Interview

Governmentality and the Image

an Interview with John Tagg

Ilija T. Tomanić, John Tagg

Interview

Governmentality and the Image

an Interview with John Tagg

Ilija T. Tomanić, John Tagg

https://doi.org/10.47659/m1.024.int

št. Vol. 1, no. 1
2016
02/04/2020

Camouflage

John Tagg is one of the most prominent contributors to critical theory and history of photography. In the interview, he talks about the contemporary relationship between (photographic) image and governmentability, on the asymmetrical distribution of power relations that it implies and on the possibilities of resistance to the omnipresent social surveillance. Within the contemporary apparatuses and machineries of surveillance, the image often represents only a nodal point for collection of nonvisual information. As the value of the image within these machineries shifts away from their representational character, the image is increasingly becoming weaponized and is in the final instance, destined to become a trigger rather than visualisation device of the apparatuses of social control. Therefore purely visual strategies of resistance, such as camouflage, are not sufficient to fight against the increasingly automated machineries of social control and changed conditions of governmentability.

Keywords: camouflage, Foucault, gaze, governmentality, surveillance, visibility, watching machine

Ilija T. Tomanić (born 1974) is Assistant Professor at the Department of Media and Communication Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His primary research interest spans across the field of visual communication, with special focus on the social and political role of photography in contemporary mediated communication. His published articles and book chapters focus on photojournalism, the framing of news, visual representations of otherness and collective identifications. Ilija is the author of Press Photography and Visual Framing of News (2015, University of Ljubljana, Založba FDV). He is currently President of the European Communication Research and Education Association ECREA.

John Tagg (born 1949) is one of the most prominent contemporary contributors to critical theory of photography and art history. He started his academic career in the UK in 1976 and has since 1984 lived and worked in the United States. Tagg wrote a number of essays and influential books on the relationship between photography, institutions and power, such as The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (1988), Grounds of Dispute: Art History, Cultural Politics and the Discursive Field (1992) and The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning (2009). He is currently a Distinguished Professor of Art History at Binghamton University, State University of New York.

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I would be reluctant to treat the monocular gaze of the camera and camouflage as a binary opposition. /.../ If we conceptualise the relation between the two as a duality – as visibility vs. invisibility, as watching machine vs. camouflage – then we run the risk of missing the fact that they are absolutely interlocked together and part of the same economy. I don’t see camouflage as being a response to panopticism, because camouflage is already part of the panoptic system.

Reading time: 20 min.

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