“While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth.” – Susan Sontag (6)

“The very ‘truthfulness’ of the new medium encouraged its deliberate use as a means of propaganda. The Nazis were among the first to use systematic photographic propaganda.” – John Berger (49)

Until the rise of the photograph, ‘realism’ was the dominant mode of art. Why did the photograph change this? Because it underlined the contingency of ‘the real.’ No longer were the laws of perspective and the basic rules of isometric projection considered to be accurate tracings of the real; why fiddle with vanishing points and figure-ground relations when the work of the artist can be done directly by photons? With the rendering of images graven by light, the enlightenment ideal of the absolute vitrification of reality in art could finally be obtained. If light itself cannot accurately and truthfully depict the images off which it reflects, then perhaps we ought to question more closely the nature of this enlightenment ideal.

Which is, of course, what Sontag, Jay, and Berger are all doing this week. The camera is a pure, instrumental, and empirical device. A crude automaton of the human eye, a motionless cyclopean monument to the values of the enlightenment. If there is truth to be found in images, then it is to be found in the photograph. And yet it seems that the problem toward which our erstwhile theorists are gesturing is that the ‘commerce between art and truth,’ insofar as it may exist, is a particularly troublesome commerce. In the realm of the photograph (and perhaps elsewhere), Truth is Art’s banana republic or its maquiladora.

Photography in particular could not survive without its illusions of verisimilitude. And yet truth enters into the photograph only, as Sontag rightly states, in the most rudimentary, documentary sense: “something exists, or did exist, which was like what’s in the picture” (5, and with digital photography, even this is not the case). Apart from the simple documentary nature of the image, it makes no claim to truth. The denotational content of a photograph is a minuscule element of the composition as a whole, even in the case of documentary photography. Otherwise, why is a James Nachtwey photograph of a young boy amidst the rubble of Mogadishu any more compelling than the camera-phone shot taken by the child’s brother? Why are some shots of poverty, famine, and the like, more compelling than others? The answer can only lie in the connotational qualities of the photograph; these qualities are the subject of photographic criticism, and these qualities are what prevent the artistic (or propagandistic) photograph from having any claim to veracity. I will be exploring the shady commerce of art and truth through a series of photographs of that German dictator whom the National Portrait Gallery named as one of the ‘world’s most photographed‘ people.

Consider this photo, or the opening photograph a few paragraphs above. Their pure denotational content is almost certainly true. Adolf Hitler, at one point, visited a troop of smiling and happy Hitler-Jugend, and, at one point, left a church. Of these facts, we can be as certain as we can ever be in the age of Photoshop. And yet can we really believe that these simple facts constitute the entire content of these photographs, as though they were snapshots from spring break? Certainly not. They are propaganda photographs. As for the first, its evident connotations are that Hitler is a caring and thoughful leader like any other, that the National-Socialists care for their (Aryan) children, and support all the same decent values as other decent people. Indeed, when we carry it even further, one cannot help but associate the uniform of the Hitler-Jugend with that fine bastion of social discipline, the Boy Scouts; by juxtaposing Hitler with the scoutlike HJ, one might reasonably assume that the photographer hoped to play on some of the positive associations with that quintessentially American institution (which was, of course, British, and had been banned with the rise to power of the Nazis). As for the second image, its religious connotations are so evident as almost not to bear mentioning: “Hitler, like you, goes to church! So Fascism isn’t ‘godless’ after all!”

