Alertness: A User's Guide to Vigilance

Irit Rogoff An occupation, military or civilian, is lived out at many different levels, modalities and distances. The suffering that is visited upon those whose freedoms are curtailed, whose movement is blocked and whose lives are threatened is rarely matched by the misgivings of those implicated in inflicting the occupation, or those associated with it through citizenship or other modes of inscription. Our concern here is with the question of how the occupiers might vigilantly live out an occupation beyond the simple rhetorics of resistance. There are many levels to such a living – out ; the need to be alert and vigilant in seeing what is actually going on, the need to document it, the need to find ways of incorporating what one sees into one’s work – often in oblique and indirect modes. At times one is close to the action taking place, close enough to have each and every detail register on one’s consciousness and at times one is distant , distant enough to observe the larger framework of what all this is leading to. To understand how an occupation not just restricts those occupied, but how it corrupts and erodes those who are occupying. The supposed boundaries between occupier and occupied are far more porous, far more eroded than one would tend to think and vigilance serves the purpose of keeping them so.

Meir Wigoder The proximate-distance paradigm allows for a vigilant mode of being because it enables a binary set of terms to co-exist: When one is visiting an area of conflict there is a need to observe things with a degree of detachment in order to maintain a critical distance precisely because things are seen up close. Later, when one is at home recalling what one saw, the process of reverie produces a sense of closeness and emotional empathy that relies on the experience no longer being visibly present nearby. At an even greater distance the daily working of the occupation form patterns that reach deep into the fabric of how a society perceives of itself or is perceived.

Proximate-distance is an intermediary area of possibility that opens up in the space of the vigilant mind: between seeing and thinking, observing and reporting, recording and exhibiting, opens up an area of potentiality that can only be realized intuitively in movement and transition. In visual terms such spaces are represented by the blurry peripheral areas of war zones and in the marked sections of quasi borders between the occupier and the occupied lands.

I.R. The thoughts and images that make up our presentation here provide a mode of vigilance rather than one of protest or one of resistance, an insistence on looking without turning that looking into a mobilized rhetoric.

WITNESSING

M.W. The vigilant-recorder of wars and occupations shares with other traditional forms of witnessing the need to be present at the scene. Traditional forms of witnessing rely on the first person speech of a subjective consciousness that reports the scene. The vigilant sensibility is based on an impersonal mode of consciousness that embraces depersonalization: the analysis of events from the position of an absence should neither be confused with the quest for objective modes of recording of liberal humanist photography, nor with the 'fly on the wall' methods of socially concerned reporting, which presents us with empathy the pain of others; instead, the vigilant state of awareness is tuned into the forensic evidence of the scenes, which release meanings that are otherwise hidden by the machineries of war and occupational administrations.

The traditional act of witnessing sends a subliminal message to its addressees; it says, the privilege you have of seeing the event relies on the subjective presence of a witness at the scene. Whereas, the vigilant message says, look at what is taking place because you are not present. The former method is meant to cause the addressees to identify emotionally with the events while the vigilant approach relies on a critical engagement, which turns the addressees into active detectives that need to decipher a cryptic text.

I.R. To witness an event is not to posses its truth, but rather to keep it company. In a vigilant mode , witnessing becomes a form of taking part from the sidelines, and it privileges not accuracy and factuality, but observation and proximity. The vigilant observer stands in by proxy for all those who are not there, who have somehow detached themselves from the process of observing, recording, minding. To be a witness is to perform two functions; one is the performance of minding, of insisting that one needs to mind what is going on, one needs to register it, to drag it into the routines of one’s daily life. I hear a friend say to another, another who practices vigilance, who stands at check points and records the misdeeds of the Israeli soldiers on a weekly basis – I hear her say that the fact that she brings up the brutality and mindlessness of the soldiers at every dinner party in Tel Aviv, serves no other purpose than to make those attending the dinner feel guilty. It does not raise their consciousness, does not make them want to go out and join her at the checkpoints , it simply makes them feel guilty and defensive. She goes on to say that one has to preserve a part of one’s life for normalcy, one cannot, she claims, live every moment in a state of hyper awareness of the tragedy around us. But, I think to myself on hearing this – one does not actually have to make a claim , just to bring in these traces of events, to have them sit like a forlorn package somewhere near the dinner table, to turn the witnessing on its head, become the witness of those not witnessing.

The other function is the performance of providing company for the sad facts. The acts to which we feel compelled to serve as witnesses to, are most often violent, tragic or just sad. And sadness should have company, should not be relegated to a loneliness of the unobserved.

