UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI

Date:______

I, ______, hereby submit this work as part of the requirements for the degree of: in:

It is entitled:

This work and its defense approved by:

Chair: ______

Constructive Alienation and Terror: An Analysis of Martha Rosler’s A Simple Case for Torture (or How to Sleep at Night) (1983), Harun Farocki’s Inextinguishable Fire (1969), and Eye/Machines (2001-3)

A thesis submitted to the faculty of the University of Cincinnati College of Design, Art, Architecture, and Planning in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Art History

Committee Members: Dr. Kimberly Paice (chair) Prof. Charles Woodman Dr. Theresa Leininger-Miller

May 2005

By: Kristin Marie Brockman B.A. May 2002, University of Dayton

ABSTRACT

In my thesis, I examine Martha Rosler’s A Simple Case for Torture (Or

How to Sleep at Night) (1983) and Harun Farocki’s Inextinguishable Fire (1969) and Eye/Machine I, II, and III (2001-3). These works investigate the role of distancing in media practices, and splay out televisual and other technologies that are used to represent war. Both Rosler and Farocki work to retrieve the distance that the spectacle creates between viewers and violence. Additionally, they intend to activate history through the systemic collection and re-presentation of information. As artist-archivists, Rosler and Farocki incite viewers to become active participants rather than passive consumers of history.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements 2

Introduction 3

Chapter 1 Torture (or how to sleep at night) 12

Chapter 2 Controlling Observation 23

Conclusion 40

Appendix A Transcripts of Harun Farocki’s Eye/Machine I, II, and III videos 49

Appendix B A Partial Transcript of Harun Farocki’s Inextinguishable Fire 55

Appendix C A Partial Transcript of Jill Godmilow’s What Farocki Taught 57

Bibliography 59

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks are due first to Dr. Kim Paice, who has guided, challenged, inspired, and supported me throughout this process. I owe a debt of gratitude to Professor Charles

Woodman, without whose advice and expertise I would be lost. Thanks also to Dr.

Theresa Leininger-Miller for many helpful discussions and comments. I owe thanks to my friends, especially Ben, whose knowledge, support, and kindness is limitless.

Finally, thanks to my dear family, especially my mother, Susan and my brother, Mikey.

2 Introduction: Constructive Alienation and Terror

An immeasurably vast array of images floods contemporary society every day.

Visual stimulation is inseparable from information, as well as from entertainment. From these basic premises, I developed this thesis. Herein, I examine Martha Rosler’s

(American, b. 1942) video A Simple Case for Torture (Or How to Sleep at Night) (1983), and Harun Farocki’s (German, b. 1944) film Inextinguishable Fire (1969) as well as his videos Eye/Machine I, II, and III (2001-3). In my thesis, I examine Martha Rosler’s A

Simple Case for Torture (Or How to Sleep at Night) (1983) and Harun Farocki’s

Inextinguishable Fire (1969) and Eye/Machine I, II, and III (2001-3). These works investigate the role of distancing in media practices, and splay out televisual and other technologies that are used to represent war. Both Rosler and Farocki work to retrieve the distance that the spectacle creates between viewers and violence. Their works confront mainstream media’s relationship to terrorism and torture. Unlike work of their contemporaries, Rosler’s and Farocki’s video not only engage viewers in a dialogue of the media’s role in public understanding, but also seek to reactivate and redefine what constitutes knowledge and history.

The connection between actual events and the representations that describe them are always in question. In her discussion of performance art and its political valences, art historian Kathy O’Dell observed:

By 1970, it had become clear in the context of the Vietnam War that there was a growing discrepancy between what was fact and what was being represented as fact by individuals in positions of power. As people followed the war from home (on television or in the newspaper), they became aware that the body counts were being inflated and that atrocities such as the My Lai massacre were common.[1] The gap between ‘what

1 On March 16, 1968 United States Charlie Company 11th Brigade soldiers attacked the South Vietnamese village of Mỹ Lai. Several hundred Vietnamese civilians were killed-- men, women, children,

3 was said’ by those in power and ‘what was meant’ grew wider and wider. This erosion of faith in the allegedly consensual relationship between the citizen and the state in the early 1970s was tied to both the disaffection with the ongoing Vietnam War and the changes taking place in contract law. In this sense, any individual’s repudiation of the war may be seen as a response to political leaders’ exploitation of the century–old pattern in contract law of privileging what is said (the signifier) over what is meant (the referent) in such a way that the latter simply disappears as it is merged ideologically with the former.2

As such, the boundary that separated actual events and fiction became increasingly contestable, possibly even nonexistent. Nevertheless, we persist in the endeavor of recovering, conserving, and classifying documents to create a history punctuated by images.

Both Rosler and Farocki attempt to activate this history through the systemic collection and re-presentation of information. In his article “An Archival Impulse,” Hal

Foster explains that contemporary archival art:

…Not only draws on informal archives but produces them as well, and does so in a way that underscores the nature of all archival materials as found yet constructed, factual yet fictive, public yet private. Further, it often arranges these materials according to a quasi-archival logic, and presents them in a quasi-archival architecture, a complex of texts and objects.3

Acting as artist-archivists, Rosler and Farocki invite viewers to become active participants rather than passive consumers of history. Their work involves connecting seemingly fragmented bits of information to provide vehicles of communication and a means of restructuring symbolic law. I contend that

Rosler’s and Farocki’s acts of making connections between ideas and images

and babies. Photographs of the events that were later published in Life Magazine December 5, 1969 provoked public outrage, and helped fuel the anti-war movement in the United States. 2 Kathy O’Dell, Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 11. 3 Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October Vol. 110 (2004): 4.

4 are motivated by the failure of mainstream media to allow viewers to internalize information. As a result, their work makes viewers aware of the failure of cultural memory.

In acting as artist-archivists, Rosler and Farocki work against what Foster calls “archival reason.”

Archival art might also be bound up, ambiguously, even deconstructively, with an “archive reason” at large, that is, with a “society of control” in which our past actions are archived (medical records, border crossings, political involvement…) so that our present activities can be surveilled and our future behaviors predicted. This networked world does appear both disconnected and connected--a paradoxical appearance that archival art sometimes seems to mimic (Hirschhorn displays can resemble mock World Wide Webs of information),[4] which might also bear on its paranoia vis-à-vis an order that seems both incoherent and systemic in its power.5

In their work both Rosler and Farocki examine how collecting images has become a weapon for culture workers in the era of terrorism. These artists are collectors activating the archive.6

Since the early 1970s, Rosler has been a revolutionary figure in video, performance, photography, criticism, and theory. To heighten social engagement, she has used diverse methods of distributing her art, for example, she has created photographs, postcards, garage sales, and videos. Accessibility and the role of viewers are of paramount concern. Rosler’s work deals with issues of contemporary life and politics: feminism, war, homelessness, and terrorism, to name a few. Through direct

4 Thomas Hirschhorn’s (Swiss, b. 1957) installations incorporate entire rooms and are composed of material such as duct tape, cardboard, and aluminum foil. His installations invite viewers to spend time with his art, investigating the materials and narratives they contain. 5 Ibid., 22. 6 Ibid. See also, Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1972), 126-131.

5 confrontation, Rosler engages viewers in a dialogue and challenges them to rethink their personal, social, and political boundaries. Her work disrupts the mythologies of everyday life by revealing the complex systems that orchestrate these myths. Her videos often subvert the ritual qualities of the medium to prompt critical responses.

In Chapter I: Torture (or how to sleep at night) I examine Rosler’s video A Simple

Case for Torture (or How to Sleep at Night) in depth, demonstrating how it performs an institutional critique of mainstream media. I address the context and content of the video, looking to Michel Foucault’s discussions of the construction of history, as well as

Guy Debord’s notion of the spectacle, to inform my reading of Rosler’s analysis of corporate media. A Simple Case for Torture centers on a critique of philosopher

Michael Levin’s essay “A Simple Case for Torture.”7 Through a combination of narration and the presentation of print articles and images, Rosler traces how individuals are subordinate to the state through censorship and terrorism. The video cites a range of articles, and the credits include an extensive bibliography forming the backdrop for

Rosler’s work and critique. Most significantly, Rosler examines the conditions, set forth in Levin’s article, in which torture is described as acceptable, even made to seem

“morally mandatory.”8

The sixty-minute video eschews the hyperactive assault of visual information that is typical of television, requiring its audience to pay close attention to the historical detail and political theory to which television viewers are not usually exposed. Art historian

Benjamin Buchloch recognized the patience required when watching the video. On this topic he writes:

7 Michael Levin, “The Case for Torture,” Newsweek, vol. 99 (7 June 1982): 13. 8 Ibid.

6 If successful (i.e. if the viewers actually develop the patience that is necessary to watch this often repetitive and litany-like presentation), the work can also develop a different kind of resistance: one that gives the viewer almost a physiological aversion to be further subjected to the naturalization of ideology, to the depoliticization of history, and to the growing deprivation and withdrawal of actual political information in everyday life that generate the conditions of a collective state of anomie and amnesia.9

Rosler intends to leave viewers with a profound discomfort concerning the representation of actual events on television, and an acute awareness of the constructedness of mainstream media’s representations of war.

Farocki has created over ninety films and videos from the 1960s to the present.

His work meditates on the role images play in everyday life. Much like Rosler, Farocki is concerned with revealing the inner mechanizations of images and exposing their hidden ideological content. Farocki addresses interrelationships and essential qualities of images, formally recontextualizing them through appropriation and montage.

In Chapter II: Controlling Observation I address Farocki’s film Inextinguishable

Fire (1969) and Eye/Machine videos (2001-03). His Eye/Machine series consists of three videos: Eye/Machine I, II, and III. Though separate, the videos collectively focus on the relationship between humans/eye and technology/machine. Images appropriated from military archives and industrial labors are repositioned with text written by Farocki. Inextinguishable Fire explores how corporations mask the participation of individuals in atrocities of war. Farocki’s film divorces itself from the documentary tradition by refusing to play to the emotions of viewers, appealing to reason instead. Though separated by over thirty years, the two works are strong

9 Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “From Gadget Video to Agit Video: Some Notes on Four Recent Video Works,” Art Journal, Vol. 45, No. 3, Video: The Reflexive Medium (Autumn, 1985): 225.

7 examples of Farocki’s work in video and film, and they allow one to examine the evolution of his practice.

