Scanning Our Mugshot Drama with Nick Mirzoeff
Today I welcome Nicholas Mirzoeff, a long time friend, activist, theorist, and all around good trouble maker to my Substack blog to discuss the spectacle from Georgia.
Hi Nick, good to have you join me as we try to make sense out of the senseless, in this case the police booking photographs, or mugshots, of our former President and his pack of accomplices from Fulton County, Georgia. This gallery of reprobates included Rudi Giuliani, Sidney Powell, John Eastman, and other confederates in the RICO racketeering case to illegally overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 election. Your work over many years extensively explores the way that photography in particular has, not without exceptions, tended to serve the entwined ideological interests of capital, of patriarchal power, and of white supremacy. You have even labeled this phenomena "white sight," implying that it exists already prior to the taking of a photograph and starts with the "look" itself. But in this case, we are confronted with these photographs, and what struck me immediately upon seeing the nine images was how little they resembled the standard, expressionless mugshot, but more closely appeared to be the result of a performance by the subjects that was designed and rehearsed precisely for that moment before the camera.
Nicholas Mirzoeff (NM): Hi Greg, great to be here. You’re on point with this mugshot drama. Mugshots are a technology of white sight, designed to create hierarchy between the “good” citizen and the degenerate criminal. In the late nineteenth century when mugshots were introduced, they sought to visualize the criminal as a racial type, following the peculiar but long-lived theories of Italian eugenicist Cesare Lombroso. Photographs quickly became part of the police apparatus to humiliate and break prisoners. When imprisoned in Reading Gaol, Oscar Wilde observed that the mugshots were taken in the same building used for executions, a form of psychological torture. Political activists on the left have often tried to refuse and subvert that policing. In a clearly co-ordinated performance–ironically validating the conspiracy accusations– Trump and his co-conspirators have appropriated this technique by either laughing at the camera or, in Trump’s case, doing a tough guy scowl.His aggression was undermined by the visibly styled hair mat above his head. As he no doubt intended, the photo is ubiquitous, as are memes derived from it. In the gym this morning, I saw a long segment on Fox News complaining that the media had just shown the photo and not Trump’s statement. Although they didn’t put it this way, the anxiety was that in this highly stylized genre, form dominates content. That’s to say, mugshot has signified “criminal” for so long that the endless repetitions of the image diminish Trump’s attempt to subvert it. When the image becomes wallpaper, it does the work it’s supposed to do and signifies “criminal.”
GS So in this instance, with Trump and company, are we dealing with a “failed” mugshot, Nick? And does its not-working help link up these images with a tradition of dissent and rebelliousness that is so fundamental to the US national identity in both its best and worst dimensions including Jane Fonda and MLK for instance, but also the Johnny Reb of the Confederacy? Or is something else going on here instead, or in addition to this genealogy of representational resistance?
NM That’s exactly the question, Greg. Trump and co. want to co-opt the tradition from the left and thereby render the trial(s) into a forum on the administration, in the way that Angela Davis or Nelson Mandela did in earlier moments. Georgia will help this effort because the trials will be televised. No competent defense counsel should let Trump anywhere near the stand, of course. But the mugshot affair also highlights his vanity. Trump is always complaining that CNN doesn't use flattering pictures of him, whereas ABC run 12 photos of Trump in every 90 second news item–which is to say every bulletin.
When you place these three photos next to each other, what leaps out is the dynamic of race and gender that Trumpism goes to immense lengths to deny. What present-day white supremacy seeks to articulate is an amalgam of resentment and fear of replacement. At Charlottesville in 2017, fascist marchers chanted “You will not replace us” at a BLM small counter-protest. This resentment and fear of replacement motivated the challenge to affirmative action upheld by the so-called Supreme Court this summer.
For a certain kind of white person, Trump’s mugshot mobilizes what Astra Taylor calls “insecurity.” The dynamic at work in this series of mugshots is the diminishing of the psychological “wages of whiteness,” in which whiteness guarantees better opportunities and facilities. Female-identified, Black, Indigenous and PoC activists are blamed for this expansion of insecurity to white identified people. This is what Trump means when he claims he’s undergoing prosecution for “you,” his white audience.
In itself the endless mainstream media narrative about Trumpism recenters whiteness as the unspoken center of US life. Despite all this, Trump won’t get to reset the national clock to 2016, even if he wins. Even as racist and police violence continues, the events at Montgomery showed how things have changed. When drunk white boaters tried to assault Capt. Dameion Pickett, a group of Black folks came to his rescue, spawning some viral videos and the meme of the folding chair. Used in the incident to fend-off one of the white boaters, the chair has become a complex symbol of Black resistance and unity, also raising questions for white viewers.
GS: I am also curious what you think of the one person of color in the group, Harrison Floyd, who was denied bail and now sits in prison. Was this a cynically intended outcome on the part of the Trump media machine?
NM I’ve absolutely got to assume so, yes!
GS Smart of them in the short-term perhaps, but ultimately, optically, it is just another instance of racially-loaded punishment that I hope backfires. And speaking of backfiring, Nick, it was amusing, but also telling, that the rocketing ascension of “Rich Men North of Richmond” in the music charts, quickly crashed again amongst the far-Right US xenophobes who once championed it after the song’s author, Oliver Anthony, embraced diversity in an interview. Not making him a hero here, but recognizing that this current blight of tribalist, ultra-nationalist white supremacy feeds directly into, and is fed back in turn by, a sea of dark money from hyper-wealthy capitalists falsely claiming that they support the true American “working classes,” while deeply coding this fiction with racially polarizing language. Making the remarkable history of cross-color and cross-gender labor organizing in the US another tragic casualty of this ruse. That particular past, alas, is being whitewashed! I only hope that occurrences such as the cancellation of Oliver by the Right will help open-up a space again for imagining the kind of solidarity of resistance to a system that oppresses the vast majority of us, as was witnessed in the past. But that possibility must also keep the purveyors of White Sight up at night.
NM The dynamic with that song is a metonym of how this curious contradiction plays out in the conjuncture. Everyone seemed to think it expressed the resentment/replacement paranoia of the “white working class”--a term that, as you rightly point out, has displaced all other class formations. If he is now claiming the opposite, it shows that the revival of the 2020 coalitions is far from impossible. Unfortunately, it’s as much the Democratic party with its categorical refusal to support the abolition agenda that created and sustained that coalition which stands in the way as the far-right. As ever, it’s social movements that are going to need to do the work in this complex overdetermined moment–just today, anti-immigrant racists tried to “Occupy Gracie Mansion,” co-opting the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement.
GS There is indeed a genuine stirring of organized social pushback that makes the return of mass, anti-capitalist coalitions seem like a political possibility again. I am referring to the new wave of unionization taking place in service center warehouses and with gig workers, as well as in our own backyard amongst teachers and art museum staffers. It is amazing to see this taking shape and to note that this union membership, are also aware of the issues you have been so steadfastly addressing about straight white insecurity and patriarchy for decades, along with confronting the urgent environmental chaos posed by an economy rooted in extractionism and unconditional expansion. Do we dare go so far as to suggest that old specter from 1840s Europe has returned to its old haunting ways? If so, then no amount of “are you talking to me?” posturing can rescue Trump’s deluded false messianism and his just deserts are about to be served to him, behind bars.
Thanks Nick! And you can follow him at: The Week in White Sight