The Pornographic
Barbarism of the Self-Reflecting Sign1
Dr. Paul A.
Taylor
(Institute of
Communications Studies, University of Leeds, United
Kingdom).
I. Introduction
Fundamentally, such violence is not so much an event
as the explosive form assumed by an absence of
events. Or rather the implosive form: and
what implodes here is the political void… the
silence of history which has been repressed at the
level of individual psychology, and the indifference
and silence of everyone. We are dealing, therefore,
not with irrational episodes in the life of our
society, but instead with something that is
completely in accord with that society’s
accelerating plunge into the void.2
Despite the heated
debates and huge mass public demonstrations about
the rights and wrongs of Gulf War II in 2003, the
biggest shifts in the British and American publics’
perception of the conflict occurred through a series
of vivid, defining images at various crucial stages.
Thus, what proved to be undue optimism was at its
peak during the fall of Baghdad and the
Ozymandias-like toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue,
complete with a forewarning of the cultural
misunderstandings to come when a US soldier
momentarily draped the Stars and Stripes around the
statue’s face. Further grounds for Western
triumphalism were provided with the images of a
disorientated and disheveled Saddam shortly after
his capture on December 13th 2003,
with the bathos of his last underground hiding-place
that contrasted markedly with the pictures of
abandoned palaces. In early May 2004 the flip side
of this ability of images to dictate the political
climate became apparent when President Bush and
Prime Minister Blair came under sustained pressure
because photographs of prisoner abuse in Baghdad’s
Abu Ghraib jail appeared in the world’s media. There
are two key aspects to the subsequent furor that are
illuminated by Baudrillard's notion of the
ob-scene and the consistent attention he pays
throughout his work to the excessively explicit,
de-symbolized nature of the contemporary mediascape.
1) The unequal relationship between the effect the
pictures had compared to the words of previously
unheeded imageless reports. Amnesty International,
for example, had reported months earlier, in
February 2004, allegations of torture and serious
human rights violations without any impact; and,
2) The question arises as to why did these images
make so much more of an impact compared to the large
number of previously witnessed scenes of more
conventional military violence and its civilian
victims?
The
thesis offered here as an answer to this question is
that, even if only for a short while and for reasons
perhaps still not adequately articulated or fully
recognised, the “Pornographic” nature of the Abu
Ghraib photographs spoke to a strong sense of unease
in the public. Despite politicians’ protestations
about a few bad apples spoiling the barrel, the
Western public had an intuitive sense that the
photographs represented something deeper about the
society that sent out such troops. It is this
“something” this paper seeks to explore.
Perhaps
the most iconic and evocative of all the abuse
photographs was that of an Iraqi man being subjected
to the faked threat of electrocution. The prisoner
is perched atop a box in a makeshift shroud, covered
with a hood reminiscent of the Ku-Klux-Klan and
pretend electrodes attached to his hands. The image
is particularly evocative for Christian viewers. It
resonates with connotations of the crucifixion and
the representation of Christ the Redeemer with
welcoming hands outstretched at his side. This
article explores the profound implications such a
poignant tableau has for our conceptualization of
political violence and what it says about the nature
of a society that could create the image of an
abused, Christ-like figure standing on a box. For
those who remain relatively impervious to any
unusual level of moral disquiet over the Abu Ghraib
pictures, the paper also raises a pragmatic
political issue for consideration. This is the
extent to which there is a link between the social
processes that constructed the prisoner abuse
scandal and the wider political environment of the
international Coalition’s "War against Terror".
The paper concludes
by arguing that a keen understanding of the West’s
unhealthy relationship to the mediated image may lie
behind the malevolent orchestration of such heavily
mediated events as the 9/11 tragedy. Marshall
McLuhan3
offers the myth of Narcissus as a defining metaphor
for the West’s problematic relationship to the
screen. Following McLuhan and Baudrillard, it is
argued that the failure of military intelligence
which led to 9/11 is at least partially due to a
myopic perspective upon our own culture. Dealing
with international terrorism might be a lot easier
if we stopped waging very real and bloody war on an
abstract noun (terror) and instead sought to emulate
the malevolently keen media savvy of such figures as
Osama bin Laden. Although it is obvious the West
desperately needs to develop a more sophisticated
and less reified understanding of the Islamic Other,
this would actually be much easier if we were more
sensitive to the processes of meaning-construction
within our own heavily mediated culture. This
culture is increasingly pornographic in a manner
both reflected in the Abu Ghraib photographs but
also perhaps somewhat obscured by the misleadingly
exceptional status claimed for them by our
politicians.
