February9th_notes

Develop sensibility toward contradictions; Lay them out, map them out and your historical, socio-economical position within. CONTRADICTIONS and potential to be realized of the media and new technologies. Why will technology liberate us? (Free time) (PROGRESS AND TECHNOLOGY) Darwin : we “evolve” in time; (entropy; change); to we evolve, decay or change (adapt?) o make the viewer question culture, power and thought processes generally. (Genevieve): can artworks really do this? Are we really “fooled” by the media? (Steve’s question a few weeks ago): Arendt says: no. I-P conflict as a matter of //space//. Xenophobic nationalism or neocolonialism? Debatably, Palestinians oscillate between the theologico-political other of Israel (as Arabs, Muslims and Christians) and enemies, and such nationalistic, ethnic and religious distinctions have further naturalized asymmetrical oppositions such as “Israelis and Muslims,” the “West and Islam,” “Palestinians and Jews.” With George W. Bush’s declaration of the “Axis of Evil,” these oppositions have recently naturalized as enmities. The enemy or the other; the neighbor; Islam as the “enemy” (Axis of Evil) critiquing the excess of violence and the scopophilia present in regimes of visibility – for him, when it comes to images of dead people, difference in terms of origin is absent because war undoes socio-historical determination. VOYEURISM WHY SHOULD WE CARE? Canada : Security agreement with Israel; deductible taxes if you donate money to Israel; companies who support Israel: Starbucks, Chapters, Macdonalds, Home Depot, Nestle and Cocacola; Caterpillar has designed special bulldozers to destroy houses; Quebequais company is the contractor of building settlements in the West Bank (Interesting trans-national law case); Development of military and technologies of surveillance; mercenaries, bodyguards, spies, are trained in Israel; Mexican-American wall; new paradigm of the exercise of power through spatial organization –not the panopticon or spactacle but //actual space//; disappearance of cities… increasing isolation of communities, the becoming “suburb” of farming land… responds to economic tendencies… as well as new configurations of power. Architecture and urban planning as surveillance and as weapons (URBICIDE); real state wars… etc; wars and security (Surveillance and control) technologies deployed not waged on TERRITORY (nation) but on SPACE. The police estate; For Weizman, in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, people and space are not organized by the occupying power as in traditional colonialism, which implies certain modes of intervention on the part of the foreign power (healthcare, education, etc.). In this case, there is the selective absence of governmental intervention, and thus the actors of this colonization become, in Weizman’s view, the young settlers, the Israeli military, capitalist corporations (such as cellular network providers), human rights and political activists, the armed resistance, humanitarian and legal experts, government ministries, foreign governments, supportive communities overseas, state planners, the media, and the Israeli court of Justice. All these actors have created a diffused power, a “political plastic” that puts occupation at work as the map of the relations of all the forces that have shaped it. Occupation is for Weizman manifested in rooftops, stones, street and highway illumination design, housing, the form of the settlements, the enclosures and spatial mechanisms of circulation control, and the Israeli flow management of people. Beginning with the fact that the areas under Palestinian control include 200 fragments of land surface (as of 2006), and that Israel controls the land around them, Weizman describes the relationships between the fragmented geography and the fact that the settlements are built in the high summits, and how these relationships have prompted the construction of raised and extended (Israeli) bridges covering Palestinian routes and lands while narrow Palestinian roads are buried under Israeli highways. The three-dimensional matrix of maps and tunnels serves as a way to divide and sustain a fragmented division of this “indivisible territory.” [|[1]] 19th Century: European Jews started to immigrate to Palestine; 1948: State of Israel is declared after the British mandate left… Palestinians did not accept the partition of the land the British & future Israelis suggested. Recent European Holocaust… more Israelis came; campaigns to attract the Jews from North Africa and other parts of the middle east (there are jews living in the WB: The Summerians); Israel although it has a complex structure as a “Democratic” nation, it is the first THEOCRACY in the middle east; what is a theocracy? Where religion and government are one; It is the opposite of “Secular.” Iran was the second Middle Eastern theocracy established in 1979 as an Islamic republic. 