRONGER THAN THE nest voice: “Thank you!” The video then ends IMAGE MAKERS abruptly. Maia does not respond as she watches the What I learn from Maia’s viewing thus far might video. As it ends, though, she now appears be simplified into the following: Maia iden- somewhat confused. By this point I have come tifies images that threaten her world views, to understand that Maia is, in her words, “very responding by reframing them in a way that pro-Israel,” and I expect that she will highlight allows her to read the images against the grain the soldiers’ benevolent humanism, as other

Alexandrowicz \ 24 Viewing Booth participants did, and she will reframe images which threaten her, why would find nothing to criticize. Maia, however, says she then turn her gaze outside of the frame that she wants to watch the video again. She in a pro-Israel video posted by a conservative replays it, and to my surprise she starts criti- outlet that promotes views that Maia shares? cizing it. Trying to make sense of this moment, I turn to another concept proposed by Ariella Aïsha He’s running to him. Obviously, he trusts Azoulay: the idea of the civil gaze. In The Civil him, and it looks very staged . . . . I mean, Contract of Photography, Azoulay introduces when does this ever happen? Patting his the concept of “the citizenry of photog- head? . . . Holding his hand? raphy.”19 Photography, she claims, when it represents people or human conditions, tran- She finishes her second viewing and says scends the technical, aesthetic, and political nothing. I break the silence by reminding her circumstances which are embedded into the that it was posted by an explicitly pro-Israel image making. Photography cannot be resource. Maia responds: duced to the intentions of the photographer, nor a single distributor, viewer, or pictured Ok . . . so it’s probably a pro . . . pro-Israeli subject, nor can it be reduced to being merely . . . make the IDF look good. But the truth artistic or merely political. Rather, photogra- is that when I see these things it looks phy brackets a set of concrete conditions, and very fake . . . I don’t know . . . not fake, it extends them across time and space. A pho- looks like . . . We get it, you’re promoting tographed subject exists in relationship to a yourselves . . . . Also . . . they’re feeding network of real and imagined viewers, whose them cheese like they’re dogs . . . like joint participation in constructing the mean- they are not really, like . . . people . . . . ing of photographs also constructs a citizenry B'Tselem videos show a lot of distress. through photographs. This is why photography, This doesn’t show a lot of happiness. as a public meeting space for viewers' gazes, Feeding cheese to a couple of kids . . . contains the potential for the equality of hu- A little silly even! “Say thank you!” she mans. This equality, Azoulay explains, which imitates the soldier. “Like they could have is often not granted to the subject of photog- given them a couple of shekels before- raphy through the political systems governing hand to do this . . . These are two little them, can nevertheless be seen and imagined kids. through their photographic depiction.

It is striking to see Maia apply the same The photograph is never a sealed product kind of doubt and criticism that she brought that expresses the intention of a single to Night Search. She was again stepping out player . . . the photograph does not make of the border of the frame, and she was again a truth claim nor does it refute other truth doing it on what I called, earlier, the Z axis. claims. Truth is not to be found in the Maia saw the event as possibly fake (I actual- photograph. The photograph merely di- ly do not think that it is). She doesn’t believe vulges the traces of truth or its refutation. situations like this exist (I actually do). As with Their respective reconstruction depends Night Search, she considers the motivation on the practical gaze of citizens who do of the people who shot, posted, and dissem- not assume that truth is sedimented in inated the video, and even assumes that the the photograph, ready to be revealed, subjects of the video might have been paid for but rather that truth is what is at stake participating in it (while the children’s hunger between those who share the space of is, to me, rather apparent). All of these aspects the photographed image and the world fall, again, outside the boundaries of the frame. in which such an image has been made But if I concluded earlier that Maia is going possible.20 beyond the boundaries of the frame in order to

Alexandrowicz \ 25 While considering Maia’s response to Night those images offer a starting point to work Search, I assumed that she attempted to towards a world held equally in common. When change its boundaries as a response to images I set off to film the seven Temple students who that might otherwise challenge her world view. volunteered to watch videos from Israel, I had Conversely, her move outside the boundaries no idea that by seeing these videos through of the frame in Israeli Soldiers Feeding Hungry their eyes I would be inspired to explore the Palestinian Kids should be regarded similarly. boundaries of the frame and to think in more It thus attests to Maia’s negotiation with the expansive ways about the principles of a cit- image, despite the fact that the video was izenry of photography at play. I would like to meant to represent her side, so to speak, of see The Viewing Booth as a model for a space the political argument. What I mean by that that allows the spectators of images and the is that I assume that the soldiers who filmed producers of images to explore how imag- Israeli Soldiers Feeding Hungry Palestinian Kids es are viewed and perceived in the present and posted it, did that because in their mind it conjuncture, even if it points to other difficult showed first that they are loved by Palestinian questions. After all, doing the political work children in the occupied city of Hebron and of developing contexts in which images can second that they are benevolent as they share help us work toward, instead of distracting us their snack with the hungry Palestinian kids. from, social justice requires an effort that can’t Maia obviously sees something else in the be done by video alone. Still, perhaps through image—she saw soldiers feeding kids as if such cinematic introspection we can discover, they are dogs. She also assumes that they are in the spirit of Azoulay’s work, ways in which trying, unsuccessfully in her eyes, to demon- images might function for humanity; ways that strate something positive through it. “Truth,” we might not be using to their full potential to go back one last time to Azoulay’s words, whenever we remove actual viewers from “is what is at stake between those who share the process of assigning meanings to images the space of the photographed image and the themselves. Perhaps through the employment world in which such an image has been made of patient techniques such as the one I tried, possible.”21 Despite the familiar logo that was we might create mirrors to our work; mirrors superimposed over the video and the title that reflect back upon us different ways for- Soldiers Feeding Hungry Palestinian Kids, Maia ward in this age of hypermediation. saw a disturbing image that once again chal- I thank Maia Levy, whose candid thoughts lenged her world views, and which she needed are the foundation of this essay, and to Nayef to negotiate by reframing. The relationship Da’ana whose courageous self-taught film- between Maia and the hungry children in the ing ability created an unforgettable, important photo is a demonstration, or so I see it, of image that this essay focuses on. My thanks Azoulay’s idea of the citizenry of photography. go to Jeff Rush, Nora Alter, Chris Cagle, Liat The humanity (or inhumanity) of the situation Hasenfratz, and Chisu-Teresa Ko for their gen- transcends the political aim of the makers of erous and insightful suggestions, to the Center the video. for Curiosity in New York, the Temple University Film and Media Arts department, and the LOOKING INTO A CINEMATIC MIRROR Sundance Documentary Film Program for their support of this project. I am grateful to Liran This essay offers no generalizable understand- Atzmor for his partnership and continuous sup- ing about oppositional viewings of human port of my work and thank you to the editors at rights videos. It does, however, intend to offer World Records who led me through the enlight- a reminder that it is not just videos, but also ening process of writing this essay. viewers themselves that perform the critical work of mediating our political realities. By turning our gaze to viewers’ negotiations with nonfiction images, we can better see how

Alexandrowicz \ 26 ENDNOTES eds., Picturing Atrocity: Reading Photographs in Crisis (London: 1—Ariella Azoulay, "Getting Rid of the Reaktion Books, 2012), 251. Distinction between the Aesthetic and the Political," Theory, Culture & 12—These included videos post- Society 27, no. 7-8 (2010): 241. ed by the Israeli Army Spokesman, Yeshiva World News, and more. 2—Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Penguin Books, 2019), 3. 13—Hall uses the phrase "oppositional reading" In Encoding and Decoding in the 3—The Interrotron is the name director Television Discourse (Birmingham: Centre Errol Morris gave his technique of film- for mass communication research, 1973). ing interviews through a teleprompter. The prompter reflected Morris’ image to 14—Hall refers to a “preferred reading.” the interviewee, so that when the inter- 15—See https://www.activevoice. viewee was looking at Morris, they were net/research/beyond-the-choir/. looking dead into the lens. My adaptation of this technique created a situation 16—To read more about what makes in which the viewer was viewing video the filming of this kind of event pos- screened over the lens of the camera. sible, see Ristovska and Price. 4—Jeffrey Skoller, "iDocument 17—Azoulay, "Execution Police: Contingency, Resistance, Portrait," 250-251. and the Precarious Present," World 18—0404 News is an indepen- Records Journal (2018): https://vols. dent news website promoting a worldrecordsjournal.org/01/04. highly nationalistic anti-Palestinian 5—Ibid. agenda. https://www.0404.co.il/ 6—Ibid. 19—Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography. (New 7—See more in Sandra Ristovska and York: Zone Books, 2014): 93. Monroe Price, Visual Imagery and Human Rights Practice (Cham, Switzerland: 20—Ariella Azoulay, Civil Imagination: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). a Political Ontology of Photography (London: Verso Books, 2015): 117. 8—Shooting Back was modeled on the practices of the U.S. based hu- 21—Ibid. man rights organization Witness https://www.witness.org/our-work/ 9—Ruthie Ginsburg, "Emancipation and Collaboration: A Critical Examination of Human Rights Video Advocacy," Theory, Culture & Society (September 2019). https://doi. org/10.1177/0263276419861681. 10—See https://www.pewresearch. org/fact-tank/2017/10/04/key-trends- in-social-and-digital-news-media. 11—Ariella Azoulay, “The Execution Portrait,” in Geoffrey Batchen, Mick Gidley, Nancy K. Miller, and Jay Prosser,

Alexandrowicz \ 27

\ Volume 4 \ “Politics is what happens between people.” —Hannah Arendt1

It was during the Renaissance that painting came down off of church walls and ceilings and the quadrangular picture frame became the space for the creation of the work. In a later period, linked to Mannerism, a proscenium arch offered the painting as a theatricalized space. And with the rise of abstraction, abstract expressionism in particular, the canvas began to be seen as a space of action rather than a space of depiction. This movement was dramatized as performance by Fluxus, which reframed art as an event, and by Situationism both for its critique of consumer capitalism and its reduction of the art object to a commodity. Situationism also mobilized the spectator in the dérive to frame the city as ACTION BETWEEN ART AND the space of engagement, linking politics CITIZENSHIP \ with spatial aesthetics—a gesture performed by many contemporary social practitioners MARTIN LUCAS and participatory artists. This somewhat fac- ile encapsulation of 600 years of art history illuminates very recent developments in the project and scope of avant-garde movements, and their means of linking art and politics. Each stage in the framing of art is also a framing of the political. If it is a leap to tie the notion of the artistic frame to the framing of political participation, it is a leap that I would like to make, at least provisionally. I want to relate the artistic frame to the framework of political participation, describing practices by Jeanne van Heeswijk and Tania Bruguera, two artists who draw on the legacy of Hannah Arendt to develop projects that question the boundaries of social, cultural, and political participation. 2 While both artists work in a tradition of public art sometimes imagined to affirm certain consensual liberal norms, van Heeswijk and especially Bruguera appeal to Arendt because her model of democracy is agonistic—characterized by performance, speech, and heroic action. The frame for Arendt is a proscenium for the theatrical, indeed virtuosic production of individual meanings in conflict. Arendt called theater “the political art par excellence” because “it is the only art whose sole subject is man

Lucas \ 29 in his relationship to others.”3 Arendt wrote The political possibilities engendered in those lines in 1958, but they allow us to con- social practice work emerge in real locales sider social practice art at least potentially as (public spaces) while participants develop a political art. Arendt’s writings prompt us to valid imaginaries (public spheres), echoing ask how aesthetic judgement can be linked to the emplaced and contingent character of political judgement. This is the core transfer- Arendt’s political ideal. This character goes ence that animates work by Bruguera and van beyond institutional space, framing any en- Heeswijk. They are not just political artists in counter in which the questions of coexistence the sense of being activists who work in the and a shared future arise.6 Both van Heeswijk art world. Rather, following Arendt, they are and Bruguera shy away from the art world artists who create the preconditions for poli- framing of their practices, and both espouse tics and who explore the politics that are made concrete outcomes, be this the rebuilding possible within certain situations. of a public square as a youth center in an In her influential book Artificial Hells (2012), Amsterdam neighborhood or the creation of a art historian Claire Bishop criticizes the social group that can struggle for immigrant rights in valence applied to social practice today. “An Queens. On the other hand, the work’s agency analysis of this art must necessarily engage lies in posing questions, raising awareness, with concepts that have traditionally had more and changing attitudes—rather conventional currency within the social sciences than in means of address, even when they attend the the humanities: community, society, empow- unconventional social practices offered by the erment, agency.”4 Art, Bishop stresses, is not works.7 The conflict between utility and sym- social action. On some level, it remains semi- bolism is muddied but remains unresolved—a otic. Even when an artist doesn’t want to do problem that Arendt’s attention to relational symbolic work, but to make change and be space and commonly held objects (the table effective, they must employ symbolic means. In which sits between political agents) will help her interview with Tania Bruguera at the CUNY us to address.8 Graduate Center in 2016, when Bruguera talks I also have a more personal motivation for about removing the art framing around her turning to Arendt in thinking through the work projects, Bishop stops her: “you're complete- of artists like Jeanne van Heeswijk and Tania ly in denial about the symbolic aspect of your Bruguera. As a documentary filmmaker, I am work.” Bishop gives the example of Bruguera's familiar with finding meaning in social action in Tatlin's Whisper #6 (2009), re-done in 2014 at an artistic context, and I am intrigued by so- the Plaza de la Revolución, a locale redolent cial movements and their potential to change with symbolic meanings for the placement of the world whether by bringing down a dictator, an open mic. For Bruguera, doing the project in fighting banks for control of a city, or resist- the Plaza, as opposed to an art world location, ing the destruction of the environment. While is a guarantee of its validity as a political act as social practice art is not documentary film, opposed to an artistic one. The context matters it is seen as sharing with documentary what to the work’s capacity to signify, and in this Nichols calls “the discourse of sobriety” as sense it remains semiotic in form. The question well as the fact that it too is often critiqued for of utility is also one with deep symbolic dimen- its lack of edge and formal concern.9 One of sions. What are these artists actually offering? the difficulties for anyone attempting to dis- Nato Thompson’s definition of social practice is cuss, describe, or document participatory art is instructive: these works “do not preach. They the ambiguity of the position of the spectator do not advocate. As opposed to providing a I mention above. The artist is not making an literal political message, these artists provide object or even an event, properly speaking, tools for the viewer/participant to develop their but providing a context for social interac- own politics. In this sense, the political content tions. Each participant will have a different is found in a project’s use. They supply possi- experience, and if you are an observer, your bilities as opposed to solutions.”5 experience will be different yet again.

Lucas \ 30 As a filmmaker, and as someone who has For Arendt, the risk of action is that we documented a lot of artwork over the years, in- risk our personhood; our self and our vision cluding that of van Heeswijk, I am aware of the of the world are tossed into the ring and can difficulty of knowing where to stand in order to be judged by others when we speak out pub- observe a project that demands participation licly. Rights are only as good as the ongoing and commitment. I consider Arendt’s commen- efforts we make to exercise them.13 In a world tary on the individual’s investments in public where documents such as the UN Universal life, voiced in an 1964 interview with Günter Declaration of Human Rights are a touchstone Gaus for German television: of moral commitment, Arendt's deep suspicion of any claim for inherent human rights puts her GAUS in a distinct minority, and with that, it leads In tribute to Jaspers you said: “Humanity to a demand that we face our shared reality is never acquired in solitude, and never by taking up the task of creating institutional by giving one's work to the public. It can frameworks. As political scientist Lida Maxwell be achieved only by one who has thrown puts it: “Arendt's depiction of individuals los- his life and his person into the ‘venture ing the ability to claim rights when they lose into the public realm.’” This venture into their polity calls us to understand rights as the public realm . . . what does it mean for collective achievements, rather than individual Hannah Arendt? possessions or as part of a national identity.”14 This puts us in the place of asking what ARENDT we share in common. From this position, one The venture into the public realm seems can address the future as a context of shared clear to me. One exposes oneself to the possibilities, rather than strictly a space of light of the public, as a person. Although territorial contention, of displacement and I am of the opinion that one must not replacement. Here, instead of zero-sum fights appear and act in public self-consciously, over resources, one can reimagine democracy still I know that in every action the per- as a space of useful conflict. It also asks us to son is expressed as in no other human look at the impoverished nature of our shared activity.10 political world, ironically one where those who don’t appear in public in the Greek polis are The word venture in English is a translation precisely those whose race, class, and gender of the German term das Wagnis. Risk or dare provide them the least cover from publicity might also be translations.11 It is worth noting today, a time when profiling, stop-and-frisk her idea that one should not appear self-con- policing, voter suppression, surveillance cam- sciously. What could that mean? One answer eras, mass data mining, homelessness, facial is that self-consciousness is not possible recognition, and more combine to turn public because the identity of the self only truly space into a territory of continuous ordeal and emerges or becomes clear in this space of diminished ability to exercise citizenship. This political appearance, in the space of dispute question of sharing also opens up the question and making claims. You can't be self-con- of the institutional framing of social practice scious because the self doesn't exist before art. the moment of action, the moment of being in public with others. Feminist political theorist DEMOCRACY'S CRADLE Bonnie Honig speaks directly to this moment in Arendt’s thought: “prior to, or apart from ac- Like Ancient Greece, Philadelphia is com- tion this self has no identity; it is fragmented, monly said to be a cradle of democracy and a discontinuous, indistinct, and most certainly site of structural racism. Philadelphia, unlike uninteresting. . . . it risks the dangers of the Athens of the Golden Age, is also known for radically contingent public realm, where any- its post-industrial decline, urban disinvest- thing can happen.”12 ment, and rapid gentrification. It was against

Lucas \ 31 this backdrop that the Philadelphia Assembled the white Downtown with its art schools and exhibition opened at the Philadelphia Museum museums and the working class, largely Black of Art's Perlman Building in November 2017. and Latino neighborhoods was being exacer- The show was large, taking over the whole bated by accelerating gentrification. For the first floor, including the three main galleries, museum, with its expressed mandate to ben- the cafe, and the gift shop. The more than 200 efit “our community and the future of the arts collaborators made it a major undertaking as in our city,”16 van Heeswijk sought to address well. The exhibition itself was only the tip of these conditions over three phases—research, the iceberg, the culmination of a multi-year off-site public engagement, and exhibition, process that included an intensive series which occurred when the project was installed of meetings in the city’s diverse communi- at the museum in the fall of 2017. During the ties. Once the core artistic team of editors first phase, van Heeswijk worked to gain the were formed, they developed a set of themes trust of neighborhood residents and the var- around key issues, and orchestrated some six- ious community groups she contacted. As a ty art events around the city's neighborhoods, white Dutch woman, she offered her project as as well as engaging in an intensive effort to a space for others to develop their own prac- remap the historical and cultural landscape of tices, and strengthen their own organizations Philadelphia. The goal of this remapping was and communities. After meeting with commu- aimed at the possibility of developing resourc- nity leaders, cultural groups, activists, artists, es to ask “how can we collectively shape our and academics to get a sense of the territory, future?”15 van Heeswijk developed a preliminary map- I made a video that gives an overview of the ping of the cultural resources and assets of work by some of the several hundred artists Philadelphia's neighborhoods. Through these and community members who ultimately par- meetings, van Heeswijk organized collabora- ticipated in the project. I will only mention tors into working groups that would develop here the final piece that Denise Valentine, one themes of Reconstructions, Sovereignty, of van Heeswijk’s collaborators, had curated Futures, Sanctuary, and Movement. Four of personally. The display—Reconstruction—com- these groups wound up being represented in prised a gallery dominated by the frame of a the galleries of the museum, while the fifth, house, with a fully furnished interior. In a vit- Movement, was responsible for the extensive rine in the corner, a silver platter with a story list of publications that emerged in the context engraved on its surface, and a slave collar sit of the project. side by side. The plate, from the museum's I went to Philadelphia in September 2016, permanent collection, comes from a founder when the research phase was in full swing. In of the city, Isaac Norris, and details how he the loft that provided the main meeting place arrived in Philadelphia after an earthquake in for the project, one wall was covered with Jamaica, bringing his property—an enslaved hundreds of colored stickies and bits of string child. Norris's name, Valentine notes, deco- linking names of individuals, groups photos, rates streets and neighborhoods around the clippings, with thematic notions of education, city. The child remains nameless. For Valentine, publicity, and distribution. The other main who is Black and of a Caribbean background, feature of the space was a large work table, this story reflects pain at that historical injus- with room for some two dozen people. The tice, but pride as well that this story can find a first thing to arrive was the food, catered by a home in this city institution and that she can project team, in big aluminum trays that gave be here telling it. the feeling of a church social. Van Heeswijk Van Heeswijk's work focuses on “radical- explained that she provided meals and cov- izing the local,” highlighting some of the ered transportation and child care out of the political dynamics already at play in the com- production budget so as to make participation munities with which she works. When van accessible to as many people as possible. Heeswijk started her project, the gap between That evening we went to one of the

Lucas \ 32 neighborhood events—sponsored by the The development of Philadelphia Philadelphia Folklore Project—inside a bright- Assembled’s central themes by partici- ly lit community center near the University pants was a subject in real and often heated of Pennsylvania in West Philadelphia. A lively debate over local priorities and how to rep- crowd of art workers and community mem- resent them. One of the working groups, bers sat in folding chairs in a room listening Reconstructions, met and researched for over to a concert of West African music—mostly in a year. One of the participating organizations indigenous languages, briefly translated for was Reconstruction Inc., a group whose name the group: one was a lament of a woman who links their efforts assisting ex-offender re-en- loses her family during the civil war, another try to a specific history of the still unfinished a call for women to unite. Although it was not project of post-Civil War Reconstruction, the discussed overtly, the backdrop of the eve- struggle to enfranchise African Americans. The ning was the horrific civil war that plagued Atmosphere ultimately decided to focus on the Liberia from 1980 to 2003, a war that saw the issues of mass incarceration, gentrification, country become one with the highest levels and displacement as they developed exhibi- of violence against women in the world.17 The tions for two public sites in Philadelphia, which music was followed by a discussion of sexism in turn led to the final exhibition at the mu- and violence against women and how these seum, where Reconstruction Inc. reproduced problems had followed West African immigrant their cozy living room complete with easy communities to Philadelphia. The discussion chairs in the middle of the museum gallery and was notable both because it was real in the met with museum visitors, engaging them with sense that there were men defending tra- their history and their approach. ditional roles as pater familias, and women criticizing them, but also because the discus- FRAMING THE STATE sion was built around issues from inside the community, and framed in the cultural terms If van Heeswijk’s work invites us to politicize of an art form indigenous to that community. institutional space in liberal society, Tania The concert implied that the city was already Bruguera operates in a context where free- a space for cross-cultural encounters and dom of speech and assembly cannot be taken migrating social and political debates. This for granted. In Bruguera’s work, risk takes on overlap—of public space for public life—was a bodily dimension. On a small stage at the thematized in the show by a dense cartogra- Havana Biennial, as part of her ongoing series phy of the history of struggle and resistance in Tatlin's Whisper #6 (Havana Version, 2009), she the city, inter-layered with a minute mapping offered one minute on an open microphone of the cultural and political assets developed to anyone who wanted it and handed out 200 by its citizens. That map, viewable on the throw-away cameras so that participants could Philadelphia Assembled website, suggests the document the event. In the process, the court- massive bottom-up, and perhaps inside out, yard became the space for an outpouring of nature of the project, which offers a granularity thwarted citizenry and their desires for free- and idiosyncrasy only possible in a crowd- dom of speech. During the forty-five minutes sourced work.18 For van Heeswijk each entry of the event, some thirty-nine people ended on the map, whether the site of a historical up speaking. event or of a current cultural asset, is a personal possession of a participant, brought to Various reactions were expressed, all re- the commons. spectfully, both those who gave reasons While the Folklore Project ultimately did for continuing to follow the revolutionary not participate in Philadelphia Assembled, path of Fidel Castro, as well as those ask- the event was typical of interactions in this ing for elections where no one from that research phase, and did prompt individual family could run. From a person whose members to work with Jeanne. only reaction was to cry from her inability

Lucas \ 33 to find any option but emigrating because Bruguera stated that if she were an of political differences with the regime, American or European artist, her target would to declarations from the Cuban blogger's not be the state, it would be the art world.24 At movement. Some demanded that any a time when the struggle over cultural cap- secret police at the event step forward, ital is heightened; when, for example, over while others hoped for the day when half a dozen artists can withdraw from the freedom of expression didn't have to be a Whitney Biennial and force the departure of a performance piece.19 very wealthy board member who is a weapons manufacturer, one is reminded of the stakes of Opening up possibilities for speaking truth to such a project.25 Gestures such as withdrawal power is central to Bruguera’s work. It is also from a prestigious biennial suggest that artists important for her that her work is completed by are acutely aware that not only are they part responses from the corridors of power. In other of a global branding operation for dirty money, words, the response sets the boundaries of but that in a world where businesses extract the frame by marking the precise limits of pub- profit exactly from our creativity, artists are lic possibility. In the case of Tatlin's Whisper both proletarianized and competing with their #6, not only was she arrested, the organiz- own audiences whose creativity is similarly ing committee of the Biennial, for whom the exploited. boundaries of artistic inquiry were more rigidly The modern public sphere is not just malig- fixed, published a denunciation of the com- nant politically, it is framed within a capitalism ments of the participants for using an artistic that extracts value from performance and event as a cover for political action.20 virtuosity. Public space is predominated by A flashier piece was Tatlin's Whisper #5, a these two factors. The joke is that the concept performance with audience participation that of art's autonomy, which traveled a rough road took place at the Tate Modern in 2008. The through the second half of the twentieth cen- piece involved a police mounted unit that ap- tury, returns in the twenty-first as a space for peared unannounced and used crowd control a new form of art patronage, still draped in the techniques to herd and control a group of mu- increasingly ghostly garments of social capital. seumgoers.21 While the goal here might be seen In a socialist society, the production of to give British museum patrons a sense of how utopia is often monopolized by the state and easily the rights of assembly can be challenged the party. When social practice artist and by the state, her work in Cuba is designed to theorist Gregory Sholette visited Bruguera's establish a direct dialogue with the govern- Instituto Arendt in Havana in 2017, he was ment, and has led to arrests, interrogations, and interrogated on his departure by officials who jail time for her and her fellow participants.22 warned him not to visit Bruguera again. He For Bruguera, Arendt's “space of appear- notes on his blog that “after returning to NYC ances” where citizens can be heard by their we discovered that Tania was again detained fellows does not exist in Cuba and a vita activa and interrogated and that the state is now is simply not possible; the basic conditions seeking to confiscate her home (the location for people to produce themselves as citizens of INSTAR). The steady pressure is quite cru- are missing. What must be created then are el and unnecessary for someone who to my the preconditions. She calls her approach Arte mind has the ideals of the revolution as her Útil, variously translated as Useful Art, or Art goal.”26 It is safe to assume that the revolu- as a Tool. In the words of art historian Jose tion that Sholette had in mind is different from Luis Falcone, it offers “the possibility of form- that of the Cuban Government, which sees ing collective desires.”23 It is in this context the leading role of the Communist Party as the that she created the Hannah Arendt Institute sole guarantee for any freedoms of the Cuban for Artivism, INSTAR, inaugurating it in May of people.27 2015 with a 100-hour reading of The Origins of Arendt believed that modern society has Totalitarianism (1951). dangerously shrunk the space of shared social

Lucas \ 34 action. Her critique of the expansion of what elucidating the way that their work is, drawing she would call private concerns (not just on Arendt's distinctions, political, not social. domestic life, but also the world of work and For Arendt, a society that cannot acknowledge the economy) over public ones, was based on its own shared predicament is headed for trends in a postwar period in which govern- fascism. ments promoted social legitimacy based on the vast increase in goods and services that USES OF THE FRAME came with the rise of a consumer society. That era of the welfare state is over. Once you start taking work out of museum Under contemporary neoliberal conditions, and gallery contexts and putting it into com- Arendt's categories of Labor/Work/Action are munities and neighborhoods underserved by facing more than just an expansion of work at modern austerity regimes, there is a risk of the expense of social action and politics. Now turning one’s practice into social service, a re- our creativity is where capital derives value; a placement for the withdrawal of the neoliberal reality that plays out in various ways. For many, state. As Hal Foster noted in the 1990s, “art work never ends. There is no separate work institutions may also use site-specific work for day that you can clock out from and no sep- economic development, social outreach, and arate work place; you're always getting a text art tourism, and at a time of privatization this message or fielding an email request. For oth- is assumed necessary, even natural.”32 Once ers, posting to Facebook on their personal time the structure of a social practice piece is itself makes their social network a direct source of the object of critique, as critics like Foster and profit for Mark Zuckerberg. Paradoxically, as Bishop make it, you can ask specifically how writers like Paolo Virno have noted, this new a project works, what it does, and whether economic model means that the modalities of this space of aesthetic activity and judgement Work and Action that for Arendt were separate is merely a sop for the masses in the face of are now interpenetrated, collapsed into a field austerity, or a form of branding for a social where our efforts to live in the world are con- democratic expectation that is no longer being tinuously political. It is this new set of human met for citizens whose lives are every day conditions that these two artists have identi- more precarious. fied and continue to clarify in their practices.28 Van Heeswijk's work has been explicitly Claire Bishop sees the rise of social prac- criticized for its alignment with governmental tice art as closely associated with the end of goals. As critic Jeroen Boomgaard suggest- “real existing socialism” and the demise of ed at the time of her appearance at the 2004 the Soviet Bloc.29 For artists who started their Venice Biennale, “general notions of commu- careers in the early 90s like Bruguera and van nication, inter-culturality and exchange have Heeswijk, the end of any real-world collective come to replace a politically charged vision vision means their work has to function in of the future based on a strict analysis of the the space of an imaginary. They cannot hitch dominant abuses.”33 Boomgaard seems to be their artistic wagons to any specific political saying that the work in projects like De Strip, formation (in fact, their art is exactly framing where van Heeswijk took over an old shop- and formation driven). In the catalog for The ping mall and made it a cultural center, is not Interventionists, Sholette asks, “can you have political enough to transcend the framework a revolutionary art without a revolution?”30 of anodyne community engagement. I would Bruguera's work clearly picks up the task of argue that what separates van Heeswijk's work an unfinished revolution in Sholette’s tell- (and Bruguera's too, for that matter) from being.31 This focus on a potential future, or better ing a kind of palliative for the demise of social said, the invigoration of the future's potential democracy is that from the beginning through for political action—what van Heeswijk has her most recent projects, van Heeswijk seeks dubbed the Not-Yet—is what separates these always to retain an openness about outcomes. artists from others and goes some way toward Her unwillingness to define outcomes is a core

Lucas \ 35 principle, even when it means refusing to apply plurality. For Arendt, being born means we all curatorial control to what will be in a show—a have the ability to make new beginnings in the serious difficulty for the institutions she works world. As Andrea Thuma puts it, “according to with. Her work explicitly keeps space open for Arendt, human beings are not ‘born to die’ in the new and the unpredictable and, I believe, the sense of a Heideggerian ‘Being towards in the end condemns the status quo. death,’ but they are born to begin anew. This In her 2012 essay “The Artist has to decide capacity of making new beginnings in the whom to serve,” van Heeswijk asks how we world is the fundamental human capacity to be (and the we is left undefined) start producing free—a capacity possessed by each and every our future or daily environment together again: individual.”37 For Arendt, however, the fulfillment of this I am concerned with the creation of spac- freedom can only emerge in the context of an es within which any person may speak. engagement with others in a public way. This The key concepts in my work are “act- emergence on what she terms “the stage of ing,” “meeting” and "communicating,” appearances” (that place where we encounter activities which demand that both the others and state our own vision) is so import- viewer and initiator take responsibility. In ant that she calls it a “second birth.”38 Plurality order to induce such engagement, I try emerges from the simple fact that we are born to create “intermediate spaces” within into a world with other people in it. In order to communities.34 live with each other we have to communicate to others our uniqueness. As Arendt states in Bruguera shares a similar sense of the need Between Past and Future: for civic engagement. The website for INSTAR has the following paragraph in its mission Human action, like all strictly political statement: phenomena, is bound up with human plurality, which is one of the fundamen- This is a unique moment to think about tal conditions of human life insofar as the concept of the nation, to imagine a it rests on the fact of natality, through new country. Because our ideas are still which the human world is constantly in- in the process of gestation, there is room vaded by strangers, by newcomers whose for us all to participate. And as art allows actions and reactions cannot be foreseen us to transform a chaotic vision into an by those who are already there and are encounter with an unexpected order, a going to leave in a short while.39 new order, from there we can articulate a new future.35 How do we understand this space where this encounter can happen? In a revolutionary Once we invoke a new future we are invok- context this interaction with others is con- ing the new as a category. Arendt considered stituent power, the power of the people who the new to be one of the two main aspects of create something new, whether the We the the human condition that provides the title of people of the US Declaration of Independence, her 1958 book. For Arendt the breakdown of or the All power to the Soviets of the Russian the belief in tradition and authority that starts Revolution. For Arendt it is the people's coun- with the end of scholasticism and the rise of cils, the political discussion groups, and modern philosophy in the seventeenth cen- workingmen's clubs that are key contexts for tury created a crisis we are still trying to deal political action. The state is mainly scaffolding, with: a loss of belief in religion (and hence not real politics. This kind of constituent pow- immortality) and in authority as the factors that er is at its heart about offering new forms of legitimate governments.36 Her own search for collective action and being. For revolutionaries a valid foundation for modern political life to from 1917 to the 1970s, revolution followed replace it led her to two concepts, natality and the Communist model and meant taking state

Lucas \ 36 power. Today, it is about developing alterna- I want to challenge our audience to think tives that alter the relations between people about what art can be and the experience and state. As Gerald Raunig suggests, con- of art in the gallery setting, rather than stituent power means “experimenting with simply expecting something that provides models of organization, collective forms and an immediate sensorial impact and which modes of becoming which resist—at least for is explained through densely written a time—reterritorialization and structuraliza- object labels. I would like museum users tion.”40 For both van Heeswijk and Bruguera to engage complex social project that this experimentation is central. Bruguera actu- requires an investment in time—not just ally calls her projects “case studies,” and she the time to pore through various types of consistently sees her work to be in dialogue documentation that might represent var- with the state from a place outside it.41 ious stages of a project, but also the time to engage in ongoing public dialogues THE INSTITUTIONAL FRAME with the space of the exhibition.45

Tania Bruguera's Immigrant Movement Reddy calls museum goers users, making International is an ongoing project that clear that for the Queens Museum, people addresses the social and legal status of immi- who come in the door are not just visitors and grants, inviting them to become participants something more than members, happy with a in an artwork and members of an internation- tote bag or a special opening hour. Reddy also al political party. A significant phase of this sees work like this as a bit of a provocation project took place in Queens, New York from and an encouragement to develop language to 2010–2015 and involved developing a com- describe this kind of art, rather than condemn- munity resource center for immigrants in the ing it as non-art. For Bruguera, people who ask neighborhood of Corona. The Queens Museum Is it really art? are asking the wrong question, and Creative Time supported the project, but are also doing what she wants. In other which included workshops on occupation- words, they are ultimately thinking Okay, if this al health and safety, legal aid for immigrants, isn't art, what makes it politics? Why isn't this ESL classes, as well as art history classes, a happening in a political arena? campaign for safe streets for bicycles and Reddy notes that in working with Bruguera, workshop on domestic violence.42 Suzie The Queens Museum was extending an insti- Kantor's retrospective catalog notes that the tutional practice already in place. The museum outcomes included two women getting legal does not have an encyclopedic collection that residence in the United States.43 reinforces a classic model of museum experi- In the current environment, museums and ence. At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which other art institutions that bring in artists does have such a collection, Contemporary Art like Bruguera or van Heeswijk typically see Curator Carlos Basualdo was well acquainted themselves as wanting to engage in a kind of with van Heeswijk's practice and brought her self-improvement. The curators of Bruguera's in to help the museum rethink its role as the retrospective at the Yerba Buena Center for city's premiere art space. Assistant Curator the Arts state, “we gratefully challenged our Amanda Sroka stresses that the institution own institution to even more fully realize its changed internally while mounting the piece, ambition to be the creative home for civic as different departments learned to work to- action, to transform from a place of transaction gether. They had growing pains, having had to to a place of relationships.”44 In order to un- learn different metrics of success to show to derstand how this is art, and how the museum their board, rather than just numbers or ticket understands its role in supporting a project sales (which the artist insisted they abandon like the Immigrant Rights International, I spoke for this show). More significantly, they spent a with Prerana Reddy, curator of the Bruguera year after the show closed going over lessons project for the Queens Museum. Reddy says: learned. The museum opened a new branch

Lucas \ 37 in a historically Black neighborhood, and in represent the 99%, but in some way, to be addition, hired community-based collaborators them. who worked on the project. It is worth quoting We can understand the work of social prac- Sroka about the experience from the museum's tice artists as open-ended in this way; that the point of view: discussion inherent in the piece is about what constitutes its own framing. This open-ended- What the project did in such a wonderful ness also extends to the frames themselves, way was really being out in the city and and here I can return to the art/politics dis- asking questions about people and their cussion. One useful definition of democracy is gifts and what they understood as art and that it is a political system where parties can the power of art in the midst of a chang- lose elections. Such “institutional uncertain- ing city. It was a civic stage where the ty” speaks to the unwillingness of both van city was performed. This idea was that Heeswijk and Bruguera to offer controlled or we could hold some of these other narra- predictable outcomes in their projects, as well tives inside a museum's walls—walls are as their unwillingness to offer clear boundaries which are walls of privilege. What does it between art and life.48 look like to use those walls for a different Prerana Reddy notes that Bruguera did purpose than what they have traditionally make one symbolic gesture when starting her been used for, and what kind of language project at the Queens Museum: she brought in of art history is it to then say that art can a readymade, a classic Duchampian porcelain actually be all of these other things?46 urinal, and had it installed in the bathroom.49 This gesture was not willful, rather it makes THE FAULTY FRAME it clear that by restoring the use value to an object, a value that had been removed by call- Since the Arab Spring and the various occu- ing it art, and excising the object's exchange pations of 2010 and 2011, there has been a value to play as a piece of culture, that we growing evolution of a politics of participation. have reached a moment where a key strategy For Occupy Wall Street or the Spanish 15M of the early twentieth century avant-garde is movement, there was a commitment to what no longer valid or useful. One could say that many participants called direct democracy. Bruguera and van Heeswijk offer us an art This is a politics without party, one where a whose realism lies exactly in its acknowledge- group forms exactly to discuss the conditions ment that the separations between life and art of its own formation.47 Arendt suggests that that the art world would like to maintain have the meaning of our lives is found in the en- effectively collapsed. The classic avant-gar- gagement, in this tricky public sphere. de aspiration to bring art into life no longer One question both of these artists raise is has meaning when the role of the aesthetic how to define the boundaries of the space is effectively in chains, when public space they create. Both of them use contexts or is a space of threat, and when the frames of spaces, often a public square or park or neigh- artistic and political discourse can only be un- borhood, as the boundaries of the project. In derstood as overlapping, creating a potential their works the participants become a com- set of new meanings and new perspectives. munity of sorts. But the participants are just themselves. In what way do they represent the In memory of Denise Valentine, one of the core community, or the neighborhood, or the city artistic team of Philadelphia Assembled. A mu- or nation? The people who show up are some seum educator and professional storyteller, she occupants of a shared public space, not all listened to the ancestors; now she speaks to us potential occupants. When there is a demon- in turn. stration, the demonstrators may say we are the 99% but they are only creating the space for that group to emerge. They don't claim to

Lucas \ 38 ENDNOTES 7—“The Artist as Activist: Tania Bruguera in Conversation with Claire Bishop.” 1—Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, April 6, 2016 at CUNY Graduate Center. Jerome Kohn,ed (New York: Schocken, 2005), 95. “There are two good rea- 8—Arendt, The Human Condition, 194. sons why philosophy has never found 9—Bill Nichols, Representing a place where politics can take shape. Reality (Bloomington: Indiana The first is the assumption that there University Press, 1991), 3-4. is something political in man that belongs to his essence. This simply is not 10—Hannah Arendt, The Last Interview so: man is apolitical. Politics arises be- and Other Conversations (Brooklyn: tween man and so quite outside of man.” Melville House Publishing, 2013), 37. 2—Both artists draw on the legacy of 11—The Duden Dictionary’s definition New Genre public art, a term popular- of das Wagnis: a.) gewagtes, riskantes ized by Suzanne Lacy, who articulated Vorhaben (bold/audacious, risky undertak- what she saw as a public art emerging in ing (or intention) b.) Gefahr, Möglichkeit the 1990s that sought less to educate des Verlustes, des Schadens, die mit einem the public, or bring art out of the muse- Vorhaben verbunden ist (danger; possibil- um, than to democratize the process of ity of loss, harm which is connected to an producing culture. Lacy laid out in some intention (or an undertaking). See https:// detail the many different forms of inter- www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Wagnis. action this art could offer to potential 12—Bonnie Honig, ed., Feminist engagement, from audience member, to Interpretations of Hannah Arendt volunteer, to collaborator. See Suzanne (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State Lacy, New Genre Public Art: Mapping the University Press, 1995), 140-143. Terrain (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), 178. 13—“No paradox of contemporary pol- 3—Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, itics is filled with a more poignant irony Second ed. (Chicago: University than the discrepancy of well-meaning of Chicago Press, 1998), 188. idealists who stubbornly insist on re- 4—Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: garding as 'inalienable' those human Participatory Art and the Politics of rights, which are enjoyed only by cit- Spectatorship (New York: Verso, 2012), 7. izens of the most prosperous and civilized countries, and the situation 5—Gregory Sholette and Nato Thompson, of the rightless themselves.” Hannah The Interventionists: Users’ Manual for the Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism Disruption of Everyday Life (Cambridge: (London: Penguin, 2017), 365. MIT Press/Mass MoCA, 2004), 19. 14—Lida Madwell, “. . . to have . . . ,” 6—In Until We Meet Again (1995) she The Right to Have Rights, eds. Stephanie was commissioned to develop a proj- DeGooyer, Alastair Hunt, Lida Maxwell, and ect that centered on the redevelopment Samuel Moyn (London: Verso, 2018), 53. of the borough of Westwijk in the Dutch city of Vlaardingen. Instead of creating a 15—See: http://www.jeanneworks.net/ plan for placing public sculptures, as she projects/philadelphia_assembled. was asked to do, she proposed a ten-year 16—Van Heeswijk’s other practice engagement with change in Westwijk. involved similar public projects in Since then she has honed her approach working class and immigrant commu- to social practice art in over eighty proj- nities from Rotterdam and Brussels to ects in Europe, Asia and North America. Aarhus, Bordeaux, Sheffield, and Leeds

Lucas \ 39 gave a methodology and a sense of become central to Cuba’s economy and her complex role as an outsider. international branding. What under vulgar Marxist doctrine was deemed the super- 17—See: https://www.odi.org/publica- structure is now the economic base. tions/8464-fallout-rape-weapon-war. 28—See Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the 18—http://map.phlassembled.net. Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary 19—http://www.taniabruguera.com/ Forms of Life (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, cms/112-1-El+Susurro+de+Tat- 2004). In "Day 2," Virno says, “I maintain lin+6+versin+para+La+Habana+. that post-Fordist labor, the productive htm. Translation mine. labor of surplus, subordinate labor, brings into play the talents and qualifications 20—Ibid. which, according to a secular tradition, 21—https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/ had more to do with political action,” 51. bruguera-tatlins-whisper-5-t12989. 29—Bishop, Artificial Hells, 3. 22—As the reference to Tatlin suggests, 30—“The Interventionists: Art in the Social Bruguera is well aware of the legacy of the Sphere,” Mass MOCA, May 24, 2004, 55. avant-garde. She notes that she went to art school in Cuba where it was assumed that 31—Sholette, “A Week in Havana.” the purpose of art is to serve the people. 32—Hal Foster, The Return of the Real 23—“A Lexicon Interpreted” in Lucía (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), Sanromán, Susie Kantor, eds., Tania 197. Bishop goes into detail, show- Bruguera: Talking to Power/ Hablándole ing how for New Labour, “participation” al Poder (San Francisco: Yerba doesn’t mean self-realization, but the Buena Center for the Arts), 88. kind of social inclusion that keeps folks off the dole. Artificial Hells, 13. 24—“The Artist as Activist: Tania Bruguera in Conversation with Claire Bishop.” 33—Jeroen Boomgard “The Platform of Commitment,” One Year In the Wild 25—See Zachary Small, “Eight Artists (Gerrit Reitveld Academie, 2004). Withdraw Work from the 2019 Whitney Biennial,” Hyperallergic, July 20, 2019. 34—Van Heeswijk, “Typologies and Social Change: Learning to Take 26—Gregory Sholette, “A Week in Havana Responsibility” (2011), Jeanneworks.net at Tania Bruguera’s INSTAR, part 1,” December 29, 2017, https://gregsholette. 35—“INSTAR Mission Statement,” trans- tumblr.com/post/169079524365/a- lated by the author, artivismo.org week-in-havana-at-tania-brugueras-instar. 36—In Beyond Past and Future (53- 27—The Cuban Revolution derives sig- 54) Arendt talks about the tremendous nificant value from the country’s own "world-alienation" that arises in Europe cultural efforts. Art, modern dance, bal- in the sixteenth and seventeenth centu- let, music, festivals for documentary film ries. She mentions Descartes' statement and Latin jazz—all have become cen- de omnibus dubitandum est. She details tral not just as branding for the friendly the breakdown in trust both in revela- face of Cuban socialism, but since the tion, and in common sense reasoning, the collapse of the Soviet Union, also to the latter because seeing is no longer believ- Cuban economy, which is built upon cul- ing. In other words, the evidence of ones tural tourism. In other words, the cultural own eyes is not to be trusted. Her main apparatus that Marx condemned as sec- example is the discovery that the earth ondary to the means of production has orbiting the sun, rather than the reverse.

Lucas \ 40 37—Andrea Thuma, “Hannah Arendt, Agency, and the Public Space,” in Modernities Revisited, Maren Behrensen, Lois Lee, and Ahmet Selim Tekelioglu, eds. (Vienna: IWM Junior Visiting Fellows’ Conferences, 2011). 38—Julia Kristeva, Hannah Arendt (Columbia, 1999), 84. 39—Arendt, Beyond Past and Future, 61. 40—Gerald Raunig, Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century, trans. Aileen Derieg (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007), 65-66. 41—Ivan Muñiz-Reed, “Use the Museum,”Bruguera, et al., Talking to Power (YBCA, 2017), 80. 42—“Our History,” Immigrant Movement International, immigrant-movement.us. 43—“The Projects” in Tania Bruguera: Talking to Power/Hablándole al Poder, 143. 44—Bruguera, 10. 45—“Why call it art? The Aesthetics of Participation: Prerana Reddy and Tania Bruguera” June 10, 2013. 46—Interview by author, December 30, 2019. 47—Martin Lucas, “The New Political Subject: Affect and the Media of Self-Organizing Politics,” Afterimage 46, no.2: 43-58. 48—See Adam Przeworski, Crises of Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). 49—Prerana Reddy, Interview with the author, December 27, 2019.

Lucas \ 41 42 \ Volume 4 \ ENTRY

Often, it was not the apparently striking or salient element of the dream that was the effective one. —Ursula Le Guin1

Of all the painful anniversaries now marked on social media, the massacre in the southern Lebanese village of Qana by Israeli forces in 1996 is one of those estranged from me.2 I think it is because I should remember it, but I don’t. Or, more accurately: I could remember it, but there is nothing there. My memories are blank. In my generation it is one of a dozen turning points, wake-up calls thick with black flags, media-heady days of red and bloodied arms, ashen faces. Friends and colleagues in Lebanon recall it as the first massacre they TO HAVE MANY RETURNS: LOSS IN THE remember. I don’t remember anything. PRESENCE OF OTHERS \ Every year, I return to this emptiness. The layers of emptiness. The numbering of it. RAYYA EL ZEIN The April details of death and destruction; the somehow always gaping incompleteness in these commemorations; the blank page of my own memory. These layers of emptiness, hardly unique, find resonant company in the work of generations of survivors, documentarians, activists, poets, artists, and thinkers who have grappled with the ineffability of loss. Authors writing in the thick and the aftermath of disease, genocide, settler colonial dispossession, slave trade, and apartheid all testify to the magnification of the pain of destruction by the intense difficulty of communicating that loss to others. Across time and space, connecting different contexts and disparate destructions, a common element of surviving lies in the impossibility of bearing witness. This very impossibility is exacerbated by what the Armenian literature scholar Marc Nichanian calls “the catastrophic dimension”—the human will to destroy—manifest in the demand that the witness perform over and over again. Similiarly, writing in the thick of the AIDS crisis—and the will to ignore the suffering of those infected with HIV evinced by US media, government, and the general public—the late American art critic and scholar Douglas Crimp wrote, “the violence

El Zein \ 43 we encounter is relentless, the violence of What can be gleaned from an interdisciplin- silence and omission almost as impossible to ary investigation into the challenges of bearing endure as the violence of unleashed hatred witness? It is clearly not that the catastroph- and outright murder.” Crimp, like Nichanian, ic dimension is the same for Crimp, Simpson, underscores the imperative that the witness Nichanian, Hartman, Butler, or the peoples to return to the scene of destruction to prove whom they refer. The distinctions and ma- that it did happen.3 If we read laterally, we terial realities that structure each loss can find this experience among many aggrieved only be collapsed at our peril. Rather, taking and grieving populations. After more than 500 Nichanian, Hartman, and others together is to years of theft and genocide in the Americas at sound strategies of hearing as a particular kind the hands of European colonialists, Indigenous of witnessing and testifying. This polyphon- scholar Audra Simpson writes about border ic listening is capable of revealing a political crossings as a serial re-enactment of the dis- soundscape we otherwise miss. possession of First Nations. In an ethnographic I am bombarded with grief: the grief that chapter exploring anger as a productive force I can remember, in the dozen revolutions (to which I return below), she documents her painstakingly built and sold off; in the count- experiences at the US–Canada border proving less bombed, starved, and tortured bodies in blood quantum as a constant requirement to Gaza, Iraq, Syria, Yemen for all the years I have return to the site and occasion of erasure.4 been aware enough to recognize an Arab body Her description resonates with Nichanian's on TV—and the grief that I cannot, like the claim: “we relentlessly need to prove our own massacre at Qana; a litany of unremembered death.”5 massacres and tucked away destructions. In Other thinkers, witnesses, and mourners my classrooms and organizing circles, I cannot offer crucial recognition of this bind that the find the words to relate this gaping emptiness witness finds herself in: the impossibility of nor to describe the hollow scream that howls relating this pain and the mandate to relate for an Arab, brown, Muslim humanity, decade it again and again. In the context of the lega- after decade sacrificed on a perverse alter to cies of the Atlantic slave trade in the American human rights. In cynical moments, I find myself South, Saidiya Hartman has cautioned against asking: what good are our relentless efforts to the unnatural pleasure of documenting ac- prove our own deaths? What courage can be counts of the tortured bodies on the receiving found to continue making our losses true loss- end of dispossession, subjugation, murder, and es? For, to be sure, the question is no longer to erasure.6 Drawing attention to “the ways we be answered with encouragement, with prom- are called upon to participate in such scenes,” ises that the whole world is watching, that she refusesto reproduce the screams of lacer- now “never again” will make it so. Even before ated slave bodies. Instead, Hartman proposes the global, viral pandemic that, as I edit this to “defamiliarize the familiar” in order to illumi- text, threatens to thunder grief on humanity’s nate the horrors of slavery—looking at legacies collective door, it was not enough to ask why of destruction not as they are manifest in it is difficult to testify to our destructions (we spectacles of terror, but in everyday slave life. relentlessly need to prove our own death). We This attention to the everyday life of the en- must also inquire why it seems impossible for slaved resonates in the practice of making, testimonies of loss to reverberate with and to as Judith Butler puts it, “our loves legitimate the multiplicities of mourning that mark con- and recognizable [and] our losses true loss- temporary political life. es.”7 That is, Hartman’s refusal to return to and I am troubled by the weaponization of pain rehearse, and thus to repeat, the whippings, and its ultimate failure to build political allianc- beatings, and murders in written description es.8 I am troubled by the relentlessness—the testifies in its own way both to the humanity loudness—required to make pain heard, and of the enslaved and her grief at the slavers’ how the metaphoric volume of this testimo- attempted usurpation of it. ny shapes not only what is heard but what is

El Zein \ 44 offered in response. I am sifting through my listening need not be located in what sound failure at both bearing witness and attending studies scholar Johnathan Sterne famous- to others’ bearing witness, at the same time. ly coined the “audiovisual litany.”11 By this I There are different routes to trace. There mean that my argument is not primarily that is the question of the appearance of agen- an analytical focus on hearing or aurality will cy and mourning. Here, alongside the other resolve the empirical blind spots of watching entries in this special issue, I engage with and seeing. Rather, it is a proposal to ap- Hannah Arendt’s notions of political life in proach our sensing of each other differently. the polis. Confined to this clearly demarcated In attending to the polyphonic in political life, political space, I am concerned with her no- I follow anthropologist Anna Tsing in consid- tion of the second birth of political subjects ering polyphony as a variant to the Deluzian in speech and action seen and heard by oth- assemblage, one that, drawing from polyphony ers. In my exploration of the limitations of this in music, registers “multiple temporal rhythms sphere of appearance, I am guided by Jacques and trajectories.”12 Listening, as I propose it Rancière’s critique of Arendtian agency and here, is not counterposed to seeing or speak- his assertion that politics “is not a sphere but ing but as a metaphor of attentive relation. a process.”9 I draw attention to in between Drawing from creative archives, another moments, what I consider to be the labor of route might be to ask: what is the role of docu- survival ignored without the banner of resis- mentary art practice in a cacophonous political tance. These are alternatives to thinking about soundscape, populated with testimonies to agency or passivity. The traveler, the citizen destruction? The Palestinian sound and visual journalist, the aunt, the artist, the poet, the artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme mural, and the poster: bearing witness as nei- offer one path. Consisting of sound and video ther victims nor agents. installations, collage, original and field record- This exploration of witnessing and agency, ings, their work courts the boundaries of what based as it is in an excavation of the work re- one sees and hears, using montage to layer quired to be in the presence of others, is also questions and suggestions about the political an examination of the public and private lives present. Their collaborative pieces invert the of trauma. This is what literature scholar Kevin malaise of a generation of Palestinian youth Quashie, in his work on quiet in US Black cul- growing up in the shadow of the Oslo Accords ture, theorizes as an intimate, internal sphere to pose a litany of refreshing, halting, and po- of politics, at a remove from the mandate for etic questions that testify to the grief of failure resistance, but potently political nonetheless.10 and the loss of grand narratives in the present. Quashie posits his sphere of quiet at a remove Their work disavows dominant representa- from the public sphere of the liberal political tions of the political in the Palestinian context, subject. Borrowing from Quashie’s deft case troubling the temporality of resistance in a for private vulnerability as the ground for col- post-Oslo landscape and refusing to perform lectivity, and the viability of intimate, inward a romantic, idyllic, or otherwise folkloric rep- gestures as potent markers for political life, resentation of Palestinian history, politics, and I argue for the recognition of yearning as a imagination. political mode of relation capacious enough for Rooted in the sprawling West Bank city both grief and experimentation, testifying and of Ramallah, and the failure of the icon- listening, past and future, self and other. ic 1991 peace accords that centered that Both of these frameworks for excavating city as de-facto administrative capital of the agency and political life—Arendt’s emphasis Palestinian Territories, the duo creatively on the polis as the space where newly born documents and bears witness to that city’s political subjects are “seen and heard” and paradoxes: its growth and emptiness; its Quashie’s assertion that quiet is not reducible prosperity and poverty; its pride and betrayal. to silence—should signal that my propos- Abbas and Abou-Rahme use sound and image, al about the political potential of polyphonic fiction and nonfiction, poetry and documentary,

El Zein \ 45 original texts and borrowed prose to construct also a halting meditation on bearing witness. an urban iconography for Ramallah that stands The montage the duo builds succeeds in rein affective relief against the romanticized futing and subverting a mainstream pattern of hagiography of the great Palestinian cities commemoration, articulation of grievance, and of Jerusalem, Haifa, and Jaffa. These layered remembering. montages deliberately draw attention to the I’d like to mimic and borrow from Abbas stalled temporality of Oslo and its failure, in and Abou-Rahme’s creative practice of lay- thirty years, to provide the sovereignty it prom- ering. In layering my own gathered corpus of ised Palestinians. In their screenshots, sound materials, I attempt my own poesis around our and video installations, collage, and other mul- contemporary moment’s deafening demands timedia work, Abbas and Abou-Rahme build on for solidarity and exasperated struggles over legacies of Palestinian and world literature to representation. From my own position between offer meditations on and mediations of failure, Palestine and somewhere else (Lebanon, the loss, nostalgia, destruction, and belonging. US, Europe), compelled to understand my Their work offers an archive to think with and own access to Palestine and listen to the loss to borrow from while examining a practice of and destruction of Indigenous lands in the bearing witness that gropes for new politics. Americas, as well as the terror of state vio- For example, the duo has a section on their lence in the US elsewhere, I layer thoughts, website, their professional portfolio, that hosts readings, and reflections. I stage multiple what they call samples. These collages stage returns. an artist workstation, juxtaposing color, text, and image. In one, which is not titled, the FRAMING RETURN predominant image in the screenshot is a photograph of a checkpoint in the occupied West Running through this experiment with mon- Bank, taken through a car dashboard. Beyond tage, my argument is that return is a practice the checkpoint, a blue horizon in green and of listening to loss—one’s own and that of yellow twilight. Across the bottom third of the others. I propose that a practice of return image, yellow text is overlaid upon the bot- illuminates some of the work required to be tom third of the screen and reads in capital in the presence of others. In theorizing re- letters in English and Arabic, TO HAVE MANY turn as a way of listening to and hearing the RETURNS. And in the upper righthand corner is catastrophic dimension, I attempt to nuance an open text window with prose ending in the Hannah Arendt’s writing on political activity in question: how did we–insurgent, united, uplift- the polis, which she attributes to the human ed and victorious– bring about the opposite of condition, by emphasizing the ways in which a what we wanted to do? This question, preced- political subject makes herself seen and heard. ed as it is by a litany of dead—dead all of them Specifically, I am invested in a critique of the dead, the greatest, the purest, the best, the emergence of agency in particular spheres of builders, the lost, the fanatics, the knowing, the appearance, here in the practice of testifying unknown, the humblest in their thousands, their to loss or in the practice of mourning. Return, millions, absurdly, iniquitously dead is another, as a serial practice attentive to relationality, excellent place to start. failure, and potential, animates the movement Despite its seeming simplicity, “un- polyphonic listening requires. titled screenshot” is a loaded volley into In understanding the practice of return as a political discourse and artistic practice for political process with radical potential, I cen- the Oslo Generation. With it, Abbas and Abou- ter the histories and legacies of Palestinian Rahme pose questions for a new generation survival, politics, and activism based in the of Palestinian audiences by starting from an righteous demand for and belief in the return urgent and unique articulation of failure: both [‘awdeh] of Palestinian refugees to homes triumphant (insurgent, united, uplifted, and and villages evacuated and destroyed by victorious!) and unquestionably defeated. It is Zionist forces in 1948 and during the ensuing

El Zein \ 46 occupation. The material reality of this call for ways to understand this contemporary wave of return and the imaginary that sustains it are dispossession. I am inspired by, and mimic this twin aspects of a radical anti-imperialism that question and this practice. has sustained a people living seventy-one Not only the images but the words, the years of settler colonial occupation. The po- ideas, and the affects evoked to articulate litical sustenance provided by the demand for a Palestinian future are increasingly out of return is immense. joint: romanticized, fetishized, obsolete in a The Palestinian right of return [haq el ‘aw- post-Oslo landscape.15 In my attempts here deh] to lands and homes occupied by Zionist to return to, and indeed to re-read, return, forces, is singular; it cannot be another way. I propose a performative exploration of the There is only one Palestine, there can only communication of loss to loss. I attempt my be one return to it. But what would it mean own writing “from and through [an] interior.”16 to take seriously the invocation to have many I oscillate between grief, anger, and mourning returns? I am not proposing a fracturing of this as a means of documenting the urgency for constant demand; nor am I questioning the political elasticity. right of the refugee. Yet, nesting within this singular demand, the possibility to have many ONE (PAIN) returns invites us to think capaciously about the shuttling movements, the elasticity, and We have to keep looking at this so we the imagination required to sustain political can listen to it life. The possibility of having many returns —Fred Moten17 also invites a multiplication of returnees and of journeys. If my loss is incommunicable, my In perhaps the most classic example of per- declaration of rights is a silent scream. But formative mourning, of agency as enactment if I and others return to this loss, if it is pos- of and testament to loss, Antigone defies sible, as performance scholar Fred Moten King Creon’s edict and buries her brother. In suggests, “that mourning turns,” layers of loss, doing so, she asserts her bold humanity; her remembering, testifying open up as a potent will to mourn the dead. The burial testifies invitation to listen.13 to her grief and performs the injustice of the At the same time, in taking seriously the state, honoring the gods. Antigone is active, invocation to have many returns, I am also agentive, defiant. A classical political reading admittedly attempting to problematize the of her action understands Antigone as enter- romance and orthodoxy around return in ing the polis, the space of political activity, Palestinian political discourse and the cultural emerging in so doing as a political subject. In imaginary. I have also felt, as Abbas and Abou- burying her brother in defiance of the King, she Rahme themselves state as an impetus for transforms from a passive, private, princess their own work, “that the images coming out of to a defiant public threat.18 In the actions she Palestine [have] begun to stagnate, to deacti- takes—burying the body and taking respon- vate rather than activate.”14 In this, Abbas and sibility for having done so—lies a model of Abou-Rahme draw attention to the extended agency based on Hannah Arendt’s model for liminal time heralded by the Oslo Accords— politics: “speech and action seen and heard by liminal because the promised sovereignty in others.”19 This reading offers tools to under- those agreements has not materialized, liminal stand agency based on action: a politics based because of the relation with time (the Oslo on noisy, visible activity. Antigone cries out: generation) the term often evokes. In pulling I loved my brother; his loss pains me—hear the imaginative threads that have sustained me, fellow citizens! I am grieving this injus- this long, stalling wait for the materialization of tice. Watch me bury him. Her actions move a Palestinian dignity, Abbas and Abou-Rahme the chorus to empathic catharsis. We feel turn to history and to the future, layering vi- for Antigone, but we feel better that she has sions of the present in order to ask for new acted.

