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The /Hamartia/ of Light and Shadow: Susan Sontag in the Digital Age
*Manisha Basu*
/ University of Pittsburgh/
mab79@pitt.edu
(c) 2006 Manisha Basu.
All rights reserved.
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Review of:
Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador, 2003.
1. In the first of the six essays in On Photography (1977), Susan
Sontag had claimed that after repeated exposure, photographs of
atrocity became less real for their audience, and therefore less
able to evoke sympathy. In her final book Regarding the Pain of
Others, Susan Sontag moves, self-admittedly, in a different
direction from her earlier argument: she stops to ask whether
indeed our contemporary culture of digitization and image-glut
actually shrivels the ethical force of photographs of atrocity, or
whether in an age in which spectacle has usurped the place of
reality, photographic images still have the power to evoke shock
and sentiment. Responding in a different way to our contemporary
politico-cultural occasion, Judith Butler in an essay entitled
"Photography, War, Outrage," elaborates the nature of the
photographic frame and its relation with interpretive practices,
and in doing so, positions hers own argument in opposition to
Sontag's. According to Butler, Sontag understands interpretation
itself to be quintessentially narrative in nature, and since
without accompanying captions and analyses, photographs cannot
tell a story, or even generate a complete understanding of the
situation they are expressing, they are neither narratives, nor
therefore, interpretations. In fact, left to themselves,
photographs are the fragmentary emanations of reality, the
punctual and discrete renderings of truth, rather than the uniform
grammar of a consistently unfolding tale. In short, they are not
'writing' and thus relay and transmit diffuse assemblages of
affect, without necessarily appealing to the coherent, narrative
understanding of an interpretive, rational consciousness.
2. In commenting on the phenomenon of embedded reporting vis-à-vis
images of atrocity from Abu Ghraib, Butler arrives at a different
notion of the photographic frame and its relation with
interpretive practices. Butler's view is that the phenomenon of
embedded reporting is a way of /interpreting/ in advance what will
and will not be included in a field of perception, and thus even
before the viewer is confronted with the image, interpretation is
always already in play. Defined as a situation in which
journalists agree to report only from the points of view already
established by military and governmental authorities, embedded
reporting was first employed in the coverage of the British
campaign in the Falkland Islands in 1982. After that time, the
phenomenon reappeared during the two Iraq wars, particularly in
the limitations that the U.S. Department of Defense imposed on
journalists reporting on the second Iraq War. Butler's argument
thus notes that restricting how any of us may see--regardless of
whether the reception of photographic images urges interpretive
practices or not--is in contemporary politics becoming an
increasingly significant way of effecting mass interpretation.
Butler argues--and she suggests that this argument is different
from Sontag's--that, even outside of the specific practices
involved in embedded reporting, the photographic frame "is not
just a visual image awaiting its interpretation; it is itself
interpreting, actively, even forcibly" (823). However, there is at
least one glaring problem here with Butler's reading of Sontag.
Indeed, Sontag by no means suggests that photographs are images
that merely /await/ interpretations, even though there can be no
doubt that she does make a sharp distinction between the
interpretive practices associated with photography and those
associated with prose or painting for instance. In fact Sontag
most famously writes that where "narratives make us understand:
photographs do something else. They haunt us" (89).
3. While in Butler's mind, this declaration expresses something of a
decisive fracture for Sontag between the momentary effects of
photography and the enduring ethical pathos generated by prose, my
view of Regarding the Pain of Others is different. Especially in
her last book, Sontag neither attempts to distinguish photography
from prose, and come to the repetitive and therefore fatigued
conclusion that without the narrative coherence of prose,
photographs do not qualify as interpretations at all; nor does
she, as Butler puts it, fault photography for not being writing.
