Bogeart-Exteriority as Condition for Resistance

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Anonymous (memberof the SonderkommandoofAuschwitz), cremationofgassed bodies in theopen-air incinerationpits in front of the gaschamber ofAuschwitz,August 1944. Oswiecim,Auschwitz-BirkenauState Museum (negativeno.278)

On theOutside: Exteriorityas Condition forResistance- Pieter Van Bogaert

At the start of the twenty-first century,French art historian and philosopher GeorgesDidi-Huberman caused somewhat of a stirwith an essay about four photographs fromthemiddle of the twentieth century.1The photographs, taken in 1944 by Jewishprisoners in Auschwitz-Birkenau, show theimportance images can have for understandinghistory. With his analysis and reprintingof them, Didi-Huberman sought to expose thefutility of the claim that there is such a thingas the unimaginable. Finally, these imagesshow that the existence of an outside ? ofthe camp, of the image frame, of one's ownsubjectivity ? is the ultimate conditionof resistance.

More or less at the same time as the publicationofDidi-Huberman's text, the Dutch artistRenzo Martens completed his first videoproject, Episode 1(2003), forwhich he travelledtowar-torn Chechnya. In this work, the artistentered the image frame, filming himselfamong professional image producers ?photojournalists, cameramen and politicaland humanitarian fieldworkers ? andChechen refugees. Four years later, for EpisodeIII: Enjoy Poverty (2008) he repeated theperformance in the Democratic Republicof Congo, a nation immersed in violenceand trenchant iniquity, and which similarlyexists in theWest via m?diatisation of these

miseries. By being on location and becomingpart of the images produced in the region,Martens not only shows but also enforces theongoing erasure of the 'outside' for the peopleof Congo ? an erasure conceived in termsof globalisation, in that the reality of the

Western capitalist world has become partof the Congo's reality (through, amongst others,

development workers, economic investors,political involvement and other professionals? including this artist ? moving to the site),and in terms ofm?diatisation, bywhichimages of the Congolese reality has becomepart of the reality of the viewing world.This is a new situation inwhich there isno more outside ? not for the Congolesein these images, not for the professionalsin the region, not for theWestern viewerat home. This erasure of the outside, then,could suggest that the acceptance of the insideis the first condition for any possibilityof resistance.

Considered together, Didi-Huberman's bookand Martens's video show how differenteras with different media produce differentnotions of interiority and exteriority. Bysetting Didi-Huberman's Images inSpite ofIt All (2003), which addresses the images fromthe camps and speaks to the necessity of anoutside, next to Giorgio Agamben's RemnantsofAuschwitz: The Witness and theArchive(1998), which analyses testimonies fromNazi concentration camps and argues that thecomplete witness needs to have been internalto the event, Iwill search for a new way tointerpret the images inMartens's work andtheir erasure of the distinction between insideand outside.

1. The Necessity of an OutsideThe images Didi-Huberman discusses cameinto being, as he says, fin spite of all'. Thephotographer ? or photographers, as there areat least five names of prisoners known to havebeen involved in the operation, all membersof the Sonderkommando, work units in Nazicamps comprised mostly of Jews who assisted

with the different operations of the camps ?is thought to have taken the photographs frominside the Birkenau gas chamber.2 One sequenceof two photographs shows corpses next to a firein the distance. Men with rolled-up sleevesare working; others in uniform stand guard.Another sequence of two photographs shows agroup ofwomen in a forest: stripped bare, alive(first image); and a glimpse of sky seen throughthe branches of trees in the forest (secondimage). These pictures have been altered overthe years in different ways and with differentaims: theywere, as Didi-Huberman showsin his book, rotated to counteract the tiltedcamera angle. The frame ? the dark edge that

1 'Images malgr? tout'was first published as an essay in Cl?ment Ch?roux (ed.),M?moires des camps:Photographies des camps de concentration et d'extermination nazis (1933?1999) (exh. cat.), Paris:Maryal, 2001. The essay became the first part of a book of the same title, published in 2003 byLes ?ditions deMinuit, Paris.2 For a good account ofhow these images were made and came tobe published, see C. Ch?roux (ed.),M?moires des camps, op. cit.,pp.86?91.

