The Future of Haiti as an International Success Story

The immediate and mid-term future of Haiti after the massive destruction in Port-au-Prince will largely be dependent on the aid that flows in from outside sources. That aid will in turn be heavily dependent on the narrative within which it flows. Already the news is full of descriptions of what a mess Haitian infrastructure was before the devastation, along with descriptions of Haiti as being the US's poorest neighbor, the most squalid and so on. Aid that is generated out of those descriptions can only follow the logic of pity for a nation that is incapable of caring for itself.

But there is a completely different historical perspective on Haiti that has been kept largely invisible in western media, one in which Haiti is a remarkable success story, for whom success came ahead of the rest of the hemisphere and for which it was severely punished by the international community.

In the Winter 2005 issue of Bomb Magazine, there is a conversation between Gina Ulysse and Sibylle Fischer about Fischer's book, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, in which Fischer explores the influence of Haiti on Modernism.

The Haitian Revolution in 1804 was an uprising where black slaves forcibly took control of the country, wrested it out of the control of its French colonial masters and created their own country. At this time a black state in the Americas was the nightmare of every neighbor, most of whose economies ran on slavery. The birth of Haiti forecast the emancipation of slaves throughout the hemisphere, but in itself was severely punished.

Haiti was immediately censured and ostracized by the international community and was allowed into international relations only after they agreed to pay massive fines to France for which they took out usurious loans from the French themselves. Haiti started from the ground up with no outside help--a nation of slaves who freed themselves and attempted to form a nation far from their countries and cultures of origin, in a part of the world where a black state was a symbol of some of the greatest fears of its neighbors. Haiti is formed as a country by "the only successful slave revolution in Western history."

Although Modernism doesn't come together in the West for almost another century, many of its principles and problems are present in the birth of Haiti as a nation. In the words of Fischer:

But I don’t think we can explain the current situation without also talking about the isolation of Haiti in the Western hemisphere. To give just one of the more egregious examples: in his recent Clash of Civilizations Samuel Huntington argues that Haiti belongs to the category of countries that are not part of any of the world’s great civilizations; and I really have to quote this to you: “Haiti, ‘the neighbor nobody wants,’ is truly a kinless country.” And there are other factors that need to be considered to explain the current disaster, especially the history of U.S. interventions on the island, the half-hearted actions of the UN, and so on...

...To me the Haitian dilemma is how to make the telling of the past visceral to inveigle a sort of awakening. It’s like being awake and everyone else is in a dream world. It is precisely because of that state of unawareness that January 2004 [the bicentennial celebration of the revolution] came and went, most newspaper articles questioned just what did Haiti have to celebrate given its 200 years of turmoil.

We need to rapidly appreciate Haiti for the success that it was, for the fact that it exists in the first place. The massive destruction in Haiti today is catastrophic on a level rarely seen in the Americas. In the next weeks and months, huge amounts of money and aid will amass, with organizations springing up to raise it, channel it and distribute it. The aid will be distributed along lines heavily influenced by a narrative understanding of Haiti's past. To what extent was it a failure and to what extent is it a revolutionary success? The answer to that question in western media will have a great deal of influence on the local futures of Haitian themselves, for it will direct the nature and character of foreign initiatives to help them build again. How the world perceives the possibilities of Haiti's future will depend on it's sense of value for its past.

Update: CJR has a post this morning detailing recent successes in Haiti. It counters the tone of the New York Times piece this morning that basically details Haiti as an ongoing hopeless situation.

A Look Back at Writings Over the Past Three Years

Representing the Unrepresentable: Photographs are conceived of, created, distributed and consumed within technological and business structures that are designed to achieve political impact. Those structures, which are largely invisible to the consumer, shape the viewer experience and it is only by reverse engineering the economies within which the images flow that we can change their political outcomes. (Nine posts.)

Modernism and Esotericism: Modernism is at its root a spiritual event that requires an intellectual response, not an intellectual movement with spiritual implications.

Towards a New Aesthetics of Democracy: In the US we have a picture of democracy as a winner take all event. We need to introduce disappointment and compromise as a key aesthetic ingredient to our depictions of democracy since they are essential to true democratic process in a pluralistic culture.

Photography and the Unconscious Panopticon: Mass media have always been organized in ways that control the flow of information and separate viewers. Now with the advent of social media, users are choosing to seek out media that only reinforces their own perceptions and beliefs. This effectively decreases diversity and variety of opinion and increases idealism. (Four posts.)

Aesthetics of Catastrophe: An analysis of my experience and process shooting in post-Katrina New Orleans.

The Self and the Other: Language shapes the root options available to anyone's perceptions of the world. Communicating across language barriers is incredibly difficult because each language forms a different picture of what the world actually is. We may live on the same planet, but effectively inhabit and believe in different worlds entirely.

Obama, Aesthetics and the Way Forward: A call for a grittier depiction of the presidency in the face of such financial crisis.

Confessions of a Bone Saw Artist: An in-depth analysis of photo retouching and how powerful tools have contributed to an increasing erosion of visual norms in popular culture, especially in the fashion and beauty industries. Editorial publications should publish retouching disclosure statements that detail their internal retouching policies so the viewers can interpret the visuals that they are presented with.

A Brief, Incomplete and Slightly Revisionist, History of the Publishing Crisis: A look at how the magazine world came to rely on advertisers as it's key consumers, and why that business model is failing.

The World in Miniature: An examination of how computer based editing tools are changing the ways we ultimately see and understand photographs.

On John Cage and Seeing the World: Artistic practice can be spiritual practice as well. John Cage sought to break open the performer/audience relationship and point the listener away or through himself and out into the world.

A Constellation of Thoughts

I maintain this blog primarily because I learn through doing, and writing in this format is a way to follow ideas and concepts forward. By focusing on the urgencies of the day over time we find bigger patterns and pictures. It is very much as if we are poking around in a massive unlit warehouse with a flashlight. Each post is focused on what is pressing and visible in that moment, and as they accumulate, a much larger picture starts to emerge.

You will have picked up on the warehouse/unconscious metaphor by now. Experience tells that production across the cultural spectrum is driven largely by unconscious pressures, and the great work of our time is in finding ways to relate to these unseen areas of our individual and collective psyches. For the past three years these posts have generally been circling around and exploring the entire process by which images are desired, conceived, created, marketed, distributed and consumed.

In that spirit, coming next is a recap of the highlights of three years of writing on this blog, each post or series of posts exploring a piece of a puzzle that contributes to an overall picture that is starting to emerge. It is a picture of a world passing through an incredible technological revolution that is creating tensions that have the capacity either to generate entirely new paradigms or to cement and reify the status quo. We are in flux, and as such the outcome is yet undetermined. But our success in imagining new economies, new political models, new communities and cultures, will in large part be determined by our ability to tolerate the dialectical tensions that permeate the process of leaving behind the old and moving towards the new.

The cultural production engines of late capitalism have created products and systems that need dismantling if we are to re-engineer them for the future. And this is not merely a technical dismantling but an aesthetic one as well. I'm working here in service to that last goal, pulling together a picture from my own diverse set of experiences across the culture making spectrum.

The kind of solutions we need arise out of the awful tensions created in cultural dialectics, where we must hold on to broken and competing realities while we synthesize new solutions. The tensions are manifest in the time that takes place between recognizing the unresolved dialectic and the emergence of a new reality that can bring some new thing from it. Most of what I am going to detail in this next series is a constellation of problems for which I have few answers. My hope is that we can live with the tensions until answers emerge, along with their associated paradoxes and contradictions.