Are any of those connotations ‘true’? Of course not. But can we with any confidence assert them to be ‘false’? This is a particularly troubling philosophical issue which is brought to the fore by the perfect realism of photography. How can a connotation be false? Indeed, on what grounds can we decry any image as ‘false.’ The truth-claim implicit to the graven image proclaims simply (to paraphrase Debord), ‘what is, is there, and what is there, is.’ With painting, this assertion can often be disproven. As Berger proposed, a painting of a horse does not have to be ‘particular horse;’ if we can show that there was never such a horse as was painted, then perhaps that makes the painting ‘false.’ But this potential falsity is so wrapped up in the nature of manual reproduction itself, that it seems almost superfluous to proclaim a painting as untrue. With photography, unless an image is retouched, the photograph’s actual content is necessarily a selective capturing of reality. And yet the process of selection involves any number of rhetorical processes that create a connotational weight. This connotational meaning is neither true nor false; indeed, it has no commerce whatsoever with truth or falsehood. One cannot agree or disagree with an effect of imagery or a photographic connotation, because there is no actual claim being made. When it comes to the connotations of a photograph, one can simply accept them, deny them, or (more likely) have them go altogether unnoticed. This is the treachery of the photographic image: the absolute veracity of its denotative content obscures the pure fiction of its connotative meaning.

Even when an image is retouched, we cannot always specifically place its falsehood. The image on the left circulated through a number of newspapers in the early 1930s, and was widely proclaimed to be a photograph of the infant Adolf Hitler. The hoax persisted despite the protestations of the German embassy in the United States, until, as is often the case, the owner of the original photograph (the one on the right) recognized the similarities between the two images. By darkening the shadows on the baby’s face and removing the bonnet, the retoucher was able to give just the right look of menace to the infant on the left; one assumes, of course, that Hitler was menacing even as an infant. The presentation of the image, we can say with certainty, was false. The ‘Hitler Baby’ was not the infant dictator, and thus the captions that ran with the image were incorrect. But is there anything truly ‘false’ about the image, even in the strictest denotative sense? Certainly, the shadows have been darkened somewhat, and the child’s bonnet cropped out. Yet the child itself ‘was there,’ and thus the documentary evidence of the photo is in some sense correct. Even the connotational weight of the image (the darkened shadows) has no real effect by itself. Indeed, captions were the only real reason that readers of the era had to think that the image on the left was Hitler, further underlining the contingent nature of photographic ‘truth.’

If one is still looking for reasons to question whether painting and photography are truly such different media, one has only to consider the above image in comparison with the next.

In the painting, we see an idealized Hitler, carrying the standard of the swastika, framed by the Sun and a Roman eagle, and surrounded by SA delivering the fascist salute. In this photograph, immediately following his Sept. 1, 1939 declaration of war in the Reichstag, we see a realized depiction of an almost identical indoor scene, Hitler standing at the speaker’s desk, below the Nazi standard, being saluted by the entire Reichstag. Both images have extremely similar denotative and connotative meanings, and yet we are likely more apt to disregard the first as propaganda, and the second as an accurate depiction of the scene. Why? To be sure, the denotative meaning of the photograph is likely more accurate. Certainly, all of those men of the Reichstag did deliver their fascist salute following Adolf’s stirring address, whereas the scene of the painting likely never happened.

When we examine the connotations of the two images, however, it becomes clear that the two are equally propagandistic, and perhaps equally distant from ‘the real.’ Both images bear all the hallmark connotations of fascist propaganda. They emphasize the unity and strength of a homogeneous community, the ’symbolic restatement’ (Sontag 9) of ancient images to establish historical continuity (with Rome, the Aryans), and they seek to convey the illusion of a populace marching in lock-step with the dictates of a powerful leader. This sort of propaganda is perhaps most problematic, because neither side has any reason to discredit it. The Nazis benefited from seeming like an all-powerful, absolutely unified society, while their enemies deployed this sort of propagandistic imagery as a tool to build military support. While it served the Allies no real purpose to reproduce the humanized propaganda images of Hitler with boy scouts or at church, it most definitely served their purposes to depict the uncanny order and frightening devotion of Nazi rallies. Will we ever know exactly how far the society of the Third Reich corresponded to the monolithic totalitarian society depicted by fascist art? It seems to me doubtful. The excesses and illusions of Nazi imagery will always corrupt any real understanding of the true nature of Nazism. As when we adopt the Nazis’ own term, ‘Third Reich,’ when we think of these propaganda photos as documentary evidence, we are in effect taking the fascists at their word — or at their image.

