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Notes 1. SEEING IN THE DARK The first of the quotations in the epigraph was uttered on the September 16, 2001,broadcast of the NBC show Meet the Press, in an interview with Tim Russert; the entire interview can be found in Reining in the Imperial Presidency: Lessons and Recommendations Relating to the Presidency of George W. Bush, a report prepared at the direction of Representative John Conyers Jr., Chairman of the US House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary ( Skyhorse Publishing, 2009). The second and third quotations are from, respectively, “Text of Obama’s Speech in Afghanistan,” New York Times, May 1, 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/05/02/ world/asia/text-obamas-speech-in-afghanistan.html; and “Remarks by President Trump at the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States National Convention | Kansas City, MO,” accessed September 3, 2018, www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president- trump-veterans-foreign-wars-united-states-national-convention-kansas-city-mo/. 1. For a discussion of coverage of the air base and the alleged abuses that took place there, see Scott Horton, “Inside the Salt Pit,” Browsings: The Harper’s Blog, March 29, 2010, accessed April 18, 2013, http://harpers.org/blog/2010/03/inside-the-salt-pit/. 2. The original phrase appeared as a slogan in the filmLe vent d’est, 1970 (Groupe Dziga Vertov [Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Gérard Martin]). For a discussion, see Marcia Landy, “Just an Image: Godard, Cinema, and Philosophy,” Critical Quarterly 43, no. 3 (2001): 9–31, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8705.00370. 3. Friedrich A. Kittler and Anthony Enns, Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999 (Polity, 2010); Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (Verso, 1989), 71; Lisa Parks, Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (Duke University Press, 2005); Roger Stahl, Militainment, Inc.: War, Media, and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2009). 181 182 Notes 4. P. W. Singer, Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, reprint (Penguin Books, 2009); Timothy Lenoir and Luke Caldwell, The Military- Entertainment Complex (Harvard University Press, 2017). 5. For a longer history of these rhetorical categories and the ends to which they are put within the frame of war, see Eric N. Olund, “Cosmopolitanism’s Collateral Damage: The State-Organized Racial Violence of World War I and the War on Terror,” in Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror, and Political Violence, ed. Derek Gregory and Allan Pred ( Routledge, 2007). For a similar approach to the spatial redefinition of boundaries, see Amy Kaplan, “Where Is Guantanamo?,” American Quarterly 57, no. 3 (October 10, 2005): 831–58, https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2005.0048. 6. Michael M. Grynbaum, “Trump Calls the News Media the ‘Enemy of the American People,’ ” New York Times, December 22, 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/02/17/business/ trump-calls-the-news-media-the-enemy-of-the-people.html. 7. The role of the “hacker” in digital culture offers an interesting figure for the consideration of activism and oppositional politics as a motor for technological change. For a discussion of both, see Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker,The Exploit: A Theory of Networks ( University of Minnesota Press, 2007); and Tim Jordan, Hacking: Digital Media and Techno- logical Determinism (Polity, 2008). For a discussion of the nuance involved in technological determinism in relation to Marx, see Donald A. MacKenzie, Knowing Machines: Essays on Technical Change (MIT Press, 1998), chap. 2. As Mackenzie demonstrates, the case isn’t always as obvious as it may seem. 8. “Charting Documentary’s Futures: An Interview with William Uricchio, Part Three,” MIT Open Documentary Lab (blog), February 4, 2016, http://opendoclab.mit.edu/charting- documentarys-futures-an-interview-with-william-uricchio-part-three/. 9. By “worldview,” I am referring not just to the more familiar usage that describes one’s outlook or individual cosmological interpretation of events, although this is undoubtedly part of it. My conception of worldview encompasses not just the personal, social, and political ideology that we use to organize events and objects in the world but also the technological and media-driven means by which we come to know the world in the first place. In this sense I am attempting to marry the literal “frame” of the computer, television, tablet, and so on to the more abstract, psychological “framing effect” that any particular representation imposes. Documentary aesthetics in this sense not only instantiate a particular worldview but also shape and express the worldview of the audiences who see and agree with any particular film. 10. