“Film and today television do not only collapse and annihilate, as is so often said, time and distance—they also make unprecedented times and spaces available for action, real virtualities that are marked by the affirmation of possibilities of engagement, ‘action,’ as well as by the negativity of this ‘dynamite.’”

- Thomas Keenan, Publicity and Indifference.

The engaging apparatus which Keenan speaks of is the camera, which in a world of telesurveillance plays an active role in modern conflict. The camera is a weapon of modern warfare, opening the field of action into the public sphere and redefining the space of conflict. Implicit in this discussion of the camera is, of course, the television, delivering the camera’s images in that mysterious realm of “real time.” But how real is “real time”? What is at stake in bringing an image to an audience in “real time”?
In modern society, television has become much more than purely a delivery device. It has created an image with a language all its own, and within that language is an innate self-recognition of its own mediation. The televisual spectator hardly regards the image as real at all. Televisual images serve to entertain and inform through the thickness of time and distance. The image has no actual voice with which to personally engage its audience. In addition, the televisual spectator is trained by television’s own form and structure to be passive. Television is defined by the half-conscious glance of the spectator instead of the full immersion of the gaze. Television exists, to a certain extent, in the periphery of it’s intended audience, and it is for this reason that Keenan deems the idea of the public “precisely the possibility of being a target and being missed” (7).
So the virtual field of action which is opened up by the camera is abruptly turned to one of profound inaction due to the nature of the delivery device. The public field of the televisual is one which becomes purely voyeuristic. The spectator is not expected to recognize it as a call to action. Publicity through the televisual means voyeuristic anonymity. We live in a far to visual world for images to stand alone as reality anymore. Our abilities for contextualizing and classifying images takes a back seat to their immediate evocative function. The television picture no longer speaks a thousand words—it only speaks a thousand other pictures: fantasy, reality, and everything in between.


posted by Anonymous at 5:25 PM

Additional thoughts on Keenan readings:

I’m interested in the different ideas people have posted about what forces are at work in causing indifference in the media consumer (implicit construction of TV flow, gigantic unknown nature of world that is presented, jading due to overexposure, lack of “proper” context). To turn the question around, what causes someone to care about something (to be “different”)? When something “happens” which directly involves our body/mind, we usually care about it. When I’m walking down the street and it starts raining, I have a personal stake in what’s going on. But do I take action? Sure, I start walking faster, or pull up my hood. But it wasn’t the lack of any action that was the problem with the “public” response to the Bosnian genocide. It was the lack of “proper” action. I don’t run around giving umbrellas to other people when it rains. When the “public” saw Bosnian atrocities on TV and did nothing, it had an effect: “...as Rieff puts it in the sharpest phrases of his book, ‘administering the Serb siege’ and becoming ‘accomplices to genocide’” (“Publicity and Indifference (Sarajevo on Television)”, 113).

So does indifference mean doing nothing, or not taking “proper” action? “Proper” is obviously a relative term, here. Enlightenment philosophy might say it means “humanitarian” or “helping”. I think there is a basic problem with this binary of action/inaction, for who is to say what counts as an action? Anything with consequences? Anything we do?

“Looking is not acting, in Sarajevo or in New York, and for Cohen the diffusion of images goes hand in hand with a more disturbing dispersion or evisceration of the conditions of action: lost as centrality, authority, borders and clear distinctions, principles and much more.” (111)

