Dignity has never been

photographed
by Abounaddara
Dignity isn’t well regarded at the moment. It’s seen as a normative
concept, difficult to gauge and even more difficult to reconcile with
artistic practices that tend to strive for emancipation from norms. It’s also
a political argument that has been made by reactionaries and enemies
of artistic freedom. Finally, it is an ideal that goes against the tide of
nihilism in this atmosphere of triumphant post-truth.
Unlike freedom, dignity isn’t sexy. This might perhaps be linked to what
nasty Marx and Engels discuss in The Communist Manifesto when they
accuse the bourgeoisie of having transformed dignity into a pure
exchange-value. Even Bob Dylan doesn’t manage to restore the luster to
the banner of dignity. The song he titled Dignity is relatively obscure. And
it ends with words that sound almost like a challenge: Someone showed
me a picture and I just laughed / Dignity never been photographed.
In fact, dignity is one of the pillars on which our shared world was
constructed in the wake of the crimes against humanity committed by
the Nazis. They began by representing their victims as deprived of
dignity, as subhuman. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
adopted in 1948 begins with the following phrase: recognition of the
inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members
of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in
the world. Dignity, then, is not only universal; it underpins both freedom
and justice.

We have no other choice but to accept the challenge of dignity —even

if it can’t be photographed. No other choice but to take part in the
struggle of representations in the world, and in doing so we must strive to
represent the other as an end in herself or himself and not as a means.

But how to meet the challenge when the screens that divide and format
the world follow a logic of representation that marches in step with the
market? How to produce a dignified image faced with the market-
produced spectacle of indignity that exhibits the debased corpses of
Syrians in the name of an obligation for compassion?
The question of dignity was raised ever since the first appearance of a
Syrian on a screen, in a film by the Lumière Brothers, The Assassination of
Kléber (1897). The scene portrays General Kléber, the illustrious figure of
the French Revolution, stabbed in the back by a bearded fanatic. But
the film chose an alternative representation of the Syrian to the historical
facts. The Syrian who stabbed the leader of the French colonial
campaign in Egypt and Syria was a beardless writer, and he stabbed
Kléber in the heart.
Two schemas of pre-existing alternative facts can explain this
representation. On the one hand, the abundant literature the Lumière
Brothers encountered representing the young Muslim writer as
ontologically hostile. On the other, the young writer’s remains were
brought back to Paris by the French Army and his skeleton was exhibi ted
at the Museum of Natural History in Paris, a specimen of a fanatic.

Exhibited at the museum since the beginning of the nineteenth century,

the skeleton became the first sensory referent for generations of
intellectuals, journalists, and artists (including the Lumière Brothers),
which would inscribe the image of a modern Syrian. Then he was tidied
away into storage at the end of the twentieth century, replaced by a
more politically correct media image, but without any of those
intellectuals, journalists, or artists bothering to challenge this original
sensory referent.
The challenge finally came from Syrians who, in the spring of 2011,
staged mass demonstrations to shouts of KARAMEH (Dignity). Even here,
the facts leave scarcely any room for doubt since the uprising of Syrian
society against the Syrian state is bolstered by socio -demographic data
favorable to the model of universal democracy (See Le Rendez-vous des
civilisations, Emmanuel Todd and Youssef Courbage, 2007).
Meanwhile, the world’s screens showed corpses deprived of dignity,
talking only of religions and sects, of geopolitics and The Thousand and
One Nights. They show images that would not have been produced —let
alone broadcast—if the victims in question were European or American.
Remember: images of the victims of terrorist attacks in Europe and North
America are never published in the name of a principle of dignity
inscribed in the charters of journalistic ethics in both the traditional
media and YouTube.
So how can we explain such a spectacle of indignity that runs contrary
to those ethics? It’s the economy, stupid! According to Osama al-Habali,
a citizen journalist who worked with international media organizations in
order to bypass the media blackout decreed by Bashar al -Assad at the
beginning of the uprising. This is his testimony gathered at the end of
2011. He was the first to give the game away by placing the issue of
dignity in the framework of the power relation between the author and
the producer.

As it so happens, the author is a citizen who films his own people in order
to defend them; the producer belongs to the media organizations that
exploit those images to reach the widest audience possible for financial
reasons—usually income from advertising. The author is accountable to
his own people with whom s/he shares a destiny; the producer is
accountable to nothing but the market.
Of course, the power relation between the author and the producer has
always been unequal in Syria, at least since the time of the Lumière
Brothers’ film. But the Syrian revolution seemed to challenge those power
relations between author and producer. At least that’s what one hoped
when a new generation of independent activists and artists arrived on
the scene. They were actively participating in the representation of
Syrian society, monopolized until then by the Syrian state or the media
and culture industry.1
This generation of image makers, to which Osama al-Habali belongs,
used the internet with a DIY spirit in order to produce and broadcast a
representation of their own society that conformed with their own
aspirations. A representation that defended society against the state,
while offering an alternative to the image of Syrians around the world,
hitherto represented through the lenses of geopolitics, religion, and
exoticism. Soon the Syrian state would use all the means at its disposal to
maintain its hegemony. And the media and culture industry would do all
in its power to protect its monopoly, beginning with satellite TV channels.

After the first popular protests in March 2011, the largest TV channels
made contact with independent authors who were filming and
uploading images of the uprising and the regime’s repression
spontaneously. The TV channels began to circulate their images and
offered to broadcast testimonies in the mainstream media. It flattered
them for their bravery. Soon TV channels began to offer to buy images
from activists. Then they began to commission new images, imposing
their own norms regarding subject matter and angle. It no longer
became the case that authors were producing images in response to
the needs of their own society. Rather they were meeting the needs of
the market where the golden rule has long been that “if it bleeds it
leads.”
So the young independent authors producing their own images for thei r
own society to satisfy their own needs became the subcontractors of the
media and culture industry producing a spectacle of indignity. Those
authors became the industry’s alibi to justify the spectacle of indignity,
putting in place a new informational order that we have called the war
from within. This is a new informational order with the power to reduce
Syria to a video game of war (see GoBro) and rebels to clowns (see Here
and Elsewhere).

We affirm emphatically that the images of Syrians are even more lacking
in dignity because the conditions of production benefit the producer at
the expense of the author. In other words, dignity is compromised when
Syrians are unable to become the producers of their own image. So if
Syrian image makers want to reinstate the dignity of their compatriots,
they must seize the means of production of their own image.
But that is not a conclusion. This is just an introduction to the struggle our
collective hopes to carry out side-by-side with the world’s image makers,
following in the footsteps of our anti-fascist predecessor who wrote The
Author as Producer. Because the market has rediscovered the tricks of
“activism” and “new objectivity” that Walter Benjamin discussed when
he delivered his speech at the Institute for the Study of Fascism. Its ruse
has been so successful that it has managed to convince th at the
aesthetics of indignity actually come to the aid of Syrian dignity, no
doubt to the pleasure of Bashar al-Assad, ISIS, and the partisans of post-
truth. So even if Dignity has never been photographed, now is the time
to defend it by laying the groundwork for a mode of production based
on the right of each human being to a dignified image.