1948: Palestinians were expelled from their homes by force or by threat; 700,000 of them. Went to refugee camps in Gaza and the West Bank or to other Arab countries… never had legal status; 1960s: Palestinian revolution organizes… Revolutionary organization, the PLO (Yasser Arafat); in 1967 they were defeated, what was left was occupied by Israel; beginning of the construction of settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. (Anti-imperialist struggles) In the seventies: They re-locate their struggle to Lebanon; in 1982: Many palestinians who were expelled in 1948 from their homes migrated to Lebanon; they do not have the status of citizens; Bashir, the Christian prime minister of Lebanon… followed Israel’s orders and massacred 15,000 Palestinians in refugee camps. (This is when Genet is writing); “Fedayeen” is the Palestinian freedom fighters training in Siria, Jordan and Amman; In 1987: The first armed movement from INSIDE the Palestinian territories happens, it is the first Intifada; it came to an end with the Oslo accords… a treaty of peace brokered by Clinton (the US) in 1993 which was let the PLO (led by Yasser Arafat: they changed from guerrilla or national liberation movement to a political party) establish themselves as the Palestinian government. What do Palestinians want? Self-determination as a nation; The right of return to their lands (key); or compensation Jerusalem as the capital of the Palestinian state (Shared with Israel) To date, they have no borders; Israel controls comings and goings, checkpoints throughout the West Bank, wall around the West Bank and Gaza. They don’t have their own money… 2000: Second Intifada (Palestinian popular uprising against Israel); a military wing (guerrilla) armed but it is not comparable to Israel’s military power. (Kids throwing stones to tank image). Suicide bombings start; 2002: Israel invaded the main Palestinian cities to fight the armed militias away and razed them; (Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah… Yasser Arafat’s //muqata// or siege was completely destroyed). Right after, Juliano went to look for Arna’s children. 2008: massacre in Gaza; (Kassam roquets); Hamas wants to negotiate; Israel is not interested. ** Arna’s Children ** : Documentary, truth and cinéma vérité Documentary claims to be //direct expression// without mediation, by making immediate what is happening elsewhere. There is no mediation: a story, the symbolic. It claims to film “life”.  à  DIRECT EXPRESSION WITHOUT MEDIATION; “Directness” of documentary; fiction is a form of mediation and so is theater. Direct expression, without the mediation (of a story, the symbolic… straight from life;  à   What are we interested in here? The relationship between the filmmaker and the subject of documentary (you know it can be exploitative, manipulative…)   à   The privileged form of visual activism is documentary: Sharpen your eyes and ears… Who speaks and acts, for whom and how? How is the subject represented?   à   Jessica pointed at the complicity between documentary, activism and tourism. “War tourism”  à  Documentary: brings the ordeal of others close to home; with no mediation; the discourse: violation of human rights;  à  Objectivity and journalism; objectivity and human rights; John Grierson first coined the word “documentary.” Documentary must not be confused with “cinéma vérité” which, in principle, utilizes mechanisms to convey to the audience the feeling of “being present” at the shooting of the actual event. Cinéma vérité has as its purpose “to capture life as it is being lived rather than re-enacted or re-invented.” Jean Rouch is one of the main authors of cinéma vérité. In his //Chronique d’un été// (1960), he sought “to eliminate fiction to get closer to real life, to pose the question of ‘truth’ and to arouse questions in the spectator,” and “to observe, record, present reality without controlling, staging and re-organizing it.” Rouch believed, furthermore, in the necessity of acknowledging the impact of the filmmaker’s presence in **the film as the “generator of a reality” rather than allowing a reality to unfold passively before the camera**.  à  Democratization: Everyone is on TV or on the camera; ** Direct Cinema ** or **Verité (**catalyst for a crisis   Verite: as provocateurs, participants and catalysts for a crisis;    Direct cinema: the invisible bystander, waiting for crisis and only taking advantage of available events.    The **filmmaker gaze/ and the filmmaker stancee**;    What makes a film more or less voyeuristic? What is the role of filmmaker in the process?    Rouch: facilitating the human experience and though much of his work is experimental…. Interested in human experience; a sense of participation as opposed to a voyeuristic gaze;   à   The question of self-representation (or inaccurate representation by the voyeuristic outsider); to allow the subjects to play with, to make-with. The filmmaker’s stance: Self-involvement or mere observation; A journey in time, a story; (like Rouch)… it is not a portrayal; it is the story of a friendship… There is that scene where Juliano and the kids discuss trust. What is the story? Many forms of activism are folded into one another… a portrait of social, filmic and radical activism;  à  Another thing that comes up is the children’s awareness on constructing their own image; remember that scene where Juliano comes to the camp accompanied by Israeli Television who is there to make a documentary about Arna’s project? He asks them to play “Israeli soldier and Palestinian” (show the violence with which they are treated); one of the kids says “I want to be the Palestinian Romeo”…  à  What does Arna’s children “reveal” as a documentary? What kind of truth does it produce? Activists: Arna, as a young woman fighting with the Israeli armed brigades kicking Palestinians out of their homes in Haifa and Tel Aviv (Scene in the car where her son asks her about it); “I was 18 and reckless…” Asks her about the kuffiyah; She then worked with the children in Jenin; Juliano: social worker, documentary filmmaker; The Palestinian children: suicide actions and uprising against Israel; Suicide bombings: Illegal violence; (divine violence: the violence necessary to founding a state and mythical violence: the violence necessary to upkeeping a state); This state-violence has been reglamented… legal and illegal violence; Palestinians because they are not a state… they do not have an army… engage in illegal violence … it is not a matter of suicide bombers killing civilians… Israeli soldiers have killed more Palestinian civilians.. it is a matter of JUSTIFIED violence or UNJUSTIFIED violence.  