II. The
Self-Reflecting Sign
From the mutation and conflation of confessional
culture and mediated ‘real life’ had emerged the
broader trend of the barbarism of the
self-reflecting sign.4
Bracewell refers
above to the “self-reflecting sign” as a defining
feature of the contemporary mediascape. It is not
the self-reflexive sign, which would involve
a sense of reflection upon an image’s substantive
meaning – rather, this article uses the conventional
concept of pornography and Baudrillard’s concept of
the ob-scene to explore how the
self-reflecting sign refers to the image that has no
meaning beyond its own tautological facticity. We
shall see how literal Pornography – [upper case “P”]
– acts as a trope for the dominant social values of
self-reflecting signs and their visual excess –
pornography [lower case “p”]. I examine the present
day manifestations of this extenuated social porn,
and its profound political consequences, evident
across a spectrum of confessional, confrontational,
and violent media formats. Just as the obsessively
repetitive attention paid by the media to the
terrible images of the 9/11 tragedy occluded more
substantive considerations of the event’s
significance, so too do debates about the Abu Ghraib
images threaten to obscure the deep social causes
and consequences of the symptoms they reflect.
The images of abuse
caused widespread shock in the West (interestingly,
in the Arab world, instead of shock, the pictures
tended to be met with a mixture of anger and a
resigned sense of déjŕ vu5.
There may also, however, be an element of denial in
the Western response. Thus even some US Senators and
Congressional Representatives highly critical of
Donald Rumsfeld during his evidence to both Houses,
took the opportunity to emphasize how this behaviour
was not representative of US forces in general (see,
for example, Senator Joseph Lieberman’s comments6).
Similarly, speaking to the media while standing
alongside King Abdullah II of Jordan in the White
House garden on May 6th 2004,
President Bush said “sorry for the humiliation
suffered by the Iraqi prisoners”. He then went on to
say that he was “as equally sorry that people seeing
these pictures didn’t understand the true nature and
heart of America”.7
Although these assertions may be true, they still
distract from a key element of the disgust the
images produced which is the central focus of this
chapter: their pornographic rather than Pornographic
nature.
In Britain, the
distraction from the deeper significance of the Abu
Ghraib photographs came in the form of a debate over
whether similar pictures of British troops abusing
Iraqi prisoners elsewhere were fake or not. In May
2004, Piers Morgan, the editor of the UK’s Daily
Mirror tabloid newspaper, was fired when the
photographs he printed were proved to be false. It
is interesting to note that when doubts were raised
as to their veracity, at least some debate took
place as to whether they were still accurate
representations of actual events not originally
photographed. In this particular instance, although
the issue of authenticity dominated proceedings,
possibly fake pictures nevertheless did allow more
substantive discussion about actual abuse that had
taken place. The debate over The Daily Mirror
pictures provided an interesting example of
Bracewell’s assessment of the contemporary status of
the image where: “’authenticity‘ is the hallmark of
truth, and hence the gauge of social value …there
is now the sense that authenticity itself can be
sculpted to suggest veracity as an image, in which
truth remains ambiguous".8
Whilst the fact remains that both the US and British
images of prisoner abuse had a disproportionately
powerful political impact, the pictures also
illustrate the ambivalent political power of images.
Normally the
postmodern concept of the hyperreal
(typically in Baudrillard and Eco’s work [Simulations
and Travels in Hyperreality9])
the paradoxical notion of a mediated phenomenon that
is more real than the real itself) has negative
connotations. Baudrillard argues that the hyperreal
often distracts attention from the real issues. For
example, in Simulations he suggests that the
public investigation that followed the Watergate
scandal merely hid the innate corruptness of US
politics, and Disneyland’s main purpose is to
disguise the fact that American society at large is
really modelled on a Disney-like ethos of
commodified fantasia. In the particular instance of
the British photographs, however, fake pictures
provoked a valuable self-examination of the
Coalition’s practices and values. Unfortunately,
more often, the process tends to be reversed:
real images often produce inauthentic discourse.
Images determine politics largely irrespective of
their truth or objective significance.
III. Redefining Violence
But why should we hear about body bags, and deaths,
and how many, what day it’s gonna happen, and how
many this or what do you suppose? Or, I mean, it’s,
it’s not relevant. So why should I waste my
beautiful mind on something like that? And watch him
suffer.10
Notwithstanding his
mother’s reluctance to confront the full
implications of the war in Iraq, the President’s
concern about the effect of the pictures upon
people’s perception of the United States is an
indication of the need to broaden our understanding
of the concept of political violence and the media’s
role in its portrayal. Political violence can be
reinterpreted by concentrating upon:
1) the
connotations that lie beyond its primary definition
of the exertion of physical force.