But I think looking is acting. It has consequences and it is something we do. It just usually isn’t “proper” action, though sometimes it is (please don’t touch the paintings, just look...) I’m interested in this hand-in-hand relationship between images and the disappearance of clear categories. Since “[t]he image has no guaranteed meaning” (114), one might think there would be all the more opportunity for authorities to brand their categories upon them. And CNN et. al are certainly involved in plenty of ideological activity (for themselves and as tools of others) in their “live” coverage, yet somehow “the conditions of action” are still lost. Is it just that CNN isn’t giving the images enough “baggage” (as Manu asked)? Or is there something inherent in the medium which dissolves “conditions of action”? Because everything and everyone: leader, soldier, good guy, bad guy, even journalist, are seen in the same place, the “there” of the TV, the difference between them becomes increasingly tenuous. In light of the “programming wars”, each of these different entities is “just” another sound-image round fired in the endless battle for “viewers.” This idea is similar to Sean’s, where the reality of the news is degraded by the general fiction of TV. But TV doesn’t just tinge “live” events with a feeling of fiction; it flattens the events out, so that their original categorical meanings (centrality, authority, borders, etc..) become merely interesting character notes in the endless, phenomenologically homogenous flow, which may arouse some feelings in us but require no more “action” than what is required to watch a play.
posted by Anonymous at 1:14 PM

In Keenan’s focus on the presence of journalism in US military campaigns I think there is an important distinction to be made between the photographic and the televisual. It reminded me of Susan Sontag’s On Photography…



“Television is a stream of under selected images, each of which cancels its predecessor. Each still photograph is a privileged moment, turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again. Photographs like the one that made the front page of most newspapers in the world in 1972 – a naked South Vietnamese child just sprayed by American napalm, running down a highway toward a camera, her arms open, screaming with pain – probably did more to increase the public revulsion against the war than a hundred of televised barbarities.” (pg. 18)


What Sontag is illustrating is that selectivity of a photograph somehow grants an image more weight than Keenan’s streaming “live feed.” The very stultifying aspect of television seems to be at work in the live feed, this moment of consumption, of feeding. A seated moment of suspended feeding is the live feed, it is eating images in real time, and the same demobilizing aspects of eating are at play. One of the most recent folly’s of instant news (sounds like a cheap food, just add water food product) and live feeds (a historical televisual event eclipsed by 9/11) was the most recent presidential elections. The need for continual coverage led to stations calling Florida for Gore and then having to recall their positions several times. What resulted was a lot of live coverage about something that would not be resolved for weeks after programming had resumed. At four in the morning on the night of the election, a cryptic Dan Rather, who had been on the air for almost nine consecutive hours, spoke these words…


“we have lived by the crystal ball all night, and have learned to eat so much broken glass that we are now in critical condition.” Call Dan the poet-laureate of CBS (whose logo has that all seeing crystal eyeball quality to it) but he takes us through some very important metaphors. Not only are the predictions made by the upper bodies that sit at the opposite end of the television table from you telling faulty fortune, but that predicting mechanism that lens that glass itself is being fed to you in shards. Television and the programming that is meant to bring us our president has spun out of the fortune tellers hands, and more over we have “learned to eat” it. Dan is worried our situation is critical. But what is so bad about being in a coma of political apathy?


Will Bush’s war on Afghanistan slowly dwindle to an end because the viewing audience will grow bored of the thinning plot? Are characters in the conflict going to have to start dating each other in an attempt to revitalize the political strata as “must- see T.V.”? The problem with political apathy is that people are actually dieing and the audience seemingly has a chance to participate – the government seemingly an obligation to participate. But as Keenan claims, all of this impulse to help seems to be in the name of tourism. From the obscure war tourists to peacekeeping photo-op forces, the people who manage to respond in spite of the enervation of the television, all seem to be people who want to see behind the sets of their favorite television show – the world at war. I wonder if this impulse is a reaction linked more closly with seeing news on telivision than seeing printed images?