ALERTNESS

M.W. What makes vigilant alertness different from the traditional mode of witnessing events in the present, is its palimpsest sensibility: The present is always viewed simultaneously with the knowledge of the way the same scene has been rehearsed in the past, and in apprehension of the way it will be re enacted in the future- such a state of simultaneous observation, reflection, and anticipation leads to an overall free floating state of anxiety that is utilized in sharpening one's critical faculties and developing a rich sixth sense.

To be alert is to live in a constant admonition of the need to grasp things while acknowledging the inability to change political events and to stop human rights violations. But it also makes one understand that living without this constant anguish is far worse- a moral death and a loss of self.

I.R. Is being alert a form of sensitivity ? is it the mode by which one feels things or notices things more keenly ? Increasingly I think it is the antidote to being frightened and panicked by the powers that be – those powers who daily scare their populations into a state of unthinking fear, who produce the anxieties that justify the aggressions they have long decided to embark on. This has been done, as Giorgio Agamben has recently argued persuasively, by means of countering acts of violence with discourses of security. “Security as a leading principle of state politics dates back to the birth of the modern state. Hobbes already mentions it as the opposite of fear, which compels human beings to come together within a society. Security being a leading principle of state politics, …politics secretly works towards the production of emergencies which can instantly be countered by an ever growing ambition for and dependence on, security. Today, says Agamben, Today we face extreme and most dangerous developments in the thought of security. In the course of a gradual neutralization of politics and the progressive surrender of traditional tasks of the state, security becomes the basic principle of state activity. A state which has security as its sole task and source of legitimacy is a fragile organism; it can always be provoked by terrorism to become itself terroristic. . And so we highjack the alertness of the security state and return it to those who stand in vigilant refusal to the production of fear.

EXHAUSTION

M.W.< Living in a society governed by wars causes a stressful condition, which leads to an abated state of awareness. And yet, such states can lead to heightened conditions of attentiveness that enable consciousness to hone in on an important insight which otherwise would have been impossible to perceive if one tried to focus intentionally on the issues. Such a distracted state of awareness recalls Theodore Adorno's definition of oral-flaneurie: it is represented by the sound of many frequencies that are screeching while we turn the knob from one radio station to another. (Today we describe the zapping between television stations.)

Imagine a continuous hum, a wavelength on which all the ills of the war, the sound bites of terror, the government press statements and the human rights violation data, are all jumbled on a screen whose function it is to muffle the sound and provide our exhausted minds with some degree of protection from the abrasive impinging reality in which we live. The vigilant consciousness is able to pick up an almost indiscernible signal, which rises in an indelible cadence above the rest of the noise and provides us, when we least expect it, with a profound crystallizing clue, leading to a critical insight, which would have otherwise not been possible to ascertain in a society whose way of life is antithetical to reflection, preferring instead to be addicted to the noises of current affair talks shows, news correspondents, military specialists, and other forms of informative stimulation that provide the warring society with a perversely seductive, and yet sedative, illusion of being alive.

I.R. We are exhausted. We have been protesting for so long, we have been marching and demonstrating and signing petitions, we have been writing books and articles and speaking at rallies and teaching courses for so long , and the situation only seems to get worse. We are exhausted. Is our exhaustion a point of departure for another politics, a politics to come, not yet articulated ? Can its inaction be mobilized for another model of accommodation? increasingly the exhaustion seems to me to rest with the inability to take sides , the inability to find a position from which to speak, an impossibility of articulating that which is to be condemned . There was a moment in which the people around us marched for peace and another moment in which they marched against war. In the state of exhaustion we find ourselves in, the implausibility of both these emerges so clearly. Exhaustion has turned our field of war into a contemporary epistemic structure ; we have no subject and we have no plan and we have no method , we know that moments of retreat from the active pursuit of knowledge , from all that empirical ferreting about, from the floating of ambitious theoretical hypothesis, is a moment of true recognition of the issues to come. We will be vigilant about remaining exhausted ... if only for a brief moment.

WAITING

M.W. The Vigilant record is created in three stages: waiting-designates the need for a hiatus between the moment of recording the event and developing the image (or between the moment of witnessing the event and writing the report). The longer one waits the more likely are optical unconscious aspects of the image able to release meanings that the recorder did not see or foresee at first. The second stage, in which the record is left unseen and procrastinating in the archive, prepares for the critical reading of the image/report that will have to be read in context to the political and social changes that have taken place since the record was made. Finally, the prolongation of time leads to a vigilant critique of the image/report in connection to affinities and correspondences of other situations of conflict in the world. It recalls Walter Benjamin's remark: one has to walk in Moscow in order to know Berlin.

