Susan Sontag wrote an interesting essay on the Iraq prison photos for the NYT magazine last Sunday, which I just had the opportunity to read last night. Her main point is that there are deep structural (and, I would argue, moral) problems in our military, our government, and even our society, which result in people of Rush Limbaugh's stripe comparing these military acts to frat-boy hazing, nothing serious, just blowing off steam.
But she raises some other interesting points as well. First, Bush and senior administration officials were outraged AT THE PHOTOS, NOT THE ACTS THEY REPRESENTED. Second, photos are a more insistent form of documentation than evanescent words. On this second point (I'll come back to the first one in a moment): our culture doesn't value the spoken word, and our vernacular is evidence of this: "It's only her word against his." "Get it in writing." It's why you have to repeat instructions to tenth graders five times - they didn't listen the first four. Or they listened but they've already forgotten.
In cultures where there isn't a written language, oral tradition is obviously much more important, and people know how to listen and to remember. We don't have that, so it's easy to dismiss on-air words; it's the photos that are taken seriously.
Why, though, especially now in the digital age, should photos be so privileged as pristine documentation, as archive, when the circumstances of the shooter's point of view, how the image is cropped, and how it is subsequently digitally changed are all so critical? And this is to say nothing of WHO has digital cameras, and WHY, and what access they have to the means to manipulate, reproduce, and distribute the photos.
Back to the first point. On first hearing, a few weeks ago, I just assumed that the photos were just a stand-in for the acts, in a rather conventional figure of speech. Thus outrage at the photos really meant outrage at the acts they represented. But Sontag seems to see something more sinister - a slippage of metonymy in which the photo does NOT represent the act but rather is disengaged from it, and therefore outrage at one does NOT imply outrage at the other.
I wonder if there is a relationship in this to what I wrote about in the Flanders fields entry, in which the language of poetics is employed to describe trauma. The latter I saw first as a necessary psychological distancing and second as an attempt to use "special" (ie, not everyday) language to convey how important it was to talk about the trauma. On the flip side, to take Sontag's view, the poetics and the metonymy could be ways to dissociate and absolve and compartmentalize and even trivialize. That's the danger - and it would be wise to be aware of it in writing further about war.
(I just reread this entry and got a creepy feeling of deja vu. Obviously these processes of symbol-making, figuration, and transference are all very important. Sigh. A lifetime of reading about them.)
Posted by otto0114 at May 28, 2004 09:35 AM