June 4th, 2018
T H E D A N G E R O F B E I N G W H I T E
In [hi]stories there is always a moment that seems everything is about to turn violent, but it never ends up being so. It never transcends or at least it doesn't seem to come to fruition. It seems that there are events that never become events. In her text Translating Geontologies, the historian Shela Sheikh picks up the definition that Elizabeth A. Povinelli makes about the concept of “quasi-event”. Sheikh introduces the idea that societies misunderstand an event as a social construction that implies an unprecedented rupture. According to Povinelli, each event is the result of a historical accumulation of "quasi-events" which in turn – contrary to an outrageous rupture – do not invoke our political and ethical commitment due to the intangibility of their short-term impact. For the author, the status of an event is achieved by its repercussion in the mass media and not by its importance in specific or local contexts. The "quasi-events" are problematic for societies mainly because they are not understood as the anticipation of. They are difficult to perceive without the prudent distance and become "patterns of dispossession without incident (...) they are what Rob Nixon calls slow violence, many times not even perceived as violence"[1]. Believe that an event appears spontaneously at a certain moment in history shows our inability to recognize the footprint, to follow the trail, to find the mark.
There is a violence that does not seem like violence; it goes at a speed that deceives our perception and yet we always contemplate its images. We always have the images. Despite the overexposure, the exacerbation of the high definition idea and the assessment of one or other in almost notarial terms, the image continues to belong to the order of the footprint, the trail, the mark [2]. The image is still a witness. In particular, the photographic image retains the index sign that allows it to overcome the strictly visual. It becomes an index to exist in opposition to the symbol and the icon: it maintains an amorphous relationship with its referent over time [3]. For Sanders, photography – or better, the photographic – makes more sense when it is understood from the logic of the footprint in the sand or the smoke of a campfire than when it is done from the simple relationship between the subject of the image and the object of the image. The photographic is in that testimony that let us know that the fire existed even though the image does not show it; in being able to follow the trail of someone who has already passed. It is under this gaze, under the idea that the index allows us to recognize the object even when it does not resemble the object itself, that "The Danger of Being White" makes use of the image.
Beyond the possibility of finding the anticipation of an event on it, we can use the idea of image -in its singularity and in its accumulation- as a quasi-event itself. It is the image, with its presence and its absence, slow violence.
( I )
In the act [to] archive, there is embedded the need to understand, to order, to accommodate and to be able to explain the very object that is preserved. To what reasons does the personal archive respond beyond that eternally stored potentiality to find a use that transcends the private and innocuous pleasure that the owner finds in preserving images? How could the images contained there explain those that are not? How do they relate to the rest of the world? How can they, if you like, explain a reality? The archive is defined by what is omitted. In an image, what is hidden is decisive. At the end of the day, it is about finding a possible genealogy, intertwining stories and pointing out relationships that allow those images -mobile or static- to have a meaning beyond the simple conservation and an antipathetic contemplation.
The exercise of critical imagination implies the challenge of official reason, to that which explains the event in the most convenient way for the one who featuring it. Narratives are never innocent nor neutral. They are never fair. Just as the absence of one characteristic defines the group, privilege and power brings with it the oppression of who does not belong and, to a large extent, that differentiation is based on an official discourse protected by a moral and a system of values created for the own benefit. With the positioning of the enlightening spirit as the axis and guide of Western development, the self-validation of those who concentrate power has occurred from all the spectrum of what constitute a modern society: Racism, for example, has been given meaning from divine designs, It has been scientifically justified, it has been fostered through the propagation of a culture that favors it and public policies have been created to perpetuate and sustain it legally. White heterosexual male has been the unit with which we measure the world to decide who fit and who do not. Xenophobia, femicides, fear of Muslims, aporophobia and homophobia, among thousands more, respond to the same model.
It is inside the gap of this extension of colonial policies, of policies that promote slow violence over time, where art often comes to function as neoliberal propaganda for western intellectual ideals.
( II )
A TV commercial, aired in prime time: several images try –without success- to show a diverse and plural Colombia, “with future” as stated at the beginning of this commercial. A voice over is accompanied by instrumental music as slow-motion images of blacksmiths and apprentice musicians pass by. The discourse points out that society – as an idea – is not born spontaneously but is the result of the practice of certain traditional values. The tone and rhythm of the voice suggest that those ideals have been upset. There are visual equivalents that describe everyday situations in which these abstract values/ emotions become concrete: Love is a man bringing roses to a woman, respect is opening the car door for another one and work is a group carrying cement from one side to the other. After two or three more representations of fundamental concepts for what they have called a healthy development of a society, an idea, and I quote, include us all, the video closes with the text "Duque for president."
Personally, when I watched this kind of political products, I have to repeat to myself that it is necessary not to give into the bewilderment but to realize the relationship between the visual and the discursive, between what is shown and the ideas that support it: What type of image can show an Afro-Colombian as the fundamental axis of a governmental plan? Which one describes an indigenous community as the main voice of the new environmental utilitarianism? How is the farmer represented as the beneficiary of an agrarian policy? The lesbian? The AIDS patient? The "us all" excludes many. In one way or another, these attempts speak more of the one that produces the image than of the one who tries to represent, which is at least perverse. What is believed to be own its strengthened by what is shown to be alien.
Having an economic system that assist them and a political one that defend them, a small sector prioritizes the ideas, words and emotions that determine the social behaviors that guarantee the continuity of their privileges. God, country, family, tradition and property are concepts so assumed, so unquestionable, so revered, so close to power and so abstractly generalized that they seem to escape the domain of the personal. This concepts shape the collective. In this country of recalcitrant and basic rights-wing discourses, the quasi-events and index signs determine the ruptures that define who we are, but more importantly, define what the other cannot be.
[1] SHEIKH, Shela. Translating Geontologies. The Avery Review. http://averyreview.com/issues/21/translating-geontologies.
[2] DUBOIS, Phillippe. El acto fotográfico: De la representación a la recepción. Paidós, 1986, p. 56
[3] SANDERS, Charles. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Pierce, Volume I and II: Principles of philosophy and elements of logic. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980.