There are countless other activists, artists, historians, who realize the political weight of technological representations of war and violence. In the conclusion of this study, I discuss selected artists whose video work concerns terrorism and torture. Jill

Godmilow’s What Farocki Taught (1996) is a remake of Farocki’s Inextinguishable Fire.

In creating a near exact replica of Farocki’s film, Godmilow reactivates the work, raising questions of appropriation, authorship, and cultural memory. Next, I discuss Johan

Grimonprez’s Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997), a video that reconstructs the history of airplane hijackings using footage appropriated from mainstream media, television advertisements, and the artist’s own home movies, among other sources. The video is punctuated with text appropriated from Mao II (1991) and White Noise (1985), novels by

Don DeLillo.10 In positioning media representations against fictional writing in his video,

Grimonprez questions the boundaries between actual events, representation, and fiction.

Survey of the Literature

A limited number of scholarship dealing with the history of video art, including

Michael Rush’s Video Art (2003) have dealt with Rosler’s work, discussing several of her performances and videos. Given its relative infancy as a medium, texts on video art are limited and often overlap with experimental film texts. The organization of texts devoted to video art is not strictly chronological; more frequently it is thematically organized. While each of these publications does not include an analysis of A Simple

10 Don DeLillo, Mao II (London, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1992). Don Delillo, White Noise (London, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1991).

8 Case for Torture (Or How to Sleep at Night), Inextinguishable Fire, or the Eye/Machine videos, I will rely on the valuable discussions of the overall history of video and performance art, as well as the placement of Rosler’s and Farocki’s work in the context of these histories. For example, Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art

(1991) edited by Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer and A History of Experimental Film and

Video (1999) by A.L. Rees are pivotal texts.

Although Rosler is a prominent figure in most comprehensive studies of photography, performance, and video, critical analysis and close examination of A

Simple Case for Torture (Or How to Sleep at Night) is scant. Significantly, Rosler’s critical writings on the nature of photography and video, as well as social and political issues, provide fertile ground for analyzing and interpreting the video. Her general oeuvre, as well as its place in history, is well documented, especially in the recent retrospective catalogue of her career Positions in the Life World (1998) edited by

Catherine de Zegher. The most substantial discussion of Martha Rosler’s A Simple

Case for Torture (or How to Sleep at Night) is Alexander Alberro’s essay, “The Dialectic of Everyday Life: Martha Rosler and the Strategy of the Decoy” which is included in this catalogue. Alberro discusses Rosler’s use of the everyday as symbolic, asserting that her work is comprised of many different media and lends itself to in-depth analysis of several layers of meaning.

Rosler’s documented methodology and critical texts will illuminate my research.

In the collection of essays Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings 1975 – 2001

(2004), Rosler discusses topics ranging from documentary photography to early moments in video art to hierarchies of power.

9 Farocki’s filmic practices are well documented. He has exhibited internationally for over thirty years, including a major retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern

Art in 2001. The most substantial collection of essays in English concerning Farocki’s work, Harun Farocki: Working the Sightlines (2004) edited by Thomas Elsaesser, includes texts by multiple authors forming a biography of the filmmaker and an overview of his practices. Additionally, a collection of the filmmaker’s essays, Imprint: Writings

(2001) edited by Susan Gaensheimer and Nicolaus Schafhausen, elaborates on his intentions as a filmmaker. Farocki also co-authored Speaking about Godard (1998) with

Kaja Silverman. The text, a dialogue between the artist and film critic on selected films by director Jean-Luc Godard, sheds light on the influence of Godard’s films on Farocki.

Godmilow’s essay, “Why I repeated Farocki” (2001) and her film What Farocki

Taught, include the most substantial analyses of Inextinguishable Fire. Godmilow explains the significance of the film and elucidates details of its production, shedding light on Farocki’s process. Hal Foster’s essay in Artforum, “Vision Quest: The Cinema of Harun Farocki” (2004), is the most significant discussion Farocki’s Eye/Machine videos. In the essay, Foster delineates the general characteristics of Farocki’s work, such as appropriation and annexation of images. He also provides a lengthy formal and theoretical analysis of the Eye/Machine trilogy.

In addition to art historical context, histories of terrorism and discussions of globalization provide the historical and cultural contexts within which the videos were created and viewed. For example, Terrorism and International Justice (2003) edited by

James P. Sterba and Zygmut Bauman’s Globalization: The Human Consequences

(1998) are substantial texts on these issues.

10 Methodology

I perform an institutional analysis of mainstream media that includes Michel

Foucault’s discussion about systems of information and the writing of history.

Foucault’s discussion of the prison and Guy Debord’s theory of the spectacle complement one another in my analysis of modern consumer society and mainstream media’s profound effect on the distribution of information. In addition, Marxist discussions by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky regarding social and political agendas influencing mainstream media inform my understanding of the history of media control and mediated information.

Conclusion

By examining Rosler’s A Simple Case for Torture (Or How to Sleep at Night) and

Farocki’s film Inextinguishable Fire and Eye/Machine videos, I discuss two unique videos by underscoring their importance within their original contexts and their continued relevance today. My thesis contributes to the expanding discourse on video art and its political underpinnings. The ground these videos cover is ambitious and differs from their contemporaries in the focus, depth of criticism, and extent to which appropriation of the media is used as a means of subversion. Both videos work to bridge the divide between the spectator and actual events by engaging the audience in a critical reexamination of what they visually and aurally consume. Working within the spectacle these artists are critically examining and calling attention to the institutionalization of visual images.

11 The nationalist not only does not approve of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. George Orwell, “Notes on Nationalism,” 194511

Chapter 1: Torture (or How to Sleep at Night)

Martha Rosler’s A Simple Case for Torture (or How to Sleep at Night) takes its title from “The Case for Torture,” an article by Michael Levin that was published in

Newsweek magazine June 7, 1982. 12 A Simple Case for Torture was first exhibited at the Whitney Biennial in 1983. The video begins by panning slowly through the issue of

Newsweek that features Levin’s article, with voiceover narration reading his text. The narrator’s tone and repetition of certain words and phrases in the essay underscores and situates the artist’s contention with Levin’s argument. After this reading, Rosler demonstrates ideological implications underlying the article, symptoms of the mainstream media as a system of disseminating disinformation.13 In this chapter, I closely examine the style and modes of critique that Rosler employs to articulate her analysis. I also discuss Rosler’s view of the mainstream media as a system of distributing heavily mediated information to perpetuate spectacle in consumer society and to support totalitarian actions. Rosler criticizes actions of the state operating with

11 George Orwell, “Notes on Nationalism,” in Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, eds. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, Vol. 3 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1969). This quotation appears on the opening page of Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman’s The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism: The Political Economy of Human Rights, Volume 1 (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1979). The book is shown in Rosler’s video and discusses at length the United States involvement in Latin American human rights atrocities. 12 Levin, 13. 13 Disinformation refers to the deliberate circulation of false information. Unlike propaganda, it attempts to engage the audience on a rational level rather than through strictly emotional appeal. Notably, it is different from misinformation, which is not deliberate. Disinformation can be spread as misinformation, if the person relaying the disinformation is unaware of its fraudulence. It is out of the scope of this paper to determine whether the specific print media Rosler refers to deliberately disseminate false information or who is the approximate source of such information. However, her video does cite the media as a way of disseminating information that is false.

12 total power, expecting its citizens to be in complete subservience. The video A Simple

Case for Torture is undoubtedly critical of the United States foreign policy and mainstream media’s implicit justification and support of state actions.

It is important to note that Rosler’s work, including this video, is not pedantic but that as a reading “lesson,” it engages viewers in a critical reexamination of the subject.14

Rosler emphasizes the process of reading in several works. She reads both on-screen and off-screen in works such as Martha Rosler Reads Vogue (1982), A Simple Case for

Torture, Fascination with the (Game of the) (Exploding) (Historical) Hollow Leg (1983), and Martha Rosler Reads the Strange Case of Baby S/M (1988). The importance of reading and of art-as-pedagogy is paramount in these works. Rosler made some works in collaboration with alternative media outlet Paper Tiger Television. Farocki also worked in the medium of television, as I discuss in Chapter Two.

Rosler uses multiple narrators and many sounds. In A Simple Case for Torture, we hear her voice and the voices of Michael Bernhard, Lyn Blumenthal, and John

Strauss, the sounds of jazz and singing by Frank White, and street noises. The soundtrack forms an auditory collage. It evokes the many heterogeneous views that make up any soverign state. Rosler’s use of sound undermines the idea of the state as an individual or homogeneous entity. Sound is not always linked to imagery directly.

A Simple Case for Torture uses devices and styles that mimic the general condition of mainstream media, a conflation of images and text, cacophony of voices and viewpoints, selective coverage, specific words/phrases, and the eventual

14 Catherine de Zegher ed., Martha Rosler: Positions in the Life World (Birmingham, Vienna, and Cambridge, MA: Ikon, Generali & MIT Press, 1998), 46. In this interview, Rosler is quoted as saying: “One of the things I have never wanted to do, and hope I never have done, is to tell people what to do. I’d rather be saying, “Here is the problem – why don’t you come up with a solution?”

13 disintegration of the line dividing “imagination from fact.”15 At the outset of the video,

Rosler lays the framework for the entire critique by asking the questions: “Why does the philosopher write of atomic terrorism and the need for a new leap into barbarism?” and

“Why does Newsweek publish it?” These questions open onto her critical examination of the underlying ideological factors that motivate Levin’s claims and the motivations behind the conventional media outlet.

Over the course of the sixty-minute video, Rosler passes a number of newspaper clippings, photographs, and magazine articles before the camera’s frame. Her meditation on the namesake of the video systematically dismantles Levin’s claims. The camera remains stationary as Rosler passes different print media through its frame, mimicking the consumer’s passive gaze in the midst of the flurry of information. Her hand is often visible within the frame, uncropped, allowing viewers to see the video’s construction and to breach the illusory qualities of the video medium. In eschewing the seamlessness of editing, Rosler establishes that what viewers see is not an illusion.

She foregrounds her process and through her questioning of manipulated images, viewers are privy to the same information as Rosler.