The waiting image: Not the long exposure we attribute to the process of recording landscape photography. Not even the early auratic effect which Benjamin described as taking place when the portrait sitters appeared to slowly emerge into the image during the long exposure. But instead, an image that provides the impression that time has been siphoned out to produce the enhanced awareness of the being-in-itself of the objects in the view. Such images recall the way Benjamin characterized Eugene Atget's views of empty Parisian streets: these locations evoked the scenes of a crime that awaited the forensic experts and made it possible for the first time to engage in a political and critical reading of the photograph.

I.R. Waiting and wanting, the lines of straggling people perform their desire for an unspeakable something.
The queue, the waiting line has no narrative structure, it is like Baudrillards grids, a realtion of proximities between points or elements. No beginning or end, no structuring action, no framing narrative and no point of resolution. It produces a notion of time that is elastic and streches infinitely and which Chantal Ackermann manages to convey so poignantly in her film d’l’est. It is a structure of time that is static (although not passive) and which defies a certain linearity of progress despite the fact that it takes the form of a line. It embodies a notion of patience that alerts us to a larger narrative.
But the queue for me is also the most embodied understanding of human subjectivity as desire I have encountered, desire in the strict Lacanian sense; As desire the human subject is the lack seeking to overcome itself as lack; the finitude seeking immortality; the limited in quest of the unlimited; the singular seeking the absolute. To understand desire as central to the human experience is not to suggest that humanity is teleologically oriented towards its object of fulfillment but rather to indicate that in naming our objects of desire we are attempting to fix what cannot be fixed in the hope of transcending the condition of our existence. That is, if to be human is to be desire, then no named object can arrest the dynamic of desire that is the human being."

Arkady Renko, hero of Martin Cruz Smith’s Moscow trilogy, a typically Eastern European anti-hero who refuses the excesses of capitalism and atrocities of communism, is standing in a main square with his asisstant the pathologist Polina, she is queing to buy beets and they are discussing the latest developments in a case involving a bomb ;

“Its a guerilla technique, I would have caught on faster if the lab result had been correct.” Polina said “You can thicken gasolene with soap, eggs or blood”

“Thats why they must be why they’r in short supply” Arkady said.

The couple behind Polina were listening intently “Dont get eggs, the woman warned, the eggs have Salmonella.
The bearuocarat countered “this is a baseless rumour started by persons who intend to keep all the eggs to themselves
The line shuffled forward another step. Polina was in open sandals but could have been a plaster bust for all her reaction to rain, blood and the insanity of the wait. Her entire attention was focused on the nearing scales. The rain fell harder.
“are they selling by wight or by count” She asked her neighbours.

Dear, the old woman said, it all dpends if the they have rigged the scales or have little. beets.
Do we get Greens too ?

Theyr’s another line for Greens.

Finally the rain, the wait and the pathology lab work gets to Polina who faints as she gets to the head of the queue. Arkady takes her to a nearby clinic which turns out to be a diet clinic for rich foreigners who come to starving Moscow to lose weight. Intrigued they ask the waitress who is contemptuous of their dowdy Moscow selves what is served here. Depends, she screws her lips around a cigarette, whether your on a fruit diet or a vegetable diet. A fruit diet? “pinapples, papayas, mangoes, bananas” the waitress rattles them off casually is if she were intimately acquainted with them.
Papays, Arkady repeated, Polina, you and I would be willing to stand in line for seven or eight years for a papya. I’m not even sure I know what a Papaya looks like. They could give me a potato and I’d probably be happy”.

DISAVOWAL

M.W. During periods of protracting conflicts, many communities find the need to prove that the war will not change their normal habits of daily life. Beirut in the Seventies, Kosovo in the Nineties, Tel Aviv at the start of the Twenty-First Century, exemplify how urban culture and the arts can flourish and be so vital precisely because death and danger have become such palpable experiences. Denial of the state of war, occupation and terror is therefore not necessarily antithetical to being politically aware and engaged, but another form of dealing with traumatic events that run in parallel to everyday life and even help to propel it.

