Cruel Images

Paraphrased from the NHS’s definition of “selective mutism” →.

A Syrian territory occupied by Israel since 1967, and forced under full Israeli administration and jurisdiction through an internal law passed in 1981.

Also known as Taqamus.

Guy Lyon Playfair, New Clothes for Old Souls (Druze Heritage Foundation, 2006), 54.

In the words of the Arabic literary scholar Zeina G. Halaby via an email correspondence on the matter, and to whom I owe most gratitude for further expanding my lexical field of the word. Thank you also for the clarifications of philosopher and translator Abed Azzam, via screen shots and text messages on the word as a noun.

Email correspondence with Zeina G. Halaby.

See the Almaany Online Dictionary and Ibn Manzur’s thirteenth-century Lisān al-ʿArab dictionary for examples of the many historic uses and alterations of the word.

Perhaps, until that silence was broken by Muntadhar al-Zaidi in 2008 when he threw his shoe at George W. Bush during a press conference in Baghdad, screaming, “This is a farewell kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog.”

Lina Mounzer, “War in Translation: Giving Voice to The Women of Syria,” Literally Hub, October 6, 2015 →.

“Almantiq al baleegh” in the words of Ibn Manzur circa 1290 in his Lisān al-ʿArab: “Uttered the utterer a reasonable matured utterance.”

As Elaine Scarry puts it in her critique of social situations related to monosyllables and the disappearance of language: “One might say that language is backing up, the way it does when one is suddenly put in pain: language not only disappears, but you can actually chart its disappearance across the sudden reaching for monosyllables or for the kinds of cries and whispers that one made before one learned language.” Elaine Scarry, interview with Elizabeth Irene Smith, “‘The Body in Pain’: An Interview with Elaine Scarry,” Literary and Cultural Studies 32, no. 2 (September 2006), 223–37.

The latter I realized after an intense discussion with Terra Critica—to whom I am grateful—on the polemics of the first-person “I.”

As the writer and playwright Mustapha Benfodil said to me in response to a question posed at the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture conference hosted by HKW Berlin in October 2018: the use of the first person “I” is a right and a practice against regimes who do not want to hear our “very little voices.” For a great humanist and linguistic analysis of personhood behind political claims and personification in the face of dictatorship, see Thomas Keenan’s essay “Two Snapshots,” his afterword to The Human Snapshot, eds. Thomas Keenan and Tirdad Zolghadr (Sternberg, 2015). In a way, his analysis conforms to one Arabic definition of the human as an “uttering soul” ( النفس الناطقة /al nafs al natiqa), slightly different from the Aristotle’s supposed notion of the human as a rational animal ( الانسان حيوان ناطق).

Chad Elias, “Emergency Cinema and the Dignified Image: Cell Phone Activism and Filmmaking in Syria,” Film Quarterly 71, no. 1 (Fall 2017) →.

For debates and theoretical movements sparked by this film, see the writings of Yassin al-Haj Saleh and Mohammed Ali Atasi, especially for the newspaper Al-Jumhuriya and the nonprofit arts organization Bidayyat.

Or even from the city of Amman, that along the years has come to signify the capital you flee war to, only to continue watching it from your living room.

Said in the words of Elaine Scarry: “To have pain is to have certainty, to hear about pain is to have doubt.” And so pain’s inexpressibility has political consequences. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford University Press, 1985), 13. Added to this of course is the perceived incompatibility of seeing and saying; summed up best in Foucault’s treatment of painting in The Order of Things (1970): “It is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say. And it is in vain that we attempt to show, by the use of images, metaphors, or similes, what we are saying.” Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (Routledge, 1985), 10. Thank you to Adania Shibli for reminding me of this text.

Adam Kirsch, “Beware of Pity: Hannah Arendt and the Power of the Impersonal,” New Yorker, January 12, 2009 →.

Even the contemporary “We” of finding a new language toward the political; the “We” of biennials, where, “everything (is) inspired by Alain Resnais’s film with Chris Marker, Statues Also Die (1953),” as the writer and critic Kaelen Wilson-Goldie once wrote. Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, “So You Yhink You Can Dance,” Artforum, November 2015 →.

Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (Picador, 2003), 7.

Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 101.

But probably a little less different if you are reading this very essay online.

As a journalist and hate-speech activist in the highly informative film The Cleaners (2018) put it: “In Rohingya the internet is the Facebook they don’t have email”; what Reuters summed up as “Hatebook” in their equally informative article on the implicitness of Facebook in the persecution of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. Steve Stecklow, “Why Facebook is losing the war on hate speech in Myanmar,” Reuters, August 15, 2018 →.

Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (Zone Books, 2008), 130.

Importantly, the image Azoulay is speaking of is never a solitary image: “A solitary image cannot testify to what is revealed through it, but must be attached to another image, another piece of information, another assertion or description … An image is only ever another statement in a regime of statements.” Azoulay, Civil Contract of Photography, 191.

For profound accounts of the way the camera enables torture see: Ossama Mohammed (2014), Openheimer (2012), Mrouheh (2012), Keenan (1997–ongoing). Beginning from the 1989 live, televised, and populist occupation of state TV in Romania, for example, in Harun Farocki’s Videograms of a Revolution (1992).

Also translated as Electrical Photographer, originally La Photographie Électrique à Distance.

Originally highlighted to me in Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark, Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation (University of Chicago Press, 2013).

Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” e-flux journal no. 10, November 2009 →. The form of this section speaks to this landmark essay, in addition to Wayne Koestenbaum’s Humiliation and Barthes’s timeless A Lovers Discourse—as the latter puts it regarding his use of references in his book: “I am not invoking guarantees, merely recalling, by a kind of salute given in passing, what has seduced, convinced, or what has momentarily given the delight of understanding (of being understood?)” Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments (Hill and Wang, 1978).

Mahmoud Abu Hashhash, “On the Visual Representation of Martyrdom in Palestine,” Third Text 20, no.3–4, 391–403. See Hashhash on how this tragic photograph marked the start of the second intifada, and also a shift from Palestinian victim to hero.

Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image.”

See also Julian Stallabrass, “Memory and Icons,” New Left Review no. 105 (May–June, 2017).

From the anxious, somehow overly familiar faces of Portrait of the Lawyer Dr. Hugo Simons (1925), to Portrait of Dr. Heinrich Stadelmann (1920), to Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden (1926).

Sohrab Mohebbi, “Reluctant Hero, ” Presence Documents, August 6, 2012.

“What is currently happening is a mutation of our experiences, perceptions, values, and modes of behavior, a mutation of our being-in-the-world,” writes Vilém Flusser on the flattening of the image into a two-dimensional “surface, context, scene.” Vilém Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 5.

From the filmmaker Jeanne Liotta, who wrote this in a Bard College alumni listserv conversation we had on the difference between a picture and an image.

Hani Sayed via Skype during a conference panel entitled “Abounaddara: The Right to the Image,” Vera List Center, 2015.

See Zack Beauchamp, “This shocking drone footage from Syria shows what a destroyed city looks like,” VOX, February 3, 2016 →.

Étienne Balibar, “Outlines of a Topography of Cruelty: Citizenship and Civility in the Era of Global Violence,” in We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton University Press, 2004), 115.

Sohrab Mohebbi, “Transformed to Tautology” Presence Documents, August 2, 2012.

Scarry, Body in Pain, 64.

Aka “Facebook Wars,” however productive some of these streams and uploads can also be; for example, see the online platform Airwars, which tracks, assesses, and archives military action and civilian allegations from such uploads →.

Following Thomas Keenan’s use of the phrase “in full view” from his pivotal analysis “Publicity and Indifference: Media, Surveillance, Humanitarian Intervention,” in CTRL (SPACE), ed. Thomas Levin et al. (MIT Press, 2002), 544–61.

Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 57.

See Ariella Azoulay on hand gestures in “Actions, Non-Actions, Interactions, and So On and So Forth,” Journal of Visual Culture 15, no. 1 (2016): 25–28.

Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 58.

Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 58.