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indicates a doorway and hence points to theposition of the photographer ? has beencropped. The poor contrast and focus, testamentto the circumstances inwhich these contraband images were produced, have been altered.The manipulations went as far as retouchingthe faces and breasts of thewomen, as if torender the figures more human and the images

more legible.These photographs were not only made in spiteof all; their history also makes clear that theymust be looked at in spite of all. Not just inspite of their poor image quality, which forcesone to look closer, and not just in spite of thehorror contained within them, which makesone want to look away. But most of all in spiteof all that is not shown in these images and inspite of all the other images that cannot be seen

of the camps, which could have helped a viewerstanding on the outside to gain a clearer pictureof events as they occurred. Like the imagesfrom camp archives, for instance, which theNazis threw in the ovens right before the campswere liberated. Or the images that were amongthemeagre possessions prisoners brought tothe camps, and the images the prisoners keptin their memory ? all these images wherefiction (Dante's Divine Comedy is a recurringreference in the book, as in the works ofRobert

Antelme, Primo Levi and other survivors ofthe camps) and reality (the images of life beforeand during the camps) become one.

These photographs, 'four pieces of filmsnatched from hell' as Didi-Huberman callsthem, are shreds, fragments within a greater

whole.3 That they are parts of a reality largerthan can be captured in an image is anargument to show the images, but also to hidethem. This lies at the heart of a discussion thatensued between Didi-Huberman and the Frenchpsychoanalyst G?rard Wajcman following theinitial publication ofDidi-Huberman's essay.

Wajcman launched the exchange from withinthe columns of the journal Les Temps modernes;Didi-Huberman's response eventually becamethe second part of his book Images inSpiteofAll (2003). This issue had been the topic of

discussion in France before, between thefilm-makers Jean-Luc Godard and ClaudeLanzmann in 1998. In his film and bookproject Histoire(s) du cin?ma (1988?98), Godardintended to create a history of the twentiethcentury using all the films that had been madeand all the films that had not been made. Theevents ofWorld War II take central importance

within that reconstructed twentieth century,and consequently in Godard's search for images.In contrast, with Shoah (1985), Lanzmann

3 Georges Didi-Huberman, Images inSpite ofAll: Four Photographs from Auschwitz (trans. Shane .Lillis),Chicago and London: University ofChicago Press, 2008, pp.3, 33 and 38.

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Renzo Martens,Episode 1,2003, video,45min, stills. Courtesythe artist

made a nine-hour-long documentary of theFinal Solution that does not contain a singleimage of the camps.4In both incarnations, the arguments pitthe essence of images (according toWajcman,the actuality of death in the gas chambers,ofwhich there are no images) against theirextension (which Didi-Huberman identifiesas the Final Solution in its broadest sense,the events in and around the camps).5 Theydeal with how an image can become reducedto a reality, and vice versa. The intensity ofDidi-Huberman and Godard's quest for imagesof the camps and the intensity with whichthey look at them ultimately springs fromthe conviction that every new image particularises, and thus opens up a more nuancedrendering of amuch larger reality. Wajcman

and Lanzmann, on the contrary, refuse touse these images precisely because, for them,they always fall short ofthat larger reality.Since it is impossible to imagine that reality,

Wajcman and Lanzmann claim, one oughtnot even use the images of it that do exist.For Didi-Huberman, however, nothing isunimaginable ? not the horrors of the camps,as these pictures prove, nor theways imagescan be used, towhich the photographs' multiple

manipulations speak.

