In ‘The Image-World’, one of the essays in Susan Sontag’s collection titled On Photography, the cultural theorist examines the status/standing of the photographic image compared to other ‘image-worlds’, with longer histories and tractability. The photographic image, Sontag notes, is unlike any of its ‘predecessors’: the photographic image comes across as reality’s [prime] usurper, since ‘a photograph in not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.’ Whether this image-making process is enhanced by the presence of the camera’s mechanical eye, which Sontag dubs (in one other essay in the publication), ‘a kind of a passport’ , a modern-day visa so to speak that allows the photographer to travel and record people, places, environments without the pang of social and moral inhibitions, or perhaps it is a simple matter of the personal choices a photographer makes when approaching a subject, the photographic image emanates the possibility of allowing ‘reality’s minutiae’ to come forth, unencumbered, in all their splendor.

What happens then to the photographic image-world, when the ‘documentary’ and the ‘sensational’ element co-inhabit the same terrain of photographic interest? How do we approach photographs that were set to record and at the same time supplicate the gross, grotesque, ‘rejected’ side of life’s multifarious nature, such as man-induced calamities, obscene behavior, deglamorized wealth? What do we ‘see’ in these image-worlds? What do they stand to ‘tell’ us about the world that they set out to ‘capture’ in the first place?

In today’s world of shady journalism and tabloid induced reality, photographic images are no longer ‘naïve’ records of a simply truthful situation. Digital technology has helped usher the insofar most privately kept into the public arenas, even going as far as engineering its truth-laden validity. Whom we see in digital photographs, or better what we get to pay witness to does not necessarily stand to represent a truthful account of a past moment/situation. Everything could be fabricated, cropped up and refashioned to suit the profits-driven media industry. And almost everything is. Long before this came into power, newspaper photography, and its ‘fast track’ journalism tactics, sought out people and places it could frame so as to deliver the public its share of ‘news worthy’ stories. The newspaper photographers of the 1930s and the 1940s needed not to concoct images as their colleagues in the tabloid press nowadays do; the world they set out to record was far too sensationally new to be made up.

All throughout the 1930s and the 1940s, with the staggering number of daily publications on the rise, American photojournalism brought the greater public its share of unfolding urban ‘myths’: a curious mixture of fire and murder sites, opening nights at the cinema and opera houses, handcuffed prisoners and ‘subterranean entertainers’, all populating shady ‘joints’ and police cars, not to mentioned Fourth of July Parades and V-Day celebrations. Amongst the crowds of almost identical ‘flashing lights’ that of New York-based photographer Arthur Felling, known under the semi-pretentious sobriquet ‘Weegee’, stood slightly on the outside. Weegee photographed the same terrain which also triggered many of his media-savvy contemporaries’ flashes; however, what has set him apart from their respective work, and in turn, has allowed his photographs to stand the test of time, is the uncanny post-anthropological approach he took towards ‘imaging’ his subject matter. Unlike his contemporaries, Weegee, an immigrant child of New York’s Lower East Side, was both a product and an originator of his photographed topography. This perhaps not so unique a trait, nonetheless, equipped the photographer with a particular understanding of the environments he trespassed on his way to get the ‘Page One’ photo. His ‘participant observer’ sensibilities, which enabled him equally to take part in ongoing activities while observing the surroundings with an open mind, render his work, particularly that exhibited in his first book-length collection titled Naked City (1945), passionately realistic, for it delivers a singularly phantasmagoric account of New York’s urban experiences. Naked City contains 229 images spread out in 18 loosely connected chapters; the pictures were taken with a Speed Graphic 4x5 camera, adorned with a Graflex synchronized flash.