El Zein\ 47 Zoom in to a different burial. In August 1955, There lies the testimony to the grief. There in 14-year old Emmett Till was visiting cousins in the reluctance, the cringe, the disappearing as Money, Mississippi. Accused of whistling at a we look, the essential, necessary look away. white woman, a group of adults shot the boy in What can learning to listen to Emmett the head, tied his body to a gin fan, and threw Till’s funeral photograph and Ms. Mamie it in the river. His mutilated body recovered Till Bradley’s burial teach us about return? and returned to Chicago, the boy’s mother Bradley’s politics of mourning underscores insisted on an open casket. Ms. Mamie Till the urgency of return in political practice. Bradley’s decision to make sure that the whole Confronted with the will to destroy, expecting world could see what a racist, white mob had or performing action will not do. Retreat, sta- done to her son asks for a different model of sis, hesitation, quiet is more like it. reading agency and politics.20 Ms. Bradley Hartman is right to remind us, who is this says: friends and foes, I am grieving. I will bury mourning for? At an academic conference in my son, but first look what they did to him. My New Orleans (that perennial capital of con- pain is greater than your discomfort at see- current, cacophonous mourning), a professor ing this brutality. The funeral was attended by I have never met asks me where my name is hundreds of thousands. And the boy’s broken, from. I tell him it is Lebanese. His face alights swollen head was photographed and dissemi- with the excitement of recognition. He begins nated in the black press, becoming legendary. to recount to me with zeal his first exposure The casket (and the wound) stay open. The to Lebanon during that country’s devastating boy is unburied. What does the mother’s quiet civil war. With disturbing relish, he describes gesture ask of us? a photograph, printed on the front page of a The affective force of the funeral photo- national paper, of a man dragging a body with graph is the subject of performance scholar a knife in its back across a city street. I stand Fred Moten’s haunting investigation of the there, blinking in his sentences that won’t sound of mourning. Instead of only looking at end. For whom is this empathetic action? Does the photograph of the lynched black boy, the our mourning ask for it? This sonic disparity is visual document of barbarity, Moten proposes deafening. The difference between the silence to listen to it as well. This listening is neces- in Alexander’s question (can you be black and sary, Moten suggests, because it is impossible look at this?) and the accelerated relish to re- to look at the photograph and actually see live the dragging of a backstabbed body. Emmett Till. It is hard to see him, Moten claims, because Emmett Till, the boy, vanishes behind I am struck, driving the broken roads of the brutality of the mob that lynched him. We southern Lebanon, by the ubiquitous martyrs’ miss the boy for the brutality. He explains, “if posters commemorating fallen fighters in Syria, he seems to keep disappearing as we look Palestine, and Lebanon. The dusty patches at him, it’s because we look away.”21 But this of earth blur with green shrubs and the smell is precisely what the photograph demands of lemon blossoms. Faces fly past, young and that we do. The documented barbarity impels unblemished, printed on party letterhead; retreat while the boy’s mother holds the space swashes of green, yellow, red.22 My own expe- open for return—the casket was left open. rience with them is always on the move, from a In a piece Moten draws from, Elizabeth car window, or stealing glances while walking Alexander asks about the Rodney King videos: briskly over uneven sidewalks. Sometimes, I “can you be black and look at this?” There is a try to imagine how the streets of Brooklyn or similar call and response here. In Alexander’s Philadelphia would look were the martyrs to question, the mourning is there in the can you state violence commemorated in the same look? Therein lies the very recognition of the way. But in these East Coast US cities, the impossibility of seeing, of bearing witness, martyrs’ commemorations are slightly differ- what Moten described as he keeps disappear- ent: an occasional mural painted on a store ing as we look at him, because we look away. side wall, each in its own colors. Yet, both

El Zein \ 48 kinds of commemoration share a similar ontol- following Mrs. Till Bradley’s command while ogy of mourning. If we listen to them, we hear listening to Saidiya Hartman: to hold open the a similar rhythm: defiant, celebratory. There sites of our destruction. Not to make them are some traces of delusion in the twinkling of fetishes of suffering—not to prove blood quan- fallen eyes. tum at each border crossing—but so that we At talks and in organizing meetings, in learn to see the horizon disappearing. A differ- books and online, the possible confluenc- ent being with. es and intersections of political actions take In Ghassan Kanafani’s iconic novella center stage. Arendt’s notion of second birth— Returning to Haifa, the protagonist couple Said the christened arrival of political subjects and Saffiya return to Haifa after twenty years through the performance of public speech of absence; twenty years since the Battle of and action—fills the air. The promise of le- Haifa on April 21, 1948, when a Haganah oper- gions of Antigones defying clear edicts with ation cleared the Arab neighborhoods of the equally clear actions hovers above. And even city. For twenty years, the couple have been in the best of these, the proof of solidarity, nursing the loss of home and a homeland. But of our intersectional politics, lies in the vocal they have also been mourning the loss of a actions we trace. Enthusiastic speakers tell son, presumed dead, whom they were forced of how, when tear gas canisters rained down to leave behind. When they return, they find on #BlackLivesMatter protests in Ferguson, their old house and the neighborhood, now Missouri in the summer of 2014, tweets from inhabited by others. They also find their son, Gaza and Ramallah in occupied Palestine in- alive, raised by others. With this return comes structed distant sisters how to soothe burning a fresh pain, a new, more complete catastro- eyes. Clear communication. Politics hailed as phe, a different, living murder. In the novella, active solidarity: mediated speech, action seen Kanafani produces a cry—a sound to accompa- and heard by others. Please understand: I want ny the nakba.25 He deliberately pries open that these pulls across and between communities, catastrophe, saying with each paragraph: we too. But I am stumbling where those urges are have to keep looking at this so we can listen to leaping. it. This, too, is return. Not the movement of the Trace the resonances between the murals— couple from the West Bank to Haifa. The story painted with specific colors and lines on a is the return: holding the wound open, giving single set of bricks—and the martyrs' posters, it sound. Hear: Mamie Till Bradley holding open painted with specific colors and lines, hanging the wound that swallowed Emmett Till’s boyish over specific streets. Between the commem- whistle. Polyphonic mourning. orations. I have suggested some aesthetic similarity, some shared ontology of mourning. TWO (ANGER) But in tracing these performances of mourning we should ask: where is the cacophony I simply could not flip out of reaching out, the orgiastic action? Milk and —Audra Simpson26 soda for your eyes!/. . . throw the can back at them! Now, only silence; emptiness returns. Is I lose my temper, demand an explanation an active political practice not possible here— . . . Nothing doing. I explode. Here are the not between the protesters, between the fragments put together by another me. martyrs?23 Between the grievers? I am looking —Frantz Fanon27 for a form of commemoration in common that is not the impulse to build hierarchies of pain; In Moscow, on a layover on my way to Palestine not a search for originary violence.24 But rath- the first time I attempted the most material er, a serial practice of return. Learning that the kind of return, I felt a kind of physical pres- horizon must disappear as we look, because sure I didn’t understand. I was the last one to we turn away. Not the relish of recounting the board the flight to Tel Aviv. When we landed, photograph (to whom? for whom?)! Rather, my breath was short, and I could feel my chest

El Zein \ 49 cavity moving under my shirt. Walking out of fragmented script in the angry wake of the the plane and into the sparkling airport, ev- boy’s murder. All the other mes watching and erything echoed, as if we were underwater. bearing witness, woven together. Then, it was gone. They took my passport and Writing for Haaretz in the aftermath of the gestured me off to wait. Soon, I found myself murder, the Israeli journalist Gideon Levy in a room with soldiers and their computers. documented a charged exchange between A yellowing office with no windows, the desk the murdered boy’s father and a captain in corners peeling plywood. Everything in electric the Israeli Defense Forces. The grieving father lights. So this was it, return. How banal! explained to the captain that the fields into In 2014, the same year I returned to which the boys had crossed were family lands; Palestine for the first time, a fourteen year-old the boy was returning home. In response, the Palestinian boy was shot by Israeli soldiers captain reportedly retorted: “you weren’t here, while he was cutting class. Yusuf Ash- and you don’t know what happened.”29 The Shawarmeh and some friends crossed a piece father, removed from his land, deprived of the of Israel’s separation fence, which arbitrarily right to work, and now robbed of a son is told cut through the boy’s family’s lands, to pick by the commanding captain, you weren’t here. ‘akkub, an edible thistle. There was a hole in The remaining fragments of the man turn to the fence, the boys slipped through it, picked Levy or to no one and say flatly, “they have the thistles. On their way back through the hole taken everything.”30 in the fence, their fists full of the edible plants, Watching the surveillance footage that soldiers shot Yusuf. He died on the spot. Abbas and Abou-Rahmeh sample over minimal Only the Beloved Keeps Our Secrets is one electronica, like a still roar of interference, I of Abbas and Abou-Rahme’s recent video catch myself retreating (Figure 3). Just when installations, one in which the technique of I expect to cringe, at a gunshot or a confron- layering or montage palpable in their samples tation, the footage cuts, another layer appears is quite developed. The installation explores on top or behind it. But the montage only Ash-Shawarmeh’s murder outside the town of reveals more fragments, more disappearance; Deir al-Asl, north of Hebron. The installation a dance form dying, an empty house, picked layers Israeli surveillance footage of the mur- plants, waves retreating out to sea. As the der with archival footage of Palestinian dance rhythm accelerates, the demand to TESTIFY in and song, newsreel of protests and house red text in Arabic and English layered over the demolitions in the occupied West Bank, and image of a boy’s fist full of thistles, draws out original music and field recordings (Figures 3 precisely the impossible bind of doing so. The and 4). The artist statement accompanying the duo’s layering of the surveillance camera foot- piece says that the video “weaves together a age with original text and dance and folklore fragmented script.” In their words, the artists asks questions about homeland, erasure, and present “moving layers with images build- destruction. Layering different documentation, ing in density on top of each other, obscuring it also invites us to think about the role of the what came before in an accumulation of con- documentary (footage, compilation, montage) stant testament and constant erasure.”28 This in memory, testimony, survival, and mourning. constant testament and constant erasure is The piece is a fascinating anthropology of the rub that calls for return; that demands its documentation: it proposes a conscious tech- constancy. nique of montage, in dialogue perhaps with Only the Beloved Keeps Our Secrets is a anthropologist Michael Taussig—asking about moving meditation on belonging, destruc- the terror of disappearance—and with Moten, tion, presence, and absence. The layering of playing with strategies to hear the mourning of fragments implicitly acknowledges Fanon’s erasure. reflection on anger (Nothing doing, I explode: “I realized,” Audra Simpson writes, “that eth- here are the fragments put together by anoth- nography in anger can have a historically and er me.) And so the artists weave together a politically productive effect.”31 In Simpson’s

El Zein \ 50 description of the US–Canada border crossing clear enough to be a threat in some circles. her, the disdain in the US border guard’s voice But the sigh is for us; beloved and held close, and the catty flippancy of her questions as holding retreating waves. It is a coherence she assumes and probes Simpson’s identity cutting through the incoherence. An angry, leap off the page. I want to spit at the wom- still-moving clarity. an she describes, too: “snooty, authoritative, Now, zoom out from the West Bank bor- aggressive—everything historically, politically, der and hear oceans of sighs. A cacophony to dislike and to dislike with vigor.”32 I remem- of holding open: not as speech and action. ber their faces and their voices in the dingy Polyphonic agency as anger in motion. room with peeling tables. The experiences at This crossing oceans to return from stolen the border Simpson documents illustrate how land to stolen land does not make them inter- Indigenous mobility enacts different sover- changeable. Another being with is necessary. eignties, exactly at the point of confrontation Another strategy to listen. In the same class- with the state. Simpson’s documentation and rooms and political meetings where I fumble theorization of Indigenous border crossings to testify to the denied humanity that threat- emphasize how movement enacts ontology. eningly crashes and washes, I start to hear This movement performs an understanding of others smarting. Have I just recounted with rel- history and law the state desperately tries to ish a photograph of a broken body I once saw erase.33 It is this very movement that makes in a national paper leaving someone else to the state desperate, anxious, afraid. stand there blinking? In the increasing relent- From the river to the sea, Palestine lessness to document the losses I remember will be free! goes the chant in the streets of and those I do not, have I risked, at the same New York and London and Oakland. But in the time, what Qwo-Li Driskill calls the “unseeing” streets of New York and London and Oakland, of other, ongoing losses?34 do we imagine that the Jordan River runs dry? As Fanon said, “we explode.” Folding out While we chant, do we picture the buses to from the border, there in the meeting, sud- cross that riverbed divided into VIP and not denly, but again sifting through fragments: VIP, split into lines marked for Europeans and weaving silences, lost tempers, nothing doing. lines marked for everyone else? Does this soli- Again the heavy sigh of sovereignty in motion. darity rhythm remember the eyes of teenagers Moving through the angry space of grief, as with guns, hard and bright and bored? Does return. it register the absurdity of soldiers carrying lunchboxes? Let me return you to children en- THREE (LOSS) acting return, waiting in lines in the desert sun, somehow still managing to play, pushing and We are losers. This, and this alone, will be pulling on the railings that hold in and direct my starting point. the border. In this hot, eternal mess of waiting, —Houria Bouteldja35 a woman sweating through her veil looks up and sighs, “all this for the Zionists?” ‘Akkub is tumble thistle in English. Gundelia. My All of return is in her sigh. Her exas- mother has not cooked it, but I have tasted it. perated exhalation is sovereignty in motion. The desert sits funny with me, squinting at the A potent political being. Spoken to no one, horizon for some memory of the Jaffa sea, and heard perhaps, but ostensibly ignored by the arid highlands of the West Bank feel dry sister, daughter, niece, fellow traveler. No one and dusty and not like home at all. (I, who have responds. Agency as exhalation in motion, just returned, feign to admit it felt not like home barely holding up on rough waves of anger and at all!) And this is what Bouteldja must mean sadness, holding on to humor and insanity, by being losers, we who have lost. Caricatures holding—together with the fistfuls of thistles of home, of nations, of belonging, of victory. of teenagers cutting class—holding open. The “They have taken everything,” the grieving chant wages the war of representation. It is father states, simply.36 What if we start here, as

El Zein \ 51 Bouteldja asks? Actually let this be our starting performative mourning, however, Bouteldja point: what does it mean to hold onto and to suggests a return to loss. By starting here, with hold open these losses? loss, with the silent sighs, she holds space In her exposé of the human condition, open even while oscillating between pains, Arendt suggests that plurality is the founda- moving between destructions, unearthing tional quality of political life. Plurality is the erasures. Boutledja’s return shakes out both uniquely human quality of being together. And nostalgia and spectacular mourning from the this being with, for Arendt, is the space to think polis. In announcing a return that does not re- about politics; plurality engenders the con- cover, she asks for a listening to loss that does dition in which politics are possible. Arendt not anticipate its end or its remedy. We are los- locates this plurality in the polis—that theoret- ers is a mourning that does not search for the ical city-state that she imagines as the space origin of pain, it does not respond to Creon. It of appearance. It is a space of appearance be- holds the casket open. More importantly, it is a cause it is here, Arendt writes, that individual holding open of pain that moves without hope. human beings are reborn as political subjects It is a turn that enacts plurality in total silence. with agency. This second birth happens when No speech, nor action: plurality without ap- individuals perform speech or action seen or pearance. We are losers: just being with. heard by others, transforming them into political subjects, and starting political processes FOUR (YEARNING) over which they no longer have control. As mentioned above, Arendt’s argument has It is easier to be furious than to be been criticized as an elitist vision of politics, yearning wherein labor and work that take place out- —Audre Lorde39 side of the polis are relegated to the realm of the apolitical.37 I want to take from her critics I’m still keeping secret what I think this attention to visibility and appearance. And no-one should know. Not even anthro- I want to take from Arendt the critical human pologists or intellectuals, no matter how condition of plurality: being with others.38 many books they have, can find out all our When the French-Algerian activist Bouteldja secrets. declares, in her chapter entitled, “We, —Rigoberta Menchú Indigenous Women!,” that “we are losers,” she interpellates a particular plurality. By return- Reviews of Abbas and Abou-Rahme’s work ing to a site of destruction—so many wounds, call it “nostalgic.” “OH, SEA!” the pink text deaths, silences, and silencings—as a politi- screams in Only the Beloved Keeps Our Secrets. cal birth (this and this alone will be my starting And the sea, in the West Bank, is precisely that point), she calls for a plurality that imagines horizon of longing, the impossible, geographic a being together not bound up in the perfor- border, collecting the sighs of ruddy-cheeked mance of a particular speech; not connected teenagers who have never seen the red waves to the performance of political agency. That that lie beyond the checkpoints, walls, and is, her we is connected not by chants of angry fences. But Abbas and Abou-Rahme hold a defiance, but by the angry sighs of sovereign- similar suspicion of nostalgia and romance that ty in motion. As such, she asks for a place of Bouteldja draws on above, when she declares listening, ephemeral and reverberating, and a that loss is her starting point. The duo’s three practice of mourning. channel installation The Incidental Insurgents Her impulse is perhaps in line with Douglas demonstrates a particular development of both Crimp’s painfully astute observation, “for I their affective relationship to an archive and have seen that mourning troubles us,” i.e. we what it might mean to sift through it in search refuse to do it; or we do so only performatively, of, in their words, “what we cannot see but asking for action, performing speech, desper- feel is possible.” According to the artists, this ate for a particular political agency. Without installation stages an “unfolding” of a story

El Zein \ 52 of “a contemporary search for a new politi- be out of joint. He is caught here: to document cal language and imaginary.”40 It follows two or to throw down? To broadcast the movement, individuals, mirroring the artists themselves, as or to feel the tear of the rope into his palm? they search for politics, aesthetics, movement. At one point he turns the camera to show his The piece is clearly reflective on the ro- face and flashes us a victory sign—the rope mance of resistance and rebellion and artistic pulling down the wall behind him, the clouds insurgency in times of political change (it of smoke rumbling behind the rope. I’m not premiered in 2012, in the height of the Arab laughing at the citizen journalist, no. The sec- Uprisings). It explores the range of contradic- onds of his staged in-between layer the point. tory affects undergirding the search for new How to hold the rope and the victory sign at politics, including new frameworks of action, the same time? different discourse, and more immediate aesthetics. Critically, the artists build characters CLOSING/ RE-ENTRY in this piece who become knowable in their lacks, in their absences, and in their contra- In the forward to the recent volume Holocaust dictions. What makes them political characters and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and is their movement on foot and in cars as they History, the renowned Lebanese novelist Elias search for and, critically, fail to find politics.41 Khoury asks, “does the possibility of discover- What shapes their agency is not what they ing a common vocabulary exist?”42 He means do or say—their speech and action “seen to set the stage for a probing of the common and heard by others.” The unseen narrator in affective, linguistic, and political ground be- Abbas and Abou-Rahme’s video montage calls tween the two great catastrophes structuring it “a story that repeatedly speaks and repeat- life for most Israelis and Palestinians, the edly loses its voice”—whose protagonists Shoah for the former and the Nakba for the were “ a kind of noise and a kind of silence.” latter. In a way, this has been my question, too; The agency of Abbas and Abou-Rahme’s char- though I have not pursued a common vocab- acters is palpable in their affective relation to ulary, per se. Rather, I chased a practice of both past and future, their yearning. Their will- listening, of rendering intelligible, that I at- ingness to return, to find nothing there doing, tempted to theorize as a practice of return. to yearn. Active mourning. In a moving exchange with David Kazanian, What is it to be yearning? How hard is it to Marc Nichanian tries to explain the urgency of be yearning, to be yearning with? Yearning understanding the impossibility of testifying like the kites sent up by Palestinians over the to the catastrophic dimension that accom- militarized border fence in Gaza. It must be panied and drove the Armenian genocide. As hard to be yearning with, otherwise it would be part of that explanation, he examines the role easy (and Lourde reminds us it is easier to be of literature and translation in the documen- furious). On October 12, 2018, a Friday, during tation of disaster, returning to the paradox of the Great March of Return, youth from Bureij witnessing. In so doing, he turns to the use refugee camp in Gaza tear down part of the by different Armenian authors of Herodotus’s separation fence, somehow remaking the coils story of the mute son of King Croesus. For of jagged barbed wire into the coils of tele- years, Croesus tried to cure his mute son, to phone wire. In a clip since removed from the no avail. When Persians invaded the kingdom, internet, a man tries to film the scene and, at a soldier came to kill the King. In that moment, the same time, assist in the efforts. He holds the son cried out, attempting to save his fa- the camera and he reaches for the rope the ther and overcoming his muteness. The soldier youth are using to tear the wall down. Camera killed Croesus anyway, despite the formerly in one hand, reaching for the rope with the mute prince’s noteworthy protest. Nichanian other. He goes for the rope, he touches it, he writes of how the story figured as a prominent lets go; knowing he can’t actually do anything allegory for many nineteenth-century Armenian while filming, that his weight and his feet will writers, grappling with Armenian struggles

El Zein \ 53 for liberation before the Turkish genocide. how things disappear. In how we mourn. In our Nichanian accuses Armenian writers of mis- ability to imagine movement and momentum understanding the parable’s significance. and weight; in our returns: multiple, myriad, He writes, “Literature is that scream crying large, minute. In our capacity to hold beloved out, which accompanies, for all eternity, the secrets. father’s death. Literature does not save the It is April again, and it indeed promises to father! It saves the ‘disaster.’ Do you under- be a cruel month. As I write, I wonder: what stand the difference?”43 Thus Nichanian writes commemoration of the massacre at Qana this in no uncertain terms against what he calls an year, amid the global spread of a disease that “optimistic view” of a politics of the future in has and will claim hundreds of thousands? I the aftermath of genocide. study again the photo of the Lebanese jour- Still, it is hardly bleak nihilism that animates nalists documenting the massacre at Qana, Nichanian’s argument. Rather, his is a mov- looking for the eyes the man is hiding in his ing entreaty asking us to think about agency hands. I admit from here, in this April, I cannot beyond a politics of recognition and recovery— even imagine a commemoration, a testifying these necessarily couched in the language of to these losses, admittedly so different from the catastrophe, in the grammar of the victor. the ones the photographers in the photograph If we are convinced that the scream saves the tried to document. Overwhelmed, I stop. Some disaster, we can be assured of the urgency of time later, I come back and try again to track the testimony of the scream. Nichanian writes, the dirge’s polyphonic strains. I hear similar “the only thing that remains to do is to under- patterns, pauses, yearning. If I am still enough, stand what happened, to denounce our being I can imagine legions of us in similar refrains— in the grasp of the perpetrator’s will, always starting, stopping, turning. and again.”44 How to do this, however? How We will return, and the thought comes more to understand what happened? If the scream like a sigh. saves the disaster, what saves us? I might return to Ursula Le Guin’s simple, ENDNOTES crucial reflections about dreams with which I 1—Urusla Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven began. In The Lathe of Heaven, her exploration (New York: Scribner, 2008), 36. of the devastation of dreams—how they lead us astray, hurt us, mar the present, threat- 2—This piece benefited from three en to destroy the future—she offers: “often, sets of workshops. It started as part of it was not the apparently striking or salient the “Disidentifying Borders: Coalitional element of the dream that was the effective Futures and Migration” José Esteban one.” The dream is blinding, she seems to Muñoz Targeted Research Working suggest. The search for action, the urgency Session at the American Society of to perform, the loud call to see, the chant, the Theatre Research in 2018, convened by promise—perhaps these are not the salient Dominika Laster and Hillary Cooperman. elements, nor the effective ones. Perhaps It subsequently benefited from feedback these are not what will save us. Instead, Le by participants in the Media Ethnography Guin asks us to consider those aspects of the Lab at the Center for Advanced Research dream that are less striking but very moving, in Global Communication at the University nonetheless. That is, an affective aspect of of Pennsylvania in spring 2019, and the dream, an effective solidarity, a coherent that fall from the Indigenous Scholars co-presence, might not be in speech or action. Research Network at Wesleyan University. It might lie instead in the practice, possibil- I wish to acknowledge in particular ity, and invitation to return. Learning how to the feedback and encouragement of hear another’s destruction in holding spaces Yakein Abdelmagid and Joseph Weiss. open. Being in the presence of others might Shortcomings I reserve as my own. then lie in how we look away and in learning

El Zein \ 54 3—Douglas Crimp, “Mourning and Monin’,” in Loss, 65. Militancy,” October 51 (1989): 16. 14—Basel Abbas, Ruanne Abou- 4—Audra Simpson, Mohawk Rahme, and Tom Holert, “The Interruptus: Political Life Across the Archival Multitude,” Journal of Visual Borders of Settler States (Durham: Culture 12 (2013): 345-363. Duke University Press, 2014). 15—I have explored the explic- 5—David Kazanjian and Marc Nichanian, it question of the political discourse “Between Genocide and Mourning,” in of resistance in Palestine elsewhere, David Eng and David Kazanjian, eds., see Rayya El Zein, “Developing a Loss: The Politics of Mourning (Berkeley: Palestinian Resistance Economy University of California Press, 2002), 131. through Agricultural Labor,” Journal of Palestine Studies 48 (2017): 7-26. 6—Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in 16—Quashie, The Sovereignty of Quiet, 84. Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: 17—Moten, “Black Monin’,” 72. Oxford University Press, 1997). 18—Butler, Antigone’s Claim. 7—Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (New York: 19—Hannah Arendt, The Human Columbia University Press, 2000), 24. Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 58. 8—These reflections were encouraged by and echoed in Jodi Dean’s recent 20—Fred Moten, In the Break: The Comrade (New York: Verso, 2019). Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of 9—Jacques Rancière, “Who Is the Subject Minnesota Press, 2003), 192–210. of the Rights of Man,” South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 2/3 (2004): 305. 21—Fred Moten, “Black Monin’,” 65. 10—Kevin Quashie, The Sovereignty 22—I will not reproduce the extensive of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in literature on these visual ephemera, Black Culture (New Brunswick: their mobilization in war and peace, Rutgers University Press, 2012). their capacity to commemorate, or the particular archive they create. See for 11—Jonathan Sterne, “Sonic example, Laleh Khalili, Heroes and Martyrs Imaginations,” in Sterne, ed., The of Palestine: The Politics of National Sound Studies Reader (London: Commemoration (Cambridge: Cambridge Routledge, 2012), 9. University Press, 2009) or Zeina Maasri, 12—Tsing writes: “When I first learned Off the Wall: Posters of the Lebanese polyphony, it was a revelation in listening; I Civil War (London: I.B. Tauris, 2008). was forced to pick out separate, simultane- 23—As Michael Taussig has put it, “the ous melodies and to listen for the moments carrying over into history of the princi- of harmony and dissonance they creat- ple of montage.” Taussig, Shamanism, ed together. This kind of noticing is just Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in what is needed to appreciate the multiple Terror and Healing (Chicago: University temporal rhythms and trajectories of the of Chicago Press, 1987), xiv. With my assemblage.” Anna Tsing, The Mushroom thanks to Edgar Garcia for this reference. at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: 24—I refer here to trends in Princeton University Press, 2015), 24. Afropessimist literature that foreground an essential antiblackness in 13—Fred Moten, “Black political violence of different types.

El Zein \ 55 25—Arabic for catastrophe; the word critique of democracy.” Rancière,“Who Is used to describe the events of 1948. the Subject of the Rights of Man?”: 298. 26—Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus, 119. 38—See also: Judith Butler, “Bodies in Alliance: and the Politics of the 27—Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Street,” Transversal Texts, September Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann 2011, https://transversal.at/transver- (London: Pluto Press, 1986), 89. sal/1011/butler/en. My thanks to the 28—https://baselandruanne.com/ blind reviewer for this reference. Only-The-Beloved-Keeps-Our-Secrets. 39—Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider 29—Gideon Levy and Alex Levac, “‘It (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 2007,) 153. Was Nothing Personal,’ Bereaved 40—https://baselandruanne.com/ Palestinian Father Told,” Haaretz, April The-Incidental-Insurgents-The- 4, 2014, https://www.haaretz.com/ Part-About-the-Bandits. israel-news/.premium-it-was-nothing-personal-1.5243907. 41—The duo write in their description of Part 2 of this piece, “Ironically 30—Quoted in ibid. “After having killed his these figures most clearly articulate son, Israel has now also revoked the en- the incompleteness and inadequacies try permits the father and his other sons in the political language and imagi- had so that they could work there. ‘Your nary of existing resistance movements. permit is canceled,’ Walid, the eldest, was Often desperately searching for a lan- told this week at the checkpoint when guage able to give form to their impulse he tried to enter Israel, where he worked for more radical forms of action.” See in construction. His father’s permit was https://baselandruanne.com/The- canceled too. ‘First they took my land, then Incidental-Insurgents-Unforgiving-Years. they took my son and now they have taken my work. They have taken everything.’” 42—Elias Koury, “Foreword,” in Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg, eds., The 31—Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus, 119. Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar 32—Ibid. of Trauma and History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), x. 33—Ibid., 115. 43—Kazankian and Nichanian, “Between 34—Qwo-Li Driskill, “Doubleweaving Two- Genocide and Mourning,” 140. Spirit Critiques: Building Alliances between Native and Queer Studies,” GLQ: A Journal 44—Ibid., 142. of Lesbian and Gay Studies 16 (2010): 79. 35—Houria Bouteldja, Whites, Jews, and Us: Towards a Politics of Revolutionary Love (Paris: Semiotext(e), 2017), 103. 36—See note 19, above. 37—Rancière writes:“Arendt’s view [is] of the political sphere as a specific sphere, separated from the realm of necessity. Abstract life meant ‘deprived life.’ It meant ‘private life,’ a life entrapped in its ‘idiocy,’ as opposed to the life of public action, speech, and appearance. This critique of ‘abstract’ rights actually was a

El Zein \ 56 \ Volume 4 \ That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man—that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem. But it was a lesson, neither an explanation of the phenomenon nor a theory about it. —Hannah Arendt, “Postscript” to Eichmann in Jerusalem

My initial thoughts about Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy and its relevance to documentary film, particularly liberal documentary, emphasized the trope of publicness in Arendt’s writing, as this concept is defined—especially in The Human Condition—in distinction from the liberal philosophical tradition, where publicness is primarily a concern ARENDT IN JERUSALEM: DOCUMENTARY, of the individual.1 The Arendtian conception THEATRICALITY, AND THE ECHO OF of publicness, by contrast, appears—and this IRONY \ quasi-phenomenological manifestation is decisive—when and where a social collectivity JONATHAN KAHANA does work that brings to light intersubjective connections that bind individuals to each other, even just temporarily, through a sensible medium of “public experience.” The term public experience appears more than once in my initial explanation.2 I observed that it was surprising that the Arendtian concept of publicness had rarely appeared in the theory of documentary to that point, even though the version of it presented in The Human Condition seemed almost a direct rebuke of the paradigm of documentary publicity promulgated by such standard and long-lived works of documentary criticism as Richard Dyer MacCann’s The People’s Films: A Political History of U.S. Government Motion Pictures (1973). In MacCann’s research, which was first conducted during the early decades of the Cold War, the freedom of the democratic subject to act is paramount: the citizen addressed by a work of documentary publicity—for instance, government propaganda—might not be convinced of the propriety of a particular, authoritative point of view, which might fail to connect with its intended public; and this subject in fact had the right, as MacCann put it, “to pay no attention” at all to the message being sent

Kahana \ 57 through a public channel of communication.3 point of justice. What matters is the offense Arendt essentially reverses this formulation, so against that which humans in a society share: that there is no common world, and no public, “for just as a murderer is prosecuted because without attention: nothing is public about the he has violated the law of the community, and members of a public until they recognize a not because he has deprived the Smith fam- common good, and recognize that they recog- ily of its husband, father, and breadwinner, so nize it. these modern, state-employed mass murder- But ten years ago I was not reading Arendt ers must be prosecuted because they violated fully enough, and did not see that with the order of mankind, and not because they Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt reverses the killed millions of people.”6 Arendt’s postscript idea again. Insofar as the occasion for Arendt’s to her report again comes back to the criti- report is the show trial mounted by Israeli cism of who sits in judgment if they were not prime minister David Ben-Gurion, the spectac- present. “Although,” Arendt wrote, “it seems ular display of state power, as Arendt argues obvious that if (presence were required for that the Eichmann trial was, cannot help but judgment), neither the administration of jus- preempt the formation of a public sphere, of tice nor the writing of history would ever be justice, or of any other governing idea. “A trial possible.”7 Thus, Arendt rejects the idea that resembles a play,” Arendt writes, “in that both justice has a mimetic structure, along with begin and end with the doer, not with the vic- the New Testament principle that we ought tim. A show trial,” on the other hand, “needs to do to others what they have done to us. even more urgently than an ordinary trial a Furthermore, she disputes the notion that per- limited and well-defined outline of what was sonal experience is a requirement of critical done and how it was done. In the center of the thought. trial can only be the one who did”: the actor, This way of thinking about the public of in both of the usual meanings of the word. If justice is not necessarily inconsistent with anyone in the show trial, an allegorical form Arendt’s earlier thinking about publicness. As of the ordinary juridical process, is to suffer, Jennifer L. Culbert notes, in a commentary on Arendt argues, it is this true life character, be- Eichmann and its relation to some of Arendt’s cause juridical suffering is intended for those other writings, Arendt uses the metaphor of who most deserve it, not those whose acts of theater to challenge a metaphysical ideal witnessing corroborate the decision and the of judgment, which, Culbert takes Arendt as punishment. There is no room in Arendtian saying, needs the world and its “appearances” justice for the suffering of bystanders and to exist. “Try as philosophers and scientists “others.”4 might to uncover the higher truth underneath At the start of her report, Arendt laments the appearances . . . and the superiority of Being spectacular character of the Eichmann trial, over appearing,” appearances and surfaces which demanded that it have an audience (in are precisely where we should look to find the addition to the gallery, the trial was televised) causes and meanings of things, the same way and that it give this audience what it already that spectators at a play are in a position to owned in the way of public goods: the narra- judge the actions of actors precisely because tive of the Jew—or, rather, of Israel—as victim. these actions are performed for the benefit “As witness followed witness and horror was and in the presence of observers.8 piled upon horror,” this audience “sat there Taken to an extreme, however, “no one who and listened in public to stories they would wasn’t there can judge” would make much of hardly have been able to endure in private, contemporary documentary impossible. Claude when they would have had to face the sto- Lanzmann, the director of the epic documen- ryteller.”5 The amassing of the evidence of tary Shoah (1985), was one of the most vocal eyewitness accounts, stories from the per- proponents of this principle of first-person spective of a private person that could be presence, excoriating filmmakers whose films told to an audience, is, to Arendt, beside the contained material not shot with survivors,

Kahana \ 58 bystanders, or perpetrators living in the pres- several decades. One sees the influence of ent or perceived by Lanzmann to be in some Lanzmann’s work in many places in contempo- manner inauthentic and thus tantamount to rary documentary. Take, for example, another works of fiction. The post-Shoah concept of of the most widely noticed and discussed documentary, it might be said, relies heavily for films of the past several years, The Jinx: The both its historical function and its ethical ef- Life and Deaths of Robert Durst (2015), Andrew fects on the truth-value of what is sometimes Jarecki’s arduous attempt to record the eccen- referred to as embodied observation. tric New York billionaire Robert Durst admitting In historical terms, this kind of embodiment to the murders of at least three people, includ- is said to occur when camera operators and ing that of his first wife, deaths for which there sound recordists are freed (the language often are no witnesses except the dead and their takes an ideological turn at such moments) killer. Made in the same speculative juridical from a stationary position or attachment to a tense and mode of Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue superhuman mechanical means of movement, Line (1988), another film that gathers evidence and when, in grammatical and psychological of a crime committed by a character who goes terms, the documentary problem of subjectivity through the film uncharged, The Jinx devolves enters the audio-visual field, in the forms of entirely onto the last moments of its 270-min- cinéma vérité and direct cinema. Around 1960 ute length, where the filmmaker finally seems or 1961—not coincidentally, the moment at to extract a confession from its main character, which the Eichmann trial is taking place and although he does so at the tantalizing fringes being observed by Arendt—these forms come of documentary ethics, since Jarecki doesn’t to dominate the realm of scholarly and critical tell Durst he’s being recorded or seen by oth- thinking about documentary, even if they do ers when he utters the admission of his guilt. not, from this point forward, necessarily be- The continued efflorescence of small-screen come the mainstream of documentary practice. documentary in the hands of production-dis- After this point, among documentary critics tribution entities like HBO and Netflix has only and producers alike, an ideological distinction enhanced the sense that one especially poi- establishes itself, between vérité and direct gnant application of documentary is less to forms of documentary and all documentary gauge the depths of a world held in common styles not liberated by embodied acts of eye- than to measure “our privately owned place in” (and ear-) witness. These latter forms seem that world9, and The Jinx is not the only widely suddenly in danger of relying too heavily on discussed recent film to structure justice like predetermination and orchestration, and thus the home version of a game show. Another into theatrical fiction and reenactment. Such a Netflix program from 2015, Making a Murderer, definition of documentary publicness seemed follows the same template of unsolved true useful at the time, around ten or fifteen years crime narrative. ago, for challenging one of the commonplaces For a sense of the difference between of contemporary documentary and its imma- these two documentary models for a public nent theory: the notion that the most complex sphere, Arendt’s earlier and later formulations, problems of social documentary were the ones it’s helpful to compare the Eichmann that the that originate in moral or ethical dilemmas of reader encounters in Arendt’s account to the embodiment and its sometime analog, wit- picture of Eichmann one finds in Lanzmann’s nessing; an idea of documentary that found documentary cinema, and to compare as well its way into many versions of documentary not the documentary methods each author uses historically or formally in close contact with to produce these studies. In The Last of the filmmaking of the moment of 1960. Unjust (2013), made from material originally “No one who wasn’t there can judge” is intended for the film that became Shoah (ten a formulation central to the films of Claude years after Lanzmann recorded the interviews Lanzmann, which are among the defin- that compose most of the former), Eichmann ing works of documentary of the past appears as a spectral but monstrous presence

Kahana \ 59 haunting the interviews with Rabbi Benjamin to Arendt’s account. Indeed, for the uninitiat- Murmelstein, the head of the Judenrat, or ed, The Specialist would be difficult to follow Jewish council, of Thereisienstadt, the Nazis’ or make much sense of without a reader’s gruesome charade of a model concentration memory of Eichmann in Jerusalem to serve as camp in Czechoslovakia. Murmelstein is a a guide text. In keeping with this asceticism central character in Eichmann’s stories about of structure, the low-contrast, low-resolution his efforts to help Jews emigrate from German video gives the impression of having faded territory, and in Kristallnacht, which he or- with time (even though, of course, videotape chestrated and participated in. Murmelstein doesn’t fade)12, especially since Sivan favors disputes Arendt’s description of Eichmann as a shot of Eichmann through the glass wall of a banal, bumbling bureaucrat. In the interviews his booth, in which very faint reflections of the with Murmelstein, conducted in 1975 (and, courtroom are visible. And the Eichmann seen according to various sources, among the first in this manner likewise reflects, literally and interviews Lanzmann recorded for the film that figuratively, the impression created by Arendt would become Shoah), Eichmann is a figure of a man whose professional and ideological of terror, wearing an SS uniform, performing commitments so inhibit his ability to feel or interrogations, and brandishing a revolv- to think that he almost entirely fails at being er—hardly the pathetic, farcical clown of the a human person capable of unique self-ex- show trial mounted by Ben-Gurion. In Arendt’s pression or communication. Arendt quotes hands, however, Eichmann is laughable.10 Eichmann as saying that “officialese is my only Lanzmann’s method of cinéma vérité interview language,” to which she responds that “offi- places emphasis and value in the indelible cialese became his language because he was impression Eichmann makes on his witness’s genuinely incapable of uttering a single sen- memory, holding a traumatic power that allows tence that was not a cliché.” Thus, Eichmann Lanzmann to figure him almost entirely without is, prior even to his “restaging” in Sivan’s film, cinematic image (he appears once, in a brief- capable only of reenacting the role of hu- ly-seen photograph at a desk, in his uniform), man being. “The longer one listened to him,” as an effect of memory and testimony. Arendt, Arendt writes, “the more obvious it became by contrast, creates the mocking image of that his inability to speak was closely connect- a character so ineffectual in his memory, ed with an inability to think, namely to think conscience, and speech as to almost fail to from the standpoint of somebody else.”13 register in the courtroom. In certain respects, we might say, it is dif- This failure is also what I take to be the de- ficult to separate the formal and aesthetic sired effect of Eyal Sivan’s film The Specialist qualities of Arendt’s Eichmann, like the ones (1999), a video reconstruction of the Israeli we find in Sivan’s film, from the very idea of television audience’s view of the trial. Made performance. The works emphasize the sense from hundreds of hours of videotape of the of an event staged by the state according to trial rediscovered by Sivan and Rony Brauman a formalized script, in a space of more or less in a variety of archives, including the Steven literally empty legal rituals designed to be Spielberg Jewish Film Archive at Hebrew observed by witnesses, and then restaged by University, The Specialist is, as a documentary, artists who stick quite close to the script, just best described by the term invented by Trinh as a play is performed from a preexisting text. T. Minh-ha for her post-ethnographic filmmak- Another aspect of Arendt’s documenta- ing, a reassemblage. (In one interview, Sivan ry method that goes largely unremarked is refers to the film as a “restaging.”11) Following her concerted, Kafkaeque effort throughout the same self-imposed strictures that Arendt the report to reduce Eichmann, the disgrun- does, The Specialist limits itself to merely tled paper pusher, to ridiculous spectacle, reporting on the trial by reproducing sections a theatrical figure of fun. Arendt constantly of the videotape recording, in an order and undermines Eichmann—and thus, the trial that with a sensibility more or less corresponding stages his performance—as a historical and

Kahana \ 60 juridical subject, with a style and tone that, corruption”17 and Eichmann’s men negotiated while adhering to her assertion that she is with Jews hoping to emigrate “as though they merely giving an accurate account of events were corrupt,” and “corruption, first simulated in the Jerusalem courtroom, is suffused with as a trick soon turned out to be real enough”18; irony. Arendt’s prose is often quite funny, and and where some former Nazis claimed to been borders on satire. It frequently emphasizes the in “inward opposition” to Hitler, in a state they theatricality—what Richard Schechner calls referred to as being an “inner emigrant,” such the aspect of performance that can be called that “the only way possible way to live in the “restored behavior”14—of Eichmann’s ways of Third Reich and not act as a Nazi was not to expressing himself, or of the linguistic environ- appear at all . . . in public life.”19 A duplicity or ment of the Third Reich itself. doubling of things and statements is, accord- Anticipating this ironic iterability in ing to Mladen Dolar, a necessary condition Eichmann’s speech and in the historical con- for comedy.20 And comedy, observes Arendt, text of his crimes, the report opens with an “now and then breaks into the horror itself, image of the three judges and the gravity they and results in stories, presumably true enough, bring to the space and the proceedings: “At no whose macabre humor easily surpasses that time is there anything theatrical in the conduct of any Surrealist invention.”21 “The horrible,” of the judges. Their walk is unstudied, their Arendt says, apropos of Eichmann’s struggle sober and intense attention, visibly stiffening with Nazi “officialese,” “can be not only ludi- under the impact of grief as they listen to the crous but outright funny.”22 tales of suffering is natural.”15 The judges’ Mordant laughter is surprisingly plentiful lack of self-consciousness, and the complete in Arendt’s report and comes in a variety of absence of their subjectivity from the public forms: a joke that doubles as both a Polish sphere of their courtroom, contrasts sharp- and a Jewish joke, for example, when Arendt ly not only with the Eichmann recounted by imagines the chairman of the Warsaw Judenrat Rabbi Murmelstein in The Last of the Unjust (a repeating a “rabbinical saying: ‘Let them kill cold-blooded madman with a revolver) but also you, but don’t cross the line’”23; the absurd, with the Eichmann observed by Arendt. as when Arendt ends the chapter, “The Final The courtroom where the Israeli court Solution: Killing” by imagining a good German assembles to do justice to Eichmann-in-his- who worries that “all that good, expensive gas own-words is a space ringing with the echo has been wasted on the Jews!” when faced that always accompanies irony: speaking for with the possibility that the Nazis might have Eichmann in free indirect discourse, Arendt to euthanize her and her countrymen24; sar- says he “‘personally’ never had anything casm, like when Arendt describes Himmler as whatever against Jews” and “on the contrary, “the member of the Nazi hierarchy most gifted had plenty of ‘private reasons’ for not being a at solving problems of conscience”; and end- Jew hater, even if many of his closest friends less examples of irony, registered as bluntly were.” This puts Eichmann, Arendt says wry- as the insertion of “mere” into the phrase “a ly, in a position opposite that of the old line mere eight thousand people,” in reference that Jews imagine coming from the mouths to an episode of mass killing in Serbia.25 One of racists, “some of my best friends are an- might say that dark joking of this sort—lit- ti-Semites.” In this respect, the courtroom eral gallows humor—was well-suited to the mirrors the space of the Reich as a place of historical moment, a period in which former such thoroughgoing duplicity that “the Party Nazis could still be found, as Arendt notes, in program was never taken seriously by Nazi of- authoritative positions in the West German ficials,” who “prided themselves on belonging bureaucracy and in public office.26 to a movement, as distinguished from a party And in this latter respect, the entire account and . . . could not be bound by a program”16; can be read as a satire of bureaucracy as such, where “business” was indistinguishable from and a lacerating parody of bureaucratic rea- “official policy,” in that “it was no longer mere son, embodied by Eichmann, a consummate

Kahana \ 61 bureaucrat. In “What is Bureaucracy?,” Claude factuality by exactly the same means, the same Lefort observes that the bureaucrat is not self-deception, lies, and stupidity that had defined simply by his penchant for orders and now become ingrained in Eichmann’s mental- their execution. The bureaucrat also belongs ity.”33) Eichmann’s enthusiasm for this risible to a discrete social system, separate from two self-description led the court, Arendt claims, different realms of social action, the division to see him otherwise than as a monster. On the of labor and civil society, which Lefort calls contrary, she says, “it was difficult indeed not the “theatre of real activities.” The bureaucrat, to suspect that he was a clown,” a caricature by contrast, inhabits a realm of “formalism,” which did not prevent Arendt from seeing him, a world where effort is compensated not within this dialectic of satire, as “the perfect only with remuneration, but with rank and bureaucrat.”34 Eichmann thus had no trou- reward, where what matters is the “prestige ble describing his work with an “‘objective’ which earns the others’ respect,” and “where attitude,” and speaking about concentration subordination is the other side of issuing camps, according to Arendt, in terms of “‘ad- commands and opportunities for promotion are ministration’ and about extermination camps in available.”27 After his entry into the National terms of ‘economy.’”35 In this respect, Arendt Socialist Party and the SS in 1932, Eichmann has the same bitter sense of humor about bu- thrived in the military hierarchy, escaping a reaucracy that Marx does. “humdrum life without significance and con- According to Claude Lefort, one of the “em- sequence.”28 In the SS, Eichmann found his pirical characteristics” of bureaucracy is its place in the military as what the Nazis called a systematic incompetence. In this he follows “recipient of orders,” with a “burden of re- Marx, who maintains that in a bureaucratic sponsibility and of importance.”29 Indeed, he system, “the highest point entrusts the un- was moved to consider his career as different derstanding of details to the lower echelons, from those other functionaries who were like whereas these, on the other hand, credit the “an ox being led to a stall,” “‘nothing but office highest point with an understanding of the drudges,’ for whom everything was decided universal, and thus they deceive one another.” ‘by paragraphs, by orders, who were interested This description of a state of mutually assured in nothing else,’ who were, in short . . . ‘small deception captures Eichmann’s situation per- cogs,’” whereas Eichmann could think of him- fectly, for even though Eichmann is, according self as an idealist30 and a Kantian.31 to Arendt, the acknowledged “expert” within Eichmann explained to the Jerusalem court the SS on “Jewish affairs,”36 the office he runs, that he thought of himself as an idealist, a ostensibly to facilitate the movement of Jews trait he was happy to share with the Zionists across and out of the Reich, in fact “functions” who were the only Jews he came in contact by creating difficulties and putting obstacles in with that he respected. (Arendt indicates that the way of the Jews seeking to emigrate, and her use of the term idealist is largely satirical to negotiate with money and paperwork their when, on the next page, she writes: “when he passage out, making actual movement impos- said in the police examination that he would sible: “[T]he chief difficulty lay in the number have sent his own father to his death if that of papers every immigrant had to assemble had been required, he did not mean to stress before he could leave the country. Each of the merely the extent to which he was under or- papers was valid only for a limited time, so ders, and ready to obey them; he also meant that the validity of the first had usually expired to show what an ‘idealist’ he had always long before the last could be obtained.” When been.”32 And a few pages later she explains Eichmann improves this process by stream- why she always frames idealism with ironic lining it, he only succeeds in creating a more quotation marks when she writes that the so- efficient death machine, a Rube Goldberg cial context for this philosophy was the same process for eliminating bureaucracy’s very “German society of eighty million people” subjects, who had been “shielded against reality and

Kahana \ 62 like an automatic factory, like a flour mill least of all the outsider, can be aware that connected with some bakery. At one end what is happening is anything more than you put a Jew who still has some proper- a cruel game or an absurd dream. ty, a factory, or a shop, or a bank account . . . and he comes out without any rights, The films which the Allies circulated in without any money, with only a passport Germany and elsewhere after the war on which it says: “You must leave the showed clearly that this atmosphere of country within a fortnight. Otherwise you insanity and unreality is not dispelled will go to a concentration camp.”37 by pure reportage. To the unprejudiced observer these pictures are just about In short, the Nazi bureaucratic apparatus as convincing as snapshots of myste- was truly, where its Jewish subjects were rious substances taken at spiritualist concerned, going through the motions, and it seances.38 worked just as well to dehumanize its victims by not working as by operating smoothly. The And in a footnote to this passage, Arendt adds: description of the bureaucracy as a domain of “it is of some importance to realize that all reason, especially a Kantian one, with ideals, is pictures of concentration camps”—by which inherently parodic. Arendt means photographic or cinematograph- I think that Arendt means the concept of ic images—“are misleading insofar as they objectivity—as in the objective’ attitude she show the camps in their last stages, at the says that Eichmann takes toward the descrip- moment the Allied troops marched in . . . what tions of his work to the police investigators gives the films their special horror—namely and to the court—to be read with the same the sight of the human skeleton—was not at all ironic inflection she uses in parodying ide- typical for the German concentration camps; alism. I base this reading on the argument extermination was handled systematically by she makes in a passage late in The Origins gas, not by starvation.”39 The exception to this of Totalitarianism where she addresses the rule of belated realism, where the camps and objectivity of film, calling into question the their survivors were concerned, was, of course, putative objectivity of a very specific kind of the Theresienstadt model camp, where a fake documentary film: actuality footage from the documentary film was also produced, to show liberation of the concentration camps. Arendt outsiders how good life was for the Jews im- explains that it is difficult to keep descriptions prisoned in the ghetto. of the camps within the frame of realism when Arendt’s mention of films was likely a ref- history testifies to the fantasmatic appearance erence to the films made from footage of the of a world in which the horrors of the camps camps shot during their liberation, and shown exist side by side with everyday life of ordinary to the defendants and the courtroom during bourgeois societies. “The difficult thing to un- the Nuremberg trials, and to German audiences derstand,” Arendt writes, made up of prisoners of war and citizens in the recently reopened German theaters by order is that, like such fantasies, these grue- of the Allied Occupation authorities. These some crimes took place in a phantom included Nazi Concentration Camps (1945), world, which, however, has materialized directed by George Stevens, the Billy Wilder- into a world which is complete with all directed Death Mills (1946), a special edition of sensual data of reality but lacks that the Allied newsreel Welt in Film (1945) devoted structure of consequence and respon- to concentration camp footage, and a compila- sibility without which reality remains for tion film made with atrocity footage, KZ (1945), us a mass of incomprehensible data. The a title taken from the German for concentration result is a place where men can be tor- camp. As a “propaganda of truth,” these im- tured and slaughtered, and yet neither ages were likely to produce only a “skeptical the tormentors, nor the tormented, and shrug.”40 Their representation of the “insanity

Kahana \ 63 and unreality” of the camps is ineffectual fact that she begins the report with some of precisely because they are representations, the only praise she dispenses in the book— and, as such, have the status of always al- here, for the “three obviously good and honest ready meaningful signs. “The conviction that men” who will sit in judgment of Eichmann and everything that happens on earth must be who refuse to “playact” in the self-aggrandiz- comprehensible to man can lead,” she writes ing ways that the major players in the “show in the preface, “to interpreting history by com- trial” do—her position on theatricality and the monplaces . . . deducing the unprecedented function of judgment is somewhat different from precedents, or explaining phenomena by by the time she comes to write the book’s such analogies and generalities [so] that the epilogue and postscript, its final twenty pag- impact of reality and the shock of experience es.45 The faculty of judgment is necessary, she are no longer felt.”41 And toward the end of the writes in the postscript, precisely because it book she writes, “[t]here is a great temptation requires one to leave behind the pretense of to explain away the intrinsically incredible by objectivity.46 A willingness to be judgmental is means of liberal rationalizations. In each one necessary if one is to recognize the originality of us, there lurks such a liberal, wheedling us of an action, and thus the possibility that his- with the voice of common sense.”42 For the tory can be made, against the backdrop of the documentary scenes to provoke radical dis- times in which one acts.47 Translated into the tress, they would have to show the camps in terms of documentary thought, it is not objec- their bureaucratic and pedagogical banality, tivity that Arendt champions in the writing of operating as workaday training grounds for judgment and of history, but subjectivity. Both making ordinary men capable of mass mur- the observer—the documentarian—and the der.43 Arendt’s approach is, as we have seen, viewer are implicated. to refute the possibility of an objective picture The difference between the time before of Eichmann or his work with irony and jok- Arendt’s report and the kind of documenta- ing. Rather, despite frequent avowals that her ry thought that followed is summed up in the job is only to present a report on the trial, the phrase used for the title of filmmaker James image of Eichmann that she crafts is flagrantly Blue’s 1965 interview with direct cinema pi- non-indifferent. oneer Richard Leacock, “One Man’s Truth.”48 Like the audience at a play, the responsi- In their interview, Blue and Leacock evince bility of those who sit in judgment is to take the typical confusion of filmmakers of the sides. “Like theater,” Jennifer L. Culbert ar- period between objectivity and subjectivity gues, “justice for Arendt is properly concerned in documentary, exacerbated by the analogy with action. Thus, at the center of a trial is, of the filmmaker as an observer of scientific and can only be, the one who acts.” Apropos phenomena. “You say that you object to be- of Arendt’s repeated comparison of the ing told something as an audience, but are Jerusalem courtroom with a theater, “what the you not telling us what you want by selecting actor does is a matter for the spectators of the what you want us to see?,” Blue asks. Leacock play, not the actor, to decide,” as Culbert puts responds: “It’s no less objective to be selec- it. “From a vantage point away from the action, tive,” and that a physicist “describes those spectators can critically evaluate what they aspects that he judges to be significant and see,” a point which can be taken a number interesting. He is objective in the sense that of ways. What the spectators evaluate is both he did not cook it up. He found something out. the performance of the actor and the actions He didn’t create it.”49 Although they could of the character within the script; and it is not easily co-exist for Arendt, for Leacock—the up to the actors to decide what to make of the cinematographer behind the camera for a characters’ actions, only to carry them out, a number of the best-known works of direct point that is particularly true of a “show trial,” cinema in the 1960s, including Primary (1960), where the meanings of the action are prede- Happy Mother’s Day (1963), and Monterey Pop termined, or “stage managed.”44 Despite the (1966)—the ability of the filmmaker to select

Kahana \ 64 and judge, the scientific attitude, was inimical cruel point, Franju’s film functions at this mo- to the idea of the subject as performer. The ment not as a documentary but as a parody of hidden camera was the ne plus ultra of so- the kind of intelligence work that characterized called observational cinematography, since it the documentary mode in many of its instan- would allow subjects to be themselves with- tiations, prior to this time. The exercises of out any self-conscious playing to an audience intelligence and reason that had justified much or cooked-up behavior before the camera. of the public use of documentary was now, (The ideal hidden camera subjects were, of after a period in which an entire society could course, Nazis and other “irresponsible peo- be “shielded against reality and factuality by ple . . . a Dr. Goebbels or an incipient Hitler or exactly the same means, the same self-decep- a drug peddler.”)50 In the moment just before tion, lies, and stupidity that had” gained such a this sea-change thought, and the onset of a purchase on the thought of idiots (in the prop- rampant confusion over what counts as per- erly etymological sense) like Eichmann, caught formance, or theatricality, in documentary, up in the appeal of what we might call the bu- documentary looks much more like Franju’s reaucratic reason of the Third Reich that is the pigeon. subject of Arendt’s report on the Eichmann tri- In Georges Franju’s 1957 short architectural al. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt frequently study, Notre-Dame, Cathédrale de Paris, a for- raises the question of whether Eichmann was mal, austerely narrated film, made for the same an “average person,” or a grotesquely cruel producers (Anatole Dauman for Argos Films) and unfeeling exception to be measured and as, and within a year of, Night and Fog, the tested against the average person.51 These director briefly turns his attention away from are questions—what is an ordinary person?; the spectacular arches and towers of the great what kind of society is populated with ordinary cathedral to observe the plight of a pigeon, people?—that will come to dominate docu- lying wounded on a roof. The narrator explains mentary practice in the vérité and direct styles that the pigeons that roost on the cathedral that signify innovation in precisely the years occasionally collide with the building, stunning in which Arendt is writing her report, the initial and injuring themselves, so that they either die years of direct cinema and cinéma vérité, the from starvation or from the cold. What is this beginnings of contemporary documentary’s rather pointless interlude doing in the middle preoccupation with the question of character. of a study of the soaring aesthetic achieve- And the question of character, as Henri ment like Notre-Dame? Bergson observed, is the question of the Unlike the violence of the scenes of killing comic. “In one sense it might be said that and dismemberment in Blood of the Beasts, all character is comic, provided we mean by this scene seems to have no logical, docu- character the ready-made element in our mentary purpose, since it does nothing to personality, that mechanical element that re- advance our knowledge or enjoyment of resembles a piece of clockwork,” Bergson writes ligious architecture—a point emphasized by in Laughter: On the Meaning of the Comic. It is, the matter-of-fact and yet excessive quality of he continues, “that which causes us to imitate the narration, which underscores what we can ourselves. And it is also, for that very reason, already plainly observe in the image of the sad that which causes others to imitate us.”52 little bird struggling to remain alive. Like Night Although we might like to think of so-called and Fog, although with considerably less com- observational documentary, in its directness, plexity, the scene reminds the viewer of the as the place to find individuals acting in their cruelty of the act of looking, tests the viewer’s singularity, the premise of most works of direct humanity, and challenges them to come up or vérité documentary from the 1960s and after with a reason—and one can find none—the is the question of whether what social doc- scene exists at all. umentary documents is individuals or types, It could be observed that with this use of and whether, by that reasoning, documentary documentary narration to make a spurious, subjects perform spontaneously, without any

Kahana \ 65 theatricality. Franju’s pigeon is not a character of,” to “arise, originate, result” or “be derived because it can’t act; its injury, pain, and death (from).” before the camera are singular. “Comedy,” re- We encounter this powerful ambiguity marks Dolar, “thrives on the generic, on types, about the tense and telos of procedure in our on stereotypes and clichés, on replication, on everyday uses of the concept. The ordinary repetition, on doubling.” So do bureaucracy authority of procedure as a grammar is cap- and fascism. tured in the injunction that’s (not) the way we And documentary reenactment. I have been do things here, where do things means, all at puzzling over the topic of reenactment for the once, do (not do) things, will (not) do things, last decade without quite noticing its rela- and, perhaps most importantly, have (not) tion to the comic. Reading Arendt’s writing previously done things. These are not exact- on Eichmann through the lenses of come- ly temporizing choices between equivalent dy—closely connected, as Dolar points out in options about which the speaker speaking of his splendid treatise, to the mimetic and the procedure—how things shall (not) be done theatrical—underscores this relation. It ex- here—maintains ambivalence or neutrality. As plains as well some of the great appeal, over is suggested by the dictionary, the current or that period and longer, of reenactment as a future (not) doing is excused or legitimized by documentary method, one that was once quite the prior example or the precedent: procedure common, but fell out of favor with the com- often devolves to the notion that we do or ing of cinéma vérité and direct cinema in the don't do things this way because they have or 1960s. Examples of screen reenactments that haven't been done that way before. And by the connect the art of doing-over to the history same illogic, procedure is often the reason to of violent action—striking, military conflict, not do something, while leaving open the pos- traumatic injury—through irony and restate- sibility that it might have been done. Procedure ment are plentiful, but for now, the work of stages the confrontation of history and dis- Polish video artist Artur Zmijewski will suf- course: one might feel that procedure is cited fice. Much of Zmijewski’s work in the vein of precisely to prevent one from doing something video and performance reenactment demon- that was, nevertheless, quite possible had cir- strates how Arendt’s Eichmann can be the cumstances been a little different. point of departure for these various thematic Many recent examples of what we might routes—bureaucracy, theatricality, comedy, want to call ironic or experimental documen- violence—through a variant of the reenacted tary work develop a sort of euphemism for documentary that I have been calling the doc- documentary through the analogy of pro- umentary procedural. cedures of the psychological testing and Of all the grammars of irony that test anyone behavioral experimentation that characterize who must work in an office or institution, the earlier phases of social-scientistic docu- irony of procedure is among the most vexing mentary. To take just two examples from the and familiar. The language of procedure is past several years, consider Zoe Beloff’s arch less an occupational hazard of bureaucratic citations of psychoanalysis and home mov- work than its medium. Procedure regulates the ies, in her imagined Coney Island Amateur behavior of institutional subjects by its ob- Psychoanalytic Society, and of Taylorism jective reference to the past, which is always and instructional film in The Infernal Dream both out of our hands—those who preceded (2011), a project with strong echoes of George us established this procedure—and, through Landow’s recycling of educational media this oblique citation, the means of our control in What’s Wrong With This Picture? 1 (1972), of the present and future. The dictionary tells Institutional Quality (1969), and other films, us that procedure combines the Latin words or Rebecca Baron and Doug Goodwin’s film for go and forward; but buried in the histori- Detour De Force (2014), about the pseudosci- cal definition is a confusing alternative: not to ence of telekinetic photography. Of course, go forward to, but to “go or come from or out the procedural analogy runs throughout the

Kahana \ 66 work of Harun Farocki, most of whose films, consciousness of procedure since it comes, from Inextinguishable Fire (1969) through the as the title suggests, to no better an under- Serious Games series (2009-10), could be con- standing of the causes of totalitarian violence sidered reflections of and on institutional and than the original—and does so, moreover, scientific testing procedure. in contemporary Poland, a state that, during It is difficult to know where on this spec- the period in which Zmijewski was making trum to place the work of Artur Zmijewski, Repetition, served as one of the black site one of the best contemporary examples of hosts of the CIA torture program. procedural irony in the field of recorded perfor- At about the same time that he was mak- mance. Born, educated, and based in Warsaw, ing Repetition, Zmijewski contracted with an Zmijewski has been assembling a body of per- Auschwitz survivor to have the tattoo of his formances on video whose rudeness beggars prisoner number, which serves as the work’s description. These include an oratorio per- title, 80064, re-inked on his forearm over formed by deaf singers in a church; a fractious the fading original. The resulting ten-minute workshop on political expression pitting Polish video, which begins with Zmijewski and his civic and affinity groups against each other ninety-two year-old subject Jozef Tarnawa in with paint and scissors; a reenactment of the a tattoo parlor, revisiting their agreement and Stanford Prison Experiment with unemployed arguing over its validity and its meaning, is a Poles; and a game of naked tag in the ruin of a series of casually shot short scenes in which gas chamber. These intensely physical works Tarnawa is reluctantly convinced to honor his frequently involve the staging and restaging agreement and go through the renovation of of acts of physical extremity or transformation, his tattoo, after which he is visited at home sometimes in a context of cultural or political by Zmijewski, who wants to see how the ren- ritual, sometimes under the pseudo-scientif- ovation has worked out, and how Tarnawa ic conditions of psychological or sociological likes it. Like a number of Zmijewski’s under- experiments, testing political concepts like takings, 80064 is literally and figuratively a agency, propriety, democracy, and tolerance. work of re-writing, and from the skin of the Just how much of Zmijewski’s work is meant film on down, both the theme and the tech- to be a kind of post-socialist Polish joke is an nique of recovering memories are inscribed open question. in bold in the work. In its citation of the docu- To capture and represent in vérité fash- mentary scenario of tattooing, 80064 nods to ion the transactions governed by procedure historically important scenes in films that are that comprise the quotidian operations, the themselves subject to intense historical mem- unwritten rules, of institutions—as Frederick ories, revered as they are in the documentary Wiseman has been doing for decades—risks tradition: Robert Flaherty’s Moana (1926) and overlooking and leaving unanalyzed the Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s Chronicle of a structural historicity of those operations, as Summer (1961). And beyond the superficiali- reflections of an engrained historical under- ty of its ostensible (and somewhat repulsive) standing of the way things “have always been topic, the violent permanent marking of live done here,” and why. But to apply a mode of flesh that these scenes share, Zmijewski’s documentary better equipped for historical video gestures in the direction of the banal explanation risks translating a paradoxical and and generic process-film that Flaherty helped illogical phenomenon into something com- popularize with Moana, and to the equally prehensible, risks replacing the obfuscatory ordinary social-scientific interrogations of logic of procedure with the documentary logic ordinary people that Chronicle alternately par- of intelligibility and mass communication. odies and embraces, commanding them, with Zmijewski’s rather pointless film Repetition, the aid of an invasive recording apparatus, to a full-scale restaging of the Stanford prison consider whether they are truly happy in their experiment shot with unemployed non-ac- own skin. At the other end of the spectrum of tors, effectively evokes this historical false reality-based reference material, Zmijewski

Kahana \ 67 draws on the long documentary tradition of drove it into his skin. Stripped of almost all the stunt-prank joke, raising the same kind of of the conventional explanatory, narrative, questions as Allen Funt or Johnny Knoxville: and affective scaffolding of real documentary what kind of person wants to get his concen- about survivors and the concentration camps, tration camp number renewed? Moreover, what conventions referenced in the video only by kind of person films it? And what kind of idiots their conspicuous absence, 80064 cannot help stand around and watch? If 80064 is, as a lot but reduce to a set of semiotic exercises: the of Zmijewski’s work appears, a kind of docu- viewer is invited, if s/he can stand to watch mentary intelligence test, it’s unclear whether the entire ten minutes, to consider what the the right thing for the viewer to do is to pass art of tattooing has in common with the pro- or to fail. cess of memory and, more specifically, what a At first glance, nothing about the film, as a figure inked in living flesh has to do with the work of documentary, seems important, novel, identity of the person who inhabits that skin. or necessary, besides the sheerly audacious Equally significant are the questions that demand that an old man, an Auschwitz sur- this moving image provokes about what’s vivor, undergo a pointless procedure for the beyond those frames, questions having to do sake of viewers who could not be present with what’s not visible in it. These necessi- to observe this indignity in person. That the tate a shift in critical emphasis from object Nazis imprisoned innocents in death camps is to apparatus, making the apparatus sensible not news; neither is their treatment as a mere even though it remains just outside the frame. agglomeration of objects before disposal, nor These are questions about the procedural as- the indelible effects of this horror, etched as pect of 80064. Where is the “agreement” that traumatic memories, on those who survived to Zmijewski and Tarnawa refer to, and what’s testify to the experience. Indeed, the dialogue in it? Can you write a contract for the right to in which artist and subject engage during the own, purchase, or reproduce history and ex- film concerning Auschwitz and its legacies, perience? And, overlaying all such moral and while Zmijewski works to convince Tarnawa legalistic questions is the implicit and reflex- to respect the agreement they made, is sadly ive question: what’s achieved by filming this? familiar, and the haphazard character of the Zmijewski’s work tests the unconscious and filmmaking further banalizes the scene and determining force of such unuttered ques- the resulting document, as if no one involved tions and the institutions of knowledge to could summon the energy to make one more which they silently refer, premises that have of these films, or to make this one seem sin- for decades sustained what Brian Winston gular. And in fact, the truly idiotic part of the once called the “tradition of the victim” in conversation is where Tarnawa and Zmijewski social documentary. But traditions don’t main- behave like art historians or dealers, debating tain themselves: someone has to operate the aesthetics of the original tattoo and the the rites, rituals, or procedures in which they value of its reproduction. This passage places must be continually reinstalled. In the docu- in relief the idiolectic quality of the survivor’s mentary work of Eichmann in Jerusalem, the testimony, which is valued for its singularity: commitment to merely record crossed with the eyewitness testimony is priceless, because no withering irony the author directs toward its one else could have formulated it in quite the “wheedling liberal” subject,53 Arendt moves same way, an axiom all the more true when it us beyond intelligence work and towards what concerns mass killing and genocide. But this she called in the “Postscript” to Eichmann in bit of dialogue sits uncomfortably next to the Jerusalem the “lesson” of the savage ironies discussion of the tattoo’s singularity: Tarnawa she had observed, recorded, and reported. If likes his faded number, and has a proud, if not this “lesson” struck Arendt as “‘banal’ and fond, relation to his memory of the tactical even funny,”54 this is an attitude we might process by which he acquired it, getting “a start to adopt as our own for documenta- friend” to stencil it before the camp tattooist ry thought in the age of Trump, a period of

Kahana \ 68 “peculiar unreality and lack of credibility”55 in ENDNOTES which concentration camps have come back 1—See Jonathan Kahana, Intelligence into fashion. Work: The Politics of American Documentary (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 2—Ibid., 18-20. 3—Ibid. 4—Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 2006), 9. Emphasis added. 5—Ibid., 8. 6—Ibid., 272. 7—Ibid., 295-296. 8—Jennifer L. Culbert, “Judging the Events of Our Time,” in Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 146-47. 9—Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), quoted in Kahana, Intelligence Work, 20. 10—See Richard Brody’s review of The Last of the Unjust, The New Yorker, September 27, 2013, and Emmanuel Burdeau, “The Last of the Unjust: Faces of Claude Lanzmann, in 4 Films After Shoah by Claude Lanzmann, DVD supplement. 11—Eyal Sivan and Gary Crowdus, “Historical Memory and Political Violence: An Interview with Eyal Sivan,” Cineaste 37, no.4 (Fall 2012): 22-31. 12—Although the original quad (2”) Ampex tapes—some of which were re- used by the courtroom camera operators who would have been concerned about its then-tremendous expense and scarcity—and the magnetic particles coating them may have been subject to various kinds of disintegration or change in state from the process of being played or stored, causing the recorded image dropouts and other kinds of distortion and effacing, it is, according to the archivist who originally

Kahana \ 69 received Sivan’s copy of the tapes in the 34—Ibid., 54. archive at the United States Holocaust 35—Ibid., 69. Memorial Museum, only in a metaphorical sense that the images could have 36—Ibid., 40. faded, though the softness of the focus 37—Ibid., 45-46. would have been an effect of the relatively primitive cameras then in use. Email 38—Hannah Arendt, The Origins of from Regina Longo, August 12, 2019. Totalitarianism (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1958), 445-446. 13—Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 48, 49. 39—Arendt, The Origins of 14—Richard Schechner, “Excerpt Totalitarianism, 446 n138. from ‘Restoration of Behavior,” in The Performance Studies Reader, Third ed., 40—Ibid., 446. Henry Bial and Sara Brady, eds. (London 41—Ibid.,viii. and New York: Routledge, 2016), 69. 42—Ibid., 439-440. 15—Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 4. 43—Arendt writes that when the SS 16—Ibid., 43. took over administration of the camps, 17—Ibid., 144. they ceased to be “amusement parks for beasts in human form, that is, for 18—Ibid.,196, 197. Emphasis added. men who really belonged in men- 19—Ibid., 127. tal institutions and prisons.” Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 454. 20—Mladen Dolar, “The Comic Mimesis,” Critical Inquiry 43 (Winter 2017): 570-589. 44—Culbert, “Judging,” 146. 21—Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 50. 45—Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 4. 22—Ibid., 48. 46—Ibid., 277-279; 295-296. See Culbert, “Judging,” 146-148. 23—Ibid., 119. 47—Culbert, “Judging,” 147. 24—Ibid., 111. 48—James Blue and Richard Leacock, 25—Ibid., 23. “One Man’s Truth: An Interview with 26—Ibid., 17-18. Richard Leacock,” Film Comment 3, no. 2 (Spring 1965): 15-22. 27—Claude Lefort, “What is Bureaucracy?,” in The Political Forms 49—Ibid., 16. of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, 50—Ibid., 18. Democracy, Totalitarianism, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge, 51—Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 93. MA: MIT Press, 1960), 92, 107. 52—Quoted in Dolar, “The 28—Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 33. Comic Mimesis”: 585. 29—Ibid., 27. 53—Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 440. 30—Ibid., 57. 54—Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 288. 31—Ibid., 136-137. 55—Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 438. 32—Ibid., 42. 33—Ibid., 52.

