Friday, June 26, 2009

the control of appearance and the face

Giorgio Agamben has written that today the power of the state is not founded anymore on the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence but first of all on the control of appearance.

Rather than aimed at suppressing a truth that lies underneath, the control of appearances is predicated on asserting the power of simulation. The more assertive and forceful this simulation appears, the more it will appear as “true.”

State media repeat allegations that the protests on the streets of Tehran and other cities are the outcome of maneuvers and plots organized by the enemies of the Republic, the Muhajeddin Khalq, U.K, U.S. or Israel.

Denunciations of foreign plots have been an important dynamic in Iranian politics at least since the end of the nineteenth century. They helped to constitute a ground of “truth” underneath the deceiving surface, a truth on which popular sovereignty could be constructed in terms of a national identity. In many cases these allegations of foreign interference were true.

Paradigmatic and foundational in this regard are the events of 1953 when a CIA engineered coup d’etat –that included both the participation of the crowd and the army—toppled prime Minister Musaddeq who was promoting the nationalization of oil. This “truth” was hidden for many years and helped to cement distrust towards the shah and the US. The US embassy takeover during the revolution of 1979 was symbolically relevant in that it was aimed at “revealing” the continuous plotting of the American government against the people of Iran. All the documents found in the embassy were published in a multivolume collection as evidence of this truth. In a parallel move the US government published those same documents not long afterwards, in order to demonstrate that there was nothing to hide. In 1999 the State Department published documents that demonstrated US involvement in the coup of 1953.

Something of this dynamic of “truth as revelation” remains today, in all those declarations that insist on the capacity of the state and its officials to be “vigilant” and denounce plotting. By celebrating the cleverness of Iranians (“we are not in Georgia”) and their capacity of defense, these declarations sustain the ideal of a truth that prevails over enemies’ deceit.

Today however, the dynamic denunciation/truth works in a different way. The aim of the media is less oriented towards demonstrating the “truth” of the allegations and focuses instead on sustaining their fabrication by demonstrating its power of assertion.

The truth of such accusations has already been “demonstrated” by the history of Iran and events like 1953, to the extent that there is no need to insist on their “truth.” Allegations that the Muhajeddin Khalq are behind protests on the streets, on gas stations and bombs, are confirmed by the numerous terrorist attacks the group perpetrated in the past against Iranian officials and civilians. The fact that current protests are taking place on the anniversary of the 1981 events --when armed Mujaheddin took to the streets in reaction to being ousted from the government and eventually began their terroristic acts-- strengthens the idea that what is happening today is something already seen and already dealt with.

[This seems also the role of TV confessions. As in the past 30 years
Prisoners were made to confess on TV to have received orders from foreigners and MKO to create disorder and chaos. As if recognizing the anonymity of the crowd, their faces were covered by pixels. By this erasure of the face changes the nature of the act. If these public confessions were once broadcasted to “identify” and make his or her faults visible and revealed, now by concealing the face of those who confess, the act of confession it self takes precedence over the identity as the mark of the control of appearance.


See for example how a blogger relates the first hand account by a young man who was arrested for a few days during the protest. Here is how the young man describes the procedure of “confession”:

He said in the second day some plain cloth people came with papers forcing people to sign them. The papers were prewritten confessions all in different handwritings saying the signer is a member of a pro-Mousavi organization. Detainees were also paid to go to streets and say things, admitting to having violated national security and Islam. Reza said some people sign them and some other just faked their signatures and names. There were not enough confession papers for all people.

The prisoners were later moved to Evin prison where they were approached again for confessions:

“In the morning a man who introduced himself as intelligence agent came, saying he would record their confessions with a camera. He promised that if one of them would confess in front of the camera, he would free them all, that they will blur his face, and he would have nothing to worry about. (see the whole account here).

As clearly described in this account, what is important for the police and intelligence agents is to obtain confessions. The fact that they are blatantly fabricated is not hidden but actually put in relief by the policemen themselves. What counts is to have the power to maintain the “appearance” of the confession, not the “truth” of it.]