As the first true innovators of photographic propaganda, the Nazis were perhaps the first to really recognize the connotative potential of imagery. By selectively manipulating the framing, composition, and context of photographs, Goebbels and other propagandists were able to manipulate the connotative power of the photograph in order to create a false impression without ever lying. Sontag proposes, in a statement which sounds somewhat archaic today, that ‘the contribution of photography always follows the naming of the event’ (19). Perhaps this is still the case to a certain degree, but it seems rather that in our ‘image-choked’ (Sontag 15) culture, the distinction between the photographic image and its context is being collapsed. Sontag herself recognizes this when she states that ‘an event has come to mean, precisely, something worth photographing’ (19). The photographic image is always an interpretation rather than a transcription of the captured reality. This is a simple truism. However, as our culture moves increasingly away from things and towards imagery, the captured reality is supplanted by the image of reality. Criticisms of photographs as inaccurate depictions of reality miss the point that our contemporary Western reality is a photographic one.

And as the progression continues, even the most despicable of images can be resurrected as pure symbolism, as imagery without referent, as in the case of this unfortunately (but, it must be said, purposefully) named Mumbai restaurant….

“from small bites to mega Joys!”

Indeed.

 

“The reality shows are only side-effects, and moreover mystifying, because in indicting them as manipulation, the critics assume that there is somewhere an original form of life … This criticism is over, as is every Situationist criticism of the ’spectacle’ and the concept of ’spectacle,’ as also in substance all criticism of ‘alienation.’ Unfortunately, I would add. Because the human abstraction of the spectacle was never hopeless; it always offered the chance of disalienation. Whereas the operation of the world in real time, its unconditional realisation, is really without alternative. Radicality has changed, and all negative criticism, surviving itself, actually helps its object to survive.” – Baudrillard, “Aesthetic Illusion and Virtual Reality”

1. Of the spectacular society, and why it demands our disobedience. 

Debord and the Situationists have revealed for us the spectacular society’s true character. The years have not dated their description of the spectacular society, but rather, society has grown into its description with the continued refinement of capitalism and its accessories. In the 21st century, far more than in the twentieth, ‘everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.’ No longer is there a ‘real’ life against which we can determine the nature of the ’spectacle.’ Representationalism is a basic human conceit, and yet the society of the spectacle exaggerates the primacy of representation to the point that it becomes absurd, it supplants the real. The map of mass culture no longer refers to, nor covers the territory, but rather it is the territory which lies in rotting tatters scattered across the map. All that once existed as free and fluid human creativity is undergoing a condensatory congealing into its inferior commodity forms. Commodity fetishism — the domination of human relations by the relations between things — ‘reaches its absolute fulfillment in the spectacle, where the tangible world is replaced by a selection of images which exist above it, and which simultaneously impose themselves as the tangible par excellence.’

The society of the spectacle demands our disobedience because it assumes our obedience as given. The spectacle in-itself ’says nothing more than ‘that which appears is good, that which is good appears.” In a society beholden to the spectacle, to be other than a spectator is to be deviant, to subject oneself to reproach, punishment, retribution. Why should we take issue with a society that makes us all into spectators? Because when the only ability is to spectate, the act of creation fades off into the mists of the memory. To be human is to create; thus to spectate is to be inhuman. The attitude demanded by the spectacle ‘in principle is passive acceptance which in fact it already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply, by its monopoly of appearance.’ To rage against the spectacle is to be human, to affirm one’s humanity in the face of its constant televised refutation.