Aside from Levin’s text, other print articles shown in the video are clipped from their original settings. This de-contextualization accentuates the condition of consuming information with little consideration of the source or author’s motivation. In drawing attention to the absence of referential information, Rosler encourages viewers to ask questions such as: Where is this information coming from? Is it from a reputable

15 Both Levin and Rosler use this phrase, to different ends. Levin speaks of the circumstances under which torture is mandatory as becoming increasingly common. Rosler’s highlighting of these words makes a more general statement, referring to the overall attitude of Levin’s article as an attempt to shake the reader into being realistic as opposed to idealistic.

14 source? What ideology underlies this information? Who is the author? These questions force us to consider what constitutes fact versus fiction and the degree to which the line between them is blurred in Levin’s essay, the print media in Rosler’s video, and in any information that is consumed.

The conflation of voices in the work exacerbates the breakdown between subjective opinion and factual material. Rosler’s voice, in some instances sounding as if reading and at other times posing questions, combines with audio reporting and/or editorializing excerpted from unspecified sources. Rosler not only reads directly from

Levin’s article but also appropriates passages from texts such as Friedrich Nietzsche’s

Genealogy of Morals (1887) and Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975).16 The shifting between her own words and these sources is not explicit.17 In some cases, the number of voices is unclear, and it becomes difficult to focus on any one without being distracted by another. In conjunction with a constantly shifting display of print media, the multiple voices are overwhelming. Viewers cannot know exactly what to focus on or how to decide which information is important or truthful. Viewers’ total saturation by aural and visual information reflects the condition of society in the information age, in which the public’s demand for knowledge results in an oversupply of information.

Beginning by deconstructing an essay that supports torture, Rosler exposes the fault in Levin’s logic and offers commentary on contemporary media coverage of world events. In addressing media outlets, Rosler situates Levin’s commentary within the

16 Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Genealogy of Morals” in Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York, NY: Random House, Inc., 2000), 437-600. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York, NY: Random House Inc., 1995). 17 An excerpt of the sixty-page original script is contained in Catherine de Zegher, ed. Martha Rosler: Positions in the Life World (Birmingham, Vienna, and Cambridge, MA: Ikon, Generali & MIT Press, 1998), 235. The excerpt is composed of individual phrases excerpted from Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals and Foucault’s Discipline and Punish that Rosler has reassembled.

15 spectrum of press coverage. In doing so, she reveals his argument as a relatively explicit appeal to readers to support the actions of the state, and shows that his contemporaries shroud themselves in the subtleties of language to the same ends.

In order to delineate how she disagrees with Levin, Rosler highlights specific words and phrases that she excerpts from the mainstream media sources to which she also refers. During the initial reading of Levin’s essay, “The Case for Torture,” the camera follows an anonymous hand pointing to the text of the article as it is read in the voiceover. The linearity of this process is broken by occasional hand gestures singling out words and cutting to a black screen where certain words appear alone. The selection of individual statements for repetition and/or display is a stylistic element informing viewers of Rosler’s points of argument/criticism. One such repetition involves the opening sentences of Levin’s essay:

It is generally assumed that torture is impermissible, a throwback to a more brutal age. Enlightened societies reject it outright, and regimes suspected of using it risk the wrath of the United States. I believe this attitude is unwise. There are situations in which torture is not merely permissible but morally mandatory. Moreover, these situations are moving from the realm of imagination to fact.18

Rosler calls attention to the importance of the words imagination and fact, displaying them alone onscreen as they are read aloud via voice-over. The repetition and highlighting of these words before the title screen of Rosler’s video lay the framework for her critique. Through the collection of print media, Rosler cites the United States government and corporate involvement in foreign affairs and systems that support, engage and benefit from torture.19 The print media and news voiceover excerpts focus

18 Levin, 13. 19 In the video, Rosler shows the book Washington Connection and Third World Fascism by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman (1979), specifically the diagram on the inside cover “The Sun and Its

16 primarily on Latin America, topics ranging from unemployment to “death squads” and legions of disappeared citizens. Specifically, Rosler refers to monetary support and military training in Latin American countries by the United States. Through showing print articles onscreen, Rosler cites the United States support and funding of the violent coup of Chilean president Salvador Allende by Augusto Pinochet in 1973. She also refers to the human rights violations of Pinochet, who exacted a campaign of terror against Chileans who were suspected of opposition to his politics. As many as 30,000

Argentineans, called the “desaparecidos” vanished during his rule; they were killed, exiled, or incarcerated and never heard from again. Rosler further cites American and

CIA involvement in Libya, Guatemala, and El Salvador.

Using one of Rosler’s source texts, Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism

(1973), Rosler’s critique of the United States involvement in foreign affairs is made explicit.20 Arendt cites the actions of a totalitarian state first concerned with extermination of any tangible enemies then ferreting out “objective enemies.”21 It is at this point, during the hunt for “objective enemies,” that pacification of the citizens in the totalitarian state occurs. In order to justify the use of torture, the totalitarian state must present a situation in which people are conditioned to fear the “objective enemy” as if it were a tangible, real threat. Following Rosler’s line of argument, mainstream media acts as an agent in disseminating the ideology of the totalitarian state.

At the core of Levin’s argument is the “ticking time bomb scenario.” This

Planets: Countries Using Torture on an Administrative Basis in the 1970s, With Their Parent-Client Affiliations.” Additionally, the text includes charts demonstrating United States’ military and economic aid to human rights violators and the relationship between United States’ fiscal participation and human rights in different countries. Reports by Amnesty International, the Department of Defense, Department of Commerce, and the Agency for Development are the sources of information for these charts. 20 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, NY: Harcourt, 1973). 21 Ibid., 424.

17 scenario is used in game theory and considerations of limits at which civil rights violations must occur for the greater good. The argument can be traced back to Jeremy

Bentham’s utilitarian essay, “Of Torture” which was written in the late 1770s. Levin’s essay rationalizes torture under certain circumstances. Rosler’s critique of Levin’s justification hinges on anthropomorphizing the state. Levin’s argument in favor of torture is an act of “leveling”22 between public and private, the state and the individual.

His essay implies that the state is a collective of individuals who are in agreement about values, aims, and how to coordinate them, referring to it as “we.” However, the state is not human, it is a geopolitical construct. The actions of a state cannot be measured on the same basis of morality or constitutionality as individual action because in theory, states exist for the service and representation of their citizens. As Rosler astutely points out, “Civil rights exist in opposition to the state whose existence is in opposition to these rights.”23

Rosler notes Levin’s use of emotional pleas and the way he courts direct identification with the reader. Individuals are asked to put themselves in the position of the state and consider the course of action they would take. For instance, the philosopher posits:

Torturing the terrorist is unconstitutional? Probably. But millions of lives surely outweigh constitutionality. Torture is barbaric? Mass murder is far more barbaric. Indeed, letting millions of innocents die in deference to one who flaunts his guilt is moral cowardice, an unwillingness to dirty one's hands. If you caught the terrorist, could you sleep nights knowing that millions died because you couldn't bring yourself to apply the electrodes?24

The subtitle of Rosler’s video, (or How to Sleep at Night), originates from this excerpt.

22 In the video, Rosler refers to Levin’s “leveling” or creating equivalents between things that are inherently uneven, such as the individual and the state. 23 Martha Rosler, A Simple Case for Torture. 24 Levin, 13.

18 In comparing the title of Levin’s essay “A Case for Torture” to Rosler’s video title A

Simple Case for Torture (or How to Sleep at Night), it is apparent that Rosler viewed

Levin’s article as an oversimplification of the conditions surrounding torture and a plea for the individual’s agreement that torture is a necessary evil providing security against terrorism.

In anthropomorphizing the state, Levin asks his readers to make a decision of conscience. The choice given: torturing a terrorist or allowing millions to die is not a matter of good versus evil. The success of terror evoked by a totalitarian state, and the condition of an institution acting in absolute power inciting fear, necessitates making decisions of individual conscience unclear. Individuality becomes superfluous, and the individual is treated as a socially conditioned robot. Levin’s question: “If you caught the terrorist, could you sleep nights knowing that millions had died because you couldn’t bring yourself to apply the electrodes?” is not a critical inquiry but implies that no rational person would choose to save the life of a terrorist over millions of others. In this scenario, doing ‘good’ becomes impossible. In placing the individual in the position of choosing between a violent end for himself or herself or someone else, the individual concedes to these crimes. Necessarily, the public is organized as a mass of sympathizers to the actions of the state. As Arendt states, “The alternative is no longer between good and evil, but between murder and murder.”25 In becoming complicit with the individual case of “choosing the lesser of two evils,” crimes of totalitarian regimes become collectively justifiable. Such is Rosler’s issue with Levin’s argument; one cannot apply human qualities to a state as vindication of state actions.

During the reading of Levin’s essay, the camera pans to the page directly

25 Arendt, 452.

19 preceding the article, an advertisement for America’s Banks with a photograph of a man lying in bed, looking terrified. The caption reads: “You will feel better in the morning if you don’t have to worry about your money at night.”26 It is in this passage of the video and with the juxtaposition of Levin’s article with the advertisement, that a similarity to

Rosler’s earlier photo collages is apparent. Bringing the War Home (1967-72) is a series of photomontages created during the height of United States involvement in

Vietnam from the pages of Life magazine. These works juxtapose American consumer society with images of war. In these works and in A Simple Case for Torture, Rosler evaluates the relationship between consumer society and war. In a catalogue essay for the series Bringing the War Home, art historian Laura Cottingham writes:

The consumer media avoids directly referring to political and economic connection between your cozy sofa and someone else's dead body: Rosler reveals the artificiality of this severed causality. The separation of us from them, here from there, is an illusion we want, as a war-profit society and as immediately war-free individuals, to maintain.27

These dichotomies, including the divide between us and them, perpetuated by mainstream media, are certainly present in A Simple Case for Torture. Displayed onscreen, the following text excerpted from Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism describes the context within which she places the media:

Practically speaking, the totalitarian ruler proceeds like a man who persistently insults another man until everybody knows that the latter is his enemy so he can kill him in self-defense. This is certainly a little crude, but it works…28

26 The advertisement also notes the condition of mainstream media’s drawing attention to problems and then attempting to pacify these difficulties with a product or service. 27 Laura Cottingham, “The War is Always Home: Martha Rosler” (exhibition essay), (October 1991), N.Y., Simon Watson Gallery; available from http://home.earthlink.net/~navva/reviews/cottingham.html; Internet; accessed 25 April 2006. 28 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism. Quoted in Rosler’s A Simple Case for Torture.

