Critical Art and The Visibility of Vulnerability:
Constructing a Political Ontology of Spectatorship with Silvered Water, Syria Self Portrait
Rewa Baassiri
MA Thesis Comparative Cultural Analysis Supervisor: Dr. Joost de Bloois
20 June 2016
Table of Contents
Preface………. 2
Introduction………..8
Chapter 1: Interrogating The Modern Regime of Critical Art.……....………..15
Chapter 2: Perceiving the Senseless Community and the Limits of Exposure………..26
Chapter 3: Politics of Vulnerability and Art of Survival.………..44
Conclusion………...………..74
Rewa Baassiri
Professor Joost de Bloois
MA Thesis Comparative Cultural Analysis 20 June 2016
Critical Art and The Visibility of Vulnerability: Constructing a Political Ontology of Spectatorship with Silvered Water, Syria Self Portrait
“Cinema presents—that is to say shares (communicates)—the intensity of a look upon a world of which it is itself part and parcel. It is part of it precisely in the sense that it has contributed to its structure as it is now: as a world where looking at what is real is resolutely substituting for every kind of visionary seeing, foreseeing and clairvoyant gazing. (…) Clearly, films turn out be something very different from a relatively new support for received ways of experience (stories or feelings, myth or dream, etc.). Well beyond the medium that it also is, cinema adds up an element: the element of looking and of what is real insofar as it is looked at. All in one, film is ubiquitous, it can take in everything, from one far end of the earth to the other”
–Jean-Luc Nancy, Abbas Kiarostami: The Evidence of Film, p. 20
“Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.” – Jacques Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics, p. 13
Preface
Silvered Water, Syria Self Portrait is a 2014 art-house documentary film about the Syrian
uprising-turned-war co-directed by Ossama Mohammed and Wiam Simav Bedirxan. It was initiated by Mohammed shortly after the outbreak of protests in Syria, which he watched from a distance. Having been publicly critical of the Assad regime for years, Mohammed was advised, for his own safety, to remain in France during a 2011 trip to the Cannes film festival. From then and there, sifting through thousands of low resolution, camera phone footage videos on the Internet, he gathered and edited hundreds of images into a personalized, impressionistic narrative of unimaginable horrors. Bedirxan, a young Kurdish schoolteacher living in Homs, reached out to the renowned director in search of guidance for what to film and how. She had chosen, to the extent that it could be considered a choice, to remain under government siege in Homs around the same time that Mohammed was banished to Europe. Their encounter frames the second half of the film, made up mostly of footage by Bedirxan and interspersed with more anonymous pixelated images of battles and funerals from around Syria. These images are often contrasted with reflective, fleeting shots from Paris filmed by Mohammed. The challenging process of watching Silvered Water, Syria Self Portrait, an unbearably urgent portrayal of wartime Syria, and the resulting inability to respond to it critically is what drove most of the questions that I am finally able to articulate and develop through this thesis. I would like to begin however with a brief description of how I came across the film, and how I approached it prior to viewing.
I met Ossama Mohammed when I took a job as a laureate’s host for the 2015 Prince Claus Awards in Amsterdam. I would describe the event as a celebration of outstanding artistic achievements with emphasis on works of socio-political relevance. The Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development website uses more precise language, stating that the awards are given
to individuals or groups from a small selection of regions based on “their outstanding achievements in the field of culture and development and the positive effect of their work on their
direct environment and the wider cultural or social field.” I regret not registering this description
at the time and never asking what measurable positive effect Mohammed’s films have had that the Fund was able to discern. It should be noted that the award is given based on the director’s entire body of work, which comprises three feature films in over three decades. What I did ask him, and this was in relation to his latest film, Silvered Water, was whether he was aware of the anonymous media collective Abounaddara and their stance on the dissemination of violent imagery. I had been doing some research on their work and attended several screenings in the presence of their spokesperson Charif Kiwan, who touted the importance of providing an alternative image of the Syrian people than the one presented by Syrian state and mainstream global media outlets, one that does not violate their dignity and returns to them the right to their own representation. Kiwan insisted that this meant avoiding promoting images of the injured, dead, tortured, and mourning Syrians. Upon reading the synopsis of Silvered Water, Syria Self
Portrait and in light of such claims, it struck me as discordant that Mohammed’s work was
currently being celebrated for having a positive impact. So I asked Ossama for his thoughts, and he explained to me that he deemed it undemocratic and counter-revolutionary to mandate what kind of portrayals of the conflict should and should not exist. He said he saw great potential in the work of Abounaddara (made up mostly of amateur filmmakers) and believes that there are many ways to approach the issues they bring up. It was almost ten years earlier that he spoke to a reporter from The New Yorker about the entrenched self-censorship of Syrian society stating: “This society is responsible for creating the dictatorship — it’s in our culture, our way of
believing and thinking. I am trying to expose the authority inside us and the shadow of political authority in front of our doors.”
Preparing to watch the film, I was armed with questions about the role of cultural production in times of conflict, what democratic aspects can be discerned from the act of viewing and disseminating, who has the right to the image, what does it mean or serve to ask this question at such a moment? What aspects of the internal dynamics of the Syrian uprising can be comprehended through such questions and by looking at how artists have dealt with them? What fatal flaws continue to manifest in this war of, for, and against images? Finally, in the process of watching and for a long time after, I found it very difficult to return to these questions, or to locate their relevance. I was frustrated with the insufficiency of common interpretive frameworks in helping me assess, understand, and respond to the reality I experienced watching Silvered
Water. Eventually, I found some refuge in Jean-Luc Nancy’s ontological reversals and notions of
the inoperative and the unavowable community. I was able to locate through these concepts a new basis, an entry point that would make it possible to address the above-mentioned questions from a different perspective.
The research proceeding from these states of spectatorship, scholarship, discomfort and curiosity oscillates between the political implications of the practice of representation, art in times of crisis, and the problem of being in a world that seems to leave no room for the realization of true community. Organizing this research, which involves a broad spectrum of theoretical possibilities from across disciplines, I will trace the trajectory that guided my attention toward particular theories over others; namely how the notion of community as a metaphysical concept relates to the political and how it can help navigate the contradictions (in meaning) that arise as a result of (manmade) catastrophe.