In addition to great
physical harm suffered by the prisoners, the word
violence also denotes the following:
2) a
powerful, untamed, or devastating force;
3)
great strength of feeling, as in language, etc.;
4) an
unjust, unwarranted, or unlawful display of force,
esp. such as tends to overawe or intimidate;
5) “do
violence to”, as in:
a.
to inflict harm upon; damage or violate: they did
violence to the prisoners.
b.
to distort or twist the sense or intention of:
the reporters did violence to my speech.11
Contra
President Bush, I argue that the true nature and
heart of America is in fact revealed by those
photographs, and the media does violence to the
fundamental nature of our political discourse. The
Abu Ghraib images effected a response that mere
words had failed to unblock:
It was the photographs that made all this ‘real’ to
President Bush and his associates. Up to then, there
had been only words which are a lot easier to cover
up in our age of infinite digital self-reproduction
and self-dissemination.12
The violence Western
reporters do to political speech occurs when, for
example, the term “abuse” is used rather than
“torture”, or in the prevailing use of the
euphemistic term “contractors” to describe, in
post-War Iraq, what were previously conventionally
referred to as “mercenaries”.
We will
see in the following sections that definitions 2, 3
and 4 are each directly relevant to the media’s
images from Iraq. However, I will predominantly
focus upon definition 5 and use the term violence to
explore the harm done to the body politic by a
societal excess of images of which the Abu Ghraib
pictures are but a particularly offensive and malign
example. The impact of the prison photographs brings
together all the different definitions of violence.
Their effects on public opinion were untamed and
produced a great strength of feeling (definitions 2
and 3) and the activities they recorded involved an
unjust and intimidating display of force (definition
4). Definition 5, however, encapsulates the wider
social harm of the image.
IV. “They did violence to the prisoners” – The
Pornographic Society and Ritual Humiliation
• Porno is far bigger than rock music and far bigger
than Hollywood.
• Americans spend more on strip clubs than they
spend on theatre, opera, ballet, jazz and classical
concerts combined.
• In 1975 the total retail value of all the
hard-core porno in America was estimated at $5-10
million. Last year Americans spent $8 billion on
mediated sex.13
The Abu Ghraib
photographs are Pornographic because of their
explicit sexual content but they are also
pornographic in a more attenuated and abstract
manner. The pornographic nature of the abuse was
part of a ritual humiliation of the Iraqi
prisoners. Such ritual abuse is but an extreme
example of a ubiquitous, voyeuristic aesthetic that
now pervades wider Western society. It is
increasingly Pornographic in the obvious literal and
quantitative sense that Pornography is much more
socially acceptable and widely available. In
addition, more qualitatively, according to Amis,
Porn, “is much, much dirtier than it used to be, but
Gonzo porno is gonzo: way out there. The new element
is violence”.14
“Gonzo” refers to wild, eccentric, or bizarre
behaviour and was first used to describe the almost
ethnographic, drug-fuelled, direct experience
journalism of the American reporter Hunter S.
Thompson, who rose to prominence with Hells
Angels (1966) a vivid account of his travels
with the infamous motorcycling gang.
In more recent years
gonzo is a label applied to a genre of
Pornography. The advent of increasingly
sophisticated hand-held cameras has added a new
amateur look (and indeed amateur involvement) to the
more glossy Hollywood-influenced aesthetic that
previously dominated the US Porn industry. The Abu
Ghraib pictures can be read in the light of this
recent evolution in both Porn and its mirroring in
the wider trend of social porn. More than this, the
permeation of the gonzo aesthetic is much evident in
the Reality-TV formats that have evolved to produce
increasingly extreme forms of ritualized
humiliation. The retrospectively benign formats of
such shows as Candid Camera15
have been replaced by a new harsher range of
programmes.
In the
hubris-generating/puncturing celebrity-obsessed
genre, we have recently witnessed the conspicuous
consumption/defecation of MTV Cribs
and Celebrity Detox or MTV’s Jackass.16
A much darker, but at first glance semantically
related format to both JackAss and
Celebrity Detox is the recent best-selling
gonzo-violence video Bumfights. This is an
US-produced underground video that has recently
gained mainstream notoriety for showing homeless
people bare-knuckle fighting in return for food,
money, and alcohol.17
In May 2004, British Channel 5 used a
“documentary” entitled Bumfights: A Video Too Far
as a vehicle for showing footage from the video.
The sociological
thesis that a general cultural climate is the
underlying cause of the Abu Ghraib symptoms has
recently received support from an unusual source.
Rush Limbaugh, the US right-wing radio shock-jock,
said that too much was being made of the Abu Ghraib
pictures. He claimed obtusely that they were very
similar to the hazing ritual common in US
fraternities: “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”.18
We can now examine in more detail the exact nature
of that “good time” by exploring the roots of social
porn.
