Democracy as a Way of Seeing (via Photojournalism)

In concluding No Caption Needed, Hariman and Lucaites take issue with the critical tendency--common among academics from various fields--to regard image-driven, visual communication as a threat to the deliberative reasoning processes that are the lifeblood of a thriving democratic public sphere.  In fact, Hariman and Lucaites suggest that "democracy is a [particular] way of seeing" (289).  Looking at the iconic images of photojournalism, democracy as a way of seeing seeks out images that inspire widespread identification--especially images that allow for multiple (often conflicting) patterns for identification.  As the examples of the book show, the iconic images of democracy generate a host of positions from which to make arguments or to feel a range of sentiments.  Viewers may have completely opposing reactions to the photos--but they are all looking or have looked at that photo (e.g., Migrant Mother, Time Square Kiss, The Hindenburg Explosion).  The flexible, disjunctive collectivity pictured by the mass circulation of photojournalism engenders, supports, and embodies the disjunctive collectivity that is the democratic ideal.  And so, as we move to imagine a public sphere for visual practices that would be the electrate equivalent of the Habermas's literate public sphere, we should learn from (and perhaps incorporate) the visual rhetoric/aesthetic developed by photojournalism throughout the twentieth century.

It seems inevitable that the visual public sphere of the twenty-first century will be built and sustained with digital technologies.  Though Hairman and Lucaites readily admit their study is largely restricted to analog images, they do speculate occasionally on the role of digital technologies in fostering visual democracies:

"Digital technologies make images and texts (and sounds) equally fungible.  Thus, the visual public sphere is not uniquely or primarily visual.  One is seeing public address as it always has been articulated, but from beyond the horizon imposed by print technologies.  Public culture is a vast intertext of mixed media.  Each medium can be dominant at any one time, and each offers a perspective on the others capable of both blindness and insight.  The culture itself can only be seen to the extent allowed by the medium one is examining."

AR apps (especially world browsers) are currently extending the digital medium into every taggable/networked location on Earth--especially in highly public/urban spaces such as city streets, museum exhibits, monuments, transportation hubs, etc.  Using an AR app, one could create an appropriation of the Statue of Liberty, not just an appropriation of a photo of the Statue of Liberty.  With this in mind, we can say that relatively familiar digital technologies (e.g., image manipulation programs and photo-sharing websites) increase the speed/rate at which appropriations can be created and circulated, while AR apps also increase the very scope/canvas of visual appropriation beyond photographic images.  Digital appropriation may be the contemporary equivalent of mechanical reproduction.  That is to say, as Hairman and Lucaites point out early in their book, when mechanical reproduction displaced the aura of the work of art it also gave rise to a new kind of aura--the iconic photograph (which gains its aura not by originality/scarcity but by popularity/circulation).  By disrupting the hierarchy of circulation characteristic of twentieth century print media, the global proliferation of digital media (presumably still in its infancy) may displace the iconic aura native to mass photography and give rise to yet another new kind of aura--and further unfoldings of democracy as a way of seeing.

 

AR Writing Scenes

This post is a follow up to a post below called "Scenes of Writing and the Staging of Theory," and my comments here all refer to the demo videos of AR apps in that post.

What I want to to in this post is describe some the more salient aspects of the AR writing scenes pictured in these videos, all the while keeping in mind a few of Derrida's insights on writing and Mitchell's notion of imagetext.

So, here I go with a couple of observations:

1. The surface of inscription, or "the signified face": any surface lends itself to virtual inscription and thereby can -- via AR apps -- come to act as a signified face.  This virtual inscription (digital arche-writing?) occurs through geotagging or through the physical placement of QR codes onto a particular surface (or designing a surface -- most any substance -- to appear/function as a QR code).  With AR apps, all the world's a link and writing leaves no trace (or at least no trace that can be seen by the naked eye).  Each of the AR apps pictured below employ geotagging and not QR codes, presumably because geotagging is much more suited for establishing flexible, global networks of users and information -- QR codes require physical installation/maintenance and can be implemented without passing through and affixing to a Web-based network (hence the writing of QR codes do not always contribute to or reinforce an existing network).  It may be helpful to remind ourselves here that writing, as Derrida claims in Of Grammatology, "designates not only the physical gestures of literal pictographic or ideographic inscription, but also the totality of what makes it possible; and also beyond the signified face, the signifying face itself" (9).


2.  Disjunctive imagetext: as a user, I can select the site of the visual, to which my text will be geotagged, but I cannot control the composition of that visual, for it is a generally a dynamic, public space and it (and the people who occupy it) need not know that it is the place of my text. That is, the location as a writing space bears no sign of the marks I place upon it -- only a signal of the sign.  As such, the image/text dynamics potential to AR apps seem to forecast some strange political ramifications. Mitchell makes it a point to identify the political as he discusses the "older" image-text media:

The image-text relation in film and theatre is not a merely technical question, but a site of conflict, a nexus where political, institutional, and social antagonisms play themselves out in the materiality of representation. (91)

This play of antagonisms would seems to take on an even further performative dimension in the sites of conflict mobilized by popular use of AR apps.  I can caption any particular location with my text or images without imposing upon its space and, therefore, intervene into some people's  experience of that place (i.e., people who have the right app) and remain undetected by other people who occupy that place (i.e., people who don't have the app) -- a stream of writing affects the discourse of a place without it even being perceptible as a writing space.  On the other hand -- and even, because of this -- those who (or even that which) occupies a place has the power (even if unaware of my text) to appropriate, defuse, or otherwise redirect the meaning/reception of my text by virtue of its autonomy from my text.  If the place changes (and likely plays host to many kinds of fluctuations), then my text, which the app positions as a caption to the visual scene, can be caught sleeping, so to speak.  Though they clearly embody a new "conjunction of images and words" like the earlier mixed media genres Mitchell discussed, the imagetext conjunction occurring within AR apps is inevitably disjunctive when we consider the radical dispersion of the visual and the stealth secrecy of the verbal, both of which are ultimately contingent upon and imminent to the technological gestures of the user in motion.