Framing Cain
What is an image? Is it simply a photographic capture? An event frozen in a moment in time?
No.
An image is filled with flickering, flowing movements across the mind’s eye. Underneath the eyelid. In between each blink. A ziggy zaggy bobbing weaving jumpy confluence of images from past and present moving in and out of frame. Over and under. From image to image. From viewer to viewed. Like a darting dotted line. From you to your family. To your friends.
Then back again.
A wibbley wobbley timey wimey river dance of meaning cutting across multiple fields of understanding. Over to your smartphone jumps our little running meaning blob. Onto your Twitter feed. Over to the blogs you read. And then back again.
And wait! What’s happened! The image has changed!
Oh sure, it’s the same image that you saw before. But suddenly you see it differently. It holds different meaning. It has taken on the forms and shapes of a dancing, jumping, hypertext latticework that you never noticed before.
Fields of Foucauldian power play out not only in the text or the visual cues, but across the margins. Fights break out. Conceptual swordfighters do battle. First left handed. Then right. Like Inigo Montoya and the Man in Black, ideologies are contested even as meanings change. Debates over sexuality. Gender roles. What defines the stereotypes of race. How we understand class.
Those who think things are always certain, always fixed, well, they end up dead from Iocane powder.
Think of Trayvon Martin’s hoodie. A substitute for black skin employed by an aging, terrified, white power structure caught in the whirlwinds of a changing world that they no longer understand. Erectile dysfunction and fading libidos seek out revenge on the potency of black youth by demanding that the image of the hoodie-wearing teenager be recontextualized as reasonable threat. George Zimmerman’s profiling now socially justified by a jury of clueless buffoons who never looked inward to contest the biases they’ve been fed after two decades of fear mongering in mass media “news” entertainment.
And that’s how images are contested. Medium is context, as Marshall McLuhan and Roland Barthes taught us in the 1960s. Images travel achronologically back and forward through time. They move across mediums and circle in and out of texts past and present. They transverse a shmorgasboard car wash of cultural framings, debates, discussions, and interactions informed by every piece of stimuli you acquire on your daily journey through our pastoral digital paradise.
The image is always alive.
As one who has long written a blog dedicated to the reclaiming, and contestation of the meaning of images that circulate in the public sphere, I have a thing or two to say about this controversy over Rolling Stone’s cover story on the Boston bomber this week.
Over the past seven years, I have efforted to highlight the absurdity of spectacle in contemporary pop culture. I do this by framing the inherent douchey ridiculousness of an increasingly adderal-stimulated generation raised on hyperlink digital social networking. When sexual competition is heightened by increasing wireless connection speeds and rapidly morphing and mutating social spheres of influence in the digital realm, the result is digital people. Douchebags.
Douchebags are simply the peacocking body spectacle of male display competing the only way it can in the age of vine, instagram, and facebook. By turning the body into a corporeal hyperlink. A repository of meaning brought by the spectator. Ideally, for our douchebag, the target spectator is both the hot chick and the surrounding spectatorial lens.
Tattoos are written on skin just like any accompanying text brought to bear on an image. The contextualization of douche spectacle.
But, whether douchebag or photograph, an image is never just an image. An image is a contested landscape. It is a mirror. A repository. A link in a chain.
For what is the real threat to the social paradigm that this Rolling Stone cover represents? The unconstrained image. The image that resists easy categorization.
Those upset that Rolling Stone dared to present a bomber as a good looking teenager fail to understand the complexity of the critique. Those outraged at a cover image of a terrorist presented as everyday kid are overcome by the need to frame, to justify, to wish away the bomber terrorist as simply an alien that can never be comprehended.
But this is a form of cowardice.
The image that upsets the grand narrative taking place in the hive mind, that forces the individual to challenge base assumptions, can only be perceived as a threat. But the threat is not what the image depicts. It is what the image represents in challenging the larger protective cocoon of mass media reassurance.
