Some thoughts on photography, and its connections to social conditions and tort law.

Tort law springs from the Industrial Revolution: factory work, and the unsafe conditions that drove techno-industrialist “progress.” Faster & cheaper meant (means) risking lives. What an arm or leg is “worth” can change whether it is in the interest of profit to improve working conditions. "Worth" changes with the race of the injured body.

This set of social conditions fed photographers like Riis. His images simultaneously represent generalized spectacle and focused humanitarian agenda. The flashbulb that made his work possible was a way of making the Hollywood “fill” portable, bringing it to dark hallways with no electric light at all. There is then a fake-ness to these photos, even the most genuine photos may have been “staged” with a flash.

We are faced with a twofold photographic dilemma. If we valorize the subject, we risk doing so only conditionally (A Few Good Men), or producing a justification for doing nothing. If we show the pathos & wretched conditions of the subject, we risk sensationalizing the subject and reinforcing stereotypes. And either representation requires the Hollywood “three-point system.”

Camera technology lends its light most unproblematically to the middle-class subject (as it was designed to do) and the banal situations of family portraits, vacation photos (themselves covertly disturbing creations, sun-shining pictures of resort hotels in countries where the average citizen is below the poverty line) &c. Is it perhaps not enough to simply shine the halo-effect on the black actor? It seems like we must completely reappropriate photography itself if we are going to use it “against race.”

The Parasitic Nature of the Black Panthers Self Representation

I found the notion of media framing as discussed in Rhodes “Media and Self-Representation” very interesting . That in order to understand the Black panthers as a cohesive sociopolitical group within the already established social order, their public image had to be forced into dominant categories.

Pre-established notions of blackness and revolutionary factions (communist fears) made the Black Panthers violent, irresponsible, irrational, anti-Americans. What’s interesting is the way the BP’s method of self representation was implicated in this characterization. The fact that they were armed was a powerful symbolic determinant: for the BPs it was meant to empower through the possibility of defense, for medias and certain white it meant the deep fear of race retribution. The Black Panthers need to re-appropriate white conceptions of black youth and political radicalism forced them to sacrifice media sympathy, and ultimately implicate themselves in their stereotyping.

This is demonstrated in Rhode’s discussion of the Black Panthers construction of black masculinity. The Black Panthers most attractive elements was creating an accessible prescriptive identity of black hyper-masculinity: uniform, gun, rhetoric, and place of leadership. This construction also meant the group promoted established prejudices of homophobia and sexism in order to situate their ‘self-made’ identity within the white patriarchy, as if reiterating dominant constructions would allow black masculinity to subsist beside white masculinity. This move speaks to the way in which the dominant ideology and oppression that structure us ultimately structure our resistance, which allows patterns of discrimination to repeat themselves and persist. Much of the BP’s self-representation engaged white racism not in a resistive way but in a parasitic way, feeding off and depending on white’s fears and constructed stereotypes for the groups coherent meaning, indicating that the neither the group nor their political aims would ever evolve past these.

The Question of the Color Line

While it is worthwhile to focus on the political, epistemological implications of the Black Panther's gun usage, I think it would be more productive to analyze the reception the party received from the media/pop culture/political arena because of their tactics and agenda. The Black Panthers' first introduction, facilitated and agitated by the media, was a quintessential moment that defined the party's national and public image as a group of menacing, radical, and hyperviolent Blacks with guns. The Black Panther's power inversion and the endless debates about the ethics of this inversion is something I would like to explore further:

"By framing the Panthers as extremists in the vein of the Ku Klux Klan, the news media demonstrated an inability ... to distinguish between the donning of a white hood and the wearing of a black beret as symbolic practices.... This framing revealed the raw fear the Panthers inspired; [many] editorials assumed the Black Panthers sought to terrorize whites in the same way the Klan terrorized blacks..." (Rhodes, p. 71).

I would like to go deeper into the issue of the ethics of liberation. Is it not possible at all that the party could come to be defined on their own terms? Or will they fall into the trap of being perpetually compared to the KKK? They wielded agentive guns with metaphorical ideological violence and attempted to subvert a strictly hierarchical system of white dominance, and this subversion whether it was intentional or not and whether it was achieved is debatable. Looking to the past and making connections to the present, I found that this comparison was quite ludicrous, spelling out how whiteness works in America. Whites weren’t being systematically killed, and when whites incited the systematical mass murder of Blacks, in the form of southern mobs who led thousands of lynchings, their actions were not criticized by the public.

This leads us to the need for an understanding of the hegemony of whites in America. So, why was it that the Black usurpation of this position of violence and ideological warfare was so stigmatized? In America, mainstream and public spectatorship has become extremely racialized. The extent of the racialization of power is exemplified by whites’ monopolization of the means of discourse and their occupying of the privileged position as an unmarked category. Puncturing this white hegemony, the Black Panthers were able to achieve this through their collective action. Through the agency of guns, appeal to the mass and geographical ubiquity, the Black Panthers were the nexus of the Black radical tradition of that time.

No Such Thing As Bad Press

I am very interested in examining the media coverage of race relations in the 1960’s as written about by Jane Rhodes in the selections from Framing the Black Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of a Black Power Icon. It seems to me that the example of “ the press customarily framed stories about the civil rights movement within binary oppositions that reproduced the standard values of American journalism: good versus evil, justice versus lawlessness, and North versus South” (p. 64) and Life Magazine’s series “fuel[ing] national anxieties about black protest and establish[ing]… new frames for media discourse” (p. 65) illustrates one major complexity about joining journalism and conflict.