posted by Anonymous at 4:05 AM

I find Keenan’s argument in “Publicity and Indifference (Sarajevo on Television)” very compelling in the abstract sense on the necessity of interpretation for the image to be understood, but when applied to war images from Bosnia I’m not sure exactly what interpretation or contextualization was lacking there. Presumably the images were accompanied by contextualizing information. So my question is then, if these kind of images are not ‘sufficient’ to impel to action, then what is? And furthermore, when Keenan says, “if we continue to think that images by virtue of their cognitive contents or their proximity to reality have the power to compel action, we miss the opening of new fields of action that they allow,” does this refer to the constituion of a new kind of public sphere? So if this new public sphere is to no longer be based on the illusory self-evident link between “knowledge and action,” then what will it be based on? I guess what I’m looking for is an idea of how this situation can be remedied, how the real time processing and transmitting of images of war and terror can become effective in stimulating action? Also isn’t there no difference anyhow between whether the images are broadcast and no one acts or they are not broadcast at all, in terms of the result being the same in terms of the extent of the damage inflicted on the region in question? That is the worst effect of this situation is a neutral effect and the best is an extremely positive effect, but it doesn’t seem to me that the broadcasting of live images of war can negatively impact the situation. The only ‘collateral damage’ it seems becomes the intrusion into or the implication of the private sphere by these images (an idea expressed in ”Windows of Vulnerability”) and a resultant guilty, disaffected, and jaded tv viewer. Perhaps it just has to be acknowledged that tv news is entertainment and only that, not designed to stimulate action at all, along with all the uncomfortable implications of this, i.e. that we are entertained by the spectacle of the suffering of others.
posted by Anonymous at 3:08 AM

Sorry for posting a little late. Also, I haven't managed to reread "Windows: Of Vulnerablility" yet, although I (re)read the other two Keenan articles. Anyway, this post will take the form of several questions, possibly (although not necessarily intended) for Mr. Keenan:

1. What happens when this link between (tele)visuality and the public sphere is complicated -- for example, the Oklahoma City bombing or the Sept. 11 attacks, where the public sphere is not only the subject of the images, but also the object? Is the public then constructed at both ends by the camera -- both in front of the lens and behind the viewfinder? Or, is something else at work, perhaps an othering of the American public? No image simply stands for itself; it needs interpretation. What happens (and I distinctly remember this from a news report on Sept. 11, although I don't remember the network) when a correspondent says "The images stand for themselves"? Are Americans (esp. New Yorkers) then placed in the same position as Faruk Sabanovic, seeing our own destruction? Or is there some distance introduced by being both subject and object of the image; are we alienated from ourselves?

2. Photographic, cinematic, and video images operate on the principle of exclusion: placing something in the viewfinder is always excluding something else. The notion that the images from the television are properly "information," that images can be transparent and fully present to themselves is exactly what Mr. Keenan seems to be arguing against in "Publicity and Indifference." Yet isn't there another way to approach the same question: that images (news reports, &c.) are always interested images. It seems to me that the following formulation seems to rest on the presupposition of the indexicality of the televisual image:

"What interests me here is less the precise formulations of and differences among these analyses than their ubiquity. The recurrence of the trope across so many different accounts and styles and methodological predispositions mirrors the phenomenon it describes: the omnipresence of the gesture is the ubiquity of the camera, the image or specter of the camera that now seems to haunt our consciousness, our conscience, our responsibility itself" (p. 105)

Do we necessarily, as dogmatic practice, like we all learned in MC66, reject the notion of indexicality? That we always understand any image is interested, that we can't necessarily trust the images? Especially with something like newscasts, which so explicitly produce themselves as truth. Or should we accept, as a pragmatic matter, that we can somehow "trust" the images, and should therefore do something about it? Perhaps this too, this moment of mistrust, this moment of "Oh no, no more doom and gloom. More foreign people dying. Does it ever stop?" is also the failure of Bosnia. That, in addition to the failure of images to be transparent precisely because that is what is expected of them, the images might no longer be potent because of their assumed transparency. That there really is apathy because of an oversaturation of images.

3. On p. 107 of "Publicity and Indifference" (is it really obvious that I liked this article a whole lot), there is a formulation that goes approximately: "there" is what is in front of the camera lens, or at least the status of the "there" is complicated by it. Can we invert this formulation, and posit that "here" is in front of the television set, computer monitor, newspaper, &c.? Is this part of the mechanism of hailing of subjects that television does? Is "our" failure not only "our" failure, but the disjoint caused by transmission of "there" to "here"? Television does not teleport us; rather, it represents (I use this word slightly self-consciously) "there" "here"? It brings "there" to "here," all the while preserving the difference between the two. Can we align this binary of "here" and "there" with the Self and Other presented in the analysis of the production of the subject by the public sphere in "Windows"?

