Automatic Ethnography:

Otherness, Indexicality, and Humanitarian Visual Media

By Pooja Rangan

B.A., Oberlin College, 2006

M.A., Brown University, 2008

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University.

Providence, Rhode Island

May 2012

© Pooja Rangan 2012

All rights reserved. !

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This dissertation by Pooja Rangan is accepted in its present form

by the Department of Modern Culture and Media as satisfying the

dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Date Rey Chow, Advisor

Recommended to the Graduate Council Date Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Reader Date Mary Ann Doane, Reader

Approved by the Graduate Council Date Peter M. Weber, Dean of the Graduate School

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CURRICULUM VITAE POOJA RANGAN

!EDUCATION

Ph.D., Modern Culture and Media, Brown University, 2011 M.A., Modern Culture and Media, Brown University, 2008 B.A., Cinema Studies (High Honors), Oberlin College, 2006 Certificate in 16mm film production, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, 2006. PROFESSIONAL APPOINTMENTS

Assistant Professor, Department of Culture and Media Studies, The New School, July 2011-present. PUBLICATIONS AND FILMS

ARTICLES: “Immaterial Child Labor: Media Advocacy, Autoethnography, and The Case of Born Into Brothels.” Camera Obscura volume 25, no. 3 75 (2011): 143-177. “Some Annotations on the Film Festival as an Emerging Medium in India.” South Asian Popular Culture volume 8, no. 2 (July 2010): 123-141. ANTHOLOGY ESSAYS: “Race, Racism, and the Postcolonial.” Co-authored with Rey Chow. Oxford Guide To Postcolonial Studies ed. Graham Huggan (Oxford University Press, 2011, forthcoming). “Transitions, Transactions: Bollywood as a Signifying Practice.” The Sarai Reader 07: Frontiers (Center for the Study of Developing Societies, 2007), 273-285. FILMS: Surface Tension (Co-directed with Josh Guilford, documentary, 16mm, ongoing series, 2009-present), supported by a Brown University Creative Arts Council Grant. Paradise (Director, documentary, flash, digital video & 16mm, 2008), http://paradise.01cyb.org/ Stubborn City (Director, documentary, digital video, 10 mins, 2007), distributed by Third World Newsreel.

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Food, Water, Revolution (Assistant photographer to Danya Abt, documentary, digital video, 13 mins, 2006), distributed by Third World Newsreel. CONFERENCE, INVITED TALKS, AND SCREENINGS

CONFERENCES: “Children’s Testimony and the Frames of Humanitarian Mediation.” Visible Evidence, International Conference, New York, August 2011 (Panel Chair: Documenting the Child). “Speculating with Precarity: Gambles of Representation and Critique.” World Picture Conference, Fourth Annual Conference, Oklahoma State University, October 2010. “Disaster Autoethnography in Documentary Media after Hurricane Katrina.” Visible Evidence, International Conference, Istanbul, August 2010 (unable to attend). “Automatic Ethnography: Immersive Aesthetics of Indexing the Animal in Contemporary Art.” Zoontotechnics (Animality/Technicity), Tenth Anniversary International Conference, Center for Critical and Cultural Theory, Cardiff University, May 2010.

“Auto/matic Ethnography: Indexing the Animal in Recent Artworks.” Society for Cinema and Media Studies, International Conference, Los Angeles, March 2010 “Direct Animation as Auto(matic) Ethnography.” Visible Evidence, International Conference, University of Southern California, August 2009. “What The Water Said: David Gatten and the Limits of Documentary Subjectivity.” The Pembroke Seminar 2008-2009: Visions of Nature: Constructing the Cultural Other, Annual Seminar, Brown University, February 2009. “Media Advocacy, Autoethnography, and Immaterial Child Labor in Born Into Brothels.” New Media and the Global Diaspora, Annual Conference, Roger Williams University, February 2009. “Autoethnography in Media Advocacy: Confessing Ethnics and Liberal Itineraries.” The Individual and the Mass, International Conference, Thessaloniki, May 2008. “Media Education as Autoethnography: The Case of Born Into Brothels.” Society for Cinema and Media Studies, International Conference, Philadelphia, March 2008.

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“From the Margins to the Center: Bollywood as Autoethnography.” North East Modern Language Association, National Conference, Buffalo, April 2008. “Mediating Eyewitness Memory: When The Levees Broke and the Documentary Politics of Catastrophe.”!! Media and the End of the World, National Conference, Plymouth State University, April 2007. INVITED TALKS: “Reporting Live: Trouble the Water and the Perils of Humanitarian Mediation.” Eugene Lang College, The New School, New York, 14 February, 2011. “Independent Film Production in India: Meanings, Scope, Futures.” Ahmedabad International Film Festival, Ahmedabad India, 27 April 2009. “New Media, Self-Presentation, and the Racial Politics of Recognition.” New Media and the Global Diaspora Symposium, Roger Williams University, Bristol RI, 2 October, 2009. “From Agit-Prop to Vikalp: Making Documentaries in India.” Screening and Conversation with Documentary Filmmaker Paromita Vohra, Brown University, Providence RI, 12 November 2007. SCREENINGS: National Museum of Women in the Arts Film & Media Arts Festival, Washington DC, September 2007 Red Earth Monsoon Film Festival, New Delhi, India, August 2007. MoMA Documentary Fortnight: The Katrina Chronicles, MoMA, NYC, February 2007. 11th Annual Harlem Film Festival, Aaron Davis Hall, Harlem, NYC, March 2007. Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting Video Series, Boston, March 2007. DocuLens Asia Film Series & Symposium, University of Minnesota, November 2006. The State of the Nation Series, Ashe Cultural Center, New Orleans, June 2006. Newsreel at Anthology: The Immediacy Series, Anthology Film Archives, NYC, April 2006.

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FELLOWSHIPS, HONORS, AND GRANTS

Manning Graduate Fellowship (Brown University, 2010-2011) Andrew W. Mellon Graduate Workshop Grant (Brown University, 2010-2011) Graduate International Colloquia Grant, Department of International Affairs (Brown University, 2010-2011) Creative Arts Council Grant (Brown University, 2009)!!Pembroke Seminar Graduate Fellowship, Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women (Brown University, 2008-2009) Teaching Fellowship (Brown University, 2006-2010) Rachel Beverly Award for Leadership in Community Organizing, Multicultural Resource Center (Oberlin College, 2005) International Student Scholarship (Oberlin College, 2004-2006) WORK EXPERIENCE

TEACHING: Assistant Professor, Eugene Lang College, The New School: LCST 2781 A: The Queerness Of Children (Fall 2011) LCST 2783 A: Mobilizing Shame: The Politics Of Humanitarian Mediation (Fall 2011) Adjunct Instructor, New School For General Studies: MC 0900W: Media And/As Ethnography (Summer 2010) Independent Study Advisor, Brown University: INDP 0005: Reading Borders (Fall 2010) Teaching Fellow, Brown University: NMDS 5173: Media And/As Ethnography (Spring 2010)

Teaching Assistant, Brown University: MC 1200: Imagined Networks, Glocal Connections (Fall 2009) MC 0260: Introduction To Film: Cinematic Coding And Narrativity (Spring 2008) MC 0230: Introduction To Television Studies (Fall 2008) MC 0150: Text/Media/Culture: Readings In Modern Culture & Media (Spring 2008) MC 0100: Screens & Projections: Introduction To Modern Culture & Media (Fall 2007) Teaching Assistant, Oberlin College: CINE 101: Form, Style, And Meaning In Cinema (Spring 2005, Fall 2005) MHST 332: Film Music History (Fall 2005) Peer Instructor, Oberlin College: EXCO 435/EXCO 422: Indian Cinema (Fall 2004, Fall 2005)

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PROGRAMMING: Workshop Coordinator, Speculative Critique Mellon Graduate Workshop and Colloquium Series, Brown University, 2010-2011 Guest Curator, The India Show: Experimental and Political Video Art from India, Magic Lantern Cinema, Providence RI, 21 May 2008 Co-Director, Zombie Film Festival, Providence RI, 26-31 October 2007! Director, AURAT/WOMAN Indian Film Festival, Oberlin College, 24-31 October 2005 Programming Assistant, Harlem Film Festival (now Creatively Speaking), New York NY, 2005, 2006 SERVICE

Departmental Graduate Student Representative, Brown University (2009-2010) Member, Documentary Studies Interest Group, Society for Cinema and Media Studies (2007-present) Peer Reviewer, differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies, Brown University (2008-present) Departmental Graduate Student Liaison, Graduate Student Council, Brown University (2006-2007) Treasurer, South Asian Students Association, Oberlin College (2005-2006) Board Member, Student Senate, Oberlin College (2003-2004) REFERENCES

Professor Rey Chow, Department of Literature, Duke University rey.chow@duke.edu, (919) 660-3045

Professor Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Department of Modern Culture and Media, Brown University wendy_chun@brown.edu, (401) 863-2382 Professor Mary Ann Doane, Department of Modern Culture and Media, Brown University mary_doane@brown.edu, (401) 863-2807 Date and Place of Birth: August 22, 1984, Mumbai, India Date Prepared: August 06, 2011

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation is dedicated to the following people, without whose guidance, support, love, and intellectual community I could not have written it: my dissertation advisor, constant mentor, and dear friend, Rey Chow; my astute and generous readers, Mary Ann Doane and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun; my partner and most reliable critic, Josh Guilford; my friends, editors, and muses, Sarah Osment, Ani Maitra, Gosia Rymsza-Pawlowska, Julie Levin Russo, David Bering-Porter, and Leslie Thornton; archivist extraordinaire Richard Manning, who assisted me in tracking down the more esoteric media discussed in this dissertation; and most of all to my wonderful parents, Girish and Sheela Rangan, who taught me to hold myself to my own highest standards.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Signature Page…………………………………………………………………………....iii

Curriculum Vitae…………………………………………………………………………iv

Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………….ix

List of Illustrations………………………………………………………………………..xi

Introduction: “In Spite of Images…”....…………………………………………….……..2

Chapter One: “Immaterial Child Labor: Media Advocacy, Autoethnography, and the Case of Born Into Brothels”.…………...………………………………………………...28

Chapter Two: “Automatic Ethnography: Animal Artists in the Global ‘Humane-itarian’ Economy”…………………................................................................………………......80

Chapter Three: “Taking Refuge in Disaster Capitalism: Speculative Acts and Humanitarian Immediacy in Trouble The Water”………...……………..……………..135

Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………….192

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 1: Hope House Image from http://www.kids-with-cameras.org/school/ [Accessed August 30, 2011]*

Fig. 2: Cover Image of Born Into Brothels (dir. Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman, Red Light Films, 2004)* Image from http://www.kids-with-cameras.org/calcutta/ [Accessed August 30, 2011] *Since the website cited in Chapter One is no longer available, the images described in the chapter have been shown here as they now appear on the new website.

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Fig. 3: Victor reaching for fruit from Itard Screen capture from L’Enfant Sauvage (dir. François Truffaut, MGM, 1970)

Fig. 4. Victor matches objects to symbols Screen capture from L’Enfant Sauvage (dir. François Truffaut, MGM, 1970)

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Fig. 5: Victor gazes out of window Screen capture from L’Enfant Sauvage (dir. François Truffaut, MGM, 1970)

Fig. 6: Victor looks back at Itard while ascending staircase Screen capture from L’Enfant Sauvage (dir. François Truffaut, MGM, 1970)

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Fig. 7: Still from opening sequence of Born Into Brothels Screen capture from Born Into Brothels (dir. Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman, Red Light Films, 2004)

Fig. 8: Manik’s Hand Screen capture from Born Into Brothels (dir. Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman, Red Light Films, 2004)

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Fig. 9: Still of Briski’s video footage superimposed over Manik’s photograph Screen capture from Born Into Brothels (dir. Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman, Red Light Films, 2004)

!Fig. 10: Avijit’s Self Portrait Screen capture from Born Into Brothels (dir. Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman, Red Light Films, 2004)

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!Fig. 11: Portrait of Avijit as an Infant Screen capture from Born Into Brothels (dir. Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman, Red Light Films, 2004)

Fig. 12: Still from “Original Elephant Painting” video Screen capture from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=He7Ge7Sogrk [Accessed August 20, 2011].

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Fig. 13: Still from Alligator Cam Screen capture from Animal Cams (dir. Sam Easterson, Video Data Bank, 2008)

Fig. 14: Still from Wolf Cam Screen capture from Animal Cams (dir. Sam Easterson, Video Data Bank, 2008)

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Fig. 15: Still from Crittercam “Blue Whale” episode Screen capture from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lO4Q9JJrVq0 [Accessed August 24, 2011].

Fig. 16: ZooMorph Hummingbird Filter Image from http://128.111.69.4/~jevbratt/zoomorph_blog/pages/interaction.html [Accessed August 24, 2011].

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Fig. 17: Julius Neubronner’s!Breast-mounted Mechanical Camera for Pigeons Image from http://www.pigeonblog.mapyourcity.net/military.php [Accessed August 24, 2011].

Fig. 18: Aerial Photograph Flanked by Pigeon Wings Image from http://www.pigeonblog.mapyourcity.net/military.php [Accessed August 24, 2011].

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Fig. 19: Pigeon Outfitted with PigeonBlog Equipment Image from http://www.pigeonblog.mapyourcity.net/stills_testflights.php [Accessed August 24, 2011].

Fig. 20: PigeonBlog Installation Image from http://www.pigeonblog.mapyourcity.net/stills_releases.php [Accessed August 24, 2011].

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Fig 21: Henry Moore’s Warrior With Shield Image from http://www.henry-moore.org/works-in-public/world/uk/birmingham/birmingham-museum-and-art-gallery/warrior-with-shield-1953-54-lh-360 [Accessed August 24, 2011].

Fig. 22: Simon Starling’s Infestation Piece (Musselled Moore) Image from http://www.canadianart.ca/online/reviews/2008/03/27/simon-starling/ [Accessed August 24, 2011].

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Fig. 23: Exhibition Display of Olly and Suzi’s Shark Bite Image from http://www.ollysuzi.com/galleries/v/publicspace/nhm-sharkbite+exterior+installation.html [Accessed August 24, 2011].

Fig. 24: Mambo’s ANDY! Series Image from http://brodypaetau.com/recent-works/andy-oxidation-paintings-by-mambo-2008 [Accessed August 24, 2011

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Fig. 25: Still from Tele Ghetto interview featuring plastic camera and microphone Screen capture from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knxjgenyySs&feature=related [Accessed August 30, 2011].

Fig. 26: Still from Tele Ghetto’s documentary footage Screen capture from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbJuDaPfGH0 [Accessed August 30, 2011].

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Fig. 27: Still featuring CNN’s call to “citizen journalists,” August 29, 2005 Screen capture from recording of CNN August 29, 2005 American Morning broadcast

Fig. 28: Still from Anderson Cooper’s live telecast for CNN from Baton Rouge, August 29, 2005 Screen capture from recording of CNN August 29, 2005 American Morning broadcast

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Fig. 29: Still 1 from Kimberly Roberts’ Katrina camcorder footage: Kimberly shoots the weather channel on her television set* Screen capture from Trouble The Water (dir. Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, Zeitgeist Video, 2008) *Stills 1-6 from Kimberly Roberts’ footage are shown in consecutive order of their appearance.

Fig. 30: Still 2 from Kimberly Roberts’ Katrina camcorder footage: Kimberly pans to herself Screen capture from Trouble The Water (dir. Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, Zeitgeist Video, 2008)

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Fig. 31: Still 3 from Kimberly Roberts’ Katrina camcorder footage: Kimberly pans to the living room of her home Screen capture from Trouble The Water (dir. Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, Zeitgeist Video, 2008)

Fig. 32: Still 4 from Kimberly Roberts’ Katrina camcorder footage: Kimberly films her neighbors Screen capture from Trouble The Water (dir. Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, Zeitgeist Video, 2008)

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Fig. 33: Still 5 from Kimberly Roberts’ Katrina camcorder footage: Kimberly’s films her neighbors taking refuge in her attic Screen capture from Trouble The Water (dir. Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, Zeitgeist Video, 2008)

Fig. 34: Still 6 from Kimberly Roberts’ Katrina camcorder footage: Kimberly films a stop sign through her attic window Screen capture from Trouble The Water (dir. Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, Zeitgeist Video, 2008)

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Fig. 35: Still from opening sequence of Trouble The Water Screen capture from Trouble The Water (dir. Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, Zeitgeist Video, 2008)

Fig. 36: Still from Trouble The Water featuring George Bush Screen capture from Trouble The Water (dir. Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, Zeitgeist Video, 2008)

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Fig. 27: Still from Trouble The Water featuring unnamed television news correspondent Screen capture from Trouble The Water (dir. Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, Zeitgeist Video, 2008) !

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AUTOMATIC ETHNOGRAPHY: OTHERNESS, INDEXICALITY, AND HUMANITARIAN VISUAL MEDIA

by

Pooja Rangan

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INTRODUCTION

IN SPITE OF IMAGES…

And tomorrow?...Tomorrow will be the time of color video portapacks, video editing, of instant replay (“instant feedback”). Which is to say, the time of the joint dream of Vertov and Flaherty, of a mechanical ciné-eye-ear and of a camera that can so totally participate

that it will automatically pass into the hands of those who, until now, have always been in front of the lens. At that point, anthropologists will no longer control the monopoly on

observation; their culture and they themselves will be observed and recorded. And it is in that way that ethnographic film will help us to “share” anthropology.

- Jean Rouch

See it. Film it. Change it. - Witness

“See it. Film it. Change it.”1 The mission statement of Witness, the human rights

organization that has since 1992 pioneered the model of training disenfranchised people

to advocate for themselves using video and digital media channels and formats, forcefully

manifests the future that Jean Rouch anticipated in his 1973 essay, “The Camera and

Man.”2 Writing in the midst of what he described as a moment of productive uncertainty

for the still-nascent field of ethnographic filmmaking, Rouch regarded the ongoing

technical revolution toward small-format film and video technology with deep

ambivalence. While acknowledging with excitement the renewed set of commitments to

cinéma-vérité techniques made possible by lightweight, portable, and hand-held cameras, !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1 See the website for Witness: http://www.witness.org/ [Accessed July 27, 2011]. 2 Jean Rouch, “The Camera and Man,” in Cine-Ethnography, edited and translated by Steven Feld (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 46.

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Rouch also submitted to the logical extension of his principled stance of giving in,

sharing, or yielding to the improvisational and embodied experience of filming the other,

or “ciné-trance”3: that these technical developments might ultimately entail surrendering

the newly simplified apparatus of filmmaking to the other altogether. Yet, throughout his

essay, which presciently condenses the insights of the poststructuralist turn in

ethnography of the 1980s,4 Rouch’s primary commitment is to interrogating the

mediations of the ethnographic image. Nowhere is this clearer than when he dissects the

apparently “direct,” improvised, or unmediated images made possible by point-and-shoot

Super-8 film and video cameras, announcing: “Ciné-eye = ciné-I see (I see with the

camera) + ciné-I write (I record with the camera on film) + ciné-I organize (I edit).”5

With this poignant reminder of the work of writing accomplished by the seemingly most

direct of cinema technologies, Rouch issues a disclaimer regarding the seductive allure of

modern audiovisual technologies, which only appear to realize the combined dreams of

Vertov and Flaherty—who each “craved cinema ‘reality’”6—by collapsing seeing,

recording, and editing into the click of a single button. Thus, Rouch ends his essay by

insisting on the continuing responsibility of ethnographic filmmakers and their emerging

native counterparts to confront the twinned impulses of staging and capturing reality that

their forefathers, Flaherty and Vertov, grappled with. Neither of these profoundly

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!3 Rouch writes, “I consider this dynamic improvisation to be a first synthesis of Vertov’s ciné-eye and Flaherty’s participating camera…nothing is known in advance…Leading or following a dancer, priest, or craftsman, [the cameraman-director] is no longer himself, but a mechanical eye accompanied by an electronic ear. It is this strange state of transformation that takes place in the filmmaker that I have called, analogously to possession phenomena, “ciné-trance” (Ibid 39). 4 Paul Stoler cites Rouch’s approach to participatory ethnography as evidence of his avant-garde articulation of “themes of ethnographic postmodernity.” See Paul Stoler, The Cinematic Griot: The Ethnography of Jean Rouch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 254. 5 Rouch, “The Camera and Man,” 39. 6 Ibid 31.

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ideological impulses is circumvented, Rouch counsels, by the so-called “revolution”

wrought by technology in the language and method of ethnographic filmmaking.

If Rouch upheld truly shared authority over the image as an ethical ideal whose

attainment is continually breached by the unavoidably mediated practice of image

production, the assured immediacy of Witness’s slogan (“See it. Film it. Change it.”)

leaches all of the ambiguity out of his formulation. Drafted in the imperative form, the

organization addresses its call to take up arms with video cameras to the beleaguered of

the world almost in the manner of a military command. The name “Witness” consolidates

the self-evident value of bearing witness into a single word, simultaneously invoking a

formal mandate, a social responsibility, and a spiritual calling. The charge of urgency that

accompanies this call-to-action impatiently brushes aside Rouch’s careful parsing of the

layered semiotic acts of seeing, recording, and editing. In comparison with the clarion cry

of illumination that drives Witness’s mission—to “use video to open the eyes of the

world to human rights violations,” the diffuse connotative vicissitudes of the image are

relegated as a fussy, academic indulgence. Indeed, in Witness’s earliest iterations, its

leadership advocated simply handing out cameras to people to “empower” them to

capture and expose human rights violations. More recently, having abandoned this

technophilic “model of change based on the transparency of media and abuse

revelations,”7 Witness has evolved a more comprehensive program of media support,

which trains groups across the globe to achieve their advocacy goals by strategically

customizing different visual media formats, rhetorics, and platforms so as to target

specific stakeholders (such as policy makers, corporations, states, or local or overseas !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!7 See Meg McLagan, “The Architecture of Strategic Communication: A Profile of Witness,” in Nongovernmental Politics, edited by Michael Feher with Gaelle Krikorian and Yates McKee (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 321.

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audiences).

The nonprofit’s re-branded vision of “smart narrowcasting” through specialized

messages—which Witness’s executive director Gillian Caldwell, describes as a practice

of retooling visual media to “leverage” or reformat particular, local claims as

recognizable human rights “issues”—is applauded by its proponents as a political and

logistical triumph that supersedes their former instrumentalizing view of generalized

exposure as a trigger of public action.8 But although it is true that Witness no longer

views visual media as purely denotative, stripped down to their capacity as visible

evidence, celebratory accounts of its new tactical approach to participatory media seldom

note the persistence of a more deeply embedded and problematic stance in Witness’s

practice: namely, the exigency of targeting specific human rights issues as a first order

principle permits and even requires the subordination of the philosophical problems of

representation that so vexed Rouch, as part of the collateral damage of “strategic

communication.”

While this dissertation is not specifically concerned with Witness as a model for

media advocacy, I argue that the rhetoric of urgency that propels this influential human

rights organization’s representational techniques is endemic to what I call contemporary

humanitarian media empowerment initiatives, whose operation under the sign of the

humanitarian “emergency” legitimates an erasure of their medial frames. In the three

chapters that follow, I examine how the adoption of “immediacy” as a rhetorical strategy

in human rights media initiatives further exoticizes their marginalized beneficiaries by

mobilizing their alterity as a self-evident sign of agency. Treating ethnography as a

technological, historical, and theoretical frame, I examine projects where visual media are !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!8 Ibid 320.

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literally “handed over” as a humanizing prosthesis to various dehumanized subjects—

ranging from the children of Third World sex-workers in India, elephants “laid off” from

Asian logging industries, and U.S. citizens dispossessed by Hurricane Katrina—as a

means for them to advocate on their own behalf. I argue that the benevolent language of

autonomy frequently adopted by advocates of “self-empowerment” through media

conceals an exploitative cultural logic that is characterized by certain unexamined

assumptions about visual media: to authenticate their authorial control, the subjects of

such participatory projects are required to actively and often entrepreneurially reify their

otherness by drawing on the rhetorical tropes of immediacy, directness, or

transparency—in a word, by deploying what we may call medial indexicality. New

vehicles are regularly harnessed to replenish the humanitarian archive with updated

visual “evidence” of otherness, with the noble savage recast as the obedient child, the

dignified animal, and the resourceful refugee.

As the subsequent sections will explain, the word “automatic” in the title of this

dissertation gestures toward the fecundity of primitivism as an attitude that permeates

through the intellectual, technological, and economic discourses from whose converging

influences contemporary humanitarian media empowerment inherits its rhetorical

strategies. This introductory chapter maps some key debates within ethnography, media

studies, and critical theory against which I locate the problems of humanitarian media,

concerning the topics of autoethnography, indexicality (or automatic registration), and

immaterial (or automatic) labor respectively. I argue that the unspoken primitivizing

binary animating these outwardly progressive debates finds symptomatic expression in

the similarly well-intentioned ideology of immediacy through which humanitarian

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advocates understand their order of priorities—of instrumentalizing images to save lives,

or saving lives in spite of images. Reversing the motto of “images in spite of all” coined

by Georges Didi-Huberman for distilling the political value of the image as a material

index or witness of a traumatic event,9 I pose another question: what are the

consequences of “handing over” visual media to disenfranchised and invisible subjects so

that they may employ indexical idioms to become recognizably eventful, in spite of the

capacity of such idioms to objectify, flatten, or simply denote their eventfulness as a sign

of alterity? With this question in mind, the following speculations critique the circular

logic that keeps the aesthetics and politics of media representations from being

considered as an organic part of the ethics of humanitarian intervention. Until this task is

urgently assumed as an indispensable aspect of humanitarianism’s commitment toward

the other, the burden of this neglected responsibility will continue to be borne, I argue, by

the abjected recipients of “media empowerment.”

AUTOETHNOGRAPHY: ETHICS, AESTHETICS, AND POLITICS

The analytic of “autoethnography” makes it possible to trace the central

problematic of humanitarian media advocacy to a shift in practices of visual anthropology

alongside the emergence of consumer video technologies, which led Rouch, and in later

decades, anthropologists and advocates of indigenous media, to conclude that the camera

would now “automatically” pass into the hands of the natives who had traditionally been

the object of anthropology. Articulated thusly in terms of overcoming the “us-them”

technological divide, autoethnography promised a visual idiom for combating the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!9 See Georges Didi-Huberman, Images In Spite of All (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

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imperialist impulses of ethnography, as an enterprise whose traditional definition has

hinged on maintaining the binary between technologically advanced and “backward”

cultures. I argue, however, that the adoption of “giving voice” and “social empowerment”

over and above textual concerns as the primary political imperative of autoethnography—

a hierarchy of priorities dictated under the aegis of the humanitarian intervention—

fetishizes the act of handing over the apparatus to the other as an authenticating mark of

reflexivity, one that is guaranteed by a visual language of immediacy. This section and

the next question the paternalistic logic that led Rouch, and other scholars who continued

his critical legacy, to the conclusion that newly simplified media were “automatically”

appropriate for native use. Although advances toward portable, lightweight, and personal

media unarguably dismantled the economic barriers to entry to image-production for

marginalized groups—an argument popularized by early practitioners of feminist video

even before indigenous video proponents10—the rhetoric of immediacy through which

humanitarian advocates have brokered the alliance of their beneficiaries with “user-

friendly” media maintains the ethnographic binary that autoethnography claims to

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!10 In her seminal volume of interviews with feminist film- and video-makers, Alexandra Juhasz chronicles a series of technological advances in visual media, attributing these developments, and accompanying ideological shifts, as a crucial condition of possibility of feminist media production as well as a number of other film/video-based social movements, including the New American Cinema in the 1960s, video collectives in the 1970s, activist video in the 1980s and web-based collectives in the 1990s and onward. Her list includes the invention of 8mm and Super 8 home movie cameras, lightweight 16mm cameras and synch-sound recording technologies, and cheap, fast 16mm film stock in the 1950s and 60s; handheld consumer video recorders such as the portapack in the 1970s, the camcorder in the 1980s and the digital camcorder in the 1990s; consumer-grade videotape and editing equipment such as 3/4” video, VHS, and Hi-8 in the 1980s; and digital editing software and hardware in the 1990s. Juhasz argues: “these changes in video technology made media production more accessible because the materials were lighter, easier to learn and handle, cheaper, and accessible to individuals outside of industry settings…[allowing] large numbers of women, people of color, and others to enter these otherwise costly and overtly professionalized media fields.” See Alexandra Juhasz, “Introduction,” in Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video, edited by Alexandra Juhasz (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 19-20.

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deconstruct.

As I elaborate in Chapter One, the ideology of immediacy invoked by

contemporary humanitarian media tends to take as its point of departure the abandonment

of the concern with medium specificity, textuality, and reflexivity that characterized

proto-discourses of autoethnography in the 1960s, in favor of the slogan of “process over

product” that was more typical among advocates of indigenous and grassroots video in

the 1970s and onward. Alongside Rouch’s practice of soliciting feedback from his

subjects, or “shared anthropology,” historians of ethnography identify Sol Worth and

John Adair’s 1966 “Navajo Film Themselves” project as a landmark event that

exemplified the structuring role of technological advances in audiovisual media in what

would become known in the 1980s, through the writings of James Clifford, George

Marcus and others, as the postmodern “crisis” or “predicament” in ethnographic

authority.11 Worth and Adair’s experiment, which involved providing six Navajo subjects

with 16mm camera equipment and some basic instructions in film production, purported

to investigate both “the cognitive processes involved in [film as] as a visual mode of

communication” and “the specific pattern, code, and rules for visual communication

within a cultural context.”12 Thanks to the lingering influence of Lévi-Straussian

structural anthropology on their research methods, Worth and Adair interpreted the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11 See Jay Ruby, “Speaking For, Speaking About, Speaking With, or Speaking Alongside: An Anthropological and Documentary Dilemma,” Visual Anthropology Review volume 7, number 2 (1991): 53-57; Faye Ginsburg, “Shooting Back: From Ethnographic Film to Indigenous Prodution/Ethnography of Media,” in A Companion to Film Theory, edited by Toby Miller and Robert Stam (Malden: Blackwell, 1999), 296. On the crisis in ethnographic authority see Writing Culture, edited by James Clifford and George Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Authority,” The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 21-54. 12 See Sol Worth and John Adair, Through Navajo Eyes: An Exploration in Film Communication and Anthropology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), 28.

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Navajo films as visible evidence of the role of culture as a static system of rules,

surmising that “cultural cognition” functioned as an ontological aspect of Navajo

communication. However, although these conclusions undoubtedly manifest the

discursive constraints of the epistemic frame within which the anthropologists were

operating, their interest in questioning how the medium-specificity of film as a culturally

constructed textual system impacted ethnographic (self-)representational practices also

prefigures Clifford’s forceful interrogation of text-making and rhetoric in written

ethnographies—like Clifford, Worth and Adair aimed to undermine the “ideology

claiming transparency of representation and immediacy of experience.”13

I propose that the dismissal of Worth and Adair’s project as a failed formalist

experiment by indigenous video advocates, who inherited their model of “handing over

the camera,” represents a key moment in the bifurcation of ethics from aesthetics and

politics that governs the representational practices of contemporary humanitarian media

empowerment initiatives. Citing the slogan of “process over product,” Faye Ginsburg,

Monica Frota, and other scholar-practitioners of indigenous video have mounted strongly

worded critiques of Worth and Adair’s investments in the formal analysis of films

produced by their Navajo subjects, arguing that the Navajo project reneged on what they

view as the most important contribution of new visual media—their potential for

“empowering” indigenous communities to achieve immediate political goals. These

scholars reject Worth and Adair’s nuanced interest in visual mediation as an

overindulgent distraction that interferes with the use of video by indigenous communities

as a political weapon. This repudiation of their own rhetorical interventions ultimately

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!13 See James Clifford, “Introduction: Partial Truths,” in Writing Culture, edited by James Clifford and George Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 2.

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intervenes in the commitment of indigenous video advocates to “process,” which they

understand as the transformative impact of the use of the video medium on indigenous

sociality, and vice-versa. By privileging the work of “giving voice” to indigenous groups

over and against the task of regarding the self-presentations of indigenous video

practitioners as “data to be interpreted, not the truth,”14 to borrow a phrase from Jay

Ruby, these scholars boil down the dialectical relationship between form and content (or

product and process) to the ethical act of handing over the camera to the other. Thus,

rather than regarding the “self” as a constantly mediated cultural entity, as the tenets of

autoethnography prescribe,15 these scholars envision the indigenous self as one that

belatedly “comes to voice” at the precise moment of handling the camera—consequently

they fail to account for the received set of representational tropes through which

indigenous video-makers articulate their cultural identity.

The humanitarian emergency functions, I argue, as an as-yet undiagnosed

ideological problematic underpinning the political motivations of indigenous video

scholars. Their polemic, tellingly articulated through metaphors of war, such as “shooting

back” and “taking aim,” bears out the troubled collusion of moral and military discourses

that together constitute and justify the logic of intervention.16 And in turn, indigenous

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!14 Ruby, “Speaking For, Speaking About, Speaking With, or Speaking Alongside,” 54. 15 Although understandings of autoethnography vary (a glossary of these variations is covered in Chapter One), definitions tend to cluster around the category of the self: as Deborah Reed-Danahay has noted, autoethnographies, whether native ethnographies, ethnic autobiographies, or autobiographical ethnographies, tend to take the form of self-narratives that place the self in social context. See Deborah Reed-Danahay, “Introduction,” in Auto/Ethnography: Rewriting the Self and the Social, edited by Deborah Reed-Danahay (Oxford: Berg Press, 1997), 9. 16 See Ginsburg, “Shooting Back”; Monica Frota, “Taking Aim: The Video Technology of Cultural Resistance,” in Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices, edited by Michael Renov and Erika Suderburg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 258-282. For the complicity of the humanitarian and military politics of intervention, see Didier Fassin, “Humanitarianism: A Nongovernmental Government,” in Nongovernmental Politics, edited by

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video advocacy’s disavowal of the ethical implications of form17 describes the primary

contradiction underpinning the interventionist discourses of child labor, animal rights,

and political asylum that inform contemporary humanitarian media empowerment

initiatives. Since these projects obtain their urgency of purpose from the lens of the

humanitarian emergency, whose abstracting connotations of the arbitrary, unsystematic,

and agent-less isolate human rights violations from their mediating contexts,18 their visual

interventions are shrouded by an aura of inevitability rather than choice, such that they

endorse a certain degree of representation violence in the work of bearing witness.

The remainder of this introduction will show how the adoption of indexical tropes

as a humanitarian media paradigm has transformed autoethnography—which began as an

experiment in textual reflexivity—into its opposite, so that the “self” of the other !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Michael Feher with Gaelle Krikorian and Yates McKee (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 149-160; this topic is discussed in detail in Chapter Three. 17 It is not my intention to suggest that such a bifurcated view of ethical and aesthetic politics was characteristic all of the social movements of the 1960s-70s that employed video, or that video is an inherently “political” medium (a determinist view that I address in Chapter One). Rather, I propose that the ethnocentrism through which certain strands of anthropology have understood their ethical task can illuminate this binary as it is mapped onto video and film. The feminist alternative/independent media movement (for which video represented a crucial counter-cultural format) arguably escaped the anti-formalist tendencies of the indigenous media movement on account of its alliance with the anti-realist trend in 1970s feminist film theory, which indigenous media largely reject on account of their allegiances to the Birmingham Cultural Studies School. Janet Walker and Diane Waldman suggest, for instance, that in the wake of influential essays by film theorists Claire Johnston and Julia Lesage, many feminist filmmakers deliberately embraced experimental and avant-garde forms as a way of rejecting realist and vérité techniques, which were argued to naturalize phallogocentric representations of women. See Janet Walker and Diane Waldman, “Introduction,” in Feminism and Documentary, edited by Janet Walker and Diane Waldman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 7-13. Although I cannot discuss this in greater detail here, Kirsten Marthe Lentz’s breakdown of the representational politics of television programming in the 1970s (which argues that the imperatives of “quality” and “relevance,” mapped onto feminist and racially oriented television series, reveals that femininity and race operate according to a politics of the signifier and of the referent, respectively) might also be extended to feminist and indigenous video of the 1970s. See Kirsten Marthe Lentz, “Quality Versus Relevance: Feminism, Race, and the Politics of the Sign in 1970s Television,” Camera Obscura volume 15, number 1 (2000): 44–93. 18 See Craig Calhoun, “The Idea of Emergency: Humanitarian Action and Global (Dis)Order,” in Contemporary States of Emergency: The Politics of Military and Humanitarian Interventions, edited by Didier Fassin and Mariella Pandolfi (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 29-58.

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functions less as a tool for interrogating asymmetries in the social text than as a vehicle

for recruiting marginalized individuals in new forms of commodifying labor.

Remarkably, the practice of enlisting indexicality for making legible the otherwise

ineffable clamor of subaltern subjects to dominant groups enacts a perversion of the

example so powerfully employed by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak for illustrating the

conundrum of subaltern subjects. In the conclusion of “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak

recalls the tale of a young female paramilitary agent in colonial India who, unable to

carry out a political assassination, committed suicide in a manner that employed her own

body as a text. Spivak suggests that by killing herself while she was menstruating (a

deliberate displacement of hegemonic narratives that inscribe female suicide within

sanctioned patriarchal scenarios), Bhuvaneshwari Bhaduri’s subversive and premeditated

use of her body as an index rewrote received notions concerning the unmitigated “truth”

of women’s bodies.19 If the index was deployed in this exceptional instance as an

insurgent strategy that reinstates the title of Spivak’s essay as an open question, asserting

Bhaduri’s selfhood in a positive, if ultimately destructive gesture, then the example of

humanitarian media shows that indexicality has now become the hegemonic media

grammar through which disenfranchised subjects are exhorted to make human rights

claims. At the same time, since documentary immediacy is positioned as the rhetorical

strategy by default for “exposing” or bringing to light Third World referents such that

they are recognizable to the West, the politics of recognition through which formerly

“invisible” or voiceless subjects are belatedly assisted to “come to voice” already assume

their alterity in advance. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!19 See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 103-4.

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INDEXICALITY, OR THE CIRCULARITY OF REFLEXIVITY

In recent years, the category of indexicality,20 which captured the curiosity of early

film theorists like André Bazin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Walter Benjamin, but which held

little interest during the Screen era on account of its indelible associations with discourses

of realism,21 has obtained a renewed cultural purchase among media scholars. Peirce’s

tripartite organization of iconic, symbolic, and indexical signs was viewed by some

structurally oriented film theorists of the 1970s as a welcome alternative to the more

linguistically oriented Sausseurian schema, since it enabled addressing the medium-

specificity of film’s connotative operations (an argument spearheaded by Peter Wollen).

However, as film scholar Mary Ann Doane suggests, the critical orientation of seventies

film theory, which “complicated and diversified the notion of medium specificity by

situating it as a structure or system—the apparatus—that orchestrated camera, spectator,

and screen in the production of a subject effect” may have kept indexicality (which Peirce

describes as a sign that is physically or “really affected” by its referent) from becoming a

serious object of inquiry, since its purported status as part of the “real” pre-empted

skepticism. With the advent of digital media technologies, indexicality names for many

film scholars the last vestiges of representational authenticity in an era of accelerating

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!20 Charles Sanders Peirce defines indexicality as the quality that sets indices (signs with a physical or causal relationship with their referent) apart from icons (signs that resemble their referents) and symbols (whose relationships with their objects are arbitrary or conventional). Charles Sanders Peirce, “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs,” in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, edited by Justus Buchler (New York: Dover, 1955), 101-115. 21 See Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973); Mary Ann Doane, “The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity,” differences volume 18, number 1 (2006): 130. Doane indicates that indexicality may have partnered well with the erstwhile project of carving out a devoted institutional space for film studies, whose disciplinary borders have once again come under question with the emergence of video, television, and digital media studies.

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dematerialization, where new digital formats are argued not only to subsume and flatten

the textural qualities of film and photography, but whose capacities for simulation and

manipulation also seem to sever the very possibility of a link between representation and

referent.22 Whereas painting and other “ritual” arts were previously designated as bearers

of authenticity and aura during the heyday of photographic media,23 film and

photography seem to have assumed their position as auratic media in comparison with the

emerging digital cultural dominant. Admittedly, the specificities of photography and film

are no longer located in their perspectival apparatus, narrative form, or their structuring

of spectatorial subject-positions, as the previous generation of media theorists argued, but

rather in their affordance of a visibly evident or documentary link with the filmed

referent, which is seen to endure both generic cues and any formal manipulation of the

image.24

I have argued that the affiliation of subaltern and non-Western subjects with the

indexical or “documentary” properties of visual media as opposed to other aesthetic

considerations pertaining to form evinces the pernicious persistence of ethnocentrism in

the humanitarian paradigm. But this equation also sheds light on an underexamined

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!22 For a critical survey of recent literature on indexicality, see Doane, “The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity,” 128-151. 23 I refer here to Walter Benjamin’s comments regarding the loss of aura with the advent of film and photography, which Benjamin labels as technologies of “mechanical reproduction.” See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 217-251. 24 Dai Vaughan writes, for instance, that the documentary status of film and photography is “more ontological than iconic.” See Dai Vaughan, “From Today, Cinema is Dead,” in For Documentary: Twelve Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 183. In “The Aesthetics of Ambiguity,” another essay in the same volume, he elaborates: “Like the photograph, film stakes a claim on reality which has nothing do with “realism” in any literary sense; and it is this claim which documentary aspires to fulfill” (Ibid 58). Vaughan argues, in other words, that realist and documentary genres represent an attempt to make good and invest interpretive meaning in the guarantee of documentary veracity already promised by the indexical link between the photographic image and its object.

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phonocentric impulse in the contemporary (re)turn to indexicality, wherein the specter of

primitive haunts the desire to position indexical media as the portal to what Doane calls

an idealized “fantasy of referentiality.”25 The index does indeed seem to strain the

interpretive logic of Charles Sanders Peirce’s classificatory schema of signs, which

informs film theory’s semiotic framework. Peirce describes signs as representations that

require a kind of projective or deductive work by an interpretive subject based on a set of

associational ideas or laws—but the index alone seems to preclude or elude the work of

interpretation.26 Symbols (most commonly represented by linguistic signs) require the

knowledge of a set of conventional laws in order to be comprehensible, while the work of

recognizing icons (which resemble their subjects) too requires facility with the laws of

qualitative, analogical, or parallel relations that connect the object and its icon.27 But

unlike the icon and symbol, Peirce describes his third type of sign, the index as one that

forcefully directs attention to an object not by force of logic or deductive reasoning, but a

kind of instinctive intuition or “blind compulsion.”28 He writes that the index, is

“really…affected by the Object…it is not the mere resemblance of its Object, even in

these respects that make it a sign, but it is the actual modification of it by the Object.”29

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!25 Doane, “The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity,” 143. 26 Peirce writes: “[a] sign or representamen, is something that stands to somebody as something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object. It stands for that object, not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea, which I have sometimes called the ground of the representamen.” See Peirce, Philosophical Writings, 99. 27 Peirce writes that symbols denote their objects only by means of conventional laws, or an “association of general ideas, which operate to cause the Symbol to be interpreted as referring to that Object” (Ibid 102). With icons, the laws (of parallelism, analogy, or convention) are what Peirce refers to as the “ground” of signification, a set of common ideas referred to by the perceiving subject in order to interpret a sign (Ibid 104-5). 28 Peirce, Philosophical Writings, 108. 29 Ibid 102. For examples of indices, Peirce cites phenomena such as footprints, weathercocks, barometers, and photographs, which involve a transfer of physical matter from referent to sign, as

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The uncanny proximity, contiguity, or adjacence attributed by Peirce to the relationship

between the index and its object has led Doane to speculate that, “[a]t times, the

disconcerting closeness of the index to its object raises doubts as to whether it is in fact a

sign, suggesting instead that the index is perched precariously on the very edge of

semiosis.”30

As I elaborate in Chapters One and Two, the phonocentric frames that have

historically justified describing the communication of “primitive” cultures and sub-

species as indexical throw into relief the ideological work that goes into imagining the

pre-semiotic or unmediated experience of referentiality afforded by indexical media.

Doane’s reading highlights a common strand connecting Peirce’s semiotic theory with

that of his contemporary Jakob von Uexküll, who is often attributed as the founder of the

field of zoosemiotics: the metaphysical capacity of the human subject for reason

represents a foundational assumption in both Peirce’s and Uexküll’s theories of

signification, such that the capacity for reading signs as signs is the province of “higher”

animals. Although Uexküll made tremendous inroads into evolving a non-anthropocentric

theory of signification, he ultimately elevates the human subject’s exceptional, world-

making ability for manipulating or “standing over” signs over and against all other

animals, who are instead held hostage by a fatal, corporeal attraction for environmental

signs. For instance, Uexküll regards animals not as interpreting subjects but as indexes of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!well as indicative signs such as a pointing finger and linguistic deixes, which share a time and space with their referent, and thus exist in immediate and present relation with it (Ibid 108-110). Although the deictic finger and linguistic deixis don’t share the transfer of physical matter characterized by many of Peirce’s other examples, Doane has suggested that linguistic deixis similarly poses the lure of the real. She writes: “Deixis is the moment when language seems to touch ground, to adhere as closely as it can to the present reality of speech.” See Doane, “The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity,” 134. 30 Mary Ann Doane, “Indexicality: Trace and Sign,” differences volume 18, number 1 (2007): 2.

