You will not have to answer for others, but you will have to give an account of yourself. Why, then, do you meddle in their affairs? -Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ The descriptions are hypnotic in Associated Press correspondent Bryan Mealer’s new book All Things Must Fight To Live: Stories of War and Deliverance in Congo – a memoir of his experiences reporting in the Democratic Republic of the Congo from 2003 to 2007. Buttressed with snappy background facts regarding the colonial and post-colonial rape of this fledgling central African “democracy,” the travelogue invites readers to imagine twelve-year-old boys armed with duct-taped AK-47s and fighting in Halloween masks and women’s dresses, cannibalism as a magic rite of war, and public amputations of hands and feet, not to mention colorful travel items such as bicycling through a huge jungle in monsoon season, mattresses seething with maggots, bribing crooked officials, and all that sort of nuisance. Leavening all the drama of blood, deprivation, exploitation, and anguish, we have the story’s love interest, the usual one in war narratives – the bonding under stress widely known nowadays as “bromance.” Mealer shares a beer, a memorable meal, and heartfelt dialogue with some fellow traveler, usually a journalist or translator, just about every fifth page or so. The constant presence of music and dancing forms a soundtrack for the righteous actions undertaken by the hero of the narrative, a role alternately filled by this or that hardworking, fearless, and uncorrupted official, priest, peacekeeper, or aid worker. At the end he travels into the countryside, away from the violence of the cities, and ends on the inevitable “up” note of – you guessed it – redemption through hope. Such an epic could hardly exist without bona-fide villains – they can’t all be victims of circumstance, after all. Two pages describe an interaction that clearly put Mealer off his feed, in which a couple of colleagues encountered a Dutch performance artist named Renzo Martens. They found him by spotting a neon sign he’d erected that proclaimed “Please Enjoy Poverty” in a small camp for displaced Congolese. Martens was taping his video Episode 3, and welcomed Mealer’s photographer friends with the greeting, “Ah, the journalists have arrived! Tell me, guys, how much do you earn from your photos in Africa?” His agenda was to put forth the idea that images of suffering were the continent’s leading export, economically speaking; his aim was to train local populations to use cameras and document their own misery, on the presumption that international aid flows first to the source of the most dire images. But Mealer implies that whenever Martens went and “preached,” he turned local populations against foreign journalists. In a public radio interview, Mealer said he felt Martens’ presence could represent a legitimate threat to the safety of those journalists and their translators. Martens had obtained press credentials to enter the country under UN protection. Mealer claimed that complaints from journalists caused Martens to lose his press credentials, an assertion denied by Martens’ gallery. Regardless, Martens apparently had enough footage for his piece, which was completed this year. For his 2003 video Episode 1, Martens’ humanitarian crisis of choice was the independence war in Chechnya, in which he talks to soldiers and civilians around refugee camps and battle scenes, but also NGO employees and journalists, often asking questions with minimal relevance to “current events” on the world-historical stage. He frequently asks people – be they UN representatives, dislocated women, or injured victims – not for comments on their immediate circumstances, nor for general insights on the upheaval around them, but, rather, “What do you think about me?” Martens’ critique of the role of journalism is always central; he gets one official to comment that ”it’s really the media who decides whether people get flour or not.” The shots are fairly candid, and Martens’ responses to various situations vary, evoking mixed shades of provocation and sympathy. The drama in Martens’ work is the tension between his strenuous efforts to occupy the center of the frame, amid the colossal destruction and bloodletting that he has traveled so far to apparently ignore. His seemingly boneheaded persistence in the face of his apparent marginality embodies, in peculiar relief, Schelling’s analysis of the subject as Nothingness endlessly striving to become Everything, And, besides a couple of art magazine reviews plus a clip on Youtube in which the refugees directly state their desire for aid, this is really all the information I have on Martens. He’s not available for interviews at the moment, and his gallery in Amsterdam informs me that copies of his videos run a cool 8.000 Euros apiece. While that’s hardly unusual for an accomplished artist who’s been in both a Manifesta and a Documenta, it’s a detail that deals yet another blow to the troubled model of uncommodifiable revolutionary media put forth by the otherwise fairly prescient Walter Benjamin. As drilled into undergraduates in introductory new media courses worldwide, Benjamin, in “Art In The Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” imagined that industrial reproduction by