A sidereal commentary on the post before it

I want to write, "the camera is inherently fascist" and mean it, without any self doubt. But, I know the formula has neither truth, nor style; it is instead unceremonious, and ugly. The camera, a tool, has no unmovable use or value. In this, it resembles the gun. Like the gun, the camera does have a primary use. A design. Both tools fix in place a human body, or a slice of environment, or the movement of light and metal, or the perception of a moment, and alter not only perception, but memory.  Like the gun, the camera extracts. The gun extracts death, and injury, and submission. The camera extracts fame, and time itself. It seizes a moment and makes it available for any use, so long as it lasts.

A painter converts raw materials - turns pigments and paints, fabric and her own effort, the food she has consumed and the air she breathes, her sleep or lack of sleep, her memories, the materials made by other human hands - into an image, which some might call art. In capturing an image in her own effort, in her labor, the painter creates. She makes. It may suck. It may fail to communicate. It may fail the artist's own expectations. But it remains labor. A person shapes herself in order to shape the medium and the materials into a new thing, a thing which did not exist before she finished it. A thing now part of the world, if only for a moment.

The camera also produces an image, but the labor happened elsewhere. The camera, a commodity, also commodifies. A person using a camera must still eat, sleep, sit up night after night with insomnia, shit and walk and find the right balance, or imbalance, of light and background. But the labor, the immediate labor of the moment of capture, is itself alienated. Foreign hands made the mechanism, others made the tool. The painter may not fashion the brush, or manufacture the paint - but brush and paint alone will never an image create.

The camera, on the other hand, doesn't even need a single human hand. Its operator can program it, place it, and walk away. Can line a bank ceiling with them. Can hang one on a street light, or in the dwindling wild, to capture the pathetic mating rituals of birds almost gone extinct. Even with one in hand, the moment of capture requires only a single actual investment of labor - to push a button and freeze an instant of the world.

The camera extracts. Like the gun. Or the tank. Or the oil drill. The painter must labor her art, must experience it. She cannot remain separate. The cameraman must separate himself. He has no choice. The moment of extraction divides him from the image he produces, because he doesn't actually produce it. He steals it. The cameraman extracts images by fixing them, and at the point of extraction produces a consumable commodity. A face. A mother and child. A wandering dust wurm of motherless orphans. A player in a game. The face of a prince, the hands of an anonymous model, the grimacing glare of a president's wife. Extracted for consumption.

I attempted to imply all this when I wrote about disaster porn produced out of the suffering of Haitians, almost a year ago:

"Actually pornography - the prurience of the concealed angle, the alleged objectivity of the camera lens, the incipient fascism of predetermined experience, the glee and horror of commentary and condemnation."

 The camera can only extract.

Thankfully, Lewis Lapham manages to say it better than I (h/t Marisacat):


"...The historical variables testify to the presence of the constant, which is the human hope or dream of immortality, but they don’t account for the broad-spreading glory that disperses to nothing. That achievement was reserved for the mechanical genius of the twentieth century that equipped the manufacturers of celebrity with the movie camera, the radio broadcast, the high-speed newspaper press, and the television screen. The historian Daniel Boorstin attributed the subsequent bull market in “artificial fame” to the imbalance between the limited supply of gods and heroes to be found in nature and the limitless demand for their appearance on a newsstand.

Perceptions of the world furnished by the camera substitute montage for narrative, reprogram the dimensions of space and time, restore a primitive belief in magic, employ a vocabulary better suited to a highway billboard or the telling of a fairy tale than to the languages of history and literature. The camera sees but doesn’t think. Whether animal, vegetable, or mineral, the object of its affection doesn’t matter; what matters is the surge and volume of emotion that it engenders and evokes, the floods of consciousness drawn as willingly to a blood bath in Afghanistan as to a bubble bath in Paris. As the habits of mind beholden to the rule of images come to replace the structures of thought derived from the meaning of words, the constant viewer eliminates the association of cause with effect, learns that nothing necessarily follows from anything else..."

That is the end game of corporate fascism. To extract the self from the body itself.