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Monday, January 09, 2006
10:38 AM      

Real and Irreal, White and Other; i.e. Class, Power, Finance, and Portrayal

. . .[In Jurassic Park] the scientist [Wu] wants to perfect the dinosaurs, to make them safe for a modern theme park, to make them slower, more stupid, more tractable, more in keeping with our stereotype of creatures destined for extinction. . . he points out that “nobody really knows what” the dinosaurs were “really like.” When Hammond objects that docile, domesticated dinosaurs “wouldn't be real,” Wu replies: “But they aren't real now. . . . That's what I'm trying to tell you. There isn't any reality here.” . . . “The DNA of the dinosaurs was like old photographs that had been retouched, basically the same as the original, but in some places repaired and clarified.” The image and reality they present are already a manipulation: they are palpable, living beings whose relation to “real” dinosaurs is already within a regime of illusion, so that the only question is what illusion we happen to want to present to ourselves, what illusion might be safe and attractive to the consumer. . . .

The interesting thing about this debate. . . is that it stages the opposition between irrealism and realism as wholly contained within a framework of consumption and display. Nowhere in this debate is it possible to ask whether it is a good idea to clone dinosaurs in the first place, much less to present them as commodified images in a theme park. The debate is completely contained within the assumptions of specular (and speculative) capitalism. What we display, what we visually produce and consume, may be debatable from a standpoint like “product safety” (a debate rather like the endless and pointless squabbles about whether television and movie violence “causes” violence in the streets), but specular economy itself cannot be critiqued. It can only be “regulated” or “de-regulated.” The debate about Jurassic Park the movie is thus mainly about whether children should be allowed to see it, not what it means that adults have produced a film whose special effects for recreating dinosaurs cost “more money. . . than on funding all scientific research on dinosaurs undertaken to date.”

Picture Theory, pp 360-361, by WJT Mitchell

I'm nearly done reading this dense and fascinating book. Something that's stuck with me throughout is this assertion on page 91: ‘Even something as mundane and familiar as as the relative proportion of image and text on the front page of the daily newspaper is a direct indicator of the social class of its readership. . . the real question to ask is . . . why does it matter how words and pictures are juxtaposed, blended, or separated.’

And from page 161:

“Children should be seen and not heard” is a bit of proverbial wisdom that reinforces a stereotypical relation, not just between adults and children, but between the freedom to speak and see and the injunction to remain silent and available for observation. . . this kind of wisdom is transferable from children to women to colonized subjects to works of art to characterizations of visual representation itself. Racial otherness (especially in the binarized “black/white” divisions of US culture) is open to precisely this sort of visual/verbal coding. The assumption is that “blackness” is a transparently readable sign of racial identity. . . Race is what can be seen (and therefore named) in skin color, facial features, hair, etc. Whiteness, by contrast, is invisible, unmarked; it has no racial identity, but is equated with a normative subjectivity and humanity from which “race” is a visible deviation.

Visiting the Norman Rockwell museum this summer, I found out that the policy of most major magazines during the early 60s was that negroes could only be depicted in subservient roles. CNN's coverage of New Orleans after Katrina seemed to unearth an entire subclass of people who normally don't merit depiction (not seen/not heard). The press complies with the US government embargo on depicting dead US soldiers, but they had no problem repeatedly showing one particular wheelchair-bound corpse draped in blankets.

Pictorial exposition always entails a power relationship.



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