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their environmental signs, insofar as their experience of these signs is not one of

recognizing or interpreting a sign (i.e. of signification as such) so much as a blind

attraction or compulsion that is physically and reciprocally marked on the animal’s body,

so that the animal “resembles” its “carrier of meaning.”31 Peirce’s qualification of the

index—as a special kind of icon that “resembles” its object not according to a known

qualitative or analogical law, but in being “actually modified” and affected by it—

resonates closely with Uexküll’s theory of how animals interpret and respond to signs

within their individual dwelling-milieus or umwelten. His nomination of the indexical as

a more elemental category of semiosis also sheds light on the kind of “direct,” embodied,

or pre-symbolic communion attributed by anthropologists and McLuhanites alike to oral

cultures—an attitude that I argue continues to influence the impulse to bequeath media

technologies to the inheritors of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s moniker of “people without

writing.”32

The recent turn to indexicality generates an opening, I contend, for a concertedly

reflexive investigation of the relationship between the dominant modes of signification of

visual media and normative modes of subjectivity: such an inquiry would extend the

legacy of Benjamin’s project of questioning the medium-specific impact of technological

changes on the human sensorium. But far from exploring these critical avenues,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!31 See Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With A Theory of Meaning, translated by Joseph D. O’Neil (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). Similarly, Peirce argues that the index is an “Icon of a peculiar kind” in that “it necessarily has some Quality in common with the Object, and it is in that respect that it refers to the Object.” See Peirce, Philosophical Writings, 102. Interestingly, when describing photographs, which might most commonly be regarded as icons, Peirce notes that indexicality forms the primary support of their iconicity: “this resemblance is due to the photographs being produced under such circumstances that they were physically forced to correspond point by point to nature” (Ibid 106). 32 See Claude Lévi-Strauss, “A Writing Lesson,” in Tristes Tropiques, translated by John Russell (New York: Criterion Books, 1961), 286-297.

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humanitarian media interventions instead document the flipside of film’s primitivization

in the medial drama that has captivated contemporary film theory, as it pertains to the

role of reflexivity in redeeming representational inequities. With the advent of digital

technologies, the mechanical capacity of film for artifice seems to have faded from

critical scrutiny, so that its medium specificity is identified with its most essential or

primitive element: the capacity for an unmediated encounter with the profilmic. The very

same misconception animates the positioning of photographic media by humanitarian

advocates as a “universal language” through which voiceless, pre-linguistic subjects can

transparently and unproblematically claim their rights, and thereby assume the selfhood

that has been denied them. I argue that the focalization of the visible handling of

indexical media by others of advanced digital cultures as a vehicle of reflexive inquiry

reveals a case of mistaken identity, wherein the capacity for an “authentic” medial

relation is thought to be a “natural” function of otherness and not the product of a

thoroughly technologized set of ideological beliefs. The nostalgic focalization of so-

called mimetic subjects (formerly oral cultures, children, animals, and racial others) as

bearers of “lost,” forgotten or discarded aspects of sensory perception typifies the

tendency of relegating indexical modes of engagement as an inherent quality of

primitives, rather than investigating how the impression of indexicality is itself a highly

constructed and mediated effect.33

Thus, the conscription of indexicality by humanitarian advocates for redeeming

the West’s guilt in this ongoing anthropological dilemma concerning the “fall” of its

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!33 Michael Taussig, in his book Mimesis and Alterity (which is discussed at length in Chapter Two), for instance, celebrates the handling of mimetic media by “mimetically capacious” primitives as an event that can assist Western civilizations in regaining access to their “repressed” mimetic faculty. See Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1992).

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“others” into technology serves less to emancipate these others than to confirm their

irreducible alterity. Chapter Three coalesces my argument that the pleasure of watching

impoverished non-Western subjects wielding the “gift” of the West’s discarded media

technologies should be analyzed as an important part of the libidinal machinery of

humanitarian charity. These “primitive scenes” of media empowerment reveal how the

humanitarian apparatus has assumed the supernumerary role of distributing rights to the

rightless, “the same as charitable persons do with their old clothes,” to quote Jacques

Rancière.34 However, the assumed resonance of these abjected subjects with indexical

media also circumscribes their speech within an ethnocentric frame, such that their pre-

mediated speech-acts are “returned to the sender,” to borrow another phrase from

Rancière, in the West’s own reified image.35 In the next, final, section of this introduction

I show how the fetishization of the image of agency in media empowerment initiatives

illustrates the inadequacy of reflexivity as a strategy for redeeming representational

inequities, since such reflexivity is already ingrained in the neoliberal logic of

contemporary representational economies.

IMMATERIAL LABOR, “AUTOMATIC” SUBJECTS

The case studies in my three chapters argue that humanitarianism’s rhetorical

investment in visual idioms of immediacy has extended political implications for those

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!34 Rancière continues: “Those rights that appear to be useless in their place are sent abroad, along with medicine and clothes, to people deprived of medicine, clothes, and rights. It is in this way, as the result of this process, that the Rights of Man become the rights of those who have no rights, the rights of bare human beings subjected to inhuman repression and inhuman conditions of existence. They become humanitarian rights, the rights of those who cannot enact them, the victims of the absolute denial of right.” See Jacques Rancière “Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?” South Atlantic Quarterly volume 103, number 2/3 (Spring/Summer 2004): 307. 35 Ibid 309.

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who are assisted in becoming subjects through media empowerment initiatives. On the

one hand, as I have already asserted, the unspoken ethnocentric assumptions that

motivate the practice of surrendering visual media to disenfranchised subjects in the

name of “empowerment” can be revealed to abrogate the purported enterprise of

autoethnographic self-reflection with which such subjects are charged. The documentary

image functions as a kind of medial closet for locating and bringing to light the

primitives, sub-species, and disenfranchised groups that are thought to be in “hiding,”

because they are regarded within the human rights framework as “subjects without a

self”: children are thought of as subjects who have yet to accede to selfhood, while

animals are definitionally self-less, and refugees are those who have been stripped of

their selfhood. Furthermore, since humanitarianism’s conception of the self is extracted

from the human rights tradition, its beneficiaries are ritually initiated into a normalizing

practice of selfhood that has its orienting coordinates in ethnocentrism,

anthropomorphism, and humanism. Consequently, the subjects who are recognized,

rewarded, and consecrated within the humanitarian paradigm tend to be those who most

immediately and entrepreneurially confess, display, and commodify their internalization

of these regulatory principles as a way of “coming to voice.”36 Rendered in reified form,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!36 Although this query exceeds the necessarily limited framework of this dissertation, a longer version of my study would undoubtedly merit an investigation of the mutual influences between humanitarian documentary practices and reality television genres, along the lines of Jon Dovey’s pioneering study of documentary and factual television, which argues that reality programming rewards the autobiographical performance and confessional display of abjection and perversion. Although Dovey’s project does not engage issues of ethnography, the primitivizing logic through which emerging “first person media” genres capacitate the aspirations of marginal individuals and groups remains a spectral presence throughout his book. This is especially so in his comments on confession, where Dovey suggests, drawing on Foucault, that the “speaking out” (which simultaneously connotes coming out and coming to voice) of people constructed as marginal, deviant, or outsiders is associated with a spiral of spectatorial pleasure and power—one that is legitimated by the self-evident positive, therapeutic, or “empowering” value attached to the act of confession. See Jon Dovey, Freakshow: First Person Media and Factual Television (London:

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the “truths” of these emerging selves inaugurate an emerging archive of primitivist

tropes. My chapters each elaborate the need for a new ethnographic vocabulary to

contend with the expansionist moral mandate that urges the humanitarian apparatus to

turn its sights ever outward to new figures of abjected otherness upon which to bequeath

the offering of empowered selfhood, often to their further disadvantage.

We can better understand how humanitarianism’s newly emancipated subjects are

recruited in a vexed set of ideological tasks by interrogating how the evidentiary quality

attributed to the documentary image couples with the interventionist principle of “saving

lives.” Humanitarian advocates understand their political task in negative or conservative

terms: of intervening to prevent, eliminate, or alleviate conditions that pose an immediate

danger to the lives of their beneficiaries—through any representational means necessary.

From the point of view of the twinned moral and military logics that constitute

humanitarian reason,37 the proposed alternative of “empowerment” through media

acquires in comparison an irrefutable charge of urgency. This is particularly so when

such media interventions are seen through the lens of the dualistic order of priorities that

dictate twentieth-century international human rights statutes, which frequently prescribe

replacing “harmful” or coercive cultural activities in favor of “benign” or voluntary

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Pluto Press, 2000), 1-4; 103-132. Laurie Ouellette and James Hay’s more recent discussion of reality television—as a cultural technology that privatizes the neoliberal mandates of self-help, -cultivation, and -actualization—positions reality programming within the history and evolution of post-welfare liberal governmentality. However, their insights could be further illuminated as a symptom of the humanitarian interventionist paradigm. The authors suggest but do not fully explore this connection in their chapter on philanthropic “life intervention” programming, which exemplifies what I describe in Chapter Three as a form of entrepreneurial disaster capitalism. See Laurie Ouellette and James Hay, “TV Interventions: Personal Responsibility and Techniques of the Self,” in Better Living Through Reality Television (Malden: Blackwell, 2008), 63-98. 37 See Didier Fassin, “Heart of Humaneness: The Moral Economy of Humanitarian Intervention,” in Contemporary States of Emergency: The Politics of Military and Humanitarian Interventions, edited by Didier Fassin and Mariella Pandolfi (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 269-294.

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substitutes.38 Humanitarianism’s embrace of the politics of voluntarism as life-giving or

emancipatory fully epitomizes Michel Foucault’s arguments regarding the positive

(rather than repressive) articulation of contemporary power,39 but additionally, the

moralism that invests the work of media empowerment with a self-evident positive value

can be shown to be of a particularly injurious neoliberal variety. To be sure, the pointedly

economic articulation of the calls to disadvantaged entities to liberate themselves by

producing humanitarian media commodities indicates humanitarianism’s complicity with

emerging neoliberal regimes of cultural production, which are characterized, according to

a group of Marxist scholars like Maurizio Lazzarato, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri,

by the extraction of imperceptible, undocumentable, or “immaterial” modes of labor,

precisely through appeals to “agency” and “participation.”

To offer a representative (but far from comprehensive) survey of the authors

primarily responsible for the formulation and popularization of this thesis, and their

positions: Paolo Virno’s coinage of “virtuosic labor” locates the specificity of the

contemporary in the collapse of the once-discrete spheres of labor, political action, and

intellectual activity, and in the contiguous emergence and proliferation of performative,

intellectual, and communicative modes of labor that, like politics, find their fulfillment in

their own perpetuation rather than in a discrete “end product.”40 Lazzarato’s notion of

“immaterial labor” takes not Hannah Arendt but Louis Althusser as its theoretical point

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!38 In Chapter One I argue that this dualism is illustrated most prominently by late twentieth-century international child labor standards, which prioritize the elimination of harmful child labor in lieu of benign child work; see for instance Holly Cullen, “Child Labor Standards: From Treaties to Labels,” in Child Labor and Human Rights: Making Children Matter, edited by Burns H. Weston (London: Lynne Rienner, 2005), 86-116. 39 See Michel Foucault, “The Repressive Hypothesis,” in The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: An Introduction, translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 15-49. 40 See Paolo Virno, “Labor, Action, Intellect,” in A Grammar of the Multitude, translated by Isabella Bartoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004), 47-71.

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of departure, defining post-Fordist labor in terms of a deterritorialization of production

from the spatial confines typical of factory work, and the reproduction of the ideological

and subjective conditions favorable for capitalism rather than the production of tangible

commodities. Hardt and Negri’s adaptation of Lazzarato’s term re-orients the discussion

around questions of affect and informatization, emphasizing the productive impact of

new networked technologies on structures of feeling, resulting in voluntary, unpaid, and

pleasurable expressions of what new media theorist Tiziana Terranova refers to as “free

labor.”41 Meanwhile, feminist interventions by Leopoldina Fortunati and Giovanna

Franca Dalla Costa provide an important revisionist perspective, arguing that “feminine”

forms of uncompensated or undercompensated affective, manual and libidinal labor such

as housework, prostitution, and care-work represent the unconscious of postmodern

forms of labor.42

Although the range of interests of these scholars and the valences of their theses

vary substantially, as indicated by the diversity of their vocabularies and philosophical

commitments, there is general agreement among them that the epochal difference of post-

Fordist labor lies in the circumvention of mediating categories like class, race, and

gender, and the focalization of pre-subjective communicative capacities at the heart of

expropriation, such that the productive potential of subjects is seamlessly put to work in

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!41 See Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” translated by Paul Colilli and Ed Emory, in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, edited by Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 132-147; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, “The Becoming Common of Labor,” in Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2005), 103-129; Tiziana Terranova, “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,” Social Text volume 18, number 2 (Summer 2000): 33-58. 42 See Leopoldina Fortunati, The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labor, and Capital (New York: Autonomedia, 1995); Giovanna Franca Dalla Costa, The Work of Love: The Role of Unpaid Housework as a Condition of Poverty and Violence at the Dawn of the 21st Century, translated by Enda Brophy (New York: Autonomedia, 2008).

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the service of capital. But this shared condition of expropriation is also seen as the basis

of new commonalities. Knitted together by their “automatic” participation in a “general

intellect,” laboring subjects are thought to forge newly horizontal and potentially

emancipatory bonds across class lines on account of their common communicative

potential; indeed, Franco Berardi has proffered the neologism “cognetariat” as an

comprehensive category for describing the alienated condition of all post-Fordist

subjects.43 In my third chapter, I demonstrate how the growing consensus among cultural

critics regarding the thesis that immaterial labor represents the hegemonic mode of

cultural production in our postmodern, globalized era evidences the pervasive influence

of the ideology of immediacy from which discourses of humanitarianism also suffer.

Here, the “blinding light” of the dominant model keeps even the most insightful cultural

critics of our time from attending to the aesthetics and politics of the concrete forms that

mediate, rather than automatically illuminate, the communicative acts of the

dispossessed—these include media forms, but also categories such as the self. By the

same token, I argue that humanitarianism’s forensic emphasis on immediately visible

regimes of knowledge and proof blindsides and de-materializes the neoliberal forms of

cultural labor that its subjects aspire to undertake precisely as a means of leveraging their

class position.

My dissertation provides a two-pronged approach to these issues: each case study

addresses humanitarian media empowerment initiatives at the nexus of discourses

pertaining to autoethnography, indexicality, and immaterial labor, while individual

chapters dwell on the specificities of these critical problematics. Chapter One, titled

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!43 See Franco “Bifo” Berardi, The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009).

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“Immaterial Child Labor: Media Advocacy, Autoethnography, and the Case of Born Into

Brothels,” examines the liberatory impulses of child media advocacy through the film

Born Into Brothels, which documents a humanitarian initiative to financially liberate

Third World children from coerced sex-work by selling photographs produced by them.

Through a reading of the self-orientalizing aesthetic of transparency encouraged in the

children’s photographs, as well as the enduring ethnographic mythology that sees art as a

passage from wildness to civilization, I demonstrate how such child media advocacy

initiatives put to work the “immaterial” or affective labor of children in the production of

what the anthropologists John and Jean Comaroff call “ethno-commodities.” My second

chapter, “Automatic Ethnography: Animal Artists in the Global ‘Humane-itarian’

Economy,” critiques contemporary animal rights campaigns that locate the humanity of

animals in their capacity for reproducing figurative art, arguing that such discourses of

the humane reproduce anthropocentric modes of signification and subjectivity.

Contrasting this with contemporary artists who immerse their media (ranging from video

cameras, steel, and canvas) within animal environments to obtain inscriptions from

animal subjects, I explore how the notion of indexicality can be redeemed as a non-

anthropocentric semiotic interface for overcoming the lures of “going native” or

“becoming animal,” so as to foreground the technological, affective, and ideological

supports of the indexical image rather than its unmediated quality. Finally, in the third

chapter, “Taking Refuge in Disaster Capitalism: Speculative Acts and Humanitarian

Immediacy in Trouble The Water,” I interrogate the practice of “empowering” victims of

disaster as amateur reporters providing eyewitness testimony of disaster zones, through a

reading of Trouble The Water, a film produced during and in the aftermath of Hurricane

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Katrina. I argue that the film’s dramatization of the documentary immediacy of such

survivor footage is symptomatic of the tendency of humanitarian testimonial initiatives to

capitalize on states of emergency as ways to amplify the mass media’s democratic

potential. This rhetoric of immediacy permeating humanitarianism and its critical

frameworks reinforces the racialized distribution of precarity, a distribution that is

encapsulated in the spectacle of catastrophe.

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CHAPTER ONE

IMMATERIAL CHILD LABOR: MEDIA ADVOCACY, AUTOETHNOGRAPHY, AND THE CASE OF BORN INTO BROTHELS

KIDS WITH CAMERAS

Running a Google search for Born Into Brothels takes you directly to the website

for Kids with Cameras.44 As the homepage loads, the opening image features a grassy

playground enclosed by a modernist concrete structure (see Fig. 1).45 A number of

classrooms look out onto the yard, and the shadowy figure of a teacher gazes out

benevolently through one of the windows. In the foreground, four young girls dressed in

sportswear play soccer on the grass, and in the distance, two boys fly a kite atop the

terrace of the concrete building, whose second level appears to hold a number of living

areas. The building is hemmed in by trees, and occupies the entire frame—no identifying

features suggest its location other than the brown skin of the children at play. The image

has a somewhat ghostly quality, and closer examination reveals that it is a digital

composite of photorealistic figures superimposed on a simulated architectural scale

drawing. The text overlaid on this image invites your participation in the “Hope House”

campaign: “Help Us Build a Home for Children from Calcutta’s Red Light District.”

Every few seconds, this image ensemble alternates with the cover-art of the film Born !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!44 http://www.kids-with-cameras.org/home/ [Accessed February 5, 2010]. 45 See the appended “List of Illustrations” for all images referenced in this dissertation.

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Into Brothels (dir. Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman, Red Light Films, 2004), and the

anonymous figures of children at play are replaced by the iconic faces of the eight

children featured in this award-winning documentary film (see Fig. 2). Centered in a

frontal shot, these smiling faces entreat you to donate money to the campaign by clicking

the links embedded within and alongside the alternating images. Some links provide

background information on Born Into Brothels, detailing how Briski’s photography

workshops with the children of prostitutes in Calcutta during the making of the film

inspired the establishment of the non-profit organization Kids with Cameras in 2002.

Others connect to satellite workshops in Haiti, Jerusalem, and Cairo that aim to

“empower…children through the art of photography.” Throughout the website numerous

conspicuously located links solicit your support for the Hope House project by hosting

fundraising parties and purchasing merchandize related to the film, such as DVDs,

soundtrack CDs, and photographs produced by children in the workshops. But by far the

most prominently visible sale items are books and prints of the original set of

photographs showcased in the film Born Into Brothels—these are located at the end-point

of a number of short-cut tabs, in addition to being the focus of the “Kids’ Gallery,” a

highlight of the website. If your eye isn’t drawn here—this is unlikely, since the

“Gallery” link is located at an eye-line level with the title in the navigation bar—and you

click instead on “About the Kids,” a tapestry of portraits unfolds, revealing close-up

individual photos of the child stars of Brothels. These portraits, accompanied by the

briefest of biographical descriptions, lead back to the same set of prints organized

according to their young authors.46

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!46 These elements of the website can be seen by following the links to: http://www.kids-with-cameras.org/aboutus/?page=partners (a full list of sponsors and partner organizations, which

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The networks of links on the Kids with Cameras website makes manifest on a

formal level the complex political economy of child media advocacy, an emerging arena

of humanitarian mediation that this chapter situates and analyzes through a reading of the

film Born Into Brothels. The structure of the Kids with Cameras site posits a causal link

between purchasing a print or a book online and effecting change remotely in the lives of

disadvantaged Third World children. The visitor to the website is hailed as a node within

a global humanitarian apparatus who can, to borrow the slogan of the eponymous

website, “save the world one click at a time.”47 This promise of moral redemption for a

minimal amount of effort on the part of the user/consumer (literally, clicking on a

hyperlink) functions according to the Web 2.0 logic of user-empowerment that Tara

McPherson has dubbed “volitional mobility”—a feeling of mobility marked by a

heightened sensation of choice, subjectivity, and causality that is paradoxically an effect

of formal constraint and structuring.48 But it also offers an important update to that logic:

by referring the consumption of cultural difference to the (presumably Western, middle-

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!include NGOs like Amnesty International, philanthropic foundations, and corporate sponsors); http://www.kids-with-cameras.org/houseparty/ (donation and fundraising suggestions); http://www.kids-with-cameras.org/kidsgallery/ and http://www.kids-with-cameras.org/aboutthekids/ (photo gallery and bios of the children) [Accessed February 5, 2010]. The children’s photographs are also available in the form of a hardcover coffee-table book: Zana Briski, Born Into Brothels: Photographs by the Children of Calcutta (New York: Umbrage, 2004). 47 http://www.oneclickatatime.org/ [Accessed February 5, 2010]. This website claims to be a hub for hundreds of charitable organizations, organized by cause rather than name. It distinguishes itself from other online charity drives with the contention that the “only cost to [the donor] is time.” Each click by the user is recognized by sponsors who “donate” funds in the form of advertising fees to the charity chosen by the user. 48 For McPherson “volitional mobility” distinguishes the phenomenology of web surfing from other media interfaces, wherein the sense of causality associated with interacting with a “live” link induces a visceral sensation of transformation that stands in for (and potentially stands in the way of) actual social change. Tara McPherson, “Reload: Liveness, Mobility, and the Web,” New Media Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, edited by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan (London: Routledge, 2006), 202; 205.

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class) user as a solution to Third World problems, the website positions “clicking,” a

particularly facile and transient mode of online interactivity, as a form of activism.

The Kids with Cameras website’s model of appealing to the spectator as an agent

of change mirrors the ethos of emancipation through media that drives the narrative of

Born Into Brothels. The film chronicles an advocacy project carried out by co-director

and photojournalist Zana Briski. While documenting the lives of women prostitutes in the

Sonagachi district of Calcutta, India, Briski turns instead to teaching photography to the

children of these prostitutes, to (in her words) “see this world through their eyes.”

Initially, the film posits photography as an exposure to producing art—a means of

building the children’s confidence, and thereby transforming their consciousness.

However, Briski’s project undergoes a gradual transformation of its own over the course

of the film. No longer satisfied with merely widening the children’s horizons, Briski

becomes invested in liberating the children from the brothels and installing them upon the

path to legality, higher education, and social repute. Her goal becomes to assist the

children in their own emancipation by setting up a non-profit (Kids with Cameras) to

fund their continued education, fueled by the sale of their own photographs of brothel

life. The vision of “Hope House” on the Kids with Cameras website embodies the

apotheosis of this reform project, as an imagined space of clarity and visibility where

children participate in wholesome age-appropriate activities under the watchful eyes of

an authority figure.

Born Into Brothels frames Briski’s intervention in terms of safeguarding the

children of prostitutes from an imminent future of illegal and promiscuous labor, by

positing the liberatory benefits of literacy in media as an alternative to commercial sex

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work. But in doing so, it effaces the manner in which Briski’s project advocates

autoethnography, or a process of self-othering through photography, as a lucrative

technique of commodification—one whose success trades on fetishizing the figure of the

child. I analyze the discursive positioning of the photographs taken by the children within

the narrative structure of Briski’s film,49 as well as their afterlives as commodities that

brand the film, paying particular attention to the system of rewards and controls

developed for streamlining the content of the children’s artistic production as an

instrument of self-determination. In investigating the qualities that makes these

photographs so appropriate for global circulation, I find that a regulatory cultural logic

underpins the incitement to photographic discourse that mediates the children’s

autoethnographic labor.

The figure of the child, as an emissary of hope whose sheer potentiality is both

perilous and imperiled, occupies a fraught position in the representational discourses of

Born Into Brothels, and within the conceptual framework of child media advocacy. I

argue that this subset of contemporary participatory humanitarian media practices derives

its ideological assumptions from a trajectory of ethnographic thinking dating back to

Enlightenment-era anxieties surrounding homo ferus, or “savage man,” a fiction that

found frequent articulation in the figure of the “wild child.” In the discussion that

follows, I begin by situating Born Into Brothels within a genealogy of autoethnographic

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!49 I refer throughout the paper to Briski’s authorial choices in Born Into Brothels. This is not intended to de-emphasize the role of co-director Ross Kauffman. I merely reflect and emphasize the film’s own mobilization of the primacy of Briski’s authorship in its diegetic and public self-presentation—a topic that itself deserves further interrogation but which I do not take up here in depth. While Ross Kauffman is credited as co-director, -writer, -editor, and cinematographer, he is typically recognized more for his role as producer of the project, particularly founding Red Light Films, the banner under which the film is produced, in association with ThinkFilm and HBO/Cinemax Documentary Films.

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media production that has its inception in the 1966 Navajo Film Themselves Project and

which has persisted in subsequent decades in the form of the indigenous video movement

and diffuse humanitarian “media empowerment” projects oriented around various

beleaguered, disadvantaged, or subaltern subjects. I argue that the image of the child,

uncertainly situated between savagery and civilization, haunts the paternalistic visual

politics of participatory media in the ethnographic tradition. Shunning a more critical

concern with the mediation of difference by semiotic conventions and narrative forms,

autoethnographic media practices have tended instead to cast ethnographic subjects in the

idealized mold of the mimetic child; accordingly their rhetorical strategies are

premediated by the conviction that the physical handling of the apparatus by the other

necessarily guarantees authenticity. Conversely, the contemporary documentary genre of

child media advocacy inherits its primitivizing visual language from the ethnographic

tradition. As my reading of Born Into Brothels explicates, the film’s emphasis on visual

idioms of immediacy and transparency not only detracts from the neoliberal moralism

guiding Briski’s politics of intervention, but also dematerializes the commodifying labor

demanded from her marginalized beneficiaries in the name of “progress.” I argue, in

other words, that child media advocacy puts Third World children to work in producing

reified—and commercially viable—images of their own alterity that buttresses

ethnocentric notions about the Western self.

This exploration of a nexus of concerns conglomerated around childhood

addresses one of the overarching questions of this dissertation: the limits of speculating

as to the communicative potential of invisible, imperceptible, and other similarly “bare”

subjectivities or conditions. Together with its spinoff project Kids with Cameras, Born

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Into Brothels presents a rich site through which to examine the technologies of

representation that encourage and enable children to mobilize their affective capacities

for obtaining currency in the circuits of global media, including the internet, film

festivals, art galleries, museums, and other fora. The film’s uneasy stance on the topic of

children’s labor illustrates that the liberal discourses of humanitarian media are not

necessarily exempt from the exploitative neoliberal project of garnering affective,

virtuosic, or “immaterial” labor that we have grown accustomed to associating with the

state, multinational capital, and mainstream media. This earnestly humanist text not only

affords an opportunity for reassessing the stakes of media advocacy and its attendant

liberalist logics of “empowerment,” but also behaves as a prism for refracting the aporia

surrounding the laboring potential of children in contemporary scholarship on human

rights. When critical thinking of this kind becomes complicit with popular discourses of

child media advocacy in an unspoken ethnographic impulse to enshrine childhood as a

state that is representative of the “outside” of culture, labor, and civilization, projects

such as Born Into Brothels remain, I propose, in its blind spot.

NAVAJO WITH CAMERAS: AUTOETHNOGRAPHY THEN AND NOW

In the summer of 1966, anthropologists Sol Worth and John Adair entered a

Navajo reservation with 16mm film cameras, tripods, and editing equipment and initiated

the Navajo Film Themselves project, now widely acknowledged as one of the earliest

attempts to “put the camera directly into native hands.”50 In their book-length chronicle

of the project, Through Navajo Eyes, Worth and Adair describe their work as a study of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!50 Faye Ginsburg, “Indigenous Media: Faustian Contract or Global Village?” Cultural Anthropology volume 6, number 1 (Feb 1991): 5.

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“how a group of people structure their view of the world—their reality—through film.”51

They tentatively label their method “Bio-Documentary,” or “a film made by a person to

show how he feels about himself and the world. It is a subjective way of showing what

the objective world that a person sees is “really” like…this kind of film bears the same

relation to documentary film that a self-portrait has to a portrait or an (autobiography to

a) biography [sic].”52 An examination of Worth and Adair’s approach to “bio-

documentary” reveals a most intriguing and prescient interest in the medium specificity

of semiotic conventions and narrative form as arbitrating factors in ethnographic

research. Rather than coaching their Navajo pupils—the majority of whom had never

before encountered a film, let alone a camera—in the history of Western cinematic

traditions, Worth and Adair took the habituation of Western subjects to popular forms

under ethnographic scrutiny, with the Navajo as “control” subjects. Accordingly, they

attempted to “neutrally” introduce camera and editing equipment to their students as mere

machinery, without suggesting the cultural purpose of cinema, or influencing them with

regard to the content, execution, or form of the films they produced.

Worth and Adair’s fascinated account of their research findings, upon viewing the

formally disorienting films produced by their students bristles with a Benjaminian

investment in the political consequences of the impact of new technologies on modes of

perception and cognition—they remark for instance upon the Navajo filmmakers’

independent “discovery” of classical and modernist cinematic conventions (such as

continuity editing, realist aesthetics, and montage) alongside unique and explicitly

politicized expressions of syntax (such as the use of interminable sequences of subjects !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!51 Sol Worth and John Adair, Through Navajo Eyes: An Exploration in Film Communication and Anthropology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), 7. 52 Ibid 25.

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walking across the countryside to procure ingredients for producing indigenous artifacts,

as a way of making the sheer duration and effort of Navajo cultural labor eventful.)53 At

the same time, the ethnocentric framework through which Worth and Adair decode (or

rather, pre-encode) the films made by the Navajo belies the emphasis on the formal

mediation of subjectivitity and cultural selfhood promised in their articulation of bio-

documentary. Despite their visionary impulse to apply the principles of linguistic analysis

to visual phenomena, which predates the semiotic turn in film theory, the anthropologists

approach the Navajo films from a functionalist standpoint, interpreting their visual

coding, narrative syntax, style, and textual organization as scientific evidence of the

ontology of Navajo communication. Most significantly, the physical handling of the

equipment, materials, and processes involved in filmmaking by their six Navajo students

confirms for Worth and Adair that their visual production is distinctly and authentically

“Navajo.”54 In general, Worth and Adair’s investigation of the relationship between

culture and semiosis is overridden by a static view of cultural categories that also

preempts their choice of pupils: an “artist” or acculturated Navajo, a “girl,” a “craftsman”

and “craftswoman,” a “person with political ambitions,” and “person with no craft or

political ambition.”55 Thus, rather than regarding the film medium as a structuring

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!53 At one point, Worth and Adair compare the Navajo Film Themselves project with various other instances where individuals emerge as subjects through technology, such as the use of prosthetic voice-implants by people without a voice box and children’s language acquisition (Ibid 87; 90-91; 137-8). 54 “We reasoned that if a member of the culture being studied could be trained to use the medium so that with his hand on the camera and editing equipment he could choose what interested him, we would come closer to capturing his vision of the world” (Ibid 14). 55 Ibid 50. Visual anthropology scholar Sam Peck, for instance, proffers that the Navajo Project suffers from a naïve and ethnocentric view of autochthonous identity—for instance, Worth and Adair are said to have chosen Alfred Clah, an “acculturated” Navajo, to rank among their students, for the purpose of studying the effect of acculturation on “Navajo visual grammar,” which is otherwise argued to be “unique” and untouched by the conventions of Western

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constraint through which “Navajo subjectivity” is both manifested and recalibrated, they

interpret their most interesting findings as proof of pure alterity—with the indexical

quality of the Navajo’s filmed images corroborating the self-evidence of this reading.

Worth and Adair’s turn to indexicality as a way of shoring up their faith in culture

as an edifice that precedes mediation keeps them from realizing their promising interest

in medium specificity. However, their insights regarding the mediation of emerging

subjectivities by formal idioms and rhetorical tropes is altogether dismissed as

“apolitical” in subsequent iterations of their influential experiment in handing over the

camera to the other, which have been executed under the humanitarian aegis of

“autoethnography.” Despite critiques of ethnocentrism and positivism from later scholars

of indigenous media, Worth and Adair’s pioneering efforts in thinking ethnographically

about film have been argued by Faye Ginsburg and other ethnographers to have played a

key role in legitimizing film as an object of anthropological study, and toward the

acceptance of visual and media anthropology as serious fields of academic inquiry.

Furthermore, their then-radical “shared” approach to cultural knowledge production is

thought to have precipitated the imperative toward self-examination, reflexivity, and

experimentation that James Clifford, George Marcus, Michael Fischer and others have

described as a “crisis” in ethnographic authority in the mid-1980s.56 “Autoethnography”

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!production and editing. Sam Peck, “Indigenous Media Then and Now: Situating the Navajo Film Project,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video volume 17, number 3 (2000): 274. 56 See Faye Ginsburg, “Shooting Back: From Ethnographic Film to Indigenous Prodution/Ethnography of Media,” in A Companion to Film Theory, edited by Toby Miller and Robert Stam (Malden: Blackwell, 1999), 296; George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). The pioneering work of Jean Rouch in participatory ethnographic filmmaking deserves to be studied in further detail for its contributions toward the advocacy model that I examine, but he does not figure here owing to the limitations of space in the chapter.

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has since emerged as a privileged site for such methodological reflection. The term

autoethnography is now often employed as a shorthand for self-reflection or reflexivity in

ethnography; for instance Carolyn Ellis and Arthur P. Bochner, propose “evocative” or

autobiographical narration on the part of the ethnographer as a postmodern strategy for

challenging realist notions of empirical evidence, self-present voice, and coherent

subjectivity.57 This paradigm of the “self as journey”—also adopted recently by cinema

scholar Catherine Russell—emphasizes the culturally constituted selfhood of the

ethnographer as a site for critical reflection.58 However the predominant understanding of

autoethnography builds on Mary Louise Pratt’s use of the term to describe the discursive

struggles of colonized subjects. Pratt’s coinage of the neologism “autoethnography” in

her seminal 1992 text Imperial Eyes offers a critically informed and theoretically

sophisticated rubric through which to revisit the impetus behind Worth and Adair’s

notion of bio-documentary. She writes, “[i]f ethnographic texts are a means by which

Europeans represent to themselves their (usually subjugated) others, autoethnographic

texts are those the others construct in response to or in dialogue with those metropolitan

representations.”59

Pratt’s understanding of autoethnography, which emphasizes transculturation,

hybridity, and ideological struggle in cross-cultural representation, resonates closely with

the vocabulary employed by anthropologist Faye Ginsburg for describing the work of

activist scholars working in collaboration with indigenous video-makers in the 1970s and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!57 Carolyn Ellis and Arthur P. Bochner, “Autoethnography, Personal Narrative, Reflexivity: Researcher as Subject,” in Handbook of Qualitative Research, edited by Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2000), 733-68. 58 Catherine Russell, “Autoethnography: Journeys of the Self,” in Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 275-314. 59 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 7.

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onward. Within the discipline of visual anthropology, Ginsburg, Terence Turner, and

Monica Frota (née Feitosa) are generally considered heirs to Worth and Adair’s model of

“shared anthropology”—and in the true tradition of successors, they work hard to

distinguish their approach from that of their forefathers. The main intervention of these

scholars, after acknowledging the intellectual and disciplinary contributions of the

Navajo project, is to emphasize the importance of social process rather than filmic

product in indigenous video production. Ginsburg exemplifies this position when she

argues, “Worth and Adair failed to consider seriously potential cultural differences in the

social relations around image-making and viewing…Their project…to see if [Navajo]

films would be based on a different film “grammar” based on Navajo

worldview…focused overmuch on the filmic rather than the social frame.”60 In contrast,

she describes the use of video by Australian Aboriginal people as “innovations in both

filmic representation and social process, expressive of transformations in cultural

identities in terms shaped by local and global conditions of the late 20th century.”61 In her

various writings, Ginsburg repeatedly highlights the instrumental role of video in social

transformation, such as internal and external communication, self-determination, and

resistance to outside domination.62

This chastening critique is mainly an indictment of the Navajo Project’s

disinterest in “empowering” its native participants through the use of film. Feitosa writes,

“‘Through Navajo Eyes’ expresses a scientific experiment centered on the researchers

instead of the “makers’” interests. The project did not by itself give rise to any further

Navaho [sic] film projects nor provided a viable means of self-representation through !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!60 Ibid 95. Also see Ginsburg, “The Parallax Effect”; Ginsburg, “Shooting Back.” 61 Ibid 92. The italicization is my own. 62 Ginsburg, “Indigenous Media: Faustian Contract or Global Village?”, 92-95.

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visual media.”63 As we see here, the polemic of indigenous video scholars also repudiates

Worth and Adair’s “scientific” interest in film language and medium specificity, an

investment that was shared by contemporaneous theories of film semiotics and the

cinematic apparatus, later known as Screen theory. Like proponents of media

anthropology who locate themselves in the tradition of British cultural studies, these

indigenous media scholars are anxious to dismiss scientifically oriented explanatory

frameworks as “totalizing.”64 For them, the affordability, portability, ease of operation,

and relative “openness” of video’s distribution infrastructure represents the promise of a

corrective to the orientalizing dimensions of ethnography that systematically “Third

World-ize” certain populations who do not enjoy continued access to advanced media

technologies as a means of world-making.65 Ginsburg, Turner, and Frota therefore

conceptualize providing indigenous populations with video equipment and training in

war-like terms as a “defiant” appropriation, “taking aim,” or “shooting back”66 by voices

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!63 Monica Feitosa, “The Other’s Visions: From the Ivory Tower to the Barricade,” Visual Anthropology Review volume 7, number 2 (Fall 1991): 48. 64 See Faye D. Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin, “Introduction,” in Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 1-38. 65 Ginsburg attributes the emergence of the indigenous video movement to a number of political, intellectual, and technological developments: the postcolonial movements toward self-determination and the radicalization of the academy in the 1960s that led up to the poststructuralist turn in anthropology, the global dissemination and penetration of media in the 1970s and 1980s, in the form of an aggressive marketing of broadcast and VCR technologies as well as the advent of consumer media production technologies (especially inexpensive portable video cameras), and relatively democratic distribution possibilities for the same, such as public access cable (Ginsburg, “Indigenous Media: Faustian Contract or Global Village?”, 95-96). Ginsburg has argued the ramifications of these new discursive conditions for representational politics, emphasizing the stakes of indigenous video production. She contends that ethnographic responsibility demands sustained explorations of approaches that go beyond models of “negotiated reading” made popular by the Birmingham Center for Cultural Studies. See Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod and Larkin, “Introduction,” 1-6. 66 See Terence Turner, “Defiant Images: The Kayapo Appropriation of Video,” Anthropology Today volume 8, number 6 (Dec 1992): 5-16; Ginsburg, “Shooting Back”; Monica Frota, “Taking Aim: The Video Technology of Cultural Resistance,” in Resolutions: Contemporary Video

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that have historically been silenced by the structural effects of the ethnographic binary or,

to borrow Fatimah Tobing Rony’s term, been rendered “ethnographiable.”67

Ginsburg et al. do in fact offer highly sophisticated context-specific theorizations

of how indigenous video can serve as a local tool for articulating specialized needs,

improving community bonds, and preserving information for future generations over and

above the more ambitious goal of rectifying ethnographic hierarchies by realigning local-

global social relations.68 At the same time, there is a problematic tendency in their

accounts to assume that the “indigenous voice” is, as Rachel Moore writes, “in and of

itself a good thing,” immune to discursive hierarchies of gender, caste, and social

position, not to mention received rhetorical tropes from the anthropologists who provide

them with equipment and training.69 Underexamined by indigenous video scholars

themselves, the keywords that cluster around their discussions of video (advocacy,

mobilization, activation, and empowerment of “silenced voices”) have proved attractive

for a number of more recent humanitarian ventures that unproblematically borrow the

indigenous media advocacy model and its slogan of “empowerment” for liberating a

whole host of beleaguered others, including children, women, girls, racial and sexual

minorities, and the mentally or physically disabled. One such instance is what we might

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Practices, edited by Michael Renov and Erika Suderburg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). 67 Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 7. 68 For a fuller account of the aims of indigenous video see Ginsburg, “Indigenous Media: Faustian Contract or Global Village?” 69 Moore also offers an excellent critique of the tendency of indigenous video scholars to encourage the “voicing” of dissent through discourse rather than traditional forms of violent conflict, arguing that the invitation to discourse ultimately functions as a disciplinary technique that is advantageous for governmental and non-governmental entities, but not necessarily for the indigenous groups themselves. Rachel Moore, “Marketing Alterity,” Visual Anthropology Review volume 8, number 2 (September 1992): 16-26.

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call the child media advocacy movement. Born Into Brothels and Briski’s non-profit

organization Kids with Cameras would fall within this category, as would more recent

emulations of the Brothels model.70 Although practices of giving cameras to children

have been ongoing since the 1960s,71 child-produced content has become increasingly

common in personal and autobiographical documentary genres since the mid- to late-

1990s where, as Michael Renov has noted, the subjectivities of diverse historical

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!70 Some instances of such projects include Through Our Own Eyes, ZoomUganda, and Ninos De La Amazonia. Mounted in 2010 by the Plan International, a Europe- and Canada-based non-profit organization, Through Our Own Eyes involved training fourteen street children in Dhaka, Bangladesh to document their lives using photography and video so as to “speak out and promote their own rights.” See http://plancanada.ca/NetCommunity/Page.aspx?pid=2522 [Accessed April 2, 2010]. ZoomUganda, an 2006 initiative funded by the Harambee Center, a US non-profit based in Portland OR, is devoted to improving the lives of twelve orphaned Ugandan girls by equipping them with 35mm consumer SLR cameras. The girls are encouraged to maintain accounts of their struggles in the form of photo-diaries, which are used by the Harambee Center as a showcase for acquiring continuing financial support for the girls’ education and housing. The ZoomUganda website and lecture presentations of the girls’ photo-diaries by founder Julie Resnick on the US academic circuit function as circulatory hubs for the trade-off between cross-cultural “awareness” and donations toward the cause. See http://www.zoomuganda.org/ [Accessed March 10, 2010]. Ninos De La Amazonia was founded in 2009 by schoolteacher Amy Coplan, following the same model as Kids with Cameras: photographs taken by indigenous children from the Peruvian Amazon “who had never seen a camera prior to the project” are sold through Coplan’s website in the form of prints and hard-bound books to raise funds for establishing scholarships for the six indigenous child-photographers as well as other children from the same village. See http://www.ninosdelaamazonia.org/About_Us.html [Accessed March 10, 2010]. 71 Anthropologist Richard Chalfen, who served as research assistant to Worth and Adair during the Navajo Project, provides a list of these more occasional child-oriented media projects produced between the 1960s and 1990s in his “Afterword” in the revised edition of Through Navajo Eyes, as follows: “…8mm film with third graders in Harlem (Bigsby 1968) and teenage street gangs in New York (Barrat 1978, Fraser 1987), video with immigrant children (Delgado 1992), still photography with mentally handicapped children (Cox 1984), Polaroid photography with a toddler in Boston (Cavin 1994), videos made by students at a Massachussetts high school (Gray 1990), and video in a “teen dreams” project (Jetter 1993)…and a model for introducing photography to children…in a project entitled “Shooting Back” (Hubbard 1991) [where] [h]omeless young people between the ages of eight and seventeen living in a shelter were helped to make their own 35mm photographs.” See Richard Chalfen, “Afterword to the Revised Edition,” in Sol Worth and John Adair, Through Navajo Eyes: An Exploration in Film Communication and Anthropology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), 294-5. While acknowledging that these practices of eliciting “insider views” may have been inspired by the Navajo project, he describes the later projects as part of the Ginsburgian tradition of “more politically engaged projects” rather than being motivated by a clearly defined set of scientific research objectives (Ibid 292; 297).

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minorities have emerged as a point of condensation.72 Numerous commentators see the

isolation of the “child’s voice” as a rallying point for humanitarian intervention as a

logical outcome of the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child

(CRC).73 The proliferation of “child-centered” legal and non-governmental initiatives

focused on children’s welfare and agency that has followed the ratification of this treaty

is evidenced by the rich and well-documented tradition of social science research on

children and media in the 1990s and onward, particularly the use of various visual media

(such as painting, drawing, photography, and video) by children and youth as research

tools in medical, psychological, sociological, and therapeutic contexts.74 This steady

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!72 Renov writes that in such works, “…the representation of the historical world is inextricably bound up with self-inscription…subjectivity is no longer construed as ‘something shameful’; it is the filter through which the real enters discourse, as well as a kind of experiential compass guiding the work toward its goal as embodied knowledge.” See Michael Renov, The Subject of Documentary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 176. The documentary film Desire (dir. Julie Gustafson and Isaac Webb, Women Make Movies, 2005), for instance, features footage shot by six young New Orleans women from diverse socio-economic backgrounds who are given digital cameras to make “intimate videos about their changing lives.” See http://www.desiredocumentary.com/Home.html [Accessed March 11, 2010]. In recent years, photographs and films produced by marginalized or disadvantaged children have also been frequently exhibited in museums, art galleries, community spaces, and film festivals. Examples include online initiatives (such as The Girl Project, founded 2007, which features a curated selection of photographs taken by young girls who are supplied with cameras; see http://thegirlproject.org/), after-school projects focused on inner-city children (like Charleston Kids With Cameras, founded 2003; see http://www.charlestonkidswithcameras.org/about/), and traveling gallery exhibits (such as the 2005 show Eyes of New California, which showcased photographs taken by immigrant and refugee teens; see http://www.calhum.org/programs/uncvrd_teen_photos_sunrise.htm; http://articles.sfgate.com/2005-03-26/entertainment/17364039_1_volunteer-work-congolese-mission-high [Accessed March 11, 2010]. 73 See for instance the essays in Child Labor and Human Rights: Making Children Matter, edited by Burns H. Weston (London: Lynne Rienner, 2005), particularly Holly Cullen, “Child Labor Standards: From Treaties to Labels,” 86-116, and David M. Post, “Conceiving Child Labor in Human Rights Terms: Can It Mobilize Progressive Change?”, 267-292. The relationship between child media advocacy and children’s rights is further explored in the concluding section of the latter. 74 A detailed literature review of recent research on children and media can be found in the section entitled “Visual Media Created by Young People” in Michael Rich and Richard Chalfen, “Showing and Telling Asthma: Children Teaching Physicians with Visual Narrative,” Visual Sociology volume 14, number 1 (1999): 51-71. This volume of Visual Sociology (published as

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convergence of growing academic and media archives by and about children attests to

Michel Foucault insight regarding the modern drive to engage in discourse about the self

and endlessly investigate it as an object of knowledge—one that dovetails with Renov’s

comments regarding the “shameless” postmodern examination and display of selfhood.75

However projects like Born Into Brothels illustrate a distinctive new feature of the

contemporary child media advocacy movement—a model of social mobilization that is

set into motion by “empowering” children (particularly Third World children) to assume

political subjectivity by becoming producers of viable cultural commodities. These

particular cases make plain an economic incentive that figures less prominently in other

initiatives that cite autoethnography as a medium for empowering children and youth to

explore their own subjectivity, but which nonetheless emphasize an entrepreneurial

relationship with image-making as an important dimension of child development.