Artistic practices, themselves interventions and interpretations, have been for me the instigators of deeper questions on how we can conceive of our shared existence in the world despite the differential distribution of vulnerability to violence and precarity. According to Judith Butler,
Precarity designates that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death…Precarity also characterizes that politically induced condition of maximized precariousness for populations exposed to arbitrary state violence who often have no other option than to appeal to the very state from which they need protection. (Frames of War 25)
Butler considers the ways in which one can develop an ethical response to highly mediated, multi-dimensional phenomena such as representations of war, conflict, and suffering. According to her, interpretive acts emerge from fields of intelligence that help us form or frame our responsiveness to an impinging world. She asserts, quite reasonably, that in order to act on its object (society), moral theory must first know its object. This knowledge moves from and through affective response towards ethical responsibility. Stemming from my own affective responses to the film, conceived of as a “world,” this paper calls upon available yet inadequate interpretive frameworks, calling them into question in order to formulate a theory of responsibility. Following from Butler, such a theory will “focus not just on the value of this or that life, or on the question of survivability in the abstract, but on the sustaining social conditions
of life—especially when they fail.” (Frames of War 35)
I will be demonstrating how Silvered Water calls into question its own “self understanding,” performs an aesthetic intervention on “the conditions of visibility” and/or “distribution of the sensible,” and prompts a social critique of spectatorship. Crucial to these acts of deconstruction and restructuring is the film’s embedded context of civil war in Syria. Approaching this context theoretically demands a foray into the notions of sovereignty and community (at their limits), as they define and correspond to relations of power. As such, this analysis also revisits, from multiple entry points, the relation between the metaphysical, the aesthetic and the political.
I would like to borrow from Nancy, if I may, a sort of disclaimer with regards to my own political position. Written in 1991 in his Preface for The Inoperative Community, Nancy’s point of departure remains highly relevant and largely unresolved 25 years later:
It is not a question of a political position that I hold, or might like to hold, in accordance with a political option or ideal, or even a political ideology and program. However, it is not independent from an unchanging and definite political determination, which I would say, to be simple and direct, while not wishing to be simplistic, comes from the left. But as we know, the task that now befalls us is to elucidate, to review, indeed to revolutionize what the term ‘left’ means. (xxxvi)
Introduction
There is an irrefutable claim for the shared nature of our existence in the world that precedes and endures all aspects of social organization and ways of being-in-common. The truth of this claim can be thought along the lines of a constitutive vulnerability, the impossibility of articulating the self without reference to an Other, and/or the social imperative to support and sustain the conditions of life over death. Judith Butler has been at the forefront of formulating a socio-political theory that derives from what she describes as the fundamental sociality of embodied life, which stems from the fact that “we are, from the start and by virtue of being a bodily being, already given over, beyond ourselves, implicated in lives that are not our own” (Precarious Life 28) By this logic, the communal basis of our ontology should inform our negotiations on moral standards and, by extension, our practice of politics. In an age of unprecedented connectivity, “presupposing an ontology of discrete identity cannot yield the kinds of analytic vocabularies we need for thinking about global interdependency and the interlocking networks of power and position in contemporary life.” (Frames of War 31)
Nevertheless, modern history demonstrates that subjectivity and collective experience are often mediated through the categories of either destructive totalitarian identity or abstract individualism. (Ingram 117) Coincidentally, modernity has produced a most dispersed and pluralized social reality. The attempt to locate universal claims within dynamic, historically determined matrices of meaning that can then be translated into empirical forms—that is, socio-political practices—often results in paradoxes and internal contradictions that are difficult to reconcile. “Not only do the fragmentation and historicity of modern life militate against a foundational metaphysics, but any prescriptive theory claiming for itself transcendent necessity and universality would simply perpetuate the totalitarian logic inherent in any ideology.”
(Ingram 97) The trouble with totalitarian logic is its insistence on the denial of difference and ambiguity by any means available. This has been and continues to be a source of unimaginable horror and violence up to the present day. On the other hand, with its failure to account for the multiplicity of perspectives and values that cannot be assimilated into a harmonious ensemble, the individualist tendency of liberal thought carries a limited capacity for dealing with “conflicts for which no rational solution could ever exist.” (“Art and Democracy” 2) Excluded from both of these regulative (ideological) systems of thought is a third framework that incorporates the interminable and indefinite iterations of being in the world. Such a framework, which will be central to my thesis, corresponds to a tradition involving the continual deconstruction and reinscription of metaphysical configurations with regards to notions of community, individuality, sovereignty, freedom and justice among others.
An investigation of critical artistic practices can provide great insight into the metaphysical substructure of socio-political practices and the ways in which they are called into question, sometimes in the service of congealing or reaffirming the dominant consensus, other times contesting and destabilizing it. Following from Jacques Ranciere, aesthetics can be defined as the conditions of sensory perception. Artistic practices are aesthetic acts inasmuch as they give form to a wide array of experiences. (The Politics of Aesthetics 9) Unbound by the ideological, their political thrust is in the potential they possess for creating alternative modes of sense perception and inducing novel forms of political subjectivity. Thus, within certain and variable limits, by operating on forms of visibility, artistic practices have the capacity to construct ways of being. “Artistic practices are ‘ways of doing and making’ that intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and making as well as in the relationships they maintain to modes of being and forms of visibility.” (13) This understanding of the politics of art will be a
recurring reference point for my analysis of cultural production in times of conflict.
This paper attempts to inhabit a discourse that, broadly speaking, recognizes the contingent historical character of cultural objects and develops through an interpretative confrontation with individual works. (Osborne 3) Methodologically, this will involve doing away with what Gabriel Rockhill calls the “politics of the isolated aesthetic artifact” by exploring instead the interaction between processes of creation, circulation, and interpretation as social dimensions that “play themselves out in the historical struggles between various forms of social agency.” (Rockhill 6) In the context of a protracted civil war, the struggle between various forms of social agency is concentrated and complicated further. When lives are lost, bodies are injured, and the material reality of an entire population and territory is under the threat of annihilation— the creation, circulation, and interpretation of artistic practices seems to be suspended in a state of emergency. This quality is palpable in the form and content of contemporary Syrian cinema.