V. The
Pornographic Zeitgeist
… I have seen in the windows the pale blue glow of
at least one television in every home. And I am told
that many family meals are eaten in front of that
screen as well. And perhaps this explains the face
of Americans, the eyes that never appear satisfied,
at peace with their work, or the day God has given
them; these people have the eyes of very small
children who are forever looking for their next
source of distraction, entertainment, or a sweet
taste in their mouth.19
… we need tits and arse because they have got to be
available to us; to be pawed, fucked, wanked over.
Because we’re men? No. Because we’re consumers.
Because those are things we like, things we
intrinsically feel or have been conned into
believing will give us value, release satisfaction.
We value them so we need to at least have the
illusion of their availability. For tits and arse
read coke, crisps, speedboats, cars, houses,
computers, designer labels, replica shirts. That’s
why advertising and pornography are similar; they
sell the illusion of availability and the
non-consequence of consumption.20
… we were just that bit too old to buy into the
rumble of a world described by advertising and
products … That was the world where everything had
turned into an idea of itself, where life no longer
had an inner life … It’s a process which just seems
to have built up, like an accumulation of fat around
the heart’s weary muscle.21
I have argued
elsewhere22
for the importance of fiction as a useful resource
with which to understand the social zeitgeist
better. The effect of the Abu Ghraib pictures has
been so shocking because, whether explicitly
acknowledged or not, they evoke in the viewer
recognition of a disturbing Western cultural trend
that is only belatedly and involuntarily being
faced. The symptoms have been previously
acknowledged within contemporary zeitgeist-capturing
novels such as those quoted above. The first
quotation is particularly apposite to our purposes
given that it presents a Middle Eastern perspective
on US culture. In The House of Sand and Fog,
through the voice of an exiled Iranian army officer,
Andre Dubus highlights the childlike dependence upon
distraction and entertainment that he perceives to
be deep at the heart of US culture. The second
quotation is taken from Irvine Welsh’s Porno,
a novel he wrote in response to the growth of
gonzo-style, DIY porn he had observed in Britain.
Given the sexual element to the events at Abu
Ghraib, the key point to be taken from Welsh is the
link between Porn and the essential values of a
consumer society. Welsh’s claim that commodities
provide “things we intrinsically feel or have been
conned into believing will give us value, release
satisfaction “ resonates closely with
Rush Limbaugh’s exculpatory rationale for the abuse:
“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”?23
The third quotation, from Bracewell’s Perfect
Tense, gives an office worker’s account of
metropolitan ennui, and his expression of “the
insistence of image over substance” provides a
fictional variation of Baudrillard and Eco’s concept
of the hyperreal. Bracewell’s phrase, “ the rumble
of a world described by advertising and products“
speaks directly to how the US Government’s explicit
couching of America’s overseas image functions in
terms of a consumer brand.
VI. Branding or
Branded?
… there is a fundamental flaw in the American view
of "perception management" on an international stage
… It emanates from a Harvard MBA type of mentality
that if you get the marketing right, anything will
sell. One of the case studies on that MBA programme
was …Charlotte Beers, formerly of Madison Avenue
(she once led J. Walter Thompson Worldwide and
Ogilvy & Mather), and until last year under
secretary of state for public affairs and public
diplomacy. Colin Powell is famously on record as
saying "Well, guess what? She got me to buy Uncle
Ben's rice, and so there's nothing wrong with
getting somebody who knows how to sell something."
Well, Uncle Sam isn't Uncle Ben and you can't sell
something to people who have no water to boil it
with. But now they do have oil on which to pour yet
another troublesome example that Uncle Sam might not
be who Uncle Sam says he is. Uncle Sam is looking
more and more like the Ugly American… the soldiers
who were photographed in these "trophy" pictures are
of a different breed of Americans. They are the
Jerry Springer elements of American society, and
they are not pretty …Seeing is believing, whether
it's on the Jerry Springer show or in this week's
newspapers.24
There is
a certain morbid symmetry in the fact that, in
addition to the literal imprisonment they depict,
the controversy caused by the Abu Ghraib pictures
reflect how US society is confined by its excessive
reliance upon the image. The visceral disgust they
caused can, however, be seen as the flip side of the
image-driven boosterism that is an intrinsic part of
America’s self-presentation. Its political use of
images is violent in the sense of the above
definitions 2, 3 and 4, and a failure to adequately
understand the negative consequences of this is at
the core of the US’s poor “image” within
international public opinion. Ironically, this image
is so poor because of its desire to micromanage
excessively the process of image-creation
(definition 4). The concept of ideology is
doubtless for some a quaint relic of Marxist theory
and media effects are notoriously difficult to
irrefutably “prove” to the satisfaction of all.