Cohn & Johnson \ 70 \ Volume 4 \ The domain of the Strange, the Marvelous and the Fantastic, a domain scorned by people of certain inclinations. Here is the freed image, dazzling and beautiful, with a beauty that could not be more unexpected and overwhelming. Here are the poet, the painter, and the artist, presid- ing over the metamorphoses and the inversions of the world under the sign of hallucinations and madness. —Suzanne Cesaire

In this text, I address the relationship between my film practice and my work as an artist-organizer with Decolonize This Place. A decolonial practice does not separate artist and organizer. It intentionally blurs the line between the two. In 2010, I began to articulate such a prac- LIFE, FILM, AND DECOLONIAL tice with Amin Husain as MTL Collective. The STRUGGLE \ process of research and organizing, action and aesthetics, debriefing and analysis—as a NITASHA DHILLON whole—came to constitute the art practice. This is a process that involves learning by doing in an uncertain terrain of struggle so that we expand the space of imagination, possibility, and training in the practice of freedom. We constantly move with actions and engage with new relations, lessons, analyses, and better questions. Among those questions are the relation between art, organizing, and state violence, in Palestine, the United States, and beyond. Similarly, decolonial film is not made in isolation from movements and organizing but rather emerges—analytically, aesthetically, and economically—within and alongside movements and against the set rhythms of colonial logic. It holds space, facilitates finding each other, and disseminates ways of making connections across struggles without losing the specificity of each. It unsettles structures and people while taking aim at domination and oppression. It works to undo what we have come to believe are fundamental and unquestionable realities so that we can move differently, together and separately but in agreement, towards decolonial freedom. Such filmic practice is beyond praxis. With a shifted geopolitical frame for decolonization

Dhillon \ 71 beyond the nation-state, our ethos in both or- emotional toll that colonization still exacts is ganizing and filmmaking is that our aesthetics neither fictive nor less important than the ma- are accountable to communities in struggle. terial; but without grounding land, water, and It is cogenerated through informal processes air as central, decolonization is a shell game." and dialogue. Questions include: what time is We cannot decolonize without recognizing the it on the clock of the world? What strategies primacy of land and Indigenous sovereignty and tactics are needed or being contem- over that land. Hence, with indigenous peo- plated? How can the frame around a subject ples’ struggle, land is central to any decolonial be broken in order to ask better questions? movement and related practices, an important What would family and friends watch? How consideration in terms of constructing decolo- could they be propelled to act? How can film nial solidarity. generally, including documentary film, be not Based on the above analysis, Decolonize about showing and telling but about building, This Place would later organize and build a breathing, and living as deeply political acts of decolonial formation in New York City, bringing resistance, sabotage, and possibility? How can together related struggles without essential- we reorient to one another as a revolutionary izing them as a way to build power from below. act? How can the project of building power be As part of this effort, groups have succeed- accompanied by the rearrangement of desire? ed in bringing decolonization and abolition How can we move from a pain-driven to a de- together in organizing spaces. For example, sire-driven mode of working?1 groups have sought to center land in all or- MTL Collective’s feature film Unsettling ganizing. They are building out the statement (forthcoming, 2020) exemplifies a practice often repeated in movement circles in New that is embedded in a decolonial struggle in York City, Stolen Bodies on Stolen Land, and relation to Palestine. I evoke the film largely the strategies that follow from that statement. through a series of still images and I frequently In other words, how does one understand cite texts of mine written during the film’s pro- the demand of reparations for enslavement duction process. Together, what follows is an alongside the demand for restitution of land to account of the different processes in motion at Indigenous people? every level of making Unsettling. This has led to growing consensus among Indigenous and Black organizers that decolo- DECOLONIZATION AND DECOLONIZE nization necessitates abolition. Abolition as in THIS PLACE the treatment of the underlying causes that give rise to the need for borders, bosses, and Decolonize This Place is best known for prisons. As Fred Moten and Stefano Harney put our mobilizations around museums like the it, "What is, so to speak, the object of abo- American Museum of Natural History, the lition? Not so much the abolition of prisons Brooklyn Museum, and the Whitney, where a but the abolition of a society that could have coalition of dozens of community groups suc- prisons, that could have slavery, that could ceeded in forcing the ouster of teargas CEO have the wage, and therefore not abolition as Warren Kanders in 2019.2 These campaigns the elimination of anything but abolition as the and actions have received extensive media founding of a new society."3 coverage over the past four years, but some- The George Floyd uprising of 2020 has thing that has consistently been ignored in brought this linkage between abolition and such coverage is that when we invoke decol- decolonization into widespread visibility. Like onization, we are not using it as a metaphor Standing Rock and the Ferguson uprising it or codeword for diversity. Rather, we are look- has yet again demonstrated the incapacity of ing to generations of struggle against settler the US nation-state to manage its own contra- colonialism and racial capitalism. Aman Sium, dictions and crises. This has been powerfully Chandni Desai, and Eric Ritskes frame the symbolized by the burning of police cars and difference this way: "the mental, spiritual and toppling of monuments to white supremacy,

Dhillon \ 72 settler colonialism, and heteropatriarchy, demonstrations and funerals, interiors of telegraphed in a banner by Indigenous Kinship homes and living rooms, all as sites of re- Collective reading "No Cops on Stolen Land." sistance and possibility. The camera itself is This moment of becoming ungovernable embedded in open-air prisons and enframed in the United States is something for which by the boundaries and hierarchies established people have imagined and trained for years, through barriers, militarization, surveillance, with thousands others in the United States and and death. In doing so, we wish to reflect a beyond, and we have always had Palestine as post-Arab Uprising climate, one which em- a horizon for understanding the possibilities braces political urgency, anger, and rupture. It and limitations of resistance here. Over the rearticulates a moment of possibility that was past decade, the making of our film Unsettling brought forward by the Arab Uprisings and has been a crucial vehicle through which we the disappointment, destruction, and fear that have tested out forms, mapped power, and followed. It attempts to learn from the failures built enduring relations over time on the path and brings forward an analysis that reorients of decolonization. our struggles and desires. Its aesthetic mode In this process of thinking through decolo- distills the analysis into a filmic language of nial film, we have looked to classics of Third affect by looking and looking differently at Cinema like Battle of Algiers (1966), La hora the architecture of oppression. The piling on de los hornos (Hour of the Furnaces, 1968), of seemingly disparate everyday non-event and Leila and the Wolves (1984), as well as experiences across a Palestine marked by Fourth Cinema, with films such as The Nouba settler colonialism, military occupation, and of the Women of Mont Chenoua (1977). But neoliberalism produces a call to action that decolonial film’s task and role are necessarily is anti-colonial in its horizon, one that many different today, because it seeks to advance dispossessed people across the globe relate anti-colonial struggle and decolonial freedom to beyond the frame of the nation-state. while recognizing that (a) the nation-state and independence are not synonymous with RESEARCH, PRACTICE, AND PROCESS self-determination, (b) the state is no longer imagined as the vehicle of emancipation to the We began working on the film that would extent that was ever the case, and (c) there become Unsettling in 2010. During the first is no competing ideology to be scaled up to research trip to Palestine, Amin and I traced compete with the global nature of capitalism in his memories of the 1987 Palestinian Uprising. organizing socio-political and economic life. We travelled the length and breadth of the West Bank, documenting, witnessing, and re- PRELIMINARY NOTES ON UNSETTLING searching the architecture of the occupation. Land, life, and liberation were on our mind. We Unsettling takes viewers on a journey to were asking ourselves: when Palestine is so Palestine, a land frequently invoked yet rarely overdetermined by the abundance of media heard or seen beyond the distorted represen- representations, how can one still see and tations of mainstream media and pain-driven share Palestine? documentaries. Unlike other films that take We learned that Palestinians experience Palestine as their subject, the emphasis of the occupation differently based on where this project is on land, life, and liberation they are located—in the lands of 1948, the rather than Palestinian oppression and dis- West Bank or the Gaza Strip, or if they live in a possession, which, in any event, is captured village, refugee camp, city, or diaspora. We also unavoidably. learned that the sheer presence of a camera or Over its duration, Unsettling maps check- a voice recorder (rather than what is filmed or points and crossings, graduations and recorded) is sometimes able to gather people cemeteries, streets and alleys, villages and in public, breaking boundaries of alienation refugee camps, farms and make-shift markets, and privacy, as workers, for example, respond

Dhillon \ 73 to questions at a checkpoint, thus creating embodies imagination with implications communal conversations through which peo- on the ground.5 ple can share knowledge and hear about their own realities. For many of us, artists and organizers, students Part of the way the occupation functions and filmmakers, educators and working peo- is that one must use the roads permitted, and ple, Zuccotti Park was a refuge of sorts and, once you deviate from that path or choose to consequently, an open wound collaged onto get lost and document the land along the way, the symbolic heart of finance capital. People you become a threat to the visuality of settler created self-organized commons and flooded colonialism that seeks to foreclose imagination public space with bodies, voices, and cameras, and any other possibility. seeking to engage with and involve others as Just as we prepared to return to New York part of an ongoing process of experimentation, after a month of listening and learning in learning and undoing, resisting and building in Palestine, Mohamed Bouazizi ended his own the unexplored terrain of a historic rupture. life through self-immolation in Tunisia, kick- Present at the beginning of the Occupy starting the Arab Uprisings. When we arrived movement, we saw the continuities between back, the city felt and looked different. organizing against Wall Street and organizing Things are buzzing; we are watching closely. against the settler-colonization of Palestine. Soon Egypt breaks. We see revolutionary people We also saw the opportunity to extend soli- power from below. But it doesn't seem to apply darity and thinking with Palestine by resisting to the United States, even though we know it and building where we are, at the epicenter is all connected in an expanded field of em- of finance capital. New York thus became a pire. We say to ourselves, that is a revolution strategic site of struggle and engagement against decades of brutal military dictatorship against ongoing US settler-colonization and, backed by the US; those are not the same simultaneously remained complicit in materi- conditions faced by those living in the heart ally supporting the continued occupation of of the empire itself. But then Greece breaks: Palestinian lands and the ethnic cleansing of here is a nominal democracy and yet people its people. are rising up, taking to the streets and holding Occupy built a commons on the finan- the squares. Then Spain, a Western nation with cialized terrain of Wall Street, doing so in an advanced economy in the midst of elec- the name of the populist figure of the 99%. tions. With the crisis people are compelled to But Wall Street was always already occu- occupy, throwing into question the legitimacy pied terrain. Lower Manhattan was forcibly of the entire political process: basta ya! no nos seized by European settler colonists in the representan.4 mid-seventeenth century. Genocide, plunder, dispossession, and enslavement lie at the I wrote a note on representation back then too: origins of so-called New York City. Wall Street is named after the literal wall built by en- We carry our cameras and our note- slaved Africans under the command of Dutch books to document things, but we end up and British settler capitalists. The purpose of participating. The art we had imagined the wall? To defend the settlement against making for so long is starting to happen Indigenous peoples fighting to reclaim their in real life. We do not have time to ago- ancestral territories. nize about representation. We are making As Sandy Grande has stated: images, writing texts, having conversations, and developing relationships out In response to the question provoca- of necessity and urgency. Aesthetics, tively posed by the OWS poster: “What research, organizing; it is all coming is our one demand?” My answer is: together in the creation of a new pub- abandon “occupy” and take up “decol- lic space in the heart of the empire. It onization”. Such a shift would bring the

Dhillon \ 74 colonial present into sharper relief and, refugees; others are seeking refuge from more significantly, allow us to reframe being a refugee. Palestinians are not liv- what is happening to workers in Detroit; ing in a “state of exception.7 public school children in Newark, NJ; and, brown, black and poor folks in the It is, rather, a prefigurative state. What life has nation's urban centers as not simply been like for Palestinians since 1948 is what it about racism, unemployment, outsourc- is becoming for so many in the region and in the ing, downsizing, and privatization—but world. as removals. A dispossession execut- As we unpack the term refugee, we should ed by an elite class still intent on the also ask what its converse, citizen, real- eliminate-to-replace vision of settler ly means. Where and what is Syria? What is colonialism.6 Palestine? Before Hassan Hassan, a Palestinian refugee, was tortured to death by the Syrian re- In the end, Occupy may have changed the con- gime, he said, “all that I know is Palestine is the versation around wealth inequality (capitalism refugee camp, and the camp is part and parcel vs. socialism and communism), but ultimately of Palestine.” it failed to change the terms upon which the conversation was being had (capitalism vs. EXPERIMENTATION, CONVERSATIONS, decolonization and abolition). With this lesson, AND RELATIONS OF CARE and without losing sight of the walls around Wall Street, we returned to Palestine. The research work in Palestine, Jordan, In 2013, on our second trip to Palestine, Lebanon, and New York established bridg- we broadened the geographies covered. We es between the movements, shortening visited Palestinian and Syrian refugee camps the distance created deliberately through in Jordan and Lebanon. Whereas the first trip the colonizer’s classification. We rejected we funded ourselves, Creative Time Reports the colonial borders and the fragmenting of commissioned us to write three articles on Palestinians across several neighboring states our second production trip. We produced and deliberately chose to use the privilege of three dispatches that same year: "The Slow movement to stitch together a reality and set Sure Death of Palestine,” “Cartography of an of Palestinian experiences that is not meant Occupation," and "What is a Refugee if There to happen. We shared what we observed in is no Nation-State?" Each was addressed to villages in the north of Palestine with refugee those engaged in struggle as a way to learn camps in the south. We Skyped with people in from and with Palestine. Gaza about their conditions alongside people We spoke of de-exceptionalizing Palestine. we were conversing with in Ramallah. When With this phrase, we intended to clarify that, we went to Lebanon, we did the same, mak- without losing the specificity of struggle, ing connections and drawing comparisons Palestine is not an outlying place of intractable and contrasts between camps in Jordan and conflict but rather an example and harbinger of Palestine. The idea again was not to render ex- broader dialectics of oppression and struggle periences coherent but rather accentuate the in the world at large. As we put it during our similarities and differences as a basis for con- 2013 trip: versation, living archives, knowledge-making, and solidarity, so that we can get at a deeper We return to Palestine not simply as a texture of what liberation requires. These were personal preoccupation but to use its the bridges we made in the name of research situation as a compass directing our un- to make Unsettling. derstanding of other experiences. Why is It was on the basis of this intellectual Palestine so resonant? The entire Middle analysis and aesthetic experimentation with East and the world’s powerless live under different image formats that we realized we varying forms of occupation. Some are needed to make a film to weave it all together

Dhillon \ 75 in an integrated flow of time, sound, and im- within the field, who told us that we were age. But what kind of film could be adequate not saying or showing anything new when for approaching Palestine, a place composed seen against the backdrop of contemporary of a fragmented geography and whose imag- Palestinian filmmaking. es have been overdetermined by demonizing This discomfort with our work thus far led racism, on the one hand, and cliches of victim- us to the realization that the film would need hood and heroism on the other? to avoid any attempt to represent Palestine Given that film was a new medium for us or Palestinians, and that for it to feel good to at that point, we sought the advice of several us, the film would need to be driven by desire, experienced film professionals in New York. We not pain. How, if at all, could a film articulate intuited that a nonlinear approach would make solidarity rather than stake its claim on repre- the most sense and would generate the best sentation? And what would this look like at the questions, but our collaborators insisted that level not just of content but at the level of form a character-driven documentary would be the and the aesthetics of the cinematic image? most compelling for a transnational audience. Most of all, how could the film advance the We decided to center the arc of the docu- struggle for Palestinian liberation and decolo- mentary around my collaborator Amin and his nial freedom? complex relation to Palestine as someone who Though frustrated that we had invested so grew up there during the Intifada of 1987, but much time and work in pursuing the dead-end had then been educated in the United States, of a character-driven/observational film, our eventually becoming an organizer in Occupy intensive research trip had generated a rich Wall Street and beyond. set of materials. In fact, we had spent as much Even though the concept was grounded in time gathering atmospheric footage, landscape the lived experience of Amin, we found our- shots, and audio recordings, all originally con- selves replicating a kind of ethnographic gaze, ceived as elements to function as background soliciting testimony of violence, delving into for the plot. What would happen if we flipped the psychology of individual people, and over- the script, foregrounding the background— all using pain and trauma as the guiding motor land, water, sky, city—and eliminating any of the film. This felt wrong to us ethically and traditional idea of character or narrative? Here formally, forcing the reality of Palestine into the original intuition that a nonlinear structure forms that were both aesthetically mundane would make the most sense returned to us, and and politically disempowering. So for our next we began to reexamine the cartographic col- production trip we moved away from charac- lages from our Creative Time projects. ter-driven production in favor of facilitating But how could a nonlinear structure and movement conversations about life, land, and ambient imaginary facilitate the question of aspirations of liberation with Palestinians. This solidarity we knew that we needed to con- was a collaboration process that relied on un- front? These were the questions we were scripted dialogue and open-ended questions determined to address for our next trip to that allowed for communal conversations, and Palestine in late 2015 in the midst of an Al- sharing and learning from one another. These Aqsa Intifada; this trip was thwarted however conversations were documented and record- when Amin was detained for 17 hours in Tel ed. Additionally, we attended various everyday Aviv airport and deported back to the United events in different parts of Palestine based States as a security risk. on personal relations and friendships. Despite Over 200 Palestinians, mainly youth, were collecting a lot of footage, when we went into killed by Israel during a few months’ time the editing room, we realized that the foot- during the Al-Aqsa Intifada. One of the names age that we had only permitted the making of of those killed was Bahaa Alayan, who wrote an observational film. As a consequence, the his own will in ten points that reflect the sen- political spirit of the film had been neutralized. timent of a new generation of Palestinians We consulted with friends, curators, and artists resisting oppression:

Dhillon \ 76 (1) I urge the factions to not adopt my long duration to generate another relationship martyrdom, for my death is for the home- with Palestinian reality under occupation, and land and not for you; (2) I do not want to open up the meaning in the images coming posters or t-shirts, for my memory will not out of Palestine. be merely a poster to be hung on walls; For her part, Puar was researching the right (3) I ask that you take care for my moth- to maim claimed by the Israeli state, which er, and don’t tire her with your questions can be understood as the strategic creation of whose only purpose is to garner sympa- physical and psychological debility and inca- thy from viewers and nothing more; (4) pacitation among Palestinians along gendered, Do not sow hatred in my son’s heart, but biopolitical lines. We would travel from refugee rather allow him to discover his home- camp to refugee camp and learn about peo- land and die for his homeland and not ple’s experience of the occupation. We filmed to avenge my death; (5) If they wants to the road to get there, the locations, the people, demolish my house, then let them. The and the conversations as we listened. In her stone is not more precious than my soul postscript “Treatment without Checkpoints” in which God created; (6) Do not be sad for the The Right To Maim, Puar shares some of her my death; be sad for what will happen to own reflections on the field work conducted in you after my death; (7) Do not search for the course of making the film: what I have written before my martyrdom, search for the reasons behind my martyr- Everywhere we went, we heard stories dom; (8) Do not chant during my funeral of debilitation: injured Palestinians dying and be impulsive, but rather be on Wudu’ while being transported through twisty during prayer at my funeral and nothing back roads to avoid Israeli checkpoints en more; (9) Do not make me to a number route to the hospital; men with shattered that you count today and forget tomor- knees and other multiple permanently row; and, finally, (10) See you in heaven.8 debilitating injuries, marking each intifada; ordinary families who had lost one, In early 2016, in the immediate aftermath two, sometime three sons to clashes with of that intifada, we were able to return to the IDF; women who had also been in- Palestine using funding siphoned through the jured or killed; frightened parents worried academic undercommons by Andrew Ross that children, both boys and girls, were and Jasbir K. Puar. They accompanied us to being targeted on playgrounds and in Palestine as part of their own research proj- the streets of the camps; speculation ects. With Ross, we facilitated his research regarding policies of shooting to kill and into the conditions of Palestinian migrant shooting to maim and when and why the workers, eventually taking the form of his book IDF might switch between them. There Stone Men: The Palestinians Who Built Israel. In was never a day without terrible news, travelling to work sites and checkpoints, meet- without some kind of antagonism with IDF ing workers and learning the history of the soldiers (teargas, shooting, harassment, land, we ourselves developed new relations to surveillance), without some confirmed or people and places in Palestine. We collected soon-to-be-confirmed report of shootings footage throughout the process. We sought of Palestinians, what were often referred to understand the spaces of the checkpoint to as field assassinations.9 as not only sites of surveillance and control by the occupier, but rather as sites of social The richness of having time together to pro- reproduction, organizing, and resistance. This cess the conversations each evening was was the first manifestation of how the cam- invaluable for the film and how we continued era can be used to better see/see differently to develop its filmic language. Conversely, our rather than represent. The key to this reorien- conversations enriched the rigorous and schol- tation was the use of the camera framing and arly research as a contribution to Palestinian

Dhillon \ 77 solidarity and disability studies and activism. board of the museum. Kanders was at that time More importantly, the roles of filmmaker and the CEO of Safariland, a manufacturer of law scholar blurred, and participation became enforcement products including tear gas used part of being present and doing the commu- against refugee families at the US/Mexico nity-based research. To this point, Puar was border, as well as demonstrators in places like present with me when we were invited to film Ferguson, Standing Rock, Egypt, and indeed the funeral of a martyr in Sa’ir, bearing witness Gaza. to and in some ways participating in the gen- One reason that Kanders initially became dered division of labor that places women in a lightning rod was that the revelation of his the role of reproductive emotional and affec- presence on the board coincided with the tive labor vis-a-vis the wounded and murdered flood of global media images of refugee fam- men of the resistance movement, something ilies and children being tear-gassed at the would become a major theme in Unsettling. border. Like pictures of suffering and dead migrants in the Mediterranean Sea, these images MOVEMENT-GENERATED AESTHETIC AND were often used to elicit empathy and concern FILMIC PRACTICES from an implicitly white northern audience aghast at this abuse of human rights, packag- When we returned to New York from Palestine ing their suffering in ways largely channeled in spring 2016, we began to develop an explic- toward liberal anti-Trump outrage. itly decolonial framework for our organizing Deconstructing such images—and the dom- of the kind elaborated in the introduction to inant framing and circulation of them through this paper. Weaving together various strands the lens of human rights—was a crucial start- of decolonial struggle, including Indigenous ing point for how we approached the Whitney. resurgence, Black liberation, a free Palestine, We pointedly refused to use images of people de-gentrification, the dismantling of patriar- as passive objects of empathy, and instead chy, and movements of global wage workers, worked to generate new actions and images the project has cultivated a widely recognized of struggle against the forces crystallized by organizational, performative, and mediatic rep- Kanders in collaboration with thirty grass- ertoire targeting major museums as platforms roots groups in the city. These ranged from for the amplification of movement demands groups like Arts Space Sanctuary to Take Back and pedagogy. As we have outlined in es- the Bronx to Within Our Lifetime - United for says for October and Hyperallergic, this work Palestine, a longstanding Palestinian solidarity took us from the Brooklyn Museum to Artists group in New York City. Space, to the American Museum of Natural The purview of Safariland's violence can History, and ultimately into the city at large be read as a global geography of counter- with the work of the FTP (Fuck the Police) insurgency against migrants, refugees, and formation in the months prior to the George those rendered disposable by settler colonial, Floyd uprising.10 Here, I want to highlight how imperialist, and racist regimes. Thus, in our our work on Palestine inflected one aspect of approach to pressuring the Whitney to remove this decolonial organizing in particular, namely Kanders, Palestine was a crucial frame. Rather the campaign around Warren Kanders at the than treating the removal of Kanders as an Whitney, and conversely, how such organizing end in and of itself, we saw the campaign as informed the making of aestheic considerati- a platform for amplifying and linking specific tons of Unsettling. struggles in an expanded work of decolonial Above, I explained the logic of de-excep- movement-building. The backbone of the tionalizing Palestine. This analysis has been campaign was "Nine Weeks of Art and Action" powerfully resonant in the latest phase of our over the course of the Spring, with each week work with Decolonize This Place targeting the bottom-lined by a different group or cluster. Whitney Museum. In late 2018, a campaign was On April 19th 2019, Within Our Lifetime - launched to remove Warren Kanders from the United for Palestine took the leading role,

Dhillon \ 78 transforming the lobby of the Whitney into a of them cousins who were all in their twen- militant yet joyous tribute to Palestinian mar- ties when they were gunned down by Israeli tyrs, replete with a debka performance. Further, soldiers as they entered their village. I found on the culminating day of the campaign, when myself placed into the role of the documentar- we marched from the Whitney to the home ian who must reflect the pain and harm being of Kanders himself, numerous marchers wore experienced by the oppressed to the world. Palestinian scarves to conceal their identities The underlying assumption here is that if the and to highlight solidarity with Palestine. Thus, mother’s loss is shown, and if the community's Palestine was a generalized horizon for the pain is seen, people will act against injustice. entire campaign, rather than a siloed issue. As a filmmaker, I found myself performing that Over the course of this work, there was nev- role offered to me as they made way for me er any question of representing Palestine in to film the bodies being kept company in the either an aesthetic or political sense. Palestine ambulance by their loved ones. was woven into the core of the movement and As part of the care we had to show, we assumed as a baseline commitment for all demonstrated that they were being heard and participants. seen, even though these are not the images Kanders would ultimately be forced off the we intended to film. In other words, and later in board in July 2019, creating a massive crisis conversations with Puar who removed herself of confidence and legitimacy among the elite after some time because of the overwhelming world of cultural funding and governance, in- sense of pain, I acknowledged the pressure to cluding at places like the Ford Foundation that perform the role of a documentarian who must have been involved in the funding of contem- give meaning to senseless, unjust loss, as a porary art, scholarship, and political organizing sign of respect. As such, I filmed martyrdom in alike. But though he was no longer able to the ways that allows for the gaze to consume participate in artwashing via the Whitney, loss, and contributed to the oversaturated Kanders’ own personal and corporate power field of images of the martyr with little speci- remained intact beyond the art system. ficity and little room for healing, resistance, or Though the Whitney campaign is not fea- desire, despite knowing that there is another tured in Unsettling itself, it embodies a similar way to understand martyrs and their offering of ethos: we began by refusing the default mode love as Bahaa Alyaan expressed in his will. of the journalistic image of suffering, and The two angles brought by Ross and Puar instead worked to create space for action, to the trip—framing the Palestinian proletariat thought, and images. Indeed, now, when one that builds the infrastructure of Israel and its googles Warren Kanders, what appears is not associated economies, systems, and spaces of just him at a gala, or isolated pictures of the labor control, and women's reproductive labor suffering his company has inflicted, but also under conditions of state violence—brought images of people from a wide range of strug- a new degree of economic, political, and cul- gles using the platform of the Whitney to stand tural specificity to the cinematic-cartographic in solidarity with each other, linking struggles challenge of articulating solidarity at the level against the camps at the border with those of form and content. With migrant labor, we in Gaza, people fighting displacement in the were able to complicate the monolithic icon Bronx with those fighting disaster capitalism in of the wall that features in so much cover- Puerto Rico. age of Palestine, noting instead the multiple ways in which the occupation is practiced THE MARTYR SCENE and deployed so as to modulate and control populations on a flexible basis; and in our I now wish to share some reflections and experience of the funeral and the martyrdom important facts from filming the funeral in work of the women we met, we confronted Unsettling. First, as we were invited to join in once again the problem of pain-driven nar- mourning the loss of four young men—three ratives, but now among the people on the

Dhillon \ 79 ground rather than through external cover- come to be asked. In the context of the film, age; how might the narrative of the martyr the image does not represent a condition as be liberated from patriarchal conceptions of much as look at a condition through the lens of heroism and sacrifice, and the attendant gen- the camera in order to understand it, because dered roles that in turn requires? As movement if we can understand it better perhaps we can scholar Hadeel Badarneh puts it in an article change it, and that is how the audience comes published in our magazine Anemones, the IDF to be invited into a specific kind of space that has developed an entire tactical logic where- is action-oriented. in centralizing, targeting, and attacking male activists serves to not only erase women’s David Graeber visited Palestine with us in 2015 leadership, but also to create vast amounts during one of our production trips for the film. of additional and exhausting reproductive Shortly after we returned, David wrote an in- labor for women when it comes to defending sightful piece which reflects his brilliance.12 and caring for decapacitated or incarcerated David was one of the real ones who left us too sons, brothers, husbands, and comrades.11 Put soon. We miss him dearly. differently, the tactics used by Israel intentionally contribute to creating and sustaining a masculine resistance movement that enacts traditional gender roles and views of sexuality as a way to preserve a national identity and resist annihilation. More specifically, in considering the figure of the martyr, this form of counterinsurgency by default forces men into internalizing a damaging ideal of the war-like hero or the sacrificial martyr that is ultimately disempowering for the movement as a whole, making the promise of liberation more distant and the struggle more vulnerable.

DESIRE NOT PAIN

Refusing a pain-driven model of documentary that fetishizes trauma and relies on victimiza- tion narratives, Unsettling is a desire-driven experimental film. It builds a space and time wherein the genres of documentary and fiction allow for old questions to be asked again. It aims to rearrange the desires, relationships, and imaginations of its collaborators and its audience through both its aesthetic form and its processes of production and distribution. It is rooted in the ever present questions of home, nation-state making, modernity, and patriarchy, as they relate to liberation struggles and movements. Desire-driven models of culture making attend to what is lost by failing to interrogate the frame. By pursuing desire, the work comes to ask questions that refer to pain but are not beholden to it. The pain is the background upon which better questions

Dhillon \ 80 ENDNOTES NC: Duke University Press, 2017). 1—Eve Tuck and K.W. Yang, “R-Words: 10—See MTL, "From Institutional Critique Refusing Research,” in Humanizing to Institutional Liberation?,” and "The Arts Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry of Escalation: Becoming Ungovernable with Youth and Communities, eds. Django on a Day of City-Wide Transit Action," Paris and Maisha T. Winn (Thousand Hyperallergic, July 31, 2020, https:// Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2013). hyperallergic.com/540324/j31/. 2—See Nitasha Dhillon, "On Decolonize 11—Hadeel Bardaneh, "Patriarchy, This Place," Artleaks Gazette 5 (April Counterinsurgency, and the Palestinian 2019), https://issuu.com/artleaks/ Struggle," Anemones (August 2018). docs/artleaksgazette_5_w ; MTL, "From 12—See http://internationaltimes. Institutional Critique to Institutional it/hostile-intelligence-reflections- Liberation: A Decolonial Perspective on from-a-visit-to-the-west-bank/. The Crises of Contemporary Art," October 165 (Summer 2018); and Decolonize This Place, "After Kanders, Decolonization is The Way Forward," Hyperallergic, July 30, 2019, https://hyperallergic.com/511683/ decolonize-this-place-after-kanders/. 3—Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Wivenhoe, NY: Minor Compositions, 2013). 4—MTL, "Occupy Wall Street: A Possible Story," in Global Activism: Art and Conflict in the 21st Century, ed. Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015). 5—Ibid. 6—Sandy Grande, "Accumulation of the Primitive: The Limits of Liberalism and the Politics of Occupy Wall Street," Settler Colonial Studies 3 (Fall 2013): 369-380. 7—MTL Collective, “What Is a Refugee If There Is No Nation-State?,” Creative Time Reports, February 3, 2014, http:// creativetimereports.org/2014/02/03/ what-is-a-refugee-if-there-is-no-nation-state-palestinian-syrian/. 8—Maureen Clare Murphy, “How a Scout Leader Became a Martyr,” The Electronic Intifada, February 12, 2017, electronicintifada.net/content/ how-scout-leader-became-martyr/14943. 9—Jasbir K. Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Durham,

Dhillon \ 81

\ Volume 4 \ 1) Decolonial film disarticulates cinema from the space and time of modernity, settler colonialism, and the nation-state—but also those of capitalist globalization and neoliberal multi- culturalism.

2) Decolonial film is not derived from a theory of history of cinema per se. It begins by asking who is in the room, who is part of the conversation, who has a stake in the images and sounds, the times and the places that will be brought together within the film and the work surrounding it. Although these questions have long been asked within the history of cinema itself, especially through postcolonial thinking and revolutionary cinema, a decolonial film will find ways to delink from modernity and the terms, frames, and conventions it imposes.

PRINCIPLES FOR DECOLONIAL FILM \ 3) Decolonial film dismantles patriarchy. The work of decolonial feminism is central, from MTL COLLECTIVE the poetics of Suzanne Cesaire, to the films of Heiny Srour, to the work of contemporary thinkers like Angela Davis. Patriarchy is forever creeping back into even the most radical cultural and political spaces. Any decolonial project worthy of the name must take aim at the individuals and systems that weaponize gender in order to structure power imbalances among workers.

4) Decolonial film is not representational, whether epistemically or politically. Image, sound, and sequence flow into life, land, and liberation. Decolonial film is grounded not in representation but facilitating spaces and enunciation as an event, act, or rupture into the fields of the sensible, the visible, and the audible.

5) Decolonial film assumes that spectatorship is always already marked by dynamics of racial- ization, colonialism, and patriarchy, and that the wounds incurred in these processes are sources of creativity, healing, and solidarity.

6) Decolonial film holds space for the People. The People is not a single thing, but an event of solidarity between and across struggles in this place, and this place, and this place .

MTL Collective \ 83 . . again and again, forever. As shown by the the economies and institutions of the culture Zapatistas, the People can be reinvented, but industry, the art system, and the non-prof- only insofar as it is recorded from the/a stance it industrial complex, from Hollywood to of Indigenous world-making and ontological Documenta to Sundance. disobedience. 11) Decolonial film points to a cinema of liber- 7) Decolonial film begins before cinema, and ation and a liberation of cinema. This process points beyond it. It digs into the ground, grows involves assemblages of place and image, with the trees, moves with the water, and sound and struggle, time and desire within watches the sky. As Nelson Maldonado-Torres filmic works themselves; and it requires old/ describes: new arrangements of resources, technologies, space and time, and networks in the interest of The decolonial aesthetic, erotic, and decolonial and abolitionist movement building. spiritual turn is a shift away from the It moves with and beyond histories of Third coloniality of established meanings, of World and Fourth World Cinema. sensing, of feeling, of vision, of gender and other modern/colonial conceptions 12) Decolonial film problematizes and breaks of the body, as well as a rejection of the the horizon line that enables colonialism and modern/colonial hierarchy of human global capitalism. It questions everything from experiences. A decolonial way of sensing Truth and Objectivity to Reality and Science, or decolonial aesthesis is a key aspect of beginning with the rejection of the linear per- the decolonization of being, including the spective of time that homogenizes space. It decolonization of time, space, and em- does so by allowing for other ways of seeing bodied subjectivity, but also of power and the world and adhering to revolutionary time. knowledge. Since aesthetics is so closely connected to embodied subjectivity and 13) Decolonial film understands that the tech- this subjectivity is at the crux of the co- nologies used by filmmakers are the result of loniality of knowledge, power, and being, ongoing colonization driven by capitalism. It is decolonial aesthetics very directly chal- also mindful that many do not have the means lenges, not only each basic coordinate of to see films. In practice, decolonial film strives modernity/coloniality, but its most viscer- to develop and cultivate ethical tools and al foundations and overall scope. practices in the making and screening of film, and the community that develops around it. It 8) Decolonial film does not involve discrete also seeks to establish that films can be expe- cinematic productions. It sets cinema to work rienced in a variety of settings, in the street or in an expanded field of media practices, direct village as well as a gallery or museum. action, and political organizing. It, for example, incorporates many languages and does not find it necessary to translate everything into English or for everything to be legible or comprehensible.

9) Decolonial film does not assume an audience. Its audience is forged not only in the work of the image but also in the work of organizing, collaboration, and solidarity between struggles.

10) Decolonial film moves beyond institutional critique. It sees that cinema is bound up in

MTL Collective \ 84 \ Volume 4 \ Many of the writings that comprise this special issue of World Records were energized by new political challenges to art and media institutions. At museums and universities across the world, artists and activists have clamored for the redistribution of institutional wealth and power, organized art workers, and criticized the extractive tendencies of liberal culture. At this moment, a new line of questioning has opened up around private art institutions’ de facto investments in prison building, munitions sales, drug trafficking, even sexual predation—investments which are often obscured by conventional ideas about art’s autonomous, and thus innocent, relation to its production and reception. Artists Tania Bruguera and Gregory Sholette have explored these questions for a long time, performing practical engagements in PICKING UP THE POWER \ the public sphere and developing the field of institutional critique. They are both prominent TANIA BRUGUERA AND GREGORY theorists of social practice and documentation, SHOLETTE IN CONVERSATION providing key concepts for understanding the political complexities that drive art and media today. Bruguera’s methods—including what she calls arte útil and arte de conducta—involve daring, site-specific interventions that aim to shock audience members into recognizing that they exist in a world with others. She has corralled art-goers by mounted police and invited workshop participants to break the law (circulating a tray of cocaine at an event in Colombia, for example). Much depends on her geographic location. In Cuba, where Bruguera was born and spent much of her life, her work has become a channel for public expression. Her Instituto de Artivismo Hannah Arendt, or INSTAR, is a hub of workshops and conversations about art and community work in Havana. In the US and Europe, by contrast, where Bruguera has been celebrated as a leading figure in social practice and performance art, her intention is to challenge the anti-politics of neoliberal institutional culture. Bruguera has stressed that her work contains a medial logic, sometimes proceeding via re-enactment, sometimes through contrac- tual performance. In a text read aloud during her 2009 piece Self-Sabotage (in which she

Bruguera & Sholette \ 85 played Russian Roulette before a live audi- any art practice to radically exceed or subvert ence), Bruguera asserted that political art the field’s existing boundaries or discursive should concern itself with “suggesting new framing.” Without such framing, the political structures of power activation” and “estab- potential of socially engaged art and media lishing mobile structures of observation.” practices must be rethought via a parallel José Luis Falconi offered this elaboration: analysis of extant phenomena outside the “one looks at oneself and evaluates one’s work. Sholette’s activism and his positions conduct, and the work of art acts as a ‘proof’ as a CUNY professor and co-director of Social of means of acting in reality. The ‘documen- Practice Queens—a consortial MFA support tation’ of arte de conducta is not a photo or a platform based out of the Queens College and video, for instance, but a change in behavior.” the Queens Museum—provide outlets for such The work prompts us to ask how the idea of a reconstructive practice. shared, living document might contest media The editors invited Bruguera and Sholette to conventions—particularly those linked to the discuss an array of pressing questions having determinations of state and market. to do with the character of public life at this Sholette’s work includes collaborations moment (and its differences and continuities with groups like Political Art Documentation/ across geographies), artistic and institutional Distortion and REPOhistory as well as direct responses to contemporary crises, docu- action with Gulf Labor Coalition. In addition he mentation as a mode of relational practice, has an extensive research practice, publishing and pedagogies of art- and media-making. two monographs on the subject of contempo- The conversation, which was recorded in rary political and activist art, along with five November 2019, was prompted by the partici- anthologies on the topic. The first, Dark Matter: pants’ engagement in 2017 at INSTAR and thus Activist Art in an Age of Enterprise Culture makes some acknowledgement of Hannah (2010), explores forms of collective creative Arendt’s attention to the idea of politics as a labor that take place below the visible surface, relational space “in between” subjects. We yet which are essential for replicating the hier- hope that by addressing these questions, this archical structures of the mainstream art world conversation can clarify the stakes of political itself. Scholette asks, “how does this glut of art art and its institutional formats. and artistic practices serve the reproduction —Nicholas Gamso and maintenance of contemporary art as a symbolic and material phenomenon?” He goes on CONVERSATION to argue that the potency of such dark matter, both as transgression and as commodity, comes WORLD RECORDS from capital’s apparatus of “decentralized Let’s start with the space of appearance, communication” and neoliberalism’s vora- which is one of the primary tropes that gets cious extraction of value from sites far from the invoked when talking about politics and pro- traditional workplace. Sholette points out that test in the arts. Hannah Arendt compares “digital networks have become simultaneously political work to performance, saying, “just as the very means through which this ghostly dark the virtuosity of the performer, dancer, theatri- matter could ‘find itself’” and “part of capital’s cal practitioner is dependent on the audience, expanding communication’s network.” action necessitates the presence of others In Delirium and Resistance (2017), Sholette in a politically organized space. Such a space theorizes the perils of political art practice in is not to be taken for granted wherever men the context of what he calls “bare art,” which live in a community.” Arendt provides us with makes plain art’s continuities with capital, this idea of politics that emphasizes theatri- media, production, and so on. Explaining the cality and relational form. What do you see as situation, he writes that “since contemporary the challenges of doing this kind of work and art no longer has any meaningful contextual or how do you see these questions in your own formal limits, it is also no longer possible for practice? Do you see yourself as producing a

Bruguera & Sholette \ 86 political space within an overdetermined polit- being a bit more of a Marxist, that you can’t ical context? really separate the economic from the political because capital interpolates the everyday TANIA BRUGUERA so easily, and ever more thoroughly it seems My work is not so much about helping others, today. Arendt has this tendency to set up an al- but about the process of awareness—how to most ideal Ancient Greek image of society, but be part of others, how to create awareness still, someone’s going to have to take out the about the political space of being together. It’s garbage. And we know, those many of us who almost this idea of how to recognize yourself have worked in collectives, we know that we in others. In my case specifically, I am very all must take out the garbage at some point, clearly trying to create a political space and while also creating the group website, partic- a political situation in most of the things I do. ipate in hours of meetings, generate posters Especially at INSTAR in Havana. We invite thirty and banners for actions, and it’s all that sort of or forty people to come to workshops. The everyday stuff of practical labor in the art col- police detain someone, so when there’s anoth- lective’s household that actually makes things er workshop nobody comes because they are work. So I’m interested in that everydayness afraid. So we have to build it up again. We have and how it relates to and informs political per- this idea that civic education is a tool to trans- formance, theatricality, and agency. form political violence into building something. And this is not only about Cuba. We are using TB this as a paradigm, let’s say, for conversation. I Since Trump has gotten into power, I have tried feel that we try to build instead of destroying. to do a piece about him and I cannot do it. I I am interested not in critique; I am interested have a folder in my Google drive with hun- in showing it can happen. When I was in the dreds of ideas and not one works. One thing Communist Youth, it was called critica conser- that interests me is the idea of appropriating tiva—constructive criticism—so you basically the timing of politics in the work. In Cuba it’s stand in front of everyone and say I’m sorry. It very clear. Other countries—meaning capitalist was kind of Catholic: I’m sorry, and I’ll do better, countries—have learned to disguise the op- and this is what I did wrong. I want to do the pression. It seems that the work of an artist in same with other civic and political institutions. such countries is to try to deconstruct the way I’ve also lately been interested in the ques- society is disguising this oppression, instead tion: can institutions feel? Because they are of actually confronting the oppression. It takes a political body—there are people inside. We so much work to find out how they have hid- always talk about institutions like they are this den the stuff that is really damaging people. kind of robotic system. There are people who It’s like a double step in a way. make the institutions. GS GREGORY SHOLETTE Let’s not forget, though, that anti-democratic It’s interesting in terms of Hannah Arendt neo-authoritarianism is creeping into much of because of the relation between labor and society, just think of Hungary, Poland, possibly action. As I understand her, Arendt’s emphasis Italy, but also Brazil and Colombia, as well as is clearly meant to be a critique of capitalism many developing countries. as much as a critique of Marxism in its classic Still, I wonder if the problem of doing a sense. She places labor in a field of human piece about Trump is because he’s like a forces in connection to oikos—the house, the fucking performance artist already. He is the economy—where base needs are taken care ultimate expression of a certain avant-garde. of. Meanwhile, the highest level transcend- He is a guy who goes into the White House and ing labor is Arendt’s idea of action, which has blows everything up all day every day, like a to come through politics, as opposed to pri- cheap version of Marinetti (can farce be even mary needs. But I’ve always thought, maybe more ominous than tragedy?).

Bruguera & Sholette \ 87 TB In Tania’s work, this seems related to the Part of creating this political community is idea that participants embody institutional understanding the time of politics. In this case space, political power, even documentation Trump is messing up the timing. Things are by way of a certain kind of sharing. In Greg’s piling up in such a way that there is no time to recent book Delirium and Resistance, he notes make people sit down and process. that these concepts pose a risk given that practical art activities, in denying the field GS of autonomy, can become seamlessly inte- We started with space, and we almost imme- grated into a landscape of power or a violent diately went to time. So the problem is time, economy. maybe, not space. Capitalism doesn’t, in my What is to be gained and lost by thinking opinion, really produce anything spatially. It with these concepts today? Should the aims of simply occupies the spaces that labor and practical and useful art be revised or embold- people create. But this time problem is ac- ened in response to the parasitic character of celerating, pumping into a completely other capitalism? Is this an instance in which the anterior zone. geographic context determines the political I actually had this idea to create a maga- viability of the intervention? zine that’s published in 2060. It’s referencing things that are happening between now GS and then. But the publication has been sup- I think what I was driving at is that once art pressed, so the only way to find out about it steps into the zone of the juridical system, it is through a sort of indirect footnote in this starts falling under all of the laws and political future journal that’s called Plastique. valences that every other system or institution already deals with. I think an example of this TB challenge is the art project that was known At the institute INSTAR—which is also a verb as Conflict Kitchen in Pittsburgh (2010–2017), that means to incite others or to push others to serving what Michael Rakowitz had earlier do something—we make a little sign that says described as enemy food from places such Happy 2028. Like we are already celebrating as Iran, Palestine, and North Korea. Let’s say the new. hypothetically that someone got food poison- ing from them, could the artists then defend GS themselves by responding, I’m sorry you didn’t We did address this question of the future. It like the art? And the twenty or so people was one of the questions I raised with your who were working there at one point making students. We thought, what’s Cuba going to be meals—I don’t mean to critique this but to like in 30 years? And people did drawings and raise questions—were they performers or were it was quite interesting, though most of the they laborers? Around 2015, Conflict Kitchen’s predictions were not optimistic at all. staff began to unionize for a $15 minimum wage and eventually succeeded, before the WR project came to an end. So you have this zone This leads to a question about what theorist in which—if art is going to be 1:1 as Wright has Stephen Wright has called a 1:1 relationship or suggested—it also enters into a whole realm of a double ontology, which I know has animated practicalities and details that it had been ex- both your bodies of work. Arendt has this great cluded from for centuries when art was merely term “picking up the power” in her writings considered an autonomous practice (real or on revolution. The idea is that power is enact- imaginary of course). And this art that falls to ed in concert with others always, but also, I earth also raises all kinds of new problems rethink, that infrastructures and apparatuses and garding political agency and commodification, relationships can be turned around in some in- but it also raises new interesting possibilities teresting way in order to create something new. of activism and resistance. Though capital may

Bruguera & Sholette \ 88 be subsuming all other forms of production it non-Euclidean geometry with a little hidden does not mean contradiction—inherent within exit. And I wonder about that too in this world capitalist relations—are excluded or resolved, we inhabit now. Once you completely eliminate quite the contrary: these tensions come to in- the mediation and mimicry of representation, habit the very core of the system in a bare art and you flatten art into a space that now must world with 1:1 artworks. compete with the everyday world, then something is gained and something lost. I call this TB “bare art,” borrowing from Agamben’s idea of 1:1 is something I try to do with almost all of bare life, and believe that we’re now operating my work. I think that art should work in reality in a “bare art world.” All mystique is stripped as well. I have problems with the idea of art as away, though this is not completely negative pure representation. Art has lost the urgency because it opens up new possibilities and puts that makes it needed. art directly into the game—as you’ve done Art has this promise, like the idea of the Tania so clearly with INSTAR—with the every- promise of the promise. With 1:1—and I think day world and its politics. But bare art also that arte de util is like this specifically—it de- sheds the ability to give people that breather, livers. In autonomous art you have this kind of that liberating space in which you gain the never ending desire that never gets realized. time back capital has commodified. Ultimately, In art de util, the work delivers the promise. It we have to recognize that art is not immune to actually has a different kind of satisfaction. all these contradictions that are in that world. This idea of constant failure; for political art 1:1 art underscores that tough love. it’s complex. TB GS I also think there is another element to this, It’s pretty clear that Arendt is a Kantian when which is the idea of gatekeepers and the it comes to aesthetic experience, that is to frame. We are dealing with this frame of the say she understands aesthetics and politics work—like framing something—and then have as detached experiences that set the stage the gatekeepers who authorize, or not, peo- for the possibility of action, even if that is the ple to enter that frame. One thing I think is a type of freedom of thought that Kant thought political gesture is to not eliminate the gate- was so important (and which of course informs keepers, because of course people will say the very notion of autonomous art). But there’s it’s impossible, but at least to create several also the whole idea of dependent beauty that dimensions of the framework so you have so Kant talks about in the third Critique, which is many gatekeepers that you actually create no closer, I think, to your idea of useful art, Tania. gatekeepers—you know what I mean? It’s not completely detached. It actually has We are living in a world of art where the a utility. But it isn’t not beautiful, it isn’t not gatekeepers are becoming very limited and aesthetic in some way. It still falls into that therefore very powerful. So there is almost an broader contemplative space. authoritarianism where if you don’t do certain I like Wright’s 1:1 very much, but let’s not things you cannot access the legitimacy of the forget he also allows for the curious escape institution or of the money or whatever. If you mechanism of what he calls a “trap door.” I are a political artist, you have to fight the art love this part even more. It’s like yes—art can world. step out into the world and it can become truly non-representational, to the point where we GS no longer know that it’s art (the house paint- The irony too is that in a sense the free mar- er who is really painting, etc.). It’s anything ket of ideas and practices, which has always but what it would be as art, and it is what it is. been and remains the ideological core of But Wright always deploys this Duchampian the bourgeoisie with regard to capitalism, is idea of the “infra-thin” as if art has entered a that everybody can come and sell their labor

Bruguera & Sholette \ 89 equally in the marketplace, meaning that there art world uses artists, so we should start using is allegedly no prejudice, no racism or sexism, it, politically speaking. I think people use it, etc. Part of this is nonsense. This is one of the but for personal gain and the career thing. You ironies of the art world in so far as it is abso- need to start using it for politics. lutely the last place that we find a free market. The art world more accurately represents the GS false free market of neoliberalism, because it Something that always comes up with people is overflowing with all kinds of asymmetries who consider themselves community artists or and power structures. How do we create a kind social movement artists is that they don’t want of alternative art un-world that doesn’t then to have anything to do with the art world and draw on that libertarian idea of everybody is they often denounce it as corrupt. And I say to just going to put the goods out for everyone them, well then why do you even care enough else to see and it’s just that simple. This is one about it to denounce it? My guess is that de- challenge. spite all else they recognize that the frame has But I think it’s interesting when you talk some value which you can leverage. It’s tricky about the framing. You’ll have to tell me if this though, because as you’ve found out in Cuba, is true of your experience in Cuba, Tania—giv- Tania, you have to understand the particular en that you are not considered an artist by the context in order to leverage its power. Cuban authorities. We might say that they’ve unframed you. To them, as I discovered on my TB visit to the Institute in 2017, you are considered I never want to disengage the art world, you an activist, a politician, whatever, but you’re not know, and it is because it puts you also in a an artist. Whereas here in the US or in Europe very good position because, if you do socially or other zones where the art world thrives, you engaged art, you don’t have to use the same are one of those artists who go directly after scarce resources that activists have. It creates the frame and try to rip that frame away from a different lens. You are not competing with the very division between art and politics and activists, you are not saying you are better activism. I find that contrast very interesting than them for a grant. and indicative of the time we live in. With art you can do what you cannot do as a citizen. There is a space of trust, even in TB chaos—they trust that you know what you’re When they took the frame away in Cuba it was doing, even if we don’t know what we’re doing. ironic—it was like yes, I finally succeeded, but There’s this respect for culture. People may then I realized that they took it away so that not understand exactly what it is, but they they could apply the law they use for traitors. know that culture is important, so they under- If you remove the element of art, with which stand there is something. Maybe it’s this idea it is your right to have your own perception of that art is always seen as something for the fu- things, you become a traitor. ture, like in the future it’ll be seen as amazing, I never said I’m an artist louder than this. looking back. I always say that I use the art world. And I think it’s ok—they use us as well. Because GS when the government removed that frame and I think the biggest challenge is that the gate- said I’m a traitor, not an artist, what I did was keepers are fewer and fewer and increasingly respond by saying yes to the Venice Biennial. I concentrating and monopolizing the actual personally had no interest at all—sorry—to be and symbolic cultural power of contemporary part of the Biennial. It’s a structure that for a art. How then do you wrest away even a por- long time I had no interest in. But I had to say tion of that power and, harder still, redistribute yes because it helped me. I needed to use the it? That’s the key, right? Distributing it beyond Venice Biennial to say I’m back in the frame. what the gatekeepers would ever want you to I think we should do it more. Because the go?

Bruguera & Sholette \ 90 TB very idea of institutional critique grows from I heard of someone who was contacted this impulse (and yet we see how institutions through their gallery to do a project in public have managed to re-absorb that opposition, space in a city, a permanent project, and the generating an entire genre of artistic practice). gallery said no, this person is not going to do Today the very structure of our bare art world it. They didn’t even inform the artist. What my is under review and facing fundamental resis- friend told me was that they were interested in tance if not rejection. having the artist produce something the gallery could sell, instead of doing something it TB would not benefit from. That’s the state of cap- It’s more Hans Haacke. You almost feel like ev- italism in the arts at the moment. I also talked eryone applied the Hans Haacke methodology to a friend of mine who is a curator and he was to reality. complaining about how much the galleries are pushing to have the artists in the museum. GS It’s also interesting that so many of the people GS who are creating labor unions in museums or This is why I use the term “bare art,” because I who are trying to, most recently at the private feel like a lot of those older, slightly aristocrat- Marciano Foundation in San Francisco, many ic ideas have now just been swept away and if not the majority of them are younger people we’re facing the raw situation of a demystified who studied art, perhaps with people like me art today. It’s kind of ironic because in a way, or maybe Hans Haacke or other artists knowl- I sense we want to bring back some of that edgeable about institutional critique. Now, as respectability back to art as a type of non-cap- actual employees of art institutions, they’re italist labor and a realm of sensual freedom, enacting this same practice, but not as an but to do so in a political way or in a strategic artistic project per se, rather as the very re- way, without regressing back to a period in ality of their relationships with institutions as which art was only for elites. workers. It’s as if institutional critique has now Today, as we witness the expanding union- come home to roost. ization drives by museum workers, there appears to be an ask in play that goes well WR beyond even the things that the Art Workers And in education? Coalition (AWC) tried to do in the late ’60s and early ’70s. AWC sought respect and com- TB pensation and power for artists as a type of I also think that the younger and younger laborer who the museum depended upon for generations have this kind of anxiety or des- its very meaning. Now I think there’s a real peration because they have to pay their loans question regarding the entire structure of the for the university (in the US I mean). When I art world when cultural activists—both inside was a student, we had a different understand- the institutions and within the art community ing of the process of being successful. And the generally—demand a de-toxification of muse- concept was, you are successful when your um boards, or the rejection of tainted capital peers—not the institution—respect your work. by Sackler pharmaceutical family members, or Success is when you have people, who are art- when the idea of decolonizing the museum ists like you or critics who are amazed by what is proposed. So while this is a repetition of you do and excited about what you do. Now the post-1968 cultural revolution, it’s also a I think it has shifted into a kind of an institu- very different moment as well, and much more tionalization. People almost feel like the only challenging I think. Then, with some important legitimacy is the one given by the institution. exceptions such as Guerilla Art Action Group and Black Mask perhaps, artists wanted to GS reform their relationship to the institution. The Or legitimacy granted by the art market. And

Bruguera & Sholette \ 91 what you’re describing, Tania, has accelerat- TB ed to such a degree that we know certain art I think Cuba is like a hyper-institutionalization programs (which we won’t name here) allow case. If you are an alternative artist or if you critics and curators to visit their students’ like independent art, they don’t recognize it studios even before they’re graduated in order because they want you to be linked to institu- to select work for purchase or for exhibiting. tions they recognize. If you go to these kinds It’s a bald-faced submission of education to of underground institutions, which are smaller the market and to our bare art world. And what scale, more challenging, more avant-garde, about student debt? When I was an under- they don’t recognize your work. graduate I lived in a city (New York in the late 1970s) where you could rent a place with five GS rooms for a few hundred dollars. You could It’s also kind of exciting—we don’t have that receive a modest grant, and you could maybe kind of space in New York or the United States. teach one adjunct class and get by. That is not I mean you can do anything the fuck you want possible anymore. And not just in New York, and you know nobody’s going to care, or al- but in any of the major cities around the world. most nobody. I think if you blew up the art So it is a very different landscape that most economy that would really upset things. But young people confront. short of that, there are probably few things I teach at a public school (CUNY), and of anyone in the cultural sector would really find course it’s cheaper than other schools, but it’s deeply problematic. In terms of the content of still a lot of money for working class people. one’s work almost anything can be shown. We Let’s face it, twelve thousand dollars is really are truly post-art-scandal. And as I mentioned more of an expense for low-income people earlier, with the man in the White House be- than one hundred thousand dollars is to an having as an avant-garde radical what else is upper-middle class person. There’s a whole possible? A revolutionary middle? scaling-up of one’s relation to both financial and cultural capital based on class back- WR ground, with those who are more connected There are renewed questions about whether always capable of extracting more value from a liberalism will be sustained in Cuba. Decree degree than those who are not. 349, which puts restrictions on artistic speech, At Queens College our Social Practice seems similarly poised to shatter the myth that Queens (SPQ) initiative was started in part Cuba is poised for normative integration. What when Tania was invited to work with us by is the status of this decree and what does it Queens Museum director Tom Finkelpearl (this portend for the future of art in Cuba? Is there a was in 2010, before he became New York Arts relationship between the decree and Havana’s Commissioner). Our approach is to encourage recent status as major art center (a direct rela- artists to envision their work—whether it’s tion or one we might infer)? performance or community research or even making welded steel sculpture—into a kind TB of social action. But we also examine the art 349 is a legal tool for the government to exer- market, coldly, critically, by looking at the debt cise censorship. Before everyone knew what structure, and that can frankly be very de- the limits were, they were invisible but every- pressing, especially to younger artists (some one saw them. Now they legally can take away have shed tears). Still, it seems that one is your house, your whatever, for doing what is better off actually seeing things for the way not authorized by the government as cultural they are and then finding the ways you can activity, which actually contradicts the con- oppose that condition. In other words, don’t go stitution where it says that “culture belongs into the scene blindfolded. to everybody.” But if you cannot do a cultural event or show other people’s culture, how is it for everybody?

Bruguera & Sholette \ 92 WR immigrants and then you demand as part Is there a way to have the good things about of your project an ethical aspect—that the liberalism without the bad things? institution has to perform some kind of justice—they don’t like it. It is a contradiction TB because they want to show the work, but they I think it should be possible. I almost feel like don’t want to activate the politics that make in socialism you lose your individual rights in the work ethical. order to have collective rights and in capitalism you relinquish the possibility of having WR collective rights in order to have your personal We’re interested in your work as a documen- rights. And neither is working. I almost feel like tarian as part of place-based doc collectives in it would be amazing to live in a society where New York. you have the kind of ethical proposal that socialism has with the right to your individual- GS ity—the right to challenge systems—that you We could begin with Political Art have in capitalism. It almost becomes black- Documentation/Distribution that was mail: oh you have your education so shut up. co-founded with Lucy Lippard, Jerry Kerns, and No, why should I shut up? many other people in 1980. That was when of It almost feels like the way to succeed in course there was no internet, yet we were lit- protesting in the arts in the US is to make it erally trying to create an distributable archive economically disadvantageous. It costs more that would inspire people to create similar for them to clean their image than for them to socially engaged and political art practices. do the right thing. Remember, this was a time in Europe and the US when, as the late Tim Rollins used to say, GS the idea of political art was typically thought This goes back to your point about feelings— of as “charcoal drawings of Lenin” and simi- can you hurt the institution’s feelings? Maybe lar forms of socialist realism. That is not what not, you can only hurt its bank account. PAD/D, or our kindred New York collective Group Material imagined it was doing. So the WR PAD/D Archive—now located at the Museum In the US context, art is essentially a sector of of Modern Art (not without irony)—sought to the economy, but this provides the groundwork show that there are all kinds of possibilities for for groups to come in protest. engaged art, and we can show you what that means. Thus documentation was meant to be a TB living, educational tool. The best work that is done today is work that Then of course in the 1990s with the col- shows the injustice of the art system. Maybe lective REPOhistory, we collectively put the this is because people don’t feel it is artwork. archive into the street, installing metal signs It is something everyone else can relate to. If that informed passersby about histories either you are a bartender you see this happening people didn’t know about, or events that were with the artists and you say, that is what’s forgotten or suppressed. It wasn’t like we were happening with me. At the same time it’s hard trying to establish a different history. To my because institutions like showing art that is mind at least, REPOhistory was showing what’s political, but they don’t want the artist to be always missing from the record of history, a political with the institution. That’s a big con- certain archival supplement that makes the tradiction we have right now. People invite me possibility of total documentation impossible. . . . I love your work, why don’t you come to the So instead, let’s talk about history as a kind institution and do something. Then as soon as I of endless process that everyone has access propose something, they say not here. to, rather than a privileged process of docu- If you are doing art about justice for menting the past. This is what I take Derrida to

Bruguera & Sholette \ 93 mean by archive fever. Because, for example with decolonizing, something has happened. It’s become popular. It is TB a very clear movement, let’s say, and there- I still think art is a great documentary sphere fore it has been accepted quickly, which is because you are looking at yourself while you great and it has made a lot of change. But at are doing it so you have a critical eye simul- the same time, we have to exercise our de- taneously with the action that you are doing. I mands in such a way that they never lose their think that’s pretty special. friction. Because a lot of people I’ve seen all Recently I was in Manchester working over the world now say oh, we are decoloniz- on a project and heard that the Manchester ing—but when you look at what they’re doing, Museum is giving some artifacts back to the they’re just saying it. So the art world and cap- Aboriginal people in Australia. What is inter- italism have an amazing capacity to empty out esting is that, because these were ceremonial content, or empty out agency. objects, some Aboriginal people came to treat When we talked before about can the in- them properly for transportation. They were stitution feel?—that was kind of the question asked, where are you going to put them now?; I was asking the Tate when I did a project and the answer was we are going to bury them there. And also the question of how you can because they belong buried. I think the biggest be so influential in the art world but not to transformation will be when people start to your neighbors. That’s another paradox we’re understand the work not through the eyes of living in the arts. The idea of pretending to the European gaze but through each people’s be for everybody—names, numbers, numbers, cultural gaze. We’re still not there yet. numbers—but maybe it’s for tourists, not the It almost feels like the process to be ac- people next door. It feels that this idea of how cepted is whitening yourself and westernizing can we generate not populism in art but a con- yourself. This is something that happened scientious effort to open the institutions again. when I was at School of the Art Institute of When I did the Tate Neighbors, something Chicago. I started creating my own words in happened—people liked the name and so Tate Spanish to explain my work (and now I have immediately—you know, has different muse- seven or eight or whatever, e.g. Arte de util) ums, there are like five—they all said, we want and that was an artwork. I didn’t start thinking to have Tate Neighbors here. And I said no. about it at the beginning but now I understand Because artists have to have some control. it’s an artwork. This is a capitalist conception of art where you just do franchises. I’m not saying they should GS not have it, but I say that each of you have to Is that why I could never understand what you have your own model of what works. This is were saying when I ran into you at school? another thing we have to battle in a way, making sure the work doesn’t dissolve in the idea TB of the happy feeling. Exactly! This idea of not understanding was so important. The problem is that it almost feels like the Western European canon thinks it always understands. We need to start a culture of I don’t understand.

GS It’s an interesting moment. Gulf Labor, Decolonize—

TB One has to be careful about self-satisfaction.

Bruguera & Sholette \ 94 \ Volume 4 \ TRIPLE-CHASER

How to recognize truth in an era of mass deception? How to even imagine truth as torrents of corrupt data, bogus narrative, and media junk matter crash all around us? To ask these questions is to propose a critique of media’s failure to uphold a basic public charter. Examples of such failure are innumerable—and they have been around for a long time. Yet in their wake a series of critical documentary practices has emerged. Forensic method- ologies and collaborative research projects not only reclaim the facts, but put together a broken public sphere, renewing the compacts which give meaning to truth. Forensic Architecture’s Triple-Chaser is an instructive case. The ten-minute film shows how the UK-based research group TRUTH, POLITICS, DISINTEGRATION: employed digital imaging and data process- FORENSIC ARCHITECTURE AT THE ing techniques to identify arms manufactured WHITNEY \ by Safariland, a company owned by Warren Kanders, vice chairman of the Whitney NICHOLAS GAMSO Museum of American Art in New York. Kanders’s company produced tear gas (deployed in “Triple-Chaser” canisters) that was used in 2018 at the US–Mexico border and during several noteworthy civil conflicts. By mining hundreds of image and audio databases, Forensic Architecture implicated Safariland in violence against civilians in a dozen countries. The group accused Kanders of “aiding and abetting war crimes” in Gaza, where Sierra Bullets (manufactured by another Kanders company) were found at a site where the IDF massacred 154 Palestinians.1 Triple-Chaser, which was directed by Laura Poitras and narrated by David Byrne, shows how Forensic Architecture uses “synthetic images”—masks based on product specifications from Safariland’s catalog—to develop machine learning adaptation programs. Volunteers in Tijuana, Bethlehem, and elsewhere go into the field to collect empty canisters, which are then scanned, digitized, and classified using programs by the company NVIDIA, a leader in artificial intelligence and a key developer of technologies used to create deep fake videos.2 As Forensic Architecture says of these technologies, “‘fake’ images help us to search for real

Gamso \ 95 ones, so that the next time Safariland munitions the release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, are used against civilians, we’ll know.”3 Arendt argued that meaningful truth can not Triple-Chaser’s use of online repositories be relayed through the specter of the smoking and open-source imaging software seems to gun—never through the exposition of facts actualize the astonishing capabilities of the alone—but must be conceived with the aims digital as a medium for critical public interest of a world worth fighting for. journalism. Not only does the film showcase Warren Kanders’s eventual resignation from digital technology’s capacity to scan and sort the Whitney board was proof that the facts millions of images, it also illustrates the use of gathered by Forensic Architecture and its net- communication infrastructures to convene ac- work of participants had come to matter in an tors from across geographies. The film brought institutional context normally granted special NGOs such as B'Tselem and the Omega standing over the meaning of knowledge and Research Foundation into a network of art-ac- its forms of acquisition. When it eventually tivists that included MTL/Decolonize this forced Kanders out, in November 2019, the Place, Chinatown Art Brigade, and W.A.G.E., as museum attempted to bring itself into line with well as the art magazine Hyperallergic, which a revised code of legitimacy. The crisis the mu- published statements from activists and cov- seum faced was resonant with a more general ered the protests after Al Jazeera America impasse in liberal institutional culture, precip- broke the Kanders story.4 Together, these itated by new, collective means of resistance groups highlighted the interlinked character of and reconstruction. publishing, academia, digital organizing, contemporary art and design, even (in the form IMAGERY WITHOUT REPRESENTATION of Poitras and Byrne) the elite star power that pervades all these fields. The project confront- One could say, citing what Hito Steyerl calls ed a complex of mediated institutional culture documentary’s “uncertainty principle,” that by mirroring that culture and replicating its Triple-Chaser comes too close to its objects— networked organizational character. The film’s too close to a financialized art institution, truth claims were enabled through computa- too close to the digital security state, and tional power and the premise of institutional thus too close to the war economy that con- good will. Without patented software and mas- nects Gansevoort St. to Gaza and the West sive visual databases, it would be impossible Bank.6 The film’s critique of the Whitney was to know how to interpret the data or judge the distorted both by the density of its visual veracity of the film’s content. Without the mu- transmission and by the fact that it was com- seum, there would be no arena for disclosure.5 missioned by the Biennial’s curators. It was Such conditions frame a style of relational not only Forensic Architecture’s findings that documentary practice that, in its effort to re- were threatened by this proximity, however. veal the truth, must also ask what truth is—i.e. In replicating digital culture’s ambient condi- whose truth, under what circumstances, pro- tions—flooded with data, imagery, and sensory duced to affirm what governing principles? effects—the film cast a net of uncertainty over By engaging a number of extant publics with- the whole complex of documentation it rep- in and outside institutional spaces, and by resented. In this way, Triple-Chaser reprised a sending participants into ruined landscapes style of paranoid aesthetics that has for a long to retrieve tangible artifacts of political vio- time been Poitras’s stock and trade. In several lence, Forensic Architecture called upon the films and in ongoing journalistic collaborations, people at large to reorder power and influ- Poitras has adopted noirish formal conven- ence. Triple-Chaser in this way substantiates tions to demonstrate (with varying degrees Hannah Arendt’s argument that truth of worldly of payoff) the absorption of data into a vast, significance is conceived only when eviden- state-controlled information infrastructure. tiary matter traverses public consciousness Poitras’s films exhibit what S. Topiary Landberg and animates political action. In response to has called “anti-representationalism.”7 They

Gamso \ 96 overflow with mediated imagery, obscuring the The soprano’s soaring voice, combined with facts themselves. The content is less the films’ the abstracted shapes of the synthetic masks, findings, or even their arguments, than a rec- is pleasing. Then it becomes alarming. As the ognition of their place within a greater system music plays, Byrne reads aloud the symptoms of positions and relationships. of exposure to tear gas from the Triple-Chaser Poitras’ films cast themselves as agents canisters’ medical handbook: “Severe allergic in a global field of power, implying that me- skin reactions, bronchial spasms, anaphylactic dia has a boundless potential to produce the shock . . . danger of disturbed cardiac rhythm, world beyond itself. Indeed, the films show the danger of pulmonary edema.” sedimentary quality of mediated information Triple-Chaser’s use of sensory techniques through the display of carceral structures that is clearly an attempt to represent the phys- have sprung up to hold and process data. In iological effects of tear gas. But the greater Citizenfour—which tells the story of Edward implication is that aesthetics and violence are Snowden’s publication of top-secret files on intrinsically related. In an interview, Forensic PRISM, the NSA spying program initiated by Architecture founder Eyal Weizman describes the Obama Administration—a series of long the effects of tear gas as “a condition of shots (produced with artist Trevor Paglen) hyperesthesia—overexposure to sensory stim- exhibit black sites and server farms humming uli.”9 The violent sublimity in the film’s imaging with discreet activity. In Poitras’s 2016 short sequence appears to take up the claim (made Project X, made with Henrik Moltke, the object by Kanders and excerpted in Triple-Chaser is a monolithic server tower in Manhattan that as an epigraph) that while Safariland and the purportedly stores NSA data. Even as these Whitney “have distinct missions, both are mammoth constructions evince the scale of important contributors to our society.” The film media and its infrastructures, they remain turned this statement into a line of question- opaque in their actual operations. The imaging: What motives do the two fields—art and es must be taken at face value, with Poitras munitions—share? Can we say that the logic (and Paglen) lending ethos to the scene. of one field underwrites the other? And what is As Landberg points out, “those landscape the character of a society which accepts such images prove nothing about the existence complicities? Weizman’s own architectural re- of the data collection activities, which are search has shown how aesthetic conventions themselves acts so enormous as to be unfath- associated with pastoral life and natural beau- omable and potentially impossible to represent ty, the traditional province of the sublime, have cinematographically.”8 masked the aims of settler colonialism.10 Does We can see a semblance of these ten- the hyperesthesia depicted in Triple-Chaser dencies in Triple-Chaser. The film’s relay and similarly evince the capacity of beauty to wage analysis of corroborating evidence (gunshots, or conceal violence over others? And, if the tear gas) is overshadowed by the sheer speed contrived pleasure of the image licensed the and reach of digital computing in its capacity film’s status as an aesthetic object, was this to classify and reconstruct. Although Byrne not an indication that the democratic pretense intones the basic research protocol in expos- of the museum is also a mask? itory voiceover, the unfathomable processes In provoking these questions, Triple-Chaser of digital classification and machine learning set itself into a feedback loop. As the film are more memorably communicated through adopted AI techniques from companies like a show-stopping three-minute graphic se- NVIDIA, it shared in developing a predatory quence. Imaging masks in dazzling colors software. So did the film, through its reproduc- and patterns dance about the screen accom- tion of media excess, share in the condition panied by a selection from Richard Strauss’ of “info-glut,” confounding its display of ev- elegiac Vier Letzte Lieder (1948)—the cycle identiary facts.11 Then there is the matter of was performed at the opening of the Warren critique. Triple-Chaser, which was commis- Kanders Stage at the Aspen Music Festival. sioned by Whitney curators, played into the

Gamsod \ 97 museum’s perennial commodification of its TRUTH AND POLITICS own missteps and failures. The film and other works that thematized Kanders’s offences A renewed claim to truth is at the forefront of seemed conditioned by their concessions to critical documentary studies. After a gener- neoliberal demands for professional visibility.12 ation of documentarians problematized the These overriding contradictions reflect medium’s realist conventions, the uncertain- some of the most salient themes in social ty principle has become, in the view of some practice—a genre of activist art that engag- commentators, a tired preoccupation of the es a public through participatory activities medium. Erika Balsom has suggested that this outside of the museum, yet which, in its ef- “phobia of facticity” is an effect of too much fort to express a politics, tends to stumble postmodern disavowal.13 The hall of mirrors over institutional entanglements. Here the that came about through reflexive filmmaking entanglements are immediately clear: the and critical scholarship has coincided with all transgressions of NVIDIA, the influence of art manner of deception in government and cor- celebrity, and the strategic cooperation of the porate media. Now the situation has gone from museum. But the film also offered an outlet to bad to worse: we must be wary not just about reparative creative action—another conven- talk of WMDs, but digital manipulation, social tion of social practice and indeed its saving media aggregators (fake news), and a fascist grace. A set of emplaced activities involving wish to aestheticize reality. hundreds of participants unfolded before and In considering “the best response to the after the film’s installation in the gallery. These present emergency,” Balsom argues for a included data collection in various sites where return to observational methods and critical Triple-Chaser canisters were deployed as well rationality, appealing to what she calls a “re- as the creation of a volatile political context ality-based community.” She refers to Kevin around the Biennial. The protests at the muse- Jerome Everson’s Tonsler Park (2017), which um, which were prodded and in some respects depicts the 2016 US presidential election from substantiated by the film, became inflection the emplaced viewpoint of a Charlottesville points for ongoing disputes over institution- poling station, and Eric Baudelaire’s Also al power, collectivizing the call for Kanders’s Known as Jihadi (2017), which tells the story of ouster and drawing connections to scandal postcolonial warfare through protracted en- and predation across the art world. gagements with landscapes and infrastructure. Triple-Chaser’s public face comprised a I appreciate the attention Balsom devotes to series of collaborations between large groups partialities and obstructions in these works. of people, evolving alongside the contingen- “To see something clearly, fully, can easily slide cies of the moment. Yet this aspect of the into the mistaken assumption that it is known, film’s itinerancy was not in and of itself on comprehended in its totality,” she observes display. Collaboration did not appear as the (citing Éduoard Glissant). I wish to echo this film’s aesthetic content or even as part of its recognition of a documentary object’s illusory forensic methodology. The film’s dazzling but character, but also to add that many observa- extraneous use of hyperesthesia appeared in tional documentaries presume a consensual lieu of more substantive ideas. For what the arena of reception and therefore constrain filmmakers ultimately achieved—a politics, a their potential as political objects.14 network of publics—could never be sufficient- To make truth meaningful, whatever acts ly represented in a ten-minute filmic work. Its of disclosure take place on screen, a dynamic success was non-representational, in other and recalcitrant public, or publics, must be- words. It was rather a dynamic set of relation- come involved. Only under such circumstances al public practices. Such activities should be can the full democratic potential of docu- called upon to redeem Triple-Chaser’s institu- mentary media come to light. The structure tional complicities and help us understand the of publicity I invoke displaces individuated political logics of media today. vision and redirects one-way channels of