The growing interest in enabling children to produce and exhibit media is

undeniably a discursive by-product of the progressively accessible and user-friendly

appeal of new media technologies and platforms, and should be critiqued as such—Sarah

Banet-Weiser for instance argues that digital venues for “girl-brand” media such as

YouTube attest to a neoliberal transcoding of postfeminist discourses of “freedom.”76 But

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Visual Studies as of 2002) surveys a range of methodological approaches to child-produced media in the social sciences. While this wide-ranging body of literature is beyond the scope of this chapter, a common procedure in social and biological science approaches to child authors is that the “child” (typically referring to young persons under the age of eighteen, or between the ages of four and twelve in situations where “youth” is employed to refer to teenagers) is pre-encoded into the research methodology as a positive (legal, biological, physiological, psychical) subject. These preconceptions are then used as a hypothesis against which to measure empirical findings. 75 See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction, translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990); Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994). 76 Sarah Banet-Weiser, forthcoming article on self-branding, girls, and social networking sites in Mediated Girlhoods: New Explorations of Girls’ Media Culture, edited by Mary Celeste Kearney.

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the approach to the subjectivity of children in contemporary child media advocacy

projects also has intimate ties with the pre-history of autoethnographic media: before

finalizing their research methodology for the Navajo Project, Worth and Adair conducted

a number of “control experiments” by handing out cameras to inner-city teenage “Negro

dropouts” in Philadelphia and New York, “to determine the feasibility of teaching people

in another culture to use film.”77 Worth and Adair are not very forthcoming about why

they chose this particular sub-group, noting only that their interest was in textual analysis

rather than community service and action.78 But given the social groups they list

alongside the Navajo as rich subjects of other ongoing “bio-documentary” projects, with

the sole exception of “middle-class whites”: “unwed mothers, grade-school-children

(some as young as eight years), Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and Negroes”—it is not

difficult to detect an essentializing impulse to investigate subjectivities that are

unproductive, inaccessible, or otherwise outside in relation to the social norm.79 Worth

and Adair then go on to describe film as a stimulant or palliative for eliciting information

from such hostile and resistant groups, arguing: “It has been our experience, and that of

others working with teenagers or members of other cultures, that people who are

normally suspicious and hostile about being taught—of anything like school—will

readily accept being studied and questioned if…they ‘can get their hands on that camera.’

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!77 Worth and Adair, Through Navajo Eyes, 24. 78 Ibid 229. 79 Ibid 55. The chapter “How Groups In Our Society Act When Taught to Use Movie Cameras” investigates differences in form, topic and reception among groups of black and white teen filmmakers, arguing that these differences are indices of the teens’ racial identity (Ibid 228-251). The critically acclaimed Up! Series, initiated by Paul Almond in 1964, roughly contemporaneous with the Navajo project, and subsequently directed by Michael Apted, adopts a similarly essentializing approach to socio-economic identity. The first film, Seven Up! (dir. Paul Almond, Granada Television, 1964) documents the lives of fourteen seven year-old children from a variety of class backgrounds, hypothesizing that their social origins determine the course of their lives.

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This unusual motivating factor is worth noting in relation to other possible educational or

research attempts with people of other cultures.”80

Other than the “social average” group of “middle-class whites,” Worth and

Adair’s laundry-list of social types are all instances of what Rey Chow has dubbed

“primitives”—marginalized or deviant groups whose subalternity can prove profitable for

a given culture when their reified identities are dialectically mobilized to rejuvenate and

modernize the image of the dominant social groups. Chow locates this self-orientalizing

tendency as the flipside of the liberatory impulse of autoethnography, which rests on the

assumption that something in a state of repression needs to be “set free” or liberated.

Reversing the terms of this “repressive hypothesis,” she argues that we need to attend to

the positivities that are produced when cultural or ethnic “others” engage in an act of self-

othering (or autoethnography) in a bid toward leveraging a potentially profitable situation

of exchange.81 The following sections will suggest that the imperative of “empowering”

children through the “gift” of technology is part of the continuing legacy of primitivism,

one that I now examine through the figure of the “wild child” in the ethnographic

imagination, and its twin problematic: the anthropological guilt surrounding the noble

primitive’s “fall” into technics. François Truffaut’s representation of the moral conflict

experienced by the doctor Jean Itard over instigating the wild child Victor’s “fall” into

language in his 1970 film L’Enfant Sauvage indicates the pervasive romanticization of

childhood as an idealized state “before” language and society, an attitude that endures, I

argue, in the infantilizing characterization of ethnographic cultures as “people without

writing” by anthropologists like Claude Lévi-Strauss. If Truffaut’s film dramatizes the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!80 Ibid 55. 81 Rey Chow, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 20-1.

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fetishization of the child’s entry into language as the precise event that severs it from a

mimetic state of self-presence, rather than one in a recursive series of events bearing the

structure of arche-violence (including birth, naming, and innumerable other rituals of

socialization), then child media advocacy’s positioning of photography and film as a

“universal form of communication” preceding language (to borrow a phrase from Worth

and Adair)82 illustrates that the contemporary counterpart of the idealization of childhood

takes place through the primitivization of indexical media—as I will later demonstrate in

my reading of Born Into Brothels, photography is seen in sympathetic resonance with the

child as a pre-linguistic figure, or as possessing a special capacity for apprehending the

child’s tactile or mimetic relationship with its environment. What ties Truffaut’s and

Briski’s texts to their ethnographic predecessors is an unspoken complicity in the belief

that technology can redeem the “fallen” primitives of the world as useful global citizens.

CHILDREN GONE WILD: HOMO FERUS, SLUMDOGS, AND MODERN-DAY WOLF CHILDREN

In one of the most memorable scenes in L’Enfant Sauvage (dir. François Truffaut,

MGM, 1970), and one that might be called a turning point in the plot, the wild boy Victor

who has been forcibly captured from his forest dwelling, is “rescued” once again (this

time from a frenzied throng of curious Parisian civilians) and delivered into the waiting

arms of the state medical apparatus. While two doctors speculate as to his potential as a

medical case study in sociality, the boy gets up from the examination table and wanders

away to a nearby full-length mirror, engrossed by his own reflection. The doctors watch,

captivated, as the boy repeatedly paws at the mirror, sniffing and loping around to try to

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!82 See Worth and Adair, Through Navajo Eyes, 19.

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locate the figure confronting him. Finally Dr. Itard, the boy’s future tutor and physician,

walks over and stands behind him with a fruit. For a time the boy flails around

desperately, trying to grasp at the mirage of the fruit in the mirror, but guided by his

sense of smell, he eventually reaches behind to grab the fruit from Itard and feverishly

consumes it (see Fig. 3). Impressed by the usefulness of the boy’s instinctual response

toward food in rehearsing an elementary lesson about selfhood, Itard makes the case to

his fellow doctor—who has simply concluded that the boy is “an idiot…lower than an

animal,” and therefore deserves to be shut away at an institution for the mentally

retarded—that if animals can be trained, then the wild boy too can be educated.83

This modified and yet rather literal representation of Jacques Lacan’s description

of the “mirror stage” soon becomes the structural basis of all of Itard’s transactions with

the boy, who is thereafter placed under Itard’s tutorship.84 Itard and his housekeeper

Madame Guerin begin a stringent regimen of exercises designed to “civilize” the wild

boy, ranging from straightening his posture and gait, making him accustomed to clothing

and shoes, teaching him table manners, wearing down his resistance to living indoors,

developing drills to train his memory, and the biggest challenge of all, to which over 30

minutes of screen-time are given over—teaching him the function of language. Realizing

that the boy will obey instructions to perform rote tasks in exchange for milk and water,

Itard adopts the restitutive logic of symbolic exchange in his attempts to initiate the boy

into language, even naming the boy (“Victor”) in accordance with a syllable that the boy

associates with the gratification of his thirst, his principle preoccupation (“o” or “eau”).

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!83 All transcriptions are taken from the subtitles provided by the National Captioning Institute in The Wild Child (dir. Francois Truffaut, France, MGM, 1970). 84 Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function, as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” in Ecrits, translated by Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2002), 3-9.

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Initially these attempts fail, and Victor stubbornly refuses to speak until after his demand

for food has been met, at which point he struggles to utter a mewl of appreciation

resembling the word for milk (lait)—a point of great frustration to Itard, since it confirms

only that the boy understands the pleasure principle, and not the principle of sacrifice

underlying symbolic exchange.

Itard increases the intensity of his tests, withholding both food and his affection

from Victor until his manipulation of the tools provided to him (matching everyday

objects with their images and written transcriptions of their designated names, arranging

alphabets to form words) finally demonstrates his understanding of language as a set of

conventions for facilitating social exchange (see Fig. 4). Meanwhile the audience’s

complicity in the learning-montages of Victor’s communicative labors too are rewarded

with occasional close-ups of the boy’s cherubic face at the end of each scene, his eyes

gazing out of a window to the distant forests in an expression of longing, or eyelids

fluttering in mute incomprehension (see Fig. 5). A nostalgic soft iris typically closes in on

these images to bring the scene to a repose, with strains of Baroque chamber music

heralding Victor’s successes and failures in every arbitrary task that marks a step toward

his “civilization,” triumphant and sorrowful in turn. Regret and self-indictment likewise

haunt Itard’s resolute investment and satisfaction in Victor’s progress. Having reduced

the boy to tears (another recently acquired response) with sharp words of disappointment

and reprobation for his unruly behavior during a particularly demanding task, Itard

records a following rueful confession in his medical diary: “I condemned the sterile

curiosity of the men who had wrenched him away from his innocent and happy life.”

Victor’s piercing look backward at Itard during the conclusion of the film as he ascends

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the stairs of Itard’s home in resignation—he has returned after a pathetic attempt at

escape, realizing that he no longer possesses the physical endurance for surviving in the

wild—seems to catch the spectator red-handed in sharing Itard’s attitude of righteous

remorse for the wild child’s lost idyll as he is propelled, like Walter Benjamin’s angel of

history, into an uncertain future (see Fig. 6).

Truffaut’s representation of Itard’s guilt over forcing language upon Victor,

coupled with unshakable belief in its redemptive potential condenses the hopeful

Rousseauvian and pessimistic Hobbesian poles of Enlightenment-era views regarding the

“state of nature.”85 This conflicted stance is strikingly reprised in Lévi-Strauss’s 1955

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!85 Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s remarkable positive regard for the vigor, robustness, and tenaciousness of “natural man” and his imaginative description of a “serene, sylvan, solitary” state before speech, sociality, and culture is often contrasted with his predecessor Thomas Hobbes’s pessimistic dismissal of life in the state of nature as “nasty, brutish, and short.” See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and The First and Second Discourses, edited by Susan Dunn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 90-107; Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Penguin, 1985), 186. As Nancy Youssef has influentially argued, Rousseau’s descriptive platitudes for imagining the self-sufficiency of “natural man,” influenced the mythologization of isolated cases of severely cognitively, emotionally, or affectively impaired children (often the result of abnormal or inadequate conditions of care) as “savage” or “wolf children,” encouraging physicians of the time (such as Jean-Marc Gaspard Itard, depicted in Truffaut’s film) to map these romantic descriptors, however incongruous, onto actual clinical cases. See Nancy Youssef, Isolated Cases: The Anxieties of Autonomy in Enlightenment Philosophy and Romantic Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 103; 100. A translated version of Itard’s original report can be found in its entirety in Lucien Malson, Wolf Children and the Problem of Human Nature, translated by Edmund Fawcett, Peter Ayrton, and Joan White (London: NLB, 1972), 91-140. Children abandoned to the wild and raised among animals became a wildly popular theme of the mid-to-late eighteenth century, so much so that the 1788 edition of Linnaeus’s Systema naturae even demarcates Homo sapiens ferus, or “feral man” as a separate species located in the blurry interstices of man and beast. See Carl von Linné (Linnaeus), Systema naturae, 13th edition (Leipzig, 1788), 1: 21. Linnaeus itemizes ten instances of homo ferus in this edition, the most well-documented of which are cases of “wild children”—Peter of Hanover, Marie of Champagne, and Victor of Aveyron. Extended descriptions of these cases can be found in Julia Douthwaite, “Homo ferus: Between Monster and Model,” Eighteenth-Century Life volume 21, number 2 (May 1997): 176-202. Like Youssef, Douthwaite explores the relationship between “wild children” and other emerging figures of racial and sexual hybridity (Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” the “Hottentot Venus”). I have chosen to delimit my discussion to figures that have received less concerted critical attention within an ethnographic genealogy rather than focusing on these gothic figures of monstrosity, whose focalization by influential feminist interlocutors of anthropology like Trinh T. Minh-ha, Donna Haraway, and Fatimah

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travelogue Tristes Tropiques, where the anthropologist admits to a similar crisis of

morality after having accidentally imposed a “writing lesson” upon an indigenous group

of Nambikwara Indians during his fieldwork in the Brazilian Amazon. The narrative

unfolds as follows: toward the end of a ritual gift-exchange, Lévi-Strauss distributes

pencils and paper among the illiterate Nambikwara in order to distract them while

logging his ethnographic observations, and to keep the peace among this otherwise

violent and hostile group. But upon witnessing the chief of the group pretending to

understand the meaning and use of writing so as to consolidate his influence over the rest

of his companions, the anthropologist concludes in dismay that he has been responsible

for exposing this oral culture to “writing…[whose] primary function…as a means of

communication, is to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings.”86 In the brief but

heartfelt reflection that follows in the chapter “A Writing Lesson,” Lévi-Strauss

concludes that even the altruistic or “disinterested” use of writing (its only ethically

correct use), remains in danger of “reinforcing, justifying, or dissimulating its primary

function.”87

The logical fallacies of this chapter form one of the main subjects of Jacques

Derrida’s extended critique of the metaphysical biases of anthropology in the latter half

of his Of Grammatology. Derrida’s main critique of Lévi-Strauss targets the

Rousseauvian nature of the anthropologist’s phonocentric conception of writing as a

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Tobing Rony has incited considerable conversation within visual anthropology over the last two decades. See Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London and New York: Routledge, 1991); Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996). 86 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “A Writing Lesson,” in Tristes Tropiques, translated by John Russell (New York: Criterion Books, 1961), 292. 87 Ibid 292.

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technical “break”: Lévi-Strauss seems convinced that the violence of writing consists in

the transcription of phonetic speech into symbols, “a corruption linked, as in Rousseau, to

writing and to the dislocation of a unanimous people assembled in the self-presence of its

speech.”88 Derrida maintains that the violence described by Lévi-Strauss as “writing”

must first be attributed to “arche-writing,” or the originary violence of entering the

symbolic order, anterior even to speech.89 He roundly criticizes Lévi-Strauss for his

paternalistic suggestion that the Nambikwara might be taken to represent “the childhood

of our race,” elsewhere translated as “the infancy of the human species.”90 At the same

time, the thrust of Derrida’s intervention—a critique of Lévi-Strauss’s poorly veiled

ethnocentric desire to envision a society mired in classificatory, reparatory, and empirical

violences as “innocent” or childlike—shies away from a deeper consideration of Lévi-

Strauss’s loaded reference to childhood. The anthropologist gestures toward the same rich

Rousseauvian legacy invoked by Truffaut: the turn toward the child as a primordial figure

of cosmic unity prior to language, sociality, and culture, for orienting the idea of the

human, and with it, the project of anthropology.91 While there is no doubt that the notion

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!88 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1976), 134. 89 Ibid 112. 90 See Claude Lévi-Strauss, “On the Line,” in Tristes Tropiques, translated by John Russell (New York: Criterion Books, 1961), 265. For the alternative translation see Claude Lévi-Strauss, “On the Line,” in Tristes Tropiques, translated by John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Penguin, 1992), 274. 91 Giorgio Agamben has compellingly argued that the anxieties surrounding the process of civilizing “wild children” bear witness to the fragility and precariousness of the human as an entity. He writes that enfant sauvages played an important role in the ongoing project of “anthropogenesis,” or producing the definition of the human, evidenced the rise of what Michel Foucault has dubbed “the human sciences.” Agamben draws on the treatment of enfant sauvages to further his major thesis that the “anthropological machine” (i.e. the ideological model for producing the definition of the human) of the ancients functioned through an inclusive process of humanizing the nonhuman or animal, while the modern machine functions through a biopolitical process of separating out and excluding the nonhuman within the human. See Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 30; 37. However, the

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of arche-writing argues the epistemological bankruptcy of locating an “outside” to the

symbolic order, it should be noted that by criticizing the comparison of a “primitive”

people with infancy or childhood, but not the use of the child as a metaphor for innocence

and plenitude, Derrida’s analysis leaves untheorized the rhetorical force of the child as a

figure signifying precisely such outsideness.

If the Enlightenment figure of the enfant sauvage distills the pervasive fear that

children may not respond to the disciplining call of society, then at the other end of the

spectrum we find the ebullient modernist trope of the mimetic child, blessed with an

uncanny capacity for imitation, or “becoming similar” to its surroundings. This nostalgic

fabulation is perhaps most recognizable in the work of Benjamin, who lists “newborn”

children alongside “the ancients” (or primitive peoples) as bearers of the archaic

“mimetic faculty,” which he argues is irrevocably transformed by the advent of modern

cultures founded on the semiotic logic of “non-sensuous similarity,” or language.92 The

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!inclusive but ethnocentric humanitarian attitude of contemporary child media advocacy toward Third World children is indebted to a model of anthropogenesis that Agamben argues is now obsolete, and demonstrates the difficulty of maintaining his distinction. 92 Benjamin muses that “schooling” the unruly child, who “plays at being not only a shopkeeper or teacher but also a windmill and a train” can be of no use to the child himself. See Walter Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty,” in One-Way Street and Other Writings, translated by Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: NLB, 1979), 161; 160. The child is a recurring theme in Benjamin’s work, and functions as a symbol for reflecting on the redemptive promise of the past. The short autobiographical vignettes in Berlin Childhood Around 1900 comprise a set of nostalgic ruminations on the author’s own mimetic relations as a child to a vast array of everyday objects, both natural and man-made (verandahs, telephones, nursery rhymes, butterflies, parks, otters, street corners, paintings, cabinets, the moon). The child in this text is the quintessential flâneur, whose playful ability to lose himself in and “become similar” to the world inhabits represents for the author an inspired and crystalline image of pure and untamed potential, threatened only by the civilizing forces of schooling and socialization. See Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood Around 1900, translated by Howard Eiland (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006). The concerted but ultimately profoundly humanist attempts by Benjamin, as well as his recent interlocutor, anthropologist Michael Taussig, to envision the role of media technologies in rejuvenating the “mimetic faculty” provides an important frame for understanding the ideological underpinnings of contemporary child media advocacy. Taussig maps Benjamin’s distinction between the sensuous and the non-sensuous onto the ethnographic binary between the

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next section will suggest, through a reading of Born Into Brothels, that child media

advocacy is similarly desirous of apprehending the child’s “spontaneous” relation to the

world, using indexical media as a conduit that circumvents the violence of language.

Consequently, the children’s autoethnographic production serves as a means of freezing

the image of childhood as a “state of nature” rather than a nebulous process of

subjectivization. The practice of aestheticizing the child as a figure of pastness is

particularly important to investigate given the advocacy movement’s frequent positioning

of children as universal emblems of the future of society while simultaneously targeting

marginalized Third World children as the focus of this temporalizing rhetoric.93 The

following analysis will reveal how the child media advocacy movement—and its

mainstream counterpart, which recruits “real” street children, or “slumdogs,” as they have

come to be known following the success of Slumdog Millionaire (dir. Danny Boyle and

Lavleen Tandon, 2008)94—treats disenfranchised, marginalized, and impoverished Third

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!mimetically gifted primitive native and the repressed civilized Westerner. Taussig’s provocative extension of Benjamin’s argument is treated in detail in following chapter, as is his conclusion that indexical media technologies are in fact, like primitives, “mimetically capacious” and possess the capacity for “rejuvenating” the West’s repressed mimetic faculty. See Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993), 243. 93 Instances of child media advocacy projects employing slogans involving “hope,” “future,” and “change” are too numerous to name. The keywords adopted by the Adobe Corporation’s recent philanthropical venture among marginalized children, whose films are currently circulating under the banner “Youth Producing Change,” in collaboration with Human Rights Watch, are exemplary. The home-page of “Adobe Youth Voices” reads: “Demonstrating the power of technology to engage middle- and high school-age youth, Adobe Youth Voices provides breakthrough learning experiences using video, multimedia, digital art, web, animation, and audio tools that enable youth to explore and comment on their world.” See http://www.youthvoices.adobe.com/ [Accessed July 5, 2010] Elsewhere, the project philosophy is stated as follows: “Adobe Youth Voices capitalizes on young people's innate optimism and sense of justice, helping encourage youth to be creative, articulate contributors to their communities.” http://essentials.youthvoices.adobe.com/ [Accessed July 5, 2010]. 94 A CNN reporter recently described the child filmmakers of Plan International’s Bangladesh-based Through Our Own Eyes as “real-life Slumdogs”: See Emanuele Comi, “Real-Life ‘Slumdogs’ Document Life on the Streets,” CNN (April 14, 2010):

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World children as the equivalent of modern-day enfants sauvages: desirably authentic

and simultaneously in need of redemption. “Empowering” these wild children through

media serves the dual purpose of gaining direct access to otherwise inaccessible or

invisible communities and humanizing subjects that are thought to be on the brink of

delinquency. Like Worth and Adair before them, child media advocates neglect to

interrogate their anxious reliance on the indexical status of the filmed image—or the

hands-on handling of the media apparatus by children—as a ligature that pins down and

guarantees the presence, immediacy, and identity of the other. I argue that advocacy

projects employing indexical media inherit this problematic stance from the deliberately

untheorized approach of the indigenous video movement to formal aspects of medium

specificity—an anti-“high film theory” tactic that video seems to legitimate and even

demand.95 The fallout of this “social activist” approach to media empowerment is that the

other’s gesture of self-referentiality stands in for the work of critical self-reflection and

even excuses its absence as a commitment to minimizing the intervention of the

ethnographer.96 Paradoxically, this inaugurates a return to a rhetoric of “directness” and

an aesthetic of immediacy reminiscent of direct observation, and “concrete” or vérité !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/03/18/bangladesh.street.children/index.html [Accessed July 5, 2010]. 95 In the editorial introduction to their seminal compilation on video practices, Michael Renov and Erika Suderburg argue for instance that the advent of an era of “user-based editing systems and consumer video” calls for a reconfiguration of traditional models of medium specificity and demands a new “media lexicon” of “plurality” and “multivocality.” See Michael Renov and Erika Suderburg, “Introduction: Resolving Video,” in Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices, edited by Michael Renov and Erika Suderburg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), xi-xii. 96 As Moore has argued in her appraisal of indigenous video, this rhetorical reframing effectively transfers the burden of ethnographic representation to the other in question. See Moore, “Marketing Alterity,” 16. Rey Chow has further critiqued the liberalist notion that the other’s selfhood functions as the ground of authenticity as an “age-old realist fallacy” that obstinately resists thinking about the self as a discursive entity which functions ambivalently within the shifting landscape of modern power. See Rey Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 113.

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approaches to ethnography, techniques that have been discredited for their positivist

approaches to the cinematic “real.” In the absence of the ethnographer’s work of framing,

I argue, the image of the child itself assumes the certitude and authority of the index.

“THROUGH THEIR EYES”: INDEXING IMMEDIACY

It’s almost impossible to photograph in the Red Light district. Everyone is terrified of the camera. They’re frightened of being found out. Everything’s illegal…I knew I couldn’t do it as a visitor—I wanted to stay with them, and understand their lives. And of course, as soon as I entered the brothels, I met the children. The brothels are filled with children, they’re everywhere. And they were so curious; they didn’t understand why this woman had come and what I was doing there. They were all over me, and I would play with them, and take their photographs, and they would take mine. They wanted to learn how to use the camera. That’s when I thought it would be really great to teach them, and to see this world through their eyes.97

These words are excerpted from Zana Briski’s voiceover narration, which remains an

intermittent structuring presence throughout Born Into Brothels. The very first spoken

words we hear, this confession occurs just a few minutes into the opening of the film,

framing what follows as a document of Briski’s decision to teach photography to the

children of prostitutes in the Sonagachi red-light district of Calcutta, India, rather than

organizing the film around her own photographs of brothel life. Briski’s explicit vow of

passivity is frequently championed in press interviews and biographies that cast her as a

savior-figure, and has become part of the mythology surrounding the film. The fact that

Briski chose not to use the film as a showcase for her own work is only dramatized

further by the fact that she had already won numerous prestigious awards for her

“humanistic” documentary photography before embarking on the Brothels film project,

the bulk of which were awarded for the very photographs of Sonagachi that are not the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!97 Transcription, emphasis mine.

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focus of the film.98 Below, I sketch out the narrative shape taken by Briski’s attitude of

self-effacement, together with her claim that the children’s photographs provide an

uninterrupted view of brothel life as seen “through their eyes.” I argue that Briski’s

cinematic language is constructed so as to cover over a number of less altruistic

machinations—the self-serving rhetorical frame of her film, which functions as a vehicle

for presenting the photographs shot by the children, the neoliberal moralism implicit in

the intervention of “saving” the children, and the ethnocentric logic of the humanitarian

“gift” of media literacy, which obscures the reciprocity of the transaction between Briski

and the children.99

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!98 Prior to the Brothels project, Briski trained in documentary photography at the University of Cambridge and the International Center for Photography, NYC. She won the National Press Photographers Association Picture of the Year Award in 1996 and a New York Foundation for the Arts grant in 1998 for her photojournalistic work on female infanticide in India. Her work in India inspired the Sonagachi project, which she began in 1997, consequently winning a slew of awards, including the Open Society Institute Fellowship (1999), the World Press Photo Foundation Award for “Daily Life Stories” (2000), the Howard Chapnick Grant for the Advancement of Photojournalism (2001). Briski’s Sonagachi photographs won her the Jerome Foundation, Sundance, and NYFA documentary film grants that funded the production of Born Into Brothels, as well as solidifying the collaboration with Ross Kaufman as the co-director of the film. See “Awards” and “Bio” on http://www.zanabriski.com/ [Accessed March 12, 2010]. 99 My critique focuses on the formal operations of the film, but a number of Indian activists and feminist critics abroad have focused on Briski’s suturing over of the film’s ethical misconducts, both in ignoring local organizing efforts and in Briski’s breach of political and legal boundaries in portraying the sex workers featured in the film as unfit parents. A much-publicized letter of protest against Born Into Brothels by Swapna Gayen, secretary of the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee, an activist organization devoted to improving health and working conditions among sex workers in Sonagachi (and notably absent in the film) can be found in its original form on the online version of The Telegraph, a Calcutta news source: See Swapna Gayen, “Nightmares on Celluloid,” The Telegraph (March 15, 2005): http://www.telegraphindia.com/1050315/asp/opinion/story_4491793.asp [Accessed February 5, 2010] Some important local critiques of Born Into Brothels (including those by Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee, and Partha Banerjee, an interpreter who worked on the film) can be found in Svati Shah, “Born into Saving Brothel Children,” Samar Magazine issue 19 (2005): http://www.samarmagazine.org/archive/article.php?id=190 [Accessed February 5, 2010]. Shah argues that the film’s criminalization of prostitution and suppression of regional histories of activism rehearses an Orientalist drama of white savior-brown victim that ultimately advocates in favor of increased police and state enforcement over non-governmental organizing efforts. Also see Jesal Kapadia, “Telegraph,” Rethinking Marxism volume 17, number 4 (October 2005): 512-523. Kapadia’s experimental “counter-documentary” digitally reiterates the contents of Gayen’s

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Although Briski’s own images do occasionally appear during Born Into Brothels,

her presence is minimal in the first half of the narrative, which unfolds austerely in the

manner of a slide presentation, featuring testimony and photographs by each of the eight

children from Briski’s photography class who are chosen to be represented in the film.

Preceding this, the introductory sequence accompanying Briski’s initial narration mirrors

the tensions enfolded within Briski’s confession of her “outsider” status, and her

resolution to overcome the difficulty of entering and representing the space of the

brothels by enabling the children’s autoethnographic photo-practice. Bearing a bag full of

cameras and optical toys, Briski is led by the hand by several children to a locked room

(later revealed to be the home of one of the children), one of whom unlocks the door to

admit her. This overture poetically captures the trade-off set into motion by Briski’s

decision to offer free photography workshops for children dwelling in the brothels of

Sonagachi—in exchange for lessons in photography, Briski’s students afford her both

literal and representational access to an illegal space that is, by her own admission,

indecipherable and impenetrable.

The visual and sound design of the two-minute long opening video sequence is

stylized to accentuate the dangerous qualities of the space of the brothels. The message

conveyed by its overview of various scenes of brothel life is that the children are

embroiled against their will in this illicit transactive space. The lighting is predominantly

red, and the camera speed is slowed down and sped up in alternation. Coupled with

handheld camera movements filmed from the tops of tenement buildings and from low

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!letter to stage a critique of the “neocolonial documentary conventions” of Briski’s film through a “withdrawal of the image,” which for Kapadia functions as an ineluctable site of epistemic violence.

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angle through the legs of passing pedestrians, the unpredictable texture of the sequence

suggests that the perspective offered to us is the chaotic and surreal world-view of a

child. The music is a drone-like raga, ominous and plaintive in its continual minor

thematic elaboration. The scenes shown capture iconic elements of brothel life—young

girls in thin, shiny clothing and bright lipstick waiting for customers at street corners,

men approaching them in groups and alone, men and women emerging half-clothed from

barely shielded doorways, liquor being pored into cheap glass tumblers, cigarette

smoking, drugs changing hands. Nothing stays on screen for very long. The camera is

mobile and snakes from place to place, creating the impression of an elusive but highly

intimate point of view—a child’s point of view. Any confusion regarding this fact is

clarified by the editing of this sequence. Briski fades back and forth between scenes of

brothel street life and the faces of children framed in extreme close up around the eyes,

soulfully lit in chiaroscuro style (see Fig. 7). We later recognize these faces as those of

Puja, Shanti, Suchitra, Tapasi, Avijit, Gour, Kochi and Manik, the eight children profiled

in the film. Even though the opening sequence does not feature even a single photograph

shot by the children, the effect is that Briski’s digital video footage persuasively conveys

a perspective of brothel life as seen from the specific point of view of the eight child

photographers. Similar sequences recur throughout the film as transitions that bridge

segments featuring the children’s photographs and Briski’s video footage of them using

their cameras; this sediments their rhetorical function as narrative devices that attribute

Briski’s perspective of the brothels to her local wards.

Poonam Arora has identified a similar logic of borrowed ethnographic authority

operating in films of the “urban realist” documentary genre such as Salaam Bombay (dir.

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Mira Nair, UK/India/France, 1988). Arora argues that Salaam Bombay masquerades as an

indigenous feminist ethnography of a foreign space by highlighting the “insider” status of

director Nair. While purporting to offer the West a relatively new “angle of vision” by

studying her own culture, Nair shores up her lack of indigenous authority by capitalizing

on the ethnographic authenticity of the “real” street children recruited in this film as non-

professional actors—a technique employed again with great success by British director

Danny Boyle in his critically acclaimed Slumdog Millionaire. Arora contends that while

Salaam Bombay constructs the appearance of documentary realism, the generic quality of

Nair’s character-sketches and plot repeatedly disengage from the complexities and

specificity of the socio-political and economic conditions that she claims to document.

Consequently, Nair’s film ossifies the space between the First and Third Worlds as non-

traversable, producing reified versions of Third-World subjectivities for effortless

consumption by the West.100 In a comparable move, Born Into Brothels posits

autoethnography, or providing the subaltern children in question with the means for

representing themselves and their world, as a solution for addressing the space between

the First and Third Worlds. Nevertheless, this merely produces a different iteration of the

problematic identified by Arora. Far from acknowledging the constructed nature of the

children’s learned autoethnographic representations, Briski’s film obliterates the fact of

mediation altogether, in a rhetorical maneuver that reifies the children’s photographs as

snapshots of unadulterated alterity. The coffee-table book authored by Briski, which

chronicles the Brothels project and showcases the children’s photographs, contains

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!100 Poonam Arora, “The Production of Third World Subjects for First World Consumption: Salaam Bombay and Parama,” in Multiple Voices in Feminist Film Criticism, edited by Diane Carson, Linda Dittmar, and Janice R. Welsch (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 293-304.

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several instances of such essentializing discourse.101 The introduction to this volume by

Sundance Documentary Film Program director Diane Weyerman chronicles the Brothels

project, extolling the children’s “transformation” by photography as follows:

Briski, a professional photographer, gives [the children] lessons and

cameras, igniting sparks of artistic genius that reside in these children

who live in the world’s most sordid and seemingly hopeless

world…Their photographs are prisms into their souls, rather than

anthropological curiosities or primitive imagery…they reflect…art as

an immensely liberating and empowering force.102

Weyerman’s characterization of the children’s photographs as “prisms into their souls”

privileges the capacity of photography to render its subject’s consciousness self-present

and fully knowable. Abigail Solomon-Godeau argues that the indexical character of

photography as a technology all too often becomes an alibi for such discourses of

documentary realism, leading to the widespread “common-sense” notion that all

photography is “documentary” in nature. She writes that “the documentary image, like

any other, is “spoken” within language and culture…its meanings are both produced and

secured within those systems of representations that a priori mark its subject—and our

relations to the subject—in preordained ways.103 That the autoethnographic photograph

appears to “speak itself” should, Solomon-Godeau points out, alert us to the

mythologizing work of ideology in realist forms. Weyerman’s earnest insistence that the

photographs taken by Briski’s students should not be treated as ethnographic fabulations

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!101 Zana Briski, Born Into Brothels: Photographs by the Children of Calcutta (New York: Umbrage, 2004). 102 Ibid 9. 103 Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 182.

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is predicated on the same assumption made by indigenous video advocates—that the

authorization of the children’s “voices” through photography must mean that they are not

objectified or spoken for in any way by Briski’s film.

A closer reading of the power attributed by the Brothels project to “art” discloses

the ideological work accomplished by its celebration of the children’s self-realization

through photography. As witnessed in Weyerman’s statement, Briski is anxious to

rhetorically position the children’s training in photography in terms of the therapeutic

use-value that accrues to them through the photographic process of self-writing. When

Weyerman writes that Briski’s photography lessons “ignit[e] sparks of artistic genius that

reside in these children who live in the world’s most sordid and seemingly hopeless

world,” her implication is that being exposed to and producing “art” will transform the

children’s consciousness, build their confidence, and provide the children with an avenue

for self-valorization that is separate from the “sordid” exchange-based economy of the

flesh-trade that comprises the fabric of their everyday lives. The unspoken conceit of this

reasoning not only reifies art as a sphere uncorrupted by exchange, but Briski’s aesthetic

decisions redouble this reification by portraying the children’s artistic production as a

natural aspect of their mimetic instinct, which merely needs an appropriate medium in

order to rise to the surface as evidence of their humanity. The striking difference in color

palette that sets apart Briski’s more sober black and white photographs from those of the

children, which are shot on vibrant color stock, mobilizes the children’s photographs as a

more undisciplined, immediate, and ultimately “truer” index of Calcutta’s garish urban

underbelly. Whether or not Briski’s decision to have the children photograph using color

film stock is financially or aesthetically motivated, the evaluation of the children’s

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photographs as “art” seems to be based on their guarantee of documentary immediacy,

while Briski’s own photographs speak the more composed language of professional

photojournalism.

Briski’s dramatic transformation from teacher to reformer over the course of Born

Into Brothels further unveils the ethnocentric logic at work in evaluating the children’s

photographs as indexes of “authentic” reality rather than as a practice of self-writing.

Approximately halfway through the film Briski admits that she now feels an

overwhelming sense of responsibility toward the children, and announces that the nature

of her intervention in the children’s lives has undergone an evolution from simply

teaching them the elements of photography to establishing an infrastructure for them to

instrumentalize their own photographs for ensuring their economic futures. Briski’s

reform project, which becomes the focus of the latter half of the film, has both a moral

and an economic dimension, which converge in the aim of extracting the children from

the brothels, which are represented as bankrupt on both fronts. Briski’s humanitarian

impulse to save the children from the brothels pivots on a brief and troubling scene of a

woman prostitute taking stern disciplinary measures with Manik while exchanging a

number of lewd profanities with Manik’s mother. The decontextualized interjection of

this sequence, offered without any exploration or analysis of either the culture of the

Sonagachi brothels or the cultural history of corporal punishment in India, paints a quick

portrait of the female prostitutes of Sonagachi as negligent mothers and the children as

victims of their wrath.104 The reproachful tone of this scene is compounded by testimony

inserted immediately prior to it from one of Briski’s female students, who admits to

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!104 The ethical and legal ramifications of this representation, which deserves further investigation than I can provide here, are taken up in some detail in Shah, “Born into Saving Brothel Children.”

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feeling hopeless about avoiding pressure from her family to become a prostitute.

Together they vindicate Briski’s resolution to protect the children from the pervasive

moral corruption of sex-work, when she muses: “One girl was already married off at age

11. Another one was forced into prostitution at 14. These are my students. They have

absolutely no opportunity without education…I’m not a social worker. I’m not a teacher

even…but without help, they’re doomed.”

Briski then embarks on a project of “civilizing” the brothel children of protecting

the children from the brothel environment by securing admission for them in more

strictly regulated private schools. Soon after, while traveling abroad to procure ongoing

grant funding for her project, she announces that her mission also includes an economic

facet: “My goal now is to teach them but also to raise money for them using their own

photography, selling their photographs to raise money for them. Amnesty International is

going to use the kids’ photos for their calendar, and the photos are being auctioned at

Sothebys. The whole point of this is to get the kids out of the brothels.” Briski’s explicitly

economic new project (which has culminated in establishing Kids with Cameras as a

forum for the children to sustain the sale of their photographs in the global market,

thereby raising funds for their own education) makes it possible to see that the children’s

“aptitude for art” is not merely a dormant creative instinct but also a repository of

untapped economic potential. The moral obligation of saving the children from the

brothels—and therefore from what is legally regarded as the “worst form” of child

labor—provides an alibi for liberating this potential from the limits of a local economy

that is deemed economically unproductive. In the concluding section of this chapter, I

argue that Briski’s rhetoric of documentary transparency not only reinforces the idealized

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view of childhood underpinning the reactionary politics of contemporary child-oriented

humanitarian intervention, but that the representation of the children’s photographs as

documentary proof of mere “child’s play” is actively malevolent, in that it covers over,

obliterates, and de-materializes the commodifying forms of neoliberal labor (often

described by Marxist scholars as “immaterial labor”) demanded from Briski’s

marginalized beneficiaries under the guise of “progress.” I now turn to two photographs

produced by the children that occupy a special status within the diegetic and extra-

diegetic world of Born Into Brothels. I argue that is not only possible but necessary to

read them against the grain of their positioning within the film. Against the urgent

temporality of the “humanitarian intervention” that legitimates this film’s march toward

an allegedly just future, I demonstrate the exigency of an alternative material politics of

the document—one that pauses to consider why these particular moments of “arrested

development” are valuable to the film.

IMMATERIAL CHILD LABOR

Shot by a boy named Manik, the photograph featured in Fig. 8 has become more

iconically associated with the Born Into Brothels project than any other image produced

by the children. “Hand”105 is often used as the cover image in sets of the children’s

photographs available for sale and also enjoys a special visibility within the film. It was

one of the few photographs chosen for exhibition at the first local public show of the

children’s photographs in Calcutta, and was featured in the invitation used to publicize

the show in question. As Briski emphasizes in the film, Manik’s image was also chosen

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!105 The titles of the photographs featured here are taken from the names of prints listed for purchase on the Kids with Cameras website.

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to represent the work of the children in a press release about the Brothels project in the

Times of India, the most widely distributed newspaper in the country. When asked to

describe his process of producing this image, Manik explains that his sister Shanti put her

hand in front of the camera as he was pressing the shutter, producing the unusual effect of

a blown-out silhouette of a hand against the backdrop of fairground lights in the distance.

In effect, this photograph breaks all the rules of photography that Briski has taught the

children: how to frame subjects, strive for balanced and carefully measured compositions,

edit out bad photographs, etc. It is interesting to contemplate why this particular

photograph represents a certain value for the Brothels project as a whole, given that it is

unremarkable insofar as mastery of the medium is concerned, and that it objectively

“defies” the children’s education in photography. The reception of this image at the

Calcutta exhibition documented in the film suggests an answer. When the children are

invited to the show, Shanti is asked over and over again by delighted members of the elite

Calcutta audience to mimic her original gesture, to recreate the movement of instinctively

“flashing” her hand in front of Manik’s camera that unexpectedly produced such an

exposure during night photography. But rather than inquiring whether Shanti’s hand

gesture may have been an intentional or unconscious defense against the invasive

presence of her brother’s camera, Briski and the other exhibition attendees celebrate the

photograph’s “spontaneity,” praising Manik and Shanti’s intuitive understanding of the

contingencies of the consumer flash camera apparatus. Beyond serving as documentary

evidence of what Walter Benjamin nostalgically refers to as the “mimetic faculty” of

children, or their powerful impulse to play at “becoming” someone or something else,

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Manik’s photograph becomes reassuring proof that this primitive and unruly instinct can

be “schooled” or usefully channeled into a socially productive form of “art.”106

The popularity of Manik’s “Hand” image is indicative of Briski’s pedagogical

tendency to encourage and favor those photographs that explicitly “arrest” their young

subjects in the midst of various affective gestures and iconic childhood activities. Many

of the children’s photographs featured in the film and on the Kids with Cameras website

emphasize bustle and flow, capturing children, animals and objects in the blurry midst of

activity, movement, or play. Running, climbing, laughing, and jumping are frequent

topics, and staged portraits are few. But in a resounding majority of images, the

unexpected intimacy of what is exposed—a man preparing for a bath, a woman in a state

of undress, a naked baby sprawled on its back—relies on the disarming speed and alacrity

of a small child. While the aleatory nature of these photographs draws attention ever

more to the irrevocable past-ness of their content, the value of the images derives from

the child-like status of their subject at the moment of taking the photograph—a playfully

sensuous capacity that is threatened with extinction as the children grow into young

adults. It is telling in this regard that Briski’s non-profit organization Kids with Cameras

does not advertise the sale of more recent photographs by the now-teenaged stars of Born

Into Brothels. The primary proceeds come from selling the limited edition of photos

featured in the film and compiled in Briski’s book. The success of Manik’s photograph

seems related to its particular efficiency in encapsulating the quality that helps to “brand”

the children’s photographs.

In addition to informing the economic logic of Kids with Cameras, Briski’s

preference for an aesthetic of childlike “spontaneity” also shapes the narrative style of !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!106 Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty,” 160.

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Born Into Brothels. The sequence preceding the presentation of Manik’s photographs

exemplifies the role that the children’s still photographs play within the flow of Briski’s

video footage. This sequence stages a re-enactment of the mise-en-scene of one of

Manik’s photographs, which captures a boy flying a kite from the rooftop of a tenement

house. The first few shots cut back and forth in medium framing between Manik and his

sister Shanti. Clad in a pair of shorts, Manik is preparing to send a kite off into the

evening air, while Shanti sits in a corner, talking to Briski. Next, the camera cuts to a

long shot of a blue kite in the distance (presumably the one being flown by Manik)

fluttering in the sky. The camera momentarily stays trained to the movements of the kite.

The image then abruptly freezes to a still of the blue kite, fading into the image of a red

kite in a similar framing (see Fig. 9). The camera then zooms out, and the change in the

texture of the image reveals that what we now see is not a freeze-frame of Briski’s video

footage but a still photograph of a shirtless boy on the same rooftop, flying a red kite.

This still image introduces the segment that follows entitled “Photos by Manik.” Briski’s

decision to produce a digital “copy” of Manik’s photograph is an ambivalent move—it

runs the risk of suggesting that the contents of the children’s photographs are somewhat

commonplace. Nevertheless, the risk pays off, since the fade from digital video to

photographic still image calls even greater attention to the uniqueness of the children’s

artistic production. The materiality of the 35mm still photograph, posed in such direct

contrast with its digital video counterpart, acquires through comparison the fetishistic

status of the “real.” For the American and European middle-brow television and elite film

festival audiences to which the film is primarily addressed, the children’s still

photographs evoke the nostalgic fondness reserved by the West for technologies on the

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brink of obsolescence. In the hands of these Third World children, the consumer SLR

camera image—an already outdated commodity that Michael Taussig might call a “relic

of modernity”—finds a renewed cultural cachet, reminding inhabitants of advanced

digital societies of more innocent times.107

The photograph in Fig. 10 is shot by a boy named Avijit, who becomes a major

player in Briski’s plan for educating and reforming the children of Sonagachi. Most of

the other children remain two-dimensional figures within the film narrative, functioning

mainly as pathos-filled talking-head bookends for individual series of photographs.

