Potential History

Unlearning Imperialism

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781788735728
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Saggi su politica e relazioni internazionali

In this theoretical tour-de-force, renowned scholar Ariella Asha Azoulay calls on us to recognize the imperial foundations of knowledge and to refuse its strictures and its many violences.Azoulay argues that the institutions that make our world, from archives and museums to ideas of sovereignty and human rights to history itself, are all dependent on imperial modes of thinking. Imperialism has segmented populations into differentially governed groups, continually emphasised the possibility of progress while trying to destroy what came before, and voraciously sought out the new by sealing the past away in dusty archival boxes and the glass vitrines of museums.By practising what she calls potential history, Azoulay argues that we can still refuse the imperial violence that shattered communities, lives, and worlds, from native peoples in the Americas to the Congo ruled by Belgium's brutal King Lopold II, from dispossessed Palestinians in 1948 to displaced refugees in our own day. In Potential History, Azoulay travels alongside historical companions - an old Palestinian man who refused to leave his village in 1948, an anonymous woman in war-ravaged Berlin, looted objects and documents torn from their worlds and now housed in archives and museums - to chart the ways imperialism has sought to order time, space, and politics.Rather than looking for a new future, Azoulay calls upon us to rewind history and unlearn our imperial rights, to continue to refuse imperial violence by making present what was invented as "past" and making the repair of torn worlds the substance of politics.

1

Unlearning Imperialism

The Shutter: Well-Documented Objects / Undocumented People

It is no secret that millions of objects, never destined for display in museal white walls, have been looted from all over the world by different imperial agents. It is no secret that many of them have been carefully handled, preserved, and displayed to this day in Western museums as precious art objects. At the same time, it is no secret that millions of people, stripped bare of most of their material world, including tools, ornaments, and other artifacts, continue to seek a place where they can be at home again and rebuild a habitable world. These two seemingly unrelated movements of forced migration of people and artifacts, as well as their separation, are as old as the invention of the “new world.” People and artifacts have become objects of observation and study, conversion and care, charge and control by two seemingly unrelated sets of disciplines, institutions, and their scholars and experts. In truth, however, neither the movements nor their separation are unrelated. With a certain endlessly recurring brevity, similar to that of the operation of a camera shutter, the unending instantiation of their separation is reiterated. They are continuously produced as disconnected, as if it were the nature of artifacts to exist outside of their communities, to come into being as museum objects, to be out of reach of those who felt at home in their midst—as if it were the nature of certain people to exist bereft of the worldly objects among which their inherited knowledge and rights, protective social fabric and safety, bliss and happiness, sorrow and death are inscribed—as if these objects were not a source of worldliness and a fountain of liveliness for the communities from which they were taken.

Think of the camera shutter. It is a commonplace in the discourse of photography that an operating shutter is necessary for obtaining a legible, sharp, and precise image out of the flow of light. Understood as a subservient element of the photographic apparatus, a means toward an end, the shutter is discussed mainly in technical terms related to the rapidity of its closure, the ability to control and change its velocity, and the swiftness of its performance. The picture to be obtained is presumed to exist, even if for a brief moment, as a petty sovereign. The petty sovereign is not what is recorded in the photograph (in terms of its final content or image) but, rather, is the stand-alone photograph-to-be, the image that prefigures and conditions the closing and opening of a shutter. The petty sovereign asserts itself at that moment as preceding and separate from the photographic event, from the participants, and from the situation out of which a photograph is about to be extracted. It commands what sort of things have to be distanced, bracketed, removed, forgotten, suppressed, ignored, overcome, and made irrelevant for the shutter of the camera to function, as well as for a photograph to be taken and its meaning accepted. What is suppressed and made irrelevant is excised by the shutter. In the technological and historical discussion of the shutter, the only elements that matter are the quality—precision, clarity, recognizability—of the images, the end product, and the erasure of any trace of the shutter’s operation. This is an effect on the one hand of the means–ends relationship between the camera and the images it produces and on the other hand, the dissociation of the camera’s shutter from other imperial shutters. The shutter is a synecdoche for the operation of the imperial enterprise altogether, on which the invention of photography, as well as other technological media, was modeled.

