Cognitive Mapping: An approach towards a visual culture for a politically effective public.

Cognitive Mapping An approach towards a visual culture for a politically effective public

Peter Buwert

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Cognitive Mapping An approach towards a visual culture for a politically effective public

Peter Buwert BA(Hons) Visual Communication Robert Godon University, Grays School of Art 2010

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Contents Visual Culture and Political Effectiveness

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Fredric Jameson - The Postmodern world space

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A Model for a Politically Effective Public

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Location(Ideology)

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Triangulation (Exposure and Conflict)

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Freedom of Expression (Access and Visibility)

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Choice (Involvement and Pedagogy)

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The Image in Society

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Cinematic Visual Culture - A Practical Application of the Theory

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Inglourious Basterds - Spectacular Intertextuality

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Waltz with Bashir - Pedagogical Defamiliarisation

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Conclusion: Pedagogy - New Perspectives

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Photo Essay

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Visual Culture and Political Effectiveness

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Two general observations underlie my motivation for conducting this study: Firstly, the observation that the world we live in is an imperfect place, abounding in greed, prejudice, injustice and inequality. Although the earth produces abundance enough to fulfil the needs of all, the rich few demand more, while the many poor become poorer, and dependent on the ‘charity’ of the rich to return to them a small and unsatisfactory portion of what should have been theirs to begin with. We are the rich few, and we are fully aware of this.

Secondly, the observation that our world is saturated with images. Our society is built on the image, the representation, the appearance. There is nowhere we can go to escape it. We live through images, we speak through images and we are spoken to by images.

The collision of these two observations, sparks a chain reaction, or perhaps more accurately, triggers an avalanche of questions in my mind about the role of the image and of visual communication in our society.

If the visual is our dominant mode of public discourse, and is as pervasive as it appears to be, why are we so ignorant of, and unwilling to act on, the political issues facing our society? It is not that the issues are not being raised. We all see

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images with social content every day. But it appears that merely seeing images with social content is not enough to promote political activity. The majority of our images no longer move us. Is there then something in the very visual structure of our cultural images which undermines the effectiveness of their political content?

Are the structures and systems of our imperfect society so entrenched that we are powerless to change them?

How can the visual communicator create images which do move the public, and not merely with a visceral knee-jerk reaction, but in a way which empowers genuinely effective democratic political action?

This concerns me, as a visual communicator – someone involved in the creation of cultural images – and as a citizen. And so I embarked on an investigation to attempt to discover what effect our visual culture has on the ability of the public to be politically effective. How can our visual culture empower or undermine the political effectiveness of the public?

This is a big question, and as such it requires a big answer. I do not even pretend to have answered it in any complete way, but I am satisfied that my investigation at least engages with the issue in a meaningful way and cannot be discounted as superficial. In the short space of this piece I have attempted to break apart the

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mechanics of political activity itself to its most basic formulations in order to create an analytical toolkit with which to engage the issue of the relationship between the image and political action in society. In this way it has been my aim to demonstrate the validity of my argument in both the theoretical realm and the practical dimension of visual culture as experienced around us.

I believe that this issue is vitally important to all of us. Whether we are creating images, or on the receiving end of their effect, it is our responsibility to be politically active as members of the public. My hope is that my investigation here will provoke a reaction in the reader, to reconsider the way that we relate socially and politically through images.

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Fredric Jameson The Postmodern world space

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The theoretical backbone of my investigation into the relationship between the visual and the social, is Fredric Jameson’s profoundly influential writing on the relationship between the capitalist economic system and postmodern culture. In order to understand Jameson’s key work; Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism based around his 1984 essay of the same name, we must first understand a little of the work of economist Ernest Mandel from whom Jameson takes the Late Capitalism of his title.

Mandel suggested that we have now entered ‘late’ or ‘multinational’ capitalism; the third stage of capital (the first stage being market capitalism and the second monopoly capitalism). The key characteristic of capital in our third stage is its fluid and all-encompassing mutation into all areas of life; absolute commodification, the final eclipse of use value by exchange value. Jameson describes this as “the purest form of capital yet to have emerged, a prodigious expansion of capital into hitherto uncommodified areas.”(1 p.3) Late Capitalism is a totalising system seeking only the perpetuation of its own activity. Mandel described the individual within the system as a captive to the laws of the market in all areas of life, not only economically but culturally, artistically and socially.(2 p.502) Everything we experience seems to be a product of the capitalist system and therefore imbued with its inherent values and qualities. We therefore would appear

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to be trapped in a late capitalist prison in which all our experience reinforces the impression that we are helplessly enslaved to the market and powerless to do anything about it. This concept of the apparent totality of capital is important to note. However if it is true, the repercussions for my current question of the possibility of political activity within this system are fatal. As Jameson writes, there is; “a “winner loses” logic – which tends to surround any effort to describe a “system,” a totalizing dynamic, as these are detected in the movement of contemporary society. What happens is that the more powerful the vision of some increasingly total system or logic ... the more powerless the reader comes to feel. Insofar as the theorist wins therefore, by constructing an increasingly closed and terrifying machine, to that very degree he loses, since the critical capacity of his work is thereby paralyzed, and the impulses of negation and revolt, not to speak of those of social transformation, are increasingly perceived as vain and trivial in the face of the model itself.”(1 p.5) This is a key point underlying Jameson’s work. That while the late capitalist system represents itself as a totality in order to pursue its own aims - and to those inside the system it does appear to be a totality - it is not in fact an inescapable

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totalising system. Mandel writes that, in actuality, late capitalism is not a complete system at all but “merely a hybrid and bastardized combination of organization and anarchy”(2 p.502) which seeks to represent itself as complete through all sorts of subtle, complex, but essentially tautological arguments, which Mandel sees evidence of in theories contemporary to his writing, which would posit the ‘end’ of ideologies, meta-narratives etc. While these type of claims are evidently self refuting - an assertion that ideology has ended is an ideological claim, the death of the meta-narrative would itself become a meta-narrative - Mandel writes that this kind of thought directly serves the capitalist system, functioning to convince the alienated labourer that they are powerless and unable to rebel against the conditions of their existence. However there is no malicious conspiracy of philosophers on the payroll of capitalist fat-cats. Mandel’s implication is that this type of thinking is a merely a symptom; a “socially determined reflection” of the economic reality which influences the everyday conditions of existence of each individual forced to operate under the system.(2 p.503) What Jameson has done is to analyse these effects of Mandel’s late capitalism by choosing as the object of his study, the cultural implications of late capitalism, which he identifies as postmodernism. He writes that the three stages of capitalism generate three distinct cultural spaces. Market capitalism corresponds to ‘realism’, monopoly capitalism to ‘modernism’, and late capitalism to ‘postmodernism’.

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It is clear that Jameson’s cultural spaces are to be understood not as superficial aesthetic veneers dictating the formal output of culture, but as ‘cultural dominants’ nourishing the root of all cultural production.

The idea of a cultural dominant avoids the paralysing critical unassailability of a theorised totality, while acknowledging the general dominance of the broad concept in the realm of cultural activity. To Jameson, postmodernism is a ‘systematic cultural norm’, not an inescapable totality. This definition leaves room at least for the possibility of change, and therefore politics. However the mere possibility for politics to take place does not mean that it will take place. The nature of postmodern space may make it easier or harder for real political change to occur and this is the subject of my investigation.

Rather than start by conducting an in depth analysis of the nature of postmodern space, which is our culture, and from there make judgements as to whether these abstract characteristics are conducive to political action, I would like to suggest an ideal model for public political action. I will then proceed to compare this to examples from our visual culture in order to examine the ways in which our contemporary visual culture can affect the ability of the public to act in political ways. However, before I progress to proposing a model, I feel it is important that I first clarify my usage of the words ‘public’ and ‘politics’ as these are subtle terms

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which are difficult to define and can easily cause misunderstanding in a text if not tied down in usage.

I will be using the word ‘public’ primarily in the sense in which it is derived from the Latin ‘populus’ which refers to ‘the people’.(3) The term ‘the people’ having connotations not only of the simple grouping of human persons, but of ‘the people’ in the democratic sense; that group of humans persons which forms a society.

A member of ‘the public’ is not just a basic human plucked from a meaningless multitude, but is a member of society who has value as one of ‘the people’. A people who are in control of their society and make decisions which control the realities of their social existence.

This brings me onto my use of the word ‘politics’. A democratic society is one in which politics is in the hands of the people. By this I mean politics in the broadest terms. For my purposes I will define politics as the process through which any decision is made which has a real effect on the conditions of existence of any member or group in that society. I must make it clear that the subject of this exercise is not to discuss the advantages or weaknesses of any specific system of government, but rather to attempt to describe what I see as the necessary prerequisites for the execution of any real political change in any society, on any level. It may be a change which affects two people or it may have universal

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consequences. The premises which I will set out in my model are what I believe to be the fundamental conditions required for such a political decision to be made in a democratic manner, which is to say that it is the decision of ‘the people’.

