Dreams on the Landscape

Martin Weber's photo project, A Map of Latin American Dreams, is build around the terse translations of want written in chalk and positioned in the frame of the photograph. In each image words take their own place in highly staged portraits. They are not merely inscriptions of interiority, the captured character of the subject, but there before us as writing, as something removed, outside, the very force that prompts the scene represented.


The theatrical "drama" of Weber's images comes from these characters of chalk. The characters are two-fold. There is the writing itself, the markings that carry the message -- like "My brother dreams of studying music" (above) and "to have friends" (below). At first glance we assume the message reflects the character's inner desires, their confessional exposure of drives and needs. Staring, seeing more and more, and then less and less, there is the uncanny confusion of where to find the "author" of such a message. What scripting has prompted this scene, this position of the body? What mode of word that has driven history's wreckage (neoliberalism, deindustrialization, free market) also stained the very language -- an idea shared by both Eliot and Celan -- of dreams?

And so the dreamer in Weber's staging is also a character who has been written within in the words of inherited circumstance.


The language in the lush anti-realism of Weber's photographs is that which comes after the dream; an articulation of what has vanished as feeling and remains and now appears not only as an idealization of the wish, a reformation of the dream's content, but as a cue for further action.

Of course the camera, which would have stilled any movement he meant to imply, captures Weber's aesthetic of unrelenting stillness. He is ensuring that the dominant feeling is one of being suspended, caught along a threshold or border of compulsions, memories, living with and against the blood-work of history, language, and self.





(Above, in the picture made along the Mexico/US divide, the dream is "Affection." Here the more universal sense of displacement, and the dream to have land).

Living Next to History

Susan Griffin's collection of history, memoir, and tentative speculations, A Chorus of Stones, is built to be incomplete, to be structured as a ruin. As she describes the systems of denial that make up the "private life of war" -- and the war within our private lives -- there is a continual refusal of what was surely so tempting: a fully articulated counter-memory that would, after brushing against the grain, take solace in some newly exposed presence.

If she is an advocate for a particular form of understanding, it is for a feeling of how history lives within us as an all-too often horrific inheritance; for a sense of the complicated uncertainties that mark human experience. The experiences in Griffin's explorations are almost always the kind of projects blighted by fear, fueled by self-loathing, sourced by torment and rage, and misunderstood because of an abject refusal. In other words, where there is a sense of security there is the greatest weakness, when the past is faced as a reality to be mastered, it appears only as a wish or delusion; framed by a cant, a comforting creed, a rush of the ego.

If her writing in A Chorus of Stones can seem too eager to make parallels where none rightly exist -- a set of willful category mistakes -- she is in no way glib about the means of reaching clarity and insight about our condition in the social world. The motivations for cruelty, or the acceptance of what is -- what Adorno calls the coldness which "does not for one second think or wish that the world were any different than it is" ("Education after Auschwitz") -- are too potent to be erased by whatever construction of insight. The effects of such motivations, however, may be tempered by stacking the stones into the ruin, an open-ended work which asks the critical imagination to account, more than is our want, for modernity's grisly traces; traces which scar us, imperceptibly and irrevocably, like the erosion lines on stones.

Griffin is fond of metaphors through which history is metastasized within, moving from the psyche to the X-Ray to the nuclear weapon, images of the molecular destruction of Being. But her insight that it is the need for security which drives the systems of destruction that cloud the world we now inhabit reminds one of a later work, more supple, and that is W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz. For Austerlitz begins with architecture and stonework, the vast mausoleums of modernity's worst impulses, whether it is the colonial barbarity visible in the cool grandeur of the Antwerp train station, or the modern fortresses that grew more and more complex in defense and defiance that they became nothing but elaborate tombs. We enter these, seeking the past, and finding that the expected presence cannot be grasped. It is as if it never were.

