- I begin with a naïve question. How is it possible that the
publication of the Abu Ghraib photographs did not (yet) adversely affect the
careers of those responsible for the war in Iraq? The photos offer dramatic
evidence to the court of public opinion. And the case at hand, at least as
prosecuted by Mark Danner, is clear enough:
It has . . . become clear that President Bush and his highest officials, as they confronted the world on
September 11, 2001, and in the days after, made a series of decisions about methods of warfare and
interrogation . . . . The effect of those decisions . . . was officially to transform the United States
from a nation that did not torture to one that did. (22)
Michael Ignatieff, in describing the benefits of truth commissions, suggests that they may at least "narrow
the range of permissible lies."[1] Yet
days following his re-election, President Bush appointed
Alberto Gonzales to head the U.S. Justice Department--Gonzales, the author of a White House memo describing
the Geneva limitations on the questioning of enemy prisoners as "obsolete."
The U.S. press, after the
election, widely speculated that Donald Rumsfeld would be a single-term appointee. He was not, and few would
cite the Abu Ghraib scandal as an important factor in his long-awaited departure.
Condoleezza Rice replaced
Colin Powell as Secretary of State. Major General Geoffrey Miller, former head of the prison at Guantanamo
Bay, was given command of Abu Ghraib. How could this happen? Perhaps someone somewhere believes they've all
been doing a heck of a job.
-
On an apparently unrelated front, theater critic turned pundit Frank Rich has opined that the
U.S. public is "living in a permanent state of suspension of disbelief," always "ready and
willing to be duped by the next tall tale." Though Rich's immediate subject is a fake memoir
by James Frey, he uses the best-seller success of this scam publication to decry (or was it
admire?) his real target--the "Frey-like genius of the right" and "the White House propaganda
operation," with their "intricate network of P.R. outfits and fake-news outlets." According
to Rich, Stephen Colbert nailed it when he coined the word "truthiness"; today the public
demands nothing more substantial, reputable or real than that. One explanation for the lack
of outcry regarding the promotions of the gang that brought us Abu Ghraib might thus be that
the U.S. public ingests whatever Bushite is dished out to it. Where there are counterstories
in the media at all, they are buried, squelched, or otherwise rendered ineffective.
-
And yet, just a decade ago, things seemed different. Reiterated in most
accounts of the war in Bosnia is the claim that photojournalism helped bring
the slaughter to an end. This notion is familiar, of course, at least since
Vietnam: reporting has been said to set the terms of public opinion, and
politicians in the West are often seen as responding to the sentiments of
their various publics. In short, the right pictures are worth a thousand
divisions. I won't speculate here about whether the power of the press is in
fact so telling; in regards to ex-Yugoslavia, many articles, and a few books
as well, have already begun to investigate this issue.[2]
-
Even before we examine the effects of war coverage, I believe, we would do well to analyze
the coverage itself. To my mind, recent war journalism still largely follows
representational practices put into place during the eighteenth century--it forms part,
broadly speaking, of that literature which, from the nineteenth century on, was disparaged as
"sentimental" but which, during the eighteenth century, existed as a complex configuration of
psychological "sentiment," social "sensibility" and philosophical "sympathy."[3] The key question I wish to address is whether a structure of
representation which is roughly three centuries old has outlived its usefulness.
-
In a passage from his Discourse on Inequality, one which has become something of a touchstone for
contemporary analyses of sentimentalism, Jean-Jacques Rousseau presents "the tragic image of an imprisoned
man"--an onlooker who witnesses, and is unable to aide, a mother and child being
attacked by a savage beast.[4] Rousseau
imagines
the tragic image of an imprisoned man who sees, through his window, a wild beast tearing a child from its
mother's arms, breaking its frail limbs with murderous teeth, and clawing its quivering entrails. What
horrible agitation seizes him as he watches the scene which does not concern him personally! What anguish he
suffers from being powerless to help the fainting mother and the dying child! (Fisher 105)
As Carol McGuirk has shown, a scene such as this, recurring in more or less achieved form throughout the
literature of sensibility, can serve as a key to the mechanics of sentimental
display.
Time and again its three (or possibly four) subject positions are reinstated, always in the same form, though
not always with the same effect. Most fundamental to the scene is the position
of the victim, whom McGuirk calls "the pathetic
object"; she notes, however, that the viewer's own role sometimes takes
center stage. In fact, she argues that
sentimental novelists following Sterne . . . made the presence of an
interpreting sensibility seem more
important than the wretchedness described . . . . The cult of feeling, from Yorick on, is characterized by a
preference in the sentimental spokesman for props that cannot upstage him. (507)
I will return to the crucial distinction suggested here between value denied to
the experience of what McGuirk calls "the pathetic object" and value added to
the discourse of the interpreting subject, or viewer. For now, let me remind you
that the third position in staging sentimentalism, in Rousseau's scene at least,
is taken up by the beast. A fourth position--or at least potential position--is
made necessary by the prison in which Rousseau's viewer is arbitrarily placed.