The model which I will propose is therefore a model for a democratic politically effective public. I must once again stress that by democracy I am not referring to any system of government. I must ask the reader to suspend cultural historical associations with the word democracy. Perhaps to some extent in the West, the influence of the first half of the twentieth century can still be felt in our connotations of the word democracy as the banner held up by those states opposed to Fascism and later Communism. But I must attempt to conceive of democracy in ahistorical terms. Not as a system of government but as an ideal. The subject of my interest is democratic politics in the most pure and basic form; the public process towards a change in the conditions of existence of that public, regardless of whatever system of government is in place in the geographical location of any members of that public, be it a republic, socialist, monarchy, theocracy or dictatorship. This comes to take particular importance when considering the nature of today’s postmodern multinational cultural space, and Jameson’s implications that in postmodern space, culture may now play an equal or even more important role than systems of government in the public’s ability to take part in politics. If we follow Jameson’s logic, ‘postmodern’ space is not simply

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a philosophical theoretical model which has been dreamed up to more neatly pigeon-hole the cultural peculiarities of our current age, but it actually “has genuine historical (and socioeconomic) reality as a third great original expansion of capitalism around the globe.”(1 p.49) and therefore: “every position on postmodernism in culture – whether apologia or stigmatization – is also at one and the same time, and necessarily, an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism today.”(1 p.6) And so I shall propose an ideal model for a politically effective public using the background and interpretive framework of Jameson’s conception of cultural space as the symptom of systems of economic reality as a foundation.

I will base my work on the background and interpretive framework of Jameson’s conception of cultural space as the symptom of systems of economic reality and the model of political culture Jameson proposes in Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, which he states “will necessarily have to raise spatial issues as its fundamental organizing concern.” that which he calls ‘cognitive mapping’. Cognitive mapping is a concept Jameson illustrates by referencing Kevin Lynch’s idea of the alienated city: the homogeneous confusing physical urban

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space devoid of notable landmarks in which an individual cannot create a mental image of either their own location or of the larger map of the city; the ‘totality’ of the space. In order to become ‘disalienated’ the individual must reclaim a sense of their own place in this world and then be able to construct a mental representation of the totality, not a mimetic map but a meaningful representation of relative locations, which can be made and remade as new locations and relationships are discovered. Jameson’s cognitive mapping is, therefore, not mapping of the subject’s location and relationship to physical space, but to cultural space. In his writing, Jameson does not elaborate on the form of his ‘political aesthetic’ of cognitive mapping in much detail. Using his work as a foundation I will attempt to break down the concept and describe each of the fundamental elements required to create a cognitive map which engenders political activity.

1. Jameson F. Postmodernism: or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso; 1991.

2. Mandel E. Late Capitalism. London: NLB; 1975.

3. Marchart O. The People and the public: Radical Democracy and the Role of Public Media.

Open: Cahier on Art and the Public Domain. 2007; (13): 6-16. p.12

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A Model for a Politically Effective Public

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Location (Ideology).

The elementary precondition which allows an individual to be able to create a cognitive map through which they become able to relate to culture, society and the world, is some knowledge of personal location within the space. In social, cultural terms this is what ultimately allows the individual to become a member of the public and take part in the political process. Jameson call this knowledge of location ideology, and he uses Louis Althusser’s definition of ideology as his basis for this. Althusser, drawing on Lacan, defined ideology as “the representation of the subject’s Imaginary relationship to his or her Real existence.”(1 p.51) This ‘representation’ is the creating of the cognitive map.

Ideology is the individual’s understanding of their own position in relation to the social realities of the world they experience every day. This location is found by the coordination of two “distinct dimensions”(1 p.53); the aesthetic (Lacan’s Imaginary), and the scientific (Lacan’s Real).

The aesthetic dimension of ideology is our experience of life as seen from: “the monadic “point of view” on the world to which we are necessarily, as biological subjects, restricted”.(1 p.53) This is the part of ideology which is formed through active participation in the world immediately surrounding the individual.

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Existential data gathered through everyday interaction with, and experience of, immediate stimuli. This point of view allows the individual to understand where they are in relation to reality immediately surrounding them. The scientific dimension on the other hand is the conception of the abstract; knowledge of unlived experience, that which cannot be perceived with the immediate senses.

Jameson describes it as like a mathematical equation where understanding of reality is calculated independently from its immediate relationship to the individual subject.

In Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory, while we are never able to inhabit the abstract realm of scientific knowledge with our own subject, we project le sujet supposé savoir – the subject supposed to know – in an assumption that while we have not experienced this abstract knowledge of reality, we can imagine that it is experienced by the Imaginary sujet supposé savoir and in this way we construct our perception of ‘the Real’. Jameson brings the application of Lacan’s complex ideas down to earth as he uses the reality of the system of capital as an example of a totality which cannot be directly experienced but can only be related to in the abstract scientific dimension by projecting a representation seen from the view point of an abstract subject. He explains that just because something is not directly experienced, does not mean that it cannot still affect the subject:

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location through Coordination

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“The conception of capital is admittedly a totalizing or systemic concept: no one has ever seen or met the thing itself, ... But let us be serious: anyone who believes that the profit motive and the logic of capital accumulation are not the fundamental laws of this world, who believes that these do not set absolute barriers and limits to social changes and transformations undertaken in it - such a person is living in an alternative universe;”(2 p.354.)

So the scientific dimension allows the subject to conceive aspects of the totality of the conditions of their existence which the aesthetic dimensional monadic point of view cannot provide them with. Slavoj Žižek writes of the importance of the abstract Real, and the danger of dismissing the abstract in favour of the more comfortable natural direct experience, again using the example of capital: “it is too simplistic to claim that the spectre of this self-engendering monster that pursues its path regardless of any human or environmental concern is an ideological abstraction, and that one should never forget that behind this abstraction there are real people and natural objects on whose productive capacities and resources Capital’s circulation is based, and on which it feeds like a giant parasite. The problem is that this ‘abstraction’ does not exist only in our (financial speculator’s)

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misperception of social reality; it is ‘real’ in the precise sense of determining the very structure of material processes: the fate of whole strata of populations, and sometimes of whole countries, can be decided by the solipsistic dance of Capital, which pursues its goal of profitability with a blessed indifference to the way its movement will affect social reality. That is the fundamental systemic violence of capitalism, which is much more uncanny than direct pre-capitalist socio-ideological violence: this violence is no longer attributable to concrete individuals and their ‘evil’ intentions; it is purely ‘objective’ systemic, anonymous.”(3) It is the abstract, the unknown Real, which can often pose the greatest danger to society, but our primary reaction is often to seek resolution in the immediate experiential dimension. As Mandel wrote, it is our everyday experience which “reinforces and internalizes the neo-fatalist ideology of the immutable nature of the late capitalist order.”(4) Abstract perspective of totality is key to the subject’s ability to ‘map’ their ideological location in relation to unseen forces which affect their reality. The representation of totality is vitally important to cognitive mapping. If a subject in physical space is unable to create a representation of space beyond their immediate sensory input, they will be disoriented and unable to plan any movement towards

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an unseen goal. This is the experience of being lost in the woods, unable to see beyond the immediate surrounding trees with no idea of which direction to go to find the way out. However if the lost wanderer stumbles upon a stream they may be able to relate this to their understanding of the totality of the landscape, connecting the previously learned knowledge that there is a road at the bottom of the valley with the fact that water flows downhill, to deduce that the road is probably to be found by following the flow of water. This ability to ‘map’ an unexperienced space through an abstract conception of totality leads to the ability to move with purpose through space, whether it is physical or social space. Jameson writes that in the social dimension just as in the physical spatial dimension “The project “cognitive mapping” obviously stands or falls with the conception of some (unrepresentable, imaginary) global social totality”. (2 p.356) It should be noted that Jameson asserts not only that social relations can be represented spatially, but that history itself - all potential interpretations of past, present, and future events - can be understood as another dimension in the cognitive map, which we understand in terms of relative distance with reference to the totality just as we do the physical and social dimensions: “Different moments in historical or existential time are here simply filed in different places; the attempt to combine them even locally does not slide up and down a temporal scale ... but jumps back and forth across a

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game board that we conceptualize in terms of distance.� (1 p.373) Without this relation to totality, there is no chance for the subject to relate to anything other than their immediate momentary experience. It is in the combination of immediate experience, with the understanding of the subject’s relationship to the totality of a space – physical, social, temporal - that it becomes possible for the subject to create a representation in their mind of where they are personally located in relation to the positions of other subjects and objects encountered in the experiential and abstract dimensions of their existential reality.

This ideological position, founded on experiential and abstract dimensions, is a prerequisite to be able to meaningfully relate to other encountered ideologies and therefore to be able to act politically in the real world.

