Introductory remarks to panel on "Cinema and the National-Security State" (Representing South Asia on Film series of screenings and talks, Queens College, November 8, 2012)
Some of you
might recall that immediately after the attack on the World Trade Center on
September 11, the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and the artist Damien Hirst
both remarked that the attack was nothing less than a spectacular work of art. Stockhausen
and Hirst were quickly condemned. Some of the condemnation seems justified,
since the remarks came across as callous, to put it mildly. But it can also be
pointed out that seeing art in disasters, crimes and atrocities is a very large
part of our culture. If that sensibility did not exist, and if it did not enjoy
a pretty broad public acceptance, the war movie as we know it would not exist.
TV shows like 24 and Homeland would not exist.
The modern
state, as George Orwell suggested sixty years ago, is inseparable from
anxieties about security and fantasies of violence: images of mushroom clouds,
images of cruise missiles being launched from warships. These anxieties and
fantasies lend themselves extremely well to art. It is, I think, fair to say
that without that art – the war movie, the TV show about terrorism, the
photograph of the raising of the flag in Iwo Jima, the movie about that photograph – our culture and
our state would both have to be reimagined. These are the aesthetics of citizenship,
i.e., the prettiness or the majesty of the relationship between the individual
and the state. Even the September 11 event, in spite of the criticism of
Stockhausen and Hirst, was almost immediately treated as art, not just by
avant-garde composers and provocative artists, but also by photographers,
illustrators and editors who looked for the most dramatic angles and the most
moving montages, and by the citizens who found the images striking.
But the
aesthetics of citizenship is not a simple structure, because citizenship is
constituted by a series of power relationships or inequalities. Not only is the
individual not equal to the state, not all individuals are equally unequal. Here,
we can make a crude but useful generalization. Mainstream or popular art, like
commercial cinema, either takes the side of the state over the individual when
there is a conflict, or refuses to acknowledge that there is a conflict. In
this vision, the state is the extension, the representative and the absorber of
the individual. Through policemen, or soldiers, or CIA agents, it thinks,
decides and acts. And that agency is not only legitimate, it has aesthetic
substance, which enhances the legitimacy.
Then there is
the art of how the state acts upon the individual. This can, of course, be
characterized in various ways: resistance art, guerrilla art, non-commercial,
non-mainstream, non-monumental, and so on. I think, however, that a more useful
characterization is to see it as the art of impotence, or of passivity. This is
not to say that it is art without agency: obviously, the act of making a film, any film, is a form of agency. But the
kind of cinema that I am talking about, and that we are going to be looking at
this evening, comes out of a particular ideological space within the modern state
where agency is fraught with difficulties. I want to explain this very briefly
with reference to the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben.
In two books
that he wrote on either side of September 11, Agamben argued that at the heart
of the modern, democratic state is a moral and constitutional black hole, which
he called a state of exception. The state of exception is a situation in which
what is abnormal – illegal, unethical, impermissible – becomes the norm, and
the lines between legality and illegality become blurred. The constitution
effectively suspends itself, at least in some contexts. You can think of it as a
permanent state of emergency, in which the specifics of the emergency and the
specifics of constitutionality are both forgotten. You can also think of it as
a particular institution, such as a concentration camp or a CIA ‘black site,’ or
a legal regime like the Patriot Act in America and the Prevention of Terrorism
Act in India. The name of each of those laws, I want you to notice, is
deliberately bland and blank, showing you nothing except complacence, anxiety
and a citizenship that calls for its own renunciation. It functions very much like a generic image of a waving
flag, or a burning skyscraper against a hard blue sky. It’s a rhetorical
technique that Norman Mailer called ‘Bureaucratic Technologese’: an inscrutable,
vanilla language that makes the violence of the state invisible.
For the person
caught in a state of exception, Agamben suggests a name: Homo Sacer, which
translates roughly as ‘bare man,’ or ‘empty man.’ Homo Sacer is a person, or a demographic,
that has absolutely no rights. He is included in the body politic by virtue of
being excluded. His place in the law is that he has no legal status. He cannot
be killed through the legal or constitutional process, but he can nevertheless be
killed at any time, by anyone, without it constituting murder.
The most obvious
example of modern Homo Sacer in a state of exception, Agamben suggested, was
the Jew in Nazi Germany. But his point is that we do not need such dramatic
examples for the model to work. In any case, extreme examples can be
misleading, because they suggest that the problem is far away and rare, when in
fact it is ubiquitous. The commonest Homo Sacer, Agamben wrote, are the inmates
of detention camps for illegal immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees, which can
be as small as a cell tucked away in a corner of an international airport, or
as large as the French facility at Sangatte, which was closed down a few years
ago. It can be as remote as Guantanamo and Bagram, and as nearby as New York City
itself.