Instead Sontag finds herself to be endlessly intrigued by
precisely that haunting quality of the visual image that marks its
distinction from the written word. In an age in which she herself
says "to remember is more and more not to recall a story but to be
able to call up a picture," (89) Sontag is not really concerned
with forcing photographs into the narrative mold of prose. Indeed,
given the sheer sweep of the visual image in contemporary culture
and politics, she struggles to come to terms with the nature of
national memorialization effected by photographs, the kind of
affect relayed by photographic images as the discrete and punctual
fragments of reality, and the semiological universe that may be
called into being by such dissociated transmissions of
affectivity. For Butler, however, such concerns do not come to the
forefront because she is responding to the very specific issue of
embedded reporting and how embedded reporting constitutes us as
unthinking consumers of visual culture. She must therefore, indeed
almost irresistibly, emphasize that "to learn to see the frame
that blinds us to what we see is no easy matter" (826). Again, she
must overlook the fact that in Regarding the Pain of Others,
Sontag, while acknowledging that framing is in itself
interpreting, is more interested in engaging a world where it is
claimed that "reality has abdicated" in favor of representations
(109).
4. Regarding the Pain of Others begins quite appropriately with an
invocation of Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas, for if the latter
was Woolf's "brave unwelcomed reflections on the roots of war" in
face of the rising fascist insurrection in Spain, then the former
is occasioned by Sontag's fearless interventions in the media
coverage of the second war in Iraq (3). The basic impetus of Three
Guineas is expertly laid out in the first few pages of Sontag's
work, emphasizing that Woolf suffers from a naïve illusion that
war is universally abhorrent to all, and that photographic
representations of war will no doubt generate universal consensus
against it. Woolf had couched her book as a response to a letter
she had received from a London lawyer asking, "how in your opinion
are /we/ to prevent war?" Woolf immediately challenges the very
grounds of this spectral lawyer's question and proposes that
although the lawyer and she may belong to the same privileged and
educated class, men and women cannot, and do not, have the same
responses to war. Inviting the lawyer to look together with her at
a particularly gruesome set of war photographs depicting bodies
maimed and mutilated beyond any viewer's recognition of them as
human, Woolf discovers with a great deal of rhetorical èlan that
both she and the lawyer--despite their differences--think the
photographs disgusting, horrific, barbarous, and abominable. From
this point, Woolf hurtles off to a conclusion that according to
Sontag unthinkingly collapses the very distinction she had begun
with. In other words, despite being "separated by the age-old
affinities of feeling and practice of their respective sexes,"
Woolf's claim is that that both the lawyer and she respond in the
same way to photographic representations of war, and that, given
this happy coincidence of emotions, they will in unison be able to
call for a stop to the abomination of mindless death and
destruction (6). Thus despite having attacked her interlocutor for
his presumption of a consensual "we" in asking the initial
question, Woolf herself, Sontag notes, slips into the same danger
of proposing that there is any kind of consensus at all in the
repudiation of war.
5. In light of our own political occasion, as images of the
butchering of noncombatants begin to seep out of Iraq, it is
difficult by any stretch of the imagination to argue that such
representations immediately evoke a repudiation of war--in fact,
as Sontag asks, do they not in fact, often enough, inspire greater
militancy? Can there indeed be a universal "we" when the issue in
question involves looking at other people's pain? Of course,
Sontag's posing of such rhetorical questions becomes in itself a
form of challenge to Woolf's assertion of a liberal consensus that
draws its sustenance from the magnanimity and goodwill of educated
democratic agreements. Yet, what the former does not take care to
note when attacking Woolf on this ground is precisely the /affect/
generated by the earlier writer's own text. Is Virginia Woolf
indeed naïve enough so easily to let go of her intellectual
position distinguishing between, on the one hand, bellicose men
who are seduced to battle by the torrid allure of sacrifice and
its promise of glorious patriotism, and, on the other,
Lysistrata-inspired women who at every juncture must be
distinguished from their war-like male counterparts? Would it not
be more critically challenging for us to investigate the effects
that an author of Woolf's intellectual affiliations might have
generated in drawing all her critical distinctions together,
violently crushing them bit by bit into one vast crucible of mass
feeling, and then proposing that they manifest a well-united
front, free of opposition and difference? Indeed, in misreading
Woolf's own reliance on transitive affectivity is Sontag not
betraying her own failure to engage the very term she has set out
to investigate?