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Triangulation (exposure and conflict).

In order for a subject to ‘map’ a physical space to be able to purposefully navigate that space, that subject must be able to perceive the physical objects in that landscape. However, merely perceiving the existence of objects in a space is not enough to navigate by. It is only when a relationship between these objects is conceived, that perception of relative distance is possible. And it is only when the subject can reconcile this abstract representation of distance between objects with their own location, that this relative distance becomes meaningful in relation to the subject and therefore a useful understanding of the space with some conception of scale can be conceived. This is triangulation, and this principle can reasonably be carried across to the cognitive mapping of society. In order for a member of the public to be able to conceive of their social ‘landscape’ they must be able to perceive the relative distances between other subjects’ ideological positions and the distances between those positions and their own ideology. To achieve any sense of scale in this ‘situational representation’ of a society, it is necessary to also be able to recognise where these ideologies are located in the bigger picture of the unexperienced totality of the whole society. In physical space, relative distance is perceived through interpretation of perspective in sensory input; scale and focus.

How can distance be perceived in the non-physical social space in which public political discourse (the process towards a decision which will make a real difference

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Triangulation

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in society) takes place?

The only way that a subject can perceive this distance in the social dimension, in order to create a cognitive map of social space, is through perception of ideological conflict. Media sociologist Oliver Marchart writes that: “a space in which the most diverse political opinions and standpoints are staged is, inevitably, a space of conflict. To discuss public space in a meaningful way is to discuss ‘conflictuality’. Only a space in which a single opinion exists can be a space without conflict. As soon as diverse and incompatible opinions appear, they enter into a conflictive relationship.”(5 p.9) The ‘political opinions’ which Marchart talks of, are ideological positions. It is only in conflict that there is distance between ideological positions. If all individuals and groups involved in an issue were to hold exactly the same opinion, there would be no discernible difference between any expressed opinions, and therefore, no perceivable distance between ideological positions on this matter. This distance is necessary in order for triangulation to be possible to be able to create a conception of relative position in the cognitive map.

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Triangulation is the recognition of a spatial relationship between at least three distinct points in a space. It is only with three discernible points that a mathematical deduction of relative distance is possible. But triangulation is not only a physical spatial concept, it can also be applied with validity to the cultural realm. Semiotics is to a large extent the study of symbolic triangulation of abstract concepts within the space of culture. Many semioticians posit some form of ‘semiotic triangle’ claiming that triangulation between some permutation of subject, symbol and referent is necessary to be able to perceive relative meaning in cultural space. Cultural geographer Kevin Robins writes of the link between semiotic theory and the creation of cultural space. He explains that it is only when a subject can differentiate between, and interpret, encountered cultural symbols that triangulation can take place and perception of space is created. When no distinction can be made between symbol and symbolised, there are no longer three related points to triangulate. In this state, the subject also loses their value as they can no longer interpret: “‘there are only objects and no subjects’. There is only reactiveness, and not the transformation of experience.”(6) If there is no conflict, there is no relative space, only ‘here’. So conflict is the key precondition for political activity, precisely because it is the condition which allows ideological spatial perspective. As Marchart says: “public space in the strict

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sense emerges wherever a conflict breaks out.” (5 p.10) To use a cosmological analogy; without conflict, there would be no conceivable space at all, as all ideologies would inhabit the same space, an ideological ‘singularity’. However as soon as a conflicting opinion arises, that ideology inhabits a new and different position, moving away from the singularity in an ideological Big Bang, creating and expanding the social spatial dimension itself as it moves away.

What repercussions does this theory have for the question of the effectiveness of the actual political discourse of the public in real life? If the public space in which political discourse can occur is created and expanded through ideological conflict, then the logical extrapolation is that exposure to a wide range of diverse and conflicting ideologies is desirable to achieve a maximally effective publicly political society. American legal scholar Cass Sunstein writes of the vital importance which this exposure to diverse ideologies has for democracy. Without exposure to diverse ideological positions, a member of the public can have no idea of the range of different experiences of life which others find themselves in. If we choose to only come into contact with others who have had similar experiences to ourselves and hold similar views, then society will inevitably fragment into smaller and smaller factions with steadily more extreme views. Sunstein writes that it is key to a democracy that the public are exposed to unselected, unplanned and unanticipated material which we have not actively sought out and may in fact find irritating

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Creation of space in perception of conflict

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or unpleasant.(7) If all we hear is one perspective on an issue, then we come to believe that it is the reasonable majority viewpoint and our own position is likely to gravitate towards what we see as the norm, causing fragmentation in society, as groups with similar ideologies grow closer together and alienate themselves from others. This type of behaviour is well documented throughout history in many indisputable cases in which large numbers of ‘normal’ citizens have acted in ways which seem abhorrent to our perspective but which went unchallenged at the time due to lack of, or suppression of, conflicting viewpoints. From the various incarnations of slavery, to manifest destiny genocide in North America, to Nazism, to apartheid in South Africa, the history of humanity is crammed full of examples of periods when suppression of conflicting ideologies have led to fragmentation and extremism. If however we are exposed to diverse perspectives, (some of which we will agree with while some we may ever find abhorrent) we are informed that there are many ways to see the same issue, and we are in a better position to assess what view is most reasonable. Even if our ideological position is not changed, we have become aware firstly that there are differing viewpoints on the issue, and perhaps also secondly we may become aware of certain reasons why others hold those differing views. We become able to engage with those holding other views in a reasonable way, understanding the motivations for the way they are rather than purely reacting against what they do. In any case, the subject’s cognitive map becomes a richer fuller environment, more aware of the scale of the diversity of

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society and less likely to succumb to fragmentation. In order to ensure that the public is able to be exposed to the full spectrum of all the diverse ideologies within its body, it is necessary for that public to have freedom of expression.

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Fragmentation and Extremism

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Freedom of Expression (Access and Visibility) Free expression is the idea that for any public to be politically effective, and to guard against fragmentation and extremism, it is vital that the voices of all members can be heard and that no opinion is denied a hearing in the public discourse. This is key to a democratic public and is achieved through the principles of access, and visibility.

The principle of access is that in a system of truly free expression there should be no exclusion. Access to the whole group should be available for the whole group.

This is to not to say that privacy is undemocratic and that it is the right of the public to invade the private space of any individual at any time to pursue public discourse, but rather the principle of access implies that there must be universally accessible public spaces in which public discourse can take place. There must be arenas - not necessarily physical spaces - where all members of the group can access all others and none are excluded. I think that there is of course a place in society for some level of censorship on grounds of morality, but that issue is beyond the scope of this work. Here, I only wish to make the case that free expression, in general, requires access for all individuals and groups to make their ideological positions known and to see the ideological positions of others.

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However, merely being able to see the positions of others is not enough to create a system of free expression. Access does not in itself provide the means to be able to communicate ideology. This requires visibility. Visibility occurs when there are the means and conditions which can allow our political positions to be seen in public space. Platforms from which we can speak. It is no use at all if individuals hold ideological positions but have no way to demonstrate these to other involved parties. Coming from slightly different angles, both Sunstein and Marchart assert that it is public media which allow us to broadcast our positions and therefore become visible. Sunstein places his faith in the institutional public media of traditional journalism; newspapers, current affairs magazines, television news etc. He values these - which he calls ‘general-interest intermediaries’(7) - for their aggregation and dissemination of diverse viewpoints to a wide public audience thus creating a visible, accessible platform for ideological exposure on a large scale. Marchart however is more cynical about the role of the institutional public media, suggesting that in their very structure they become too closely connected to certain ideologies and are liable to become biased “hegemony machines”.(5 p.10) He writes that the apparent ideological neutrality they display is a fiction which they are required to produce daily in order to maintain the illusion that there is an objective stance available on all issues which the public can take and use to inform their own opinion. He suggests that the truth is that it is very often impossible to hold a neutral stance in relation to a conflict and so these ‘public’ media are forced

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Visibility

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to produce the illusion of objectivity. The underlying subjectivity of this apparent objectivity more often than not functions to reinforce the dominant hegemonic ideology: “the ‘way things are’ here, in our corner of the world.”(5 p.12) Baudrillard wrote of the illusional nature of the neutral media position as an ‘implosion of meaning’ in which the staging of information does not create communication but only a simulation of it. In characteristically extreme terms, he writes that the very effort of the act of staging information in such a way which appears to be neutral, devours, exhausts and dissolves the meaning itself leading to entropy of meaning and neutralisation of the ability to act.(8) Marchart writes that true public media are the means through which our ideological positions can be made visible. Perhaps our conception of what a public medium is, needs some reappraisal. Marshall McLuhan’s definition of media as ‘the extensions of man’ would tell us that ‘media’ can be any external method which allows the human to extend the limits of their physical capabilities.(9) This broad conception of media as any form which extends our ability to communicate, allows us to rethink what we mean by public media. Public media is not our traditional conception of a media which is publicly owned, or indeed media which is privately owned but publicly distributed. This is not to say that these media cannot be public media, only that it is not the ownership or distribution which qualifies a media as public. A public media is one which is accessible and in which genuine

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ideological conflict can take place, but most importantly it is a medium through which this conflict is made visible to the public. What form the medium takes is not important: it could be a television programme; it could be a scribbled post-it note; it could be a piece of chewing gum stuck to the bottom of your shoe.

