Conversation
When approached with the task of making a commentary or
developing a dialog with the work in this incredibly hard-hitting show
and the many challenging conversations that emerge from each work, I
wanted to be conscious on my own position and be sure to avoid
claiming knowledges or experiences that I do not share but can only
try to understand and develop solidarity around. So in thinking of how
to engage with the works I decided to chose an avenue that related to
my own critical practice, specifically the deconstruction of various
technologies that are tasked with mediating and reproducing power,
enframing the subject within a complex tension of ideologies and
histories. This mediating technology which kept reoccurring in the
works, specifically in Steve McQueens End Credits and Sven
Augustijnens Spectres, is the document, not only as tool for
organizing, facilitating and witnessing the process of historical violence
and trauma but also a mediator between that violence and the
perpetuators of it, a tool for the systematic normalization of state
violence. Although the document as tool vastly predates the
contemporary digital condition, its importance in an environment of
leaks, historical document disclosures, and other revelations brought
about by Freedom of Information requests and processes of Truth and
Reconciliation cannot be understated. Rather than to pull attention
from the materiality of the document itself, digital processing and
proliferation has foregrounded the document as material, as subject.
This is dramatically apparent in Steven Mcqueens End Credits, where
the document is not presented in the singular page but as a seemly
endless digital loop of scanned paper. When we are presented with the
quantity the volume, the document no longer behaves singularly as
witness, it is transfigured in the massing together, into a symbol of the
totality, the superstructure, the complete system that seeks to in its
documentation, in its fracturing and regimentation of dissenting
bodies, to reduce them into units that fit into predictive systems, into
complex narratives of state planning in which we as individuals are
expected to enact in petty degrees our limited freedoms. It speaks to
not only the overarching historical violences but the minute quotidian
forms of violence that in their plentitude become too vast to wholly
conceive but which form the basis for the fundamental restructuring of
our beings by the systems which wish to shape or break them or if
proven expedient, to simply erase them.
The age of the document dump, a process that could only have
been facilitated by the foundational restructuring of circulation systems
by the digital, has introduced a duality to the document, it is both a
record or witness of a given injustice or overreach and also in its
shadows of the events of the Black Lives Matter protests that the FBI
Director James B. Comey in a speech to Georgetown University finally
acknowledges that, quote At many points in American history, law
enforcement enforced the status quo, a status quo that was often
brutally unfair to disfavored groups, Comey goes on to remark that,
One reason we cannot forget our law enforcement legacy is that the
people we serve cannot forget it either. So we must talk about our
history. It is a hard truth that lives on. These disclosures certainly do a
part in disrupting narratives of erasure and begin a process of truth but
the reconciliation part needs to further acknowledge and challenge the
results of these policies in determining the present and the future and
what are ongoing processes of oppression. Furthermore it is important
to likewise reach back further and problematize what Nathan I Huggins
calls the normalization of Black slavery and post-1865 racism in the
master narrative of American history. As Huggins notes:
Slavery was (seen) a "tragic error" (like the Vietnam War),
rather than a rational and institutional choice; it has been
marginalized as an aside or tangent, rather than recognized
as a central and integral feature of U.S. history; and it has
been portrayed as an error in process of rectification in a
progressive evolution, rather than a terrible permanent scar
that helps explain the Southern Strategy, the current attack
on affirmative action, and the enlarging Black ghetto disaster
of today.
And it is another recent story of documents that helps to further
problematize these revisionist narratives and firmly reposition the
process of plundering, enslavement, coloniality and subjugation in the
realm of the planned society. The declassified documents made
available November 29, 2013 at the National Archives at Kew, southwest London, England came from a cache of 8,800 colonial-era files
that the Foreign Office held for decades, in breach of the 30-years rule
of the Public Records Acts and in effect beyond the reach of the
Freedom of Information Act. They were stored behind barbed-wire
fences at Hanslope Park, Buckinghamshire, a government
communications research centre north of London. The documents only
came to light after a high court proceeding by a group of elderly
Kenyans who were suing the government over the mistreatment they
suffered while imprisoned during the 1950s Mau Mau insurgency. What
was revealed in these documents was an extensive operation of
document burning that accompanied the handover of power in former
British colonies. Codenamed Operation Legacy, a plethora of
documents outlined a policy instructing diplomats to burn, quote any
material that might embarrass Her Majesty's [the] government", that
could "embarrass members of the police, military forces, public