However Briski devotes significant screen and character-development time to Avijit

during the latter half of Born Into Brothels, and he becomes instrumental in personalizing

the uplifting story arc of the film. Early in the film, Avijit is singled out as having a

“unique talent” for autoethnography. This is documented in the sequence where his “Self

Portrait” is shown and discussed in Briski’s photography class. As seen above, Avijit’s

self-portrait frames him against the background of the Sonagachi street that his house is

located on. The features of his face are somewhat blurred, and in contrast, the

background is crisply clear—we see a dirty tenement building behind the boy, the walls

spattered with mud and dirt, betel stains, graffiti and posters. Several stories above Avijit

and the woman who stands behind him, we see clothes hung up to dry outside windows.

While Avijit’s face itself remains anonymous, the background of his “Self Portrait”

abounds with signifying elements that confess his socioeconomic and cultural identity.

Briski displays Avijit’s self portrait to the children in the photography class as an

example of a “good photograph,” noting commandingly that “we can see the street, the

environment in which he lives.” !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!107 Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, 232.

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The imperative to self-orientalize implicit within Briski’s praise of this image

becomes clearer by reading this sequence in juxtaposition with the one immediately prior

to the class session, where Briski films Avijit’s grandmother holding up a photo portrait

taken of Avijit as an infant. In this image (see Fig. 11) baby Avijit is posed for a

photograph in the garb of the infant God Krishna. This tradition of portraiture is very

likely familiar to Indian audiences—framing a child within a discourse of divinity is a

traditional Indian trope for representing children in formal portraiture. The photograph

held up by Avijit’s grandmother for Briski’s camera is an instance of such a “formal”

photograph, one that conveys a specific collective history of community and religion, but

not necessarily of class—in fact the “divinity” trope is designed to disavow rather than

affirm the class determinism of a child having been “born into a brothel.” When Briski

cuts immediately to Avijit’s self portrait, valorizing it as an example of good

photography, she sets up Avijit’s more “spontaneous,” “modern” and “personal”

expression of selfhood over and against the traditional posed portrait, which becomes

relegated as simply another Oriental curiosity rather than a vehicle for representing the

self in a collective register. Avijit’s “Self Portrait” tellingly empties the history out of

those indices that are not meaningful to the Western reader, replacing a mythological

representational convention that encodes markers of familial and religious background

with a documentary realist aesthetic that expresses his ethnic difference as a class

distinction. Avijit models as the lesson of the day in photography class what Rey Chow

has described as “coercive mimeticism”—by displaying and mobilizing the terms that

make him recognizably and irreducibly “other” in relation to the West rather than

representing himself in terms that erase his class-based “otherness” within the context of

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his local cultural community.108 The film’s championing of this photograph’s role in

Avijit’s personal transformation from “wild child” to cultural delegate seems to illustrate

John and Jean Comaroff’s thesis that “ethno-commodities” have replaced traditional

rituals or “heritage” as the preferred channel through which twentieth-century ethnics

assume subjecthood.109

Avijit does more than simply model good autoethnographic habits for his peers.

He also has all of the trappings of a tragic hero, as far as the film is concerned. Although

he is “gifted,” a number of personal tragedies pose threats to his continued success as a

photographer. His mother becomes the victim of what Briski strongly suggests is a

dowry-related killing, and his father is portrayed as a self-destructive alcoholic.

Traumatized by his mother’s death, Avijit becomes reclusive and diffident, and his

interest in producing photographs dwindles rapidly. Avijit’s lapse into non-

productiveness provides a new impetus for Briski’s resolution to “liberate” the children

from the brothels. Avijit’s unhappy situation allows her to rationalize the urgency of

transferring all of her students from the poorly supervised local municipal schools that

they currently attend to privately funded and remotely located rehabilitative educational

facilities. Framed by Briski as a therapeutic measure rather than a disciplinary precaution,

the plan to relocate the children is met with much resistance by some of the other

children’s parents and grandparents, particularly Puja’s, although Briski ultimately

prevails. It becomes apparent that not all of the children share Avijit’s situation, and that

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!108 Chow, The Protestant Ethnic, 107-8. 109 John L. and Jean Comaroff, Ethnicity, Inc. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 10. The commodification of ethnicity, the authors suggest, is fast becoming the condition of possibility of humanity itself. Paraphrasing an anecdote by a Tswana elder named Tswagare Namane, they argue that the finding a viable avenue for marketing their culture is an increasingly popular vehicle through which ethnic groups affirm their self-worth and humanity. “To be human these days, [Tswagare Namane] suggests, one must “have culture” (Ibid 25).

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many of their families are nurturing, if nontraditional, although the film wastes little time

examining these dynamics. A rather remarkable montage intervenes at this point. Briski

inventories the panoply of bureaucratizations and medicalizations of the children’s bodies

necessary for entering the children into the private education apparatus: ration cards are

applied for, HIV and blood tests are conducted, medical certificates are obtained, proof of

prior schooling amassed, and passport photographs taken in order to overcome the legal

obstacles of the children’s often illegitimate parentage and establish their status as

citizens.

Special attention is lavished upon Avijit, whom Briski becomes invested in

transforming from a potentially “bad kid” into a “star photographer.” With the help of

Robert Pledge, a professional photo agent recruited to generate global interest in the

children’s photography, Briski nominates Avijit as a child ambassador of the Brothels

project, charging him with the responsibility of representing the work of the children

abroad. Following this, the narrative is all but given over to Briski’s relentless pursuit of

legal documentation to enable Avijit to attend a corrective school and to travel abroad to

attend photo shows. A triumphant finale concludes the film when Avijit’s passport

arrives in time for him to travel to an international photography exhibition in Amsterdam.

The last segment of the film is devoted entirely to Avijit’s travel in Amsterdam and his

participation at a children’s tour of the photo show, where Avijit obligingly models his

training as a cultural ambassador. Smartly outfitted in Western clothing, Avijit expounds

to a rapt audience of children gathered over a photograph, “This is a good picture. We get

a good sense of how these people live. And though there is sadness in it, and though it’s

hard to face, we must look at it because it is truth.”

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Born Into Brothels argues that being given access to the means of production of

discourse allows marginalized children to take charge of their own economic futures, and

can thereby liberate them from exploitative conditions of extreme poverty and potentially

coerced sex-work. Briski offers the humane, benign, and even “empowering” solution of

the children selling their “own” photographs as a substitute for the far more egregious

alternative of selling their bodies. This brand of child media advocacy finds legitimation

for its politics of humanitarian intervention in the hierarchy of priorities that currently set

the international standards for responses to child labor. In the wake of the 1989 United

National Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), legal and quasi-legal standard-

setting has moved toward a human rights approach to child labor rather than considering

it an issue of labor regulation, with the result that “child welfare” (which has to do with

necessary goods and capabilities for well-being) is upheld as a primary principle over and

against the “child agency” principle (having to do with chosen and therefore secondary

goods and capabilities).110 Prior to the near-universal ratification of the CRC in 1989,

International Labour Organization (ILO) conventions simply aimed to abolish all child

labor by “treating [it] as an issue to be resolved via the setting of agreed legal rules

concerning minimum ages for employment, similar to the regulation of other aspects of

the employment relationship as the health and safety of workers.”111 In contrast,

international standards drafted since 1989 do not view all child labor as violative of

human rights. Instead, they “focus on those aspects of child work that are truly abusive or

exploitative, as now expressed in the 1999 ILO Convention Concerning the Prohibition

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!110 See Cullen, “Child Labor Standards,” 92. 111 Ibid 88.

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and Immediate Elimination of the Worst Forms of Child Labour (ILO C182).”112 The

merging of the children’s rights agenda with the child labor agenda has taken the form of

special protocols for prioritizing and eliminating child prostitution as one of the four

“worst forms” of child labor (ranked second after child slavery, before recruitment of

children in drug trafficking, and work harmful to the health, safety, and morals of

children).113

One of the key conceptual interventions of ILO C182’s imperative to eliminate

the “worst forms of child labor” has been in differentiating between “child labor”

(harmful for child welfare, hence impermissible) and “child work” (benign and having to

do with child agency, hence permissible).114 In this regard, Born Into Brothels’ advocacy

of the production of media commodities by children as a salubrious alternative to

prostitution typifies the recent trend among child labor commentators of mobilizing the

legal categories of child work and child labor (with little fidelity to or elaboration in

relation to the uses of these categories by Arendt or Marx) for championing work that

children enter into willingly, as “free,” “independent,” and “willing” agents, over coerced

work.115 This kind of simplistic understanding of agency has been critiqued by others,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!112 Ibid 87. 113 ILO C182 lists the following among the “worst forms” of child labor, which are to be immediately prohibited as violations of children’s rights: “(a): “all forms of slavery or practices similar to slavery or practices similar to slavery, such as the sale and trafficking of children, debt bondage, and serfdom and forced or compulsory labor, including forced or compulsory recruitment of children for use in armed conflict”; (b) “the use, procuring, or offering of a child for prostitution, for the production of pornography or for pornographic performances”; (c) “the use, procuring, or offering of a child for illicit activities, in particular for the production and trafficking of drugs as defined in the relevant international treaties”; and (d) “work which, by its nature or the circumstances in which it is carried our, is likely to harm the health, safety, or morals of children”” (Ibid 94). 114 Ibid 93. 115 For instance, Ivy George’s 1990 ethnography of child textile laborers in Chinnallipatti, India, argues: “Child Labour [sic] is the employment of children and the extraction of their productivity for the economic gain of another, with debilitating ramifications on the psychological and

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who argue that structural forces like need, poverty, caste, and class impinge upon

children’s “active participation” in “child work.”116 However, the idea that work is often

the only avenue through which marginalized children can fashion “self-image, self-

esteem and identity”117 forms the basis of an influential critique of recent child labor

legislation—one that notes the new human rights-driven tenor of child labor initiatives

employs a monolithically Western moral conception of childhood as a domain that should

be dissociated from the production of value.118 The danger of employing this static notion

of childhood as a cipher for understanding labor is that cultures with a more fluid

understanding of the spectrum between childhood and adulthood are summarily

dismissed as malevolent, dangerous, or criminal. The flipside of this ethnocentric

indictment of non-Western laboring economies is that since the ILO’s understanding of !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!physical development of the child. The working child, on the other hand, enters work arrangements that offer freedom and independence. Working children cease to be mere means to another’s ends; instead they actively participate in decision making and the appropriation of resources and in that sense the whole work process is a learning experience, entered into willingly…I do not oppose children working; in fact, from a social and economic standpoint it may very well be a viable alternative for all the children who are driven to inhumane conditions of labour today. The provision of work settings which foster the development of children, and which are unexploitative, is of utmost importance in alleviating the problems that beset the children and their kin. My suggestion for an alternative approach rests on the earlier differentiation of work and labour.” See Ivy George, Child Labour and Child Work (New Delhi: Ashish Publishing, 1990), 22-23. George claims to derive her schema from Hannah Arendt’s distinction between work and labor, however her highly reductive summary of Arendt—which ignores the category of action altogether—suggests a fundamental misreading of Arendt since George defines work (rather than labor) as a fundamental biological function of life (Ibid 15-20). 116 See Christopher Pole, Phillip Mazin, and Angela Bolton, “Why Be a School-Age Worker?”, in Hidden Hands: International Perspectives on Children’s Work and Labor, edited by Christopher Pole, Phillip Mazin, and Angela Bolton (London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2001), 37-54. 117 Ibid 16. 118 See for instance Olga Nieuwenhuys, “The Paradox of Anthropology and Child Labor,” Annual Review of Anthropology volume 25 (1996): 237-51. Nieuwenhuys suggests that the origins of the Western view of childhood (which has become the norm for defining childhood in modernity) stem from a misreading of the abolitionist discourses surrounding child factory labor during the Industrial Revolution—the elimination of the same, she insists, had less to do with humanitarian motives and more to do with the economic and ideological requisite of protecting the mechanized textile industry from the uncontrolled competition of a youthful labor force. Nieuwenhuys also provides numerous citations for scholarly work exploring the symbolic dimensions of childhood in different historical and cultural circumstances.

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“harmful” labor is based on an eighteenth-century model of Western factory labor, the

“worst forms” initiative arbitrarily sanctions a whole spectrum of exploitative informal,

unpaid, and familial child work as relatively “benign” on the basis that such work is not

considered to be “productive.”119

Although many labor rights scholars have lobbied for more nuanced and

culturally specific approaches for responding to the evolving needs of working children

as “active social actors,”120 the program articulated by these detractors is largely

reactionary, and seeks to simply revert to the previous method of labor regulation-

oriented reform.121 As a result of this overwhelming focus on quantitative measures—

such as standardized scales of compensation and policy reform to determine the

“appropriate age” 122 for various modes of child labor—that seek to assign numeric values

to rather than qualify the impact of emerging forms of child labor, there is as yet little

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!119 Ibid 239. Nieuwenhuys argues, for instance, that schooling, which is commonly conceived as an antidote for reforming child laborers (as evidenced also in Briski’s project) often results in simply lengthening the working day for many children in developing countries who end up having to attend school in addition to taking on odd jobs (Ibid 244). 120 Victor Karunan, for instance, draws directly on Nieuwenhuys to advocate a “child-centered approach [that] seeks to view working children as change makers” by positioning them not as “innocent, vulnerable, susceptible beings, but also as active social actors who can make a positive contribution, as children, to social development and change.” See Victor Karunan, “Working Children as Change Makers: Perspectives from the South,” in Child Labor and Human Rights: Making Children Matter, edited by Burns H. Weston (London: Lynne Rienner, 2005), 303. 121 A striking illustration of this trend can be seen in recent debates surrounding children’s “care-work,” or the recruitment of children for providing unpaid assistance to family members, ranging from housework, administering medication to elders, infant care, intimate care, and providing physical and emotional support. The overwhelming majority of scholarly criticism on child care work focuses on the importance of legal provisions for recognizing the same as labor, rather than focusing on how the recognition of affective forms of work might complicate the means by which labor is recognized and evaluated. See for instance Saul Becker, Chris Dearden and Jo Aldridge, “Children’s Labour of Love?: Young Carers and Care Work,” in Hidden Hands: International Perspectives on Children’s Work and Labor, edited by Christopher Pole, Phillip Mazin, and Angela Bolton (London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2001), 70-87; Chris Dearden and Saul Becker, Young Carers in the United Kingdom: A Profile (London: Carers National Association, 1998); Jenny Frank, Chris Tatum, and Stanley Tucker, On Small Shoulders: Learning from the Experiences of Former Young Carers (London: Children’s Society, 1999). 122 See Becker, Dearden and Aldridge, “Children’s Labour of Love,” 84.

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analysis of the philosophical and social implications of the affective dimensions of new

modalities of child work, nor any attempt to theorize how this problem can contribute

toward theoretical scholarship on affective labor.123 Consequently such criticism

maintains the exceptionalism surrounding the figure of the child rather than

symptomatically positioning the recruitment of affective child labor within a broader

theoretical landscape of shifting conceptions of productive work.

Perhaps the most devastating failure of the interventionist lens through which

child labor activists now envision their moral duty has to do with their stubborn quest for

visible evidence of the “worst” forms of child labor. As a result, humanitarian projects

such as Kids with Cameras remain blind to the possibility that postmodern labor may

assume forms that are not necessarily dramatic, catastrophic, or even documentable at all.

Indeed, a group of Marxists scholars, including Maurizio Lazzarato, Paolo Virno, Franco

Berardi, Antonio Negri and others, have argued that neoliberal forms of labor are

distinguished precisely by their imperceptibility. Lazzarato writes that under

neoliberalism we are increasingly “hailed” to become “active” economic subjects—in

other words, we are encouraged to mobilize our affective or creative desire for agency as

“immaterial labor,” setting it to work in a number of economic tasks that are not

necessarily recognizable or measurable as work, and which are therefore typically

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!123 Ibid 72-3. See the chapter “Introduction: In Spite of Images…” for a glossary of articulations of post-Fordist forms of labor, including virtuosic labor (Virno), immaterial labor (Lazzarato), affective labor (Hardt and Negri), free labor (Terranova), feminine labor (Fortunati, Dalla Costa), and cognitive labor (Berardi). Unpaid child care-work, as described by child labor scholars, might be best described by the term “affective labor,” although it arguably shares dimensions of the other forms of labor.

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uncompensated or undercompensated.124 More recently, Berardi has suggested that “brain

workers” like call center executives, digital workers, and entrepreneurial managers

represent the archetype of postmodern labor, in that their intellectual and communicative

work is instrumental in shaping an economic climate in the form of industrial standards,

cultural norms, fashions, tastes, and public opinion.125 Since these are not tangibly

measurable commodities but rather favorable conditions that lubricate the machinery of

capitalist accumulation, the expenditure of creative, intellectual and affective “will to

power” is argued to herald a new and unprecedented era of willful submission to

exploitation. With this in mind, the spirit of volunteerism that galvanizes the production

of “ethno-commodities” so proudly showcased in Born Into Brothels may be said to

represent the apotheosis of immaterial labor. It might even be said that the idealized

figure of the child, with its invocations of innocence, leisure, and recreation, represents

the unconscious of postmodern forms of labor.

Within the de-materializing frames of Briski’s documentary film, the work

accomplished by the children’s communicative labor is rendered benign,

inconsequential—it is child’s play. Given the film’s ethnocentric view of the landscape of

child labor, it is impossible to disagree with its proposed alternative without being against

children, and therefore against the unquestioned value of the image of “Hope” that lights

up the Kids with Cameras homepage. Born Into Brothels’ advocacy of “art” as a viable

economic, moral, and perhaps most importantly, voluntary, alternative to coerced sex-

work interpellates the spectator within what Lee Edelman has recently described as the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!124 Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” translated by Paul Colilli and Ed Emory, in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, edited by Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 135. 125 Franco “Bifo” Berardi, The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009), 87

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“ideological Möbius strip” of contemporary children’s rights rhetoric.126 The film

essentially seeks to substitute a particularly pernicious legal form of affective labor for an

illegal one,127 and in doing so, endorses immaterial child labor as a culturally viable and

even meritorious practice. If at first the children were born into brothels, as the film

claims, we might now say that they are re-born into capitalism, with all of its attendant

apparatuses of capture. This chapter, and my dissertation as a whole, argues an attention

to the filmed document that rubs against and resists the dematerializing logic that

transforms the index into a sign of immediacy. The photographs sold on Kids with

Cameras are not just commodities that crystallize the rich potential of childhood but rich

texts for interpretation—they are material manifestations that capture the children’s

affective desire in a moment of becoming. By interpreting, reading, and dwelling on these

texts, we can insist that the immaterial child labor mobilized in the name of saving

children, does matter.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!126 Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 2. 127 Leopoldina Fortunati’s The Arcane of Reproduction represents one of the earliest articulations of the argument that sex-work is a form of affective labor. Fortunati argues that within capitalism, value is isolated to the process of commodity-production, while housework and sex-work are treated as a form of non-waged affective labor—or rather, labor that is mediated by the wage of the male worker. She argues compellingly that prostitution remains outside of the sphere of total subsumption of labor under capital since it is not subjected to capital’s mediation of time via the intensification of the workday. I cannot take this up here, but Fortunati’s argument regarding the political potential of sex work within capitalism is very pertinent to the shift in the status of the children’s labor that I discuss here. See Leopoldina Fortunati, The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labor, and Capital (New York: Autonomedia, 1995).

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CHAPTER TWO

AUTOMATIC ETHNOGRAPHY: ANIMAL ARTISTS IN THE GLOBAL “HUMANE-ITARIAN” ECONOMY

THE ELEPHANT’S SELF-PORTRAIT In early 2008, a digital storm began brewing around a viral video of an elephant in

the act of painting what is repeatedly described as a “self-portrait.” Originally posted on

YouTube in March 2008 by tourist art entrepreneurs Mark Fangue and Liz Allen as a

teaser campaign for their business venture “Exotic World Gifts,”128 the video

subsequently made the rounds of numerous social networking sites, accumulating over

eleven million hits according to one count, in addition to being re-posted on a slew of

personal blogs.129 Shot at an anonymous Asian location,130 this video features an elephant

bearing a trough of materials in its trunk being led by its mahout up to a canvas, where it

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!128 See “Original Elephant Painting”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=He7Ge7Sogrk&feature=fvw [Accessed September 7, 2010]. 129 See the “Viral Video Chart” listing for “Original Elephant Painting”: http://viralvideochart.unrulymedia.com/youtube/ORIGINAL_Elephant_Painting?id=He7Ge7Sogrk [Accessed September 7, 2010]. Owned and operated by the UK-based viral video marketing site Unruly Media, Viral Video Chart is a site that collates live statistics on viral videos by type, region, date and site, and claims to offer “the world’s largest, most comprehensive database of viral videos.” See http://www.unrulymedia.com/about/ [Accessed September 7, 2010]. 130 In a different video, Fangua and Allen describe the site as a “well-managed…camp in Thailand”; elsewhere, they cite its location as “Northern Thailand.” See Fangue and Allen’s video “Elephants Working and Playing in Thailand”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EUHX2soD6s&feature=channel [Accessed September 7, 2010]; also see Fangue and Allen’s blog: http://exoticworldgiftsblog.com/about/ [Accessed September 7, 2010].

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proceeds to engage an audience of tourists in a somewhat novel circus routine: painting

on an easel by gripping a paintbrush with its trunk. The main event of the video takes

place at around a minute and a half into the eight-minute clip, when the animal’s single

protracted brushstroke begins to undeniably resemble the outline of an elephant’s torso

and trunk, eliciting a marked escalation in the crowd’s response from polite amusement

to exclamations of astonishment. The camera zooms in to emphasize the remarkable

spectacle of mimesis—an elephant’s trunk painting an elephant’s trunk—and remains

locked in this framing as the pachyderm laboriously completes its sketch amid alternating

gasps and cheers from the now unseen onlookers, even stopping to switch brushes for

adding one final flourish: in place of a paintbrush, the elephant in the portrait bears an

orange flower complete with green stem and leaves in its raised trunk (see Fig. 12).

The motley array of comments generated by this video are split between believers

and skeptics, but invariably circle around the implications of whether animals are capable

of consciously producing a self-portrait, or whether the faculty of producing an iconic

representation of oneself is the province of human beings alone (as those who have selves

and therefore consciousness of a self).131 The May 2009 National Geographic “Wild on

Tape” special devoted to investigating and contextualizing the story behind Fangue and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!131 A number of bloggers have devoted entries to debunking the video as a hoax, inviting comments scrutinizing the editing of the video, particularly the zoom-in, which many protest is contrived to disguise a human hand in a rubber sheath digitally manipulated to produce the effect of an elephant’s trunk. Others turn to Pavlovian behaviorist theories to affirm the veracity of the act itself, but maintain that the execution of the painting is merely the mechanical reaction of a beast subjected to relentless and possibly abusive human manipulation and training. A sizable majority view the video as an occasion to engage in speculations as to the sublime, “inspiring,” and unknown dimensions of non-human intelligence, although these benevolent gestures are typically grounded in empirical conjectures that attempt to quantify the same in comparison with the cognitive development of human children. For a representative sample of such comments see the discussion thread on the post by Cory Doctorow on http://boingboing.net/2008/03/29/elephant-paints-an-e.html [Accessed September 9, 2010].

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Allen’s video demonstrates this anthropomorphizing sensibility—the confusion of

categories generated by the elephant’s achievement is waylaid by “expert” testimony

from zoologists who reassure viewers that elephant and human musculature and

cognition differ in degree rather than kind.132 Curiously, this humanizing narrative of

animal intelligence has become an overarching legitimating framework that supports a

small but thriving industry of purveyors of elephant art. These organizations rely on

generating financial sympathy for “starving elephant artisans”133 as a means of

supporting conservation efforts focused on the endangered Asian elephant. Fangue and

Allen’s fair-trade handicraft enterprise Exotic World Gifts advocates “compassion

shopping” (or the consumption of non-Western handmade goods by Western cultural

tourists) as a business model that enables economically disadvantaged or at-risk Third

World artisans—including elephants—to assume economic autonomy. While Exotic

World Gifts focuses on branding the genre of image produced in their infamous video

(representational “portraits” of elephants and flowers), competitors like The Elephant Art

Gallery differentiate their product by arguing that under less contrived conditions

elephants actually produce the abstract brush-stroke elephant paintings available through

their website. They contrast these “genuine” or “original” artworks with the more popular

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!132 This video episode can be seen through Fangue and Allen’s website at http://www.exoticworldgifts.com/video_popup.php?id=13 [Accessed September 9, 2010]. The “Wild on Tape” archive at the National Geographic Channel can be viewed at http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/episode/wild-on-tape-3651/Overview [Accessed September 7, 2010]. In addition to comparative testimony by zoologists who argue that elephant and human biology and cognition differ in degree and not kind, the National Geographic video confirms the location of Faing and Allen’s video (the Maetaman Elephant Camp in Northern Thailand) and the identity of the “original” elephant painter, Hong. 133 See the extended description of the “Original Elephant Painting” YouTube video posted by ExoticWorldGifts.

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portraits advertised on sites like Exotic World Gifts, which they denounce as being

unnaturally coerced rather than products of the elephants’ “own volition.”134

Any disparities between these contesting projects, as well as the more dubious

dimensions of their revenue flows, are reconciled under the greater goal of humane

animal conservation efforts by The Asian Elephant Art Conservation Project (AEACP), a

non-profit organization whose primary objective is finding viable alternatives for re-

employing domesticated elephants made redundant by deforestation-related national bans

on logging across the Asia-Pacific region.135 AEACP openly acknowledges its

undifferentiated embrace of a panoply of “gentle” approaches to “teaching various

painting techniques to elephants and caretakers.”136 This attitude, which views all labors

associated with elephant painting as relatively humane when compared with the violent

reputation of the Asian logging industry, symptomatizes the knee-jerk liberal response of

the international humanitarian community regarding the “barbarism” of Asians toward

animals—one that Laura U. Marks and others have criticized for its intolerance of

cultures which consume or employ animals in less abstract ways than the West.137

Aesthetically, AEACP’s motto of liberal relativism translates to a celebration of the range

and variety of elephant art practices, as evidenced in the press statement that introduces

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!134 See the section titled “Are Paintings by Elephants Really Art?” at the Elephant Art Gallery site: http://www.elephantartgallery.com/learn/authentic/are-elephant-paintings-art.php [Accessed September 12, 2010]. 135 AEACP (founded 1998) works with a range of elephant camps across Thailand, India, Cambodia, and Indonesia toward the goal of “aiding people in need and…saving the diminishing number of Asian elephants left on our planet through...work with domesticated elephants.” See AEACP’s “Mission Statement” and “Artist Statement” at http://www.elephantart.com/catalog/aboutus.php [Accessed September 12, 2010]. 136 See the history of AEACP at http://www.elephantart.com/catalog/history.php [Accessed September 12, 2010]. 137 See Laura U. Marks, “Animal Appetites,” in Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 23-40.

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the “elephant art gallery” section of the non-profit’s website, composed by New York-

based curator and elephant painting advocate Mia Fineman. Fineman evocatively

describes the “youthful exuberance” and “process-oriented sense of exploration” that

results from the “frenzied interspecies collaboration” between mahout and elephant,

extolling the work of these Oriental pachyderms as “the ultimate Outsider art.”138 Her

article confers the legitimacy of the Western art-world upon AEACP’s stated objective of

“push[ing] the boundaries of art as charity, while questioning our notions of artist and

intent.”139 But at the same time, the anthropocentric vocabulary Fineman provides for

exploring this alleged Outside—“Elephant Abstraction…Elephant Impressionism,

Elephant Surrealism, Elephant Conceptual Art”—reaffirms Art as an inviolably human

category that is amateurishly channeled through the naïve elephant caretaker to his noble

but lumbering animal apprentice. While authorizing the dualistic interventionist logic that

legitimates the abolition of visibly coerced animal labor in favor of the comparatively

analgesic institution of “animal painting,” Fineman’s sweeping gesture brushes under the

table centuries of ethically ambiguous animal activity that do not easily fit within the

categories of “labor” or “art,” denying their constitutive location within what Elizabeth

Grosz, following Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, dubs the “plane of composition” of

art.140 Admittedly, the use of animals in sport, hunting, domestication, surveillance,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!138 See the catalog essay “Elephant Painting in Thailand” on http://www.elephantart.com/catalog/thailand.php [Accessed September 12, 2010]. 139 See AEACP “Mission Statement.” 140 Grosz writes: “Deleuze and Guattari affirm the plane of composition as the collective condition of art making: it contains all works of art, not specifically historically laid out, but all the events in the history of art, all the transformations, “styles,” norms, ideals, techniques, and upheavals, insofar as they influence and express each other. [It] is not a literal plane…but a decentered spatiotemporal “organization,” a loose network of works, techniques, and qualities, within which all particular works of art must be located in order for them to constitute art.” See

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agriculture, and transportation—many of which are ongoing practices, and several of

which apply to the elephant artisans’ former careers—are harder to unequivocally

champion as coeval “interspecies collaboration,” but nevertheless perform the kind of

poietic or world-forming work that the emerging global “animal art” apparatus wishes to

attribute solely to art with a display-function.

THE SEMIOTIC ECONOMIES OF “HUMANE-ITARIAN” ART

The purpose of beginning this chapter by recapitulating the instance of the

elephant painting “self-portrait” (arguably just another small wave on the vast shore of

animal kitsch-based digital memes) is to emphasize how the frictive set of local needs

and global desires that mobilize this narrative of animal autopoiesis are held together by a

common investment in anthropocentric modes of meaning-making.141 The libidinal

economies that underpin this example resonate throughout this chapter, where I argue

that the claiming of selfhood for the elephant on the basis of its performance of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 70. 141 I intend to evoke Anna Tsing’s compelling use of the notion of friction to describe how the unexpected convergences of globalization permit diffuse groups of actors “come together” precisely by staying apart, to achieve goals that are often mutually exclusive and incommensurate. See Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). Tsing’s account of frictive globalization also rubs against the grain of the liberatory potential accorded to global digital flows in celebratory discourses of “viral” media, which argue that the materiality of the medium can be subordinated to or instrumentalized by its “contagious” content. Jonah Peretti writes, for instance, in his triumphalist manifesto on contagious media: “It does not matter if the media in question is an email forward, a website, a movie, a TV show, or a text message. All that matters is how it is spreading and the social networks that are facilitating the spread.” See Jonah Peretti, “Contagious Media,” in Structures of Participation in Digital Media, edited by Joe Karaganis (New York: Columbia University Press/Social Science Research Council, 2008), 161. Although this chapter does not challenge this narrative directly, my arguments against the self-evidence of indexical signs could also be addressed to the viral insofar as I argue that both are products of material mediations and not inherent properties of any entity.

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recognizable semiotic acts calls attention to the mutual constitution of dominant symbolic

and iconic modes of signification of visual media and normative modes of subjectivity.

Taking this issue as a launching point, I examine the work of visual media practitioners

who activate under-explored semiotic registers of mass media technologies in the process

of recruiting animals as authors of visual media. In my analysis, I suggest that these

unorthodox animal art practices both call attention to and gesture beyond the problems of

autoethnographic humanitarian media. On the one hand, by staging encounters with

animals using the indexical or contact-based dimensions of visual media, these

practitioners do seem to invoke the claims to immediacy, transparency, truth content, or

documentary status that I have previously argued to be typical among humanitarian

advocates of media empowerment. However, by calling attention to the work that goes

into producing “animal” signs as indexical, these practices not only challenge the

anthropocentric conception of art underpinning popular animal rights campaigns, but also

function, I suggest, as critical engagements of the non-anthropocentric theories of animal

semiosis of early interlocutors of the “animal question” such as Roger Caillois and Jakob

von Uexküll. I argue that taking seriously the positioning of animals as autoethnographic

subjects in these diverse and often playful media experiments can also be a way of

seriously reconsidering indexicality as a vehicle for alternative avenues of subject-

formation. These practices illustrate that for humanitarianism to live up to its

responsibility to the other, it is necessary to account for its rhetorical, medial, and textual

politics rather than merely relying on the inclusionary narrative of media access and

“empowerment.” Thus, they tentatively stage ways to move beyond the problematic

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continuities between humanitarian debates and animal rights discourses, ethnocentrism

and anthropocentrism.

The paradoxes of the elephant painting video’s popularity reveal the value of this

inquiry. The fractious opinions surrounding elephant “art” and its equally contentious

brokers appear to be unified by the seemingly timeless pleasure of looking at animal

images. However, the power of the elephant’s iconic portrait to corral these pleasures

within an ethical argument about animal rights seems specific to the contemporary

historical moment. The enjoyment of partaking of and circulating this video may be

linked to what art historian Steve Baker has described as the “apparently simple

pleasure…[of] looking at the image of animals.” Baker suggests that this seemingly

natural cultural habit is the cumulative effect of centuries of myth-building in the West.142

Charting a magisterial course from Aristotle to Disney, Baker argues that the

pictorialization of animal bodies has served as a transhistorical medium for representing

otherness and as a placeholder against which to continually refine and confirm the

coherence of the human as a metaphysical entity. Animal bodies thus sustain the

axiomatic currency of Cartesian dualism, and function as tropes for expressing this

dualism in other forms: perhaps most immediately the ethnographic binary, which casts

racial others as primitive or beast-like, but also the figuring of femininity as the

repository of corporeality in the Freudian psychoanalytic tradition. But the proliferation

of anthropomorphized animal imagery across mass media forms in the twentieth century

(such as Disney’s talking animals or apropos our discussion, painting elephants) should

necessarily be understood, Baker argues, in the wake of John Berger’s influential

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!142 Steve Baker, Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity and Representation (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1993), 121.

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commentary on the zoo as an imperialist apparatus for consuming the spectacle of captive

animals.143

Notwithstanding the forlorn tone of Berger’s essay, which nostalgically mourns

man’s alienation from an authentic pastoral relation to animals in industrial modernity,

his argument that zoos can only offer a view of animals as an “image out of focus”

remains an important contribution.144 Berger’s point is that the architecture of looking

relations within urban zoos functions as an ideological apparatus that frames the animal

in the image of its onlooker, while simultaneously maintaining its alterity at a safe

distance. This permits easy identification with animals: as Marks has written, the

orchestration of the zoo experience as entertainment, complete with the theatrical staging

of the animal as a postcolonial spectacle, encourages perceiving the animal as a screen

onto which humanist fantasies of integrity, diligence, or nobility can be projected. In this

engineered overidentification, the animal’s commonality with and difference from its

human onlooker are both disavowed, in a process that Marks suggests might, borrowing

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!143 Baker, Picturing the Beast, 67. 144 “A zoo is a place where as many species and varieties of animals as possible are collected in order that they can be seen, observed, studied. In principle, each cage is a frame round the animal inside it. Visitors visit the zoo to look at animals. They proceed from cage to age, not unlike visitors in an art gallery who stop in front of one painting, and then move on to the next or the one after next. Yet in the zoo the view is always wrong. Like an image out of focus. One is so accustomed to this that one scarcely notices it any more; or, rather, the apology habitually anticipates the disappointment, so that the latter is not felt…The truth is…However you look at these animals, even if the animal is up against the bars, less than a foot from you, looking outwards in the public direction, you are looking at something that has been rendered absolutely marginal; and all the concentration you can muster will never be enough to centralize it.” John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?”, in About Looking (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 23-4. Berger’s fertile visual metaphor of a distorted image can arguably be extended toward a critique of his own position, which is uncritical of the idea that zoos inevitably “disappoint” their viewers since the animals have been abstracted from some (imagined) authentic context. As Jonathan Burt has argued, the liberal humanism of Berger’s own essay can also be regarded as a product of the anthropomorphizing frame of the urban zoo. See Jonathan Burt, “John Berger’s “Why Look at Animals?”: A Close Reading,” Worldviews: Environment, Culture, Religion volume 9, number 2 (2005): 203-18.

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from Anne Friedberg, be dubbed “petishism.”145 The zoo in our example, the “humane”

elephant conservation camp in Thailand, is alleged to “sustain and protect”146 its

inhabitants but nonetheless relies financially on safaris and shows performed by them.147

This demonstrates the continued relevance of Berger’s formulation, as well as the

urgency of investigating the new and liberal forms of the distortion-effect that he

describes. The pleasing image of the paintbrush-wielding elephant replicating a

proverbially human activity (representational painting) corroborates Marks’s insight that

petishism extends beyond the realm of household pets like dogs to other charismatic

megafauna that can be trained or domesticated. The dissemination of this image beyond

the bounds of the cage-free camp to worldwide wildlife television broadcasts and the

cabinet of curiosities of YouTube can be further viewed as a deterritorialized vehicle for

indulging in the humanizing pleasures of the zoo.148 However, in contrast with the online

debates surrounding the video, which predictably position the animal as either irreducibly

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!145 Marks, “Animal Appetites,” 31; 25-6. Marks writes, “[For Friedberg] Petishism is built on a mechanism of disavowal similar to fetishism. A fetish is useful for its ability to distract from the anxiety-inducing scene at the origin of difference, in order simultaneously to affirm and disavow it. Usually the scene in question provokes sexual difference and the fear of castration. In the present case the difference in question in species difference and the fear of animality. I would argue that the primal scene of petishism is the terror of finding out that we are not, after all, so different from animals. Like sexual fetishism, petishism takes an ideologically troubling difference and represents it in terms of individuals…Petishists believe that animals are both just like us and fundamentally other” (Ibid 26). 146 See the description of AEACP’s partner camps at http://www.elephantart.com/catalog/mission.php [Accessed September 18, 2010]. 147 See the program offerings of the Maetaman Elephant Camp at http://www.maetamanelephantcamp.com/ProgramTour.htm [Accessed September 18, 2010]. 148 Animal metaphors abound in descriptions of YouTube: for instance, in a recent report for the Neiman Foundation at Harvard, Steve Grove, director of News and Politics on YouTube describes the database logic of YouTube in terms of an ordered ecosystem: “A glance at YouTube might give the impression that it’s a jungle in there…[but] dig beneath the chaos, and an evolving order is revealed—one that is driving content through the broader ecosystem.” Steve Grove, “YouTube’s Ecosystem for the News,” Nieman Reports (June 16, 2010): http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports/article/102417/YouTubes-Ecosystem-for-News.aspx [Accessed January 16, 2011].

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distinct from or similar but subordinate to the human, the economic imperative of the

organizations devoted to selling “elephant art” motivates a novel narrative: the elephant’s

capacity to produce what is recognizable as “art” is treated as evidence of its active

“volition” or intention as a subject. Subsequently “elephant art” becomes a rallying cry

for elephant rights.

Several aspects of this line of reasoning (that the humanity of animals justifies

their humane treatment) are familiar. Donna Haraway has noted that the domestication of

animals as pets in the Western context, which has entailed modifying animals genetically

and behaviorally for human needs, should be regarded as a process of humanization.149

Furthermore, since the overarching conservationist frame within which the notion of

elephant volition is invested with economic meaning seeks to delegate humans with the

responsibility of determining living conditions for animals, it is therefore fundamentally

anthropocentric in conception, as anthropologist Tim Ingold has argued of discourses of

conservation in general.150 The ethical persuasion of Exotic World Gifts and the AEACP

is also a common one. Matthew Calarco writes that “uncovering some sort of

fundamental [human] identity (for example, sentience or subjectivity) shared by all

animals” is the modus operandi of the contemporary animal rights movement, which !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!149 Some instance of these medical and behavioral adaptations might include the genetic engineering and cross-breeding of companion species, specialized medical provisions for the health of domestic animals, and taboos on consuming the meat of certain animals, which are in turn trained not to attack humans. Haraway would want to insist that engaging the “significant otherness” of companion species has a reciprocal impact on the genetic, subjective, and affective constitution of the human, but for the present purposes I am interested less in the ethical and political promises of companionship than in the modalities of “companionship” as a technology of humanizing animals since, as Haraway herself acknowledges, practices of significant otherness are rarely symmetrical for animals and humans. See Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003); also see Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 262-3. 150 See Tim Ingold, “Introduction,” in What Is An Animal?, edited by Tim Ingold (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), 12.

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remains indebted to a humanist agenda that marries Peter Singer’s utilitarian schema of

“animal liberation” with the Kantian framework of animal rights philosopher Tom Regan,

who beckons to animal agency and subjectivity for obtaining membership for animals

within the moral sphere of rights. This move, asserts Calarco, merely ushers animals in as

the next logical cause for the identity movement to regroup around, with its familiar

slogans of rights, access, resistance, and participation, while holding in place the very

liberal humanist framework that has historically served to legitimate violence against

animals, and the “others” that came before them.151 As with the case of Born Into

Brothels in the previous chapter, the act of handing over the artistic apparatus to

beleaguered animals is criss-crossed with the humanitarian (or as the title of this section

re-dubs, “humane-itarian”) drive of revealing the animal’s underlying humanity and

hence, its worthiness of compassion. It is telling in this regard that the vehicle for the ever

outward-expanding rights movement is the portrait, a genre whose popularization through

photography is regarded to have played an important role in democratizing the “self” as a

technology.152

Indeed, the success of a business model organized around arguing the capacity of

elephants for producing works of art illustrates the extraordinary attractiveness of the

identity movement’s “voice” model as a vehicle for “empowering” animal subjects. The

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!151 See Matthew Calarco, Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 6-10; 103-149. Calarco argues that the logic of moral equivalence between humans and animals espoused by Singer and Regan retains a hierarchical schema that simply redraws new lines of exclusion while retaining the parameters of the “normal” liberal subject. As a corrective, he advocates a deeper engagement with Derrida’s reinterpretation of Bentham’s writings on animal suffering in terms of passivity and vulnerability rather than agency as the shared basis of human and animal being. Calarco’s emphasis on passivity will be further explored in the section of the chapter devoted to discourses of touch. 152 See John Tagg, The Burden of Representation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 34-59.

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articulation of the animal’s “voice” in relation to notions of artistic volition and

originality153 demonstrates the persistence of what Michel Foucault calls the “author-

function” as an inaugural principle in the conception of subjectivity within which

membership is sought for the animal.154 The overwhelming concentration of audience

interest in the realistic color palette and figurative qualities of the iconic elephant painting

in the original viral video (the more idiosyncratic abstract paintings touted by the

Elephant Art Gallery rarely merit a mention in viewer comments), as well as the desire to

read the same as a self-portrait, clearly indicate the limiting parameters of this notion of

subjecthood. The subject-position that the elephant is invited to occupy is constituted by a

normative human look, characterized by the centrality of trichromatic binocular vision for

organizing sensory information,155 and moreover, according to the capacity for

representing the self as an iconic sign. The constitutive relationship thus posited between

subject-formation (the capacity of inhabiting the symbol “I” as a sign within a chain of

signifiers), iconicity (the quality of resemblance between a sign and its object), and self-

consciousness implies a view of subjectivity founded on the capacity for reflecting upon

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!153 For instance: the series of elephant brush-stroke drawings offered for sale at The Elephant Art Gallery are at first glance indistinguishable from one another, but are given evocative orientally-flavored titles that imbue them with personality, such as “Native Grasses” and “Flames at Midnight.” The “biographies” section also attributes a distinct painterly style to each elephant auteur, nearly always with reference to Western schools of art. See http://www.elephantartgallery.com/paintings/ and http://www.elephantartgallery.com/meet/ [Accessed October 3, 2010]. 154 Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?”, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 113-138. 155 A recent study headed by Emory University-based evolutionary geneticist Shozo Yokoyama cites evidence that elephants have dichromatic vision similar to that of certain “color-blind” humans who lack necessary visual pigments for perceiving the primary color red and red-based intermediary colors. See Shozo Yokoyama, Naomi Takenaka, Dalen W. Agnew, and Jeheskel Shoshani, “Elephants and Human Color-Blind Deuteranopes Have Identical Sets of Visual Pigments,” Genetics 170 (May 2005): 335-344. Based on these findings, the realistic color palette used by the elephant for the portrait painting featured in the video (which features color-distinctions that would be imperceptible to elephants along a grey-scale) could not have been the result of choice, but only training.

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the world through an anthropocentric set of semiotic tools.156 Like the wild child Victor,

who has to pass Itard’s language tests in order to be proclaimed civilizable (and therefore,

higher than an animal), the formerly “voiceless” animal is thought to emerge as a subject

only at the moment of gaining access to the tools for representing itself iconically. The

“self” voiced by the elephant simply holds a mirror to its audience but attains through

that very act the mirage-like desirability of a commodity.