I have more to say on that, but I'm going to stop typing now because it's later than it should be.

See you all tomorrow.

--scott

posted by Anonymous at 12:30 AM

"Television, that virtual place, displaces the public space, substituting emotion for reason, immediacy for the delay proper to thought" (108-109, "Publicity and Indifference").

"If the public means us, us in our exposure to others, then today "we" cannot be something given in advance, not the sum total of all of us somewhere or sometime, not a community or a people but rather something that comes after the image, a possibility of response to an open address. The public, we could say in shorthand, is what is hailed or addressed by messages that might not reach their destination. Thinking about the images at hand, we could even say that what defines the public is the possibility of being a target and of being missed" (107-108).

The juxtaposition of these two citations seems to present a paradox: If the public, according to Keenan, functions as something neither stable nor pre-existing, but rather as a kind of supplement, an effect of the image itself, how can we say that television "displaces the public space"? If the public, for Keenan, is inseparable from the ephemeral, from a kind of effect of representation, what, then, is there to be displaced? What is this public space that Keenan speaks of in the first citation? Is it somehow produced against the virtual? Is there some formation of the public that pre-exists an increased proliferation of images brought about by new technologies of representation? That is, what, ultimately, is the relationship between the public and the televisual? Is television simultaneously involved in the production and displacement of the public? And, if this is the case, can we present some sort of obverse? That is, if television functions as a space that substitutes for our absence, that reduces us to an increased dependence on images of the real, is there a reciprocal effect of a public space informing the representational matrix of television?

What, ultimately, is at stake in the televisual's privileging of the emotional over the rational, the immediate over the deliberative? Does such a displacement necessitate the imagined idea of a kind of pre-virtual public space, one defined by the prerequisites of the rational (a la Habermas)? Does the public image's virtualization of the public space constitute a positive, or productive moment? A political moment? Why this continued attachment to responsibility? And how might we insert the hyperreal's production of indifference into this matrix of the rational/emotional?

posted by Anonymous at 12:09 AM

(sorry for the delay.. i had to download a new version of ie on this mac.. blogger
doesnt like netscape 4).

Keenan and the image:

Telivsion as not a delivery system of representation, but a public field of action. Television has been a battle ground since the beginning, with its gridlike schedule and programming wars, TV has been a space of entrentched warfare on display to the masses.
But the notion, as Keenen suggests, that one can be fixed by the images on TV, fixed into a position of inaction (to paraphrase Cohen), seems most intriguing. traditionally we think of suture in terms of Film, and in terms of an active spectator (but active in the sense that he engages the visceral images presented on screen and is emotionally involved in the narrative), yet here we see this form of active to be most passive, indeed. Ultimately it seems like reaction is inherently linked to the realm of the emotional (Tv, that vr place,displaces public space, substituting emotion for reason). If a successful film narrative uses emotion as a suture, then ultimately, it would seem that successful delivery of images on television also strive to strike a similar emotional accord. Thus it would seem that what failed with the endless stream of images out of Sarejevo was due to a lack of contextualization. In other words, its a lot easier to ignore images of anonymous people dying than images of ‘your own’ people being killed (just look at the images of sept. 11… images that were powerfull enough to start an entire war). It seems like the idea of desensitivity isnt at the core of this problematic, I would surmise that this issue is more a question of distance because ultimately, I know the power that media has over ‘the public sphere’ as many have used it as a political tool presicely to cite an emotional and physical reaction. If anything, the images being fed were without enough baggage to be read properly.

Ok out of time… more tomorrow.