Sunstein writes that public exposures can take two forms: exposure to experiences, and exposure to arguments. Exposure to arguments generally takes place through text and speech based media, but exposure to experience can happen in apparently unmediated situations. In this case the media is whatever creates the conditions for this exposure to take place; it could be the space in which the experience takes place itself. Sunstein makes the point that quite often exposure to argument takes place through the medium of an experience which “sometimes serves as a kind of short-hand reference for the former, as when a picture or a brief encounter has the effect of a thousand words.�(7 p.28) Public media is anything which facilitates an encounter with a conflicting ideology, in either experience or argument. This has particular significance for my later investigation into the effect of the visual element of our culture on the effectiveness of the public’s political activity.

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Choice (involvement and pedagogy) As I have discussed, discourse requires cognitive representation of relative ideological distance. The role of the public media is to facilitate the creation of an environment in which members of the public can take part in discourse by firstly making ideological conflict between positions visible, so that distance between differing positions can be perceived. However political discourse is ultimately pointless if there is no possibility of actual change coming about as a result of it.

For political discourse to have a purpose, there must exist a real choice to be made which will effect an actual change in the real world. The final role of a public media is to create the conditions to make visible the reality of the choice.

Jameson describes the aesthetic of cognitive mapping as a ‘pedagogical political culture’ but was well aware of the historical negative connotations between culture which teaches and politics, in propaganda and state manipulations and interventions in culture such as Soviet Zhdanovism. The legacy of these past abuses has been that the teaching function of culture has been repressed in a reaction which has expanded from repudiation of manipulative propaganda to the repression of the very possibility of culture being able to teach, and the denial of the artistic validity of pedagogical culture. Jameson writes that postmodernism is the cultural logic of the realities of late capitalist systems of economics, creating

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a society in which all activity under the system tends towards becoming culture.

The autonomy of the sphere of culture has collapsed as culture can no longer be separated from reality when our reality itself becomes cultural. The intuitive impulse under these conditions would seem to be to deny the role of culture in social and political action. If culture has lost its autonomous status and is now a part of the system, surely it cannot be used to attack the system as it can achieve no critical distance (the ability to be situated outside of a system in order to critique it) from which to launch any attack. However, this would be a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the postmodern cultural space. The deduction that the omnipresence of culture abolishes critical distance, is based on the conception that the cultural sphere is located in an autonomous dimension and is accessed and understood through abstract subjective interpretations. However, what Jameson describes is not an inescapable expansion of the semi-autonomous sphere of culture throughout ideological abstract space, but the fact that the expansion of culture has genuine reality in physical space. Postmodern culture is real. It is the way we live our lives, and we can achieve critical distance in the ideological dimension by recognising the reality of the conditions of our existence and the incompatibilities between this and the ideological positions of ourselves and others. The problem is that the nature of the postmodern space is to serve its own interests; protecting, promoting and developing only itself. The cold objective system of capital wishes only to pursue profit by selling more and perpetuating

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the cycle. It is therefore in the direct interest of capital to promote a perception of reality which serves these interests; interests which often conflict with the actual reality. Marchart writes that in the capitalist system; “the subject of politics is redefined as the market subject of the consumer who is free to make a choice among various products (political parties for example) which ultimately turn out to be nearly identical. Thus we are left with a choice that makes no difference – an entirely apolitical choice – as politics begins, and begins precisely, where a decision is taken which in actual fact does make a difference.” (5 p.12) Any attempt to achieve political effectiveness in postmodern space must find a way to reveal the truth of the situation, exposing the reality of the system and the world beyond the system, and not only exposing the way things are, but also the way things could be, the possibilities of real choices available to subjects acting within the space which will make a real difference to the nature of the space and society within it. Jameson calls for a “pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system”(1 p.54) This pedagogy is not a propagandistic preaching to those poor alienated ‘victims’

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of the system by an apparently enlightened few of what they see as the nature of ‘true’ reality. It is rather an effort to create a shift in attitude in the way we - the public - relate our intellectual activity to our real existence. It is an attempt to cause the subject to think for themselves dialectically about a certain issue by exposing the ideological positions of all involved parties, and allowing the subject to see the way this relates to the actual reality of the world they operate in. Most importantly, through this exposing of the factors which construct the way society is, and the position of the subject as an element within this, pedagogical culture exposes the truth that society is constructed and constantly reshaped by its active members, and therefore the subject, as an active member located within the world, can make a change in their environment by acting within it. Peter Womack draws a metaphor of a sheet of plate glass to describe the two distinct modes of relating intellectual activity to actual political change.(10) In one model, the subject views experience of the world philosophically from behind a pane of glass, subjectively contemplating and forming opinions of viewed activity. From behind the glass there is no possibility of active involvement, merely passive reaction to events. If the subject is to be able to effect political change, active involvement is necessary. The glass must be smashed so that the subject can touch and be touched, change reality and be changed. This is not to say that we are to abandon our minds in favour of only physical activity. Theory and contemplation are to be thought of as part of a process with actual change as the goal. The description of reality is not a political

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Passive Observation / Active Involvement

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activity, but without it we cannot understand what it is that we wish to change.

The ability to mentally step back from engagement in reality in order to deliberate upon the issue is vitally important to democratic political change. Without deliberation and theoretical discourse, we are reduced to visceral reaction which can only ever serve the immediate momentary desire. Pedagogical and didactic culture must not teach an ideology, but provide a framework for the subject to be able to objectively deliberate upon the issue and formulate a response which affects their interaction with their conditions of existence in real life.

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In summation; the preconditions for the public to be able to be politically active, are that each member must inhabit an ideological position within public space, and be able to recognise the positions of others in relation to their own location and to their abstract projection of the totality of the space. In order to be able to take part in effective political discourse, the public must have access to, and be exposed to, a wide range of diverse and conflicting ideological positions, and must have the means to also freely broadcast their own ideologies to the same wide audience. Finally, in order to be actually politically effective in the real world, the public must be aware of the reality of the choices facing them, and of the actual abilities and limits they have in influencing the conditions of their own and others’ existences. This reality can be revealed to the public through pedagogical culture.

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1. Jameson F. Postmodernism: or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso; 1991.

2. Nelson C, Grossberg L ed. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Illinois: University of Illinois press; 1990.

3. Žižek S. The fragile absolute: or why is the Christian legacy worth fighting for? The essential Žižek ed. London: Verso; 2008. p.12.

4. Mandel E. Late Capitalism. London: NLB; 1975. p. 502.

5. Marchart O. The People and the public: Radical Democracy and the Role of Public Media.

Open: Cahier on Art and the Public Domain. 2007; (13): 6-16.

6. Robins K. Into the Image: Culture and politics in the field of vision. London: Routledge; 1996. p.

143.

7. Sunstein C. Republic.com 2.0. Woodstock, Oxfordshire: Princeton University Press; 2007. p. 5-6 8. Baudrillard S. Simulacra and Simulation. The United States of America: The University of Michigan Press; 1994.

9. McLuhan M. Understanding media: the extensions of man. London: Routledge; 2001.

10. Frost A ed. Theatre Theories: From Plato to Virtual Reality. Norwich: Pen & Inc. ; 2000.

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The Image in Society

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For my purposes, I will define visual culture as the sphere of activity surrounding the complete spectrum of images in all their forms in a society; a constantly mutating cycle of communication through creation, transmission and reception of images. In essence, visual culture encompasses any activity involving images.

It is everywhere we look, precisely because in the very act of looking we are participating in it. It is pervasive and it is invasive. So long as we see anything, we cannot escape from it. Any image we see is part of it; from a child’s drawing to a masterpiece in a gallery, from advertisements to graffiti, from cinema to YouTube, from products to the buildings we live in. Every object created by man is influenced by and adds to the spectacle of visual culture. Even if we attempt to escape to nature we still cannot avoid it, as subconscious emotional associations are evoked by cinematic images etched in our brains with accompanying swelling soundtracks. Our phenomenological experiences of life around us become a part of the visual culture which affects all the images we create and the way we will perceive and interpret all future visual experience. Burgin describes the significance of this cycle of the continual revisiting of interpretation of visual perception: “...in memory, in association, snatches of words and images continually intermingle and exchange one for the other. It will be objected that this is indistinct and insignificant background noise to our primary act of seeing. If I may be excused a physiological analogy, the murmur of the

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circulation of the blood is even more indistinct, but no less important for that.”(1) Human culture is shaped and formed in the collision of the mishmash of stimuli we subconsciously associate with an encountered situation, and in our creation of symbolic objects which can carry these meanings from one individual to another.

