Heroes are Manifestations of National Desire.

Of all of the readings we've done so far, the most powerful quote, in my reading, does not even directly relate to the visual. In fact, the sentence seemed tossed out casually, almost as if the authors missed its import: Helmers and Hill wrote, in the introduction to Defining Visual Rhetorics, "Heroes are manifestations of national desire." A perfect sentence.

And to be sure, they wrote this in service of an explication of the visual, specifically the post-9/11 image Ground Zero Spirit. Helmers and Hill showed the intertextuality between this and the Iwo Jima monument, where the masculine "unambiguous hero" image is constructed through national desire. In this, the element of time works through a culture and an image, for on the one hand, we view an image in the present (Helmers and Hill call this synchronic), but on the other hand, we view images through knowledge of previous images (they call this diachronic). This resonates with Berger's ideas about light and time being the primary elements of photography, where an image "quotes" a scene, and arrests it in time, detaching it from past and future actuality while remaining there in potentiality. This corresponds, in part, to Christine's post about the relationship between photography and time.

And this idea of national desire also connects to our reading of Hawk's A Counter-history of Composition, specifically in his treatment of desiring-machines (the idea comes from Anti-Oedipus by Deleuze and Guattari). While Hawk reads Deleuze and Guattari through the lens of rhetoric and composition, with an eye toward explicating and defending complex vitalism, I am interested in the way the authors of Anti-Oedipus conceptualize desire as a productive force, where it is not merely the acquisition of an object of desire by a desiree, but a process that produces reality. Heroes are called into being by national desire.

But maybe to say that they are "called into being" is too strong. Helmers and Hill use the word "manifestations," which carries the idea of a disembodied spirit appearing in physical form. As matter rushes to fill a vacuum, heroes appear at times of need, like when traditional values need to be re-inscribed: patriotism, or family, or the essentially goodness of humanity. Are we to understand these heroes, then, as ersatz, or merely constructed?

And this resonates with the issue I chose to represent 2010: the Chilean mine collapse. It is probably safe to say that most Americans do not spend much time thinking about Chile, much less about miners in Chile. Disasters happen weekly, even daily. Why were we so fascinated by these men? Perhaps we needed heroes. In the midst of religiously motivated warfare and economic upheaval, we needed a story with a happy ending. Maybe we subconsciously seized on the hell/purgatory metaphor, where they fought their way free through bravery and cooperation, a triumph of the human spirit. Or perhaps, as other readings suggested, the heroes were not the men themselves, but other forces, like God or capitalism.

I cannot help but connect this with my time in seminary. Perhaps in contradiction to a Jewish reading of Jesus's appearance, the early Christians saw the coming of Christ as running counter to the national desire of the Hebrew people, who longed for a warrior-hero to deliver them from Roman rule. Jesus, instead, came in the guise of a "suffering servant" (see Isaiah), sheathing Peter's sword and replacing the servant's ear, and thus distancing himself from the sword as a symbol (John 18), and instead taking the visual symbol of the cross (some have noted that in ancient times, wearing a cross around ones neck would be roughly akin to wearing an electric chair necklace today). Thus his legacy became a site of struggle, much in the same way as that of the miners.

What heroes do you see manifested by national desire? And what counter-interpretations of those events are offered?