Although there is none at hand, we may imagine that rescue--and therefore a
rescuer--is called for.[5] -
One way to parse such sentimental scenes may be to consider the intentions
that give rise to them.[6] At a Smith College
teach-in during the NATO bombing campaign in Kosovo, a sociologist long involved in
refugee work was the first to speak. He began by showing a collection of news photos
culled from a variety of conflicts during the fifty-odd years since WWII. Each photo
portrayed a nearly identical image, a mother and her child, invariably in the midst of
desolation of one kind or another. The professor explained, with no trace of irony,
that within human rights organizations this image is commonly referred to as "The
Madonna of the Refugees." His intention was not, as mine is, to investigate the
representational constraints and presuppositions that generate this image, time and
time again. He simply wanted us to think about this woman with her child, to imagine
ourselves in her place, and to remember her face the next time that history brought it
to our attention. In this case, the time was now: almost as if my colleague had
predicted it, the very next cover of Time magazine portrayed a Kosovar
Albanian woman wearing a head-scarf and breast-feeding her child while carrying it
through a crowd of other displaced people.
|
|
Figure
1: The Madonna of the Refugees
Time, 12 April 1999 |
- When an exhibition of Ron Haviv's war photographs, which include some of the most
widely-known pictures of the war in Bosnia, opened in New York in January 2001, a single image
accompanied the New York Times article publicizing the event. The shot is actually
the middle of a sequence taken in Bijeljina, a town in northeastern Bosnia that was "cleansed"
even before the first shots were fired on Sarajevo. The first photo was taken from a space
between the cab and trailer of a truck where the photographer hid himself. Not long after, the
paramilitary leader Zeljko Raznjatovic accosted Haviv and stripped him of his film--one roll was
missed.[7]
|
|
Figures 2-4: Ron Haviv,
Blood and Honey Used with permission of the photographer |
The first image shows a woman bending over and touching a prostrate man; the last shows that same
woman and man, and another woman, all apparently dead--a soldier stands above them, looking over a
gate, not at them. The central photo captures another soldier in the act of kicking the second
woman: sunglasses tucked into his hair, he holds a rifle nonchalantly in one hand, a cigarette in
the other. Peter Maass, a U.S. journalist who witnessed both Bijeljina and the camps at Trnopolje
and Omarska, writes that:
when the call of the wild comes, the bonds of civilization turn out to be
surprisingly weak . . . The wild beast had not died. It proved itself a patient
survivor, waiting in the long grass of history for the right moment to pounce. (15)
The reporter introducing Haviv's exhibition commented simply, "[This photo] tells you
everything you need to know." -
I believe this last statement to be flat-out wrong. What this photo tells
us first and foremost, when it is reprinted by the New York Times along
with an article reviewing a photo exhibition, is "read the article" and perhaps
"come
to the exhibition." In the context of this essay, what this photo and the
Time cover tell us is also clear. The latter image focuses on one
iconic, nameless victim in an apparently infinite procession to the exclusion of the
other subject positions outlined above, thereby summoning up the very interventionist
sentiment--"Are Ground Troops the Answer?"--which its caption questions.[8] The key
photo in the Haviv sequence, in contrast, centers exclusively on a different subject
position: an act of aggression that is animal-like in both savagery and grace. As
an early emblem for the war in Bosnia, this image was used for diverse cultural
work, including offering a warning to the U.S. public about the risks of
intervention. "What does the earth look like in the places where people commit
atrocities?" asks Robert Kaplan, in Balkan Ghosts. There are also
reasons why, when confronted with stark images of their military's interrogation
techniques, the U.S. public was in fact not told everything it needed to know. For
the moment, however, I would like to stay with our penultimate mediatized war.
-
There exist, of course, alternatives to the thin history of daily newspapers and
to the slick stories of government press offices. For example, a group of
over 200 professional historians, during the past few years, has been working in teams
to write a consensus history of the wars of the former Yugoslavia. One way of
characterizing "The Scholars Initiative" would be to say that the project intends to
refute the quotation from Simo Drljaca that serves as their epigraph: "You
have your facts. We have our facts. You have a complete right to choose between the
two versions." (For more information, see www.cla.purdue.edu/si/scholarsprospectus.htm.)
Drljaca was instrumental in establishing a series of prison camps near Prijedor in
Bosnia-Herzegovina; he himself was killed during an arrest attempt before he could be
brought to trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia
(ICTY) in the Hague. In short, the scholars were not the first to offer a refutation.
Let me cite here, from a press release, the ICTY's verdict about the crimes committed
at Drljaca's camps:
Like Trnopolje and Keraterm, Omarska camp was officially established on 30 May 1992
by Simo Drljaca . . . Planned initially to function for a fortnight, it in fact
remained in operation until 20 August 1992. During this period of almost three
months, more than 3,334 detainees at least passed through the camp . . . . All those
detained were interrogated. Almost all were beaten. Many would not leave the camp
alive.
The living conditions in Omarska camp were appalling. Some of you, perhaps,
remember the images filmed by a television team showing emaciated men, with haggard
faces and often a look of resignation or complete dejection. These are the images
which would make the international community react and are, perhaps, one of the
reasons the Tribunal was established.
In some sense, the very existence of institutions such as the ICTY, as well as their
verdicts, provide a definitive answer to the militant relativism of the world's
Drljacas. Though courts and historians are hardly infallible, whatever power they
have, they are granted. -
It is striking as well that the judge of an international court should attribute
his very mandate to the so-called "CNN effect"; as suggested above, the verdict by
sociologists, political scientists, and media critics on the very existence of such
an effect is far from clear. In this case, Judge Almiro Rodrigues, in sentencing
five participants in the "hellish orgy of persecution" at the camps, may have also
felt it necessary to respond to an essay--originally published in February 1997 in a
journal called Living Marxism or LM--which argued that the
press reports about the camps were a massive hoax. Its author, Thomas
Deichmann, begins the essay with a claim much like the one that introduces the
Haviv photo exhibition:
None of the reporters present in August 1992 described Trnopolje as a concentration
camp comparable with Auschwitz. But pictures speak for themselves. The general public
around the world that was confronted with this ITN-picture interpreted it without
waiting for an explanation.