An incongruous image such as the one seen here ruptures the latticework of good/evil that so many prefer to reside in. It punctures the safety of visual clarity. It reveals the intertextual structures of meaning imposed on each of us daily in our saturated world of smartphones and smart TVs, digital car screens and flashing electric billboards telling us, in the immortal words of John Carpenter’s They Live, to sleep.
This is why Rolling Stone’s cover image is so revolutionary. And so necessary. In one simple image of a young man, the power of imagery itself to resist easy answers and simplified paradigms is revealed. The Wizard behind the curtain reveals the emdedded biases at work in how we hope to reduce the complexity of the real world to an easy cartoon narrative.
But Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is not Wile E. Coyote. He is real. But for us to comprehend that complexity requires a conceptual awakening. An awakening that makes so many so uneasy. Not because of what it tells them about Dzhohkhar Tsarnaev. But because of what it tells them about themselves.
For a life without the easy answer of the constrained image is not an easy life to live.
One image, re-contextualized in a forum where so many have been celebrated for artistic achievements (Rolling Stone’s cover) destabilizes the very human desire to turn a human being who commits heinous acts into an inhuman monster. Here is Dzhohkar as a young adult, and not the spawn of satan. So the people are outraged. How dare a murderer be shown as anything other than a monster?
This is the power, and the threat, of the truth revealed. When Dzhohkar appears as folky pop singer, the bobbleheads lose the power of clear demarcation between the normative and the deviant. Instead of the Satanic overlord of hate rendered inhuman and monstrous, the us/them binary is shattered by Dzhohkar the Human Teenager. This challenges simplified understandings of the events of the Boston bombing and reminds us of the uncontrollable and unpredictable threat of a world unconstrained.
Without frame there is only the savagery of nature. This challenge, in the form of the Dzhokhar innocent/evil paradox, is delivered in context with larger constructions of false consciousness. How do we conceive of celebrity, youth, beauty, and the public sphere itself? Through easy, mass produced imagery that tell us that this over here is “good” and this over here is “evil.”
The controlled image is the tool by which reassurance is sold.
And that knowledge of the artificiality of the media industry to sell easy narratives is what’s really threatening to so many about the Rolling Stone cover.
Judging by the hysteria, this knowledge of the graphic power of imagery cannot be allowed to exist because it cannot be constrained into soothing narratives of pictorial reassurance. It is far easier to picture Hitler like this then it is to accept that Hitler played with babies, had a girlfriend and loved his dog.
To accept the complexity of those who do evil acts is to accept the possibility of evil acts within all of us.
To accept that Dzhokhar could look happy, healthy, youthful and beautiful is to humanize that which does not deserve an act of humanization. For evil must be monstrous and alien to the normal hierarchy of celebrity in which Rolling Stone usually traffics.
But is precisely for these reasons that the cover is so important. So critical to reminding us of the power of evil to transform the mundane, everyday college boy into a terrorist.
And that, of course, is the point.
You lost me at ‘clueless buffoons’.
CLUELESS BUFFOONS ONLY DESCRIBES THE FOOLS WHO REFUSE TO UNDERSTAND WHY GEORGE ZIMMERMAN HAD TO BE FOUND NOT GUILTY.
Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge the results. – Margaret Atwood
.True evil comes not with horns and a pitchfork, but more likely in the form of an insurance salesman. – CTDS
.
.Well said DB1
Did I click on Lucky Punkass?
That Hitler fellow could really pull some tail.
And that, of course, is the point.
One image, re-contextualized in a forum where so many have been celebrated for artistic achievements (Rolling Stone’s cover) destabilizes the very human desire to turn a human being who commits heinous acts into an inhuman monster.
.
As art, it has done its job.
.
He is still a monster. Given your like of alpaca’s and booze (and hott chicks), he’d more than likely cheerfully cut your head off and mount it on a pike, and sleep like a baby because he did so with the approval of his god. Is that monstrous or not?
those that control the image, control your universe!