After reading Images inSpite ofAll, it is hardtomaintain that these four photographs weremade to remain unviewed. Rather the opposite.Prisoners risked their lives to get a camerainto the gas chamber (hidden in a bucket),then smuggled the negatives out of the camp(in a tube of toothpaste). Their sole motivationwas the conviction that the outside world hadto seewhat was happening inside the camp,

making the images themselves an act ofresistance against the horrors inflicted uponthe camp inmates by the SS, enabled by theignorance ofthat outside world. The interiorof the camp poses the threat, but the exterior

world provides the drive ? the ultimatecondition ? for resistance. These photographsdemand to be seen. And, as Didi-Hubermanshows, looking at them takes a good doseof courage and much empathy. For theywill

always remain incomplete ? always an'image in spite of all' ('image malgr? tout9)and never an 'all image' ('image toute'),or complete image. There is no such thingas an 'all image* that represents thewholeofAuschwitz, or any other reality. In thisDidi-Huberman is very clear. What is left arejust 'images in spite of all* ? images thattherefore have to beworked on, thought about,discussed and completed by the viewer. Thatdemands an engagement to complete, an

4 Lanzmann has also been the editor in chief ofLes Tempsmodernes since 1986.5 G. Didi-Huberman, Images inSpite ofAll, op. cit., p.58.

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engagement on the part of the viewer tomoveinto the interior of the image.62. The Inevitability of the InsideThis type of displacement into the image, orinto the work and discourse that lies behindeach image, constitutes a Foucauldian gesture.

When, in the first chapter of The Order ofThings (1966), Michel Foucault discusses DiegoVel?zquez's Las Meninas (1656), he deals not somuch with the painter or painting, but withthe role of the viewer, analysing the paintingby inhabiting the position of the painter asviewer and co-author.7 In other words, Foucaultspeculatively moves the exterior, which heoccupies as a viewer, to the interior of thepainting, putting himself in the same positionas the subject of the painter. His aim is todecode what he calls the blind spot in Las

Meninas, which is situated in the painter'sline of sight: it is the image he is in the processof painting, on a canvas whose back is visibleto the viewer. The painter's gaze is directedat the model (ormodels ? the king and queen).Yet the viewer in front of the painting, too,finds himself within the painted painter'sline of sight. Part of the blind spot ismade

visible in amirror hung behind the painter'seasel, on the wall in the far back of thepainting. The mirror casts the gaze back tothe viewer, the painter's eternal accomplice,

who helps him create and complete the image.1In the case of the four photographs made atBirkenau, the blind spot iswhat is situatedbehind the photographer: the viewer, again,whose point of view is conflated with thatof the photographer, but also the gas chamber,

which the viewer has to imagine in order tocomplete the picture. The gas chamber and thephotographer's personal history, his employment in the Sonderkommando ? his history,but also his hope for an outside and a future.

At stake for Didi-Huberman is the viewer'sactive engagement with the image, whichimplies an ethical dimension: not looking

away, but having the courage to look, to lookdifferently, to imagine and hence to staveoff'any fatalism of the "unimaginable"'.9Foucault's point is that the viewer needsto change his or her position in order toimagine. Didi-Huberman goes one stepfurther, arguing that to call something'unimaginable' ('inimaginable') comes

6 Ibid., pp.59?60.7 SeeMichel Foucault, The Order ofThings: An Archaeology of the uman Sciences (1966), London andNew York: Routledge, 2001, pp.3?18.8 Foucault's conception of the painting's perspective is inaccurate: themirror doesn't reflect theviewer, but rather the canvas Vel?zquez is painting inside the painting. See Joel Snyder and Ted Cohen,'Las Meninas and the Paradoxes of Visual Representation', Critical Inquiry,Winter 1980, pp.429?47.9 G. Didi-Huberman, Images inSpite ofAll, op. cit.,p. 179.

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Renzo Martens, Episode1,2003, video, 45min,stills. Courtesy theartist

down to a refusal to inhabit the image,tomove inside it. As Jean-Paul Sartre argued,the image constitutes an act, but also impliesan act, which raises the question ofhow imagesshould be approached.10 How exactly can andshould we partake in their reality? The moveinto the interior space of the image is necessaryin order to fully understand its functioning.Necessary and inevitable.

