Word: neutralizing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...core of Sontag's argument is that photography is not an art: it is a language, a neutral medium. Its analogue is not painting but paint. "Out of language, one can make scientific discourse, bureaucratic memoranda, love letters, grocery lists, and Balzac's Paris. Out of photography, one can make passport pictures, weather photographs, pornographic pictures, X-rays, wedding pictures and Atget's Paris...
Sontag is uneasy about the entire role of "concerned" photography. Holocaust victims, matchstick Biafran children, burnt Vietnamese-seen as products in the camera's neutral eye, she argues, these images of suffering become analgesic; they first stimulate the moral sense, then dull it by overload. There is a truth to that, but not the whole truth. No matter what one may say against the continual voyeurism of photography, the likelihood is that it played as great a role in finishing the Viet Nam War as the printed word did. (One main reason why civilians in England could tolerate...
...there something potentially sinister about television's intrusion into this striking moment of history? Did TV in fact serve history well in the episode? Or was TV, as the networks defensively insist, merely a neutral professional bouncing its images off a satellite with no intention-or effect-beyond good journalism? Oddly enough, the answer to all three questions is probably...
Precedents exist for such limitations on sovereignty. In 1955 Austria agreed to remain neutral and to limit the strength of its military in order to gain independence from the occupying powers (U.S., Britain, France and the Soviet Union). Japan's constitution allows only for self-defense forces that cannot be used in aggressive acts...
...display pronounced male sexual development. Wachtel discovered why. Analyzing the blood of these individuals, he found that their chromosomes apparently contained a hidden male factor-a variant of the same signal found in normal males. In the first few weeks after conception, when the embryo is still sexually neutral, the signal causes the development of testes, a source of male hormones. In the case of the XX males, however, the male factor, apparently consisting of a bit of genetic material-possibly no more than a single gene-is somehow attached to a chromosome other than the usual Y. The proof...