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Article Excerpt
In the picture, he departs from this earth like an arrow. Although he
has not chosen his fate, he appears to have, in his last instants of life, embraced it. If he were not falling, he might very well be flying. --Tom Junod
Are those who fell to their deaths on September 11, 2001, exploited or honored by the display of images representing their experiences? While the circumstances that led to the actions of the man in Richard Drew's photograph are unprecedented, images of falling are not new to photojournalism or contemporary art. That images of those who fell from the towers became traumatically imprinted in people's minds suggests that they urgently merit not only detailed study but also deeper contextualization within visual culture. In light of Drew's iconic photograph, an image that, perhaps more than any other, epitomizes the tragedy and the horror of the September 11 catastrophe in Western cultural memory, my questions are as follows: What reinterpretations can be brought to art created prior to September 11 (by Yves Klein, Andy Warhol, and Sarah Charlesworth, for example) that takes falling as its subject matter? How do artworks made in response to September 11 (by Eric Fischl, Carolee Schneemann, and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, for example) hold up under critical scrutiny when the photojournalistic images of the actual event are already so aesthetically powerful? (1) Further, what challenges do these mostly lens-based images pose for photographic theory, in particular, the substantial contribution made by Roland Barthes, whose work is concerned with the cultural codes of press photography as well as the interrelationship between death and photography? (2) From the perspective of contemporary art history, my purpose is not to defend whether or not one should look at, display, or circulate such images of falling--ultimately such questions lead to the irresolvable problem of whether or not there is a violation in looking, and then quickly shift to issues of censorship--but to identify what one sees in them, how the perception of movement alters the subjectivity of those falling, and what the stakes are for the subjects involved, namely, those made visible and those who view them. These questions can be summarized equally as "What is one to make of the image?" and "What does the image make of its subjects?"
When different media capture such fragile subjects, in liminal moments that cannot be adequately named, vulnerability becomes an issue of representation. This attention to vulnerability is neither prurient nor morbid. Vulnerability is a complex condition centrally tied to agency, to the subject's ability to exert or extend itself in the world and to be recognized by others. Images of falling make acutely evident the body's simultaneous potential for vulnerability and its capacity for agency. Images of falling challenge codes of representation on two significant levels: visually, in terms of the subject whose body is arrested by the medium; linguistically, in terms of the viewer's ability to respond and identify what is seen. Vulnerability therefore implicates the subject of representation and the viewer: while the falling subject is left in a state of suspended animation in the image, the viewer is held in a state of speechlessness, unable to name what or whom is seen. I am interested in uncovering how, in subtle and often unintended ways, aesthetic qualities alter the perception of the falling subjects' potential mortality and make it impossible to perceive the vulnerability of the subject in the image. My hypothesis is that, in the process of identifying moments when vulnerability is or is not apparent in images of falling, formal and ideological problems are revealed to such an extent that an ethical paradigm unfolds.
With its global consideration of the ramifications of September 11 as image and event, a major premise of Retort (the Berkeley-area collective comprising Iain Boal, T. J. Clark, Joseph Matthews, and Michael Watts) is that one of the most trenchant results of the terrorist attacks was the exposure of the vulnerability of the state. The way the attacks made visible a nation wounded with such surgical precision is identified by Retort as the reason they functioned so "well" as spectacle (this is not an endorsement) and why their media visibility had to be immediately suppressed: "Terror can take over the image-machinery for a moment--and a moment, in the timeless echo chamber of the spectacle, may now eternally be all there is--and use it to amplify, reiterate, accumulate the sheer visible happening of defeat." (3) As the cultural theorist Susan Buck-Morss incisively claims, "What disappeared on September 11 was the apparent invulnerability, not only of US territory, but of US, and, indeed, Western hegemony" (4) With the destruction (if only temporary) of a financial capital market and a manifestation of modernity's highest architectural aspirations, as well as its working, human subjects, the exposure of the vulnerability of the nation-state was, as Buck-Morss points out, achieved not only at the symbolic level (as image), but also at a concrete, physical level; further, "the photographically mediated experience of the attack was of both the symbol and the real, antagonistically superimposed." (5) But rather than focusing on the geopolitical implications of September 11, I want to consider representations of vulnerability at the individual level of embodied subjectivity--not without acknowledging, of course, that those individuals represent more encompassing images of nation-state vulnerability.
