When Images Take a Position: Didi-Huberman’s Brechtian Intervention

Didi-Huberman’s concern with the political efficacy of images brings his work into dialogue with debates concerning the relationship between images and politics in the wake of 9/11. Footage of the World Trade Center attacks, photographs from Abu Ghraib, and, more recently, the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris have renewed critical discussions concerning the power of images to shape realities. How is it possible for images to represent events that no longer have meaning, through either media overexposure or sheer lack of visibility in public consciousness? What lessons does Didi-Huberman’s retrieval of the ambitions of the historical avant-garde hold for contemporary artists and theorists? How may a politically engaged artist take a position?

Didi-Huberman has argued, “Pour savoir il faut prendre position” (To know, one must take a position).² 2 - Ibid., 11. To develop this line of thought, he turns to a little-known text in Brecht’s oeuvre, Kriegsfibel (War Primer).³ 3 - Bertolt Brecht, Kriegsfibel (Berlin: Eulenspiegel, 1994); Bertolt Brecht, War Primer, trans. John Willett (London: Libris, 2001). Produced during Brecht’s exile in the mid-1930s and 1940s, Kriegsfibel was a collection of press images with accompanying four-line poems that Brecht ­called “photo-epigrams.” Kriegsfibel follows the general chronological progression in the lead-up to, and ensuing events of, the Second World War. Despite the heterogeneity of the collection of images, Brecht’s selection is not arbitrary, and it is possible to detect recurring themes. Criticism is especially reserved for politicians, commencing with Hitler but extending also to the Allied leaders, with Brecht clearly disapproving of the ambitions of American imperialism.

Perhaps the first thing to recognize is that the phrase “to take a position” actually belongs to Walter Benjamin. Benjamin claimed that the most effective tool for creating proletarian alienation and promoting social change was the avant-garde technique known as montage, a procedure that “interrupts the context into which it is inserted.”⁴ 4 - Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” in Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Verso, 1998), 99. In his 1934 essay “The Author as Producer,” Benjamin enthusiastically aligns Brecht’s epic theatre with the most advanced modernist techniques, such as John Heartfield’s photomontages and Soviet film and radio: “It brings the action to a standstill in mid-course and thereby compels the spectator to take up a position towards the action, and the actor to take up a position towards his part.”⁵ 5 - Ibid., 100 (emphasis added). Brecht’s epic theatre departed from the function of traditional theatre as a benign form of entertainment. At its most successful, montage marked a distinct shift for the audience from passive spectator to active participant. Based on this principle, Brecht’s epic theatre was an exemplary mode of disruption. Simply taking sides was not enough. With its capacity to “interrupt” spectators out of their complacency, montage contained the revolution­ary potential to provoke change.

Brecht’s call for a “non-Aristotelian” form of epic theatre, with its attendant issues of estrangement and alienation, is well known.⁶ 6 - Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method (London, New York: Verso, 1998). Didi-Huberman, however, approaches Brecht’s key theoretical concepts with an eye to accentuating the logic of montage that he detects at work in Kriegsfibel. He is interested in the “shock” effect of the montage created by the juxtaposition between image and text. This collision, as opposed to imitating reality, results in the construction of something entirely new. The photo-epigrams force an interruption in representation by the media of the events of the war: “Le montage rend équivoque, improbable voire impossible, toute autorité de message ou de programme. C’est que, dans un montage de ce type, les éléments — images et textes — prennent position au lieu de se constituer en discours et de prendre parti” (The montage makes any authority of message or program equivocal, improbable, even impossible. That is because, in a montage of this type, the elements — images and texts — take a position rather than being constructed into discourse and taking a side).⁷ 7 - Didi-Huberman, Quand les images prennent position, 118.

Brecht’s photo-epigrams act as singular disruptions to the framework of popular media. Take, for example, photo-epigram number 47, which shows an American soldier standing with his back to the camera and holding a gun. Beyond him is a beach, littered with bodies. The caption reads, “An American soldier stands over a dying Jap who he has just been forced to shoot. The Jap had been hiding in the landing barge, shooting at US troops.” Originally published in LIFE magazine, the image of an American soldier having just shot the “Jap” conveyed a certain moral authority over the enemy, thereby legitimizing the participation in the war to an American audience. Brecht’s epigram reads,

And with their blood they were to colour red
A shore that neither owned. I hear it said
That they were forced to kill each other. True.
My only question is: who forced them to?⁸ 8 - Brecht, War Primer, Photo-epigram 47.

The juxtaposition between image and text is startling. Brecht forces the spectator to reread the image beyond the intended original context and reconsider the normative framework of American popular media during the 1940s. Moreover, the moral authority of the image begins to break down as Brecht relocates spectatorial empathy from the war hero to possible murderer. The American soldier’s actions can no longer be rationalized, as the spectator’s sense of narcissistic certainty is eroded. The montage destabilizes the authority claimed by the news image. Instead of simply taking sides, Brecht is intervening, taking a position.