Gamso \ 98 transmission. It moves the center of the doc- Daniel Ellsberg’s action significant, in her view, umentary work away from the filmic interface was precisely that he made such a distinction, and into the fields of production and reception. saying no to the mandated conformity in which The public is not a singular narrative voice, he lived and worked. He modeled a human but a polyphonic ensemble of participants. capacity for action so that others—in govern- Attention to documentary politics should ment and on the streets—could do the same. generate a new kind of public criticism as Ellsberg’s action posed an enormous well—one in which the documentary object is threat to administrative powers, which in not primary. Critical attention should be divert- Arendt’s account compromised a common ed from the singular work and focused on the world of appearance and threatened to can- circumstances and relationships that materi- cel subjects’ ability to think.17 At the time of alize around it. Projects such as Triple-Chaser Arendt’s writing, such powers included state are starting points for these interventions in bureaucracies and a few monopolistic private documentary theory and practice. The film enterprises (some in the fields of research and convened a transnational network of art- development). Now power resides in global, ists, activists, data scientists, journalists, and financialized computing space, structured critics. Its energies proved continuous with a around zones, servers, semiconductor fac- surrounding media ecology: the film circuited tories, and mobile receivers. Administration itself into extant systems of imagery, discourse, remains, in this sense, an engine of hy- politics, and publicity, laying the ground- per-rationality: it turns reason against itself, work for collective reconstruction. Following mandating forms of standardized technocrat- Balsom, we might call this a reality-based ic solutionism. Ellsberg showed how reason community. But it is the term community that could be turned around again in an act of must take priority. subterfuge. By tearing down a groundless but For Hannah Arendt, questions of truth and widely accepted order of truth, a recognition deception oblige some recognition of hu- of different realities (including what we might mans’ “relative freedom from things as they think of as empirical reality) could begin to are.” Writing amid the fallout of the Pentagon appear. The people saw new information and Papers in 1971, Arendt made note that “the demanded new answers of their government— texture of facts in which we lead our daily lives and, short of that, a new government. . . . is always in danger of being perforated by But as the controversies surrounding more single lies or torn to shreds by the organized recent data breaches have shown, the outlying of groups.”15 Arendt characteristical- comes of such transgressions are not always ly took this political tradition of deception as intended. The release of information has as grounds for a reparative reading of truth. at times been leveraged by governments in She called attention to the ability of politi- displays of state violence, redoubling author- cal communities to produce truth by creating ity through force. In a similar contortion, the public theaters of valuation and debate. These cultural economy exerts institutional pres- spaces are a fundamental condition for ratio- tige as its mode of control, absorbing critique nal judgment—exactly what we need in order and commodifying protest. Nothing changes. to perform politics or, as Arendt says in her Reason is turned around again. These activ- classic definition of human action, “to start ities present their own order of truth: a truth something new.” Truth cannot be spoken as which is given and accepted, no matter its the simple disclosure of “contingent facts,” inconsistencies. But there are opportuni- but must be reconstructed through creative ties—“choke points,” in the words of some of transformations, new deliberative cultures, the Whitney protestors—for another kind of new orientations with regard to the world. truth to appear. The choice, as Arendt’s implies “Without the mental freedom to deny or affirm in her writings, is to make a distinction be- existence, to say ‘yes’ or ‘no,’” Arendt argues, tween these two ways of apprehending truth “no action would be possible.”16 What made and deception: one which attains its authority

Gamso \ 99 from a sovereign source, and others which are photograph of a Nazi death camp, captured insisted upon by the people. by Allied powers but suppressed until after the war. The photo’s blind spot came from DOCUMENTARY SOCIAL PRACTICE the narrow index of veracity the photograph was produced to represent: the photogra- In calling for a democratic reconstruction of phers weren’t looking for the camp, and in fact truth, we must take into account technologies hadn’t identified it in their initial analysis. In of capture, study, and display. While today’s revisiting the photograph decades later, and digital media threaten to fully abstract these immediately recognizing Auschwitz, Farocki processes, they nevertheless call to mind ear- imbues the image with an evidentiary quality it lier expressions of disembodied looking. The did not have when it was operative as a prima- orbiting satellites that appeared in the post- ry source in an original context.20 Yet even in war period to mediate life on Earth exemplified posterity, the view remains partial, contingent, such representations’ spurious claims to truth and positioned. and evidentiary knowledge. Arendt made note Documentary matter such as photographs of the satellite optic in her introduction to and video can of course support different The Human Condition, criticizing the “human ideations of truth over a protracted duration or surveying capacity” for “alienating man from across different environments. An object’s ex- his immediate earthly surroundings.”18 Aerial hibition in a gallery, its integration into a video perspectives, spliced footage from hand-held sequence, is part of its own singular history cameras, the exhibition of scientific metrics, as well as the greater histories out of which it and collective enterprises like the Magnum appears and into which it is placed. These his- Photo Agency reflected new attempts to repre- tories have, in the context of liberal capitalism, sent the world as a totality. Such an aesthetics been pitched toward speed and precision. Yet was apposite to Cold War social investments, they remain mired in idealized representations evading the threat of totalitarian thought-con- of the past via the large archival trail they in- trol by focusing on the supposed agency of the variably produce. Such a diachronic condition individuated viewer and reducing the docu- proposes, in the words of Homay King, “a new ment to a static object.19 reality on the cusp of existence that emerg- While these modes of spectatorship sup- es in an interval of present time that is rich ported institutional authority over knowledge, with past and future images.”21 The ceaseless they ultimately failed to reduce the nego- development of media technologies, each one tiated character of documentary artifacts. leaving a vast and growing record, shows no Filmmaker Harun Farocki has shown that major obvious destination for the practioner’s work. breakthroughs in photography and synthet- In traversing space and time, documentary ic imaging could not, for example, affirm the may instead provoke comparative, disputed empirical character of visual data. His film perceptions. Such disputes frame the prob- Images of the World and the Inscriptions of War lem of truth as a political matter motivated (1989) shows how war photography eludes by documentary practice and research.22 attempts to determine fixed meaning or locate Documentation becomes a medium for so- evidentiary content. Even when an image or a cial practice—staking a share in the world’s film is meant to convey a total field of repre- common archive, provoking forms of active sentation (for example an aerial photograph of spectatorship and creative action. The role of the landscape), the visual evidence cannot by the spectator or reader, as well as the role of itself denote truth. It merely indicates the set the ethnographic subject, can be said (like the of questions asked—and thus the attitudes role of the critic) to be always developing in and suppositions out of which an idea of truth relation to a changing worldly context. had been expressed, divined, projected, or In evaluating the political character of an otherwise identified. In Images of the World, art or documentary practice, in other words, the elusive object is an aerial surveillance we must look beyond normative institutional

Gamso \ 100 space. To measure a work such as Triple- control”—which is to say a world already con- Chaser based simply on its screenings at ceived around processes of social death and the Whitney would be to ignore the way its debility.25 Certainly the film’s sequences in participants went to the field to collect vital in- Gaza and at the US–Mexico border show the formation. It would ignore the document’s use extent to which destabilized ecologies inform in court (to convict an Israeli soldier of man- the exigencies of activists and artists. slaughter for his use of Safariland products Yet a tremendous potential for political against civilians). Such an approach might renewal arises from these conditions as well. result in a failure to understand the film’s po- The improvisatory actions of the film’s partic- tential as pedagogy: works like Triple-Chaser ipants—made visible in the film via cutaways train us not only to see, but to look again, with to the field—could be said to allegorize the a critical eye, at framing devices and social remediation of social death and its desolated context. A valid critical position on Triple- physical environments. Such potential echoes Chaser must also understand the film in light of Arendt’s understanding of politics in which a the protests and demonstrations that occurred modality of deconstructive work is performed at the Whitney and which built upon the film’s so that something new can be actualized. revelations.23 As Arendt pointed out in her reflections on Ellsberg, “in order to make room for one’s own ALLEGORIES OF MATTER & MEDIA action, something that was there before must be removed or destroyed, and things as they Like all worldly practices, documentary pro- were before are changed.”26 The prospect of duction and research exist in a plastic relation change is an outcome of such newness—a with external matter. Documentary allegoriz- structure of alterity which shows itself in es the real, material qualities that it seeks novel social and territorial encounters. Cecilia to represent, conduct, and produce. I borrow Sjöholm has described this in her writings on the term allegory from Jonathan Kahana, who Arendt as the realization of “ontological plu- uses it to indicate the formalization of certain rality”: a “non-dialectical form of materialism” environmental conditions in modernist docu- that supports the pluralism of any political mentary cinema.24 Kahana’s work concerns the community.27 Ontological plurality is the con- way filmmakers visualized great planes and dition of difference which underwrites all surfaces, but the digital forensics employed entities, and in particular all new entities—all in Triple-Chaser do something different. The changes, all repairs. Of course such plurality is film comprises a multidisciplinary apparatus the target of administrative inclinations, for it that sources and mediates worldly matter— disrupts the normal course of things and thus discharged tear gas canisters—through the stands in distinction to the forced accords embodied actions of participants. In routing associated with sovereignty. Politics, as Arendt these energies across platforms, bodies, and argued, is a form of movement and multiplicity, geographies, the film creates an allegorical while power is a form of stasis. matrix in which cinema’s mimetic function is The most salient feature of the current multiplied and exacerbated. It remains diffi- crisis in liberal certitude is the emergence of cult to tell whether these visual redundancies ontological plurality as a sensible condition strengthen the existing power structure or of worldly experience. Distended inequalities, aggravate its vulnerabilities. As TJ Demos eroding infrastructures, climate breakdown, has argued, the exponential capacities of predatory digital interventions—these condi- AI, presented as animated imaging masks in tions are beginning to percolate dramatically Triple-Chaser, portend the “deathlessness” in ways that radically challenge liberal conven- of the machine world amidst the slow dis- tions of individuation, perception, consensus, integration of human systems. This omen and predetermined futurity. At stake in pro- occurs in light of Safariland’s centrality to ducing and negotiating the terms of the future what Demos calls a “global regime of climate is what mobilizes protesters to, in Arendt’s

Gamso \ 101 words, “pick up the power” lying about.28 I in- gas canisters laying about the grounds of the terpret this phrase not only as a way for Arendt Gaza and the US-Mexico border that ultimately to signal the idea that power is achieved made the film possible. through collaborative activities, but that ma- Even seemingly small actions have foment- terial conditions and extant ontologies may ed a reckoning in the global culture industry. be creatively repurposed in expressions of of These actions operate together, appearing as political volition. This is literally what people what the architect Keller Easterling has called had to do in order to indict Kanders and to crit- “dispositions”—conditions of imminence icize his place at the Whitney, as Triple-Chaser which press upon the surface of a system.31 shows. It was the act of “reporters, activists, Through such actions, museums, universi- inhabitants of Palestine and Ferguson picking ties, and philanthropic foundations might be up empty tear gas canisters with their hands creatively reimagined to make visible these and looking for a corporate logo”—a collab- underlying currents. The situation called to orative form of reconstructive world-making mind what another Whitney Biennial con- at a global scale with a large number of tributor, Augustina Woodgate (one of several participants.29 artists who threatened to pull her work from The imminent quality of such pluralistic the show), referred to as a goal of “collectively political action is precisely what contemporary reclaiming autonomy in the process of disin- activism, social practice work, and engaged tegration.”32 Woodgate’s work emphasized documentary media might strive to provoke. the erosive qualities of labor and power in Here the artists and critics Hannah Black, the contemporary, prompting the arts reporter Ciarán Finlayson, and Tobi Haslett—authors Zachary Small to ask: “How has the museum’s of an Artforum essay on the subject of the essential purpose shifted as the public grows Whitney protests—express the character of cognizant of the inequitable relationships such striving: between money, power, and culture? And how has this great laboratory of democratic expres- We know that it’s hard: hard to survive, sion slowly eroded its own functional value, hard to act. It’s hard to remain sensi- even as it purports to defend individuality and tive to horror in an art world bored by its intellectualism?”33 own obscenity. The rapacious rich are Questions like these seem effective in amused by our piety, and demand that providing the groundwork for the kind of we be pious about their amusements. democratic world-making that museums sup- Against a backdrop of prestigious inertia posedly facilitate. But what if the ground has and exhausted critique, it can be hard to already fallen away? And what if it will soon? marshal our most vital feelings: our anger, The part that seems most interesting to me is our love, and our grief.30 not that an enlightened space has been compromised by its criminal associations, nor that Triple-Chaser provided a flashpoint to marshal its pretense to democracy has faltered due to these most vital feelings. The politics of the the institution’s role in exacerbating inequal- film materialize beyond the singular ten-min- ities, but that even the museum’s financial ute work of cinema, spilling into the channels architecture is threatened as a result of these of critical witnessing, reflection, activism, and overriding contradictions. world-making. It is this traversal of interde- pendent activities that licenses the prospect AUTONOMY AND DISINTEGRATION of political transformation in a nevertheless continuous (Arendt dares to say eternal) world. The call to reclaim autonomy amid disintegra- These lessons are important to remember tion could indicate a more general crisis of because, although machine learning licensed legitimacy—one which characterizes liberalism Forensic Architecture’s work, it was the ac- and which has cut across its claims to enlight- tions of those who picked up the disused tear enment, democracy, and progress. I make this

Gamso \ 102 point to answer a question I raised at the start: ENDNOTES How can the hall of mirrors which today con- 1—Safariland teargas has also been used stitutes documentary, journalism, scholarship, to disperse demonstrators at recent pro- and critique be opened into a new practice tests against police violence across the for constructing truth? How can an awareness United States, including in Lafayette Park, of contingent facts be turned into something adjacent to the White House, when it was new? The aim may be what Alberto Toscano cleared by the Trump administration on recently proposed—an idea that is analo- June 1, 2020. On June 7, 2020, Kanders’s gous to the modes of reconstruction that are company announced that it would cease quickly (though perhaps not quickly enough) selling what it called “crowd-control coming into focus. What we need is not mere solutions,” such as “chemical agents, mu- recognition that another world is possible, he nitions and batons to law enforcement and writes, but “a way of threading together those military agencies.” moments of mass action in which the powers that be have been put on the back foot.”34 This 2—These dimensions of Forensic form of reconstructive activity could actually Architecture’s research practice are noted follow from the deconstructive efforts of theo- on the group’s website. ry and recent inroads in curatorial practice, but 3—See Triple Chaser, Dir. Laura Poitras & it needs us (we critics, artists, media practi- Forensic Architecture, 2019. tioners) to do the work. Following the actions at the Whitney, we 4—See Decolonize this Place, “After should be ready to take hold of institutions and Kanders, Decolonization is the Way radically reorient them. In doing so, we may Forward,” Hyperallergic, July 30, 2019. view our work as part of a protracted effort Anna Feigenbaum, “The Profitable to wrest the very bases of what we call truth Theatrics of Riot Control,” Al Jazeera from their origins in colonial research practice America, May 2, 2015. and to decolonize the terms of knowledge that 5—See Aruna D’Souza, Whitewalling: Art, have proliferated throughout modernity. This is Race, and Protest in Three Acts (New York: no abstraction or metaphor, but a vital way of Badlands Ltd., 2018). producing the world we want. 6—Hito Steyerl, “Documentary Uncertainty,” A Prior 15 (2007). 7—S. Topiary Landberg, “Citizenfour and the Anti-Representational Turn: Aesthetics of Failure in the Information Age,” in Reclaiming Popular Documentary, eds. Christie Milliken and Steve Anderson (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, forthcoming). 8—Ibid. 9—Alex Greenberger, “For Whitney Biennial, One Participant Targets Controversial Whitney Patron,” Art News, May 13, 2019. 10—See Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso Books, 2007).

Gamso \ 103 11—See Marc Andrejevic, Infoglut: How (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 13. Too Much Information is Changing the Way 22—Ariella Azoulay, “What is a photo- We Think (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013). graph? What is photography?,” Philosophy 12—While Forensic Architecture, along of Photography 1, no. 1 (2010): 9–13. with nine other artists, requested to with- 23—Judith Butler, Toward a Performative draw the work, it nevertheless declined to Theory of Assembly (Cambridge: Harvard, institute a deadline. Later the group said 2015), 16. it would have Triple-Chaser removed, but only after it had prepared a new work to 24—See Jonathan Kahana, Intelligence be shown in its place. This new work, the Work (New York: Columbia University Press, group claimed, had enormous potential, for 2008), 90-92. it offered the lynchpin in the case against 25—TJ Demos, “Climate Control: From Kanders—a Safariland bullet recovered in Emergency to Emergence,” e-Flux 104 Gaza. (November 2019). 13—Erika Balsom, “The Reality Based 26—Arendt, “Lying in Politics.” Community,” e-Flux 83 (June 2017). 27—Cecilia Sjöholm, Doing Aesthetics 14—Nicholas Gamso, “Lifeworld of the With Arendt: How to See Things (New York: Junkyard: Toward a Sensory Politics of Columbia University Press, 2015), 38. Place,” ASAP/Journal 4, no. 2 (June 2018): 429-449. 28—Hannah Arendt, “The Freedom to be Free,” in Thinking Without a Banister, ed. 15—Hannah Arendt, “Lying in Politics: Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, Reflections on the Pentagon Papers,” New 2018), 385. York Review of Books, November 18, 1971. 29—Hannah Black, Ciarán Finlayson, and 16—Ibid. Tobi Haslett, “The Tear Gas Biennial,” 17—See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Artforum, July 17, 2019. https://www. Totalitarianism (New York: Harvest, 1955). artforum.com/slant/a-statement-from- hannah-black-ciaran-finlayson-and-to- 18—Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition bi-haslett-on-warren-kanders-and-the- (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019-whitney-biennial-80328. 1958), 251. 30—Ibid. 19—In every case, intellectuals con- verged to determine a format to broadcast 31—Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft and exhibit these new representations. (London: Verso Books, 2014), 71. Progressive social scientists such as 32—Quoted in Zachary Small, “The Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, for Apprehensive Politics of a Generation example, argued that documentary prac- Surface at the 2019 Whintey Biennial,” tice, in contriving a public, should invest in Hyperallergic, May 15, 2019. “apperceptive habits, [our] habitual ways of looking at the stream of events of which 33—Ibid. our own behavior is a part.” Quoted in Fred 34—Tasos Tsakiroglou, “Interview with Turner, The Democratic Surround (Chicago: Alberto Toscano,” Efimerida ton Syntakton, University of Chicago Press, 2013), 66. July 21, 2019. 20—Images of the World and the Inscription of War, Dir. Harun Farocki, 1989. 21—Homay King, Virtual Memory: Time- Based Art & The Dream of Digitality

Gamso \ 104 \ Volume 4 \ I first read Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition about twenty years ago, when social media was just taking off. I found in Arendt’s notions of the private, the public, and the social a way to understand the social in social media. Ever since then, I have continued to reread Arendt for insights into the newest trends in media technology. In my latest book, The Software Arts (MIT Press, 2019), I make use of Arendt’s distinction between work and labor to distinguish information from computation and narrate a new history of both. In general, I am wary of anachronistic applications of theories of the past to conditions of the present, but one should not apply Arendt. One must instead examine a question as Arendt might have done and try to reanimate Arendt to think through our present conditions. Arendt inspires this course of action in the prologue to The Human CONDITIONS \ Condition:

WARREN SACK IN CONVERSATION WITH The trouble concerns the fact that the JENNY REARDON AND BONNIE HONIG “truths” of the modern scientific world view, though they can be demonstrated in mathematical formulas and proved technologically, will no longer lend themselves to normal expression in speech and thought. The moment these “truths” are spoken of conceptually and coherent- ly, the resulting statements will be “not perhaps as meaningless as a ‘triangular circle’, but much more so than a ‘winged lion’” (Erwin Schrodinger). We do not yet know whether this situation is final. But it could be that we, who are earth-bound creatures and have begun to act as though we were dwellers of the universe, will forever be unable to understand, that is, to think and speak about the things which nevertheless we are able to do. In this case, it would be as though our brain, which constitutes the physical, material condition of our thoughts, were unable to follow what we do, so that from now on we would indeed need artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking.1

We now live with smartphones and machine learning and artificial intelligence. Have we yielded our thinking to machines, as Arendt

Sack, Reardon & Honig \ 105 feared? Can we only demonstrate what we today were inspired by the vision that infor- know in mathematical formulas and new tech- matics was going to give people the power to nologies? Or, can we take up the challenge recreate the world. In the case of genetics, the she throws down: to render the truths of belief was that we can recreate life. But now today’s world in normal expression of speech we’re reaching the limits of that vision. Over and thought? To take up this challenge is to the last few decades, folks moved out of com- engage in the struggle to see and to act with- puter science into the life sciences because in the politics of contemporary new media they wanted to do good—to cure cancer rather technologies. than create another geolocation app. The ge- The Human Condition was published in nome became a gathering point partly because 1958.The prologue begins with a passage on it offered up the possibility of doing good and the first artificial satellite, Sputnik I, launched fostering life. Now, though, biotech itself is on October 4, 1957 by the Soviet Union. This coming under scrutiny for concentrating wealth was the beginning of the so-called Space and health into the bodies of the few. Age, a zeitgeist that I remember distinctly as a child of the 1960s and 1970s. Now, in the BONNIE HONIG Information Age, our sights are fixed not on the Some of the critique you develop in The stars, but our social media feeds. The differ- Postgenomic Condition has to do with the ence for the technologists was wryly phrased way that the genome project interacted with by the billionaire Peter Thiel: “we wanted flying capitalism and with other social and political cars, instead we got 140 characters.” But, if forces. If we look at how capitalism is part the Information Age is a technological disap- of the picture, then we see some people are pointment, it is also a political morass. coming into the genome project, looking to do In the late fall of 2019, Jenny Reardon, good, like you just said, but some are pulled in Bonnie Honig, and I met twice for a trialogue to by more entrepreneurial aspirations, right? discuss questions like these: what are the pre- vailing trends in science, biotech, and software JR engineering? What kinds of trajectories are I think of Anne Wojcicki as an emblematic implied by computational theory and machine figure here. At the time she started 23andMe learning? What are the risks of these devel- she was married to Sergey Brin, the cofounder oping fields as they come into contact with of Google, and they have a son named Benji. modes of privatized, bureaucratic rationality, When Benji is born, they make it known that or with statism and surveillance? How does Brin’s mother has Parkinson’s. One of the rea- Arendt’s work help us think more deeply about sons for 23andMe is to find new treatments for these questions? Parkinson’s so if Benji has the genetic variant —Warren Sack that predisposes him to disease, there might be new treatments, or even a cure. If you listen CONVERSATION to folks in biotech, which I had a chance to do last week at a dinner conversation organized JENNY REARDON by the Atlantic, you will hear them foreground How do collectivities form in this moment of again and again this story about their commit- widespread critique of dominant institutions: ment to curing disease and saving lives. When banks; the European Union; home ownership? asked by the dinner conversation moderator The university too is under critique; post-WWII if they had a responsibility for the SF hous- institutions are falling apart and you have new ing crisis they responded: “No. IT, information media moving into the governing space they technology, is responsible for all the Google formerly occupied. Earlier than that, the com- buses, and the focus on making money. We puter transformed from a threat of control into are different. We are mission-oriented. We a promise of liberation, as Fred Turner’s work want to cure diseases.” They really see them- shows. A lot of people who work in genomics selves as not about the money, even though

Sack, Reardon & Honig \ 106 money is there. We also spoke that evening programming (Kay’s contributions to the about whether this narrative was reaching a programming language Smalltalk) became tipping point. Could this narrative last? To ask prominent. Innovations emerge when there is this question is to be impolite in the Arendtian a shift in the vision of the normative user. In sense, in the sense of breaking the polity. The the rhetoric of the social media companies, kind of writing and work that I do is Arendtian like Facebook, there is a stated goal to shift to in that it attempts to narrate the genome as a the citizen as the canonical user and, thereby, site of agonism and politics. It interrupts the a shift to describe these platforms as things origin story of the Human Genome Project as of the public. But they are falling short of this a heroic public effort to improve human un- goal. derstanding and health. For some genome scientists, that feels rather impolite . . . BH Facebook is saying, more or less: This is what BH social media for citizenship looks like. We are The way you tell the story in The Postgenomic not censoring—reading political speech for Condition is very complimentary to the aspira- content—we’re just giving you access to ev- tions that different people bring to the project. erything (we’re not passing our own personal But, at the same time, your version of the story judgments too much, only around the edges might not be their preferred version because, for the extremes). They are practicing a kind as you tell it, they are not the heroes of the sto- of liberal neutrality over content. The claim ry. In the second chapter, when you talk about then is: it is up to us. We choose. But that is the conventional founding narratives, you say not neutral. Leaving it up to us means leaving these are the heroes of that conventional ver- it up to them, since they are organized and sion of the story, but not your version. Page du we, scripted as individual choosers, are not Bois says of her work in classics that she wants (yet). Individual choosers are not the same to topple the hero. You do that too. thing as citizens. Moreover, Facebook does make non-neutral decisions about what to WARREN SACK feature on the site and whom to support with Jenny, the biotechnologists are trying to po- donations (they co-hosted, with the conser- sition the human genome as a thing of the vative Federalist Society, a dinner for Brett public if they’re saying things like we don’t Kavanaugh, for example). care about the money, this is for the public good, this is going to help health everywhere. JR That’s what I understand from your book. But Arendt becomes useful here by her insistence is the genome a thing of the public? A similar on a distinction between the social and the po- shift is happening in software. It can be peri- litical. What about a political media as opposed odized according to who was assumed to be to a social media? There is a lot of concern the normative user of software. In the old days about social media’s echo chamber, that we’ve it was the military and insurance companies, created a social—in the Arendtian sense—me- and then it was big business. After that was dia that makes us conform . . . the introduction of the personal computer and software intended for the individual con- BH sumer at home. Now social media is not just That lacks plurality for the individual, but for friends, family, and colleagues. New innovations in software are JR made when designers create software for a Yeah, that’s right. new group of people. For example, when computer scientist Alan Kay focused on the child BH as the user, innovations like the laptop (Kay’s That’s the key feature for Arendt. An Arendtian vision of the Dynabook) and object-oriented political media for citizenship would be

Sack, Reardon & Honig \ 107 fundamentally committed to plurality and even private for the genome to become an object to what William Connolly calls pluralization (to of collective concern. Because if it was just protect against future homogenization). another site where someone was profiting, there is no way it would have become a site of JR collective action, a thing we should mobilize Right, and I think that’s a good way of diag- around and put our efforts into. This university, nosing what a lot of people are struggling with UC Santa Cruz, one of the main stories it tells right now with social media. How do you de- about why it’s a great place is that . . . sign that plurality? Warren, these are questions at the heart of your work. I think the other WS thing that unites all of us is a concern with the UC Santa Cruz saved the genome from private political. To what extent is the political a proj- enclosure! ect of the democratic? To what extent do we hold onto democracy as the aspirational politi- JR cal form? Right! If the genome is the quote-unquote book of life, then we [UCSC] built the shelf WS that you could put it on to make sure there The common complaint about contemporary was public access. “We gave you the book- social media—and genomic data as well—is shelves.” And that’s in fact how folks talked that private data is being aggregated and sold about it. Now, let’s fast forward twenty years to for profit. This seems to me quite concordant today, and now you hear talk about how there’s with the distaste Arendt holds for the social, of no way you could study a genome without pri- appropriating the public for . . . vate investment. It’s just too expensive.

BH BH Private gain? What does that mean? Is it more expensive than the last 18 years in Afghanistan? Because WS we have some very expensive public projects. Yes! Bonnie points out that the social is a con- When we say something’s too expensive, I tested territory of politics exactly because it think, OK, how expensive is it? mixes these things together. But the recurrent diagnosis of what’s wrong with contemporary WS Silicon Valley business models is that it’s all (jokingly) Trillions of dollars? based on an advertising model, aggregating everybody’s data and selling it off. Reading JR Jenny, I see a homology between that and OK, let’s think of NIH’s budget . . . what’s going on in biotech. BH JR The Washington Post just did a story today There is a need for the issue of the public about how much we’ve spent on nation-build- versus the private to be understood in this ing in Afghanistan since the US invaded. It’s an current moment in conversation with Arendt astronomical number. In the US, some things and some of the work Bonnie has done to are just not thought of in terms of their afford- reread Arendt’s insistence on the separation ability, no matter how much they cost; some between the public and the private. The big kinds of investment are assumed to be simply story of the Human Genome Project was we’re indispensable. Why not this, then? saving the genome for the public. The story was the fight between the public and the private JR effort. It was very important that a distinction I think it’s a both and situation. Genomics be maintained between the public and the has brought the most expensive approach

Sack, Reardon & Honigx \ 108 to biology we have ever seen. Now we could responded to a 1-800 number. Within an hour mobilize public funds to support it. And there of placing that number in a local newspaper, might be something to the narrative that it a whole bunch of people called in, and of exceeds the capacity of the public. The lat- those people they selected 10, and randomly ter story justifies the entrance of massive sequenced one. I’ve always wanted to write a new amounts of private funding into the life little article exploring that story. That person, sciences. whoever they were, ended up having lots of rare variants. So now we are at our university BH going back and creating the standard diverse And the other thing that could be happening human. At every single point in the genome, in the background is other considerations the question is what is the most common vari- having an impact. Not just costs, but race. You ant, as opposed to the one that we randomly write about this in your book and I do too, in got from that person in Buffalo? My point is Public Things: historically, in the United States, that no one could do anything with just this things are public until they become racially one random individual’s genome. Everybody mixed, and then they are made private. For knew that we were going to have to sequence example, researchers appropriated, in an ex- all kinds of people in order to make sense of tractivist way, cells from Henrietta Lacks and the human genome. others; they experimented on people of color, and acquired scientific knowledge, and made BH profitable progress and products. Sometimes, if That’s the big data part. (laughter) there was an objection, the heirs of those used for this purpose might get some compensa- JR tion. But now, having derived an entire industry Yeah, that’s the big data part. And that big and mode of inquiry through the extraction of data project is rife with problems of how to things of value from the bodies of people of deal with the question of race. There was a color, suddenly the claim is oh, but the proj- big push to get samples from people of African ect is too big, it has to be done through private descent, because they were thought to be the funding, it can’t be public anymore. Can’t it? I most diverse. But the critique was that you’re wonder. Look at what happens when the ques- just going to take those samples, get the variation becomes not whether the research should tion, then you’re going to develop drugs for be public but rather who owns the cells. If the people who have the money to pay for them. question is who owns the HeLa sequence? the The All of Us project, the US government’s solution comes to appear obvious: just pay the effort to study human genetic variation, has family some money and give them health ben- attempted to address this, but there’s different efits. But the real issue is: is this public? If it problems with this. First, there’s distrust. Even is, then everyone must benefit from it, in some if you do want to represent and serve folks true sense of public: all races, all classes, all who have not been represented, you have genders. And that is when we hear: it’s too ex- the problem of distrust in these communities. pensive, we need private industry. So the story Second, the cost of the drugs coming out of here has to be part of a racial politics story too. genomics are some of the most expensive we I think it’s really important: In the US you can have ever seen. never separate marketization or privatization from racial division and white supremacy. WS You, Jenny, are asking: for whom do the deliv- JR erables of big data projects work? Let’s also The genome is a great example of that. After pose another question about big data projects: the genome was sequenced there was a ques- do their productions actually work for anyone? tion about who was the human of the human There’s scant evidence that genomics has genome. It was someone from Buffalo, NY who advanced medicine, but that’s hardly unique.

Sack, Reardon & Honig \ 109 One would be justified in skepticism about the WS productions of practically any big data project, I worry the problem runs deeper than the not just genomics. I’ve been interested in a bad rhetorics of fundraising and advertising. set of other claims that big data and machine I worry that the productions of big data don’t learning have contributed to the solution of work because at the core of the disciplines longstanding problems in computer science. responsible for these productions the very For example, machine translation has been a idea of meaning was abandoned long ago. That benchmark ever since Warren Weaver wrote a their productions have no meaning should memorandum in 1949 proposing that comput- come as no surprise. In my book The Software ers could be used to translate texts. Currently, Arts I characterize this as the computational Google’s Translation system (available at condition. For me, the computational condition https://translate.google.com/) is said to be the is when meaning has been put to the margins best and was, in 2016, completely redesigned in a manner evident in logic, linguistics, and using techniques of big data and machine computing of the 20th century, when the grand learning. It is trumpeted as a success of big theorists said meaning is of no interest. For data. But if you are bilingual, you can very eas- example, David Hilbert, who set the agenda for ily demonstrate that it doesn’t work at all as a formalist mathematics of the twentieth centu- translator. It can help you correct your spelling, ry—from Gödel to Turing and into the theory of it can help you conjugate verbs, but it does computation—intended meaning to be omitted not translate: it does not perform the task it is from mathematics. Noam Chomsky stated that advertised to perform. Douglas Hofstadter had meaning should not be a concern of linguis- a very nice little article in The Atlantic last year tics. Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, the showing how poorly Google Translate performs founders of information and communication in the several languages he speaks (includ- theory, argue that information has nothing to ing French and Chinese). In her book Artificial do with meaning. In her book, Jenny recounts Unintelligence, Meredith Broussard says we’ve seeing a printout of the whole human genome, become so enamored with having things in the volume after volume, thousands and thousands digital form that we no longer care whether of pages. But no one knows how to interpret they work. This, I fear, is a very accurate diag- it, no one knows what it means. And yet, why nosis: there is a popular concern with the uses should anyone know? Not just big data en- of big data, but few worry whether the results thusiasts, but all of computing has picked a do what they are advertised to do. In terms methodology that excludes meaning from its of public things, this could be a disaster. We foundations. If one wants one’s work to mean will live just fine without machine translation, something, one shouldn’t employ methods but what if the future generation of cars are founded on the exclusion of meaning as a first self-driving but they don’t actually work? What principle. if the future is in personalized medicine but it doesn’t work? BH They didn’t want to do meaning, though. BH They wanted to formalize what they might Things get touted like that because that’s how have thought of as the raw material for they fundraise. But there is no guarantee that understanding. the things promised will ever be produced. Partly because it’s not public, so there is less WS oversight to see to that, and partly because That’s exactly what Hilbert is talking about. they are over-promising. They are not going to produce miracle cures for diseases in BH the promised ways, since we’re also devel- Could we say that they didn’t think about the oping new diseases. We will never become possible effects of formalization, whether peo- un-diseased. ple might be changed, in turn, by formalization

Sack, Reardon & Honig \ 110 and how they might become less good at in the data. The newest forms of machine things we take for granted, like meaning-mak- learning—like deep neural networks—are ing? This is at least a possibility. It seems to forms of data compression. Machine learn- me that when we assess certain things as ing is, more or less, a process of analyzing public things, we are asking how they orient the data to try to find the shortest computer us to each other and in relationship to the program or mathematical formula that summa- world—and in plurality in Arendtian terms. rizes it. But current techniques are restricted The question is as apt for the seemingly less to a search for formulas of a very limited kind. thing-y things like genomics and software, For example, deep neural network learning is which also position us in relation to each oth- essentially a technique to tune the parameters er, as it is for more obviously thing-like things, of large polynomials. How large? Well, a poly- like the table, right? nomial, for example, that runs as the engine Look at how we seated ourselves, around behind Google Translate is over a billion terms this object, the table, in this room we are in long. Too big for any of us to read, much less now. There were other places to sit in this understand. This puts us, epistemological- room but the table drew us to it, we set down ly, in a really strange position. In 2008, Chris our books, and positioned ourselves around it Anderson wrote an editorial for Wired, “The in relationship to each other. As Arendt says, End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the the table is part of a material “in-between” Scientific Method Obsolete,” claiming that as (knocks on table) that allows us to congre- long as we have lots of data we no longer need gate and talk to each other. In Public Things, any theories. I think he didn’t really understand I pay close attention to her section on Work that theories have not been lost from the in The Human Condition. The Work section realm of big data, rather they just take another describes where the world’s furniture comes form, a bizarre form: billion term polynomials from and why it is important to Action. The are now what are advanced as theories. Old products of Work provide us with points of science had short equations as theories, equa- orientation in the world. Things position us tions like Newton’s F = ma. Data science has in relationship to each other and provide us billion term polynomials as theories. with insulations from others as well as with connections to them. Meaning is generated BH by our interactions across lines of difference What’s really interesting is how those devel- and commonality, that is to say, in a world that opments, which do seem to precipitate some resists formalization. So, if you just take mean- kind of episteme, come along with the evacua- ing out of everything so as to have this formal tion of other kinds of public things that may be language, something that doesn’t come from more orientating for us, and which are linked anything and is therefore pure, that kind of pu- to care and concern for others. Arendt notes rity is like being in an unfurnished room: bare something like what you’ve just described and disorienting. when she talks about Galileo’s telescope. Looking through it was a disorienting experi- WS ence, phenomenologically: to look into space There are two practices of making meaning from earth and see the earth in the universe, with big data. As I noted, making meaning is as one planet among others. hard to do with the theories and methods of The example of Galileo is not that different disciplines in which meaning has been pushed from more recent examples of disorientation to the margins. Nevertheless, one approach to now. Indeed, in a recent Arendt-inspired remaking meaning with big data is visualization. port, called The Ethics of Coding, a Report on Visualizations are usually rendered as enor- the Algorithmic Condition, the authors, who are mous diagrams with no obvious meaning. The code ethicists, make a similar point: they note other approach is the application of machine that Arendt’s proposal for The Human Condition learning to discern repeated patterns or trends begins with the Sputnik 1 satellite, which

Sack, Reardon & Honig \ 111 repositioned us again in relation to outer BH space. They argue that the algorithmic condi- Right. Or it did once, and then the metaphor tion repositions us in a similar way now. They left the table behind. This suggests that, even point out that The Human Condition was sometimes, once we’ve all become habituated written at a moment of a “booming cybernetics to an object, the object becomes dispens- society [amid] the development of information able. Even if there is no table, people will often infrastructures.” congregate in a circular form in order to have a Now, what you describe, Warren, is very discussion. But is that why tables were built in much like the experience these code ethicists the round? Or do we gather that way because are looking at; when we say a table orients we once had round tables? us, it does that phenomenologically. If we Even more interesting is that the table is thought of the table scientifically, as a bunch not just a table at all. For example, kitchen of molecules, it would not orient us. I think table talk, in feminist circles, say, refers not the problem of public things isn’t just about to the power of the table per se, but to the how, epistemologically we can now see things condensation in the table of past experiences in such magnified forms that are beyond our around it. That is why there is a feminist press comprehension; it is that those new experi- called Kitchen Table Press. The name captures ences are not partnered with other kinds of the feelings of power and enchantment that public groundings that could perhaps anchor many feminists know from sitting at kitchen them, and us. Those code ethicists recom- tables, planning, plotting, and talking. It con- mend community-based action in concert as a denses experiences of intimacy and sorority counter-weight. Is that enough? It has to be, in for feminists. Conversely, but relatedly, when a way, but it isn’t. Sara Ahmed talks about the role of the table in phenomenology, in Queer Phenomenology, she WS points out that the table functions as a fixed If we talk about public things, let’s also point for a thinker like Husserl, but that it does discuss what elsewhere in the social sci- so because his wife has cleaned it, prepared ences would be called institutions. I speak it, quieted the environment for him to work. Norwegian, so when I think of the English word That’s the patriarchal table, the philosopher’s thing I also think of the Norwegian translation, table, but there’s also, still, the kitchen table, ting. The Norwegian parliament is called the where different kinds of ideas may gather. So Storting—literally the big thing, but what might things that seem to exist independently of us be better translated into English as the great are soaked with meaning. Today, the dining assembly. It’s an institution, not just an object; room table is where kids do homework, guests an institution that assembles people governed are welcomed, a parent might write a book, by a set of rules. So in Norwegian there is no and/or the Passover commemoration of re- clear distinction between a thing and an in- lease from slavery is observed. Which comes stitution. How might we make the distinction first? The object or the use? It is a chicken and between a thing and an institution? egg problem.

BH JR I’m not sure there is a difference. So, one of That chicken and egg problem is the right one the things that’s quite interesting about the to think about. When the genome was attempt- way that philosophers always go to the ta- ing to create its public, it faced the question of ble as an example of something simple and who was going to use this thing, the genome? obvious that you could then build your phe- And the Federal Drug Administration said, you nomenology around . . . can’t go out there and get people to use this because you don’t know what it is, and what WS could it do! And so in the beginning there was A round table discussion has a round table in it! no advertising for 23andMe. You had to be in

Sack, Reardon & Honig \ 112 the know to be part of constituting the ge- is that they didn’t build into the institution- nome . . . al infrastructure of genomics any process for addressing the question of meaning. They BH said, we’ll do that later. And so now we’ve got Part of the bespoke-ness that’s in the DNA of a world where we’ve created this genome that the genome. (laughter) There is this quality in is not meaningless, because there is meaning, genome products like 23andMe that’s like, this but it’s not meaning in the . . . is just uniquely for you. BH JR I think that what you’re describing is, in a And it became the hip thing to do. It was in way, captured by something that you quote in the Style section of the New York Times. They your book, which is Arendt’s injunction that did spit parties during Fashion Week! Spitting we should think what we’re doing. And they in a tube to get your DNA sequenced was the decided not to stop and think what they were new glamorous thing to do. Beyond the hip, doing. the other group they recruited were skydivers. Those were the three constituencies they WS went for: the rich and famous; the in-the-know Which had, as you narrate, big business im- Silicon Valley hip people, and the skydivers. plications, right? Because, then, building the They were the genome’s publics. sequencing machines becomes the thing.

BH JR Well, if you’re willing to jump out of a plane, That was the thing! That’s right. That’s what why wouldn’t you spit into a tube? (laughter) they were doing.

JR WS Here you are trying to constitute a new And that just blew up as a business. enchanted thing that will create a collectivity—the genome—but we have very little idea JR what it means or could be used for. Warren, Yeah, and that’s what they’re still doing! what crosses over quite clearly between your They’re still building better sequencing work on the computational condition and my machines. work on the postgenomic condition is that we’re looking at things—the information, the BH genome—that sideline meaning. During the In The Human Condition, Arendt talks about Human Genome Project, Craig Venter, the how the French used to have an empire and scientist who led the private effort to se- when they lost their empire, suddenly they quence the human genome—the purportedly became very much in love with their bric-a- evil Craig Venter—at one point said, “I think brac. (laughter) She suggests, in a way, that we shouldn’t sequence the whole thing all it is an overcompensation: deprived of the at once. We need to stop and figure out what glory of empire, they invested themselves in some of it means.” And there was a decision, miniatures in their private homes. The rea- an actual decision, made to not do this. I love son I mention this now is that Arendt is here Arendt’s demarking of the cis in decision to inviting a critical interrogation of what we’re call our attention to the fact that de-cis-ions enamored with, and why. This goes back to are about cutting. what you said earlier, Warren, about how we’re Leaders of the HGP made a cut, and they too enamored with the form of the digital. And said, no! We are going to sequence the whole now you, Jenny, are describing how people are thing, and then future generations can figure caught up by the progress that they’re mak- out what it means. But the problem with that ing and they just don’t want to stop and think.

Sack, Reardon & Honig \ 113 They’re enamored also! And I’m thinking how we want a different time. The Judaic Sabbath important it is now to think not only about is an example of that: a no to 24/7 temporality re-establishing the possibility of publicness even before we had a name for it. and citizenship, but also about re-cultivat- ing in people the capacity for refusal and JR practicing a sort of non-inevitabilization of I think the topic of temporality is something to progress. Ariella Aïsha Azoulay talks about that dwell on. In the genome world speed is, as the in her new book, Potential History: Unlearning historian of genomics Mike Fortun has point- Imperialism. ed out, constitutive of the genome. It is about Jenny has described various moments in speeding things up. You want faster and faster the genome project’s development when there sequencing machines, you want the data . . . were invitations or opportunities to refuse, to interrupt, to stop the temporality of inevitability BH and then we see: No, we’re not stopping. We’re What’s the acceleration driven by? just going to keep going. Sometimes going with the flow is a lot easier. And it’s the same with JR the form of the digital; it has a flow to it, as Multiple things. The argument is that we need Warren has written. It’s very hard to stop the a lot of data to make any meaning. And, in flow, but it isn’t impossible. We know how to order for us to get there in any kind of time do it! You need to join up with others, congre- scale that we can imagine as being meaning- gate around a shared effort to open up what ful we need it to happen much faster. So, if we Arendt would have called a different time, a sequence DNA at the rate that I was doing it new line of time. That, it seems to me, is what when I sequenced DNA back in 1994 it would the three of us share in our writing and think- be two centuries before we had the human ge- ing. As I was reading your work in preparation nome. This is not in a timescale that anyone’s for this conversation, I was thinking, Wow! You going to get behind. At the end of the day we know, we’re all humanists. (laughter) The hu- were able to sequence one human genome in man, for Arendt, is the capacity to not just be fifteen years. Now if we want to sequence a swept up with the flow but to carve out our million people, we do not have 15 million years. own time. This does not mean being a Bartleby, The process had to speed up in order for it to who just says no or prefers not to. It is more be meaningful. And it has. Genomics has sped like the example of Muhammad Ali who refuses up technically and culturally. I was once talking (I am thinking of his draft refusal) on behalf of to someone who works in genomics, and she a world he would like to belong to but doesn’t said to me, “I don’t get up in the morning and fully exist yet. He wants to open up a different plug myself in. I’m not a robot.” Finally, there is line of time. the argument that if we don’t speed up, people We can talk about it in terms of media. We die. are in a moment that can seem disempowering. It’s one of the challenges of our moment, but BH we’ve been there before. With the develop- Really though they worry if they slow down, ment of print media, for example, the medium somebody else will beat them, though, don’t seemed to invite the collapse of high and low you think? culture. People worried that literacy might degrade rather than elevate people’s tastes JR and sensibilities. Once people could read, Well, yeah, right! there was no telling or controlling what they might read! Romance novels were not what the WS enlightened philosophers had in mind. There Bonnie, doesn’t this connect to some of what have been many moments, historically, where you were saying about Wendy Brown’s book, there’ve been invitations to refuse and say, no, Undoing the Demos; how efficiency becomes

Sack, Reardon & Honig \ 114 like the master good, in some sense. And what app that uses genomic data and algorithms to you’re narrating now is the micropolitics and ensure you don’t fall in love with someone who the rhetorical strategies that position efficien- has the same genetic variant for a disease as cy or speed as the ultimate good, right? you. The idea is to avoid perpetuating seven thousand different diseases—to bring disease JR to an end through assortative mating guided As life! And this is interesting because Arendt by algorithms and genomic data. refuses life as a ground for politics. BH BH Yeah, and the casualties of that are things Exactly. She’s the earlier critic of biopolitics. Arendt asks us to value: plurality, contingency, and not knowing. Not knowing is an important JR: I think that’s important, and as I read part of the capacity to have understanding. We Arendt and reread Arendt, I always wonder are thinking in terms of problem-solving, effi- what she would think today as life becomes ciency, curing, but not in terms of the kinds of completely reworked. It is no longer the un- relationships that we need to have to survive changeable, but rather the site of change. It the failures that await us too. still has the kind of power over us that Arendt saw as the antithesis of politics because if I’m WS sick with sickle cell disease and you tell me Filmmakers and novelists have frequent- you can use CRISPR to cut DNA and cure my ly speculated about how new technologies sickle cell, you have power over me. It be- could change what it means to be human comes very hard to refuse. So, I think there’s and transform our everyday world. This tech- something about temporality, refusal, and life— no-imaginary does not just appear in science their interplay—that denies the possibility of fiction but is also part and parcel of scientific the political in an Arendtian sense. discussion. For example, there are a lot of writers of non-fiction who claim we’re on the verge BH of developing a super-intelligence, a ma- I think that’s right, but it is important that, chine more intelligent than any of us. George for Arendt, contingency, which includes the Church’s discourse about genomics seems condition of illness or accident that befalls to inhabit an analogous techno-imaginary. us, is part and parcel of the human condition, These imaginaries are rhetorical strategies and, so, efforts to change this might funda- for gathering more and more resources to the mentally alter the condition of being human, technical work by driving public reception. For and this requires thinking, and maybe refus- example, journalism’s expression of the tech- ing! So often in science fiction novels, there no-imaginary of AI would lead the public to are marginal communities or rogue families believe that self-driving cars are just around that have removed themselves from the new the corner. Unfortunately, technically, we are techno-world that others greet with welcome not anywhere near a self-driving car practical or resignation. We have that choice too. And for the everyday world! we have to ask, as Arendt would: what would the human condition look like if, in utero, BH everybody was genetically cured of whatever But you can see them on YouTube. (laughter) diseases they were carrying before they were We’re nowhere near them, but you can see born (which is one possible direction we could them. end up going in)? JR JR Or they might almost run you over in San This is what the Harvard geneticist George Francisco where you see these self-driving Church just announced yesterday: a dating cars with people in them training them.

Sack, Reardon & Honig \ 115 WS scientists’ work with Chinese forensics au- Right, but the fantasy is far from fact. And in thorities to develop techniques that have been some cases, when car owners have accepted used to surveil ethnic minorities in China. fantasy as fact, disaster has struck. There are Media have focused on this issue because it is already examples of deaths caused by Tesla an area where genomics is working. Genomics drivers who assumed the car could drive it- has increased exponentially our ability to order self. There’s been a whole spate of videos on people, to distinguish between this person and YouTube of people falling asleep at the wheel that person. So some things genomics does with the car in self-driving mode. On the one exceedingly well. They just are not the things hand, we have real change driven by technol- we hoped for: the cure to cancer, the tran- ogy, like frantic news feeds of social media scending of race. Genomics was supposed to that interrupt everyday life 24/7. Some of these prove we were all just human. It was supposed changes are of the magnitude of a change in to preserve and augment the human. the human condition but they are not the ones advertised. We are promised self-driving cars BH but receive, instead, 24/7 harassment. The There has never been anything done in the promises and fantasies about technology are name of augmenting the human that didn’t frequently diversionary tactics or advertising turn into a device of partitioning and surveil- techniques that appear as early as Vannevar lance! I’m just thinking with Foucault, you Bush’s 1945 Atlantic Monthly article, “As We know: a technology that begins as a health May Think,” on the topic of hypertext. Bush’s technology ends up as a policing technology. rhetoric is repeated with variations today. In The technology doesn’t carry its own guard- the article he cycles between tales of fantasy rails within itself. and what he knows as a maker of scientific instruments, the latter employed to convince WS us that the former—the fantasy—is credible or I worry whether there is an intrinsic tendency workable. for technology to always be authoritarian or warlike, or whether technological develop- JR ments are mostly dependent upon funding. I think it’s important to say both things. They One can narrate, as Manuel DeLanda did in don’t work and they do work. The question is War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, the what are they working to do? development of technology as a war effort. Analogously, one might see technology de- WS velopment as an outgrowth of surveillance. It Well, that’s what I keep coming back to in my might be traced back to Francis Galton and book: what does it mean to work? Alphonse Bertillon and those who invented statistics and so show computing to be just JR the newest apparatus for furthering finger- Yes, I think that the importance of the public is printing and forensics. But have alternative that it is a space where we get to ask who we technologies not been explored because, com- are and what we ought to gather around and paratively speaking, there has been no budget work towards. We are losing that space. We for such explorations? What’s happening in are transforming the public into an instrument Silicon Valley today is a sad example of this. All of privatization. That is very clear in the case of the social media companies are essentially of the human genome. The genome is working advertising firms. One could do something else to do certain things that were built into it to with social media except, relatively speaking, do. For example, it works to identify. This has there is no budget to do so. If one wants a been in the news a lot recently. The New York billion dollar company one has to capitulate to Times keeps covering these new surveillance the advertising model and collect private data powers of genomics—most recently genome and sell it.

Sack, Reardon & Honig \ 116 JR going to get on this train and ride it to dystopia. Within the bio-world, you are also starting to The thing that has always fascinated me about see alternatives responding to all this precari- the genome is how it’s always both everything ty. My PhD student is working on open insulin, and nothing. But this is not livable! We do a project to create insulin in a manner that not live in everything and nothing. We live in places it in an open space, not in a privatized particular places with particular relations. We space, so it is available to all. Alternatives like have to revalue the public spaces where we these are emerging. We just don’t know if they can think across our differences and create are going to be flashes in the pan. these relations.

WS BH It could be that this kind of thinking is intrinsic Yes. But the way that you just said what you to the medium itself—a sort of technological said makes me think that we’ve written the determinism. It could be simply that a finite story in a kind of tragic form. In this narration, number of business models work best, so there’s this ambition to dominate, it acceler- that’s what everybody does: build guns, build ates, it knows no bounds, and then like in any snooping devices, and so forth. But I also Greek tragedy, at some point the hero falls. think (and this is where a lot of my work goes And when the hero falls, the Chorus always to) that the fantasies that technologists have says: this is how man learns, by being sub- today are very old. They precede the business jected to the blows of fate. The idea is that models. They precede even the antecedent you have to be beaten in order to learn not media of what we call new media. And so, the to be so ambitious, not to seek to dominate histories of these fantasies . . . nature, women, kinship, or the gods. If we plot our challenges in tragic form, that has con- JR sequences for our thinking. It suggests that Old imaginaries for new technologies. the only way that we may see some of the changes that we’re talking about is if someone WS is brought down and made to experience the The imaginaries are frequently fleshed out blows of fate. It suggests that nothing else is in books and films before they are made into going to stop the genome project other than working technologies. And, if you can articu- some kind of blow of fate. A lot of the things late an alternative vision, that’s really powerful. we’ve been talking about—accelerationism, And that’s where it does make a difference to extractivism—may fit that model, in which write a book. There’s a lot of discounting of people come up against finitude. But tragedy people who write books or make films, espe- counts on fate putting us back in our place. cially if you go to a code-oriented place like There’s no reason to think that that won’t Silicon Valley, where they want to know, well, happen (unfortunately, it could happen through did you write the code? But, that’s just one climate catastrophe all too soon) but the risk mode of articulating these imaginaries. We of tragic plot is that we wait for fate. must examine the history of these imaginaries taken by technologists to be goals. Such an ENDNOTES examination is one way to rethink the current 1—Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition landscape of technology. (University of Chicago Press, 1958), 3. JR Yes, we must think and imagine new possibilities. The biggest ethical problem that we face in genomics is the problem of thought. We must think, and part of that is developing our collective capacity to refuse. We’re not just all

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\ Volume 4 \ Contemporary media is replete with imagery of invasive others. These others take different forms, but perhaps the most recognizable are humans, particularly those crossing borders, like migrants and refugees. We regularly see images of people coming by the boatload from Syria or North Africa to land on European shores. Frontex, Europe’s border patrol agency, understands these migrants as posing an imminent danger, and uses cutting-edge technology to surveil and detect them. If not left to drown, migrants are turned around at sea or deported when they reach land. Considered invasive, they are kept in detention centers or in camps on various shores of the Mediterranean. In the context of US immigration, Donald Trump explicitly called one migrant caravan—which started traveling north from Honduras in October 2018—an invasion, and mobilized over REWRITING THE GRAMMARS OF five thousand active troops at the US–Mexico INNOCENCE: ABOUNADDARA AND THE border to keep it out. RIGHT TO THE IMAGE \ But in the public imaginary in much of the Global North, fear is rarely present without its MIRIAM TICKTIN conjoined opposite: pity. Migrants are rendered visible as invasion or threat, but they are also shown as suffering victims. If fear is evoked by the imagery of threat, shame is the effect of representing those who suffer. This latter approach is exemplified by the now-iconic image of Alan Kurdi, the three- year-old Syrian boy whose body washed up onto a Turkish beach in September 2015. The language of humanitarianism, while often well-intentioned, also traffics in the discourse of victimhood or abjection, and uses images of children like Kurdi to this end. The focus on children is a tried and true strategy of humanitarian organizations, which regularly display them on their homepages and in fundraising materials to elicit support for those considered most vulnerable. We need only think of the classic 1993 photograph of an emaciated Sudanese child, too weak to stand up, being preyed upon by a vulture. Taken by Kevin Carter, the photo quickly came to signify the South Sudanese famine, and served as an early example of the humanitarian call to action, driven by pity and shame. Anthropologist Liisa Malkki has perhaps best described the aesthetics and politics of humanitarian imagery in

Ticktin \ 119 her suggestion that in such images, refugees this “secret solidarity” between humanitari- “stop being specific persons and become pure anism and the police contributes to the end of victims in general.” They (especially African politics, insofar as it gradually institutes one refugees) are figured as “a ‘sea’ or ‘blur of world order.4 humanity’”—as “a spectacle of a ‘raw,’ ‘bare In the interest of forging both a new polit- humanity.’”1 Such photographs erase all his- ical imagination and new political subjects, torical context, focusing on refugees’ faces then, we might consider aesthetic projects or bodies, which in turn draws attention to that try to counter or undo humanitarianism’s their expressions of pain or suffering. Those affective structure and its associated sub- represented become subjects in urgent need, jects—not just to refigure them, but to reclaim quintessential victims. In this sense, refugees the terrain of the political. Abounaddara, an are understood as passive and voiceless. anonymous Syrian film collective, which has Reduced to an undistinguished mass of bod- been posting a film online every Friday about ies rather than individuals, refugees, Malkki daily life in Syria since the start of the revolu- argues, are mobilized to represent a human- tion, offers one of the most powerful examples ity stripped of dignity. Indeed, in her short I have found. The collective wants to undo a but prescient essay, “We Refugees,” Hannah Western desire to witness victimhood, and to Arendt described a shift in the meaning of feel pity. In other words, it directly opposes the refugee after WWII: “Now, refugees are those discourses and imagery of humanitarianism, of us who have been so unfortunate as to and the subjects they call forth. To make sense arrive in a new country without means and of Abounaddara’s work, I draw in particular have to be helped by Refugee Committees.”2 on the work of philosopher Jacques Rancière, In other words, no one wants to be classified who suggests that the goal of the political is as a refugee, as it evokes misfortune, pity, and to shift the grammar of the sensible, and what helplessness; not heroism. is rendered visible and invisible. I argue that As the ascension of Trump and many other only in this way will we be able to forge new global strongman leaders has put into relief, forms of collective enunciation.5 Rancière in both the aesthetic and affective dimensions of turn builds on Hannah Arendt, reworking her politics are exceedingly important; people are notion of the political even as he retains her responding to fear. We can no longer pretend suspicion of the category of humanity, as we that the political is or ever was primarily about will see. reason, debate, or logic. Indeed, insofar as we Abounaddara is engaged in changing are in a moment where the real is contested, images of Syrians and of the ongoing war, and the idea of truth no longer has legs, we overthrowing the frameworks that repre- have no choice but to think of politics and sent Syrians as only victims or terrorists. aesthetics together. To do politics means to in- Abounaddara’s strategy first calls for “the right tervene and shape media representations—to to a dignified image.” As the collective’s one do politics is to help create new imaginaries. named representative, Charif Kiwan, states, the In today’s mediated landscape, then, can we Abounaddara films “deal with the indignity of get beyond the dichotomy of threat or victim, war without representing indignity.” He points beyond responses based either on security to the fact that we rarely, if ever, see bloodied or humanitarianism? Indeed, these are often or dead Americans or Europeans in the media, two sides of the same coin.3 French anthro- despite their perpetual military engagements pologist Michel Agier has said it most directly: and occupations. The US military tightly con- humanitarianism “strikes with one hand, heals trols images of dead American soldiers, but with the other,” it’s the “left-hand of Empire,” the mainstream media follows suit. Media or the softer side of the liberal civilizing mis- elsewhere in the Global North is not so differ- sion, one that regularly accompanies the more ent; for instance, French television stations violent forms of intervention or abandonment. refused to show images of the victims of the Perhaps most importantly, he suggests that Paris terror attacks in 2015. Why then, Kiwan

Ticktin \ 120 asks, are images of Syrian corpses all over the walks along, descending into the basement media? Why the graphic images of violence of a building, where, through the dim light, we and tragedy? He states, “once you watch those gradually see that women are engaged in a photos all the time, then you are not surprised beauty lesson, learning how to style a bride’s . . . you consider those people not very import- hair. There is no electricity, but the teacher ant, because they are dying all the time. So you says, in a playfully ironic tone, “War or no war, finish by telling yourself, these people are not we are following fashion!” Such scenes chal- like me, not human like me.”6 The traditional lenge Western perceptions of Muslim women epistemology of photography assumes that a as long-suffering victims who require saving— photograph represents an event that precedes perceptions that scholars like Lila Abu-Lughod it in an independent or neutral way, but since have long critiqued.9 Some watch attentively, the 1990s, this sequence has been scrambled. others chat; the teacher reminds them that Sometimes the possibility of representation tomorrow they have a nursing lesson. precedes and in fact makes the event.7 As In another film, called Vanguards (2011), we Abounaddara suggests, the media not only see little children lined up, in uniform, shouting represents, but produces a different battle- war slogans and other propaganda, repeating front; war needs to be waged in these corollary after a voice that guides them. They shout, terms as well. “Revolution!” and “Bearers of immortal mes- Abounaddara’s second strategy is rooted sages!” and “Always ready!” and “Freedom! in its larger political goal: a humanity that is Freedom! Freedom!” and raise their arms in represented by freedom and dignity, not by salute. the image of a pitiful victim. In some sense, These films depart from and challenge key they challenge Arendt’s classic critique of this humanitarian tropes. First, these are not strict- category, as she cautioned against drawing ly innocent children. Unlike Alan Kurdi, whose on humanity as a political constituency (for innocence is represented by his inert, vulnera- instance, by way of human rights). Indeed, ble, and passive body—a small body overcome she said that the abstract nakedness of being by the larger, dangerous forces in the world— human and nothing but human was the ulti- these children are politically active and mate danger.8 Unlike many who follow Arendt engaged. Similarly, they have no likeness to and challenge the grammar of humanitarianism the image that went viral in August 2016: the by finding fault with the category of humani- video of five-year-old Omran Daqneesh, dazed, ty itself, Abounaddara’s political ethos is still covered in blood and dust, sitting in an ambu- driven by the language of a shared or common lance in the aftermath of an airstrike in Aleppo. humanity; it calls what’s going on in Syria “a Again, in the photograph, Daqneesh appears crime against humanity.” It calls, too, for equal confused, unknowing, alone, and vulnerable, standards for Syrians, Americans, and everyone while the children in Vanguards are portrayed else. as part of a larger political and historical con- Abounaddara’s films are short—just a few text in which they participate. While many say minutes each—and often quite intimate. They that photographs such as those of Kurdi and are nevertheless set in the context of war. Daqneesh are what finally shamed Europe into Abounaddara does not try to forget or erase action (to help immigrants, to stop supporting what they call the “nightmare” of war, but to the war in Syria), images of innocence—and show people living their lives within it, be- the moral imperative they engender—have side it, or despite it. One film, The Lady of a long history of actually hurting those they Syria (2015), opens with a woman looking into intend to help, because they produce the the distance from a hilltop, stating, “see . . . very idea of worthiness. In the process, they it fell over there . . . in the next village . . . not work to separate deserving from undeserving, on houses.” We cannot see what she’s look- often penalizing or criminalizing those who ing at, but we can imagine it’s the aftermath are perceived to be in the latter category. In of an explosion or drone strike. But then she this sense, to shift images is indeed—as the

Ticktin \ 121 collective of Abounaddara argues—a matter of in 2014.11 And while the numbers went up life and death; images can produce physical in 2017, only nineteen Syrians were granted harm. asylum there, at a rate of 0.5% of those who Abounaddara’s films work to change the requested the status. As Hannah Arendt ac- sensory landscapes of humanitarianism. This knowledged in 1951, asylum as a category was involves illustrating the harm of victimhood, only meant for exceptional cases, never for the which is in turn inextricably tied to the con- masses.12 cept of innocence. While the phrase innocent To be sure, days after the image of Alan victims occurs so often that it can be difficult Kurdi appeared in media outlets, Germany, to think these two terms apart, innocents France, and the United Kingdom increased need not be victims, and victims need not be the numbers of refugees they were willing to innocent. accept.13 But those claiming asylum must still Since April 2015, innocence has been used go through rigorous application procedures to create a distinction in both American and and be judged worthy. The Canadian govern- European public discourse between refu- ment had already denied legal status to Kurdi gees and illegal economic migrants. This was and his family; it is not clear that he would the start of the so-called refugee crisis in have been saved by the policies proposed Europe, when the numbers of people both in response to his death. In fact, after these crossing into Europe and dying in the process measures were declared, the constraints on increased exponentially.10 Although asylum asylum applications were made more and more may be a legal category worthy of protection, apparent: Germany said it would process asy- here it is primarily a moral, not a legal distinc- lum applications more quickly, not in order to tion that purports to separate the deserving help, but to deport those who do not qualify in from the undeserving. Real refugees are seen record speed.14 as innocent—fleeing well-founded fears of Innocence is about purity, vulnerability, and persecution. They are understood as passive, naivety; it carries the desire to protect and vulnerable, and in need of saving. take responsibility for those who—in their Economic migrants, in contrast, are por- lack of knowledge—cannot take care of them- trayed as wily, deceiving their way into selves. Innocence establishes a hierarchical Europe’s welfare and other beneficiary sys- relationship between those who care and tems and undermining not only European those who are cared for. Ultimately, innocence security but European values. In the United works as part of a series of binaries—in this States, we see this distinction deployed in the case, the flipside is guilt.15 This frame was case of the Dreamers (undocumented youth) most clearly revealed after the Paris attacks of and their parents. Dreamers are innocent; they November 13, 2015, which altogether result- came unknowingly, as children. Their parents ed in the deaths of 130 people. Despite the are the ones who acted illegally, and should attackers being French citizens, France imme- be deported. The recent furor over migrant diately closed its borders, establishing a state children separated from their parents at the of emergency that suspended the rules of US–Mexico border is also about the distinc- the Schengen Agreement, effectively render- tion between deserving and undeserving, ing refugees responsible for the attacks. The innocent and guilty: Americans were angry at United States and much of the rest of Europe the treatment of the children, but fewer have followed suit. Refugees in general shifted from suggested that their parents do not deserve to contingently innocent to guilty in the blink be held in detention centers. of an eye. Mass media played an important So although the focus on helping innocent role in this shift, unabashedly broadcasting refugees may appear generous and humane, imagery of hordes and invasions and figuring in practice, it functions to limit the numbers of migrants as rats or insects. The attacks set off people admitted: as just one example, Spain an enormous backlash in the United States and granted asylum to a total of fifteen people Europe, where extreme right, anti-immigrant

Ticktin \ 122 parties had already gained large followings— These induce both the desire for mastery as in Germany, such parties as Alternative for well as the desire to help and to cuddle. As Germany and Generation Identity reacted ethologists have long noted, cuteness is asso- strongly to Angela Merkel’s more generous ciated with juvenile features in animals as well migrant and refugee policies. as humans, and is accompanied by a desire to Innocence is not just important conceptual- protect.20 Innocence, like cuteness, is a minor ly; it functions on a visual level. Why did Alan aesthetic concept (unlike the more prominent Kurdi capture the world’s attention? As Charles ones like beauty, sublimity, and ugliness), and Homans argued in the New York Times, his its very diminutiveness is critical to its ap- appearance—including his shoes, shorts, and peal. Indeed, innocence, like cuteness, seems red shirt—made him look like a Euro-American to name an aesthetic encounter based on an middle-class child.16 He looked like one of us. exaggerated difference in power; it works in In addition to making Westerners think of their relation to a socially disempowered Other. own children, this class position helped render Finally, innocence is perhaps most vividly him innocent; historically, childhood innocence figured in death, the state of absolute noth- has been represented by cleanliness and lack ingness—no thoughts, no desires, no longings. of want, which in turn is associated with a cer- This is how we recognize innocence, after tain middle-class whiteness.17 This is what is all: it is visualized as a specific kind of lack. seen as neutral, pure. But as with photographs As Anne Higonnet states, images of romantic of war, innocence is not simply represented childhood are always haunted by death.21 The after the fact; rather, images have served to photograph of Alan Kurdi on the beach did not produce the very contours of what we under- simply represent migrant innocence; it pro- stand innocence to be. duced such innocence. Innocence is marked by singularity—that Using innocence as a key ethico-moral lens is, by representing individuals outside of any shifts all those who do not qualify as innocent context, outside time itself. Innocent chil- into the category of guilty. Abounaddara’s visu- dren, after all, are figures that are understood al work breaks this binary, filling out the frame to precede knowledge: they are promises of that currently restricts our possibilities to both the future and the past. But this is ac- either identification with the victim or bracket- complished through the framing of the image. ing the subject as a distant and barbaric Other. Omran Daqneesh is alone, looking straight To return to the film Vanguards, the children ahead; Alan Kurdi is shown on the beach actively participate in learning propaganda. with a soldier looking down on him (and even Surely the children lack full contextual under- then, the soldier is often cut out of the frame). standing, but they are nevertheless engaged in And images of childhood innocence are ren- all the complexities of childhood, figuring out dered more powerful by the ways in which who they are, when to lead, whom to follow, distinctions between children and adults are when to obey, how to resist, when to speak foregrounded: for instance, an emphasis on back, and when to run away. Some shout, some children’s roundness, their pudgy quality—we look gleeful, others look bored. None of them see this in Daqneesh’s face. But this focus on is passive or pure. roundness is an effect of aesthetic histories In this sense, Abounaddara’s films both that helped to produce the very notion of ro- visually and conceptually create room for mantic childhood as a distinct ontology or way subjects who are neither victims nor heroes. of being, distinct from adulthood.18 Similarly, We might say that the films enact their own Sianne Ngai describes the aesthetics of cute- grounding principle of anonymity: they render ness, suggesting it accentuates helplessness visible the lives of the anonymous, or what and vulnerability.19 Innocence shares many for- Rancière calls “the part who have no part”— mal signifiers with cuteness, organized around those who, as the least likely to be seen as small, helpless, abject, or deformed objects: political actors, exemplify the political. These for instance, large eyes that evoke distress. people are as ordinary as can be, and they

Ticktin \ 123 are everywhere; yet we rarely see them, not focuses on the principle of dignity. only due to a lack of visual representation, but This grounding in human rights is at once because we are unable to recognize them. promising and perplexing; Abounaddara’s Abounaddara works to rupture our frameworks, work undermines the idea and practice of to render everyday people as notable and humanitarianism, which itself is grounded significant. on universalist principles such as humanity, Abounaddara’s films are beautiful and of- and linked, but not identical, to human rights. ten poetic; they offer an intimate glimpse Abounaddara reveals the lie of such humani- into people’s lives, and they implicate their ty-inspired practices, which, more often than audience for a moment. They manage to cap- not, create difference-based hierarchies. ture the global scale of war in these intimate Indeed, in Arendt’s famous words, “only with a frames without showing explicit violence. As completely organized humanity could the loss such, they challenge the visual and affective of home and political status become identical vocabularies of humanitarianism, and its at- with expulsion from humanity altogether.”23 tempts to generate care and concern by way of But does continuing to work within a frame images of horror and affective responses such of human rights constrain Abounaddara’s as pity or compassion. They refuse all of these, work? Although human rights may not have including the dominant subject positions avail- started out this way—new histories show that able to immigrants and refugees. And this is the language of human rights was used very critical: after all, what does it mean for an im- powerfully by those struggling against colo- migrant or refugee to be welcomed as a victim, nial regimes24—today, the discourse of human passive, unable to take care of oneself? In the rights has become a key tool of the neoliber- face of such images, why would migrants be al order.25 In this sense, human rights claims hired once they are up and on their feet again? risk being activated in a way that predictably If seen as pitiful victims, how can they possibly serves to reinforce the extant social order. be trusted as smart, capable, responsible? Rights claims often work in an additive fash- As Charif Kiwan stated as he hesitantly ion: they do not transform the system; they accepted an award for Abounaddara from the simply add another identity category to the Vera List Center for Art and Politics in October fold (women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, religious 2015, the collective hopes that people in the rights, and so on). Only certain kinds of injus- United States will join their struggle. By this, tices fit into its framework. he did not mean the current war—he asked Class, for instance, does not always or easily for people to stay out of that—but instead the fit. Where, then, do we locate the right to the struggle against the banality of evi created image? We might evaluate how transformative by the humanitarian apparatus within main- Abounaddara’s work is by asking how much stream global media, which undermines what energy it puts into the struggle for legal rights, Abounaddara holds most dear: dignity. whether it sees the legal front as primary, The two strategies that ground or whether its work can bring this right into Abounaddara’s work—the right to dignity and being by producing dissensus. Might we say, the category of humanity—are inseparable in Rancière’s purposefully tautological terms, from the discourse of human rights. Indeed, that Abounaddara claims rights that they don’t Abounaddara appeals to this universalist lan- have? Does it claim power despite not having guage, insofar as it says the dominant regimes the qualifications to do so, or does it get lost of representation are grounded on universalist in the paradox of rights, which only become principles even as dominant regimes of repre- meaningful when claimed by those outside sentation are frequently used to discriminate the realm of the intelligible? Differently stated, and segregate.22 Abounaddara suggests that how much does Abounaddara believe in an Syrians themselves speak in the language of already constituted political sphere—one in higher principles, embedded in the Declaration which it wants to participate, one in which it of Human Rights; namely, the collective asks for entry in the sense of a liberal politics

Ticktin \ 124 of inclusion—and how much is it rewriting rights can slip into humanitarian rights, or the very terms of the political, such that it the rights of absolute victims, in the name of may later contain a right to dignity? Is the whom others are authorized to act; when one collective opening a space of political sub- sticks to the consensual script, and tries to jectivation in which rights will come to mean work with the law rather than rewriting its very something quite different—taking us out of a meaning, one is not actually enacting politi- liberal, capitalist order? I would like to think cal rights.28 Rather, these rights are carefully that Abounaddara is using media technology guarded by those in power, who use them to as the terrain for the negotiation of moral and justify intervention in the name of suffering political questions; indeed, that it sees politics others. This has been called the Responsibility happening at the level of technological design to Protect (R2P), but it started out, in the more than at the level of international law. By words of Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors producing and circulating its own images, with Without Borders) founder Bernard Kouchner, as or without rights, Abounaddara helps obviate the humanitarian right to intervene. This is pre- the need for the right to the image. cisely what Abounaddara fights against; and We might also ask why Abounaddara draws yet its strategies walk a fine line, risking the on the category of humanity as its political reproduction of this same order. Abounaddara constituency. To be sure, humanity is a power- works at this tense and tender threshold of ful way to name a broad, sweeping collective; political transformation; my hope is that its but it always requires a constitutive outside, beautiful and compelling work pushes fully into even as that outside shifts.26 Is it effective the terrain of political otherness. to work for equality in the name of humanity when humanity is itself always exclusion- An earlier version of this essay was com- ary? Abounaddara insists on holding onto the missioned by the Vera List Center for Art and category, perhaps because it understands Politics at The New School to critically examine the political stakes of letting it go completely. the work of Abounaddara, recipient of the 2014- Feminist scholar Donna Haraway offers one 2016 Vera List Center Prize for Art and Politics. interpretation of this strategy, arguing against the term post-humanism by suggesting that we cannot simply pretend the human no longer exists; such feminist work contends that we cannot will the concept away, even if we want to expand the frame beyond the human, as it carries too much political and affective weight. The question, to me, is: how does Abounaddara’s concept of humanity hold together? Is dignity an affective grammar that is politically open, flexible, inclusionary, and compelling enough? The collective itself recognizes that dignity is a normative concept.27 What kind of subjects does it enable, recognize, or call into being? Can we always recognize what dignity looks like? How does this dignified humanity remain open to new, undignified constituencies? The risk, of course, is that in the name of the law and the category of humanity, Abounaddara gets caught in a system that reproduces these same types of hierarchy and violence. Rancière describes how human

Ticktin \ 125 ENDNOTES of a crisis. These included the escalation of conflicts in Syria, Afghanistan, and 1—Liisa Malkki, “Speechless Emissaries: Iraq; and a shift in route from Libya and Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Italy, to Turkey and Greece, and over new Dehistoricization,” Cultural Anthropology Balkan routes. These events were ac- 11, vol. 3 (1996): 377–404. companied by an increased emphasis on 2—Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees” security and policing rather than rescue. in Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on 11—“Final decisions on (non-EU) asylum Exile, ed. Marc Robinson,(Washington, applications, 2014,” Eurostat: statistics D.C.: Harvest Books 1996), 110. explained, May 21, 2015,https://ec.eu- 3—Didier Fassin, “Compassion and ropa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/ Repression: The Moral Economy of index.php/File:Final_decisions_on_(non- Immigration Policies in France,” Cultural EU)_asylum_applications,_2014_(num- Anthropology 20, vol. 3 (2005): 362–87. ber,_rounded_figures)_YB15_IV.png. See also Miriam Ticktin, “Policing and 12—Arendt, The Origins of Humanitarianism in France: Immigration Totalitarianism, 294. and the Turn to Law as State of Exception,” Interventions: A Journal of Postcolonial 13—Helena Smith and Mark Tran, Studies 7, vol. 3 (2005): 347–68; and “Germany says it could take 500,000 Michel Agier, “Humanity as an Identity refugees a year,” The Guardian, and Its Political Effects (A Note on September 8, 2015, https://www. Camps and Humanitarian Government),” theguardian.com/world/2015/ Humanity 1, vol. 1 (2010): 29–45. sep/08/germany-500000-refugees-a-year-clashes-lesbos. 4—Agier, “Humanity as an Identity.” 14—Natasha Lennard and Lukas 5—Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: Hermsmeier, “Merkel’s Refugee Policy On Politics and Aesthetics (London: Is Political Calculus, Not Humanitarian Continuum International, 2010). Generosity,” The Nation, November 19, 6—Melena Ryzik, “Syrian Film Collective 2015, https://www.thenation.com/article/ Offers View of Life Behind a Conflict,” merkels-refugee-policy-is-political-cal- New York Times, October 18, 2015, culus-not-humanitarian-generosity/. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/19/ 15—In its different incarnations, in- movies/syrian-film-collective-offers- nocence can also be the opposite of view-of-life-behind-a-conflict.html. knowledge, intention, and desire. 7—See Thomas Keenan’s contribution 16—Charles Homans, “The Boy to the “The Anxiety of Images” fea- on the Beach,” New York Times, ture in Aperture 204 (2011): 56–57. September 3, 2015, https://www. 8—Hannah Arendt, The Origins nytimes.com/2015/09/03/maga- of Totalitarianism (New York: zine/the-boy-on-the-beach.html. Meridian Books, 1951). 17—Anne Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence: 9—Lila Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood Women Need Saving? (Cambridge, MA: (London: Thames & Hudson, 1998). Harvard University Press, 2013). 18—Ibid. 10—To be sure, migrants and refugees 19—Sianne Ngai, “The Cuteness of have been crossing the Mediterranean the Avant-Garde,” Critical Inquiry for years, moving from Africa to Europe, 31, vol. 4 (2005): 811–47. but a number of events created the idea

Ticktin \ 126 20—Konrad Lorenz, Studies in Animal and Human Behavior (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). 21—Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence, 30. 22—Jason Fox, “Representational Regimes: A Conversation with the Abounaddara Film Collective,” World Records 1, vol. 1 (2018). http://vols. worldrecordsjournal.org/01/10. 23—Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 294. 24—Joseph Slaughter, “Hijacking Human Rights: Neoliberalism, the New Historiography, and the End of the Third World,” Human Rights Quarterly 40, vol. 4 (2018): 735–75. 25—Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017). 26—Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963). See also Ilana Feldman and Miriam Ticktin, eds., In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). 27—Abounaddara, “Dignity has never been photographed,” documenta 14 Notes & Works, March 24, 2017, https://www.documenta14. de/en/notes-and-works/15348/ dignity-has-never-been-photographed. 28—Jacques Rancière, “Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?,” South Atlantic Quarterly 103, vols. 2–3 (2004): 297–310.

