viz.

Behold, the generic and intimidating Lego "Bad Guy" for their new Indiana Jones series:

Image: www.lego.com

As you may realize, Lego is engaging in a bit of revisionism: in the original films (at least in the first and third films), the "Bad Guys" were Nazis. Yet notice here that something is conspicuously absent from this little guy (in Lego lingo, a "minifig")...

From the Lego web site's description of these "Bad Guys": "On his many dangerous quests, Indy often runs into evil people who want to steal ancient treasures for their own gain. Although they might outnumber Indy, his skill, his friends, and his trusty whip always help him get away!"

What's missing, of course, is the scarlet armband with swastika so ubiquitous in most films depicting Nazis. It's not surprising that Lego has made this change--as has been noted on this blog, the swastika is a highly controversial symbol, nearly universally reviled in the west (in my opinion, with good reason), even though it has a long history predating its cooptation by the Nazi party. It's also the case that these new Lego sets (released in anticipation of the upcoming Indiana Jones 4 movie) depict films and not real history, which (as I have to keep reminding myself) the movies do not portray. So it's not as if there is some obligation on their part to stay true to the facts (and after all, this is a toy company we're talking about--imagine the response if they started selling millions of little Nazis in boxes marked for 10-12 year olds).

Still, while the change is not remarkable, it is definitely noticeable--and it does lead one to reflect on some weightier issues about representation and violence. For example, it brings to mind an earlier debate about a controversial project by the Polish artist Zbigniew Libera, in which he created a series of Concentration Camp Lego sets with bricks donated by the company:

(For more images, do a Google image search for "Lego Concentration Camp.") According to Wikipedia, Lego did not have a clear vision of Libera's project and after it was released declined to endorse it--even though the boxes very prominently say the project was sponsored by Lego. The sets were created in 1996 and shown in 2002 at the Jewish Museum in New York City as part of an exhibition about representations of the Holocaust; predicably, they stirred some controversy, with detractors claiming that the sets trivialized the Holocaust. You can read an essay on these sets by Stephen C. Feinstein in "the e-journal of cultural criticism" Other Voices:

Libera represents only one example of some of the boundaries that are being pushed by artists regarding a subject which has traditionally been sanctified. The desanctification may provide an edge to shake many viewers from complacency about the Shoah, and in fact provide simple and plausible answers to the question about its origins: all of the elements of a potential Holocaust or genocide surround us. All that is needed is someone to assemble them, and tell people how to use them. Most important is that the art does not sanctify and commit viewers to look only towards the past, but to engage in an active debate about ongoing genocidal events.

This controversy about representations of the Holocaust has become something of a debate not only in art criticism but also political philosophy. In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Giorgio Agamben argues that it is politically untenable to "lend a sacraficial aura to the extermination of the Jews by means of the term 'Holocaust'" (114) because treating these events as a matter of what he calls "religion" obscures the mechanisms which led to the unfolding of such events in the first place. Feinstein's argument about the Lego sets seems to echo such a view. For him, the sets very simply and directly draw attention to the building blocks of genocide, as it were. I'm inclined to agree with his analysis, but I'm also inclined to agree with Agamben, and his work has been controversial in this regard. Is the Holocaust itself even representable? For many years, the default answer was "no": but a new sense seems to be emerging that if we insist on treating it this way, we may not be able to prevent another one or see it coming (or, for that matter, adequately see and deal with the ones that are already happening in the world around us).

These issues have something to do with my dissertation project and representations of suffering and violence and the cultural work such representations perform. They also certainly raise questions in terms of poetics and studies of mimesis, but they also clearly point toward other questions about the circulation of meaning and where it is/can be created. How visually effective is Libera's work as an argument? How clearly and successfully does it communicate the argument Feinstein says it does?