Perhaps a fresh perspective upon both, however, can
be gained by looking at the intimate relationship
the concept of ideology has with the production of
images and how the single most important
contemporary ideology is an image-driven discourse
of which Jerry Springer is but the (il)logical
conclusion.
Mitchell emphasizes
the iconic basis of ideology, arguing that the
concept is etymologically grounded
in the notion of mental entities or ‘ideas’ that
provide the materials of thought. Insofar as these
ideas are understood as images – as pictorial,
graphic signs imprinted or projected on the medium
of consciousness – then ideology … is really an
iconology, a theory of imagery.25
For Burke, ideology
is thus related not to truthful images, ”but of
falsely reductive images that could only lead to
political tyranny”.26
For Coleridge:
…Any ‘idea‘ worthy of the name …is distinguished
precisely by its inability to be rendered in
pictorial or material form: it is a ‘living educt’
of the imagination, a ‘power‘ that can be rendered
only by the translucence of a symbolic form, never
by a ‘mere‘ image.27
An idiosyncratically
expressed preference for the cultural richness of
the symbolic over the essential emptiness of the
overloaded, hyper-realistic, and
technologically-mediated images forms the basis of
Jean Baudrillard’s theory of the ideology of media
images and is explored through his concept of the
obscene.
VII. The Obscene
Image
… this is the enterprise of our entire culture,
whose natural condition is obscene: a culture of
monstration, of demonstration, of productive
monstrosity.28
… this viral contamination of things by images,
which are the fatal characteristics of our culture.29
Jean Baudrillard has
compared the West’s relationship to images in terms
of obscenity. In the light of events in Iraq,
frequent accusations that his work is willfully
abstruse should be reconsidered. Baudrillard takes
the notion of the obscene literally. An
etymological analysis of the word gives us “ob” – a
prefix meaning hindering – and “scene” – from the
Latin and Greek words for “stage”. Ignoring its
conventional connotation of depravity, his
re-reading of the term obscene gives us the
notion that Western media-dominated society is ob-scene
because its proliferation of images has imploded the
traditional, symbolically coded distance between the
image and viewer that is implied with a stage.
Baudrillard’s writing contains the repeated theme
that in the West we suffer from a virus-like
proliferation of immediate images that replace the
distance needed for either considered reflection or
a developed sensitivity to the ambiguities of
cultural meanings.
Baudrillard’s analysis illuminates the present
mediascape. For example, he argues: “… we shouldn’t
underestimate the power of the obscene, its power to
exterminate all ambiguity and all seduction and
deliver to us the definitive fascination of bodies
without faces, faces without eyes, and eyes that
don’t look”.30
This has chilling pertinence to the dehumanized
images of Iraqi prisoners in which their faces are
hooded, deliberately pixilated, or only appear as
minor details within a broader tableau (e.g., the
naked man cowering in front of snarling guard dogs).
Originally used in a different context, Baudrillard
also provides an unwittingly prescient description
of the furor over the Daily Mirror pictures’
authenticity:
…we don’t look for definition or richness of
imagination in these images; we look for the
giddiness of their superficiality, for the artifice
of detail, the intimacy of their technique. What we
truly desire is their technical artificiality, and
nothing more.31
Beyond the manifest
obscenity of the Pornography of the Abu Ghraib
photographs, Baudrillard’s broader theoretical point
relates to how their staging paradoxically
relies upon the actual absence of a stage. A
surfeit of images is presented to us so that:
”Obscenity takes on all the semblances of modernity.