In the first case, journalism (both in the 1960’s and today) used such tactics as “fuel[ing] national anxieties” (p. 65) in order to sell their stories. Race conflicts in the 1960’s and various conflicts today do something for this technology by providing them with information to make a popular story. However, on the other hand, technology does something for race as illustrated when the Oakland Tribune attacked the Black Panthers declaring that they “‘pretend they’re just as grown up and honorable as the man who wears a badge and is paid to carry a gun to preserve law and order’” (p. 74) illustrates their negative attitude towards the press, while at the same time getting the name of the Black Panthers out in the public sphere, blowing it up so that it is a topic that everyone needs to know about. To take this point further, in their attack they actually end up getting the Black Panther message out there by illustrating that they pretend to wear the badge partially because the Oakland police force makes it very hard for them, as Black men, to join the ranks.

temporalities & difference

How do Keeling's visual technologies of difference grapple with enframing and poesis? Could the initial cinematic appearance of the BPP which" short-circuited a sensory-motor schema habituated to recognize the black according to a colonialist, racist common sense" (Keeling 74) be considered a moment of a poesis, which later/retroactively loses its surprise and serves as a masculinized standing reserve? If so, what does this do in terms of tethering race, technology, temporality? Thus far we've encountered a few instances of race and technology as inextricably linked: racism and classifications via biopower (with categories both visible and otherwise), questions of screens/visuality/representation, and processes of commodification. Are there consistent temporal models at work across these observations that inform the practices of difference we've addressed?

In general, I could benefit from an exploration of the conceptualizations of time that Keeling invokes with Bergson/Deleuze/Fanon.

PS: I really kept expecting the Keeling to turn toward the Lacanian mirror stage, though was okay when it didn't, as there are plenty of cans of worms already opened

Using vs. rejecting racial identity

A tension kept appearing throughout the readings and film: that between resisting and utilizing one's identity for political purposes. This tension is perhaps best exemplified in Richard Lentz quote about Time magazines attitude toward the BPP: "America was to be set right, not torn asunder" (78). This demonstrates the conflict between readjusting the current ways of thinking about race and overthrowing them. Would setting America "right" use definitions of right and wrong that exist within a racist ideology?

The Black Panther Party embraced whites' stereotypes about black men in order to psychologically intimidate them. I found Rhodes' criticism of the way the BPP was portrayed as threatening curious, considering that this threat was exactly their goal. During the Black Panthers' protest in the Capitol Building, Newton bemoaned that "the papers are going to call us thugs and hoodlums" (Newton qtd in Rhodes 70). Yet he and the other leaders knowingly used the image of the incorrigibly violent and lustful black male, reinforcing the very beliefs about race and gender (masculinity and phallic imagery of guns were also a large part of their campaign and its exclusionary aspects) that were keeping them down. I found this contradictory, but then I thought about how, to a certain extent, everybody plays a role that preceded and was assigned to them. For example, in Keeling's reading of Fanon, Fanon wants to reject the black pride movement that he finds to be essentializing blackness, but he also wants to create a black subjectivity. Couldn't this also become a universalizing category? Keeling says that "neither 'the Black' nor 'the White' can be or exist unproblematically" (28) — so does this bring us back to Gilroy? Or does being problematic also open up possibilities for exposure as such, or for strategy, or for boundary-pushing? If racial identity is inextricably linked to an oppressive hierarchy, is there any use in trying to escape it, or is it better to make do with this identity the way the BPP and cultural nationalists did? Where does one draw the line between owning one's racial identity and acknowledging it as part of a racist system? Is it possible to use one's own race without being used by it?

Any Publicity is Good Publicity

The Black Panther Party (BPP) was an icon for counterculture in the 1960s. The group's image was constantly handled by the media; filtered through several scopes of interpretation. Considering the provocative rhetoric and militanistic qualities of the group, there was a no clear line betwee the image of "Negroes 'resorting to violence'" and "...Negroes defending themselves" (Rhodes 59). Unfortunately for BPP, during this time television was a suffering business and the industries had to focus on gaining an audience and advertising revenue. Race became televisions commodity; a tool for the success in the media. While BPP would be able to transmit ideas about race through public venues, it also meant the commodification of the black power movement and race itself. BPP gained coverage, although soon became part of the development of a racial identity that the media would continue to circulate.

The racial identity circulates, and is then recognized by its viewers as the representing identity of the black power movement, and ultimately black people in general. The media generated a racial identity, mass produced it and distributed it - further legitimizing race as a technology as it becomes integrated into our broadcast. The BPP was then caught in a dependent relationship with the media, as they thought it would give them the voice they needed to avoid sever punishment from government forces. On the other hand, the movement ultimately was a commodity, and was only worth as much as its controversy. BPP had an image, but unfortunately the media-generated identity was marketed as the racially other, violent and something to fear.

