Below is the conclusion to the draft of the chapter section I began in my immediately preceding post.
NOTE TO READERS: For the next month and one-half, other priorities will be taking me away from blogging at this site. Accordingly this will be my last post until early next year. I hope to put up my next post on January 4, 2010.
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There is something voyeuristic about the fascination with which those who occupy a position of spectator with regard to the traumas of others look upon photographs of the suffering involved. Susan Sontag reflects on that voyeurism in Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003), her return after a quarter-century to the concerns she first addressed in On Photography, originally published in 1977 (by the same publisher). It is worth noting that in Regarding the Pain of Others she raises the issue of voyeurism in relation to photographs of trauma by first contrasting such photographic images to other visual images that, no matter how graphic and “realistic,” involve imaginary, and in that sense fictional or “invented,” events. Thus, on page 42 she writes:
An invented horror can be quite overwhelming. (I, for one, find it difficult to look at Titian’s great painting of the flaying of Marsyas, or indeed at any picture of this subject.) But there is shame as well as shock in looking at the close-up of a real horror. Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it—say, the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph was taken [as in an example she has earlier discussed]—or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be.
Near the end of her book, Sontag returns to the same issue of the moral inappropriateness and illegitimacy of trafficking in photographic images of trauma, adding another dimension to her critique. In addition to opening the door to voyeuristic abuses, the proliferation of such images serves, even aside from the intentions of those involved in its production, the powers at work in the perpetration and perpetuation of trauma inflicted by some upon others. Thus, against the not uncommon idea that the dissemination of such images on television and in other mass media brings spectators to greater understanding and sympathy for the victims of traumatic abuse, Sontag writes (pages 102-103):
The imaginary priority to the suffering inflicted on others that is granted by images suggests a link between the far-away sufferers—seen close up on the television screen—and the privileged viewer that is simply untrue, that is yet one more mystification of our real relations to power. So far as we feel sympathy, we feel that we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence. To that extent, it can be (for all our good intentions) an impertinent—if not at inappropriate response. To set aside the sympathy we extend to others beset by war and murderous politics for a reflection on how our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering, and may—in ways we might prefer not to imagine—be linked to their suffering, as the wealth of some may imply the destitution of others, is a task for which the painful, stirring images supply only an initial spark.
However, Sontag is not some sort of Luddite, calling for dismantling the engines that proliferate the images of others’ sufferings. Her view in Regarding the Pain of Others is a carefully crafted, nuanced one in which she even takes issue with her own earlier views, as expressed in On Photography. It is not simply a matter of replacing the idea that the proliferation of such images creates sympathy with the idea that it deadens sympathy, as she had thought at the time she wrote that earlier book. Rather, it is a matter of reframing the entire discussion. Thus, just two pages after the passage cited immediately above, she writes in Regarding the Pain of Others (pages 105-106): “As much as they create sympathy, I wrote [in On Photography], photographs shrivel sympathy. Is this true? I thought it was when I wrote it. I’m not so sure now.” Then she reframes the whole issue as follows:
The question turns on a view of the principal medium of the news, television. An image is drained of its force by the way it is used, where and how often it is seen. Images shown on television are by definition images of which, sooner or later, one tires. What looks like callousness has its origins in the instability of attention that television is organized to arouse and to satiate by its surfeit of images. Image-glut keeps attention light, mobile, relatively indifferent to content. Image-flow precludes a privileged image. The whole point of television is that one can switch channels, that it is normal to switch channels, to become restless, bored. Consumers droop. They need to be stimulated, jump-started, again and again. Content is no more than one of these stimulants. A more reflective engagement with content would require a certain intensity of awareness—just what is weakened by the expectations brought to images disseminated by the media, whose leaching out of content contributes most to the deadening of feeling.
Two pages later, on page 108, she adds:
Since On Photography, many critics have suggested that the excruciations of war—thanks to television—have devolved into a nightly banality. Flooded with images of the sort that once used to shock and arouse indignation, we are losing the capacity to react. Compassion, stretched to its limits, is going numb. So runs the familiar diagnosis. But what is really being asked for here? That images of carnage be cut back to, say, once a week? More generally, that we work toward what I called for in On Photography: an “ecology of images”? There isn’t going to be an ecology of images. No Committee of Guardians is going to ration horror, to keep fresh its ability to shock. And the horrors themselves are not going to abate.
“Images,” Sontag later (on page 117) recapitulates the view that even she had once espoused, “have been reproached for being a way of watching suffering at a distance, as if,” she importantly and ironically concludes, “there were some other way of watching.” Then on the next page she continues:
It is felt that there is something morally wrong with the abstract of reality offered by photography; that one has no right to experience the suffering of others at a distance, denuded of its raw power; that we pay too high a human (or moral) price for those hitherto admired qualities of vision [those that once caused the ancient Greeks to heap praise upon vision above all the other senses]—the standing back from the aggressiveness of the world which frees up for observation and for elective attention.
“But,” Sontag replies against such contemporary disparagement of vision, in contrast to the original praise of it by Plato and the other ancient Greeks, “this is only to describe the function of the mind itself.” Thus, she continues: “There is nothing wrong with standing back and thinking. To paraphrase several sages: ‘Nobody can think and hurt someone at the same time.’”