We are used to seeing it, first of all, in the
perpetration of sex, but it extends to everything
that can be perpetrated in the visible – it becomes
the perpetration of the visible itself”.32
In a form of semiotic potlatch, images become their
own justification for the decontextualized
consumption for its own sake of such formats as
MTV Cribs and Bumfights. Everything
becomes a potential image for the voyeuristic gaze
and less and less is ruled out on grounds of taste
or any other consideration. The pornography of the
image lies here in its explicitness. Nothing is left
to the imagination and all is revealed to the
passive viewer. An apparently overwhelming sexual
will-to-reveal that Welsh identified in the rise of
gonzo porn may at least partially explain the sexual
aspect of the Abu Ghraib pictures. As Sontag
recently argued, we live in a world where,
increasingly:
An erotic life is for more and more people what can
be captured on video. To live is to be photographed,
to have a record of one’s life, oblivious or
claiming to be oblivious to the camera’s non-stop
attentions ...Ours is a society in which secrets of
private life that, formerly, you would have given
nearly anything to conceal, you now clamour to get
on a television show to reveal.33
VIII. Media
Tautology: Reality TV and the Democratization of
Celebrity
Today this critical energy of the stage …is in the
process of being swept away. All that theatrical
energy goes into the denial of the scenic illusion
and into anti-theater in all its various forms
…illusion is proscribed; the scission between stage
and audience is abolished; theater goes down into
the street and everydayness… This is no longer the
famous Aristotelian catharsis of the passions
…Illusion is no longer valid here: it is truth which
bursts into free expression. We are all actors and
spectators; there is no more stage: the stage is
everywhere; no more rules: everyone plays out his
own drama, improvising on his own fantasies. The
obscene form of anti-theater, present everywhere.34
In the Ecstasy of
Communication among other works, Baudrillard
develops the theme of modern communication’s
tendency towards uncontrollable circulation
(definition 2). The roots of this uncontrollable
circulation can be found in Sontag’s earlier
examination of photography’s defining status as the
groundbreaking technology of the image where she
asserts that: “Photographs document sequences of
consumption carried on outside the view of family,
friends, neighbors”.35
This resonates with Welsh’s previously cited linking
of pornography with consumerism and is poignantly
prescient in terms of the distress caused to the
families of such US soldiers as the Porn-star
sounding Lynndie England. The lack of values with
which to judge the appropriateness of the image is
for Sontag an intrinsic part of the conceptually
reductive nature of the technology. She argues that:
”there is an aggression implicit in every use of the
camera” and that it is responsible for “an ever
increasing spread of that mentality which looks at
the world as a set of potential photographs”.36
Specifically in the
light of Abu Ghraib, Sontag points out that,
although “trophy” pictures have been taken in many
previous military and social conflicts, these
particular photographs:
… reflect a shift in the use of pictures – less
objects to be saved than evanescent messages to be
disseminated, circulated …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 emailing them around the globe
...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 Mr Bush is telling the world – part of the
”true nature and heart of America.37
Again, the link
between fiction and reality is instructive here. In
Italo Calvino’s short story about the increasingly
obsessive mentality of a photographer in Trieste
entitled The Adventure of a Photographer, for
example, he portrays the tautological
self-generating tendencies of the need to
photograph. The person who feels the urge to
photograph is, he argues:
… already close to the view of the person who thinks
that everything that is not photographed is lost, as
if it had never existed, and that therefore in order
really to live you must photograph as much as you
can, you must either live in the most photographable
way possible or else consider photographable every
moment of your life. The first course leads to
stupidity; the second, to madness.38
Calvino compares
Trieste’s photographers to game hunters, describing
in a relatively benign form the innately aggressive
and violent nature of the photographic act
identified by Sontag:
When Spring comes, the city’s inhabitants, by the
hundreds of thousands, go out on Sundays with a
leather case over their shoulder. And they
photograph one another. They come back happy as
hunters with bulging game-bags…”39
Particularly
apposite to the case of the Iraqi photographs,
Oliver Wendell Holmes predicted that:
every conceivable object of Nature and Art will soon
scale off its surface for us. Men will hunt all
curious, beautiful, grand objects, as they hunt for
cattle in South America, for their skins, and
leave the carcasses as of little worth.40
Although they would
seem unlikely bedfellows, Baudrillard’s notion of
the ecstasy of communication was implicitly
acknowledged by Donald Rumsfeld who complained that
it was much harder nowadays to control the
information sent back home by soldiers serving
overseas. Unlike conventional letters in which the
censors can black out the offending parts, Rumsfeld
bemoans the fact that US soldiers were “running
around with digital cameras and taking these
unbelievable photographs and then passing them off,
against the law, to the media, to our surprise”.41
With US troops thus acting like an extremely
malevolent form of Trieste’s Sunday promenaders,
Calvino’s story gives an imaginative account of
photographic excesses whilst Rumsfeld’s complaint
provides a more practical illustration of its
dynamics. Sontag’s, Calvino’s and Wendell Holmes’
descriptions are all seen combined in the
aggressive, acquisitive, trophy-seeking behaviour of
the Abu Ghraib photographers which so dramatically
undermined the Coalition’s attempts to brand itself
as Occupation-Lite.
IX. The
Geo-political Consequences: the Post 9/11 War of
Images
Of all nations in the world, the United States was
built in nobody’s image. It was the land of the
unexpected, of unbounded hope, of ideals, of quest
for an unknown perfection. It is all the more
unfitting that we should offer ourselves in images.
And all the more fitting that the images which we
make wittingly or unwittingly to sell America to the
world should come back to haunt and curse us.42
I have focused here
on the Abu Ghraib pictures but their significance
can be more broadly linked to the events of 9/11.