6. Sontag writes that Woolf's sweeping generalization about
humanity's universal repudiation of war rests on two uncritical
assumptions: one that assumes that violence is by and large
condemned by all Kantian citizens of goodwill, and another that
dogmatically believes in the transparency of the photographic
image and its ability to convey an undiluted truth. It is of
course fairly easy for the author of Regarding the Pain of Others
to convince her readers that the question of violence is a much
contested one, and indeed she does not waste much time on this
self-evident issue, except to say that the history of war has
shown that violence is often entitled "just" or at least
"necessary" in the face of a threatening enemy. What is of greater
interest in this context is Sontag's attack on Woolf's faith that
photographs have the ability to reflect an undistorted real. And
indeed it is here that Butler's claim about Sontag arguing that
the photograph cannot by itself provide an interpretation totters
on the brink of a misreading. Weaving in and out of the history of
photographic images, Sontag argues that the photograph, like all
other texts, is indeed interpretative; it has an author whose
point of view we see, a frame that excludes and includes objects
of cognition, a career of meaning that moves away from the
sovereignty of the author's clutches, a life of circulation and
dissemination that may or may not make it the plaything of
different interest groups struggling for legitimation and
authority, and what Edward Said would call a worldliness that
institutes it as a part of numerous heterogeneous realities that
come together to form the great discontinuous network of human
existence. In short, the photograph, like all representations and
texts, is flawed in being intimately tied up with power, position,
and interests, whether it was a victim in their struggle or not.
Strangely enough however, having argued in this manner about the
representational quality of the photographic image, Sontag is
unable to decode Woolf's text within her own paradigm of thought.
In other words, if as Sontag proposes, photographic images,
despite their "truth" or "untruth" do have rhetorical and polemic
effects, then why is it that Woolf's text or her "image of
thought," as it were, is allowed to slither out of such a complex
domain and stand on its own, as the supreme expression of
authorial sovereignty? Why is Woolf's writing released and
liberated not only from a consideration of the author's own
rhetorical invention but also from the historicality of the
effects it might have produced in conjunction with the different
knottings and strands, that, dependent on a myriad of
circumstances, came together to question, trouble, upset, and
reformulate notions of liberal democracy in the wake of Europe's
second great war?
7. The 1930s were a critical juncture in the life of liberal
democracy in both Europe and North America, and intellectuals in
these continents were already looking toward the margins of
intellectual history for ideas that would transform and revitalize
the landscape of politics. Indeed, many critics believe that the
quest had made itself known even earlier, and that if the last
decades of the nineteenth century could be seen as grand zenith of
liberalism in the West, then the Great War marked its grotesque
nadir.[1 <#foot1>] Despite the fact that Virginia Woolf's work is
a part of this intellectual milieu, Sontag is unable, or perhaps
unwilling, to investigate what might have been the intriguing
effects of Three Guineas within such a trajectory of thought. More
surprising perhaps is the fact that while shying away from
thinking the historicality of Woolf's text, Regarding the Pain of
Others is almost seductively alluring in its historicization of
the photographic image. The writing not only displays a
breathtaking array of scholarship in a lucidly elegant style that
rarely appears pedantic, but also entices readers with the promise
of a heuristic about how war is waged, understood, and represented
in our own time. Particularly exciting is the chapter of the book
that undertakes an excursion into the long and illustrious
pedigree of the iconography of suffering. Beginning with the
writhing statue of Laocoön and his sons, moving niftily through
the cadaverous sweetness of depictions of hell in the Christian
tradition, and finally briefly touching on the inexhaustible
catalogue of cruelties in pagan myths, Sontag's range of examples
culminates in the claim that the practice of representing
suffering came to be considered deplorable only with changing
historical-political conditions:
The practice of representing atrocious suffering as something
to be deplored, and if possible stopped enters the history of
images with a specific subject: the sufferings endured by
civilian populations at the hands of a victorious army on the
rampage. It is a quintessentially secular subject, which
emerges in the seventeenth century, when contemporary
realignments of power become material for artists. (42-43)
Sontag's argument reaches its critical acme with the above quote,
in which the universal condemnation of the slaughter of civilians
is neatly plucked out of the comfort of its naturalized setting
and violently defamiliarized. This claim is of course also the
point of entry for Sontag's attack on Woolf's notion that
photographs of war are universally lamentable. It is thus from
this intellectual platform that we expect Sontag to launch her
foray into the contemporary landscape of politics. However, our
author's quite skillful reading of the deplorable nature of
suffering as a historically specific moment rather than an
eternally true human reaction to atrocity does not seem to
translate into a corresponding intellectual dexterity with
representations of human suffering in an occasion very different
from that of the seventeenth century.