à  to simplify the question of suicide bombing implies: to say it is grounded on religious motivations –they want to be in heaven… (Kamikazes in Japan: nationalistic drive); to try to wonder what would drive a suicide bomber/attacker to do this is also inaccurate: we will never be in their shoes. I say: it is symbolic (Baudrillard since the seventies said terrorist attacks are MEDIATIC EVENTS and that is their sole purpose: to create an image that does not usually circulate in the media); Palestinians think of them as martyrs: //shahid// means literally martyr; This DOES have a religious connotation… Jesus, God’s son sacrificed himself for all our sins; SCAPEGOAT; self-sacrifice… is a symbolic act. A symbolic act of witnessing. What happens? Israelis come and destroy the family’s house.  à  Juliano: as much Israeli as he is Palestinian; Special status as mediator; Theater, mimesis, catharsis. Imitation (and exaggeration) as having a healing effect: The scene when Juliano asks the children to imitate their English teacher: They re-enact the authoritarianism… internalizataion of occupation and how in the education and familial stystem… these relationships are maintained; the violence of the occupation permeating the whole social tissue. (**Palestinians are thought of as “intractable”… they are not “born” as violent…)** “Truth” and theater: the political question is, the REGULATION OF DISTANCE between the subject of the play and the spectator. (Tout va bien: Scene with the stage); Question of the image and veracity; Theater: is where we appropriate symbolically collective existence; a staging of appearances in common; **What is CATHARSIS?** 1.  How does Genet describe the act of looking at a dead body in “Four Hours at Chatila”? Does Genet draw a distinction between bearing witness to the massacre “life” and in a photograph? How does he describe how the corpses are dealt with and photographed after the massacre? (2 pts) 2.  Bearing in mind Callison’s distinction between direct cinema (documentary) or Cinéma Vérité, what is Juliano’s relationship to the subjects (actors) of the film? Is it an objective or voyeuristic account of the situation? Or something else? Is Merkhamis’ approach closer to Wiseman and Leackock or Rouch? (2 pts) 3.  There are 4 forms of activism (praxis) present in //Arna’s Children//. Mention them and describe how they operate. Two of them intersect with //poiesis//. Explain. (1.5 pts) 4.  According to Susan Sontag, Are we responsible for the images of violence that we see? How should we relate to them? (Bear in mind her discussion of the relationship between compassion and action). (2 pts) 5.  In your opinion, which is more powerful, Jean Genet’s or Juliano Merkhamis’ account of the Palestinian situation (from 1982 and 2002 respectively) and why? (1.5 pts)  A photograph has two dimensions, so does a television screen; neither can be walked through. From one wall of the street to the other, bent or arched, with their feet pushing against one wall and their heads pressing against the other, the black and bloated corpses that I had to step over were all Palestinian and Lebanese. For me, as for what remained of the population, walking through Chatila and Sabra resembled a game of hopscotch. Sometimes a dead child blocked the streets: they were so small, so narrow, and the dead so numerous. The smell is probably familiar to old people; it didn't bother me. But there were so many flies. If I lifted the handkerchief or the Arab newspaper placed over a head, I disturbed them. Infuriated by my action, they swarmed onto the back of my hand and tried to feed there.   à  Massacres of Sabra and Chattila: Israel invaded Lebanon… Bashir Gemayel ordered the massacres; Jean Genet talks about how it was organized by the Israelis; to date, they have not claimed responsibility; What is VERY dangerous is that they claim “not to have seen, kind of heard a rumor that it was happening…” This is what the European civilians said when the genocide of European jews was happening; in the 1990s: with the Balkans war: EVERYONE knew and none did anything about it; Why is this alarming? Muslims vs. Christians or Arabs vs. Israelis… all conflicts grounded on religion; <span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: Times-Roman; mso-bidi-font-size: 33.0pt; mso-bidi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Times-Roman;"> <span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: Times-Roman; mso-bidi-font-size: 33.0pt; mso-bidi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Times-Roman;"> A photograph doesn't show the flies nor the thick white smell of death. Neither does it show how you must jump over bodies as you walk along from one corpse to the next. If you look closely at a corpse, an odd phenomenon occurs: the absence of life in this body corresponds to the total absence of the body, or rather to its continuous backing away. You feel that even by coming closer you can never touch it. That happens when you look at it carefully. But should you make a move in its direction, get down next to it, move an arm or a finger, suddenly it is very much there and almost friendly. Love and death. These two words are quickly associated when one of them is written down. I had to go to Chatila to understand the obscenity of love and the obscenity of death. In both cases the body has nothing more to hide: positions, contortions, gestures, signs, even silences belong to one world and to the other.” <span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: Wingdings; mso-ascii-font-family: Times-Roman; mso-hansi-font-family: Times-Roman; mso-bidi-font-size: 33.0pt; mso-bidi-language: EN-US; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings; mso-bidi-font-family: Times-Roman;"> à <span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: Times-Roman; mso-bidi-font-size: 33.0pt; mso-bidi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Times-Roman;"> Dead bodies: death undoes historical determination, religion, place of origin. It is a body; (love) <span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: Times-Roman; mso-bidi-font-size: 33.0pt; mso-bidi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Times-Roman;"> <span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: Times-Roman; mso-bidi-font-size: 33.0pt; mso-bidi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Times-Roman;"> Hiding and revealing information (Genet: accounts for that… “It will be very easy for Israel to clear itself of all the accusations. Journalists of all the European press are already at work clearing them: no one will say that on the nights from Thursday to Friday and from Friday to Saturday Hebrew was spoken in Chattila.” <span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: Wingdings; mso-ascii-font-family: Times-Roman; mso-hansi-font-family: Times-Roman; mso-bidi-font-size: 33.0pt; mso-bidi-language: EN-US; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings; mso-bidi-font-family: Times-Roman;"> à  <span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: Times-Roman; mso-bidi-font-size: 33.0pt; mso-bidi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Times-Roman;"> Genet goes back: to 1970-1971 when he lived with the fedayeen in the training camps in Jordan; <span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: Wingdings; mso-ascii-font-family: Times-Roman; mso-hansi-font-family: Times-Roman; mso-bidi-font-size: 33.0pt; mso-bidi-language: EN-US; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings; mso-bidi-font-family: Times-Roman;"> à <span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: Times-Roman; mso-bidi-font-size: 33.0pt; mso-bidi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Times-Roman;"> Passage where Genet is talking about the “octogenarian” women (who are 80 or older)… what is at stake for them? Children bearing and rearing, owning the land, having been forced out their home land… “After having fled Hebron under Israeli threats the earth here seemed solid, everyone was lighthearted and moved sensuously in the Arabic language.” <span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: Times-Roman; mso-bidi-font-size: 33.0pt; mso-bidi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Times-Roman;"> <span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: Times-Roman; mso-bidi-font-size: 33.0pt; mso-bidi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Times-Roman;"> Genet’s relationship to the Palestninians: “I am French, but I defend the Palestinians whole heartedly and automatically. They are in the right because I love them. But would I love them if injustice had not turned them into a wandering people?” <span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: Wingdings; mso-ascii-font-family: Times-Roman; mso-hansi-font-family: Times-Roman; mso-bidi-font-size: 33.0pt; mso-bidi-language: EN-US; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings; mso-bidi-font-family: Times-Roman;"> à <span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: Times-Roman; mso-bidi-font-size: 33.0pt; mso-bidi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Times-Roman;"> Genet talks about the Refugee camps in //Jordan//… trying to give us an image of the refugee camps in Beirut (Sabra and Chattila; what was there before it was ruined… he talks about the women… peasants…  <span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: Times-Roman; mso-bidi-font-size: 33.0pt; mso-bidi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Times-Roman;"> fore the Algerian war, the Arabs weren't beautiful, their gait was awkward, shuffling, they had ugly mugs, and almost suddenly victory made them beautiful; but a little before victory was assured, while more than half a million French soldiers were straining and dying in the Aures and throughout Algeria, a curious thing happened to the faces and bodies of the Arab workers: something like the intimation, the hint of a still fragile beauty which was going to blind us when the scales finally fell from their skin and our eyes. We had to admit it: they had achieved political freedom in order to be seen as they were: very beautiful. In the same way, once they had escaped from the refugee camps, from the morality and the order of the camps, from a morality imposed by the need to survive, once they had at the same time escaped from shame, the fedayeen were very beautiful; and since this beauty was new, shall we say pristine, naive, it was fresh, so alive that it discovered at once what connected it to all the beauties of the world, freeing themselves from shame. Lots of Algerian pimps walking through Pigalle at night used their charms in the service of the Algerian revolution. Virtue was also there. It is Hannah Arendt, I believe, who distinguishes between revolutions according to whether they aspire to freedom or virtue -- and therefore work. Perhaps we should also recognize that revolutions or liberations aim -- obscurely -- at discovering or rediscovering beauty, that is the intangible, unnameable