Remediation, virality and affect: a phenomenological reading into the Alan Kurdi Image

ABSTRACT

On 2 September 2015, Alan Kurdi’s image went viral on the social media and immediately shook the world. This paper concerns not so much with the referent as with the capacity of image to represent. What in an image endows it the capacity to shame entire humanity, heterogeneous as it is? To further complicate, how does a digital image – a conglomeration of pixilated dots, devoid of any materiality whatsoever – in its singularity generate ‘affect’, universalizable and synchronic across cultures? When we recycle contents from the ‘traditional’ media to the ‘new’ media, we tend to convey something buffer to what the text in its singularity conveys. Using Kurdi’s image as a case study, this paper illustrates how the politics of ‘remediation’ – the buffer – immanent in digitally viral images informs our practices of spectatorship. It engages in sustained, critical questioning of what differences Kurdi’s image makes in terms of the perception and performativity of refugeehood (as a site of knowledge). In other words, how does this image, among others, emerge as the face of refugeehood, or better still, the Syrian crisis? What ‘new’ is being brought in and afforded by the image? How do we interpret the emergence of an image as the face of an ‘event’, and what ontological implications does it entail?

KEYWORDS:

• Alan Kurdi
• remediation
• affect
• iconicity
• refugeehood
• pensive image

Acknowledgements

A very sketchy draft of this paper – barely featuring the problematique, but without any analysis – has appeared online in Sinestesieonline: Il Parlaggio. I thank the editor for allowing me to develop it into a full-fledged paper. I have presented preliminary versions of this paper at the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies, Heidelberg University and the University of Liberal Arts (ULAB), Dhaka. I thank the audience whose well-considered feedback have helped develop my arguments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I am aware that there is a small degree of generalization when I say ‘entire humanity’. The cartoonists who drew (in Charlie Hebdo) Alan Kurdi growing up to become a sex-offender, for example, are likely not to have felt ashamed. I am keeping these nuances aside provisionally. Speaking of which, I must signal right at the onset: there is some generalization in my usage of ‘we’, and, by extension, in my speculation about ‘our’ ocular subjectivity. While in most cases I have phrased my articulation as token reflexive thinking, in some cases – the opening and the last paragraphs, to be precise – I have used collective pronouns, though not indiscriminately. The crux of my argument in this paper is premised on the trajectory of the Alan Kurdi image: its transformation from the particular to the universal. Accordingly, I have used reflexive pronouns when speaking of the particular photograph, but collective pronouns in the context of the universalized image. ‘We’, however, is in itself a concept that includes and excludes; and, in the context of this paper, might refer to a range of different ‘signified’: we the non-refugees, we the national citizens, we the well-intended liberal observers, we the users of social-digital media, we the scholars of photography etc. I have abstained from delimiting the conceptual periphery of ‘we’, for these categories might actually be overlapping. In my narratorial articulation, this ‘ambiguity’ – far from signifying any ‘lack’ – gestures towards the capacity of the image, when universalized, to speak to diverse audiences across spectrums.

2. An overview can be found here: https://goo.gl/Bf5NWR. Website last visited on 28 June 2020.

3. ‘Bring(ing) forth’ is a phrase that been appropriated from Heidegger. In this paper, I play on the phrase in the context of Kurdi’s image. This phrase recurs in his writings on technology (Heidegger 1977). In original German, Heidegger uses ‘hervorbringen’ hyphenated – her(here)-vor(forth)-bringen(bring) – to bring out the nuanced gamut of role of technology (techne) in bringing ‘hither out of concealment, forth into unconcealment’.

4. The examples here drive home my point about interactability. A paper map, one might conversely argue, can also take us to locations we do not know. A dictionary can also translate unknown languages. However, the paper map and the dictionary – both examples from the ‘old media’ – are clearly not interactive in the same sense as the Google Map or the Google Translate, for example, is. Based on browsing history, the Google Map or the Google Translate can also customize our search results.

5. For details, see: https://goo.gl/Bf5NWR. Website last visited on 28 June 2020. Also, one may browse the discussion threads centring the Alan Kurdi image on different social media sites. The Reddit threads, in particular, are worth reflecting on. In this context, Mortensen and Trenz (2016) offers a critical analysis of performativity concerning the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ that unfolds on the Reddit threads with reference to the image. Prøitz (2017) discusses the reception of the image among the youth population in Oslo and Sheffield and how it contributes to galvanizing an ‘affective resonance’ around the refugee. Alternatively, for a discussion on the forensic reconstruction of this image, see Lewis (2016, 202–215).

6. ‘Decisive moment’ is a phrase coined by Cartier-Bresson (1999, 16) to denote, in the context of photography, ‘the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression’.

7. Steve McCurry photographed the Afghan girl. However, upon critical examination, many of McCurry’s seemingly ‘candid’ photographs, including that of the Afghan girl, have been revealed to be staged and retouched. For details, see: http://goo.gl/3gqQV0. Website last visited on 28 June 2016.

8. In fact, the tendency to impose a ‘national’ attribute to photography seems to be very recent. Contrary to the early-classical semiotic assumptions on photography, predicated upon its purportedly ecumenical language, this approach tends to situate the medium as well as the oeuvre of certain photographers in ‘national(ist)’ terms. The constituency of ‘national’ photography – illustrated in The Oxford Companion to the Photograph (2005) or by titles like American Photography in the Oxford History of Art series – is also problematic. The discourse of ‘vernacular photography’ – discussed eloquently by Pinney and Peterson (2003), Edwards and Hart (2004), Olin (2012), among others – marks a shift away from both approaches.

9. The subject-object distinction in the case of photography, or for that matter, visual arts in general can often be confusing. The ‘subject’ may refer to one who conceives the image (the photographer, the painter etc.). It may also refer to the referent of the image (that what the image concerns) in terms of the compositional aspect of the frame. On the other hand, the ‘object’ may refer to what has been captured in the frame, what/who we study in the frame. Thinking in these terms, one can perceive the referent of an image in its duality: it can be both ‘subject’ and ‘object’ at the same time. However, in this paper, I use ‘object’ in the latter sense, while my use of ‘subject’ has two dimensions: S1 refers to the photographer and S2 refers to the viewers who view and study an image.

10. In Barthes’ usage, not all photographs have ‘punctum’.

11. The ‘world picture’, for Heidegger (1977, 115–54), offers us a phenomenological experience of the world, rather than an objectivist re-presentation of the world out there. It our situatedness in the world, our dissociability that helps us perceive any representation in its totality.

12. I have paraphrased Weigel (2013) in appropriating this phrase.

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Avishek Ray

Avishek Ray is currently working on a monograph on the epistemic foundation of the heuristic construct ‘vagabond’ and the convergence between the politics of itinerancy and that of dissent in the context of South Asia. He is the co-editor ofNation, Nationalism and the Public Sphere: Religious Politics in India (SAGE, 2020). His research appears in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Journal of Literary Studies, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Multicultural Education Review, Journal of Human Values, among others; and he has held research fellowships at the University of Edinburgh (UK), Purdue University Library (USA), Centre for Advanced Study, Sofia (Bulgaria), Mahidol University (Thailand) and Pavia University (Italy).