The Unknown Rebel
Author: James Addicott
Email: james@spatialmontage.com

In October1833, while using his Camera Obscura, William Fox-Talbot recall’s being struck by an idea:

“…the idea occurred to me… how charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves durably, and remain fixed upon the paper!”

(Fox Talbot, 1833 cited in Neale, 1985, p. 10)

Metaphorically, that initial spark of genius ignited a bush fire, which rapidly spread around the globe. That fire is the reproducible medium that we now know as ‘photography’. However, Fox Talbot’s concept arrived to him in an era where many others formulated their similar conceptualisations. Louis Daguerre’s 1839 discovery of the Daguerreotype in France begs us to ask the retrospective question; was this idea an inconceivable stroke of genius or did it follow an intuitive path of logic?

     Eleven year’s following Fox Talbot’s idea of photography; Karl Marx and Frederick Engels published their book “The German Ideology”. They stated that ideology represents the: “production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness” (1845, n.a.). Their theory was that these dominant ideas legitimized by the ‘ruling class’ would form the superstructure of society. The ruling class also had ownership over the material conditions of production that would employ these ideologies. As the son of the daughter of the 2nd Earl of Lichester, Fox Talbot would have been identified as a prominent member of bourgeois society by Marx’s literature. His idea would have understood using the Hegelian notion of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Marx, as a young Hegelian, would understand photography’s materialization, dialectically, in the same light.

     Marx’s concept of ideology, and Ferdinand de Saussure’s structuralist model of semiotics, were later adopted and developed into Foucault’s post-structuralist framework of critical discourse analysis. Foucault claims that discourses are: “(…) practices which systematically form the objects of which we speak” (Foucault, 1972, cited in Howarth, 2000, p.7). Foucault’s theoretical framework implies that the rules put into place by the powers that govern any body of knowledge inevitably construct objects discursively. This rule in Foucault’s form of discourse analysis is also applicable to human subjects. However, his notion trivializes the degree of human agency, which structuralism gave priority to. As David Howarth points out: “Social practices are not caused by rules. Rather, social practices shape the meaning and application of rules by providing intersubjective criteria for identifying and evaluating forms of behaviour.”(p. 62). The question remains; is what we do socially constructed or do our actions construct society?

     As the field of Cultural studies expanded, so too did the theoretical understanding of photography. In 1996, John Szarkowski introduced the notion of the ‘vantage point’ into the critical discourse of the medium, which Szarkowski himself refers to as: “(…) the unique phenomena of photography” (1996, p. 99). Szarkowski states that the vantage point is just one of the many characteristics which: “(…) are anonymous and untraceable gifts from photography itself” (p. 103). The vantage point is therefore an essence of photography, which has developed since the conceptualization and materialization of photography.

     Opposing Szarkowski’s optimistic view of photography, is the more sceptical and pessimistic argument presented by John Tagg. Tagg used Foucault’s panoptic model of power/knowledge, to argue from a Marxist perspective, that photography merely enforce the process of capitalist exploitation over the working class as a form of authoritarian surveillance. He states that photography has been developed by, and would consequently be used by the institutions which: “(…) produced, trained and positioned a hierarchy of docile social subjects in the form required by the capitalist division of labour for the orderly conduct of social and economic life” (1998, p. 63). With and estimated five million CCTV camera positioned in various vantage points throughout the UK, one can easily see how the governmental state and the sphere of privatised businesses have deployed this function of photography. Tagg continues to state that: “(…) photography has been historically implicated in the technologies of power/knowledge, of which the producers of evidence are part, they must themselves be the object of study” (p. 65). Tagg’s argument subverts Fox Talbot’s idyllic recollection of the initial conceptualisation of photography into a form of systematic domination.

     This essay discuses these contrasting theoretical perspectives. I will align my argument with the philosophical doctrine of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism. In his 1945 lecture Sartre stated that: ‘existence comes before essence’ (1948, p. 26). From this stance my essay will aim to answer the question; is there something essential about photography as a medium, or is it a discursive construction? I will argue that photography can be used as a medium for understanding how much free will and agency actually exists within the human subject. That there is an unquantifiable ‘x-factor’ within all of us, which discourse analysis inevitably overlooks, and consequently distinguishes in its efforts to provide a totalizing theory to culture. To achieve this, I will narrow my argument into the enquiry of Foucault’s discursive notions of power/knowledge, in particular the system of rules that govern the production of discourses, and deploy his method to Szarkowski’s notion of the ‘Vantage point’, and Jeff Widener’s iconic photograph, “The Unknown Rebel”.

     In 1989 Jeff Widener claimed a position on top of the Beijing Hotel overlooking the largest public open space in the world; Tiananmen Square. This position gave him a vantage point which allowed him to capture the photograph which would make his career:

the unknown rebel

Figure 1: Jeff Widener, 1989. "The Unknown Rebel"

Widener’s photo entitled “The Unknown Rebel” captured the politically motivated courage of an individual student, whose instantaneous revolt managed to halt the dominant advance of military machinery and technology. His photograph is loaded with various sources of conflicting powers that collide into one explosive instance. I suggest that these power sources could be categorized as; political, economic, mechanical, technological, authoritarian, photographical, media apparatus, solar, universal, metaphysical, collective people-power, and subjective will power. The latter power – “will-power” - I will argue provided the essential essence of the photo over the domination of the formers.