Of course, even a cursory glance at a Time magazine cover taken
from the
British ITN television footage, or at the similar photo posted along with Deichmann's
article, shows that in these cases there was no need for the general public to wait
for an explanation: they were given one with the image itself.
|
|
Figure
5: ITN Photo. Time, 17 August 1992 |
At the bottom right, Time captions their cover as follows: "THE
BALKANS
/ Muslim prisoners / in a Serbian / detention camp." While locals might grimace at
the Balkanism inherent in the all-caps phrase, or at the "ethno-national"
identifications, considerable thought probably went into the choice of
the phrase "detention camp" as a
label for the scene on the cover. Claiming a
greater part of the page, and hence of our attention, there is the
question, "MUST IT
GO ON?" There is a delicate balance here between an implicit call to
action ("this must not go on") and fatalism ("it will go on"), a part of all
sentimental representation. -
On the relation between photographic images and the words that accompany them,
John Berger has given perhaps the most sober and even-handed description:
In the relation between a photograph and words, the photograph begs for an
interpretation, and the words usually supply it. The photograph, irrefutable as
evidence but weak in meaning, is given a meaning by the words. And the words, which
by themselves remain at the level of generalisation, are given specific authenticity
by the irrefutability of the photograph. Together the two then become very powerful;
an open question appears to have been fully answered. (92)
In Deichmann's case a supratitle, and not the image, is meant to do the talking. Here are
the details of his claim (offered without substantiation of any kind):
Now, four and a half years later, it turns out that the media, politics [sic],
and the public have been deceived with this picture. It is a proven fact that it is
not the group of Muslim men with Fikret Alic that are surrounded by barbed wire, but
rather the British reporters. They were standing on a lot to the south of the camp.
As a preventive measure against thieves, this lot was surrounded with barbed wire
before the war. . . . There was no barbed-wire fence around the camp area, which
also included a school, a community center, and a large open area with a sports
field. This was verified by international institutions such as the International
Criminal Tribunal in the Hague and the International Red Cross in Geneva. The fact
that it was the reporters that were surrounded by barbed wire can be seen in the
other film-material that was not edited or broadcasted.
The rhetorical move is familiar to most amateur magicians: if you dazzle them,
you do so by misdirection. Here Deichmann translates an argument about events in the
world into a dispute over barbed wire and misrepresentation. Certainly both the
Time cover and Deichmann's image were cropped, centered and captioned
with a purpose--yet magazine editors, journalists, and photographers do not, at
least when they are acting as editors, journalists, and photographers, create the
events they portray. The obvious bears repeating on
another point as well. As Elie Wiesel, in his preface to a memoir from an Omarska
survivor, comments, "Omarska was not Auschwitz. Nothing, anywhere, can be compared
to Auschwitz. But what took place at Omarska was sufficient . . . to justify
international intervention and international solidarity" (Hukanovic vii).[9] John Berger remarks:
The photographic quotation [from reality] is, within its limits, incontrovertible.
Yet the quotation, placed like a fact in an explicit or implicit argument, can
misinform. Sometimes the misinforming is deliberate . . . ; often it is the result
of an unquestioned ideological assumption." (97)
A key purpose of this essay is to demonstrate, in photographic records of war, the
traditional structural foundations for such ideological assumptions. -
But first let me tell you something more about their effects. When I first gave
materials on the Bosnian camps to students as part of a "War Stories" course, my idea
was simply to "teach the conflicts." Given that the semester had already provided
several occasions for examining the use and abuse of war photos, I felt that
Deichmann's article would offer an important cautionary tale. What I myself read as
a relatively sophisticated, and sophistic, attempt, in a Bosnian context, to
disseminate the equivalent of Holocaust denial was meant as a window into history in
the making--a case where the verdict of the international image tribunal hadn't yet
been delivered.
-
There are no doubt a number of reasons why my students believed Deichmann and
discounted, or didn't read, the other evidence they were given (including coverage of
ITN's libel case against Living Marxism, which ITN won). What I believe
their response demonstrates most strongly, however, is the obverse side of the
truthiness factor. Today campaigns to discredit the media are at least as powerful,
and no doubt easier to mount, than successful propaganda. What strikes me most,
however, in seeing the Time cover and Deichmann's denial together is that both
exploit the same representational structure. Rather than Rich's ready state of
suspended disbelief, today we may actually find ourselves trapped in a supersaturated
suspension of particulate histories--ready to believe, or not, whenever thew right mix
comes together.
-
Bruno Latour is right: it is time for critique to stop fighting the last war. As
he puts it, "entire Ph.D. programs are still running to make sure that good
American kids are learning the hard way that facts are made up, . . . that we are
always prisoners of language, that we always speak from a particular standpoint, and
so on, while dangerous extremists are using the very same argument . . . to destroy
hard-won evidence that could save our lives" (227). Latour goes on to argue that the
best critic is not "the one who debunks, but the one who assembles"--that the
"question was never to get away from facts but closer to them, not
fighting empiricism but, on the contrary, renewing empiricism" (246). Understandably
upset at a family resemblance between his own work and the discourse of conspiracy
theorists and anti-science conservatives, the philo-, socio-, anthro-historian of
science proposes a reassessment of tactics and a reaffirmation of principles.