Nobody Commodified Breakfast

Keeling discusses ‘blacks with guns’ and how it changed common senses of blackness while reaffirming common senses of masculinity, and points to the increasing commodification of blackness and ‘blacks with guns’ particularly, but I think it would be a mistake to let this be the only legacy of the Black Panthers or to say that the “image became the movement.” In “Power!” Huey Newton expresses regret? frustration? that ‘blacks with guns’ was what got picked up by people starting BPP chapters nationally, and not the “more important” social programs of the Panthers, but I think we can at least partially attribute to the BPP a change in common senses around the role of police in the community and the community in policing. There are still groups like Copwatch (members of which carry video cameras to document police, rather than guns...) and Anti-Racist Action (which among many other things sometimes holds house demos at cop’s houses to hold them accountable for instances of brutality or murder).
Keeling posits that images that interrupt the sense-motor flow and cause ‘thinking’ to take place can make a multiplicity of changes to common senses; that the cinematic will mobilize some to further the interests of the dominant hegemonic power structure. We see that ‘blacks with guns’ is now completely embedded in our hegemonic common senses, and we see that nobody seems to have commodified breakfast programs, while it was the threat to U.S. sovereignty embodied partially by the breakfast programs the provoked the response of Cointelpro and the eventual destruction of the BPP at their hands (Keeling, 78 - also for a good documentary about the rise of the bloods and the crips in the void left after FBI’s destruction of the BPP - http://www.worldstarhiphop.com/videos/video.php?v=wshhdKqG9531Bj0SaJkU ).
The question: what does the legacy of the BPP teach us in regard to commodification (as people hypothetically trying to overturn a racist order)? Many anarchists/anti-capitalists marching or rioting nowadays will tell journalists in no uncertain terms to fuck off. Does allowing oneself to be ‘captured’ as an image still inevitably entail being taken up and repeated in a particular way to reinforce hegemonic commonsense with our new proliferation of ‘user-created media’?

The cinematic and black nationalism

I wonder if being so cinematic, in its tie to spectacle, had a double effect of making the Black Panther Party highly visible and a political player as well as also limiting the the social effect of the BPP due to the bounding effects film/television has.

Has the cinematic aspect of the construction of Black Nationalism an the BPP made both a overwhelming utopia to be taken in from the safety of a spectator decision?

Is the vision of BPP akin to a narrativized fiction isolated and not representative of the real world?

will the televisual "black" forever only "reveal time's differentiation into presents that pass and pasts that are preserved" (Fanon qtd. in Keeling 71). Could the BPP only conjure up past images and was this a limiting factor in their political success

Race as Technology, through media

In “Becoming Media Subjects”, Rhodes writes “The Times found the Panthers irresistibly primitive and exotic, and the daring of Eldridge Cleaver and the charisma of Huey Newton gradually seduced writers for the paper. What we see are the nuances of racial ideology at work.”(89) This is a good example of one of the things we're looking for in this class: race being used as a technology. As Rhodes suggests, a large part of what made the Black Panthers so successful was their creation of an image for themselves that was able to draw attention - negative as well as positive, but attention nonetheless. They employed the existing stereotypes of the black male, rendered them theatrically, and used this to their benefit.

In this vein, media theorist Marshall McLuhan writes in his essay 'American Advertising', with respect to the repetition and blatancy of radio commercials, “...irritation has great 'attention-getting power' and... those irritated in this respect are reliable customers.” While not “irritation” per se, the Panthers's calculated generation of spectacle resulted in a flurry of media coverage that could be said to have similar success, through saturation of a potent image. In order to make their local message a global message, the Panthers required the help of news media to extend their reach. However, informative or impassioned messages often get lost in amidst noise, and are less valuable in this regard than constructing highly noticeable messages, when mass media is concerned. The Black Panthers took a route that many American advertisers would later take: transform the product or message into an (easily communicable) icon, and work to proliferate that as a figurehead.

Here, the ability to use race as a technology to achieve the end of popular understanding was only because of the technology of mass media itself. However, despite this positive aspect, how have the same media worked at the cross purpose? And would similar tactics work today, given the changes that have taken place in how mass media is consumed and created?

Spectacle: Subjectivity and empowerment.

To me, there seems to be much in parallel between Jane Rhode's discussion of Black Panthers movement and previous class discussion on spectacle of lynching, in that both methods bestow power to the one who seeks to be looked at.

Both Black Panthers and white lynchers used violence and offense as a tool to shape group identity and garner public attention. Towards the end of chapter 4, Rhodes explains how Black Panthers used violent and provocative symbols to manifest their power. Use of weapon is the prominent example of those symbols. Black Panthers, as did postbellum whites by lynching, made themselves as the subject of spectacle by employing violence. This use of violence, symbolized by weapons, not only "represented power and the ability to seize control over one's destiny," but also "… [incited] terror in the white populace" and in turn located the group to the focus of nation-wide media attention (106).

Black Panthers' attempt, however, demonstrates limit of spectacle as a political tactic. By rendering themselves as spectacle, subject to be seen, Black Panthers were able to expose themselves to the wider public beyond Bay Area. However, just like Foucauldian sovereign could not keep the governed from sympathizing with the one being tortured, Black Panthers could not control how viewers' understand and interpret the spectacle. And especially in the racially bifurcated world, the world of "us" versus "them," Black Panthers had no control over white media portrayal of the movement. Excessive violence not only incited fear, but also resulted in contempt against such fearful violence among the white public sphere.

The movement as representation

According to Rhodes, the Black Panthers spent a significant portion of their efforts on creating a culture, a collective subjectivity of their own, and disseminating their beliefs to the world through media representation and publicity. Among the efforts including carefully thought out speeches, deliberate terminologies such as calling the police “pigs,” creation of a ‘revolutionary culture’ and the image of a black panther as their logo, their choice of presenting themselves in uniforms of blue shirts, black pants, black leather jackets, black berets and opening displaying loaded shotguns strikes me particularly. It is striking to me because of its intentionally high level of theatricality, to the extent that an editorial derided them as “children acting out their fantasies in a world of make-believe” (73). Such theatricality, if not indeed a result of childish acts, should be treated more seriously as a deliberate strategy of the movement – the powerful image of the paramilitary attire and the shotguns, through its effects dissimilated and augmented by media representations, become a fundamental aspect of the movement itself. When we find the image hardly distinguishable from our conception of the Black Panthers, the image becomes no longer an expression or representation of the movement but rather a fundamental and central piece of the movement – the representation becomes the movement itself. For some reason I’m disturbed by Emory Douglas’s comment: ‘like being in a movement you’d seen on TV and now you could participate and share in that movement… to become part of that brought a sense of pride’ (68). What happens when a political movement becomes conceived in terms of TV representation? And what does it mean to desire to be part of that representation?

remaking the black image

Rhodes explains the necessity of the Black Panthers' alternative news source as a "weekly act of resistance against the corporation and homogenization of mainstream media, which generally demonized the Panthers as a threat to national order" (103). If the Black Panthers were at war with dominant symbolic culture and its representations of blackness, did their employment/manipulation of media visibility effectively produce a shift in the meaning of blackness? 

