I was looking forward to Susan Sontag's piece, "The Pictures Are Us", in the New York Times Magazine this last weekend, but although I agreed with parts of it, I ended up finding it disappointing. I was looking forward to it because I enjoyed Sontag's recent book, Regarding the Pain of Others, about photographic depictions of violence and war, and so I thought that she might have something interesting to say about the pictures at Abu Ghraib. She did, but it was mixed with things which were not especially insightful, and some which I thought quite mistaken.
It is frustrating to see someone you agree with botch an important point. This, for example, is exactly right:
The Bush administration and its defenders have chiefly sought to limit a public-relations disaster -- the dissemination of the photographs -- rather than deal with the complex crimes of leadership and of policy revealed by the pictures.So it is a pity that Sontag follows this point with the following insight:
There was, first of all, the displacement of the reality onto the photographs themselves. The administration's initial response was to say that the president was shocked and disgusted by the photographs -- as if the fault or horror lay in the images, not in what they depict.This is only two sentences, and Sontag gets back on track immediately after them. But what a sophomoric bit of nonsense this is. In ordinary language we often express our disgust for what a photograph depicts by expressing our disgust for the photographs. Whatever else you want to say about the President - and I would like to say a lot of nasty things - it's pretty obvious what he meant. If he is insincere here, we won't shed any light on his insincerity by talk about the displacement supposedly evidenced in disgust for a photograph. That is a modest point about two sentences, but I offer it as a representative of my reaction to a number of other passages in Sontag's essay.
These are quibbles. I am also uncomfortable about the way that Sontag develops her thesis. One of the main points of the essay is that
the horror of what is shown in the photographs cannot be separated from the horror that the photographs were taken -- with the perpetrators posing, gloating, over their helpless captives.Sontag's elaborations on this theme are either confused or virtuosic, depending on what you think of her piece. They are certainly complex. For she wants to tie this idea to ultimate responsibility for the moral climate of the military operation (and that to the war on terror and the botched war on Iraq), to changes in our culture, to pornography and violence, and to a number of other observations which are supposed to fit somewhere within this general framework.
Some of these observations seem badly focused or unclear. Expanding on the point quoted just above, Sontag writes:
German soldiers in the Second World War took photographs of the atrocities they were committing in Poland and Russia, but snapshots in which the executioners placed themselves among their victims are exceedingly rare, as may be seen in a book just published, ''Photographing the Holocaust,'' by Janina Struck. If there is something comparable to what these pictures show it would be some of the photographs of black victims of lynching taken between the 1880's and 1930's, which show Americans grinning beneath the naked mutilated body of a black man or woman hanging behind them from a tree. The lynching photographs were souvenirs of a collective action whose participants felt perfectly justified in what they had done. So are the pictures from Abu Ghraib.With this contrast, Sontag seems to suggest that the difference reflects a difference in attitudes towards the crimes. I do think that when someone photographs him or herself as a participant in a torture scene without apparent shame that is decent evidence that he or she endorses that torture. But can we say the reverse about the apparent reluctance of other perpetrators to figure in otherwise similar photos? I'm not inclined to read anything charitable into this little quirk of Nazi photography. Neither, probably is Sontag. But then what significance does she draw from this contrast? I can't tell if I'm simply misreading her or she is simply confused.The lynching pictures were in the nature of photographs as trophies -- taken by a photographer in order to be collected, stored in albums, displayed. The pictures taken by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib, however, reflect a shift in the use made of pictures -- less objects to be saved than messages to be disseminated, circulated. A digital camera is a common possession among soldiers. Where once photographing war was the province of photojournalists, now the soldiers themselves are all photographers -- recording their war, their fun, their observations of what they find picturesque, their atrocities -- and swapping images among themselves and e-mailing them around the globe.
