<underfire> Brother's photo, checkpoint borders 3

[Brian Holmes]

François Boucher's post is extremely interesting to me. And he is right: 
the quote from Serge Daney goes to the heart of what is sometimes so 
shocking about the ways that our carefully reasoned system of laws, 
rights, and prerogatives is inscribed in a parallel system of violence - 
and vice versa. This double inscription is an "enigma" because the 
contradictions are so vast that they go beyond personal identities and 
personal responsibilities, receding back into history and exceeding the 
ability of any individual to overcome the predicament. Yet the 
contradictions are ethical: they involve us as personal identities, with 
personal responsibilities. The political imperative to "dampen affects" 
in favor of rational debate then becomes paradoxical. Do we tacitly 
accept the enigmatic character of our position in society, by dampening 
the expression of an affect for which we have no precise and adequate 
reasons? Or do we express that feeling, at the risk of engaging 
ourselves in the murky joust of feelings against feelings, feelings 
against reasons, reasons against feelings? And yes, all this, when it 
comes to the decision of expression, is a matter of "representation."

For some reason, the immediate reaction I had to the copyright sign - 
which, because of certain carefully argued political positions I have 
taken in my life, has a strong emotional valence for me - did not make 
it to the forum. It went exactly like this:

"Ahem, speaking of affect, I agree with Rene Gabri. I wanted to puke 
when I saw the copyright on that photo. The logic of ownership goes all 
the way to the point of the soldiers gun. And it's all legitimate.

So this is yet another way that political affect circulates today.

best, Brian"





francois bucher wrote:
> —René Gabri's post opens up a question that is far reaching. To put it 
> metaphorically: now it’s not the image of an event that counts, it’s the 
> event of an image.  Or, it’s not what happens /in/ the image, it’s what 
> happens /to/ the image.
> 
> — Onto a sequence of stills of the concentration camps, taken from a 
> television network, Godard once wrote his notes: "Was it really 
> indispensable for a national network to print its copyright logo on 
> these poor images of the night?" The last still from the sequence is a 
> close-up of the number stamped on the striped shirt of a prisoner... 
> nothing needs to be added. There is an easy definition here for the 
> technical eye of television: the technical eye is the eye that doesn’t 
> see that logo. It is also the eye that can’t see the cut to commercials. 
> 
> —Serge Daney's phrase (that Brian Holmes will recognize since he 
> translated it some 14 years ago) is to me the most precise way of 
> describing the issue at stake with the "copyright prisoner brother's 
> photo" :  “The movement is no longer in the images, in their 
> metaphorical force or in our capacity to edit them together, it’s in the 
> *enigma of the force that has programmed them* (and here the reference 
> to television—the triumph of programming over production—is unavoidable).” 
> 
> —I would also like to bring up Claire Pentecost's section on "Ownership 
> Society" in her article "Reflections on the Case by the U.S. Justice 
> Department against Steven Kurtz and Robert Ferrell".  She opens up the 
> spectrum of the problem of copyright in a very interesting way. In the 
> last paragraph of that article, Claire writes "Of course it's about the 
> art. It's about representation. The individual cases, the kinds of 
> cases, the facts of the cases, the arguments of the cases, the numbers 
> of cases and the distortions of those numbers, these too are very much 
> matters of representation. The case against the Palestinians, the case 
> against Islam, the case against pacifists, the case against independent 
> science, the case against rural people who don't conceive of their 
> knowledge as property, the case against all people who are in the way of 
> the cannibalistic machine of global capital cannot only be won by force. 
> It has to be fought in the field of representation..."
> 
> François
> 
> On Dec 5, 2006, at 11:09 PM, Rene Gabri wrote:
> 
>> Who should have copyright on this image? Bracha L. Ettinger, his 
>> brother (who is bracha’s brother?), or the (presumed) unidentified 
>> Palestinian male who is subjected to this violence? Who owns this 
>> violence? Who owns up to this violence? Where is the intersection 
>> between our relations of property and this occupation? Even the 
>> violence bestowed upon Palestinians is not their own property? Where 
>> is the violence taking place here, in this scene? What is the role of 
>> this image in a discussion like this? What deliberations were made in 
>> allowing it to remain, to post to the list?
>>
>> I have to say that this session of underfire has for me been the most 
>> staged and symptomatic of “orchestration” as opposed to moderation.
>> I wonder just how many posts have been refused? And what are the 
>> categories and economies of decision making which determine what stays 
>> and what goes?
>>
>> Why did these images remain? What do they communicate? To whom are 
>> they intended? And just what is being represented (because maybe we 
>> should stop speaking of communication for a minute) here?
>>
>> sincerely, with a little less compassion, rene
>>
>> On 12/5/06 11:45 AM, "Bracha L. Ettinger" <brachale at zahav.net.il 
>> <mailto:brachale at zahav.net.il>> wrote:
>>
>>> my emphasis ---> Brother's photo, n.3, 2006 © Bracha L. Ettinger    
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Under Fire  http://underfire.eyebeam.org
>> 16 October - 10 December 2006
>> International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville 
>> all writings copyright individual authors
>> no commercial use without permission
>> to post a message, send an email to:
>> underfire at underfire.eyebeam.org <mailto:underfire at underfire.eyebeam.org>
>> to unsubscribe, send an email to:
>> underfire-leave at underfire.eyebeam.org 
>> <mailto:underfire-leave at underfire.eyebeam.org>
> 
> Local moblile while in NY
> until 30th November:
> 347 768 6076
> 
> François Bucher
> francoisbucher at gmail.com <mailto:francoisbucher at gmail.com>
> Mohrenstrasse 17
> Berlin 10117
> tel 49(0)3020674606
> cel 49(0)15117283792
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Under Fire  http://underfire.eyebeam.org
> 16 October - 10 December 2006
> International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville 
> all writings copyright individual authors
> no commercial use without permission
> to post a message, send an email to:
> underfire at underfire.eyebeam.org
> to unsubscribe, send an email to:
> underfire-leave at underfire.eyebeam.org