Exactly how inevitable the idea of takingposition is to the act of understanding andwitnessing becomes clear in Agamben'sRemnants ofAuschwitz.11 Agambendemonstrates that the truewitness is thewitness who has lived through thewholeexperience ? in the case of the camps it is the

witness who died in the gas chamber. Agambencalls it 'Levi's Paradox' (referring to Primo

Levi): the true testimony of the camps is thatof theMuselmann, the prisoner on the brinkof death who is no longer capable of expressinghis or her condition.12 If the truewitness isnot (or rather no longer) capable of bearingwitness, then the testimonies of the survivors? eternally the third party ? can ofnecessity

do no more than speak on behalf of that muteother. Further, every reader, Agamben states,is always awitness to thewitness; by readingthe account, imagining it, he or she inevitablybecomes (co-)author of the testimony and thuspart of its narrative. By reading, Agambenargues, the reader collaborates in thewriting.By looking, each viewer collaborates in theimagining of the events. Reading and writingare the tasks of thewitness; looking andimagining those of the spectator.

Agamben devotes one ofhis four chapters totheMuselm?nner. These were walking corpses,he writes, the living dead: not deceased yet,but not wholly alive anymore either. The

Muselm?nner were the next ones to be selectedfor the gas chambers; theywere an image ofthat phase every prisoner desperately needed

to avoid. This was the image no one wantedto acknowledge within themselves, that no onewanted to be (or see). Only those who were (inthat) image, who experienced what was insideit, can fully comprehend the events thatcomprise it. That image needs to be actualisedover and again to bear witness. So true testi

10 The Sartre quotation serves as an epigraph to Part II ofImages inSpite ofAll: 'The image is an act andnot a thing.' Ibid., p.50.11 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants ofAuschwitz: TheWitness and theArchive (trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen),New York: Zone Books, 2002.12 Ibid., p.82. ThoughMuselmann means 'Muslim' in German, in the concentration camps itwasthe name given to the prisoner who 'was giving up andwas given up by his comrades [...].He wasa staggering corpse, a bundle ofphysical functions in its last convulsions.' Jean Amery, quotedin ibid.,p.41.




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mony for thewitness means inhabiting the oneform of life they resisted in the camps: that oftheMuselmann, who experienced the process ofthe Final Solution to its full depth ? the onlytrue witness of the camps. Itmeans re-humanising theMuselmann, reviving the (near oractual) dead. Agamben mentions that the

Muselm?nner were referred to by the Germansin the camps as 'Figuren', and hence as images.13(The SS's insistent process of naming formspart ofwhat Didi-Huberman refers to as a'machinery of disimagination9.)14 Finally then,breathing life back into theMuselmann alsomeans becoming image oneself. This revealsempathy as the highest form of imagination.3. There Is No More OutsideAt the tail end of 2000, Renzo Martenstravelled to Chechnya ? then a war zone ?

ENJOY

in order towork on Episode I. He wanted toreflect on his own self-image, both with andamong professional image producers (press,NGOs, government bodies). Four years later,for Episode III, Martens flew from Brussels,

where he lives, toKinshasa, where he embarkedon a boat journey that took him into theinterior of the Congo. In his video and personalpresentations of thework, Martens invokesthe infernal voyage ofMarlow in JosephConrad's Heart ofDarkness (1902) and the hell

of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now(1979), which was inspired by Conrad's book.

At the same time, as a viewer I am tempted tomake references to Dante's hell, omnipresentin the imagination of the concentrationcamps, or Didi-Huberman's four photographs,'snatched from hell'. But, of course, this isn't

hell. This is pure reality. Not an image, but areal place you can visit, explore, interpret andultimately transform. It is a reality ofwhichimages are a substantial part.

Martens uses different strategies to force hisaudience ? both the Congolese men and womenin the film and the viewers in the cinemaor gallery ? to transgress the borders of thescreen. All of these strategies confront theCongolese with their misery, their reality,ofwhich theWest is a substantial part.