And so it goes. Here is what Sontag says to put the photographs in cultural context:
An erotic life is, for more and more people, that which can be captured in digital photographs and on video. And perhaps the torture is more attractive, as something to record, when it has a sexual component. It is surely revealing, as more Abu Ghraib photographs enter public view, that torture photographs are interleaved with pornographic images of American soldiers having sex with one another. In fact, most of the torture photographs have a sexual theme, as in those showing the coercing of prisoners to perform, or simulate, sexual acts among themselves. One exception, already canonical, is the photograph of the man made to stand on a box, hooded and sprouting wires, reportedly told he would be electrocuted if he fell off. Yet pictures of prisoners bound in painful positions, or made to stand with outstretched arms, are infrequent. That they count as torture cannot be doubted. You have only to look at the terror on the victim's face, although such ''stress'' fell within the Pentagon's limits of the acceptable. But most of the pictures seem part of a larger confluence of torture and pornography: a young woman leading a naked man around on a leash is classic dominatrix imagery. And you wonder how much of the sexual tortures inflicted on the inmates of Abu Ghraib was inspired by the vast repertory of pornographic imagery available on the Internet -- and which ordinary people, by sending out Webcasts of themselves, try to emulate.And again:
Even more appalling, since the pictures were meant to be circulated and seen by many people: it was all fun. And this idea of fun is, alas, more and more -- contrary to what President Bush is telling the world -- part of ''the true nature and heart of America.'' It is hard to measure the increasing acceptance of brutality in American life, but its evidence is everywhere, starting with the video games of killing that are a principal entertainment of boys -- can the video game ''Interrogating the Terrorists'' really be far behind? -- and on to the violence that has become endemic in the group rites of youth on an exuberant kick. Violent crime is down, yet the easy delight taken in violence seems to have grown. From the harsh torments inflicted on incoming students in many American suburban high schools -- depicted in Richard Linklater's 1993 film, ''Dazed and Confused'' -- to the hazing rituals of physical brutality and sexual humiliation in college fraternities and on sports teams, America has become a country in which the fantasies and the practice of violence are seen as good entertainment, fun.I think that what happened at Abu Ghraib is very revealing about America: This is a country in which the President can brag in a state of the union speech about extra-judicial killings. Many Americans will despise him even more than before, but many will not. And the latter really do help to sustain a moral atmosphere in which abuses become inevitable.What formerly was segregated as pornography, as the exercise of extreme sadomasochistic longings -- as in Pier Paolo Pasolini's last, near-unwatchable film, ''Salo'' (1975), depicting orgies of torture in the Fascist redoubt in northern Italy at the end of the Mussolini era -- is now being normalized, by some, as high-spirited play or venting. To ''stack naked men'' is like a college fraternity prank, said a caller to Rush Limbaugh and the many millions of Americans who listen to his radio show. Had the caller, one wonders, seen the photographs? No matter. The observation -- or is it the fantasy? -- was on the mark. What may still be capable of shocking some Americans was Limbaugh's response: ''Exactly!'' he exclaimed. ''Exactly my point. This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation, and we're going to ruin people's lives over it, and we're going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time.'' ''They'' are the American soldiers, the torturers. And Limbaugh went on: ''You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people having a good time, these people. You ever heard of emotional release?''
Shock and awe were what our military promised the Iraqis. And shock and the awful are what these photographs announce to the world that the Americans have delivered: a pattern of criminal behavior in open contempt of international humanitarian conventions. Soldiers now pose, thumbs up, before the atrocities they commit, and send off the pictures to their buddies. Secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal, you now clamor to be invited on a television show to reveal. What is illustrated by these photographs is as much the culture of shamelessness as the reigning admiration for unapologetic brutality.
So I don't want to simply reject out of hand Sontag's effort to connect what happened at Abu Ghraib with the moral atmosphere which made it possible. But part of this line of reasoning may be vitiated by the fact that the pictures may well have been official policy, as part of a program to humiliate the prisoners further. This doesn't lessen moral responsibility, of course, but it may influence the way we interpret the photos: The perpetrators may appear in them less for broader cultural reasons to which Sontag appeals, and more simply because it was intrinsic to the project of information-gathering by torture. Sontag also seems to oversimplify: if the photographs came naturally to "us" then so did the revulsion which followed their publication. This too was part of the story, and by leaving it out for the most part, Sontag loses a good deal of the moral complexity of the popular response she aims to interpret.
Set that aside, though. What is really disturbing about this passage is how close Sontag appears to the many voices on the right who also attempted (with different ideological ambitions) to connect Abu Ghraib with their favoured stories of cultural decay. Like the cultural conservatives, Sontag has less an argument here than a juxtaposition of thoughts which we are expected to find convincing. ("And you wonder how much . . . " - I wonder many things, but I never imagine that my wondering will suffice as an argument.) And like the cultural conservatives, I think Sontag deserves the same response: As morally problematic as, say, pornography is, most of it is very far from sexual torture. And while some of the tortures at Abu Ghraib may remind Limbaugh and Sontag of initiation rituals, surely it is obvious that it is the element of nonconsensuality at Abu Ghraib which turns it from a game into a nightmare. Cultural criticism of the sort that Sontag is attempting is an interesting and worthwhile project, but if it isn't rigorous, it collapses into Limbaugh-level patness, and here Sontag is not rigorous. Notice also that Sontag is apparently attracted to a narrative of cultural decline which has a lot in common with the one cultural conservatives push. Indeed, if this essay focused on the cultural aspects of Sontag's theme, no one would have batted an eyelash had they found it within the pages of the National Review, and liberals would have been up in arms about the National Review's latest stupidity. (I haven't yet seen any liberals criticize the Sontag piece.)
This is a pity, because as much as I enjoy grand explanations which manage to sweep together cultural history and politics into an analysis of current events, I also dislike the confusion of distinct issues. We can safely reject - or at least regard sceptically - Sontag's observations about the larger cultural meaning of the Abu Ghraib photographs, while as the same time accepting the basic point that the political climate in the country made the events depicted in them practically inevitable.
Posted by Chris at May 24, 2004 11:15 PM