except by this word. <span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: Times-Roman; mso-bidi-font-size: 33.0pt; mso-bidi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Times-Roman;"> is a revolution a revolution when it has not removed from faces and bodies the dead skin that made them ugly? I am not speaking about academic beauty, but about the intangible - unnameable - joy of bodies, faces, cries, words which are no longer cheerless, I mean a sensual joy so strong that it chases away all eroticism. <span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: Times-Roman; mso-bidi-font-size: 33.0pt; mso-bidi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Times-Roman;"> <span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: Times-Roman; mso-bidi-font-size: 33.0pt; mso-bidi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Times-Roman;"> <span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: Times-Roman; mso-bidi-font-size: 33.0pt; mso-bidi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Times-Roman;"> Writing vs. Image as political action debate: Sartre: For Sartre, insofar as images are mute, they are open receptacles of meaning and therefore invoke ambiguous readings, as opposed to conveying a clear, unified message, like writing. That is why for Sartre only literature can be successful as committed art, because the writer guides the readers through a description, making his audience see the symbols of social injustice and thereby provoking their indignation. For Sartre, insofar as images are mute, they are open receptacles of meaning and therefore invoke ambiguous readings, as opposed to conveying a clear, unified message, like writing. That is why for Sartre only literature can be successful as committed art, because the writer guides the readers through a description, making his audience see the symbols of social injustice and thereby provoking their indignation. [|[2]] // Guernica // : //Guernica// is not a speech act, and that is perhaps the reason why it became the epitome of an autonomous yet committed work of art, because while it remains separate from the social sphere (the domain of opinion, speech), it lets the German guilt/culpability surface, and at the same time, it does not have as an end Picasso’s //declaration// of indignation. [|[3]] While we can doubt with Sartre whether //Guernica// converted anyone to the Spanish cause, this painting, like.. condemned by Sartre in 1960 and championed by Adorno in 1966; the image’s status as both an icon for militant <span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: Times-Roman; mso-bidi-font-size: 33.0pt; mso-bidi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Times-Roman;"> <span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: Times-Roman; mso-bidi-font-size: 33.0pt; mso-bidi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Times-Roman;"> <span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: Wingdings; mso-ascii-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-hansi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings;"> à  Sontag: “Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience” ** Why? **   What are the responses? Compassion, indignation, approval, titltilation; <span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: Wingdings; mso-ascii-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-hansi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings;"> à  How to respond to the steadily increasing flow of information about the agonies of war; “Awareness of the suffering that accumulates in a select number of wars happening elsewhere is something constructed. Principally in the form othat is registered by cameras, it flares up, is shared by many people, and fades from view. In contrast to a written account –which, depending on its complexity of thorugh, reference, and vocabulary, is pitched at a larger or smaller readership – **a photograph has only one language and is destined potentially for all**. <span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: Wingdings; mso-ascii-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-hansi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings;"> à  The understanding of war among people who have not experienced war is now chiefly the product of the impact of these images. Something becomes real –to those who are elsewhere, following it as “news” –by being photographed. <span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: Wingdings; mso-ascii-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-hansi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings;"> à  Question of the image: can catastrophe be represented, conveyed (World Trade Towers); to be described as “a movie” as “surreal”…. “Unassimilable” (beyond our capacity of our thinking to process things); Shock produces surplus value; (voyeurism) We get to know war through the camera; photography and deat; photographs as superior to any painting as a memento of the vanished past; to “seize death in the making” is different; “Photographs have the kind of authority over imagination today, which the printed word had yesterday, and the spoken word before that. They seem utterly real.” Storytelling; novels; images. One can feel obliged to look at photographs that record great cruelties and crimes. One should feel obliged to think about what it means to look at them, about the capacity to actually assimilate what they show. (voyeurism: mutilated bodies) “Prurience” (a mental itching, a want, a desire); All images that display the violation of an attractive body are, to a certain degree, pornographic. But images of the