The War of Images Is a War of Movement

There is a “war of images” going on. There has been for quite some time. Right now it’s a conflict in open movement, very fluid and with lots of potential outcomes. Collectively, that’s a new experience after the long cultural ice age of neoliberalism. There are ups and downs. The downs can feel violent and depressing. So it’s important to highlight the ups—yesterday was an up on several “fronts” —the claim for bodily autonomy; the move from a society of control to one of protection; and for the possibility of democracy.

To summarize:

In Chicago, the teachers beat the cops in the Mayor’s election. Everyone reading this should hail this win in the face of persistent media bias against Brandon Johnson.

In Wisconsin, a state where elections are decided very narrowly, a clear majority installed a Supreme Court justice who campaigned for bodily autonomy and for democracy.

Tiny in Court

In New York, you may have heard that a former politician has been indicted. While liberals agonize yet again that this may help “Tiny,” as Stormy Daniels memorably calls the person with whom she shared “the worst 90 seconds of my life,” the “image” here is that a Black DA brought charges against the white-supremacist-in-chief in a country where old white men never get charged and one in three young Black men go to prison.

When Tiny slunk back to his Florida swamp and gave the predictable hate-filled rant, several news networks like MSNBC didn’t cover it. Finally. The networks all did what Fox News has now been revealed to have done: talked one game in private but covered Tiny extensively nonetheless. Deny him wall-to-wall coverage and his impact pancakes.

The Italian theorist and activist Antonio Gramsci defined the war of movement as one where it was possible to “obtain a definitive (strategic) victory, or at least an important victory in the context of the strategic line.” Under neoliberalism, we have become accustomed to the war of position, more like a siege. It is inevitably slower but allows for permanent victories. That was what Stuart Hall called the right’s “hegemonic project.” For all the damage done, which none of this mitigates, the combination of financial, political and public health crisis has lifted the siege.

The “image” in the war of movement isn’t a picture or a photo. It’s what Denise Ferreira da Silva calls a “composition,” including sound, text and meta-data. Under siege, the task was to undo the visualizing of counterinsurgency—a counter-counterinsurgency, if you like. Now there are a range of possibilities.

By creating multiple sites of countervisuality, visuality can no longer cohere as a legible “image.” This is what white people and institutions call “chaos,” for two centuries the only imagined alternative to visualizing by “great men.” This de-composition of visuality causes it to fail, both in terms of visualizing the social and as a justification for autocracy.

Above and beyond such subversion of visuality, there is the chance to create a set of intersectional abolition “images,” which imagine a society of protection and of relation, in which personal autonomy is in dialectical relation with classes of protection for human and non-human life. It’s Walter Benjamin’s dialectical image by way of Audre Lorde and Ferreira da Silva.

That said, nothing is determined by this one day. In the war of movement, how image politics is practiced matters. Elections are often defensive maneuvers because, as Astra Taylor put it, “democracy may not exist but we’ll miss it when it’s gone.” Switching the emphasis in Chicago from cops to care reverses the long march of the New Jim Crow begun, lest we forget, by the Clintons. In her book of that name, Michele Alexander used Chicago as an example of how draconian regulation made life all but impossible for anyone drawn into the miasma of the criminal justice system.

Johnson’s majority was decent, not the hair-splitting margin of many recent elections, but not crushing. It was the familiar face off between the Obama majority (comprising Black, brown and other people of color with young people, women and “progressive” whites) versus the white-identified moral panic brigade.

This is far from over. Each and every crime committed in Chicago from now on will be splashed all over the media. The cops will go on strike—only in terms of not doing their jobs, they’ll take their pay—in an effort to create scary headlines. Emphasizing protection via mental health care and alternative pathways for young people is slow work in the present media environment. So there’s going to be a lot to do.

In Wisconsin, Janet Protasiewicz crushed a nasty far-right opponent by doing what Democrats always fear to do: running a political campaign. As a result, there is a mandate to protect the bodily autonomy of those who can get pregnant, which should extend to other domains of human existence. While Protasiewicz failed to win Black support because of some of her sentencing decisions, the result should end the Jim Crow gerrymandering in Wisconsin. However, with Republicans winning a key State Senate seat, giving them a supermajority in the chamber, this failure to create multiethnic alliances could undo the headline win.

As for the Tiny saga, what could be more appropriate for the current wave of rage-driven white supremacy than a cover-up of a failed fantasy encounter with a porn actor? The anticipated drama did not happen. Despite weighing in at 270 lb., Tiny looked diminished in the court, with his usual mirror-practiced scowl punctuated by uncertainty and his difficulty hearing. His mob failed to appear, with the Proud Boys under indictment and the much-discussed Young Republicans a no-show. Majorie Taylor-Greene was drowned out by protestors, led by the feminist collective We Will Not Be Silent.

By contrast, white sight creates images that are silent from the perspective drawing to the drone feed and CCTV. The coalition against it is one of teachers, artists and many others including, yes, sex workers who refuse to be silent or to go away, shouting as one that there is something to see here.