Images as discursive praxes: Mick Jagger in Tangiers

Abstract

Images do not simply grow of their own volition in meadows unplanted and unwatered. Inundating screens and even walls, images pervade and invade every inch of our privacy. So pervasive and invasive has this presence become we have grown into the habit of consuming them as though they were born, not made. This naturalness will be denaturalized, denuded and shown for what it is and what it is not; what it reveals and conceals. This article will then tap into the images Mick Jagger circulates while en voyage in Tangiers recording Continental Drift. We will demonstrate how images come to be and to mean especially when commented upon, a cultural composition (trans)forming a composite of elements that go into its making and marketing. Before being marketed, images are made, aligned, sequenced, filtered, and brought together to become shots, and the shots to become scenes, the rearrangement of which gave the Rolling Stones rebirth caught on camera in The Rolling Stones in Morocco. This documentary film, a cultural rather than a natural composition, under study is impregnated with meanings and nuances one can hear if one listens closely. This film ought not to be «seen and heard, but to be scrutinized and listened to attentively» (Barthes, 1977, p. 68). While they purport to speak for Moroccans, the images in collusion with Mick Jagger speak against things Moroccan.