If, as Fanon suggests, blackness is hinged to its historicity--or, its colonially constructed meanings from the past, is it possible to remove the black image from its past, its negative connotations? Furthermore, if even positive images of blackness do not erase the problems of visual representation, can negative or stereotypical images be used as a method of resistance to white dominance? 

The Black Panthers' use of hypermasculine black images worked to provoke white fears, but, as Keeling argues, it also functioned to confound whites' ability to recognize the now unfamiliar black image. Blackness became a threat--not only to white dominance--but to symbolic meaning. It revealed that the previous connotations of blackness were inadequate to understand these new images of black men sporting guns. Did the Panthers succeed then in seizing and transforming the meaning of black identity and visibility by overcoming black 'historicity' and 'liberating the black man from himself,' as Fanon describes? 

Is the Black Panther vision--one of class-based politics, overturning of white hegemony, community service, and rhetoric-propaganda--an extension of Fanon's conception of the freedom gained from eschewing the past? How would Fanon's vision negotiate the masculinist-heterosexist-homophobic ideology embedded within  Black Panthers' "resistive" and "radical" agenda? 

Affectivity, and Body/Population

Keeling writes of affectivity as the moment when the awareness of surfaces plunges into the awareness of a sub-surface. The moment when an image makes the viewer react is the moment they are aware of themselves as an individual. So, when images of the BPP roused stirring senses of being “one of them” for black Americans or being called back to join in (as Angela Davis remembers having experienced), is actually also the most individualizing moment. How does the role of affect being essentially one of identifying yourself in turn affect what agentive role can subsequently occur?

I’ve also been noting the frequent and varied use of statistics in our readings. Stats are used to reveal surprising truths about populations that aren’t necessarily visible in lived experience (example: Stokes’ opponent learns of his certain defeat when he sees the statistical breakdown of the precincts yet to be counted, despite being surrounded by apparent success). I’m struck by the similarity between population statistics and DNA definitions of race—both use “objective” and “scientific” means to reveal the hidden truths about the makeup of populations and bodies. How are both these technological processes indicative of a similar tendency to make both bodies and populations both exist simultaneously as body and population? Another way to put this, (keeping in mind Foucault’s concept of biopower and Heidegger as well)—how does technology as a mode of revealing force bodies to exist as populations and populations to exist as bodies?

The New Armaments

It strikes me that even as the Panthers shouted that “A Gun is Power,” they were aware that media technology was as much or more a part of their war against government aggression than projectile weaponry. The “black colony” that was declaring its rights to life, liberty, and self-direction in the Panthers’ party platform could not do so with guns alone: a constant, international, public-opinion-changing media assault was the only way that their demands could be forced on the government.

The presence of the media could enflame already tense situations (Rhodes, 71). Think of May ’68 in France, where the experienced their actions in real-time through the radio: “making history” can destabilize. But the news also protected the Panthers from police attacks: “Being in the news kept us from getting killed” (115). Or alternatively, media technologies could be firmly in the arsenal of the police forces. In BCNS Vol II, No 1. 1968, on page 2, in “Arm Ourselves or Harm Ourselves,” the entry “8 T.V. taping recorders” appears in a list of technologies acquired by the Newark PD, alongside shotguns, rifles, riot shields, PA systems, and vans. In the entry above, a helicopter, presumably armed with both guns and cameras, surveils the Cleveland ghetto.

On page 5 of the same paper, the footer screams “GUNS BABY GUNS” and sprouts the curiously multi-valenced subtitle, “The Spirit of the People is Greater Than The Man’s Technology.” Whose technology? What technology? Where did Black Panther Power lie between guns, radios, typewriters?

IBM does it again

Saw this, thought of you guys.

The Use of Technology under Capitalism

For Nazis, the IBM technology was a tool for their racist project. For the census, the technology for the census changed and shifted racist ideology. Is technology going to dictate us or is it going to serve us? Is there a hidden essence to technology that can be revealed, or is technology simply a tool that humans manipulate? If there is an internal essence, is it dangerous or freeing? Heidegger p. 307 "when we once open ourselves expressly to the essence of technology we find ourselves unexpectedly taken into a freeing claim." But Heidegger says we remain unfree and chained to technology (p 287).

If that's the case, then what exactly is the role of technologies in social processes? Does it determine what plays out, or is it simply a tool of pre-existing social interests? What is the synergy between racial ideologies/practices and technology? Nobles seems to think the census technology actually shaped racial thinking.

What about when capitalist interests are involved in promoting technology? Can capitalism really defend its claims to be morally neutral and colorblind, even when its products are used in such extreme ways, as by the Nazis? What about the ways capitalism is used to perpetuate a racist, but also colorblind ethos in marketing and consumerism? In this case, IBM and Watson are implicated as such during the Holocaust. Does capitalism need to take responsibility for supporting racism? How would that work?