I will be taking as an object of analysis the 2014 impressionistic documentary film
Silvered Water, Syria Self Portrait co-directed by Ossama Mohammed and Wiam Simav
Bedirxan. I would like to consider how the film contributes to our understanding of the political from the standpoint of the common and the community. I will be exploring what it means, in dire circumstances, for art to interrupt the flow of assumptions (about subjectivity, sovereignty, justice and also issues of gender, cultural hegemony, stereotypes, fears) at the very moment when action requires a prompt decision. Perhaps these works constitute a fragile, urgent, and overlooked moment that precedes the political. Perhaps this is what Brian Holmes was implying when he wrote that “Art can offer a chance for society to collectively reflect on the imaginary figures it depends upon for its very consistency, its self-understanding.” (qtd. “Art and Democracy” 1)
cultural critique is the displacement from a theory of regulative ideas to the examination of “differential relations between socially constituted practices as well as the historical formation of supposedly natural objects.” (Rockhill 4) This has been the trajectory followed by many scholars interested in understanding the socio-political phenomena that contribute to the material inscription of inequality among human subjects. Artistic practices have been an integral part of this process historically, taking on special significance for twentieth century (Western) critics and philosophers, whose categorization of political and apolitical art remains entrenched in contemporary debates. Chapter 1 will trace the origin of this thought and find ways to account for what it excludes.
Broadly construed, my research is concerned with the ever-changing landscape of the political in relation to art and in light of the continued sanctioning by world powers of violence and mass murder in the name of the community (the nation-state), freedom (democracy), and sovereignty (autonomous rule). Elucidating some of the presuppositions that contribute to the total closure of politics and metaphysics that Jean-Luc Nancy emphasizes, my focus will be the philosophical moment that arises in the event of the break down of meaning. Chapter 2 is dedicated to defining this moment. It can be argued that this is a rupture which art has a unique ability to address. As my analysis will demonstrate, artistic practices embedded in the context of the ongoing conflict in Syria constitute representations of and responses to such a breakdown.
Silvered Water, Syria Self Portrait presents a challenge to a viewer eager to make sense of its
subject matter and to communicate its effects. Throughout the film and in the process of its viewing, the possibility of understanding is deferred through perpetual doubt. It speaks of an overwhelming sense of urgency that is very difficult to capture, internalize, or transform into coherent response or action. As such, the film commands a different set of questions, a different
kind of encounter between its interlocutors. It demands a theoretical approach where the viewing subject is no longer exteriorized and is understood rather as the site of interpretation and convergence. Chapters 2 and 3 will look closely at scenes at the level of construction and reception in order to extrapolate an analytic framework that is inherent to the process of spectatorship.
My central inquiry comprises an attempt to interrogate and reformulate multiple stances on ethical spectatorship. I will be discussing in detail the notion of responsibility and the purported problem of complicity in the material production of inequality through spectatorship. Rooted in conditions of visibility and vulnerability, this analysis elaborates the importance of distinguishing ethics from prescriptive morality:
Considerations of distributive justice and moral reciprocity require establishing objective comparisons between persons from the perspective of an outside observer; ethics, by contrast, pertains to the asymmetrical encounter (face to face) between ‘I’ and ‘thou.’ The former involves prescribing actions with a view to global consequences; the latter imposes a prior obligation to remain open to questioning as such. (Ingram 106)
* * *
“Emancipation begins when we challenge the opposition between viewing and acting… It begins when we understand that viewing is also an action that confirms or transforms the positions. The spectator also acts, like the pupil or scholar. She observes, selects, compares, interprets.”
–Jacques Ranciere, The Emancipated Spectator p. 13
I share with many critics and commentators a concern with spectatorship. Like Ranciere however, attempts to locate the passive complicity of spectators in the ongoing material inscription of differentially distributed suffering have always struck me as problematic. Rather, I wish to consider the spectator from an ontological perspective, neither passive nor an agent, participating inadvertently in the realization of community in the senseless sense that Jean-Luc Nancy proposes. In order to elaborate this difference, a brief introduction to the film in question is necessary.
Despite the hostility of work conditions for journalists, the Syrian war is the most documented conflict in history. (Lynch) Civilians, citizen journalists, perpetrators and victims have taken up the task of filming scenes of suffering as they unfold and sharing them online. Mohammed and Bedirxan have translated some of these images into an impressionistic documentary film about the uprising-turned-war. The first part of the film is made up of footage from various Internet sources, collected and edited by the Mohammed, whose voiceover recounts the process of putting together a cinematic account of the revolution from a distance, from his exile in Paris. The curated selection of footage is made up of potently visceral images, frantic and pixelated, documenting first-hand experiences of what most viewers would consider unimaginable violence. Scenes of killing, burials and funerals, torture, battles, demonstrations, and everything in between are interspersed with scenes shot by the estranged filmmaker of the European sky, train windows, and raindrops on glass.
Title cards mark chapters throughout the film and contain dates and descriptions constructing a timeline of events specific to this narrative. The film fosters a historical
consciousness of cinema. As such, it attempts to create a parallel between the birth of the revolution and the birth of (a new) cinema in Syria. Mohammed’s voiceover inflects the film with a poetic tone as he deals with his own feelings of heartbreak, guilt and cowardice, his inexhaustible love for Syria, and his yearning to make sense of what he sees and what he cannot see using the language of cinema. At the height of his struggle, ready to give up, a chance encounter offers the potential for resolution. A young Kurdish woman living in Homs contacts Mohammed asking him for advice on what to film, or rather, what he would film if he were there. The second half of the film is the story of their encounter and the voiceover details their correspondence. Simav films her experience of a desolate, hellish, besieged Homs, bearing witness to a deeply disturbing reality.
In my analysis, spectators are everywhere. There are those present to the act of violence (who are also those present to the act of filming), those filming the acts of violence and the surrounding conditions, those disseminating the images, those viewing the images, those using the images as part of other stories and representations (the news, documentaries), and those watching those secondary representations. Several layers of reception and interpretation overlap throughout the film informing a theory of collective spectatorship that questions the predetermined distribution of roles of filmmaker, filmed subject, and viewer. Rather than announcing their complicity, this understanding (and the film) disrupts the exteriority of viewers in order to (re)construct spectatorship within a more formative dynamic of communication. In order to clarify my divergence, it is necessary first consider some of the well-known arguments that dominate the former understanding of the distant, passive spectator.
Chapter 1: Interrogating The Modern Regime of Critical Art
“Between 1938 and 2003, even earlier and certainly since, the impact, role and meaning of representing war, conflict and violence has inspired countless texts and arguments among theorists and thinkers. In essence, these discussions interrogate a human being’s ability to experience empathy with others. (Our far-flung, foreign, or close-by neighbours.) Our capacity to motivate action is linked to the power of an image to mediate and provoke an emotion beyond words.”
