[Reader-list] (no subject)

[Vivek Narayanan]

I agree absolutely with the comment below; certainly writing is also 
subjective mode of perception; and for that matter, basic sensory 
perception itself is mediated and constructed in many ways, as the 
neuroscientists have been showing us for a while now.

However, I'm not sure if I agree with your reading (if my reading of 
your reading is correct) that the Milosevic article was necessarily 
pointing to the "inadequacies" of photography, or arguing that a textual 
net could do any better without bringing its own limitations in tow. 
There is, of course, a question that the article raises over whether 
"going and seeing for yourself" is in fact a more unmediated activity 
than looking at Delahaye's photograph or reading newspaper reports, but 
in my reading this question is kept in constant tension throughout the 
article and not resolved one way or another. This is something for 
Ananya herself to address-- so we could be clear at least about what her 
intentions were.

My question would be, why does the question of subjectivity
continue to bring about so much anxiety?

There was a time when "scientific instruments" such as the camera or the 
microscope claimed a certain higher authority because they supposedly 
gave more accurate readings (the pun is instructive) on external 
reality; then it was discovered over time that they did not. Yet, 
despite this shift, the primacy of the "objective" account seems to have 
lingered on-- that one continues to call one's enemies subjective, that 
the critique of objectivity is only deployed against, say, "inaccurate" 
colonialist accounts of the other.

I want to remind instead, that subjectivity can be used as a positive 
force, that it can lead us further into the truth (to deliberately, and 
not innocently, use a currently unpopular word) than objectivity, at 
least as often as not. The Milosevic article is a perfect case in point. 
A retired professor of linguistics arrives at the podium in a suit; the 
lawyers fumble and fail to zero in on him in their self-invented 
universe of rules and regulations; but a photographer-- and indeed a 
historian-- are able to offer powerful, subjective readings that show 
him up for what he really is.



sou dhamini wrote:

>This is in response to Ananya Vajpaye's  article which I found very packed. I  feel the need to unwrap it for myself before I can interact. Do bear with the shearing. I am a film-maker and a current Sarai fellow. 
>
>A photograph of a war criminal undergoing trial, draws a researcher to look ‘behind’ the picture and catch history direct. She is inundated  with more details and nuances than the photo held. The colours of the courtroom. The body language of the criminal still at large. Her own subjectivities. At the same time, she is made aware of the privileged access a celebrity photographer gets to his subject, which is denied her as an anonymous researcher. She also hones in to the particular form of historical discourse the still photo was engaged in. For among the myriad possible angles of framing open to him, the photographer  had chosen to frame it as quotation – linking this event to an earlier war crime  and this photograph to a nascent genre of war and justice documentation. 
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>Interesting.
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>But for someone  who works more with images than with words, and hence looking at it from the other side so to speak, a question that is equally interesting  is how conscious we are  of words as a – mere – representation system. Despite the point and shoot camera and handycam, image making  is still shrouded in the mystique of technology and hence overtly  suspect. While the  means  of  production  of  words, including  the formal academic word and  informal reader-speech, is  more familiar  -  hence  more deceptive, in their relation to reality. Or so it seems to me.  All  we can do  I think  is  to  become  aware  of different   
>‘frames’ including our subjectivities and the  constraints-privileges they entail. The self-reflexive - as critical tool not gimmick - is possibly  the only mode of speech available today, in any register. 
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>Comments?
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