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4. The Image of Power: Self-Interrogative Imaging
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four The Image of Power: Self-Interrogative Imaging Four daguerreotype likenesses of my head were taken, two of them jointly with the head of Mr. Bacon. All hideous . . . At seven this morning Mr. Bacon came and I went with him to the Shadow Shop, where three more Daguerreotype likeness were taken of me, no better than those of yesterday. They are all too true to the original. —former president john quincy adams, upon seeing his photographed images, in two diary entries dated 1 and 2 august 1843 (krainik 2002: 24) This chapter advances a third form of counterpower: self-interrogative imaging, or the process by which the aesthetic basis of power is re›ected, refracted, and reoriented through images. Images imprint and objectify the “glory” of group Selves and are representations of those Selves. Selfinterrogative imaging refers to the distribution of images that represent (and re-present) the subjectivity of power’s aesthetic basis. Both complimentary and critical forms of self-interrogative imaging spring forth to manipulate power by, like other forms of counterpower, engaging its aesthetically constructed sense of (in this case) national “Self.” Such images are not necessarily concerted “strategies”—they manifest spontaneously, like other forms of counterpower. This chapter presents four case illustrations of such self-interrogative imaging. Two sets come from the Vietnam War: the series of photographs taken by Ronald L. Haeberle documenting the 1968 My Lai massacre and the photo of the April 1975 Fall of Saigon. The other two case illustrations come from the U.S.-led Iraq War: the images of the 133 burned contractors hanging from a Fallujah bridge in late March and early April 2004 and the series of Abu Ghraib photographs made public in late April of the same year. Several aspects of these counterpower illustrations make them especially important for study. Most pressingly, these all represent iconic moments in U.S. foreign policy history, although they by no means exhaust the illustrations that could have been chosen for these cases. The My Lai and Saigon examples, as I discuss in more detail later in this chapter, are, in certain ways, microcosms of the “tragedies” that a collective generation of Americans have “viewed” politics through for four decades. Abu Ghraib and Fallujah are important moments of the U.S. war in Iraq. They were, in many ways, turning points in the U.S. effort in terms of losing the “moral” (Abu Ghraib) and “strategic” (Fallujah) high grounds at a similar point in the war (the spring of 2004). While I investigate the impact of the images, I am also interested in the discursive interventions of power—how they attempted to create meanings of these images and to what degree those meanings successfully disciplined each of these four instances of counterpower. As one will notice, however, the images were varied in their counterpower positioning. In certain cases, such as the My Lai photos, the images were quickly archived and kept hidden from U.S. memory. Representing deaestheticized moments in the Self of U.S. power, they needed to be isolated , concealed, and forgotten. In other cases, such as the Fall of Saigon photo, such images made little initial impact but were then ‹t into ideological narratives such as those of the neoconservative movement for the purpose of engaging the issues of “strength and will” into a vitalist American identity, once its large generational cohort acquired, beginning in the 1980s and thereafter, the resources to develop such a narrative. In all cases, self-interrogative imaging is perhaps the most vibrantly generationally shaped form of counterpower. Because images are experiential , they are like codes of data imprinted on the collective minds of generations. This does not mean, of course, that each generation interprets these images in the same fashion. Indeed, what makes these images interrogative is that they are sites of political contestation of the Self of U.S. power. They disturb precisely because they challenge an aesthetic vision of that national Self, a vision that is always politically negotiated. Another part of the process of self-interrogative imaging comes about because of the ambiguity of power’s operational environment. The important trope of “darkness” has pervaded analyses of two of the cases that follow (My Lai and Abu Ghraib). I am interested in just what or who is 134 • defacing power [18.205.114.205] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 10:30 GMT) darkened here. To reset my argument from earlier chapters, the basis for power’s in›uence lies in...