–Rasha Salti, “War, Art, Cinema, and What Images Can Do”
“Postmodern theorists—such as Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, and Susan Sontag—who bore witness to a glut of images were the first to fall prey to a kind of ‘image fatigue’; they simply stopped looking. The world filled up with images of horrors, and they loudly proclaimed that viewers’ eyes had grown unseeing, proceeding to unburden themselves of the responsibility to hold onto the elementary gesture of looking at what is presented to one’s gaze.”
–Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, p. 11
I came to realize early in my research that the challenges facing anyone who wishes to critically address the cinematic practices of wartime Syria are of an ethical nature, dealing particularly with the right to representation (the right to control what can be seen and how), the question of responsibility (what should be made visible) and the ethical failure bound up with the spectatorship of the suffering of others. When confronted with images of injured bodies and dismembered corpses, we are advised to proceed with caution. Aside from the distressing effect
on the viewer, which is a phenomenon I will explore in detail later, several arguments pertaining to viewing the violent suffering of others conclude that it is an unethical act, inscribing the complicity of the spectator into the violence being witnessed. The privilege of seeing, watching, viewing–of being passive and preoccupied with one’s own life as images of unimaginable violence flicker before our eyes– renders the suffering of others devoid of dignity, weight, seriousness. (Sontag 2003) This is one argument. Additionally, the display of mutilated bodies is considered dehumanizing, as violating the physical integrity and, again, the dignity of victims. “The human being, as an incarnated being, is here offended in the ontological dignity of its being as body, more precisely in its being as singular body.” (Cavarero 8) Furthermore, the sheer number of images available is seen as contributing to the ethical problem. “Arguably, the exponential proliferation of still and moving images has relentlessly pushed against the boundaries of what is deemed provocative, untenable, unacceptable. Today, the global mainstream audience seems numbed with regards to the pain of others and the abominations of war.” (Salti) One must also consider arguments concerning the inherently dramatic or spectacular aspects of war, terror, and violence, which tout the ethical imperative of avoiding over-sensational media representations as they can lead to the desire for and reproduction of violence. (LaCapra 91-122) Lastly, there is the role of states and institutions in restricting the freedom of press or individuals to disseminate images. The institutional mediation of war imagery is inscribed into larger projects of global ordering which must be contested. (“Art and Democracy” 3) It can be said that all of these positions are derived in one way or another from the modern critique of political art.
“Although restricting how or what we see is not exactly the same as dictating a storyline, it is a way of interpreting in advance what will and will not be included in the field of
perception.” (Frames of War 66) In light of this, one must consider seriously the effects of omission and/or suppression. An adherence to the above arguments to the point of censorship prompts a closer look at the ethico-political justification of a stance against the publication and dissemination of violent imagery. How to take the facile arguments that are continually leveled at the inclusion of violent imagery to task? In this section, I will be looking at some of these arguments as products of a reductive critical framework, underpinned by moral indignation. (Bishop 9) This will necessitate an investigation of concepts such as dehumanizing, sensationalism, and first of all, the critique of the spectacle. I would like to argue that in adopting the premises of this critique, cultural production loses sight of the political. One preliminary point I wish to make is that the effort to produce work that is decidedly anti-spectacle dogmatizes “political” or “critical” art and produces narrow results. That the spectator is incapable, without the premeditated effort of the artist, of participating in a critical interpretation of the work is an inegalitarian assumption that lends itself to the reproduction of hierarchies.
* * *
“The essence of modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself—not in order to subvert it, but to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.”
–Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting” p. 111
From Brecht to Debord, the critical lexicon of modernity has designated for the author an active position counter posed by the passivity of the spectator, a configuration that has since been
challenged by many. Ranciere demonstrates the circular logic of modern criticism by tracing the genealogy of critical thought as a tool for social emancipation that continues to reproduce hierarchies despite its opposite intent. At the heart of this mechanism is the problem of quantity or multiplicity. Ranciere locates the origin of the critique to which Barthes, Debord and Baudrillard belong in the 19th century elitist fear of multiplicity. The problem of proliferation and its management—the fear of too many images—was triggered by a coincidence of events in the scientific and political organization of the individual subject. Scientific discoveries about the multiplicity of nervous stimuli and circuits that form the human psyche coincided with the rise of democracy as the main form of government as well as the rapid reproduction and circulation of images, texts, and commodities resulting from advanced industrialization. From there grew a fear that the (over)stimulation of the common peoples’ nervous energy was a danger to the preservation of the social order. The fear of the multitude’s transforming capacities due to the multiplicity and accessibility of “unprecedented forms of lived experience” developed into an attitude of fear for the multitudes, who were not equipped to master the abundance of thoughts and images available. (The Emancipated Spectator 47) The intervention of critical thought came from a similar position of fear for the common people and their ascription to ignorance and incapacity. The task of social critique was to enable the people (consumers) to see the reality behind deceptive, manipulative images forming “the society of the spectacle.” “In effect, the procedures of social critique have as their goal treating the incapable: those who not know how to see, who do not understand the meaning of what they see, who do not know how to transform acquired knowledge into activist energy.” (47) This leads to an understanding of the means to social emancipation as caught within a flawed system that allows for endless inversions in order to preserve the need for critique, for critics, for those who can see what the multitudes cannot
and can help show the world the path toward enlightenment and emancipation. “The machine can work in this way until the end of time, capitalizing on the impotence of the critique that unveils the impotence of the imbeciles.” (48)
* * *
In order to clarify a divergence from the founding principles of such art, I will briefly address the emergence and proliferation of participatory art as a prominent genre in the contemporary art sphere around the world. The critique of the spectacle is the central point of reference for many arguments advocating participatory art and direct engagement. Art critic and scholar Claire Bishop summarized the argument pertaining to this form stating that,
For many artists and curators on the left, Debord’s critique strikes to the heart of why participation is important as a project: it rehumanizes a society rendered numb and fragmented by the repressive instrumentality of capitalist production. Given the market’s near total saturation of our image repertoire, so the argument goes, artistic practice can no longer revolve around the construction of objects to be consumed by a passive bystander. Instead, there must be an art of action, interfacing with reality, taking steps—however small—to repair the social bond. (Bishop 11)
Participatory art often manifests as a sort of utopian experimentation through which artists imagine alternative modes of communal living. Such works attempt to construct micro-societies
that diverge from “consumer society” and to transform the complacency or ignorance of the audience-participants into activated awareness. (“Art and Democracy” 5) The concluding statement of a fifteen page report on the 2011 symposium “Stretching New Boundaries: Participation in Visual Arts” (part of that year’s Folkstone Triennial) is emblematic of the above, demonstrating the continued recourse to the premise of incapacity that Ranciere points to.
