By: neil

neil — Fri, 02 Sep 2005 03:45:12 +0000

i’m heartened by the image; its figuring of an unintentional solidarity is staggering. indeed, the images we’ve feasted on these last few days of new orlean’s black poor and more generic images of death and conquest in iraq strike a chord in the context of insisting, “man, i ain’t got no quarrel with the viet cong.” it was awesome–literally inspiring–to see people in new orleans offering comparison to the situation in iraq. where is the war being waged, then? these communities have been resiliant for years, under fierce scrutiny, living in abjection, in the fallout of larger forces and power relations. new orleans’ working poor, iraq’s stuggling civil society, even those in aceh and sri lanka after the tsunami, which i draw upon in relation to new orleans–all have been pioritized to absorb the force of this sort of moment of failure. perhaps they, in their common plight, share empathy. the best i can do is sympathy, relief in the distance provided by the image, a measure of my relieved removal. that the shia procession yesterday was mortared (killing 16) **before the thousand were killed in response to a threat of a suicide attack perhaps allows for a recognition of the emergent environmental conditions; losing 16 is par for the course on a daily basis. yet people still insisted on participation….and yet, with the football match above, there’s relief, not in a primitive sense of sharing the spectacle nor in a sense of celebrating an idealization of roots, but in the sense of taking a moment to commonly participate and partake…i don’t know much about mali but i assume the country occupies a zone on the fringe, at least relative to the powers that be. yet, the affect the image generates and inspires suggests a resiliancy that may, in its simiplicity, be the best form of relief and resistance of all.

Comments on: The Presidential Cup: the final photo in the Mali series

By: neil