hope still fading

As part of my research I’m always on the lookout for Shepard Fairey’s iconic Hope poster image and the numerous re-appropriations, remixes and internet memes it continues to serve. This one, problematic as it is (when was Obama ever a leader, much less a part, of the American Left?), will be added to the ever expanding “hope fading” category.

New Statesman, January 9, 2012.

LIFE.com’s 2011 Photo Blog Awards

Congratulations again to everyone at BagNews Notes for topping the list.

Casing the Colors, or green zone triumphalism?

As David Dayen writes, “The location of the ceremony gives away exactly how this war is ending, and it doesn’t read ‘triumphantly.’” Quoting the NYT:

In a fortified concrete courtyard at the airport in Baghdad (emphasis his),  Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta thanked the more than one million American service members who have served in Iraq for “the remarkable progress” made over the past nine years but acknowledged the severe challenges that face the struggling democracy.

This is what victory looks like in the new imperialism, no grass crowned Caesar triumphantly riding through public streets. What we see here, the muted, understated ceremony from within the heavily fortified barricades is the visualization of the neoliberal restructuring of global geography into green zones and red zones. From Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism:

At first I thought the Green Zone phenomenon was unique to the war in Iraq. Now, after years spent in other disaster zones, I realize that the Green Zone emerges everywhere that the disaster capitalism complex descends, with the same stark partitions between the included and the excluded, the protected and the damned.

There’s a lot going on in this image, and the rest of the set at the link, none of which portray confidence or “victory!” The color guard is out of sync with a single cable running along the ground between them, separating them two by two, faces obscured with one soldier hopelessly out of step with the rest. The soldiers in the background seem out of place, no display of uniformity. Then there is the cluster of cables running through the shot under and out to the other side of what is clearly one stark partition.

Photo: Michael Kamber NYT, caption: A ceremony ending the American military engagement in Iraq. 

UPDATE: Dec. 19, 2011

Looking around at TIME.com’s Lightbox I thought their “Pictures of the Week, December 9 – December 16” speaks even more dramatically to this concept of partition.

Our Eyes Are Still Open

“How does one survive a moral virus?” asks John Lucaites in the title of a recent post. Perhaps the answer is to just keep looking.

an Occupy Fish Fry

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker gave a speech at Chicago’s Union League Club on November 3, 2011. Stand Up Chicago! and the Chicago Teachers Union showed up, mic checked and occupied.

Reminded me of the song “Fat Cats and Bigga Fish” by The Coup, particularly the wonderfully subversive scene starting at 2:48 in the video below.

Occupy Bat Signal

Visual Securitization and the Occupy Movement

Randy L. Rasmussen, The Oregonian

A colleague of mine works at the margins of an International Relations research agenda called securitization theory as articulated by Ole Weaver at the University of Copenhagen’s Center for Advanced Security Theory.

Ole Weaver, who heads the program, is famous in IR circles for his ideas about security as a speech act. In other words, security threats are created through their enunciation, through acts of speech, by naming them. Weaver:

What then is security? With the help of language theory, we can regard “security” as a speech act . In this usage, security is not of interest as a sign that refers to something more real; the utterance itself is the act. By saying it, something is done (as in betting, giving a promise, naming a ship). By uttering ”security,” a state-representative moves a particular development into a specific area, and thereby claims a special right to use whatever means are necessary to block it.

This is a field in which I have no particular experience so I hope I’m not misrepresenting Weaver’s theory here in my oversimplifications. But as an active citizen and someone who spends a lot of time looking at public images I’ve certainly noticed, for quite some time, the growing visualization of state security theater alongside the expanding domestic police state and the policification of the military.  Weaver again:

What really makes something a security problem? …security problems are developments that threaten the sovereignty or independence of a state in a particularly rapid or dramatic fashion, and deprive it of the capacity to manage by itself. This, in turn, undercuts the political order. Such a threat must therefore be met with the mobilization of the maximum effort.

The problem for democratic activists and citizens more broadly in relation to #Occupy is that security discourses have increasingly come to include ever greater aspects of social life (environmental, welfare, immigration, refugees, not too mention the g.w.o.t.) above and beyond the traditional frame of “threat-defense” between and among nation states. Of course, the American State has a long and colorful history of violent suppression of protest movements. It’s certainly nothing new for the State to see social movements as “threatening  the sovereignty or independence of a state”, “depriving it of the capacity to manage by itself” and thus ultimately undermining the political order.

That the State protects Capital is also not new. But with Capital so completely dominant in virtually every aspect of public (and private) life in America, with a State police apparatus so heavily militarized within a framework that encompasses virtually every aspect of social life a potential threat, it shouldn’t be surprising we’re witnessing such heavy handed suppression of what has up until now  posed no real material threat to the political order. Perhaps we might think about these police actions then under the rubric of preemptive warfare as #Occupy might pose a potential threat at some future point. Glenn Greenwald puts it more bluntly:

The reason the U.S. has para-militarized its police forces is precisely to control this type of domestic unrest, and it’s simply impossible to imagine its not being deployed in full against a growing protest movement aimed at grossly and corruptly unequal resource distribution.

Greenwald goes on to point out that “most of this militarization has been justified by invoking Scary Foreign Threats — primarily the Terrorist — but its prime purpose is domestic.” How then does the State invoke Scary Domestic Threats?

The image above was taken by photographer Randy L. Rasmussen for The Oregonian in Portland during the N17 national day of actions. I received it via a retweet on Twitter as have thousands of others. It represents a growing archive of iconic images of State violence circulating among activists and supporters. I’m going to collect them here, in one place, as I and many others read them viscerally as terrifying evidence of State oppression. In this use, they are pro-movement propoganda pieces much like citizen captured viral video, protest signs and activist artwork. But I also believe it’s important to start thinking about these images as visual speech acts, particularly from the perspective of the State naming (visualizing) security threats.

Now obviously, not every image of police-citizen conflict captured by photojournalists are selected to serve the state or narrate securitization. And each individual will view and interpret these images subjectively. That is to say, even an image “intended” to be read a certain way by the sender can be interpreted quite differently by the viewer. While the image above may motivate many to action, it quite well may call many more to inaction through fear, while others, however unfortunate, may see a justifiable police response to disorder. But it’s also obvious, to anyone willing to look, that the corporate media does actively participate in visualizing “us” within post 9/11 security framing while simultaneously depicting the police state as an overwhelming and all powerful force.

Here’s the entire collection of N17 photojournalism at the Oregonian.

Update: There’s a lively and relevant discussion at Naked Capitalism under the title, Are You Happy That Your Tax Dollars are Going to Crush #OWS and Other Occupations? Yves Smith:

…The number of police involved is stunning, something that has not been adequately conveyed in print media reports. This for a group of maybe 2000 people at 1 AM? There were clearly other considerations at work besides simply clearing the park. A big one, as we have stressed, was keeping the media and anyone with a camera well away from any police manhandling. Another is the “resistance is futile” message, that those who oppose authority will lose when it is roused to show force.

If you accept this, and I do, then the police don’t want us to actually see the violence  they commit, but rather  visualize its consequences.

Occupy History: Ressurrection City

Tree House: scene 1

Fishing Cottage

A fishing cottage behind our colony, just on the other side of the pond.