The interpretation of the elephant’s portrait as a self-representation, that is as

proof of the animal’s apprehension of its own selfhood, suggests the adequacy of drawing

(rather than writing) as a means through the animal can accede to a viable, albeit limited

form of subjecthood, rehearsing the well-worn adage that language evidences subjectivity

or consciousness and hence agency.157 However, the elephant’s portrait comprises the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!156 Akira Lippit allies the human exceptionalism of the poststructuralist understanding of subjectivity (as constituted through language) with a Heideggerian genealogy, citing the philosopher’s insistence that the animal “does not have access to beings as such and in their Being.” See Martin Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, translated by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 199; Akira Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 60-61; 23. According to Lippit, Heidegger’s line of reasoning bears the heavy influence of Johann Herder’s 1772 text, “Essay on the Origin of Language,” wherein Herder argues that the “faculty of reflection, which forms the foundation of language, is complete in human beings and distinguishes language essentially from the “dark language of even all animals” (Ibid 108). 157 Cary Wolfe writes that the equation of language-use with subjectivity represents an entrenched dogma of human exceptionalism that permeates numerous domains of scholarly inquiry across the humanities, social, and cognitive sciences. See Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 129. Rey Chow’s critique of Jacques Derrida’s discussion of Chinese as an ideographic language brilliantly elucidates the ramifications of the distinction I draw here between drawing and writing. Chow argues that the residual ethnocentrism of Derrida’s comments symptomatizes the “continual stigmatization of [the Chinese] language through the mechanical reproduction of it as graphicity, as predominantly ideographic writing.” Thus, she illustrates that the phonocentrism through which Chinese is apprehended as more “immediate” than Western languages is a function of the mediation of its script by technologies of mechanical reproduction. See Rey Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 62. The equation of language-ability with agency has also been contested within disability studies. In her study of the debates surrounding facilitated communication with autistic children, Lisa Cartwright argues that disability rights discourses have problematically tended to associate the ability to constitute symbolic signs through speech or writing with agency. Since this focus on individual agency has

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barest of line drawings, and contains no identifying features whatsoever that might

indicate the singularity of its author. The characterization of this image—which could

really be a portrait of any elephant—as a self-portrait reveals the reactionary underside of

attributing a singular subjectivity to the elephant. Coupled with the conservationist claim

about the impending species extinction of the Asian elephant, this move of mapping

selfhood onto a multiplicity seems to affirm that the meaningfulness of death as an event

is applicable to animals only when an entire species is exterminated.158

Similar assumptions about the incommensurability of human and animal

consciousness underpin claims about the iconicity of the elephant’s painting. The

“scandal” or miracle of the elephant’s portrait of an elephant is only meaningful within a

schema where the animal is defined in contradistinction to the human as a being that

enacts mimesis but cannot apprehend it as a representational act. But if we refer to the

writings of Roger Caillois on animal mimicry, a different picture begins to emerge, which

reveals that the “money-shot” of the elephant painting video draws its validation and

fascination from an anthropocentric understanding of the concept of mimicry—one that is

predicated on human perception and socialization. In fact, as Caillois clarifies, the very !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!led to figuring the person who facilitates the child’s “coming to voice” as either liberator or manipulator, both sides of disability studies debates fail to consider how communication is inter-subjective rather than autonomous, and how subjectivity may be mutually constituted through nonlinguistic or affective communicative encounters, such as those of touch. See Lisa Cartwright, Moral Spectatorship: Technologies of Voice and Affect in Postwar Representations of the Child (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 157-227. 158 Lippit attributes this view to the Hegelian philosopher Alexander Kojeve, writing that “in Kojeve’s reasoning, humanity’s transcendental singularity actually transforms each individual death into a universal event,” and (citing from Kojeve’s Reading of Hegel) that “…it does not seem evil at all to kill or destroy some representative or other of an animal or vegetable species. But the extermination of an entire species is considered almost a crime.” See Lippit, Electric Animal, 235-6. Thomas A. Sebeok further elucidates that within discourses of biology, only the draining of an entire species’s gene-pool is considered to have impact in communicational terms, being conceptualized as “the elimination of a unique communicative code.” See Thomas A. Sebeok, “‘Animal’ in Biological and Semiotic Perspective,” in What is an Animal?, edited by Tim Ingold (New York: Routledge, 1994), 68.

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attribution of mimicry to animals amounts to little more than anthropomorphization, since

the resemblance in question is in the eyes of a human beholder.159 In his 1935 essay

“Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” Caillois offers another distinction to replace

“human” and “animal” as stable binaries: recognizing resemblances (an acquired

perceptual ability to distinguish spatial borders, linked with the normalizing imperative of

ego-maintenance) and “becoming similar” or “depersonalization by assimilation to

space.”160 Curiously, this instinct of “becoming similar” through camouflage, typical of

insects such as mantises and leaf insects that conform morphologically to their

surroundings, seems to have to do with renunciation as frequently as with survival.

Morphological imitation allows insects to “play dead” by merging with their

surroundings, but such “inertia” simultaneously exposes the insect to being crushed or

eaten by larger animals. Caillois describes this morphological act of visual fusion by the

animal with the other—its environment or milieu—as a loss in psychic energy, or

psychasthenia.161

It appears that Caillois was attempting to formulate a vocabulary for embodied

experiences of ambivalently tending toward an inorganic state of inertia or suspended

agency that find manifestation in signs that visually represent “a crisis of the boundaried,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!159 Roger Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” October 31 (Winter 1984): 16-32; 27. 160 Ibid 30. 161 Caillois writes this kind of camouflage, which renders mimetic insects invisible to predators who can only detect their presence through vital changes in color and motion, can function as a defense mechanism. Similar phenomena include preadaptation (insects seeking milieux that most closely match their dominant shade of color), and the coloring of non-mimetic species of butterflies and caterpillars whose patterned hind wings or retractable front segments bear the appearance of the eyes of a larger animal or bird and thus deter predators (Ibid 18, 22). At the same time, he avers that “alongside the instinct of self-preservation, which in some way orients the creature toward life, there is generally speaking a sort of instinct of renunciation that orients it toward a mode of reduced existence, which in the end would no longer know either consciousness or feeling—the inertia of the élan vital, so to speak” (Ibid 32). The emphases here are Caillois’s.

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well-formed self.”162 Caillois’s larger project involved developing a theory of “diagonal

science,” or an open series of experimental or poetic analogies and correspondences

conceived in opposition to the binary taxonomies of the structuralist human sciences.163

Taking this into account alongside his late work, which extrapolates a non-

anthropomorphic theory of “generalized aesthetics” based on the inscriptions of stones,164

it is possible to see that his early notion of the “instinct of renunciation” of mimetic

insects may have referred to a repressed desire to recoil to an inorganic or mineral state,

one that he felt was subordinated in so-called “higher” animals by the mandated

“ascension” to a state of split consciousness.165 Indeed, the use of mimicry has been

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!162 See Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 342-3. Jay argues that Caillois was attempting to distance himself from Freudian psychoanalysis by drawing on the French psychotherapist Pierre Janet, who coined the notion of psychasthenia to refer to a loss in ego strength. Jay also links Caillois’s interest in psychasthenia with Georges Bataille’s notion of informe. Caillois himself declines to comment on the relation between his “instinct of renunciation” and the Freudian death drive (see Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” 32), although commentators frequently equate the two. It seems important to note two points that differentiate Caillois from Freud and his most famous interlocutor, Jacques Lacan: (1) In this essay, Caillois seems specifically interested in visual signs that represent the ambivalence of ego-maintenance in relation to spatial categories, and (2) Caillois wants to complicate mechanical views of animal instinct, but not necessarily by claiming for animals the interiority/unconscious that Lacanian psychoanalysis uses to distinguish humans from animals. For instance, in his first articulations of the mirror stage, Lacan refers to Caillois’s theory of animal mimicry, but uses it to argue that the animal lacks the lack which propels this developmental stage in humans. On this, see Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function, as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” in Ecrits, translated by Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2002), 5. 163 See for instance Roger Caillois, “A New Plea for Diagonal Science,” in The Edge of Surrealism, edited by Claudine Frank (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 343-7. 164 See Roger Caillois, The Writing of Stones, translated by Barbara Bray (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1985). 165 David Macey writes, in a review of Cailois’s work: “Mimetism is usually a defence mechanism [sic]: the creature mimics or merges into its environment so as to escape predators. As the creature merges into its environment, it loses some of the more obvious characteristics of life – visibility, mobility – and seems to retreat to some earlier stage. For Caillois, this is symptomatic of a desire to revert to an inorganic state that is characteristic of all living things.” See David Macey, “Review of The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader, edited by Claudine Frank,” Radical Philosophy volume 128 (November/December 2004): http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/reviews/128-reviews [Accessed August 20, 2011].

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argued to necessitate a renunciation of the characteristics that most visibly signify

vitality, such as mobility and recognizability—a willful surrender whose aesthetic,

performative, or ornamental dimensions seem to exceed and even sabotage the purely

functional act of defense against predators.166 Building on Caillois’s ambivalent insights,

we can see that the real scandal in the elephant painting video involves the subsumption

of the unsettling, threatening, and perhaps unthinkable political possibilities of animal

poiesis within a set of regulatory ethical discourses that maintain the cohering coordinates

of the liberal human subject, thereby repudiating forms of agency that do not follow the

prescribed formula of identitarian resistance. If this is so, then perhaps we can use animal

poiesis to indicate the limits of liberal discourses of humanitarianism just as Gayatri

Spivak once employed the act of subaltern female suicide for undoing the received

notions of liberal Western feminisms.167 By thinking these two seemingly

disproportionate acts alongside each other, we can begin to see the pervasive violence of

liberal interpretive lenses which, in their single-minded moral mission to give a voice or

“self” to subalterns and sub-species, remain blind to the violent and self-destructive

excesses that can inhere in the speech-acts of these entities. Reprising Spivak’s lingering

question of how we can be receptive to subaltern speech without necessarily !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!166 Grosz’s splendid Deleuzian reading of ornamental displays by birds and animals as excessive of survival functions also provides a rich framework through which to understand animal mimicry. She writes: “In the case of battling birds, many territorial struggles are primarily theatrical, staged, a performance of the body at its most splendid and appealing, rather than a real battle with its attendant risks and dangers…Ornamental display occurs in the most successful and aggressive males, yet even those males who are most successful at fending off predators and rivals are not always guaranteed to attract the attention of a possible partner…Although beauty of all kinds is displayed, this beauty puts the creature in some kind of potential danger, it has a cost, even if it is not the cost of real battle but of becoming more visible or audible to predators as well as suitors.” See Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art, 68. 167 See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 66-111.

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understanding, deciphering, or mastering it, I want to ask if an alternative, non-iconic,

approach to animal autoethnography can generate new vocabularies for rethinking

humanitarian action.

Although Caillois himself devoted only this single suggestive and brief essay to

the topic of psychasthenic mimicry, scholarly proponents of critical animal studies have

recently exhumed the work of the early twentieth century Estonian proto-ethologist and

-zoosemiotician Jakob von Uexküll for a non-anthropocentric perspective on the

“reduced existence” of animals. As the remainder of this section will suggest, Uexküll’s

work, as well as that of his interlocutor Giorgio Agamben, presents a compelling model

of animal semiosis as indexical, so long as we maintain a critical distance from the

ideological and medial frames that subtend these scholars’ ultimately functionalist views

regarding animal communication. Uexküll characterizes as delusional the common view

that animals exist within the same phenomenal environment as humans but are simply

lesser beings incapable of apprehending and accessing that environment to the same

degree of sophistication. Such a view, he writes, denies the subjective realities of

animals, which each exist within separate but harmonious space-time worlds. Uexküll

sought to displace the view of the animal characterized by Martin Heidegger’s comment

that “[t]he animal’s behavior is never an apprehending of something as something.”168 To

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!168 Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 311. The emphasis is my own. Heidegger casts animals as “poor in world” on the basis of their inability to move from perception to the work of representation that allows Dasein to accede to language, and hence stand over, possess, or appropriate its world. Lippit argues that language and “world” are inseparable in Heidegger’s schema, which contrasts Dasein, the being that “has world,” with animals who are “poor in world” and inanimate objects like stones that are without world. For Lippit, Heidegger exemplifies the philosophical stance of privileging the human capacity for symbolic representation as the defining characteristic of selfhood. The equation of language ability with world-making forms the ontological basis of Heidegger’s dualistic characterization of animals as

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such an impoverished view of the animal relative to the human, Uexküll counters that all

animals, even the simplest organisms, are inserted perfectly within their individual

functional environments or umwelten; these form a “bubble [which] represents each

animal’s environment and contains all the features accessible to the subject.”169

Since each subject experiences its milieu as a closed unity composed of features

or “carriers of meaning” that may be utterly irrelevant or even imperceptible to other

subjects, these worlds may not only be unknown but unknowable to the human subject—

this explains Agamben’s rendition of the title of Uexküll’s recently translated German

text as “excursions in unknowable worlds.”170 According to Uexküll, the “contrapuntal”

intertwining of different functional cycles forms the basis of harmonious ecological

relations between species. For instance, the web of a spider can be said to be “fly-like”

precisely because the spider and its prey, the fly, are reciprocally blind to each other’s

carriers of meaning. Even though it has never measured a fly, a spider weaves its web in

the fly’s “primal image,” while the specific limitations of the fly’s field of vision prevents

it from seeing the web that will entrap it.171 The fly can thus be said to “resemble” the

spider’s web, even though such resemblance would not fall under the commonplace

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!inferior beings enveloped in their world, incapable of representing their separation from their environment or apprehending their selves as such. See Lippit, Electric Animal, 56-7. 169 Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With A Theory of Meaning, translated by Joseph D. O’Neil (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 43. In one of his favorite examples, Uexküll describes “a stroll on a sunny day before a flowering meadow in which insects buzz and butterflies flutter.” But each organism’s experience of the meadow’s idyll is limited to its Umwelt: “As soon as we enter into one such bubble, the previous surroundings of the subject are completely reconfigured. Many qualities of the colorful meadow vanish completely, others lose their coherence with one another, and new connections are created. A new world arises in each bubble” (Ibid 43). 170 Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 40. 171 Uexküll, A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, 171; 158.

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understanding of visual iconicity exemplified by the elephant painting.172 But even while

he scrupulously attends to the radical specificity of each species’ mode of meaning-

making, Uexküll holds the animal and the human apart, channeling the phonocentrism

that was pervasive in the functionalist thinking of his time. He argues that the animal has

a directly functional relationship with its carriers of meaning rather than man’s

interpretive one, wherein certain qualities of environmental objects resonate perfectly

with the body of the animal as if according to a pre-given “plan” or natural “score.”173 In

contrast, the bubbles of men “effortlessly overlap,” enabling them to communicate, only

because their meaning-carriers are made up of signs perceptible to all human subjects.174

He insists, on this basis, that animals should not be seen as Cartesian machines, but rather

as “machine operators” or “subjects, whose essential activities consist in the perception

and production of effects.”175

Uexküll’s schema of Umwelten, which casts Nature in the role of transcendental

orchestrator of meaning and humans and animals as sensate machinists cast in static pre-

ordained roles, fell out of favor for several decades on account of the political

ramifications of his ecological views.176 However, Agamben has recently spearheaded a

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!172 By the same logic, Caillois’s mimetic insect might be said to resemble the dry twig upon which it comes to rest (often permanently) in terms of the twig’s brittle inertia rather than in terms of their similar visual appearance to a human subject. 173 Ibid 159-60. Continuing the musical metaphor, Uexküll explains that these qualities produce “rhythmically arranged” biological or motor impulses in the animal, which in turn are re-impressed upon the carrier as an effect mark, thereby completing a perfectly functional cycle (Ibid 47-49, 145). 174 Ibid 69. For Uexküll, humans too are bound within their own bubbles, so that a chemist, a deep-sea researcher, and an astronomer each experience only a “tiny excerpt from Nature, tailored to [their] capacities” (Ibid 133). Through these examples, we see that for Uexküll, different human beings apprehend the phenomenal world using different sets of semiotic laws and sensory supplements. 175 Ibid 42. 176 In his untranslated 1920 study Staatsbiologie (or State Biology), Uexküll uses the idea of harmonious interconnected Umwelten as an analogy for the distinct political destinies of various

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resurgence of interest in Uexküll among contemporary proponents of posthumanism. In

The Open, Agamben protests the wholesale dismissal of Uexküll, and draws on his

characterization of the animal’s “intense and passionate” relationship with its milieu to

endorse a revisionist speculation into the work of another tarnished theorist, Martin

Heidegger, on the topic of boredom. Agamben argues that special circumstances such as

profound boredom might afford human beings an opportunity to suspend their normative

sensory propensities, thereby simulating the animal’s uncanny resonance or compulsion

toward its carriers of meaning, as described by Uexküll. Agamben suggests that for

humans, being delivered over to the experience of emptiness or boredom may

approximate most closely the animal’s captivation by its carrier of meaning, but with one

crucial difference: unlike the animal, whose single-minded captivation can even result in

its death, Agamben argues that the sensory deprivation of boredom can function as an

enabling constraint for the human subject, opening the way for other possibilities that lie

inactive.177

To argue his case, Agamben reprises Uexküll’s much-cited example of the tick,

whose Umwelt reconfigures the taxonomy of mammals as the lowest common

denominator of its three meager carriers of meaning: the odor of butyric acid in

mammalian sweat, the blood temperature of thirty-seven degrees, and hairy skin well-

irrigated with blood vessels. He writes, “the tick is immediately united to these three

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!peoples whose relations would be comprehensively coordinated by a sovereign state. Although Uexküll never explicitly spelled out an eliminationist political program, his conservative views on political destiny and vocational expertise proved to resonate ideologically with Nazi science, which sought to elect medical and biological experts as stewards of a biopolitical project of state racism. For an excellent historicist reading of Uexküll’s political biology, including descriptions of his untranslated works, see Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, “Afterword,” in Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With A Theory of Meaning, translated by Joseph D. O’Neil (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 209-243. 177 See Agamben, The Open, 46; 64-66.

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elements in an intense and passionate relationship the likes of which we might never find

in the relations that bind man to his apparently much richer world. The tick is this

relationship: she lives only in it and for it…However that may be, the tick’s feast of

blood is also her funeral banquet, for now there is nothing left for her to do but fall to the

ground, deposit her eggs and die.”178 Having thus dramatized the tragic

inconsequentiality of the tick’s life cycle, Agamben then cites the astonishing case of a

tick that was kept alive for eighteen years in a laboratory, using artificial means, in total

deprivation of its sensory environment. By framing his discussion of boredom in terms of

the human ability to transcend the tick’s fatal attraction for blood, with the ennobling

effect that the otherwise lowly tick appears to patiently “wait without time and world,”

Agamben resurrects the human subject as the metaphysical agent of negative potential. In

doing so, he inevitably romanticizes the automatic and anaesthetic nature of the animal’s

relationship with its carrier of meaning—automatic in that its bodily compulsion appears,

exempt from choice or will, and anaesthetic in that the compulsion both deadens

suffering and seems to exceed or precede signification.

Agamben’s reading of the animal relationship with its carrier of meaning as pre-

semiotic thus problematically reinforces the functionalism of Uexküll’s biosemiotic

model, and re-casts the animal and the human in a timeless drama of destiny. Just as

Uexküll drew on but simultaneously denied the structuring influence of the data-

processing technologies that provided him with his semiotic vocabulary of receivers,

processors, and emitters of signs, so too does the animal-machine metaphor, which

Agamben superficially reviles, following his forbear’s lead, function as the unspoken

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!178 Ibid 63-70; 47. The emphasis is Agamben’s.

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ideological basis of his compulsion toward examples that seem to strip semiosis bare.179

A similarly fetishized view of the animal’s pre-programmed, unmediated, or transparent

relationship with its environmental reference-points remains a haunted presence in the

recent revival of interest in the semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce’s notion of the

“indexical” sign among contemporary film scholars. In these works, indexical media such

as film and photography are routinely designated as bearers of a lost and seemingly pre-

semiotic capacity for “direct” or referential communion with the natural world in an era

of increasing dematerialization, mirroring Peirce’s own characterization of the index as a

strangely primitive or “animal” sign.180 Rather than querying the work that goes into

producing the dualism of the animal’s “intense and passionate” relationship with its

Umwelt and the human’s contemplative one, Agamben perpetuates the primitivizing

discursive frames that animate this binary. But Agamben’s project is not without its

redeeming qualities, since his suggestion that the index represents the point of contact

between “animal” and “human” semiotic modes makes it possible to see how certain

modes of signification have been historically subordinated or supressed in the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!179 Winthrop-Young argues that even though Uexküll frequently criticized animal-machine metaphors, his feedback-based model of animal machinists receiving signals emitted by carriers would have been unthinkable outside the emergence of data-processing machines. The spectral presence of machines within Uexküll’s writing serves as a reminder of the technological conditions of possibility of his theory. According to Winthrop-Young, semiotic readings of Uexküll have systematically avoided addressing this technological apriori; indeed he argues that abstraction from mediality may have even been a prerequisite for the appropriation of Uexküll as a semiotic theorist: “To concentrate on the semiotic dimension [in Uexküll’s work] it appears necessary to remove the technologies that provided the model for conceiving subjects as receivers, processors, and emitters of signs in the first place.” See Winthrop-Young, “Afterword,” 237-8. 180 This literature is referenced in the Introduction (chapter one). In his canonical essay on animal semiotics, Thomas Sebeok Sebeok invokes the work of Martin Krampen, who has argued, drawing on Peirce’s schema, that plants exhibit primarily indexical signs, while animals exhibit both indexical and iconic signs, and human sign-processes encompass the range of symbolic, iconic, and indexical signs. Sebeok does not elaborate on this point, merely noting that more empirical research is needed in this area. See Sebeok, “‘Animal’ in Semiotic and Biological Perspective,” 66; Martin Krampen, “Phytosemiotics,” Semiotica volume 36 (1981): 187-209.

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construction of the human as a metaphysical entity. I want to argue that by interrogating

the work that goes into producing the affinity between the index and the animal, we can

simultaneously animate the points of contact between the human and the animal that are

effaced by the anthropocentrism of humanitarianism and its “humane” counterparts. In

this way, my project of positioning the index as a metaphor of continuity between the

human and animal resists Agamben’s proposed embrace of man’s animality—a gesture

that fetishizes alterity—and coincides with that of Marks, who has advocated

communicating with animals along a continuum rather than maintaining their absolute

alterity in relation to humans, which can collapse into undifferentiated identification or

“petishistic” disavowal.181

In the following section, I therefore discuss contemporary autoethnographic

media practices involving animals that compel consideration of the very issues foreclosed

by my opening example. By titling it “Indexical Excursions in Unknowable Worlds,” I

ask how the index can function as a communicative horizon, enabling what Marks calls a

relation of “empathetic nonunderstanding” between humans and animals.182 The works

that I describe are not united by genre, medium, or mode of address—in fact the

practitioners cited vary greatly in intellectual lineage and spectatorial appeal. They do

however share what we might call, drawing from David Morley, a common ideological

problematic obtained from the ethnographic tenor of their process, which involves

immersing the medium (video cameras, steel, pollution sensing devices, canvas, copper

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!181 Marks, “Animal Appetites,” 39. Marks’s examples of such communication along a continuum consists mainly of intercultural filmmaking practices whose aesthetic and narrative forms disrupt the fetishistic forms of identification typical of Western representations of animals, thereby reflecting the belief structures of non-Western cultures that do not delineate strict boundaries between humans and animals. 182 Ibid 39.

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sheets) into non-human environments. This encourages animal subjects to physically

interact with, manipulate, mark and alter the medium, producing indexically inscribed

documents of their presence. In my readings I suggest that by surrendering the medium to

animal subjects, these artists seek to reconfigure our normative relations with the medium

in question, precisely by calling attention to the constructedness of signs that are marked

as indexical. Like Uexküll, these artworks argue that no living entity, humans included,

can be said to enter into a relationship with an object “as such.” By opening new

relational possibilities of the medium through the index, they propose that a change in the

relationship with the medium can impact both the signifying logic of the medium and the

subjectivity of the agents in question.183 This inquiry feeds back into the larger project of

this dissertation: to account for the rhetorics of mediation in humanitarian practices that

insist upon the referential or documentary certitude of the autoethnographic image.

I do not want to suggest that the unconventional practices discussed in this

chapter are fully exempt from criticism. At moments, the artists do invoke the causal

logic of the index for authenticating the animal as fully present, thereby casting a familiar

frame of otherness over the animal’s interaction with the medium. Their humorous tone,

framing, or impact also invokes the anthropocentrism of the elephant painting, and they

similarly rely on the spectator’s pleasure in seeing entities excluded from the definition of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!183 In one of his many works devoted to “biosemiotics,” or a theory of semiosis that attempts to encompass life in general, not just human life, Sebeok argues along these lines that the conventional avenues through which humans encounter animals (such as predation, consumption, sport, entertainment, training, or taming), function as modes of semiosis or meaning-making that constitute humans and animals as life-forms. But alongside encounters that are parasitic on animals, Sebeok includes those that are mutual or commensal. Drawing on Uexküll’s theory of Umwelten, Sebeok asks whether situations where animals apprehend human or man-made actors as functional signs within their phenomenal worlds (for instance as a mate, or as an insentient climbing prop) can call our attention to semiotic modes of interaction that undermine the centrality and mastery of human actors. See Sebeok, “‘Animal’ in Semiotic and Biological Perspective,” 68-72.

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subjectivity assume the role of human subjects. If we engage them only at this level, we

might conclude that these works simply confirm the alterity of their subjects, which is

pre-encoded in their conceptual framework, much like the findings of the Navajo project

discussed in the previous chapter. However, the hyperbolic gestures of surrender adopted

by these artists in yielding their apparatuses to their animal collaborators invite us to

question the softer forms in which the human-animal power differential may lurk beneath

their visibly exaggerated abandonment of the semiotic, narrative, and technical protocols

of their media; thus they leave open the question of what is accomplished by the new

forms of creative labor in which “animal artists” are employed, with or without their

knowledge. As I have argued in the previous chapter, a similar desire to isolate and

deactivate the normative signifying capacities of the medium set the Navajo project apart

from its followers, whose humanitarian orientation toward social justice and media access

led them to ignore the textual constraints of the medium. By attempting to free their

Navajo subjects from the burden of Western cinematographic conventions, Worth and

Adair did encourage their subjects to develop a counterintuitive approach to filmmaking,

even if their research objectives ultimately foreclosed these possibilities. Although they

are not always successful, the practitioners I discuss re-create such openings, affirming

through their indexical process that becoming vulnerable to the semiotic logic of the

other during the immersive experience of fieldwork represents the continuing political

promise of ethnography.

If my close readings lean in the direction of optimism, it is to develop a critical

vocabulary for outlining these openings, rather than dwelling on the problems of

transparency and immediacy that are discussed at length in the previous chapter. To lend

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balance to this critical stance, I devote the final section of the chapter to a reflection on

indexicality, taking the concern with referentiality to be the root of the ambivalence of

these practices as well as a central problematic of contemporary debates within the

emerging academic sub-field of critical animal studies. I conclude by considering how

these indexical artworks might productively temper the overly pessimistic or optimistic

stances on technological mediation taken by contemporary scholars of the “animal

question,” by indicating the mediated (rather than the immediate or self-evident)

dimensions of the index as an interface for relating to animals.

INDEXICAL EXCURSIONS IN UNKNOWABLE WORLDS

Video artist Sam Easterson has since 1998 collected video footage from the “point

of view” of animals, which he exhibits online and in gallery, museum, and educational

contexts under the banner Animal Cams. Easterson “outfits” his subjects with tiny

custom-made helmet-mounted surveillance cameras that capture video footage as their

carriers go about their day. He frequently describes this difficult work in the “field” as

“ninety percent of the battle” of his project.184 The subjects of his experiments indicate

that the title of his artwork cuts across taxonomic orders, encompassing not just animals

but an idiosyncratic range of non-human species and objects. Animal Cams prominently

feature charismatic mammals such as sheep, wolves, buffalo, armadillo, alligators, and

moles, but also arachnids (tarantulas), birds (falcons, turkeys, chickens), carnivorous

plants (pitcher plants) and even insentient objects (a tumbleweed). The content of the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!184 See interview with Sam Easterson at http://www.artbabble.org/video/ima/sam-easterson-video-artist [Accessed November 11, 2010]. Here, Easterson describes one of his encounters as follows: “The herd of buffalo was very difficult, it was hazardous just because they’re such large animals. You can’t figure out what the challenges are necessarily going to be until you’re out in the field and you have to solve some of those problems.”

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videos likewise thwarts the spectatorial impulse to glean any overarching stylistic quality

across the collection that corresponds either to the dramatic alterity of wildlife

programming or to the anthropomorphic performance of the elephant painting video.

Since the camera is mounted on the head of the subject, the image frequently remains

close to the ground or pointed downward as the animal forages for food, providing a

counterpoint to the fantasy of distance afforded by the wide framings and extended takes

that have come to generically signify “wildlife.” The viewfinder of Easterson’s cameras

are set at a fixed framing and have a shallow depth of field so that the image toggles in

and out of focus as objects pass haphazardly into the camera’s field of focus.

Consequently we are rarely granted the plenitude of a panoramic landscape shot or a

studied close-up that inventories the visual spectacle of the subject’s body and sensory

environment.

Unlike most nature films and television shows, which are strategically

narrativized to minimize uneventful lag time,185 thereby producing the temporality of

animality as one of unpredictable contingency and action, Easterson’s digital prostheses

index both the stases and the movements of his subjects. For instance, the smooth and

calm image in Alligator Cam might be mistaken for the mechanical precision of a

Steadicam, were it not for the bulbous eyes and domed head of the subject framing the

placid water (see Fig. 13). Meanwhile, the bulk of the videos (such as Wolf Cam and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!185 Cynthia Chris writes that the cultural capital of nature television relies on its evaluation as an educational tool, arguing that this spectatorial attitude is motivated by the self-presentation of wildlife shows as positivist rather than a carefully orchestrated and hyperreal heterotopia. Describing the dramatic editing of an early precedent of the genre, she notes its “excising [of] the tiresome bits of any real visit to a menagerie or zoo: animal that have hidden themselves out of view, sleeping or otherwise inactive animals, long walks between displays. Thus, animals on film are even better than animals in zoo enclosures, and surely better than animals in the wild: they are not only captive and visible at our whim, not their own, but they are at their very best.” See Cynthia Chris, Watching Wildlife (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xiii.

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Sheep Cam) are out of focus, convulsive, and jarring, and the jostling of the camera

registers on the audio track as an amplified series of static disturbances. Throughout

Animal Cams, we are denied the benefit of narrative strategies that structure our

identification by rendering animals as characters in a drama of survival, such as

humanistic framing centered on the subject’s face, an omniscient roaming camera

presence, or shot/reverse-shot editing. Often chaotic or illegible, the footage is only

relieved when sections of the subject’s body serve as a framing device, and during

moments when we catch a glimpse of something recognizable—such as a shadow or a

reflection of the subject in a pool of water in Buffalo Cam, or a pair of paws suggesting a

wolf at rest after a long day (see Fig. 14). The unexpected hermeneutic weight born by

these moments brings our attention to bear on the extent to which our understanding of

these entities is anchored in the realm of narrative. Easterson’s minimalist titles (“Farm

Cams,” “Wild Animal Cams,” followed by the name of the featured animal) play with

this knowledge, withholding the explanatory supplement without which the indexical

image only points blindly, bereft of any substantive meaning.

It is perhaps owing to this deliberate lack of framing that Easterson’s Animal

Cams remain enigmatically suggestive in comparison with National Geographic’s hi-tech

counterpart, Crittercam. This show is based on a similar conceit of attaching cameras and

other research instruments onto endangered marine and terrestrial animals to “witness the

lives of animals from the animals’ own perspectives.”186 But rather than emphasizing the

animals’ resistance to this scientific endeavor (which has necessitated a laborious and

expensive research and development process of adapting the Crittercam technology to

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!186 See the Frequently Asked Questions section of National Geographic’s Crittercam homepage: http://www.nationalgeographic.com/crittercam/faqs.html [Accessed November 11, 2010].

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their behaviors), the show touts itself as a series of “unique home movies” actively

produced by animal agents. As Haraway has noted in her essay about Crittercam

technology—which has been over twenty-three years in the making to date—the main

protagonist of each Crittercam program is more frequently the technology (cameras fitted

with suction caps or glue, hydrophones, radiotransmitters, and other recording devices)

and its fearless developers and deployers (scientists, marine biologists, and an athletic

television host) rather than the critter in question.187 In point of fact, in the “Blue Whales”

episode, all but two minutes of the 24-minute long program are given over to a

sensationalized telling of the physical prowess of the scientist-explorers in locating the

animal, and the technical struggles of equipment assembly, attachment onto/release from

the animal, and data-collection.188 The culminating two minutes of Crittercam footage

bear a strong resemblance to Easterson’s videos: aside from the small section of the

whale’s body which functions as a framing device, the visual information in the frame is

indecipherable to the non-expert viewer, consisting of inky water and bits of debris. In

Haraway’s words, it is “boring and hard to interpret, somewhat like an ultrasound

recording of a fetus…more like an acid trip than a peephole to reality” and relies on the

highly produced narrative frame for its effect.189 Predictably, the Blue Whale Crittercam

footage is overlaid with numbers that explain the depth and density of the water (see Fig.

15), while rapid audio commentary interprets the footage in terms of whale behavior and

habits, speculating that Crittercam’s new information about whale calls may enable

advances in whale conservation efforts.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!187 See Haraway, When Species Meet, 250-1. 188 This episode can be viewed at http://www.hulu.com/watch/142113/wild-crittercam-blue-whales [Accessed November 11, 2010]. 189 Ibid 258.

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Haraway suggests that the relationship of the Crittercam with the animal in

question should be read as “commensal” rather than parasitic—i.e. productive of

scientific benefits without necessarily harming or helping the animal. To support this

claim, she cites the ecological phenomenon that inspired the Crittercam developers: the

commensal relationship between blue whales and remora, a kind of suckerfish that

attaches, undetected, onto larger animals and obtains “rides” from them to new habitats.

She exuberantly praises the “epistemophilic endorphin surge” afforded by the show’s

display of science, arguing that Crittercam’s scientific pursuits should be defended from

“easy ideology critiques.”190 But by privileging the show’s spectacularization of technical

“attractions” (to borrow Tom Gunning’s term) over their incorporation within a set of

legitimating narratives, Haraway’s reading dismisses the meaning given to the indexical

traces of the animal’s inadvertent labor by the show’s conservationist frame. In contrast,

rather than adapting technology for observing animals undetected and making their

perspectives legible to human viewers, Easterson emphasizes the disjunct between the

perceptual worlds of animals and the visual language of video technology. He does so by

engineering a confrontation between medium and subject, so that each animal cam piece

lasts only as long as the camera stays mounted on the body of the reluctant subject,

typically between a few seconds and several minutes. Easterson’s presentation of these

ineffable images in this abortive form reminds us that for his animal carriers, the foreign

presence of the camera may signify a variety of meanings (such as discomfort,

inconvenience, or the marking of the animal as taboo by its pack) that scientific !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!190 Ibid 259; 253. Haraway writes earlier: “The announcements and framing narratives for the show present an easy target for a chortling ideology critique with a superiority complex. The animals who carry the attached cameras into their watery worlds are presented as makers of home movies that report on the actual state of things without human interference or even human presence” (Ibid 251).

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explanatory supplements can never make fully knowable, particularly those that interrupt

the project of science.

Lisa Jevbratt’s software art project ZooMorph (slated to premiere in 2011)

similarly seeks to highlight the distinction between the subjective perceptual world of

humans and of various other animals. But in an inversion of Easterson’s use of video

prostheses for staging the unreliability of the filmed image as an autoethnographic

document of the animal, Jevbratt digitally alters filmed images to simulate how they

appear to variety of non-human animals, from mammals, birds, and fish to marsupials,

insects, amphibians, and reptiles. Available as an “augmented reality application” that

instantly modifies the image seen through smartphone cameras, or alternately as a plugin

for software programs like Photoshop and Final Cut Pro, ZooMorph filters indicate how

the visual perception of different animals departs from normal human vision. Using data

gleaned from ethnographic, behavioral, medical, and genetic research, the application

makes corrections along axes such as color differentiation, acuity, light sensitivity, field

of view, and motion perception to provide an approximation of how the species in

question perceives the visual information. For instance, the featured “Hummingbird”

filter produces intense fluorescent purple highlights and saturates the red shades when a

smartphone camera is focused on a hibiscus flower, while elsewhere a picture of a yellow

daffodil is rendered pixellated in a spectrum of pink and red shades to represent how it

would appear to a bee (see Fig. 16).191 As an extension of the human hand that holds it,

the smartphone transforms the invisible visual apparatus of the animal into a screen,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!191 See the “bee vision” image on http://serialconsign.com/2009/02/lisa-jevbratt-ocad-lecture [Accessed November 28, 2010].

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indicating that the environment in which we are immersed affords contiguous but

different immersive experiences for the hummingbird and the bee.

Jevbratt describes ZooMorph as an attempt at “therianthropy,” or the

metamorphosis of humans into other animals, and hopes to encourage interspecies

collaboration by inspiring “awareness and respect” for alternate subjective perceptual

worlds or Umwelten that exist alongside that of the human. She offers, for instance: “the

filters could be used on photographs taken by a camera worn by one’s dog, or to

manipulate pictures of one’s garden in order to see how it looks to the scrub jay, and then

change the garden to make it seem more visually interesting to them.” On this basis she

suggests that ZooMorph is potentially “a large scale inexplicit collaboration between all

the human users of the filters and the various species they may involve.”192 To the

critique that ZooMorph privileges vision as a sensory system for representing non-human

Umwelten, Jevbratt counters that several non-human animals rely more on their keen

sense of vision than on the “messy” or irrational senses (like smell, taste, and touch) that

are often argued to set them apart from the human as “the visual animal.”193 Through this

response, Jevbratt helpfully anticipates the residual anthropocentrism that accompanies

the denigration of vision, which as Martin Jay notes, frequently amounts to arbitrarily

designating vision as cultural/produced by historical and technological changes in

contrast with other “natural” perceptual registers that are predictably assigned to animals

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!192 See the links to “Therianthropy,” “Introduction,” and “User/Audience/Interaction/Participation” on http://128.111.69.4/~jevbratt/zoomorph_blog/ [Accessed November 19, 2010]. Also see “Aspects of Vision,” “Methods.” 193 See http://128.111.69.4/~jevbratt/zoomorph_blog/pages/issues.html [Accessed November 19, 2010].

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or ethnographic cultures.194 At the same time, Jevbratt’s defense of her project hesitates

to theorize the particular rhetoric of interactivity promulgated by ZooMorph in relation to

the ideology of visual knowledge embedded within its programming logic—or for that

matter the significance of developing a touch-based digital interface for communing with

animals at a moment in technological history when indexical media (or media “touched”

by their referents) seem to be on the wane. Although Jevbratt intends ZooMorph to

combat the logic of its commercial software hosts, her application’s approach to data

visualization preserves the dominant epistemology of software, one that according to

Wendy Chun conflates seeing and knowing, reading and readability, thereby shoring up

vision as a reliable source of knowledge.195 Thus, in place of Easterson’s method of

visibly positioning the animal as the causal agent of what we uncertainly experience,

ZooMorph represents the neurobiology of animal vision as something the human viewer

can see and control. The graphical interface represents a set of programming protocols as

meaningful information that is furthermore the cause of user actions.196

Beatriz da Costa, another new media artist, explicitly frames her project

PigeonBlog as both an intervention in the hermeneutic infrastructure of technoscience !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!194 Jay writes that for the majority of commentators, “ocularcentrism” is understood in physiological or evolutionary rather than historical terms; consequently ethnographic evidence of intersensorial variations in other cultures are cited in attempts to “reverse” the effects of visual domination. See Jay, Downcast Eyes, 3. 195 See Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “On Software, Or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge,” grey room volume 18, number 18 (Winter 2005): 26-51. Curiously, this runs counter to Jevbratt’s previous work, which has used data visualization to problematize the relationship between interface and code, as in her project 1:1, which translates the numerical data of IP addresses into RGB values rather than URLs, rendering the web as an abstract image rather than a “logical” navigable space. Zoomorph suggests that the animal remains the limit of Jevbratt’s practice. Exhibition images of 1:1 can be seen at http://128.111.69.4/~jevbratt/1_to_1/exhibitions.html [Accessed November 28, 2010]. 196 In her discussion of potential exhibition possibilities for ZooMorph for instance, Jevbratt proposes that “[p]rints of the photographs made by the users can be exhibited together with descriptions of the images/projects.” See the aforementioned link “User/Audience/Interaction/Participation.”

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expertise and as a playful questioning of the assumption that visual knowledge guarantees

political action. Like Easterson and the Crittercam developers, da Costa and her team of

engineers collaborated to produce technical prostheses that could be attached to urban

homing pigeons. In her San Jose-based project, GPS-enabled electronic air pollution

sensing devices carried by trained racing pigeons sent real-time locative information to an

open-access online server and blogging environment. Here, viewers could access a

minute-by-minute air pollution index “from a pigeon’s perspective” presented in the form

of an interactive map. The purpose of PigeonBlog was to use the low altitude of pigeon

flight to cheaply gather air pollution data at levels that fixed-location state instruments do

not monitor—California stations currently monitor only specific bands of air in low-

traffic areas, often providing only skewed projected data for the surrounding highly

polluted minority neighborhoods. Da Costa hopes to complement this data through her

low-cost mobile model, by transforming pigeons into “reporters” working on behalf of

the city’s poor, thereby contesting both the inadequacy of official scientific agendas and

the reputation of pigeons as urban parasites.197 Intriguingly, in her essay about

PigeonBlog, da Costa insists that the value of her project lies in the fact that its scientific

value is not immediately apparent: few other birds inhabit the specific atmospheric band

at which pigeons fly, and the data is irrelevant to the lived experience of humans at

ground level. Given the characterization of pigeons as an urban menace, the improvement

of their environmental conditions ranks very low among civic priorities.

In the same essay, da Costa briefly references an early twentieth-century military

experiment in enlisting camera-carrying pigeons as agents of surveillance, writing that

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!197 See the links to “Statement” and “Members” on http://www.pigeonblog.mapyourcity.net/index.php [Accessed December 1, 2010].

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this served as both inspiration and foil for her specifically civilian “grass-roots scientific

data-gathering initiative.”198 Although da Costa doesn’t elaborate on this point, it is

instructive that she refers to the military project by way of the image that made it famous

despite its tactical failure: a picture of a homing pigeon fitted with a breast-mounted

mechanical camera (see Fig. 17). The miniature panoramic camera technology in

question was designed by German court pharmacist and amateur engineer Julius

Neubronner in the early 1900s, for taking time-lapse photographs during the flight of

pigeons. Neubronner intended his technology to be used in aerial reconnaissance, but it

was never used for this purpose owing to difficulties in getting the pigeons to return to

dovecotes displaced during battle. Neubronner instead rose to fame on account of an

aerial “pigeon photograph” of a castle in Germany that was met with critical and popular

acclaim due to its accidental inclusion of a pigeon’s wing-tip: the castle, flanked by the

bird’s wings, occupies the center right of the frame with the horizon line perfectly

positioned in the top third of the canted image (see Fig. 18). This image won Neubronner

a number of photography awards in addition to being featured in newsreel shows across

Germany in the late 1920s.199 The celebration of this image, which provided no strategic

information, seems to have centered around the pigeon’s indexical mark on the image.

Although the affective charge of the image derives from the unpredictable alterity of the

animal, the aestheticization of contingency in this particular image documents the

anthropomorphism responsible for its canonization. In exhibitions, Da Costa’s

PigeonBlog similarly relies on the spectacle of pigeons carrying cameras to solicit

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!198 Beatriz da Costa, “Reaching the Limit: When Art Becomes Science,” in Tactical Biopolitics, edited by Beatriz da Costa and Kavita Philip (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010), 377. 199 See S.F. Spira, “Dr. Neubronner’s Doppelsport,” in The History of Photography As Seen Through The Spira Collection, edited by Eaton S. Lothrop, Jr. and Jonathan B. Spira (New Jersey: Aperture Press, 2001), 124-129.

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attention toward the cause of air pollution (see Fig 19). Images and sounds taken by

“embedded reporter” pigeons who fly alongside the “reporter” pigeons carrying cell-

phone cameras and microphones are used to encourage spectators to interact with the

more laborious blog interface (see Fig 20).200 And yet, da Costa’s acknowledgement of

the impossibility of assigning scientific or aesthetic value to the data indexed during the

pigeons’ flight pushes back against this anthropomorphizing animal rights frame. By

aligning pigeons with other disposable populations whose living conditions do not merit

monitoring or improvement, PigeonBlog questions the aggregate logic that governs the

priorities of civic administration.

Three final works bear mention, as a conclusion to this section. All of them

involve an artist submerging a medium within a non-human environment, and using

bodily traces obtained from animal “informants” to raise questions about the

displacement of the medium from its original environment as well as its role within the

new one. Berlin and Scotland-based conceptual artist Simon Starling’s recent Infestation

Piece (Musselled Moore) (2007-08) comments on the territorial concerns that have

shaped the transnational political economy of the art world by allegorically invoking

parallels in contemporary environmental economies. Starling produced this piece by

staging an encounter between his sculptural medium and underwater animals participants.

The first step involved creating a steel replica of Henry Moore’s bronze sculpture

Warrior With Shield, a work produced by Moore in 1952 with the support of public funds

from the Canadian government (see Fig. 21). At the time, Canada’s patronage of Moore

was met with intense opposition from Toronto-based artists, who resented the English

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!200 See PigeonBlog blog interface: http://www.pigeonblog.mapyourcity.net/blog/index.php [Accessed December 10, 2010].

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artist’s invasion of the Toronto art scene (which was doubly illicit in that he was

introduced to the city by art historian and Soviet spy Anthony Blunt). Starling then

submerged his steel replica for eighteen months in Lake Ontario, with the intention of

evoking another ecological accident in the aftermath of the Cold War: the colonizing

presence of Eastern European zebra mussels in the Great Lakes since the mid-1980s,

when they were inadvertently introduced into the lakes in the ballast water of cargo ships

arriving from the Black Sea at the end of the conflict. The introduction of this foreign

species of mussel in the Great Lakes has had both beneficial and harmful environmental

effects: zebra mussels are known to filter algae and other pollutants from the water,

resulting in increased sunlight penetration and plankton growth at greater depths.

