From Image Politics to Image Politics 2.0

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ORCID

Robert Hariman http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2570-2888

Notes

1 The Prospect of Rhetoric: Report of the National Developmental Project (Prentice-Hall: Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1971). An early compendium of journal articles that responded generally to the call for work on the relationship between rhetoric, media, and politics can be found in Rhetorical Dimensions in Media: A Critical Casebook, eds. Martin J. Medhurst and Thomas W. Benson (Kendall/Hunt: Dubuque, IA, 1984). See also the early attempt to engage the relationship between rhetoric and documentary film in Carolyn Anderson and Thomas W. Benson, Documentary Dilemmas: Frederick Wiseman's Titicut Follies (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991).

2 See, e.g., J. Robert Cox, “The Die is Cast: Tropical and Ontological Dimensions of the Locus of the Irreparable,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 68, no. 3 (1982): 227–39; Christine Oravec, “Conservationism vs. Preservationism: The ‘Public Interest’ in the Hetch Hetchy Controversy,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70, no. 4 (1984): 444–58; Jimmie M. Killingsworth and Jaqueline S. Palmer, “The Discourse of ‘Environmental Hysteria’,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81 (1995): 1–19; Brant Short, “Earth First! and the Rhetoric of Moral Confrontation,” Communication Studies 42, no. 2 (1991): 172–88; Mark Moore, “Constructing Irreconcilable Conflict: The Function of Synechdoche in the Spotted Owl Controversy,” Communication Monographs 60, no. 3 (1993): 258–74; and Tarla Rai Peterson, Sharing the Earth: The Rhetoric of Sustainable Development (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997).

3 Fred Ritchin has been raising many of the questions that have to be addressed to study the changes in visual imaging wrought by digital media: In Our Own Image: The Coming Revolution in Photography, Second Edition (New York Aperture, 2006); After Photography (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2010); Bending the Frame: Photojournalism, Documentary, and the Citizen (New York: Aperture, 2013). On virtual intimacy, see Shaka McGlotten, Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect, and Queer Sociality (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013). On networked publics, see Robert Asen, “Neoliberalism, the Public Sphere, and a Public Good,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 103, no. 4 (2017): 329–49. Both interests are brought together in Kris Cohen, Never Alone, Except for Now: Art, Networks, Populations (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).

4 For example, DeLuca draws on John Durham Peters’ discussion of the tension between dialogue and dissemination as they have been models of communication, from Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). For an expansive discussion of how the concept of a medium can be taken across the nature/culture divide, and has been taken there previously, see Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

5 Kevin Michael DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples, “From Public Sphere to Public Screen: Democracy, Activism, and the ‘Violence’ in Seattle,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19, no. 2 (2002): 125–51. We see the concept of the public screen as a major extension of the optic of Image Politics; in fact, we were surprised on rereading to discover that it is not actually in the book. We also believe that DeLuca may not be appreciated sufficiently as a public sphere theorist. He states that the “concept of the public sphere is indispensable for theoretical and practical reasons” (Image Politics, 21) and affirms it as “a vital concept for social theory” (“Public Screen,” 128). Although he offers the public screen as a “necessary supplement,” we believe it is that and more: a construct for translating public sphere theory into digital media environments and for coordinating many other adjustments that have emerged from critique of the theory, and also a concept that could be used to reanimate controversies about public images and spectatorship and perhaps to develop a critical phenomenology of digital media. To those ends, one might look less to the old conflicts (e.g., text vs. image) and more to emergent media practices as they crisscross private and public life.

6 Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, The Public Image: Photography and Civic Spectatorship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

7 The conventional wisdom was promulgated by Roland Barthes, Guy Debord, Susan Sontag, Alan Sekula, John Berger, John Tagg, Victor Burgin, Rosalind Krauss, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Martha Rosler, Carol Squires, and many subsequent scholars. It was preceded by and occasionally draws on Frankfurt School media theorists such as Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, Berthold Brecht, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer. For the record, we find some in the latter group to be less iconoclastic than many of those who came after them, not least in being willing to consider how media have both exploitative and emancipatory potential.

8 Trevor Paglen, “Is Photography Over?” Still Searching, http://blog.fotomuseum.ch/2014/03/i-is-photography-over/ (March 3, 2014).