If participatory art is to stand for anything, it must surely be the empowerment of the people in developing an identity and role as a citizen (where the very category is changing as the spectrum of socio-political power is changing). It is to equip people as citizens, linguistically and intellectually, to play a formative role in shaping the environments in which they live their lives. (Vickery 15)
Surely, there are other practices of critical art that have incorporated different models. The dominant mode in recent years has been one that deals with subject positions in relation to identity politics, touching on questions of otherness, oppression, marginality and victimization. This includes feminist art, queer art, or art made by religious or ethnic or other minorities. Another model involves work that more or less engages directly and critically with socio-political reality, including artists like Barbara Kruger, Santiago Sierra or Hans Haacke. Furthermore, there is the kind of work that interrogates its own condition of production and circulation. This would include artists like Andrea Fraser, Christian Phillipp Mueller or Mark Dion. (“Art and Democracy” 5) And while these models may or may not be entirely assimilable into the discourse of modernity, it would be difficult to deny its ubiquity, its far and wide outcrops, which (arguably) mediate all aspects of the present, regardless of geographic location
and/or economic development. What the effects of “modernity” were, and what constituted a resistance to those effects becomes increasingly unclear.
Furthermore and more importantly, the current Western conception of critical or political art, outlined above and demonstrated by these examples, is conceived from a position of non-violence, from a world in which horror is a thing of the past or the distant. There is a double bind here. Although this kind of critical art and its metaphysical counterparts cannot account fully for work that deals with or stems from a different political (and material) reality than that of the West, Western cultural hegemony is inescapable and remains a necessary reference point for developing alternative frameworks. Moreover, while these kinds of works denote a resistance to the implicitly coercive power of corporate capitalism in the West, in the contemporary context of global interdependency, they raise questions and initiate conversations that can be extended to the more explicit practices of power and oppression that we see in other (non-Western) parts of the world. Returning to the immediate context of the Syrian civil war (often referred to also as a global proxy war), we might begin to understand the universality of mechanisms of domination and liberation. I will be returning to this notion towards the end of Chapter 3 with the help of Foucault, who situates civil war in the daily exercise of power. (The Punitive Society 31) In order to arrive there (theoretically) however, we must find a way out of the “post-political.” For the purpose of this paper, this will involve identifying aesthetic practices that function as strategies of opposition to the predetermined distribution of positions of power and subjection inherent to the act of representation. My analysis of the multiple layers of spectatorship constructed through
Silvered Water, Syria Self Portrait attempts also to understand how artistic practices contribute
to the construction of new subjectivities.
In order to shed the faulty orientations of modernist critique, Ranciere revisits the principles that construct the paradox of the spectator and prohibit her emancipation. Drawing parallels between the arguments of the reformists, Plato, critics of the spectacle, and those who consider theatre to be a “mediation striving for its own opposition,” he locates several binary oppositions that help organize “the distribution of the sensible.” Included in these are the opposition between the collective and the individual, the image and living reality, activity and passivity, and self-ownership and alienation. Thus the distribution of the sensible is defined as “an a priori distribution of the positions and capacities and incapacities attached to these positions” (The Emancipated Spectator 12) Although they attempt to transform passivity into activity, sacrifice the individual for the collective, or uphold reality against illusion, contemporary critical artistic practices maintain the structure where one position is always offered as better than the other. “The terms can change their meaning, and the positions can be reversed, but the main thing is that the structure counter-posing two categories — those who possess a capacity and those who do not — persists.” (13) As such, emancipation entails the freeing of thought, or reason, from these binary configurations and the recognition that the self-evident (a priori) facts which structure this distribution “themselves belong to the structure of domination and subjection.” (13)
In order to break the cycle maintaining this structure, Ranciere proposes some fundamental dislocations that can pave the way for alternatives approaches:
At the heart of this approach is the attempt to uncouple the link between the emancipatory logic of capacity and the critical logic of collective inveiglement. To escape the circle is to start from different presuppositions, assumptions that are
certainly unreasonable from the perspective of our oligarchic societies and the so-called critical logic that is its double. Thus, it would be assumed that the incapable are capable; that there is no hidden secret of the machine that keeps them trapped in their place. It would be assumed that there is no fatal mechanism transforming reality into image; no monstrous beast absorbing all desires and energies into its belly; no lost community to be restored. What there is are simply scenes of dissensus, capable of surfacing in any place at any time. (48)
* * *
In addition to the prospect of sidestepping the stifling presuppositions of modern critical thought that it offers, dissensus can be a very useful organizing concept for formulating a (non-totalitarian) political alternative to the rationalist, individualist approach of liberalism. Chantal Mouffe defines the political as that which engages with the problem of choosing between conflicting alternatives or, “the ever-present possibility of antagonism.” (“Art and Democracy 2) By bringing to the fore “the inescapable moment of decision—in the strong sense of having to decide in an undecidable terrain,” antagonism, or dissensus, reveals the very limit of the rationalist approach. (2) If we are to think a way of being with this limit, of accepting irreconcilable difference in the development of a non-violent, radically egalitarian socio-political theory, we must first consider the forces that present this as an impossibility, and the extreme measures they take to do so.
When protests broke out around Syria in 2011, President Bashar Al Assad was determined to deny the Syrian people the opportunity of developing a form of social organization
in which he was no longer the sovereign leader. Despite the regime’s best efforts, the use of force to quell the popular uprising was and continues to be unsuccessful. Five years into the atrocious civil conflict, the mass displacement and killing of the people by the regime rages on and the “global community” has contributed little to no input in developing and implementing a viable solution. The level of complexity and diversity within and between warring sides has marginalized the non-violent social movement and alienated critical engagement from those who are not immediately affected by the situation. It seems to be that the most tangible element in the unfolding events is the material damage to bodies and space, a reality that goes largely unregistered by the general global audience. Silvered Water, Syria Self Portrait is in part a testimony to the extensive pain and destruction that has replaced ordinary life in Syria, one that lingers at the limit of the representable despite all the difficulty that entails. In response to a question about conflicting responses to the film, producer Orwa Nyrabia stated in an interview,
It’s a multi-level experience in presenting this reality and an experiment to see the democratic aspects of watching, of viewing. Do we make this for everybody, for those who are forced to ask if it’s necessary to see it? Is a film defined by the violent moments in it? (…) And it’s Ossama’s right to try this, this one experiment, this one attempt to answer the question: What is censorship? What is necessary? That question might be a bit conservative, in the sense that it might be the beginning of discussing the legitimacy of censorship. None of us are really adept or experienced in making films during massacres, now are we? (Cohn “Orwa Nyrabia”)
When destruction and sensational violence are ubiquitous, an adequate representation depends on articulating a stance within and not outside of the principle of spectacle. Perhaps then like antagonism in the realm of the political, in the realm of the cultural/artistic, the spectacle is ineradicable.