2. Of situationism and the worker: preposterous pandering to a past proletariat.

Even as the Situationists recognized the cultivation of proletarian idiocy on the part of the spectacular, they remained blinded by dogma. The spectacular breeds passivity, and the countless screens of spectacular capital are at the ready to drown out the pitiful yelps of theoretical solipsism. Why, then, are these students and intellectuals so caught up in the ‘emancipation of the proletariat?’ The spectacle has already ensured that the proletariat have no interest in their own emancipation, nor at they aware that they need to be emancipated (or that they are proletarian). Debord and his contemporaries called for revolution — a fine and noble goal, to be sure. But every revolution is but a rotation. How could the Situationists deluded themselves into hoping for revolutionary change, when such change could only but be built on the mass mobilization of the spectacle’s dupes? Indeed, how could such a mobilization ever take place but by the deployment of the spectacular? The backwardness and self-contradictory nature of the Situationists’ Marxism is clear: the worker is the slave of the spectacle, therefore to mobilize the workers one must speak the language of the spectacular, and yet the spectacle is inherently an incitement to passivity.

A postmodern situationism takes the Society of the Spectacle as its point of departure, and necessarily (but reluctantly) leaves the proletariat behind. We have no interest in inciting revolution, nor in pandering to a proletariat that has long ago been induced to no longer identify itself as such. 21st-century workers have all but lost interest in the patently conventional ‘workers’ union,’ much less in violent struggle against some supposed capitalist oppressors who provide them with all they (believe themselves to) need. This is not to say that we have forgotten the worker, but merely that we have accustomed ourselves to the worker’s having forgotten us. Nor do we lay the blame upon the shoulders of the worker! Being continuously admonished in the workplace, the last thing we might expect the worker to respond to would be further admonishments to revolution in the leisure-place. Such incitement might seems noble to the naïf bourgeois, but to the ‘real’ worker (such that this hypothetical construct even can be said to exist) the revolutionary is merely a new boss, and one who pays poorly at that. A postmodern situationism must forget its ‘negative criticism’ and seek its own positive jouissance before it can hope for acceptance.

3. Of the revolution, and its infinite postponement.

The revolution is at once impossible, inevitable, and irrelevant. It is impossible in that we will never be able to incite its occurrence; it will begin when it begins, and it will end when it ends, and that will be that. It is inevitable because we can be sure that it will begin, even if we might not be sure of when or what form it might take. And it is irrelevant, in that a full revolution always returns from whence it came: ‘the vision comes to life in the moment of uprising – but as soon as ‘the Revolution’ triumphs and the State returns, the dream and the ideal are already betrayed.’ Revolution, when it does come, will as likely as not speak the language of the spectacle, and it will replace one set of spectacles with another. Of this we cannot be a priori certain, but only ex posteriori vindicated. It is not our concern to incite yet another rebellion which will more deeply enshrine the dominance of the spectacular, but to reshape our relation to the spectacular so that if and when the revolt does arise, it will be a productive one. As Vaneigem tells us, ‘Hierarchical power, which has been with us for millennia, furnishes a perfectly adequate explanation for the permanence of rebellion, as it does of the repression that smashes rebellion.’ In order to reshape this repressive interaction, we must remake our idea of revolution.

Our postmodern situationism abandons not the ‘hope-for’ a social revolution, but the ‘attempt-at.’ We seek no abstract revolution, but rather to enshrine rebellion as an essential social value. Why have we abandoned revolutionary ideology? The western Marxist has been repeatedly confronted with the paradoxes of proletarian revolution. Where its seeds have taken root, true revolution has necessarily been thwarted by those states and traitorous ‘leftist’ organizations still deeply invested in capitalist oppression. And where ‘socialism‘ has truly flourished, we have seen the development, not a workers’ free states, but quasi-fascist oligarchies, socialist in name alone. Since roughly Gorky, even the most dogmatic of intellectual Marxists have affirmed by their patterns of residency that they would much prefer the bourgeois legality of a comfortable democratic-capitalist state to a repression which masquerades as proletarian. And yet many of these same intellectuals go on proclaiming the ideals of revolution, as though this proclaiming in-itself was somehow sufficient to bring about a true Marxist revolution. Only a fool blinded by spectacular society could hope to enshrine Marxism through the force of idealism, of all things! Today, the revolutionary is even less likely to succeed: watched, heard, and scrutinized by an assemblage of hidden cameras and microphones, the overt revolutionary has only the repressive state apparatus itself as audience.