Imagine that the origins of photography are not to be found somewhere around the beginning of the nineteenth century—when European white males enjoyed a certain cultural, political, and technological wealth and could dream of recognition as glamorous inventors if and when they succeeded in developing further ways to fragment, dissect, and exploit others’ worlds to enrich their own culture. Imagine instead that those origins go back to 1492. What could this mean?

To answer this question we have to unlearn the expert knowledge that calls upon us to account for photography as having its own origins, histories, practices, or futures and to explore it as part of the imperial world in which it emerged. We have to unlearn its seemingly obvious ties to previous and future modes of producing images and to problematize these ties that reduce photography to its products, its products to their visuality, and its scholars to specialists of images oblivious to the constitutive role of imperialism’s major mechanism—the shutter. Unlearning photography as a field apart means first and foremost foregrounding the regime of imperial rights that made its emergence possible.

Let me present briefly an excerpt from the well-known report by Dominique François Arago, which was delivered in 1839 before the Chambre des Deputies and is considered a foundational moment in the discourse of photography. The speech is often quoted as an early attempt to define and advocate the practice and technology of photography. I propose to read it as a performance of the naturalization of the imperial premise out of which photography emerged. That Arago, a statesman and a man of his time, confirms the imperial premises of photography and praises its goals is no surprise. What is striking is how his ideas are reiterated in non-statesmen’s texts, including works that rejected the imperial order and goals, such as Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Such reiteration is testament to the way photography was rooted in imperial formations of power: first and foremost the use of violence, the exercise of imperial rights, and the creation and destruction of shared worlds.

Dominique François Arago:

While these pictures are exhibited to you, everyone will imagine the extraordinary advantages which could have been derived from so exact and rapid means of reproduction during the expedition to Egypt; everybody will realize that had we had photography in 1798 we would possess today faithful pictorial records of that which the learned world is forever deprived of by the greed of the Arabs and the vandalism of certain travelers. To copy the millions of hieroglyphics which cover even the exterior of the great monuments of Thebes, Memphis, Karnak, and others would require decades of time and legions of draughtsmen. By daguerreotype one person would suffice to accomplish this immense work successfully.¹

Walter Benjamin:

Around 1900, technological reproduction not only had reached a standard that permitted it to reproduce all known works of art, profoundly modifying their effect, but it also had captured a place of its own among the artistic processes. In gauging this standard, we would do well to study the impact which its two different manifestations—the reproduction of artworks and the art of film—are having on art in its traditional form.²

Both Arago and Benjamin assumed that images and objects—items that were not meant to be works of art or part of an imperially imagined depository of art history—are waiting to be reproduced. Reproduction is understood in this context as a neutral procedure to be used by those who own the proper means for it, and regardless of the will of those from whom the objects have been expropriated. It is based on this understanding of reproduction that photography could be perceived as a new technology of image production and reproduction. A lineage of previous practices of image production and reproduction should have been invented for photography to be conceived of as a novel addition, a technology that alters and improves—substantially and on different levels—the quality of the end product. In this means–end relationship, not only is photography construed as a means for the achievement of an end, but the end is also construed as a given, and the existence of the object as simply given to the gaze (of the camera, in this case) is thus assumed and confirmed.

The context of Arago’s speech enables one to reconstruct the regime of rights and privileges that were involved in the advocacy of photography. That the world is made to be exhibited, that it is only for a select audience, is not a question for Arago, addressed in his speech by the familiarizing “you” to an audience made up of white men like him, French statesmen and scientists. The right to dissect and study people’s worlds—the Napoleonic expeditions are a paradigmatic example—and render their fragments into pieces to be meticulously copied is taken for granted. For that to happen, those who are harmed by the use of the new means of reproduction, which (to take one example) had been imposed and used systematically by Napoleon’s brigade of draughtsmen during the expedition to Egypt should be bracketed and left outside of these debates in which the fate of photography is discussed, and the rights to operate it are directly and indirectly accorded to a certain class, at the expense of others.