The word that echoes is "gentrification," the idea of a pacified space in which to dwell. That is the necessary space of denial and the very Thing with which one must reckon. There, History is the neighbor, the inscrutable otherness of where we reside. The only response to this, says Sebald, says Griffin, is to write, write; to enter into the symbolic restructuring. In Zizek's language, this is what it seems to be to live next to history:

"We need the recourse to performativity, to the symbolic engagement, precisely and insofar as the other whom we encounter is not only the imaginary semblant, but also the elusive absolute Other of the Real Thing with whom no reciprocal exchange is possible. In order to render our coexistence with the Thing minimally bearable, the symbolic order . . . the pacifying mediator, has to intervene." (Slavoj Zizek, The Neighbor)

After the Fevers

"No one experiences pleasure like one who is convalescing. His delights are not orgiastic in nature: the flow of his renewed blood resonates with the murmur of streams, the purer breath from his lips with winds in the tree tops. [There is a] childlike nobility for those who have escaped from the depths of night and madness, the madness, namely, of myth."

--Walter Benjamin

Exposure

"How does a collective deal, finally, with its vulnerability to violence? At what price, and at whose expense, does it gain a purchase on 'security,' and in what ways has a chain of violence formed in which the aggression of the United States has wrought returns to it in different forms? Can we think of the history of violence here without exonerating those who engage it against the United States in the present? Can we provide a knowledgeable explanation of events that is not confused with a moral exoneration of violence? What has happened to the value of critique as a democratic value? Under what conditions is critique itself censored, as if any reflexive criticism can only and always be construed as weakness and fallibility?

Negotiating a sudden and unprecedented vulnerability -- what are the options? What are the long-term strategies? Women know this question well, have known it in nearly all times, and nothing about the triumph of colonial powers has made our exposure to this kind of violence any less clear."

--Judith Butler, Precarious Lives

Philip Gourevitch's and Errol Morris' New Yorker piece, "Exposure" -- about the army m.p., Sabrina Harman (above) -- presents the psychic fissures introduced by an unbearable intimacy with human violence. Once upon a time, some of Harman's photographs of Abu Ghraib were the momentary talismans of imperial destruction; U.S. torture exposed. Now that acts which shock any conscience worthy of the name have become the lawful prerogative of this state, the images are no longer shocking, no longer indicative of anything that can be addressed as an "issue" for reckoning.

The forms of cruelty her photographs, among others, brought to light have receded into the realm of the historical facts of the war (still being) waged. They have dissolved into the long disquisitions on the ways modern man, from the Inquisition to today, abuses the human. Those photographs are ready relics of what seemed at the time to be the excavation of ruined civilization.

But by presenting the eye that saw, the woman who worked along the edge's of Abu Ghraib's systemic chaos and destruction of human beings, the horror that the "issue" of torture deflected is finally introduced. (Morris, who presented so insistently the internal deceptions and categorical divides of Robert McNamara in The Fog of War, has made of film of Harman called Standard Operating Procedure). The horror is that Harman participated without being able to process the implications of her participation. The camera seems like her last defense, a device of transference with which to work through the wretched. For whatever decency she exudes in the conversation with Morris and Gourevitch, she participated in the military's brutalization of men, women, and children in that prison.

And still, her conscience was shocked. She also photographed the violence there with the aim, she says, of giving it an afterlife; of creating an indicting residue of the policies that operated as the standard reduction of human beings to soft targets. And still, she does not see the impossibility of simply showing, or simply getting close to the carnage as a recorder. So she participates (to a degree) and protects her fellow soldiers, and then, like a form of flinching, places a camera before her conscience and the crime.

And when she appears in the photographs, there is the same defensive gesture -- the sweet sign of open, youthful enthusiasm; a willed innocence, a tactical naivete -- no matter the proximity to death.

The theme of "forced" participation in cruel policies saturates "Exposed." From an American perspective, the effects of that participation is where the horror of torture will have to be rooted if there is to be any recognition of the stakes. In this way, the article by Gourevitch and Morris will offer the temptation of a moral exoneration of Sabrina Harman. For she is certainly negotiating a sudden and unprecedented vulnerability. But the determinations to come, the struggle for which will be, one expects, the intellectual nerve-enter of Morris' forthcoming film, is how the individual is to be armored with the recognitions necessary to withstand the participation and dissolve immediately the defenses against the vulnerability.