The book’s overall structure, with its fragmented arrangement, between individual chapters, on the one hand, and within the chapters themselves (that is, between Weegee’s introductory notes, the captions for the photographs and the photographs themselves), on the other, contributes to likening the image-world as presented in the book to one coming out of ‘film noir’ aesthetics. The late 1940s saw the proliferation of the genre, with some of its most prominent examples, such as Gilda, The Big Sleep, The Blue Dahlia, Fallen Angel, The Killers, The Postman Always Rings Twice, skyrocketing at the box-office while Weegee pursued his photographic work in a similar vein. Both end-products, the film noir movies and Weegee’s photographs of New York’s urban lifestyle, display a mutual sense of shared visual aesthetics, ranging from the incorporation of strongly contrasted, almost pure black and white images, to the preferred use of artificial sources of lighting. Weegee critic and fellow filmmaker, Alain Bergala, calls this historic overlapping of aesthetic choices, ‘one of those historic, rare coincidences, rich with implications for the parallel history of the arts, by which two only apparently related expressions [at this time, cinema and photography]…for a time happen to be at the same outposts of the representation of a period and of a change of ways of thinking that seek further new forms and rhythms to manifest them.

Both William Klein and Diane Arbus, notable names of the post-1950s school of photography have cited Weegee and his work as a valuable influence.Even though none of Weegee’s photographs from Naked City made into it Edward Steichen’s 1955 Family of Man exhibition, he was a forerunner for ‘rudely honest’ photojournalism, representing the city’s landscape and its inhabitants with a vigorous sense of ‘less ornamentation, more life-gripping viciousness’. Reverently, Weegee’s work exhibited in the collection Naked City does not expound on the idea of the ‘American Promised Land gone Wasteland’ that Klein’s and Arbus’s works, respectively, call into prominence. From the opening images in the collection, through the more volatile spaces of murder and fire sites, to one of the last photographs ever taken of the great Alfred Stieglitz, Weegee’s photo-storytelling only purports to ‘tell it like it us’, whatever that ‘is’ may be. His American landscape does not pay tribute, either way, to the melting-pot theory of immigrant life in the New Land; his is a New York of overpopulated boroughs which turns strangers into neighbors/intimates, seeking innovative ways to make ends meet while witnessing life and death passing by. It may appear that the photographer, who incessantly pursued the next murder or fire scene, brought Middle America, as well as his fellow New Yorkers, a warning against the treacherous nature of the American Dream myth. With a dazzling number of crime scene photographs in the Weegee archive, mostly housed in New York’s Museum of Modern Art archives, it seems that Weegee’s images, if not the photographer himself, dispel the mythical semblance of the American life: no one really makes it, all could be lost in a flick of a fire.

Even so, the empathy his photo-text-images put forward to contemporary readers of the Naked City, with a ‘curious self’ rather then a mere voyeur illuminating the people and places inside the frame, Weegee’s work renders the publically private its lost intimacy, familiarity, peacefulness and undaunted craziness amid the rumble of violence and surreptitious fragmented existence.

What more is there to ‘dream’ about, in colorful black and white?

At a first reading, James A. Herne’s once exceedingly controversial play, Margaret Fleming (1890), comes across as a skillfully crafted exercise in 19th century dramatic conventions and artifices. For example, the play unfolds a melodramatic story of a wronged young waif (Lena Schmidt) who must bear her illegitimate child in shame. Her robust older sister (Maria Bindley), conveniently situated in the home of her younger sister’s seducer (Philip Fleming), plays the role of his wife’s maid, and at one point in the play she threatens to avenge her sister’s dire circumstance aiming at Mrs. Fleming with a pointed gun. On top of everything, the angelic wife (the titular Margaret Fleming) is struck blind as she learns of her husband’s infidelity. However, these apparent surface clichés are put to a new use. A more careful reading of this social drama enacted in a closely knit family environment attests to a conscious choice on the part of the playwright to render a carefully planned study of American domestic life at the turn of the last century.