-
It should not have been surprising, perhaps, to read Deichmannesque
pronouncements about the Abu Ghraib photographs coming from supporters of the Bush
administration. Most notorious among these were the widely reported comments of Rush
Limbaugh, aired on his radio show in early May of 2004. Limbaugh first apparently
claimed that the interrogations were "no different than what happens at the Skull and
Bones initiation" and went on to characterize the torturers as "need[ing] to blow off
some steam," arguing that "emotional release" is understandably needed in a situation where
soldiers are "being fired at every day" "I'm talking about people having a good time,"
he added. A few days later, Limbaugh returned to the topic, this time comparing the
interrogations to "good old American pornography."[10]
-
Given a pre-Abu Ghraib survey which suggests that 63% of U.S. citizens believe
that torture is sometimes justifiable,[11] as well as
the recent popularity of
pro-torture television (e.g., 24 and NYPD Blue), it is necessary to
remind ourselves of what Limbaugh's identification with the aggressors occludes. Let
me offer one particularly eloquent example. With great economy and discretion, Jean
Améry describes the manner by which the Gestapo dislocated both his
shoulders. He also notes however, that the key existential moment in his horrific
experience in fact came much earlier. As he puts it,
The first blow brings home to the prisoner that he is helpless, and thus it
already contains in the bud everything that is to come . . . . They are permitted to
punch me in the face, the victim feels in numb surprise and concludes in just as numb
certainty: they will do with me what they want. (27)
Améry uses a deceptively simple phrase to describe the transformation we
undergo when a regime that uses torture takes us into its hands. What dies at that
moment he calls "trust in the world." We lose, he explained,
the certainty that by reason of written or unwritten social contracts the other
person will spare me--more precisely stated, that he will respect my physical, and
with it also my metaphysical, being. The boundaries of my body are also the
boundaries of my self. My skin surface shields me against the external world. If I
am to have trust, I must feel on it only what I want to feel. (27-28)
In The New Yorker in 2005, Jane Mayer recounts the following:
Two years ago, at Abu Ghraib prison, outside Baghdad, an Iraqi prisoner in [C.I.A.
officer Mark] Swanner's custody, Manadel al-Jamadi, died during an interrogation.
His head had been covered with a plastic bag, and he was shackled in a
crucifixion-like pose that inhibited his ability to breathe; according to forensic
pathologists who have examined the case, he asphyxiated. In a subsequent internal
investigation, United States government authorities classified Jamadi's death as a
"homicide," meaning that it resulted from unnatural causes. (1)
Mayer also refers to an Associated Press report describing the position in which Jamadi was
killed "as a form of torture known as 'Palestinian hanging,' in which a prisoner whose hands are
secured behind his back is suspended by his arms" (7). This form of torture was also
used by the Gestapo to simultaneously dislocate both of Jean Améry's
shoulders. And yet, unlike Jamadi, and unlike the vast majority of victims portrayed
in the last three centuries of sentimental display, Améry's voice has not
been silenced. -
The most sustained and insightful analysis of the Abu Ghraib photos, as well as
the most provocative thesis regarding their (lack of) reception by the U.S. public,
has been recently published by the art historian Stephen Eisenman. His book,
The Abu Ghraib Effect, traces the representational history of a certain
form of pathos in Western art from Greco-Roman sculpture to the mass culture and
racist subcultures of today. For Eisenman, the Abu Ghraib photographs draw on
a mnemonic heritage that has made the inscription of "passionate suffering" a key
foundational discourse in what has come to be known as Western art. As an art
historian, Eisenman asks how this obvious connection--to works by such artists
as Michelangelo and Raphael--were not immediately obvious to his colleagues, and why
scholars turned instead toward antiwar representations by Goya and Picasso (or Ben Shahn
and Leon Golub) in their discussion of the torture images. Despite topical
resemblances that are at times undeniably striking, the latter group of artists,
after all, meant to expose and oppose the horrors they depicted. Instead, the
tradition which Eisenman dates from the Pergamon Altar (c. 180-150 BCE) through the
Italian masters and beyond celebrates the expressive depiction of suffering;
its "pathos formula of internalized subordination and eroticized chastisement"
functions as "a handmaiden to arrogance, power and violence" (122). According to Eisenman,
this insistent attention to one set of artists, and blindness to a more obvious and much
wider field within Western visual culture, is evidence of an "Abu Ghraib effect," a Freudian
parapraxis that has largely succeeded in repressing the uncanny doubling between these most
recent documents of Western barbarism and some of the "most familiar and beloved images" in
its representational tradition.
-
One strength of Eisenman's argument is that it makes sense of the comments by
Rush Limbaugh I cite above--a necessary task since much of Limbaugh's audience can be assumed to be in agreement with them. After all, unlike Bill Maher or Don
Imus, Limbaugh's remarks didn't cause him to lose his job. The key elements of the rant--its eroticization of
the images, its identification with the torturers, and its imputation of the victims'
willing complicity in their own degradation ("a Skull and Bones initiation"; "good
fun," etc.)--are point for point those found by Eisenman in works such as
Michelangelo's Dying Slave and Raphael's Battle of Ostia.