Daniel Boorstin feared that America’s over-reliance
upon images would come back to haunt it. With the
events of September 11 2001, Osama bin Laden
confirmed Boorstin’s foresight in a terrible fashion
with an attack deliberately designed to be consumed
as a media event. Writing a full forty years before
9/11, Boorstin feared the displacement of ideals by
images. His fears have been realized to the extent
that the emotional charge of the 9-11 images has
been skillfully manipulated for the non sequitur of
The War on Terror. Writing at the height of
the Cold War, Boorstin focused upon Communism, but
his words are now painfully relevant to the gulf
that exists not only as a geographical area to which
troops are periodically dispatched but also and more
significantly as an ever-widening gap between
Western and Islamic sensitivities:
Accustomed to live in a world of pseudo-events,
celebrities, dissolving forms, and shadowy but
overshadowing images, we mistake our shadows for
ourselves. To us they seem more real than the
reality …Our technique seems direct only because in
our daily lives the pseudo-event always seems
destined to dominate the natural facts. We no longer
even recognize that our technique is indirect, that
we have committed ourselves to managing shadows. We
can live in our world of illusions. Although we find
it hard to imagine, other peoples still live in the
world of dreams. We live in a world of our making.
Can we conjure others to live there too? We love the
image, and believe it. But will they?43
The images of
prisoner abuse reflect the West’s narcissistic
obsession with the screen and it is this unhealthy
obsession which increasingly fuels Said’s concept of
neo-Orientalism.44
A keen awareness of this process arguably
marks the malevolent acuity of Bin Laden. He is the
latest in a string of key Islamic hate-figures that
previously included the Ayatollah Khomeni and who
all have in common being bracketed within a
discourse of evil.45
Bin Laden fulfills the role portrayed in
Baudrillard’s work of the Manichean demiurge who
creates the evil illusions against which God and
goodness avail themselves. The biggest danger for
the West, however, is that Bin Laden and others play
this role self-consciously. They know which buttons
to press in order to produce effects that go right
to the core of the West’s own deeply embedded social
pornography of which Abu Ghraib was but a
particularly shocking example. An implicit notion of
this paper is therefore, that the media’s role in
the facilitation of America’s increasingly myopic
separation from the Islamic Other has been
incorporated into the terrorist game plan.46
In his
Contributions to Analytical Psychology, Jung
argued that an individual’s psychology could be
profoundly, albeit unwittingly, influenced by an
underpinning dependency of the wider society47.
He used the example of the average Roman citizen who
was inevitably infected by a general social
atmosphere permeated by slavery and claimed that the
individual is powerless to resist such an influence.
McLuhan and Innis48
used a similar argument to describe the cultural
impact of media technologies through history. This
paper suggests that social pornography now permeates
media discourse in the West and the Jerry
Springer nature of the Iraqi pictures implies
the validity of Jung’s analysis. The social
pornography of the image is a fertile resource from
which Bin Laden and others base their media-savvy
strategies. Social pornography facilitates the post
9/11knee-jerk and unfocused political responses and
provides Bin Laden with opportunities to further
exacerbate the situation with such politically
pornographic events as the tragically iconic 9/11
attack.
The true malevolent
ingenuity of Bin Laden’s outrage thus resides in his
knowing incorporation of the West’s inability to
look beyond its own biased and distorted social
porn. His malevolent success has been heightened by
the repetitive nature and simply overwhelming
presence of 9/11 images and their displacement of
more considered debate. For example, Osama Bin
Laden’s image is now readily familiar to all but a
tiny proportion of Western populations but a
similarly small number are likely to be aware of the
more substantive issues lying behind the image.
There is, for example, no significant public
discussion of the historical parallels and links
that can be made between his acts and the Royal
House of Saud’s uneasy yet perennially intertwined
relationship with the Ikhwan bedouin fighters and
the Wahabi fundamentalist strand of Islam. The US
was traumatized yet fundamentally unenlightened by
the shocking yet constantly repeated images of the
twin towers being hit. Unaccompanied by significant
efforts to understand, mere repetition of the images
reflected the fundamentally distorted perspective of
a society increasingly incapable of thinking outside
the self-referential media realm alluded to
throughout this chapter.