The image is peculiar among methods of storing and transferring human experience. In comparison to musical or oral methods of symbolic exchange, the image seems to move much faster with less cultural restraint. Returning to McLuhan’s media theory will be useful to investigate what exactly it is about the image which allows it to act in this way. Take for example his account of the evolution of text, the visualising of language: “...pictographic and hieroglyphic writing as used in Babylonian, Mayan and Chinese cultures represents an extension of the visual sense for storing and expediting access to human experience. All of these forms give pictorial expression to oral meanings. As such, they ... are extremely unwieldy, requiring many signs for the infinity of data and operations of social action. In contrast, the phonetic alphabet, by a few letters only, was able to encompass all languages. Such an achievement, however

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involved the separation of both signs and sounds from their semantic and dramatic meanings. No other system of writing had accomplished this feat.”(2) The image becomes an extremely powerful medium as it not only encodes human experience, but can be easily ordered into combinations to create new meanings. Further than this, the image can be broken down to abstraction and still retain meaning. Much visual culture, including the pictographic systems of communication mentioned by McLuhan, relies on recognition of representations of experienced reality. Mimesis - as Neil Mulholland defines it - is: “the concept that pictorial representations bear a resemblance to what we see in the world.”(3) This does not however mean that a mimetic image can only communicate information relating to the object of its resemblance. As Burgin pointed out, an image carries all the weight of its subconscious associations. A representation is not simply a reflection of reality but a producer of meaning. What really unlocks the power of the image however is that for it to be a carrier of information, it is not necessary for a representation to be mimetic of any existing phenomena. Images can go much further than this. The phonetic alphabet, used in the example, is a series of abstract shapes which correspond to auditory sounds rather than visual objects.

The idea of it seems quite ridiculous when you think about it. As Charlie Brooker so eloquently put it:

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“These words don’t make sense. The vowels and consonants you’re hearing in your mind’s ear right now are being generated by mere squiggles on a page or a screen. ... Shapes. You’re staring at shapes and hearing them in your head. When you see the word “trust”, can you even trust that? Why? It’s just shapes!”(4) This is precisely the magic of the visual. Abstract ‘shapes’ – visual forms which bear no relation to original existing objects - can conjure powerful ideas in our minds.

Immanuel Kant wrote that our comprehension of beauty in a representational object is dependent not on any attribute of the existential reality of the object, but to the meaning that it stimulates in us.(5) An understanding of this dialectic between representation and reality in visual culture is vitally important to being able to understand the way that visual culture operates in our social dimension.

Perhaps it would make sense at this point to step out of the theoretical mode and turn our attention towards the actual behaviour of the visual in our society, in order to gain a better understanding of how visual culture operates today, and what effect this can have on the public’s ability to be politically effective.

Where to start? An analysis of the operation of visual culture in society is a

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foolishly gargantuan task. Scenes from everyday experience immediately spring to mind of those bizarre moments in which the inherent strangeness of the behaviour of our cultural images becomes apparent. However, perhaps in this case, a single detailed analysis of a specific instance will be of more value than a wide sweeping but superficial discussion of the general state of visual culture. In order to investigate the ways in which an instance of visual culture can affect political ability in the public, I have chosen to conduct a case study from cinema, a medium which is relevant to the vast majority of the public and is inherently visual by nature.

1. Burgin V. The end of art theory: criticism and postmodernity. London: Macmillan; 1986. p. 51.

2. McLuhan M. Understanding media: the extensions of man. London: Routledge; 2001. p. 95.

3. Rampley M ed. Exploring visual culture: definitions, concepts, contexts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; 2005. p. 119.

4. Brooker C. The very fabric of society is breaking down around us. What the hell is there left to believe in? The Guardian 2009 July 13; G2 supplement Comment & features sect. p.5.

5. Kant I. The Critique of Judgement. Oxford: Clarendon; 1952.

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Cinematic Visual Culture A Practical Application of the Theory

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I have selected for analysis two feature films which would, at a glance of their vital statistics, appear to be similar in many ways, but which emerge from differing ideologies, are visually very different, and have very different effects on the viewer: Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir (2008)(1) and Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009).(2) Released in the UK nine months apart, both films can be said to be operating in the ‘war film’ genre while also questioning and breaking the formal stylistic conventions of this mould. The directors of the two films both pursue very specific and unconventional methods, with great artistic integrity, to realise their visions, and were both nominated for the Golden Palm award at Cannes Film festival in their respective years. Both films feature horrific violence (‘18’ certificates) and an integral degree of ironic black humour. Both plots revolve around the central event of a massacre, feature Jewish main characters, and involve themes of genocide.

Of course, these similarities of content are only superficial. Folmans’s film is an animated autobiographical documentary piece which follows his attempts to regain his lost memories of the first Israel Lebanon war in 1982, while Tarantino’s Basterds is a live action fictional World War Two story following a group of JewishAmerican soldiers on a revenge mission against the Nazis. I chose to analyse these particular films partly because they do share some technical similarities in subject

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matter and content, but more specifically, because these similarities allow us to more clearly see how in these examples it is not so much the content of the story itself but the way in which it is staged visually, which actually brings about the end result upon viewing. Both these works relay their content through radically different visual methods, and it is through their very visual structures that the ideological position of the creator is revealed. This is the true content, which speaks at the subconscious level, acting independently and not necessarily in conjunction with the stated motivations and intentions of the directors. It is quite possible for the content of a film to apparently say one thing while the structure speaks something entirely different at the ideological level. By studying the visual aspects of these films, I hope to explore a little more of how the image in visual culture can - consciously or subconsciously – affect the viewing public in various ways, and is used as a platform not for content, but for an ideology.

Looking at any film towards this end, it is important to firstly understand the effect of the medium of cinema itself on the viewer. Cinema by its very nature, as a large scale projection of moving image viewed in a darkened room, draws the viewer into the illusion that the moving screen image is as experiential reality. We are all familiar with the experience of going to the cinema and ‘losing ourselves’ in the film, forgetting, or becoming unaware of our surroundings as we are immersed in the image, and of the subsequent wakening from the illusion as the credits roll

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and the theatre lights come up wrenching us back in the ‘real’ world. Cinema is an immersive medium in which the subject who walked into the cinema on their own two legs somehow becomes sucked into a new reality for the duration of the showing. The immersive experience of cinema is caused by the visual simulation of reality. The projected series of images which merge into motion through our cognitive interpretations appear to us to be so similar to the visual sensations of movement we experience in our everyday lives, that in the absence of other sensory input, our minds will begin to react to this input in the same way we would to ‘real’ life experience. This happens regardless of the content of the movement, whether it be live footage of a well know location or a completely alien scene featuring a computer generated panda-bear practising martial arts. On some level, the viewer is no longer that person sitting in the cinema, but becomes the viewing subject of whatever image is projected to the screen.

This raises an interesting issue for a model of political activity in which an individual’s cognitive mapping of the location of their own subject is key to political effectiveness. If the viewing individual to some extent loses track of their own subjective location in the immersive cinematic experience, where is their subject and its contingent ideological position located? And from what subjective location and ideological position are they experiencing the film?

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I am by no means suggesting that the cinematic experience completely obliterates and replaces subjective identity during viewing, but only that to a greater or lesser extent, the viewer’s awareness of their own subjective location is pushed back from consciousness. I suggest that the degree of this pushing back is directly related to the level of spectacle which the film creates. Spectacle being the quality of the film which assists the illusion of the reality of the projected image reinforcing the simulation. To the same extent to which the spectacle represses the viewer’s subjective identity, the viewer comes to identify their own location as that of whatever visual perspective they are ‘seeing’ from, which is that which is projected by the film. This perspective is not, however, identification with the character on the screen, even in an apparently first person view. As Walter Benjamin wrote, the audience identifies not with the actor, but with the camera.(3) The subject persona which the viewer subconsciously assumes is that of the visual narrator, not a narrator introduced as a device in the film, for that narrator is also viewed, but a narrator who sees the entire film and provides the image as the narrative itself. This is purely a projected subject of course, but it is a subject which has already been inhabited by the creator of the film.(4) Various individuals are involved in creation of a film, but I shall refer for simplicity’s sake primarily to the director as the creator. The director has made all the decisions in a film about what the camera sees and therefore what the viewer

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will see. Ultimately then, the subject and ideology which is projected onto the viewer, is the subject and ideology which the director has designed and created, intentionally or not. Watching a film is exposure to this ideology in an experiential way, putting the subject into the very eyes (camera) of another.

Surely this is good if ideological exposure is a benefit to a politically effective public? The danger with such an immersive medium as cinema is that the experiential ideological exposure to a captive audience afforded by the medium, can easily be abused to manipulate rather than inform, and to weaken other activities vital to political effectiveness, such as the subject’s ability to distantiate and deliberate upon the ideology which it has been exposed to.