9 The community that is working out the paradigm shift includes writers such as Dora Apel, Ariella Azoulay, Geoffrey Batchen, Susan Buck-Morss, David Campbell, Lilie Chouliaraki, Georges Didi-Huberman, Geoff Dyer, Jae Emerling, Cara Finnegan, Paul Frosh, Liam Kennedy, Wendy Kozol, Susie Linfield, Nicholas Mirzoeff, W. J. T. Mitchell, Margaret Olin, Griselda Pollock, Jacques Rancière, Mark Reinhardt, Fred Ritchin, John Roberts, Vanessa Schwartz, Kaja Silverman, Sharon Sliwinski, Shawn Michelle Smith, David Levi Strauss, Barbie Zelizer, and ourselves, among many others.

10 W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 26.

11 Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 244.

12 Robert Hariman, “Introduction,” in Culture, Catastrophe, and Rhetoric: The Texture of Political Action, ed. Robert Hariman and Ralph Cintron (New York: Berghahn, 2015), 10–13; see also in the same volume Ralph Cintron, “Conclusion: What Next? Modernity, Revolution and the ‘Turn’ to Catastrophe,” 231–55.

13 This point is taken up briefly in Joshua Trey Barnett and Kevin Michael DeLuca, “The Conditions That Form Us: Affect, Media, Social Change,” Culture, Theory & Critique 60, no. 2 (2019): 99–106.

14 DeLuca, Image Politics, xii.

15 See also Finis Dunaway, Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

16 DeLuca, Image Politics, xiii. Note that phronesis also is enlisted on behalf of the guarded optimism of supporting radical environmental groups staging image events for mass dissemination and public uptake (Image Politics, 44). That commitment seems to wane, however, and probably was simply the use of an available concept to mark practical political intelligence, rather than an interest in developing it further and especially in respect to the poststructuralist theorists who are taken more to heart.

17 Kevin Michael DeLuca, “Interpreting the World as it is: Thinking Amidst the Corporatocracy and in the Wake of Tunisia, Egypt, and Wisconsin,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 28, no. 2 (2011): 92. Note also the affinity with Walter Benjamin on this point.

18 DeLuca, “Interpreting the World as It Is.”

19 Kevin Michael DeLuca, “Creative Cultural Studies: Encountering African Elephants in China,” Culture, Theory and Critique 60, no. 3 (2019): 171.

20 Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 26–7, 336–56; Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture, and Media Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 20–1; Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Paddy Scannell, Television and the Meaning of Live: An Enquiry into the Human Situation (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2014); Hariman and Lucaites, The Public Image, 1–28; DeLuca, “Creative Cultural Studies: Encountering African Elephants in China.”

21 For discussion focused on moving past the critique of aesthetics in documentary media, see David Levi Strauss, “The Documentary Debate: Aesthetic or Anaesthetic?” in Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics (New York: Aperture, 2003), 3–11 and “Troublesomely Bound Up with Reality: On the Aestheticization-of-Suffering Critique Today,” Words not Spent Today Buy Smaller Images Tomorrow: Essays on the Present and Future of Photography (New York: Aperture, 2014), 130–5; Mark Reinhardt, “Picturing Violence: Aesthetics and the Anxiety of Critique,” in Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain, ed. Mark Reinhardt, Holly Edwards, and Erina Duganne (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 13–36; Susie Linfield, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 32–62; Jae Emerling, Photography: History and Theory (New York: Routledge, 2012); Ariella Azoulay, Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography, trans. Louise Bethlehem (New York: Verso, 2012).

22 Patrick Jagoda, Network Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Paul Frosh, The Poetics of Digital Media (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2019); the special issue on Visualizing the Environment, Public Culture 26, no. 2 (2014), including the intriguing study across analog and digital media by Ursula K. Heise, “Plasmatic Nature: Environmentalism and Animated Film,” Public Culture 26, no. 2 (2014): 301–18.

23 Georges Didi-Huberman, Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science, trans. Shane Lillis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018); David L. Marshall, “Warburgian Maxims for Visual Rhetoric,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 48, no. 4 (2018): 352–79.

24 These tensions can include all the entanglements of the many transcriptions activated by the semiosis of the image in the heteroglossic context of a public culture, as well as “existential” pairings such as elements as past–future, self–other, nature–culture, abundance–scarcity, despair–hope, etc.

25 Elizabeth A. Brunner and Kevin Michael DeLuca, “The Argumentative Force of Image Networks: Greenpeace's Panmediated Global Detox Campaign,” Argumentation and Advocacy 52, no. 4 (2016): 281–99; DeLuca, “Creative Cultural Studies,” 183–8.