POVERTY

Martens trains Congolese photographerstomake images ofwar, rape and poverty ?following their Western photojournalistcounterparts ? instead of photographs of

marriages and births they had until then madea living from. He organises a party in honour ofpoverty, which he sees as the last resource leftfor the Congolese themselves tomine. He pinslogos of international-aid organisations on

malnourished children, enforcing the fact thathis Congolese subjects and his Western viewers

13 Ibid., p.51.14 G. Didi-Huberman, Images inSpite ofAll, op. cit., p.20. Italics original.

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Renzo Martens, EpisodeIII: Enjoy Poverty, 2008,video, 90min, stills.Courtesy the artist

are part of one and the same system. He teachesthem to abandon any hope of an outside.Acceptance of the interior reality now becomesthe prime condition for resistance.

Not only the border between inside and outsidebut also the border between image and realityhas been effaced here. The references to differenthells mentioned earlier ? the artist's and theviewer's ? are inevitable. All these imagesare part of one and the same reality, fragmentsof one and the same history. There is no longeraway to separate image from reality, just asthere is no way to separate the Congolese realityfrom our own ? however much Europeanpolitics tries to do so. The reinforcement ofEuropean immigration law does not separateboth realities, but rather makes it clearer howdeeply they are intertwined. The exterior, still

an actuality for those in the German concentration camps, has been erased in present-dayCongo through the presence of journalists,NGOs, relief workers and other mediators inthe refugee camps ofEastern Congo ? a grouptowhich Martens, the 'artistic development

worker' with press accreditation, inevitablybelongs (a position underscored by the logos of

NGOs he pointedly films and employs withinhis images). It is precisely in the act of'exporting' itself to the Congo and other Third

World countries that Europe ? or, generically,theWest ? tries to efface this notion of apossible outside for the Congolese. It isprecisely the presence of themedia and theNGOs that undermines the urgency of theCongolese citizens' potential demand to beaccepted in Europe as refugees. The logos makethem part of our European reality. Helpingthem on the spot is also away to prevent themfor coming to Europe to take their part.The force ofEpisode Ulis also its problem.Travelling to the Congo, intervening in theimage and literally taking control of itsproduction displaces the exterior and therebyeffaces it, replicating the situation already

enforced in places such as the Congo by thepresence of themedia and relief workers.No matter where he is, arguably, Martens isalways part of their reality, affected by their

misery. He would not be there if he were not,and it is not by leaving Congolese soil that heleaves their reality.15 This both is Episode IIFsgreat triumph and tragedy: its ability to reflect

15 It is interesting to refer here to a contractMartens made, stating that part ofhis profits go to theCongolese heworked with on this project. He actually made two contracts, fitting the ambivalenceofhis film, increasing the percentage from donations from 0% to 100%, with a guarantee of$500ifno donations are received (both contracts are reproduced in A Prior, no.16,2008, pp.174?75).With these contracts, Martens made the villagers in his film shareholders of thework. He also soldsome of the pictures of the photographers in his film to collectors in Belgium, ofwhich the profitsgo to the Congolese photographers.




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the fact that there is no more outside. Not fortheWestern European who boards a plane to theCongo to gowork there: the film-maker,inescapably complicit, who moreover hardlyever leaves the frame. Not for the Congolese

men and women pictured in thework, whohave nowhere else to go and thus have to acceptthe unattainability ofEurope as a possibleoutside ? the closest to Europe they can get isthe Europe that is brought to them. And finally,there is no outside for the viewer, constantlyconfronted with the uneasiness ofhis or herown involvement in the story.Even though the pictures by the Congolesephotographers Martens trains are poorlyframed and lit, they are, in contrast to those ofthe Birkenau prisoners, perfectly legible anduseable (and to be fair, since Martens is his own