I want to turn to examine the contemporary relevancy of Brecht’s criticism. Polemically, we might ask, Can montage hope to maintain a political or ethical function, to facilitate taking a stand? In Didi-Huberman’s view, the answer is an emphatic yes — when montage is deployed as a tool of knowledge. After a generation of postmodernism’s “depthlessness” and “a consequent weakening of historicity,” as famously described by Fredric Jameson,⁹ 9 - Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 6. taking a position is a resolute counter-manoeuvre. By evoking the Benjamin — Brecht nexus, Didi-Huberman revitalizes an early strain of Marxist theory dedicated to combatting notions of artistic withdrawal and disengagement. For Didi-Huberman, the potential of montage is not restricted to the historical avant-garde but may be deployed as a tool for rethinking knowledge itself. To take a position is inextricably linked to interrogating existing knowledge and mass-media structures. It is to make the image a question of knowledge, and not illusion (“C’est faire de l’image une question de connaissance et non d’illusion”).¹⁰ 10 - Didi-Huberman, Quand les images prennent position, 67.

In his discussion of British artist and director Steve McQueen in Sur le fil, Didi-Huberman demonstrates the contemporary urgency of taking a position.¹¹ 11 - Georges Didi-Huberman, Sur le fil (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2013). We might say that the spectre of Western Marxism returns to haunt the contemporary. Brecht’s Kriegsfibel assumed a position, disrupting the complacency of the spectator through the juxtaposition of image and text. Fast-forward to 2003 and Britain’s highly contested involvement in President George W. Bush’s “war on terror.” The Imperial War Museum selected McQueen to visit Iraq as the official war artist. The situation in Basra, however, was extremely unstable, and McQueen was confined with the British troops in the “safe zone” for the duration of the six-day trip. He was faced with the vexing question of how to best represent the war if filming was out of the question. How to produce a work beyond the sanitized experience of an embedded war artist? As Benjamin had intuited, traditional modes of representation as illusion are ill equipped for penetrating the spectator’s stupor. What was needed was an interruption, something capable of piercing the veil of homogenized official war images and forcing the spectator to think anew.

As a response to the dangerous conditions, McQueen began composing a new commemorative project, Queen and Country (2007–09), seeking to give representation to the British service members who had died serving in Iraq. McQueen wrote to 115 families, requesting their assistance with the project by providing him with and allowing him to use an image of their son or daughter.¹² 12 - For the background to McQueen’s status as an official war artist, see David Evans. “War Artist: Steve McQueen and Postproduction Art,” Afterimage 35, no. 2 (2007): 17 – 20; Herbert Martin, “Post War,” Artforum International 45, no. 9 (2007): 57 – 58. Ninety-eight families responded positively. These images were subsequently made into sheets of postage stamps, a series of tiny commemorative portraits of the individual soldiers. The stamps were subsequently displayed in a large oak cabinet. By electing to portray the dead soldiers, Didi-Huberman argues, McQueen’s gesture is a disruption of the sovereign representations of power traditionally embodied by stamps.¹³ 13 - Didi-Huberman, Sur le fil, 58 – 59. What are we to learn from McQueen’s very Brechtian intervention? He was not simply taking sides in the highly controversial commitment of British forces to the war in Iraq. To take a position is more than delivering an argument. Instead, his nuanced gesture was epistemological, designed to displace existing knowledge structures. By electing to choose the humble postage stamp as his preferred medium, he disturbed the normalized flow of carefully managed information that neutralizes the soldier’s individuality. In Brechtian terms, we might say that McQueen’s gesture is the creation of knowledge through making strange (Verfremdungseffekte). Like the juxtaposition between images and text in Kriegsfibel, the stamps interrupt spectators and jolt them out of their complacency, penetrating existing circuits of knowledge. McQueen forced a disruption in the Ministry of Defence’s careful orchestration of images in the war on terror. By taking a stand, he gave representation to a caesura in visibility produced by institutionalized censorship.

There is one final historical parallel worth considering here. Kriegsfibel was completed in 1944–45, but it took almost ten years for it to be published in the format imagined by Brecht.¹⁴ 14 - On this point, see Didi-Huberman, Quand les images prennent position, 31 – 32. McQueen submitted the commemorative portraits to the Royal Mail to be issued as official stamps, but the concept was rejected by both the Ministry of Defence and the post office. In a bittersweet paradox, Queen and Country was eventually purchased by the Imperial War Museum, neutralizing McQueen’s gesture and its critical capacity to intervene. Queen and Country remains unrealized — it will be truly complete only when the U.K. postal service issues the stamps officially and they can begin circulating freely, as tiny pieces of Brechtian montage.