In her critical study of Herne’s overall playwriting choices, Patricia D. Denison closely examines the author’s ‘game plan’ for/in Margaret Fleming. (Denison, Patricia D., “The Legacy of James A. Herne: American Realities and Realisms”, found in Realism and the American Dramatic Tradition, edited by William Demastes, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996, pp.18-36)

Ms. Denison remarks that both Herne and his contemporary, the Norwegian playwright Ibsen, grew out of the theatrical tradition of the second half of the 19th century which, in turn, demanded the production of melodramas and well-made plays. At the same time, Ms. Denison is quick to point out that it was precisely this early theatrical experience which strengthened the two playwrights’ determination to pursue innovation in then contemporary theatrical practice. That is to say, “for both playwrights, subsequent innovation became less a matter of repudiating the old than reconfiguring it in order to create anew.” The new in Margaret Fleming is Herne’s attempt to build a storyline around social constructs, such as class and gender, refiguring their place and their mutual relationship as found in an American patriarchal hegemony.

By having the action of his controversial social drama set in a small New England town, Herne draws our attention as critical readers to his method, or better, his conscious choice for the selection and application of ‘representative truths’. Ms. Denison, in her essay on Herne’s work as a fledgling realist on the American stage, poignantly questions the author’s principle of selection. She refuses to take the ‘representative’ in Margaret Fleming as a “truth” set in stone; quite the contrary, for Ms. Denison “the representative [in the play] can prove to be not so much a descriptive inevitability as a prescriptive necessity for those seeking to shape a society in flux.” This way, the author has made enough provisions for the audience’s contestation of socially rigid barriers of class, gender, even to an extent race, in a particular historical time and place.

Contemporary readers may disagree with Ms. Denison’s appraisal of Herne’s work as a innovative dramatist; some may find the play’s final chapter, the closing of Act IV, with Margaret’s ‘blind forgiveness’ and Philip’s seeming honesty and mended ways, to be too acquiescent of the same social values and relationships the play set out to challenge in the first place. A present-day reader may not welcome the didacticism behind Dr. Larkin’s speeches, nor for that matter the overwhelming presence of Margaret’s reborn self in the final scene. In all likelihood, they might find it a tad too soap-operish for their taste. On the other hand, such readings of the play, to the contemporary minds’ abjection, are too universally representational in the contemporary mind’s abjection of a historically different social reality. Ms. Denison’s critical study offers us, weary and almost too cynical readers, a way of acknowledging, if not fully accepting, Margaret’s character for what she truly is. According to Ms. Denison, “what Margaret finally offers Philip, and the audience, is not a large, simplifying and summarizing image of the “true” wife and mother to cover all cases for all times, but a local, historically situated, complicated instance of one person’s adjustment to changing social circumstances.” In this respect, James A. Herne has left behind him an imprint of a new American drama, one which may be roughly modeled upon the conventions of the European drama at the time, and yet at the same time, unquestioningly American in its portrayal of a distinctive social, cultural and economic milieu.

In a world of larger-than-life advertising billboards and catchy monosyllabic jingles, language is everything but an instrument of communication. Yet amidst this pervasive sense of decay, language continues to exert its power over the production of discourse, over the formation of identity. No matter how inarticulate or broken-up the language of present-day identity may appear to be, it continues to carry within its patchwork unity the modus vivendi behind contemporary social relations and their crumbling essence. David Mamet’s 1992 play Oleanna examines this innate causality existing between language and social action, as it questions the rhetoric of ‘political correctness’ within the language of the academy.