A film can either tend towards spectacle or pedagogy. The spectacular suppresses the individual subject’s ability to inhabit the perspective of their own ideological location and thus also suppresses the ability to relate the film to reality existing outside of the spectacle once the image has faded from the screen. A pedagogical approach on the other hand, informs the viewer of the existence of another ideology, while leaving the subject with an intact representation of their own ideological position, in order to come to their own conclusions. I will attempt to investigate by what visual techniques the films in question project the ideological positions of the creators onto the viewer and whether in these examples the effects

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of these methods of exposure are beneficial or detrimental.

1. Waltz with Bashir. [film]. Israel: Bridgit Folman Gang; 2008. [DVD] London: Artificial Eye; 2008.

2. Inglourious Basterds. [film]. USA: The Weinstein Company; 2009. [DVD] USA: Universal; 2009.

3. Benjamin W. Illuminations. Pimlico edition. London: Random House; 1999. p. 222.

4. Holmes D ed. Virtual politics: identity and community in cyberspace. London: Sage; 1997. p.167.

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Inglourious Basterds Spectacular Intertextuality

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Figure 1: Inglourious Basterds

Inglourious Basterds, written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, runs to two hours thirty-three minutes. The film is set “Once upon a time in Nazi occupied France...” immediately tipping us off to the fact that Tarantino has not limited himself to historical accuracy but created a fairytale version of events. This is his fantasy of how history could have been had his characters existed and intervened in actual historical events. The action takes place, as the subtitle suggests, in France, and the plot revolves around a group of Jewish-American soldiers called the Basterds, whose mission is to spread fear among the occupying force by collecting Nazi scalps. Simultaneously we follow the story of Jewish-French teenager Shosanna Dreyfus who’s family are murdered by the chilling ‘Jew Hunter’ Colonel Hans Landa. Throughout the film, dialogue is spoken in the appropriate languages with English subtitles. Casting is nationality specific; only American actors play American roles, French actors French and German, German. The two storylines of the film come together for the climax at the premier of a Nazi propaganda film held in Shosanna’s cinema, in which, ultimately, Adolf Hitler and most of the Nazi high command are killed by the combination of the Basterd’s machine guns and dynamite, and Shosanna’s plan to ignite nitrate cinema film to incinerate all trapped inside the locked theatre. Thus the war is ended and the Jews ‘get their own back’ on the evil Nazis.

Is this rewriting of history with ridiculously black and white comic book

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stereotypes the pinnacle of ironic black humour parody, or of insensitive reductionist infantile revenge fantasising? My purpose here is not to judge whether the film promotes ‘good’ or ‘true’ values, but only to investigate what effect the film, as an object of visual culture, has on the viewers’ ability to be politically effective in real life.

The cinematography in Inglourious Basterds is without doubt of the highest quality. Each shot is beautifully calculated and thought through. Each angle, cut and pan seems formally perfect to the viewer, however the juxtaposition between this visual staging and the content and context is surprising, almost shocking at times. There are certain visual conventions within the conventional genres of the

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Figure 2: Hugo Stiglitz

cinematic medium which go unspoken and unnoticed. Tarantino takes them, flattens them and reapplies them in altogether unexpected places to great effect.

This is the dominant visual trait of the film, a technique of pure formal intertextual pastiche.

The work is packed from start to finish with intertextual references – in fact it is difficult to find any element of the film which does not directly mirror some other cultural text; from the point at which the character Hugo Stiglitz (whose very name is an intertextual reference to a Mexican actor) is introduced with his name in giant bright yellow text in direct reference to Sergio Leone’s ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’(1966), to the twenty-three minute long La Louisiane bar scene

Figure 3: La Louisiane

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which culminates in a Mexican stand-off and gun-fight bloodbath, and is almost a shortened version of Tarantino’s own 1992 crime heist movie ‘Reservoir Dogs’ but with a film noir sensibility and nods to classic gangster film scenes such as the bloody finale of Brian De Palma’s 1983 ‘Scarface’. Even the soundtrack of the film is entirely taken from other film soundtracks. But Tarantino’s technique is a flattened formal intertextuality in which the reference leads primarily to a form, not a symbolic meaning. He quotes the structural forms of cinema against themselves to create novel cinematic forms which surprise and in most cases entertain the viewer.

Umberto Eco wrote of how we find aesthetic pleasure in the repetitive impulse and this dialectic between ‘scheme’ and ‘innovation’, but also that this intertextuality can be applied in a structural way by using metaphorical; “quotation marks so that the reader pays no attention to the content of the citation but instead to the way in which the excerpt from a first text is introduced into the fabric of a second one.”(1) This method maintains the aesthetic pleasure of the repetition at the risk of flattening the symbolic meaning. The problem arising in many of our cultural productions including Tarantino’s work, is that this is taken to such an extreme that there is no longer any reference to external real life but, in its place, a mimetic

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representation of the empty structural forms of cinematic reality. Intertextuality is something which cultural progress requires. We use it to bring a richness of symbolic meaning to our cultural productions, without which the majority would be lifeless and dull. However when cultural intertextuality reaches such a point that reference to the real existence of society becomes meaningless, it becomes a hindrance to the ability of the individual to accurately create a cognitive representation of their own relationship to reality. It becomes pastiche, a meaningless mash-up of visual style. The aesthetic effect is maintained, but political exposure is incapacitated. Jameson writes of this flattening character of pastiche as opposed to symbolic parody: “Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists.”(2) Any film such as Inglourious Basterds which so heavily ‘borrows’ the language of other cultural texts risks descending into pastiche and therefore the spectacular.

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Once a film becomes a properly immersive spectacle by severing referential links to external reality and the viewer’s subjective location, and creating a simulation of a reality within the screen, it will have great difficulty in affecting the actual political action of the individual viewer outside of the simulation, no matter what the content of the film may be. This spectacular culture can be an experience of great emotion but its effect is ultimately depoliticising. Benjamin quotes Bertolt Brecht describing it as the common man’s; “accustomed opiate, his mental participation in someone else’s uprising, … the illusion which whips him up for a few hours and leaves him all the more exhausted, filled with vague memories and even vaguer hopes.”(3) The spectacular film creates an immersive alternate reality by creating the simulation of involvement. In the absence of stimuli reminding of subjective external reality, the viewer is drawn into participation in the subjective perspective of the image. But this is of course only a passive viewing participation, not an active involvement. Any political content of the spectacular film is presented as active but can only be experienced passively, as the dislocated viewing subject can only relate this content to the reality created in the film, not to their own subjective reality. Political engagement is limited in Inglourious Basterds by its spectacular nature. This is not to say that the film has no cultural value and cannot entertain or

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raise questions, but rather that the visual structure of the film pushes the viewer’s consciousness inwards towards the cinematic universe and away from their real conditions of existence.

1. Capozzi R ed. Reading Eco: an anthology. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press; 1997. p. 26.

2. Jameson F. Postmodernism: or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso; 1991. p. 17.

3. Benjamin W. Illuminations. Pimlico edition. London: Random House; 1999. p. 149.

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Waltz with Bashir Pedagogical Defamiliarisation

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Figure 4: Waltz with Bashir

By what techniques then, can an object of visual culture avoid descending into spectacle and maintain and promote political effectiveness in the viewing public?

In comparison to the spectacular Inglourious Basterds, I have selected Folman’s Waltz with Bashir as an example of pedagogical cinema.

Waltz with Bashir is eighty-seven minutes long, animated mostly in 2D Flash cutout animation with around twenty percent classical animation and with some 3D elements added for aerial shots etc. The final seconds of the film are real live action documentary footage of the aftermath of the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre in Beirut at the end of the first Israel Lebanon war. The story of the film follows director Ari Folman’s search to recall his repressed memories of the war leading up to and including his role in this horrific event as a soldier in the Israeli army at the age of nineteen. The film is based around discussions and interviews between Folman and others who were present with him during the war or somehow related to the events of the time, as he tries to reconstruct his memories of what exactly it was that happened in 1982. Folman took the source interviews and wrote a screenplay based on them, re-recording the interviews around this script with the original interviewees on a soundstage (in UK cinemas Waltz with Bashir played in the original Hebrew with English subtitles but it is available on DVD in a dubbed version). The film was then visualised, illustrated and animated around the audio and screenplay.

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This film would perhaps seem a strange choice for an example of anti-spectacular cinema, as the majority of the visual material of the film is so obviously fabricated in form; animated illustrations of memories, which the investigation of the plot often proves to be inaccurate. But this is precisely the difference between Inglourious Basterds and Waltz with Bashir: the latter never makes any claim that what it portrays is an absolute reality. Although the content of the film is documentary ‘truth’, the visual approach of the film is to constantly remind the viewer that the film is a subjective creation, not an objectively portrayed reality.

