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Camerawork: A Journal of Photographic Arts Fall/Winter 2000, Volume 27, No.2 Democracy - The Last Campaign Guest Editor: David Levi Strauss Table of Contents • In This Issue • $8 each (no discount) [Add to Cart]   table of contents 3. In This Issue by David Levi Strauss 6. A Ferocious Philosophy (The Last Campaign): The Image of Democracy & the Democracy of Images David Levi Strauss 13. False Promises: Utopian Rhetoric and the Digital Divide David Trend 17. Portfolio: Democracy - The Last Campaign Margaret Crane / Jon Winet 27. Elián Through the Looking Glass Democracy: Virtual and Otherwise Roberto Tejada 36. Exhibition Review Blurring the Boundaries: Installation Art, 1969-1996 San Jose Museum of Art Susan Marquez 38. In the Gallery Recent Exhibitions at SF Camerawork 39. Screen Grab: The Net Bazaar Alicia Miller 40. Book Review Eugenia Parry, Crime Album Stories Lydia Matthews 42. Books Received and Noted 44. Books Received in this issue Democracy: The Last Campaign This issue of Camerawork: A Journal of Photographic Arts was initiated and inspired by Margaret Crane and Jon Winet as part of their year-long multi-media project focusing on the spectacle of the twentieth century's last American presidential campaign. This year's investigation is Crane/Winet's fifth consecutive quadrennial election year word and image project, and it peers deep into the dark heart of our political process and its public representations. Its title, Democracy: The Last Campaign, has haunted me since I first heard it over a year ago. It has a melancholy ring to it, as if we might be viewing the final stages of the ultimate decline of a once noble experiment. Might democracy disappear, not as the result of strong-arm tyranny, but by attrition, as the descent into ochlocracy is orchestrated by corporate oligarchs of the type Socrates long ago described as those who consider "nothing but the ways of making more money from a little," because they have "never turned [their] thoughts to true culture?" I began to think about how that might happen and how photographic images might contribute to or resist that gradual diminution. My essay begins with an imaginary conversation on the image of democracy and the democracy of images with Walt Whitman, George Eastman, and Paul Virilio: a poet, a businessman, and a theorist, out of time. It then compares Whitman's image of democracy with that of Rimbaud, Virilio's resistance to the ideology of technocracy with Bill Joy's mea culpa, and our contemporary cultural images of democracy with its historical reality. David Trend has been thinking and writing about the current crisis of democratic discourse, and the relation between democracy and technology for many years now, in his books such as Radical Democracy (1996), Cultural Democracy: Politics, Media, New Technology (1997) and the forthcoming Reading Digital Culture. In his essay for this issue, he confronts the extravagant claims currently being made for a new technological democracy, and compares the rhetoric and hype of access and interactivity to the hard reality of the digital divide, pointing out that "Internet users represent less than 3 percent of the world's six billion people," and that Bill Gates' personal wealth "is equal to that of the entire lower half of the U.S. population–or 120 million people." In this light, Trend asks "Is it possible to reconcile the democratic aspirations of cyberspace with its inegalitarian materiality? Perhaps, but not until digital media are seen as a terrain of struggle rather than an inherently egalitarian space." Roberto Tejada's essay focuses on the images of democracy that arose from the Elián González story. Like other recent media spectacles (O.J., Jon Benet, and Monica), the Elián story was driven largely by images, with a logic and a history of their own. Tejada points out that, like those other media blitzes before it, the Elián story "was a reminder of TV's (and now the Internet's) failed utopian promise of a peaceably united community of spectators in the form of televised entertainment or virtual transmission." In the propaganda war that raged around this story, the images of a little boy rescued from the sea, the lost son of either the Revolution or the anti-Castro forces in Miami, were too fascinating and too potent to ignore. Tejada considers these images and "representation–both democratic and aesthetic" in an in-depth analysis of their workings in the image-nation, recognizing that "the high stakes at play…were the contradictions and impossibilities inherent in democracy itself." Technology today is almost always thought of as the answer to whatever problems humankind faces. What is missing are the questions. And if we learn anything from the Greeks about democracy, it should be that democracy is not the answer, but a question that must be asked over and over again. Our intent in this issue is to raise a few questions. Against the deluge of Panglossian optimism about the current and future relation between technology and democracy, we propose a little Resistance. David Levi Strauss home | about | exhibitions | bookstore | events | membership | journal | mentoring | links Copyright 2002. SF Camerawork. All Rights Reserved.