In 1839, those who were directly invoked by Arago’s “you” had already been responsible for large-scale disasters that included genocides, sociocides, and culturcides in Africa, India, the Americas and the Caribbean Islands, for naturalizing and legalizing these acts through international institutions and laws and for instituting their right to continue to dominate others’ worlds. At that point, the universal addressee implied by Arago’s “everybody” and “everyone” is fictitious because those who were its universal addressees could not come into being without dissecting, bracketing, and sanctioning others’ experience of violence. The violence of forcing everything to be shown and exhibited to the gaze is denied when the right in question is only the right to see. If the right not to exhibit everything is respected, the right to see that endows “everybody” with unlimited access to what is in the world cannot be founded. Thus, extending the right to see so as to render “everybody” a true universal is not possible without perpetrating further violence. The idea of a universal right to see is a fraud. When photography emerged, it didn’t halt this process of plunder that made others and others’ worlds available to some, but rather accelerated it and provided further opportunities to pursue it. In this way the camera shutter developed as an imperial technology.

In a split second, the camera’s shutter draws three dividing lines: in time (between a before and an after), in space (between who/what is in front of the camera and who/what is behind it), and in the body politic (between those who possess and operate such devices and appropriate and accumulate their product and those whose countenance, resources, or labor are extracted). The work of the shutter is not an isolated operation, nor is it restricted only to photography. If shutters in the service of petty sovereigns were limited only to cameras and were not operative in other domains—wherein the violence perpetrated by the sharp movement of their blades hits bodies at a greater proximity—the departure of the camera and the photographer from the scene would not necessarily be part of a devastating regime. “Here we’re going to take your photograph”: this is what women whose children were snatched from them have been told after being arrested at the United States–Mexico border. When the automatic movement of the shutter completed its cycle, at one and the same time launching the event of photography and determining its completion, the women were taken to a different room from their children. Saying goodbye, hugging them, protecting them was no longer allowed, a set of limitations without any definite end.³

It is not the first time that their worlds were depleted and divided into pieces, that they were approached as if they were the image that a camera can take out of them, as if they were what they were forced to be. The pervasiveness of imperial shutters blurs direct responsibility. A woman can be made objectless, undocumented, an irresponsible mother, or a delinquent inhabitant by a shutter. Each new status forced upon people and objects by a shutter is likely to be reaffirmed by the next photograph. In such a world, one can no longer hear the cries of those who were separated from others and claim not to be what they are doomed to be by the shutter. For those doomed not to be heard, there is little way out of these coordinated technologies and institutions; their cries can be treated only as coming after, from the outside, or from an unruly position to be tamed. The mothers seek redress, but it is after the fact of dispossession. Consequently, the operation of the shutter commands zero degrees of neutrality, because whatever comes from its operation is already stripped bare of its singularity, its singular way of being part of the world.

Thinking about imperial violence in terms of a camera shutter means grasping its particular brevity and the spectrum of its rapidity. It means understanding how this brief operation can transform an individual rooted in her life-world into a refugee, a looted object into a work of art, a whole shared world into a thing of the past, and the past itself into a separate time zone, a tense that lies apart from both present and future.

The camera’s shutter is not a metaphor for the operation of imperial power, but it is a later materialization of an imperial technology. Photography developed with imperialism; the camera made visible and acceptable imperial world destruction and legitimated the world’s reconstruction on empire’s terms.

Unlearning imperialism aims at unlearning its origins, found in the repetitive moments of the operation of imperial shutters. Unlearning imperialism refuses the stories the shutter tells. Such unlearning can be pursued only if the shutter’s neutrality is acknowledged as an exercise of violence; in this way, unlearning imperialism becomes a commitment to reversing the shutter’s work. This reversal must overcome the dissociation between people and objects in which the experts specialize. Imperial shutters are operated and controlled by experts of different sorts who are mandated to determine how the commons is to be exploited, what could be extracted out of it and under which circumstances. The photographic shutter contributes to the reproduction of imperial divisions and imperial rights and is used as lasting proof that what was plundered is a fait accompli.