8. Confronted, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries, with a sheer discordance of pixilated images and their
inexhaustible generation of other images, and therefore the
culture of 'image-glut', Regarding the Pain of Others finds itself
inundated. In the final section of the essay, Sontag's prose loses
its patient elegance to become instead a harried and in fact
beleaguered document that is little more than a frustrated rant
against the inhuman multiplication not just of images, but of the
sacrilegious settings in which we see them. In fact, in my view,
Sontag's apparent frustration with the fact that "photographs
cannot produce ethical pathos in us" (which Butler reads as her
distrust of the interpretive force of the punctual and momentary
nature of the photographic image) is a result of this besieged
intellection ("Photography, War, Outrage" 824). Harrowing
photographs of blood-spattered men, women, and children, ruined
monuments of flesh and stone, twisted and maimed beyond
recognition, faceless bodies, and amputated limbs are flanked
today, Sontag writes, by advertisements for SUVs, pain relievers,
and emollients, in much the same manner that the unbridgeable
difference between the editorial and advertising sections of
leading news dailies is blurred to the point of indistinction, and
photographs of the Spanish Civil War unabashedly adorn walls of an
Agnes B. boutique. In other words, if the nature of understanding
conjured by photographic images was in the first place distinct
from the "coherent reason" called into being by prose, then the
contemporary landscape that Sontag lays out seems to question the
very validity of categories which used to describe a humane
response to images of atrocity. Can "reason," "conscience," and
"sympathy" or even "desire," "delight," and "curiosity" meet the
challenge of an irreverent blasphemy of contiguities between
distinct images? What nature of curiosity, for instance, might be
sparked by the pressures of witnessing an advertisement for
Benetton in conjunction with its deployment of the blood-stained
shirt of a dead Croatian solider, and what quality of sympathy by
the violent yoking together of the concentration camp photographs
from 1945 and the Hôtel de Sully in Paris?
9. Tragically, Regarding the Pain of Others turns back decidedly from
answering any such questions in much the same way as it had
foreclosed its own engagement with the rhetorical affect generated
by the style of Three Guineas. Indeed, it is here that we can
locate the /hamartia/ of the work--the tragic shortcoming, not of
the hero, but of the text--whereby it cannot bring to fruition its
own implicit struggle in coming to terms with the nature of the
affect transmitted by photographs, the increasingly aphoristic
quality of the image, the place of the image in an era of
information-overload, and the capacity of the image in such a
landscape to infinitely, and perhaps "irrationally," multiply its
significations in relation to continuously mobile variations.
Instead, Sontag looks for reprieve to the hundreds of millions of
television watchers whose viewing habits are radically different
from those of a small educated population living in the rich part
of the world, and to those areas of the globe where news has not
yet been converted into entertainment. She seems to suggest that
for such people and others who do not have the luxury of
patronizing reality, photographs of atrocity at least provide an
initial spark for humane thought, for engaging with the sheer
range of depravity and human wickedness, and for practicing what
may be called the ethical act of remembrance. Indeed, benumbed and
inured to tormented and twisted masses of flesh, we in the
metropolitan center may be able to do absolutely nothing with the
residual feelings of compassion that such images evoke, we may
argue endlessly, and in Sontag's opinion, unproductively about the
indistinguishable boundaries between representation and reality,
and draped in the armour of the postmodern critic, we may
grandiloquently propose that the effects of images exceed the
photographer's intentions, yet, there is, a "real," Sontag tells
us, that is untouched by, and uninterested in, the trace it leaves
on film. "The dead," Sontag writes are "supremely uninterested in
the living," in fact they thwart our gaze and thus tell us that
they do not care that we see. This snub to our habits of visual
consumption is for Sontag the ethical force of "the real," it is
the haunting quality of the photographic image, which according to
her has a close relationship with mortality. Yet how exactly, from
amidst a massification of pixilated images, we should engage this
"real" and whether indeed the "haunting effect" lies buried,
irretrievably, in a sheer volume of images, remains largely
unclear in Sontag's final book.
