Image Wars

Abstract

For more than three weeks, Greece was rocked by demonstrations and rioting. Thousands took to streets of Athens in protest of fatal shooting of a 15-year-old boy by a police officer who did not obey commands, and instead executed law himself in district of Exarchia on December 6, 2008. The unrest quickly spread to Thessaloniki, Greece's second-largest city, and to other parts of country. Clashes also occurred in parts of Cyprus, while demonstrations were organized in other European cities. In central Athens, protesters, including secondary school pupils, students, and anarchists, battled riot police by smashing windows of banks, car dealerships, and supermarket chains. They burned vehicles and buildings by detonating petrol bombs and Molotov cocktails. Official media in Athens and around world have spent a significant amount of media time analyzing, in various sociologically inspired roundtable discussions, possible reasons for this sudden disquiet, which, despite official international media condemnation, was supported by majority of Greece's population. The riots introduce a series of difficult questions: Why were there so many people on streets without a specific political motivation? Why aggressive exposition of lootings in center of a civilized European city? Why did these massive riots not result in a storming of Winter Palace? Why, in end, did they not lead to a revision of country's current political agenda as people demanded? Through critical discussions of December 2008 Athens riots, this essay seeks to investigate specific of visibility, as deployed in public space and appropriated by official and radical media and internet. It approaches Athenian events not as a singular and contingent moment in political life, but as symptom of structural failures of current consensual polities as depicted worldwide in depoliticization of citizens and lack of voluntary co-operatism. It explores discursive and visual mechanisms within society and critically addresses possibilities for new and more democratic forms of social organization. Philosopher Simon Critchley recently observed that, [P]olitics is always about nomination. It is about naming a political subjectivity and organizing politically around that name. (1) Drawing on this statement, this essay seeks to determine this naming process, which would inform radical politics while addressing its mechanisms of visuality. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Current debate in political, social, and ideological arenas is driven less by an opaque discursiveness than by a supposedly transparent imperative to visualize. A number of art historians researching field of visual studies often use various concepts to analyze intertwining of imagemaking, hegemonic ideology, and power relations. Art historian Mieke Bal points out that what she considers worth studying, more than images per se, are visual regimes, including dominant one--the one that dominates us. ... If we fail to do this, she writes, the currently dominant [will] hold us imprisoned while remaining invisible and resistant to critique. (2) Similarly, historian T.J. Clark uses term and processes of concealed power formation in order to describe way images monopolize subjectivities. He explicitly proposes a politicized critique of visual subject as constructed by modernity: [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The enemy now is not old picture of visual imaging as pursued in a state of trance-like removal from human concerns, but parody notion we have come to live with of its belonging to world, its incorporation into it, its being fully part of a certain image regime. Being fully part means, it turns out in practice, being at any tawdry ideology's service. (3) The political and ideological implications of current regime of visibility are also described by art historian Camiel van Winkel: Life amidst visual media is dominated by a permanent pressure to compensate for missing imagery, to visualize non-visual practices and processes. …