Disavowal does not exclusively negate the possibility of being vigilantly-alert. Instead, in a more dialectical fashion, it can become a facet of vigilant consciousness itself. In some situations it can easily evolve as a result of the vigilant observer becoming too obsessed with the macro details of the conflict, which make one lose the larger overall picture. The state of denial takes place when proximity overwhelms consciousness (one becomes emotionally affected by the current swings of mood in the media or by the public hysteria at certain historical junctures that make many persons suddenly have the need to hold on to former ideological beliefs from their past, which they thought they had shed), causing any sort of critical distance, which is a condition for realizing the possibilities of real change in the future, to be deflected for awhile.

I.R. Disavowal -We are good they say, we want peace they say, we are humane they say, we are democratic they say, we embody European values they say, we have an orderly society they say, our occupation is far less brutal than others they say, WE ARE BETTER.

VIGILANCE

M.W. The vigilant recorder is not satisfied with a single document or representative image. The need to return over and over again to the same locations and monitor the changes in the occupation characterizes the quintessential obsessive attribute of vigilance: No matter how many images, records, statistics and personal reports are accumulated over a period of time, the vigilant mind will always be conscious of what is missing.

Repetition conditions the very ontological existence of the vigilant consciousness because it is always attuned to the unfolding of events that lead to an uncertain future from which the vigilant person will never emerge—this mode of reporting and analyzing the present is quintessentially different from narrative modes of writing, which focus on events that have been completed in the past.

I.R. Vigilance – the only way to live out an occupation. To look where we avert our eyes, to listen where there seems to be nothing comprehensible to hear, to focus attention when only distraction seems to be demanded. Vigilance is the production of attention, the ability to will attention and as such it is one of the most powerful political tools we have at our disposal. For it is when we pay attention that we participate in the constitution of the other into subjecthood. The denial of subjecthood has always been a major part of colonialism and its erosions have been produced through elaborate bureaucratic reasoning and equally elaborate semantic. At the beginning of the second Intifada while the cities of the West Bank were under curfew and closure and their inhabitants forced indoors for over 40 days I heard a young Israeli schoolgirl explain on NPR that this was not an ‘occupation’ for the word occupation meant a final conquest , whereas we, she said, had always meant to give these territories back. Vigilance then, is perhaps the act of paying attention to the erosion of ourselves more than to charting the conditions of the others.

VIGIL-PRESENCE

M.W. A story is told about a lone demonstrator who conducted a daily vigil outside the White House long before the anti war movement sprung up in the United States against the war in Vietnam. No matter how many persons passed by him everyday with indifference or shouted abusive remarks at him, it only strengthened his resolve to return every day and stand with his placards. One day, he was surprised at the sight of a pedestrian who actually bothered to stop and talk to him. The stranger asked, "Do you really believe you can change things by coming here every day and demonstrating?" After a pause, he softly replied, "I do not persist coming here because I have any illusion that I can stop the war and influence events--I come here every day because I do not want the administration and the events to change me."

Machsom-Watch is an example of a women's vigilant activist organization that vow to monitor Israeli checkpoints in the occupied territories on a daily basis. Vigilance becomes a form of active presence, using tactics of engagement to intervene, stall, and interfere with the soldiers' work when that is needed. Frustrated with the women's committed work, the army decided recently in some checkpoints to draw a white line on the ground and write the word "watch" on a sign to impede the women from crossing this boundary and disturb the soldiers. Such an action has a reverse effect to the one intended. It may partly hamper the efficiency of the women's ability to intervene but it is no small feat in their credit because their presence is now inscribed into the space of the checkpoint and into the discourse which the occupier has from the start wanted to avoid. Hence, now, even when the women are not there, there is a vigilant semiotic presence, inscribed by a white line and a sign, which not only calls attention to the notion of the gaze (of being watched) and to a moral standpoint (one must remain on guard because one has to internalize a conscientious eye) but it also induces a reference to time ('watch') which corresponds to the women's actual work in trying to enable the Palestinian pedestrians to travel freely and not have to wait in long lines and lose time. The white line can also be read in relation to another green line, which the soldiers painted on the ground to mark the distance the Palestinians have to maintain from them at the checkpoint. Two colors, green and white (both of which are present in the Palestinian flag) are now inscribed into the spatial and temporal scene of the checkpoint, which is the only transitional space in which Israelis and Palestinians meet in some form of contact.

I.R. My friend who has been accused of spoiling so many dinner parties in Tel Aviv with her tales of woe, has an answer for her accuser – “its not that I mean to sour these enjoyable evenings, she says, its not as if I arrive with a plan to tell these stories and shame everyone for not being as keen or as vigilant as I am, its simply that it does not leave me , I see these stories in every face around me”.