These camps are
not prisons, Agamben reminded us. This is a crucial distinction in the history
of the modern world. Michel Foucault argued, back in the 1970s, that the prison
is the defining institution and metaphor of modern society. But Agamben argued
that the detention camp has surpassed the prison in its utility as a model.
Prisoners have rights, they have access to lawyers and appeals, they have an
existence in the public record, they have been through a constitutional process
of trial and conviction, and their sentences are definite (although this is
changing in the era of sex-offender registries and similar systems of
information-based control and permanent probation). Camp inmates do not have
those things. The detention camp is a place with rules but no rights, and it
exists within a constitutional state but the constitution does not exist within
it. These dynamics make it the perfect example of a state of exception.
After September
11, America acquired a more or less new archipelago of states of exception, and
a new population of Homo Sacer. These are for the most part Muslims, although
non-Muslims have not been immune. They are mostly non-citizens: immigrants,
foreign students, people on work visas, people who have been kidnapped overseas
by the military or the CIA. But they also include US citizens, and the citizens
of countries that are allied to the United States. They include scientists,
office managers, and people who looked suspicious to a flight attendant or a fellow
passenger on a plane. These are people who are included in America by virtue of
their exclusion from the constitutional protections of citizenship, and
simultaneously, by their subjection to the power of the state.
It is not
surprising that South Asians have been at the very heart of this particular state
of exception. This is not only because of the American military adventures in
Afghanistan and Pakistan, but also because of the large population of South
Asian Muslims in America, and because even those that are not Muslim seem to
fit the profile. (It is, I think, a remarkable phenomenon that the image of the
‘terrorist’ in America has shifted eastwards from the Arab in the 1980s, to the
Pakistani and even the Bangladeshi in the present day.)
The documentary films
that we are showing you today reflect the experiences of these South Asians,
and they were made by a group of artists and activists, the Visible Collective,
that includes quite a few South Asians. In that double sense, they are the art
of passivity as well as of agency: art that comes from the intersection between
a metaphorical detention camp that captures us all, and the actual camp that
captures some but not others. The film-makers may disagree with that
characterization, but I’ll leave it to Uzma Rizvi (of the Pratt Institute) and
Prerana Reddy (of the Queens Museum of Art) to address that issue, if they
choose.
I want to make a
couple of quick points first, before I shut up. One has to do with the South
Asian diaspora in America. And this point is that there is really no such thing
as the South Asian diaspora. There
are many South Asian diasporas. They are separate by class, by education, by
country of origin, by language, by religion, and very importantly, by legal
status. By the terms of my analysis, they can be divided into two broad groups:
the visible and the invisible. The visible are people like me, and like Uzma
and Prerana. We have some money, some social status, American passports,
command of the English language, acid tongues, colleagues who can and will
stand up for us when the acidity gets us into trouble.
The invisible are
the cab drivers and waiters, who typically remain unseen by us even when they
are in plain sight. They see themselves, of course, but their sight is
unconnected to the political power that makes the difference between rules and
rights. If they were to earnestly declare at the airport, ‘My name is Khan and
I am not a terrorist,’ nobody would understand their accent and the
consequences would be unpleasant. So they remain invisible when they are
secretly approached and intimidated by the NYPD or the FBI, and when they
disappear into a detention site without a charge or a trial, not knowing when
they will reemerge, and under what conditions. What the visible group sometimes
attempts to do, as Visible Collective has tried to do, is recover these people
from invisibility, even if it is for the seven or eight minutes of a short
film. The short film format is particularly appropriate, I think, because it
constitutes an aesthetic of anti-monumentality, doing without grand spectacles,
slow-motion video montages, and even pretty pictures. The stripped-down
starkness that we see in these films is the aesthetic of Homo Sacer, glimpsed
from the perimeter of the camp.
My other point –
the last one, I promise – is that the visible people, the ones who are not in
the camp, are in fact within the orbit of the camp. Sometimes even Imran Khan
and Shah Rukh Khan must explain that they are not terrorists. The state of
exception is not just a concrete box or a razor-wire fence for people without
passports and credit cards. The camp, as I said before, is also a metaphor: a
fate that can befall anyone, including citizens and film-makers and the
visible, including people who are not South Asian or Muslim, or even brown. The
shadow of Homo Sacer – the predicament of being excluded from citizenship – falls
on all citizens of the modern state.
As promised, I
will now shut up. We will be showing you four short films, imbedded in the
talks by Uzma and Prenana. Following that we can have a discussion with the
audience.
The films shown are:
The films shown are:
FEAR OF FLYING: http://vimeo.com/24910890
LINGERING TWENTY: http://vimeo.com/39513929
INVISIBLE MAN: http://vimeo.com/39473380
PATRIOT STORY: http://vimeo.com/39450303
LINGERING TWENTY: http://vimeo.com/39513929
INVISIBLE MAN: http://vimeo.com/39473380
PATRIOT STORY: http://vimeo.com/39450303