20 Though she does not say it explicitly, Rosler indicates that mainstream media is an agent in perpetuating these insults and sanctioning ideologies in support of torture. The collective effect of inciting fear and confusion through disinformation intended to appeal to the emotions underlies mainstream media’s legitimization of the United States involvement in torture.

The definition and justification for the use of torture is one that continues to be hotly debated today. The cover story of Newsweek magazine on November 21, 2005 was “The Truth about Torture,”29 and in October 2005, the United States Senate voted on a bill to ban inhumane interrogation techniques. The bill, advocated by Republican senator John McCain passed in the senate by a vote of ninety- to- nine. However, Vice

President Dick Cheney is advocating legislature that will not only overturn McCain’s bill but institute torture as part of United States’ policy.

In 1983, when Rosler made A Simple Case for Torture, the most recent torture legislation/regulations observed by the United States had been set forth nearly forty years prior in 1948. In that year, the United Nations proclaimed the Universal

Declaration of Human Rights, which states, “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”30 Additionally, the Third Geneva Convention in

1949 declared, “No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted upon prisoners of war.”31

However, as is Rosler’s implication in the video and demonstrated through the support of state regimes that engage in violations of the aforementioned human rights

29 The title refers only to the cover story. There are several articles relating to how terrorism has led the United States to become involved in torture, specifically after September 11, 2001. 30 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 5. Adopted and proclaimed by the General Assembly of the United Nations 10 December 1948. 31 Article 17 of the Third Geneva Convention, 1949.

21 declarations, the United States acts unilaterally both in 1983 and today. Rosler cites

specific instances of these blatant violations. Levin poses the following, “Torturing the

terrorist is unconstitutional?” and answers himself, “Probably. But millions of lives surely

outweigh constitutionality.” In juxtaposing Levin’s emotional appeal to readers with

documentation of involvement and support of torture by the United States, Rosler

exposes the systemic manipulation of society through corporate media.

Rosler’s use of video is significant in that it allows for stylistic replication of

overwhelming and emotionally evocative means to manipulate viewers. A Simple Case

for Torture does not attempt to seduce viewers; it requires their critical attention. The

absence of enticing images functions as an immediate signal to viewers that they are

not to passively consume. According to Rosler, the media functions to mediate social

relationships, affecting the perceptions of others, fostering individual alienation, and

collective pacification.

Rosler situates Levin’s article at the opening, laying the framework for her video.

She deconstructs his argument to reveal his implication that individuals should trust the

actions of the state without question. The closing text of the video reads:

Order is more important than law. Law is more important than justice. Security is more important than freedom. Money is more important than mercy. My pleasure necessitates your pain. And death is more important than change.32

Overall, Rosler contends that under the conditions of the totalitarian state supported by the media, order, law, security, money, pleasure, and death are of the utmost significance.

32 Rosler, A Simple Case for Torture.

22 “The field of vision has always seemed to me comparable to the ground of an archaeological excavation.” Paul Virilio, Negative Horizon: An Essay in Dromoscopy, 2005

Chapter II: Controlling Observation

Harun Farocki was born in German-annexed Nový Jicin, Czechoslovakia. He attended the Deutsche Film und Fernsehakademie Berlin (DFFB) (German Film and

Television Academy) from 1966 to 1968. In 1968, Farocki began making films and doing freelance television work ranging from children’s programming to programs analyzing the media. In 1973, West German Broadcasting (WDR), a public broadcasting institution serving North Rhine-Westphalia, gave Farocki a platform for investigating his increasing distrust of mass media. Farocki produced Der Ärger mit den

Bildern (The Trouble with Images) for the television series Telekritik. Significantly, this was the filmmaker’s first work made entirely from appropriated film. The program indicted mainstream media’s “systematic overuse of meaningless images.”33 In 1974, he created Moderatoren im Fernsehen (TV anchormen) or Die Arbeit mit den Bildern

(Work with Images) for WDR, both similarly critical of mainstream media.

In addition to being a prolific filmmaker and video artist, Farocki served as editor and regular contributor to the Munich-based journal Filmkritik between 1974 and 1983.

Filmkritik’s mission was to discuss films that the collective of contributing authors felt were important, an unabashedly subjective task. The style of writing is heavily descriptive and meticulously detailed. Filmkritik’s contributors were united by their

33 Volker Siebel, “Painting Pavements,” Thomas Elsaesser, ed., Harun Farocki: Working the Sightlines (Amsterdam, NL: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 47.

23 allegiance to physical description of films rather than ideological imposition of the authors’ opinions. On this topic, German film critic Olaf Möller writes:

None of their favorite directors impose their worldview upon the spectator- - they do not hit you over the head with their visions; rather, they approach the world by describing it. They show people at work and in their free time, in groups and through the dynamics that bind them together. Their images remain clear, their style is unadorned; a multiple exposure or a superimposed image is about as wild and manipulated a special effect as one of their films would permit itself. These directors also seem to reject the classical bourgeois notion of the functionality of art, in which everything is ultimately resolved and assigned its meaningful place.34

Preference for and allegiance to delicate illustration of ideas aptly characterizes

Farocki’s style of filmmaking as well.

In addition to his regular contributions to Filmkritik, Farocki has published a volume of essays and co-authored a book on Jean-Luc Godard.35 Kaja Silverman and

Farocki’s Speaking About Godard focuses most of its discussion on the filmmaker’s early work from 1960 to 1967, a period in Godard’s oeuvre known for its references to film history.36 The awareness of one’s place in filmic dialogue and institutional critique align Farocki with Godard. The connection to Godard is significant, in that both he and

Farocki maintain this awareness to bring about what Bertolt Brecht terms verfremdungseffekt, or the alienation effect.37

In this chapter, I discuss Farocki’s film Inextinguishable Fire (1969) and his

Eye/Machine (2001-03) videos, analyzing the relationships that he examines and

34 Olaf Möller, “Passage along the Shadow- Line: Feeling One’s Way Towards the Filmkritik- Style,” in Harun Farocki: Working the Sightlines, 71. 35 Harun Farocki and Kaja Silverman, Speaking About Godard (New York, NY and London: New York University Press, 1998). 36 Robert Stam, Reflexivity in Film and Culture: From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1992). 37 The translations for what Brecht termed verfremdungseffekt are variable-- distancing effect, estrangement effect defamiliariazation effect, or most commonly alienation effect. This is apparent in Godard’s films in his use of deliberately disruptive editing, direct address of the viewer, and unexplained or blank intertitles between scenes.

24 establishes between spectator and violence. Inextinguishable Fire premiered on West

German Public Television June 27, 1969. Eye/Machine I and II also premiered on

German Public Television in 2001 and 2002 respectively. Eye/Machine III premiered at the Institute for Contemporary Art in London in November 2003. This marked the first time the three videos were shown together.

Farocki’s commentary on technology, surveillance, and the systematic collection of visual information illuminates the status of images in perception of contemporary life.

Michel Foucault’s writings on prison systems offer a framework for understanding the controlling effect of representations.38 The combined practices of ubiquitous collection of visual information and of distancing viewers from information extend social alienation.

Farocki’s films and videos involve mapping systems of images, their status, production, dissemination, and reception. Appropriating images from mainstream media, military, and industrial facilities, Farocki repositions the images and consequently alters viewers’ relationship with them. Inextinguishable Fire and

Eye/Machine exemplify two major themes in Farocki’s work, both addressing representations of war. The film Inextinguishable Fire deals with the Vietnam War and the Eye/Machine videos deal with the Gulf War of 1991.

Eye/Machines

Distance is the primary theme of the Eye/Machine series, specifically the distance between humans and machines. The three component videos are composed

38 I am concerned with Guy Debord’s definition of the term spectacle as opposed to Foucault’s definition. Foucault’s Discipline and Punish begins with a graphic description of public execution and the author’s stated intention to consider “the disappearance of torture as public spectacle,” p.7. For Foucault, spectacle refers to a public display, as with the theatres of torture he later discusses. Debord’s definition of the spectacle is quite different, elaborated in Society of the Spectacle (1967) as the condition of modern society in which “everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation,” p.12. The spectacle is not a collection of representations themselves, but “a social relation between people that is mediated by images,” p. 12.

25 of images appropriated from newsreel and industrial footage, compiled to show the removal of human physical presence from warfare and industry. The first Eye/Machine video begins with an aerial view of a bombing target and the on-screen text: “Images like these could be seen in the 1991 war against Iraq.” As we witness a sequence of aerial landscapes, the text continues:

Shown from the air, crosshairs at the center. / Images from flying projectiles. / Images from suicide cameras. / These images lacked plasticity. / The human scale was missing. / Without reference to everyday experience, the images failed to grip. / The war soon became forgotten.39

Human protagonists, with whom viewers might viscerally identify, are noticeably absent.

The images, culled from standard military and industrial practice, bear no physical resemblance to viewers’ everyday experiences and thwart the cinematic process of suturing.40 Viewers are left without a lasting impression of war. The violent impact of events is transformed into dispassionate images and sanitized for consumption.

Farocki calls these representations “operational images,” they have been taken via satellite or aerially to monitor, detect, or supervise. Farocki describes operational images as follows:

These are images which do not portray a process, but are themselves part of a process. As early as the Eighties, cruise missiles used a stored image of a real landscape, then took an actual image during flight; the software compared the two images, resulting in a comparison between idea and reality, a confrontation between pure war and the impurity of the actual. This confrontation is also a montage and montage is always about similarity and difference.41

39 Harun Farocki, Eye/Machine I, directed by Harun Farocki with Matthias Rajmann, Ingo Kratisch, Rosa Mercedes, Harun Farocki Filmproduktion, 2001, single channel videocassette, 25 min. 40 In film theory, suturing refers to “stitching” the viewer into the filmic text. This practice is most apparent though certainly not confined to narrative film. When suturing occurs, the camera establishes the viewer’s point of view seamlessly into the film. 41 Harun Farocki, Eye/Machine III, directed by Harun Farocki with Matthias Rajmann Ingo Kratisch, Rosa Mercedes, Harun Farocki Filmproduktion, Berlin, in co-production with Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 2003, single channel videocassette, 25 min.

