by David Levi Strauss

Excerpt from  "A Ferocious Philosophy ..."  from the Fall 2000 issue of Camerawork Journal.

This was first published @ http://dtlc.walkerart.org/

Prologue: A Conversation on Democracy and Images, Out of Time, with Walt Whitman, George Eastman, and Paul Virilio

Whitman: Curious word, "Kodak." What is a Kodak?

Eastman: Well, now it's the name of a huge multinational corporation, but when I coined the word it was the name of a camera that anyone could use.

Whitman: Splendid! A tool for democracy! Image-making for the common man! But what does the word actually mean?

Eastman: It doesn't mean anything. I just wanted a name that couldn't be misspelled or mispronounced in any language - a brand name for the global market. But the Kodak actually cost a lot of money and only the rich could afford to use it. I called the real first camera for everyone a "Brownie."

Whitman: Even better! A hobgoblin or ghost! A household spirit of good or ill. "A new cloak, a new hood/ Brownie will do no more good." "You've got to be a spirit, Bullworth, can't be no ghost."

Eastman: Yes, well. . . Actually, it was a product tie-in to a popular series of children's books. I just thought it would sell cameras, especially to children, and it did, like hotcakes.

Whitman: But it also brought about a new democracy of images, did it not? When everyone could make their own pictures, they could remake themselves in their own image, and produce a history from which there would be no appeal.

Virilio: History has been created through stories and the memories of individuals having witnessed certain events. Today, however, the media no longer exists as narratives but rather as flashes and images. History is therefore being reduced to images.

Whitman: I told Matthew Brady that his photographs of the Civil War would change the way history is written. But the real war never got into the books. When I first published Leaves of Grass in 1855, I put a photograph of myself opposite the title page, instead of my name. It was a snapshot of me, standing - casual, sensual, direct - you know, one of the roughs. I wanted the whole book to be a daguerreotype of my inner being. I said, "What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest, is Me." Like a photograph. I loved being photographed, especially by my friend Gabriel Harrison. I always thought that photography would someday become one of the great expressions of an ecstatic, erotic democracy. And you, Brother George, made that happen!

Eastman: Whitman, you missed your calling - you should have been in advertising. Advertising is the business of bullshit, and you have a real talent for it. All that sentimental crap about "the people" is good for only one thing: to move more product. Your "vision" of democracy is pure folderol. What the people want is to get something for nothing. If you can convince them that they're getting something for nothing, they'll line up like lambs to slaughter, and make you rich. I did it with the Brownie camera in 1900. Convinced them they were getting "memories preserved" for one dollar. "The people" en masse are greedy, vain, lazy, and selfish. All they ever meant to me was numbers in an account book. I didn't get to be one of the wealthiest men in the world by appealing to their "higher selves."

Virilio: But you did, inadvertently or no. You made them look at the world differently and this made the world different. You engendered the possibility that if everyone took photographs themselves, they would learn how images worked and wouldn't be tyrannized by them. You took the means of production of representation out of the hands of experts and put it into the hands of the common person.

Eastman: Look, I did that because the "experts," the professional photographers, wouldn't buy my products. They said they were inferior. So I thought that if ordinary people could take pictures, maybe they wouldn't be so goddamned fussy. And they weren't. As I said, people are lazy. Something for nothing. "You press the button, we do the rest."

Virilio: Things have gone far beyond that now: from the box camera to the cinema, to television, and now the Internet. You still had human beings holding the means of production in their hands and pressing the button to make images that had something to do with them. But the button soon became the one on a remote control, able only to change channels and increase the volume. Everything speeded up. All resistance was eventually overwhelmed by the speed and frequency of transmissions. The democratic impulse has been reduced to this: voting every second with your finger on the button. With the Internet, this reduction is hyped as a great democratic revolution, but it is the ruin of democracy. It replaces the practice of democracy with its image - an eidolon without a body.

Whitman: But such images matter a great deal! We can't have democracy without first having the imagination of democracy!

Virilio: Yes, if it is the people's imagination. But today everything is imagined for them, in images manufactured like any other consumer product and beamed into every living American room. Because of how these images are made and transmitted, they displace the democratic idea rather than inspiring it. They turn it into its opposite. One of the most retroactively cynical statements in history came from your second president, who said the trouble with democracy is that people get the government they deserve.

Eastman: Excuse my anachronism, but I just saw a spokesman for Eastman Kodak on TV talking about the importance of free trade to China. He said China is now the second largest market for consumer photographic materials in the world, after the U.S. So, the Last Commies want to take pictures, too. Democracy has no special claim to this. The age of the omnipotent image is post-political. Wake up and smell the Starbucks, gentlemen, this is business.

Virilio: And as the business of consumption has come to replace the social, freedom of choice is reduced to consumer preferences. As the new leader (and former KGB cop) of that old simulacrum of the social, Russia, said recently, "Voters shouldn't be asked to choose between candidates as between products, like Tampax or Snickers."

Eastman: What are those?

Virilio: Code names for Gore and Bush.

Whitman: I sing to the last the equalities modern or old, I sing the endless finales of things, I say Nature continues, glory continues, I praise with electric voice, For I do not see one imperfection in the universe, And I do not see one cause or result lamentable at last in the universe.

Eastman: Bill Gates is my progeny. . . and my revenge.

Virilio: Brownie, movie, TV, PC, out..

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