-
Unlike Eisenman, most critics who write about the photographic evidence of U.S.
torture in Iraq follow Deichmann's lead: they substitute an argument about images for
one that focuses on the acts they depict. In a recent PMLA essay, for
example, Judith Butler calls an unexpected witness--the then current U.S. Secretary
of Defense--to help prosecute her argument with Susan Sontag. Butler opines that when
Rumsfeld claimed that to show all the photos of torture and humiliation and rape
would allow them "to define us" as Americans, he attributed to photography an
enormous power to construct national identity. The photographs would not just
communicate something atrocious but also make our capacity for atrocity into a
defining concept of Americanness. (825)[12]
According to Butler, Sontag's influential writings on photography deny interpretive power to
the photographic image. Butler argues that Sontag consistently characterized photography as
appealing to the emotions, not the understanding, and that for Sontag, a photograph "cannot
by itself provide an interpretation" (823). Butler, however, also cites Sontag's New
York Times Sunday Magazine essay on the Abu Ghraib photos, a polemic that seems to
contradict this thesis. That essay, published in as national a forum as Sontag was likely to
get, memorably argues that "the photographs are us'" (Butler 826). Butler speculates that
"perhaps [Sontag] means that in seeing the photos, we see ourselves seeing . . . . If we see
as the photographer sees, then we consecrate and consume the act" (826). There is, of
course, a less complicated reading that sees Sontag's comment directed toward the world,
not toward the photos. In a democracy, citizens bear responsibility for the actions of their
representatives. -
The political and ideological power of war photography, and the limits of that
power, has long been an explicit subject of Martha Rosler's work, from her seminal
Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful (1967-72) to a more recent series
of photomontages. Rosler's Election (Lynndie) pastes the U.S. soldier
and her leashed prisoner into a magazine layout displaying an ultra-modern, high-tech
kitchen (a selection of Rosler's images, including both those discussed here, can be
found at <http://home.earthlink.net/~navva/photo/index.html>). A
city in flames,
presumably Iraqi, can be seen outside the room. At some point, the viewer notices
the business end of the leash, hidden behind the cabinet, reproduced again on the
glass of the oven door, placing the prisoner inside. A second Abu Ghraib photo of a
naked prisoner cowering before an attack dog is attached to the door of the oven
above. The viewer will also notice photos on the covers of cooking
magazines and on files in a recipe rack. A pair of scissors and some
clippings lie on the counter, as does an electric green, iconized print of the hooded
man photo; a hot pink version appears next to a salad bowl on the opposite
counter. On the face of a cabinet is a cut-out quote from the New York
Times: "Be Part of the Solution . . . If this election is going to be a fair
and honest one, concerned citizens will have to do their part to ensure that every
vote counts."
-
Though he does not say so in The Abu Ghraib Effect, I have little
doubt that Eisenman would read Rosler's recent work as a direct descendent of Goya
and Picasso, or of Gillo Pontecorvo, Ben Shahn, and Leon Golub--that "limited number of
artists who acted against the instrumental and oppressive authority of the Western
pathos formula" (122). In its explicit engagement with both politics and
photography, however, Election (Lynndie) also forces us to think about
the categorical difference trapped within the single word "representation." As the
legendary French documentary cinematographer, Chris Marker, has commented, "as long as there
is no olfactory cinema . . . , there will be no films of war" ("smellies," we
would probably call them, just as we used to say "talkies"). Marker adds that this
absence is "the prudent thing to do, because if there were such films, I can assure
you that there wouldn't be a single spectator left."[13] Though more complex and powerful, the play of irony, horror,
and critical
distance in Rosler's image is ultimately similar to, and probably no more effective
than, the Ipod/Iraq parodies it cites. Even if, as Rosler's title suggests,
Abu Ghraib alone ought to have changed the past Presidential election, the newspaper
clipping incorporated into the work appears more inane than hortatory. Rosler's
masterful assemblage will rivet any audience already convinced of the U.S. public's
complicity, duplicity and complacency; whether its critique gets us closer to the
facts, or simply closer to the process of fabrication, is another story.
-
Although Rosler's technique in this image resembles that in
her earlier work, its effects seem worlds apart. Take, for example, her Vietnam-era
montage entitled "Balloons." In the right foreground, a Vietnamese peasant carrying
a wounded child begins to climb the stairs in a suburban home; to the back on the left,
we see the white living room with its floral divans and sunroom, replete with
rattan swing. In the corner, balloons lie in a pastel pile. After My Lai, and before
Watergate, bringing the war home was an essential political move, one that helped
puncture the bubble of faith enveloping the Cold War U.S.
Balloons's ironic title is overpowered by a victim who refuses to be
occluded by the
sentimental tradition. After My Lai, the U.S. public needed to hear and to see in
their living rooms Corporal Paul Meadlo respond to Mike Wallace's question ("And
babies?"). Today another tactic is needed.