Sontag knows, of course, that there is a perfectly ordinary sense of “thinking” in accordance with which it is all too easy to do just that, “think and hurt someone at the same time.” In that sense, torture is always a very thoughtful activity: the torturer must plan ahead and be attentive to what he is doing, to cause the torture victim the maximum of pain, at maximal duration. In making her remark, however, Sontag is, as it were, thinking of “thinking” in the most highly morally responsive, contemplative sense—the very sense, I might add, that is supposedly at issue in “philosophy.”
In that high sense, a truly thoughtful– “philosophical”—response to “the pain of others” requires precisely the sort of distance that a photograph introduces between the viewer and what is in view in the photographic image. It is because of the power of photographs to create such necessary distance that, as Judith Butler has recently put it in Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London and New York: Verso, 2009, page 96): “In the last chapter of Regarding the Pain of Others [on page 115], Sontag seeks to counter her earlier critique of photography. In an emotional, almost exasperated outcry, one that seems quite different from her usual measured rationalism, Sontag remarks: ‘Let the atrocious images haunt us.’ ”
On the next page, Butler again quotes the same line, calling it “Sontag’s imperative.” And, in fact, both Sontag’s original discussion and Butler’s later reflections on it serve to show that there is indeed a sort of moral obligation upon those who occupy the position of spectators in relation to the trauma of others–an obligation not to turn away from others’ pain but, instead, precisely to look and see what they have suffered. Those who, voluntarily or involuntarily, find themselves in such a spectator’s position are ordered, as it were, by the very spectacle they are given to see in such photographs of the pain of others, to continue to “regard” that very pain in those images. They are obligated, that is, to hold the pain of others so imaged “in a firm, fixed gaze,” a steady gaze in which, in the etymologically original sense of regard, they “keep guard” over that pain, letting themselves be “haunted” by it, as Sontag insists they should do.
However, Sontag’s own remark, cited above, on page 42 of Regarding the Pain of Others, about her own difficulty in viewing such images as Titian’s painting of the flaying of Marsyas, suggests that, paradoxically, it may well often be in just such “invented” images—such fictions or imaginative constructions—that the imperative to continue to look and see others’ pain speaks most clearly, most imperatively. That is not only because, as Sontag herself observes in the same passage, beholding the fictional or invented representation can engender in the spectator a pure horror, unadulterated by the shame at one’s potential or actual voyeurism with which “real” or photographic representations tend to mix the horror. It is also because, as fictions—literally, things made or created—“invented” images carry the message of their own having been made or created as part of their very representational content. As I argued years ago (in my book The Stream of Thought, New York: The Philosophical Library, 1984), following Heidegger’s remarks along the same lines in “On the Origin of the Work of Art,” that is one of the crucial ways in which what Sontag calls “invented” images differ from photographs, especially those that count as what we call “snap-shots.”
Significantly, to use Butler’s own prime example for her discussion in “Torture and the Ethics of Photography: Thinking with Sontag,” the second chapter in Frames of War, the notorious photographs of American torture of Muslim prisoners during the war in Iraq in the prison at Abu Ghraib were just such “snap-shots.” As Butler’s discussion makes clear, it is only insofar as those photographs have been taken up by others–that is, by those who are other than the original producers and consumers of the photographs (the American guards at Abu Ghraib themselves)–and disemminated “outside the scene of [their] production,” as Butler writes at the end of her chapter on Sontag (page 100), that their “circulation . . . has broken up the mechanism of disavowal, scattering grief and outrage in its wake.”
That is, she argues that it was only when such “outside” circulation occurred that the photographs of torture came to have the power to let us see the very “frame” that otherwise “blinds us to what we see.” According to Butler, “if there is a critical role for visual culture during times of war it is precisely to thematize the forcible frame, the one that conducts the dehumanizing norm, that restricts what is perceivable and, indeed, what can be.”
That means, however, that considered in the scene of their production and in terms of their representational content–what is actually photographically visible within that same scene—the photographs from Abu Ghraib just do not problematize that “forcible frame” itself. They presuppose it, rather than calling attention to it, and thereby leave it “out of the picture” altogether. Only when the photographs are, as it were, forced out of that “forcible frame,” does the fact, manner, and significance of their own production, their own having been made, come “into the picture.”
In contrast, it is in the “invented” visual image—or in the “fiction” in general—of torture and abuse that what is so brought into the image is itself revealed in its own having been made, its own having been invented. In the fiction, the fictive nature—which is to say the non-“natural”-ness, the artificiality, the “forc-ed”-ness—of what is represented, in the scene of its own production, its own making or invention, is brought to attention.
In sum: In the face of the fictional representation of trauma inflicted upon others, the spectator is brought face to face with the fic-tion, the pro-duction, of such trauma itself. The fictional trauma lets us see the fully fictional status of what purports to be an “act of God” in the sense that insurance companies use that expression to get themselves off the hook of liability for a disaster: The fiction of trauma in the “objective” sense (that is, the fiction “of” trauma in the sense of the fictive, as opposed to photographic, imaging of trauma) lets us see the fiction of trauma in the “subjective” sense (the sense in which trauma itself creates fictions, makes up stories, about itself).
That holds, at least, for trauma perpetrated by some upon others, as the American guards perpetrated trauma upon the prisoners they tortured at Abu Ghraib, or the Nazis perpetrated it upon the Jews. However, I will begin the next section of this chapter with some reflections suggesting that it holds for all trauma, not just for that in which we can distinguish perpetrators from victims. I will argue that the internal structure of trauma is such that trauma makes a fiction of itself.