photography and film would liberate fine artists from the imaginary “aura” of the unique and perfect object, an aura that he saw clinging to the elite detritus of art history. But the Vaseline-smeared lens of the aura, if it exists anywhere, is nowhere more pernicious than in the news, the “objective” media we don’t trust but still believe. Martens demonstrates this pointedly, and Benjamin himself states it unequivocally: “If it were the intention of the press to have the reader assimilate the information it supplies as part of his own experience, it would not achieve its purpose. But its purpose is just the opposite, and it is achieved; to isolate what happens from the realm in which it could affect the experience of the reader.” The value of Martens’ take on the role of the privileged interlocutor among the participants in and victims of mass devastation was personally illuminated for me, in an inverted and very low-key fashion, in a recent off-putting incident. I was outside in downtown Chicago, instructing a group of fairly privileged white and Asian middle-school-aged girls on the trendy guerrilla art form of spray-painting through handmade stencils. An African-American man somewhere in his middle years came over to investigate. He introduced himself, and from the course of the interaction I can attest that being homeless and drunk at ten in the morning were only the most obvious challenges he was coping with. He took a keen interest in the girls’ artwork, as well as in the girls themselves. And, as sometimes occurs in such a situation, his comments veered toward the realm of the super-creepy. We managed to finish up, and he was kind enough to throw out some of our trash, after requesting a series of hugs (not from me). The girls were mildly freaked out, as was I – I told them to chalk it up to a lesson about misfortune, and we talked a bit about racism and poverty. But that interaction was ineffably jarring in a way that made this historical moment seem more tangible than the many representations that only speak to our distorted imaginations. But my experience in itself is misremembered and described falsely. It offers nothing, except the hopelessness of trying to make it meaningful. Any potential for being jarred is similarly swallowed up by the missionary mystique that clings to images voraciously gathered in post-colonial disaster areas by Western media, whose role in raising awareness, thereby greasing the wheels of relief and development, disclosure and justice, is largely unquestioned.  In these images, as Martens points out in a conversation with Els Roelandt in A Prior magazine, white or Western faces are often invisible, as are the mechanisms that allow or deny access to action shots in war zones. A July 7, 2008 All Things Considered interview with New York Times photographer Tyler Hicks provides a typically nauseating discussion of piously aestheticized voyeurism in Afghanistan; National Public Radio teems with this kind of expansionist Schadenfreude. The pieces and articles such images accompany often feature the heartbreaking stories of victims, strung together with minimal elaboration by an egregiously sensitive voiceover. However, in James Dawes’ 2007 book That The World May Know (also the name of a Focus on the Family-linked initiative to get Christians to visit Israel), the deeply-felt experiences of aid workers and journalists who went abroad to gather such stories, are tellingly made into their own meta-narrative, a cloying therapy encounter between those who struggled and hoped in the face of adversity, on behalf of native people who may have done the same – or may merely have suffered. Dawes’ book seems like a belated illustration of Michel Foucault’s commentary in The History of Sexuality Vol, 1 (that other freshman-seminar classic), on the pleasures such orgies of confession offer to all acolytes of the regime of mass population control known as “biopower.“ The reverence of individual experience is at its heart, in the camera that dwells on the face of the starving child, what Levinas calls “the face of the Other.” Renouncing the notion of authentically “felt” empathy as a basis for justice, Slavoj Zizek says, “the true ethical step is the one BEYOND the face of the other, the one of SUSPENDING the hold of the face . . . This coldness IS justice at its most elementary.” A transcendent standard of morality is not a moral-climbing competition for a Pulitzer Prize – it begins with introspection, and ends with collectivity. That The World May Know also seems a modest exhibit in Foucault’s defense for hailing the 1979 Islamist revolution he witnessed as a journalist in Iran – not because the revolution or the brutal regime it brought in was just, but because, in its absolute oppositionality, it acted like what Zizek calls an “obscene supplement:” a shadow of secular humanism, an inverted parallel dimension to Cold War geopolitics, now moving into the Iraqi power vacuum created by the U.S. The Islamic theocracy’s aversion to images and communitarian disregard for individual experience represented a stark “no” to Westerners’ implicit assumption of an unrestrained sphere of influence, ethical and otherwise. Intending to convey a message of peace, Danish performance artist Claus Beck-Nielsen ran around in Afghanistan last year