-
We can start with what the pictures themselves show. In a monograph entitled
Sociology after Bosnia and Kosovo, Keith Doubt cites a rather lengthy
passage from Peter Maass's Love Thy Neighbor which, mutatis
mutandis, applies to the torture in U.S. military prisons:
Bosnia makes you question basic assumptions about humanity, and one of the questions
concerns torture. Why, after all, should there be any limit? . . . You can, for
example, barge into a house and put a gun to a father's head and tell him that you
will pull the trigger unless he rapes his daughter . . . . The father will refuse
and say, I will die before doing that. You shrug your shoulders and reply, Okay, old
man, I won't shoot you, but I will shoot your daughter. What does the father do now,
dear reader? He pleads, he begs, but then you, the man with the gun, put the gun to
the daughter's head, you pull back the hammer, and you shout, Now! Do it! Or
I shoot! The father starts weeping, yet slowly he unties his belt, moving like a
dazed zombie, he can't believe what he must do. You laugh and say, That's right, old
man, pull down those pants, pull up your daughter's dress, and do it! (51-52)
As Doubt comments, the scene contains, in addition to the torturer and his victims,
at least one other representational position, that of the witness. In Maass's
scenario, that position is occupied both by the gunman's accomplices (it can hardly
be imagined as the work of a single soldier) and by the "dear reader" whom Maass
explicitly invokes--the observer who is asked to actively imagine him- or herself in
the role of torturer. -
In many readings of atrocity, including those emanating from Washington, emphasis
is placed on aberrant psychology or convulsive histories--the "bad apples." Doubt,
borrowing his analytic frame from Harold Garfinkel, discusses instead Maass's scene
of forced rape in terms of its social context. The passage is read as an example of
an "attempted degradation ceremony," a ritual that involves, by definition, a scene
of denunciation in front of witnesses. Doubt observes that, "the denouncer and the
denounced do not alone constitute a degradation ceremony . . . . To induce shame,
a denouncer needs to convince the witnesses to view the event in a special way"
(39). He cites Garfinkel:
The paradigm of moral indignation is "public" denunciation. We publicly deliver the
curse: "I call upon all men to bear witness that he is not as he appears but is
otherwise and in essence of a lower species. (39)
In his analysis of the scene from Maass, Doubt also emphasizes that the gunman's
attempt ultimately fails, for at least two reasons: first, the gunman himself
violates the moral order from which he attempts to remove his victim, and second, the
victim has no choice in the matter. He comments that, "if the degradation ceremony
is to be successful, the denouncer must show that the denounced chose to be estranged
from the values that the denouncer and witnesses share" (40).[14] -
The key to Doubt's analysis, however, is his reversal of the focalization in
Maass's scene. Rather than share the gunman's point of view, he attempts to give
his reader the victim's perspective.[15] Like
Maass, he uses second-person address to produce this viewpoint:
The gunman . . . is not just trying to shame you; he is trying to shame your
relation to the world, the fact that you and the world share values, fundamental
values such as fatherhood . . . . Only in this way can the gunman . . . presume to
be a legitimate spokesperson for the world. As long as the world stands for nothing,
the gunman becomes the legitimate spokesperson for the world . . . . If the
dignity of the world is to stand for nothing, then the gunman speaks for the world
and the world's relation to you, that is, the world's rejection of you and itself. (43)
Using language more typical of existential hermeneutics than U.S. sociology, Doubt
sets up here a key analytic reversal:
Soon you begin to see that the world, even more than you, is being denounced. Your
role at this point changes. You become not the one being denounced, but the witness
to the denunciation of the world . . . . You see the world rather than you is
being denounced, and you begin to pity the world. (43)
Doubt sees the former object of attempted degradation as the ritual's true
interpreting subject, the only subject who, in this case, has authentic
moral standing. -
Much of the world has denounced the Abu Ghraib photos
for what they are: a record of beastly, state-sanctioned aggression. They also
record an attempted degradation ceremony. For many U.S. citizens, however, the
victims themselves have been less important than the faces and uniforms of the
aggressors--which poses something of a problem. The evidence that those faces and
uniforms present contradicts the a priori positioning of most U.S. war
stories. Though it would be absurd to argue that the position of compassionate
observer in the scene of sentiment belongs to any one nation, an argument can
be made for the peculiarity of the U.S. fascination with this perspective. Certainly
the story
we tell ourselves about ourselves fits it rather neatly. Isolationists first, then
liberators in two World Wars, we have since played the liberation theme over and over
again, most notably in the other Americas, most recently in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Like any compassionate observer, we anguish over the fate of innocent victims; unlike
others, we also send in the cavalry.
-
Such stories have consequences, both obvious and not so. One effect of this
particular narrative--self-identification in the U.S. with an eighteenth-century
construct of compassion--is that the Abu Ghraib photographs were not seen by the U.S.
public as the rest of the world saw them. In a sense, perhaps, the U.S. public
could not see them at all. If a nation that believes itself compassionate had
actually seen state-sanctioned torture, would it have re-elected the man in
charge? The photos' reception in the U.S. has probably been affected by the
depiction of smiling soldiers whose good humor contradicts the cruel and degrading
actions they performed; two of the photos in which soldiers give "thumbs-up" gestures
show a soldier's smiling face just inches
away from that of a dead Iraqi prisoner. These photos can only be described as
trophy shots.[16] Unlike the rest of the
world, we citizens of the United
States of America cannot look on from the point of view of a compassionate observer.
We are being hailed by our own soldiers; when someone makes a "thumbs-up" sign to
you, you're supposed to return it.
-
In effect, what the Abu Ghraib photos ask us to do is join the party at
www.nowthatsfuckedup.com. Before the site was closed down in April
2006, and
its webmaster (briefly) jailed, anyone with an internet connection had access to just
the gleeful sort of aggressors community which the Abu Ghraib photographs record.[17] In 2003, a 27-year-old Floridian named Chris
Wilson had opened a website originally
dedicated to amateur pornography, one where users could gain access to restricted
areas either by paying or by sending in photos and videos of their own. At some
point in 2004, Wilson decided to grant U.S. soldiers free access to the site,
provided that they sent in some photographic evidence that they were indeed U.S.
soldiers. What followed? Postings of the charred remnants of Iraqis, or of their
mutilated heads, torsos, or severed limbs, accompanied by cold jokes from both
photographers and viewers.[18] If, while surfing
the internet, it were possible to
stumble innocently onto such images,[19]
wouldn't one's likely response be simply to clear
the screen? Such a site would most likely not elicit sympathy, fascination, or glee,
but just make the viewer run for the nearest exit. As one
of the bloggers remarks in an essay response to Chris Wilson's site, "We don't want
to know what the war looks like" (Gupta).