-manu

posted by Anonymous at 12:05 AM

“…when home has become as alien as a foreign land.” (Keenan, LF, 131)

Just as war torn environments abroad became destinations for tourists, Ground
Zero has become a domestic site of pilgrimage now. Despite the ubiquitous presence of cameras as witnesses, real time coverage could not keep the twin towers from collapsing onto a city in terror. Now tourists flock to the stage of annihilation in New York—to see for themselves a reality too intense to trust the one contained with in the frame of their TV sets.
Is it a macabre fascination? Many amateur camcorder owners risked death in order to record the carnage and the flight from downtown New York that day. The image was so precious. In order to record the actuality of the unbelievable, as if the documentation would have made the event any less indelible in our national consciousness, the camera had to survey and record.
Nothing has more recently jolted a nation into an immediate outpouring of support and rage. “Humanitarian action” (Keenan, PI, 3) never came so quickly in response to the 24 hour coverage of horror. Home, the untouchable United States was rocked…not an embassy on another continent, but domestic soil. Will home ever be the same? Did the media’s coverage of the aftermath slowly try to repair the damage? All the visits to Ground Zero by President Bush, members of Congress, celebrities, and foreign leaders to boost morale, to bring faith and security back to residents and rescuers, and the subsequent broadcast of those bearing witness.
In order to smooth over the military action in Afghanistan, simultaneously a wholly appropriate humanitarian aid plan was implemented. The government used the media to highlight our benevolence and defer anti-war criticism. “War is the logistics of perception.” (Keenan, LF, 133) The Afghani covergirl of National Geographic became a symbol again of the poor, the oppressed—it was America’s duty to liberate her. Is it any wonder that finally after almost twenty years her person was recovered?
Crisis coverage is still mediated coverage. What kind of public and politics do these images create or change? In the “War against Terrorism,” Keenan’s statement is more pertinent than ever. “What is it to fight not for a hill or a city but for a headline or picture? It is nothing short of war itself: that struggle not only to kill and capture but to define, to determine a people and a nation, to mark, inscribe, represent, to redraw the boundaries…and to live on, to fight in the light of another day. This violence—of battle and of publicity—is irreducible.” (Keenan, LF, 133)

posted by Anonymous at 11:54 PM

19 March 2002
To connect the earlier “Windows” essay to this week’s readings…
In “Windows: of vulnerability,” the television window is “a pocket of somewhere and somewhen else”: “The beyond from which this indirect light enters breaks utterly with the present of any given subject or group of subjects, neither here nor there nor anywhere accessible to intuition or perception. It is emitted from beyond the horizon of anything reducible to humanity, from the placeless place of…others.” Perhaps it is just my reading of this, but Keenan seems to place television images as coming from an ambiguously “other” place, one which is not by any means conceivable as coexisting with the viewer’s present. Is this why/how television troubles “reality” (as noted in “Publicity and Indifference”)? Is this how images can result in inaction?
Also, I’m having trouble with the idea of glare, which is “harsh and blinding light”. It is mentioned in both “windows” and this week’s “Live From…” essay. In “Live From…”, it is referred to as “the becoming public of the effort at publicity, the live coverage not of the landing, but of the live coverage.” So glare is the sign of the media “slipping up” and making themselves visible. But in “windows” it is equated with the excess of light which comes through the window and blinds the viewer (but which also reaffirms our humanity?). Are these one and the same glare? Or can they not be compared because they come from different kinds of windows?

posted by Anonymous at 11:39 PM

March 19, 2002
Responses – Humanitarian Interventions
Shawn E Greenlee

Has the public image (mass media) really displaced the public space? What was our public space before the advent of mass media? Was our experience of public space smaller in scope, more readable as a local experience of the public, with a more defined sense on the part of the individual of the impact an individual could have within the public sphere? With the advent of mass media then, does media facilitate the expansion of this public space or does it rather create a sphere that is somehow unreal because of the impossibility to grasp its vastness and detail? I am curious about the notion that hyper-awareness facilitated by the media breeds indifference. I suppose this presumes people cared in the first place before they were saturated with images as tools of eliciting response. If people are indifferent in their own everyday experience, then they surely will not act in response to what goes on inside the TV window. Or is simply there a distinction between the actual experience of a subject and the relayed experience of others that facilitates indifference in general and manifests profoundly when there is a need for action?