The juxtaposition of documentary audio with animated visual form constantly prompts the viewer to reappraise what is real and what is not, and through this, they are reminded of their own subjective location from which this reappraisal must take place.

The fact that the film is animated - is composed of abstract shapes and colours generated on a computer, and requires a cognitive effort to be able to recognise these shifting shapes as representations of places and characters - serves to remind the viewer that the projected image is just that; a projection of a created, manipulated representation of reality. It reminds us that any such screen image, even live footage, is in fact the same; a composition of frames, pixels or lines of light created by some process with a motivating purpose. Folman’s use of this technique of refusing to feign objectivity ensures that the symbolic meaning of

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the film is never flattened by the spectacle, but there is still danger that the beauty of the animated images could create a spectacular visual barrier to the political potential of the work.

Despite the constant negation of objectivity displayed throughout the plot and staging of the film - as apparent truths are disproved or questioned even as they are presented - the animated visual does create a certain spectacular reality which is removed from real life; an animated universe which we easily believe as an autonomous reality bearing no relevance to our own subjective reality. Folman is well aware of this dilemma. In an interview included on the DVD of the film, he raises the philosophical question of whether the animated image is less real than the ‘real’ documentary footage from which it is inspired. Both images are a

Figure 5: Flashback

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technological representation presented by the same machine, using the same real voices recorded from the interviewees, so which representation holds more truth?

The monadic scientific camera, or the abstract subjective illustration? “is a drawing, done by very talented artists like the guys who did this film, less real than a camera that is shooting [inaudible] and still y’know it is, the image is done by pixels, and by lines, is our image coming out of the camera is more real than the drawing? Because the voice is the same.

And who decides? And its up to the audience. If you walk in the cinema, and you decide to go with the film, and believe the film, fine. But it could have been a real film, okay, and someone would walk in the cinema, and

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Figure 6: First day of war

see it and then say “oh it’s crap, this guy is such a left-wing guy, he doesn’t show us any truth whatsoever.””(1) Folman is crediting the audience with the ability to make their own decision as to the truth value of the content during the performance. But how can he be sure that the viewer is not sucked into the spectacle becoming too involved, losing track of their own subjective location, and therefore losing their ability to do this? He has one more visual trick up his sleeve.

Throughout the film, violence and death in scenes of war is shown graphically in the illustrated medium: from Folman’s own recollections of transporting the bodies of dead and wounded soldiers for evacuation on the first day of the war; to the scene in which the soldier Frenkel describes shooting a young boy in an orchard; right up to scenes from the Sabra and Shatila massacre witnessed by Israeli soldiers on the perimeter, and its aftermath in which journalist Ron BenYishai tells of discovering the murdered body of a young girl of similar age to his own daughter buried in rubble. These images are distressing and disturbing, yet somehow - whether it is due to their illustrated nature or because of a more general cultural anaesthetisation in our society as a result of seeing so many violent images – the viewer does not recoil in horror and disgust but continues silently viewing, absorbing the images as a necessary part of the story, perhaps with the noble

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intention of suffering some visual discomfort for the greater gain of the lesson which it is supposed the film will teach.

But this is not Folman’s intention. Yes, he wishes to tell the story of the characters memories, and inform the viewer of a series of events which occurred in his own life shown from these differing perspectives. But his purpose is not to teach a moral, to assume some special status from which he has a right to teach. Rather, the film is designed to challenge the broader political ability of the viewer in relation to the content, but also to the way visual culture stages political content in general.

Folman constructs a film which claims no objectivity, yet creates a certain spectacular quality, to some extent derealising the content while simultaneously crediting the individual with the ability to retain their subjectivity. The viewer has reached a comfortable point of believing that they are engaging with the truth of the film, deliberating upon it and deciding what political consequence this may have. But in reality this is still to a great extent spectacular. As reactions to the depictions of animated violence show, the viewer has dislocated the reality of the film from the reality of their own lives. It is after all only an animation. Then, suddenly, the façade of animation is wrenched from the screen.

The final seventy seconds of the film is composed of real documentary journalistic

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footage of dead and mutilated bodies piled up in the streets and alleys of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp. The footage is truly horrific. The spectacle is smashed and the true visual impact of the violent images is unleashed upon the viewer. Similar images have already been shown in animated form, so why does this new footage have such a different effect? As I have already discussed, the ‘real’ image is, in essence, exactly the same as the animated one: a projection of light, a mere representation, so the viewer’s response to the image of a dead body shot in film should be no different to that of seeing an illustration of the corpse. The impact of Waltz with Bashir lies exactly here. The film reveals to the viewer the fact that throughout the film they have been rationalising the horrific content of the film by subconsciously distancing the image from themselves, seeing it from the perspective of an alien subject in an alternate reality dimension. The sudden removal of the visual structures of this dimension also removes this spectacular reality dimension, as the essence of the spectacle is in fact purely visual. It has no content but is only a simulacrum of content, as Baudrillard says: “Rather than producing meaning, it exhausts itself in the staging of meaning.”(2) An effect of defamiliarisation is experienced by the viewer as they are faced with a representation which is alien to the reality they thought they were experiencing but which they recognise as closely resembling the reality which exists outside of the cinema. And in this defamiliarised state the realisation dawns that the

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representation in front of them is not in fact a reality itself, but a visual staging of content which has a genuine root beyond the image. This understanding wrenches the content of the film out of the spectacular dimension and into the dimension of the viewing subject’s cognitive map.

The viewer is suddenly shaken into the realisation that to the same extent that they believe the truth of the final filmed sequence, the animated events of the film are also actually rooted in some reality outside of the image which they can relate to in ideological terms. Not only the final seventy seconds, but all that they have been watching up to this point is also based on some real world truth. And, shattering the conventions of the cinematic medium, this truth is incomplete, unknown, pieced together from the testimonies of individuals none of whom have any real

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Figure 7: Recall

idea of what happened, only what happened to them, and even that is unclear. The viewer is faced with the realisation that they are not going to be offered an answer to whatever the question was spoken from an omniscient narrative perspective. Le sujet supposĂŠ savoir is not going to be provided for them, only a representation of monadic perspectives.

Suddenly the film is over. No judgement is made, no conclusion come to. We never find out exactly what Ari Folman discovered about his own role in the event, whether he ever finally pieced his repressed memories back together. The credits roll and the viewer is left not with the familiar post-cinema awakening from spectacle, but with the shocking realisation that their presuppositions of the cinematic medium have been turned upside down and they must now deal with the content of the film in real life, and not only the content of the film, but perhaps the very way they relate to cultural images themselves.

1. Waltz with Bashir. [DVD] London: Artificial Eye; 2008. Interview with Ari Folman.

2. Baudrillard S. Simulacra and Simulation. The United States of America: The University of Michigan Press; 1994. p. 80.

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Conclusion: Pedagogy - New Perspectives

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Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds creates a simulation of reality, dictating how the viewer should interact with it, while Folman’s Waltz with Bashir provokes a revelation in the nature of how the viewer interacts with representations of reality in their real life. This small scale example is a demonstration of how the visual image can be used to inhibit or promote the process of cognitive mapping in the individual, and therefore affect the individual’s ability to act politically within the public.

Jameson suggests that any ‘new political art’ which seeks to promote political activity through aesthetic means, must not create a spectacular representation of reality, but; “(if it is possible at all) will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism, that is to say, to its fundamental object – the world space of multinational capital – at the same time at which it achieves a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing this last, in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion.”(1)

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This is what Waltz with Bashir does. And this is what we, as socially concerned creators of images, must also do. Certainly there is always the option to serve the anonymous violence of the system, and the majority will continue to choose to do so. As Brecht wrote; “Thinking that they are in possession of an apparatus which in reality owns them, they defend an apparatus over which they no longer have any control.�(2) But if the visual communicator has any desire to see the public equipped with the abilities to take control of their own conditions of existence and fulfil the roles of citizens rather than consumers, it is absolutely necessary that we make it our explicit goal to create not spectacular but pedagogical images.

The spectacular image undermines political effectiveness by creating an object of attention far removed from the genuine existential issues of reality. The pedagogical image does not teach or even necessarily inform, but creates a new perspective in the viewer. While the spectacle may involve the individual emotionally for a short time and even teach some new fact about an existing situation, the pedagogical image offers subjective exposure to a genuine ideological conflict, and does not restrict the possibility of the viewer achieving critical distance from the image in order to deliberate upon the social repercussions of this conflict. Most importantly the pedagogical image does not hide the truth of

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the extent of the subject’s ability to actively play a part in making a change to the reality of their actual conditions of existence. Through this pedagogical approach to images, visual culture can provide the public with the conditions in which they can become politically effective.

1. Jameson F. Postmodernism: or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso; 1991. p.54 2. Thomson P, Sacks G, ed. The Cambridge companion to Brecht. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 1994. p.103.