It becomes clear that with regards to contemporary aesthetic practices ranging from mainstream media to art-house cinema, the differential distribution of suffering is coextensive to the ethics of representation. This can be a very intricate notion to navigate. Despite the proliferation of images, what prevents the victims of war from becoming visible and publicly grievable? It is my suspicion that the answer to this question belongs to a yet undetermined or underdeveloped discourse that can render the process of viewing such images critically intelligible.
Chapter 2: Perceiving the Senseless Community and the Limits of Exposure
Although they belong to a different aesthetic regime than that of documentary cinema, I have discussed examples of participatory art because of their literal engagement with the notion of community. From a Western European standpoint, the events of the twentieth century are thought to have corroded the infrastructure that held society together as a unified, harmonious ensemble. Bishop attributes the popularity of participatory art to the ongoing cultural effort to repair the social bond and to locate or rediscover the lost community. She states:
The social turn in contemporary art can be contextualized by two previous historical moments, both synonymous with political upheaval and movements for social change: the historic avant-garde in Europe circa 1917, and the so-called ‘neo’ avant-garde leading to 1968. The conspicuous resurgence of participatory art in the 1990s leads me to posit the fall of communism in 1989 as a third point of transformation. Triangulated, these three dates form a narrative of the triumph, heroic last stand and collapse of a collectivist vision of society. (Bishop 3)
This is precisely the point from which Jean-Luc Nancy initiates his intricate and extensive interrogation of the political ontology of community. The opening lines of The Inoperative
Community attest to this.
The gravest and most painful testimony of the modern world, the one that possibly involves all other testimonies to which this epoch must answer (…), is the testimony of the dissolution, the dislocation, or the conflagration of
community. Communism, as Sartre said, is “the unsurpassable horizon of our time,” and it is so in many senses—political, ideological, and strategic. (1)
Examining this proclamation of its end, Nancy dwells on how community came to be defined, in the sense of acquiring meaning. He interrogates the absolute certainty of the subject in modern philosophy as one that is formed fully before its inscription in a relation with the collective. Nancy’s philosophy of the subject and the community challenges the Humanist, Immanentist tradition. Much of his critique is beyond the scope of this paper; however, for the purpose of clarity, I will briefly introduce how Nancy does away with the “individual” in favor of the “singular plural being” as the formative basis of community. Ultimately, in analyzing closely the texts of Georges Bataille, Nancy refutes the premise of the broken social bond.
Community at its best can be thought of as the sharing of fate, the fate of being the same in the world. It does not hold an immanent power to shape society. In his extensive essay “Being Singular Plural,” Nancy tracks the discontinuities of selfhood that challenge the idea of subjectivity as an autonomous, open process that grants the individual freedom to decide who he or she would like to be. He does away with the binaries and internal contradictions that structure the ideology of individualism, which comes to define community as a relationship that occurs between distinct interiorities. His findings lead to a conception of community that relies rather on the mutually constitutive relation between self and other. Nancy claims that community has its basis in a more formative dynamics of communication. (Stubblefield 48)
Although the claim that significations only find meaning through communication is not difficult to accept, it may serve to clarify why this is important to Nancy. According to him, the nature of Being is not imbued with meaning; its utterance is the only meaning it can have, the
only way it can be said to have meaning. Being is not a given that can exist without meaning, to which meaning can be added. To consider Being one must also, simultaneously, consider its meaning (however abstract and confusing it may be). Being is what Being is when I think of Being. In this position, Nancy is critiquing the notion of a pure and simple Being whose meaning can be possessed (to have meaning) or considered separately. “Being itself is given to us as meaning.” (Being Singular Plural 2) If the movement of thought (what is given, what comes into thought) is a process of communication with oneself, then Being and meaning depend upon communication. The interdependence of Being, meaning, and communication is further developed to encompass the notion of community, which is nothing more than the circulation (communication) of meaning (Being). (Being Singular Plural 2)
This development is clarified through Nancy’s claim that Being (and meaning) exists only when it is shared. On a more abstract level than that of Butler, whose claim for the shared nature of being I referred to in the introduction, he defends this claim by referring to the notion of presence, which can only be determined or understood when it is divided (shared). “Pure unshared presence – presence to nothing, of nothing, for nothing – is neither present nor absent.” (2) By this logic, the individual, in the sense of being indivisible, is an impossibility. As such, Nancy posits the subject as a singular being rather than an individual. The singular being is defined against and within the plurality of all beings. Moving further towards the community, given that Being and meaning are co-constitutive phenomena, and the circulation of meaning is also the circulation of Being, community is essentially that which comes into being through communication. Communication is the movement that forms “we.”
The notion that meaning is not separate from Being is crucial to understanding why the meaning of that conceptual “we” seems to come into question so often, why it doesn’t hold up
for very long before it has to be adjusted. This is most apparent when there is a loss in our ability to be in harmony and identify with one another according to the meaning that “we” once had. When we have had to ask, who is this “we?” History has dealt with this problem by resorting to separation, by adding to community (and Being) an external meaning, be it nationality, religion, kinship or any other identity category. The Syrian civil war—as an instance of the further breakdown of “we” as nation into smaller, less neat categories—exposes the dangerous fragility of a world-dominating system. When the dissolution of community as nation (for example) is experienced, a sense of loss is inevitable. Reading Bataille, Nancy reveals that what is experienced as a loss is rather the recognition of a lack—an absence. “The excess to which sovereignty is exposed and exposes us is not…in the sense in which the Being of the finite being is less what makes it be than what leaves it abandoned to such an ex-position.” (18) The notion of finitude, of mortality, is something that offers Nancy’s community some material grounding. I will be returning to this in my close analysis of scenes from Silvered Water. For now, it serves to help us do away with the idea of community as something that can be lost, found, or achieved and to attempt to move forward from there.