More than ever the struggle is being fought at the level of media and language. Though the attempts at controlling independent and foreign media inside Iran have been quite successful, in the long run however, what makes the difference and what gives power to the state is not so much the monopoly of information, as much as imposing the recognition that the state can effectively fabricate news.

Somehow paradoxically, the more the accusations of terrorist and foreign plots sound implausible, the more they are powerful, because they point to the state’s capacity of controlling appearance. The concerted effort by different media outlets hours to denounce the plots of terrorists and foreigners soon after the leader’s Friday prayer was effective in demonstrating the power to control the production of news.

Telling in this regard are the allegations the newspaper Javan made in relation to the killing of Neda, the young woman whose death by bullet was captured in two videos that circulated all over the world. The newspaper suggests that the woman was shot by thugs hired by a BBC journalist who wanted a scoop. The struggle over the control of appearance takes the form of an accusation against a media opponent who allegedly killed the woman to fabricate a piece of news. What matters here is not the denunciation of this “truth” but the entitlement to these assertions. The more implausible they appear, the more their force of assertion.

[A few days later, while the president ordered an official investigation, one of the TV channels broadcasted a journalistic investigation of the killing, interviewing witnesses and showing evidence that supported the idea that Neda’s death was a pre-arranged plot: the site of the killing was far away from the protests, the person who drove Neda to the hospital thought the dynamic of the events was suspicious, the caliber of the bullet is much smaller than the ones used by security forces.]




In a play of mirrors, media outside of Iran, in Persian or other languages, have become the stage that both questions such denunciations of plots and makes them more effective by turning them into “news.” Presented as implausible or ridiculed, these denunciations when discussed on global media, are used as evidence of the real power of fabrication of the Iranian state and thus somehow reproduce it even if only to challenge it.

Global media rather than assuming the burden of representation for themselves delegate it to the “citizen journalists” in Iran. [what they instead keep for themselves are decisions on how to run the story, how much relevance should be given to it and until when—see for example Cohen’s notable editorial “the end of the beginning NYT June 23 that declares the first phase of the movement over in terms that seems to have more to do with the need to move on to other news than with facts on the ground. Coverage of the events on the internet editions of American and European newspapers and TV has been particularly nuanced and this too is part of the control of appearances]

Film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf stated that people on the streets are at once commanders, defenders, ambassadors, martyrs and journalists, describing what appears to be a new social type emerging out of the crowd [on the crowd see previous posts]. These “citizen-journalists” produce video and short TXT-like dispatches that seem to defy the logic of the control of appearance, at least until they are not captured by the media and used for their own interpretation.

Most telling are those videos where moments of distraction and everyday chat are suddenly disrupted by images of people running or security forces beating them. These videos capture the indefinite character of the crowd, assembling and dispersing in relation to the actions of the police but also in relation to changing moods and dispositions (fear, bravery, anger, indifference, laughter).

[Many first hand accounts describe participation in the protests as a momentary engagement, not totally disconnected from the “everyday.” People walk, people check out the scene, get involved and leave not too long afterwards. Conversely, many protesters assume the posture of passers by, they walk as if they were going about their business to avoid being beaten etc. According to the same accounts, the police often beat everyone up, as they do not distinguish between protesters and passers by]

When the videos are captured and aired by more organized media, they enter the economy of images that has come to dominate our life. They are called upon as evidence of what is happening. Their character however remains indefinite except for the few viewers who can recognize the places where they have been shot and the actions of the people in them. Inevitably the most violent ones are those that are repeatedly shown, and what one sees are not individuals but gestures that remain unintelligible except as images of blood.


To the state control of appearance, Agamben juxtaposes the face as the site of an appearance that does not aim at communicating this or that truth, but reveals the power of language itself, the open possibility of expression. He writes that this “emptiness” of the face is like an abyss in which the inadequacy of being human comes through. Even if captured and already consumed by the media and MKO, Neda’s face covered in blood remains shocking in that it does not communicate anything but the indistinct possibility of a life.

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