26

The operational image, initially developed for the military to map targets in enemy territory, has found its way into civilian life. For example, Global Positioning Systems

(GPS) in military practice are used to guide smart bombs and the satellites that transmit

GPS signals carry nuclear detonation detectors and are an integral feature of the United

States Nuclear Detonation Detection System. The civilian applications of this technology include automobile tracking systems, which not only provide maps and directions to guide travelers but also can track the location of the vehicle. Surveillance is used in military practice to survey and gather information about foreign territory.

Urban planners use it to determine the risk for crime in a given area, architects to determine human traffic flow through a given space. Other civilian applications for surveillance include spy ware that tracks computer users’ activity without their informed consent, and closed circuit surveillance in banks and shops.42 In industrial labor, operational images are used to both monitor employees and monitor production, with the goal of creating a more economically efficient albeit mechanically controlled labor force.

The imagery in Eye/Machine includes humans performing tasks that set the pattern for the machine’s repetition of the action, sensors scanning airspaces for foreign aircrafts, reconnaissance of foreign landscapes for obtaining data, and surveillance footage. Farocki describes operational images as follows:

Many operational images show colored guidance lines, intended to portray the process of recognition. The lines tell us emphatically what is all- important in these images, and just as emphatically what is of no importance at all. Superfluous reality is denied – a constant denial provoking opposition.43

42 Closed circuit surveillance has become popular as means of home security as well. 43 Harun Farocki, Eye/Machine III.

27

Denial of the physical world calls into question what Farocki considers the loss of authentic images, which are events viewed through human eyes.44

Farocki describes operational images as inauthentic because they are not created with any sense of history or concern for specific time and location. Farocki writes, “The computerized images of war extinguish the difference between simulated and real events, the difference between historical time and technically/electronically simulated time.”45 These images exist as signs that do not refer to signifiers in the physical world. Viewers are unable to place these images within a historical framework or develop a sense of their context.

The use of mapping technology allows the military to control warfare remotely, as part of the C3I system, short for Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence.

Farocki states that the purpose of this system “is not to act independently or to allow the commanders to ‘be there.’ Its purpose is to project the latter’s authority of command onto the battlefield.”46 In striving for remote control through smart technology, the military operates under the same panoptic principles governing surveillance and industry. It is noteworthy that the same companies providing technological support to the military for C3I systems offer their services to surveillance companies and industries desiring to monitor production of factory work performed by machines. For quality control, computers compare manufactured items to ideal appearances of the product as held in image banks. Farocki refers to the act of comparing these images as

44 Harun Farocki, Production Statement for Eye/Machine [on-line], available from http://www.farocki- film.de/; Internet; accessed 14 February 2006. 45 Harun Farocki, “Eye,” in CTRL [SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, eds. Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Frohne, and Peter Wiebel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 424. 46 Ibid.

28 “montage.”47 This process parallels Farocki’s own use of montage in the series of

Eye/Machine films, in that he also juxtaposes images. The subject is not physically present in either of the images, rather it is the distance between the two.

Controlling Observation

Unlike Inextinguishable Fire, the Eye/Machine videos eschew linear narrative.

Military and industrial images cycle in short sequences that recur in various combinations side-by-side, and are continuously repositioned throughout the series.

Patterns emerge between the appropriated images and Farocki’s text. The effect is

“intellectual montage,” a term coined by film director and theorist Sergei Eisenstein, to describe a style of editing that links disparate images which point to a subject that is absent from the images themselves. 48 To Eisenstein, intellectual montage was a non- literary kind of writing. He also believed that the process of intellectual montage closely echoed common thought processes, images conflicting with one another and ultimately finding meaning in relationships formed in the mind of viewers.49

Appropriation and montage play a central role in Farocki’s work as a whole.

Regarding appropriation, Farocki has said:

One must work with existing images in such a way that they become new. There are many ways to do this. Mine is to look for buried meaning and to clear away the debris lying on top of the pictures. In doing so, I try not to add ideas to the film; I try to think in film so that the ideas come out of filmic articulation.50

47 Harun Farocki, “Eye,” 424. 48 Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1949), 82. 49 Ibid. 50 Harun Farocki, from an interview on occasion of exhibition of Eye/Machine at Walker Art Center, , Minneapolis, MN, May 2002, courtesy of GreeneNaftali Gallery, New York City.

29 The ideological implications of Farocki’s use of montage are explicit in this statement.

Historically, montage has appeared in film as a device linking disparate concepts in viewers’ minds.51 According to the above, Farocki does not intend to imbue these images with new content, rather he intends to put images together that are nearly similar. This is a significant feature of the Eye/Machine trilogy, and important to bear in mind. Farocki is not merely suggesting a connection between eye and machine.

Rather, he is stating that the machine has become the eye’s replacement.

In the essay “Controlling Observation,” (1999) Farocki discusses the condition of surveillance and control in prisons and the proliferation of smart technologies in penal systems.52 Smart technology replaces physical contact between prisoners and other human beings. Designed for this end are machines that check prisoners’ orifices for drugs or weapons, iris scanners for identification, and chairs designed to restrain troublesome inmates with steel arms while gagging them with gentle force.53 These so- called innovations point to a penal system not designed for rehabilitation but for the control of human subjects. The dispassionate denial of the prisoners’ humanity echoes the collective movement toward alienation in society. Farocki connects uses of smart technology in prison systems to its uses in industrial production:

Guards are meant to have as little contact with the prisoners as possible, and just as the role of humans in the production of goods has given way to machines, so too are prisoners to be kept almost without any direct human intervention54

51 Harun Farocki, “Eye,” 424. Farocki refers specifically to the use of montage in films of the 1920s. Interestingly, among the earliest films credited as containing montage is Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925). 52 Harun Farocki, “Controlling Observation” in Imprint: Writings, eds. Susan Gaensheimer and Nicolaus Schafhausen, trans. Laurent Faasch- Ibrahim (New York, NY: Lukas & Sternberg, 2001), 301-321. 53 Ibid., 310. 54 Ibid.

30 Technology that is designed to provide efficient, ubiquitous vision in prison systems is an extension of the prison industrial complex.55

Inextinguishable Fire

The film Inextinguishable Fire (1969) chronicles the production of napalm by Dow

Chemical Company for use in the Vietnam War. The twenty-five minute film examines how corporations, such as Dow Chemical Company, mask individual contributions to the atrocities of war. The film’s tone is dispassionate and detached, its austerity reminiscent of the films of Farocki’s mentor Jean-Marie Straub, rather unlike contemporary representations of war on television and in films.

Often referred to as the first “living room war,” Vietnam War coverage saturated television.56 The first few years of the war were portrayed in a generally upbeat manner, including the “Five O’Clock Follies,” a daily press briefing illustrating military actions with a battle map. Uncensored violence that often made its way onto network television. During the Tet Offensive in 1968, viewers witnessed Colonel Nguyen Ngoc

Loan execute a Viet Cong captive in a Saigon street. In 1972, during the Spring

Offensive in North Vietnam, television viewers were shown the aftermath of a Napalm attack, and the South Vietnamese mistaking their own fleeing civilians for North

Vietnamese troops.

Violent images of war shock and traumatize viewers. For instance, late- eighteenth and early-nineteenth century history painting represented war before the

55 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sharidan (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1977), 195-230. 56 Michael Arlen, Living Room War (Television Series) (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997). The origin of the phrase “living room war” is unknown, but widely used by media theorists in discussion of television and film’s representation of war. Arlen, television critic for The New Yorker, offers further insight into 1960s television culture in this text.

31 advent of photography. Author and humans rights activist Susan Sontag has stated that such paintings, tableaux vivantes, and dioramas were all means to make the past,

“especially the immediate past, seem astonishingly, disturbingly real.”57 Whereas dispassionate images fail to retain viewers’ interests, disturbing images alienate viewers.

Inextinguishable Fire begins with Farocki sitting at a table opposite the camera, dressed as an anchorman.58 The filmmaker reads the eyewitness report of a

Vietnamese man who survived a napalm attack on his village (appendix C). He concludes and directly addresses viewers, saying:

How can we show you napalm in action? And how can we show you the injuries caused by napalm? If we show you pictures of napalm burns, you’ll close your eyes. First, you’ll close your eyes to the pictures. Then you’ll close your eyes to the memory. Then you’ll close your eyes to the facts. Then you’ll close your eyes to the entire context.59

Farocki extinguishes a cigarette on his arm as he reads these words aloud. His speech challenges spectators to make an intellectual connection to the violent imagery, and at the same time elicits a visceral response to the protagonist’s violent action. The performance of self-inflicted harm at its most basic level induces in viewers an awareness of their physicality and identification with the violence witnessed. Kathy

O’Dell has written extensively on artistic performances of masochism, a tradition that

Farocki is calling upon in the opening scene of Inextinguishable Fire.60 According to

57 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York, NY: Picador, 2003), 124. 58 Farocki’s direct address of the audience while seated at a table brings to mind performance and video artists such as Adrian Piper and Vito Acconci. 59 Harun Farocki, Inextinguishable Fire, directed by Harun Farocki, Berlin-West für WDR, Köln, 1969, 16mm b/w film, 25 min. 60 In her book Contract With the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s, O’Dell discusses the work of Chirs Burden, Gina Pane, Vito Acconci, and Marina Abramovic/Ulay. She parallels the contractual relationships between performance artists/audiences to individuals/institutions.

32 O’Dell, performance of masochistic acts implies institutional critique. This critique is rooted in distantiation and fragmentation, similar to the masochistic performances of

Marina Abramovic and Vito Acconci. Distantiation is a technique used to distance viewers by revealing the ideological and institutional constructions underlying society.

In the case of masochistic performance such as Farocki’s, fragmentation is the rupture of spatial and temporal separation between the representation of the action and viewers occurring simultaneously with viewers’ bodily identification. O’Dell explains that

“masochism is what converts distantiation into constructive alienation.”61

In other words, masochism has the potential to change distantiation into the alienation effect Brecht describes as follows:

What is involved here is, briefly, a technique of taking the human social incidents to be portrayed and labeling them as something striking, something that calls for explanation, is not to be taken for granted, not just natural. The object of this “effect” is to allow the spectator to criticize constructively from a social point of view.62

Through distantiation, Farocki challenges the ideological and institutional framework of film as a means for conveying political messages. He creates a situation where viewers are forced to consider the ideological and institutional basis of his masochism. Thus, his self-inflicted violence is metonymically connected to the institutional framework it occurs within. Through his performance, Farocki calls attention to the distance between his masochistic act and the violence of war. According to O’Dell images of masochistic performances “implicitly invite viewers to question how much distance is appropriate.”63

In fact, Farocki’s direct address concludes with questioning in the form of a voiceover,

61 Kathy O’Dell, Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 61. 62 Bertolt Brecht, “The Street Scene: A Basic Model for Epic Theatre” (1950), ed. and trans. John Willett, Brecht on Theatre (London: Methuen, 1984), 125. 63 O’Dell, 61.