It is somewhat ironic that you spend the first half of your essay disparaging “the douchey rediculousness of an increasingly adderal-stimulated generation raised on hyperlink digital social networking” as “douchebags”– the whole point of this website.
Then in the second half, you claim that the power of the image is that it “challenges the embedded biases at work in how we hope to reduce the complexity of the real world to an easy cartoon narrative”.
So which is it?
Is the guy with tattoos and steroid arms actually worth a more sympathetic, understanding narrative about the choices he made in his life (which, ho ho, we readers would never make, so doesnt our mocking of them make me feel better about my choices)?
Or maybe the guy on the Rolling Stones cover is just a douchebag of epic proportions?
Don’t let The Man keep you digital. Or douchey.
From Pink Floyd’s The Wall:
“Hey, douchebag! Leave those hotts alone!”
Here’s a good one:
http://www.funnyordie.com/articles/edfd86d411/how-disney-execs-greenlit-the-lone-ranger
I laughed at WEEI’s Dennis and Callahan this morning as they breathlessly condemed the cover, the magazine, the photo, the aspect that there’s a back story and a chance to see what the heck was going on in this misguided young man’s mind to participate in the bombing.
.
Without even reading it yet
.
The story may very well be a compelling tell. The research has been done and it’s now presented to a mass audience (although I’ll agree with the critics that say Rolling Stone has lost it, because it is not a very good read anymore).
.
At first blush , maybe they didn’t need to use the shock of Dzhohkar Tsarnaev’s image on the cover. The article could stand on it’s own merit.
.
But say Newsweek, Time, Life or even Business Week had the article and placed this photo, the same critics would be calling them brave and contemporary.
.
Rolling Stone may be just a stone chip of the granite wall they once stood as, but this cover/article looks like the most important piece of journalism to cover the aftermath of the Marathon Bombing. I’ll read it to see what the fuss is all about.
.
As a different look at this story, GQ magazine believe it or not, did a great piece
.
.
All those people that wanted him taken alive so we could try to understand the mindset of a terrorist/mass murderer ? This RS story is your first look. Give it a chance. Take a breath, Fox News
If you are going to toy with some purple prose, you have to keep it short and sweet. This one required more endurance than I have to give.
I heard what you were saying. You know nothing of my work! You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing!
— Marshall McLuhan
Funny.
In the first half of your essay, you describe how you are “framing the inherent douchey ridiculousness of an increasingly adderal[sic]-stimulated generation raised on hyperlink digital social networking.” In your words, “digital people.” Douchebags.
Yet soon thereafter you claim that “those outraged at the cover image of a terrorist presented as an everyday kid are overcome by the need to frame, to justify, to wish away the bomber as simply an alien that can never be comprehended.”
So which is it?
Does the tattoo-laden greaseball deserve a more sympathetic interpretation? Should we strive to overcome our embedded biases that lead us to the “easy cartoonish narrative” upon which this whole website is based?
Or maybe Dzhohkar is just a douchebag of epic proportions?
You can’t have your mock and eat it too, DB1.
This one’s better Dude:
http://www.film.com/movies/columns/the-lone-ranger-pitch-meeting
this one nearly got me in trouble at work:
JERRY BRUCKHEIMER: And Ms. Bonham Carter would like to be a prostitute with a wooden leg.
DISNEY EXEC. #1: That doesn’t surprise me. Oh, in the movie, you mean.
Rather than apply inconsistent reasoning skills and waste time trying to ascribe deep meaning to a magazine’s editorial board’s motivations, look at the state of magazines.
.
The medium has been dying for years.
.
Rolling Stone magazine ranks outside of the top-50 in circulation in the US behind a host of other largely irrelevant publications including the now-defunct Newsweek, American Rifleman, Guideposts, the also defunct Parenting, and publications from the American Automobile Club and AARP. Combine the audience of Rachel Maddow with any other of the bottom-of-the-ratings dwelling MSNBC “shows” and you’ll catch more eyeballs than Rolling Stone. Actually, probably most of the same eyeballs.Not exactly Relevancy Central.
.