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\ Volume 4 \ How does the place where a person resides inform their legal claim upon the human right to dignity? How do images of brutality inflicted upon people affect the relationship between those people’s location and their ability to make rights claims? These are urgent questions to ask when war is no longer just something declared between nation-states, when mass media are devouring one conflict after another—from Syria to the US border and police violence against communities of col- or—and when the overwhelming speed and scale at which images of conflict circulate challenges our sense of personal, national, and ethical borders. These questions are prompted here by the Abounaddara film collective’s call for the “right to a dignified image,” a demand for a transnational civil protection to be modeled through the United Nations Universal CAN RIGHTS BE FOUND ON A MAP? \ Declaration of Human Rights.1 Such a protection aims to extend equally to everyone the JASON FOX right to exercise control over how their image circulates. The first step in linking these questions involves shifting away from the moral philosophy of how one ought to orient themselves to a rights politics that guarantees dignity, and toward a critical focus on the ways that images and the institutions that mobilize them do, or fail to, guarantee rights. In making this shift, one quickly arrives at the relationship between atrocity imagery and what Bonnie Honig describes as the “paradox of politics” that informs conventional human rights discourse.2 Human rights politics are paradoxical for Honig because, while they appeal to a universal, and thus imaginary, community of humanity in which all people are thought to always already naturally belong, human rights imagery frequently attempts to call such a community into being through images of peoples whose injuries demonstrate their very exclusion from that imagined community. While the aspiration of human rights protections is informed by imaginary social bonds between individuals and groups, human rights imagery tends to traffic in images of bodily harm to particular bodies, as if rights can be made explicitly visual at the individual sites of their loss. Contemporary examples of such a paradoxical structure of

Fox \ 129 representation abound: the 2019 photograph protections, whether that here is a function of of the dead bodies of Óscar Alberto Martínez physical location on a spatial grid, an embed- Ramírez and his daughter Valeria, face down dedness in a national project, or through the on the bank of the Rio Grande River at the US felt presence of human rights-driven visual border with Mexico; the 2015 video of a South media. In the absence of meaningful inter- Carolina police officer shooting Walter Scott in national enforcement frameworks, atrocity the back as Scott runs for his life; the iconic imagery, often deployed instrumentally, pro- 2015 image of three-year old Alan Kurdi, whose duces the feeling of physical presence. The lifeless body was photographed and circulated feeling of presence then becomes the ethical after washing ashore on a Turkish beach. In basis for extending the recognition of rights each of these cases, a widespread insistence to the injured. Viewed through this frame, the that the subjects’ fundamental human rights depiction of atrocity becomes integral, rather were violated arrived only after their death, than incidental, to human rights media’s ter- at the moment documentation of their deaths ritorial appeal. By paying closer attention to began to circulate. some of the legal and aesthetic dimensions This paradox goes unnamed in that inform the aesthetic registers of human Abounaddara’s 2015 call for the Right to the rights imagery, one can begin to imagine a Image. Still, it underwrites the collective’s world where human rights aren’t recognized in insistence that it is time to re-evaluate the the image of distant suffering, but which can role and value of atrocity imagery in wartime rather be collectively produced through imag- reporting, humanitarian campaigns, and hu- es of shared power. man rights claims.3 For the collective, the continued journalistic broadcast of images of THE MYTH OF RIGHTS POSSESSION atrocity from Syria has the capacity to further fuel the very conditions of violence that their In 1951, as the philosopher Hannah Arendt circulation is often thought to help ameliorate. continued to process the devastating after- When images of suffering are circulated in the math of the Second World War, she wrote of spirit of compassionate humanitarian concern, the plight of those who had been ejected from those images tend to invent or re-materialize the Western “trinity of state-people-territory” the very “disenfranchised humanity that (they) that “still form[s] the basis of European or- claim to redeem.”4 In doing so, documentary ganization and political civilization.”6 Human images have a way of solidifying rather than rights discourse gained urgency after the war challenging the preexisting hierarchies that with the recognition that those living without led to the atrocities documented in the first the civil and political rights granted to citi- place. Dignity therefore begins for the collec- zens of a nation-state should still be entitled tive as an ethical precept safeguarding Syrians to civil and political protections against the from the circulation of images of bodily vio- perceived abuses of repressive governments. lation, but it also importantly extends beyond As an aspirational form of governance, human the question of representational ethics to how rights discourse offered a framework for imag- images of war in turn shape and reinforce the ining power that accrues through a collective lived realities of those experiencing it. belief in the inherent dignity of all people. One reason images of atrocity remain Human rights frameworks, so the narrative such a hallmark of human rights discourse went, could enforce that belief in alliance may be accounted for by legal scholar Linda with the political and military might of sover- Bosniak’s notion of “ethical territorialism.”5 eign states when possible, or in opposition to Ethical territorialism, the dominant ethical them when necessary. Yet the United Nations, framework through which liberal democrat- as one of the only supranational institutions ic states currently recognize or deny rights able in theory to enforce rights claims across claims, insists that being here is the fun- sovereign states, was in practice designed damental basis for extending rights and specifically to bring balance and stability to

Fox \ 130 the hegemony of Western nation-states. It look beyond the ethical axis of enfranchise- was never intended to oppose or supersede ment/disenfranchisement along which their them.7 The result is that well into the twen- writing aligns. For Giroux’s position is predicat- ty-first century, rights claims and protections ed on the political uses of images of suffering are still largely enforceable only through the and Agamben’s position rehearses the trap of sovereign body of the nation-state. To be sure, rights discourses within Western, capitalist na- the past several decades have witnessed the tion-states, without offering meaningful ways significant growth of human rights norms and to escape that trap. Until such a moment as mechanisms. Nevertheless, what remains un- the demise of the nation-state, we need to pay reconciled is the tension between the concept more attention to the structural and institu- of universal personhood on which many human tional logics of human rights within it. This age rights frameworks are based and the legal and of migration sees nation-states of the Global social conditions of territorial sovereignty that North adhering to the normative position that typically limit their force. rights are natural possessions of its citizens, Arendt, who saw clearly the tension be- fortified by an imagined homology between the tween the universalist aspirations of human geographic border and the reciprocal social rights discourse and the local and particular relationships of a nation. political conditions needed to make them In order to introduce the concept of ethical enforceable, knew firsthand that meaningful territorialism and to explore the enduring links rights protections are predicated upon belong- between ground, citizenship, and rights that ing to a political community. Rights guarantees animate her concept, Linda Bosniak turns to are chimerical unless they are coupled with a mostly forgotten moment of political the- collective political participation. Against the ater. In 2013, US Senator Rand Paul staged a background of Arendt’s skeptical diagnosis, thirteen-hour filibuster opposing the confir- human rights advocates have championed the mation of John Brennan as the new director potentials of video and photography, when tak- of the US Central Intelligence Agency.9 At en up by the oppressed, to offer a meaningful stake for Paul was the integrity of the Fifth form of resistance to political excommunica- Amendment, which guarantees American cit- tion. Henry Giroux, for example, suggests that izens the right to due process under federal if rightlessness is predicated upon political law. Paul believed that the protection of due exclusion, then video can aid liberatory proj- process was placed at risk by Brennan, who, ects when it makes suffering visible across as National Security Advisor, had overseen the political borders. For him, video offers in this 2011 drone assassination of US citizen Anwar way agency and the possibility of inclusion al-Awlaki, a suspected terrorist living in Yemen. for those without rights. But like Arendt, oth- As Paul continued on the Senate floor, it be- ers have taken up a more critical position. came clear, however, that his sympathies did Philosopher Giorgio Agamben has argued not lie with al-Awlaki, nor did he believe that that wherever videos broadcast depictions of al-Awlaki deserved protection under the Fifth distant suffering, they only serve to reaffirm Amendment. Rather, he demanded to know if the very futility of rights discourse that Arendt the al-Awlaki operation provided a precedent highlighted.8 Agamben resorts to the metaphor for the government to kill citizens at home of the concentration camp to articulate his within the territorial boundaries of the United more fatalist view of media’s role in perpetu- States. It was only to the latter prospect that ating, rather than alleviating, the plight of the the Kentucky Senator expressed horror. already excluded. Paul’s filibuster offers a compelling mo- Without disputing Agamben’s and Giroux’s ment to reflect upon how a person’s perceived assertions that the recording and broadcast location informs their ability to claim rights, of shocking and shaming images to distant a relation that is made increasingly complex viewers have played a formative role in con- by the deterritorializing effects of digital me- temporary human rights discourse, it is time to dia and global migrations on our social and

Fox \ 131 national imaginaries.10 Paul’s line of thinking Arendt, universal humanism can’t logically be reflects the common tendency to more strong- defined as natural if nature itself has come ly identify with those who feel closest to us, to be understood through a vision of univer- whether in reality or in representation. As sal humanism. The fallacy of this position, as such, this case represents a normative exam- Arendt pointed out, is that it makes no distinc- ple of ethical territorialism, a spatio-ethical tion between a world populated by one person framework that assumes that a person’s pres- or one billion people. Human nature alone is ence within the territory of a state—whether not a sufficient framework for rights protection national or supranational—“should be the precisely because it is pre-political, because it basis for extending them important rights imagines rights as inherently possessed rather and recognition.”11 From the perspective of than reciprocally guaranteed. contemporary legal theory, it is the citizen of In contrast to the status definition, the a state who is entitled to rights. Engaged in territorial conception of rights turns to an indi- an obligatory network of reciprocal relations vidual’s geographical position inside the state formed across shared territory, the citizens are as the basis for protection. Instead of focus- the fundamental subjects of liberal democratic ing on assigned legal categories, it stresses membership and recognition. In this account, “normative significance of presence.”17 It citizenship is the fundamental subject position emphasizes the physical and social fact of because it establishes the right to have rights, presence in a national space. In this case, be- as Arendt provocatively wrote.12 ing here is the right to have rights. Yet this too But what about non-citizens? How might poses too many problems of boundaries and they be recognized? In response to this ques- distance to provide a meaningful legal frame- tion, two answers most frequently arise.13 work. Ethical territorialism stands for an ideal The first answer embraces a status-based of universality within a territory. It is, howev- conception of rights. In this approach, per- er, typically either coupled with a vision of a sons are afforded rights protection through bounded territorial community within which their recognized legal status. The second inclusion is to take place (thus rendering position endorses a territorial conception of those who remain exterior to the boundary ex- rights based on location. It is the status argu- cluded), or, its universalist aspirations exceed ment that prevails under the 1948 Universal its enforceability or the framework of a shared Declaration of Human Rights. But as Arendt social identity that supports it. Bosniak calls noted in The Origins of Totalitarianism, the this the “hard-outside/soft-inside” problem.18 status argument’s claim for the right to have The imagined bond of shared soil that unites a rights presents more problems than it solves.14 nation is predicated on a set of boundaries and For one thing, “the right to have rights” ac- borders. Boundaries can always be extended corded by collective membership makes little in order to offer greater inclusion, but once sense outside of a community through which everywhere becomes a territory of inclusion, to secure those rights, and in the mid-twen- the concept of the territory becomes stretched tieth century there were no supra-national well past its utility. communities of legal inclusion and enforce- The merging of global humanitarian concern ment outside of the nation-state. Thus, while and audiovisual technologies that connect human rights were designed to be a principle distant and dispersed peoples signals a spatial advantage of all citizens, “they risked becom- reconfiguration in practice that emerging hu- ing the last chance” of all those humans who man rights discourses had relied on in theory. did not enjoy the protection of the state.15 In the long-standing absence of meaningful Second, Arendt highlights the obvious tau- international treaty bodies to enforce global tology embedded in the phrasing “the right human rights abuses, monitoring duties have to have rights,” arguing that in this framing largely fallen “to journalists, filmmakers, and humanity has “in effect assumed the role human rights organizations from international formerly ascribed to nature or history.”16 For NGOs to local grass-roots social movements

Fox \ 132 who use cameras to record abuses and appeal enforcing rights claims. Burke would add that to action.”19 Human rights media scholar Leshu the Rights of Man were abstractions because Torchin sees such a formation as a crystal- they obscured the real source of modern au- lization of precisely the type of mediascape thority, which was located in what he viewed that informs anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s as the unquestionable authority of the na- influential demand for new post-national dis- tion-state. However, where Arendt invited her courses that express the textures of translocal readers to take seriously the active construc- cultures.20 For Appadurai, the political agen- tion of new institutions that can enforce the cy given to the concepts of culture, ethnicity, rights of the stateless, Burke believed that the territory, and locality is neither natural nor Rights of Man were to be dismissed altogeth- inevitable, but stems from the primacy these er because they only echoed what the nation concepts have been given in public discourse already naturally provided all of its citizens. as narrative frames for contemporary culture.21 For Arendt, rights are made, not had. For Burke, Regardless of their origins, such concepts rights are always already had by those in for Appadurai are no longer able to describe the privileged position of full citizen. Arendt contemporary realities characterized by the offered her readers no clear path to the alter- deterritorializing forces of mass migration and native institutions and structures of safeguard new media technologies.22 that might transform new ethical imaginaries The concept of ethical territorialism then into legal realities. Meanwhile, Burke’s faith complicates the relationship between the was well placed, because the sovereign na- global circuits of human rights media and new tion still remains the dominant legal frame discourses of post-national realities. As tech- for guaranteeing rights, rendering human nological formations, infrastructures of media rights discourse largely redundant. The chasm production and circulation well transcend the remains between social realities, ethical imag- boundaries of particular states. Yet, as discur- inaries, and normative legal frameworks, one sive formations that must respond to actually too frequently bridged by images of atrocity. existing legal mechanisms, humanitarian media is nevertheless committed to reconciling the THE CONVENTIONS OF ATROCITY ethical tensions provoked by the perception IMAGERY of distance. To the extent that global systems of media circulation allow for a rehabilitation Contrary to decades of work by documentary of ethical and legal concepts of society by and photography scholars who have chal- extending the possibilities of civil inclusion, lenged documentary’s immediate relationship the ethical force of such systems remain to be to the real, conventional atrocity imagery reconciled against preexisting systems such still turns on the erasure of its own marks of as the nation-state.23 Thus, humanitarian video mediation in order to produce what cinema of distant suffering does more to reproduce scholar Pooja Rangan calls a “presentist pol- than to reconcile the failures of status-based itics of compassion.”25 In the field of human and territorial conceptions of rights. rights and humanitarian media, Rangan and Arendt’s critique of rights foresaw this Leshu Torchin deconstruct the “assumption impasse, one that arises whenever rights are of self-evidence” that demands the ontologi- conceived as something that can be pos- cal presence of the spectator in human rights sessed. Emphasizing her point in the ninth witnessing.26 Despite the complex discursive chapter of Origins, she surprises some of her frameworks that surround their circulation and readers by agreeing with the conservative phi- reception that these scholars trace, atrocity losopher Edmund Burke that universal rights imagery frequently still relies on the logic of of man are nothing but “metaphysical ab- self-presence within the framework of ethical stractions.”24 They were abstractions because territorialism. This logic of presence suggests their allusion to nature obscures the role that that images of violence restore and deliv- intentional acts of political membership play in er witnesses anew to an unmediated flow

Fox \ 133 of relations characterized by a “passion for see this little girl, did not know it hit her or the real,” the social over the systemic, sem- destroyed the world in which she lived. This is blance over resemblance, and the universal what terrorism is all about. The impersonal as- over the political.27 As a practice reliant on pect of it.”30 Today, the atrocity image is more the perception of proximity, atrocity imag- often produced by cameras built into weapons ery must overcome the double terrain of the systems themselves, making it harder to po- photograph; that is, the spatial and temporal sition the camera as posterior and responsive interval between the recording and exhibition to events. Lens-based images have become of a historical event that figures so centrally in integral components in the routine operation the ontology of photography. In my view, the of atrocity. They don’t capture unimaginable authenticating forms of immediacy that mark events which then shock us into action, so atrocity photography’s perceived proximity to much as they have become constituent com- the real need to be reconciled with a similar ponents in the routine operations of atrocity. tautological recourse to nature that informs This was the case in the drone missile as- the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human sassination of Anwar al-Awlaki, in which the Rights. Like the UN declaration, conventional camera affixed to the drone simultaneously atrocity imagery relies on an exceptional logic performed targeting and documentary func- that exceeds the medium-specific conditions tions. Nevertheless, the “kid in the plane” in which it was recorded in order to be validat- impulse re-emerges in Rick Rowley and Jeremy ed as a part of a shared territory so that it can Scahill’s 2013 Dirty Wars, a film featuring a then be judged as aberrant within the norma- scene in which viewers look on with extended tive moral framework of that shared territory. family members at home movie footage of a By exceptional, I mean that when images seven-year-old Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki, re- of violence circulate in order to shock view- corded in Colorado when the Al-Awlaki family ers into some form of action, they tend to still lived in the United States.31 The boy was render the perception of the events that they killed in Yemen in a separate drone attack two document as anomalies and unfortunate ex- weeks after the campaign that targeted his ceptions, confirming rather than undermining father. An anonymous US official, seeking to of- the overall integrity of a universalist ethical fer a narrative framework to contextualize the imaginary. Such a logic of exception and ex- government’s assassination of a seven-year- cess is at work wherever atrocity photography old US citizen, built on the if-we-only-knew is said to transcend the capacity of repre- trope when he remarked that “the US govern- sentational language, as in Susan Sontag’s ment did not know that (Abdulrahman) was account of her first encounter with images there.”32 In each of these cases, atrocity pho- from Dachau that “cut me sharply, deeply, tography operates through a paradoxical logic. instantaneously.”28 More recently, feminist It exceeds the capacity of representation by performance scholar Peggy Phelan describes negating its double in order to be validated as her encounter with Abu Ghraib photographs present, as a part of a shared world. Once it is which, in her telling, resist coding and decod- acknowledged as part of a shared world, the ing and which expose an ideological blindness events it contains are deemed an aberration, “that constitutes the very act of seeing.”29 excessive, and apart from that very world it The logic of exception can also be located in claims presence within. If ontological presence the extra-discursive framing of atrocity pho- was perceived, each of these instances seem tographs that seeks after the fact to reconcile to suggest, the events the images contain the spatial disconnect that caused an atrocity would have turned out otherwise. The atroci- in the first place. One example is the caption ties would not have taken place. historian Studs Terkel gave to Nick Ut’s iconic That imaginary of ontological presence is 1972 photograph “Accidental Napalm Attack,” articulated differently in the 2015 online Al in which he surmised that “the kid in that Jazeera America piece of reportage, “Charities plane that dropped the bomb probably didn’t Arrive in Calais to Help Refugees.”33 The video

Fox \ 134 begins with a pan across a dusty landscape of human rights violations, reinforces a sense where numerous migrants have taken up camp, of ontological presence and epistemological accompanied by the voice of an off-camera certainty. Atrocity images in the humanitarian journalist who asks his imagined audience, mode frequently rely on a positivist logic in “What do you say about this?” It is a rhetorical which we can see horror in the image so that question that both demands and precludes a horror is confined to the image’s discursive response to the ethically fraught site of ab- field. Images that violate the perception of jection being described by the camera. He a shared ethical framework are thus able to continues to explain that what elevates the im- produce surplus affect in order to engage the ages of “Eritreans and Ethiopians” on screen potentially disaffected without also produc- to a newsworthy status is that the scene un- ing surplus meaning. Positivism becomes a folds “not in Africa, but in Calais [France].” A containment device in which “the borders of representative for Solidarity International, one the frame” become the “bounds of the dis- of a cluster of on-site NGOs, laments that it is cussion.”34 If atrocity were not self-evident “a failure to have to work on our own territo- in an image, it would require more and more ry,” an effort that he notes the organization is supporting evidence to make its case. How forced to undertake for the first time in its thir- long would it take, we might ask, before an ex- ty-five-year history. It is a curious statement, panding chain of evidence spills into life itself, since the “Calais refugee crisis,” as Al Jazeera transforming the exception that is depicted in describes it, has in fact continued uninterrupt- positivist evidence into the ethical space of ed on French soil for two decades. The visual daily life? rhetoric, then, also forges political technolo- This question animates critic Paul Arthur’s gies of space and time to manage the sense of 2008 Artforum review of Errol Morris’s doc- felt proximity to onscreen migrants, navigating umentary Standard Operating Procedure a relationship that vacillates between a sense (2008).35 Morris’s film examines the infamous of invasiveness and stability. Its geographic photographs from 2004 depicting the tor- proximity to home compels the on-screen an- ture of Iraqi detainees by American soldiers chor’s frustration. Yet, there is still a sense of at the Abu Ghraib prison during the US mili- shared possibility that marks that frustration, tary’s invasion of Iraq. Arthur is perplexed by transforming defeatism into a plea for Western Morris’s focus on a revelation that the man European empathy and response. Calais here who identified himself publicly as the hooded threatens the ethical hierarchy that positions prisoner in a particularly iconic photograph Western Europe and Western humanism as proved not to be the actual victim depict- exterior to sites of abjection. Thus, the rhetor- ed therein. Morris finds this fact compelling ical positioning of crisis as emergency signals because he wishes to demonstrate that these that the phenomenon is neither natural nor atrocity images can “attract false beliefs.”36 naturalized on European soil. If time is a key But Arthur rightly suspects that Morris’s fo- component to naturalization as the production cus on the figure in question blurs the larger of belonging, then crisis as temporal rupture picture. “Really,” Arthur asks? He continues, compels an ethical obligation without shatter- “I thought the images under consideration . . ing the imagined normative ethical framework . reveal more about policy than about episte- that informs that obligation. mology, more about state-sponsored barbarity A moment later, the report frames a close than about media deception.”37 Arthur’s exas- up of a medical worker applying ointment to peration reflects a desire to materialize a set a migrant’s gangrenous foot. The network’s of politics that he locates in the Abu Ghraib visual emphasis on the gangrenous foot also imagery, not visibly present but crystallized by reminds us, like “Accidental Napalm Attack” the larger political forces that the photograph and the Abu Ghraib images, of the insistence condenses. He longs for a politics that can’t be upon positivism in atrocity media. Positivism, kept at a distance nor confined to the edges responding to the demand for visible evidence of the image. Morris doesn’t argue for fewer

Fox \ 135 photographs. Rather, he wants more images actions that work toward a world in which with more solid “chains of custody,” episte- everyone can legitimately claim the right to mological operations that ensure the temporal, dignity in legally and culturally mediated forms spatial, and descriptive registers of the image of representation. from recording to reception.38 But we don’t This more dynamic approach to status need more images. What is needed, of course, invites recognition that alternative forms of is less state-sanctioned torture. Insofar as an image cultures that do human rights work aesthetics of positivism proposes to offer a already exist, even if they are not recognized solution to the decontextualizing technological as such. One example might come by way effects of modernity, it is one more politi- of the January 2017 protests at international cal technology that is seldom recognized as airports that came in reaction to the new US such. As a conceptual approach to articulating president’s ban on immigrants from predom- presence, it operates in tandem with other inantly Muslim-identifying countries. Tens of concepts of belonging such as native/invasive, thousands of protestors across the United nature/naturalization, and ethical territorialism. States swiftly responded to an impromptu call made by organizers via social media platforms UPDATING THE STATUS OF RIGHTS to occupy dozens of airport terminals where the administration’s xenophobic policies were “The calamity of the rightless,” in Arendt’s taking effect. Thousands of photos and videos phrasing, plays out over and again wherever shared by protestors, registering their partic- human rights discourse relies upon images ipation in this collective action, testify to its of suffering to summon concern from distant power and potential, but also its real limits. viewers.39 One proposal is to recognize for- Power, because it was a moment in which mal approaches to human rights imagery that rights claims were pictured not at the site of picture rights not as possessions to be had their loss but at the sites where they could be or have lost, but rather as actions to be won collectively enforced, and because the perfor- and maintained. At a moment when social mativity of the demand for maintaining rights media platforms have dramatically increased recognition to non-citizens of color was not many viewers’ exposure to human rights ap- merely performative. The demand was accom- peals from across the globe, it is fitting make panied by the force of thousands of bodies this distinction through two uses of the term in airport terminals. It was limited in its effect status. because to be successful in the long term, In nondemocratic systems of governance, the performative dimension of the protests constitutions often do little more than en- must be recognized by a sustaining external shrine the status of those who have already power. Another example might be found in been historically vested with authority and the hundreds of videos circulated online by power over a society. For Arendt, this is Abounaddara itself, the film collective that precisely the failure of the United Nations’ emerged with the onset of the Syrian uprising, Universal Declaration of Human Rights: it and one whose prodigious output between secures the status of those who already have 2011 and 2017 formed a counter-archive to rights while the image of suffering demon- popular documentary and broadcast journalism strates the inescapable reality of the sufferer depictions of the war. The collective’s goal has who lacks status. Democratically consti- not been to memorialize the past nor to render tuted societies, on the other hand, involve the immediacy of the Syrian present, but to frameworks for transforming the historically create forward-looking images of a potential powerless from the subjects to the agents of Syrian future characterized by the collective political power. But status cannot simply be strength of a diverse population. And this given, constitutionally or otherwise. It has to strength, the collective argues, is buttressed be maintained and continually renewed. Status by the external force of viewing publics across must constantly be updated through collective the globe whenever they refuse to participate

Fox \ 136 in the uptake of images of violence broadcast the work of Abounaddara, recipient of the 2014- by human rights and journalistic outlets alike. 2016 Vera List Center Prize for Art and Politics. Thus, while their hundreds of videos are much too diverse in form and content to character- ENDNOTES ize, what links them all is their refusal to show images of bodily harm, their lack of attribu- 1—The Abounadddara Collective, “A Right tion to single authors, and their absence of to the Image for all: A concept paper for a geographic and identitarian specificity. These coming revolution,” Vera List Center. http:// gestures, for the collective, challenge the link www.veralistcenter.org/media/files/24f5a- between territory and belonging by subduing e024cdca7b1ca9c5c572cd14eb4.pdf. the contextual information that might inform 2—Bonnie Honig, “Three Models viewers’ senses of ethical and physical dis- of Emergency Politics,” Boundary tance. “Images of war are images that wage 2 41, no. 2 (2014): 46. war,” Abounaddara argues, when the abjection frequently contained in war reportage reaffirms 3—Ibid. the violent power of the regime that Syrian 4—Pooja Rangan, Immediations: The revolutionaries sought to overthrow.40 Images Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary of atrocity wage war too when they are re- (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 1. duced to their evidentiary uses, and when they uphold instead of challenge legally defined 5—Linda Bosniak, “Soil and borders of political belonging. Citizenship,” Fordham Law Review With these two brief examples, I intend 82, no. 5 (2014): 2069–75. neither to create an equivalence between 6—Hannah Arendt, The Origins of them nor to valorize the makers responsible Totalitarianism, second ed. (New for them. Rather, I reference them to highlight York: Meridian, 1968), 282. the contingent role that images can play in catalyzing or maintaining particular forms of 7—See Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: political organization and recognition in rela- Human Rights in History (Cambridge: tion to political crisis. Arendt warned readers Harvard University Press, 2010). against recognizing equality though sameness, 8—See Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man through images of dispossession and abjec- and Animal, trans. Kevin Attel (Stanford, tion as signs of undifferentiated suffering, or CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). through guarantees that precede one’s encounter with the difference of others. Through 9—Bosniak, “Soil and Citizenship.” very different aesthetic modes and in different 10—This is not to diminish the ex- political contexts, these brief examples each tent to which ethnicity and al-Awlaki’s confront the dominance that ethical territori- Muslim identity facilitates the ease alism still holds in the imagination of Western with which Paul renders al-Awlaki ex- nation-states. At stake in these emerging terior to the United States. Rather, it forms of image cultures are gestures towards further highlights the ways that eth- more meaningful, if fragile and contingent, nicity arises when the perceived link conceptions of rights, what it means to have between culture and territory is broken. them, the role of images in animating them, and the empowerment of people, inside as well 11—Linda Bosniak, “Ethical Territoriality as outside the boundaries of the photographic and the Rights of Immigrants,” Amsterdam frame, in securing them. Law Forum 1, No. 1 (2008), http://amster- damlawforum.org/article/view/54/73. An earlier version of this essay was com- 12—Arendt, Origins, 296. missioned by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School to critically examine 13—Ibid.

Fox \ 137 14—Arendt, Origins, 290-302. Abu Ghraib Photographs,” in Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis, eds. 15—Moyn, The Last Utopia, 12. Geoffrey Batchen, Mick Gidley, Nancy 16—Arendt, Origins, 298. K. Miller, and Jay Prosser (London: Reaktion Books, 2014), 55. 17—Bosniak, “Soil and Citizenship”: 2071 30—Studs Terkel in Time: Great 18—Linda Bosniak, “Being Here: Ethical Images of the 20th Century (New Territoriality and the Rights of Migrants,” York: Time Books, 1999). Theoretical Inquiries in Law 8 (2007): 389. 31—Dirty Wars. Dir. Richard Rowley. 2013. 19—Leshu Torchin, Creating the Witness: Documenting Genocide on Film, Video, 32—"U.S. airstrike that killed American and the Internet (Minneapolis: University teen in Yemen raises legal, ethical ques- of Minnesota Press, 2012), 4. tions," Washington Post, October 23, 2013. 20—Torchin, Creating the Witness, 12. 33—See http://america.aljazeera.com/ watch/shows/live-news/2015/7/ 21—Arjun Appadurai, Modernity charities-hand-out-food-during- at Large: Cultural Dimensions of calais-migrant-crisis.html. Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 34—Ariella Azoulay, “The Execution Portrait” in Picturing Atrocity: 22—Appadurai’s argument also rever- Reading Photographs in Crisis,eds. berates in Abounaddara’s position that Geoffrey Batchen, Mick Gidley, Nancy they will not participate in any exhi- K. Miller and Jay Prosser (London: bitions that contextualize their work Reaktion Books, 2012), 251. through a primarily geographic frame. 35—Paul Arthur, "The Horror: Paul 23—As a visual practice of representing Arthur on Errol Morris's Standard non-white and/or non-Western peoples, Operating Procedure," Artforum this position does not operate in contra- 46, no. 8 (2008): 111. diction to the writings of Trinh T. Minh-ha and others whose vital work reveals the 36—Errol Morris, Errol Morris: othering capacities of Western practic- Believing Is Seeing (Observations on es of cultural representation. Rather, it the Mysteries of Photography) (New argues that the logic of human rights York: Penguin Press, 2011): 92. media operates through Michel Foucault’s 37—Ibid. notion of biopower, as a process of inclusion, as much as it does by exclusion. 38—Torchin, Witness, 154. 24—Edmund Burke, Reflections on the 39—Arendt, Origins, 135. Revolution in France, ed. Frank M. Turner 40—Abounaddara Collective, para- (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). phrasing Serge Daney in Jason Fox 25—Rangan, Immediations, 1. and the Abounaddara Film Collective, “Representational Regimes,” World 26—Torchin, Creating the Witness, 145. Records 1. See Serge Daney, “Before and 27—Alain Badiou, The Century After the Image,” trans. Melissa McMahon, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 55. Discourse 21, no. 1 (1999): 181–190. 28—Ibid. 29—Peggy Phelan, “Atrocity and Action: The Performative Force of the

Fox \ 138 \ Volume 4 \ ARENDT’S PHOTOGRAPHIC “RIGHT TO HAVE RIGHTS”

Hannah Arendt argued that the principle of human rights formulated during the Enlightenment has proven incompatible with modern ideas of national sovereignty. In Arendt’s view, sovereignty presumed compli- ance between citizenship and rights: without citizenship, no rights. Such logic has reduced stateless humans, as well as prisoners and victims of war crimes, to the site of naked life. It is not only the citizenship but the very humanity of such groups that is at stake: “the world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human,” Arendt wrote.1 “A man who is nothing but a man has lost the qualities which make it possible for other people to treat him as a fellow-man.”2 The resulting con- VISUALIZING THE RIGHTS OF THE dition is one of absolute exposure. No natural DEAD: PHOTOGRAPHY AFTER ARENDT \ law defined by philosophy, such as the prohi- bition of killing, is capable of overcoming the CECILIA SJÖLHOLM orders of modern lawmaking. No philosophical concept, moreover, including the idea of the proletariat, offers much but reification of naked life as a social category. Responding to this lack, Arendt argued that the principle of human rights ought never to be founded on a specific content but that the principle itself should be displaced by the “the right to have rights.” This means that all—with or without the definition as human—should have the right to belong to an organized political community.3 Arendt based her assertion on the Roman tradition, where the law is an outcome of the political negotiations of the res publica: the public space of political life. Greek lawmaking was no less important. It presented law as a pre-political condition for the production of sovereign space. Law is like a wall or barrier: “this wall-like law was sacred, but only the enclosure was political.”4 In other words, the law is a condition for that which takes place in a political community. But a political community is not a nation, or a state. It is a space which makes lives visible. Today, the camera is a decisive tool for the appearance of those who are not read- ily recognized to possess rights, those who have been excluded, banned, or otherwise

Sjölholm \ 139 denigrated—refugees, victims of war. Susie foregrounded a critical distinction between life Linfield is one of many scholars who describes considered as zoe, that is biological fact, or an intrinsic relation between the widespread and life considered as bios, the life of the indi- images of human suffering: photojournal- vidual and political community.7 To Agamben, ism has “globalized our consciences.”5 naked life, or zoe, is the kind of life that is Conscience or empathy, however, is not the relegated at will to the sovereign power. Yet issue as Arendt might see it; the question is even naked life, in Arendt’s framework, must rather how we are to conceive of the rights have the right to have rights. The idea conveys of the bodies depicted. Documentation of war a certain inalienability: we cannot abide the in the work of the photographers Ron Haviv murder or mutilation a living body, no matter to and Nina Berman, for example, shows that whom the body belongs, no matter its gender the camera is a provisional and imperfect tool or its origins. Sometimes, however, the rights for denoting legal standing. As Ariella Aïsha of a body itself, devoid of life, are also called Azoulay has argued, we must today talk of into question. Sometimes the dead evince the an extended, photographic citizenry, a “civil rights they held, or should have held, at the contract of photography,” which serves as an time they were killed. Surveying the use of life- alternative to the visual regimes of modern less bodies in artistic works—John Duncan’s power. Photography offers the potential, in its cadaver performances in counterpoint with widespread use, to overcome the distinctions Teresa Margolles’ investments in the full hu- imposed by national sovereignty and sub- manity of disappeared persons—helps us to jection.“The civil contract of photography,” develop ideas about the relationship between Azoulay writes, “enables citizens and noncit- appearance, law, and aesthetic judgment. izens alike to produce grievances and claims While Duncan’s work renders the body a mere that otherwise can’t be seen and to impose object, Margolles’ seeks to make the past lives them by means of, through, and on the citizen- of the dead appear to us. ry of photography.”6 Her work prompts us to consider the potential judgment made possible PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE PAIN OF by aesthetic perception. We need to conceive OTHERS of the aesthetic not only in our apprehension of an image but by way of accompanying The Universal Declaration of Human Rights narratives and counter-images. Judgment was forwarded by the United Nations in 1948. necessitates recognition that an image exists It states that everyone has the right to life, in the context of a political community. The liberty, and security, that no one should be camera may be fully capable of making rights subjected to torture, or to cruel, inhuman, or appear, not only in the sense that it may depict degrading treatment or punishment, and that obvious injustices and violations, but insofar everyone should be recognized as a per- as it can pose questions of who counts as hu- son before the law. War crimes, in turn, have man and who is voided of worth and symbolic been defined by international law ever since value. One may, in other words, understand the nineteenth century, conceived to protect the debate over the right to have rights via civilians and prisoners of war against torture, an aesthetic framework that determines the sexual violence, and dispossession. The laws value of life, whether it is imbued with political against war crimes and the Declaration state meaning or left naked, unprotected beyond the plainly that human beings should be protected horizon of full humanity. by the rule of law and thus granted absolute To this, however, we must add the com- dignity. Sharon Sliwinski has contended that plicated fact that it is not clear how we are the Declaration was partly motivated by the to treat the rights of bodies that are no lon- images that reached the world community ger living. How are we to perceive the role with the opening of Nazi concentration camps of the dead in conceptions of political agen- after the Shoah. As Sliwinski argues, the his- cy? Both Arendt and Giorgio Agamben have tory of human rights is a “richly illustrated

Sjölholm \ 140 one.” In the long postwar period, much of the for the images. But this idea derives from discussion around human rights focused on a rather narrow definition of aesthetics. As the ethical implications of photography.8 In On Azoulay has argued, by contrast, images are Photography, Susan Sontag highlighted the aesthetic in the sense that they are produced relation between suffering and empathy: pho- and seen within a series of overlapping visu- tographic images imply “a grammar, and even al and political traditions. We may add to this more importantly, an ethics of seeing.”9 At the that while the original conception of “aesthet- same time, Sontag argued that photography ic judgment,” to be found in Immanuel Kant’s and its reception constitute an act of “non-in- Critique of Judgment, depends on “disinter- tervention”—indeed our perception of an estedness”—the freedom of the sensing and image connotes our complicity with the world thinking subject in relation to the object per- as it is. Ever since Sontag, we have been dis- ceived—this necessitates some recognition of cussing various notions of ethical responses to what the image fails to disclose. photographic images of cruelty, suffering, and To Georges Bataille, what any image dis- loss. We ask whether it is morally acceptable closes is a play of life and death. In his to look upon dead bodies. Is it exploitative, or speculations on the cave paintings in Lascaux, can it awaken our desire to act in the name of Bataille argued that an exuberant joy of life just causes? Susie Linfield, following Sontag, expressed in the paintings (sometimes called has argued that photographers cannot show the birth of art) induced a fear of death, which human rights, only “what the absence of such was in turn looked upon with awe. To Bataille, rights does to a person.”10 Over the last few the faces of the dead represented an origi- years, however, there has emerged an abiding nal version of a sacred object.12 It is not by interest in the relation between photography chance that so many images in contemporary and rights, thus shifting our perspective from global society evoke violence. Can the reverse an ethics of seeing to a politics of visuality. also be true? Do images of violence provoke As both Charlotte Klonk and Ariella Aïsha questions about the protection of life? The Azoulay have demonstrated, today everyone Norwegian state tried to stop the spread of is a participant in the world of images. We images of women who were beheaded by share responsibility for what is shown across ISIS; these acts of violence had been per- mediated platforms and relationships.11 We formed precisely for the sake of their own participate in the reception of videos that documentation and dissemination. The image document beheadings, violations, and dese- of death—or more precisely the fact of death crations. In sharing responsibility, furthermore, relayed in images—was displaced by the func- we displace the individual act of seeing with tional and thus political import of the image’s an attention to the world of photography as a circulation. mutual civic context. If we look at the body of A photograph, in short, cannot be reduced a beheaded victim, our own emotions are, in to what occurs within the frame, nor to the other words, not the pivotal issue. What is at subject who views the image. What we see stake is rather the fact that a violation against is not an act perpetrated against this or that international law may have been committed, person, subject, people, or identity, but an and that we, as spectators, in the act of con- enveloping situation which implicates multiple suming these images, are made complicit in parties. We learn to conceptualize and reflect the very violation. Why? We see the images critically upon our own participation in view- and in seeing them may imbibe the specta- ing the image. Following Arendt, we might see cle of violence as passive voyeurs. As photos ourselves as in this way already embedded in become canonized, furthermore, they attain a world of appearances. To Arendt, the spec- a certain distance. Sontag refers to this dis- tator who seeks to make a judgment engages tance as an “aestheticized” response—we use the world through a pose of disinterestedness, judgment to cleave our instinctual reactions but importantly this neutrality does not disarm and thus to absolve ourselves of responsibility the spectator but guides her preparedness to

Sjölholm \ 141 act.13 This means that aesthetic judgment, in purchase in court, must be rethought.17 Haviv’s an Arendtian reading, has to do with a sense of critics allege that the photographer was an sharing and potentiality within the context of agent at the scene, rather than a mere onlook- a dynamic political community. In other words, er unaware of his influence on actual events.18 the process of aesthetic perception in this It is all but impossible to conceive of any context does not connote a moral distance, as photographer, or any photograph, that does Sontag is assuming, but a dynamic set of per- not represent some kind of position, agency, or spectives, choices, and investments. referential field. Sometimes these aspects of the photograph are not even conscious choic- PHOTOGRAPHY AND WAR CRIMES es. Azoulay has argued that photographs of the rubble that covered the mass graves in Berlin Given the extraordinary spread of images from in 1945 disclosed certain facts that were not war zones and other situations of crisis, our directly shown—the images were of an effort treatment of images depicting the violation of by Nazi troops to destroy corroborating evi- human bodies has become a pressing juridi- dence.19 The images imply that war crimes had cal issue. Yet it remains difficult to determine taken place, but do not identify the nature of how a court will act. An image may convey these crimes. The photographs contain mean- one thing but its determining social context ing without eliciting pity, empathy, or other may suggest another. It has been argued, for emotional responses. In this way they could example, that the war in former Yugoslavia pro- be said to perform their politics rather than to duced a new role for the image of war, since document a specific political activity. photographs were admitted as evidence in Consider again the context of the Yugoslav war crimes trials.14 Litigators employed pho- Wars, during which sexual violence came to tographs by the photographer Ron Haviv, who the attention of the world as a weapon of war. had become internationally celebrated for his This was the first time that international law documentation of killings, desecrated bod- recognized rape as a crime against humanity, ies, and the erection of concentration camps. following the Geneva Convention.20 This de- Haviv’s images were submitted as forensic velopment occurred in light of the widespread evidence to the International Criminal Tribunal reporting the stories of rape survivors, which in the former Yugoslavia’s case against Arkan were in turn collected and submitted to the in 2000. Haviv himself abstained from giv- courts by human rights organizations, reporting testimony in order to avoid endangering ers, and photographers. The making visible of war photographers in the future.15 The imag- sexual violence through the documentation of es would presumably speak for themselves. storytelling about rape drew the world’s atten- Despite their evidentiary value, however, the tion not only to the suffering that took place images quickly became subject to debate: but to the trauma experienced by those who a photograph of the Serbian concentration were affected. In the work of photographer camps in Trnopolje, for example, was ques- Nina Berman, the sharing of personal narrative tioned because it was said to evoke the was shown to bear an equal weight to the pho- Shoah and thus seemed to demand an implicit tograph itself. Berman’s work from the war in comparison.16 The photograph’s unintended Yugoslavia consisted in documenting not only reference, while giving meaning to what it individual victims, but composite stories which contained, potentially obstructed its purchase were presented in courts and human rights in its immediate context of the trial. If a photo- commissions. In this sense, what is depicted is graph points too much to its referent, it risks not helplessness, but humanity hitherto de- reducing the complexities of what it shows. nied. The work made legible the right to have The resulting ambiguities threaten the notion rights, and did so within a legal framework that that photographic images contain verifiable made justice possible.21 truths. The supposed political neutrality of the document, which is vital to its evidentiary

Sjölholm \ 142 WHEN THE DEAD CANNOT SPEAK FOR at a performance venue, where it lamented THEMSELVES that Duncan had been “severely humiliat- ed by the board of IASPIS” and would have But how are we to address rights of bodies in to “survive the next five months without a art and photography when no law is applica- contract.”23 Eventually, the board settled ble? And how are we to deal with a notion of financially with Duncan, although he was not rights that cannot be claimed by the victim, allowed back into the program. (He returned in but the body that has passed beyond even the 2008 with a show, The Gauntlet, on perception, state that Arendt and Agamben call zoe, or exposure, and seeing.)24 Duncan’s defenders mere biological being? One example of a work found Blind Date challenging and provocative, that presents a body without rights in a way ultimately mounting a defense of the artist’s that appalled many can be found in the work of right to free expression. But these defend- American artist John Duncan. At the end of the ers had nothing to say about the rights of the 1970s, Duncan bought a corpse in Mexico, had body of the dead woman. Not once were the sex with it and recorded the sounds. (In addi- possible legal ramifications of his act of using tion to the sexual act, Duncan had a vasectomy a corpse brought into discussion. The corpse performed on himself and recorded these of an anonymous woman was thus presented sounds as well). The resulting sonic trac- again as affording no civic or political atten- es are at the core of the work Duncan titled tion. The woman, or her body, were denied Blind Date. The sounds are supplemented by recognition. Certainly such denial has much a photographic image. Duncan explained the to do with gender, race, and nationality: the motivations behind Blind Date in this way: corpse of an anonymous Mexican woman was offered no value beyond its relation to a cele- I wanted to punish myself as thoroughly brated American artist. There is a morbid irony as I could. I'd decided to have a vasecto- involved in the support of the group’s appeal my, but that wasn't enough: I wanted my to Duncan’s humiliation by the IASPIS, and in last potent seed to be spent in a dead the expression of fear over how Duncan would body. I made arrangements to have sex survive the next months without remuneration. with a cadaver. I was bodily thrown out of The absent presence of another’s death several sex shops before meeting a man (and thus a recognition of her life) appears who set me up with a mortician's assis- in related artistic practices to quite different tant in a Mexican border town.22 ends. Teresa Margolles has exhibited body parts and images of victims which had hitherto On his webpage, Duncan describes his art as been suppressed from public view. Through an experience of a pure overflow of life, spill- her employment at a morgue, Margolles gained ing into the awe of the dead. This is an idea access to human remains that told of crim- of aesthetics perhaps inspired by Bataille’s inal violence. Her work thus offered a kind reflection on the awesome power waged by of social critique. For example her Cards for images of death—but Bataille took us back Cutting Cocaine (1998) were produced for the to the cave paintings of Lascaux, and did not upper-class kids of Mexico City who employ discuss the bodies of his time. Duncan’s work the cards to cut up and handle the drug. Her was different. work Dermis (1995) consists of a bed sheet Decades later, when Duncan was an artist that shows the bloody stains of two embrac- in residence at IASPIS in Stockholm, the insti- ing lovers who had taken their own lives. What tution’s board learned about the work, which remained on the sheet was the direct trace was still advertised at the artist’s website, and of two dead bodies. Formally, Margolles’ use he was thrown out of the program. This caused of visual and material traces may not be so an uproar among many artists in Stockholm. different from Duncan’s use of sound, but the The resulting Committee of Support for John governing context could not be more differ- Duncan’s Stay in Sweden arranged an evening ent: Margolles is herself a Mexican woman

Sjölholm \ 143 working within the idiom of loss and recovery victims who have never been afforded rights which characterizes life in the country for but who, through her work, are made to appear such a long time and which has in some sense as subjects. Margolles could be said to bring been exacerbated by the cavalier treatment the bodies from a state of zoe to that of bios: of disappeared bodies by Duncan. In his book they are no longer merely a number in a tale on contemporary Mexican art, the critic Ruben told many times about the disappeared wom- Gallo has stated that the traffic in bodies en of Ciudad Juárez, but individual subjects and body parts has become a dimension of with personal histories. The work provokes the Mexican life especially since the liberalization audience to imagine the lives of young women of the nation’s economy in the 1990s.25 As lost to violence. Not to affect a moral instinct, Gallo argues, Margolles’ work must be under- but to redress the violations of individuals. stood from such a point of view. He points out Making the faces of these girls appear is an that although Margolles has drawn criticism expression of the right to have rights: to be from international art audiences, this has sel- honored as the victims of individuated acts of dom been the case in Mexico. Margolles does violence, rather than as casual throwaways in a not degrade the bodies she uses, but evokes a massive, global circulation of trafficked bodies. sense of their personal histories and thus the Arendt’s evocation of the right to have rights affordance of recognition through the para- compels us to consider photography and art digm of rights. The violence that is evoked in practices—not simply as evidentiary documen- Margolles’ work is thus formulated within a tation but as gathering points for narratives, negotiated political community. This way, the demonstrations, and other kinds of aesthetic young women will not only be remembered as elaboration. The circulation of disputed images objects of love and affection, but through legal of violence reveals the generalized complicity recompense for their unjustifiable deaths. of art audiences and institutions. Visualizing Margolles’ work is always indexical, and al- the rights of the dead calls us to undo law’s ways metonymic: she would never exhibit a full complicity with power in the context of nation- corpse, only memories of it. Her photographic al sovereignty. Our capacity to negotiate such installation at the 2019 Venice Biennale, La rights needs to develop, bringing the spectator Busqueda (The Search), originally shown in beyond her private sense of morality towards a 2014, demonstrates this quality. At the fore- more distinct sense of what communal re- front are the faces of young Mexican girls sponsibility might entail. and women, their images appearing upon the xeroxed copies of MISSING Posters that adorn city walls and marketplaces. Margolles has situated these posters upon glass panels, all of them placed in a dark room. The installation includes a sound, recorded from a train that cuts across Ciudad Juárez, implying also the location where the girls went missing. What we witness is the result of the violent narcot- ics trade with a specific relation to the city. The women and girls are casualties of that violence. As audiences enter the dark room, they become rattled by the sound of the trains. The sense of place immerses the audience as the faces of the women are illuminated. These are not anonymous bodies, the work shows, but persons with names, faces, backgrounds, ages. Each has a day on which she went missing. Margolles uses these materials to speak of the

Sjölholm \ 144 ENDNOTES repercussions of these images, see Martin Lukk and Keith Doubt, “Bearing Witness 1—Hannah Arendt, The Origins and the Limits of War Photojournalism: of Totalitarianism (London: Ron Haviv in Bijeljina,” Human Rights Harvest, 1973), 295-296. Quarterly 37 (2015): 629–636; Ron 2—Ibid., 296–297. Haviv, “Response to Martin Lukk and Keith Doubt,” HRQ 38 (2016): 208–210; and 3—Ibid., 296–297. Martin Lukk and Keith Doubt, “Response 4—Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition to Ron Haviv,” HRQ 38 (2016), 211–216. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 16—Sliwinski, 124. 1998), 64; see also 194–195. 17—Thomas Keenan, “Mobilizing 5—Susie Linfield, The Cruel Shame,” South Atlantic Quarterly 103, nos. Radiance: Photography and Political 2-3 (Spring/Summer, 2004): 435–449. Violence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 46. 18—Lukk and Doubt, 2016. 6—Ariella Azoulay, The Civil 19—Ariella Azoulay, “Rape,” in Visual Contract of Photography (New Global Politics, ed. Roland Bleiker York: Zone Books, 2012), 192. (London: Routledge 2018), 237–244. 7—See Hannah Arendt, Between Past and 20—See for instance Beverly Allen, Rape Future (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), Warfare. The Hidden Genocide in Bosnia- 42; and Giorgio Agamben, Sovereign Herzegovina and Croatia (Minneapolis: Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel University of Minnesota Press, 1996). Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford 21—Kelly Foster, "Lessons from '91— University Press, 1995), 179–193. Documentary Photography From 8—Susan Sliwinksi, Human Rights Ex-Yugoslavia," Ikon Arts Foundation, on Camera (Chicago: University http://ikonartsfoundation.org/ of Chicago Press, 2016), 4. lessons-from-91-documentary-photography-from-ex-yugsolavia/.; see 9—Susan Sontag, On Photography also Nina Berman, ”Bosnia Archive,” (New York: Viking, 1977), 1. November 5, 2010, https://ninaber- 10—Linfield, 37. man.wordpress.com/2010/11/05/ bosnia-archive-tuzla-hospital/. 11. See Charlotte Klonk, Terror: When Images Become Weapons (Berlin: 22—See John Duncan, Blind Date, http:// Fischer Verlag, 2017) and Azoulay, johnduncan.org/events/blind_date.html. The Civil Contract of Photography. 23—Ingrid Engarås, “Committee of 12—Georges Bataille, Prehistoric Painting: Support for John Duncan’s Stay in Lascaux or the Birth of Art, trans. Austryn Sweden,” March 9, 2002, https:// Wainhouse (Geneva: Skira, 1955), 31. www.fylkingen.se/node/636. 13—See Cecilia Sjöholm, Doing 24—See Fargfabriken, “The Gauntlet,” Aesthetics With Arendt (New York: Feb 2, 2002, https://fargfabriken.se/ Columbia University Press, 2015). sv/arkiv/item/129-john-duncan. 14—See Ron Haviv, Blood and Honey: 25—Ruben Gallo, New Tendencies A Balkan War Journal (Brooklyn: TV in Mexican Art: The 1990’s (London: Books / Umbrage Editions, 2000). Palgrave McMillan, 2004), 116–120. 15—For a discussion on the legal

Sjölholm \ 145

OUR VIOLENT COMMONS

"IMPERIAL VIOLENCE IS OUR COMMONS, OUR FORM OF BEING TOGETHER." – ARIELLA AÏSHA AZOULAY, POTENTIAL HISTORY: UNLEARNING IMPERIALISM

WE INVITE SHORT RESPONSES THAT ENGAGE ARIELLA AÏSHA AZOULAY’S RETHINKING OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN VIOLENCE AND THE COMMONS IN CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL PRODUCTION AND POLITICAL ORGANIZING.

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\ Volume 4 \ A distinction is often made between the natural and the cultural commons: water, air, and earth on one side, and images, texts, artworks, artifacts—everything that can be digitized and museumified—on the other. Like any proposition to cleave nature from culture, this division is untenable, all the more so in this late stage of what Françoise Vergès has labeled the Racial Capitalocene.1 I would like to suggest that a more salient distinction be introduced, in parallel to Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s recalibration of major concepts in political theory—including sovereignty, citizenship, rights, and reparations—between an imperial and a worldly commons.2 Building from Azoulay’s argument that our actually existing commons— whether they are water systems or cultural archives—are constituted by imperial violence, we should ask how to transform imperial public WITNESSING THE WORLDLY WITHIN THE spheres and institutions into worldly spaces of IMPERIAL COMMONS: YAZAN KHALILI’S care and interdependence. HIDING OUR FACES LIKE A DANCING Photography has been a key tool for the im- WIND \ perial enclosure and control of worldly life, but it also holds the potential to challenge imperial KAREEM ESTEFAN principles. Azoulay describes the camera as a technology that has legitimized the violent transformation of shared worlds into imperial territories, of people into refugees or infil- trators, and of the past “into a separate time zone, a tense that lies apart from both present and future.”3 She warns of “[t]he violence of forcing everything to be shown and exhibited to the gaze.”4 Nonetheless, photography, which Azoulay has long theorized as an event and a relational practice rather than merely a tool for producing documents, also carries a “potential of reversibility.”5 Interactions with photography can enable the reversal of the camera shutter and the refusal of the imperial classificatory regime, inviting returns to a worldly commons in which forms of life are not extracted and exposed as images but in which images are intrinsic elements of shared worlds. Uncovering this worldly potential involves reversing what Azoulay calls “the imperial shutter.” For Azoulay, the camera’s shutter is not a mere metaphor for power, but a key element of an apparatus for colonial ordering: the shutter cleaves time, space, and social relations. To reverse this logic would imply

Estefan \ 149 dismantling, or simply refusing, the visual and those of contemporary biometric sur- orders of empire.6 I want to anchor this proj- veillance—an analogy that culminates, in the ect of refusal in my current thinking around video, with the superimposition of cropped Palestinian visual culture and digital media images of masks over the woman’s face. projects that reject colonial mechanisms of The constellation of imagery in Khalili’s vid- visibility and posit opaque, relational forms of eo raises questions about the extent to which bearing witness. imperial techniques of capture and classifi- Consider Palestinian artist Yazan Khalili’s cation connect the histories of museological video Hiding Our Faces Like a Dancing Wind work, photography, and settler colonialism. The (2016). Composed as a screen capture of the masks and figurines that appear in Khalili’s artist’s activities on his laptop computer, the video have been robbed from the worlds in seven-minute video juxtaposes two disparate which they were meaningful—not as objects photographic scenes concerned with imperial for display, but as integral elements of cultural extraction—of images and artworks, identities and spiritual life. Such acts of imperial appro- and forms of life—from a worldly commons. priation are always accompanied by the partial Khalili’s video obliquely narrates the relation- or total destruction of the worlds to which the ship between these forms of the common in a creations belonged. Shorn of their social basis, poetic text slowly typed in a small window at these objects and the worlds they represent- the upper-right corner of the screen. The text ed were condemned to history, converted reads, into static documents to be interpreted from within the imperial commons—for example, all the masks that disappeared from our in Israeli state archives to which Palestinians lives were not recognized as the faces of are denied access.7 Khalili’s video illustrates our ancestors who came from the far- Azoulay’s critique of the imperial shutter away shores of our dreams asking us to through its portrayal of the Palestinian woman recognize them as messages from trees attempting to evade facial recognition technol- looking at us as we feel the pain of not ogy—a metonym for all the modes of biometric being recognized by the thieves who control, data tracking, classification, and sur- stole our faces and left us unrecogniz- veillance to which Palestinians are subjected, able facing the flow of time trying to hide even in humanitarian depictions. our remains with our hands like a danc- Just as an African statuette in a museum vit- ing wind not wanting to have our faces rine is forced to broadcast a generic image of recognized by the cameras that keep a lost past, a photograph of a Palestinian is co- stealing our souls . . . erced into circulation as a generalizable image of victimhood (this is when Palestinian identity In the center of the screen, Khalili plays an is not associated with a culture of violence or iPhone video documenting a young Palestinian simply erased from view).8 In Khalili’s video, woman covering parts of her face with her the refusal of photographic exposure to co- hands in a careful choreography designed to lonial classification and control begins with a thwart the camera’s facial recognition algo- claim to what Édouard Glissant has called “the rithms. Simultaneously, on the left side of the right to opacity.”9 Much scholarly literature screen, Khalili opens a series of digital photo- has turned to Glissant’s writing on opacity as a graphs of indigenous masks and figurines in theory to apply to practices of counter-surveil- museum displays, the glares and reflections lance. But, in my view, the more consequential created by the vitrines visible. Framed by the aspect of his thinking is the potential for interface of an iPhone camera and punctuat- relation without classification and standard- ed by the same yellow square that sometimes ization, which stands in opposition to imperial recognizes the woman’s face, these images regimes of visibility.10 Hiding Our Faces is not provoke a visual analogy between the ex- merely a rejection of surveillance, but a call tractive tendencies of the imperial museum to reorient the politics of appearance beyond

Estefan \ 150 representation, or beyond those temporalities the operation of an “imperial shutter” and identities which the camera has fixed in outside the field of photography as well. place. In thus reversing the imperial shutter, 7—Scholarly literature on the Israeli plun- Khalili projects a Palestinian image in poetic der of Palestinian documents, books, relation to a world ensnared by settler colo- photographs, films, artworks, and an- nialism and its visual conditions. He implies a tiquities is extensive. Azoulay writes solidarity among masked faces—a recognition on the looting of Palestinian archives across time and place that remains illegible to as a key part of the “regime-made di- empire. saster” in Palestine in the “Archives” chapter of Potential History, specifical- ENDNOTES ly pp. 210-220. See also Nur Masalha, 1—Françoise Vergès, “Racial “Appropriating History: Looting of Capitalocene,” Futures of Black Radicalism, Palestinian Records, Archives, and Library eds. Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Collections, 1948-2011,” in The Palestine Lubin (New York: Verso Books, 2017), Nakba: Decolonizing History, Narrating the 72–82. The essay can be read in full Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory (London: online: https://www.versobooks.com/ Zed Books, 2012); and Rona Sela, “Seized blogs/3376-racial-capitalocene. in Beirut: The Plundered Archives of the Palestinian Cinema Institution and Cultural 2—Distinguishing the worldly from the Arts Section,” Anthropology of the Middle imperial in relation to sovereignty, Azoulay East 12, No. 1 (Summer 2017): 83-114. writes, “Worldly sovereignty refers to the persisting and repressed forms and for- 8—I take the phrase from the anthropolo- mations of being in the world, shaped by gist Lori Allen, who has written incisively and through intimate knowledge of the on the impact of NGOization and the world and its secrets, of its multiple nat- rise of a human rights regime on glob- ural, spiritual, political, and cosmological al media representations of Palestinians taxonomies preserved and transmit- and on Palestinian self-representa- ted over generations and shared among tion. See Lori A. Allen, “Martyr Bodies in those entitled and invested to protect the Media: Human Rights, Aesthetics, them. Imperial sovereignty consists of and the Politics of Immediation in the the massive expropriation of people’s Palestinian Intifada,” American Ethnologist skills so as to transform them into gov- 36, No. 1 (Feb. 2009): 161-180. ernable subjects in a differential body 9—Édouard Glissant, “For Opacity,” in politic. Worldly sovereignty consists of Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: University care for the common world in which of Michigan Press, 1997), 189-194. one’s place among others is part of the world’s texture.” Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, 10—As a compelling example of the for- Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism mer tendency, see Zach Blas, “Informatic (New York: Verso Books, 2019), 388. Opacity,” Journal of Aesthetics & Protest 9 (November 2013): 1-14. For a recent 3—Azoulay, Potential History, 6-7. text brimming with theoretical insights 4—Ibid., 5. regarding the poetics and politics of Glissant’s writing on opacity and rela- 5—Ibid., 368. tion, see Kara Keeling, Queer Times, Black 6—Ibid., 5. Because the camera proved Futures (New York: NYU Press, 2019). an essential technology to nineteenth century imperial powers, Azoulay stresses that the camera shutter is not only a metaphor; but she nonetheless identifies

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\ Volume 4 \ An essential component of unlearning imperialism—a project that becomes more urgent each day—is to acknowledge the violence embedded in archives, particularly the archives that the neutral we understand as our cultural commons, and to then envision new ways of being with these cultural objects so as to allow them to speak their own futures. Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s investigation into dynamics of the spatial, temporal, and body politic of these cultural commons often foregrounds physical objects and images, primarily photographic ones. In Jumana Manna’s film A Magical Substance Flows Into Me: The Musical Diversity of Palestine (2015), music is the focus. A catalog of Oriental music from a 1930s radio show by the German Jewish ethnomusi- cologist Robert Lachmann that Manna takes as her subject is a fruitful catalyst for unpacking imperial logics of the archive, spatial regimes, THE TERRITORY OF LISTENING \ and the classifying of subjects according to RACHEL STEVENS their ethnic identities. The performance of multiple diasporic traditions, Manna demonstrates, can counter-map spatial logics in ways that resist the imperial imagination. However, Manna’s film also serves to highlight entanglements of “worldly sovereignty” vs. “imperial citizenship”1 set in the landscapes of Israel and Palestine. Each week Robert Lachmann invited musicians playing traditional Oriental (Arab and Eastern Jewish) music to play on his 1930s radio show, framing the work with informational commentary. Lachmann often used terms like magic, revealing a penchant for exotici- zation or for distancing these practices from modernity. He encouraged “pure, unspoiled . . . local kind of music”2 and advocated against using non-traditional instruments or recording with musical notation. Manna appreciates his labor of love, but is acutely aware that, as the founder of an archive of Oriental music at the Hebrew University, he is aligned with the project of the colonizer—is “part of the knowledge/power nexus of colonialism . . . the system that erased Palestine.”3 In her film, Manna also takes on the role of the archivist, as she travels to different sites to record contemporary examples of each of Lachmann’s subjects. One by one, Manna frees

Stevens \ 153 these pure objects of study from the archive incredible cultures that I am not interest- so we, the viewers of the film, can listen to the ed in erasing. soulful, historical music and witness its performance in the world. In her book Potential Beyond a simple liberation or recuperation, History, Azoulay frequently evokes Audre however, Manna’s work is bound up in drawing Lorde’s message that you cannot dismantle attention to the violence that circumscribes the master’s house with the master’s tools,4 the musicians’ lives, as well as an awareness but Manna’s retracing of the master’s map of history (bolstered by her history profes- allows for correctives, for alternative and mul- sor father, who is just finishing a chapter on tiple imaginaries. She reads Lachmann’s notes the Nakba, on extermination and expulsion). with irony and a tone of play and mimicry, as a Manna systematically introduces each musi- performer at Carnival might wear the costume cal event within a tightly framed landscape or of the colonist. fragment of a neighborhood and approaches The experience of music in the film is fore- the exteriors of homes and windows leading grounded over language and imposed meaning. to kitchens, to enter into the cramped domes- Lyrics are not translated, musicians are not tic spaces in which most of the action takes named (until the final credits) except for the place. This strategy is born of her own experi- tradition they represent, which is named ence of claustrophobia as a Palestinian woman through the reading of Lachmann’s notes. For living in Jerusalem6 and alludes to the segre- Manna, this strategy supports an “alterna- gation and unequal positioning of the various tive form of narrative or of memory, one that’s citizens and non-citizens. Historical Palestine through a libidinal form or a muscle memo- does not exist any longer. ry.”5 The affective experience of the music Manna is careful to note the contradic- short-circuits the viewer’s impulses to rein- tions that evade a simple call to harmonious scribe a colonial organization of knowledge. coexistence through the transcendence of The film is a platform for these objects music: A Bedouin in Bge’a Village, Naqab to perform, while situated in the cultures interrupts the viewer’s potential expectation and spaces of the performers—in homes of a pastoral demeanor as he disses the his- and private areas for work or prayer or lei- torical recording, saying “this is a peasant sure. The testimony and music of one artist, playing,” and that “the internet ruined it for Neta Elkayam, is particularly moving as the us.” Following Lachmann’s description of the Morrocan Jewish singer makes a case for music of Kurdish Jews, in which trance and honoring layered, diasporic cultures against demons that speak through the musician are Israel’s monolithic national culture. She coolly mentioned, the heart-stopping beauty speaks and cooks in her kitchen, her words of Kurdish-Jewish liturgical song is performed sandwiched by two impassioned songs, ac- in the setting of an economics and real es- companied by Amit Hai on what appears to be tate appraisal office located in Jerusalem. The a very non-traditional banjo. office is decorated with layers of maps, the camera panning over a computer and pa- I was born in a house where the im- pers that read “Table of Land Expropriation age and the flag of Israel were hung, According to Plan 4558” and “Judea and and the myths were ready to be told. Sumera Area Supreme Planning Council,” fol- My Grandmother was there with the lowed by a close up of the rapturous listening counter-image. Luckily in the end the expression on a young office colleague’s face. image was broken . . . . The Israeli im- As Eyal Weizman has written, the strategy of age that they tried to paint for me was Israel’s perpetually encroaching occupation is very flat and in denial. In denial of things one of “elastic geography.” that I don’t want to deny today. Be that Judaism, Jewish-Moroccan culture, or our The elastic nature of the frontier does not Arab-hood, our Berber culture. All these imply that Israeli trailers, homes, roads

Stevens \ 154 or indeed the concrete wall are in them- ENDNOTES selves soft or unyielding, but that the 1—Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential continuous spatial reorganization of the History: Unlearning Imperialism (New political borders they mark out responds York: Verso Books, 2019), 388. to and reflects political and military conflicts. The various inhabitants of this 2—Jumana Manna, Q&A with space do not operate within the fixed Rachael Rakes at Lincoln Center, envelopes of space—space is not the Art of the Real, 2016. background for their actions, an abstract 3—Ibid. grid on which events take place—but rather the medium that each of their 4—See Section 4 of Azoulay, actions seeks to challenge, transform or Potential History, 286-374. appropriate. Moreover, in this context the 5—Manna, Q&A. relation of space to action could not be understood as that of a rigid container to 6—Ibid. ‘soft’ performance. Political action is fully 7—Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: absorbed in the organization, transforma- Israel’s Architecture of Occupation tion, erasure and subversion of space.7 (New York: Verso Books, 2007).