33 “If the viewers want no responsibility for Napalm’s effects, what responsibility will they take for the explanations of its use?”64 The film educates viewers about the connections between everyday life and the production of deadly chemicals, in this case, Napalm.

Through dispassionate actors playing the part of Dow Chemical employees, viewers are taken through the production process of creating Napalm B. Farocki recovers the distance between the effects of Napalm and viewers via the apparent Dow Chemical employees. Instead of appealing to emotions or “hurting the viewers’ feelings”65 by showing them the effects of Napalm B, he focuses on the chain of connections between the atrocities of war and individual citizens. He reasons this connection as follows:

(1) A major corporation is like a construction set. It can be used to put together the whole world. (2) Because of the growing division of labor, many people no longer recognize the role they play in producing mass destruction. (3) That which is manufactured in the end is the product of the workers, students, and engineers.66

Beginning with a masochistic action designed to alienate and distantiate, and continuing with an institutional analysis of the production of Napalm designed to reconnect viewers through recovering the distance between representation and actual events,

Inextinguishable Fire is an agitprop film.67 Instead of assaulting viewers, Farocki understates the atrocities of war and in doing so, the distance between representation and actual events is made explicit. As he states in the opening scene, “We can only give you only a weak demonstration of how Napalm works.”68

64 Farocki, Inextinguishable Fire, 1969. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid. 67 Agitprop is a contraction of the phrase “agitational propaganda.” Agitprop films generally begin with an appeal meant to agitate the viewer’s emotions. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s regional Department of Agitation and Propaganda coined the term agitprop. Notably, in Russian the word “propaganda” does not take on a negative connotation, rather it is a general term for the distribution of any information. 68 Harun Farocki, Inextinguishable Fire, 1969.

34 Manufacturing Consent

Having examined two of Farocki’s works dealing with similar themes, I would like to consider their differences and the shift in Farocki’s artistic practice. The distinctions between the works are certainly noteworthy, such as the shift from filmmaking to video art. Additionally, Inextinguishable Fire includes a human element, and deliberately includes corporeal violence. The treatment of this violence is dispassionate and not aimed at evoking empathy, yet it is nonetheless present. Humans are present in the

Eye/Machine videos solely acting in concert with machines to remotely control warfare.

Above all, the question of why Farocki shifted his practice from narrative-based, agitprop filmmaking in favor of video montage is important to consider. In both works,

Farocki is mapping the status, production, reception, and dissemination of information.

Employing Brecht’s alienation effect, viewers are emotionally distanced from the work, thus forced to approach it critically. In distancing viewers, Farocki is able to reactivate the images. Additionally, Farocki’s later work including the Eye/Machine videos negotiates spatial terms, which is to say they are multiple-channel videos, often presented as an installation. His concern for space calls to mind the architectural constructs of control as articulated by Foucault.69

Contrasting violent images of the Vietnam War, representations of the Gulf War in 1991 failed to elicit empathy. The operational images in Eye/Machine were not initially meant for civilian eyes, but for military intelligence. Through re-contextualization as sanitary images of war for mass consumption, the images shift from information to propaganda.

69 Foucault, Discipline and Punish.

35 Much has been written about the production and dissemination of propaganda, including Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent: The

Political Economy of the Mass Media (2002). This text provides a compelling model of the motivations and effects of propaganda. The conclusion offers the following concise review of the authors’ propaganda model:

A propaganda model has a certain initial plausibility on guided free-market assumptions that are not particularly controversial. In essence, the private media are major corporations selling a product (readers and audiences) to other businesses (advertisers). The national media typically target and serve elite opinion, groups that, on the one hand provide an optimal "profile" for advertising purposes, and, on the other, play a role in decision-making in the private and public spheres. The national media would be failing to meet their elite audience's needs if they did not present a tolerably realistic portrayal of the world. But their "societal purpose" also requires that the media's interpretation of the world reflect the interests and concerns of the sellers, the buyers, and the governmental and private institutions dominated by these groups.70

The presentation of war images in the context of mainstream media positions them as propaganda. The purpose of these mediated, sanitized war images is to create distance between viewers and the atrocities of war. In reactivating the images, Farocki seeks to recover this distance not through emotional pleas but in endowing viewers with knowledge of the system they exist within. The images in the Eye/Machine videos bear uncanny resemblance to video games. Viewers are not emotionally engaged, but rather are invited to experience war as entertainment.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the Eye/Machine series focuses on images of the Gulf War in

1991, heavily abstracted in comparison to the graphic imagery of past wars. Created by machines, these images lend themselves to viewers’ increasing indifference. The result

70 Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York, NY: Pantheon, 2002), 303.

36 is collective detachment from the physical atrocities of war. The shift from unflinching portrayal of physical damage to cold, detached militaristic imagery void of a connection to humans reveals the shift in what information is given to the public. It is important to consider who controls this imagery, as they hold the power to affect perception of reality for the consumer public.

At one point, emotional involvement and corporeal sympathy, although detached, was the “objective truth” of war imagery, as was often the case in mainstream media’s treatment of the Vietnam War. However, when one looks at the images of the Gulf War in 1991, the human element is absent. Instead, one sees images of smart technology.

The effect is dehumanization of the other and detachment from the violence occurring.

Made into a spectacle, depictions of war and death become consumer entertainment.

French cultural theorist Paul Virilio states that despite corporate media’s repetition of war imagery, the Gulf War failed to have a lasting impression.71 It is this repetition and the fleeting effect upon viewers that Farocki confronts.

The dehumanization of the enemy fits the general conditions of the panoptic society. The enemy is not a single, identifiable person but rather a ubiquitous unknown.

In order to provide security, the spectator craves the invisible be made visible. The desire for visibility continues today, as heightened surveillance permeates contemporary society. The enemy is so fluid it could be anyone. As such, a general state of paranoia and state-sponsored fear results. Contemporary society, now driven by the desire to make the unseen visible, unwittingly victimizes itself.

71 Paul Virilio, Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light, trans. Michael Degener (New York, NY: Continuum, 2002).

37 Michel Foucault’s lectures on Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon warn us about this phenomenon.72 When asked about the welcoming reception of Bentham’s eighteenth- century innovation, Foucault replied:

It was the dream of a transparent society, visible and legible in each of its parts, the dream of there no longer existing any zones of darkness, zones established by the privileges of royal power or the prerogatives of some corporation, zones of disorder. It was the dream that each individual, whatever position he occupied, might be able to see the whole of society, that men’s hearts should communicate, their vision be unobstructed by obstacles, and that opinion of all reign over each.73

Machines make ubiquitous vision economically efficient and the development of smart technology is distancing human involvement from the process of surveilling others. On the economy of surveillance and the power dynamics of the panoptic society, Foucault states:

In contrast to that [corporeal punishment] you have the system of surveillance, which on the contrary involves very little expense. There is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorizing to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over, and against himself. A superb formula: power exercised continuously and for what turns out to be at a minimal cost.74

Considering these statements in relationship to Farocki’s films and videos, one concludes that contemporary abstract representations of war are merely a marketing tool for war. They serve as propaganda, concealing aspects of war that do not elicit the

72 In Discipline and Punish, Foucault traces the changes occurring in the penal system in France and their social and theoretical consequences. In the chapter titled “Panopticism,” Foucault discusses philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s eighteenth-century design for a prison building, the panopticon. The design allows a hidden observer in a central tower to see all prisoners. The prisoners cannot see into the tower, and therefore do not know when they are being watched. Foucault posits this architectural design as a metaphor for systems of control and normalization in modern societies. 73 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972- 1977 (New York, NY: Pantheon, 1980), 152. 74 Ibid, 155.

38 desired public responses. In repositioning the images of the Gulf War, Farocki exposes the mechanics of their original presentation.

39 Conclusion: Constructive Alienation and Terror

War Pornography75

The previous two chapters have focused on the work of Rosler and Farocki respectively. In this chapter, I intend to deal with thematic commonalities between their works and works of other artists. First, I discuss Jill Godmilow’s 1998 remake of

Farocki’s Inextinguishable Fire, entitled What Farocki Taught.76 The remake calls attention to Farocki’s direct address of viewers and his divergence from the

“compassionate voyeurism” of the traditional documentary.77 Next, I briefly discuss

Johan Grimonprez’s Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997), a video that attempts to create a history of terror via airplane hijackings. The video is made entirely of appropriated images culled from the mainstream media, and is punctuated by text from two novels by Don

DeLillo, Mao II (1992) and White Noise (1986). Through looking at works that deal with similar themes using varying tactics, I situate Rosler and Farocki in the artistic dialogue with terrorism and their place in recovering the distance between reality and representation.

Godmilow’s What Farocki Taught (1998) premiered in August 1998 at the

Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland. The film begins with the following voice over:

Here is a footnote to the war in Vietnam. Snatched from the archive. A short, black and white, some would say crudely-made film by Harun Farocki. Produced in Germany in 1969 for a televison station. This was

75 This term describes explicit images of violence as characterized by Godmilow. Jill Godmilow, “Why I repeated Farocki,” text accompanying the retrospective exhibition of Harun Farocki’s work Nicht Iöschbares Feuer at Haussite Kunstlerhaus, Stuttgart, 2001 (www.haussite.net), accessed online: www.haussite.net on March 23, 2006. 76 Godmilow’s replication of Farocki’s work calls to mind other artists who have appropriated and/or replicated works of art, such as Sherrie Levine (American, b. 1947). The series, After Walker Evans (1997) is composed of Levine’s re-photographing Evans (American, b. 1903, d. 1975) photographs of Depression era sharecroppers in 1937. 77 Godmilow, “Why I repeated Farocki,” Accessed online: www.haussite.net on March 23, 2006.