are many m

cinematographer and shoots all images ofhimself at arm's length, the look ofhis owncamerawork is often equally poor, in a more-orless staged cin?ma-v?rit? style). The reality ofthe Congo ? inherent to our times ? ismuchcloser to us than that ofAuschwitz. PrimoLevi's shame of being human has been replaced,by the end ofMartens's film, by the filmmaker's acknowledgement that misery is partof the human condition. As Georges Bataille

made clear, there is no outside to history: 'Like

the Pyramids or the Acropolis, Auschwitz isthe fact, the sign ofman. The image ofmanis inseparable, henceforth, from a gaschamber...'16 Contemporary reality does notallow for exteriority, that isMartens's lesson.The tragedy of the Congo now also stands asa sign ofmankind.

Didi-Huberman's enigmatic opening sentenceto Images inSpite ofAll ? 'In order to know,

we must imagine for ourselves'17 ? imploresus to share in the task of recounting, translating, babbling, stuttering in the language ofthe witness. The original French phrasingof the sentence uses the term 's'imaginer'tunderscoring amove away from a simpleimagining (imaginer) to a type of imaginingthatweaves the self into the image, anempathie inhabiting of the image. In order

to understand, the viewer must intervene intoand claim space for him- or herself in the storyof thewitness, in the archive, in the image.It is imperative for the viewer to partakeactively in the labour of imagining, otherwisethese images remain mute.

That iswhy Episode III can be read as aworkabout images in spite of all, a lesson inimagination. It makes theWestern viewerthink about his or her position in relation

16 G. Didi-Huberman, Images inSpite ofAll, op. cit., p.28. Quoted from Georges Bataille, 'Sartre' (1947),Oeuvres Compl?tes, XI, Paris: Gallimard, 1988, p.226.17 Ibid., p.3.

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^^^^^^^^^^ Irf??to^l

Renzo Martens, EpisodeIII: Enjoy Poverty, 2008,video, 90min, stills.Courtesy the artist

to the situation and therefore engages incompleting the image. Not only the viewer,but the Congolese men and women also areencouraged to complete their own images. Thefilm constitutes a positioning (in the sensethat Martens takes a position of aWesternertrying, and eventually failing to help thelocals take advantage of their situation) and adispositioning (in the sense that he, from thatvantage point, puts himself at the disposal ofhis audience, creating for them a prescriptivepossibility). Episode Ulis an ongoing attemptto complete the image, an act of engagementthat turns this work into an actualisationofDidi-Huberman and Agamben's theoriesand a translation of them into the present(specifically the present relationship to

media). Martens searches for involved, nonprofessional witnesses with the same all

consuming dedication that Didi-Hubermandevotes to the four images made by the membersof the Sonderkommando, or Godard to his questto find images that never were made. Inscribing himself into the image (the lesson ofGodard and Didi-Huberman) is the only wayto bear witness. Making himself part of thesituation of the victims (Agamben's lesson) ?or attempting to? is the only way to force asolution together with them. He shows us theimage as site, and the witness as participant.

Displacing oneself. Going on location and(dis)positioning oneself in order to interveneinto the image. All of this means becomingpart of the image and themedium, and thereforebecoming image and medium oneself. Itimplies imaging (producing images) andsharing (distributing them). It constitutes

what one can describe as an act of love, ofsharing oneself with another, becoming onewith another. That is the reason why Martensis not only resisted, but ? in all his otherness? also accepted by some of the Congolese peoplefeatured in the film, who take his lessons,his art, his food and the logos that gowith it.

Love is the planned subject ofEpisode II, theclosing chapter ofMartens's triptych, a projectwith increasingly evident religious undertones.That, after all, is the bottom line of his at

times ironic but always messianic endeavour:by situating himself at the heart ofhis work,bymaking a film the protagonist ofwhich ishis own unhappy happiness in the face of theCongo's misery and not somuch, as onewouldexpect, misery itself ? he transforms himselfinto the ultimate and complete witness,resolving interior and exterior, if for ashort time.

Translated byYasmine Van Pee.

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