Given this context, perhaps the rearticulation 8—Ibid, 98. of polyphony—to take the concept Bakhtin has 9—Azoulay, Potential History, 166. borrowed from music and apply it back—of diasporic voices, rhythms, vibrations, joys, sor- rows, and movements of people that embody many divided and buried cultures, counters both the tactics of frontier architecture and imperial imaginaries through their inscription of geographies that follow logics not sanctioned by the state. Manna’s attention to these polyphonic geographies in the present mirrors Azoulay’s call to shift from the “temporal axis and its historical markers of ‘beginning,’ ‘end,’ or ‘post’.”8 Musicians are performing their own kind of elastic geography and planting seeds in the experience of viewers of the film who are thus invited to become co-citizens.9

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\ Volume 4 \ Liberal representations today reflect what I have elsewhere termed, following Hannah Arendt, a “co-dependent politics of appearance.” In psychological terms, codependency is the excessive reliance on a partner who requires support regarding an illness or addiction. A codependent politics of appearance is the resulting social pathology, which manifests as superficial investment in others’ problems, often to satisfy the emotional needs of the voyeur. This mode of despotic empathy has displaced the sharing of a world- in-common—precisely what, in Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s wording “was destroyed and should be restored”—with ubiquitous spectacles of privation and racialized violence. A look at documentary media on the subject of social death in Mexico and Central America reveals the centrality of such themes to even EMPATHY AND CODEPENDENCY \ humanitarian representations. Consider Carne y Arena (Virtualmente present, físicamente IRMGARD EMMELHAINZ invisible) (2017), a VR installation by filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu, conceived in collaboration with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki at the Tlatelolco University Cultural Center at UNAM. The exhibition—which was shown at Cannes, LACMA in Los Angeles, and the Prada Foundation in Milan—seeks to confront audiences with the experience of immigrants crossing the Mexican desert to the US border. The work employs a series of media interfaces such as a panoramic screen, a VR mask, as well as video interviews with migrants to place spectators in a 360º virtual desert landscape. It is clear that the installation seeks to expand documentary cinematographic language: González Iñárritu shows the out of field and thus attempts to expand audiences’ perspectives by interpolating them in the immediacy of a virtual border crossing. The work offers the audience the momentary fantasy of becoming zoe, in Arendt’s language, or non-mournable life. About this project, González Iñárritu declared:

I never conceived it as a response or as a political project but as an artwork that would be about human crisis at the world level . . . . It has the power to transport

Emmelhainz \ 157 you to the Sonora desert so you can live children express a narrative of extreme vio- in your own flesh the tragedy. [The objec- lence, direct persecution, and danger of death tive is] to be seen in Washington by those that would attract the interest of a lawyer. who make international policies in the Luiselli’s narrative is punctuated by the recur- United States. rent question posed by the author’s five-year old daughter: “tell me how it ends, Mama.” The The problem with González Iñárritu’s instal- impossibility of giving a concrete and hopeful lation is that its logic resides in a clinical response to the child, imagining the moth- apparatus. The immediacy of its effect, its er living the moment of silence she takes to claim to objectivity, its performance of techni- process her frustration, pain, and incertitude cal realism are all confused with emancipatory before the migrant children’s situations and social change. Gonzalez Iñarritu’s installation then be able to articulate an answer to her invites us to ask, perversely, whether virtual daughter, achieves the transmission. We feel reality may recreate the experience of domes- the knot forming in her throat. tic violence or even rape, hoping that it would For Luiselli, the attitude of US authori- work as an antidote to gender violence. Such ties regarding migrant children is not always ideas are in keeping with the representational negative, but is generally “based on misunder- strategies of pornomiseria, fetishistic engage- standings or voluntary ignorance.” It is urgent ment with bare life that has become popular in to put on the table the causes of the mass neoliberal Latin America. exodus and thus enjoin the US and Mexico to Certain journalistic representations reprise take responsibility for the deteriorating so- these tendencies. In Tell Me How It Ends: cial conditions in Honduras, El Salvador and An Essay in Forty Questions (2017), a book Guatemala. Toward the end of the book we that also addresses the migration crisis of learn that the author’s students, inspired by Mexicans and Central Americans to the US, her, have created a political organization to Valeria Luiselli parts from her experience as establish a program to integrate children of a translator of migrant children seeking refu- refugees into US society: the TIIA or Teenage gee status in the US to describe the migration Immigrant Integration Association. Luiselli system and expose their ordeals in the form concludes: “while the story continues, the only of literary reportage. She tries to explain the thing to do is to tell it over and over again as origin of the migration crisis and to denounce it develops, bifurcates, knots around itself.” It the complicity of the Mexican government, must be told, she writes. The problem re- which has made the crossing even more sides in the fact that works like Luiselli’s, dangerous for the migrants. The challenges along with the mass media, draw a horizon of Luiselli faced when obtaining a Green Card the common in mere legibility. led her to work as translator for the New York Representations of violence, in lieu of di- court reviewing the asylum petitions of chil- rect action, tend to delineate an arch of what dren. This is how she translated into Spanish can be said and done, what positions can be the forty questions solicited by Migration legitimately adopted and what actions can or Services and to English the children’s re- not be committed. It is worth drawing a dis- sponses. (Under Barack Obama’s DACA policy, tinction from the actions taken by, for example, children had 21 days, after being released from Scott Warren, the activist accused for offering humiliating and dangerous ICE Boxes, to find food, water, and shelter to Mexican immigrants a lawyer and put together a case.) Depending stranded in the desert at the Mexican- on the answers Luiselli was able to extract American border; or against Captain Pia from the children, their chances of staying in Klempe, who is currently facing 20 years in an the US diminished or increased. In most cas- Italian prison for rescuing some 1,000 people es, the children were deported by a judge in from drowning in the Mediterranean, and who absentia. as who has been accused of “assisting illegal The key to attaining asylum was to make the immigration.”

Emmelhainz \ 158 A well-known quote by Uruguayan thinker Eduardo Galeano draws the difference between solidarity and charity (or what I call codependent empathy): “differently than solidarity, which is horizontal and is executed between equals, charity is practiced from top to bottom. It humiliates the receiver and never alters power relations, not even a little.” A redoubling of social hierarchies is, in short, endemic to the modes of representation by which we perceive the world. It is therefore necessary to move even beyond the intersubjective validity of judgments of taste in Kantian morals, which are for Arendt the grounds for political consensus. For this, we would need to modify commonness on the go, acknowledging interdependence beyond mere empathy.

Emmelhainz \ 159

DOSSIER \ DOCUMENTARY WORLD-MAKING

EDITED BY JOSH GUILFORD AND TOBY LEE

161

\ Volume 4 \ Dossier \ What does it mean to speak of documentary world-making? Though conversations about world-making have gained currency in film and media studies in recent years, documentary might seem a strange addition to this discourse.1 Since its inception, documentary has claimed a privileged relation to the world, but the terms of this relation appear inverted or out of sequence when we speak of documentary world-making. Doesn’t documentary name a mode of attending to the world rooted in practices of listening and observation that position the world before the document? As the title of this journal suggests, documentary is supposed to make records of the world rather than the world itself. Of course, contemporary documentary practice exceeds this definition, encompassing diverse forms of creative manipulation as well INTRODUCTION: as various approaches to media production DOCUMENTARY WORLD-MAKING \ that seek to effect change in the world. But artists who have historically embraced doc- JOSH GUILFORD AND TOBY LEE umentary as a transformative practice have frequently done so while remaining within a representationalist paradigm that ultimately reinforces perceptions of documentary as a medium of record. Whether using media as an instrument of consciousness raising, exposure, or agitation, such practices often valorize documentary’s adherence to the world, embracing its claim to picture a reality that exists outside the cinema. In this paradigm, documentary may make or shape the objective world, but only indirectly, through its representation. In assembling this dossier, our aim is to consider another way in which documentary practices can be seen as world-making. Rather than looking at how documentaries shape the world through representation, or even at the ways documentarians fashion virtual worlds onscreen, we turn our attention to the social and cultural practices that take place around and through documentary, and which have a more immediate impact on lived experiences of reality and community. The artists featured in this dossier devote substantial energy to conducting workshops, programming cultural forums, archiving media, maintaining technical equipment, and managing organizations; their practices regularly extend beyond the

Guilford & Lee \ 163 screen to include such activities as education, understood in terms of verity, as more or less community building, and cultural preservation. truthful representations. For Arendt, how- Through such activities, these artists initiate ever, objectivity has little to do with vexed and sustain complex forms of sociality, and questions of truth. It has more to do with the contribute to the infrastructure—material and objectness and publicness of the common immaterial—of collective life. world, and the ways in which worldly things Our interest in approaching world-making condition social and cultural practices, and in these terms is informed by Hannah Arendt’s mediate our relations with ourselves and with idiosyncratic understanding of the world, a others. In Arendt’s work, objects ground per- term she uses to designate the shared envi- ceptions of reality, shape understandings of ronment produced and inhabited by humans, the past, delimit spaces in which we become which she divides into two registers: a realm sensible to each other, and draw individu- of human artifacts (or what she often calls als into relation, facilitating experiences of “the human artifice”), and a realm of human affiliation and community, as well as those affairs.2 While the former consists of the total of difference and dissensus. The public con- assemblage of material objects—everything texts that objects demarcate—populated as from tables to walls, satellites to cathedrals— they are by “others who see what we see and created through processes of fabrication, the hear what we hear,” while still retaining their latter consists of the various activities that unique perspective or “location”—can alone people conduct between themselves, and convey objective experiences, “assur[ing] us includes the quasi-reified customs, habits, of the reality of the world and ourselves.”4 This manners, and traditions that structure human understanding of objectivity as a worldly char- actions and relations. In Arendt’s view, the acteristic can help us to view documentary world is thus “both material and nonmaterial,” not as a means for fashioning representations as Ella Myers observes, and though Arendt dis- that are truthful to a pre-existing world, but as tinguishes between the realms of artifacts and itself a thing in the world, an object—however affairs, she also views these realms as highly multifaceted or intangible—that contributes imbricated and even mutually constitutive.3 to the formation and stabilization of public The main purpose of the human artifice is to life, enabling and securing crucial experienc- house the realm of human affairs, providing es of reality, recognition, and commonality. By a stable environment in which the perpetual adopting this perspective, we mean to frame flux of human activities can reliably unfold, documentary as a variety of what Bonnie Honig and enabling the ephemeral products of ac- refers to as “public things”: the objects that tion to endure through time in various reified “gather people together, materially and sym- forms (stories, documents, monuments). The bolically,” providing a ground “in relation to man-made world of things is thus integral to [which] diverse peoples may come to see and the production and preservation of culture, in experience themselves—even if just momen- Arendt’s view. But it is also a precondition for tarily—as a common in relation to a commons, the experiences of recognition and mediation a collected if not a collective.”5 that ground Arendt’s theory of politics. Along The ideas that structure this dossier with securing a vital space of appearance—a emerged from a process of research and public setting in which individuals can assem- collaboration that has manifested in different ble with and gain recognition from others—the projects over the past two-and-a-half years.6 human artifice constitutes an objective in-be- One of these projects was a series of three tween that offsets the intrinsic subjectivity of events exploring questions of world-making human experience. in contemporary documentary media culture, The objectivity that Arendt associates with which we co-curated in New York City between the world is one reason we were drawn to February-April 2019, and which led to three of her ideas about worldliness. Traditionally, the the contributions in this dossier. objectivity of documentary media has been The first event in this series was a panel

Guilford & Lee \ 164 and roundtable exploring world-making in by creating physical and virtual forums for ref- contemporary archival practices, which was ugees, migrants, and other displaced persons moderated by Jared McCormick and which to converse and collaborate, Noncitizen brings featured representatives from three differ- vital forms of publicness to communities ent archival initiatives that deal primarily in marked by isolation and obscurity. And in their documentary media: Diana Allen and Kaoukab most basic daily operations, all three organiza- Chebaro from the Nakba Archive, an oral his- tions establish complex webs of relationality tory collective which records video interviews between otherwise distant social actors, from with first-generation Palestinian refugees in state funding agencies and partner institutions Lebanon; Yasmine Eid Sabbagh and George to the diverse artists, researchers, donors, Awde of the Arab Image Foundation (AIF) activists, and other individuals who contribute in Beirut, which collects and preserves to, access, or help to maintain these archives’ photographs from the Arab world from the holdings. Such webs, always in flux, constitute mid-nineteenth century to the present; and a key product of these organizations, demon- Christian Rossipal of Noncitizen Archive, a strating the ability of archives to create as well Stockholm-based independent platform for as preserve. the secure storage of digital video, audio, Another event in the series that centered and photographs from contemporary migrant the worldly capacities of documentary and experiences.7 While each of these archival archival practice was a lecture performance initiatives is driven by a deep investment in by the artist and researcher Helene Kazan, documentary representations, their relation to produced during Kazan’s tenure as 2018-2020 the world does not stop there. Many of their Vera List Center Fellow at The New School.8 defining activities occur in an offscreen space In her work, Kazan often uses documentary that typically eludes documentary studies, but modes, whether engaging archival documenta- which reveals an aspect of worldliness at the ry media or producing nonfiction media herself, base of documentary that manifests in such in order to investigate forms of risk and practices as collecting and preserving media conflict existing at the potent intersections objects, documenting personal and commu- between architecture, international law, and nal histories, developing relations within a contemporary art. In the essay “Decolonizing community, coordinating technical training Archives and Law’s Frame of Accountability,” for volunteers, digitizing collections and de- which develops concepts originally presented signing web platforms, staging exhibitions, in her lecture performance, Kazan argues that and negotiating institutional relations. The a decolonizing archival practice can help to energy these organizations devote to these reveal, and contest, the reified hierarchies and activities speaks to their commitment not biases ingrained in international law. Echoing only to recording worldly phenomena, but to Arendt’s description of the law as an architec- actively forging and sustaining worldly for- tural construct assembled to stabilize human mations. This commitment animates a range affairs, one comparable to the walls that en- of remarks by participants in “Before, Within, close and secure spaces of political assembly, Around, Beyond: World-Making in the Digital Kazan here frames the law as a world-building Archive,” an edited and expanded transcript technology, but stresses that the violent leg- of the roundtable discussion, which illus- acies of colonialism and imperialism continue trates the multiple aspects of world-making in to inform its architecture.9 Through discussion which these archives are engaged. By collect- of historical case studies, as well as her own ing and preserving little-known histories of research and artistic work concerning the marginalized communities and making these twentieth-century history of colonial and state accessible to broad and variegated publics, violence in Lebanon, Kazan argues for an op- the AIF and Nakba enable experiences of con- positional approach to the archive that aims to nection and commonality that cross historical, illuminate hidden and suppressed records of geographic, and cultural boundaries. Similarly, colonial violence, and to counter the influence

Guilford & Lee \ 165 that official colonial histories continue to exert care and forms of mutuality and collectivity on the practice of international law. Yet Kazan that diverge dramatically from the relational also emphasizes the need for critiques of in- customs and structures governing the com- ternational law that bring together poetic and mercial film industry. In their discussion, and forensic resources. Presenting the concepts particularly their remarks on the possibility of of poetic testimony and legal fiction, which she changing existing systems of production, we uses in her work, Kazan proposes the realm hear echoes of Arendt’s famous metaphor of of cultural production as an alternative legal the world as table—something that “is located arena, one in which creative practice can chal- between those who sit around it . . . relat[ing] lenge, disrupt, and intervene in the dominant and separat[ing them] at the same time.”11 structures of the given world. Examining the oppressive and liberating ca- Completing the event series was a round- pacity of such mediating constructs, the artists table on Black women’s cinema, co-organized featured in this contribution debate whether with members of the New Negress Film it is better to have a seat at the table, to try to Society (NNFS), a Brooklyn-based produc- re-shape that table, or to build another table tion collective that centers the work of Black altogether. women and non-binary filmmakers.10 The Rounding out the dossier are two essays roundtable brought members of the NNFS to- composed specifically for publication in World gether in conversation with participants from Records, both dealing with organizations that, the inaugural Black Women’s Film Conference, like the NNFS, are not strictly centered on an event produced by the NNFS at MoMA PS1 documentary but that model the world-mak- in March 2019. With this event, our aim was to ing capacities of media in ways that challenge expand the frame of the series by considering and provide critical perspectives on docu- artistic organizations and creative practices mentary’s representational paradigm. In “The that are imbricated with or adjacent to tradi- Abominable Community: Notes on Independent tional forms of documentary media, but which Filmmakers’ Laboratories,” Mariya Nikiforova are not strictly defined around documentary. examines the movement of independent pho- The NNFS is a core collective of Black women tochemical film laboratories that has taken filmmakers who work across different media shape over the last two-and-a-half decades, and genres, including documentary. But their largely in response to the commercial film priority is to create community and spaces of industry’s digital conversion. As Nikiforova support, exhibition, and consciousness raising explains, though this movement was initi- around the work of Black women and non-bi- ated in Francophone Europe as a relatively nary artists. Through diverse activities that modest experiment in DIY filmmaking, it has range from fundraising to organizing work- since expanded into an international network shops, programming films, and conducting of artist-run workspaces that are reorga- interviews, members of the NNFS work col- nizing the infrastructure of photochemical lectively to create spaces of recognition and filmmaking in artisanal terms. Focusing on a networks of support for artists marginalized single lab within this network—L’Abominable, by the industry, striving in this manner to alter located on the outskirts of Paris—Nikiforova the material and social conditions under which argues for the importance of approaching they work. In “Another Table: Black Women’s independent laboratories as political rather Cinema and the Production of Community,” than simply aesthetic endeavors. In her view, an edited transcript of the roundtable, partic- the anarcho-socialist principles that seem ipants discuss the many entrenched biases, to animate L’Abominable help us to see the material obstacles, structural inequalities, and independent laboratory as “a proposal for a restrictive conventions they have confronted particular kind of community,” one oriented and transformed in their fight to create media not only toward filmmaking but toward the on their own terms. They also emphasize the production and maintenance of a cohesive labor they devote to forging communities of “form-of-life,” or a way of living that strives

Guilford & Lee \ 166 to “unify social, creative, political—and even, of documentation as a form of reification— possibly, biological—aspects of life into a the mechanism whereby vital processes and continuous whole.” For Nikiforova, this uto- events are transformed into dead objects, pian ideal is evident in L’Abominable’s efforts such as archival records—helps to explain to integrate photochemical film systems into the NAC’s ambivalence about documentation, a non-hierarchical organizational structure which manifests in the Coop’s paper archive that necessitates resource sharing, collabo- at multiple registers. As an avant-garde forma- ration, and self-education, and which values tion governed by ideals of vitality, spontaneity, filmmaking as much for the social relations it and immediacy, the NAC struggled to evade facilitates as for the aesthetic objects it pro- the deadening effects of reification at every duces. Yet L’Abominable’s interest in cinema turn, even as the artists affiliated with this as a communal medium can also be discerned, movement sought to elaborate a durable, she argues, in its commitment to preserving, alternative culture anchored in institutions maintaining, and redesigning the materi- like the Coop and documented in expansive al objects, mechanisms, and processes that collections of paper records and audio-visual enable photochemical filmmaking, which are media. Focusing on the tensions that resulted increasingly rendered obsolete by digitization. from these seemingly contradictory impulses, As Nikiforova explains, this commitment re- Guilford explores the legacy of the NAC’s de- veals L’Abominable’s investment in elaborating sire for a “world without worldliness.” Rather a sustainable, collectivist model of cinematic than assessing documentary filmmaking, his practice consistent with the ethical and po- essay considers the worldly dimensions of litical principles held by many of its members. the document more generally, and the ways What Arendt would term the “attitude of loving in which practices of documentation and care” that this organization displays toward archiving function as crucial testaments to worldly things can thus be understood as a alternative world-making projects. sign of its resistance to the world-eroding The framework of this dossier is thus struc- tendencies of consumer society, which Arendt tured primarily around organizations, and is considered detrimental to public modes of meant to highlight the crucial role that film action and affiliation.12 and media organizations play in catalyzing and A related emphasis on the world-mak- sustaining alternative cultural formations. As a ing ambitions of alternative film movements whole, the dossier connects the otherwise dis- can be found in the final contribution to parate set of organizations assessed in these this dossier, Josh Guilford’s “Disorganized contributions by positioning them as testa- Organization: Signs of Life in the Film-Makers’ ments to the world-making capacity of film Cooperative’s Paper Archive.” Guilford’s es- and media, committed as these organizations say examines a complex interplay between are to building and maintaining the material worldliness and vitality—or what Arendt would and social infrastructure that makes worlds term zōē, a form of life affiliated with natural out of emergent or marginal forms of collec- and biological processes—that structures the tivity. At the same time, these conversations paper collections of the Manhattan-based and essays seek to raise complex questions experimental film distributor, the Film-Makers’ about the value and function of worldly sta- Cooperative, which was founded by members bility. Even as the artists and organizations of the New American Cinema (NAC) in 1962. featured herein exemplify the radical potential Positioning this interplay as a symptom of the of world-making activities, the various forms NAC’s simultaneous desire for, and aversion of work they conduct also reveal the restric- to, cultural stability, Guilford demonstrates tive and oppressive components of worldly how these competing impulses play out in the constructs, as well as the difficulties that alter- history and operations of the Coop, as well native cultural formations confront when they as the structure and contents of the Coop’s strive to contest the dominant world’s reified paper archive. As he argues, Arendt’s view structures.

Guilford & Lee \ 167 In the process of discussing the differ- ENDNOTES ent approaches to refashioning the world, or forging new ones, that manifest across these 1—For recent discussions of world-mak- materials, we have returned repeatedly to John ing in cinema, see especially: Daniel Grierson’s seminal definition of documentary Yacavone, Film Worlds: A Philosophical as the “creative treatment of actuality.” This Aesthetics of Cinema (New York: Columbia phrase is usually understood, as it was in- University Press, 2015); Karl Schoonover tended, to specify the work that documentary and Rosalind Galt, Queer Cinema in the performs at the level of representation, desig- World (Durham, NC: Duke University nating documentary’s aesthetic treatment of Press, 2016); and Claudia Breger, sounds and images of the world. But in their Making Worlds: Affect and Collectivity in efforts to create and sustain community, to Contemporary European Cinema (New reshape the conventions that organize film York: Columbia University Press, 2020). and media practice, to stabilize and preserve Earlier analyses of world-making in cin- alternative ways of life, and to otherwise build ema studies include: David Bordwell, the worlds they want to inhabit, the artists and “Three Dimensions of Film Narrative” in organizations featured in this dossier suggest Poetics of Cinema (New York: Routledge, another possible interpretation of this phrase, 2008); and Suzanne Buchan, ed., Animated modeling a creative treatment of actuality that Worlds (Herts, UK: John Libbey, 2006). takes the world itself as its terrain. Following 2—Arendt elaborates on her understand- their model, we end by asking whether the ing of world most extensively in The expanded creative practices in which these Human Condition, Second ed. (Chicago, artists and organizations are engaged could be IL: University of Chicago Press , 1998), applied productively back to understandings of esp. ch. 4 (on “Work”). The duality un- documentary. What if the point of documentary derlying this concept can be seen, for is not to represent the world, but to make it? instance, in an important passage from this work, in which Arendt distinguish- es her definition of world from the more natural and terrestrial connotations that sometimes accompany this concept: “[The] world . . . is not identical with the earth or with nature, as the limited space for the movement of men and the general condition of organic life. It is related, rather, to the human artifact, the fabrication of human hands, as well as to affairs which go on among those who inhabit the man-made world together” (52). She expands on these remarks later in The Human Condition, writing: “[T]he physical, worldly in-between along with its interests is overlaid and, as it were, overgrown with an altogether different in-between which consists of deeds and words and owes its origin exclusively to men’s acting and speaking directly to one another. This second, subjective in-between is not tangible . . . [but] is no less real than the world of things we visibly have in common.

Guilford & Lee \ 168 We call this reality the ‘web’ of human Exercises in Political Thought (New relationships, indicating by the metaphor York: Penguin, 2006), 208. its somewhat intangible quality” (182-3). For an interesting assessment of Arendt’s phenomenological account of this duality via D.W. Winnicott’s object-relations theory, see: Bonnie Honig Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), esp. 37-57. 3—Ella Myers, Worldly Ethics: Democratic Politics and Care for the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press , 2013), 89-90. 4—Arendt, Human Condition, 50. See also pp. 57-58. 5—Honig, Public Things, 16. Honig borrows this distinction from Michael Oakeshott. 6—The first of these was “‘In the Presence of Others’: Revisiting Hannah Arendt in Film and Media Studies,” panel presented at the annual conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Toronto, Ontario, March 14-18, 2018. We are grateful to Bonnie Honig and Nicholas Gamso for their participation in this panel, which shaped the framework of this dossier in significant ways. 7—“Archival Worlds: Documentation, Preservation, and Digital Media in the Middle East,” Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, New York University, New York, NY, February 21, 2019. 8—Helene Kazan, “Speculative Legal Futures and the Poetic Testimony of Violence,” UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art, Brooklyn, NY, April 4, 2019. 9—See Arendt, Human Condition, 194-5. 10—Roundtable on Black Women’s Cinema, UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art, Brooklyn, NY, March 16, 2019. 11—Arendt, Human Condition, 52. 12—Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture: Its Social and Its Political Significance” in Between Past and Future: Eight

Guilford & Lee \ 169

\ Volume 4 \ Dossier \ In the introduction to a rental catalogue published in 1989 by the artist-run film distributor the Film-Makers’ Cooperative (hereafter the Coop), Paul Arthur writes of the endurance of a dissident, improvisatory spirit that drove the Coop’s formation at the beginning of the 1960s.1 “[T]he Coop continues to hold out the possibility of ‘chance’ in an administrative society,” Arthur states, “the artistic undoing of standards and hierarchies in an age fettered by rules.”2 By introducing the catalog this way, Arthur proposes this view—the belief that contingency and unruliness should be cultivated as remedies to administration—as something like the dis/organizational ethos of the Coop. But he also establishes a connection between this ethos and an under-examined current of life that runs through the history of the Coop. This connection becomes apparent when DISORGANIZED ORGANIZATION: SIGNS we consider the title of Arthur’s introduction: OF LIFE IN THE FILM-MAKERS’ “Movies the Color of Blood.” Referring to the COOPERATIVE’S PAPER ARCHIVE \ closing sentence of a collective manifesto published in 1961 by members of the New JOSH GUILFORD American Cinema (NAC)—the independent film movement that established the Coop in 1962— Arthur’s title harks back to this movement’s founding desire to create movies that would be “rough, unpolished, but alive,” not rosy films but films “the color of blood.”3 By framing the Coop’s commitment to chance as an extension of this early desire for blood-colored films, Arthur identifies an abiding association between disorder and vitality that has governed the cultural practices of the NAC since this movement’s inception, when artists such as Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke, Robert Frank, and Edward Bland joined together to contest the industrial-commercial cinema established by Hollywood. This association is evident in the “First Statement” itself, where the technical imperfections of amateur films (their rough, unpolished features) are embraced as signs of life. But it can also be discerned in the institutional discourse of the Coop, where the Coop is often celebrated for nurturing an unruly form of life rooted in contingency, immediacy, and by extension, disorder. Conceived in this sense as a “living institution,” one charged with preserving the avant-garde’s vitality, the Coop has been imagined with a

Guilford \ 171 certain level of consistency as a paradoxical the archive’s implicit claims to order, stasis, thing: an organization meant to cultivate and objectivity, and authority. sustain disorganizing modes of expression and My analysis of the Coop’s paper materials is experience.4 informed by Hannah Arendt’s observations on What prompted the NAC to organize the the necessity of reification for worldly stability. Coop in this form, and how has this film cul- In Arendt’s theoretical framework, reification ture’s understanding of vitality impacted the is defined as a particular form of work where- Coop’s operations across its near six-decade- by the dynamic contents of life (anything long existence? Moreover, what does this from a speech act to a tree) are fashioned organizational image look like today? While the into static things (a document, a table) that disruptive vision of life promoted by the NAC structure and mediate human relations in the was originally meant to be liberating—con- present, and stabilize such relations across ceived as it was in opposition to the culture generational change.6 This assessment of of standardization attaining in post-WWII reification as a stabilizing force—one intrinsic American society—this vision has assumed a to cultural production and historical preser- new aspect in the contemporary era, when dis- vation—helps to elucidate a complex tension organization has been thoroughly integrated that structures the ideology of the NAC and into dominant systems of exploitation and con- pervades the Coop’s paper collections. This trol. What happens, then, when an avant-garde tension comes into view when we approach institution endures so long that the life-form it the NAC as a world-making project: a group was founded to protect appears historical? As of artists who came together not only to make an index of a broader restructuration that has films, but to enlist cinema in the production dusted the ’60s avant-garde with a layer of and maintenance of an enduring infrastructure pastness, this kind of perceptual shift speaks for alternative culture—an ordered configura- to the need for in-depth reassessments of this tion of objects, institutions, conventions, and artistic community—efforts to re-examine its practices within and around which alterna- guiding ideas and practices, as a way of better tive forms of individual and social expression discerning their separation from the present. could emerge, evolve, and persist. The NAC’s Working in this vein, this essay explores investment in elaborating a durable world of how the NAC’s rhetoric of vitality manifests in this sort is evidenced, in the first instance, by a somewhat unexpected location: the Coop’s the impressive quantities of material things paper archive.5 With records that date back produced by these artists (films, publications, to the organization’s earliest years, the pa- documents, etc.), but it can also be discerned per collections archived by the Coop provide in the considerable energy they expended on insight into the struggles and achievements creating and maintaining organizations devot- of a long-standing avant-garde institution, ed to experimental cinema and culture, many documenting important aspects of the Coop’s of which remain operational today. organizational history, daily operations, and The NAC’s world-making project was de- institutional discourse. At the same time, the fined in paradoxical terms, however. Since this archive also registers the NAC’s aversion to movement’s consolidation in the early 1960s, the very organizational processes that it doc- its desire for a stable alternative culture has uments, preserving a range of materials that been offset by an equally pressing suspicion index this film culture’s perennial effort to ac- of reification, organization, and stability writ cess an elusive register of life by evading such large. Like other alternative cultural forma- things as organizational structure, institutional tions that emerged in the postwar US, the NAC protocol, and even the practice of documen- regarded the late modern world as a danger- tation itself. While the Coop’s paper archive ously rigid domain saturated by dehumanizing functions as a key historical resource, then, it pressures toward conformity. In direct contrast also contains a wild variety of documents that to Arendt, for whom the central crisis of late trouble this historical function, problematizing modernity appeared as the unceasing erosion

Guilford \ 172 of worldly stability by an all-consuming life This conflict informs the structure and process, artists of the NAC associated the late records of the Coop’s paper archive at multi- modern era with an overwhelming excess of ple levels, inflecting the overall organization reification, often framing the surrounding world of the archive, as well as the basic structure as a static, artificial gridwork or machine, and and content of the documents this archive railing against the deadness of everything contains, many of which index the NAC’s anx- from commercial cinema to civilization more ieties about reification in remarkably tangible generally. Perceiving the world as something ways. The archive thus provides a privileged to escape rather than inhabit, artists of the space in which to investigate the NAC’s am- NAC sought refuge in life, investing liberatory bivalence about worldly stability. It stands, on potential in what Arendt would term zōē—a the one hand, as a material testament to the natural modality of life affiliated with organic NAC’s profound investment in the processes and biological processes, as well as the in- of fabrication, documentation, and preserva- ner fluctuations of the soul.7 This investment tion that are so crucial to the production and extended beyond the register of filmmaking to maintenance of a stable culture. On the other shape the NAC’s broader world-making activi- hand, precisely because of the archive’s status ties, including its attempt to elaborate new and as an historical and organizational repository, more vitalizing organizational forms than those the Coop’s archival collections have harbored governing industrial cinema of the postwar pe- an intrinsic threat for members of this film riod. The Coop was a direct outgrowth of these culture, evoking specters of stasis, deadness, activities. It emerged from the NAC’s defining and control that are obviously troubling for effort to create a world that would be respon- an avant-garde institution guided by ideals of sive and conducive to life. vitality.9 Arendt’s writings help us to perceive the contradictions inhering in this project. Within The Coop’s paradoxical status as an organi- her theoretical framework, the form of life zation founded in the name of destabilizing promoted by artists of the NAC is defined by experiences and expressions of life can be a fundamental refusal to reify that perpetually discerned in its earliest iterations of institu- threatens the stability of worldly constructs. tional discourse. Consider, for instance, the “Life is a process,” Arendt asserts, “that ev- various organizational reports, letters, and erywhere uses up durability, wears it down, memos that Jonas Mekas composed during makes it disappear”; it is always, she explains the 1960s for circulation to members of the elsewhere, “a metabolism feeding on things by Coop and the New American Cinema Group, devouring them.”8 While this ruinous capaci- Inc. (the non-profit corporation that serves as ty was no doubt appealing to the apocalyptic the Coop’s legal agent).10 It is in these com- imagination of the NAC, this movement’s con- munications that Mekas famously promotes ception of life as a dynamic, ephemeral force the NAC as a “disorganized organization,” obviously conflicts with its effort to situate it or a “loose” affiliation of independent artists as the basis of a world-making project. Artists unhindered by the restrictions that accompa- of the NAC wanted a world without world- ny cohesion.11 “[L]et’s remain disorganizedly liness, a stable alternative culture in which organized,” Mekas writes in a report from wildly dynamic experiences and expressions of June 1st, 1962, adding: “It is an underground vitality could somehow endure without solid- principle, guerilla warfare. And that’s where ifying into a routine. The tension entailed by we are.”12 In a report written the following this pursuit precipitated an enduring conflict year, Mekas extends the ethos of disorganized within this movement, which—from its earliest organization to the Coop more directly, pro- statements—has been bisected by competing moting the Coop as an intentionally illogical desires for both a stable alternative culture distribution center whose refusal of standard and relief from the tyranny of stability itself. organizational processes was central to its emergence and evolution as “the working

Guilford \ 173 frontier” of the new cinema, writing: organized, it comes through more clearly in other writings from this period. A good exam- The birth of the Coop was a spontaneous ple can be found in Mekas’s oft-cited letter to happening provoked by . . . the simple Amos Vogel from August 25th, 1966, wherein fact that no distributor wanted our films Mekas contests Vogel’s (apparent) criticism . . . [W]e decided to do it ourselves, in of the Coop’s lack of policy by asserting, “Our our own ‘unbusiness-like’ way . . . . The policy OF NO POLICY is also a policy!”15 Though Coop is an irresponsible and changing Mekas begins this letter in an effort to alle- group where anything goes, anything can viate tensions that had developed between be tested, and where we can get excited Vogel and members of the Coop during Vogel’s about anything with no need to blush now tenure with the New York Film Festival, the or later . . . . [W]e have been following, letter quickly expands into more philosophical as our working method, an anarchistic concerns. “It seems, that our disagreements dictatorship.13 and divergencies upset you,” Mekas writes:

As such statements indicate, for Mekas, the But we THRIVE on disagreements . . . . To NAC’s distaste for traditional forms of institu- disagree is to assert and to practice a tional structure and protocol was predicated sense of freedom, and it’s beautiful . . . . on an understanding of organization as an Please don’t take this ‘anarchic’ attitude impediment to individual freedom. Everyday as anything personal, against you. Believe matters of organization were thus ethically me: it’s much bigger than you, then [sic] and politically inflected for artists of this film me, than any of us. When something culture, who perceived their activities within grows—and the Underground is still the context of the Coop as a form of resistance growing and digging still deeper and the against the commercial imperatives govern- branches are sprouting and going to all ing then-contemporary American cinema, as sides—it becomes more complex, and well as the broader culture of rationalism and more alive, it takes a number of different conformity adhering in the postwar US. Yet directions . . . . It’s part of our growth.16 Mekas’s resistance to organization was also motivated by a more fundamental belief in Framing the Coop’s anarchy as a sign of its the disorderly nature of organic life process- vitality, Mekas here presents a view of the NAC es, as is suggested by his characterization of as a living organism, one whose internal dif- the Coop’s establishment as a spontaneous ferences and divisions were merely reflections birth. In Mekas’s writings on the NAC and of the chaotic character of natural processes. the Coop, which frequently traffic in meta- The Coop’s refusal of overriding organizational phors of fertility and natality, disorganization policies must be understood, he insists, as an is elevated beyond the register of a political intentional effort to accommodate the organic commitment to assume the status of an ide- growth of a budding cultural formation.17 ology. Disorganization is naturalized, in other Whether or not a commitment to disorga- words, as a transhistorical precondition for nized organization remains operative within the operation of vital and organic processes, the Coop’s offices today, it is interesting to which Mekas understood to proceed in es- consider how the NAC’s historical pursuit of sentially “uncertain” ways.14 In Mekas’s view, unstructured vitality has impacted this organi- the Coop’s ability to function as an organ of zation’s archival holdings. Obviously, the idea the living cinema was contingent upon its that the livelihood of the avant-garde turns development of an organizational mode con- on its ability to resist order, fixity, and stability ducive to the disorganized workings of the life runs contrary to notions of archival preser- process. vation, as well as the more general process While this basic sentiment is implic- of reification that is fundamental to the pro- it in Mekas’s call to remain disorganizedly duction of historical documents. If it is true,

Guilford \ 174 as Arendt states, that documentation affords inaccurate), and by consulting with members living acts and events a durable materiality of the Coop’s staff to determine the location of they do not intrinsically possess, but that the documents relevant to their research. In addi- price of this materialization is life itself—with tion, large portions of the collections remain the document functioning as the “dead letter” unsorted, particularly those materials desig- that replaces the “living spirit” of the event, nated as pertinent to the Coop’s organizational transforming fleeting manifestations of human history. And because the paper materials are action into static records—then it is evident regularly consulted and utilized in the course why artists of the NAC would regard documen- of the Coop’s daily business, the archive is tation with suspicion.18 But this film culture’s surprisingly dynamic, with the location of in- adherence to an ideology of disorganization dividual items and the contents of individual also conflicts with more general principles of boxes and folders perpetually subject to modi- archival arrangement. To the extent that an ar- fication. The paper collections are thus riddled chive is understood as a collection of records with gaps and opacities that serve simulta- arranged into meaningful groups and se- neously to frustrate and motivate historical quences, the space of the archive would seem research, making it difficult to ascertain a clear antithetical to this film culture’s preferred view of the Coop’s history while also impelling mode of operation, like an imposition of ab- visitors, staff, and volunteers to impose order stract form on the NAC’s spontaneous sprouts on the collections. and branches. The sort of structural disorder displayed by This may help us to understand the rela- the Coop’s paper archive is no doubt com- tive disorder of the Coop’s paper materials, mon amongst paper collections maintained whose idiosyncratic arrangement, fragmen- by small, underfunded, and marginalized cul- tary collections, and lenient access policies tural institutions. Yet it does not only serve stand in stark contrast to the strictly admin- as evidence of this organization’s marginali- istered archives maintained by large research ty. Archival disorder also indexes the Coop’s institutions. Existing somewhere between a emergence from a film culture defined by an collection and an accumulation, the paper embrace of disorganization as a requisite for materials consist of documents generated or vitalizing modes of experience and relation. received by the Coop in the course of its daily The ideology of disorganization that governed operations, which have been compiled, or- much of the creative and cultural practices of dered, and reordered sporadically over the last the NAC impacted the organizational activi- fifty-eight years by the organization’s rotating ties of the Coop at multiple levels, including roster of staff, members, directors, and volun- efforts to arrange and maintain its collections. teers. Formed in this amateur fashion, without This impact is perhaps evidenced most imme- oversight by professional archivists, the rough- diately by certain documents contained in the ly 16 filing cabinets, 86 card files, 40 cardboard Coop’s archive in which members and staff boxes, and 2 book shelves that comprise the can be found complaining about the disorder majority of the archive at the time of this of the offices and collections.19 But the materi- writing are arranged in accordance with an al effects of this ideology on the paper archive organizational system that is not only uncon- become more apparent when we consider this ventional (i.e., inconsistent with professional archive’s relatively late emergence within the standards of archival arrangement), but also Coop’s organizational history. undocumented and incomplete. As with many To be sure, the earliest description of the paper collections maintained by organizations Coop specifies the maintenance of records as that do not function as official archives, there a key activity of this organization.20 In keep- is no finding aid to guide one’s research at the ing with this organizational charge, many of Coop. Instead, visitors navigate the archive the documents contained in the archive date by referencing the labels on drawers, box- back to the Coop’s earliest years, and import- es, and folders (many of which are vague or ant elements of the current filing system were

Guilford \ 175 developed and maintained by the organiza- Coop had come to function as a “de facto” film tion’s long-standing Secretary, Leslie Trumbull, archive: an active distribution center that was who began working on staff in 1963, and who simultaneously engaged, by way of necessity was known for his fastidious documentation rather than design, in restoring and preserv- of organizational activities.21 Yet the Coop’s ing the ageing, orphaned, and often unique records were kept private for the majority of film prints in its care.24 The conjunction of Trumbull’s tenure, as resources to be consult- these two archival initiatives three decades ed by the Coop’s staff in the course of regular after the Coop’s establishment was not mere business. And Trumbull left large quantities of coincidence, but the result of a significant documents unsorted at the time of his depar- temporal shift that occurred within the orga- ture from the organization in the early ‘90s, nization over the course of its development, when a series of health issues forced him to which the crisis of the late ‘80s brought into leave. sharp relief. Because the Coop was initially According to the Coop’s Executive Director, conceived as a cultural incubator—an organi- MM Serra, the paper archive was not initiated zation devoted to nurturing the vitality of the as an organizational project until the begin- new cinema, rather than to safeguarding that ning of the 1990s, when Trumbull’s tenure with cinema’s legacy—its primary objectives were the organization was concluding. At this time, oriented toward supporting film production, the Coop’s Board was in the midst of a push to distribution, and exhibition in the present, have the organization recertified as a 501(c) with the aim of facilitating the emergence of (3)—a project that the organization initiated a new cinema in the future.25 It was only with after a new generation of directors and staff, the new cinema’s slow accretion of historic- including Marjorie Keller, Robert Haller, and ity, as exhibition prints gradually transformed Paul Arthur, among others, assumed responsi- into endangered artifacts and institutional bility for guiding the Coop out of an extended records gradually became legible as historical period of financial and organizational decline. evidence, that the Coop shifted its attention As part of this process, Serra (who joined the to its past, with a new generation of directors Board in 1990, and who was appointed Office and staff endeavoring to preserve the vast Manager of the Coop in 1991) and Keller (who quantities of material remnants accumulated served as President of the Coop between by the organization over its first thirty years 1987-1988, and as Treasurer between 1988- of activity.26 While this shift is evidenced by 1990) began to arrange the paper documents the establishment of the paper archive, it can that the Coop had accrued over its first thirty also be discerned in the Coop’s organizational years of activity, assessing, sorting, and filing structure. In a significant gesture, members these materials in a concerted effort to estab- of the Coop chose to formalize archival prac- lish them as an educational resource.22 This tices as official corporate activities in 1989, activity would not have been possible without when they voted to adopt a new certificate Trumbull’s recognition of the historical value of incorporation specifying both the “cata- of the documents he produced and retained, log[ing] and preserv[ation] of older film and but the actual assemblage of the Coop’s paper video productions . . . for the benefit of pos- materials into a relatively ordered and acces- terity” and the “collect[ion of] . . . information sible archive only became a priority as the about film and video-makers and their works” organization sought to open its collections to as organizational purposes.27 While the Coop’s outside researchers, curators, and students as development of historical resources like the a way of complying more fully with the legal paper archive has certainly been intentional, definition of an educational nonprofit.23 then, the organization only achieved archival Keller’s and Serra’s efforts to reorder the status accidentally, as an unexpected con- Coop’s paper materials occurred contempo- sequence of its remarkable endurance as an raneously with a growing recognition by the organization. organization’s staff and directorship that the The Coop’s relative success in managing

Guilford \ 176 this accident is among its more impressive functioning as material records that seem to accomplishments in the last three decades preserve some aspect of the living spirit to of its history, a period in which its staff and which they refer. The brittle newsprint from old membership have maintained sizeable col- advertisements in the Village Voice announc- lections of celluloid, electronic, and paper ing Film-Makers’ Showcase screenings; the materials across two moves (one of which notes scribbled across envelopes or random resulted from a forced eviction), and amidst scraps of paper; the fading postcards riddled substantial transformations to archival meth- with shorthand and grammatical errors; the ods and technologies prompted by the rise illegible, translucent receipts—such docu- of digital media.28 But the organization’s ar- ments provoke imaginings of the everyday chival practices have been complicated by lived experiences from which they emerged, a variety of factors. As is suggested by the while also rendering visible the material lives Coop’s late recognition of its archival status, of documents themselves, which continue to one such factor has been the lingering influ- degrade even within the protective enclosure ence of the NAC’s emphasis on life as a refuge of the archive. By gesturing in this manner from the deadness of history. The structural to the life process, a form of vitality that the disorder of the Coop’s paper archive is just archive can index but not preserve, ephemera one consequence—one might even call it an function not only to complicate perceptions of inheritance—of the ideology of disorganiza- the document as a static object, but to de- tion elaborated by the 1960s avant-garde. This stabilize understandings of the archive as an ideology enabled, or perhaps necessitated, instrument of totality and integrity, affording a neglect of key elements of historiography, researchers “a sense of a life that lies beyond preservation, and records management with- the folders,” as Ann Cvetkovich has eloquently in the Coop over its first twenty-five years of observed.29 operation, which the organization’s staff and The ephemeral documents archived by the membership have been struggling to reme- Coop can thus be said to register the NAC’s dy since the late ‘80s. The many blank spots, ideology of disorganization at the level of mysteries, and vortices of original chaos that form, or what archivists might refer to as the one encounters in the Coop’s paper collec- document’s physical structure. Yet the NAC’s tions need to be understood, in part, as relics ambivalence about reification can also be of the NAC’s aversion to all things old, static, discerned at the level of content, and particu- past, and dead. larly in the variety of paper materials archived by the Coop that exhibit a pronounced anxiety The NAC’s pursuit of a disorganized life pro- about the institutional processes they enact or cess did not only impact the arrangement of perform. the Coop’s paper archive, but the very doc- Consider, for instance, the various commu- uments that this archive contains. This can nications sent by filmmakers to request rental be seen most clearly in the prominent place income from the Coop. Unlike distributors that that the archive affords to various kinds of provide members with account statements ephemera, where the NAC’s predilection for detailing earned income at regular intervals, immediate, ephemeral experience seems to the Coop’s policy is to provide such informa- extend down to the materiality of the doc- tion only upon request—a policy that has led ument. Ranging from relatively common to a recurring dilemma for the Coop’s mem- occasional documents such as fliers, adver- bership, given the latter’s self-definition as tisements, and postcards to less conventional a community guided by ideals of amateurism paper records such as hand-written notes, the and authenticity. The awkwardness entailed ephemera collected by the Coop trouble the by a situation in which avant-garde filmmakers presumed durability of the document by fore- are required to admit their desire for financial grounding its disposability. They thus form a remuneration in writing comes through partic- welcome presence in the Coop’s collection, ularly clearly in requests submitted by artists

Guilford \ 177 who developed friendly relationships with everyone needs the money thes [sic] days).” Trumbull over their time with the organization, Krell makes his distaste for officialness more and who typically formulated such requests explicit by then issuing a complaint about the in a noticeably indirect manner, with a ques- weather to Trumbull, the significance of which tion about finances posed in the course of a is mysterious to the outside reader: “Nix the message that appears to be about anything formalities; Leslie, it’s raining here and my hair other than money. A letter from Will Hindle is splitting all over the place.”31 A different dated “Late July ’77,” for example, seems to sentiment about policy comes through in a let- dramatize the roundabout approach one often ter composed by Jon Jost on November 10th, encounters in such requests, beginning as it 1971, in which Jost requests the withdrawal does with two paragraphs recounting a road of his work from the Coop’s collection. After trip Hindle took from his home in Blountsville, complaining about the Coop’s poor treatment Alabama, to Colorado, which focus on Hindle’s of its members, including its failure to ac- mental and physical responses to the vary- knowledge an earlier request from Jost that ing levels of humidity he encountered along his work be withdrawn from distribution, Jost the way. After narrating his arrival in Colorado writes: “as per my previous letter & your rules- (“I could at least roll the windows down and of-the-game, please return my films, as listed take the non-air-conditioned air straight. I above IMMEDIATELY.”32 In a manner that paral- think I even sang a bit”), his time in the moun- lels Krell’s mock performance of “formalities,” tains (“It was a fine day. No humidity”), and Jost—who remains a member of the Coop at his journey home (“Along about Louisiana the the time of this writing—here complies with humid air hit and so did some sort of pollen. I the organization’s requirement for a formal got light headed [again], did things like walk authorization, but does so while trivializing into the ladies’ part of rest rooms”), Hindle the organization’s policies as “rules-of-the- cuts abruptly to a request for funds, which is game,” suggesting a view of such policies as separated by full paragraph breaks from the unnecessary regulations imposed to restrict personal remarks that precede and follow it, the creative play of its membership. emphasizing the request’s alterity to the for- Similar efforts to evade or subvert the mat in which it appears: “If there is anything impersonality of protocol often recur in film- in the film-fee kitty there, could you send it on makers’ requests for the withdrawal of their to me here.”30 Hindle’s use of a period rather prints, which comprise one of the more than a question mark to conclude this sen- charged genres of documents contained in tence feels significant, whether or not it was the Coop’s paper archive. In a number of intentional. The error works to negate the very withdrawal requests sent by long-standing request that the sentence conveys. members of the Coop, the authors can be Other requests from filmmakers exhibit a found attempting to strike a complex bal- similar sense of unease when employing the ance between executing a formal discursive impersonal mode of speech required to enact function that will effectively conclude their organizational processes. In a letter received membership with the Coop, and performing a by the Coop on February 12th, 1974, the film- sincere communicative mode to convey their maker James Krell requests that his rental discomfort at having to invoke such formalities income be used to pay off a debt incurred at in the first place. This balance is evidenced a lab. The note begins in an official tone that in Yvonne Rainer’s withdrawal request from would seem appropriate to such a request, December 4th, 1987, for example, which was but then breaks into a parenthetical that prompted by the Coop’s failure to remit a sub- reveals the insincerity of this tone: “I hereby stantial amount of rental income to Rainer (and authorize the payment of present monies in other members of the organization) earlier that my account (minus the debt standing to the year. Rainer’s letter begins with a simple state- Co-op of some amount not known but for god ment of withdrawal: “After much thought,” sakes [sic] to be paid in triplicate cause [sic] she writes, “I have decided to withdraw my

Guilford \ 178 prints.” But she goes on to state, “I believe relief, the erotic imagery he deploys is quite strongly that the Coop must continue to exist appropriate to his intimate mode of address. and I shall work to further that end as best I Somewhat like Jost, Dorsky here adheres to can—as a friend, consultant, contributor to the institution’s requirement for a written benefits, fundraiser, etc.,” and then issues a authorization of withdrawal while attempting personal expression of gratitude to Trumbull to subvert the sterility of that format, discard- “for these many years of meticulous attention ing formalities for the sake of a more informal to the booking of my films.”33 A letter sent by discursive form. Stan Brakhage to the Board of Directors on While the aforementioned documents differ February 8th, 1990, places a more pronounced in many respects, each registers a sense of emphasis on the conflicted feelings provoked conflict experienced by its author at a moment by the Coop’s financial difficulties during this when an impersonal edifice of organization period. In Brakhage’s letter, which was writ- is found impeding the intimate relations and ten under circumstances similar to those that unstructured experiences that the Coop was prompted Rainer’s withdrawal, Brakhage writes established to protect. Over and over again of his anguish at finding himself “in the painful in the archive, we find examples of artists position of having asked Leslie [Trumbull] to striving to retain the Coop’s informality and stop all bookings on my films . . . [and] having disorder as key organizational values while hung-up on Bob Haller in anger.” Though not enacting or conforming to formal organization- technically a withdrawal request, Brakhage’s al procedures, including those prompted by letter threatens withdrawal not only because the Coop’s administrative and organizational of the financial burden placed on him by the failures (as in the case of withdrawal requests Coop, but also because of the way organiza- such as Rainer’s). Letters like Hindle’s, Krell’s, tional matters had come to interfere with the and Dorsky’s were composed to enact specific, artist’s personal friendships. “These are two organizational procedures, and these docu- of the very closest and oldest friends I have,” ments thus serve as evidence of important Brakhage writes, “I don’t ever want to encoun- institutional activities. At the same time, they ter either of them again in any similar way.”34 push back against the document’s status as a A letter sent to Trumbull by Nathaniel Dorsky procedural device, whether by questioning the on July 23rd, 1987 similarly foregrounds the validity or necessity of such procedures, or by author’s emotional ambivalence about with- striving to disguise formal requests, authoriza- drawing, though in less-anguished terms. “It tions, or demands as mere correspondence. is with a great sentimental tug of the heart,” The NAC’s investment in disorganization Dorsky begins, “and weeks of hesitation that as a symptom—or precondition—of vitality I am writing to you concerning moving the is also evident in the various forms of paper prints of my six films.” After explaining the materials collected by the Coop that index its practical reasons for this decision (Dorsky had membership’s strong distaste for formal and relocated to San Francisco, and was consoli- standardized communicative formats. This is dating his prints with the San Francisco-based perhaps most obvious in the many envelopes, distributor, Canyon Cinema), Dorsky stresses postcards, and packages contained in the that his withdrawal should not be read as an paper archive that feature decorations and expression of dissatisfaction with the Coop, adornments added by filmmakers as a way of or with Trumbull himself. Addressing Trumbull personalizing their correspondence with the directly, he writes: “So, you who have always organization, as in a pair of envelopes sent to been a sweetheart to me, my priest of distri- the Coop by Le Ann Bartok in 1988 and 1989, bution . . . I apologize for ‘pulling out’ just as which feature long, wavy strands of color things were getting goood [sic].”35 Though resembling the mile-long paper streamers Dorsky’s decision to frame his withdrawal Bartok sent plummeting through the air in her from the Coop via a humorous deployment of a Skyworks productions of the 1970s.36 A related sexual metaphor was likely intended as comic disregard for communicative standards can be

Guilford \ 179 found in responses submitted by filmmakers the maximum audience of a given screening to a questionnaire that the Coop distributed to encloses something closer to a prayer for a its members in 1966, to solicit information in sell-out engagement, featuring the word “ca- the lead-up to the publication of Film-Makers’ pacity” surrounded by a wall of text consisting Cooperative Catalogue No. 4, which was print- of what would appear to be the mystic syllable ed the following year. Structured as it is around “OM,” which is repeated 19 times.38 Similar a uniform set of prompts requesting yes or no instances of internal discourse can be found answers to questions concerning such legal on film inspection cards as well, the standard- and practical matters as filmmakers’ use of ized forms on which staff members log details release forms, the questionnaire seems as of the inspections they conduct on analog film if it were designed to incite ridicule from an prints after a given print returns from a rental, organization of artists bound together by a to determine whether the print incurred any shared investment in irrationality and disorder. damage. On the card for a retired print of Marie It is thus not surprising to find that, on Bruce Menken’s Hurry! Hurry! (1957), for instance, Conner’s completed questionnaire, Conner’s an inspection dated October 31st, 1990 reads, response to the question, “Are your films “Happy Halloween.”39 On the card for a re- copyrighted, carrying your name, date, and @?” tired print of Robert Downey’s Babo ’73 (1964), comes as a hearty “Hooha chugghug,” or to which was pulled from distribution in 1986 discover that George Landow (aka Owen Land) due to the amount of wear it had incurred over elected to eschew the suggested yes/no re- twenty-six years of rentals, the rigid lines that sponse format when asked if the Coop should delineate the space of inspection are offset by provide renters with his telephone number, a crude rendition of a ribbon, hand-drawn in instead directing the Coop to do so for “girls green marker and blue ink, which reads: “1st only.”37 prize—dirtiest movie ever!!—film cleaners of The Coop’s members were not the only America Inc., award.”40 persons affiliated with the organization to Such documents are indicative of a broad- worry about the impersonality of protocol er malaise provoked in affiliates of the NAC and standardized forms. When reviewing the by purportedly neutral informational formats, Coop’s substantial collection of organizational signs of which can be found in other items records such as invoices and booking cards, held in the Coop’s paper archive. When ex- one sometimes encounters instances of staff amining the Coop’s series of back catalogues, writing that trouble the official, organizational for instance, which were published by the framework of the records in which they appear. organization intermittently between 1962- Though the large majority of such documents 1989 to distribute information about the films are strictly business, with writing restricted and videos in their collection, this discomfort to the narrow parameters of information and comes through in the many catalogue entries data, some stand out for their registration that privilege evocative poetic language over of personalized messages, commentary, or a more standard summary of a given work’s more elaborate forms of creative expres- subject, content, or form. Storm De Hirsch’s sion. For instance, on an invoice from 1967 description of her short film, Journey Around addressed to the Boston branch of the Film- a Zero (1963), in Film-Makers’ Cooperative Makers’ Cinematheque—a screening venue Catalogue No. 6, is a case in point: “A phal- initiated in New York in 1964 as a division of lic invocation. An abstract occasion of image Film Culture Non-Profit Corporation, whose and sound. Zero are the violated, zero the Board overlapped significantly with that of the redeemed, zero always in the round, molest- Coop—the area of the form typically used to ed by the computation of an ache, a threat of specify the terms of payment reads “ha, ha, hangman’s thread or ballad dangling from the ha!” in an apparent recognition that no such eye.”41 This entry begins with something like terms had been established, while a small descriptive content, as Journey Around a Zero box at the bottom of the form used to specify is comprised of abstract imagery and sound.