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Harvard University Press, 2000); Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (Zone Books, 2010); Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, reprint (Zone Books, 2017); McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard University Press, 2004). 11. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (Bloomsbury Academic, 2006), 12. 12. A brief note here on terminology: the two media listed here are enormously capa- cious and lend themselves to widely divergent interpretations in different contexts. “The moving image,” of course, can refer to both film and television, two separate forms of media that have unique histories and disciplines, and yet the two overlap in that they share similar properties, producers, and content. My point here is not that all forms of moving images are Notes 183 identical (nor are all Internets or digital technologies), but simply that, taken together, these general groups point to larger historical trends. 13. Douglas Gomery, The Coming of Sound (Routledge, 2005), 14–20; Donald Crafton, The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1926–1931, vol. 4 (University of California Press, 1999); Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (University of Chicago Press, 1992); William Boddy, “The Studios Move into Prime Time: Hollywood and the Television Industry in the 1950s,” Cinema Journal 24, no. 4 (1985): 23–37, https://doi.org/10.2307/1224894. 14. To see this sort of transitional integration between technologies at work across a broad range of media, consider Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (MIT Press, 2000). Marshall McLuhan, of course, offers the prototypical model for this in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill, 1965), which Bolter and Grusin reference in their title. 15. In this sense my study draws on the model of media emergence Bolter and Grusin outline in their influential work Remediation. They describe the process as a double ac- tion in which any new form of media both draws on and influences prior forms of media. Thus, a new technology like the web will draw from existing media like newspapers (in both form and content) in order to gain legitimacy, while at the same time these older forms will adopt characteristics of new forms in order to remain viable in this shifting media landscape. In my formulation, new forms of networked political action will thus draw on certain tendencies and characteristics of documentary film even as documentary itself evolves to take advantage of newly available digital technologies. Given this, my aim is to chart a spectrum of different work, from mainstream political documentaries on one end to those that bear little actual resemblance to documentary on the other. 16. This independent tradition, as Patricia Zimmerman’s powerful account States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracy (University of Minnesota Press, 2000) demonstrates, was one of the targets that emerged in the decade or so between the end of the Cold War and the start of the war on terror. Zimmermann meticulously outlines the connections between public media, public spaces, and the independent voices and agencies that act as a check on power. Zimmermann’s own work through festivals (primarily the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival), the Flaherty Seminar, the Visible Evidence community, and many other venues is another example of the deep connections between independent documentary and political activism. 17. This has been extensively discussed by both Bill Nichols and Carl Plantinga, among others. See Bill Nichols, “Rhetoric and What Exceeds It,” chap. 5 in Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Indiana University Press, 1991); and Carl R. Plantinga, Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film (Cambridge University Press, 1997). 18. Not all of the blame for this extreme polarization can be laid at Bush’s feet, however. The protests that emerged during the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle, the Clinton impeachment over the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” in 1995 might all be cited as further starting points for a political trend that has hardly ceased since Bush left office. Wherever we place the starting point, however, it should still be noted that events during Bush’s tenure pushed this general political enmity to a fevered pitch. 184 Notes 19. As Jane Mayer notes, the debate that I refer to here wasn’t so much an internal debate about the ethics of torture within the Bush administration, but rather an attempt to stretch semantic and legal boundaries in order to accommodate the inhumane and illegal techniques already often in use by the CIA and other groups in charge of interrogating suspects. In any case, most observers ended up agreeing with Mark Danner’s point of view that regardless of how you categorize these illegal and inhumane acts, they are also ineffec- tive, rendering any payoff irrelevant. See Jane Mayer,The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (Knopf Doubleday, 2009), 148–57; and Mark Danner, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (New York Review of Books, 2004), 10–26.