Technology's Ethics

Heidegger makes the point that technology is a mode of revealing, as are aesthetics, politics, religions, culture etc. Yet it holds a monopoly over truth (the non-fallibility of the scientific process) and operates in a way that excludes all other modes of reveal. He states that “technology is not equivalent to the essence of technology.... everywhere we remain un free and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it" (287). Technology in its essence is a mode of reveal, a way for man to access truth. This point speaks to the collective tendency to regard technology as neutral, empirical, objective, (its essence) which negates its function as a man made and man used tool, and consequently something susceptible to human failings and errs. This speaks to a disparity between man’s use of ‘modern’ technology and technology’s essence.

But Blacks essay made me question this notion of an empirical essential technology. Is there an inherent morality to technology, separate from the moral leanings of the humans who use it? Does technology as technology have ethical truths?

I’ve also been thinking about modern technology as an “enabling vulnerability”.

Whose territory is technology/race?

Heidegger introduces "The Question Concerning Technology" by posing the problem of who has access to knowledge about technology in which cases, and which fields should be considered a valuable source of information about technology. There are some aspects of the study of technology, he argues, that are " 'technical philosophical' questions which none but the philosopher can answer." On the other hand, there are " 'technical technological' problems that the philosopher had best let alone" (284). Is it possible to approach technology from both sides at ones, to look at the philosophical implications of its technical aspects and use philosophy to inform its mechanics? Is the latter an ethical imperative?

The Noble reading expresses similar confusion over whose place it is to assess various racial paradigms and statistics as tools for grouping people — one could say, as technologies, as means to determine blacks' freedom and other contentious political questions. Solon Borland (D- Ark) expresses concern that statistical information should be reserved for "scientific men of the country" (40). In contrast, William Butler (D-SC) claims it is inappropriate for the government to use statistics about race as "a vehicle for information of a philosophical kind" (41). Already, the tension between technical and philosophical approaches to technology that Heidegger talks about is evident. Philosophy and science are conventionally considered separate, yet the privilege to proclaim truths about race was seen as both too scientific and too philosophical for the government. The question concerning race as a technology, then, is so muddled because it has been both a factual and a moral issue.

Media, enframing, revealing

I’d like to discuss the role of the media in conjunction with Heidegger’s text.

Black briefly describes the thousands of Jews expelled into the no-man’s land between border crossings. She writes, “The agony of these ditch people became an on-going spectacle for the world’s media” (158). I’ve seen some footage taken from concentration camps in the days after the end of the war, and the idea of similar imagery being broadcast on TV and consumed as spectacle presents the violent power of technology. Television images and newspaper photographs literally ‘enframe’ or circumscribe their subjects. If, as Heidegger writes“[w]ith the bounds the thing does not stop,” but “rather, from within them it begins to be what after production it will be,” (291) then those depicted in the media as a spectacle of suffering can no longer be approached as otherwise.

Heidegger writes, “Technology is a mode of revealing. Technology comes to presence in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take pace, where al­etheia, truth, happens.” The media ‘reveals’ the truth of Jewishness—of living not only in inhuman conditions, but also of existing in a visual suffering rather than a real and embodied suffering . This is, again, a question of the particular stakes of visuality.

What happens when people are 'revealed'? How do we approach people without the violence of modern technology--HeLa cells, eugenics, census reports, consumable spectacle?

art and disrupting entrapment

I had a similarly (to Lizzie) skeptical reaction to Heidegger’s turn to art. I’d be curious to look at Heidegger pre-1944/45 and his philosophical connections to Nazism; I’m guessing he would have come to different conclusions regarding technology (does anyone know, had he written about technology before?) Let’s spread our blame around to some ideologues (If nowhere else we see in Nobles the feedback between ideology and the operation of political machinery).
I am certainly not defending Heidegger, but I think we can get something useful out of his take on art. If we understand the “essence of art” that technology threatens but also forces us to turn to be something more fundamental than ‘the arts’ as a discipline (I think this is what Heidegger is talking about, just like we’re supposed to look at technology as the kind of approach to truth where we reveal things as standing-reserve, not just look at it as technological machinery), if we understand art as “the revealing that brings forth truth into radiant appearance” - then maybe we can rewrite art as things like partisans (using stolen guns and improvised explosives) blowing up Nazi supply trains (or maybe even all those trains carrying IBM census cards) - “in our sheer aesthetic-mindedness we no longer guard and preserve the coming to presence of art.”
I’d like to look at different kinds of disruptions of entrapment. What does passing do to the census? How does that change when we bring lynching back into the picture? (conspicuously absent as it is from Nobles’ chapter)

Circumscribing gives bounds to the thing. With the bounds the thing does not stop; rather, from within them it begins to be what after production it will be. p 291

The quote above made me think the agency in "enframing," which is how technology positions the world in respect to man in a way. Enframing thus has a boundary or limit giving property which actually informs what the ideal "thing itself" will be.

As much as explaining natural phenomena was a way to order the world for us, it appears that technology which, at face value seems to suggest a way of actually controlling the order of the world to work for us, the enframing that technology does actually productively create meaning and inform the structure we see in our world.

Binary Anxiety

Noble's essay spoke to my interest in racial passing, the failings of a reliance on racial visibility/physiognomy to verify racial "fact," and the systematic (or "scientific") creation of American black identity by whites in positions of power. 

