technical images and linear text

The simple answer to Martha Rosler’s question of “which political battles have been fought and won by someone for someone else” (307) is every one. That is to say, in the political sphere, there is no individual action. This is a structural necessity, insofar as the ‘political sphere’ is the realm of the polis, not of the individual subject. And so, every political movement is necessarily one driven by a committed vanguard, behind whom the masses can rally, but without whom the movement would cease to exist.

And so, dramatic though Martin Luther King’s quarter-million-strong March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom may have been, it represented only a minuscule fraction of the African-American population of the United States. Simply because the 30 million black Americans who didn’t march that day shared a skin colour with those who did does not imply that they were fighting ‘their own’ political battle. Instead, the civil rights won for American blacks by Dr. King’s movement were ‘won’ by a small vanguard of intellectuals and revolutionaries, for the entire black polis.

Those political movements which we the bourgeois and enfranchised often idolize as indicative of an organic push for self-determination nearly always have an externally-determined character. Indeed, we live in a society founded upon the delegation of one’s political battling. The system of democratic representation is nothing more than a complicated arrangement whereby the privileged can get someone else to fight their political battles for them.

Which, of course, raises the question: who fights the political battles of those without privilege? This is the central issue of Rosler’s piece, in which she bemoans that “the exposé, the compassion and outrage, of documentary fueled by the dedication to reform has shaded over into combinations of exoticism, tourism, voyeurism, psychologism and metaphysics, trophy hunting – and careerism” (306). This lament comes even as she recognizes that the lost ‘meliorism’ (304) of a Jacob Riis or Lewis Hine meant that their photographs were taken within the explicit framework of a certain ideal of ‘social-work propagandizing,’ which according to Rosler, “presented an argument within a class about the need to give a little in order to mollify the dangerous classes below” (304).

The central problem of Rosler’s text is the issue of agency. To put it bluntly: Is it ‘Okay’ for a bunch of wealthy Caucasian progressives to congratulate themselves for having taken pictures of the poor, beige masses of the world? Rosler seems to be arguing, on the whole, that it is not. Though her piece maintains the veneer of objectivity, the latent vitriol in places is self-evident. She implicitly decries Edward Murrow’s House of Shame, for instance, noting with a disgusted tone that Murrow exhorted his viewers to “write to their congressmen to help the migrant farm workers, whose pathetic, helpless, dispirited victimhood has been amply demonstrated for an hour… because these people can do nothing to help themselves” (306-307).

This is certainly a troubling undertone in any instance of documentary production by the privileged. It is often difficult even to analytically separate the noble impulse – that those with power should be using it to help those without – from the vicarious, ‘trophy-hunting’ element derided by Rosler. The issue of agency is still more problematic, however, in that it seems almost implicit within the documentary form – produced by and for privileged whites – to deny the agency of those being photographed. After all, if they were able to help themselves, then the documentarian’s function would be considerably diminished. Particularly in our digital context, however it becomes difficult to understand why we need a privileged white man like James Nachtwey to ‘bring back’ photographs of global poverty. When the instruments of photography and dissemination have become widespread and cheap enough that indigenous documentary production is possible, the attitudes of documentary photographers toward the significance of their own products seems vastly overinflated. In the most egregious examples raised by Rosler (the VISA ad and the version with the Guadeloupian boy, for instance – 312), documentary photography even seems to have been at times inhabited by the spirit of colonialism.

This is the problem that Rosler describes when she states that “documentary, as we know it, carries (old) information about a group of powerless people to another group addressed as socially powerful” (306). This claim is at once more troublesome and less troublesome than it may seem. It is first less troublesome, because this seems like the only conceivable way by which the politically powerless could ever obtain political power. The political sphere functions as a system of inclusion and exclusion; there are those actors within the polis who determine its politics, where there are those outside who are subject to the political authority without having any say in its governance. The extent of the polis is historically variable, of course, and contingent upon social norms. And yet, without delving too deeply into its structure, it should be immediately apparent that the system of politics offers no way for the powerless to obtain power. Those outside the polis are powerless: the only ones with power are those within the polis. Therefore, the only means by which the powerless will ever obtain power is if the powerful can be convinced of the necessity of granting it them. This is the traditional function of documentary: to induce the powerful to sympathize with the powerless, to the point of perhaps granting them (some limited form of) power. This is also an impulse clear in the work of Riis; though ostensibly included within the polis, the homeless are perhaps the most politically disenfranchised individuals within the modern system.

The implications of Rosler’s statement are also more troublesome than it may first appear, however. This is because by perpetuating this particular mode of documentary production, documentarians are in some sense also perpetuating the status quo with regard to the nature and distribution of power. Rosler herself even seems to be tied to a certain understanding of power which is to some extent archaic and reductive, in that neither her piece, nor the instances of documentary production she cites, ever questions the equivalence of power and political power. I mentioned at the beginning of my piece that every political battle was fought and won by ‘someone else.’ This stems from the nature of political power as described in the previous system: without political rights, one has no voice within the polis to demand such rights (and the power which accompanies them). Consequently, the system of political power seems like a universal absolutism – which is certainly what all systems of power hope to become. But the example of César Chavez, which Rosler lauds as an example of an organic effort toward self determination (in contrast to the Murrow example, 306), gives the lie to this reductive understanding of ‘power.’

César Chavez’ Farm Workers’ Organizing Committee was not successful because its members realized they were powerless, and decided to use documentary production to demand the power they lacked. Rather, they obtained political power by using the power of documentary production to emphasize the power they already had. The same is true of any mass movement for self-determination. The only way to obtain political power without the voluntary intervention of those who already have such power, is to leverage another form of power against the political establishment and demand such power. Before AFL-CIO, farm workers were politically powerless; to claim, like Murrow’s documentary, that they themselves were powerless, is nevertheless a distortion. Agriculture feeds nations; farm labourers are thereby an exceedingly powerful group when mobilized appropriately. Power exists in manifold configurations, and functions within a discursive system of exchange. Perhaps the only group that is after all, truly ‘powerless’ are the homeless, since they have neither labour, reputation, nor property to leverage as power.

In sum, then, the problem with traditional ‘social-work propagandizing’ is that in seeking to aid the powerless by informing the powerful, it replicates the very same categories of power that are responsible for the seeming ‘powerlessness’ of marginalized groups. In closing, however, it is intriguing to note that the ‘problems’ described by Rosler with regard to contemporary ‘trophy-hunting’ documentary work can perhaps be traced to the same issues of discursive power. Insofar as the ‘social-work’ style of documentary is intended to provide information about the powerless to the powerful, it seems as though the decline in that style of documentary is traceable to the fact that postmodern subjects no longer consider themselves ‘powerful.’ Where a certain modernist, neo-Enlightenment notion of power could accept that we bourgeois whites were ‘powerful’ simply by virtue of our participation in a political system, the subject in postmodernity sees itself only as a functionary, a prisoner of that very same system of power. And so, instead of presenting images of poverty and decay according to the trope of ‘informing the powerful,’ postmodern documentary simply asks its powerless viewer to identify with its powerless subject.