The Treachery of Images can be the image of treachery, as Banksy shows us using Twitter in reference to Je Suis Charlie, since the outrage, real or imagined about Charlie Hebdo's publications is really only metaphorically about spectacles and pulling down pants, or meta-message conveyed by paralanguage. Put culturally, it is meta-criticism distributed via media. As a target for radicals, satire or more correctly parody has in media form become the easy method for cultural criticism and as we have seen, political action in the form of terrorism, as if language or language-like forms could really have the same force exercised by paramilitary police. Static and dynamic art are never as transgressive as static and dynamic CQB entry, yet should never have killed anyone and yet they have when one considers any of history's iconoclastic and idolatric controversies.
Jean Bastien-Thiry, the last person to be executed by firing squad in France and the quasi-fictional subject of the Day of the Jackal cannot be compared to the barbaric attempt by two shooters on Wednesday to be seen as heroic and this is no reason to valorize their actions, but they are Algerian-French and hence part of the legacy of an historically alienated population in France, the pieds-noir. The assassination attempt on Charles DeGaulle in 1962 by the OAS is another reason for revisiting that cinematic history since it goes both to the fictionalizing of the original act in the novel and movie Day of the Jackal using the actual attempt as a framing narrative. As always, cinema and now digital media can perform both terror and counter-terroristic purposes as they become realized and criticized. The difference is that casualties result, both real and imagined, much as the discourse will continue to fragment in societies determined by their historical legacies.
After the March 1962 Evian agreements, which granted independence to Algeria and marked the beginning of the exodus of the pieds-noirs, the OAS tried by a campaign of assassinations and bombings to stop the on-going political process. This campaign culminated in Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry's 1962 assassination attempt against president Charles de Gaulle in the Paris suburb of Le Petit-Clamart.
The Treachery of Images (French: La trahison des images, 1928–29, sometimes translated as The Treason of Images) is a painting by the Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte, painted when Magritte was 30 years old. The picture shows a pipe. Below it, Magritte painted, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe.", French for "This is not a pipe."
"The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it's just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture "This is a pipe", I'd have been lying!"
His statement is taken to mean that the painting itself is not a pipe. The painting is merely an image of a pipe. Hence, the description, "this is not a pipe." The theme of pipes with the text "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" is extended in his 1966 painting, Les Deux Mystères. It is currently on display at the Art Institute of Chicago, on loan from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The painting is sometimes given as an example of meta message conveyed by paralanguage. Compare with Korzybski's "The word is not the thing" and "The map is not the territory".
Underlying ethnicity matters as it has from the
Battle of Algiers period for example the use of the term
banlieue or a witness remarking on the "perfect" French accents of the Charlie Hebdo terrorists. One person's banlieue is another's Casbah, but in both cases it is life on the margins. Some of them could be like the
Pieds-Noirs (European-descendent citizens who "returned" to mainland France as soon as Algeria gained independence, or in the months following). "Jacques Derrida did not emphasize his Jewish-Algerian roots until later in his career. ... as a Jewish pied-noir, Derrida's identity was self-consciously hybrid..." So
banlieue is more than but rather like the dystopian movie
District B13, a frame for understanding the discourse of Charlie Hebdo.
The word banlieue, which is French for "suburb," does not necessarily refer to an environment of social disenfranchisement. Indeed there exist many wealthy suburbs, such as Neuilly-sur-Seine (the wealthiest commune of France) and Versailles outside Paris. Nevertheless, the term banlieues has often been used to describe troubled suburban communities—those with high unemployment, high crime rates, and frequently, a high proportion of residents of foreign origin mainly from former French African colonies and therefore Berbers, Blacks and Arabs.
And yet, as a signifier, banlieue is encoded to mean something different, something more specific. The technical and purportedly neutral meaning of banlieue as “suburb” not only stands in stark contrast to the entire linguistic and political history of the word, but it also accentuates a number of values and meanings assigned to it within contemporary discourses
During his trial he claimed he intended to kidnap de Gaulle, not kill him. Asked how he intended to confine the President, Bastien-Thiry replied, "We would just have taken away his spectacles and braces." His defense lawyer was heard to mutter, "he has just signed his own death warrant," as it was much anticipated that while de Gaulle might have pardoned an assassin, he would not pardon an assassin who publicly mocked him.