However their rapid consumption of algae deprives native mussels of their food source,

and they also immobilize these native species by attaching to their shells.201 Starling

explains that he chose steel rather than bronze as the medium for his replica since bronze

is toxic to mussels and he intended to use the sculpture as a breeding-ground for the

invasive species.202 When Infestation Piece was retrieved from the water in 2008, it was

covered with a patina of rust and mussels, having had been “completed” by the combined

work of water erosion and the life-cycles of the resident mussels (see Fig. 22). By

literally plunging the work of high art into a new environmental context, Starling

reconfigures the artistic medium, which otherwise functions as a material or technical

means as well as a limiting condition for aesthetic expression, as a set of conditions that

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!201 The following link on the United States Geological Survey website contains further information on the ecological impact of zebra mussels: http://fl.biology.usgs.gov/Nonindigenous_Species/Zebra_mussel_FAQs/zebra_mussel_faqs.html [Accessed January 1, 2011]. 202 See Edoardo Bonaspetti, “Interview with Simon Starling,” Mousse Magazine issue 13 (March 2008) http://www.moussemagazine.it/articolo.mm?id=20 [Accessed December 30, 2010].

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can carry an entirely different set of meanings within the Umwelt of another species; thus

Infestation Piece raises unexpected questions about the transnational ecological impact of

art. The dried mussel shells encrusted onto the corroded frame of the steel replica remain

as a material testament to past and future environmental overlaps that physically

transforms and builds upon the allegorizing work of Starling’s piece.

London-based painters Olly Williams and Suzi Winstanley, who work under the

banner “Olly and Suzi”, also obtain bodily testimonials of organic materials from their

living non-human collaborators, which frequently include endangered animal species

such as lions, killer whales, polar bears, and Arctic foxes. Working exclusively in

extreme environmental contexts (their ouvre is divided into the categories “Arctic,”

“Desert,” “Ocean,” and “Jungle”), these artists employ a colorful host of Orientalist

metaphors to describe their artistic practice, most prominently the language of

“expeditions” in the “wild.”203 Typically, their process consists of introducing painted

canvases into the environments of the terrestrial, marine or avian subjects depicted in

their paintings, soliciting them to interact with their images and leave organic traces in

the form of mud, footprints, spit, skin, excrement, humus, blood, and digested food

matter. In addition to leaving tracks, spoors, and prints, some animals take bites out of the

canvas. For instance, the popular painting Shark Bite, produced during a 1997 Cape

Town expedition, has chunks missing where a white shark tore off its ends, and is coated

with chum, a mixture of fish parts and blood (see Fig. 23). The water-soaked and battered

canvas functions as a war trophy of sorts; by bearing witness to vigorous signs of

interaction and struggle, it functions as a document of the animal’s investigation of a

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!203 See the links to “statement” and “journals” on Olly and Suzi’s website: http://www.ollysuzi.com [Accessed January 1, 2011].

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foreign object in its habitat. The artists write that the bodily indexical imprints left by the

animal are intended to both authenticate the painting and to serve as a sensory time

capsule of an entity that is threatened with extinction. In an interview with the National

Geographic, the artists refer to these marks as “autographs,” and elaborate elsewhere:

“Conceptually we aim to raise awareness and an understanding of our subject

matter…[by] documenting the habitat or the passing of a creature that is here now but

may not be for much longer. This interaction can be viewed as evidence to an event, a

form of primal investigation; a physical performance of the senses.”204

Olly and Suzi’s insistence on the physical trace even merits an extended

discussion in Steve Baker’s recent book on postmodern representations of the animal.

Baker opines that the primary impact of their practice derives from the contingencies of

its status as trace, writing that: “as far as the artists’ environmental message (as opposed

to their aesthetic sensibility) is concerned, it could be said that it hardly matters what the

painting looks like. The key thing is its status as a mark of the real, the wound, the

touch.”205 Admittedly, Olly and Suzi’s actual paintings, which consist of clumsily

executed large-scale primitive figurative sketches of the animal in question composed

with organic materials such as berries, mud, ochre, and dung seem to function primarily

as supplementary supports for the marks left by the animals, mimicking them in material

and investing them with iconic and symbolic meaning. Since the artists produce the

paintings on site, often in close proximity with wild animals, even the figurative images

carry a charge of urgency. The physical threat to the body of the artist lends a visceral !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!204 See Bijal P. Trivedi, “Painter-Explorers Turn Animals Into Artists,” National Geographic Today (August 6, 2003): http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/08/0806_030806_tvanimalpainters.html [Accessed January 1, 2011]. Also see the artist statement previously referenced. 205 Steve Baker, The Postmodern Animal (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 13.

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immediacy to exhibitions of their work, where paintings are displayed alongside

documentary-style photographs and text-based travelogue accounts that narrativize the

performance of collaborating with the animal. For instance, exhibits of Shark Bite include

dramatic photographs and descriptions of the artists being lowered into freezing cold

water in a ramshackle cage-like contraption, surrounded on all sides by sharks. The

desire, Baker suggests, is to rupture the “deadening effect” of the gallery and museum

environment, where the viewer passively consumes a series of spectacles.206 By

surrendering their paintings to the animal, which on occasion destroys it whole, Olly and

Suzi transform the canvas into a physical extension of the artist’s vulnerable body, with

the effect that their own primitivist practice ironically questions the ideological

conventions of wildlife genres that cast the explorer as hero. In this way, their practice

brings to mind the performance art works of Yoko Ono and Marina Abramovi!, but

perhaps even more so the environmental earth art of Ana Mendieta, whose Silueta series

documented imprints of her own naked female form using mud, sand, and other

perishable materials, thereby recording the vulnerability of each one to the other.207

Olly and Suzi’s insistence of the status of the organic imprints on their paintings

as “autographs” also sheds light on a recent, smaller-scale work by Berlin and Prague-

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!206 Ibid 13. 207 Judith Halberstam’s forthcoming work includes an extended discussion of interactive performance art practices that explore vulnerability and passivity as an alternative to traditional Western feminist conceptions of agency by placing the female body at risk (including Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece). See Judith Halberstam, “Shadow Feminisms: Queer Negativity/Radical Passivity,” in The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011; forthcoming). Along similar lines, Patrick Anderson employs starvation as a metaphor to consider the ways in which Marina Abramovi! and Ana Mendieta have used their bodies to stage entropy, vulnerability, and withdrawal. See Patrick Anderson, “How to Stage Self Consumption,” in So Much Wasted: Hunger, Performance, and the Morbidity of Resistance (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 85-109.

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based provocateurs Ondrej Brody and Kristofer Paetau.208 These artists have recently

“co-produced” a series of paintings with a dog trained by a local circus performer in Rio

de Janeiro, Brazil to urinate on a copper pigment-coated canvas upon hearing the

command word “Andy.”209 The resulting series (also titled ANDY!) consists of abstract

oxidation patterns in shades of green and orange, paying a tongue-in-cheek homage to

Andy Warhol’s oxidation paintings (see Fig. 24). Warhol’s own irreverent use of

materials, contingency-based processes, and mass-produced aesthetics are frequently

credited with muddying the boundaries between authorial intention and chance, art and

capitalism. By commemorating him, Brody and Paetau’s series revisits the conversation

as to whether the categories of the aesthetic and the poietic rely exclusively on the

legitimating frame of the Western art milieu, but by orienting the discussion around the

animal’s so-called “call of nature,” they raise the question of whether the definition of

aesthetic value is necessarily the prerogative of an intentional, laboring, subject—namely

the human subject. Despite the reterritorializing efforts of the dog’s trainer, the pattern of

the animal’s urination is not contained neatly within the frame of the canvas, but instead

repurposes the canvas as part of the animal’s territory. In this regard the territorializing

marking of the dog can be considered an index of its singularity—a sign of malleability

as well as resistance to domestication. As an action that signifies an infinitesimal

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!208 Brody and Paetau achieved some level of notoriety in 2007 for their use of animals in shock art in their piece Dog Carpets. Purporting to call attention to the ethical contradictions between the treatment of street dogs and pets in South America, and to question the special status accorded to domesticated cats and dogs in Western cultures, the artists displayed “rugs” consisting of crudely taxidermied, splayed carcasses of street dogs exterminated in La Paz, Bolivia. The artists discuss this project at length on their website: http://brodypaetau.com/recent-works/dog-carpets-2007-by-ondrej-brody-and-kristofer-paetau [Accessed January 2, 2011]. 209 Like the elephant art camps discussed in the opening of the chapter, the ethical vagaries of Brody and Paetau’s transnational art practice lie beyond the purview of this chapter, but certainly merit further scrutiny.

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difference with each repetition, we might think of it as a signature or, to borrow Olly and

Suzi’s term, an autograph. In this way, the ANDY! series seems to echo Deleuze and

Guattari’s question of whether the territorializing marks of animals are “readymades” that

function as the base or ground of art, each demarcating a domain or territory that is

perpetually in-formation.210 This line of questioning reconfigures art as a “becoming” or

“emergence” rather than a preconstituted territory, while the signature serves to indicate

the coming-into-being of a subjective relation rather than certifying the presence of a pre-

existing subject.

MEDIATING THE INDEX

In my opening example of the elephant painting viral video, the meme-ification of

the iconic image “of and by” the elephant bears out Marks’s claim that animal images

function as a blank screen or metaphor for a fantasy of “humanity,” projected as

autonomy, industriousness, or dignity. If the capacity for figurative self-representation

functions here to demonstrate the animal’s underlying humanity, it does so at the expense

of interrogating the signifying conventions that preserve the distinction between human

and animal; consequently the episode simply rehearses received notions regarding the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!210 “The territory is not primary in relation to the qualitative mark [color in birds or fish; urine and excrement; odor; bird-song; track-marks]; it is the mark that makes the territory…In this sense, the territory, and the functions performed within it, are products of territorialization…Can this becoming, this emergence, be called Art? That would make the territory the result of art. The artist: the first person to set out a boundary stone, or to make a mark. Property, collective or individual, is derived from that even when it is in the service of war and oppression. Property is fundamentally artistic because art is fundamentally poster, placard…qualities are signatures, but the signature, the proper name, is not the constituted mark of a subject, but the constituting mark of a domain, an abode. The signature is not an indication of a person; it is the chancy formation of a domain…No sooner do I like a color that I make it my standard or placard. One puts one’s signature on something just as one plants one’s flag on a piece of land…Territorial marks are readymades.” See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “Of the Refrain,” in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 315-6.

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similarity and alterity of animals in relation to the human. In contrast, the immersive

process of the practices examined in the previous section suggests that the index can

serve as a point of contact or communication between the entities to which we refer as

human and animal, but one that calls the truth-content of these entities into question

rather than guaranteeing them in any conclusive way. By playing with our desire to invest

the mark or trace of the animal with meaning, these works repeatedly call our attention to

the narrative supplementation of iconic and symbolic signs that produces the index’s self-

evident effect of authenticity. By staging the absence of this supplement (as in Animal

Cams) or alternately amplifying or dramatizing it (Shark Bite and PigeonBlog), these

works indicate the need for us to scrutinize the role of political history (Infestation

Piece), rites of institution such as those of the Western art milieu (ANDY!), and the

protocols of the medium (ZooMorph) in interpreting the mediations of the index. At the

same time, if the artists invite the viewer to adopt a critical or skeptical stance regarding

the possibility of communicating with animal subjects, they do so as a function of their

methodological curiosity. By literally submerging cameras, canvases, and steel within

animal environments, these artists allow the medium to become reconfigured as elements

of other Umwelten. Using the indexicality of their media, they raise the possibility that

becoming susceptible to the signifying logic of the other may open up an alternative

semiotic economy of the medium that urges reconsideration of the concepts “human” and

“animal.” Thus, while they work within the confines of an anthropocentric institutional

definition of art, these practices serves less to integrate animal poiesis within this

definition than to call its borders into question.

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I want to end by asking how the speculative spirit of these works can be harnessed

for articulating some preliminary hypotheses regarding the critical strategies of scholars

working in the area of animal studies. The question of how to sidestep the twinned

ideological traps of anthropocentrism and humanism, and thereby approach animals “in

their reality” has become a significant theme in recent scholarship in this area.211 Several

scholars have draws inspiration from Jacques Derrida’s famous description of an

encounter with his pet cat in his 1997 lecture “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to

Follow),” positioning this text as a critical manifesto that articulates the difficulty of

accessing the animal as an object of study. In his lecture (which also forms the opening

chapter in his posthumously published book of the same name), Derrida takes stock of

the potential for defamiliarization in a very familiar everyday encounter: meeting the

gaze of his pet cat whilst naked in his bathroom, and becoming overcome with

involuntary modesty. Using his own nudity to emphasize the literal quality of the

encounter with “a real…little cat,” not a literary or figurative cat, Derrida then speculates

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!211 This section does not claim to comprehensively address the emerging academic sub-field of critical animal studies, which is both wide in scope and experimental in idiom, ranging from interlocutors of philosophy (Akira Lippit, Cary Wolfe, Matthew Calarco), biotechnology (Donna Haraway), literature (Eric Santner), art history (Steve Baker), and bioethics (Joanna Zylinska). Although scholarship on animals is itself not a recent phenomenon, the body of work to which I refer can be distinguished by its meta-disciplinary attempts to (a) centralize the animal as a devoted subject of transdisciplinary inquiry, and (b) interrogate epistemological problems emerging from specific disciplinary or discursive constructions of the animal. Several animal studies scholars position themselves in relation to Berger, Deleuze and Guattari, and Derrida, whose critiques of the human-animal binary are frequently cited as ur-texts of critical animal studies. See for instance: Lippit, Electric Animal; Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Calarco, Zoographies; Haraway, When Species Meet; Eric Santner, On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Baker, The Postmodern Animal; Joanna Zylinska, Bioethics in the Age of New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009). Also see Berger, “Why Look At Animals?”; Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus; Jacques Derrida, “‘Eating Well’ or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida” in Who Comes After the Subject?, edited by Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991), 96-119; Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).

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that his awareness of his feeling of shame is a consequence of being held by the

reciprocity of the cat’s gaze.212 Describing the moment as one of compelling subjection to

the “passion of the animal,” Derrida muses that his malaise results from the cat’s physical

presence before him, which implies that it can look back at him and regard him in its own

way—a capacity for response that has been systematically disavowed in philosophical

and literary traditions that have subjected animals to endless tropological treatment,

casting them as myth, allegory, or metaphor, but never as singular beings.213 Derrida

relates his “passion” for the animal in terms of a disarmed vulnerability or “denuded

passivity,” remarking that in the instant of the encounter, the edifices that preserve the

boundary between human and animal (language, philosophy, museums, paintings, zoos,

literature) temporarily fall away, leaving him with only questions as to the identity of the

entity called the human.214

For Derrida, the potential of this moment seems to have less to do with

encountering the real in the form of the irreducibly alter (the animal) and more with the

possibility of experiencing an ineffable response that resists being dismissed as the

automatic reaction attributed to animals by the Cartesian tradition. To put it in other

words, the value of the encounter lies for Derrida in the possibility of a brush with the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!212 Derrida clarifies: “I must make it clear from the start, the cat I am talking about the cat that I am talking about is a real cat, truly, believe me, a little cat. It isn’t the figure of a cat. It doesn't silently enter the room as an allegory for all the cats on the earth, the felines that traverse myths and religions, literature and fables…the cat that looks at me in my bedroom, or in the bathroom, this cat that is perhaps not “my cat” or “my pussycat,” does not appear here as representative, or ambassador, carrying the immense symbolic responsibility with which our culture has always charged the feline race, from La Fontaine to Tieck (author of Puss in Boots), from Baudelaire to Rilke, Buber and many others. If I say “it is a real cat” that sees me naked, it is in order to mark its unsubstitutable singularity.” Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” Critical Inquiry volume 28, number 2 (Winter 2002): 378. 213 Ibid 381. 214 Ibid 381.

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uncanny—that which exceeds identification, requiring translation or forcing

reconsideration of the terms of communication. Directly challenging the humanistic

model of identitarian empowerment mobilized by the elephant painting advocates,

Derrida clarifies that the potential of meeting the animal’s gaze is not a matter of giving it

a “voice”: “It would not be a matter of ‘giving speech back’ to animals but perhaps of

acceding to a thinking…that thinks the absence of the name and of the word otherwise as

something other than a privation.”215 Instead of emphasizing the animal’s lack of

language, Derrida describes the positive content of the encounter in terms of an

impression that is conducted directly through the medium of his body, one that

necessitates shifting the terrain on which signification or communication can be thought.

He writes: “Being after, being alongside, being near [près] would appear as different

modes of being, indeed being-with. With the animal. But, in spite of appearances, it isn’t

certain that these modes of being come to modify a preestablished being, even less a

primitive “I am.” In any case, they express a certain order of the being-huddled-together

[être-serré] (which is what the etymological root, pressu, indicates, whence are derived

the words près, auprès, après), the being-pressed, the being-with as being strictly

attached, bound, enchained, being-under-pressure, compressed, impressed, repressed,

pressed-against.”216 In Derrida’s prose, the promise of this confrontation with the animal,

whether or not it is realized, seems to derive from the experience of physical proximity or

touch, wherein the philosopher’s own exposed body responds in unexpected ways to a

communiqué from the animal that lies beyond the symbolic structures that transform both

human and animal into signs. Felt as an impression or index, this aspect of what is called

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!215 Ibid 416. 216 Ibid 379-380.

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animal is experienced as the most ephemeral of awakenings that yields too quickly to

familiar vocabularies or repertoires that struggle to make it sensible and restore a sense of

complacency: “When the instant of extreme passion passes, and I find peace again, then I

can relax and speak of the beasts of the Apocalypse, visit them in the museum, see them

in a painting…I can visit them at the zoo, read about then in the Bible, or speak about

them as in a book.”217

Offering through this anecdote a vision of the narrative and rhetorical discursive

devices that give order and meaning to the encounter with the animal and thereby

transform it into an object of humanistic inquiry, Derrida exhorts philosophers and poets

to instead channel the disruptive force of the encounter within their modes of

questioning.218 Although he himself emphasizes the inadequacy of language for capturing

the singularity of such an encounter, we can look to interlocutors of ethnography for a

vocabulary that approximates Derrida’s emphasis on its forceful impact. To borrow a

term from the anthropologist Johannes Fabian, Derrida seems to be articulating the need

for acknowledging the coevalness or contemporaneity of animals with humans. Speaking

from the perspective of ethnography, a discipline based on narrativizing anthropological

fieldwork, Fabian explains that coevalness signifies the coexistence of the anthropologist

and his informant in the present tense of discourse during the fieldwork encounter—an

experience of co-presence that represents the referential limit of communication.219

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!217 Ibid 381-2. 218 Ibid 382-3. Derrida mounts separate charges on “philosophers” and “poets,” arguing that the former are guilty of never meeting the gaze of actual animals that they may have studied, while the latter’s fault lies in assuming the guise of animals without accounting for their own guise or discourse. 219 “[C]oeval, and especially the noun coevalness, express a need to steer between such closely related notions as synchronous/simultaneous and contemporary. I take synchronous to refer to events occurring at the same physical time; contemporary asserts co-occurrence in what I called

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Against the grain of poststructuralist critiques of his time, which tend to locate the

imperialist impulses of anthropology precisely in the institution of fieldwork, Fabian

argues that the fault of ethnography lies rather in its textual strategies. Fabian explains

that traditional ethnographic narratives rely on temporal sleight of hand, which he dubs

“allochronism,” wherein semantic, syntactic, and stylistic rhetorical devices transform the

anthropological other into a literary trope for pastness or anachronism.220 Thus

ethnographic texts systematically deny the temporal force of the other’s presence felt

during the fieldwork encounter by reifying the other within the distant realm of an

imagined past.221 Fabian emphasizes the promise of the fieldwork encounter for

revivifying the discipline of ethnography. Despite the inevitable cultural and linguistic

mediations that subtend such an encounter, he argues that its dialogical realities represent

a potential to which the discipline of ethnography must continually strive.222 The

challenge of working toward coevalness, according to Fabian, lies in remaining

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!typological time. Coeval…covers both (“of the same age, duration, or epoch”). Beyond that, it is to connote a common, active “occupation,” or sharing, of time.” See Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 31. The emphases here are Fabian’s. Also see 82-7 for a discussion of the significance of dialogical co-presence of the fieldwork encounter, and the removal of the anthropological referent from the dialogical discourse between ethnographers. 220 “Beneath their bewildering variety, the distancing devices we can identify produce a global result. I will call it denial of coevalness. By that I mean a persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse.” Ibid 31; see 28-32 and 74-79 for Fabian’s taxonomy of allochronic literary conventions. The emphases here are Fabian’s. 221 Fabian clarifies: “Anachronism signifies a fact, or statement of fact, that is out of tune with a given time frame; it is a mistake, perhaps an accident. I am trying to show that we are facing not mistakes but devices (existential, rhetorical, political). To signify that difference I will refer to the denial of coevalness as the allochrony of anthropology” (Ibid 32). The emphases here are Fabian’s. 222 Although Fabian’s discussion pertains specifically to written ethnography, other scholars have written at length about the allochronic strategies of ethnographic film. See for instance Fatimah Tobing Rony, “Taxidermy and Romantic Ethnography: Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North,” in The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 99-126.

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vulnerable to the logic of the other after the moment of shared presence has passed.

In closing, I will briefly diagram the two kinds of positions commonly taken by

animal studies scholars regarding the possibility of coevalness with animals, in order to

indicate the contributions that the practices that I described may have to offer on this

topic. On one pole, scholars like Akira Lippit have drawn on Derrida’s description of the

animal’s transformation into a trope to melancholically mourn its irretrievable alterity.

Like Derrida, Lippit pronounces the impossibility of approaching the animal from within

the realm of language, writing: “the figure of the animal has come to occupy…a negative

space [within language]—one that language can point to without naming, subsume

without securing.”223 Pointing to literary examples (Kafka, Lewis Carroll) where

language assumes a synaesthetic quality or corporeal impenetrability, Lippit writes that

the animal can exist within language only as a foreign presence that attests to the limit of

figurability.224 But Lippit remains skeptical about the possibility of ever indexing a “real”

animal presence even in those instances where language seems to indicate the ontology of

animals, protesting that the history of philosophical and literary discourse on the animal

has rendered it impossible to conceive of the animal as anything but a metaphor. By way

of an example, he points to cinema, a technology whose evolution was synonymous with

the slow eradication of animals from the phenomenal world in technological modernity,

when they were both literally and emblematically repurposed as food, transportation, and

fuel. Although the photographic substrate of cinema seems to share an ontological basis

with the animal, in terms of indexing a referential world that remains beyond the reach of

language, Lippit argues that cinema only epitomizes the transformation of the animal into

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!223 Lippit, Electric Animal, 162. 224 See the chapter “The Literary Animal: Carroll, Kafka, Akutagawa” (Ibid 135-161).

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a metaphor. He reasons that animation constitutes not just a genre but the very

technological basis of cinema, which converts the vitality of real animals into signs that

convey the qualities of the medium—movement, liveness, magnetism. Cinema becomes

“animetaphorical” while animals themselves are relegated as rhetorical signs that

circulate endlessly within a symbolic universe. In Lippit’s words, “the animal as figure

functions as a technological trope, a technological index”—a sign that perpetually

references its own status as a trope, but never the singular finitude of a mortal body.225

Lippit’s melancholic conclusion that cinema functions as a crypt or mausoleum for

ritually mourning an “undying” animal presence reproduces a brand of Berger’s despair

over the disappearance of animals.226 But unlike Berger’s nostalgia, which maps an

imagined primitive proximity with animals onto ethnographic societies, Lippit’s

allochronism casts animals in a realm of perpetual presence, denying them access to a

sense of pastness altogether.

At the other extreme from Lippit’s techno-pessimism, Haraway exuberantly

extols the capacity of modern technoculture for enabling transformative intimacies

between humans and animals. Borrowing the concept of the “contact-zone” from Mary

Louise Pratt’s seminal anthropological text on zones of transculturation, Haraway

attempts to outline how the tactile dimensions of the playful relationship between

companion species may function to restructure the human-animal binary in ways that

cannot be fully articulated through language. During play, Haraway writes, the human

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!225 Ibid 195. 226 Lippit writes: “Since animals are denied the faculties of language, they remain incapable of reflection, which is bound by finitude, and carries with it an awareness of death. Undying, animals simply expire, transpire, shift their animus to other animal bodies… modern technology can be seen as a massive mourning apparatus, summoned to incorporate a massive disappearing animal presence that could not be properly mourned because, following the paradox to its logical conclusion, animals could not die” (Ibid 187-8).

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must respond to the actualities of “[t]he real dog—not the fantasy projection of self.”227

The demands of mutuality and interaction posed during the convivial encounter produce a

unique experience of co-presence between human and dog despite the radically

asymmetrical slope of the master-pet power relationship. Therefore, for Haraway, the

experience of play, whether during quotidian walking sessions or serious agility training,

is one of shared time in which both participants experience a reciprocal alteration of their

temporal sense. This mutually “altered but still unidentical sense,” Haraway writes, “feels

something like an eternal present or suspension of time.228 What is invaluable about

Haraway’s line of questioning is her curiosity regarding how the process of relating to

each other renders both entities in the relationship as constantly in-process, or in the

making. At the same time, it seems important to question her embrace of touch as an

idiom for encounters that test the limits of semiosis or referentiality. Her nuanced

mistrust of the colonialist heritages of language and visuality as modes of relating to the

other229 contrasts jarringly with a relatively unhistoricized interest in the revelatory

possibilities of touch, which recalls the faith placed by Marxist theorists like Walter

Benjamin and Theodor Adorno in the capacity of mimesis to rejuvenate an unalienated

relationship with the phenomenal world. While Haraway cannot be accused of the

organicism that has led followers of Benjamin and Adorno such as Michael Taussig to

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!227 Haraway, When Species Meet, 221. 228 Ibid 241. Haraway quotes from novelist and poet Ian Wedde’s reflections on his walks with his dog Vincent: “For me it came to involve pace, space, and focal length, as well as duration and memory. My sense of the present became more vivid; concurrently, Vincent’s perceptual pace altered if he was required to share by speed. Our combined time contained by enhanced sense and his altered pace; we were both fixed in vivid temporal foregrounds” (Ibid 241; Haraway quotes here from Ian Wedde, “Walking the Dog.”) 229 Drawing on the Derrida text discussed earlier, Haraway discusses the limitations posed by practiced modes of looking at the animal for respectful response (Ibid 19-27). A detailed history of debates regarding language ability and animals in philosophy, linguistics, and the cognitive sciences follows (Ibid 234-7; also see footnotes 43 and 44 on pages 372-3).

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locate the mimetic faculty as an essential element of primitive societies, the thesis that

motivates her study—that touch between humans and animals results in a

“miscegenation” of being that “ramifies and shapes accountability”—is nonetheless

marked by a disavowal, if not an embrace, of the organicist history of Western discourses

of touch.230 When Haraway valorizes the “endorphin surge” that Crittercam technology

enables for its human viewers by imitating the tactile physicality of marine mammals

with its “fingery eyes,” she herself mimics Taussig’s gesture of celebrating the capacity

of “mimetically capacious technologies” to rejuvenate forgotten dimensions of sensation

of which animals are now the new bearer.231 Her refusal to take seriously the semiotic

conventions that invest the mark of the animal’s touch with meaning amounts, in this

context, to a refusal to theorize the ideological complex that adheres to the Western

conception of touch.

By engaging the indexicality of their media for obtaining physical traces of

animal presence, Easterson and the other artists described in the previous section

simultaneously highlight the historical singularity of their animal subjects and dwell on

the moment of co-presence. This process insurrects the index as an underexplored

semiotic vocabulary for the kind of transient yet forceful encounter described by Derrida.

It stresses that a relationship of “empathetic nonunderstanding” with animals involves a

perpetual process of translation, of attempting to articulate a shared ground that can

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!230 Ibid 36. See Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1992). For a detailed criticism of Taussig and more canonical Marxist advocates of mimesis, from a point of view that regards the sense of touch as historically produced in the confluence of individual and cultural training and disposition rather than a function of cultural essence, see Laura U. Marks, “The Memory of Touch,” in The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 127-193. 231 Haraway, When Species Meet, 249.

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neither be attributed as a “property” of either entity nor rendered fully knowable. In this

way, even though their practice is superficially based on directness and immediacy, these

works harness the index in its capacity as a metaphor, one that indicates that the semiotic

logic of both the human and the animal are held in place by cultural and technological

systems. If these works offer a crucial contribution to current discourse on achieving

coevalness with the animal, they do so, in Marks’s words, by demonstrating “the power

of approaching [the] object with only the desire to caress it, not to lay it bare.”232

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!232 Marks, The Skin of the Film, 191.

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CHAPTER THREE

TAKING REFUGE IN DISASTER CAPITALISM: SPECULATIVE ACTS AND HUMANITARIAN IMMEDIACY

REFUGEE BRICOLAGE Between October 2010 and March 2011, Global Nomads Group (GNG), a

nonprofit organization that aims to “empower” youth by facilitating “virtual” travel and

dialogue between groups of students from around the world through live

videoconferencing and educational video content,233 released a series of short YouTube

videos featuring a Haitian youth group named Tele Ghetto at work “on the ground” in

Port-au-Prince in the aftermath of the disastrous January 2010 earthquake. Filmed under

the auspices of GNG’s “Students Rebuild” program—one of many North American

student-led reconstruction efforts in Haiti—three of these videos showcase members of

Tele Ghetto interviewing local civilians about various topics pertaining to the post-

earthquake political, economic, and cultural landscape in Haiti.234 In each of these videos,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!233 See “Overview”: http://www.gng.org/about_gng/overview.html [Accessed April 2, 2011]. Global Nomads Group repeatedly employs the term “virtual” to describe their immersive interactive programs, arguing that “live [video] events add a dose of reality to the learning experience, bringing children straight to the source,” thereby positioning students as “empowered” eyewitnesses to each others’ lives. See “Programs”: http://www.gng.org/programs/spring2011.html and “Methodology”: http://www.gng.org/about_gng/methodology.html [Accessed April 2, 2011]. 234 See the section titled “Live from Haiti” under Fall 2010 Programs: http://www.gng.org/programs/fall2010/Students-Rebuild.html. The Spring 2012 “Students Rebuild” Program has its own devoted website (http://studentsrebuild.org/interactive-video-

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one young man is shown holding a video camera while another plays the role of a

reporter, handling the microphone and conducting interviews. The high seriousness with

which the interviewees engage their teenaged inquisitors235 is rendered somewhat surreal

by the realization that the camcorder and microphone brandished by Tele Ghetto are not

actual electronic instruments, but obviously fake-looking props ingeniously fashioned

together from scrap materials (see Fig. 25). A plastic bottle is painted black, with red and

purple foam knobs, to resemble a digital video camera. The neck of the bottle points

forward to serve as a lens, and its side is cut and splayed open in a crude semblance of an

LCD screen. A pair of broken headphones, and a piece of wire fastened to the bottom of

the contraption complete the ensemble, while the microphone consists of steel wire duct-

taped roughly to a wooden stump. Remarkably, the men and women approached by the

boys nevertheless direct their responses and their gazes toward Tele Ghetto’s makeshift

apparatus rather than at the real camcorder presumably borne by the GNG youth

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!conferencing) and YouTube channel, which is now the sole distributor of GNG’s two most recent Tele Ghetto videos (“Teleghetto – Election Part 2” and “Tele Ghetto: One Year Anniversary”); see the StudentsRebuild YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/StudentsRebuild [Accessed April 2, 2011]. The remainder of GNG-produced videos about Tele Ghetto (“Tele Ghetto Haiti Introduction”; “Tele Ghetto: Guerilla Media in Haiti”; “Behind the Scenes with Tele Ghetto”; “TeleGhetto Pre-Elections”) can be seen on the GlobalNomadGroup YouTube channel http://www.youtube.com/user/GlobalNomadsGroup [Accessed April 2, 2011]. NB: On the website of Atis-Rezistans, the umbrella organization that supports the Haitian youth group, their name is spelled as “Tele Geto”; see http://www.atis-rezistans.com/tele_geto.php [Accessed April 05, 2011]. For consistency, I have maintained the spelling “Tele Ghetto” in my own prose. 235 The interviewees earnestly offering their opinions on a range of issues, from the administrative failures of the November 2010 elections; the quotidian difficulties of obtaining adequate food and shelter in the wake of the earthquake and subsequent hurricane; and the faith vested in supernatural forces during religious ceremonies commemorating the one-year anniversary of the earthquake. See Tele Ghetto – Elections Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knxjgenyySs&feature=related [Accessed April 5, 2011]; Tele Ghetto Pre-Elections: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFMzczOBk1Q [Accessed April 5, 2011]; and Tele Ghetto: One Year Anniversary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0J290Df5ys [Accessed April 5, 2011].

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delegates, who remain off-screen, positioned at a 90-degree remove from the Tele Ghetto

“camera crew.”

In another of GNG’s videos, the Tele Ghetto team explains that they conceived of

their project as a performance art piece during the November 2009 Haitian “Ghetto

Biennale,” a salon des refuses established in the impoverished Grand Rue neighborhood

of Port-au-Prince by a collective of resident sculptors named “Atis Rezistans” (or Artists

of Resistance), for drawing attention to neglected works produced by themselves and

other Haitian salvage artists.236 The Rezistanz artists have evolved an unorthodox

Voudou-inspired style of assemblage by repurposing both unclaimed human remains

(mainly skulls and bones) and found industrial materials (defunct engine parts, burnt-out

light-bulbs and television sets, rusted hubcaps, metal chains, wire, rotten lumber, warped

bicycle wheels, and street signs) discarded from the car repair shops, scrap metal dealers,

and junkyards that border their Grand Rue workspace. Tele Ghetto was the brainchild of

“Ti Moun Rezistans,” a group of local children between the ages of 6 and 18 who

produce and sell sculptures and paintings composed of salvaged materials under the

guidance of the older Rezistans artists. Art historian Katherine Smith suggests, upon

having attended the Biennale, that the Tele Ghetto performance was prompted by the

heavy presence of international attendees and domestic and foreign journalists at the

Ghetto Biennale, each of whom came equipped with personal and professional camera

equipment and other recording devices. Sensing an opportunity to showcase their art

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!236 See the Ghetto Biennale website: http://www.ghettobiennale.com/ and the Atis-Rezistans website: http://www.atis-rezistans.com [Accessed April 5, 2011].

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practice, the children rerouted their salvaging skills toward constructing an improvised

camera unit, and set about imitating the journalists, much to their delight.237

When introducing Tele Ghetto to the Global Nomads students, founding member

Romel Jean Pierre describes it as a supplement for “the voice of people who stay away

from society,” with fellow founders Alex Louis Braziel and Steevens Simeon adding that

their pantomime alleviated their feeling of inadequacy in comparison with the “foreigners

[with] cameras in their hands.”238 By protesting his community’s exclusion from the

mainstream news media (rather than the exclusion of Haitian artists from high-profile art

venues, which provided the original reasoning behind the Ghetto Biennale), Pierre

shrewdly repackages the performance art project as a human rights appeal for his new

audience of young humanitarian aid-workers. Perhaps recognizing the mediation of these

cosmopolitan visitors as another vehicle for positive endorsement, Braziel and Simeon

add: “The objective of Tele Ghetto is to pick up all of Haiti. We started with a fake

camera and it was therapeutic for the people…When we asked them questions, it made

them feel better.” Described thusly, Tele Ghetto assumes the sympathetic shape of a

morale-boosting palliative for its marginalized participants, particularly when seen

through the triumphalist lens of GNG’s video title: “Tele Ghetto: Guerilla Media in

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!237 Katherine Smith, personal interview, April 09, 2011. According to Smith, the sculptural work of Ti Moun Rezistans closely resembles that of their mentors, who erect large-scale sculptures often towering over two stories in height. Smith suggests that Ti Moun’s works are self-consciously smaller in scale in order to attract casual buyers, who have been discouraged by the gigantic stature of the older artists’ sculptures. Smith’s forthcoming work deals at length with the politics of Atis Rezistans’ salvage aesthetic, arguing that their shrewd recycling of both Haitian cultural-spiritual history and Western representations of their work draws inspiration from the popular Vodou spirit Gede, an eroticized trickster figure or “cosmic recycler of life and death” whose excessive masculinity parodies and subverts gender norms. See Katherine Smith, “Atis Rezistans: Gede and the Art of Vagabondaj” (unpublished manuscript). 238 See Tele Ghetto: Guerilla Media in Haiti: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZEHjnNhzl8 [Accessed April 5, 2011]. All quotes transcribed from the original translation by Global Nomads Group. The following quotes in this paragraph are drawn from the same video.

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Haiti.” The viewer is inspired to join in cheering on the intrepid ghetto dwellers—whose

wishful role-play of television reporter and interviewee performatively conjures a worldly

public existence that otherwise eludes their bleak existence, and furnishes a chance to

briefly don the guise of a political agent—placing aside any trepidations regarding how

the faith in the power of televisibility that drives this collective fiction may be

misdirected or illusory.

But through a series of timely coincidences, also catalyzed by television, a

heterogeneous array of minor and major humanitarian agents (the Global Nomads Group

is only one instance) have enlisted in this very fiction, purporting to assist the young Tele

Ghetto players in transforming their drama of agency into reality. On January 12, 2010,

the junior apprentices of the Rezistans artists were in the midst of being interviewed in

their Grand Rue studio by the globally acclaimed Haitian photojournalist Daniel Morel,

when the earthquake hit, compelling Morel to abandon his assignment in favor of the

more urgent role of eyewitness reporter.239 Morel’s opportune photographs of injured and

bewildered Ghetto Lianne pedestrians buried under rubble by the very first tremors were

broadcast throughout the international press in the days following the event, and quickly

became icons of the Haitian earthquake.240 Ti Moun Rezistans continue to bask in the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!239 See Daniel Morel and Robert A. Harris, “This Isn’t Show Business,” The New York Times (January 27, 2010): http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/27/showcase-117/ [Accessed April 8, 2011]. In this interview, Morel explains the circumstances surrounding his presence in Port-au-Prince at the time of the quake, including his profile of Ti Moun Rezistans. This article also features the original thirteen images uploaded by Morel to his TwitPic account on January 12, 2010. 240 The rampant proliferation of these images even precipitated a copyright dispute between Morel and various image distribution parties, one that elongated their media after-life, ultimately winning Morel two World Press Photo awards in 2011 for his punctual and dramatic encapsulation of the Haitian catastrophe. For Morel’s prize-winning image, as well as an account of custody battle between Morel and Agence France Presse, Getty Images, and other parties such as CBS, CNN, and ABS for using his Haiti images without authorization, see Oliver Laurent, “Daniel Morel Reacts to World Press Photo Wins,” British Journal of Photography (February 12,

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reflected light of Morel’s award-winning coverage of the Grand Rue, occupying the focus

of numerous news stories, television reports, and gallery shows devoted to the Haitian

recovery effort.241 Special attention has been paid to their Tele Ghetto initiative after the

catastrophe: the children’s improvised camera props and inventive mimicry of their older

mentors’ salvage aesthetic have led several humanitarian advocates to herald the potential

of these young artists as a hopeful allegory of Haiti’s regeneration amid impossible odds,

hailing them as “visionaries [emerging from] ruin.”242 Global Nomads Group and Global

Voices (a Harvard-based non-profit organization devoted to supporting citizen media)

variously praise the work of Tele Ghetto as “guerilla media”243 and “vibrant…citizen

media activity”244 while London-based artist, scholar, and Ghetto Biennale supporter

John Cussans has been moved to present the children with an actual video camera and

microphone to enable them to emulate Morel, by documenting life in Ghetto Lianne after

their homes and Grand Rue studio were destroyed by the earthquake.245

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!2011): http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/news/2025758/daniel-morel-reacts-world-press-photo-wins [Accessed April 8, 2011]. 241 See for instance this press release by the AS IF Gallery in Manhattan, for a show that exhibited the Morel’s photographs of Ti Moun Rezistans “in the throws [sic] of the Haitian earthquake” alongside the children’s artworks: http://www.asifgallery.com/info/children-of-rezistans.htm [Accessed April 14, 2011]. 242 See Holland Cotter, “Out of Ruins, Haiti’s Visionaries,” New York Times (March 13, 2010): http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/18/arts/artsspecial/18HAITI.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1 [Accessed April 12, 2011]. 243 Global Nomads Group refer to Tele Ghetto in one of their videos as “guerilla media in Haiti”; see Tele Ghetto: Guerilla Media in Haiti: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZEHjnNhzl8 [Accessed April 5, 2011]. 244 See “Global Voices in Haiti: Grand Rue Artists After the Earthquake”: http://globalvoicesonline.org/2010/02/01/global-voices-in-haiti-the-grand-rue-artists-after-the-earthquake/ [Accessed April 8, 2011]. A description of Global Voices can be found by following the “About” link. 245 See John Cussans’ blog, which includes several entries devoted to his sponsorship of Tele Ghetto: http://codeless88.wordpress.com/ [Accessed April 14, 2011]. Links to all six of Tele Ghetto’s YouTube videos can be found on this blog. Cussans writes: “Tele Geto was created by Ti Moun Rezistans of the Grand Rue area in Port-au-Prince during the Ghetto Biennale. In light of the lack of video news coming from the ground in Haiti after the earthquake I sent a basic

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If the readiness of the young Tele Ghetto artists to be interpellated as camera-

armed revolutionaries, citizen bloggers, or amateur journalists by their Western advocates

indicates the Haitian children’s investments in televisibility, with its attendant promises

of political agency and cultural prestige, then the six videos produced by Tele Ghetto

using their gifted camera equipment obliquely expose what these appellations represent

for their benevolent crusaders from abroad. Despite grandiose pronouncements by

Braziel, the group’s designated anchorpersons, who proclaims Tele Ghetto’s intention to

broadcast the unedited reality of Haiti to “the international community” at large, the boys

find the majority of their formerly garrulous interviewees (save a few of their Ti Moun

cronies) recalcitrant about divulging their native authority, and suspicious of their

newfound status as television reporters bearing state-of-the-art camera equipment rather

than benign toys. The paltry page views on each video—numbering around a hundred for

each—hint at the modest reality that awaits Tele Ghetto’s ambitious dreams of global

fame.246

The most striking feature of these videos, and which perhaps makes them sought

after by their small group of advocates, is suggested in one of Cussan’s interviews, where

he describes the boys’ footage as “honest and direct,” attributing an unmediated quality to

their childlike guilelessness, which disarms their interviewees and cuts across the clamor

of other competing sources of information.247 Indeed, Tele Ghetto’s roughly hewn

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!video recording kit so that the children of the Grand Rue could document life there after the quake” (Ibid). 246 Braziel assures, “We are not editing…we want to show it to you like it is…not just in Port-au-Prince but also in Jacmel, Cayes, Cap [Haitien] and the rest of the world.” Excerpted from the videos labeled “Tele Geto 1-6” (ibid); and “Tele Ghetto Haiti Introduction”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdMZJqkAMfg&feature=related [Accessed April 14, 2011]. 247 Cussans opines: “The respondents are totally unguarded, because the kids are young people—and they’re Haitian, they aren’t white, they’re not from the UN, they’re not intimidating, so the

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footage volubly conveys authenticity, with handheld images leaping in and out of focus

as the boys clamber over rubble-laden streets, destroyed homes, refugee camps and the

temporary tent cities in which they themselves subsist, the audio lurching between

deafening and inaudible with each unexpected jolt (see Fig. 26). In registering the

equipment’s limited capacity to absorb the shocks of the destroyed urban landscape, these

blemished sounds and images invest Tele Ghetto’s footage with the force of documentary

immediacy, relative to the skillfully edited and well-produced Global Nomads videos.

The palpably situated drama of authenticity is so convincing that it is easy to forget that

the boys are still engaged in a performance, this time imitating the televisual genre of

“live” eyewitness testimony from a disaster zone. The replacement of their fake camera

with a real one also effectively replaces the fact of their fictional play with the impression

of recorded truth. In Tele Ghetto’s six unadorned videos, the aesthetic of improvisation

that distinguishes Ti Moun Rezistans’ art, including the original Tele Ghetto

performance, is transformed from a calculated style to an index of the children’s exposure

to the contingencies of structural poverty, one that speaks less of their mobility or cultural

transgression than their vulnerable refugee status.

EMERGENT AGENCIES

Tele Ghetto exemplifies how disenfranchised individuals are routinely

encouraged to deploy the rhetorical tropes of liveness, transparency, or immediacy as

“self-help” tools for overcoming their structural exclusion from media visibility. In recent

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!locals tell them what they think.” See Kirsten Cooke, “Tele Geto: Interview with John Cussans,” London Fields Radio (July 13, 2010): http://www.londonfieldsradio.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/Tele-Geto.mp3 [Accessed May 4, 2011]. Cussan’s ascription of this charge of authenticity to Tele Ghetto’s footage can equally be understood as a habituated response to a mediated effect of liveness.