One ought to imagine that at the moment the shutter closes in order to reopen again in a fraction of a second—to proclaim a new state, a new border, or a new museum—the people whose lives are forever going to be changed by the act are rebelling and do not let the shutter sanction such acts as faits accomplis. One may also imagine that those who have been dispossessed manage to recover some of the objects robbed from them or burn the papers that granted their possessions to others. This is not what one has to work hard to imagine; this happens anyway. Rather, it needs to be recognized and acknowledged as an intrinsic part of the shutter’s operation. There is always withdrawal or refusal.

Imagine now that you are able to consider all of these occurrences as constitutive of the operation of the shutter; imagine, then, that when you recognize the operation of the shutter independently of such occurrences, you risk effecting their disappearance. Imagine you can grasp and describe this shutter’s operation, follow the events that it violently generates, and do so without using the shutter’s dividing lines to describe them. Imagine that you refuse to naturalize the dividing lines and do not accept them as having always already been there. Imagine that the presumed factuality of the sentence “a Mexican migrant was killed while crossing the American border” becomes impossible because one sees through imperial shutters and recognizes that a Mexican cannot cross illegally a foreign border erected illegally on her own land. Recalling this fact (which runs against common propaganda), one now understands that if the woman is killed it is because a foreign border has been erected against her in a way that transforms her murder into an affirmation of her own guilt and illegality.

This is what unlearning imperialism looks like. It means unlearning the dissociation that unleashed an unstoppable movement of (forced) migration of objects and people in different circuits and the destruction of the worlds of which they were part. These worlds were transformed into a construction site where everything could be made into raw material. Under imperial rule there is no longer a common world to care for but only scattered enclaves to protect. Unlearning imperialism is an attempt to suspend the operation of the shutter and resist its operation in time, space, and the body politic in common cause with those who object to it. Unlearning imperialism attends to the conceptual origins of imperial violence, the violence that presumes people and worlds as raw material, as always already imperial resources.

What does it take to attend to the recurrent moment of original violence? It involves rehearsals of avoidance, abstention, nonaction, stepping back, and losing ground. One should learn how to withhold alternative interpretations, narratives, or histories to imperial data, how to refrain from relating to them as given objects from the position of a knowing subject. One should reject the rhythm of the shutter that generates endless separations and infinitely missed encounters, seemingly already and completely over. One should unlearn the authority of the shutter to define a chronological order (what and who came first, who was late to arrive) and the organization of social space (what is included and what is not, who can inhabit which position and engage in which role). One should engage with others, with people and objects across the shutter’s divides, as part of an encounter to be simultaneously resumed, regenerated, retrieved, and reinvented.

To attend is to seek different transformative modes of repair of which restitution and reparations are possible options. When heads of some European states speak publicly about possible restitution of looted works of art, they act as if the click of the imperial shutter is no longer audible and the destruction of entire worlds can be reduced to discrete objects. The language of restitution that focuses on discrete objects and assumes their sameness after decades of confinement in foreign hands is oblivious to the communities that were destroyed at the moment of their extraction and oblivious to the mutilation of the objects severed from their worlds. Restitution implemented unilaterally as a magic solution risks substituting a substantial accountability and closure to violence with what Glenn Coulthard describes as a settler-colonial form of reconciliation that allocates “the abuses of settler colonization to the dustbins of history.”⁴ Restitution may be the right thing to follow in particular cases as defined by the claiming communities, but it should be questioned as a solution, as long as the problem that restitution means to solve remains defined through the same shutter that generated it, leaving untouched the imperial violence of the camera’s first clicks.

In a complaint filed on March 20, 2019, against Harvard University and the Peabody Museum, Tamara Lanier inhabits the position of her ancestor, Renty Taylor, whose image was “seized” in the formative first decade of photography, thus attending to the origins of photography and reclaiming a series of expropriated rights. The complaint’s use of the term “seizure” to describe the act of taking a photograph emphasizes the violence involved but also undermines the legal and cultural consequences of the separation between taking the photograph and holding the photograph a...