Abstract
Debate on Demanding images: Democracy, mediation, and the image-event in Indonesia, by Karen Strassler, David Kloos, Nuraini Juliastuti, and Annemarie Samuels
Highlights
I would like to raise three issues for debate
Experts encroach on each other’s purported domains. This is a paradoxical age, in which the authority of experts crumbles— partly because of the proliferation of mass media—while at the same time political contests take the form of struggles over the expert voice, amplified by the same media
Perhaps, than the pace of change and its perception is the sense that ecology is precise in a way that landscape is not
Summary
In Demanding images Karen Strassler observes and analyses ‘image-events’ in the Indonesian post-authoritarian public sphere. One of the most impressive contributions of Demanding images, to me, is that it illuminates the high cost of the seemingly endless public quest for visual evidence In this public sphere, where the ideological dream of transparency has become an unstable ground of democracy, the public becomes increasingly anxious about the invisible side of politics; perhaps more insidiously, political recognition itself becomes premised on public visibility. If in such instances a colonial and ‘postcolonial disorder’ (Good et al, 2008) is temporarily evoked in a highly visual way, how do generally non-visualized (or ‘unvisible’) haunting pasts and present processes of marginalization affectively shape a public sphere so obsessed by images?. These questions testify, I hope, to what I find to be the book’s tremendously productive theoretical and ethnographic reach as well as its intricate and convincing analysis of the crucial place of the visual in the contestation of Indonesia’s public sphere
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