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years, such salvation narratives involving “live” media have become naturalized as an

uplifting discursive counterpoint to the more dubious rescue operations of humanitarian

intervention under catastrophic conditions, finding critical support among scholars for

whom such conjectural speech acts serve as proof of the communicative potential

immanent in even the most precarious members of postmodern society. With the theatrics

of Tele Ghetto’s reality show in mind, this chapter interrogates the practice of recruiting

disaster victims as reporters providing eyewitness coverage of catastrophe zones. I attend

in particular to the interplay between the agential stance adopted by disenfranchised

individuals as media professionals and the rhetorical constraints through which these

entrepreneurial acts become recognizable to the humanitarian advocates who champion

them as a form of empowerment. Such self-fashioning by asylum seekers to visibly

demonstrate their political choice and will rather than the suspension or abjection of the

same marks, I wager, the advent of a new and problematic regime of humanitarian

appeal, whose reliance on mass-mediated codes of documentary immediacy covertly

reinstates their precarious position. This chapter challenges the medial logic propelling

the ongoing rhetorical turn to immediacy in both popular and critical domains. I begin by

exploring how the politics of humanitarian recognition under emergent conditions

engender speculative modes of appealing for asylum, followed by a meditation on

contemporary theoretical debates that locate the media “commons” as the key to

actualizing the biopolitical potential of precarious subjects. The last section of the chapter

then employs this critical foundation for analyzing a documentary film produced during

Hurricane Katrina that showcases camcorder footage shot by disaster victims, arguing

that the calamitous aesthetic of immediacy demanded by catastrophic circumstances

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places a deferred burden on the marginalized agents who appropriate it as a mode of

agency.

The mode of address of Tele Ghetto’s disaster documentary videos is

symptomatic of the organic role of humanitarian actors in contemporary states of

emergency, and also indexes the internalization by human rights discourse of the

interventionist temporality of urgency. When surveying the damage done by the

September 2010 hurricane to the flimsy plastic-tented refugee shelters across Port-au-

Prince, the boys direct their appeal not to the Haitian government but to an imagined

sympathetic audience of heterogeneous Western relief providers: they beseech the

“whites” to send them durable materials capable of withstanding the Haitian weather, and

to hold local officials accountable for their corruption in dispensing medical relief

materials.248 The hazy invocation to “whites” as dispensers of both charity and authority

calls to mind not only the major global emergency relief organizations such as the

International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC) and Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors

Without Borders; MSF), both of whom were among the first nongovernmental medical

responders after the January earthquake, but also potentially UN peacekeeping forces and

the US military, who together assumed emergency control of numerous civil functions in

Haiti, including transportation and law and order.249 This perceptual conflation of

humanitarian and military actors attests to what has become commonly known over the

last two decades as a “crisis” in humanitarian assistance. The majority of commentators

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!248 See Tele Geto 4 and 5. 249 Maureen Taft-Morales and Rhoda Margesson, “Haiti Earthquake: Crisis and Response” (CRS Report for Congress): www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/R41023.pdf [Accessed April 22, 2011]. For an overview of emergency relief operations in Haiti by the Haitian government, the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti, local and global humanitarian relief organizations in various sectors, US-AID, the US Department of Defense, and US-based non-governmental organizations, see 1-8.

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on this so-called crisis have focused on how the moral obligation to “save lives” has

become an alibi for extra-legal state action in the post-Cold War era, often combined with

military intervention into weak states by their stronger counterparts.250 Under the

humanitarian paradigm of intervention, the symbolic capacity of non-governmental

humanitarian bodies to designate “emergency” situations (where civilian lives are in

jeopardy due to a hostile state, warring insurgent factions, or man-made or

environmentally induced disaster) is habitually borrowed by partisan actors for

legitimating a diffuse set of agendas that lie beyond the non-partisan purview of

humanitarian principles, which have historically prioritized the punctual and “neutral”

work of treating the symptoms of violent social upheaval, or saving lives, over the more

protracted “political” work of targeting their causes of their endangerment.251 Indeed, in

recent instances where humanitarian discourse has been employed to sanction military

intervention, its legitimating embrace has extended beyond emergency assistance to

diffuse initiatives surrounding human rights, democracy promotion, peace-building,

reconstruction, and development, which have sought to import conglomerations of

foreign state agencies, para-, inter-, and non-governmental organizations as temporary or

long-term substitutes for allegedly absent local structures.252

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!250 Didier Fassin, “Introduction,” in Contemporary States of Emergency: The Politics of Military and Humanitarian Interventions, edited by Didier Fassin and Mariella Pandolfi (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 9-13. Fassin locates India’s 1971 military intervention aimed at liberating the people East Pakistan as the turning point where the new discourse of humanitarian reason superseded the prevailing sovereignty of states upheld by the U.N. (Ibid 11). 251 See Michael Barnett and Thomas G. Weiss, “Humanitarianism: A Brief History of the Present,” in Humanitarianism in Question: Politics, Power, Ethics, edited by Michael Barnett and Thomas G. Weiss (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 10. Barnett and Weiss’s comments speak in particular to the self-definition of the International Committee of the Red Cross (founded 1863), which has since sought to distinguish the brief time frame and neutral motivations of humanitarian rescue and relief from longer-term, politically motivated initiatives. 252 Ibid 5.

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My immediate concern is less with how contemporary “humanitarian reason”

provides an insidious ideological naturalization of “just wars” during peacetime, in the

words of medical anthropologist and former MSF Vice President Didier Fassin, or the

extent to which this phenomenon implicates humanitarian actors in the normalization of

what Giorgio Agamben has hyperbolically termed a “permanent state of emergency” in

Third World sites in the name of development or progress.253 Nor is it my intention to

explore how this rationale demarcates disaster zones as a new frontier for neoliberal

securitization, with its attendant deregulatory measures of privatization, foreign direct

investment, and trade liberalization, as Peter Hallward, Naomi Klein, Nandini

Gunewardana, and others have done. These scholars have contributed valuable and well-

researched analyses of the manifold ways in which the economic logic of neoliberal

catastrophe management exacerbates the pre-existing social distribution of vulnerability

among affected populations.254 Along these lines, Fassin has incisively shown how

ethical questions are foreclosed when military-market rationality emerges as a moral

response from the turbulent affective landscape of catastrophe, particularly in the context

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!253 Fassin, Contemporary States of Emergency, 11; Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, translated by Kevin Attell (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 2. 254 See Peter Hallward, “Securing Disaster in Haiti,” ZNet (January 19, 2010): www.zcommunications.org/securing-disaster-in-haiti-by-peter-hallward [Accessed April 23, 2011]; Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2004); Nandini Gunewardana, “Human Security Versus Neoliberal Approaches to Disaster Recovery,” in Capitalizing on Catastrophe: Neoliberal Strategies in Disaster Reconstruction, edited by Nandini Gunewardena, Mark Schuller, Alexander de Waal and Sara E. Alexander (Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2008), 3-16. Unlike Hallward, Gunewardana’s humanist approach to questions of security does not partake of a Foucauldian methodology; however this chapter provides an extensive bibliography of 20th century literature on disaster recovery. The work of Thomas Haskell can be considered a precursor to these recent analyses of neoliberalist disaster regulation. Challenging prevailing materialist-constructivist analyses of humanitarianism as either a mode of class domination or alternately, a transcendental moral choice, Haskell provides a nuanced Weberian account of the origins of humanitarian sentiments as a regulatory moral counterpart of capitalist expansion: see Thomas Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility Parts 1 and 2,” in Objectivity is Not Neutrality: Explanatory Schemes in History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1998), 235-279.

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of postmodern or “complex” humanitarian emergencies, in which the primary

stakeholders and accountable parties are not easily identifiable.255

To appreciate the implications of Tele Ghetto’s self-presentation, it is more

important to understand how they seek to make themselves recognizable to their Western

advocates. The rhetorical comportment of their documentary testimony should be read as

a response to an unspoken cleave within the articulation of humanitarian good-will, or

what Fassin labels the humanitarian “politics of life”—the politics of hierarchically

assigning value to the lives of aid providers and receivers.256 Fassin argues his case with

and against Agamben, for whom humanitarianism’s replacement of civil rights with

human rights amounts to an exoneration of the nation-state from its political

responsibility to ensure the inseparability of the two. Fassin’s reference to Agamben calls

attention to the implicit power differential or “ontology of inequality” embedded in the

conceit of “saving lives,” one that introduces a dialectic between lives passively saved on

one hand, and lives actively and voluntarily risked on the other.257 As Adi Ophir notes,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!255 Against Luc Boltanski’s influential treatise on humanitarian morality, which focalizes the affective dimension of mediated spectatorial response to distant tragedy, Fassin argues that the value judgments of humanitarian morality (as evidenced in the 19th century coinage of the French term humanité, which refers both to an ethical category of shared human experience and the affective movement of humane sympathy) are complex negotiations of affect and ethical rationality, which Charles Taylor views as central to the constitution of modern identity. See Didier Fassin, “Heart of Humaneness: The Moral Economy of Humanitarian Intervention,” in Contemporary States of Emergency: The Politics of Military and Humanitarian Interventions, edited by Didier Fassin and Mariella Pandolfi (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 271. Describing the moral economy of discourses of modern philanthropy, Fassin writes, “the articulation of reason and emotion in the attitude held toward the other as a vulnerable human being…opens up the possibility for all actors, including victims, to claim the authority of law, or to excite sympathy and to play on this tension in order to promote interests and defend causes and even to instrumentalize humanitarian action” (Ibid 272). 256 Didier Fassin, “Humanitarianism as a Politics of Life,” Public Culture volume 10, number 3 (2007): 500. 257 Fassin, “Humanitarianism as a Politics of Life,” 500; 519. Importantly, Fassin also argues against Agamben’s characterization of humanitarianism’s detachment from state apparatuses by

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Agamben views humanitarianism’s logic of intervention not only as a desertion of the

political field, but an active consolidation of sovereign power, which decides whether to

bestow life or deny its political value altogether: “Humanitarian organizations, in

Agamben’s words, ‘maintain a secret solidarity with the powers they ought to

fight’…[When they] provide aid and relief to refugees, invoking the sanctity of their

lives, [they] act as a substitute for the political authorities and under their auspices,

contribute to the reinstitutionalization of a false (ideological) distinction between the

realm of bare life and the realm of politics…They depoliticize the disaster, obstruct

understanding of its local and global contexts, and tend to represent its victims as passive

objects of care, devoid of political will and organizational capacities—if they do not

actually make the victims so.”258 By emphasizing how humanitarian organizations

prioritize saving the lives of their own (typically Western) representatives over those of

their (typically non-Western) beneficiaries in moments of crisis, Fassin thus dismantles

both the long-standing myths regarding humanitarianism’s averred political “neutrality”

and its self-conception as the life-giving nemesis of the military politics of death, which

can be said to explicitly devalue “enemy” lives.259

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!pointing to the mutual interpenetration and overlap between state and humanitarian officials, with France as a privileged example (Ibid 510). 258 See Adi Ophir, “The Sovereign, the Humanitarian, and the Terrorist,” in Nongovernmental Politics, edited by Michael Feher with Gaelle Krikorian and Yates McKee (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 168; Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 133. 259 To illustrate the continuity between the military and humanitarian politics of life, Fassin highlights the symmetry between the US’s 2003 military mission in Iraq and MSF’s response in the form of a medical delegation to Iraq, of which team-members were abducted by the Iraqi intelligence service. He argues that when MSF decided to terminate the humanitarian mission in order to obviate further hostage situations and/or harm to their aid-workers, the organization implicitly participated in the differential valuation of Western and Iraqi lives that has characterized the US invasion, wherein “the life of one Western soldier is worth one thousand times the life of the inhabitants of a country in which the soldiers are intervening to ‘liberate’ or ‘protect’ them.” See Fassin, “Humanitarianism as a Politics of Life,” 513.

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The greatest value of Fassin’s formulation regarding “humanitarian as a politics

of life” however, lies in his distanciation from Agamben. Rather than regarding the

relationship between the humanitarian aid-worker and the refugee as exemplary of any

originary condition, Fassin sees the aforementioned “ontology of inequality” as the

sedimented outcome of a historically contingent and mediated set of ideological

dispositions. Taking MSF as a case in point, he outlines how the anti-racist ethical ideals

of humanitarian assistance are often, at critical moments, outweighed by deep-seated

institutionalized racisms. According to Fassin, the practice of giving preferential political

protection to Western aid-workers over and above civilians whose suffering they purport

to alleviate merely manifests the thoroughly racialized anatomy of humanitarian

organizations, wherein expatriate “volunteers” are systematically privileged over local

employees or “nationals” in terms of decision making, medical coverage, remuneration,

political protection, and institutional immunity. Furthermore, he elaborates that the

rhetorical demands of humanitarian witnessing both emerge from and reinforce the

subject-object binary logic of humanitarian rescue, with the mediation of non-Western

testimonies by Western advocates taking form in narratives of victimhood. Fassin

contends that this representational strategy has profound consequences for refugees, who

capitulate to the reductive and visibly commodified image of victimhood demanded by

this narrative, having accepted that their fate is contingent upon their recognizable need

for humanitarian assistance. Repeatedly hailed to behave and present themselves as

“suffering beings who can only be described in terms of their physical injuries and

psychological trauma…[these individuals] end up perceiving themselves, too, at least in

part, as victims.”260 Fassin’s ethnographically based reflections paint a sobering portrait !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!260 Ibid 517-8. Fassin has written extensively on this topic elsewhere, drawing on ethnographic

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of the ostensibly radical offering of the humanitarian “gift of life,” where the sacrifice of

aid-workers’ lives purports to valorize and dignify the lives of victims whose rights have

been suspended. Within the political economy of appealing for humanitarian assistance,

he counters, this purported gift eventually entails a discursive burden for its recipients,

wherein the representational weight of perpetually supplicating oneself as a victim

gradually assumes ontological proportions, establishing these individuals as “the indebted

of the world”—those who can never hope to be equal participants in the gift economy,

since they can only ever receive.261

Two points can be gleaned here that shed light on Tele Ghetto’s use of

documentary conventions to spectacularize the facticity of their refugee status. The first

is regarding the diffusion between humanitarianism and the “political” modes of

intervention from which it seeks to distinguish its task of “saving lives.” Of these so-

called political modes, Fassin overtly emphasizes the permeation of humanitarian

discourse by the biopolitics of military occupation; however his remarks regarding

humanitarian witnessing likewise index a blurring of boundaries between

humanitarianism and human rights advocacy. As Craig Calhoun notes, human rights

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!research in France and other European countries where, in recent years, manifesting visible evidence of trauma (as physical scars and psychic traces) has become institutionalized as a legal requirement for justifying refugee-status and receiving political asylum. Since a crop of NGOs have emerged to respond to and oversee this need for proof from state institutions, Fassin and his co-authors contend that humanitarianism is thoroughly implicated in the visual rhetoric of victimhood. See Didier Fassin and Estelle d’Halluin, “Critical Evidence: The Politics of Trauma in French Asylum Policies,” Ethos volume 35, number 3 (2007): 300-329; and Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, “The Politics of Proof,” in Empire of Trauma (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 217-274. The scenario outlined by Fassin and his co-authors seems to extend Wendy Brown’s critique of the “ressentimental” politics of the liberal state to its humanitarian appurtenances, arguing that humanitarianism reinforces injury as a regulatory basis of identity when it seeks to “liberate” its injured beneficiaries through recourse to the same legal discourses that countenance a differential distribution of injury. See Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). 261 Fassin, “Humanitarianism as a Politics of Life,” 512.

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discourse has traditionally departed from humanitarianism by virtue of its protracted time

frame. This derives from an investment in universalizing the rights of citizens, which are

seen as a variegated set of entitlements that define humanity in the long run, as opposed

to the singular and timely delivery of the “gift” of life itself.262 In contrast, the condensed

temporality of the humanitarian emergency is concerned instead with the preservation of

humanity (understood in Agambenian terms as the abstract fact of living, or zoë) as a first

order principle, with all political aspects of existence coming second. Indeed, Calhoun

opines that the notion of the emergency, with its connotations of the agent-less, sudden,

and unpredictable, has provided humanitarianism with a justification for cutting across

mediating forms that give meaning to the mere fact of life—such as the state, the

economy, as well as other cultural categories of difference such as race, gender, class,

language, and religion—and acting upon “humanity” in its most vulnerable and abstract

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!262 See Craig Calhoun, “The Idea of Emergency: Humanitarian Action and Global (Dis)Order,” in Contemporary States of Emergency: The Politics of Military and Humanitarian Interventions, edited by Didier Fassin and Mariella Pandolfi (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 29-58. Beginning with the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, Calhoun provides an analytical account of how the impulses of charity and empire have together produced the “social imaginary of emergency,” or a mediated understanding of eventfulness and response that informs the works of states, UN agencies, NGOs, religious, and humanitarian actors (Ibid 30-1). Calhoun’s following points regarding the distinction of humanitarianism and human rights discourse are worth noting at length: (1): Although humanitarianism, like human rights discourse, drew on the notion of common humanity, it emphasized political, though not religious, neutrality. (2): “The human rights movement sought to universalize the rights of citizens and insisted that these are not gifts, but entitlements…But even the notion of human rights implied rights that obtain before politics, in humanity as such, even if it requires state action to secure them” (Ibid 37). (3): Humanitarian groups reject the politics of human rights advocacy (which is often oriented toward lobbying campaigns, getting treaties signed, and otherwise working directly with and on states) since they most often work in situations of state failure, even if they themselves end up assuming state functions, and (4): Humanitarianism’s self-definition in terms of “urgency” emerges from a desire for autonomy from economic conditions and constraints, which otherwise define the parameters of development assistance addressing structural issues such as poverty and disempowerment (Ibid 52).

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form.263 Bearing this assessment in mind, we can see that the practice of encouraging

asylum seekers to deploy the “ontology of inequality” as a strategic technique of self-

representation evidences a mixing of humanitarian and human rights modes. Not only has

humanitarianism in its late twentieth-century iterations diversified to encompass

canvassing for political rights that fall beyond its traditional scope, but human rights

advocacy has clearly begun to operate within the humanitarian order of priorities.

Admittedly, the “urgent” task of alleviating life-threatening violence in the era of the

“media intervention” condones or even necessitates a certain degree of representational

violence in the work of bearing witness—such as, for instance, the injurious self-

orientalization of others as victims.

A second, related issue illuminated by Fassin is that the representational economy

of contemporary humanitarianism operates according to a neoliberal rather than a purely

repressive logic. Unlike recent proponents and critics who have attributed a sovereign

basis to humanitarian assistance, Fassin emphasizes its biopolitical underpinnings,

suggesting that its agents employ racism to differentiate those “other” lives (which may

be passively sacrificed) from their own actively safeguarded lives, even as they imagine

themselves to be defending those very others against state racism. In doing so, Fassin

emphasizes the unconscious mediation implicit in every aspect of humanitarian

intervention and not only the explicitly representational act of bearing witness, thus

positioning humanitarianism as an ideological apparatus that interpellates each of its

actors within a racializing representational regime. This provides an important !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!263 Calhoun rightly notes that the idea of emergency relief pivots on a particularly modern notion of humanity as an abstract category of equivalence, one that derives not only from ethical universalism but also from a biopolitical administrative gaze that takes an aerial view of populations disengaged from kinship, religion, nationality and other systems of relationality (Ibid 34). Also see Fassin, “Heart of Humaneness,” 275.

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counterweight to the predominant tendency of disavowing the representational politics of

humanitarianism. On one side, the view that upholds humanitarian assistance as an

unconditionally neutral or radically altruistic gift neglects Marcel Mauss’s insight

regarding the cyclical symbolic economy of the gift, which inevitably visits violence

upon those who renege on the gift’s implied loan of credit.264 The polar view, of which

Agamben is emblematic, takes a structurally similar position regarding the transcendental

sovereignty of humanitarian aid, envisioning an absolute and unmediated mode of

intervention that renders the beneficiary totally abject and powerless. Fassin usefully

departs from the precept of sovereignty in characterizing humanitarianism as a fluid, if

structurally asymmetrical, biopolitical field of power in which the codependent

representational forms of savior and victim are voluntarily adopted by either side for their

mutual gain. This has particular ramifications for the “victims,” for whom any potential

gain has an overtly speculative component. These individuals—frequently those who,

like Tele Ghetto’s members, already face heightened structural levels of exposure to

catastrophe—are invited to take on the additional “acceptable” risk of representational

disadvantage in order to be conspicuously visible as victims to their would-be saviors.

Thus they willingly and even entrepreneurially participate in a discursive economy that

ultimately compounds their precarity in the hopes of partaking of the immediate benefits

of humanitarian recognition.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!264 Mauss’s view that gift economies are based on the idea of credit fundamentally opposes the developmental view that positions gift economies as a primitive or altruistic precedent to “civilized” capitalist credit systems. Indeed, Mauss argues that gift-exchange functioned for archaic societies as a pacifist substitute for war, wherein a small series of equivalent sacrifices served as a means to obviate larger human costs. See Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, translated by W.D. Halls (London: Routledge, 2002).

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With these remarks we can productively elucidate Tele Ghetto’s relation with the

notion of “emergent agencies” that names this section. As the Latin root of the word

emergency, or emergentia (“arise, bring to light”) suggests, emergency is associated not

only with the interruption of the regular but also the materialization or coming into being

of the new. As Calhoun argues, the “humanitarian emergency” has become an abstract

lens for stripping human suffering of its local and geopolitical contexts and focusing on

the naked present as a discontinuous and singular event.265 If we accept this thesis, as I

do, then it is important to consider how the rhetorical frames of humanitarian states of

emergency behave as material constraints for emerging subjects. How does the

imperative of urgency—understood as the prioritization of immediacy over mediation,

and action over analysis—predetermine the conjectural and exploratory speech-acts that

emerge from those who have been deprived of speech by catastrophic circumstances? To

respond in the vocabulary through which I have previously defined the aims of

humanitarian media empowerment, or autoethnography, we might say: refugees seeking

to “come to voice” under the banner of urgency face the constraint of conforming to

ontology of inequality described by Fassin when articulating human rights claims.266

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!265 Calhoun notes that emergency, which has become the primary term for categorizing catastrophes, conflicts, and human suffering in general, “points to what happsn without reference to agency, astral misalignments, or other causes or any specific outcomes. The emergency is a sudden, unpredictable event emerging against a background of ostensible normalcy, causing suffering or danger and demanding urgent response. Usage is usually secular. Use of the word focuses attention on the immediate event, and not on its causes. It calls for a humanitarian response, not political or economic analysis.” See Calhoun, “The Idea of Emergency,” 30. 266 My comments here regarding the potential subjectivity of the refugee are based on Ophir’s understanding that “[i]n our contemporary world…the refugee is not just any other nomad, and his existence cannot be reduced to that of a stateless person, as Arendt has it. Rather, the refugee is always already a double subject: a noncitizen of the sovereign state on whose soil he resides and a potential or actual subject (subjectus) and object of the humanitarian regime of discourse and action that would keep him alive.” See Ophir, “The Sovereign, the Humanitarian, and the Terrorist,” 171.

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Tele Ghetto demonstrates a troublesome extension of this conundrum. Judging the

project solely on formal criteria, we might be tempted to commemorate it as a reversal of

“the terms of human-rights reporting to include the agency of those who are brutalized by

abuses,” or what Fassin beckons to as a means of making refugee lives

“autobiographical” rather than merely biological or biographical.267 Indeed, the boys

comport themselves not as passive victims but in the agential manner of eyewitness

documentarians. But to extol Tele Ghetto as an “empowering” model of autoethnography

would be to ignore the boys’ shrewd imitation of the active stance of humanitarian

agents, through which they seek both to make themselves recognizable to their overseas

supporters and thereby avail of the preferential treatment accorded to the professional

volunteer. By the same token, the boys clearly apprehend and seek to make good on the

opportunity presented by the discursive phenomenon of the emergency, which

sensationalizes and gives currency to their quotidian ghettoization through the moniker of

“refugee.” It is necessary therefore to query how the medial language of documentary

immediacy that indexes and validates Tele Ghetto’s refugee status also arbitrates their

access to recognition and agency. To illustrate the malevolent repercussions of this

indexical rhetoric of visibility, I now engage two conversations with surprisingly little

boundary crossing, spanning questions of media theory and biopolitics respectively. I

begin with a brief vignette that shows how the televisual mandate of “immediacy” or

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!267 Fassin, “Humanitarianism as a Politics of Life,” 519. The phrase in quotes is excerpted from a list of “progressive” directives for human rights advocacy compiled by Bridget Conley-Zilkic, project director for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which echoes the ideal articulated by Fassin. See Bridget Conley-Zilkic, “Speaking Plainly about Chechnya: On the Limits of the Juridical Model of Human Rights Advocacy,” in Nongovernmental Politics, edited by Michael Feher with Gaelle Krikorian and Yates McKee (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 80.

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“liveness” surrounding catastrophe coverage places different demands on professional

journalists and the disaster victims who are hailed to imitate them as “citizen reporters.”

THE RAW AND THE COOKED, OR, THE CONSTRUCTION OF IMMEDIACY

Anderson Cooper’s eyewitness coverage of Hurricane Katrina for CNN—which

has been widely hailed as the advent of a new era of “unanchored” or “raw” journalistic

reportage—is representative of the intensified frame of televisual “liveness” from which

contemporary disaster autoethnography of the likes of Tele Ghetto derives its

documentary conventions, as well as its persuasive appeal. Journalist Jonathan Van Meter

argues that Cooper’s impassioned outbursts of rage against FEMA Director Michael

Brown and Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu (during live transmissions televised from

Bay St. Louis, and Waveland, Mississippi on August 31 and September 1, 2005,

respectively) earned him the reputation of America’s favorite “emo-anchor.”268 Cooper’s

frequent breaches of journalistic decorum, Van Meter proffers, marked “a fork in the road

for the future of broadcast journalism”: while NBC’s Brian Williams’ stolid affect

channeled an older era of anchors like Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather, whose reassuring

air of authority soothed previous generations of catastrophe spectators, Cooper’s “raw

emotion [and] honest humanity…removed the filter.”269 Along similar lines, media

scholar Steve Classen has claimed—citing then-CNN President Jonathan Klein’s

approbation of Cooper as being “about visceral experience” rather than “cerebral

analysis”—that Cooper’s brand of crisis reporting signals an ever-increasing emphasis on

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!268 See for instance the following special feature on Anderson Cooper’s early coverage of the hurricane: Jonathan Van Meter, “Unanchored,” New York Magazine (September 11, 2005): http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/features/14301/ [Accessed May 22, 2011]: 2. 269 Ibid 5.

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immediacy over analysis in televisual catastrophe coverage.270 The spectatorial success of

such reporting, continues Classen, was evidenced by the extent to which “some of the

most emotional, confrontational and “out of control” journalists effectively advanced

their careers via their “wild” and provocative performances in the early hours of Katrina

coverage,” particularly Cooper, whose sky-rocketing ratings following his on-location

Katrina reports won his show Anderson Cooper 360° a devoted fan following among

internet bloggers, as well as a coveted two-hour prime-time slot on CNN in November

2005, replacing anchor Aaron Brown’s NewsNight.271

Van Meter and Classen’s comments not only sum up other critics’ views that

Cooper’s Katrina coverage constituted a “crisis in journalistic objectivity,”272 but their

emphasis on the physicality of Cooper’s embodied response to the storm—a vulnerability

that promised to expose the “reality” beneath the practiced theatrics of reportage—also

signals an important shift in the poetics of liveness in disaster reportage. In the era of the

Challenger explosion in 1986, the first catastrophe to be televised live as it unfolded,

catastrophic televisual speech was marked, as Mary Ann Doane has demonstrated, by an

oscillation between the overt display of morbidly fascinating moments of seemingly

authentic reality, and the strategic containment of these lapses in television’s carefully

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!270 See Steve Classen, “Reporters Gone Wild: Reporters and Their Critics on Hurricane Katrina, Gender, Race and Place,” Journal of E-Media Studies volume 2, number 1 (2009): 5. 271 Ibid 5; also see Van Meter, “Unanchored,” 5; and Vanessa Lynn Morogiello, “A Content Analysis of Anderson Cooper 360º’s Coverage of Hurricane Katrina: Politically Slanted or Objective Reporting on a National Crisis” (MA Thesis, Seton Hall University, 2007), 39: http://domapp01.shu.edu/depts/uc/apps/libraryindex.nsf/titlethesis?OpenForm&Start=1&Count=1000 [Accessed May 22, 2011]. 272 See for instance Jay Perkins and Ralph Izard, “In the Wake of Disaster: Lessons Learned” in Covering Disaster, edited by Jay Perkins and Ralph Izard (New Jersey: Transition Publishers, 2010), 1-18; Sue Robinson, “‘If you had been with us’: Mainstream Press and Citizen Journalists Jockey for Authority Over the Collective Memory of Hurricane Katrina,” New Media Society volume 11, number 5 (2009): 795–814.

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scripted flow within a technologized narrative signifying “progress.” Doane refers, for

instance, to improvisational, direct, and stumbling address of the usually unruffled Tom

Brokaw as he attempted to mediate the space shuttle’s traumatic destruction for his

dumbstruck audience. Although Brokaw’s unscripted commentary constituted an

interruption of journalistic artifice and thus crucially substantiated television’s claim to

live, authentic experience, this disturbance in the social order nevertheless demanded a

compensatory discourse: a technophilic “fetishism of controls” consisting of digital

replays, forecasts, animated simulations, and eyewitness accounts (signifying television’s

live co-presence in the space of, if not at the exact time of the disaster) designed to stave

off the audience’s anxieties regarding further technological breakdown.273 According to

Doane, this dialectic of the improvised and the rehearsed, mapped onto Nature—

including the anchor’s “natural” or “all too human” response—and Technology—

represented by hi-tech digital imaging and broadcast media—enables television to

capitalize on the visual drama of disaster while simultaneously recuperating it within its

relentless flow.274 The logical upshot of transforming catastrophe into a mere genre that

glorifies television as benevolent witness, educator, and guardian, she argues, is that

spectators are reassured of technology’s subordination of natural contingencies, thereby

safeguarding the neoliberalist (and frequently, nationalist) economic rationale that

underlies such mediatized spectacles.

If this suturing of contingency within the flow of narrative characterized the

emerging televisual genre of catastrophe nearly a quarter of a century ago, then it might

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!273 Mary Ann Doane, “Information, Crisis, Catastrophe,” in Logics of Television, edited by Patricia Mellencamp (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 231-2. Importantly, Doane notes that such displays of technological control are frequently inseparable from a discourse of national sovereignty. 274 Ibid 228.

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be said that uninterrupted access to the eyewitness body in crisis has become the hallmark

of twenty-first century catastrophe coverage, particularly in the case of live coverage of

severe environmental and seismic phenomena. Cooper’s eyewitness reports for CNN,

especially during the early days when the hurricane made its devastating landfall on the

Gulf Coast, reveal the structuring impact of the humanitarian intervention, with its

connotations of heroic responsibility and punctual decision-making, on the temporality of

contemporary “live” media, which, accordingly to new media scholar Wendy Hui Kyong

Chun, increasingly operate in the mode of crisis and not catastrophe. Indeed, Cooper’s

rhetorical strategies cannot be adequately explained by television scholar Katherine Fry’s

insight that contemporary catastrophe news subordinates analysis and critical scrutiny to

the task of dramatizing television’s reassuring presence at the scene of the disaster.275

Rather than exemplifying Cooper’s heroism as unique, the image of his endangered body

forms the basis of a seductive appeal that entreats his audience to participate, and to

emulate his heroic act. As Chun writes, the lure of crisis also names the lure of new

“democratic” media technologies over older media: of “using” over “watching,” of active

involvement over passive reception, and of touching “a time that touches a real, different

time: a time of real decision, a time of our lives.”276 This appealing sense of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!275 Katherine Fry concurs with Classen in her analysis of live news coverage of Hurricane Katrina, arguing that the imperative of showcasing television’s own “live” presence led news reports to emphasize the heroism and sacrifice of their eyewitness reporters, eschewing in the balance any sustained investigative analysis of the disaster. Fry writes: “The flipside of television’s strength in covering the now [was] its weakness in understanding the past and offering historic context in general.” See Katherine Fry, “Hero For New Orleans, Hero For the Nation,” Space and Culture volume 9, number 1 (February 2006): 84. 276 See Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “Crisis, Crisis, Crisis, or, Sovereignty and Networks,” Theory, Culture, and Society (unpublished manuscript; forthcoming, 2011), 10. The emphasis is my own. Chun continues: “crises are central to experiences of new media agency, to information as power: crises—moments that demand real time response—make new media valuable and empowering by tying certain information to a decision, personal or political (in this sense, new media also personalizes crises). Crises mark the difference between ‘using’ and other modes of media

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empowerment is illusory, however, since the battle of Man versus Nature staged by

Cooper’s endurance test is articulated within a political economy of risk whose

differential distribution is effaced by its inclusionary spectatorial address.

An excerpt from the August 29, 2005 edition of CNN’s American Morning,

featuring a live telecast of Cooper from Baton Rouge, illustrates in microcosm how the

ideological burden of guaranteeing the impression of shared exposure—and immunity—

to catastrophe is outsourced to local eyewitnesses. By considering how the news network

appeals to disaster victims to emulate Cooper’s visibly vulnerable stance as “citizen

journalists,” (see Fig. 27) we begin to see how the gradient of Fassin’s ontology of

inequality differently implicates professional journalists and their civilian counterparts.

Cooper’s reports, as well as those by numerous other correspondents and affiliates

stationed along the Gulf Coast (notably John Zarella, Gary Tuchman, and Jeanne

Meserve), are woven into an ongoing consultation between CNN anchor Daryn Kagan

and meteorologist Chad Myers, the stated purpose of which is to provide residents and

evacuees “in harm’s way” with up-to-date information about the hurricane’s path and

conditions on the ground.277 Poor or diminished visibility is the resounding theme of the

conversation. The live video footage broadcast from Baton Rouge, downtown New

Orleans, and Gulfport have little to distinguish their geographical variance: all feature

barely discernable cityscapes behind a cloudy barricade of falling rain, with an audio

track similarly consisting of a wall of static through which the correspondents struggle to

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!spectatorship / viewing, in particular ‘watching’television, which has been theorized in terms of liveness and catastrophe. Comprehending the difference between new media crises and televisual catastrophes is central to understanding the promise and threat of new media” (Ibid 8). 277 Excerpted from “CNN Live Today: Hurricane Katrina” Rush transcript of American Morning (Aired August 29, 2010): http://www-cgi.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0508/29/lt.01.html [Accessed June 02, 2011]; henceforth referred to as Transcript 1.

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be heard. Undeterred, Myers and Kagan, who are stationed at a remove from the sites of

the hurricane, trade off on emphasizing the advanced sophistication of CNN’s satellite

and on-site weather tracking technologies relative to its peer networks, emphasizing in

particular the live broadcasting capabilities of CNN’s mobile unit, “Hurricane One.”278

But even as Kagan insists that Hurricane One’s “amazing technology” enables retrieving

“pictures and images even from places where we can’t get a satellite truck in,”279 she

hastens to add that the paucity of eyewitness visuals available to elucidate Myers’ VIPIR

maps and forecasts is not evidence of technological failure but rather simply of the fact

that, in Myers’ words, “there is simply nothing to see.”280 Thus, in CNN’s own discourse,

the fidelity of the network’s cameras resides not in their capacity to overcome the poor

visibility on the ground but to tangibly index it. By visualizing the ephemeral limits of

technology faced with the “power of mother nature”281—as Kagan confesses, CNN

broadcasts were necessarily impacted by communications failures all along the Gulf

Coast, affecting both the duration and the quality of the image—indexicality foregrounds

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!278 Myers cites the cutting-edge VIPIR (volumetric imaging and processing of integrated radar) imaging system employed by his team for providing multi-colored, three-dimensional digital simulations and forecasts of the storm’s predicted trajectory, while Kagan trumpets the combination of IFB (interruptible feedback) and FTP (file transfer protocol) techniques employed in “Hurricane One.” Her proud announcement, that “[this is] the same technology that we used to bring you the invasion of Iraq,” contains an echo, albeit unintentional, of Lisa Parks’ insight that the so-called “view from nowhere” of satellite images conceals a conglomeration of military-industrial interests. Excerpted from “CNN Live Today: Hurricane Katrina” Rush transcript of American Morning (Aired August 29, 2010): http://www-cgi.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0508/29/lt.03.html [Accessed June 2, 2011]; henceforth referred to as Transcript 3. Also see Lisa Parks, “Digging Into Google Earth: An Analysis of the Crisis in Darfur,” Geoforum volume 40, number 4 (July 2009): 540. 279 “CNN Live Today,” Transcript 3. 280 “CNN Live Today,” Transcript 1. Referring to Zarella’s live camera feed from downtown New Orleans, Myers elaborates: “On the north side of the causeway where the police had actually been blocking the causeway off, there was nothing on that camera at all. Not because the camera is broken, because the rain and the wind are going so quickly there's literally nothing to see. Visibility there, [is] less than about 100 feet.” 281 Ibid.

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the vulnerability of the machinery, allowing the mediating infrastructure subtending the

eyewitness image to fall away. This profoundly ideological proclamation of “unmediated

truth” names the actual informational content provided by the eyewitness image.

Nowhere is this more apparent that when Kagan finally brings in “the man

himself, Anderson [Cooper],” anxiously adding, “take it away but don’t go away or blow

away.”282 Cooper’s rousing appearances counterbalance numerous frustrated attempts at

obtaining synced audio and video footage of CNN’s on-location correspondents: Zarella,

for instance, is only able to join in by telephone, and Kagan initially fails to establish a

connection with Meserve, who later only appears from within the visually unexciting and

safe confines of the Superdome. Perched precariously on the edge of a pier in Baton

Rouge, and facing directly into 120 mph winds (described in graphic detail by Myers

immediately prior to his cameo), Cooper’s body functions as a barometer of the severest

weather conditions documented live during Katrina. Apologizing for his uncharacteristic

disarray, reddened face, and blinking eyes, which are barely protected from the torrential

weather by his thin orange CNN windbreaker, Cooper explains: “It’s very hard to look in

this direction. The wind—the rain is just coming horizontally and it’s like pinpricks in

your face as you try to turn north and look into the wind.”283 Cooper’s testimony is

validated more by the non-stop, panicked stream of his commentary than by the

inconsequential information he provides. Despite his best efforts to make visible what

remains obscured from view, his words end up being a banal and repetitive description of

what little he can see: discarded ice-coolers bobbing in the water, an unanchored barge

moving dangerously fast toward the shore, a broken crane colliding repeatedly against the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!282 Ibid. 283 Ibid.

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pier. Instead, what really make an impression are the stumbling excitement of his speech,

his barely audible words, and perhaps most importantly, his embodied and verbal

demonstrations of physical discomfort (see Fig. 28). These seemingly involuntary

reflexes not only legitimate his outbursts of rage in the coming days as “natural” or

“unfiltered” journalism, but also authenticate and lend credence to the camera’s

indexicality.284 Cooper’s performance suggests the reason why the “reporter in the rain”

trope has become a standard accompaniment to hi-tech satellite visuals in contemporary

weather reports, as Marita Sturken has noted in her recent analysis of the Weather

Channel.285 His vulnerable eyewitness body—whose presence in the space and time of

the disaster represents the apotheosis to which televisual liveness strives—behaves as the

close up that guarantees and interprets the obscure establishing shot provided by the

satellite or radar image, whose algorithmic claim to indexicality needs confirmation from

another “documentary” image whose palpable authenticity strips away every appearance

of mediation.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!284 The physical impact of the storm occupies the bulk of Cooper’s memoir of Katrina: “At the height of Katrina, I’m holding on to the railing of a pier, surrounded by a whirling wall of white…The storm is a phantom, rearing, retreating, charging. It spins and slaps, pirouettes and punishes. I’m submerged in water, corseted by the air…I’ve felt the tug. A few more steps and I’d be gone. Crushed by the wall of water and wind. It’s that close. I can feel it…By noon the worst of it is over…Face scrubbed raw, whipped for hours by the elements, eyes itching, I long for sleep.” See Anderson Cooper, Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of Wars, Disasters, and Survival (New York: Harper Collins, 2006), 128-9. 285 Marita Sturken, “Weather Media and Homeland Security: Selling Preparedness in a Volatile World,” in Understanding Katrina, Social Science Research Council (October 5, 2005): http://understandingkatrina.ssrc.org/Sturken/ [Accessed May 22, 2010]; also see Marita Sturken, “Desiring the Weather: El Niño, the Media, and California Identity,” Public Culture volume 13, number 2 (2001): 161-189. Sturken writes: “In the increasingly technologized story of the weather, the weather reporter remains a crucial human element. The physical body of the on-site weather news reporter must by convention be subject in uncomfortable ways to the weather. Hence, while the “real” information about the weather and its impact may be coming from satellite images and helicopter news footage, the signification of the real seems to demand a surrogate body that can feel and speak the weather corporeally” (Ibid 169).

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But what is crucial to note is that this impression of “raw” documentary

immediacy is in fact a highly artificial effect produced by placing the reporter in the

middle of the storm, wherein television produces the real situation of disaster victims as a

coded drama. Cooper’s decision to “weather the storm” aligns him with Gulf coast

residents who did not evacuate, but this identification effaces his relative invulnerability

in comparison with those for whom evacuation represented a luxury out of reach rather

than a choice. As Sturken has argued, the practice of visualizing sophisticated satellite

technologies of tracking, mapping, and predicting weather patterns (such as 3-D

simulations and forecasts using the expensive Doppler radar imaging system)

unproblematically addresses all television and digital media consumers as globally

mobile citizens with the financial resources to proactively employ this information in

order to protect themselves.286 Following this line of thinking, we see that television’s

discourse of prediction and control positions its spectators as empowered technocrats

during peacetime and humanitarian volunteers during “wartime,” charged both with

governing their “common” environmental resources and intervening to protect them. The

sentimental appeal of civic participation glosses over the fact that the exposure to

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!286 Sturken, “Desiring the Weather,” 166. Building on Parks’s pioneering study of satellite imaging technologies, which argues that an aerial or planetary epistemology—historically associated with military monitoring—has become normalized as the establishing perspective of live broadcast transmission, Sturken notes: “Today, satellite technology is a central aspect not only of how the weather is visualized but also of how viewers locate themselves regionally, nationally, and globally. A satellite image situates the viewer from a point of view in space. In that most local news weather maps define weather within a hundred-mile radius, this emphasizes a regional situation for viewers. But for many viewers of cable channels such as the Weather Channel, this emphasizes a positioning within the nation and the globe. This is one of the consequences of the fact that, as Jody Berland puts it, we now view the skies looking down, rather than up” (Ibid 171; also see 174-5).

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environmental risk is thoroughly striated by race, class, and other categories of structural

marginalization.287

While the limits of Cooper’s endurance provide the image of urgency and

immediacy signifying “catastrophe,” these limits also represent a threat to the live feed of

information and thus to CNN’s competitiveness. Physical risk to the Cooper not only

translates to a potential financial loss for the television network, but also the loss of an

icon for audiences in the USA and beyond, as talk show host Jon Stewart famously

parodied in February 2011, after attacks on Cooper and his crew by supporters of the

soon-to-be-deposed Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak resulted in Cooper being relieved

of his assignment in Cairo. Stewart’s ironic commentary (“Alright Hosni, now you’ve

gone too far! Hands off Anderson Cooper! There is not to be a silvery wisp out of place

on that man’s glorious head!”288) brilliantly revealed how Cooper’s presence at the point

of what Walter Benjamin has called the “equipment free aspect of reality”289 is only

possible thanks to the powerful legal, economic, and geopolitical apparatuses that insure

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!287 This has been amply demonstrated by Nicole Fleetwood’s discussion of the “Katrina weather media event,” which argues that the US government’s official directive of “mandatory evacuation” to Gulf Coast residents during the hurricane amounted to a necropolitical exercise. Those without the resources to heed the weather forecast were cast as victims of their own delinquent choices rather than of impoverished circumstances. See Nicole R. Fleetwood, “Failing Narratives, Initiating Technologies: Hurricane Katrina and the Production of a Weather Media Event,” American Quarterly volume 58, number 3 (September 2006): 767-789. Fleetwood’s essay combines Sturken’s analysis regarding the Weather Channel’s depoliticization of risk with Elihu Katz and Daniel Dayan’s vocabulary regarding live television “media events” as performative rituals contrived to emphasize the common identity of the audience. See Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). Sturken has also elaborated on her argument that weather prediction is an unequal science in “Weather Media and Homeland Security: Selling Preparedness in a Volatile World.” 288 See “Mess O’Slightly-to-the-Left O’Potamia: Pro-Mubarak Demonstrators,” The Daily Show (February 2, 2011): http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-february-2-2011/mess-o-slightly-to-the-left-o-potamia---pro-mubarak-demonstrators [Accessed June 3, 2011]; personal transcript. 289 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 233.

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his privileged social position.290 Instead of exposing this machinery, the emphatically

visible physical threat to Cooper during his Katrina reports conveys a shared sense of

vulnerability to the storm, thus allowing a inclusive nationalist message to prevail: “We

are all in this together.” Meanwhile, the civic imperatives of this spirit of commonality is

extended outward to the (predominantly poor and black) hurricane victims watching

CNN’s telecast who did not evacuate, with Kagan periodically issuing the following

missive: “If you live in an area impacted by Hurricane Katrina, we’re encouraging you, if

you’re able to, to e-mail us your photos and video and become one of CNN’s citizen

journalists.”291 The exploitative nature of the television network’s appeal to the patriotic

sentiments of its most marginalized viewers is especially clear given that CNN reporters

repeatedly referred elsewhere to residents seeking local shelter from the storm as

“refugees,” that is, as citizens denied the protections of citizenship.292

This anecdote shows that complex ideological agendas are held in place by the

rhetoric of documentary immediacy that typically structures the media experience of

catastrophe. Legitimated by the “universal” spirit of volunteerism, the medial logic of

crisis effectively outsources the liability of presence in the disaster zone to those who are

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!290 In this regard, the much-publicized 2002 kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, and more recently, the death of photojournalist and filmmaker Tim Hetherington while documenting the conflict in Libya in 2011, exemplify rather than detract from Fassin’s point that the lives of professional Western volunteers are evaluated on a different scale than civilian lives lost in non-Western disaster zones. In his memoir, Cooper writes for instance that: “In Baghdad most major American news organizations contract with private security firms. Big guys with thick necks meet you at the airports and give you a bulletproof vest before they even shake your hand.” See Cooper, Dispatches from the Edge, 56-7. 291 “CNN Live Today,” Transcript 1. 292 To cite just one example, correspondent Drew Griffin, stationed in Meridian, MI, reported to Kagan later in this edition of American Morning that “The hotels are just packed. In fact, we got in late last night, and there was a stream of refugees going from hotel to hotel, desperately trying to find a room.” See “CNN Live Today: Hurricane Katrina” Rush transcript of American Morning (Aired August 29, 2010): http://www-cgi.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0508/29/lt.02.html [Accessed June 2, 2011]; henceforth referred to as Transcript 2.