Like the audience it caters to, old hippies straining to maintain their significance, Rolling Stone is making a last stand. More people are talking about the magazine that actually read it.
.
Let’s not get too lathered up over a magazine’s death throes, this blip on the radar; it’s just another once prominent cultural institution going the way of the Buggy Whip.
Deep thoughts, DB1.
.
Full support on Zimmerman being a Douchebag. Saw a black kid walking through HIS neighborhood at night, took a gun with him, continued to follow his prey even after being told not to, and when his victim defends himself, the moment he starts to lose the fight, he pulls out and shoots the kid.
.
If that doesn’t have “loser douchbag” written all over it, nothing does.
.
Note to Florida women: If you defend yourself against your stalker/rapist/etc and he feels threatened, he can legally kill you now. Beware.
Also, I’m glad to see Marshall McLuhan drop in from Annie Hall.
My name is Chad Kroeger, you blew up the Marathon. Prepare to die!
And ye lost me at buffoon too. Cause although I am part of mankind, I don’t care about 1 dead brothabag shot by a Mexican half-Jew. And if Obummer tries to get him federally, it will be the time Ted Nugent shoots em.
In other news, what kind of epic spectacle of corruption would Glaxo have to be putting on in order to offend Chi-comm sensibilities? Kickbacks are practically one of the sacraments of the Great Commerce Religion.
Way too long for me, but you go for it, dude.
.
When *anyone* starts telling the media what they can and can’t put on a magazine cover, *that’s* when the terrorists have one.
.
Hey Rev, *one* Black kid? STFU (respect)
Better cover here:
.
http://assets0.ordienetworks.com/misc/rollingstoneTsarnaev.jpg
Why do they have Bob Dylan on the cover again?
You know what sucks? The first day back from vacation.
.
Six days in the paradise called San Diego. Coolest city ever imagined. Zoos, phenomenal tour of the USS Midway aircraft carrier, street after street of wall-to-wall bars/restaurants/live music and they stuck an incredible MLB ballpark in the middle of the action.
.
Not to mention the balls achingly hottest hotts that side of the I.E.
.
Fuck home, work and reality. Bitches. Gimme the crystal sand and pure waters of Imperial Beach any day
Call me a clueless buffoon but you are completely wrong.
… on Zimmerman at least.
DB1 pulled a Godwin, on himself. Whenever I see images oh Hitler, he loves his pineapple.
.
Awesome post. It’s nice to see a thinking person instead of a reactionary. Too many of those in this country.
umm what he said
The more important discussion of the day:
.
http://gossipextra.com/2013/06/08/george-zimmerman-trial-chaz-bono-2665/
I’m glad I’m not working tonight. While waiting for Hermit to read all of the above and make his last post here, may I suggest that there may be a fundamental generation gap between some of us here. I’m cool with dat, yo! But I got in fights with multiple dudes at a time and that’s what your head looks like when a Trayvon or Trayvons bangs your head on a cutting blunt object. That being said I never lost a fight to a Trayvon cause I’m racist and only fight with white people (respect). And I don’t give a fuck about the guy from Uzpeckerstan doing the other Mr. Zimmerman on the Rolling Stone cause I don’t read smut rags like dat, yo!
.
In anticipation of the inevitable now, a few old friends have asked for a placement way in advance of the Douchies and shit…Yo’.
.
The lovely Rosie Vela and that fucking guy
.
I’m going to get stoned yo!
.
Can’t y’all just get along Son.
.
I’m stoned. Next up on Piss Morgan. DB1
.
.
Sons
Yes.. Hitler killed millions of innocent people but loved his dog and this guy killed innocent people too but looks like a cute Donovan 60s hippy. Your point leaves me perplex..
Dark Sock for the win. Exactly what I was thinking.
With respect, don’t try and work the Martin-Zimmerman case into this. Everybody’s been doing waaaaaaay to much of that lately, playing armchair juror as if they were there and have the right to claim authority to the truth. Well guess what, there were only two people there, and only one of them has a story to tell. You weren’t there, y’all don’t know shit.