The one-drop rule and segregation were used to secure the borders of difference due to white anxieties over racial mixing and the disappearance of social hierarchies of meaning. If meaning is dependent upon difference (e.g. 'black' only has significance in relation to its opposite, 'white'), and blackness (as a "pure" racial category) was to slowly become extinct through racial mixing, whiteness would lose all its value. Thus, 'mulattoes' were/are a threat to social meaning and cultural order in their inability to conform to binary racial meaning. Passing was especially threatening given that it could trespass these boundaries and attest to the unreliability of racial visibility. In an attempt to regulate meaning and preserve white purity rigid binary structures (Jim Crow laws, Black Codes/Anti-miscegenation laws) needed to be erected to ameliorate white fears of the erasure of racial meaning/white superiority. Segregation ensured that whiteness would remain a distinct category while opening up "colored" to all non-whites and ensuring that all mixed-folk identify with their "dominant" side, or their nonwhite ancestry. There could be no such thing as 'mixed whites.' As Nobles puts it, "blacks and other nonwhites were mixed; whites were not" (54). 

How did white anxieties around the categorization/ pseudo-scientific understanding of blackness and obsessions with racial visibility facilitate the use of  census-science, segregationist public policy, and the historical endurance of the one-drop rule?  

Why did American scientists and legislators feel so deeply committed to preserving racial binary distinction? What use did obsessively delineating the terms of blackness hold for constructing whiteness as a pure category and maintaining white dominance? 

Chained

Heidegger claims that our relationship to technology "would be free if it opens our human existence of the essence of technology....technology is not equivalent to the essence of technology....everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it" (287). Throughout each of the readings I was fascinated by the overall concept of technology as a component of society that ultimately is in our control/controls our means. While I agree with several of Heidegger's statements, I am also incredibly intrigued in exploring the element of "danger" within technology and the power it has to additionally stream out of our control. Especially in today society it seems that most of our daily functions/activities function around technological devices/tools that further the possibility for us to create progress throughout the day. Heidegger’s comments illustrating the relationship we have with technology made me question how does danger therefore allow us to be, in Heidegger’s terms “chained," to technology? How can we "unchain," ourselves and is it all-possible?

** I was also interested in discussing Heidegger’s concept of the essence of technology as well.

Racial Manipulation/Technologic Manipulation

I remember on the first day of class when Professor Chun gave the example of the commercial for the Internet where in order to address a world where race and gender are unimportant, you must first address this world where race and gender are, in some places, still extremely important. In Heidegger states in “The Question Concerning Technology” that technology in the modern day is just “a means to an end” (pp. 288-289) and that “everything depends on our manipulating technology in the proper manner as a means” (p. 289) which immediately brought me back to that commercial along with our discussions of passing. Branching off of these ideas, along with our discussion from last week, I was posed with many questions such as, what does it mean to manipulate something like race and/or technology as a means to an end? What does it mean to use race like a manipulated technology, as in the case of passing, to use race as a tactic to end racism?

Also, on the opposite side of the spectrum, how does technology enforce the solidification of races to stop racial manipulation and passing as Nobles explores in her “‘The Tables present plain matters of fact’”? As illustrated in the title for this course, race and technology can have a very intertwined relationship and I am left wondering what sort of relationship is this in the context of the readings for today.

Technology as racial

For Heidegger, “the essence of technology lies in enframing. Its holding sway belongs within destining,” which sets man on a way of revealing that orders everything as “standing-reserve” (307). He goes on to point out that the destining of revealing is “the supreme danger” because there is no other way of thinking/seeing/revealing for him other than enframing and everything including himself becomes but standing-reserve. Thus for Heidegger, “the essence of technology, as a destining of revealing, is the danger” (309).

The issues discussed in the other two readings – how censuses were used to support racial discourses in the U.S. and how the machines produced by IBM enabled the Nazi to efficiently collect information about Jewish population in multiple regions and therefore to commit massive prosecution against Jew. In Shadows of Citizenship, Nobles’ detailed investigation gives us a striking picture of how in the seemingly neutral and “pure” name of science research, the obsession with race when it come to censuses actually have everything to do with racial discrimination and political and economic interests lying at the heart of continuing oppression of African Americans. Edwin Black offers an even more obvious example with the strategic alliance between IBM and Nazi Germany, demonstrating that technology is not only far from neutral but can be developed precisely for certain political purposes. In this case it is even clearer that the census-taking conducting by Nazi was not a neutral activity just for collecting facts, but rather one step leading to the wholesale slaughtering of the Jewish population. This makes me think, in which ways are technologies and scientific knowledge or mechanisms that we easily take as neutral today are in fact at work in perpetuating racial relations?

Blame

I’d like to address the issue of (talking about) culpability. Black’s project in “IBM and the Holocaust” is one of apportioning blame, although we’re also made to see how mere machines, in and of themselves, produce incredibly lethal knowledge-power. Still, it’s clearly IBM’s fault for supplying Germany with this technology, without which, Black implies, they might not have been able to complete the “final solution.” (It’s interesting to think about the emphasis often placed on German culture as the origin of the orderliness and punctuality that proved so effective for carrying out genocide). Reading Heidegger’s description of “the gathering together of that setting-upon that sets upon man…to reveal the real…as standing-reserve,” in relation to the Holocaust, Heidegger doesn’t address the burning question—if the Nazis are the men who created—and did away with—the Jews as a “standing reserve,” who challenged them forth to do so (302)? I wonder what Heidegger’s answer would be to how did this happen?, and it would compare with Black's focus on the enabling power of punch-card machines (or their distributors)?

And while the question of culpability has been integral to the readings this week, I wonder from the outset how we can/should frame it in theoretical discourse. If we’re trying to read Heidegger’s argument for a way to look at Nazism and information/technology, his move to “art will save us” at the end of the article seems kind of pathetic. Why does he go there? Is that (arguably evasive) move ethically-politically-morally questionable when thinking in terms of such catastrophe?