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virtually refugees, such that their predicament as “eyewitnesses” punctuates the otherwise

uneventful and banal information flows of weather reportage. This also implies that the

pleasurably reassuring spectator position of anticipating and avoiding remote weather

media events is only available to some, while yet others—whose economic situation

exposes them to heightened structural levels of natural disaster risk—are encouraged to

privately assume the corporeal burdens of the professional reporter, but without the

advantage of legal protection, or assurance of financial or symbolic returns. As the

concluding sections of this chapter will elucidate, these individuals are additionally

relegated to the role of spectacle, with the visible fact of their otherness being employed

to guarantee the indexicality of “live” media and supplement the lost aura of the

unmediated event.293 This troublesome trend in contemporary media practice finds

unexpected support in a prevalent mode of argumentation in cultural theory that I now

turn to, which unproblematically embraces immediacy as a tactic of biopolitical struggle,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!293 It is worth pausing here to consider how Doane’s discussion of the relationship between television’s formal logic of spectacular display and narrative flow and spectatorial pleasure builds on Laura Mulvey’s insights regarding the construction of visual pleasure in film. By indicating that television borrows its narrative logic from film, Doane shows that visual idioms of authenticity and immediacy extend across media forms (while it is the female form that represents the threat of the unvarnished real in classical Hollywood cinema, with television it is the image of nature gone awry that requires narrative containment or fetishization). This is an important point of reference for my understanding of medial indexicality, which is concerned specifically with how figures of otherness (the child, the woman, the animal, nature) are employed to signify the “im-mediacy” of visual media. Mimi White has recently picked up on this important strain in Doane’s essay to argue that catastrophe is merely one of television’s many visual “attractions.” In noting that television borrows its narrative conventions from film, White highlights how Doane counterpoints scholars such as Jane Feuer, who has influentially isolated liveness as a temporal attribute specific to the medium of television. Although White is ultimately concerned with arguing that television’s visual strategies exceed their narrative function, her fundamental insistence that visual idioms of authenticity and immediacy extend across media forms is one that I share. See Mimi White, “The Attractions of Television: Reconsidering Liveness,” in Mediaspace: Place, Scale and Culture in a Media Age, edited by Nick Couldry and Anna McCarthy (New York: Routledge, 2004), 75-91.

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without necessarily interrogating how medial indexicality averts attention from the real

challenge of communicating precariousness as a striated and not universal condition.

TRANSLATING THE COMMON

In recent decades, a number of cultural theorists have adopted the vocabulary of

“biopolitics” for exploring the openings for resistance produced by biopower, defined by

Michel Foucault as the regulatory mode of modern power that takes the entire field of life

as its domain. Foucault’s argument that racism functions as the rationalizing technique

par excellence of biopower (one that legitimates the murderous function of the state and

regulates the distribution of life and death) has triggered a profusion of analyses devoted

to examining the prognosis for those who are most disadvantaged by such racializing

abstraction—those whose lives are marked such that they can be legitimately neglected or

sacrificed to improve the lives of the rest.294 There has been particular interest in

employing Foucault’s model for critiquing the neoliberal management of “natural”

disaster zones, given his insight that racism internalizes the confrontational logic of war

and positively restates the rhetoric of evolutionary biology as a regenerative process of

weeding out the weakest members of a given society. For instance, Henry Giroux has

called attention to the oppressive role of racism in what he terms the “biopolitics of

disposability” of the post-Hurricane Katrina media landscape, arguing that media

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!294 Describing racism as the “pre-condition for exercising the right to kill,” Foucault writes that racism has two functions: “of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die,” and establishing a positive “relationship between my life and the death of the other that is not a military or warlike relationship of confrontation, but a biological-type relationship” wherein the death of the inferior race is seen to make life purer for the rest. See Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the College de France 1975-1976, translated by David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 254-6.

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visibility functioned as a racist optic for fragmenting society into opportunistic

speculators and invisible refugees. To cite him at some length:

Something more systematic and deep-rooted [than incompetence of failed national leadership] was revealed in the wake of Katrina—namely that the state no longer provided a safety net for the poor, sick, elderly, and homeless. Instead, it had been transformed into a punishing institution intent on dismantling the welfare state and treating the homeless, unemployed, illiterate and disabled as dispensable populations to be managed, criminalized, and made to disappear into prisons, ghettos, and the black hole of despair…This is what I call the new biopolitics of disposability…marked by a cleansed visual and social landscape in which…the poor, especially people of color…all share a common fate of disappearing from public view…Excommunicated from the sphere of human concern, they have been rendered invisible, utterly disposable.295

In other words, Giroux argues that the dialectical logic of State racism, as identified by

Foucault, is reinforced by a neoliberal mainstream media apparatus that exacerbates the

dismantling of the welfare state by criminalizing the poor as failed citizens or social

parasites, as media scholar Nicole Fleetwood also agrees, or even worse, by simply

“rendering them invisible.”296 Giroux’s argument derives its rhetorical force from

Giorgio Agamben’s Holocaust-based model of biopolitics, or “thanatopolitics.”297 For

Giroux, Agamben’s example of the concentration camp serves as a visual metaphor for

racial outcasting in an age of media ubiquity—a dark dungeon in which society’s

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!295 Henry A. Giroux, “Reading Hurricane Katrina: Race, Class, and the Biopolitics of Disposability,” College Literature volume 33, number 3 (Summer 2006): 175; 186. 296 In his subsequent book-length study of this topic, Giroux compares Katrina and the murder of Emmett Till as follows: “While the murder of Emmett till suggests that a biopolitics structured around the intersection of race and class inequalities, on the one hand, and state violence, on the other, is not new, the new version of biopolitics adds a distinctively different and more dangerous register to the older version of biopolitics…[it] also relegates entire populations to spaces of invisibility and disposability.” See Henry Giroux, Stormy Weather: Katrina and the Politics of Disposability (London: Paradigm Publishers, 2006), 21. 297 Agamben argues that the sovereign capacity to kill with impunity has been extended beyond the purview of the state to various social and private actors, amounting to “thanatopolitics,” which for him marks “the point at which the decision on life becomes a decision on death…this line no longer appears today as a stable border dividing two clearly distinct zones.” See Agamben, Homo Sacer, 122.

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“others” may be condemned to unspeakable injustices, unrelieved by the light of public

exposure. As we see in the passage above, the metaphors of light and dark in Giroux’s

prose correspond directly with white and black: “people of color and the poor” are exiled

to the darkest margins of society, and made to “disappear into prisons, ghettos and the

black hole of despair.”

Finding no recourse for this depoliticization of life through “ex-communication”

in Agamben, and having concluded that Foucault’s own contributions are limited to

illuminating the productive ecology of biopolitical sacrifice (wherein the disposal of

some lives privileges those of others), Giroux turns to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri,

whose argument about biopolitics and media lends support to his own remedial views. He

explains, “For my purposes, the importance of both Foucault’s and Hardt and Negri’s

works on biopolitics, in spite of their distinct theoretical differences, is that they move

matters of culture, especially those aimed at ‘the production of information,

communication, [and] social relations [,] to the center of politics itself.’”298 With this

citation from Hardt and Negri’s Multitude representing their confluence with Foucault,

Giroux swiftly subordinates Foucault’s interest in the institutional regulation of vital

functions to Hardt and Negri’s focus on new media networks as the milieu and catalyst

for new forms of “immaterial” production. Spanning the production of “ideas, images,

knowledges, communication, cooperation, and affective relations,” immaterial production

is said to be the biopolitical motor of society, and transgressively so: Hardt and Negri

argue that it liberates the productive synergies of laboring bodies, or “living labor,” from

the standardizing forces of the classical commodity cycle, thus potentially transforming

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!298 Giroux, “Reading Hurricane Katrina,” 179, or Giroux, Stormy Weather, 15; also see 13-14; 20-21.

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the subjective conditions of possibility of social relations.299 Inspired by this formulation,

Giroux insists on the pedagogical capacity of “new media technologies [to] construct

subjects differently with multiple forms of literacy that engage a range of intellectual

capacities,” elsewhere describing them as “symbolic forms and processes conducive to

democratization.”300

Having thus identified the communications media as a biopolitical battlefield,

Giroux celebrates the flood of media documentations of Hurricane Katrina that “broke

through the visual blackout of poverty”, suggesting that this revelation of the catastrophic

scale of racist biopower was a means of reclaiming bios, or cultural and political meaning

for zoë, or those lives which were neglected to the point of being divested of their

citizenship rights.301 Giroux likens these images of dead and suffering black bodies to the

unedited photo of Emmett Till’s mutilated body that launched the Civil Rights

Movement, insisting on their capacity to “shock and shame” the US government and the

international community.302 The self-evident visibility of race marking the black bodies

of the dead confirms for Giroux that the remedy lies in liberating the destitute

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!299 See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2005), 145. As Giroux continues, citing from this same page, immaterial labor represents for Hardt and Negri, “a mode of biopolitics [that creates not] “the means of social life but social life itself” (Giroux, Stormy Weather, 14). Hardt and Negri’s formulation is indebted to Maurizio Lazzarato, whose coinage of the term “immaterial labor” refers to Post-Fordist forms of labor that reproduce the social relation of capital, and not just commodities, through a series of activities not normally recognized or compensated as “work.” For Lazzarato, immaterial labor names the work of reproducing the ideological environment in which subjectivity (as both its raw material and product) lives and produces. See Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” translated by Paul Colilli and Ed Emory, in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, edited by Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 132; 143. The essays in this collection represent the body of Autonomous Marxist thought which is surveyed and summarized in Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth. 300 Giroux, “Reading Hurricane Katrina,” 191; Giroux, Stormy Weather, 111. 301 Ibid 188. 302 Ibid 173.

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(represented here by the darkest bodies) into the light in order to reveal the everyday

marginalization of the country’s poor. He accordingly proposes that the Internet,

camcorders, and cell phones should be used as documentary tools of the oppressed

against the “sanitized” corporate media landscape, labeling such autoethnographic uses of

media as an “oppositional biopolitics” oriented toward democracy and social

empowerment.303

Giroux’s faith in the power of images to compensate for the failures of democracy

is fully consistent with what Thomas Keenan has called the logic of “mobilizing shame.”

According to Keenan, this mode of deploying public embarrassment to enforce the absent

conscience of malevolent states and corporations is “the predominant practice of human

rights organizations, as well as the dominant visual metaphor through which human

rights NGOs and advocates understand their work.”304 Keenan’s own writings and those

of colleagues working in the intersection of trauma and visual studies have enumerated

the contradictions of this thinking, both in terms of its wishful faith in the Enlightenment

power of reason and in the integrity of the conditions for public action under postmodern

conditions, and its instrumentalizing view of the image.305 Keenan has powerfully shown

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!303 Ibid 172; 191; Giroux, Stormy Weather, 113. 304 See Thomas Keenan, “Mobilizing Shame,” The South Atlantic Quarterly volume 103, number 2/3 (Spring/Summer 2004): 437-8. 305 Georges Didi-Huberman and co-editors Roger Hallas and Frances Guerin have separately addressed the iconoclastic view of images we observe in Giroux (which invests images with the ability to pierce through the real) as the counterpart of another equally prevalent and instrumentalizing position, which sees images as a Platonic veil that forever conceal the real. See Georges Didi-Huberman, Images In Spite of All, translated by Shaun B. Lillis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 159; Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas, “Introduction,” in The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture edited by Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas (London: Wallflower Press, 2007): 4-6. In a separate context, media scholar Meg McLagan has warned against assuming the transparency of human rights testimonies, arguing that the attachment of humanitarian advocates to medial conventions of journalistic realism prevents them from fully engaging media as a constitutive element of their political and identitarian goals. See Meg McLagan, “Human Rights, Testimony, and Transnational Publicity,” in

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the complex and ethically ambiguous field of opportunity that humanitarian publicity

affords a multiplicity of actors, including those who are traditionally assumed to be

enemies of human rights, and others like Joy Fuqua and J.M. Bernstein have cautioned

against generalizing regarding the benefits of public exposure, which can further

disadvantage those stripped of their human rights by eviscerating their privacy or worse,

aestheticizing its lack.306 But more critically, Giroux’s conviction regarding the virtue of

enlightenment leads him, like Agamben, to miss Foucault’s most important intervention

into biopolitics as it is related to media: that within the framework of surveillance society,

it is through the medium of light, not darkness, that control is enforced—as Foucault

famously writes in Discipline and Punish, “[v]isibility is a trap.”307 A similar reversal is

at work in Foucault’s thinking about biopolitics and race. Foucault suggests that within a

neoliberal framework, biopower functions less in directly repressive ways than through

discursive “liberation,” through technologies of selfhood like race and sexuality that

“enable” marginal entities to turn a normalizing gaze upon themselves. Indeed, if there

can be a Foucauldian summation of neoliberalism, we might call it the “privatization of

the soul.” To that extent, letting people be—laissez faire—really means letting them

believe that they have ownership over their soul, self, property, sexuality, ethnicity, etc.

This is consistent with a technology of power that authorizes individuals to observe,

monitor, augment, and improve themselves through a systematic investment in the self,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Nongovernmental Politics, edited by Michael Feher with Gaelle Krikorian and Yates McKee (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 304-7. 306 See Fuqua’s discussion of Katrina’s violent “inside-outing as a type of public humiliation, a shaming ritual for citizens” in Joy Fuqua, “‘That Part of the World’: Hurricane Katrina and the ‘Place’ of Local Media,” Journal of e-Media Studies volume 2, number 1 (2009): 6; J.M. Bernstein, “Bare Life, Bearing Witness: Auschwitz and the Pornography of Horror,” Parallax volume 10, number 1 (2004): 2-16. 307 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1991): 200.

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as an entity that has been worked over by and must “live” or “survive” in correspondence

to institutional surveillance.308

That the key to neoliberalism lies in privatizing the burden of regulation remains

uninterrogated in Hardt and Negri’s engagement with neoliberal modes of biopower,

which hinges on the assumption that immaterial production resists all private or

proprietary forms. They arrive at their conclusion that “[o]nly the standpoint of bodies

and their power can challenge the discipline and control wielded by the republic of

property” through a vitalist reading of biopower that conceives of bodies as corporeal

substrates that directly channel and resist power, without addressing the abstracting

action that is so central to Foucault’s articulation of biopower; they insist that

“[m]ediation is absorbed within the productive machine.”309 Thus, in Hardt and Negri’s

hands (and in Giroux’s, by extension) the mediating function of forms such as the self, in

conjunction with others like populations, racial and ethnic groups etc., through which

biopower targets “life itself,” escapes critical scrutiny. From a Foucauldian standpoint,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!308 In his 1978-79 lecture series, The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault argues that the issues of biopolitics cannot be thought outside liberalism, the “framework of political rationality within which they appeared and took on their intensity.” See Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79, translated by Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 317. Although Foucault spends little time in these late lectures on the connection between racist biopower and neoliberal economics, emphasizing only that biopolitics and neoliberalism are both guided by the dictum of governing as little as possible, his insistence that neoliberalism provides an impetus to biopower strongly suggests the trajectory indicated here. For more on this topic, see Rey Chow and Pooja Rangan, “Race, Racism, and Postcoloniality,” in The Oxford Guide to Postcolonial Studies, edited by Graham Huggan (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 309 See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 27; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 33. In Empire, Hardt and Negri write: “when power becomes entirely biopolitical…[s]ociety, subsumed within a power that reaches down to the ganglia of the social structure and its processes of development, reacts like a single body” (Ibid 24). Later, in Commonwealth, they argue that racist biopower operates according to the principle of fundamentalism, in that it is “about bodies in their stark materiality…without the implication of other, less corporeal factors such as ideology, law, politics, culture, and so forth” (Ibid 35) and insist on these grounds that resistance “remains tied to the material…of bodies” (Ibid 38).

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then, Giroux’s impulse to emancipate refugees by encouraging them to use visual media

to represent their most visibly destitute moments seems to reinforce the fundamental

neoliberalist imperative of self-fashioning. Furthermore, this equation of visibility with

democracy is particularly problematic given that such an equation ignores the testimonial

codes of catastrophe that allow the speech of the refugee to be recognized, and which

give such speech its predetermined recognizability in the first place. The shortsightedness

of this thinking comes into view when we consider how Hardt and Negri’s focus on

exceptional political states (such as the subaltern, the migrant, or the poor),310 together

with Giroux’s emphasis on a state of exception (catastrophe) as a human rights photo

opportunity, combine to make a perfect storm, the brunt of which is borne precisely by

those dispossessed individuals who are the beneficiaries of their universalizing rhetoric.

Despite their immanentist bent of their prophecies regarding the ongoing

revolution, many of Hardt and Negri’s concrete proposals for change are formulated in

the terminology of universal human rights—as for instance at the end of Empire, when

they advocate the institution of universal citizenship, a minimal income, and the re-

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!310 I limit my comments on this topic to Hardt and Negri, although this critique might also be extended to Agamben’s discussion of the refugee. Giroux’s view of the poor, black, disaster victim as a vanguard figure whose (condition of) exposure heralds the revelatory potential for a new democratic consciousness is reminiscent of, if not directly in conversation with Agamben’s evocation of the refugee as the definitive paradigm of the contemporary political subject. Following Hannah Arendt, Agamben defines the refugee as the person who has lost every quality and specific relation except for the pure fact of being human one, arguing that the refugee’s “bare” condition productively indicates the potential plight of every so-called citizen. He writes: “if we want to be equal to the absolutely new tasks ahead, we will have to abandon decidedly, without reserve, the fundamental concepts through which we have so far represented the subjects of the political (Man, the Citizen and its rights, but also the sovereign people, the worker, and so forth) and build our political philosophy starting from the one and only figure of the refugee.” See Giorgio Agamben, “Beyond Human Rights,” translated by Cesare Casarino, in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, edited by Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 160.

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appropriation of communications media.311 This focus on universal justice and equality,

as Slavoj Zizek too has noted, together with their staging of the poor at the heart of

biopolitical struggle, suggests why Hardt and Negri’s optimistic model has been so

attractive to human rights advocates.312 Hardt and Negri’s well-known critique of

humanitarian moral intervention as an alibi for the exercise of force313 does not extend to

human rights themselves, which seem to be at the heart of the project of the “common,”

to borrow the terminology of their newest collaboration, Commonwealth. Here, Hardt and

Negri rearticulate biopolitics as a struggle to actualize the universal human potential for

intellectual and affective communication, locating this potential, and not membership

within any identitarian formation, as the necessary foundation for a truly democratic

community.314 The utopian dimensions of this project, which is opposed equally to

private ownership, repressive nation-States, and a priori articulations of community,

seem to rest on a radical conception of human rights, in the vein of Jacques Rancière’s

understanding of the same. Human rights, as Keenan has argued, following Rancière, do

not “belong” to any particular subject such as the citizen (a tautology, since citizens are

those who already have rights) or the refugee (a paradox, since refugees are those with no !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!311 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 393-413. 312 See Slavoj Zizek, “Have Hardt and Negri Rewritten the Communist Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century?”, Rethinking Marxism volume 13, number 3/4 (2001): 190-198. 313 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 36-38. 314 In his commentary on Commonwealth, Cesare Casarino notes that Hardt and Negri’s association of “the common” with communicative potential over and against communal concerns derives from an early-modern lineage, when Dante characterized the vernacular as not just a common or everyday linguistic practice of belonging but a universal human potential for intellectual and affective communication. Casarino elaborates: “communication—in both its semantic and nonsemantic forms—is understood as a collective and cooperative process of actualization of common intellectual and linguistic potentials that entails necessarily the mobilization of humankind in its totality, to that extent it is also identified as that process that undermines the very condition of possibility for the emergence both of separate, discrete, unitary individualities, and of separate particular, homogeneous communities.” See Cesare Casarino, “Surplus Common,” in Cesare Casarino and Antonio Negri, In Praise of the Common (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 13.

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rights at all)—these are the rights that belong to no one in particular but apply to

everyone in common.315 Human rights discourse holds out the promise of democracy in

its most counterintuitive sense, as that which begins only when those who are excluded

are included—indeed, are permitted to stand for universality.316 Politics, in this view,

derives from the Althusserian principle of a “process without a subject,”317 and political

subjectivization is seen as the outcome of a process of translation—of bridging the

interval between the liminality of right-lessness and hegemonic forms such as citizenship

rights.

This is precisely the political potential Hardt and Negri see in what they call the

“postmodern” or “biopolitical” form of production. They argue that the hegemonic form

of postmodern production may be recognized in communicative modes of cognitive and

affective work that is not bound by the specificities of space and time, and which

therefore cannot be accurately measured or appropriately compensated. On the basis of

this “tendential” forecast of things to come, they argue that the condition of expropriation

or dispossession may be generalizable across society, enabling new modes of

commonality with the poor, who are by the same flattening logic said to be fully included

within biopolitical production.318 Having thus deduced that the poor, or the traditionally

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!315 See Jacques Rancière, “Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?”, The South Atlantic Quarterly volume 103, number 2/3 (2004): 297-310. 316 Thomas Keenan, “Where Are Human Rights…?: Reading a Communique from Iraq,” in Nongovernmental Politics, edited by Michael Feher with Gaelle Krikorian and Yates McKee (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 65-6. 317 See for instance, Louis Althusser, “Reply to John Lewis,” in On Ideology (London: Verso, 2008), 83; 133. 318 For a critique that addresses how Hardt and Negri’s conjunction of postmodernism and globalization dematerializes the concreteness of geopolitical borders, the physical and financial infrastructure underpinning “immaterial” formations, and the situatedness of the laboring bodies comprising this infrastructure, see Philip Rosen, “Border Times and Geopolitical Frames,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies volume 15, number 2 (Fall 2006): 2-19.

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excluded, stand for universality, Hardt and Negri conclude that the conditions for

democracy are, already, immanent within the existing social field. Furthermore, they

identify the most disenfranchised workers—the subaltern, the migrant, the poor—as

agents of biopolitical resistance, and announce that translating their communicative

potential into power is the key to regaining the common.319 Hardt and Negri’s theory of

“communicative biopolitics” is seductive precisely because it sees such translation of the

poor’s specific modes of communication to be unnecessary—linguistic potential for them

represents the potential for self-presence rather than the inevitable perpetuity of

translation. The blind spot in their thinking is therefore that their model of

communications media subscribes to an ideology of immediacy. Elsewhere described in

equally undifferentiated terms as “the network,” the “communications media” are

imagined to function as a connective tissue that, in the authors’ words, paradoxically

renders “the set of all the exploited and subjugated, [as] a multitude that is directly

opposed to Empire, with no mediation between them.”320 If Agamben sees all of society

by way of the nightmare of the concentration camp, Hardt and Negri in contrast see all of

society as bathing in the light of communication.321

The dark side of this ideology of immediacy is that it ignores the concrete

elements of mediation that often not only shape but dominate the speech of the

dispossessed when it is articulated in the form of human rights claims. Human rights

discourse is structurally a general pleading, as Keenan reminds us. Human rights speech

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!319 See Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, xi. 320 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 393. The italics are my own. 321 This mythical capacity for communion accorded to media suggests that Hardt and Negri’s vision of the multitude accords with what Jean-Luc Nancy has called an inoperative community See Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, translated by Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).

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acts are fundamentally speculative actions by the dispossessed, who take an urgent leap

of faith by mimicking, repeating, or quoting the rhetorical structure of hegemonic speech-

acts, with the aim of transforming this structure through a performative use that would

bring them recognition within the system.322 This means that human rights claims are

meaningless if the concrete, particular experience of the dispossessed cannot be

enunciated in the hegemonic or “universal” grammar of rights speech—a grammar that is

increasingly defined by the testimonial codes of mass media, and particularly visual

media, if we are to believe media scholars Bhaskar Sarkar and Janet Walker.323 This is

why subaltern studies scholars have described the challenge of attending to the

communiqués of marginalized people as a process of translating their insurgent actions,

which are often articulated through minor or unconventional media and therefore exist

outside traditional archives (such as the burning of buses or the desecration of billboards,

in South Asian contexts, or in the case of Tele Ghetto, the repurposing of industrial

waste).324 Within a human rights context, the embrace of Hardt and Negri’s celebratory

focus of mainstream communication technologies amounts to an implicit rejection of the

critical task of inhabiting the temporality of alterity. The call to society’s others to

communicate in the prevailing visual language of rights discourse has particularly fraught

implications for refugees operating within a catastrophic time-frame, given that the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!322 Keenan, “Where Are Human Rights…?”, 66. 323 See Bhaskar Sarkar and Janet Walker, “Introduction: Moving Testimonies,” in Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering, edited by Bhaskar Sarkar and Janet Walker (New York: Routledge, 2009), 1-34. 324 See for instance Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), and more recently, Bishnupriya Ghosh, “The Subaltern at the Edge of the Popular,” Postcolonial Studies volume 8, number 4 (November 2005): 459-474. Building on Guha, Ghosh argues that sighting subaltern insurgency requires a “semiotic leap of faith” on the part of the theorist, whose task lies in decoding the pressure exerted by such speech-acts on dominant semiotic codes (Ibid 459).

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authenticating codes for their testimony are more or less predetermined by the televisual

imperative of “urgency.” I turn now to a concrete consideration of the stakes of this

rhetorical stance for precarious individuals, through a reading of the critically acclaimed

documentary film Trouble the Water (dir. Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, 2008), whose fame

derives from its incorporation of several minutes of “on-the-ground” camcorder footage

obtained at considerable risk by two Katrina survivors, an African-American couple from

the economically depressed Ninth Ward of New Orleans. My reading suggests that the

humanitarian “call” for eyewitness testimony can only be answered, as it was by the

protagonists of this film, with ambivalence.

DISASTROUS SPECULATION

In Trouble the Water, filmmakers Deal and Lessin chronicle the US government’s

abandonment of the poor, black citizens of New Orleans during and in the aftermath of

Hurricane Katrina, using camcorder footage shot by survivors Kimberly Rivers Roberts

and Scott Roberts in an evidentiary capacity, to demonstrate the humanity and dignity of

these protagonists. The positioning of this “survivor footage” as a human rights claim is

motivated, I argue, by the film’s treatment of the visual immediacy of race as a sign of

self-empowerment through media. However, this eminently pre-coded, visible narrative

of empowerment distracts from the cynicism with which the hurricane survivors

entrepreneurially mobilize their racial otherness—a cynicism whose limits as a defense

mechanism are tested by the challenges of physical endurance as dictated by the

conventions of liveness. By paying close attention to the film’s narrative and rhetorical

frames of immediacy that seek to literalize this footage, we begin to grasp a different

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predicament of race, one in which the racialization of the “common” and the politics of

humanitarian advocacy are shaped by persistent class distinctions.

The opening sequence of Trouble the Water—a scene shot in the Red Cross

shelter in Alexandria, Louisiana, where the Roberts made the acquaintance of the

documentary filmmakers Deal and Lessin—indicates that its protagonists are well-versed

in the logic of disposability that drives television catastrophe coverage, and are rightfully

skeptical of the interpellation of “citizen” journalist. Facing the documentarians’ camera,

Kimberly differentiates herself and her husband from the scores of other survivors

assembled at the shelter by emphasizing the uniqueness of the footage that she shot

during the storm on her $20 store-bought camcorder, exclaiming: “All the footage I seen

on TV, nobody ain’t got what I got. I’ve got right there in the hurricane...But I ain’t

gonna give it to nobody local, for them to mess around with. This needs to be

worldwide!”325 While Kimberly is fully aware of the commodity value of her camcorder

eyewitness footage, her reluctance to turn this footage over to the local news suggests her

wariness of compounding her existing economic disadvantage by being transformed into

a stock supplier of generic information. In press releases and interviews, Scott and

Kimberly report that they premeditatedly approached the New York-based filmmakers

and their crew when they converged at the Red Cross shelter in question; Scott admits

that he and Kimberly immediately recognized in the film crew (who happened to be

passing through after a failed attempt to make a film on the return of that state’s National

Guard from Iraq) an opportunity to “get that story out.”326 Although the mutually

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!325 This and all future quotes are drawn from my transcript of the film. 326 See Kenneth Turan, “Telling Their Story,” Los Angeles Times (January 20, 2008): http://theenvelope.latimes.com/movies/filmfestivals/sundance2008/env-et-trouble21jan21,0,2643574.story [Accessed June 20, 2011].

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beneficial transaction between the filmmakers and the survivors is absent from the

diegesis of the film, the product of their collaboration—a documentary that intersperses

Kimberly’s camcorder footage with the story of their struggle to return home to New

Orleans after being displaced to Houston, Texas—has yielded rewards for both parties.

Trouble The Water won multiple major documentary awards for Deal and Lessin,

including Grand Jury Awards in 2008 at both the Sundance Film Festival and the Full

Frame Documentary Film Festival in addition to Oscar and Emmy nominations, while

Kimberly and Scott Roberts have successfully used the film as a platform for establishing

a record label, Born Hustler Records, which, in turn, has launched Kimberly’s career as a

rap artist.327

When we cut to the first of Kimberly’s approximately fifteen minutes’ worth of

documentary testimony of the storm, her shrewdly enterprising stance regarding the

status of this camcorder footage is unmistakable. Training the camera on the television in

her living room, which is tuned to the weather channel (see Fig. 29), Kimberly pans away

to focus on herself (see Fig. 30), her home (see Fig. 31), pets, and neighborhood (see Fig.

32). She imitates the stance of a television reporter, stating the date (August 28, 2005),

location, and purpose of her “report,” if only to distinguish her own intimate, hand-held

verité-style coverage as the “real deal” in comparison with “what you see on TV.” To

continue in her own words, she assures, “you know me, it’s still me, Kimberly Rivers,

breaking it down for the ’05 documentary, how it really is, starting right now.”

Furthermore, she turns her own inability to evacuate (as she explains to her fleeing

neighbors, “if I had wheels, I’d be leaving too”) into a source of journalistic authority,

announcing “I ain’t going nowhere, I’m gonna be right here to give y’all this live and !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!327 See http://www.bornhustlerrecords.com/ [Accessed June 21, 2011].

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direct footage of this thing when it go down.” At the same time, she unabashedly

acknowledges to friends down the block that her testimony is authenticated by the racial

difference visibly marked on her body and those of her neighbors; this is why she jokes

that she hopes to sell her footage to the “white folk.” As the hurricane makes its landfall,

however, the bravado of Kimberly’s performance strains under the pressure of her

situatedness—or what Doane describes as the televisual demand for “presence in

space.”328 When the storm gains in intensity, driving Kimberly, Scott, and a few

neighbors seeking shelter into the upper levels and finally to the attic of the Roberts’

home, Kimberly’s authorial voice becomes melancholy, panicked, and fatalistically calm

in turn, as the focus of her commentary shifts from racial critique to affirmations of

spiritual faith.329 However, Kimberly keeps up the show of describing the scene for the

camera, seemingly as much for her own sake—a confirmation that she is alive—as for

elevating the spirits of her small group.

Additionally, Kimberly seems cognizant of the need to provide visual proof of her

endurance over time, in order to back up her claim and status as an authentic eyewitness,

over and above the task of maintaining a perpetual stream of vocal commentary.

Accordingly, over the course of the seven minute-long attic sequence, she repeatedly

alternates between close-ups of her fellow survivors’ desperate faces (see Fig. 33) and a

stop sign on the deluged street outside, framed by the sole attic window (see Fig. 34).

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!328 Doane, “Information, Crisis, Catastrophe,” 229. 329 Although the problematic role of religion and faith in Trouble the Water is something I cannot take up at length here, the following essay by Elizabeth Castelli contains a very relevant critique of the employment of religious frames for understanding natural disaster: Elizabeth Castelli, “Theologizing Human Rights: Christian Activism and the Limits of Religious Freedom,” in Nongovernmental Politics, edited by Michael Feher with Gaelle Krikorian and Yates McKee (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 673-687. Castelli argues that framing human rights as the product of divine authority rather than of ongoing political struggles and debates ignores the historical roots of human rights in secular Enlightenment-era discourses.

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This stop sign appears in three different shots, as an index of the rising water, as well as

to the only point of view available to Kimberly from her place of refuge, but perhaps

mostly importantly as a sign of rising urgency—a marker of time passing. The

unavoidable bodily threats posed by the situation outline the limits of cynicism or irony

as a means for Kimberly to mediate her relationship to the documentary task at hand.

When she worries out loud at the very end of her recorded footage that she’s “running out

of juice” for her camera, she draws an uncanny, or perhaps canny, relationship between

her ability to provide a document of enduring the storm and enduring the aftermath of the

storm. In this moment, before technology fails her (mere minutes before a friend

fortuitously arrives to rescues the group, as we are told later), we realize the profoundly

postmodern conundrum facing Kimberly: that for someone in her position, the failure of a

link to the discursive reality that is media, the cutting off of the live stream of the

televisual, can have very real negative consequences. Under the circumstances,

Kimberly’s speculative response—to turn her entrapment and inability to evacuate into

an opportunity for pithy “live and direct” reporting—can be appreciated as a calculated

response to impossible odds, one that “seeks strategically to optimize the terms of trade,”

to borrow a phrase from Arjun Appadurai.330

Appadurai’s measured statement that “the poor are not dupes or secret

revolutionaries, they are survivors”331 ironically anticipates Kimberly’s positioning

within the empowering narrative of Deal and Lessin’s film. But unlike Appadurai, Deal

and Lessin are uninterested in questioning how their film’s rhetoric of documentary

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!330 Arjun Appadurai, “The Capacity to Aspire: Culture and the Terms of Recognition,” in Culture and Public Action, edited by Vijayendra Rao and Michael Walton (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 65. 331 Ibid 65.

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immediacy reinforces the coercive televisual terms of recognition to which the Roberts

adhere in a bid for survival. The nuances of Kimberly’s ironic engagement of the

televisual and its limits in her camcorder footage are expunged from the visual language

of Trouble The Water. One of the clearest instances of this censorship of ambivalence

takes place in the introductory sequence of the film. Here, Deal and Lessin mirror

Kimberly’s strategy of drawing on television’s centrality to the spectator’s experience of

catastrophe, taking pains to distinguish the sobriety of their work in relation to television

coverage—as Deal emphasizes in interviews, conveying the “immediate” nature of the

eyewitness testimony was a priority that led their filmmaking.332 In this opening montage,

the filmmakers stitch together their own flow of silent vignettes from the documentary,

set to audio samples drawn from TV and radio coverage during the storm and in its

immediate aftermath. The slow-motion footage of these silent faces (of the film’s

protagonists, as well as a cast of occasional characters; see Fig. 35) gains a certain austere

sincerity in the midst of the audible confusion; the high seriousness of the music claims

for the film a position of calm at the heart of the storm, which is, of course, also the

media storm. This obviously produced—and indeed, highly televisual—effect of

immediacy serves, as the film proceeds, to emphasize the constative or indexical quality

of Kimberly’s footage in contrast to the empty performatives of televisual speech. To

emphasize the reality of Kimberly’s plight, Deal and Lessin deliberately intersperse

archival examples of highly exaggerated televisual performances amidst the tense final

minutes of her survivor footage, such as George Bush’s disingenuous pledges of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!332 See John Hartl, “Trouble the Water Captures Katrina through a Survivor’s Point of View,” Seattle Times (October 16, 2008): http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/movies/2008274832_mr17trouble.html [Accessed June 21, 2011].

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solidarity with Gulf Coast residents in a speech addressed to senior citizens at an Arizona

resort (see Fig. 36), and broadcast footage of an unnamed television news correspondent

theatrically surrendering various object (including his own body) into the gale to illustrate

the strength of the hurricane-force winds, before being rescued by his waiting crew (see

Fig. 37).

The effect is that the subtle and equivocal performance of race played out in the

camcorder footage is replaced in the film by a drama of black and white, with Kimberly’s

footage employed as a device to puncture mainstream media and the governmental

apparatus it is shown to prop up. In a way, it would seem as though Deal and Lessin have

bought into the surface politics of Kimberly’s resourceful mobilization of race,

interpreting the simple fact of its visibility as a sign of liberation and empowerment.

Indeed, the indexical appeal of race as a mark of self-evidence has the same structure of

immediacy as photographic realism: both signal “truth and nothing but the truth.”333 This

reading is echoed in the emancipatory narrative arc of the film, which resolves with the

Roberts’s return home to New Orleans after a Sisyphusian battle with a failed

bureaucracy. Reviews of the film repeatedly corroborate the efficacy of the film’s frame

in reinforcing this reading of race: references in their prose to the authenticity of the

survivor footage (“eye of the storm”, “raw”) are used interchangeably with euphemisms

for blackness (“soul-rattling”).334 By locating the value of such a troubling document in

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!333 Nicholas Mirzoeff has argued that “[t]he photograph became a prime locus of the performance of the racialized index” in the late nineteenth century, and functioned as an important cornerstone of modern practices of visualizing and exhibiting difference that “created and sustained a desire to see racially.” See Nicholas Mirzoeff, “The Shadow and the Substance: Race, Photography, and the Index,” in Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self, edited by Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003), 111-2. 334 See Lisa Kennedy, “Eye of the Storm was on the Ground with a Movie Camera,” Denver Post (October 17, 2008): http://www.denverpost.com/movies/ci_10729760 [Accessed June 21, 2011];

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its unmediatedness, Deal and Lessin well-meaningly enact what is perhaps the most

dangerous mediation of all: far from challenging the testimonial codes of disaster media,

they intensify its insistence on referentiality, broadcasting a racialized visual vocabulary

in which black bodies at risk signify, by default, the authentic. While the film appears to

celebrate a narrative of racial empowerment, its invitation to the most precarious subjects

to voluntarily and even heroically assume personal risk as a means of “intervening” in

their own fate illustrates with startling clarity the precise opposite: the coercive, indeed

primitivist logic that, as Foucault argues, constitutes the racist division of society into an

“us” and a “them.”

By returning to the transaction between Kimberly and Scott Roberts and Deal and

Lessin that is so conspicuous in its absence from the diegesis of the film, we can see how

the film, as an instance of the kind of humanitarian advocacy project focalized in this

chapter, is founded upon a misrecognition. Deal and Lessin decide, on the basis of this

footage that Kimberly and Scott Roberts deserve the advocacy platform that their

filmmaking can provide. However, the filmmakers “recognize” the Roberts’ footage as a

sign of political speech and of their humanity precisely because it is articulated in a

recognizable grammar. They conclude on this basis that the Roberts’ lives possess a

general equivalence, and that they have a “right” to return—a “right” to be recognized as

citizens rather than as the “refugees” that Katrina survivors have been commonly

identified as. But they fail to recognize precisely what exceeds the limits of that

hegemonic grammar that mediates or pre-empts the voices of the dispossessed. It is

perhaps this spectral subalternity that is so palpable in the impromptu performance by

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!“Mini Reviews of Films Currently in Theaters,” Denver Post (October 30, 2008): http://www.denverpost.com/entertainment/ci_10856323 [Accessed June 21, 2011].

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Kimberly of one of her musical tracks, titled “Amazing,” which is featured in the film,

and is frequently the subject of rapturous praise in reviews.335 This sequence captures

Kimberly improvising an impassioned rendition of her song, which is an autobiographical

journey through the impossible odds she has faced and survived throughout her life,

culminating in Katrina. The words of the song are organized around the refrain “I don’t

need you to tell me that I’m amazing.” With each self-affirming refrain it becomes more

apparent that Kimberly needs Deal and Lessin as much as they need her, and also more

difficult to disavow the fact that there is no “outside” awaiting Kimberly and Scott after

their escape from Giroux’s “black hole of despair,” because the logic of capital works

here, as always, by converting the vernacular into a universal, and giving it a general

equivalence by commodifying it. The subaltern, speaking in this manner, is seen and

heard as an index.

We might say that Deal and Lessin misrecognize the Roberts as being among

those who willingly and professionally choose to risk their lives (the humanitarian aid-

worker, the documentarian, the journalist). The near-sightedness of this distinction lies in

its inability to decode how class separates the illusion of choice from actual political

choice; consequentially Deal and Lessin’s representational politics subscribe to what

Fassin has described as the humanitarian “ontology of inequality.” They mark the lives of

those whom they (however erroneously) believe to already have access to political speech

as being more worthy of being saved than those who do not evidence this access in all of

its immediacy. Returning to the incident with which I began this chapter, we can now see

that mutual misrecognition likewise animates the relationship between Tele Ghetto and

the television reporters in whose image the children wish to remake themselves. The !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!335 See for instance the aforementioned review by Hartl.

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humanitarian impulse to interpret—and reward—their speculative mimicry as the

behavior of professional volunteers in the making casts a reassuring glow over the

dubious transformation that the boys have to undergo in order to realize their wordly

aspirations. The hidden cost of abandoning their satirical but locally-bound aesthetic

practice in lieu of a globally mobile documentary discourse of sobriety is embedded in

the primitivizing function that their documentary images fulfill for their humanitarian

advocates, signifying a flat truthfulness rather than a complexly layered cultural reality.

The boys can only become agents of their own empowerment by mobilizing their alterity,

a survival technique that is modeled for them by Atis Rezistans, for whom salvage is

necessarily a political as well as aesthetic practice. Although the founding members of

Atis Rezistans hoped that the foreign attendees attracted by Ghetto Biennale would

authenticate their art in a global context,336 their highly eroticized Voudou sculptures

have provided a different kind of authentication for global audiences in the aftermath of

the earthquake followed on the heels of the Ghetto Biennale: television reporters and

online reviewers alike have tended to fetishize the sexual content of Atis Rezistans’

work—particularly their use of unclaimed human skulls and bones within their sculptural

assemblages—as a form of primitive or spiritualist bricolage, rather than viewing their

aesthetic innovations as an ingenious means of distinguishing themselves within a highly

regulated institutional space.337 If this practice was always viewed as somewhat macabre,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!336 Although the core members of Atis Rezistans have enjoyed a certain amount of Western press and gallery exposure over the last decade, they have found it difficult to consistently maintain their reputation as artists of global caliber since they face legal and economic barriers to attending the major American and European biennale. See Leah Gordon, “The Sculptors of Grand Rue: Reinterpreting Slavery,” Dazed & Confused (March 2007): http://www.atis-rezistans.com/press.php [Accessed September 1, 2011]. 337 Western journalists frequently lump Atis Rezistans’ work alongside that of the woodworking ateliers who have traditionally occupied the Grand Rue, and whose cheap artisanal souvenirs

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it has now acquired a thanatological aura, with the documentary veracity of the human

remains seeming to testify to the eerie clairvoyance of the artists’ apocalyptic vision. But

far from dispelling these sensationalist misconceptions, Atis Rezistans have cheerfully

accepted their favorable implications for their own economic future, incorporating them

within their discourse as another form of recyclable material.338

Humanitarianism’s ethical act of handing over the camera to disadvantaged groups

denies the value of such ongoing local acts of political resistance, by insisting that

aesthetic considerations have no place in their “timely” practice of taking decisive action.

The tragic effect of the ideology of immediacy driving this practice is that the self-

conscious attempts of newly empowered humanitarian subjects to reflect on their

predicament are construed, thanks to the mediatized connotations of this rhetoric, as

evidence of their alterity. From within the crisis mode in which humanitarian advocates

operate, it is impossible to see that the reflexive solution they propose is fully part of the

vicious circle of fundamental inequality that both propels and is intensified by the process

of technological “progress.” The critical task at hand, as this chapter and my dissertation

as a whole argues, lies in the work of decoding how multiple axes of precarity crisscross !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!aimed at the tourist market also employ salvage techniques—an evaluation that thwarts the Haitian collective’s desire to compete within the significantly better-compensated gallery and museum circuit. For instance NPR’s coverage of Haitian art in the aftermath of the earthquake borrows the appellation of “rubble art” (elsewhere applied to artisans employing earthquake rubble in constructing tourist souvenirs) for describing the work of Atis Rezistans, who have employed salvage techniques since well before the earthquake. See Claire O’Neill, “Creating Art from Haiti’s Rubble,” NPR (May 25 2010): http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2010/05/24/127096526/artist [Accessed April 11, 2011]. 338 News features, reviews, and announcements publicizing Atis Rezistanz after the earthquake frequently hyperbolize descriptors employed in Gordon’s aforementioned 2007 review (“radical, morbid and phallic sculptures”, “dystopian sci-fi view of the future,” “bristles with menace, anger and a dark sexuality”) to emphasize the prophetic quality of Atis Rezistans’ apocalyptic message. See for instance Cotter, “Out of Ruins, Visionaries.” Not to be outdone, Atis Rezistans’ own home-page has enterprisingly recycled these same exaggerated idioms (“heightened, Gibsonesque, Lo-Sci-Fi, dystopian view of their society, culture and religion,” “deranged, post-apocalyptic totems”).

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the rhetoric of documentary immediacy that has permeated humanitarianism and its many

critical frameworks, and in understanding how this ideology of immediacy both derives

from and reinforces the neoliberalist economic rationale that fuels the spectacle of

catastrophe. The urgency of this task lies not in focusing on the urgent as a category, but

in a refusal to give up questioning the medial frames of humanitarian mediation,

particularly in those cases when these frames erase the fact of their own existence.

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