Guilford \ 180 But the concluding sentence, which repli- would seem to undermine the basic premise cates the opening lines of De Hirsch’s poem of printed forms like catalogues and program “Countdown,” from her 1964 poetry collection notes, which hinge on the capacity of words to Twilight Massacre, addresses the reader on represent the audio-visual characteristics of a different register, drawing out associations the filmic medium. of violence and sexuality embedded in the concept zero in an effort to appeal to a view- Many of the imaginative, poetic, or evasive ership attuned to the poetic components of documents held within the Coop’s paper De Hirsch’s film. Along with pointing to the archive parallel their authors’ explorations of connections De Hirsch perceived between her the moving image as an aesthetic form, rather literary and filmic output, both of which traffic than a transparent documentary medium. But in irrational juxtapositions, symbolic imagery, they also point to a more general anxiety about and metaphysical themes, the catalogue entry traditional understandings of documentation for Journey Around a Zero implicitly contests that manifests in the Coop’s paper collections the notion that experimental films constructed in different ways. This is especially apparent around non-rational modes of signification can in one of the more significant forms of in- be adequately encompassed in rational, de- stitutional discourse produced by the Coop scriptive language. during the 1970s specifically for the purpose of This basic sentiment was shared by other documentation: the Film-Makers’ Cooperative filmmakers associated with the Coop, many of Report, a serial report composed and distribut- whom used catalogue entries, or references to ed by Trumbull intermittently between 1970-76, film descriptions in other discursive forums, as which served to summarize or transcribe occasions to voice concerns about the capac- Board meetings for the benefit of the Coop’s ity of linguistic description to summarize or membership, and to convey important details represent their films. In a hand-written letter about organizational projects such as cata- sent to the Coop by Saul Levine ca. 1967, for logue publications and elections. example, difficult-to-read descriptions of three During the period in which they were of Levine’s films are followed by the following produced and distributed, these reports admission: “If you cant [sic] read descriptions functioned as one of the Coop’s signal organi- of films above, I dont [sic] care wether [sic] or zational mediums: communications intended not they are put into the catalouge [sic]. I’ve not only to convey information about the lost most of the words to say about my films.”42 Coop’s processes, achievements, and needs, A comparable sense of defeatism emerges but also to solicit participation from the indi- from Bruce Baillie’s catalogue entry for Roslyn viduals involved in the cooperative enterprise Romance (Is it Really True?): Intro.1 & 2 (1977), of the organization. The appearance of these which wagers: “The work seems to be a sort reports reflects their significance. While the of manual, concerning all the stuff of the cycle aforementioned reports that Mekas composed of life, from the most detailed mundanery to throughout the ’60s were characterized by . . . God knows.”43 In her program notes for a their informality, with Mekas structuring many 1983 screening at The Collective for Living reports in an epistolary form and writing in the Cinema, Mary Filippo voices her concerns subjective, meandering style for which he is about language more directly, preceding her known, Trumbull’s reports have a more offi- film descriptions with the following disclaimer: cial aspect. Each is published on the Coop’s “I have misgivings about program notes. They letterhead, for example, with formal headings can limit responses in their attempt to illu- denoting the date, volume number, and issue minate a work. If you’d rather respond to the number of the report. In addition, each report films directly, without reading these descrip- features a condensed layout that is designed tions, please do so.”44 Reflecting the American for economy, with information delineated avant-garde’s suspicion of language as a into segments demarcated visually by border static, operational domain, these documents lines and labels, and individual items further

Guilford \ 181 indicated by nested bullet points. Yet the by the process of composing these reports, structured format of Trumbull’s reports is often particularly after the Board began to pro- punctuated by disruptive eddies of subjectiv- duce audio recordings of their meetings (a ity and distortion—parenthetical comments, practice initiated at Levine’s request), which lengthy asides, and stray remarks—that un- Trumbull was then tasked with transcribing. dercut a given report’s claims to objectivity, In the midst of the eight-page report from rendering Trumbull’s authorship visible and a meeting held on November 25, 1975, for injecting a strain of mischief into his otherwise example—a meeting that devolved into a con- orderly communications. tentious argument about a number of Levine’s In a report on a Board meeting held on proposals—Trumbull inserts the following March, 1973, for instance, a summary of parenthetical, which precedes a summary the Board’s conversation with the scholar of letters sent by members in response to a Gerald O’Grady, which concerned a survey question about catalogue funds: “Aside: your O’Grady was conducting on the state of in- weary transcriber-typist has decided to edit, dependent film distribution at that time, is as well. Letters will be summarised [sic] or followed by a lengthy “aside to the reader,” characterized, rather than quoted extensively in which Trumbull criticizes the inevitably or—gasp!—verbatim, to hold down the size skewed character of surveys, and lays out of this.”48 Trumbull’s acknowledgment of this his personal assessment of the differences sort of slippage from transcriber-typist to separating artist-run cooperatives from com- editor occurs in other reports as well, as in mercial distributors.45 Trumbull’s willingness one from May 1970, where Trumbull introduces to contest or refute the statements he was a set of points made by Stan Brakhage, who tasked with conveying also comes through participated in the meeting by telephone, as in a report on a meeting from June 1974, in follows: “Brakhage ‘phoned in and offered the which Trumbull begins a section summariz- following (inevitably distorted by long-dis- ing a series of proposals advanced by Charles tance multi-voice crackle and Leslie’s inept Levine—a longtime member of the Board, longhand).”49 In a report from September whose proposals in Board meetings were often 1975, Trumbull follows an awkwardly worded controversial—with the following character- summary of a statement by Robert Breer with ization of Levine’s remarks: “CHARLES held a similar parenthetical: “Well, I have to admit the floor for ½-hour to read a prepared state- that’s the gist of Bob’s comment: no-one really ment. Although it primarily was an expression talks like the final clauses of that sentence!”50 of his bitterness at the failure of his cable-TV In such moments, Trumbull’s remarks refute and other alternative distribution projects to the purported fidelity of the official docu- achieve funding and sponsorship (viz., Co-op ments in which they appear, riddled as these is ossified & Jonas is a monster), the Board are with gaps in conversations and distor- recognized and discussed three substan- tions of meaning or intent. The reports only tive matters.”46 Later in this report, Trumbull approach or approximate the meetings, never deploys a parenthetical to correct what he capturing them. Rather than faithfully docu- perceived as an inaccurate statement made by menting the event, they document a failure of Levine. This was a practice that Trumbull re- documentation. turned to in a subsequent report from October Indices of failure such as these are marks 1975, in which he repeatedly undercuts of success when regarded from another angle. Levine’s remarks with parenthetical correc- Within the context of an organization founded tions and clarifications, despite Levine’s own in the name of life, the refusal to document, protestations (registered in the same report) archive, or order can appear as a protective that Trumbull had been misrepresenting his measure, an effort to preserve the living spirit comments.47 that historiographic processes inevitably re- Other examples of Trumbull’s embellish- place with so many dead letters. The traces of ments highlight the personal labor entailed this kind of preservative practice—a practice

Guilford \ 182 oriented toward the preservation of futility— ENDNOTES are evident in many places in the offices and 1—For the sake of simplicity, I have chosen collections of the Coop, but especially in this to use the name Film-Makers’ Cooperative organization’s paper collections. To be sure, in the body of this essay to refer to both the scope and extent of these collections the distribution center that operates under speak to the NAC’s enduring fascination with this name, and the broader non-profit that what Arendt has termed “the reification which serves as the Coop’s legal agent: The New remembrance needs for its own fulfillment,” American Cinema Group, Inc. The latter is revealing this film culture’s recognition that a nonprofit corporation that encompass- the recollection and transmission of culture es activities other than distribution. It depend on the transformation of fleeting was officially incorporated in the state of actions and utterances “into the tangibility of New York on July 14, 1961. The Coop was things.”51 Yet the NAC’s interest in resisting founded by members of the New American this process remains a defining attribute of the Cinema Group on January 18, 1962, and documents that comprise these collections. is technically a division of this nonprofit One of the more pressing questions that corporation. The practical distinction be- confronts members of the Coop’s board and tween these entities is negligible, however, staff—as well as the volunteers who assist and has been for many years. As early as with the arrangement of the Coop’s archive, 1965, Jonas Mekas explained, in a letter and the researchers who regularly rummage to members of the New American Cinema through its collections—is whether it is pos- Group, “for all practical purposes, Coop is sible to recover the history of the Coop while the [New American Cinema] Group” (Jonas respecting the NAC’s radical desire to evade Mekas to Film-Makers, 23 September the reifying confines of history. This question 1965, reproduced in New American Cinema is not embedded in the Coop alone. It hovers Group and Film-Makers’ Cooperative(s): within the halls and stacks of a wide range The Early Years, ed. Mekas [New York: of de facto archives that concretize the leg- Anthology Film Archives, 1999], 255). acy of the 1960s avant-garde, haunting the custodians who have been left to manage the 2—Paul Arthur, “Movies the Color of scattered remnants of this culture’s devotion Blood,” in Film-Makers’ Cooperative to life. Catalogue No. 7 (New York: New American Cinema Group, Inc., 1989), vii. Importantly, This essay has been informed by conversations Arthur attributes this view of the Coop with past and present staff members of the to the filmmaker Ken Jacobs. For another Film-Makers’ Cooperative. The author would like essay by Arthur that addresses the history to thank MM Serra, Gordon Ball, Michael Zryd, of the Coop, and which has significant- and Robert Haller for their generosity in dis- ly informed my own analysis, see: Arthur, cussing their experiences on staff. “Routines of Emancipation: Jonas Mekas and Alternative Cinema in the Ideology and Politics of the Sixties,” in A Line of Sight: American Avant-Garde Film Since 1965 (Minneapolis, MN: 2005), 1-23, esp. 9-16. 3—“First Statement of the New American Cinema Group,” Film Culture Reader, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Cooper Square, 2000), 83. 4—I borrow this phrase from Steve Anker, who writes about the significance of “living, or vital, institutions” to experimental

Guilford \ 183 film and media culture in “Experimental September 1988, Board of Directors Files, Media Centers Across the USA: A Personal New American Cinema Group, Inc./Film- History,” INCITE 4 (Fall 2013): 17-21. Makers’ Cooperative Paper Collections, New York City [hereafter FMC Papers]). 5—I should note that I worked as the The second important event that occurred Coop’s Print Traffic Coordinator between during this period, and which resulted 2013-15, and was Scholar in Residence in a more practical restructuring of the at the Coop between 2015-16. In ad- Coop’s operations and correspondence, dition, I have been an active member of was the organization’s acquisition of a the Coop since 2015, and currently serve computer in the summer of 1988. Many as a member of its Board of Advisors. of the organizational processes that the 6—See especially Hannah Arendt, Coop previously recorded on paper formats The Human Condition, 2nd ed. moved into the realm of electronic writing (Chicago: University of Chicago in the years following this acquisition. Press, 1998), 93-96, 136-174. 10—The corporate entity “The New 7—For Arendt’s writings on zōē, see es- American Cinema Group, Inc.” is not the pecially The Human Condition, 96-101. On same as the “New American Cinema.” The the relationship between “the life pro- latter is a more capacious term, which cess” and the “inner life” of the soul, see: refers to the independent film movement Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: that emerged in New York City at the be- Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 30-37. ginning of the 1960s. As noted above, “The New American Cinema Group, Inc.” 8—Arendt, The Human Condition, 96; is the legally-incorporated non-profit Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture: Its organization that was established to facil- Social and its Political Significance,” itate this movement, and whose primary in Between Past and Future: Eight enterprise is the operation of the Coop. Exercises in Political Thought, 4th ed. (New York: Penguin, 2006), 202. 11—Mekas, “Second Report of the N.A.C. Group,” 1 June 1962, reprint- 9—My research focuses on a period of ed in New American Cinema Group and organizational activity that predates a Film-Makers’ Cooperative(s), 84. substantial institutional restructuring that occurred at the Coop between 1987-93, 12—Ibid, 84. during which time the Coop’s culture of 13—Mekas, “Third Report of the New disorganization came under careful scruti- American Cinema Group,” 15 April ny. The full extent of this change is beyond 1963, reprinted in ibid, 127-129. the scope of this essay, but two important aspects of this period should be noted 14—It is worth noting that Mekas borrows here. First, between 1987-93, the Coop’s the characterization of vital processes Board worked to modify the organization’s as uncertain from Wilhelm Reich. See: legal structure by amending and restat- Mekas, “Notes on the New American ing its certificate of incorporation, and Cinema,” in Film Culture Reader, 107. pursuing federal designation as a 501(c) 15—Reprinted in New American (3) nonprofit (a designation it received in Cinema Group and Film-Makers’ 1993). This process was initiated in the Cooperative(s), 295. wake of a financial crisis that nearly forced the Coop to close in 1987, an assess- 16—Jonas Mekas to Amos Vogel, ment of which can be found in Robert 25 August 1966, reprinted in New Haller’s “Report to the Board of Directors American Cinema Group and Film-Makers’ of the Film-Makers [sic] Cooperative” (20 Cooperative(s), 295. Mekas reiterated

Guilford \ 184 this basic position on many occasions found in a number of artistic and critical throughout the years, in remarks he made statements of the NAC, where the per- in defense of the disorganized processes ceived lack of vitality in the late-modern maintained by independent, cooperative- world is often posited as a condition to be ly run arts institutions. For instance, in rectified through a refusal of form, con- an interview with Mekas featured in Joel trol, administration, and rationality. For Schlemowitz’s experimental documen- examples of this tendency in writings by tary, Moving Images – The Film-Makers’ filmmakers and critics affiliated with the Cooperative Relocates (2001), which NAC, see, for instance: Gideon Bachmann, was produced on the occasion of the “The Frontiers of Realist Cinema: The Coop’s move from 175 Lexington Ave to Work of Ricky Leacock,” Film Culture the Clocktower Gallery, at 108 Leonard 22-23 (Summer 1961): 12-23; Ricky Street, Mekas can be heard explaining Leacock, “For an Uncontrolled Cinema,” in voiceover: “As far as the small orga- Film Culture 22-23 (Summer 1961): nizations, alternative organizations for 23-25; Stan Vanderbeek, “On ‘Science alternative forms of art, they never had Friction,’” Film Culture 22-23 (Summer any problems, or when they had and had 1961): 168-169; Vanderbeek, “If the Actor to close, they probably—they deserved is the Audience,” Film Culture 24 (Spring to be closed because there was no need 1962): 92; Ken Kelman, “Anticipations of for them, they had lost a vital function.” the Light,” in The New American Cinema: A similar view is voiced by Mekas in his A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock short video Letter to John from Jonas (New York: EP Dutton, 1967); and Arthur, (1999), though in relation to a different “Movies the Color of Blood.” For a critical institution: Anthology Film Archives. Within assessment of the NAC’s abiding commit- the context of a monologue addressed ment to disorganization, and the way this to John Hanhardt about Anthology’s de- commitment impacted the Coop over the cision to terminate negotiations with the first half-century of its operations, see: Guggenheim Museum regarding the es- Haller, “Report to the Board of Directors tablishment of a formal affiliation between of the Film-Makers [sic] Cooperative.” the two institutions, Mekas states: “We 18—Arendt, The Human Condition, 169. [representatives of Anthology and the filmmaking community] all rambled togeth- 19—It is particularly humorous, for in- er, we all talked, and to all of us became stance, to encounter a memo that appears [sic] clearer and clearer that Anthology to have been composed by Mekas, which has to remain totally independent from chastises members of the Coop for their any other established international or lack of organizational etiquette: “I do not national institution, that we need one want to restrict your ‘personal’ ‘expres- such showcase, workshop, experimen- sions’ etc. etc. However, there are things tal maybe and anarchic a little bit, that in this place like films, sound tapes, etc. open [sic] to all the possibilities, where They MUST BE WHERE THEY ARE, in specif- money does not dictate, the boards do ic places assigned to them on the shelves, not dictate, and even the directors do not so that we can get them when we need dictate, but the filmmaking-videomaking them” (“MEMO n.10001345,” n.d., re- community, that things that happen very produced in New American Cinema Group naturally and develop, life itself will dictate and Film-Makers’ Cooperative[s], 225). the policies of Anthology Film Archives.” 20—For early references to the role 17—The idea of life that guides this im- of paper records in the New American age of disorganized growth was not held Cinema Group, Inc. and the Coop, see: by Mekas alone. Similar visions can be “Constitution and-By [sic] Laws of the

Guilford \ 185 the [sic] New American Cinema Group, 25—The original certificate of incorpora- Inc.,” in New American Cinema Group tion for the New American Cinema Group, and Film-Makers’ Cooperative(s), 63; Inc. is quite clear on this point, specifying and “Minutes of a Special Meeting as it does the corporation’s first object as of Directors of the New American follows: “to encourage the development of Cinema Group, Inc.,” ibid, 73. a New Cinema which reflects the highest ethical and esthetic standards.” Within this 21—A valuable account of the Coop’s document, the development of this New early office culture, and of Trumbull Cinema is said to entail creative work at himself, can be found in Gordon Ball’s the level of “film financing, distribution and memoir, 66 Frames (Minneapolis, exhibition,” but not at the level of preser- MN: Coffee House Press, 1999), esp. vation. See “Certificate of Incorporation 143-148, 188-190, 225-234. of the the [sic] New American Cinema 22—Interview with MM Serra, Group, Inc.,” New American Cinema Group 18 January 2015. and Film-Makers’ Cooperative(s), 28. 23—Trumbull’s understanding of this value 26—This is not to say that matters of is evidenced not only by his decision to preservation were not a concern with- retain such records, but also by his stan- in the broader context of the NAC prior dard practice of annotating organizational to the late ‘80s. This film culture’s idea documents, many of which are stamped to establish a museum devoted to the with the date on which they were received, film as an artform—a project that was or adorned with hand-written marginalia eventually realized as Anthology Film that convey valuable details about a giv- Archives—emerged as early as 1967, for en document’s origin and significance in instance, and a key component of this Trumbull’s characteristic cursive script. project was the establishment of a “permanent archives” to house the museum’s 24—The phrase “de facto archive” repertory collection (quoted from Sitney, comes from Paul Arthur, Letter to mem- “Introduction,” The Essential Cinema: bers of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, Essays on the Films in the Collection of 16 February 1990, Board of Directors Anthology Film Archives: Volume One [New Files, FMC Papers. Arthur also notes the York: Anthology Film Archives, 1975], ix). Coop’s engagement in “de facto preservation” in “Movies the Color of Blood,” vi. 27—“Certificate of Amendment and However, the primary figure driving con- Restatement of the Certificate of versations about preservation within the Incorporation of the New American Coop during its period of reorganization Cinema Group, Inc.,” 16 September was Robert Haller, who was initially hired 1988, Organizational Files, FMC Papers, as an Executive Consultant to the Board 2. The revised bylaws and amended cer- in January 1988, before being appointed tificate of incorporation were officially Administrative Director in December of approved by members of the Coop in that year, a position he occupied until the January, 1989. See: Newsletter, No. 2 fall of 1990. Haller’s interest in developing (March, 1989), Organizational Files, FMC an ambitious, long-term film preserva- Papers. The issue of preservation does tion initiative at the Coop is articulated in figure in a number of earlier organiza- various documents from this period. See tional documents collected in the Coop’s especially: Haller, “Towards the Future,” paper archive, but the Coop did not for- 28 November 1989, 2, Board of Directors mally acknowledge preservation as an Files, FMC Papers; and Memo to the Board organizational practice until this time. of Directors, 26 December 1989, 3-4, 28—The Coop’s initial offices were located Board of Directors Files, FMC Papers.

Guilford \ 186 in a loft occupied by Jonas Mekas at 36—Le Ann Bartok to Film-Makers’ 414 Park Ave. South. In 1967, the orga- Cooperative, 1988, Personality nization relocated to a building at 175 File, FMC Papers; Le Ann Bartok to Lexington Ave., where it remained until Film-Makers’ Cooperative, 1989, 2001, when the Coop lost its lease and Personality File, FMC Papers. was forced to relocate to an office space 37—Bruce Conner Member Survey, in the Clocktower Gallery at 108 Leonard 1966, FMC Papers; George Landow St. The organization was evicted from Member Survey, 1966, FMC Papers. this space in 2009, at which time the real estate developer, Charles S. Cohen, donat- 38—Invoice No. 66745, 14 April ed an office space to the organization in 1967, Exhibitors File, FMC Papers. a building at 475 Park Ave. South, where 39—Retired inspection card for Hurry! the Coop currently resides. It should be Hurry!, n.d., Personality File, FMC Papers. noted that MM Serra was instrumental to the maintenance of the paper collections 40—Retired inspection card for Babo during this process. According to Michael ‘73, n.d., Personality File, FMC Papers. Zryd, Serra insisted that the Coop’s pa- 41—Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue per records be transported, with great No. 6 (New York: Harry Gantt, 1975), 65. effort, to the Clocktower Gallery during Another notable filmmaker who blurred the 2001 relocation, when the mov- distinctions between catalogue en- ers questioned whether these records tries and poetry is Piero Heliczer. See, needed to be retained (Zryd, person- for instance: Heliczer, “On Film,” Film- al communication, 16 August 2019). Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue No. 4 29—Ann Cvetkovich, “Ephemera” in (New York: Harry Gantt, 1967), 62. Lexicon for an Affective Archive, eds. Giulia 42—Saul Levine to Leslie Trumbull, Palladini and Marco Pustianaz (Chicago, n.d., Personality File, FMC Papers. IL: Intellect, 2017), 183. My understanding of the cultural and political significance 43—Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue of ephemera has been informed by Alana No. 7, 18. Ellipsis in original. Kumbier, Ephemeral Material: Queering the 44—Program notes for “Films by Archive (Sacramento, CA: Litwin, 2014). Mary Filippo” at Collective for Living 30—Will Hindle to Leslie Trumbull, July Cinema, New York City, 17 June 1983, 1977, Personality File, FMC Papers. Personality File, FMC Papers. 31—James Krell to Wheeler Winston 45—Film-Makers’ Cooperative Report 2, Dixon, n.d., Personality File, FMC Papers. nos. 5-7, (February, March, May, 1973): 2, Organizational Files, FMC Papers. 32—Jon Jost to Film-Makers’ Cooperative, 10 November 1971, 46—Film-Makers’ Cooperative Personality File, FMC Papers. Report 2, no. 8 (June, 1974): 1, Organizational Files, FMC Papers. 33—Yvonne Rainer to Leslie Trumbull, 4 December 1987, FMC 47—See: Film-Makers’ Cooperative History Files, FMC Papers. Report 3, no. 2 (October, 1975), Organizational Files, FMC Papers. 34—Stan Brakhage to the Film-Makers’ Cooperative Board of Directors, 8 February 48—Film-Makers’ Cooperative 1990, Board of Directors Files, FMC Papers. Report 3, no. 3 (November, 1975): 6, Organizational Files, FMC Papers. 35—Nathaniel Dorsky to Leslie Trumbull, 23 July 1987, Personality File, FMC Papers. 49—Film-Makers’ Cooperative

Guilford \ 187 Report 1, no. 5 (May, 1970), Organizational Files, FMC Papers. 50—Film-Makers’ Cooperative Report 3, no. 1 (September, 1975), Organizational Files, FMC Papers. 51—Arendt, The Human Condition, 95.

Guilford \ 188 \ Volume 4 \ Dossier \ Fifteen years after major film studios announced the end of celluloid, and four years after the digital conversion of the world’s cinemas was declared to be nearly complete, photochemical filmmaking not only persists but, in some important respects, even enjoys a modest resurgence.1 In Hollywood, a number of high-profile directors and cinematographers obstinately continue using 35mm or even 70mm film in the production and distribution of their work. On the small-gauge side of the market, Kodak’s reintroduction of Ektachrome and the Super 8mm camera in 2018 signaled the triumphant return of this beloved format from near-extinction. One of the most surprising developments of the past two decades, however, has been the emergence of independent photochemical filmmakers’ laboratories. These shared, often collectively run workspac- THE ABOMINABLE COMMUNITY: NOTES es are replacing disappearing commercial film ON INDEPENDENT FILMMAKERS’ laboratories, and, despite their DIY origins, they LABORATORIES \ seem to proliferate and become stronger and more innovative each year. MARIYA NIKIFOROVA A filmmakers’ laboratory focuses primarily on small-gauge photochemical film practices, to which end its members collect, repair, refurbish, and modify discarded commercial and amateur film equipment, which has been abundantly available in the years following the digital conversion. The commonly accepted historiography of this movement begins well before the changeover, in 1995, when the French performance group Metamkine organized a meeting in Grenoble in order to encourage filmmakers to establish experimental laboratories according to the model of Metamkine’s own Atelier MTK. This gathering led directly to the formation of six filmmakers’ laboratories in francophone Europe. Some parallel activities in the Netherlands were integrated into the burgeoning network two years later, as part of a gradual growth that would, within a few years, include collectives in other parts of Europe. This was followed by other regions of the world, such as Australia, Southeast and East Asia, and the Americas, with especially vibrant activity in the 2000s and 2010s—the years of cinema’s digital transformation.2 There is a growing body of enthusiastic

Nikiforova \ 189 research on the independent laboratory move- filmmaking collectives that appeared around ment, and like many others, this essay comes the political events of 1968, the LFMC holds from the perspective of an admiring partici- a special place in the history of experimen- pant.3 There are now between forty and fifty tal cinema. Soon after its founding, the group independent laboratories in operation around expanded its activities, quickly becoming, the world. Although their technical capabilities according to Malcolm Le Grice’s recollections, and organizational strategies vary widely, the “London’s principal center of experimental laboratories' activities converge on a number screenings and cinematographic produc- of important points that merit our attention. tion.”4 In 1969, the cooperative acquired a First of all, the many practices dedicated to Debrie step-printing machine, which gave the the maintenance of the photochemical medi- filmmaker-members the technical ability to um, as well as to its re-evaluation, deviation, reprint their footage in various experimental and subversion, provide an occasion to reflect ways, playing with temporal and spatial givens on the role of technology in art, within a cul- of the cinematic image and thus challenging ture increasingly defined by the imbrication of and deconstructing its diegetic illusion.5 This these domains. Furthermore, as I will explore technical context proved to be a fertile envi- in this text, working with an obsolete artistic ronment for theoretical debate and discussion, medium is the first step to creating an alter- accompanying the elaboration of the Marxism- native economy outside of the commercial inspired Structural/Materialist current of cinema industry, in line with certain currents of cinema over the next decade, a movement that anti-capitalist thought. Considering the net- aimed, in the words of Peter Gidal, “to break work of laboratories from this perspective will given terms of unity, to explore the heteroge- help us to look beyond the surface nostalgia neity of film in process.”6 of Super 8 and 16mm films and articulate the The LFMC model was a vital inspiration for political potential that lies within this curi- experimental filmmakers outside the UK. In ous project. L’Abominable in the Paris region France, at the end of the 1970s, a number of is a particularly interesting example whose “independent, experimental and different” practices will be my primary focus here. As a filmmakers unsuccessfully attempted to rep- veteran laboratory that has existed for almost licate it with official funding from the National twenty-five years, it has considerable tech- Center for Cinema.7 Two decades later, when nical capabilities, organizational experience, the days of LFMC were coming to a close, a and institutional connections, which allow it project of similar ambition could finally begin to launch and participate in many initiatives to be realized. Starting with the creation of the with significant influence on the course of the Ébouillanté group in 1996 following the afore- laboratory movement. Moreover, in its endless mentioned Grenoble meeting, L’Abominable search for a perfectly sustainable operational was established in a basement space on model, it represents, perhaps, more than any the outskirts of Paris by a dozen filmmakers other laboratory, a fascinating experiment in who had met each other at experimental film community building with a level of influence screenings around the city.8 By 2012, when it that goes beyond the milieu of analog film. was forced to relocate, the group had amassed a large amount of know-how and equipment, ORIGINS AND OPERATIONS and its next home would be a large industrial kitchen in the working-class suburban town The London Film-makers’ Co-operative (1966– of La Courneuve. Today, L’Abominable receives 1999, hereafter LFMC), originally conceived sizeable municipal, regional, and state fund- as an independent film distribution network ing and operates an impressive amount of similar to the Film-Makers’ Cooperative in professional-level equipment, including two New York City, is an important precursor to developing machines, optical and contact the contemporary laboratory model. Against printers, a sound camera for creating optical the panorama of the numerous independent soundtracks, a 16mm laser subtitling machine,

Nikiforova \ 190 as well as more common DIY laboratory tools Writing in the introduction to the second such as editing tables and a darkroom for man- volume of his opus The Obsolescence of Man, ual film processing. A limited number of digital Anders critiques the increasingly solitary, aso- filmmaking tools are also available, includ- cial nature of media consumption, asserting, ing homemade telecine setups for digitizing “the technology of reproduction of the media 16mm and Super 8mm footage and a digital not only does not have a democratizing effect, post-production suite. As for social activities, but to the contrary, it has a directly anti-demo- the kitchen/dining room/office accommodates cratic and atomizing effect.”13 daily meals, meetings, and administrative work, Commercial digital tools that facilitate me- while the sophisticated screening room wel- dia production today insist on individual use comes private and semi-public projections. and consumption, effectively impeding the for- The laboratory is staffed by several employ- mation of artist collectives that might attempt ees, allowing it to dedicate time and energy to combine their resources. The photochemical to grants, film programs, workshops, and other laboratory offers a sanctuary from this form of outreach projects in the community and be- private and individuated economy. For exam- yond, all while maintaining a membership base ple, at L’Abominable, nearly the whole chain of of nearly one hundred filmmakers and man- analog film production is represented, so it is aging a seemingly endless waiting list of new possible to complete a film, from the shoot to applicants.9 the striking of a release print, without com- An artist’s preference in choosing her or his ing into contact with commercial services for medium is a complex and ultimately mysteri- much of the process.14 But, L’Abominable offers ous matter. Still, there are some overarching more than just tools for analog film work. The political concerns that link many filmmakers’ laboratory—and especially the darkroom—is attachments to the photochemical medium. also a place that embraces formal experimen- Above all, it is the increasingly opaque design tation and play, allowing for an open-ended of commercial digital tools, often described artistic process that does not follow the fre- as black boxes, which threatens to transform netic rhythm of contemporary professional media makers into submissive consumers of activity. constantly updating products. Consider, for The independent laboratory is a proposal example, cloud-based post-production soft- for a particular kind of community, one that ware that severs access to the user’s creative takes inspiration from a number of historical projects if the monthly subscription is not precedents. Its modus operandi, described as paid.10 This disconnect with one’s creative “open-access do-it-yourself” in an early zine instruments speaks to a greater alienation of made within the network, implies collective the individual with respect to the products responsibility for the filmmaking tools and, and services that govern one’s interactions simultaneously, efforts to elevate the technical with the world. Starting in the 1950s, philoso- capability of each filmmaker-member.15 Hence, pher Günther Anders wrote about what he saw the filmmaker is compelled to assume all of the as the dictatorial nature of mass-produced, technical roles of the filmmaking process, in “ready-to-consume” commodities.11 Speaking addition to creative ones. Within the discourse of mass media in a way that seems more per- of the movement, the concrete, material na- tinent today than in 1979, he described the ture of the workspace is often emphasized; “abyss” in the consumer’s perception “be- manual activities are valorized over intellectual tween the mass character of the products, ones. The smaller of the Paris-based labora- identical everywhere, and the private character tories, L’Etna, describes itself as “above all . . . of their reception.”12 Although Anders wrote at a space. A place made of wood, metal, plastic, a time of analog media, his predictions regard- machines, basins, beakers, tables, chairs, pro- ing the evolution of media services for private jectors. We, members of L’Etna, are its reverse consumption, clearly tied to the emergence side.”16 In a certain way, the laboratory fulfills of digital technology, have been prophetic. the late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century

Nikiforova \ 191 anarcho-communist dream of a workplace The 2014–2016 Maddox seminar brought where the worker and the intellectual are one. together scientifically inclined filmmakers In The Conquest of Bread (1892), the anarchist from laboratories in France, the Netherlands, Pyotr Kropotkin described a future where a Canada, and the United States in a coordinated writer would get unparalleled enjoyment from attempt to improve the tools and processes typesetting his own manuscripts in like-mind- necessary for small-scale fabrication of pho- ed company, rather than charging an exploited tosensitive film emulsion.21 And, on a more worker with the technical execution of his basic level, many new laboratories have been intellectual labor.17 L’Abominable would have formed or expanded thanks to the technical pleased Kropotkin: here, filmmakers don labo- participation of more experienced members of ratory coats and goggles and get their hands the network. When Richard Tuohy and Dianna dirty in photochemistry baths. An ordinary day Barrie from Nanolab (Australia) assist with the involves a collective meal prepared by one of establishment of a laboratory in Jakarta, or the laboratory’s members, a daily ritual ac- when the Distruktur duo from LaborBerlin help companied by informal discussions, before to establish one in Cairo, they affirm the ideal everyone returns to the machine, the dark- of Buber’s affinity-based communities, while room, or the desk. Often, colleagues from other also revealing the capacity of such communi- laboratories or cultural organizations visit in ties to propagate across national borders. order to learn about the space or to discuss In addition to their shared ethos, which is a collaborative project. The laboratory posits further encouraged by collaboration, labora- itself as a non-hierarchical space that allows tory-based filmmakers also share aesthetic for various creative and organizational trajec- predilections; most noticeably a certain hand- tories to cross and interact. Whether or not the made look. Since films made in this context non-hierarchical aspect is fully true in practice, often rely on DIY instruments in the hands of it is enough to spend a small amount of time artists learning technical skills as they go, the here to get a sense of L’Abominable as a kind results are prone to imperfections and typically of hub of diverse and enthusiastic activity. bear traces of photochemical inconsistencies In its broader structure, the network can be and mechanical errors. Moreover, since only compared to early- and mid-twentieth century one or two prints of a film are usually made utopian proposals, such as those of the phi- due to the cost and effort involved, repeated losopher Martin Buber, an important supporter projections result in an accumulation of visible of the kibbutz movement. Buber’s idea of a scratches, burns, fading, etc. The handmade, working community based on affinity rather DIY look of laboratory-made films is often de- than religious or economic utility is particu- scribed as artisanal—and some might view it larly relevant here.18 His strategy consisted of as hopelessly nostalgic. Extending the parallel the creation of “islets of socialism” within the to nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century dominant system, little communities composed critical thought and practice, the laboratory fo- of even smaller ones, that would eventual- cus on materiality and artisanship has inspired ly organically renew the “cellular tissue” of comparisons with the British Arts & Crafts society.19 Similarly, the laboratory network movement, which famously attempted to resist is composed of many small collective spac- industrialization.22 Seen from this angle, can es that interact and bond with each other in the laboratory produce work of contemporary order to grow. These collaborations often lead relevance? to concrete projects. For example, the RE:MI Perhaps, the focus should be shifted away project, forged in 2015 by LaborBerlin (Berlin), from the aesthetic implications of film’s Mire (Nantes), and Worm Filmwerkplaats materiality and toward the workings of the (Rotterdam) with financial support from the laboratory community and its particular con- European Union, aimed to increase the labora- vergence around technical knowledge. Writing tories’ competence in using and maintaining today, the philosopher Giorgio Agamben complex re-printing and animation machines.20 puts the question of artmaking in terms of

Nikiforova \ 192 its opposition to the work of art. In his view, technical objects; in a sense, the laboratory is the art market—the “artistic machine”—has an ensemble of objects—a collection of wood, been “idling” since the emergence of the metal, plastic, machines, basins, beakers, ta- artistic avant-gardes of the early twentieth bles, chairs, projectors, which enables a certain century, and particularly, of Marcel Duchamp's community to take shape as its reverse side. readymade.23 A wholly new direction is nec- Yet, in today’s digital landscape, where manu- essary, he argues, for art to maintain its social facturers of analog equipment, film stocks, and relevance. For Agamben, the process and chemistry sporadically discontinue essential context of artmaking are more interesting products, simply maintaining regular opera- than its fruits. Along these lines, it may help tions is a constant challenge. This speaks to to elucidate the contemporary value of labo- philosopher Gilbert Simondon's concept of ratory-made films if we approach them not as the “associated milieu”: the combination of artistic products, but as continuations of other technical and natural resources that surround processes that take place at the lab: the tech- technical objects and make their existence nical and social processes that maintain and possible.27 In the case of filmmaking, this develop its operations. milieu has been profoundly affected by the In his multi-volume Homo Sacer project, mainstream industry’s digital turn. Today, the Agamben discusses the division of human life sudden discontinuation of something as in- into its vital and social aspects that is con- nocuous as a projector bulb or a certain film tinually effected and instrumentalized by the stock can upset the already fragile equilibrium state.24 As an alternative to the divided life, that underlies the workflow of a photochem- he proposes the concept of “form-of-life” as ical laboratory, ultimately threatening its very an ideal of life reunified, where living would existence. In a situation such as this, preser- become one with its form “in the materiality vational activity is as central to the lab as the of bodily processes and habitual ways of life, creative activities that are conducted there. as well as in theory,” where a primordial open- There are a number of approaches to this ness and potentiality could again be found.25 problem: the preservation of machines and Artistic practice, according to Agamben, is techniques, which is more akin to maintenance a space where this aspiration is continual- than to conservation28; bricolage using dis- ly played out. This tendency characterizes carded elements; and the invention of hybrid many artistic practices of the twentieth and objects that put digital-era technologies at the twenty-first centuries, where the work of art service of analog ends. and the artist’s creative activity, or even her or his private life, often become interchange- MAINTENANCE OF TECHNIQUES AND able.26 Taking a cue from Agamben, we might OPEN MACHINES regard the complex of laboratory activities as a small-scale attempt to unify social, creative, “Too fast a change is contrary to technical political—and even, possibly, biological—as- progress, for it impedes the transmission, in pects of life into a continuous whole. By its the form of technical elements, of what one very nature, this multifaceted experience pro- era has achieved to the one that follows,” duces particular ways of perceiving, analyzing, wrote Simondon in 1958.29 There is a gener- and interacting with the world and with cinema al sense among the laboratory community, as itself. Perhaps, we can discuss films not as ar- was expressed at a meeting in Nantes in 2016, tistic products, but as processes or machines, that such a disruption has occurred in the as communities or even dwellings. film world and that, perhaps, many institutions In order to delve into the artistic and po- have rashly folded to the change before a real litical implications of the laboratory, it is conversation about the specificities of analog fundamental to understand its technical en- and digital film media could have taken place. vironment. Crucially, the laboratory’s ability to To fill this perceived gap in the transmission function depends on an ensemble of specific of film knowledge, independent laboratories

Nikiforova \ 193 assume the task of maintaining and transmit- between preservation and experimentation in ting tools and skills that are no longer current contemporary audiovisual culture.”34 anywhere else in the film world. Of course, film At a large laboratory such as L’Abominable, archives do preserve technical objects and for the professional-size machines to become often put them on display, as was done, for ex- practically usable, they often have to be re- ample, during the immense special exhibitions duced from industrial to artisanal scale. For Lumière! Cinema Invented at the Grand Palais example, the laboratory’s physically imposing in Paris in 2015 and From Méliès to 3D: the film processing machines, originally intended Cinema Machine at the French Cinémathèque for a resource-intensive workflow involving in 2016–2017.30 As if unearthing an ancient powerful water jets that remove the anti-hala- culture, these exhibitions solemnly displayed tion layer of film have been domesticated with tools and devices from the beginnings of cin- a home-made sprinkler mechanism requiring ema—the zoetrope, the Kinetoscope and the less water, while, at the end, processed film Lumière camera—as well as equipment that is is dried with an ordinary hairdryer. In addition still in use on some film sets today. It was clear to being a practical necessity, this gesture from the presentation of the objects that these of downsizing an industrial object is meta- exhibitions did not intend to transmit an un- phorically significant, for it proposes a path of derstanding of their mechanics to the viewer. reduction, rather than endless growth for its The technical object, placed under protective own sake. glass and with its output approximated with This gesture finds its expression in certain digital video regardless of its actual format, is films made at L’Abominable, perhaps most untouchable, like almost any museum piece. explicitly those of Rey himself. In his most Accordingly, the gestures that animated it and celebrated film to date, Differently, Molussia the specific sensations it elicited remain a (2012), Rey proposes a reading of several mystery. For the viewer, therefore, the object’s passages from Günther Anders’s 1931 novel “nature” and “essence,” to use the words of The Molussian Catacomb, which consists of Simondon, are hidden and, ultimately, lost.31 a series of fables recounted by underground The loss of connection with this knowledge is prisoners in an invented totalitarian state. not only technical, but cultural, since, accord- Anders was a techno-skeptic philosopher who, ing to the philosopher, “to play its role fully, like Hannah Arendt, to whom he was married in [culture] must incorporate technical beings in the 1930s, was consumed by questions of the the form of knowledge and sense of values.”32 nature of totalitarianism. Like Arendt, Anders In this light, one could say that by transmit- too linked the conditions for totalitarianism to ting technical skills such as negative cutting the self-perpetuating growth of technology. or the operation of the optical printer or the In the wake of the Holocaust and the bomb- film processor, the independent laboratory ing of Hiroshima, Anders wrote a number of serves as a depository of a specific kind of cul- texts discussing what he saw, already in the tural memory. Unlike an archive, however, the 1950s, as a point of no return in the increasing former is not constrained by professional pro- “machinization” of society, where catastroph- tocol, and this freedom allows for a wide range ic events are caused by activities that have of experimentation. Speaking of the laboratory been fragmented to such an extent that no model in 2014, one of L’Abominable’s founders, one can take responsibility for the results.35 Nicolas Rey, defended the idea of a “produc- More importantly, the very scope of the cat- tion space that [would also be] a conservatory astrophic events produced by humanity has of techniques,” that, unlike a “dead conser- become so great that “the capacity of our vatory” or “a museum,” would be a “creative imagination (and that of our feeling and re- tool shared among filmmakers.”33 As media sponsibility) cannot compete with that of our theorists Rossella Catanese and Jussi Parikka praxis.”36 In other words, the instruments we phrase it, “the lab becomes a stage for per- use carry a potential so large that it completely forming film history, by negotiating the space escapes our comprehension. Updating Kant for

Nikiforova \ 194 the Atomic Age, Anders commands, “have and themselves into the associated milieu while use only those things, the inherent maxims allowing for a “margin of indetermination” in of which could become your own maxims and their functioning.42 The opposite of an open thus the maxims of a general law.”37 machine is a closed one: an automaton imper- In Differently, Molussia, Rey symbolically vious to the outside world. In fact, Differently, responds to this commandment by construct- Molussia itself is a kind of open machine: Rey ing, together with L’Abominable’s engineer has built a chance operation into this piece, Christophe Goulard, two fantastical cameras: compelling the projectionist to randomly de- the spinning-top-camera and the zephyrama. termine the order of the nine 16mm film reels. The first camera spins freely around the hor- In Simondon’s view, engineering decisions izontal axis; the second fluctuates its lateral have an ethical depth that affirm the profound movement and the speed of its motor (thus connection, rather than division, between affecting the shooting speed and, hence, the technology and humanity. According to the exposure) in relation to the movement and philosopher, technological changes bring strength of the wind. As film scholar Christa about evolutions in “technical thought”—our Blümlinger suggests, these “human-scale” ways of understanding and interacting with the machines can be seen as ecological respons- world informed by the technical environment es to large-scale technology.38 The latter is we create around us, which is inseparable alluded to in the film, on one hand, through from the development of human culture.43 landscapes dominated by mysterious con- Importantly, the role of art in this process is structions and apparatuses from the realm of to transform abstract concepts into percep- industrial agriculture and, on the other, through tible and shareable experiences; it is the images of meteorologists analyzing data on “mediator between knowledge and will.”44 computer screens. In contrast to the unidi- Although Simondon’s optimistic outlook on rectional, data-based analysis performed by modern technology clashes with Anders’ more the meteorologists’ computers, the zephyra- pessimistic view, the underlying ethical impli- ma obviously tries to provide a more sensory cations of their reflections resonate, and help representation of the force of the wind. Not to illuminate the creative engagements with only is it an object “within man’s reach,” but, technology that occur within the context of to return to Simondon, it actually integrates the independent laboratory. itself into the associated milieu of the natural space, modifying its behavior with respect BRICOLAGE AND COMMUNITY to the weather conditions.39 This apparatus is similar in concept to the setups used by In addition to the maintenance of techniques LFMC member Chris Welsby in his 1970s films. and the reduction of industrial tools, an im- For example, in the series of films Wind Vane portant activity that defines the laboratory is (1972-1978) and Windmill (1973-1974), it is the bricolage. In its common contemporary sense, wind that directs the composition of the frame, this French word conveys tinkering with ob- while in Seven Days (1974) the direction of jects, whether to repair them, rejuvenate their the camera is determined by the level of cloud mechanisms with new parts, or purely for the cover.40 Speaking of Welsby’s films in a way pleasure of the process. Claude Lévi-Strauss, that could also apply to Differently, Molussia, who brought the term into anthropology in the film theorist Peter Wollen has pointed out that 1960s, explains that the word has from the they “[make] it possible to envisage a different outset carried a sense of détournement.45 In kind of relationship between science and art, The Savage Mind (1962), Lévi-Strauss discuss- in which observation is separated from surveil- es the figure of the bricoleur in opposition to lance, and technology from domination.”41 that of the engineer: while the latter invents The apparatuses used in Rey’s and Welsby’s new objects and structures, the former merely films are “open machines,” the higher form of reconstitutes pre-existing ones by filling them technical object for Simondon, which integrate with “odds and ends,” “remains and debris.”46

Nikiforova \ 195 A literal—and ingenious—example of brian attempt to reconstitute a technical cine- colage in the laboratory context is the design matographic place that no longer exists in the for an optical printer by Georgy Bagdasarov, real world. But it can also be seen as a desire co-founder with Alexandra Moralesová of the to rearrange vestiges of the formerly domi- small laboratory LaboDoble in Prague.47 Unlike nant commercial cinema industry, fragments the typical horizontal setup, Bagdasarov’s de- of which, intersecting in this incongruous sign is vertical; it uses the column of a photo encounter, would signal the emergence of a enlarger as well as its bellows; a Bolex camera qualitatively new filmmaking space. Fittingly, is mounted on top with its lens pointed down. upon entering L’Abominable, members and The most surprising element is the projector, visitors are greeted with what appears to be which points upward: to allow for step-by-step a 1970s-era signboard, whose movable letters advancement, it is outfitted with a three-phase have been rearranged to say, “Stranger, you are motor recycled from a washing machine, while in the service of no one.”51 the too-bright light bulb is replaced with a LED. A characteristic project, whose production In fact, Bagdasarov and Moralesová have men- has been inextricably linked with L’Abominable tioned that their laboratory project involves in subject and form, is Jérémy Gravayat and collecting designs for filmmaking tools that Yann Chevalier’s multidisciplinary endeavor can be constructed from simple, non-cine- that has produced the 2019 film A Lua Platz matographic components: a kind of catalog for (Taking Place), directed by Gravayat. Starting a post-analog—or post-apocalyptic—era. around 2012, the filmmaker began research- Building on Lévi-Strauss's characterization, ing the history of a shantytown known as La sociologist Roger Bastide has continued the Campa that had existed from the late 1950s discussion of bricolage as a cultural phenom- to the early 1970s in the vicinity of the pres- enon, specifically in the context of the African ent-day laboratory.52 Within two years of diaspora.48 In his view, bricolage is a means to beginning the project, Gravayat received a fill a cultural absence of pre-existing ensem- regional grant and took up an artistic residen- bles. In our case, we can imagine Simondon’s cy—the first of its kind—at L'Abominable. In its technical ensemble, the chain of analog film early form, the project consisted in collecting production of the past, whose gaps bricolage photographs and testimonies of the shanty- strives to fill with its Frankenstein objects. town’s everyday, a collection of which were Moreover, looking closely at the laboratory published in the single-edition journal Atlas space, one can see bricolage in a more general (2015) and distributed in the surrounding town sense. L’Abominable, for example, is outfitted of La Courneuve. In his words, the journal was with a large amount of debris recuperated an active object that allowed him to share the from various defunct technical spaces: type- project with the community and to reach out written instruction manuals and logos from to those who had spent their childhoods in La commercial laboratories, Soviet technical Campa. In parallel to this research, Gravayat books on photosensitometry and engineering, and Chevalier became involved in local pro- seats from a closed-down movie theater, even tests and sit-ins to oppose the expulsion of a signage remaining from the former industrial contemporary shantytown, known as the Platz kitchen. In his article, Bastide speaks of an among its predominantly Eastern European underlying drive on the part of an uprooted residents, many of them Romani. This ex- community to “break down” and “cut up” the perience led to a more direct engagement dominant surrounding culture in order to use alongside the Samaritan collective, which the resulting pieces to reconstitute the miss- involved breaking into and occupying unin- ing structure of its own, lost culture.49 This habited houses to accommodate displaced action brings forth “a new signification” that families, as well as accompanying them in the “springs from this disparate ensemble.”50 In ensuing bureaucracy and legal troubles. A Lua the case of the laboratory, this playful activity Platz shows a number of moments from this can be seen on two levels. Most directly, it is experience, as well as some elements from the

Nikiforova \ 196 La Campa research. a variety of formats and temporalities. Like A In discussing the future film two years Lua Platz, it attempted to draw people living on before its completion, Gravayat spoke of weav- the very margins of French society, who had ing, for he had planned to collect a number of never made or acted in films, into the creative testimonies of La Campa and blend them into process. With perceptible nostalgia for that anonymized, but truthful, narratives. The direct brief moment of community, Nambot reflected, experience of the Platz eventually entered the “The film acts as a place of temporary refuge film. It appears to have reaffirmed Gravayat's for things that could be simply articulated: view that, despite the difficult material con- Dreams, home, land, love, revolution, work, and ditions of shanty and squat living, this type of friendship . . . . Maki says that we worked as a environment nurtures affinitive links, a social family, creating a structure that would function fabric, which can be broken when people are like a home. [Brûle la mer] was our shelter.”53 relocated into atomized living environments, such as the housing projects that increasingly CONCLUSION: HYBRID MACHINES AND fill the area. This line of thought brings us back POSSIBLE DEVELOPMENTS to Martin Buber and his organically growing cellular tissue of society. Naturally, bricolage These few examples reveal how, far from is an important component of the community contenting themselves with pure formal ex- portrayed by Gravayat: when building one’s perimentation, even the smallest technical home in conditions of scarcity, one is forced to gestures made within the laboratory movement use any available materials, to resort to rus- can articulate a political position. In some proj- es to achieve a functioning structure. A Lua ects, one can even observe an earnest desire Platz itself resembles a bricolage composed to extend the refuge of the laboratory beyond of various cinematographic registers: fiction- its walls, to create a wider community through al and seemingly reenacted scenes intermix participatory film work. But these intentions with direct interviews; black-and-white Super often end at the creation of aesthetically 8mm and color 16mm film alternate with digital beautiful and thought-provoking films, leaving video and cell phone recordings; essay film the more radical dream unrealized. gives way to drama, etc.—as if the film resist- A number of texts that discuss and analyze ed formal unity. Diegetic illusion is constantly the analog film network point to the “hybridity” constructed only to be ruptured, as when the of certain laboratory activities, which trans- crew places itself into the frame, suggesting form and extend photochemical practices with some degree of fluidity in the creative roles digital-era tools.54 In my view, this still-mar- and leading one to wonder about the nature ginal direction within the network is a key of the filming process. Perhaps unconsciously, innovation with a potential to greatly expand the film’s form suggests a resistance to be- the artistic, theoretical, and even political posing an art object, as if it would prefer to be a sibilities of the movement: the intersection of manifestation of a process, a construction of the laboratory model with digital open source something, rather than an end in itself. Over culture. the course of its making, the film had been Efforts in this area have been undertaken a community that, transcending steep social on a number of occasions but have yet to grow barriers, intertwined the artists’ lives with into a widespread practice. For example, at those of struggling immigrant workers. the 2016 meeting in Nantes, a member of the Five years earlier, a similar film was com- Brussels laboratory Labo BxL, Maxime Fuhrer, pleted at L’Abominable: Brûle la mer (2014) unveiled the wiki-based project Wikipelloche, by Nathalie Nambot and Maki Berchache, which allows any interested person to which focused on the latter’s experiences as contribute technical information about pho- a 26-year-old Tunisian refugee in France. Like tochemistry to the open online platform.55 At A Lua Platz, this film mixed traditional on- and the same meeting, Nicolas Rey presented a off-screen space and wove its narrative from system that he had developed with Christophe

Nikiforova \ 197 Goulard to synchronize analog film projection investigations. By fully adopting the model of with an accompanying digital soundtrack, the open machine—by accepting to further based on the open source software Film-o- integrate the emancipating aspects of digital sync created by Zach Poff. On the other side of culture—the independent laboratory not only the ocean, Matthew McWilliams, who is affil- has a chance to become more inclusive, thus iated with the laboratory AgX in Boston, has expanding its capacities of continual adapta- developed a number of projects that extend tion to changing technical conditions, but to the possibility of analog filmmaking using tools further invent new significations through the that have been on the consumer market for no meeting and interaction of different strains of more than a decade. His best-known design technical thought. is perhaps the Intval, an intervalometer that allows one to program the Bolex camera for frame-by-frame shooting, with the ability to change the frequency and number of frames or reverse the direction. This elegant object, constructed at a cost of about fifty dollars using a laser-cut wooden body, 3D-printed plastic pieces, electronic components and an Arduino microcontroller, is simultaneously more affordable and more portable than the commercially-produced equivalent.56 These are instances where bricolage transforms into invention, giving birth to hybrid objects that combine analog and digital-era technology. Some laboratory-based filmmakers are enthusiastic about the possibilities offered by this path. For example, Esther Urlus of Worm Filmwerkplaats in Rotterdam considers the hybridization of tools, which she groups under the concept of “re-engineering,” an important direction for the laboratory movement.57 In fact, the RE:MI project mentioned earlier, in which Worm Filmwerkplaats participated, was partly conceived with this idea in mind. Like the laboratory filmmaker, members of open source and hacker culture also fight an uphill battle against proprietary software and opaque hardware. Among them, the French artist Jacques Perconte, who subverts the functioning of digital cameras and editing software to create beautiful impression- istic video pieces, is a striking example of “technical non-cooperation” in art.58 Digital bricoleurs could become the perfect allies for the laboratory movement. Expanding investigations into hybrid analog/digital technologies would attenuate the supposed analog purity of laboratory film work; it would undercut the auratic quality of the films and, perhaps, open the path to new aesthetic and conceptual

Nikiforova \ 198 ENDNOTES NECSUS European Journal of Media Studies (2018), https://necsus-ejms.org/ 1—Regarding the digital conversion of handmade-films-and-artist-run-labs-the- cinema, see: Laura M. Holmson, “Film chemical-sites-of-films-counterculture. studios said to agree on digital standards,” New York Times, July 27, 2005, 4—François Bovier and Adeena Mey, https://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/27/ “‘Discours’ versus ‘médium,’” Décadrages business/media/film-studios-said-to- 21-22 (2012), https://journals.openedi- agree-on-digital-standards.html; and tion.org/decadrages/675 (my translation). David Hancock, “The global digital con- 5—Michael Maziere, “Institutional sup- version of cinemas is almost over,” IHS port for artists’ film and video in England, Markit: Technology, May 3, 2016, https:// 1966-2003,” AHRB Centre for British technology.informa.com/577835/ Film and Television Studies: British the-global-digital-conversion-of-cine- Artists' Film and Video Study Collection, mas-is-almost-over. 98.2 % of the world's November, 2003, http://www.studycol- cinemas were said to be converted to lection.co.uk/maziere/paper.html. digital projection in the latter article. 6—Peter Gidal, Materialist Film 2—Much of this research comes from (London: Routledge, 1989), 2. my master's thesis: Mariya Nikiforova, Laboratoires argentiques indépendants. 7—Patrice Kirchhofer, ed., “Cinéma in- Politique, technique, esthétique (Paris: dépendant différent expérimental - Le Sorbonne-Nouvelle, 2016). The gene- colloque de Lyon” (May, 1994). alogy of the laboratory network is also 8—Ébouillanté (Scalded) was a collective described in a number of texts, including zine alternately published by the burgeon- articles by two of L’Abominable's founders: ing laboratories between 1995 and 1999. Pip Chodorov, “The Artist-Run Film Labs,” Millennium Film Journal 60 (2014): 28–37; 9—It must be mentioned, however, and Nicolas Rey, “From the basement to that the space currently occupied by the kitchen (2007-2012),” L'Abominable the laboratory is doomed to demolition (2014), http://www.l-abominable. in a still-unknown number of years. org/en/history/a-traduire-en-en_us- 10—For example, the Adobe de-la-cave-aux-cuisines. Creative Cloud. 3—See, among others: Kim Knowles, 11—Günther Anders, Obsolescence of Man, “Self-Skilling and Home Brewing: Some Volume II: On the Destruction of Life in the Reflections on Photochemical Film Epoch of the Third Industrial Revolution, Culture,” Millennium Film Journal 60 Ch. 16, §1 (digital version translated to (2014): 20-27; Genevieve Yue, “Kitchen English from the Spanish translation: Sink Cinema: Artist-Run Film Laboratories,” Gunther Anders, La Obsolescencia del Film Comment (March 30, 2015), https:// Hombre (Vol. II) Sobre la destrucción de www.filmcomment.com/blog/art- la vida en la época de la tercera revolu- ist-run-film-laboratories; Noélie Martin, ción industrial, trans. Josep Monter Pérez, “Pratiques des émulsions artisanales,” La (Valencia: Pre-Textos, 2011), https:// Furia Umana 33–36 (January 2018 - April libcom.org/library/obsolescence-man-vol- 2019), http://www.lafuriaumana.it/index. ume-2-g%C3%Bcnther-anders. php/66-archive/lfu-33/767-noelie-martin-pratique-des-emulsions-artisanales; 12—Ibid. Rossella Catanese and Jussi Parikka, 13—Ibid. “Handmade films and artist-run labs: the chemical sites of film’s counterculture,” 14—This excludes, of course, the film

Nikiforova \ 199 material itself, although, even the fab- Grand Palais, Jacques Gerber and Thierry rication of film has been attempted in Frémaux, curs., March 27 – June 14, 2015; the laboratory network, including at De Méliès à la 3D: la Machine Cinéma, Paris, L’Abominable (See Martin, “Pratiques Cinémathèque Française, Laurent Mannoni, des émulsions artisanales.”) cur., October 5, 2016 – January 29, 2017. 15—“Do it yourself en libre accès,” 31—Simondon, Du mode d'exis- Collective, L'Ébouillanté 7 (1996). tence des objets techniques, 10. 16—Emmanuel Falguières, “À propos de 32—Ibid., 9. L'Etna,” L’Etna, April 8, 2015, http://www. 33—Éric Thouvenel and Carole Contant, etna-cinema.net/a-propos-de-etna. eds., “La Véritable clé c'est d'avoir 17—Pyotr Kropotkin, Хлеб и воля (The un outil,” in Fabriques du cinéma ex- Conquest of Bread) (Saint-Petersburg: périmental (Paris: Paris Expérimental, Svoe izdatelstvo, 2013), 154–155. 2014), 116 (my translation). 18—Martin Buber, Communauté (Paris: 34—Catanese and Parikka, “Handmade Éditions de l'éclat, 2018), 25. films and artist-run labs: the chemical sites of film’s counterculture.” 19—Patrick Marcolini, “Présentation” in Martin Buber, Utopie et socialisme 35—Günther Anders, Nous, fils d'Eich- (Paris: L’Échappée, 2016), 19–18. mann (We Sons of Eichmann) (Paris: Payot & Rivages, 2003), 91. 20—The Crass animation stand, the Debrie contact printer, and 36—Günther Anders, “Commandments the Oxberry optical printer. in the Atomic Age,” in Burning Conscience (New York: Monthly 21—See Martin, “Pratiques des Review Press, 1962), 12. émulsions artisanales.” 37—Ibid. 22—Ibid. 38—Christa Blümlinger, “The Double 23—Giorgio Agamben, Création Paths of Nicolas Rey: On autrement, et anarchie (Paris: Éditions Payot la Molussie (Differently, Molussia),” & Rivages, 2019), 24–26. Millenium Film Journal 58 (2013). 24—Giorgio Agamben, Homo 39—Ibid. Sacer: L'Intégrale, 1997-2015, Marilène Rail, trans. (Paris: Éditions 40—Chris Welsby, “Films/Videos,” du Seuil, 2016), 1259. Chris Welsby (2001), https:// chriswelsby.uk/decade/1970s/. 25—Ibid., 1271. 41—Peter Wollen, “Landscape, 26—Ibid., 1304. Meteorology, and Chris Welsby,” Millenium 27—Gilbert Simondon, Du mode d'ex- Film Journal 16/17/18 (1986/1987), 210. istence des objets techniques (Paris: 42—Simondon, Du mode d'exis- Éditions Aubier, 1989), 57. tence des objets techniques, 141. 28—Thanks to Julia Gouin for sug- 43—Ibid., 179-240. gesting the distinction between preservation and maintenance. 44—Ibid., 193. 29—Simondon, Du mode d'exis- 45—“In its old sense the verb ‘bricoler’ tence des objets techniques, 70. applied to ball games and billiards, to hunt- ing, shooting and riding. It was however 30—Lumière! Le cinéma inventé, Paris,

Nikiforova \ 200 always used with reference to some ex- available for the Bolex at a minimum price traneous movement: a ball rebounding, a of about 1000 dollars (http://www.inter- dog straying or a horse swerving from its valometers.com/rev/bolex/index.php). direct course to avoid an obstacle.” Claude 57—Martin,“Pratiques des émul- Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (London: sions artisanales.” Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), 16. 58—Bidhan Jacobs, “Jacques 46—Ibid., p. 22. Perconte: voies et formes de la libéra- 47—The optical printer, a tool for post-pro- tion du signal,” La Furia Umana 26 duction special effects, allows for (Winter 2015), http://www.lafuriau- rephotographing footage frame by frame by mana.it/?id=436 (my translation). alternately advancing film on the camera side and the projector side, according to simple algorithms programmed by the user. 48—Roger Bastide, “Mémoire collective et sociologie du bricolage,” L’Année sociologique 21 (1970), digital version by Jean-Marie Tremblay (Chicoutimi: Université du Québec, 2013), http:// classiques.uqac.ca/contemporains/ bastide_roger/memoire_collective_so- cio_bricolage/memoire_coll_texte.html. 49—Ibid. 50—Ibid. 51—“Étranger, tu n'es au service de personne.” 52—The quotes in this and the following paragraphs are by Jérémy Gravayat, recorded during a discussion organized by the journal A Bras le corps in Les Lilas on April 2, 2016. 53—Nathalie Nambot in Aaron Cutler, “Public Works: MoMA’s ‘Documentary Fortnight,’” The L Magazine, February 13, 2015, http://www. thelmagazine.com/2015/02/public-works-momas-documentary-fortnight. 54—Catanese and Parikka, “Handmade films and artist-run labs: the chemical sites of film’s counterculture”; Knowles, “Self-skilling,” 26-27; Martin,“Pratiques des émulsions artisanales.” 55—See http://www.film- labs.org/wiki/en/start. 56—The “Revolution” intervalometer,

Nikiforova \ 201

\ Volume 4 \ Dossier \ INTRODUCTION

An important movement in critical legal theory argues that a historical turn is necessary in order to understand the current failings of international law.1 The proposition is that a study of the colonial and imperial historic legacies ingrained in the law and its practice must be undertaken to expose the coloniality of law's authority and in turn its limited frame of accountability.2 This article builds on this proposal, arguing that a decolonial archival practice underscores the importance of liberating collections that detail little-known activities undertaken by colonial powers. Such efforts would allow engaged and meaningful re-readings of historical events that continue to inform the operations of international law.3 By examining the historical processes respon- DECOLONIZING ARCHIVES AND LAW’S sible for inequalities produced through law’s FRAME OF ACCOUNTABILITY \ enforcement, we can come to challenge its defining principles. HELENE KAZAN International law’s authority and legitimacy rests on its claim to operate universally, capable of representing and protecting all of humanity equally. Any suggestion that it operates with bias goes against these foundational principles and undermines its claim to justice. Critical legal scholars argue that colonial biases and hierarchies remain deeply embedded in the institutions of international law, and efforts to ignore or suppress such legacies only serve to replicate and exacerbate the ongoing effects of colonial systems. Legal theorist Anne Orford points to one aspect of this problem:

Many international legal regimes are based on the assumption that current extremes of uneven development, inequality, mass movement of peoples, civil war, food insecurity and poverty are the consequence of the inherent characteristics or failed leadership of post-colonial states, rather than the effects of a historically constructed global political and economic system that can be challenged.4

As Orford explains, instead of recognizing the continuity between the colonial past of international law and the contemporary multilateral

Kazan \ 203 legal systems that produce and exploit resil- too young at the time to fully comprehend ient populations, proponents of international the turn of events, I turned instead to these law argue that further legal frameworks are loaded documents, removing them from the needed to educate and advance the peoples determinate authority of my parents’ influence, of the decolonized world to end international to engage a history that had been held at a violence. This legal rhetoric parallels the early distance. This work culminated in the short colonial argument of a duty to civilize those film Masking Tape Intervention: Lebanon 1989 encountered in the colonies.5 In this way, in- (2013), which reconstructs and reactivates ternational law becomes an internalized belief the space of our home, in order to stage my system, producing complacency in regards to parents’ first conversation on the material its known failures. This process, known as the conditions of living through conflict, and the reification of international law, is what a de- spatialized nature of warfare.9 colonial archival practice seeks to counter. It Rediscovered in 2012, the collection of does so by tracing little-known histories of in- images is unusual, in that each simply depicts ternational violence that evidence colonial and the rooms in the house. No smiling family, imperial processes, demonstrating how these just single frames of empty rooms, taken as a have led to the continued normalization—and keepsake in case of no return. The image of legal legitimization—of violence.6 our kitchen shows the morning sun stream- Feminist and intersectional critical legal ing through a south-facing window, casting a theorists have pointed to culturally ingrained distinctly-patterned shadow across the space and gendered modes of voicing evidence through cross-hatched masking tape placed in the law, which often exclude or render to stop glass shattering during bombardment. the human or non-human subject invisible. The masking tape, in both the kitchen and the Following this, I pose poetic testimony as a image, is the only visual demarcation of the method of engaging necessary and radical exterior threat of conflict. In the film, I use the forms of poetics in expressing and translating tape and its shadow as a mechanism to de- the experience of violence. This approach also scribe the lived condition of potential violence, allows the narration of materials uncovered where the home shifts from a space of shel- through a decolonial archival practice in the ter to a space of threat. The first five minutes retelling of a global history of violence.7 This assembles an archive of 12,000 stills taken is in order to find ways to dismantle the asym- over the course of a day, drawing the viewer metric power relations produced through the into each small shadowy corner of the room, world-building technology of international law. as the light slowly moves across this altered My own research-based work uses the free- domestic space. The second part of the film doms provided in spaces of art and cultural uses archival BBC news footage reporting the production, engaging such platforms through violent events leading to my parents’ decision speculative narratives of what I refer to as to leave, ending with an interview with my legal fiction, in an attempt at activating further family as we arrive into the refugee center in reparative processes towards a wider engage- Larnika, Cyprus. ment in international legal justice. The small-scale action of putting masking-tape on glass to stop it shattering is a DECOLONIZING ARCHIVES feeble attempt to fortify the home against such exterior force. Beyond its pragmatic My journey starts at my family home, with a function, this action provides a visual and collection of archival photographs taken by material demarcation of the turbulent time and my father on the eve of our flight from the context within which the home is situated. Lebanese Civil War in 1989.8 In uncovering As the architecture of the home articulates the images, I surreptitiously began the pro- risk as both abstract and affective, it makes cess of mining them for information about the visible the relationship between the familial, situation we had been forced to leave. Being domestic scene being depicted and the larger

Kazan \ 204 political and legal forces that bring such a to engage and disrupt the continued legal condition into effect. Recognizing this, the technologies that are secured by authoritative research practice that began from the discov- interpretations of archival materials.11 ery of these images evolved into a method for My understanding of the potential political intervening in any singular authority’s capacity and legal outcomes of a decolonizing archival to speak for the archival object and a certain practice has been informed by the important turn of events. This connects the domesticity precedent set by the Hanslope Disclosure, of Masking Tape Intervention: Lebanon 1989 which demonstrates the concrete impact such with my argument for decolonizing archives a practice can have on juridical processes. through a relational authoritarian complex existing in both. In Archive Fever: A Freudian THE HANSLOPE DISCLOSURE AND THE Impression, Jacques Derrida explains: MAU MAU UPRISING IN KENYA

the meaning of “archive,” its only mean- Kenya became a colony of the British ing, comes to it from the Greek arkheion: Government in 1920, as settlers displaced initially a house, a domicile, an address, large numbers of indigenous people to take the residence of the superior magistrates, control of the vast and fertile African territory. the archons, those who commanded. This violent process of dispossession saw the The citizens who thus held and signified British colonial regime introduce a number of political power were considered to pos- restrictions over land ownership and agricul- sess the right to make or to represent the tural practice. Priyamvada Gopal describes this law. On account of their publicly recog- process in her recent book Insurgent Empire: nized authority, it is at their home, in that Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent. place which is their house (private house, Quoting from the work of George Padmore, family house, or employee’s house), that Gopal writes: official documents are filed. 10 punitive taxation, forced labour and wide- This logic, that a citizen’s authority to ac- spread impoverishment were constitutive cess the house and its official documents features of colonial rule in Kenya. Here affords them the right to dictate the law, is ‘democracy is interpreted as the right what a decolonial archival practice intends of a small white minority to rule an over- to problematize. By doing so, such a practice whelming black majority who have been implicitly challenges the coloniality of law’s denied all right of free political expres- authority. That is, if an archive can only ever sion’. 12 be read and administered through a particular frame of authority while it is under the pro- Reflecting on Padmore’s writing, Gopal goes tection of the so-called house, this condition onto state that “Kenya, more than anywhere dictates access to the archive as part of this else other than perhaps South Africa, exempli- authoritative frame of the law. This argument fied the workings of colonialism as a species is materialized to a certain extent, in the proof fascism.” 13 cess developed in the making of Masking Tape The Mau Mau Uprising began in 1952 in Intervention: Lebanon 1989, where I remove the reaction to the inequalities produced by archival images from the determinate authority British colonialism in Kenya. The Kikuyu tribe of my parents’ influence, to extract a withheld launched an armed attack on white colonial history. Yet it can be applied more broadly to settlers and their local collaborators that initi- efforts to liberate access to diverse archival ated the conflict. In response to the uprising, collections, in order that the documents held the British put a military operation into action in collections can be reread and reactivat- to suppress the resistance, resulting in the ed outside of a limited authoritative frame. massacre of Kenyan people.14 By 1956 the up- Liberating archives in this way can help efforts rising had been defeated, but opposition to the

Kazan \ 205 British colonial regime had been demonstrat- “inherited” legal responsibility for the colonial ed, leading to Kenyan independence in 1963. violence upon gaining Kenyan independence.23 In 2011, 1.2 million British government doc- The case was then brought to the British High uments charting these events and the period Court for a second time in 2012. In this in- at the end of empire were found in the UK, in stance the British government didn’t dispute Hanslope Park—documents which had been the torture of the Kenyan people, but instead illegally withheld in a breach of the UK Public argued that the case was too historical for a Records Act.15 The sensitive and incriminat- retrial to be allowed. The accidental discov- ing collection of documents had been sent ery of the archival documents in the Hanslope back to the UK from thirty-seven Foreign and Disclosure meant that in October 2012, Commonwealth Offices in Britain's former colo- Justice McCombe could reject the argument nial governments on the eve of decolonization being made by the British government. The in the 1950s.16 These files were allegedly uncovered archive of unusually detailed re- saved from burning and sent for storage in cords—which included minutes revealing the Hanslope Park, to avoid their public disclosure Governor of Kenya, Sir Evelyn Baring saying, and any subsequent embarrassment to the “if we are going to sin, we must sin quietly”— British government.17 made a second trial possible.24 The Hanslope Disclosure (as the move to In 2013 the British government agreed to abide by the Public Records Act of 1958 and pay £19.9 million in compensation to over bring the archive into the public domain came 5,000 claimants who had suffered torture to be known) enabled information from the and abuse during the Mau Mau Uprising.25 archive to enter as evidence in a case holding Though the case established a precedent for Britain responsible for atrocities committed legal accountability of colonial violence car- during the Mau Mau Uprising and eventually to ried out by the British Empire, the applicable prove that war crimes had been carried out in laws were soon amended so that the case Kenya by the British colonial regime. The Mau couldn’t serve as such. The effective change Mau case represented victims of colonialism, in these laws can be observed in the example as they were given the right to claim com- of Chong and Others v. the United Kingdom, in pensation from the British government for the which the European Court of Human Rights torture and violence that had been inflicted.18 rejected a trial concerning the shooting and The case was instigated in 2002 when Mau killing of 24 Malaysian plantation workers by Mau representatives contacted a partner at British troops in 1948, unanimously declar- legal firm Leigh Day.19 In taking up the case, ing the case to be inadmissible, as it was too the firm started proceedings into the claims, historical.26 This was followed by the British seeking the help of historian Caroline Elkins, Supreme Court’s rejection of the call for a who had already conducted years of archival public enquiry into the Malaysian killings in research into British colonial violence. Elkins’ 1948. However, in a more recent case brought work prior to the case was part of the reason against the Netherlands for a colonial mas- legal proceedings were able to start.20 In 2009, sacre that took place in Indonesia between legal action began in London’s High Court. The 1946-1947, the Dutch state tried to evoke the victims’ claims were based on the systemat- historical ruling to make the case inadmissible. ic abuse and torture inflicted on the Kenyan The Hague however, did force the Dutch state people by colonial officials under British com- to pay reparations and take responsibility for mand.21 The trial also revealed that British the violence.27 officials had put civilians into detention camps, subjecting them to torture, leading to a massa- GENERAL SPEARS’ ARCHIVE AND THE cre in 1959.22 ALLIED INVASION OF LEBANON AND In the first ruling on the case in 2011, Justice SYRIA McCombe rejected the British Government’s argument that the Kenyan government had After the fall of France in 1940, Britain’s control

Kazan \ 206 over colonial territory it had secured in the in early 1941, as strikes and demonstrations Sykes Picot Agreement became unstable took place across Lebanon and Syria against as French authorities in Lebanon and Syria the sanctions that the British had put on food aligned themselves with the new Vichy gov- and trade imports.33 In order to legitimize the ernment. Concern grew that Vichy authorities invasion and to alleviate any resistance on the operating in the region were collaborating ground, the Free French Army, with the support with the Nazi regime, and therefore slowly of the British, promised independence for Syria gaining control over Allied oil supplies in Iraq and Lebanon. and Iran.28 On 3 September 1940, Churchill The coalition between the Free French and wrote that “aside from the potential invasion Britain planned a three-pronged attack to- of the British Isles, the other major theatre of ward Beirut, Rayaq, and Damascus, promising operations of the Second World War would as much military and air support as the Allies be the Middle East.”29 Regarding the impor- could provide. The invasion began on 8 June tance of these resources, J. B. Glubb, a British 1941, as Allied Forces crossed into Lebanon Commanding Officer, wrote: “Iraq, Iran and and Syria. After a month of conflict, on 9 July Arabia contain the last great oil-producing 1941, the Vichy French asked for armistice areas of the world: and are vital to the Empire. terms, bringing Syria and Lebanon under Allied It is necessary therefore to secure our wells, control. Though the promise to grant indepen- pipelines and refineries.”30 The vast mechani- dence was made before the beginning of the zation of war operations taking place for the invasion, negotiations continued in Lebanon first time during the Second World War meant until 22 November 1943 when independence the need for fuel began to distort the conflict’s was finally granted. The last Allied troops did initial rationale. The use of widespread aerial not withdraw from Syria until 17 April 1946. bombardment created a need for oil to fuel During this conflict, the vast mechanized the war machine, which, as a result, made the technology of the war machine engaged for Middle East the second most important front the first time a mode of governance producing of the war.31 Therefore, conflict for control of resilient populations according to economic, natural resources, namely the extraction of social, and racial standing. When discussing oil became legally legitimized as a military measures of resilience, it is important not necessity. to give in to its logic. In this case, resilient In May 1941, in order to secure its oil refin- populations are produced through state-per- eries, the Allied forces invaded and occupied petrated violence, forcing them to live under a Iraq. Unsettled by German aircrafts refuelling condition of increased threat.34 By increasing at Syrian airbases during the conflict, Churchill the resilience of a population, the state is able ordered an armed intervention into Lebanon to impose further violence. In the widespread and Syria. Operation Exporter, was the name use of aerial bombardment, we see the birth given to the Allied invasion of Vichy French- of resilient populations established through controlled territories in Syria and Lebanon a discursive international humanitarian legal between June and July 1941. framework coupled with biopolitical tech- There was much apprehension among niques of governance.35 This process, still in the Lebanese and Syrian population at the effect today, visible in the ongoing internation- time, following the experience of famine and al bombardment of Syria as part of its civil war, disease during the First World War. It was un- and in the recent explosion in Beirut, forces derstood that even if both the Allied and Axis the population to continue to cope under the forces both might invoke the noblest of princi- ongoing potential eruption of the imposed ples to justify the violence of warfare, in reality threat. both belligerents were operating equally in In 1942 the British government circulated their own self-interest, as two foreign inter- two Top Secret reports written by J. B. Glubb ests fighting for control over natural resources that testify to the British forces’ imposition in the territory.32 The tension came to a head of a state of exception in Iraq, Lebanon, and