-
As for me, at this point I'd like to step back into the eighteenth century
again--where, in some sense, all this began. Perhaps the oddest feature of the
vignette cited earlier from The Discourse on Inequality is its
provenance. Rousseau's explicitly acknowledged source for his scene of pathos and
horror is Bernard de Mandeville (a pairing which, politically speaking, is about as
strange as Judith Butler agreeing with Rumsfeld). As it turns out,
however, unlike the French philosophe, the author of The Fable of the
Bees intended his scene to be ironic. We know because Mandeville prefaces his
portrait by giving us a sort of Deichmannesque supratitle--telling us in advance that
he considers compassion a "counterfeit Virtue." He thus intends not to reveal, but
to expose. His version of the scene concludes gleefully:
To see [the beast] widely open her destructive Jaws, and the poor Lamb beat down with
greedy haste; to look on the defenceless Posture of tender Limbs first trampled on,
then tore asunder; to see the filthy Snout digging in the yet living Entrails suck up
the smoking Blood, and now and then to hear the Crackling of the Bones, and the cruel
Animal with savage Pleasure grunt over the horrid Banquet; to hear and see all this,
What Tortures would it give the Soul beyond Expression! (255)
If you find this description only grotesque, and not comic, note the ease with which
the word "pleasures" may be substituted for Mandeville's "tortures" ("What
[Pleasures] would it give the Soul beyond Expression!"). Such, for Mandeville, is a
clear, distinct and unadulterated example of Pity or Compassion, one with which, as
he puts it, "even a Highwayman, a House-Breaker or a Murderer" could sympathize
(254-56). That one might well exhibit such virtuous sentiments and yet keep
on being a highwayman, paramilitary, torturer or even paidophage, is the Dutch
critic's point. Mine is somewhat simpler: I believe that it's time to think beyond
this obvious, and apparently natural, triad of observer, aggressor and victim, given
that its terms provoke wildly disparate and often opposing effects. -
Might it instead be possible to create, as Domna Stanton has suggested, "a new
interdisciplinary field, one that conjoins the critical and interpretive practices of
the humanities with the ethical activism of the international human rights . . .
movement" (3)? The necessary steps are rather obvious. Taking the side of Harriet
Jacobs against Hannah Arendt, Elizabeth Spelman has commented that, "The solution is
. . . if possible, to make sure that those who are suffering participate in the
discussion" (88). And yet, as a Peabody award-winning episode of the radio
show This American Life put it in 2006,
one thing that's just weird about Guantanamo is that in all of these years .
. . why haven't we seen more of these guys on radio or TV? Over 200 of them
have been released, right? At our radio show this week we were talking about
this, and we realized that NONE of us had ever heard or read any interview
with these guys.[20]
How many interviews with Abu Ghraib prisoners have
you read, seen, or heard? How about Bagram? How about the known
unknown locations?[21]
-
Among the foundational texts for the field that Stanton envisions would
surely be Nunca Más (1984), published by the Argentine
National Commission on the Disappeared, a group headed by novelist Ernesto
Sábato. Sábato begins his prologue to Nunca
Más by comparing the then recent history of Italy to that of
Argentina. He notes that, "when Aldo Moro was kidnapped, a member of the
security forces suggested to General Della Chiesa that a suspect . . . be
tortured. The general replied . . . : 'Italy can survive the loss of Aldo
Moro. It would not survive the introduction of torture'" (1).
Sábato's answer to his country, to a State that "responded to the
terrorists' crimes with a terrorism far worse than the one they were
combatting," was to debunk torture quickly and to assemble painstakingly a
report on human rights in Argentina. In place of the military junta's blather
about "individual excesses," about acts "committed by a few depraved
individuals acting on their own initiative," the Sábato Commission
presented a nearly 500-page tome, reporting on several thousand statements
and testimonies and referring to over 50,000 pages of supporting
documentation. It is nearly impossible to imagine a U.S. novelist entrusted
with a similarly historic Commission. But why?
Sábato's prologue is arguably as essential to Nunca
Más's reception as the evidence it summarizes. His strategy,
the argument of a novelist, is to present the Argentine public with a
structuralist analysis. "From the huge amount of documentation we have
gathered," Sábato comments, "it can be seen that . . . human rights
were violated at all levels by the Argentine state . . . . Nor were they
violated in a haphazard fashion, but systematically, according to a
similar pattern, with identical kidnappings and tortures taking place
throughout the country" (2, emphasis added). The general introduction to the
assembled testimony fills in this pattern: its "typical sequence" is named
"abduction--disappearance--torture" (9).
-
In the PMLA volume that includes the Judith Butler piece
cited above, another essay refers to Myra Jehlen's suggestion, some twelve
years ago, that we study "history before the fact," i.e., history in the
making, rather than "history as the past." The "prisoner abuse" story is of
course far from settled; as I've attempted to demonstrate, it's hardly been
opened. Even the trials of Argentina and Chile have not yet ended. The
International Image Tribunal has some long work days ahead. One thing, at
least, seems clear. No matter what new photos surface, and no matter what
they depict, there will be those who wish to see the images themselves as the
issue, rather than investigate what they depict. Not long ago, a publication
by Human Rights Watch called for a special counsel investigation of prisoner
abuse in Iraq, in order to focus on the command responsibility of Rumsfeld et
al. The HRW report was given the title, "Getting Away with Torture?" To my
mind, that's the question we should settle.
Smith College
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
JHICKS@email.smith.edu
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Notes
1. This quote comes from the preface, by Ignatieff,
to an excellent comparative study of truth commissions by Priscilla Hayner. Since
truth is at issue here, I should add to Danner's comment a response
to it from an Argentine poet, social critic, and friend Judith Filc. "Yes,"
she notes, "you didn't have torturers, you just trained them."