Set as an ‘artifact’ within the ‘metadrama’ of the debate over political correctness (which has left its indelible imprint on the last decade of American life), David Mamet’s Oleanna tends to read as a character study situated within the context of this debate that fails to address the debate itself. Along those lines, Mamet’s two protagonists, John and Carol, come off as two-dimensional character sketches lacking astute psychological realism. However, Mamet’s treatment of language as a source of power and powerlessness, while exploring the phenomenon of political correctness, overrides this initial, formulaic simplification of the piece. In an essay titled “The Devil’s Advocate: David Mamet’s Oleanna and Political Correctness”, the critic Alain Piette looks more closely at Mamet’s investment in language as a dramatic act of (dis)empowerment, particularly when the rhetoric of political correctness is as stake. Mr. Piette views Mamet’s interest, as a playwright, in the phenomenology of political correctness as an example of an author’s coming to terms with the corrosive nature of a controlling practice. According to Piette, “at the bottom of the notion of political correctness lies the very Mametian belief that, by altering and correcting mechanisms that help perpetuate the discriminatory linguistic patterns, we will end up altering and correcting the corresponding discriminatory behavioral patterns, thus eradicating from the structures of both our language and our society the inequalities that threaten the social consensus with extinction.” Therefore, the world of Mamet’s Oleanna cannot but dismiss an idealized representation of “a harmonious multi-cultural society where most political, social, racial, and gender tensions have been resolved,” optioning for the only viable alternative, that of “a nightmarish world picture in which these tensions have been exacerbated because of a too fanatic application of the precepts of political correctness.” Within this sanitized world, we encounter John and Carol taking turns at finding/exerting their identity (personal power over each other) through language.

The first act of their verbal game belongs to John; his language, i.e., the language of higher education, is complete, articulate, overpowering. Carol who seems to be at odds with her identity, since the language of her environment is out of her reach, sounds incomplete, inarticulate, subjugated. As the play progresses, their respective situations change; John slowly loses his identity as a teacher, which manifests itself through his lack of coherence in speech, while Carol’s former linguistic inaptitude is replaced by a fairly articulate command of a complete language, namely that of her “Group”. Both John and Carol have been conditioned by the language of their seemingly disparate social groups, thus rendering their immediate struggle to be one of exerting domination rather than consoling communication. This re-casting of language as a weapon of absolute dominance within the intellectual community has confined David Mamet’s Oleanna inside the realm of offensive art. Both critics and theatergoers have felt revolted/ repulsed by Mamet’s purposely disengaging ‘linguistic play’ with such volatile social issues as sexual harassment, invasion of privacy, freedom of speech/ expression.

Why doesn’t Mr. Mamet take a stand? Why doesn’t Mr. Mamet speak against the vile nature of derisive social practices, openly, directly, up to the point? Why doesn’t Mr. Mamet understand the need for ‘political correctness’, now more than ever?

I do not presume to speak for the playwright when I say that as an artist his choices of addressing perplexing issues may not coincide with our way of ‘speaking about’ their threatening effect on civilized life; however, as an artist, and a conscious social being, Mr. Mamet does address these same instances of social unrest, by reminding us, through the stylized incongruity of his play’s language, of the blighting “institutionalization of modern American society into a myriad of self-proclaimed minorities elbowing for power amidst the crumbling debris of the social consensus and demanding immediate gratification.” With that in mind, Mamet’s Oleanna is the quintessential grammar book of the day.

French thinker Michel Foucault delineated the intricate relationship(s) existing between the production of various systems of knowledge (i.e., discourses) and the production of power within a social framework. According to Foucault, each society exerts different rules and regulations that would ‘lawfully’ police and discipline the ‘undesired’ discourses, thus maintaining its hold on power. Those who are considered a viable threat to the dominant discourse and its tight grip on social structures may be dismissed as ‘mad’, ‘non-conforming’, to say the least. Classifying non-conforming individuals as mad eases the ‘burden’ of ‘dealing with them’; they could be almost surgically removed from the cultural unconscious, leaving a space which is momentarily filled up by subjects that have been instructed to conform to the norms and ideals of the dominant discourse. However, even in a ‘well-rounded’ oppressive social framework there is a push by the marginalized ‘mad subjects’ to re-claim/re-map this space which has been taken away from them. Reading Amiri Baraka’s (LeRoi Jones’) Dutchman (1964), we are confronted with one such revolutionary artistic attempt at re-defining one’s cultural image.