40 at the height of US resistance to the war. I remade the film in 1996.78 I made a perfect replica in color and in English. I made adequate substitutions. A blonde for a blonde. A library for a library. A cricket for a cricket. This is a period piece. I dressed my actors in sixties clothes. I used old cars, old factories, old typewriters. I found a high school chemistry classroom that hadn’t changed in thirty years. In the original, German friends of the filmmaker played the parts. That is, they played Americans. I use Americans for Americans.79

Godmilow’s film does exactly as it states, it quotes Farocki’s Inextinguishable Fire.

What makes this video worthy of consideration is its complete appropriation and repositioning of Farocki’s statement thirty years later. Godmilow footnotes the film in an interview conducted by an anonymous interviewer as she paces around the set where the opening scene of the film is reproduced. Godmilow discusses her interest in

Farocki’s film as a multi-layered critique dealing with both documentary film and corporate masking of individual participation in war. She then discusses the absence of a word to define the film’s genre, specifically its differences from documentary film.

Inextinguishable Fire uses only one minute of actual footage from the Vietnam War, and no actual footage of the Dow Chemical Company. Further, Farocki does not give into what Godmilow calls “the pornography of the real.” That is, he does not play into the emotions, desires, or expectations of viewers to be “seduced by the horror” 80 of war.

On this topic she states:

American documentary has been completely dependent on what it calls “cinema verité” – what I call pornographic cinema. It believes only and completely in “the real,” and it seeks to get its message across by providing cinematic proofs of the actual existence of this and that, represented by real people and real things. When it wants to talk about war, for instance, it tries to show it in the most fiery and melodramatic way

78 The video was produced in 1996, but not distributed until 1998. 79 Jill Godmilow, What Farocki Taught, directed and produced by Jill Godmilow (Chicago, IL: Video Data Bank, 1998), videocassette, 30 min. 80 Godmilow, What Farocki Taught, 1998.

41 possible. . .to get us all excited, to make us weep, or rage, or feel guilty. . . guilty, but excited. American documentaries produce an almost sexual fascination with state terror and operate as a license to grieve “for the others.” But the “real” in documentary is only a “horror show” – a fun house of scary pleasures and false political consciousness, constructed for liberal voyeurism. In “Fire,” Farocki seeks to make a useful analysis of how war is produced – materially.

Here, Godmilow calls into question the one-sidedness of the American documentary tradition. She continues:

He refuses the “real” and substitutes cheap models to under-represent the effects of weapons of war. With these models, he demonstrates the relationships of war; the relationship between science and death; between dead rats and dead Vietnamese people; between description and analysis. His film is uncontaminated by scary pleasures, and uncontaminated by identification, false morality, and the production of us versus them.81

Godmilow’s repetition of Farocki’s film is motivated in part because she feels that the lesson that Farocki taught has not yet been learned, either in terms of documentary filmmaking or the connections that individuals have to war through corporations.

Though a comparison of Godmilow’s film with the original discussing its differences and the issues it raises in filmic practice, authorship, appropriation, et cetera warrant further exploration, I would like to consider the general statement Godmilow makes in replicating Farocki’s document “snatched from the archive.”82 The remake forces a re-experience of the “original,” and underscores its significance. At key points during the film, for example, Farocki’s direct address and his performance of the masochistic act of burning his hand, she superimposes his film on top of hers. In doing so, she accentuates these passages for viewers. In re-presenting his filmic text,

Godmilow makes viewers aware of the distance between themselves and the original,

81 Godmilow, “Why I repeated Farocki,” Accessed online: www.haussite.net on March 23, 2006. 82 Godmilow, What Farocki Taught, 1998.

42 and the original and its subject matter. This highlights the constituent role of video/film as virtual mediums. Considering her opening statement, “Here is a footnote to the war in Vietnam. Snatched from the archive,” Godmilow reminds viewers that the lesson taught by Farocki and his statements are not simply relics of the past, that the archive of collective memory and history is actively constructed, that it can and should be revisited as it bears relevance to contemporary representations of war and on the general status of such images.

Another film that works to activate history is Grimonprez’s Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y.

Similar to Godmilow’s What Farocki Taught, it is composed almost entirely of appropriated images. In this way, it is more closely related to Rosler’s A Simple Case for Torture and Farocki’s Eye/Machine videos. Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y is a 68-minute video presented in installation form. The installation transformed the gallery into a domestic space including couches, recliners, wallpaper, pictures hung on the walls, and televisions. Viewers were invited to sit on couches and view the video on individual television screens. The video premiered in 1997 at Documenta X in Kassel, Germany, where it gained a flurry of critical attention for its sensationalism.

The narrative thread running through the piece is a chronology of airplane hijackings from the late 1950s to the hijacking of Pan Am Flight 103 in 1998. The soundtrack is composed of seventies disco music and excerpts from Don Delillio’s Mao

II and White Noise, which Grimonprez says, “highlight the value of the spectacular in our catastrophic culture.”83 The history Grimonprez constructs is composed of images

83 Johan Grimonprez, quoted by Paul Stultzman, Documenta X: Short Guide (Ostfildern (Ruit), Germany: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 1997), 80.

43 from news reports, clips from science fiction films, found footage, and the artist’s own home movies.

In the Documenta X catalogue, art historian Paul Sztulman states that the video’s purpose is to “detect the impact of images on our feelings, our knowledge, our memory.”84 While I think it is an interesting and often compelling work, it falls short of truly investigating the aftermath of the sensational array of images. The video effectively calls attention to the notion that history is composed of the currency of popular culture, but Grimonprez’s commentary is unclear.

In general, Grimonprez’s work focuses on Western ethnocentrism and the proliferation and influence of mainstream media on history and perceptions of reality.

Viewed in the larger context of his work and in relationship to A Simple Case for Torture and the Eye/Machine videos, crucial thematic similarities emerge. All three videos rely heavily on montage, specifically intellectual montage. Though the work required of viewers to make the connections between disparate ideas varies, all of the videos require their audiences begin to recover the distance between themselves and the reality they seek to unearth.

Unlike any other film or video discussed so far in this text, Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y not only deals with images, but fictional literature as well. The inclusion of such texts undermines the authority of what could easily be mistaken for a documentary and makes the subject matter seem more poetic. Grimonprez does not seek to chronicle the history of hijackings to create a document of authority. Rather, I contend that his video seeks to subvert itself, reminding viewers of the tenuous boundary between

84 Ibid.

44 documentary and fiction. Like the other artists discussed in this text, Grimonprez questions not only his own authority, but also the authority of the sources he appropriates.

Godmilow and Grimonprez offer two ways of approaching the topic of the distance that images create. Godmilow replicates the lesson that she feels has not yet been learned, both in terms of documentary filmmaking and of individual involvement in war. Grimonprez creates a sensational visual and aural collage of popular culture and mainstream media. These approaches are nearly opposing, one analytical, the other spectacular.

Conclusion

I would like to return to Kathy O’Dell’s discussion of performance art to which I referred at the beginning of this study. She underscores the increasingly distant relationship between what is fact and what is represented as fact. O’Dell contemplates the “erosion of faith”85 in the apparently consensual relationship between the individual and the state. During the Vietnam War, the photographic evidence of the My Lai

Massacre published in Life magazine gave viewers a sense of the distance between themselves and the actions taken by the state on their behalf. I chose to phrase this weakly, just as Farocki did in the opening of Inextinguishable Fire: “We can only give you a weak demonstration of how Napalm works,”86 since any representation of reality is an understatement of the facts. As Guy Debord states in his treatise Society of the

Spectacle:

The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered.

85O’Dell, 11. 86 Harun Farocki, Inextinguishable Fire, 1969.

45 Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudoworld that can only be looked at. The specialization of images of the world evolves into a world of autonomized images where even the deceivers are deceived. The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving.87

History constructed through images fails to signify actual events; rather it is a separate entity, a history of images. So long as we live in a society mediated by images, there will persist a separation between actual events and representation of these events.

As artist-archivists, Martha Rosler and Harun Farocki work against this condition, undermine the pornography of reality in documentaries, and expose the mechanisms that construct mainstream media, encouraging viewers to discard passive consumption in favor of active investigation. Even as I conclude this study, we face similar crises.

On March 20, 2003, United States and British armed forces invaded Iraq in the Third

Persian Gulf War, the war on terrorism. The impetus for the war was the claim by the

United States to have found evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Less than two months after the initial invasion, on May 1, 2003, President George W. Bush declared the end of major combat operations, and on December 13, 2003, Saddam

Hussein was captured by United States forces. The United States then began its mission of rebuilding a sovereign, democratic government in Iraq, and has retained troops in the region since.

During occupation of Iraq by the United States, as early as June 2003 reports of abuse and torture of Iraqis by United States’ armed forces began to spread. In late April

2004, the television program “60 Minutes” reported on the abuse and humiliation of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib, a prison twenty miles west of Baghdad. Since then, countless

87 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York, NY: Zone Books, 1994), 7.

46 photographs and videos of torture and humiliation have been circulated in the mainstream media and on the Internet. The photographs were mostly taken by soldiers with digital cameras.

In the New York Times magazine on May 23, 2004, Susan Sontag wrote of the power of images in the wake of the first photographs from Abu Ghraib being released:

The pictures taken by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib. . .reflect a shift in the use made of pictures-- less objects to be saved than messages to be disseminated, circulated. A digital camera is a common possession among soldiers. Where once photographing war was the province of photojournalism, now the soldiers themselves are all photographers-- recording their war, their fun, their observations of what they find picturesque, their atrocities-- and swapping images among themselves and e-mailing them around the globe.88

The photographs from My Lai, taken by an Associated Press photographer, and those taken at Abu Ghraib by soldiers, act as war pornography. They remind us of the horrors of war, reconnecting viewers physically to the violence the state enacts on our behalf. They, too, are weak demonstrations of reality, reminding us of the relative comfort and security of being us rather than them. Both Rosler and Farocki begin to recover this distance, explicating individual involvement in state action.

Terrorism refers not only to the violent actions of rogue individuals. It also refers to creating a perpetual state of distrust, paranoia, and fear. In A Simple Case for

Torture, Martha Rosler deconstructs a utilitarian justification for torture. She exposes the manipulative emotional pleas underlying Michael Levin’s rhetoric in the popular press. Inextinguishable Fire traces individual connections to violent warfare via consumer capitalism. The Eye/Machine videos explore the relationship between

88 Susan Sontag, “Regarding the Torture of Others,” New York Times magazine (23 May 2004): 27.

47 humans, machines, and warfare. These three works share a concern for the alienation of individuals from the atrocities of war. Each evaluates and exposes corporate media’s mediation and manipulation of images. It is my hope that the interrogation of representational technologies continues and gains momentum. Perhaps with the realization that visibility does not provide safety or prevent violence, the need for more sophisticated technologies of vision will be more strictly regulated and less frequently taken at face value as truthful.