The truth is that we can suffer from something we lack, but even if we have a paradoxical nostalgia for it, we cannot, except by some aberration, long for the religious and royal edifice of the past. The effort to which this edifice corresponded was nothing but an immense failure, and if it is true that something essential is missing from the world in which it collapsed, then we can only go farther ahead, without imagining even for a moment the possibility of turning back. (Bataille qtd. The Inoperative Community 18)
This passage from Bataille can be understood to imply several things. Nancy suggests the following:
Bataille is without doubt the one who experienced first, or most acutely, the modern experience of community as neither a work to be produced, nor a lost communion, but rather as a space itself, and the spacing of the experience of the outside, of the outside-of-self. The crucial point of this experience was the exigency, reversing all nostalgia and all communal metaphysics of a “clear consciousness” of separation…of the fact that immanence or intimacy cannot, nor are they ever to be, regained. (19)
Accepting that there is no lost community to be restored, that the community is nothing more than what is, it remains increasingly difficult to imagine, to envision, to know or to see being-in-common, let alone map out a corresponding politics. Here lies the importance of space, and what I wish to take away from Nancy in order to bring it toward the practice of art, the practice of articulating meaning as space, of giving form.
Circulation – or eternity – goes in all directions, but it moves only insofar as it goes from one point to another; spacing is its absolute condition. From place to place, and from moment to moment, without any progression or linear path, bit by bit and case by case, essentially accidental, it is singular and plural in its very principle…[We are charged with] the truth of this paradoxical ‘first-person plural’ which makes sense of the world as the spacing and intertwining of so many
worlds (earths, skies, histories) that there is a taking place of meaning, or the crossing-through [passages] of presence. ‘We’ says (and ‘we say’) the unique event whose uniqueness and unity consist in multiplicity. (Being Singular Plural 5)
* * *
“Insofar as that dispute concerns the visual, necessarily interfaced with the other senses, this politics of bringing the embodied subject into presence in space is visual culture.”
– Nicholas Mirzoeff, “Visual Culture” p. 23
Having posited the subject, community, and communication as co-constitutive concepts, the manifestation of Nancy’s ontological reversals remains to be illustrated. In order to carve from its metaphysical basis a political imaginary, the inoperative community must be rendered perceivable to the senses; it must become to a certain extent visible. (Mirzoeff 22) It is possible to approach this seemingly impossible task by returning to the central concern of this thesis, which involves considering the ways in which suffering is presented to us. As such, I will now turn to a reading of the opening scenes of Silvered Water, Syria Self Portrait. Looking closely at the scenes on the level of their construction as well as the process of reception, this section will investigate how the film destabilizes the notion of the individual subject in accordance with Butler’s social theory and Nancy’s philosophy, and the meaning that emerges within the space between spectator, film, context, and author(s). In any particular configuration, these interlocutors can be thought of as subject positions forming a certain regime of the sensible. In other words, the position of the spectator is not predetermined but rather constructed by the film
itself. Spectatorship, as I will argue, is presented as the site of convergence for the distinct participants.
The opening shot of the film starts at a distance and zooms in onto its subject. The camera pulls closer into view a dribbling faucet, exposed to the street as if it belongs outside, surrounded by the rubble walls that once housed a bathroom, or a kitchen, a room in which the faucet would be used. Next, a title card presents the sources of the upcoming images stating: “This film is made up of 1001 images, shot by 1001 Syrian men and women.” The next card reveals a solitary, “and me.” A short pause, a black screen, a breathful voice says in Arabic “I watched her.” Another short pause cues what will be recurring atmospheric vocal music and white text spelling out “Syria” in French and Arabic fades very slowly into view against the black background. The tone is set to tragic. We become the reluctant viewers of a spectacle that has already been watched. Here we observe the first layer of spectatorship, that of the filmmaker Ossama Mohammed, who is narrating his act of watching the scenes he compiled to the secondary viewers, the film’s audience, in this case, me. I will be referring throughout this reading to my act of watching in order to illustrate how exclusive spectatorship is provoked and challenged by the film.
Despite every urge one may have to separate them, the following two, consecutive scenes resemble each other. The first shows cellphone footage of a home birth. The camera documents the cutting of the umbilical chord, the baby lying restless on a towel while it is handled by multiple hands, each larger than his or her tiny body. Next, the baby is held over a bucket and water is being poured over his or her back while he or she lets out a continuous loud, healthy cry. The color of flesh dominates the frame. The second scene is also filmed on a cellphone, this time in portrait mode. The image looks sliced and contained by the wide black margins surrounding it,
the excess of the 16:9 aspect ratio. A young man is helplessly crouched over in a corner, his chin to his knees, his arms forming a continuous loop over his compressed body, his hands hanging off his wrists. He is not disfigured but his body seems contorted, as if he has released control over his muscles but rather than submitting to gravity, his limbs are tense and suspended in action. The young man’s posture strongly resembles the preceding shot of the baby held awkwardly over the bath face down. It appears as a reversal, as if the baby was turned over and is now a grown boy. The next shot shows him standing. His face would be clearly visible if the image were sharper. I still manage to make out his expression; he appears to be completely traumatized. At this point, 1 minute and 48 seconds into the film, I pause to adjust the media player’s resolution but find it already set to a maximum. I am already overwhelmingly sad and wary of what’s to come. My reflection becoming visible to me due to the dimming of the laptop screen on standby, I can hardly bear to look at the tortured and exposed body frozen before me. Having read about the horrors depicted in this film prior to watching may have been the reason for my strong reaction so early on. Perhaps it was the undesired link to the baby’s body that disturbed me. The scene continues to unfold silently as the young man, probably a teenager, raises his frail arms in a gesture of surrender. A subtle cut, made less noticeable by the lack of sound, shows the young man in the same corner kneeling down on the floor repeatedly kissing a soldier’s foot. We see only the soldier’s leg, extended from his body which lies outside the frame, resting a moment on the floor then dismissing the boy with a kick to the face. Cut back to him crouched, he is now involuntarily passive to a brutal beating. His body is stiff and tense and he does not move to protect himself from the incoming kicks. He is a very thin boy but he moves heavily. The violence escalates as we see him standing again, angled away from the camera, one soldier making sure he stays put while another abuses him sexually with a long, white plastic
stick. Alone again after another swift cut, we see his knees slowly bending, his chest and stomach sinking inwards as he crouches back down to the floor, beaten. The color of skin fills the frame. He is back where he started, squatting naked and scared in the corner. The silence is so unsettling that I attempted several times to adjust the volume, hoping to hear something that would diffuse my gaze or allow me to gage the severity of the soldiers’ brutality and of this boy’s pain.