Despite the very
real effects experienced by those New Yorkers in the
immediate vicinity and aftermath, the rest of the US
experienced the WTC attack Hollywood-style. The
pictures of destruction were already disturbingly
familiar to a public regularly exposed to the
Hollywood imagination of disaster films. Soon after
the tragedy US intelligence services consulted
Hollywood figures to brainstorm scenarios for
possible future terrorist attacks whilst the release
of several movies was postponed because of their
perceived similarity to actual events. The media’s
post 9/11 coverage consisted of an excessive,
pornographic dose of the act of destruction and then
a matching pornographic exploration of the personal
suffering by the victims’ families. The emergency
workers of Ground Zero quickly became emotive icons
and fodder for daytime TV. Hollywood’s image-driven
influence was much in evidence in the post-September
11 political response as Ronald Reagan’s Star
Wars-sounding Cold War “Empire of Evil” was
quickly revised to the “Axis of Evil” and discussed
in colloquial terms borrowed liberally from the
Western film genre. In terms of Calvino’s previously
cited characterization of the photographic impulse,
the madness of Bin Laden’s designed-for-TV terrorist
act was quickly matched by the stupidity of the
media’s mediated response.
X. Conclusion: Gulf
War II As the Revenge of the Image
The same law holds for evil as pornography. The
shock of photographed atrocities wears off with
repeated viewings, just as the surprise and
bemusement felt the first time one sees a
pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few
more.49
Have you seen the cicadas? These insects wake up
every 17 years. These cicadas are brazen. Just today
they made some cockroaches line up in a pyramid.50
A key element of
Pornography is the short-lived nature of the
viewer’s attention span. Its nature is such that
once consumed there is an almost immediate demand
for fresh images. The same tendency is evident in
social pornography in which political discourse
requires fresh images and the impact of the old ones
fades rapidly. This perhaps at least partially
explains the insensitivity of David Letterman, the
most successful late-night talk show host on US
television, and his above “joke”. It was made less
than a month after the Abu Ghraib pictures first
appeared in the US press and when delivered produced
a large amount of laughter in the New York theatre
audience to whom Letterman presents his show each
weeknight. Žižek delineates two major post
September 11 options open to America:
it can either further fortify its sphere from which
it watches world tragedies via a TV screen or it can
‘finally risk stepping through the fantasmatic
screen that separates it from the Outside World,
accepting its arrival in the Real World.51
The Letterman
incident suggests that Žižek’s second option is
unlikely to be taken up by America in the near
future and the complex reasons for this is a major
theme of Baudrillard’s work, and something we have
only been able to touch upon here. What I have tried
to show, however, is the deep-rooted nature of the
West’s unhealthy relationship to the image and the
way in which this has repeatedly prevented the West
from stepping through that fantasmatic screen and
engaging meaningfully with the Muslim Other. This is
a failure that has typified the post September 11
political response, from its immediate aftermath
right up to recent events in Iraq.
The apparently
benign concept of branding the US like any
other commodity image is in fact a stark indication
of how "The Land of the Free" is in fact imprisoned
whether it is thought of in terms of Narcissus’s
pond surface or Žižek’s screen. In keeping with
Jung’s above insight, social pornography reveals the
darker, slavish element of the term brand. In
order to provide the video’s publicity shot, Rufus
Hannah and Donnie Brennan, two of the homeless
protagonists from Bumfights, were paid $200,
whilst drunk, to have the show’s logo tattooed in
ink on the former’s knuckles and the latter’s
forehead.52
Sometimes a brand connotes more than we would wish.
XI. Postscript
Almost immediately prior to publication of this article, I
encountered a series of photographs presented as a
fashion shoot in Italian Vogue magazine.
It reminded me of an interview in which Baudrillard
mentions how he is no longer read much in Japan
because the perception is that his work has been
overtaken by reality. This seems to be the fate my
article has already suffered. I naively thought that
the jokes David Letterman made about the Abu Ghraib
abuse could represent the nadir of Western
insensitivity to the Muslim other, but I seriously
underestimated the recuperative ability of a media
system in which moral condemnation and visual
titillation are inextricably intertwined in an
unprecedentedly malignant form of caducean
commercialism.
At the recent Engaging Baudrillard
conference held at the University of Swansea, Mark
Poster interpreted the US TV series The Swan
via Foucault's notion of care of the self in
a positive light rather than as a panegyric for
culturally endorsed, narcissistic self-mutilation.
Contra Poster, I would suggest that The Swan
is of a part with the images from Italian Vogue.
They portray much more eloquently than mere words,
the seamless web between the darkest parts of our
abusive, pornographic social psyche and institutions
as nominally distinct as the US army and the Italian
fashion industry. Notwithstanding cultural
populism's on-going attempts to create a more
palatable brand of Baudrillard-lite, we should not
forget that the real import of Baudrillard's work
resides in his unabashed critique of our society's
seemingly inexhaustible (and highly profitable)
appetite for such recuperations. It is difficult to
envisage a better example than these Italian
Vogue images of the “Cold collage” and “cool
promiscuity”53
that constitute the current evil demon of images.
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