It is disappointing to get what appears to be definitive evidence that Robert Capa’s photograph of the falling soldier was staged. Sadly, too, I’m inclined to agree with the thought that the staging in that case also amounts to fakery. Still, I’m far from certain about my reactions here: staging a photograph is not, in itself, sufficient to make the charge stick. I was thinking last night about the US Civil War photographs where we suspect the photographers rearranged the bodies, and that is one of the examples that Philip Gefter discusses in an essay on the problem at the New York Times. Many of Bill Brandt’s photographs of English upper and working-class lives were staged, but that staging doesn’t make them bogus. Rather Brandt was using artifice to get his subjects to enact a role more general than any particular haphazard moment. That also seems true of the Lewis Hine pictures that Gefter discusses. Capa’s soldier seems altogether more problematic. We could say that he is an icon standing for the many soldiers who did in fact die for the Republic, but that doesn’t feel right since it would be hard for the image to play that role for us if we knew that the man was simply acting. Brandt’s subjects were (barely) acting, but they were at least playing parts that they also played in life. And for reasons Susan Sontag discussed long ago, the fact of photographic selection means that even where a picture appears to have a definite semantic charge, it would be naive to take that as a veridical report, since the image may well have been chosen for that effect from a sequence of which all the rest conveyed a quite different impression.
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Chris Bertram
England win the second test (the first time they’ve beaten the Australians at Lords since 1934), thanks to some awesome bowling from Flintoff, and some very dodgy umpiring. Open thread below.
The latest episode of police harassment of street photographers is recounted by Henry Porter in the Guardian. There just seems to be an endless loop around this stuff: police officers stop/arrest/intimidate photographer, fuss in the press, lobbying of politicians, earnest denials and issuings of revised guidance by senior police, continued botherings despite guidance. Do, repeat.
What really astonishes me about this is that the alleged terrorism link is based on what seems to be a law-enforcement myth about the bad guys scoping out their targets using DSLRs and that the police are actually missing a major intelligence opportunity. Anyone who mixed with enthusiastic photographers knows that there is a bunch of people in every town and city who wander around looking at things, noticing the unusual, exploring side-streets and back alleys, and so forth. Even when we haven’t got cameras on us we’re looking, noticing, framing, making a mental note. You’d think that a smart police officer somewhere might have cottoned on to this and had the idea that cultivating good relations with such people, not acting so as to piss them off, might actually be a good idea. But no. The police mentality is to see such people as suspicious and possibly criminal and to intimidate them off the streets. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
That’s a headline at the BBC. So it would seem that they do rather less damage to the UK economy tham the various banking groups that needed rescuing ….
Phew! England (and Wales) just about got away with it despite Pietersen’s stupidity and arrogance. The really big difference from 2005 (so far) is the change in feel caused by Warne’s retirement. Four years ago, Warne was a feral presence, spooking the England batsmen with his cunning and aggression. Of course, Ponting was captain back then too, but this series has seen him come to the fore: planning, homework, probing the England weaknesses. Collingwood was terrific today, but, generally England were brainless. Still, no harm done yet and four tests to play to win back the Ashes.
A couple of weeks ago, I gave a public lecture in Bristol on the subject of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his continued relevance to modern society and political philosophy. Undoubtedly mileages will vary on that question, but anyone who wants to hear my take on it can listen to a podcast . (The lecture is included as part of the “Philosophy at Bristol” series which you can access via its blog or at iTunes .)
I’m just back from an excellent Rousseau Association conference at UCLA to find, now I’ve tuned back in to CT, that we’ve been discussing sociology v economics as theories of society. Funny, because one of the the things that came up in LA was the old Robert Nisbet thesis about the conservative origins of sociology. The idea is that sociology has its origins in the counter-enlightenment attempts of Burke, de Maistre, Saint Simon etc to theorize about social order in the light of the Revolution. It turns out that I’ve long since lost or given away my copy of The Sociological Tradition, so I haven’t been back to the original, but I’m curious as to what the thinking is on the Nisbet thesis today. I’m perfectly fine with the use of methods drawn from economics in the social sciences (and with other approaches too) but it is worth noting that most economics involves a straighforwardly rationalistic and enlightenement attitude to the social world, one that the Burkean tradition disputes as being inadequate to social understanding.
… of philosophical rudeness. BBC Woman’s Hour has Anne Fine discussing her new book Our Precious Lulu (12 June episode), a novelistic exploration of step-siblings and their relationships. Anne’s ex-husband was, of course, the philosopher Kit Fine. Her children with KF had certain norms – ferocious argument at the dinner table, utter contempt for table-manners, etc. – and then got to share family life with non-philosopher’s children, her new step-children, who had, er, different expectations.
Well someone had to use that headline first, so it might as well be me. Does anything demonstrate the desperation and vacuouseness of the Brown adminstration more than the appointment of a former entrepreneur, turned property developer, turned reality-show compere as “enterprise Czar”? Actually, don’t answer that question, because lots of other things do. Despite a lifetime of voting Labour, I couldn’t bring myself to back them in the Euros (went for the Greens in the end, faute de mieux, since you ask). Maybe nothing can save Labour, but Alan “tm” Johnson might be their only chance. Brown needs to jump though.
Both Alan “the Minister” Johnson [sorry, in-joke] and Ed Miliband have raised the prospect of electoral reform in the UK . Ostensibly, this is all about restoring public confidence in the political class after duck/moat/flip-gate, but it also makes sense as a way of cooking the Tory goose. Under the present system, Cameron stands to win a landslide and Labour would be in opposition for a generation. But introduce a proportional representation system and the Tories couldn’t get a majority on their own. (And even if they were in government for a while, the Lib Dems would probably bring them down before long.) This move is reminiscent of Francois Mitterrand’s introduction of a party-list PR system for the 1986 French legislative elections. The right still won, but the Parti Socialiste and its allies maintained a healthier legislative presence than they otherwise would have done, and the right eventually tore themselves apart over the issue of dealings with the Front National. In the UK context, the analogy would be the Tories wrangling over relations with UKIP and the BNP. It could happen.
