I once told a friend that I disagreed with a film critique he had written because it was focused on what he wished the movie had said instead of what the movie actually said. We can only critique what is, I pointed out, not what we wish it said. Critique, I insisted (at least in regards to art or media) can only highlight a presence, a critique by absence, I insisted, would be mere wishful thinking. And yet, here I am about to engage in the very same wishful thinking I once decried as “not critique”.
I am talking about Judith Butler’s presentation last night, as part of Amsterdam University’s School for Cultural Analysis annual workshop. This year’s theme being “Dislocating Agency, Moving Objects, Associations, Demarcations, Transformations”. The title of Butler’s presentation was “Fragments of lost life: Kent Klich’s Visual Images of the Bombings of Gaza, 2009”. Her presentation was impeccable. Of course, I am not impartial when it’s about Butler. Both Frames of War and Precarious Life have been fundamental texts in shaping some of my politics in regards to immigration and what I call “the administration of death” in the European Union. So, I listened to her in a quasi mystical state, dare I say it, in adoration. And yet, I cannot shake off this feeling of absence from her presentation. What wasn’t said, rather than what was there.
Here we were: picture this former church turned University auditorium (complete with crystal chandeliers hanging from the roof and the church’s organ serving as background); the queue to enter turned around the corner and a tight crowd packed the entrance, anxiously trying to get in. The audience was huge and for the most part White and Western. She spoke passionately showing the photographies of what were once Palestinian homes, now empty, decayed, bombed. Yet, there wasn’t a single moment of situational awareness. More than once she said “As you know”, “As you are aware” and I found myself resisting this “as you know” which I perceived as a rhetoric device that assumed a prior knowledge I know for a fact (because I live here) is simply not there. No, a huge percentage of those sitting in the auditorium do not know and neither are they aware of the State interventions that make the situation possible, the very same State acting on their behalf. The assumption that “they know” allows many to walk away without having to place themselves in what they were witnessing. The photos then, a testimony of something that happens far away, something that doesn’t involve “us over here”.
I know it is somewhat unfair to place my wishful thinking upon other people’s work. This is the presentation that was given. This is what was, not what I hoped it would have been. However, as I said I cannot shake this absence off because it is at the very root of the lack of personal implication that allows the State to act without encountering resistance. As long as it’s “over there” or involving “those people”, then why would anyone need to revise their role in these (or any State) interventions. I guess my open question would be whether the academic has an obligation to not only show the photographies but to provide the frame that pierces those photographies together.
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