"Where pathos rules, the ruling class has vanished from the scene."
There are two spectacular posters in the back room of the gallery. This one is black and red and grey and has fragments of essays on the relationship between the photographic image and capital. Next to a portrait of a miner, there is a stern condemnation of the Magnum photographic agency for its contribution to a tradition that privileges the power of the emotive image. Copies of pages from old newspapers aimed at "the workers" are accompanied by statements by the journalists involved in their creation.
The split between the two sides of the poster is clear: one side is a critique of the dominant photographic approach, the other a brief history of resistance. Black versus red: but the text in the black is frequently dragged into incomprehensibility by its reliance on a specialised jargon.
"The crisis of feminism is not incidental to a matriarchal symbolism of moral interdependency..." "No mutual and reciprocal strategy is either required or envisaged..." "The visual rhetoric of consumer sovereignty is surprisingly pervasive..."
If specific quotations are dense, the overall impact is more expressive. The contrast between the charming and urgent workers' newspapers and the iconic power of the capitalist images makes the argument that an image is not neutral. Even documentary reportage has an aesthetic and beneath that aesthetic there is a political philosophy. If taste is preferring one style over another, this poster encourages the belief that taste is not merely a matter of aesthetics. Your aesthetics are your ethics.
What, then, do I make of my own dislike for the presence of specialist language? In rejecting the phrases and words so common in left-wing dialectic, am I expressing my own faith in the apparently innocent language of capitalism? Elsewhere, I have argued for more clarity, abandoning words that are general and picking the more precise. Isn't the language of the Marxist much the same as that of the scientist, finding exactly the word that matters?
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