A brief note on the crisis that is currently shaking public confidence in the British government and its MPs: some MPs are making the point that they merely did what they were entitled to under the rules. Much of the public reaction to their behaviour is predicated on the view that, whatever the rules said, strictly speaking, they acted unjustly in milking the public purse for private advantage. An interesting echo, there, of Jerry Cohen’s view that justice should not just govern institutional design, but also private attitudes and actions. Thomas Nagel observed,
it is difficult to combine, in a morally coherent outlook, the attitude toward inequalities due to talent which generates support for an egalitarian system with the attitude toward the employment of their own talent appropriate for individuals operating within it. The first attitude is that such inequalities are unfair and morally suspect, whereas the second attitude is that one is entitled to try to get as much out of the system as one can. [_Equality and Partiality_, p. 117]
Nagel, thinks (on broadly Rawlsian lines) that the “personal perspective” is entirely defensible and that the difficulty can be overcome. The British electorate may take a different view.
Rupert Murdoch thinks he can charge people for reading The Times online :
Asked whether he envisaged fees at his British papers such as the Times, the Sunday Times, the Sun and the News of the World, he replied: “We’re absolutely looking at that.” Taking questions on a conference call with reporters and analysts, he said that moves could begin “within the next 12 months‚” adding: “The current days of the internet will soon be over.”
Hmm. On Tuesday I attended the Bristol Book Awards. Nick Davies walked off with the prize for his Flat Earth News. The killer findings :
80 per cent of news stories in the quality UK national newspapers are at least partly made up of recycled newswire or PR copy, according to new research. This was one of the findings of a study by Cardiff University’s journalism department which also claimed that fewer Fleet Street journalists now produce three times as many pages as they did 20 years ago. The research was carried out for a controversial new book investigating Fleet Street by Guardian journalist Nick Davies. It also claims that the majority of home news stories in national newspapers are mainly made up of PR and/or wire copy. The research claims that the proportions are: The Times, 69 per cent; The Daily Telegraph, 68 per cent; Daily Mail, 66 per cent; The Independent, 65 per cent and The Guardian, 52 per cent.
So why would people pay for that?
Particularity by itself, given free rein in every direction to satisfy its needs, accidental caprices, and subjective desires, destroys itself and its substantive concept in this process of gratification. At the same time, the satisfaction of need, necessary and accidental alike, is accidental because it breeds new desires without end, is in thoroughgoing dependence on caprice and external accident, and is held in check by the power of universality. In these contrasts and their complexity, civil society affords a spectacle of extravagance and want as well as of the physical and ethical degeneration common to them both. ( Philosophy of Right sec 185).
Alternatively
… “Everything is amazing; nobody is happy.”
via The Online Photographer .
I’m lecturing on Hobbes this week. Since it is a first year lecture, I’m not going to get too deep into any of the controversies, but I will try to give the students a sense of who Hobbes was, why he remains important and how his ideas connect to other topics they may come across. I’ll probably say something about Hobbes’s time resembling ours as a period of acute religious conflict.
Suppose I were lecturing about Karl Marx: I’d do the same thing. I’d probably start by discussing some of the ideas in the Manifesto about the revolutionary nature of the bourgeoisie, about their transformation of technology, social relations, and their creation of a global economy. Then I’d say something about Marx’s belief that, despite the appearance of freedom and equality, we live in a society where some people end up living off the toil of other people. How some people have little choice but to spend their whole lives working for the benefit of others, and how this compulsion stops them from living truly truly human lives. And then I’d talk about Marx’s belief that a capitalist society would eventually be replaced by a classless society run by all for the benefit of all. Naturally, I’d say something about the difficulties of that idea. I don’t think I’d go on about Pol Pot or Stalin, I don’t think I’d recycle the odd bon mot by Paul Samuelson, I don’t think I’d dismiss Hegel out of hand, and I don’t think I’d contrast modes of production with Weberian modes of domination (unless I was confident, as I wouldn’t be, that my audience already had some sense of those concepts). It seems that Brad De Long has different views to mine on how to explain Karl Marx to newbies. Each to their own, I suppose.
Martin Kelner’s utterly cynical piece in the Guardian rather sums up the attitude of metropolitan journalists. OK, so he focuses on the BBC rather than asking directly, “why don’t those mawkish Scousers shut up about their 96 dead?”, but the comparisons to Diana and Jade Goody are there for a purpose (there are some excellent comments by readers in response). Actually, I think the BBC’s coverage of the anniversary has been rather good, especially Kelly Dalglish’s fine radio programme (not mentioned by Kelner, but also featuring interviews with the parents of the Hicks sisters). There are lots of good reasons not to shut up after 20 years. Not only has there been no apology from the police for their actions, but many things haven’t changed. I was reminded of this whilst listening to the current Chief Constable of South Yorkshire explain how much the police have learnt and how it wouldn’t happen today. Oh really? Well as we know from the G20 protests (and other recent events such as the de Menezes shooting) the police still try to get their “blame the victim” story in early. They still represent themselves as helping the victim but being prevented by a hail of missiles that no-one else saw. Videotapes that might have provided evidence of police misconduct or ineptitude still disappear, or cameras “malfunction”. And the police still get to compare their notes after events involving deaths, just to make sure that their stories are consistent and supportive of the institutional stance. Yes, all good reasons not to shut up.