If situations occur that require humanitarian intervention in our local experience of the public, we may be more apt to respond than when a similar occurrence occurs in the public space that has never been experienced in a real/present way. When the neighbor’s house is burning down, we may be more equipped to respond. The degree of the response may vary, but surely some type of response – humanitarian intervention seems more likely. Is the fact that we do not have a relationship other than the real virtuality provided by mass media enough to hinder our response? Keenan cites Virilio; “There is no politics possible at the speed of light. Politics is the time of reflection.” Perhaps the speed of the transmission/telepresence is a factor but the gigantic nature of the world out there as immediately defined against the world of genuine experience seems an important distinction. Coupled with the rate of bombardment of those messages, paralysis may be inevitable.

The experience of television is an industry and mistaking it for something else seems one of the problems at hand. My assumption is that most people utilize the television as a means to suspend/escape reality… entertainment. The fictional quality of the bulk of programming on the television informs those moments of reality that peek through. How difficult it is to comprehend the gravity of a situation across the ocean juxtaposed with a commercial for Friskies (cat food), or the “one-day only!” sale at the mall on Saturday. I believe we have to realize that regardless of content, every moment experienced through a media informs all other moments experienced within that same medium, especially in a limited given frame of time. I think that it is fair to assume that the motivation for the programming on television is driven by an industry. They are selling us the world we see, or rather showing us the world they sell.


posted by Anonymous at 10:42 PM

This is a question/investigation of definitions. I’m interested in Keenan’s statement that:

“The sheer fact of survival was cause for wonder, and it rendered the territory attained by definition foreign and the experience of arriving there enigmatically excessive.” (“Live From..., 134)

So is it wonder that causes territory to be foreign, or survival? Is he saying the state of being in wonder is equivalent to feeling out of place? Wonder takes us out of our normal places (non-wonder/predictability/boredom?) into a new, previously unknown (therefore foreign?) place. He also says:

“To have set those feet and boots on the ground in France, for the first time, was already to have survived, to have outlived no only so many others but also expectations, and to begin again, begin to see again, something strange.” (134)

What is the connection between survival and foreignness? To survive is to “pass through” some threatening situation into a safe one. A foreign situation? Can you feel at home and survive simultaneously, or are those states exclusive? At what point in survival do you begin again? Survival means NO death, so what is this beginning that comes with it?
posted by Anonymous at 6:34 PM

I have been having a bit of difficulty reconciling the two kinds of presence-absence that Keenan argues are produced by televisually mediated war. On the one hand, he says that there is a kind of touristic desire “to coincide with nothing less than history itself” (Live From, 137), to see the spatial place of the production of that history with one’s own eyes. On the other hand, he talks about the distance that mediation produces. Is there a way in which mediated distance can both produce the indifference that he discusses and still elicit the desire to see or even to participate in the production of history – is the desire to see a part of that separated indifference, or is it suggested that the would-be tourists are those who are not indifferent to the war?

Also, is it possible that the journalists’ and the governments’ motivations are not simply altruistic but could be another manifestation of the desire to be a part of the production of history, just like the tourist? The prevalence of the media and the exhaustive documentation of the Marine presence in Somalia and the war in Bosnia seem, at least superficially, to suggest as much. The journalist’s desire that “one more picture, or one more story” could provoke foreign intervention into Somalia is reminiscent of the war-tourist’s media provoked desire. By seeing the media production, the individual tourist wants to see and to experience with his own eyes. How different is it, then, for an entire nation of individuals (or just the government that “represents” them) to decide to intervene politically or militarily into a nation? Do the humanitarian goals of the government who wants to help a beleaguered nation place it above simple curiosity of the war tourist, or are they both simply partaking in the media produced desire for presence?

posted by Anonymous at 11:11 PM