2. See, for example, the study by
Charaudeau and the collection of essays edited by Gow. For an
insider's view that argues against the so-called "CNN effect," see
Western.
3. The term "sympathy" has an even
longer and more complicated history; it was also used as a
technical term
in the Renaissance sciences of alchemy and astrology. Eisenman, in an
excellent book on the relation between Western art history and the Abu Ghraib photos
(discussed below), traces what he calls the "pathos formula" in art back to
Hellenism. Carlo Ginzburg, in an important historical essay on sympathy, goes
back
to the Greeks as well, beginning with a discussion of Antigone.
4. My attention to this passage
results from its analysis by Philip Fisher in the chapter on Uncle Tom's
Cabin in his book Hard Facts. In a conference on
sentimentalism at Brown University, Nancy Armstrong commented that she and
Elaine Scarry have frequently made use of the same passage from
Rousseau.
5. The classic spoof of this structure can
be found in Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles: "Won't somebody help that
poor man?"
6. I am aware of the long
history, and metaphysical foundations, that underlie constructions of authorial
intention. My own intention is to focus, whenever possible, on public records
of intentionality, and to include evidence of reception within the same general
framework, conceiving of the ensemble, in short, as part of "the text." "A thing,"
Nietzsche argues, "is the sum of its effects."
7. This account, and the photos
below, are taken from the coffee table edition of Haviv's work Blood and
Honey.
8. One of the most famous, and
influential, examples of sentimental representation with a similarly exclusive
focus on the victim is Josiah Wedgewood's 1788 jasperware cameo
depicting a kneeling slave in chains, with the supratitle "Am I Not a Man And A
Brother." See Eisenman (80-81) and Hochschild (129).
9. As for the Fikret Alic, the man front and
center on the Time cover, the Deichman article originally
claims that
his horribly emaciated state was due to "a childhood bout of tuberculosis"
(Connolly). This claim no longer appears in the on-line version of Deichmann's
article cited here. David Campbell has authored a detailed analysis of this
controversy and its political implications in the Journal of Human
Rights.
10. One of the more extensive discussions of
Limbaugh's comments in the mainstream media was given by Dick Meyers on
CBSnews.com (<www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/05/06/opinion/meyer/printable616021.shtml>).
See as well Kurt Nimmo's comments at <www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/nimmo05082004/>.
References to the remarks can also be found in columns by Maureen Dowd (New York
Times 6 May 2004) and Frank Rich (New York Times 16 May 2004) as
well as in an article by Stephen Kinzer and Jim Rutenberg (New York
Times 13 May 2004).
11. According to a Pew Center poll
conducted between 5 September and 31 October 2003 (as reported by Agence France
Presse on 17 November 2005).
12. Rumsfeld, of course, was likely to
have been less worried about the photos defining America than about them defining his
administration. On the other hand, his refusal to release evidence, to confess his
complicity, and, in general, the Bush administration's attempt to pass
the whole
thing off as the work of a few criminal apples lead much of the world to equate
these photos with the country. If the U.S. doesn't stand against them, it stands for
them.
13. "Tant qu'il n'y aura pas de
cinéma olfactif comme il y a un cinéma parlant, il n'y aura pas de
films de guerre, ce qui est d'ailleurs prudent, parce qu'à ce moment
là, je vous jure bien qu'il n'y aura plus de spectateurs." From Loret's
review of Sacco's Safe Area Goraude (my translation).
14. As Eisenman point outs, and as Limbaugh implies, central to the pathos formula in
works that celebrate torture is an attempt to depict victims as complicit in
their own victimization.
15. I came across Sociology after
Bosnia and Kosovo after reading Igor Sladoje's unpublished American Studies
Diploma thesis, which uses Doubt's analysis to open an investigation of the
U.S.'s role in recent international conflicts. In Sladoje's opinion, "the
conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Somalia, Rwanda and Kosovo may be
regarded as attempted degradation ceremonies in which the role of the witness
to ethnic cleansing, genocide, violence and starvation was played by the
world. For this gazing world, the role of the witness becomes problematic.
Serving as a witness to evil simply becomes untenable because of the moral
values the world claims to stand for. The world can choose to identify
itself with either the denouncer or the denounced" (3). Bosnian himself,
Sladoje's text here performs, in paraphrase, the very act which Doubt sees as
the end result of the Bosnian war: "Eventually, the roles are exchanged. The
victim is no longer the one being denounced; he is instead witness to the
denunciation of the world" (3).
16. In an essay written only a few
days after the photos became public, Luc Sante calls them precisely that. He
also sees a resemblance between the attitudes they displayed and the
photographic records of crowds at lynchings.
17. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nowthatsfuckedup.com>;
<www.thenation.com/doc/20051010/the_porn_of_war>;
<www.theledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051008/NEWS/510080427/1039>;
<www.indypendent.org/?p=692>;
and <www.eastbayexpress.com/2005-09-21/news/war-pornography/>.
A selection of the photographs, with an introductory essay by Gianluigi
Ricuperati and an afterword by Marco Belpoliti, has been published in Italy.
18. On the "cold joke" and its
prevalence in combat situations, see Glover.
19. It wasn't--you had to either
pay, or to play by sending in your own.
20. The show "Habeas Schmabeus"
was first
broadcast on 10 March 10 2006. Free podcasts are available at <www.thislife.org>.
21. For an important exception to this
general silence, see the work of artist Daniel Heyman based on interviews with Abu
Ghraib detainees, as presented and reviewed in SMITH magazine.
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