.
I saw Fox News this morning, with some pundits going off about how saturated the mass media is with this story and whining about how some random black-on-white murder isn’t getting any national attention. And of course they immediately follow that with a story about how juror number B-something-or-other-who-gives-a-flying-rat’s-ass said some shit. Fucking hypocrites is what y’all are. Bitching about image and media coverage and commercialization, then going on some pseudo-philosophical tirade about the very thing the media is selling to…. wait….
mcrudeshoosftw!
mr. sock….that was funny, truly funny!
It’s all part of the same media machine that will shock, titillate, or offend to keep us buying what they’re selling. Ted Bundy and Tim McVeigh were pretty good looking guys, too, and Rolling Stone would slap them on their cover in a heartbeat, if they thought it would help them make a buck.
.
I’m just saying.
Copied from wwtdd.com…..but this:
The Internet is all in a tizzy over Rolling Stone’s decision to put Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the horribly demented dumbshits that allegedly committed the Boston Marathon bombing, on their cover. What’s the problem, you might say? He’s been on a lot of magazine covers, right? Yeah, well the Rolling Stone one makes him look like a fucking rock star. If I didn’t know what this piece of shit looked like and I just glanced at the cover I’d think he was some crappy teenage emo rock artist. The article examines how a good-looking, well-liked, American-bred teen can turn into a terrorist. These questions are important, particularly so that we can take the next one of these broken souls out behind the shed and shoot them before they hurt anyone. But is that really Rolling Stone’s job and isn’t there a better way of doing it?
Rolling Stone thinks it’s still on the journalistic cutting edge but, let’s face it, it hasn’t been that in decades. It isn’t the subversive underground magazine that Hunter S. Thompson wrote for in the 70′s. Now it’s just an oversized waste of paper full of Dolce and Gabbana ads and articles about Pink’s latest album. I frankly don’t give a flying fuck what they think caused Tsarnaev to snap. It would be like me getting my financial news from Highlights Magazine. CVS pharmacies is threatening to not carry the magazine in their stores and other places are considering similar boycotts. But what does Rolling Stone have to say about the controversy? They said that while they feel bad for the people of Boston,
“The fact that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is young, and in the same age group as many of our readers, makes it all the more important for us to examine the complexities of this issue and gain a more complete understanding of how a tragedy like this happens.”
Yeah, that. Or trying to sell magazines on a national tragedy.
Nice post, DB1 – shame that most everyone isn’t going to get it.
“Let’s not get too lathered up over a magazine’s death throes, this blip on the radar; it’s just another once prominent cultural institution going the way of the Buggy Whip.”
@DoucheyWallnuts: yeah, you got a point.
@VinDouchal: I live here every day. It gets old, like anyplace, but there’s very few places I’ve been, all of which are in Hawaii, that I’d rather live. Gotta say, congrats, you found the only white woman in IB, that must have taken some doing.
DB1, you are a sage and a patriot!
LIBs like Rolling Stone always seem to get it wrong…lionizing the scum in the world while condemning the noble. Tsarnaev was NOT a promising student…he was always on the verge of flunking out.
On Trayvon Martin: the lessons to learn are these: if you are going to commit an unprovoked, violent physical assault on someone…
1. make sure you can kick his ass
2. make sure he is not armed
Fail on Trayvon’s part
More bullshit from our leftist leader.
.
Wanna know where you lost me?
.
It was right here:
.
“Erectile dysfunction and fading libidos seek out revenge on the potency of black youth by demanding that the image of the hoodie-wearing teenager be recontextualized as reasonable threat. ”
.
This theme is becoming SO common with you that I am, despite my natural inclination not to psychoanalyze, beginning to think you’re saying a lot more about yourself when you make these repeated erection / penis size / lack of girlfriend in highschool / etc. references than you are about those whom you are discussing. And of course one could (again) question whether those very same types of things might cause one to start a site themed as this one is, but that would be too easy, wouldn’t it?
