<underfire> Image as Event

[Radhika Subramaniam]

To all Under Fire

Yesterday Palestine.  Today Iraq.  I, like Susan Charlton, 
can’t help but read it as saying:  Tomorrow, it will be 
us.  And what does that warning (hope to) achieve?  To 
follow on Negar’s closing comment, what is Tehran’s 
pre-occupation?

What I can see a glimmer of here is what strikes me 
continually in my New York world and that is the wagging 
finger that governs our daily life now.  That warns and 
threatens and keeps us confused, suspicious, careful and 
obedient.  Surveillance, ID cards,  fingerprinting, 
toothpaste gels – yes, from the video camera in a bank to 
what I use on my teeth – are all part of this fantastical 
construction of fear and control.  I have learnt to press 
my index finger hard at the airport counter knowing my 
prints never show up at the first try.  I no longer rail 
against building regulations that ask Carlos to greet me 
by name while refusing me entry to my office because I 
can’t find my ID in my bag.  For so many living in the 
U.S. there is just the enormous, dare I say, silly, web of 
poking and prodding that transform the everyday – and it 
seems that it is really for this, after all, that havoc is 
being wreaked half way across the world.  For this 
“security” which now serves as a substitute for peace. 
 Can anyone really speak of “peace” anymore – the sort of 
peace whose originary affect is compassion, as Bracha 
Ettinger suggests?  The sort of peace based on reciprocal 
knowledge, even a churlish tolerance.
Of course, there are more violent systems of policing – 
the detentions, renditions, surveillance – that are but a 
step away.  I have often wondered how one sort of terror 
and violence (arbitrary searches) comes to substitute for 
another sort of terror (al-Qaeda) while making invisible 
the experience of that substitution.  Why aren’t we 
horrified?  Why aren’t we terrified?  And I can’t help but 
feel that a component of it lies in these asinine daily 
rituals which confirm our participation in the broad 
network of policing – as the policed – which then allows a 
certain smugness to paper over what could have been that 
horror of what is taking place.

Is it really possible, then, to counter violence and 
terror without fundamentally imaging the very forms that 
are being opposed?   How can one deploy the Abu Ghraib 
image of the hooded man with any certainty anymore, for 
instance?  Do notions of “good intentions”, “context” etc 
matter when in this age of internet promiscuity, it’s no 
longer possible to claim that those borders can be drawn?

And isn’t there a question here for Under Fire as well: 
even if we have no illusions of our remove from the 
apparatus of violence, how do we astutely, craftily 
construct an alternative, a response, an expression of 
outrage that doesn’t partake of the same murky stuff that 
seeps and unsettles zones of fear and terror?

Best, Radhika

Radhika Subramaniam
Director of Cultural Programs
Lower Manhattan Cultural Council