- During the events in Iran this summer (2009), I saw a young person wearing a T-shirt featuring the old Gil Scott-Heron line: “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” (1971). The couplet concludes: “the revolution will be live.” Or on YouTube.
- As I don’t speak Farsi and I am in no sense an expert on Iran, I will refrain from comment as to whether this was a new revolution, the continuation of a debate about the meaning of Iran’s 1979 revolution, or a counter-revolution. Perhaps that multiplicity of options defines a revolutionary moment.
- I’d like to think instead about what it was that we saw, or more exactly, what was it that we thought we saw? What can this moment tell us about the Internet, about death, about the archive? or more directly, about the Internet as an archive of death?
- The cell-phone video circulated on the Internet of the death of Neda Agha-Soltan encapsulated this crisis of viewing as a cultural and political event. As the story came to be told, Neda was a minor participant in the demonstrations on one day, who was struck and killed by a stray bullet the next. While such stories have always circulated in the margins of political violence, the sight of the young woman’s death in all its unglamourous rapidity became the symbolic condensation of the Iranian events. The lack of context reinforced the realization that what was being seen was a real person’s death, with none of the slow motion, last words or heroic acts of retaliation that Hollywood cinema has long associated with death.
- Just two days after Neda’s death, the blogger Nico Pitney of the Huffington Post relayed a question to President Obama from Iran at a live, televised Presidential news conference. Pitney’s live blogging of the Iran crisis generated over 100,000 comments. Obama cited the Neda video in taking a stronger line on the crisis. Taken as a whole, this was the most public image yet of the change in the news media from print to web that Clay Shirky, channeling James Joyce, calls “Here Comes Everybody.” The print journalist Dana Milbank of the Washington Post became childishly and publicly furious at being superseded in the traditional question order by what he claimed was a pre-arranged stunt. It was, however, only a few days before Katherine Graham, owner of the Post, was forced to admit that the paper was selling access to administration officials at her “salons.”
- Within the short-term media cycle, the video was immediately accepted because it served diverse political purposes. The former Crown Prince of Iran Reza Pahlevi, son of the deposed Shah, broke down crying about Neda at a press conference held on June 22, 2009. He claimed Neda as his “daughter,” making a renewed claim to be the “father” of Iran. Today when I see well-dressed Iranians in New York protesting Neda’s death, I find myself wondering if these are supporters of the Shah using a convenient stick to beat their old enemies. Uneasily, I realize that such suspicions are also voiced by Ahmadinejad’s supporters in Iran.
- Lost in this “horse-race” media politics was any consideration of the video itself. Perhaps because of the Gil Scott-Heron encounter, I came to associate the revulsion I felt watching the clip with a debate from long ago. During the punk years in Britain (1976-78), there was a persistent discussion about so-called snuff films, following the 1975 film Snuff. A “snuff” film would show a person being killed, meant to be watched for pleasure. Despite the apparent unlikelihood, it was long insisted that such films existed. A critic versed in cultural studies might say that the snuff controversy indicated a sense that photography no longer indexed the real, that the modern had become postmodern and that even death was a simulacrum. Baudrillard later famously asserted that the Gulf War had not taken place but was a simulation.
- Around this time, photography was widely declared to be dead, insofar as it could once have claimed to depict something that was “really” in front of the lens. What do we make of such claims now, when there are 40 billion photographs on Facebook alone? No suggestions that the Neda video was faked lasted longer than one cycle of the blogosphere. Together with the Saddam execution video, this “snuff” film was immediately accepted, suggesting a definition of the present-day snuff film as the archiving of death that moves beyond indexicality to a “political” purpose that does not exclude pleasure on one side of the reception.
- The anxiety in Neda’s case was archival rather than indexical: who was this woman, where was the video shot and by whom? Who were the other people seen? This questioning persisted in regard to other videos and photographs that surfaced during the events of June 2009. Locations were correlated with Google maps and Google Earth, as if this precision would somehow render what was seen more valid. The entire dispute was one concerning archival accuracy, in that the counting of ballots was held to have been falsified, rendering the Ahmadinejad government illegitimate.
- For US viewers, the archival anxiety was a displacement of the disputed presidential election in 2000. On the one hand, it seemed that history was repeating itself–the first time as farce, the second time as tragedy. On the other, the willingness of Iranians like Neda to resist the stealing of the election could not help but reflect badly on Democratic supporters of Al Gore, who had gone down quietly, allowing a few Republican staffers to shut down the recount in Miami-Dade with a little pushing and shoving.
- Paradoxically, therefore, the digital archive appears to matter only in the extended moment in which it is active, being counted, or actively viewed. Such archiving, and its attendant “archive fever” (Derrida), has come to be the substance of politics itself, rather than its supplement. Archiving establishes the “now” in which the political takes place and the terms within which it sustains a “division of the sensible” (Rancière). Legitimation depends on that archive commanding consent, as it has failed to do from the United States (2000) to Mexico (2006), Iran (2009) and now Afghanistan (2009). It seems that neo-liberal governance has achieved the trick of holding elections in which the people still do not count. These questions are still very much in play: is the Internet the archive of archives, the new universitas around which claims of legitimation might be made? Or is it instead the new “mystic writing pad” (Freud) that neither forgets nor records, a surface that is constantly wiped clean, only for its traces to remain and return?