48

Appendix A

Transcripts of Harun Farocki’s Eye/Machine I, II, and III videos Transcribed by Kristin Marie Brockman Video Data Bank, The Art Institute of Chicago December 2005

Eye/Machine I, 2001

Images like these could be seen in the 1991 war against Iraq. Shown from the air, crosshairs in the center. Images from flying projectiles. Images from suicide cameras. These images lacked plasticity. The human scale was missing. Without reference to everyday experience, the images failed to grip. The war soon became forgotten. Industrial production abolishes manual work. And also visual work. The machines perform tasks blindly. These images are devoid of social intent. They are not for reflection. They are not for edification. In the age of flow production, Images to monitor the predetermined. Cameras capture the glow of the plate as it rolls across. Cameras discover flaws in the material. (Voice over) This is a high-resolution satellite photo showing the area of Dubai airport. (Voice over) A very important element of civilian and military applications is to know the layout and location of airfields. This war was shown in operational images. Images to check whether a target had been hit.

49 Images from the missiles’ warheads. We learned of intelligent weapons who were able to find targets on their own. Increasingly, armed forces on behalf of the United Nations are asked to protect civilians from military attack and pacify crisis regions. A drone, an aircraft without a crew, surveys enemy territory. (Voice over) The system has a video tracker. It automatically tracks moving targets, recognizing and identifying targets. An experimental robot points its camera eyes toward a doorplate. It lowers its gaze and turns to find the next doorplate. An algorhythm compares images taken with stored geographic data. The system recognizes curbstones, signs, and poles in the image. An experimental construction of autonomous driving systems. The machines perform tasks no longer blindly. A model of the human body. A camera tracks the surgeon’s instrument. No need to open a patient’s abdominal wall. Minimally invasive surgery. An examination almost without invasion. No real need to invade foreign space to collect data. Minimum required invasion. Camera eyes are in civilian production as well. (Voice over) The transition between friendly territory and low-level flight begins at this point. The camera produces ideal images from geography. It models images according to requirements of facilities and labs. Operational images. Low-level flight is not an end in itself, but avoids detection from the enemy. The machine determines the safest route. (Voice over) I am being attacked by the first missile. Distance between human and damage. We saw images like this in the 1991 war against Iraq.

50 Not propaganda, yet and ad for intelligent machines. For machines are no longer repeating tasks blindly, but rather independently, autonomously. Imagine a war of autonomous machines. Wars without soldiers like factories without workers. Eye/Machine II, 2002 The punch press. A single purpose machine. There must be a connection between production and war. A simulator from Germany, 1943. Simulation of driving tanks. Each point represents survival probability within the territory. (Voice over) The transition between friendly territory and low-level flight begins at this point. (Voice over) I am being attacked by the first missile. (Voice over) I will now take counter measures. Simulation of factory work. This device simulates missile flight. The missile head and those images presented in the search head. Images of territory over flown by the missile. A simulation without humans. A workplace without humans. Images produced identify and locate in the workplaces. Images produced guide the missile. Guidance points are stored in the missile. Balancing intention and proven reality. Image processing. (Voice over) The computer is breaking things into shapes, defining the edges. The computer then creates a model to identify and locate in the workplace. A single purpose machine. The task of equipping is simplified and sped up once more.

51 Guidance weapons. A flight path can be altered after launching or correct itself. Thus signaling the end of the process of a single purpose machine. Thus announcing the beginning of flexible automation. Germany, 1942- the first bomb with a TV camera. The images were signaled to an airplane. Electronic image reception was not yet possible. Images were filmed from a monitor with a film camera. The TV bomb, HS293D, was never deployed. Only in 1991 in the war against Iraq would such images become public. Once machines have camera eyes, humans are hardly needed to equip them. Eyes and hands – sense and identify location in the workplace. There must be a connection between production and war. Flares – their glow is supposed to attract warheads, diverting the missiles. (Voice over) I have been downed. For next wars – Do computer battlefields suffice? (Voice over) We are entering another battle theatre. (Voice over) Back to the main theatre.

Eye/Machine III, 2003 The human hand sets a pattern for motion. An aircraft wing is sensed. Data is grabbed for measurement. Sensors scanning skies for aircraft. A laser sensor examines a bridge. A bridge can clearly mark a route. A promotional film with music. These images have no operational function. They are meant to threaten—and to entertain. These images were meant for technicians’ eyes. An instructional film for VI missile, 1942.

52 A film to instruct war technicians—not propaganda. Still, it shows a shimmering sea. Animation film. A genre prone to exaggeration. Hardly suited to depict death. Robots explore the space-- to navigate autonomously. Devices recording images. And processing images. Producing images. A missile simulator. A missile search head reads the images. Image processing presents itself. Route markers are stored: roads, crossings, bridges. Power lines. Lines are highlighted in color, To check whether they are part of a stored image. These images are purely operational. If such images possess beauty, This beauty is not calculated. Cinematography by devices. Images recorded by assembly robots. Images, not really intended for human eyes – sometimes viewed by technicians to check functioning. These images were meant for war technicians. To guide the projectile. To check whether the target was hit. In 1991, images like these from the war against Iraq were shown on TV. As if TV viewers were to be turned into war technicians. Empathy for technology of war. A promotional film with economic arguments. If each bomb hits its target, fewer bombs can be sold.

53 Cost turnover. To compensate, more guidance systems must be sold. The economy calls for wars of the highest precision. Such wars are declared humanitarian.

54 Appendix B Excerpts from Harun Farocki’s Inextinguishable Fire (1969) Transcribed by Kristin Marie Brockman Video Data Bank, The Art Institute of Chicago December 2005

A statement given at the Vietnam War Crimes tribunal in Stockholm. My name’s Thai Bihn Dahn, I’m Vietnamese, born in 1949. I want to register war crimes [that] the United States imperialists committed against me and my village. While washing dishes on March 31, 1966 at seven p.m., I heard planes approaching. I rushed to the underground shelter but was surprised by an exploding Napalm bomb very close to me. The flames and unbearable heat engulfed me and I’d lost consciousness. Napalm burned my face, both arms, and both legs. My home was burned as well. I was unconscious and thirteen days later, I awoke in a bed in an FLN hospital. Farocki addresses the camera. How can we show you Napalm in action? And how can we show you the injuries caused by napalm? If we show you pictures of Napalm burns, you’ll close your eyes. First, you’ll close your eyes to the pictures. Then you’ll close your eyes to the memory. Then you’ll close your eyes to the facts. Then you’ll close your eyes to the entire context. If we show you a person with Napalm burns, we’ll hurt your feelings. If we hurt your feelings, you’ll feel as though we have just tried Napalm on you at your expense. We can only give you only a weak demonstration of how Napalm works. Farocki then burns his left arm with a cigarette. Voice over: A cigarette burns at 400 degrees. Napalm burns at 3000 degrees. If the viewers want no responsibility for Napalm’s effects, what responsibility will they take for the explanations of its use? Napalm burns at 3000 degrees. The slightest drop burns half an hour. It sets free poisonous gases that attack human respiration. The poisonous gases drive people from their shelters. Within 80 meters, survival is impossible. The newest Napalm, so- called Napalm B, cannot be wiped off human skin. Even when burning, Napalm B floats above water. It is inextinguishable.

55 When it has been extinguished, it is in most cases too late. The skin is burned off and in most cases, the flesh is also burnt down to the bone. When Napalm is burning, it cannot be extinguished. Napalm has to be resisted where it is produced, in factories.

56 Appendix C Excerpts from Jill Godmilow’s What Farocki Taught (1996) Transcribed by Kristin Marie Brockman 14 March 2006 Video courtesy of the University of Cincinnati Library, Gift of Charles Woodman

Voice over: Here is a footnote to the war in Vietnam. Snatched from the archive. A short, black and white, some would say crudely-made, film by Harun Farocki. Produced in Germany in 1969 for a televison station. This was at the height of United States resistance to the war. I remade the film in 1996. I made a perfect replica in color and in English. I made adequate substitutions. A blonde for a blonde. A library for a library. A cricket for a cricket. This is a period piece. I dressed my actors in sixties clothes. I used old cars, old factories, old typewriters. I found a high school chemistry classroom that hadn’t changed in thirty years. In the original, German friends of the filmmaker played the parts. That is, they played Americans. I use Americans for Americans.

[A landscape photograph with typed words printed and taped to the middle of it is shown. It reads:] Midland, Michigan The Glued on Humanism

Onscreen Text: Behavioral Model #1 Onscreen Text and Voice Over: As far as Hiroshima and Vietnam are concerned, many scientists and technicians realized that their contribution to the destruction was criminal: TOO LATE.

The same landscape photograph with words printed and taped to it is shown. This time it reads: Midland, Michigan Increased Division of Labor

Onscreen Text: Behavioral Model #2

57 Onscreen Text and Voice Over: Because of increased division of labor, many scientists and technicians no longer can recognize the contributions they have made to weapons of destruction. Regarding the crimes in Vietnam, they feel like observers. Who does it benefit? Who does it harm? The loss of the oppressed is the gain of the oppressors. No matter how you look at it. A man stands alone in a washroom. He speaks: I am a worker in a vacuum factory. My wife could use a new vacuum. That is why I take one part with me everyday. I try at home to put the vacuum cleaner together but no matter what I do it always turns into an automatic rifle. The same man stands alone in a washroom, in exactly the same manner as before. He speaks: I am a student and right now I work at a vacuum factory. I believe though that the factory is making rifles for the Portuguese. But we really could use some proof. That’s why I take one part home with me. At home I try to put the rifle together but no matter what I do it always turns into a vacuum cleaner. The same man stands alone in a washroom, this time holding a vacuum cleaner in one arm and a rifle in the other. He speaks: I am an engineer and I work for an electrical corporation. The workers believe we’re making vacuum cleaners, the students believe we are making automatic rifles. This vacuum cleaner can become a useful weapon. This rifle can become a useful household gadget. What we manufacture depends on the workers, students, and engineers.

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