.
Anyway, it’s just dumb, no matter how much you dress it up by mentioning Foucault. Dumb, I say.
.
I’m with Chris above. Don’t attack someone, you’re a lot less likely to get shot by them. Simple, really. It’s not some sort of symbolic battle between the forces of evil and the forces of good. It’s a young black guy on pot who decided he didn’t like being followed through a neighborhood by a neighborhood watch person (in a neighborhood where crimes had been committed), so he sought out and attacked the person following him (who had by his own admission lost track of the young black man at that point), thought he could beat the guy up in a deserted parking lot with no one around, and ended up getting shot by his victim in self-defense. That’s what happened, whether you like it or not. (As has been pointed out, if it had been Zimmerman’s intent to assassinate Martin for being black in the wrong place, why would he have called 911? He’d have just done it.)
.
I should also mention that “efforted” is not a verb no matter how hard you try to make it one.
^Word.
Sorry boss but I gotta take exception with you here. Fact is, people, even (and especially liberals) make claims to evil all the time. Douchebags are evil, Texas is evil, corporations are evil, etc. etc. And it gets so calicified it gets annoying.
Then a guy like this comes along, and even implicit in the “challenge of his evilness” you make another, frankly quite annoying, moral assertion. You assert that anyone who jumps to the conclusion that such a reckless act of violence would be considered “evil” is morally contemptuous for their rush to judgment.
Are they? How about pointing the finger in the other direction, squarely at the spokesperson for “that necrophiliac Rock ‘n Roll” as Malcolm McLaren so prophetically called it so many decades ago, long before it decayed into the obvious douchebaggery we know it for today.
Necrophiliacs indeed are the people at Rolling Stone . Long gone are the days where the rock star could claim legitimate title of rebel against stifling morals of civilization, and claim the banner of freedom. Long gone are the days where a terrorist even claimed membership to an organization with distinct, clear political goals, a la Battle of Algiers.
No, this man is no different than the kid who grabbed an assault rifle and mowed down Batman fans at a movie theater. It was senseless violence, in the purest sense of the word.
Call it as such, stick by it, and defend that position. And the next time the banks skim another few trillion from the economy, or the president lies us into another war, maybe you’ll have enough demonstrated moral clarity for people to listen to you as some kind of authority on the subject.
Seriously. Yeesh. You want sympathy for this guy, join one of the dozens of FB groups full of babbling tween girls seduced by his bedroom eyes, claiming he’s innocent and was framed.
Liberalism had nothing to do with my post. It is not “liberal” to think Zimmerman a murderer, nor is it “liberal” to understand the complexity of the cover of Rolling Stone to challenge how we try to easily define good and evil through simplified images. The fact that these positions are considered “liberal” by some says far more about them than about what I wrote.
I blame Delaware.
Oo I think I hit a nerve! Let’s prod it a little, shall we?
Fine, take out the word “liberal” from my arguments as tactless overzealousness. My point remains, he is a douchebag, and begs your very definition of the douchebag which corrupts culture as we know it into the toilet that it is.
And yet, he goes farther than a douchebag. He is the logical result of douche. For he makes the argument we all fear to make, and yet must address if we are to reproduce:
You want to attract the ladies? YOU MURDER PEOPLE.
THAT’S WHAT MAKES THEM CREAM THEIR PANTIES.
That’s what is getting this guy more pussy at this point than any of us can imagine. That’s the center of the shrubbery maze, that we all tip-toe around because cutting through that Gordion Knot is too frightening a proposal.
You must gore, rip, rend, all of life’s web to suit your own desires. That’s what makes the ladies wet. That’s what makes them want your babies. That’s what makes them spread their legs and moan for you for those brief moments before they slam them back shut, give birth and get themselves in the safe confines of religious dogma where they can spit on the rest of creation as beneat their contempt.
And that’s what makes the douchebags we mock laugh right back at us, as we go spiralling towards the apocalyptic conclusion of such an unanswered truth.