Regarding the Pain of Others

tags

Attention Economy

Notes

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1

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Woolf professes to believe that the shock of such pictures cannot fail to unite people of good will. Does it?

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No ''we" should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.

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the same photographs of children killed in the shelling of a village were passed around at both Serb and Croat propaganda briefings. Alter the caption, and the children's deaths could be used and reused.

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evidence that contradicts cherished pieties are invariably dismissed as having been staged for the camera.

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the photographs supply no evidence, none at all, for renouncing war-except to those for whom the no- tions of valor and sacrifice have been emptied of meaning and credibility.

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should not distract you from asking what pictures, whose cruelties, whose deaths are not being shown.

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believed that if the horror could be made vivid enough, most people would finally take in the outrageousness, the insanity of war.

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2

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(After four decades of big-budget Hollywood disaster films, "It felt like a movie" seems to have displaced the way survivors of a catastrophe used to express the short-term unassimilability of what they had gone through: "It felt like a dream.")

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In a system based on the maximal reproduction and diffusion of images, witnessing requires the creation of star witnesses,

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guaranteed the attention of many cameras because they were invested with the mean- ing of larger struggles:

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In the current political mood, the friendliest to the military in decades, the pic- tures of wretched hollow-eyed Gls that once seemed subversive of militarism and imperialism may seem inspirational. Their revised subject: ordinary American young men doing their unpleasant, ennobling duty.

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The photographer's intentions do not determine the meaning of the photograph, which will have its own career, blown by the whims and loyalties of the diverse communities that have use for it.

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3

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No moral charge attaches to the representation of these cruelties. Just the provocation: can you look at this? There is the satisfaction of being able to look at the image without flinching. There is the pleasure of flinching.

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The caption of a photograph is traditionally neutral informative: a date, a place, names.

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cannot be simply a transparency of something that happened. It is always the image that someone chose; to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.

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Everyone is a literalist when it comes to photo- graphs.

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The first justification for the brutally legible pictures of dead soldiers, which clearly violated a taboo, was the sim- ple duty to record. "The camera is the eye of history," Brady is supposed to have said.

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many of the canonical images of early war photography turn out to have been staged,

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The famous photograph of the raising of the American flag on lwo Jima on Febru- ary 23, 1945, turns out to be a "reconstruction"

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of Russian soldiers hoist- ing the Red flag atop the Reichstag as Berlin continues to burn, is that the exploit was staged

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Only starting with the Vietnam \Var is it virtually cer- tain that none of the best-known photographs were set- ups.

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4

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These Cam- bodian women and men of all ages, including many chil- dren, photographed from a few feet away, usually in half figure, are-as in Titian's The Flayi.ng of Marsyas, where Apollo's knife is eternally about to descend-forever looking at death, forever about to be murdered, forever wronged. And the viewer is in the same position as the lackey behind the camera; the experience is sickening.

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During the Vietnam era, war photography became, normatively, a criticism of war.

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American military promoted during the Gulf War in 1991 were images of the techno war: the sky above the dying, filled with light-traces of missiles and shells- images that illustrated America's absolute military su- periority

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the irre- pressible identification of the camera and the gun, "shooting" a subject and shooting a human being.

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cast as judgments about "good taste"- always a repressive standard when invoked by institutions.

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both sides treated the three and a half min- utes of horror only as a snuff fihn. Nobody could have learned from the debate that the video had other footage,

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The more remote or exotic the place, the more likely we are to have full frontal views of the dead and dying.

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They confirm that this is the sort of thing which happens in that place. The ubiquity of those photographs, and those horrors, cannot help but nourish belief in the inevitability of tragedy in the benighted or backward-that is, poor-parts of the world.

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5

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Leonardo is suggesting that the artist's gaze be, liter- ally, pitiless. The image should appall, and in that terribilità lies a challenging kind of beauty.

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The most people dared say was that the photo- graphs were "surreal," a hectic euphemism behind which the disgraced notion of beauty cowered.