4. Absurd responses to an absurd society: Dérive, détournement, déconstruction.

Vaneigem tells us also that ‘anything that does not kill power reinforces it, but anything which power does not itself kill weakens power.’ All of this development leads to a central concern: what is the radical alternative to revolution?  The spectacular society is necessarily an absurd one; it accepts no logic not of its own. We live in ‘a topsy turvy world where people do the opposite of what they wish, pass the time away in self-destruction and venerate that which destroys them, obedient to abstractions and sacrificing their real lives to those abstractions.’ Marxism in a spectacular society is no different. Revolutionaries agitate when they would rather be playing, sleeping, making love. They venerate their ridiculous idols in the fetishized author-personae of Marx, Trotsky and Mao. They are obedient to the abstraction of Marxist dogma, and their lives are certainly sacrificed to that abstraction. Leaving dogma behind, we have constructed against this pattern our irrevolutionary response to a society that refuses to recognize the possibility of revolution.

We refuse to enslave ourselves to unfree labour of any sort which does not beget immediate, tangible, and comprehensible benefits to ourselves; where we are compelled to labour within the theft-structure of capitalism, we will replace our surplus labour with our own play. We will appropriate the technologies of capital to suit our own ends: in an originary coup, this manifesto was covertly written in a workplace for pay. (The ideal act of disobedience is performed on company time!) In short, we accept capitalism as fundamentally enshrined in the Western ego, and yet we refuse to obey the structures which capital provides for our work and for our leisure.

Through situationist détournement, we reappropriate the undifferentiated mass of cultural commodities to suit our own ends. We wish to express ourselves with pastiche, reinterpretation, parody, and satire; nevertheless, this postmodern collage, ‘far from aiming to arouse indignation or laughter by alluding to some original work, will express our indifference toward a meaningless and forgotten original.’ Indeed, we wish to recognize the fact that the spectacle has become the simulacrum: the question of ’the original’ has become irrelevant. Nor do we consider détournement as a hermeneutically-sealed, artistic project. Indeed, we refuse to recognize these bourgeois distinctions between art and labour, between labour and leisure; our labours are both art and leisure. Nothing could be more anathema to our art than a gallery! This institution of the oppressor cannot be tolerated: our gallery is the street and the sidewalk, our canvas, the high-rise and the highway! If art does not provoke a repressive response from the institutions of capital, then it is little more than a dessicated husk, a throwback to a previous order of simulacra.

The dérive is an implicit refusal to accept the categories of spatiality imposed by capital. Our geography is to be a dipole interaction between our psyches and our lived environment; we refuse to allow this intimate psychogeographical awareness to be mediated by consumerism, or by the structures of industrialism and commercialism. We will treat the shopping mall as a park, the industrial plaza as a shopping mall, and the park as a canvas. Through psychogeography, we will uncover and transgress those hidden, soft boundaries of urban existence and break free of the tyranny of a corporate-administered habitus: “We must replace travel as an adjunct to work with travel as a pleasure.” Instead of travelling in the traces of capital, we wish to forge through its ‘extended and indistinct bordering regions’ and recover the geography that is rightfully public.

In both of these (and other) relations to capitalism, there is an implicit deconstruction of its dictates. We strive to carry this deconstructive spirit with us always; this is the essence of the irrevolutionary struggle! Culture is a socially-made and individually-performed decision. Capitalism persists by the individual free choices of an mass citizenry unfree in its ideology; in the face of this, we wish always to reaffirm the freeness of our choices. This is the paradoxical revolution at the core of our irrevolutionary manifesto. By never accepting the dictates of a capitalist culture as given, and by questioning always the hidden assumptions of an oppressive economic régime, we hope to institute a new paradigm in the citizen’s relation to capital. As deconstruction speaks from within the text to uncover its inherent contradictions and excluded conclusions, we speak from within a spectacular society to unearth its contradictions: its basic unreality and its hegemonic function.