10. Regarding the Pain of Others is not, as Judith Butler argues,
caught up in a fruitless endeavour to argue the value of the
written word over photographic images, or even the value of
narrative coherence and understanding over all other forms of
understanding. It does not by any means deny that the frame is in
itself an interpretive device--indeed Sontag states in no
uncertain terms that photographs have an "author . . . [they]
represent the view of someone" (31), just as she points out that
"to photograph is to frame and to frame is to exclude" (46).
Regarding the Pain of Others labors to understand /why/ and /how/
the transmission of affectivity conjured by photographs is
distinct from the narrative understanding engendered by prose, and
it strives to uncover a contemporary political occasion in which
such diffuse relays of pixilated affect have not only massified to
an inhuman scope, but also have increasingly become the norm for
constructions of national and patriotic memory. In that sense,
Butler's and Sontag's projects are not very different. Butler
believes that it is the frame of embedded reportage that is
increasingly being called upon to constitute a national and
patriotic population, which is inured to the suffering of others,
for, as in the case of the Abu Ghraib photographs, there is a
"clear belief that those who deliver this torture, along with
those who commemorate the deed are doing justice the American
way." "Photography, War, Outrage" thus emphasizes that it is the
frame that is constitutive, even at the expense of, and perhaps
tragically missing the mark of Sontag's distinct concerns with how
to preserve the ethical force of the image given the inhuman
accelerations of a changing economy of visibilities.
11. Sontag too, like Butler, is concerned with mobilizations of
nationalism and patriotism. Unlike Butler however, she understands
the contemporary face of nationalism not through the particular
phenomena of embedded reporting, but broadly, through the defeat
of humanism--through the new order of representations that has
little room for modern humans and their reliance on the rational
ordering of syllogistic propositions. Sontag's is an endeavour to
come to terms with digitization as a chaotic deluge, in which a
sheer volume of information bombards the citizen every day, and
image variables with varying degrees of frequency come into close
proximity in brutally contradictory settings and with no necessary
rational thread. Left to narrativize such a messy surfeit with
little resort to what used to be the cultural-pedagogical
institutions of the welfare state, the citizen uses images
available in a pragmatic way, inserting and situating them in a
patchwork of connections that indeed draws attention to an
emergent style of thinking not necessarily bound by the sovereign
reason of modern /anthropos/. Despite being such a powerfully
historical text--one that reveals that the very abhorrence of
representations of atrocity is a relatively modern
phenomenon--Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others tragically
misses the mark in so far as it fails to encounter the
historicality of /anthropos/ and indeed of humanism as a mode of
thinking (and the inability to encounter the historicity of
Woolf's Three Guineas is an aspect of this failure). Yet, is this
flaw not in itself a testament to the fact that the changing
contours of the human are still emergent, and that we are even now
living the passing of an older political form and its attendant
categories of organization? After all, are not intellectuals the
world over laboring to grasp fundamental transformations in the
way humans and citizens affiliate themselves with modes of
political aggregation? Is not much of their work belated in
relation to the emergent changes it seeks to track?
/ English Department
University of Pittsburgh
mab79@pitt.edu /
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Notes
1 <#ref1>. See Waters.
Works Cited
Butler, Judith. "Photography, War, Outrage." PMLA 120.3 (May
2005): 822-27.
De Man, Paul. Critical Writings, 1953-1978. Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 1989.
Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador, 2003.
Waters, Lindsay. Paul de Man: Critical Writings, 1953-1978.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989.