Because it involves nonfictional subjects, the issue of vulnerability here is profoundly ethical. Subjectivity as I understand it is an ongoing series of effects (involving language, images, cultural and political institutions and their discourses, names and identity categories) that form a subject who must always be assumed to be under construction, a work-in-progress, changing and contingent, less a source of agency than a scene or sight through which the effects of power are materialized. Part of my project is to extend the notion of subjectivity to the dead, to show how they are acutely vulnerable to representational violence. (6) One must keep in mind that subjects are not merely theoretical premises but are as vulnerable to the burdens of the body as they are to the painful effects of discourse and representations. The dead should be considered implicated in the processes of subjectivity; subjects are vulnerable equally to posthumous distortion, neglect, and dishonor by images and words as to bodily death. How is subjectivity produced for bodies in motion, bodies whose weight and movement led to their deaths, bodies whose deathly trajectories are captured in lens-based representations? Do some representations contort the process of subjectivity, and if so, how?
My focus on vulnerability is also indebted to Judith Butler's 2004 reflections on September 11, in which she develops a cultural theory of intersubjectivity with global reach, an ethics founded on the experience of mourning (national, collective, and individual) in which the self, through the experience of being made acutely aware of the Other's vulnerability to mortal violence, also experiences vulnerability: "Loss and vulnerability seem to follow from our being socially constituted bodies, attached to others, at risk of losing those attachments, exposed to others, at risk of violence by virtue of that exposure." (7) Imagining an ethics that can be integrated into global politics, Butler proposes that governments base their global policies on a micropolitics of relationality constituted by the awareness of mutual vulnerability, so that a response to terrorism can be developed that doesn't perpetuate violence, isolationism, or unilateralism, or lead to the restriction of personal and intellectual freedoms. Butler's critical injunction is to be understood in the present global context of war, conflict, and acts of terror that afflict non-Western civilian populations (Palestinians, Afghans, and Iraqis in particular) to a much greater degree than North Americans. Butler acknowledges that although grief is an interior focus, it also directs attention to the ones who are lost. The mourning subject may feel a sense of solitude but not of autonomy: what ensues from mourning is the realization that we are socially constituted subjects, communities, and nations. According to Butler, the experience of grief is ultimately qualified by the realization that the self is irrevocably transformed, if not also shattered, by the loss of the other, a situation whereby "one finds oneself fallen." (8)
In its affective movement, Butler's description of the mourner as herself having fallen provides an empathetic model for understanding the potential for the present images to reduce the viewer to a state of vulnerability. This is not to prescribe the form that the response to vulnerability viewed should take. It is enough to admit that grief leaves one speechless and unhinged: "My narrative falters, as it must." (9) Butler's conception of vulnerability as an inarticulate state helps avoid the pitfalls of attempting to establish "appropriate," "good," or "morally acceptable" responses to images of human suffering, a pursuit whose complexity, as Susan Sontag cautions in Regarding the Pain of Others, a book devoted specifically to this issue, leads to other problems and paradoxes (formal, ideological, political, and moral) rather than resolutions.
I introduce this writing about falling with Butler's proposal for an ethics of mutual vulnerability because her premise involves an intersubjective relation conceived as constitutive rather than diminutive or objectifying. If in mourning the living come "undone," the experience of pain when viewing the other's mortality can constitute an ethics of intersubjectivity in which vulnerability is reciprocal. (10) Can one consider the images in these pages accountable to such an ethical relation? In so doing, can one transform the fallen from two-dimensional figures...
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