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Bibliography

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Books Barthes R. Image Music Text. London: Fontana Press; 1977.

Baudrillard S. Simulacra and Simulation. The United States of America: The University of Michigan Press; 1994.

Benjamin A. The Problems of Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin. London: Routledge; 1989.

Benjamin W. Illuminations. Pimlico edition. London: Random House; 1999.

Berman M. All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity. Tenth impression Verso ed. London: Verso; 1999.

Bourriaud N, ed. Altermodern Tate Triennial. London: Tate Publishing; 2009.

Burgin V. In/different spaces:place and memory in visual culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press; 1996.

Burgin V. The end of art theory: criticism and postmodernity. London: Macmillan; 1986.

Capozzi R ed. Reading Eco: an anthology. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press; 1997.

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Chomsky N. Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies. London: Pluto; 1989.

Darley A. Visual digital culture: surface play and spectacle in new media genres.

London: Routledge; 2000.

Debord G. Panegyric; Volumes 1&2.Verso ed. London: Verso; 2004.

Debord G. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books; 1995.

Docherty T, ed. Postmodernism: A Reader. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf; 1993.

Feuerbach L. The essence of Christianity. Second Edition. New York: Calvin Blanchard; 1855.

Frost A ed. Theatre Theories: From Plato to Virtual Reality. Norwich: Pen & Inc. ; 2000.

Holmes D ed. Virtual politics: identity and community in cyberspace. London: Sage; 1997.

Horkheimer M, Adorno T ed. Dialectic of enlightenment: philosophical fragments.

Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press; 2002.

Huyssen A. After the great divide:modernism, mass culture, postmodernism.

Basingstoke: Macmillan; 1988.

Jameson F. Postmodernism: or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso; 1991.

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Jameson F. Signatures of the visible. London: Routledge; 1992.

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Kant I. The Critique of Judgement. Oxford: Clarendon; 1952.

Keen A. The cult of the Amateur: How blogs, MySpace, YouTube and the rest of today’s user-generated media are killing our culture and economy. Revised paperback ed. London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing; 2008.

Lipovetsky G. Hypermodern Times. Cambridge: Polity Press; 2005.

Mandel E. Late Capitalism. London: NLB; 1975.

McLuhan M. Understanding media: the extensions of man. London: Routledge; 2001.

Morris W. Useful work versus useless toil. Penguin Books – Great Ideas ed. London: Penguin; 2008.

Nelson C, Grossberg L ed. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Illinois: University of Illinois press; 1990.

Norris C. Reclaiming truth: Contribution to a critique of cultural relativism.

London: Lawrence and Wishart; 1996.

Poynor R. Obey the giant: life in the image world. London: August; 2001.

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Rampley M ed. Exploring visual culture: definitions, concepts, contexts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; 2005.

Roberts A. Fredric Jameson. London: Routledge; 2000.

Robins K. Into the Image: Culture and politics in the field of vision. London: Routledge; 1996.

Sarup M. Identity, culture and the postmodern world. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; 1996.

Sunstein C. Republic.com 2.0. Woodstock, Oxfordshire: Princeton University Press; 2007.

Thomson P, Sacks G, ed. The Cambridge companion to Brecht. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 1994.

Virilio P, Armitage J, ed. From Modernism to Hypermodernism and Beyond.

London: Sage; 2000.

Virilio P, Der Derian J, ed. The Virilio Reader. Oxford: Blackwell; 1998.

Virilio P. Art as far as the eye can see. Oxford: Berg; 2007. Žižek S. The fragile absolute: or why is the Christian legacy worth fighting for? The essential Žižek ed. London: Verso; 2008.

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Periodicals Marchart O. The People and the public: Radical Democracy and the Role of Public Media. Open: Cahier on Art and the Public Domain. 2007; (13): 6-16.

Brooker C. The very fabric of society is breaking down around us. What the hell is there left to believe in? The Guardian 2009 July 13; G2 supplement Comment & features sect. p.5.

Films Waltz with Bashir. [film]. Israel: Bridgit Folman Gang; 2008. [DVD] London: Artificial Eye; 2008.

Inglourious Basterds. [film]. USA: The Weinstein Company; 2009. [DVD] USA: Universal; 2009.

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Photo Essay

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“An image which has not been deliberately separated from its meaning adds great precision and certainty to knowledge. ... An authentic illustration sheds light on true discourse, like a subordinate clause which is neither incompatible nor pleonastic.�

-Guy Debord

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“There is little chance of our over-emphasizing, with regard to the life that is lived now, the general disgust and the beginnings of fright that are felt in so many domains. They are felt but never expressed before bloody revolts. The reasons for this are simple.

The pleasures of existence have recently been redefined in an authoritarian way – first in their priorities and then in their entire substance. And the authorities who redefined them could just as well decide 94

at any moment, untroubled by any other consideration, which modification might be most lucratively introduced into the techniques of their manufacture, entirely liberated from any need to please. For the first time, the same people are the masters of everything that is done and everything that is said about what is done.

And so Madness ‘hath builded her house in the high places of the city.’�

- Guy Debord 95

“Society no longer imposes norms by discipline, but by choice, and the realm of spectacle.�

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- SÉbastien Charles 97

“Advertising’s right to colonise the physical environment of the street and act as primary shaper of the mental environment is taken for granted and there is no officially sanctioned public competition for the thoughts, beliefs, imagination and desires of the passer-by. Apart from other ads.”

- Rick Poynor

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“To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose ‘sense of the universal equality of things’ has 100

increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction.�

- Walter Benjamin 101

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“To see without going there to see. To perceive without really being there... All this was to shatter the whole set of the different phenomena involved in visual and theatrical representation, right up to representative democracy�

- Paul Virilio 103

“There is no longer a staging of the commodity: 104

there is only its obscene and empty form.�

- Jean Baudrillard 105

“It is hardly possible to overstate the value, in the present low state of human impoverishment, of placing human beings in contact with other persons dissimilar to themselves, and with

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modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar ...

Such communication has always been, and is peculiarly in the present age, one of the primary sources of progress.�

- John Stuart Mill 107

“The mentality of the public, which allegedly and actually favors the system of the culture industry, is a part of the system, not an excuse for it.�

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- Adorno and Horkheimer 109

Images All images and illustrations: Peter Buwert 2009/2010 except: Figure 1:

Quentin Tarantino. Inglourious Basterds [Screenshot from DVD].

Inglourious Basterds. [DVD] USA: Universal; 2009.

Figure 2:

Quentin Tarantino. Hugo Stiglitz [Screenshot from DVD].

Inglourious Basterds. [DVD] USA: Universal; 2009.

Figure 3:

Quentin Tarantino. La Louisiane [Screenshot from DVD].

Inglourious Basterds. [DVD] USA: Universal; 2009.

Figure 4:

Ari Folman. Waltz with Bashir [Screenshot from DVD]. Waltz with Bashir.[DVD] London: Artificial Eye; 2008.

Figure 5:

Ari Folman. Flashback [Screenshot from DVD]. Waltz with Bashir.[DVD] London: Artificial Eye; 2008.

Figure 6:

Ari Folman. First day of war [Screenshot from DVD]. Waltz with Bashir.[DVD] London: Artificial Eye; 2008.

Figure 7:

Ari Folman. Recall [Screenshot from DVD]. Waltz with Bashir.[DVD] London: Artificial Eye; 2008.

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Photo Essay Quotations Page 91:

Debord G. Panegyric: Volumes 1 & 2. London: Verso; 2004.

Page 92:

Debord G. Panegyric: Volumes 1 & 2. London: Verso; 2004.

Page 94:

Lipovetsky G. Hypermodern Times. Cambridge: Polity Press; 2005.

Page 96:

Poynor R. Obey the giant: life in the image world. London: August; 2001.

Page 98:

Benjamin W. Illuminations. Pimlico edition. London: Random House; 1999.

Page 100:

Virilio P. Art as far as the eye can see. Oxford: Berg; 2007.

Page 102:

Baudrillard S. Simulacra and Simulation. The United States of America: The University of Michigan Press; 1994.

Page 104:

Sunstein C. Republic.com 2.0. Woodstock, Oxfordshire: Princeton University Press; 2007.

Page 106:

Horkheimer M, Adorno T ed. Dialectic of enlightenment: philosophical fragments. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press; 2002.

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PeterBuwert.com 112

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“Cognitive Mapping: An approach towards a visual culture for a politically effective public� is the undergraduate dissertation of Peter Buwert

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Peter Buwert

How can the visual communicator create images which do move the public, and not merely with a visceral knee-jerk reaction, but in a way which empowers genuinely effective democratic political action?

Cognitive Mapping

Images no longer move us. Is there something in the very visual structure of our cultural images which undermines the effectiveness of their political content? Are the structures and systems of our imperfect society so entrenched that we are powerless to change them?