Michael Dale week3
Defacement by Michael Taussig Michael Tassig characterizes the attributes of defacement in a cultural context. Tassig provides a framework for understanding the power of defacement. Tassig looks at defacement as a means of revealing the truth of a public secrete. This exposure works by unmasking or brining out the inherent magic in iconic cultural manifestations. Criticism: Tassig’s example of knowing what not to know in the case of the police, and military human rights violations in Colombian is somewhat confusing. My confusion arises in what Tassig is characterizing as a shared secret in this case. I do not believe many people where aware of the human rights violations taking place in that country. I don’t know if you could characterize information available only to select portions of the population as a shared secrete. Perhaps Tassing is implying that the shared secrete is what occurs among policy planers. As policy planers would presumably know the “secrete” of shared culpability in human rights violations that their collaborators participated in. But even that claim is problematic as often policy planers are directed in specific domains that have very bounded lines of inquiry in the context of their ideological position. That is to say they would understand defacement very differently than someone that was in on the shared secrete. This reveling of truth is ultimately relative to ideological position. A truth ceases to be true if it is in conflict with the ideological construction of the individual for who it is presented. Tssigs explanation of defacements and how they function on shared secrets is productive, but I would not characterize secretes as publicly shared secrets. Questions and Art examples: On page 5, Tassig says that “Defacement works on objects the way jokes work on language” This reference is productive given my first example of contemporary defacement. America the Book, published in association with the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, illustrates this principal of defacement in their nude depiction of Supreme Court judges. Similar to the mismanaged engagement with royalty featured by Tassig, the demythologizing of Supreme Court justices reveals the mythical judicial authority. Featured below is a clip from the news media’s engagement with the revelation of that secret.
Another example of defacement is the literal hacking of a webserver to deface the authority of the domain in putting an alternate message on the site. Zone-h features an archive of such defacements. It is interesting that the majority are characterized as non-political. |