seeing the picture

 This morning on NPR, a Syrian activist was speaking about how he hacks into the facebook accounts of activists who are picked up by the government. He removes all information that could be used against these revolutionaries and replaces them with pornographic images, anything to distract govt. officials looking for information that might help them charge these young activists. Information is collected and disseminated in so many different ways now and I want to link this with something else but for now, I want to go with the listener or viewer who is spectator.

In thinking about the visual presentations or representations of war, I was struck by Rey Chow's account of how the overpowering image of the mushroom cloud obscured a different narrative where Japan was not the victim of violence but the perpetrator. It is something I never thought about or heard of till now. It makes me realize how powerful certain narratives or representations can be so that they obscure other narratives or get normalized.

The caption of the images alter or shape the reception, the spectator. Puar cites Songtag and suggests that as information photos defy any need for the "elucidation of captions. The force of comprehension occurs not via what these photographs mean, in their contextual and symbolic specificity, but through what these images do - do to us, to the Iraqi prisoners, to the US. guards, to our sentimentalizing and hopeful notions of humanity, justice, peace. In other words, their productive force of affect renders language impotent: by looking we experience all that we need to know" (109).

Of course, these sentences take another meaning when we take into consideration the ease with which photos are taken and disseminated and whose bodies are presented to the world and whose are maintained as sacred. The photos of Abu Ghraib did go away, Puar says, and the events were reconstructed by the perpetrators and not the victims. I am trying to read the forms of visual representation keeping in mind what we have already read about testimonies and memoirs. The form that it comes in is "othering" as it states its position as one who sees, who witnesses, who keeps record, or has the eye or the language.

What does it mean to render language impotent? Is it really language we are referring to or something else? Our references, for example? Our method or medium of reception which is almost a form of commercial exchange. I am struggling a bit with Puar's book because it is speaking to many things but perhaps by tomorrow I will have a better way of putting things together. Or perhaps, that is the point - putting things together is exactly what is impossible anymore because the picture comes already framed.