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The photograph gives mixed signals. Stop this, it urges. But it also exclaims, What a spectacle!*

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With a subject conceived on this scale, com- passion can only flounde~and make abstract. But all politics, like all of history, is concrete.

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for how long? Does shock have term limits? Right now the smokers of Canada are recoiling in disgust, if they do look at these pictures. Will those still smoking fi\'e years from now still be upset? Shock can become familiar.

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the very notion of atrocity, of war crime, is as- sociated with the expectation of photographic evidence.

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all the photographs and newsreels of the concentration camps are misleading because they show the camps at the moment the Allied troops marched in.

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All memory is individual, unreproducible-it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened,

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The Holocaust Memorial Museum and the future Armenian Genocide Museum and Memorial are alx>ut what didn't happen in America, so the memory- work doesn't risk arousing an embittered domestic popula- tion against authority. To have a museum chronicling the great crime that was African ~ry in the United States of America would be to acknowledge that the evil was here. Americans prefer to picture the evil that was there,

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The problem is not that people remember through photographs, but that they re- member only the photographs.

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"The image is stark, one of the most enduring of the Balkan wars: a Serb militiaman ca- sually kicking a dying Muslim woman in the head. It tells you everything you need to know." But of course it doesn't tell us everything we need to know.

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submitting to the ordeal should help us understand such atrocities not as the acts of "barbarians" but as the reflec- tion of a belief system, racism, that by defining one peo- ple as less human than another legitimates torture and murder. But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. (They look like everybody else.)

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6

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think about what it means to look at them, about the capacity actually to assimilate what they show. Not all reactions to these pictures are under the supervi- sion of reason and conscience. Most depictions of tor- mented, mutilated bodies do arouse a pntrient interest.

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at last the desire was too much for him. Opening his eyes wide, he ran up to the bodies and cried, "There you are, curse you, feast yourselves on this lovely sight."

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"love of mischief," love of cruelty, is as natural to human beings as is sympathy.

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It is a view of suffering, of the pain of others, that is rooted in religious thinking, which links pain to sacrifice, sacrifice to exaltation- a view that could not be more alien to a modern sensibil- ity, which regards suffering as something that is a mistake or an accident or a crime. Something to be fixed. Some- thing to be refused. Something that makes one feel powerless.

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Wherever people feel safe-this was her bitter, self-accusing point-they will be indifferent.

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And it is not necessarily better to be moved. Sentimen- tality, notoriously, is entirely compatible with a taste for brutality and worse.

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Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence.

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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,

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7

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television is organized to arouse and to satiate by its surfeit of images. Image-glut keeps attention light, mobile, relatively indif- ferent to content. Image-flow precludes a privileged im- age. 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 stimu- lated, jump-started, again and again. Content is no more than one of these stimulants. A more reflective engage- ment 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.

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singled out the blunting of mind produced by "daily" events and "hourly" news of "ex- traordinary incident." (In 1800!)

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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 Phnwgraphy: an "ecology of images"? There isn't going to be an ecol- ogy 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.

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To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breath- taking pro\'incialism.

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There are hundreds of millions of television watchers who are far from inured to what they see on television. They do not have the luxury of patronizing reality.

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Citizens of modernity, consumers of violence as spec- tacle, adepts of proximity without risk, are schooled to be cynical about the possibility of sincerity.

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And the Sarajevans did want their plight to be recorded in photographs: victims are interested in the representation of their own suffer- ings. But they want the suffering to be seen as unique.

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8

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Someone who is perenni- ally surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with ev- idence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.

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Let the atrocious images haunt us.

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The images say: This is what human beings are capable of doing-may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, self- righteously. Don't forget.

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To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited.

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But watching up close-without the mediation of an image-is still just watching.

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There's nothing wrong with standing back and think- ing. To paraphrase several sages: "Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time."

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9

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These dead are supremely uninterested in the living: in those who took their lives; in witnesses-and in us. Why should they seek our gaze? What would they have to say to us? ''We"-this ''we" is everyone who has never expe- rienced anything like what they went through-don't un- derstand. We don't get it. We truly can't imagine what it was like.

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