with a big white flag displaying a circular hole, providing an amusing unintentional comment on the ignorance required for invasion; the blank white flag, it turns out, is an icon of the Taliban. Beck-Nielsen illustrates exactly the kind of DIY progressive-documentary auteur-hero image that Martens criticizes, an image that links the worlds of journalism, activism, and video art. Beginning mythically with Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera, this hero sent out spores and blossomed into the recording of “everyday life” in the cinema verite tradition and 1980s activist video, up through the era of the crowd-pleasing Michael Moore expose. Paul Chan’s roving documentary, Baghdad In No Particular Order, shot in defiance of U.S. sanctions in the months leading up to the U.S. invasion, appeared in the 2006 Whitney Biennial. Outside of its anti-imperialist intentions, was the core of this piece different from the visions of a secularized Middle East that formed an ideological basis for the invasion? In fact, the transparency of the “realist” or “humanitarian” lens is often quite similar to the death-denying mirror of desires that Marxists deplore in the commodified opiates of the herd. St. Paul warned against the sinful shadow of the written Law, the smell of guilt and death seeping from Leviticus, but under humanism exegetical excesses have carried over into a proxy colonialism via the lights of the Western literary canon. Whether it’s Chan recording an Iraqi bookseller reciting Federico Garcia Lorca from memory, or the “just war” imperialist and George Orwell wannabe Christopher Hitchens submitting to waterboarding for a Vanity Fair article, or the arguably subversive re-education immortalized in Azar Nafisi’s huge bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran, the centrality of literature is merely the sore thumb, the liturgical element of a humanism that seems as impervious to questioning on its own terms as is the inevitability of capitalism after the Cold War. Also focused on Congo, Steve McQueens’s recent video Gravesend takes its name from the departure port of Joseph Marlow, protagonist of Heart of Darkness. Unsurprisingly, Joseph Conrad citations also abound in All Things Must Fight to Live, lending further cultural cred to the panoramic, “surreal” Congo of Mealer’s soul. similarly praises the transparent artifice of Laurence Sterne’s The three virtues I identify as central to humanism are autonomy, transparency, and the dream of the perfected man. The Man With the Movie Camera is free from prejudices, doubts, guilt, and all other forms of unreason, he sees things as they truly are, and, untainted by the ideological baggage of nostalgia, explicit and explicated under the Law, he celebrates the possibilities of his medium and heralds a new spirit of enlightened universal brotherhood. Much as avant-garde filmmakers have revered Vertov for his self-aware artistic experimentalism, Benjamin admired the non-linear time-frame of German Baroque theater, and Bertolt Brecht’s refusal of naturalizing dramaturgical conventions. In his book about Benjamin, Terry EagletonTristram Shandy, As realism, Sterne may fetishize his self-conscious authorial ocularitty, but as satire, he (like Brecht) clearly defines its remove from reality. His air-quotes delimit experience without touching it, avoiding the techno-Utopian conceits of Vertov, or the synchronistic chaos of Benjamin’s Trauerspiel. But the omniscient author persists, an “eye in the sky” that denies a fundamental awareness of one’s own contingency. In Martens’ videos, on the other hand, people make choices freely, consequences follow actions, good intentions matter, and still liberation is impossible, all-seeing mastery is unattainable – and in this, we glimpse something more familiar than “reality.” We are culpable but nearly helpless; Benjamin’s ideal Unmensch (“Un-Man”) is, in Martens’ portrayal, a bumbling megalomaniac, whose radical ideas have led him to comically desperate actions. Too close to focus, he occludes the disembodied gaze of documentary realism with the inscrutability of a subject who refuses either to resolve or to disappear. Thanks to Noah Berlatsky and Katie Fizdale for help with editing and research. BIBLIOGRAPHY Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, ca. 1418 Giordano Bruno: Cause, Principle and Unity, 1584 Bryan Mealer, All Things Must Fight To Live: Stories of War and Deliverance in Congo, 2008 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (writings 1925-1936, pub. 1968), The Origins of German Tragic Drama (pub. 1928) Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin, or Toward A Revolutionary Criticism, 1981 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (or, The Will to Knowledge), 1976 Slavoj Zizek, “Neighbors and Other Monsters,” in The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology, 2005 Meister Eckhart, Outward and Inward Morality (sermon), ca. 1300 Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Bruno, or On the Natural and the Divine Principle of Things, 1802 Jacques Lacan, The Signification of the Phallus (essay, 1958), in Ecrits: A Selection (pub. 2002) Bartolomeo de las Casas, The Devastation of the Indies, a Brief Account, 1552 Rudyard Kipling, “The White Man’s Burden,” 1899 by Bert Stabler