     To decode this photo from a Foucaultian perspective; the motivation of the student was provided by the will-to-truth ideologies blazoned by the discourses of capitalism and liberalism. These westernized discourses were politically suppressed in China at that time under the power of communist rule. Widener’s motivation came from his pursuit of capital, career advancement, and / or his social political agenda. The rebel’s power to stop the tanks could well have been provided by the surveillance and gaze of international media attention that monitored this activity in broad daylight. The fact that Widener was permitted to leave China and publish his photograph is another rule to be considered in the discursive construction of his photograph. However, the power of the camera and media apparatus is wielded against the discursive rules of communist authoritarianism. And now, for me to retrospectively decode this photo as an icon of liberalism and individuality, is too politically side myself within the system of rules that govern these discourses. Inevitably, critical discourse analysis decodes this photograph into a conflict between various rules appointed by contrasting economic and political agendas.

     In contrast, from a Sartrean perspective; the student’s existence offered him a path of choices. The rebel’s free-will decisions led him along that path of life. The resulting consequences of his decisions gave his life its essences. Sartre states that: “In life, a man commits himself, draws his own portrait and there is nothing but that portrait.” (1948, p. 42). Therefore, his free-will choices created the portrait of himself that Widener captured in his photograph. If this notion is true, we should also consider that Widener’s long trail of free-will choices against communist rule, the tank driver’s choices, and the long trail of free-will choices that has brought the medium of photography into existence, all reached a magical point of juncture that day in Tiananmen Square – in broad day light.

     It is clear to see that discourse played an essential role in the construction of Widener’s photograph. As a documentary journalist; Widener had the relevant bureaucratic documentation (passport, employment papers and visa papers) to initially claim this vantage point. He stood alongside Stuart Franklin from Magnum Photos and various BBC and CNN journalists. His 400 mm zoom lens gave him the technological ability to capture the photo from an 800-meter distance. However, Widener’s photo has also been constructed with elements that exist outside the framework of discourse. The tanks and the student fell wonderfully into his perspective gaze. The photograph is therefore readable from left to right. If the photo had been taken from behind the tanks they would look possibly three times taller than the student. However, from that claimed vantage point, and printed onto a 2D surface, the tanks fall into a diagonal alignment. This makes their presence seem five or six times taller than the student. Widener’s positioning therefore sensationalizes the feeling of military domination and represents a much better visual ‘David and Goliath’ story. Widener’s bureaucratic credibility as a photojournalist, and his claimed vantage point, can be understood retrospectively as entirely discursive. However his timing, framing, intuition and vantage point, can also be considered a stroke of pure luck, pure genius, intuition, the product of will power, or indeed a natural phenomenon. Much like the sunlight, which enabled his photograph to be captured.

    Following this notion, the essence of the unknown rebel’s choices is only partially captured in Widener’s photographic ‘decisive moment’. I use the word ‘partially’ because for us to fully understand from this students perspective - at that particular moment in time, and from his vantage point - the inner conflicts between: fear, anxiety, worry, loyalty, anger, resentment, sentiment, empathy, and pride. As well as sensing the smell, hearing the roaring sound of tanks engines, feeling the hot sun upon the side of his face, perceiving the openness of the vast space he inhabited, imagining the heart pumping and the adrenaline gushing through his veins. And then, to try and understand the amount of will power, determination and gut-courage that it would take to confront four military tanks head on; is incomprehensible, unimaginable, unintelligible and intangible – totally unknowable and yet incredibly powerful. My choice of words now, only belittles the entirety of such an act of courage.

     I have argued that this photograph partially captures the essences of free will and subjective choice. It is here that the Szarkowskian relationship between photographic imagery and natural phenomenon exists. Vilém Flusser takes a similar view that: “The significance of images is magical”. Furthermore, he states that:

“Texts do not signify the world; they signify the images they tear up. Hence, to decode texts means to discover the images signified by them… In this way, texts are a metacode of images”

(2000, p. 11).

Flusser terms this process as ‘Textolatry’ (p. 12). If it follows that we actually inhabit a magical world, then what are the implications for critical discourse analysis as a form of textolatry? It follows, that in the process of analyzing cultural texts as metacode, using the Foucaultian model, as a discourse itself, we actually: systematically form the objects of which we speak. We texturalize, totalize and categorize the phenomenon of culture production, free will and genius, into groupings of simplified, standardized and readable texts. Or, Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall prefer to use the term; “Visual Data” (1999, p. 6). Therefore, Foucault’s framework provides a system of rules, which are as repressive as the institutions of repression it aims to illuminate. Fredric Jameson notes a similar sense of power diminution in Foucault’s work on the panopticon:

“…the more powerful the vision of some increasingly total system or logic (…) the more powerless the reader comes to feel. Insofar as the theorist wins, therefore, by constructing an increasingly closed and terrifying machine (…) the impulses of negation and revolt, not to speak of those of social transformation, are increasingly perceived as vain and trivial in the face of the model itself.”

(Jameson, 1992 cited in Dochetry, 1993, p 66).

Therefore, and to conclude, the discourse of critical discourse analysis offers us a theoretical framework that is based on the premise that the production of culture is linguistically predetermined. And furthermore, that it is systematically enforceable by institutionalized authoritarian rule. I personally resent any totalizing theory that extends from the premise that linguistic conditioning constitutes the larger amount, or even the entire make up, of our entire subject. By accepting these arguments we accept, as a form of defeatism, the domination of structural determinism in the face of authority. Or, we refer a larger amount of our individual responsibility and potential to it. Therefore, critical discourse analysis denies, rather than affirms, the phenomenological magic, or the essences of life, which is being captured within every photograph captured. The Unknown Rebel essences have been ironically captured in this photograph; to remind us of that phenomenon of individual will power actually exists outside the constraints of discourse. This abstract convention is therefore applicable to the medium of photography. Discourse analysis only holds a place of relevance as a political tool. Its analysis of the past, present and future, proceeds to prematurely extinguish, or bureaucratically ‘dull down’, potential forms of individual will power, cultural production, phenomenology, genius, or imagination.

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