Kazan \ 207 Syria—using aerial bombardment to orches- conduct of aerial warfare—placing the lives trate the destruction of key infrastructure—to and bodies of human and non-human sub- apply a (neo)colonial mode of governance. The jects in a position of mortal threat.37 Though moment of total war brought into the region these consequences are by now widely under- through the Second World War allowed Britain stood in Europe, the events that occurred in to take advantage of a weakened French state Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq are part of a well-hid- and gain further influence over the industries den (neo)colonial attempt to use this violent of Lebanon and Syria. By these maneuvers, it method to govern the sites of oil extraction also managed to gain influence over the gov- and distribution. The industrialization of ae- ernance of these soon-to-be independent rial warfare following the Hague Convention, nation-states. This is explicitly revealed in the and in the lead up to the Second World War, following sinister passage from Glubb’s report: meant that both Allied and Axis forces could deploy the extra-technological capacity of With little or no official standing, we must international laws of war to legally legitimize really dominate and control these coun- widespread aerial bombardment. tries from behind the scenes. . . . This The legal protections for such exercises is an entirely new development in gov- of violence were further enhanced during ernment service. Control by influence is the Nuremberg Trials, the war crimes tribunal a new art, which all who serve in these of the Second World War. Though this tribu- countries must learn. nal was effective in criminalizing the horrific Basic features characterises [sic] the genocide conducted by the Axis forces, it left situation in Arabia to-day: the division of the widespread use of aerial bombardment the Arabs into two classes – the govern- undertaken by both the Axis and Allied forces ing and the governed.36 unpunished as a criminal act.38 This resulted from the Nuremberg Trials being led and influ- It is difficult to keep an objective view of the enced by the Allied forces, who did not want information in these documents when con- legal scrutiny into their own violent actions,39 fronted by this colonial mindset. This passage setting a dangerous precedent. Following makes it clear that the British government’s the Nuremberg Trials, air power entered the aid in the reconstruction and development of post-war period free of all constraints, save these countries was intended as a method of those imposed by its own technological and control by influence. Here we can see the sig- economic restrictions. In “The Materiality of nificant shift explored in my research, in which International Law: Violence, History and Joe new modes of (neo)colonial governance are Sacco’s The Great War,” legal theorist Luis produced in the proliferation of mechanized Eslava argues that the impact of this histo- conflict, specifically through the widespread ry of international law can be observed in use of aerial bombardment. the creation of nation-states out of former Such a view frames this history in the larger colonies and the expansion of a global capi- process by which international law came to talism—processes that Eslava sees as leading legitimize the violence of aerial warfare, and to the “consolidation of today’s multiple glob- points to ways by which this legitimation has al regimes of governance.”40 Eslava further served to reinforce and exacerbate violence points to the invisibility of international law’s throughout the decolonized world. The 1907 historic effects, which “lurk behind much of Hague Convention is key here, because of its the violence experienced in our unequal and role in endorsing the legal argument of military still-violent present,” and which can now be necessity, which meant that the laws of war observed especially through the framework of could only restrict belligerent forces to act in civil wars.41 accordance with their own military self-inter- In operating at state level international laws ests. The elasticity of this ruling has meant of war are not victim- or subject-focused, that strong states can legally justify nearly any but instead absorb the affected subject of

Kazan \ 208 international violence in a legal technological methodological intervention, for providing framework. a more expansive and inclusive framework Today, legally legitimized methods of aerial for international law’s affective capacity.45 bombardment continue to allow racialized kill- But such a methodology doesn’t only frame ing in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, as well as other women’s concerns as that which the law has states across the region, including Palestine, come to exclude. Rather, it should reflect a Afghanistan, Iran and Yemen. To develop a complex of intersectional issues, in engaging legal case would require a radical change in a broader framework that resists the inherent the global perception of aerial bombardment inequalities bolstered by international law’s and of international law itself. The human asymmetrical power structures.46 and non-human subjects being affected by In developing these ideas as a situated this violence need to have further agency in practice and in conversation with feminist and informing how the man-made technology of legal scholars in Lebanon, it has also been international law operates. important to look towards established work from postcolonial south-Asian scholars writing FRAME OF ACCOUNTABILITY on the subaltern, and Black studies scholars and practitioners working on the revolution- In 2018 the opportunity presented itself to ary potential of poetics in law.47 In “Toward bring together interdisciplinary investigations a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(ion) of into the lived and built effects of slow, struc- Blackness Toward the End of the World,” artist tural, and spectacular violence in Lebanon, in and theorist Denise Ferreira Da Silva writes: the exhibition and public program Points of Contact.42 In addition to curating the project, I Decolonization requires the setting up of participated by presenting the short documen- juridic-economic architectures of redress tary film Under Multiple Suns.43 through which global capital returns the In working on this project and with its in- total value it continues to derive from the terdisciplinary participants, I observed and expropriation of the total value yielded developed ideas on poetic testimony as the by productive capacity of the slave body necessary engagement of radical forms of and native lands. Before we can even poetics in expressing and translating the conceive on how to design these archi- experience of violence. Here I draw on the et- tectures, we need another account of ymological meaning of poiesis from the Greek racial subjugation, for the one we have term meaning to make, which in the case of cannot comprehend a demand for de- poetic testimony alludes to a process of build- colonization, that is the unknowing and ing on and from an experience, as a necessary undoing of the World that reached its development of its becoming, as testimony.44 core.48 There is however a noticeable tension that exists between the use of poetic methods Ferreira Da Silva goes on to argue that re- and forensic or analytical forms of knowledge dress in juridic-economic architectures needs production. My proposal is that these methods, to break from “reparation or a restitution of both poetic and forensic, shouldn’t exclude monetary sum that corresponds to that which or lessen the credibility or necessity of one or mercantile and industrial capital have ac- the other, but rather attempts should be made quired through colonial expropriation since to uphold and make use of the strengths and the sixteenth century.”49 In contrast, I frame possibilities in both, in this way irrevocably reparations, not as a monetary sum connect- changing the latter. ed to capitalist extractive systems, but rather Inspired by Luce Irigaray’s feminist writ- as an important method of repair, providing ing on hysteria as a form of protest against further agency for the subject in the pro- patriarchal oppression, legal scholar Yoriko cess of dismantling asymmetric frameworks Otomo proposes écriture feminine as a feminist that constitute violence in the operation of

Kazan \ 209 international law. voices working with similar aims, to gain My Frame of Accountability is a series of collective strength through a practice of sol- non-linear short films produced through the idarity, towards dismantling the continued genre I term legal fiction. In addressing the colonial impact of the law as structural vio- two moments in the neo-colonial construc- lence. The arguments in this article are part tion of international law described in this of a complex, uneasy, evolving, and necessary article, the films foreground a contract of risk supra-disciplinary movement for developing created by these events as a colonial technol- ways of dismantling the known limits of inter- ogy imposed in the racialized consequence national law and its frame of accountability. of decontextualizing resource commodities With no satisfying answer to these problems in through capitalist financial systems and violent sight, these processes are still in motion. modes of conflict. As resource commodities are disconnected from bodies and land to enter financial markets to be converted into capital value. International laws of war and aerial bombardment become the violent processes undertaken by strong states to secure sovereignty, and control over bodies, land, and resources. Recontextualizing risk, the story is told through a complex of human and non-human voices that give testimony to the disproportionate effect of this lived limit-condition. An extra-international legal hearing uses radical methods to invert the coloniality of law’s authority, in turn producing a precedent that brings accountability to normalized forms of international violence. The legal fiction is told as a speculative attempt at dismantling the continued capacity of international law as structural violence. Through a decolonizing archival practice and in the formation of my own poetic testimony, this project attempts to disrupt the coloniality of law’s authority. In the time it has taken to write and develop this work, the world has undergone some dras- tic changes. The premiere of the film series, which was to take place in April 2020, was interrupted by an unravelling global response to the spread of COVID-19. Further, in reaction to the terrible killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the Black Lives Matter and abolitionist movements have taken further hold in many places across the globe. And on August 4, 2020, a catastrophic explosion took place in Beirut, causing widespread destruction across the city. Addressing the racialized conditions produced through law’s enforcement has never been more important.50 I join a chorus of

Kazan \ 210 ENDNOTES 35, no. 1 (1994): 49-96. 1—Anne Orford, “International Law and 7—For more on poetic testimony, the Limits of History,” in The Law of see Helene Kazan, “The Architecture International Lawyers: Reading Martti of Slow, Structural, and Spectacular Koskenniemi (Cambridge: Cambridge Violence and the Poetic Testimony University Press, 2015), 297-320. of War,” The Australian Feminist Law Journal, Routledge (2018): 119-136 2—This movement in international legal scholarship is observed in critical 8—Helene Kazan, Masking Tape legal theory and is part of but not lim- Intervention, 7min, 2013, http:// ited to TWAIL (Third World Approaches www.helenekazan.co.uk/mask- to International Law) scholarship. The ing-tape-intervention.html. legal scholars I follow in making this 9—Helene Kazan, “What The War Will argument are R. P. Anand, Luis Eslava, Look Like” In Forensis: The Architecture Sundhya Pahuja, B. S. Chimni, Antony of Public Truth (Sternberg Press, 2014) Anghie, Ratna Kapure, Vasuki Nesiah, More is written about these archival im- Anne Orford and Rose Parfitt. In this ar- ages in this previously published chapter. gument I also draw from feminist and intersectional critical legal theory from 10—Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: Brenna Bhandar, Emily Jones, Gina A Freudian Impression (Chicago: Heathcote, Sara Kendall & Yoriko Otomo. University of Chicago Press, 1996), 2. 3—Matilda Arvidsson and Miriam 11—My argument on the necessary de- Bak McKenna, “The turn to histo- colonizing of archives and knowledge ry in international law and the sources also draws from Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion doctrine: Critical approaches and meth- Black Anthropocenes or None (University odological imaginaries,” Leiden Journal of Of Minnesota Press, 2018), 49. International Law 33, no. 1 (March 2020). 12—Priyamvada Gopal, Insurgent Empire: 4—Anne Orford. “The Past as Law or Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent History? The Relevance of Imperialism for (London: Verso Books, 2019), 396. Modern International Law.” IILJ Working Quoting from George Padmore, “Behind the Paper 2012/2 (History and Theory of Mau Mau,” Phylon 14, no. 4(1953): 355. International Law Series, (2012): 1 13—Ibid, 396. This is important to note, 5—This proposition was made by as we observe the use of similar meth- theorist Oscar Guardiola-Rivera in nar- ods in other contexts, as in the example rating Columbus’ journey to the tropics later in the article, in Lebanon and Syria. during his introduction for “The Devil’s 14—Nolundi, “The Mau Mau Uprising,” Advocate: a Roundtable for Forensic South African History Online, November Architecture,” at the Centre for Research 24, 2016, https://www.sahistory. Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of org.za/article/mau-mau-uprising. London, 2013. In retelling this narrative Guardiola-Rivera was referencing 15—Aoife Duffy, “Legacies of British N. Wey Gómez’s, The Tropics of Empire: Colonial Violence: Viewing Kenyan Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies Detention Camps through the Hanslope (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). Disclosure,” Law and History Review 33, no. 3 (August 2015): 489–542. 6—Chris Jochnick and Roger Normand, “The Legitimation of Violence: A 16—Calder Walton, Empire of Critical History of the Laws of War,” Secrets: British Intelligence, the Harvard International Law Journal Cold War and the Twilight of Empire,

Kazan \ 211 (London: Harper Press, 2013). Naval Institute Press, 2013), 95. 17—Ibid 29—Ibid. 18—Alex Wessely, “The Mau Mau case - 30—J. B. Glubb British Commanding Officer five years on,” Leigh Day Blog, October of the Arab Legion, “Top Secret: Note on 6, 2017,, https://www.leighday.co.uk/ Post-War Settlements in the Middle East” Blog/October-2017/Kenyan-colonial- (British Government Report), 1942, Box abuses-apology-five-years-on. 3, File 5. GB165-0269, Sir Edward Spears Collection at the General Spears Archive, 19—Ibid. Middle Eastern Centre, Oxford University. 20—More detail on this can be found in 31—My use of the term relates to Mark Parry, “Uncovering the brutal truth its philosophical meaning as per about the British Empire,” Guardian, August Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, 18, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/ Nomadology: The War Machine, (Los news/2016/aug/18/uncovering-truth-brit- Angeles, CA: Semiotexte, 1986) . ish-empire-caroline-elkins-mau-mau; and Caroline Elkins, “Archives, Intelligence 32—Albert Habib Hourani, Syria and and Secrecy: The Cold War and the End of Lebanon: A Political Essay, (Oxford: the British Empire,” in Decolonization and Oxford University Press, 1946), 230. the Cold War: Negotiating Independence 33—John P. Spagnolo, Problems of (London: Bloomsbury, 2105), 275. the Modern Middle East in Historical 21—Ibid. Evidence was found of abuse Perspective: Essays in Honour of including the use of castration, sys- Albert Hourani, (Middle East Centre, St. tematic beatings, rape, and sexual Antony’s College, Oxford, 1996), 231. assault; all of which was sanctioned at 34—This proposition of the develop- top levels of the British government. ment of resilient populations in part 22—Ibid. comes from theorist Giorgio Agamben’s writing on bare life, exposed to a state 23—Ibid. of exception that constitutes a biopow- 24—Ibid. er of governance as an imposed risk. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign 25—Ibid. Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: 26—Press Release issued by the Stanford University Press, 1998), 31. Registrar of the European Court of 35—Foucault also writes on govern- Human Rights on the 'Case concern- mentality and biopolitics at the human ing 1948 Batang Kali killings by British scale in The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures soldiers is inadmissible', The European At The College de France 1978-1979 Court of Human Rights, 2018. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 27—Daniel Boffey, “Hague court orders 36—Glubb, “Top Secret: Note on Post- Dutch State to pay out over colonial massa- War Settlements in the Middle East.” cres,” Guardian, March 27, 2020, https:// www.theguardian.com/world/2020/ 37—This is discussed to a point by mar/27/hague-court-orders-dutch-state- Eyal Weizman, “Lawfare in Gaza: to-pay-out-over-colonial-massacres. Legislative Attack,” openDemocracy, March 1, 2009, http://www.opendem- 28—Basil Aboul-Enein and Youssef Aboul- ocracy.net/article/legislative-attack. Enein, The Secret War for the Middle East: The Influence of Axis and Allied Intelligence 38—My definition of aerial bombard- Operations During World War II (Annapolis: ment includes all aerial warfare, including

Kazan \ 212 all regulated missiles, nuclear missiles, of the Other Woman (Ithaca, NY: drones and automotive missiles as part Cornell University Press, 1985). of the same lethal technology of killing. 46—Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping This argument applies to all aerial warfare the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity carried out during this period, including Politics, and Violence against Women the use of nuclear bombs in Hiroshima and of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. Nagasaki. Jochnick and Normand, Ibid, 49. 6, 1991: 1241–99. Gina Heathcote, 39—Ibid. Feminist Dialogues on International Law: Successes, Tensions, Futures, (Oxford, 40—Luis Eslava, “The Materiality of United Kingdom: OUP Oxford, 2019). International Law: Violence, History and Joe Sacco’s The Great War,” 47—For example the discussion on London Review of International Law 'Feminist Strategies: In and Out of the 5, no. 1 (March, 2017): 58. Legal Frame' with Marwa Arsanios, Dima Hamadeh (98weeks Feminist Reading 41—Ibid, 51. Group) and Ayat Noureddine as part of 42—More information about the exhibition the exhibition programme for 'Points of can be found at http://www.heleneka- Contact'. Also, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. zan.co.uk/points-of-contact.html. "Can the Subaltern Speak?". In Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds.). 43—Under Multiple Suns, dir. Helene Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture . Kazan, 2018, http://www.heleneka- (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988). 271–313. zan.co.uk/under-multiple-suns.html. 48—Denise Ferreira Da Silva, "Toward a 44—To a certain extent, this method- Black Feminist Poethics, The Quest(ion) ological approach might be seen as a of Blackness Toward the End of the recognisable trope in the internationally World", The Black Scholar 44, no. 2: 86. established artistic practices that emerged following the violence of the Lebanese 49—Ibid. Civil War, seen for example in the work of 50— It is important to note, that my Walid Raad and the Atlas Group and Akram argument for international accountabil- Zataari. Across these practices there is ity does not take away from the need also an underlying thematic relationship for accountability against corrupt gov- between the archive and the archival ernments operating in these states, image. This is in part due to the loss or de- rather it highlights the entangled na- struction of the archive in Lebanon through ture of the capacity for both to continue the years of war. These practices there- the perpetration of such violence. fore attempt to reassert a certain public notion of truth or untruth. The Arab Image Foundation is an outcome with an interest in the missing archive in Lebanon. Drawn from personal archives from Lebanon, the AIF recently digitalised the entire archive to respond to issues in regard to access. AIF also recently suffered terrible damage from the port explosion in Beirut. 45—Yoriko Otomo. Unconditional Life: The Postwar International Law Settlement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 3. Luce Irigaray, Speculum

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\ Volume 4 \ Dossier \ The Black Women’s Film Conference connected fourteen filmmakers at MoMa PS1 for a public display of an internal conversation we began a long time ago.1 Our films were already speaking to each other, and in collecting them, we made it obvious. Then 400+ people trekked to Queens for a peek at what some called an historic event. The conference—held on March 17th, 2019, with Nuotama Bodomo, Shirley Bruno, Dyani Douze, Ja’Tovia Gary, Gessica Généus, Nikyatu, Adepero Oduye, Tchaiko Omawale, Chanelle Aponte Pearson, Stefani Saintonge, Yvonne Michelle Shirley, Cauleen Smith, and Keisha Rae Witherspoon all participating—was organized as an experiment to convene Black women who are making work not as a response or as a calling card to the industry, but as the artist is supposed to do: by investigat- ANOTHER TABLE: BLACK WOMEN’S ing a truth. And the Black woman’s truth is a CINEMA AND THE PRODUCTION OF hidden one: invisibilized, misconstrued, and COMMUNITY \ disrespected, foolishly. The concept for the conference was born NEW NEGRESS FILM SOCIETY WITH out of our collective, New Negress Film NUOTAMA BODOMO, TCHAIKO OMAWALE, Society, where six of us—Nuotama, Dyani, CHANELLE APONTE PEARSON, KAMILAH Ja’Tovia, Chanelle, Stefani, and Yvonne—pur- BADIANE, GESSICA GÉNÉUS, JA’TOVIA posely intertwine our lives out of a need for GARY, ADEPERO ODUYE, CAULEEN protection. It’s space for redirection. We meet SMITH, AND NIKYATU and drink and commiserate by text, swapping strategies and reminding each other that, despite how it feels, we see you. We constructed a community amongst ourselves, and the conference was an attempt to expose it. We created a space where this conversation can inspire other conversations, so that perhaps the notion of creating autonomously—that is, without the intentions or concerns of the other—is not radical, but necessary. One of the highlights from the conference, Gessica Généus’ Douvan Jou Ka Leve (2017), tells a story about the filmmaker and her mother, who suffers from a mental illness brought on by many factors. Genetics, poverty, spir- ituality, and the great history of colonialism assemble in Généus’ search to understand it all. It is only through her gaze that Généus can conduct a complete investigation of what is a penetrating, emotional affair. And this, we would argue, is the Black woman aesthetic. The emotionality of a political

Bodomo, Omawale, Pearson, Badiane, Généus, Gary, Oduye, Smith & Nikyatu \ 215 world that left us devoid of power, but filled East Coast. I've told my partner that part of his with a specific wisdom. One that we have no reparations is that he needs to make sure that choice but to keep investigating. our house is open for my friends, specifically The night before the conference, all of the Black women. participants sat in a closed room at UnionDocs for hours and spoke at a roundtable over wine, NB with a few friends present. What kept coming I feel like a phrase that's been coming up for up were the methods of creation, the produc- me as I keep talking with people about these tion of community, and the audacity to exist as things is this idea of making a life together. I we are, exploring parts of ourselves not ex- know that it's a general thing, but I've felt for pected of us. Below is a lightly edited excerpt a long time that in order for the kinds of mov- from the conversation. ies that I want to make to get made—for the —New Negress Film Society people I'm in community with to actually make these movies—we have to make a life together TRANSCRIPT in some way. It's like opening up your house. For some people, you're literally in a commune. NUOTAMA BODOMO It has to extend beyond production. Very often Hey everyone, we're going to do a full table I feel like we don't get to production at a rate discussion. I'm just going to start with a topic, that we could if we're not supporting each and we can go with it. But whatever happens, other outside of the frame of writing a script happens. We're not stuck with this question. and then making a movie. I think one thing that came up as we were talking about this roundtable was the pro- CHANELLE APONTE PEARSON duction of community. Basically, we're all I also have a background in public policy, and filmmakers, we make movies, but outside of there's this theory there called asset theory. the thing within the frame, we're collectivizing, Instead of going into a community and seeing or even making movies as a collective effort. what is not available and what you have to put So, we’re just wanting to talk about what it in it, asset theory asks what it looks like to en- means to us to produce community outside of ter a community and see what resources and producing a film. It's a very general question. assets already exist, and think about how you Jump in! can leverage those. We can apply that theory to so many other parts of our lives. And this is TCHAIKO OMAWALE something that I've been talking about with a I can start. I live in LA, which feels super lot of other filmmakers, artists, creatives, and draining because, at least in my world in LA, folks in general. In thinking about what a larger everything is about film, film, film, and busi- world community looks like, we also need to ness. I've actually been really craving just, reframe what resources are. Just like you have like, normal relationships with people. Time is an apartment in Hollywood, I have a car in New also something that is like super up for me. I York City. Who needs my vehicle? It’s a com- feel like I don't have enough time, and like the munity vehicle. That’s a way of reframing what stress of not having time is detrimental to my assets look like, what resources look like—for body. So, I've been trying to seek out—this productions, but also just for life. sounds so weird—people outside of the film industry, people who have normal lives, and KAMILAH BADIANE who don't care anything about the industry. I'm curious to learn about how a lot of you I’ve also been trying to make use of the privi- women started filmmaking. Even knowing what leges that I do have, like my house. I have this your voice as a filmmaker is, or what you would really nice apartment in Hollywood, and have like it to be—how did you get to that point? been trying to make it a space where people can come to rest, especially people from the

Bodomo, Omawale, Pearson, Badiane, Généus, Gary, Oduye, Smith & Nikyatu \ 216 GESSICA GÉNÉUS dropped out of school. I was studying the- I started as an actress. When I was living in ater, and I was just really disillusioned. Really Paris, I could not find any part in movies. Every disempowered by what I was being offered. I time I would go to a casting I would either be had come from a performing arts high school a maid or a prostitute somewhere. And then at where you could be whatever you wanted to some point I said to my agent, It's kind of weird. be. They were color blind casting, they weren't I've been here for two years and you keep adhering to any rules around race or how you sending me to the same . . . I don't mind being a looked. It was what you could do. Then I moved maid, I can be a maid, but It's kind of weird that I to New York and had a rude awakening. Bitch, only get these types of auditions. And she was you look like that and that looks like the maid. like, Well, you have to start somewhere. My god, And so, it was really a power grab for me. It okay. was like, Oh okay, they're telling me this, but So, I got tired and annoyed. I got tired of I know what it means to be a Black woman. I criticizing them actually. I was like, This is not know a Black woman's life, so I'm interested in helping me. It's surely not helping them because operating within the space of the person who they don't care. So, what am I going to do? I makes the film, the person who tells the story. have things that I want to express and it seems To answer your question, Kamilah, for me it was like no one will give me the space to express it. like, Okay, you’re saying this, but I know you’re And I'm not even saying it as a judgement. It's a liar. So, let me go to school so I can access like, why would they? It's my story, you know? the means of production, access an education, We are always expecting people to be interest- so that I can be in the operating position, so I ed in something that they don't even know or can be the one who says this is the reality for they don't even care about. Black women. So anyway, I went back to Haiti and I put up my production company. I'm probably the GG only person working in it because we cannot It’s more ignorant than liar. They have no idea. produce other people right now. I can only But you do. produce my own movie. So yeah, I'm going to make movies. I'm going to tell stories that I JG want to hear, and I'm going to cast people that Right. It’s like, How would you know what it I want to cast. And I think it's all about that. means to be a Black woman? So, hand over the Create your own space, and it's okay if others reins and have a seat. don't create it for you, because they created their own. So, take your courage to create ADEPERO ODUYE your own space, to feel the pain of starting. Or not even hand over the reins. It’s more like, It's painful to start. That's why we tend to lean Keep that, and I’ll go over here with my sisters on, Take me. Take me with you. It's so comfort- and fashion this whole thing. My business as a ing, but at the same time, we're going to take human being, as a creative person, is to cre- this hit together. We're going to take the hit of ate. It’s this idea of not waiting. I can't wait for starting. someone to say, You can play someone other than a slave. I just have to create. It came out JA’TOVIA GARY of necessity, because there are things hap- I'm so glad you say that, because this is exact- pening here, things that I'm seeing, things that ly me. I was an actor for several years, from like I'm trying to get out, and I have to get it out a little girl to maybe 24. And my last job was somehow. Grand Theft Auto. I was a girlfriend of a drug So, then it's just a process of trusting. I'm dealer. In the video he was beating me, he was ready to fuck up, fall flat on my face, I don't beating my character. And you are the player. know what I'm doing. It's been so freeing You're a white man from Russia, and you can because now I know that it's possible to cre- choose to save me, or not. I was in school and ate in the way that my spirit always knew it

Bodomo, Omawale, Pearson, Badiane, Généus, Gary, Oduye, Smith & Nikyatu \ 217 wanted to create, in terms of high-vibrating can disseminate that clarity to the people out- production. From the process to the product. side? I'm having too many conversations with High-vibrating, women-led production, where talented people, Black people in particular, everybody is on equal footing. There's none who are having a hard time: I'm a Black person of that hierarchical bullshit. None of that mili- and I think about things in a certain way, but I'm taristic shooting. Think about the language of having to deal with Hollywood. film. The language of filmmaking is violence. Shooting, action. CAULEEN SMITH I think the most important thing is to know My own personal experience with the film that it is possible to create the kind of work industry is that it is an industry that builds that you want to create in the way that you itself and serves itself. It serves its values and want to create it. Because we're going to go it serves its own reservation. And I would just out and have meetings in LA, but they're do- say, really earnestly, I don't think it's reasoning their own thing in LA and they're doing it able to expect for your own interests to be in a very specific way that doesn't feel good, served within that particular industry. You can't or that doesn’t feel conducive to me. But to really expect people making a lot of money see that there are people here that have been doing what they love to do to change it just for doing it in a way that feels expansive and us. They're not going to and there's no reason not soul crushing . . . Like, what's the point of why they should or would. working on a film when the people are treat- On the other hand, as a Black diaspora, ed like shit? You make a great product, but we're an undercapitalized people. We have the people walk away not wanting to do film to find other ways to practice our culture that anymore, trying to find their way back to the don't require cash money, or a kind of glob- thing that they love. I mean, that happens all al domination hegemony. It's ironic, too. We the time, and it's just so hard because people actually do as Black people have a global dom- don't understand this idea of community, and ination in terms of our culture and the way in what it means to really take care of the people which people need it. And the real irony is that, who are showing up and getting paid a very even as we make money from it, we basically small amount of money to make your vision give it away. And I actually don't have a prob- come true. lem with that at all, because I feel like that's the power of practicing a culture as opposed CAP to exploiting interests. It's unjust to watch It's one of those things where, once you expe- one industry exploit and profit from the things rience something or see something, you can't that we make and invent and share, but I can't unsee it, you can't unfeel it. Now that you've imagine being on the other side of it, being felt it, you've experienced it, you're like, Oh, someone who does profit from and exploit that. hell no. This is what I want to replicate, and I I would just say that the film industry is never want to experience, and expand beyond. And ever ever going to be a place sided with lib- then it's just a matter of what that looks like. eration for anyone other than the people that What are the steps, what are the practices, control it. what are the agreements that we have with each other as community members in order to NIKYATU make the things that we want to make in the I think there's something to be said about way that we want to make them, knowing that those of us who are transitioning out of a less it's possible? commercial or mainstream space and into the business. In terms of my journey, I just got AO representation, I'm learning to navigate what And the importance of clarity within yourself. it means to have agents, what it means to be a What are the agreements that you have with product. I think that something we can share yourself? Are you clear about that, so that you with each other, as people who may or may not

Bodomo, Omawale, Pearson, Badiane, Généus, Gary, Oduye, Smith & Nikyatu \ 218 be interested in transitioning into the industry, favor. Because we can flip it. They don't real- is what it looks like to be branded as a product. ize we're flipping it, and we figure out how to What do our individual paths look like with- move in these spaces. I think Jordan Peele is in the industry? If you have to pitch a series, doing a pretty good job of starting to flip it. what does a successful pitch look like? I think that I'm trying to figure out how to straddle the NB industry and academia, but also stay grounded But I'll be honest and say I don't see that as in the work I want to make. I'm lucky because a win. There are many ways in which that is a I'm at a place where people are asking, Where win, but there's a way in which it's not a win are the women in horror? And that works to my for me, in that we're still talking within that favor. Never mind the fact that I perceive my framework. film as a drama. But yeah, funnel me into horror because right now it works. CS I guess my question is, how do we deal with I really hate playing the age card, but I'm defi- the way the industry brands us as different nitely the oldest person in the room. And so, variations of Black women? How do we deal many of these questions are aspirations I've with what they think we are and how that dic- heard before, framed in the same way before, tates whether we're successful or not in the because there's always this one person that industry? you can point to—Spike Lee or Jordan Peele or Ava DuVernay—who suggests that things are NB changing. I'm not cynical about change. I'm But I almost want to jump back to what you just cynical about where we place our faith in were saying earlier about the opportunities our ingenuity. I started to make films because I of being a woman in horror, and the sort of learned that filmmaking was this very powerful people who are asking, Where are the women language. It was influencing and even impact- in horror? I don't think that's not an oppor- ing the way I thought about and understood tunity—I won't act superior to that process, myself. And once I realized that, I thought because I do take general meetings and I that maybe I could use that language to influ- am in that world too. I have representation ence and impact the way Black girls felt about and stuff. But I feel like a lot of the time, I'm themselves. That was literally it. I just wanted wondering what horror even is as a genre to to see images that made sense to me or that a tradition of African Black storytellers. This didn't disown me or insult me and demean me. genre is too small. That's it. That was all. I grew up across many cultures, so for me, I was born in 1967, and in my lifetime, I feel language as a verbal and textual thing was not like I now can consume, just like blithely con- enough. Filmmaking brings so many things to- sume images that make me feel great about gether, and it's so much bigger than the genre myself, make me think I'm super cute, make of horror. And I know from your work, I can see me think I'm just fabulous and have all kinds that it's bigger than horror. I don't want to act of feels. There is all this media that can be superior to the branding or the opportunities consumed and all these media personalities that are there to get our work made, but I do that can be consumed, and yet here we are, inherently kind of take offense at the fact that full of discontent and aspirations. And there's I have to define, or even you have to define, nothing wrong with that, I'm not mad at y'all. the work that you're doing in a category called I'm just saying—and yet here we are. And my horror. question is, with all of this media to consume, why is it that it's not enough? I still feel like NIKYATU there are huge gaps, still so much that we I agree, which is why I say that to some de- don't have. Or is it that we want to be the pro- gree, depending on how you flip it, other ducers of what others consume? people's limited imaginations can work in our

Bodomo, Omawale, Pearson, Badiane, Généus, Gary, Oduye, Smith & Nikyatu \ 219 I have a quick response or suggestion. TO Something that has been really exciting to me Is there a midway point? Is there a way to hack has come out of conversations with certain systems? So, I've accepted that this table that academics about the problem of representa- Hollywood likes to advertise is for everybody tion. Somebody presented the work of Lorna is not for everybody. I'm accepting that there's Simpson to me, and was talking about how, at certain privileges that I have, that's why I've first, she had the body in the artwork, like a been invited to the table. Knowing that I want woman's body. And then, even though she was to do fantasy films and it costs a ton of money still dealing with anti-blackness, she didn't to do that, but I can't do that independently have to use the actual body of a Black person. because I would then have to educate other Something that has been sort of titillating to people outside of film who have money to give me, is this idea of devising an aesthetic lan- me the money—is there a way I can hack the guage from people who have been theorizing system? Not that I'm trying to change it, not and thinking about it more than me, of how to that I think that's going to happen, but just so make these things where you're not center- I can make my films and then maybe find a way ing or reacting to white folks. And I know that to fund things so there's another table that's people have been doing it and are doing it, but being made, on the side, that has nothing to I'm offering this to Gessica, because I think do with them, so that eventually we're done the knowledge we have access to is varied with that table. Or will I die trying to do that and different, and I only knew about this stuff because my soul has been eaten? because I happened to follow Ja’Tovia and talk to her, or because somebody introduced me to GG Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, but it never occurred To be honest, I think I'm dreaming of the to me. Before, my sort of penultimate thing was day when we can . . . I mean, it has to be ex- seeing myself on screen, and it's still taking pressed, the frustration. And I feel it and I have me a while to understand how you move past it inside. But I'm dreaming of the day where I'll representation. But I wanted to offer that there be able to make a film not to express that frus- is a way to create art where there's more joy tration. Because I feel like I'm stuck in it and and freedom in not having to think about the it really annoys me. I want to tell the story of a struggle around whiteness, or in reaction to woman. I don't necessarily want her to strug- whiteness. gle because she's Black. She can struggle because she's a human being in a situation. AO But I feel like I'm stuck in it. Even though I feel This whole conversation around, the focus on, like it needs to be said, at the same time I feel whiteness. I don't give a shit. I don't care. And like, can I just be a filmmaker and woman that it took me a while to get to the point where I is making films, or just a human being making can say that. If that's something you're think- films? ing about because it's something you want to As we were saying, there's not enough of think about, that's cool. But if you don't want to us being shown. But still we are in reaction to think about it, it's 2019, we are all free. As I'm what is being given to us. We are not in action saying this, I'm just reaffirming this to myself. yet. I still feel like I'm in the eyes of those peo- We can make it how we want to make it. We ple that I'm trying just to shift—not shift away get to choose. We get to choose. If we have to from, but just look away. Because they're not burn this shit off, let's burn this shit off. Burn looking at me. If they were looking at me they it out, talk about it, get it out. And then go out would've seen who I am and what I'm standing there knowing that we are free. It just got to for, so why do I keep looking to see myself in the point where I was tired of thinking about their eyes? I feel trapped in it, you know? what they want to do, how we can make them see. It's like, No. I'm going to be over here with TO my people, whoever that may be, building some

Bodomo, Omawale, Pearson, Badiane, Généus, Gary, Oduye, Smith & Nikyatu \ 220 shit. And if you decide that you want to come ENDNOTES along and be a part of it respectfully, and that 1—See https://www.moma.org/calen- you can contribute to something, then you can dar/events/5029. The New Negress Film come along. Outside of that, I don't give a shit. Society produced the second iteration of the Black Women’s Film Conference CS between September 7th and October I feel like there was a conversation long ago 4th, 2020, staging the conference as a about distribution being the crucial thing for series of online screenings and stream- being independent, and now actually the sad- ing events. For more information, see dest thing is that distribution has been taken https://newnegressfilmsociety.com/ care of, because we have the interwebs. That's black-womens-film-conference. what's so sad. Distribution is there, and yet, still we have not managed to harness and em- power and circulate and own a quadrant of it, to circulate our powerful stories. So, we're still actually stuck in the system. I mean, if people want to hack the system, do what you gotta do. I’m 100% behind you, and I’ll buy all kinds of tickets. But when I hear a Black woman say, What does it mean to be a product? Let me google you pictures of what it means to be a product. We actually all know; it's in our DNA, what it means to be a product. We know it. We know it. And I'm not actually trying to do it again, ever. That's not for me, that's for my ancestors. So, when I hear a question like that, what I think is, Okay, yes. We are in material realities, and we all have to find our way. But the fact is that, in my humble opinion, we've never actually had more tools and resources so cheap and so accessible. So, the very idea that you ever sit in a room with some stupidly ridiculous, ignorant white person who holds some kind of key to something you think you want is so painful to me, because it's not the case anymore. And what is it in this world that's making us think that it is? Because it isn't. It just isn't. So, the question is do you want to play in this capitalistic sandbox or do you not? That's the question. If you ask everybody at this table, everybody has a different goal. Some of us might want to shape the table, some of us might want to get a seat at the table. But please know that there's a grand history of radical Black women who did never not want no part of it. They're the reason we're in this room.

Bodomo, Omawale, Pearson, Badiane, Généus, Gary, Oduye, Smith & Nikyatu \ 221

\ Volume 4 \ Dossier \ This transcript originated from an event produced at New York University’s Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies on February 21, 2019, which explored contemporary archival practices in and from the Middle East. The event featured presentations by panelists representing three archival initiatives that use digital platforms to collect and preserve documentary media from historically marginalized worlds: Diana Allan and Kaoukab Chebaro of the Nakba Archive, an oral history collective established in Lebanon in 2002, which records video interviews with first-generation Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, and whose collections are now housed at the American University of Beirut (AUB); Yasmine Eid Sabbagh and George Awde of the Arab Image Foundation (AIF), also located in Beirut, which maintains a collection of photograph- BEFORE, WITHIN, AROUND, BEYOND: ic objects and documents from and related WORLD-MAKING IN THE DIGITAL to the Middle East, North Africa, and the Arab ARCHIVE \ diaspora that date from the mid-nineteenth century to the present; and Christian Rossipal DIANA ALLAN, GEORGE AWDE, of Noncitizen Archive, an independent plat- KAOUKAB CHEBARO, JARED MCCORMICK, form for the secure storage of digital video, CHRISTIAN ROSSIPAL, AND YASMINE audio, and photographs from migrant expe- EID SABBAGH riences today, which is based in Stockholm. The presentations—accessible online1—were followed by a roundtable discussion between the panelists and the audience, which was moderated by Jared McCormick. The transcript of that discussion appears below. It has been edited and expanded through correspondence with the participants. We are grateful to the Kevorkian Center, the Department of Cinema Studies, the Center for Media Culture & History, and the Tisch Initiative for Creative Research at NYU for sponsoring this event, and to World Records, UnionDocs, and Amherst College for the additional support they provided to facilitate the production of this transcript. —Toby Lee & Josh Guilford

TRANSCRIPT

JARED MCCORMICK I want to start with a framing question about archives and their relationship to place. Traditionally, we have thought of archives as being tied to a specific community, or

Allan, Awde, Chebaro, McCormick, Rossipal & Sabbagh \ 223 geographic area, or the actual, physical lo- activism and keep in mind that even the digi- cation where they are kept. But these three tal or virtual counter-archive still concentrates archives disrupt that association, in certain power to a certain extent—although, perhaps, ways, through their focus on migration, mobil- in novel and more insidious ways. ity, displacement, and exile. So I’m wondering if the conceptual frameworks of your projects, DIANA ALLAN with their emphasis on displacement and mo- With the Nakba Archive, we haven’t been bility, offer a chance to rethink the archive. I’m working so much with the question of how also wondering if these emphases are related digital platforms impact notions of the archive. to the way each project uses digital media. We have been more interested in thinking Does the digital archive itself allow this kind of about exile as a kind of critical paradigm for transition, where archives are able to address reconsidering our understanding of identi- and document types of movement, or modes of ty in the Palestinian camps in Lebanon, and belonging, that are not tied to locality? bringing that to bear on the notion of what an archive is. So, for example, this particular CHRISTIAN ROSSIPAL archive is not oriented around a statist proj- In some ways, the Noncitizen Archive could ect but is dispersed. Also, very importantly, we be called a virtual archive, as its contents are want to recognize the identities and histories uploaded online, stored in digital databas- that are located in exile, in these communi- es, and disseminated via a website interface. ties, in camps as being just as important as Scholars like Haci Akman have argued for the the narratives that we've recorded about life potential of virtual archives in disseminating in pre-’48 Palestine. Within the Palestinian the cultural heritage of stateless peoples.2 A context, there's a reflexive move to always common argument in this vein of thinking is see identity retrospectively, as tied to villag- that the virtual aspect of such alternative or es of origin, and to not attend to the ways in counter-archives is not only important in the which the camps are absolutely fundamental absence of physical institutions, but that there to refugee identity. It's not like the histories is a potential for another kind of diasporic and spaces of the camps are just going to be institution precisely because virtual archives made obsolete by return. They are deeply en- do not rely on structures and methods found in meshed in the narratives that we’ve collected. traditional archives or museums. As much as the Nakba Archive is an archive of However, I find it a bit hard to make clear- a Palestinian nationalist project, then, it is also cut distinctions from other, more traditional an archive of camp histories, and I think that modes of collection and archiving. As I sug- its documentation of camp spaces and camp gested in my presentation, Noncitizen Archive life is one aspect of the project that is going to is entangled in both material and immateri- be uniquely valuable. al practices—and, more generally, to infer a For me, this emphasis on exilic histories separation between tangible and intangible and identities has provided a way of rethinking heritage would lead to a dead end. To clari- what an archive should be, or what it should fy, I mentioned Denis Byrne, who argues that attend to, and what it's oriented to in the heritage “being by nature discursive, is al- future. Is it oriented to a statist project, or is ways intangible.”3 On the flip side, discursive it oriented to something more diasporic and designation of what constitutes heritage has complex? Almost forty years ago, Edward Said material effects. This kind of mutual entan- asserted that Palestine is exile—in the wake glement should caution against reading the of uprooting and dispossession, Palestine and virtual archive as something radically new or Palestinians are deterritorialized, fractured, liberating, in and of itself. Digital archives have scattered, and multiple. As Said put it, “slowly their own materiality and their own violence our lives—like Palestine itself—dissolve into of inscription, like any archive. In other words, something else. We cannot hold the center I think we must avoid an idealism of digital for long.”4 What kind of archive could capture

Allan, Awde, Chebaro, McCormick, Rossipal & Sabbagh \ 224 this process of dissolution and transformation, comment during her presentation, about the or accommodate the cumulative experiences difficulty of precisely determining the num- of a global Palestinian diaspora? Who would ber of villages represented in the Palestinian the archons be? Where would it be locat- diaspora in Lebanon, is very telling. The human ed? An archive in and of exile, which exists relation to space is very complex, multi-layered virtually, as this one now does, introduces a and fluid. The kind of structured represen- critical paradigm shift. Jared, as you point out, tation provided by a map belies this rooted, archives are normally understood as tethered subjective experience of space. To account to place, to the nation state, and to a bounded for this, when we were working to define or notion of political community. By contrast, exile name a village referenced in the interviews, dislocates and disaggregates the archive. It and to produce a visual representation of that remakes the collective in a way that implicitly village, we were interested in finding ways refuses the colonial logic of imposed borders to add layers of this microhistory and of the and the forms of political exclusion they have village histories—for example, the route to produced. school—so that it would be more recognizable to the inhabitants. We were very concerned KAOUKAB CHEBARO with opening up channels of empowerment so I would like to add a point to Diana's obser- that the microhistory, the human geography, vation about the archiving of camp histories and the lived, subjective experience could be and camp spaces. Some of the challenges we reinscribed in the discourse of the archive. were facing with the audio and video materials Our aim was to lift up the context, the voice, in the archive were technical, like the quality the texture, and preserve it as a way to recon- of the sound. Many times, when working with nect with the place. My hope is that it is a very these materials, we tried to retain the whole empowering tool, rather than an alienating one concept of the present, the moment of the that stresses absence or erasure. interview, at the expense of the quality of the sound, or even at the expense of understand- YASMINE EID SABBAGH ing what you are seeing or hearing. We kept I would like to speak to the idea of transition even the inaudible portions of audio, as well as that you mentioned, mainly through refer- moments where, for example, something was ence to the Burj al-Shamali collection, which happening in the street next door that disrupts is actually not called an archive on purpose. the interview. We want viewers to see and As I said, the collection was gathered be- hear those moments of camp life, rather than tween 2005 and 2011 in Burj al-Shamali simply reading through a transcript to try to camp, a Palestinian refugee camp created understand what is happening. in 1954 in the south of Lebanon. It consists On the question of place, I think our per- of photographs, video, and sound files, spective on this issue may be a bit peculiar, which document photographic practices given the history and human geography of and people’s relation to their photographs. Palestine, and the way that we try—with this In assembling the collection, we considered archive—to lend access to a place that has both the embodied, material layers that com- been barred to the community we are docu- prise the photograph as a physical object (the menting. We thought of this archive as a tool paper, the emulsion), and the other, disembod- rather than an end, rather than as a thing. At ied or “meta-medial layers” that surround or the same time, we were very much aware that overlay the object (the diverse narratives that it could turn into a thing or an object—that it accompany a photograph, the emotions or si- could essentialize and politicize and trans- lences someone expresses when speaking of late and interpret things. We tried to define a photograph, the subjectivities, the refusals). the goals and the means as empowering a We chose to give these meta-medial layers a reconnection to place, sometimes even a place, and in different contexts I have worked reconstruction of place. For example, Diana’s to make these layers—rather than the images

Allan, Awde, Chebaro, McCormick, Rossipal & Sabbagh \ 225 themselves—visible through what I call “per- JM formative interventions,” which seek to allow This leads into another question for me. As I for a feminist and post-colonial reading of was listening to your presentations, I wrote these photographs. 5 down “the overflow, the more than, the be- I often call the entire endeavor a negotiation yond.” It’s this idea of what escapes or lies process, which is still ongoing. This collec- beyond the archive, or even beyond our usual tion was not located and digitized as an end. understanding of the text or the document. It doesn't exist as an accessible archive, and So, for example, Yasmine described a kind of it’s not even possible to access an index, or to activation between people that happened in understand what type of order is in this collec- the process of collecting, which doesn’t nection. The work on the collection is a transition essarily make it into the collection itself. Diana in itself. This process aims to enable a certain talked about the process of indexing inter- future, something that is not yet there, or even views, and all of the aspects of the videos and a place, or a kind of recognition, or perhaps the audio recordings that escape the index. all these things combined. It works very much But even in the video you showed, Diana, there on a conceptual level, but then is translated are moments when Sa’dá (al-Ḥasan Kāyid) into everyday life through many other gestures sighs, and I couldn’t help but smile when that and activities, which are not necessarily linked air was released. I would be interested in hear- to the collection, but which were enabled ing more about the process of transitioning through reflection on the collection and the these collections to the digital platform, and contradictory conditions of individual images. the ways that you have tried to account for this It is interesting how this way of dealing beyond, the thing you can't capture. with the collection, the idea of giving it an existence without showing the photographs, CR comes from the process of confronting and With Noncitizen Archive, some of us were collecting the photographs. People were com- initially thinking of the digital archive itself ing to us who were collecting and looking at as an anarchive, a concept that has precisely these images, and they would say, I want you to do with excess and the things you cannot to digitize this and add it to the collection, but really capture, but which are activated in and don't show it to anyone. It was this giving but around the archive. Ultimately, we did not use holding back at the same time—this tension this term for the project, though I would argue that made us go on, and which became the that the idea of anarchiving is still present im- catalyst for reflection around the collection. plicitly for many of the participants, and this is This is where the very radical decision comes reflected to some extent in the website. There from, to actually not make it an archive, not are different options so you can choose, for make it accessible. It often sounds very coun- instance, to have your material stored safely terproductive, but I think it is very much linked offline in long-term storage, and not be made to the question of transition, in the sense that publicly accessible. This could be described as the work on the collection is a process, maybe an embargo system, in the journalistic sense of a metaphorical one, which aims to facilitate the term, because some of the people who are another process which needs to happen so- living undocumented may not want to expose cially, politically, and economically. Disclosing themselves immediately but might still want this collection in a certain order as an archive to save whatever they make within the context would actually be a counterproductive act, as of the archive. On the one hand, the so-called it would fix a certain order, instead of working irregular migrant is already exposed to sur- towards a change, a different society, a differ- veillance and hyper-visibility—in news media ent world, as you call it, or a different possible and public spheres; at internal and external reality for these people who have endured a border controls; in everyday life. On the other transient situation already for seventy years hand, their own perspectives, political voices, now, which is very, very long. and life stories often appear under erasure,

Allan, Awde, Chebaro, McCormick, Rossipal & Sabbagh \ 226 are actively unseen, or are simply ignored in I've really enjoyed was this decision to not state-centered or more official cultural her- think of the site as something that needed itage endeavors. Adding optional levels of to be launched as a finished product, but as privacy to access material within the archive a work in progress. What I mean by a work in is one way to work through this double-bind progress is that it accounts for how digital of hyper-visibility and erasure. In other words, production is never done, it’s something un- you have the ability to postpone publication folding—and the design of the site allows us until the time is right, your situation is less to continue to develop it over time. The beta precarious, or whatever the specific circum- launch of the platform will make available the stances may be. main structure of the interface, which consists of four sections, and then, little by little, we will YES add smaller modules for specific collections or Just following on that, one interesting aspect sections. Further, we are planning to develop of the AIF platform that George touched on is interactive tools for the audience to intervene the capacity for layering, which is behind many and contribute to the documentation of col- aspects of the website. The basic idea is to lections, or to research around the collections. present the photographs themselves, which For me, this allows our audience to intervene are accompanied by a basic description. But and feel welcome to engage in something we’re working to create many other descriptive that's still in development, and to actually have layers, so that, in addition to the description, some sort of agency in the direction that the you are able to look at a photographic object platform takes, whether that's through key- from the front side, from the back side, as a word interventions, or the lab section of the negative, as a print. There are other objects website, or other parts of the interface. that have multiple versions that users can access, and we are developing other aspects DA that would allow the description of sensory To go back to the question of what escapes layers—for example, the smells that images the archive, when we began this project we suggest—or that enable users to experiment were thinking about the archive primarily as with other types of layering, for instance by a historical resource that would be driven by writing over an image. This interactive dimen- content, by narratives that could be used for sion of the platform is really important. In the claims-making, and so on. It is only recently case of the AIF, all of this physical material was that I've started writing about the archive—for brought to Beirut and stored in its cool storage a long time it was a counterpoint to my eth- room, which is fantastic and gives the material nographic work, but now I'm turning to it and a prolonged life. But if we would just keep it listening to it and writing about it. I think that there, the material would be like dead objects. my understanding of the phenomenological Digitization helps us go beyond a sort of cem- possibilities of the collection have come out etery practice. The new platform will enable of that process, by really attending to these users who aren’t able to travel to Beirut to embodied and affective registers, and thinking access and work with the material. about the significance of gestures and other non-verbal modes of communication. At the GEORGE AWDE most literal level, to hear and see someone I've been lucky enough to be a board member speak—or remain silent—is a radically dif- at the AIF for the last year, though this digital ferent experience from reading a transcribed platform has been in the works for ten years. interview. So much is lost in transcription; how This long-term development is really reflected refugee elders communicate their experienc- in the website—it’s a great platform. But this es is often as important as what is said, and year, we had to make a lot of decisions with fundamental to our apprehension. In these the board, due to the cost of custom-made interviews, meaning is conveyed not simply development. And one of the decisions that through semantic content, but in the rhythm of

Allan, Awde, Chebaro, McCormick, Rossipal & Sabbagh \ 227 speech, in voice as sound and song, in ges- KC tures. We feel the force of all that cannot be A few final comments on the general impact communicated and are viscerally affected. of building a digital archive, which I see in a In relation to this broader theme of nutshell as an act of curation, an act of trans- world-making, I would add that I think that lation, or perhaps better put, as a continuous, audiovisual media invite a different kind of and ongoing act of dialogue, of participation. imaginative engagement from viewers. They You grapple with all these questions: How do open up the possibility for other forms of you preserve the integrity of the material, of relation between subject and viewer, for a that performative act of testimony that the recognition of a shared humanity and a shared document is, that the photo is, that the oral field of consciousness, even if only momentar- history interview is? How do you lift up the ily and in a qualified manner. In contexts like context? How do you preserve the provenance, this, where people are recounting histories the genealogy, the format, the texture, the of unimaginable loss and violence, attending tropes of communication? I don't think there is to these non-verbal registers—which vocal- an easy answer to these questions but all you ize the embodied reality of deep, enduring can do is keep reflecting on them and work grief—becomes acutely significant for empir- toward opening up communication in an inclu- ical, political, and ethical reasons. This is one sive way. The person curating a digital archive, reason that POHA (Palestinian Oral History or the person studying the content in a digital Archive) has resisted transcribing the inter- archive, brings as much to the interactive dia- views in the archive, as Kaoukab mentioned. logue, to the research process, as the person We want people to engage precisely with giving a testimony in an oral history interview. these moments where the affective structure If there is an end, really, it is towards opening or the emotions that undergird these narra- up a dialogue so someone would feel like they tives are made manifest, and to reflect on what have a seat at the table in the bigger frame is being communicated at that level. of the politics of knowledge production and In my own filmmaking, I’ve begun using representation. We need to bring that perfor- sound from the Nakba Archive—sound not mative moment or act of testimony as close necessarily as words, but as these other kinds as possible to the researcher or the viewer in of elements we’ve been discussing. I’m really the present, and support dialogue between the interested in the embodied voice as sound and researcher and the agents in that initial perfor- material presence—something that produces mative moment. That's all you can do: act as a historical sense but also relation. These more communicating vessel. ephemeral and partial forms of knowledge, which encode the affective force and dura- JM tion of these events for refugees today—and There is such a nuance and a sensitivity to by this I mean history not simply as a remem- how you all are approaching the materials that bered past, but as a lived present—remain you’ve collected, and the people and lives and underexplored and largely unassimilated in struggles and hardships behind those materi- mainstream renderings of Palestinian ex- als. That really comes through in this idea that perience. I think that to understand the full you mentioned initially, Kaoukab: “it’s the tool, scope and significance of the expulsion for not the end.” I like the idea of thinking about Palestinians in Lebanon today is to recognize interfaces and archives not as ends, but as oc- that these events are not only remembered casions to ask, What do I have? What does this discursively but embodied, passed down not material beget? What does this material want only historically but existentially. My hope is to of me to activate it? These projects are really somehow recuperate these other registers of taking the time to delve into these questions, meaning-making. and to ask, “What does this material need to actually do something in the world?” And so I just wanted to highlight that in appreciation.

Allan, Awde, Chebaro, McCormick, Rossipal & Sabbagh \ 228 With the flood of digital platforms that we have course, more or less an inherent and unavoid- now, it’s great to see projects that are stewing able problem for the small counter-archive, and cooking and taking time to consider the but there is also a certain potential in this very best way of treating the material. fragile and precarious nature. It needs to be kept alive; it cannot stagnate or be enclosed. KC In other words, in the best of cases it propels a And there is another dimension that we need constant, vibrant, and always unfinished effort to be aware of and address, and that is in- that does not foreclose the future of the ar- stitutional funding and sustainability. This is chive, so to speak. definitely an arena for the politics of knowledge production to really play out. Often, you JM can have the greatest idea and want to build I think it would be good at this stage to open the most authentic or democratic or grassroots things up to the audience. Does anyone have a archive, but you are doing it for someone else, question they would like to pose? who is the agent, who is the person affected. You are archiving this group, or this individu- AUDIENCE MEMBER 1 al's testimony. There is a political and ethical For the Arab Image Foundation, could you responsibility there to the interviewee, and it talk a bit more about your collection process? has many layers, including the sustainability of What do you currently accept, and what is the your project, integrity of representation, ensur- process? ing transparency and sharing of agency in the curatorial and scholarly performative acts. YES We happen to have our Director, Marc CR Mouarkech, here today. Marc, do you want to I can maybe add something here, too, by ex- answer? panding on something I mention in my paper, when I talk about being cautious about digi- MARC MOUARKECH tal activism. This is partly because long-term We are currently not actively collecting in storage, even if it’s digital, is very resource order to better understand what we hold today, intensive. And even though Noncitizen Archive and what gaps we would like to fill. At its be- has funding for a few years, it's kind of instruc- ginning, the Foundation collected by sending tive to contrast that to what's called the Film members to different countries, who would Heritage Department in Sweden, an archive then bring in collections based on their own, which would be like the national counterpart. subjective interests. Although these inter- With secured state funding they can plan for ests were wide, this raised a lot of questions hundreds of years into the future, which means around the act of collecting itself. Today, we that there is another sense of temporality, be- are responsible for more than 500,000 photo- cause of this resource backing. graphic objects, and it is a huge responsibility. The same institute that governs the Also, to go back to the question of what an Heritage Department has also funded individ- archive is today, we ask ourselves this ques- ual Noncitizen events, but this very long-term tion every single day at the Foundation. What heritage—which even in digital form needs does it mean to be responsible for an archive? hard-drive migration every five years or so— Which ethical implications does this have? is reserved mainly for theatrically-released What does it mean to hold collections that Swedish films. I think that says something are linked to families and personal lives from about the long-term challenges facing digi- so many different contexts? Taking the time tal projects that are oriented around cultural to consider these questions and reassess our heritage, which attempt to operate outside own collections is important. Meanwhile, we the framework of the nation-state, or without rarely decline collections when people ap- big forms of institutional backing. This is, of proach us with interesting ones.

Allan, Awde, Chebaro, McCormick, Rossipal & Sabbagh \ 229 JOSH GUILFORD should all be undocumented. I mean, it was Diana, in your presentation you used a phrase, obviously a bit performative, but I think one “the risks of documentation.” That idea has does have to think critically about what Marc manifested in different ways across all of was saying too: What is an archive? What are these presentations: you’re all involved in acts collections? Why are we doing this? What's of collecting documents, while being quite the purpose? And I agree with Kaoukab about cognizant of the risks of documentation. That the responsibilities that one has when one re- seems like a really powerful problem. Could cords a testimony, to the person who has given you expand on what that phrase means within that narrative. We become implicated in these the context of the Nakba Archive? materials, in these interviews, as researchers, I’m also wondering if we could talk more archivists, and viewers. as a group about the productivity of these Obviously, these concerns become even archives. We often think of archives as insti- more important in the context of an ongoing tutions that are oriented toward preserving liberation struggle. I think there is a way in cultural formations of the past, but each of which the creation of archives is often accom- these projects is invested in facilitating so- panied by the illusion of temporal distance cial relations in the present as well. How can and transcendence. It suggests the events we consider this in more detail—the specific recorded are somehow over, and yet this is types of social formations that archives gen- clearly not the case here. It has now become erate, or in which archival practices become commonplace to speak of the Nakba as on- imbricated? going—not finished history, but a process of erasure that widens and deepens. So I think DA we need to be very alive to this fact and rec- On the subject of risk, I don't have a more ognize that this archive, and those of us who evolved answer—I can't really elaborate too have brought it into being and worked on it, much. But in the context of making this ar- are accountable to a lived environment of chive, often we would have to justify why memory and contestation. we were collecting material and why people should participate. One of the things we KC were saying was that the documents we were I want to thank you for raising this point about producing could be used for claims-making. risk so explicitly, because I feel like this is There's a sense that, when these stories are something that needs much more discussion. told, there’s a kind of imagined audience that Archiving is a political act of intervention and they're being circulated to. And I think that often we are not very clear about whose ends people become invested in the notion that are being served by the act of archiving. Is it these stories are going to have some kind of the institution? For instance, does an archive impact. So, I think there's a danger in the pre- enhance an institution’s pedigree, or function sumption of what a document can do. as a unique source that can attract research- In my anthropology class last week, I was ers? Or, does it serve the community that is teaching documents and archives and thinking being archived? There needs to be much more about the moment that we're in now, where open dialogue around these questions and everything is being over-documented. We are clarity, ethical clarity of purpose. An archive surveilled all the time—there's a sort of black can change the field. Any archive also elevates hole of metadata where every time we do any- a certain discourse. It is a political act of rep- thing we are being documented. We are also in resentation and to what end you are doing this a moment where if you don't have documents, is something that needs to be thought about. you're screwed. And so I was talking with my students and saying, Maybe we should all be DA destroying documents, and we should all be I remember when we were discussing this destroying the documents that we carry, we question of access last year, and how we

Allan, Awde, Chebaro, McCormick, Rossipal & Sabbagh \ 230 were going to make these interviews avail- ended up working with us have since gone able. There was real anxiety, particularly from on to develop their own oral history projects, Mahmoud [Zeidan], the co-founder of the and some went on to do graduate studies in Nakba Archive, about making the collection related fields. So retrospectively I have come accessible online. Because, as I mentioned to better appreciate the world-making proper- at the end of my paper, there is this sense ties of an archive. As the project has evolved, for Palestinians that everything is taken and the community that has formed around it has incorporated and used against them. Even grown, both locally and internationally. We now things that should be assets and means by have a dynamic network of activists, scholars, which they can assert rights are turned around filmmakers, writers, researchers, and partner and used against them—we see it again and institutions that contribute in diverse ways to again. When we came to this decision of mak- making the materials in the archive available ing it an open-access archive, it was a real to broader publics, both within and outside thing. It was a struggle, but we came to that Lebanon. decision and it is the right one. As Kaoukab was saying, it's a very complicated question YES that one has to think very carefully about. This I could speak a little to the issue of social idea of open access sounds wonderful, but is connections as well, and the complexities of really complicated. these. As Marc mentioned earlier, the AIF is On the second question you raised, about currently revisiting its collection and contracts the social relations that archives produce, I in order to assess how it has to deal with would say that, from the outset, both Mahmoud these collections. It is, among other things, the and I felt very strongly that this should be a development of the digital platform that has grassroots project run out of the camps and provoked the revision of contracts, as nearly all that the interviews and recording should be images will be made accessible publicly, and done by refugees themselves. Palestinians in not only selections in the form of exhibitions the camps in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan con- and publications. This means having a broader tinue to be spoken for, and their lives are often reach and engaging more diverse audiences. understood as political abstractions—the dis- Consequently, we had to reach out to those course around the right of return often stands who have signed donation or deposit contracts for the sum of refugee experience itself. So with the AIF. Also, the entire documentation our aim was to give communities a stake in process takes us back to those who own, or the project by enabling them to represent their can relate to the collections. The AIF archivists histories on their own terms. The significance and collection management have interest- of the project is therefore not simply the ining stories to tell about their interaction with terviews, but also the research practices and owners of the collections, photographers, or forms of community engagement that it fos- even sometimes galleries who sell the work tered along the way. that artists have produced with images of the In Lebanon, camps are scattered and collection. isolated and few opportunities exist for col- The entire question of its economic potential laborative work among refugees outside of is omnipresent, especially since the foundation institutional settings. So initiatives like this is operating as an association with no aim for one, which consciously seek to develop net- profit, in a country with no political and eco- works between researchers and activists at nomic stability. Consequently, the foundation the local level, can be enormously valuable. has no aspiration to scale up its archive and Both the interviews and the training work- activities, but it is still interested in diversifying shops in video and interview techniques its audiences and practice, giving it an educa- became spaces where refugees were able to tional aspect, and encouraging research. It is share their experiences and forge connections. not easy to find a sustainable balance that al- Many of the twenty-eight researchers who lows work on the collection, the online platform,

Allan, Awde, Chebaro, McCormick, Rossipal & Sabbagh \ 231 and projects at the intersection of preservation, working with were operating in a very pres- artistic practice, research and technology, while ent, exigent context. I’m curious to hear about maintaining stability and good working condi- those moments. tions for the foundation’s staff. CR AUDIENCE MEMBER 2 Noncitizen Archive is not only about collect- I have one comment, just to contextualize the ing things. We also organize workshops, as I work you are doing with the Nakba Archive. I mentioned in my presentation, where our aim think it’s a highly important project, especially is to establish different kinds of connections at a time when the Israeli state is classifying and relations of solidarity between people so many of the documents from 1948, par- who would perhaps not otherwise meet. An ticularly those related to military actions and example that relates to your question is the operations from that time. This is happening local anti-deportation movements in Sweden, at the same time as a kind of criminalization which in their latest iterations, since 2017, of the commemoration of the Nakba—I call have mainly been organized by families and it criminalization de facto. It’s like you’re not unaccompanied teens from Afghanistan, who supposed to celebrate the establishment of face deportation. Most well known is proba- the Israeli state as an occasion for mourning, bly the group Young in Sweden and the leader it has to be a celebration. So, de facto, it’s a Fatemeh Khavari. They staged sit-in strikes criminalization of Palestinian memory. Many in public squares, and filmed these actions Palestinians, and many internationals who with the hope that they would spread—and in speak Hebrew, were using the Israeli State fact, they did generate much media attention Archives’ materials around 1948 for their own and pushed policy makers. That was part of a research—people who did critical work on the media-activist tactic with a more instrumental Nakba. But recently, the documents related to and immediate time-span, aiming for a poli- 1948 were classified. Because of this, the re- tics of recognition and rights. But of course, searchers have started connecting with other people also want to save the footage for the people who had access, and they are sharing future and for themselves, and this is where classified documents that were accessible a the archive plays an important role: to facili- few months before. So I think an archive like tate collection of material securely and without Nakba becomes highly important at this mo- imposing copyright restrictions, rather than to ment. The Palestinians are speaking of the leave such videos to only be streamed on so- Nakba, and the Israelis are trying to silence it cial media and then more or less vanish. Some now as much as possible, because of the polit- of the original sit-in strikers of 2017 became ical weight that speech carries. involved in Noncitizen, in the archival process, and in future workshops. This meeting AUDIENCE MEMBER 3 between an exigent context, as you put it, and Listening to you all, I’m realizing that you another, long-term archival temporality real- occupy multiple positions. You’re archivists, ly pushes the question of the politics of the but you’re also human rights activists, you’re archive and whom it is for. translators, you’re witnesses, photojournalists. And in some ways, all of those different tasks TOBY LEE have different timeframes and exigencies. I’m Jared began this conversation by asking about wondering about instances in which people the relationship between archives and place, from whom you were collecting objects, ma- and so it seems fitting somehow that we’re terials, testimony were operating in a different coming to a close on questions of time: differ- timeframe than you as archivists were imag- ent temporalities or timeframes, and past vs. ining your work. For instance, instances when present orientations. I’d like to extend this line you were thinking of your work in relation to of thinking further, to ask if any of you have a future to come, but the people you were any closing reflections on the relationship

Allan, Awde, Chebaro, McCormick, Rossipal & Sabbagh \ 232 between these archives and future worlds, came to understand that, apart from the bigger or potential social worlds to come. At differ- political conflicts these archives contain and ent points in this conversation, a number of the positions they try to take, they also contain you have brought up the issue of longevity or many smaller conflicts and potentialities, which sustainability, which indicates that these are trigger negotiation and reflection processes future-oriented projects as well. Can you speak that can be very productive at different scales. in a more explicit way about what your hopes If we consider all the different stakeholders are for the future of these archives, and the involved in an archive—owners, researchers, future communities or worlds which they might persons depicted, persons who relate to it, help us to imagine or construct? archivists, digitization officers, etc., as well as institutions and other larger entities—we un- DA derstand that any archival practice, if it is not It’s always hard to look ahead and speculate an authoritarian or dominant one, could enable about what one might find there, but I think social worlds and social interrelations that are that the launching of the POHA later this year less individualistic and less neoliberal, that as an open-access online archive will mark a allow for diversity and equality, and thus maybe new era for work around the history and on- for societies with more human values. going legacy of the Palestinian uprooting. I hope it will inspire a new body of work that will ENDNOTES allow these narratives to circulate and live on 1— See https://www.youtube.com/ in manifold ways that can’t yet be imagined— watch?v=yCFZMGa32M&list=PLEX- these stories will return, even if their narrators zHwcO5SeiDZowKfL15giK0U16qSQCo. will not. Most importantly, POHA will help to ensure that the Palestinian lifeworlds that 2—See, for instance, Haci Akman, “Statsløs disappeared so violently and cataclysmically i diaspora: kulturarvdokumentasjon og in 1948 will remain narratively and imagina- virtuelt museum,” Nordisk Museologi tively alive. In a fundamental sense, resistance 2 (2011): 67-82. Rossipal also ad- to the continued erasure of Palestine and to dresses this issue in "The Noncitizen the Israeli settler-colonial project—through Archive: Transversal Heritage and the the destruction of archives, Palestinian homes Jurisgenerative Process," in Migrant, and infrastructure, through the removal of Arab Multicultural, and Diasporic Heritage: street names, the planting of pine forests over Beyond and Between Borders, eds. ruined villages, the denial of the rights and Alexandra Dellios and Eureka Henrich attachments of refugees in exile, the immiser- (New York: Routledge, 2020). ation and destruction of Gaza, and the many 3—Dennis Byrne, “A Critique of Unfeeling other ways in which the land and lives of Heritage,” in Intangible Heritage, eds. Palestinians are being dismantled—continues Laurajane Smith and Natsuko Akagawa to be understood as a struggle of remembering (New York: Routledge, 2009), 230. against forgetting, and so the relevance and urgency of this work continues to rise. 4—Edward W. Said, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (New York: Columbia YES University Press, 1999), 32. I have been working closely with several very 5—Eid-Sabbagh expands on these issues different archives in the past decade: the in Eid-Sabbagh, “Extending Photography: AIF, the Burj al-Shamali collection, and the the Meta-Medial/Conversational Layers Necessità dei volti archive. The latter, an in- of Dematerialized Photographs,” voluntary and transitional archive, as we call Photography & Culture 12, no. 3 (2019): it, was gathered by the Polisario during the pp. 307-320, https://doi.org/10.10 liberation struggle of Western Sahara against 80/17514517.2019.1654234. Morocco. Working with these collections, I

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