Also, personally, I'd benefit from a brief unpacking of the Heidegger before we begin tomorrow.

Criticism on "danger of technology"

As Erik nicely re-articulated, Heidegger defines technology as something more than a mere means to an end -- to him, technology can eventually turn human beings to be "no more than resources," causing the crisis of technology and making us forget human-ness in us. To me, this concept of crisis brought by "danger" of technology sounds really dangerous.

To begin with, no matter how Heidegger defines essence of technology, technology has long been thought of as means to achieve an end as Heidegger himself explained. In fact, the readings on census serve as good example of how human civilization has been using technology as means to an end. In different cultures and different era portrayed in the reading, people in power often struggled to justify racism. In order to achieve this goal, they develop new technology and enhanced existing technology; for example, they came up with eugenics, new use of computer for census, different application of IQ measurements, etc. People in power also manipulated and reformulated racial categorization, which can also be considered as a governing technology. Nazi (re)defined the term "Jew," and Americans came up with the whole idea of one-drop rule. Even today, new words and concepts such as "Asian American" and "Hispanic American" are made to support the goal of efficient governing of the society.

We create, shape, and constantly reshape the technology for our use -- in this way, technology serves a means to an end. In other words, we as human beings have ample control over technology. This is why I say that the "danger of (the essence of) technology" is very a dangerous concept. Whatever tragedy occurs with exploitation or misuse of the technology, we the human kind are responsible for that exploitation or misuse. So here is my stance to Erik's question: there is no one -- not even technology -- else to blame here but us.

I am not rejecting Heidegger's premise that our way of thinking has been shaped by technology. If I were to completely reject that idea, it would be just like me randomly picking a side on chicken-first-or-egg-first sort of a debate. I do realize that human beings and technology are in a relationship of constant dialogue, and mutually impact each other. But whether that impact would be a synergy or a disaster is on our hands, and technology is not a victim to be blamed.

The Business of Race

The IBM article spells out the complicated dance that had to be choreographed between IBM and Germany during World War II. To me, this piece raises questions (questions already raised by Hale) about how business contributes to and relieves racist politics. To me, the technology of race does not operate heavily within economics. Watson's concern was always to maintain a political stance that would prove the most profitable. He advocated for "adjustments that would give all countries an opportunity to share in the resources of the world" because that ideology is the one that would enable his economic opportunity most, not to advance a racist ideology abroad (149). War Cards also made me reconsider Gilroy's piece in a more accepting way. In that so much technology, and infrastructure has been created around race, for race. It has had to be a unifying method, but a new humanism when considering what we currently have create... makes sense. I just don't think it's a place my mind/world will ever allow me to truly envision or embrace.

The crisis of technology, in moving toward a "new humanism"

Technology is not merely a passive participant in human affairs. It has the power to shape everything we do, from what we eat to what we investigate to how we interact with others of our species. Heidegger’s key points about technology, written more plainly:

• Technology is not merely a means: it brings things about independently of our wishes.
  
  
• Technology requires everything to be useful, to exist as a “reserve.”
  
  
• The crisis of technology occurs when it causes humans to see ourselves as standing reserve: when we become no more than resources, we lose ourselves in technology and forget our human-ness.

The connections to the statistical sciences are plain: the field of census technologies precipitates this sort of crisis, and can justify and enact the unspeakable.

Clearly, we cannot blindly scramble to rid ourselves of technology. But how do we have to approach technology itself, if we consider it to be active, and possibly antipathetic to human beings? The census can justify much-needed economic support programs, but can also make genocide possible; the internet opens up a new mass-readership and access to information, but adds a new inequality between those with and without that access. Must a new humanism start at the level of technology? How do we keep it free from oppression? Whose job is it to recognize and resist misuse? Can technology bring us together, or does it, in its ever-increasing ability to quantify differences, continue to fracture us along new spectra (race, &c.)?

Segregation as desire to regression

Similar to the comment raised in the comment "Insecurity within ones 'Territory'," I interpreted the enforcement of segregation as a form of insecurity -- or more precisely, nostalgic insecurity, insecurity against irresistible progress of the history. One of the first forms of spatial segregation discussed in chapter 4 of Making Whiteness was segregation in trains and streetcars. The modern transportation marks the pinnacle of modernity. Train cars represented "anonymous yet intimate social relations" (129) that has become prevalent in the modern society -- modern means of transportation and communication reduced distance between individuals, yet (to borrow the expression from Durkheim) the transition from mechanical to organic solidarity made much of individual interaction unnecessary. Such environment created by the progress towards modernity, this "increasingly anonymous world … " brought racial disorder that "endangered the very meaning of white racial identity" (129).

Same goes with the rise of consumerism. As Hale explains, "African American southerners could not vote, but … they could spend" (193). The modernity presented irresistible challenge against racism, or in Marxist way of speaking, the capitalist mode of production threatened Southern agricultural mode of production. Capital replaced the privilege of "whiteness," and I interpreted the whole segregation measures as tactic to fight against the progress, the weapon to fight against transition from social structure molded around plantation agriculture to that built upon capitalism.

Race and/as spectacle

The question of why so much scopophilia and epistemophilia surround racialized images has still been nipping away at me. I would like to expand on a point that came to me at the end of last class: that contrast is pleasing to the light eye — not in the sense of color values, but in the sense of moral values. The Emmett Till documentary and "The Show" both contain explicit voyeurism. As repeated throughout the documentary, the black male body has become a code for mankind's primal darkness and animalistic drives. The white female body, on the other hand, symbolizes delicacy, daintiness, refinement, and vulnerability. When the black male body, a symbol of guilt, is mutilated for the protection of the white female body, a symbol of innocence, order appears to be restored; the scene of white conquering dark became a concrete, delineated symbol of justice in what Hale calls “a fragmented and an increasingly abstract society” (6).

