Mukul Kesavan: Photobombing death and the banality of evil / Evil, framed. By SLAVENKA DRAKULIĆ
NB: India's Prime Minister has warned the world of the threat of 'regressive thinking.' The rhetorical artistry of our Great Leader is indeed admirable; although I think his camp-followers will miss the irony. The article below describes what can happen in India in the name of politically correct nationalism. And here's another: A Grateful Nation. We should be thankful we live in such a progressive nation. DS
Photobombing death: Narcissism is a useful example of the banality of evil
The photographer jumping on a man shot dead by policemen in Assam on Thursday is a creature of two intersecting histories. The first is the history of State-sponsored majoritarianism, which in India generally and Assam particularly, is beginning to devolve into a form of fascism. The photographer knew that stomping on Muslims, dead or alive, was sanctioned by the zeitgeist. But he was also performing for the camera in a way that is the signature behaviour of this digital age.
The clip that went
viral is, in itself, an example of the ubiquity of cameras in our world. You
first see the photographer stamp on the man. Immediately afterwards, a
policeman hits the prone body with his lathi as if in corroboration. The
photographer then knees the dead man, punches him and is ushered away by
policemen. Another cameraman moves into the frame, inching up to the body to
get a closer shot. Abruptly the stomping cameraman reappears. He takes a
running jump and lands on the dead man with a bullet hole in his chest, overshoots
and then returns to assault him. A policeman leads him away for a second time.
Evil, framed. By SLAVENKA DRAKULIĆ
That makes at least
three camera persons embedded in the armed police party responsible for the
evictions and the subsequent firing. And that’s not counting the cameras in the
phones likely carried by everyone on the scene. If we didn’t live in a world
where every other act gets videoed and turned into a home movie for someone’s
delectation, the dead Muslim would likely still have been killed by the police
but the photographer wouldn’t have done his ghoulish death dance: that was an
act of performative depravity rooted in the idea of an audience.
We have been here
before. A few years ago, there was a video of middle-class men calmly beating
ragged Dalit workers with metal slats and filming themselves in the act. The
provocations on Indian news channels are forms of performative depravity, as
are the political pronouncements of the more brazen representatives of the
majoritarian right.
But this sense that we
are continuously performing for an imagined community of unseen eyes isn’t
political; it’s a function of the coming together of phone cameras, cellular
connectivity and social media. This does two things: one, it amplifies
narcissism because people can share themselves and their doings online,
instantly, and two, it creates a peculiar disjunction between their
here-and-now, that is to say, their corporeal lives and their digital avatars.
(It’s interesting that when we’re not online, we acknowledge in our minds that
we are ‘offline’; our engagement with the physical world of taste and touch and
smell is now described, by default, as a state of disconnection.)
This increasingly gets
people to do things in their off-line lives that they wouldn’t do otherwise,
for the sake of their online personas. The person who walks up to the edge of a
cliff to take the perfect selfie and falls off is only the most extreme example
of this growing conviction that the physical world exists to supply us with
props for our online lives.
Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive socialist who represents New York’s 14th
district in Congress, created a social media splash when she attended a swish
gala at the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute in a long white dress with
‘Tax the Rich’ emblazoned in red on its back. A pundit in a conservative
British newspaper grudgingly conceded that right-wingers denouncing AOC for
hypocrisy - swanning about with the rich and famous while railing against them - missed the point and misread her audience: she was using a real world ‘do’ as
a platform to perform and get her message across to a larger audience online.
This hyper-awareness
of an audience is now existential: ‘I perform therefore I am.’ Everything we
do, including eating meals cooked by others, is Instagram-able. I have a friend
who constantly shares dreadful portraits of himself wearing his best ‘camera
face’ with no self-consciousness because he clearly believes that there is no
such thing as a bad ‘view’ or ‘share’ or ‘like’ or ‘follow’. They all count…
literally.
It’s pointless
being superior about this because we are all implicated. In the old days of
non-digital photography, when I sent off camera rolls for developing and then
got the prints in the mail, I was always exasperated by the idiot pictures I
had taken of the Qutub Minar or the Amber Fort because I didn’t figure in them.
In my absence, they were just bad amateur postcards. Selfies pre-empt this
problem; they foreground you, with the world assigned its proper place in the
background as an anchoring detail.
Selfies are like
late-medieval paintings in European museums, when an exclusive focus on Christ
or Mary gives way to pictures with landscapes worked into the composition,
visible through casements but still dwarfed by its iconic subjects. Selfies
have reached the same point in a reverse journey: Western art moved outward
from the iconic image to the landscape; we are receding from pictures of the
world around us into the voids of our nostrils.
There is a banality to
online narcissism because it reduces the world to your presence in it. Nothing
matters, except being there and letting people know that you were there. This
is what the photographer did: he photobombed a man’s death. We can see from his
actions that he enthusiastically endorsed the police firing but approval wasn’t
enough: he needed to be in the moment, in the frame. Narcissism in this degree
is a useful example of the banality of evil. In the photographer’s mind, he
jumped on a what, not a who, a prop, not a person.
Narcissism is by
definition auto-erotic, but the self-obsession that marks these lives is best
described without euphemism: it is a masturbatory view of the world. What we
see in that clip is political porn that will be endlessly ‘curated’ and shared
by bigots and incels hunched over their screens. A long time ago, Gil
Scott-Heron sardonically sang that the revolution will not be televised. The
counter-revolution, though, will be shown in instalments, one vile video clip
at a time.
More photo-related posts
Javed
Anand: On RSS reassurances to Muslims, deeds matter more than words
Naxalites
should lay down their arms and challenge the ruling class to abide by the
Constitution
Julia Kristava: Interpreting radical evil
Evil,
framed. By SLAVENKA DRAKULIĆ
STANISLAV MARKELOV - Patriotism as a
diagnosis
Some information for Israelis (and the rest of us)
Bharat Bhushan:
It suits the RSS to allow BJP to encourage defections from other parties
Swati Chaturvedi:
It Was BJP Who Made It Mamata vs Modi. Too Far
Anand K. Sahay:
The idea behind capturing power in any kind of way: fair or foul
Society of the Spectacle
/ 'इमेज' - 'Image': A
Poem on Deaths in the Age of Covid
Modi says
Congress committed 'sin' of partition // The Non-politics of the RSS
The Supreme Court, Gandhi and
the RSS