repulsive can also allure (we have an unworthy desire to look at gruesome images); we have an appetite for sights of degradation and pain and mutilation; <span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: Wingdings; mso-ascii-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-hansi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings;"> à  “As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible.” <span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: Wingdings; mso-ascii-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-hansi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings;"> à  A view of the pain of others… is it a mistake, an accident or a crime? We feel powerfless. What to do with such knowledge as phographs bring of faraway suffering? People are often unable to take in the sufferings of those close to them. “This is not happening to //me//” <span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: Wingdings; mso-ascii-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-hansi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings;"> à  When people are safe –they will be indifferent; Nothing can be done; expression of helplessness and fear; <span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: Wingdings; mso-ascii-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-hansi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings;"> à  It seems like any war doesn’t seem as if it can be stopped so people become less responsive to the horrors; Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. Question: What to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated; (Bored, cynical, apathetic) <span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: Wingdings; mso-ascii-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-hansi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings;"> à  The imaginary proximity to the suffering inflicted on others that is granted by images suggests a link between the faraway sufferers –seen close-up on the television screen –and the privileged viewer is simply untrue, that is yet one more mystification of our real relations to power; so far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence; To that extent, it can be (for all our good intentions) an impertinent –if not an inappropriate –response. To set aside the sympathy we extend to others beset by war and murderous politics for a reflection on how our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering… <span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: Wingdings; mso-ascii-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-hansi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings;"> à  In a world of hyper-saturated images, those that should matter have a diminishing effect… after repeated exposure, an event becomes less real; they create sympathy and shrivel sympathy; An image is drained of its force by the way it is used, where and how often it is seen. Images shown on television are by definition of which, sooner or later, one tires. Content is a STIMULANT to consume; A more reflective engagement with content would require a certain intensity of awareness –just what is weakened by the expectations brought to images disseminated by the media, whose leaching out of content contributes most to the deadening of feeling. “Corruption of sensibility” by an extreme flow of images; Is compassion going numb? The flow of images of horrors will not go away; WHAT TO DO? Conservative argument made on the critique of the diffusion of images: of the idea that reality gets ‘eroded”; There is still a reality that exists independent of the attempts to weaken its authority; (defense of reality); Old debate: “our capacity to respond to our experiences with emotional freshness and ethical pertinence is being sapped by the relentless diffusion of vulgar and appaling images.” It is more radical: there is nothing to defend; (spectacle); <span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: Wingdings; mso-ascii-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-hansi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings;"> à  People feel like they can anticipate their own experience; a war being lost or won because what happened in the media; (Death of reality, reason, intellectual, literature…) Relity as becoming spectacle is provincial; It universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment; “everyone is a spectator”; and that there is no real suffering in the world; It is a cliché that images have little effect; <span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: Wingdings; mso-ascii-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-hansi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings;"> à  Not to be cynical about the possibility of sincerity; some people will do anything to keep themselves from being moved;
 * Contradictions; **
 * Theater as a form … combination of poiesis and praxis; **
 * Regulation of distance; **
 * What kind of image of Palestinians and their struggle does it portray? What kind of information can we derive from the documentary? **
 * <span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: Wingdings; mso-ascii-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-hansi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings;"> à ****  Boycott, //sumud// (endurance)  **

[|[1]] Weizman, //Hollow Land//, 28. [|[2]] In “What is writing?” in //What is literature?// [|[3]] According to Adorno, in “Commitment.” Further, he writes about the joke of a Nazi officer coming into Picasso’s studio and asking him: “Did you do it?” Picasso’s answer being: “No, you did it!”