The play, which is set in a mystical New York subway car, revolves around the conversation banter between a young black man, Clay, and an enticing young white woman going by the name of Lula. Clay has been ‘modeled’ by the discourse of white society, which, in turn, has ‘trained’ him to regard ‘innocent’ strangers with politeness and courtesy even when their behavior disrupts the conformity of sophisticated public demeanor. He has been taught to accept, passively, the verbal abuse of Lula’s speech and in a way she has been ‘murdering’ him with it, long before she draws her knife inside his bellows. There is, however, a moment of violent break-through which surprises both Clay and Lula, as he sheds his controlled, proper self and responds to her provocations. He tells Lula that only murder would make the repressed culture he belongs to sane. But then again, he does not venture into this liberalizing practice, since such a violent task is beyond his social education. He fails to put up a struggle because he has been conditioned to turn the other cheek. Therefore, his fatal end is a mere result of his impassivity as a tragic character caught up in a web of misfortunate circumstances.

On the other hand, I have been wondering about Baraka’s rather complex use of “the Flying Dutchman” theme and how it relates to the casting of Clay’s character as a tragic man.

If we examine Clay and Lula as character sketches for a thought-provoking allegory, we only come half way to understanding the symbolical ambiguity of their relationship. Baraka’s subway car and its ‘crew’ (during the first part of the play the car is virtually empty, save for the two main characters, but with the passage of time, other passengers file in) provide the needed space and audience for Clay and Lula’s ritualistic confrontation. Both the car and its wraithlike cargo acquiesce the impossibility of redeeming love (the Wagnerian version of the myth), and the inexorableness of racial hate and reprisal as they inevitably lead to murder. In that respect, it is Clay rather than Lula who fills the symbolic part of the doomed ship’s captain; as a black man living under white culture’s rules and regulations, Clay can ‘lift the curse’ of his abode only by offering himself as ‘game’. He has been instructed by the dominant society all throughout his life so it is only ‘fair’ that he gives in, scarifying his own identity on the pyre of a rationalistic culture. Baraka’s conclusion sees Clay’s fatal end as an essential release from the vicious cycle of his cursed existence, allowing Lula enough space to hunt for her next ‘project’. Hence, Baraka’s “dutchman” is ripped apart from the mendaciousness of real-life American social existence as it simultaneously opens up a space for its much needed (and long-overdue) socially conscious relegation.

Reading Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s insightful take on the preeminent presence/meaning of race as “an unstable, “decentered” complex of social meanings being transformed by political struggle” in past, present and future U.S. society, through the postulation of their own theory of racial formation and racial projects, has challenged my “old world” views on the ethnicity theory as a dominant paradigm of race and racial dynamics. The authors’ theoretical approach to a subject which not only involves but also vividly evokes painful, hurtful, all-to-real experiences for many engages my thoughts on several related levels of understanding/application.

I was wondering about the usefulness of such a theoretically-charged rendition of U.S.-specific sociohistorical processes outside the geographic, political, and social milieu of their origin. What of racial formation theory outside American society? Could it be applied? For example, could contemporary Western European societies (and even Eastern European ones) benefit from the racial formation theory, now that they have (more or less) recognized the racial diversity of their citizens?

The theoretical view that really captivated me comes out of Cheryl I. Harris’s article on the relationship between race and property, i.e., viewing “whiteness” as a definite, concrete, real something. Harris’ establishing of whiteness as a tangible social construct, with its rules and regulations, is something quite new for me, not necessarily something which I had previously regarded as an axiomatic paragon, but rather an assumed category within the ethnicity theory which classifies racial phenomena. Grasping the relevance of situating whiteness as a definite “thing”, so to speak, a property in Harris’s terms, bears its mark on the way I understand the intricacies behind the network of present-day social institutions. I am beginning to realize more fully why people of different racial status are granted and/or denied certain (internationally) recognized civil liberties (e.g., access to good public education, nurturing and affordable health care system, housing opportunities in once uni-racial neighborhoods, etc.).

However, the idea of examining “whiteness” as an exclusive prevalence of a community is something which I had not considered before. On the one hand, should people choose to relegate the benefits of “whiteness” how would they be able to do it? Whereas, on the other hand, can people really choose not to accept these “fruits”? What are we to make of “whiteness” as property outside the socio-political geography of the U.S.?