5. The revolution of everyday play.

There is, deftly concealed in our ‘irrevolutionary’ manifesto, a revolution (or perhaps we had better say, a ‘rebellion’ or ‘revolt’). Baudrillard and others have demonstrated the incoherence of supposing to criticise the society of the spectacle from some privileged position outside its symbolic order. The futility of negative criticism against the spectacle, however, requires us to make some positive contribution to our lived experience of the spectacle. Our sanity demands it! We cannot incite revolution against the spectacular, but must first radically reshape our relation to the spectacle. By adopting our deconstructive stance toward the spectacle, one takes the first step in performing the long-awaited revolution.

Marxist theory after Marx has often reified capitalism to an unfortunate extent. Capitalism is portrayed by Marxists and capitalists alike as monolithic, powerful, and external to society (for it is in the interests of both to do so). “Capitalism” has dictates, and “society” has to accept them! This is a portrayal that suits the purposes of those who would maintain or undermine capitalism, but which has precious little correspondence to our lived reality. Indeed, it is this very myth which allows capitalism to persist. By avoiding it, we hope to avoid complicity in the continued dominance of a regressive economic system. The truth is: capitalism is chosen by you! Like any social structure, it exists, develops, changes, and (or!) persists on the basis of choices made by the individuals who find themselves in that structure. If we persist in obeying the dictates of the structure, then we are in effect ensuring its continued dominance. But what if we don’t? This is the proof that capitalism is up to us.

What if, like me, you go to work and write a manifesto for six hours? What if, far from contributing to the surplus labour pool of your employer, you fail to perform even that labour which is ostensibly ‘necessary’? Does that not undermine the basic principle of capitalism from within? And what if your overseers have no way of knowing that this fundamental tenet of oppression is being quietly phased-out? What if you sell a product to a customer for its use-value, or steal something and give it away? What if you cease to regard the dictates of capitalism as natural, or given, but you begin to question their basic premises and find them to be nonexistent?

Apart from the obvious — that you are reaffirming your fundamental human freedom and revelling in an oppressive regime’s deserved disobedience – you are also starting the rebellion. The radical nature of our irrevolutionary manifesto is thus: capitalism has colonized your life-space, stolen your labour and humanity, and removed any possibility of meaningful change within its structures . . . so you are to take it for all it’s got! Study its repressive mechanisms, its disciplinary apparatus, its cameras and its gatekeepers, and take advantage them all! Concern yourself with its asymmetries and its blind spots! Play with capitalism, and teach others to share in your playfulness. This is how the revolution will take place — not through the obscure jottings of a flaccid intelligentsia, but through the decisive example of those who refuse to accept repression as a given!    

6. Indebtedness.

Although a neo-situationist manifesto needs no repressive citation-apparatus to justify its intellectual pastiche, we recognize in this manifesto a debt to Guy-Ernest Debord, of course, as well as Raoul Vaneigem, Jean Baudrillard, Hakim Bey, and the students of U.N.E.F. Strasbourg, 1968, amongst many others. This manifesto was produced while its author was being compensated by one Sykes Canada Corporation for services-not-rendered. The radical tendencies outlined in this manifesto are not our invention, nor even particularly original. Rather they constitute an uncanny manifestation of an attitude toward the spectacle that is already long familiar to anyone who lives and works as a subject of the spectacular. Consider it a positive formulation of ironic detachment and postmodern sarcasm.

7. Onward!

You’re not still reading, are you?

This is a text to be performed, not contemplated.

“…we might now contemplate aesthetic actions which possess some of the resonance of terrorism (or “cruelty,” as Artaud put it) aimed at the destruction of abstractions rather than people, at liberation rather than power, pleasure rather than profit, joy rather than fear. ‘Poetic Terrorism.’ Our chosen images have the potency of darkness–but all images are masks, and behind these masks lie energies we can turn toward light and pleasure.” - Hakim Bey