The juxtaposing of the two scenes depicted and described here opens the film with a statement about the primary exposure that characterizes human life. Such a statement entails the recognition that the conditions that mark the possibility of sustaining life from birth onwards are the same as those that make us vulnerable to abuse, exploitation, and humiliation through “unwilled coercion, constraint, physical injury, violence.” (Frames of War 55). “What is revealed is the two poles of the essential alternative inscribed in the condition of vulnerability: wounding and caring. Inasmuch as vulnerable, exposed to the other, the singular body is irremediably open to both responses.” (Cavarero 15) The opening sequence thus frames the film’s narrative within the extreme limits of these two potentials, of what can be done to a body. The spectator might locate herself along the spectrum, and find it difficult to remain outside this all-encompassing frame. Making the generalized condition of precariousness recognizable,
sensible in this way is an especially important act in an age when images are used as weapons of war.
The tacit interpretive scheme that divides worthy from unworthy lives works fundamentally through the senses, differentiating the cries we can hear from those we cannot, the sights we can see from those we cannot, and likewise at the level of touch and smell. War sustains its practices through acting on the senses, crafting them to apprehend the world selectively, deadening affect in response to certain images and sounds, and enlivening affective responses to others. (Frames
of War 52)
Mohammed continues to build his narrative with scenes he did not construct, witness, or film himself. They are scenes he came across, that were presented to his gaze, which he presents back. In the following scenes, some context in provided through title cards. The silence of the torture scene is broken with what sounds like magnified breathing and suspenseful light percussion. The white text tells a story about the city of Dara’a and the events that triggered the revolution. Briefly recounted here, the torture of a young boy who wrote on a wall “the people want to topple the regime” sparked outrage from his family. In response to their demands for his release, the army officer who detained him crudely says: “Forget him, go make yourselves a new one, if you can’t, send your women here, we shall help you.” Atmospheric music returns together with a baby’s cry and the sound of trickling water cuing the title card “and cinema began.” Mohammed equates the birth of the revolution with the birth of cinema, reaffirming the notion
that image and narrative are the vessels of power. Crucially, the politics set up through this particular narrative involves a loud cry against the coercive control of the regime.
An increasingly loud musical note accompanies a long ten seconds of black screen, abruptly ending in a chaotic image of shoulders, backs and fingers moving over the camera lens. A jarring thump brings us to the heart of a demonstration where the loud, infectious chanting of the word freedom in Arabic creates an enormous affective atmosphere that engulfs the viewer. “I don’t know how to film,” says a muffled voice against a black screen, fearing his incapacity. The demonstration continues with several fast cuts and various slogans call for the fall of the regime. The footage is rough and pixelated, the sound diegetic and powerful. The silence soon returns against footage of what is now a sparsely populated street, the image seems subtly warped. This could be due to the resolution, compression, or some sort of file corruption. It could also be that one of the creators, distributors, or sharers slowed it down in the edit. Perhaps it is the effect of a silence that contrasts so greatly with the last scene and distorts the viewer’s visual perception. Whatever the reason, the effect is dizzying. The cellphone camera behaves as the eyes of its operator. What we see is always in motion, never still. The operator walks with his camera and his eyes towards and through a gathering of bodies to discover a dead body on the ground. A young man lies twisted on the concrete, his eyes and mouth open, some blood on his shirt. Waving left and right across the screen, the cameraperson is circling the body. The silence is broken with the sound of fingers typing on a typewriter. Mohammed’s voiceover is crisp and authoritatively poetic in his use of classical Arabic as he says, “the train to Dara’a has departed.” The sharp atmospheric string music also returns. The camera floats jaggedly over the face of another dead man, this time on bloody white sheets in what might be a hospital lobby. He resembles the man on the concrete but his face is covered dried in blood. The camera comes
uncomfortably close to his face, awkwardly framing its features in various fragments. This is the kind of gory image that should come with a caution labeling it violent and unsuitable for children and sensitive viewers. The scene seems to last forever and culminates in a close-up of a gaping hole in the man’s neck. We see the camera operator’s fingers gently pushing away the white sheets to make the wound more visible. His fingers are also guiding our gaze, moving softly along the skin around the wound. I cannot bring myself to see what he is pointing at. I register the images through my body in all sorts of movements. The voiceover is just noise. Mohammed is reciting a story about the train from Dara’a, which he remembers from his childhood reading lessons. The first five minutes of the film conclude with the same fingers that were guiding us towards the wound, now grasping the white sheet and covering the man’s face. It seems he could not be put to rest before the damage done to his body was documented. A title card appears stating “the first martyr.”
* * *
There is, it seems, a face-to-face aspect to horror that cannot be avoided. As though, in the act of its unprecedented destruction, the singularity of each person were acknowledging itself in the singularity of the other or rather knew that what was being destroyed here was precisely the singular. The realm of the eye is paramount, whether as the reciprocity of seeing and being seen or, more specifically, as the redoubling and mirroring of the gaze.
– Adriana Cavarero, Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence p.15)
A prominent aesthetic feature of the above outlined scenes is the visceral portrayal of the human body. As the raw materiality of the body comes to dominate the screen, the viewer loses the critical distance necessary for reflection and the rational understanding that follows. The relationship between revolution, death and community, though difficult to navigate, can help us understand and relate to the above scenes (and more broadly, to the sequence of events in the Syrian uprising.) The liberating, invigorating chants of freedom are contrasted sharply with the subsequent scene’s occupation with a single corpse and its open wounds. Perhaps the effect of this fragmentary association extends to the viewer. Both the person filming and Mohammed have presented and represented this image. This lingering over the image of the “first martyr’s” face forces us (this us includes the spectators and the filmmakers) to remain present to his moment of death.
What, then, calls me into question most radically? Not my relation to myself as finite or as the consciousness of being before death or for death, but my presence for another who absents himself by dying. To remain present in the proximity of