Emmett Till’s body had the opposite effect: of symbolizing injustice. While I believe Emmett's mother's explanation for putting her son's body on display, I could not help but feel as if I were watching a voyeuristic horror film. The way multiple witnesses gave accounts of the appearance of his body was perversely entertaining in its shock value. Perhaps this is because it served as a privileged form of knowledge, visible proof of what happened to the black man at the hands of whites. The pleasure of looking at it, however, could be an extreme form of the pleasure of lynching spectators: assurance of the distance between blacks and whites, and creation of an us.-vs.-them dynamic.

The idea of contrast is interesting in light of Hale’s discussion of popular culture displays of race, such as minstrel shows, and “systemized spatial relations,” such as train segregation (130). By exaggerating physical differences between blacks and whites, minstrel shows naturalized the segregation that was already in place and justified “whites’ often unconscious real-life performances” (17). Train segregation similarly provided an excuse not to question the concept of race. When it was difficult to tell who was what by looking at them, one could simply observe where someone was sitting. The fact that the need to divide blacks and whites transcended skin color shows that such divisions not only utilized but also created racial difference. This suggests that, as the Toni Morrison quote from the first class posits, the concept racial difference has a utility far beyond describing; it also prescribes in order to maintain a symbolic system of morality. -Suzy

Biopower piercing the skin

"racism justifies the death function in the economy of biopower by appealing to the principle that the death of others makes one biologically stronger insofar as one is a member of a race or population, insofar as one is an element in a unitary living plurality" (Foucault 258).

How can this converse with the molecular magification that Reardon drew our attention to? Can we identify significant categories that power technologies will produce as they "pierce the ideological veil of the skin" (Reardon 52)? Does this just look like the movie Gattaca, or something else?

Also, Foucault shows us the significance of the state being represented as a body. It is interesting to wonder how this could change alongside advances in modern bio science. How might the state be represented as we further prioritize things like genomics and bio-engineering? Perhaps one route is the turn toward conceptualizations of network culture, and the crosstalk with computational biological models that become abstractions ripe for social theory.
If this is a viable route, could the "unitary living plurality" become replaced by something more decentralized?

Are there other ways to read our turn towards the molecular? What new kinds of power does this afford? What are the bounds of the discursive bodies currently doing this reading of genetics - how deeply intertwined are they with the state already?

The Extreme Witness of Photographed Lynchings

In Making Whiteness, Hale examines the cultural power of lynching. Lynching in the South was characterized on the one hand a spectacle of torture and on the other, the sensationalized mass circulation of lynching photographs . Concerned with the politics of the image from the lynching publics in the South, Hale argues that the key to understanding the spectacle of lynching, “lay not in the assignment of cause and blame, the rallying of rights and wrongs, but in the looking” ( 221). Although “looking” was central because of the public spectacle that it produced, it was the distributed photographs of lynched bodies that created a complex system of representation. Importantly, such images were used by lynch group and anti-lynch groups alike.

The deployment of gruesome images by anti-lynching groups reframed the narrative from woman as victim to the greater victimization of the black man. The means of effective mobilization were argued, “one violated body demanded another more violated one” (224).  The aestheticization of horror that the image of the lynched body represented became a mode of bearing a greater truth. As Hale describes, the practice of distributing images was one where the two figures of victimhood became “competing bodies as metaphors for competing truths” (224). What are the ethical and representational limits that emerge from the mobilization of such sensationalized and extreme images? What can we make of the space between the two “victims,” woman and black, as well as the space between the image and action, narrative and truth? This is particularly relevant in relation to the use of the beaten body of Emmett Till as a mode of activism.

Monica

Lynching by any other name still smells

Hale gives us a picture of early 20th century lynching as a modern spectacle, illegal but not extra-legal in its maintenance of a racist economic, social, and sexual order, legitimized by the “Black man rapes white woman” narrative. She documents its relationship with consumer culture, allowing it to shape the construction of a racist order throughout the entire country, as both photographs and pieces of the murdered Black bodies were quickly distributed.
“The Show” poses the question of the continued effects of these commodities, what they continue to construct, how a photograph translates into the present. (One thing I can not stop thinking about is that spread throughout the country today there must still be thousands of pickled pieces of lynching victims’ bodies).
That photographs and body parts were on display nationally by the 1890s makes the narrative of “The Murder of Emmett Till” - that the one particular instance, due to its wide publicity, triggered The Civil Rights Movement (and the implicit narrative of problem, response, resolution) - seem disingenuous, especially given the history of anti-lynching activism and Black liberation struggles stretching back into the 19th century. The movie documents only one moment in a continuous process of struggle against a racist order; by doing so it makes the structure's extension over time invisible.
So, how can we understand today's prison-industrial complex, extra-legal but certainly not extra-juridical police violence against people of color, and the consumer culture around constructions of Blackness as “Gangster,” as well as the proliferation of prison movies and TV shows like “Cops,” in light of Hale’s analysis? There is still extra-legal but not illegal (or the other way around) systemic violence against people of color, continuing to enforce a racist order; there is still even lynching (On September 17 2007, off-duty police in Washington DC tracked down, shot and killed 14 year old Deonte Rawlings, who they suspected of stealing one of the cop’s personal bicycles. The cops were cleared, because of tenuous evidence that he shot at them first.) To what extent is this continuous from the order of the early 20th century, how has the order changed, and what work do narratives like “The Murder of Emmett Till” do to prop up this order?