Even if they are only tokens

“Even if they are only tokens, and cannot possibly encompass most of the reality to which they refer, they still perform a vital function.  The images say:  This is what human beings are capable of doing–may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, self-righteously.  Don’t forget.” (115)

taken from

Sontag, Susan.  Regarding the Pain of Others.  New York:  Picador.  2003

In her book, Regarding the Suffering of Others, Susan Sontag emphasizes that the photographic image, as a representation, can hardly escape the necessary ambiguities and deceptions of any other representation. They are a species of rhetoric. “They reiterate. They simplify. They agitate” (6). They frame and thus exclude (for example, in war photography, we might ask, ‘whose deaths are not being shown?’—that is, as Sontag puts it, one might ask “where are the white bodies from white countries’ catalogued?” (7). No image is (or can be) the entire truth, if the truth is the real. The real cannot be brought into focus and held in such a finite frame. Images may upstage the very horrors and/or social issues of which they simultaneously make us aware, like advertisements—we get the image and are in awe of it but cannot remember what we were to do with it—a catch commercial that fails because we can’t remember what we should have bought but instead merely consume the hook of the jingle stuck in our head or the marketed sexiness of the body displayed before us. More, they turn the person photographed into “something that can be possessed” (45). They exploit sentiment (pity, compassion, indignation), as Christian iconography has traditionally done—“the spectacular is very much part of the religious narratives by which suffering… has been introduced” (37). The iconic image is an easy-to-identify example of what can, should, and does happen in a given situation when someone does this or that. Often, these images seem to carry within them a palpable sadistic quality; they cater to an appetite for seeing bodies in pain. In the end, we love the image of death. Give us more horror that we can see and then cluck our tongues at how horrible these things are to see.

Yet, late in her book, Sontag breaks from her fairly even-minded analysis and creates in the reader an emotion through her own, suddenly emerging moral passion. Despite all the hazards she’s laid bare in looking at war photographs, she asserts that we don’t have the right not to look at them:

It seems a good in itself to acknowledge, to have enlarged, one’s sense of how much suffering caused by human wickedness there is in the world we share with others. Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists . . . has not reached moral or psychological adulthood. These are the tongue cluckers who put their hand to their foreheads and bemoan “how can such things happen?”

Intellectually speaking, nobody, after a certain age, has the right to this kind of innocence, of superficiality, to this degree of ignorance, or amnesia.

Sontag thus defends “watching suffering at a distance” (107) there being no other way of watching: “watching up close-without the mediation of an image-is still just watching” (97). But by “watching” she doesn’t mean gawking; she means “thinking.” “There’s nothing wrong with standing back and thinking. To paraphrase a number of pacifist sages: ‘Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.'” We are to understand that “the painful, stirring images supply only an initial spark.”

To side with thinking about evil, as against doing it, is of course an unassailable position. Sontag herself doubtless exemplifies the best thinking that can be done about photographs of suffering. But her supple analysis nonetheless points to one conclusion: namely, draw none; remain in suspension. For the matter is insolubly complex: photographs of pain are potentially instructive and humbling but also potentially misleading and corrupting. You can’t see both the positive and the negative sides at once. You no sooner have one thought in focus than comes another thought to push it aside. So much intelligent caution makes thinking fall back on itself. Arduously, it discovers the necessity of its own hesitations.

In defending watching as such, Sontag momentarily blurs the distinction between war as known directly on the nerves (“watching up close… is still just watching”) and war as known through mediations. But surely the mediations are relative simplifications, if just for that reason also punctuations. But then-in the only lurching, “righting of the scales” in the book-Sontag is moved to say, by way of reflecting on Jeff Wall’s huge Cibachrome transparency “Dead Troops Talk” http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/dead-troops-talk/ (a studio piece, an imagined mediation, which she nonetheless treats as a source of knowledge about war), that “we can’t imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can’t understand. . . . That’s what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude… death…, stubbornly feels. And they are right” (125-126). As regards the pain of others, then, it’s inexcusable not to attend to it, even in the extremely problematical medium of photographs, but naive to think anything to do with war is not unimaginably more than a camera-worthy subject. In fact, any representation of it diminishes it.

But this is a large part of war’s fascination: it is bigger than life, if not bigger than death. Chris Hedges, one of those journalist-survivors of whom Sontag speaks, says in his work, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning: “I wrote this book not to dissuade us from war to but to understand it” (111). War, then, can be understood—in a fashion—as something broken down into “myth,” “drug,” and “nightmare.”

The myth includes the cult of the war hero (still standing upright, if buffeted,), a cult that has largely devolved upon the movies, though traces of it can be found even in Vietnam War memoirs. But the myth’s major ingredient is at once the most intoxicating and disastrous one, namely, “meaning” or “purpose,” chiefly in the form of a simple-minded, binary, immoral moral scheme: the good versus the bad, the saved versus the heretics.

The myth, then, is part of the “drug.” But the latter also includes, paradoxically, the “nightmare”: for we like to rape and kill. And not only is war “necrophilia”; it is the pursuit of one’s own destruction: “The ancient Greeks … called it ekpyrosis-to be consumed by a ball of fire. They used the word to describe heroes” (45) Moreover, in wartime, lust becomes an intoxicant: “casual encounters are charged with a raw, highvoltage sexual energy that smacks of the self-destructive lust of war itself. The erotic in war is like the rush of battle.” So, then, war releases and exaggerates our quarrel with being-with just being here, finite, unconsummated, and secretly if not openly miserable. Hedges portrays war as an outbreak of what others have called a death drive-a passion in which an individual feels the bodily instinct to return to the state of absolute tranquility and calm that preceded our birth. The death drive, according to Freud’s later writings (Beyond the Pleasure Principle, “The Uncanny”), explains why humans are drawn to repeat painful or traumatic events (even though such repetition appears to contradict our instinct to seek pleasure). Through such a compulsion to repeat, the human subject attempts to “bind” the trauma, thus allowing the subject to return to a state of peace because the trauma has been contained.

But we should be wary of these lustful desires. For, as we return to Sontag, we see that in this wave of images, we are in danger of viewing fragments of time, space and action wholly divorced from context. This “makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality and eventually in one’s own” (101). Our conscience, which we must develop, which we are compelled to develop as we mature into an ethical and responsible human being, is forever at risk of becoming predatory. Whether it be the lust for blood, blood and more blood or the lust to understand at the overly safe distance of paternalism—we “know” what it is to have suffered as Croat, Hutu, Jew, Muslim, Slave, Native American, etc., etc., we must always be aware that we are always, and this is most likely out of a strange type of necessity, in danger of being nothing more than consumer’s of product. The question is, what do we do with this knowledge? How do we ethically discuss the horror of being human? How do we do what cannot be done?

More specifically, we should think about how this might apply to writing and the “images” writing—particularly in the artistic examples of literature—portrays. As we begin going through our texts this semester, I want you to think about how the point Sontag is making in her discussion of photographic tokens can apply to writing. How might written works function as tokens generally? Obviously, the novels will all function as tokens in some way. However, you should also consider that the theoretical approaches we will be covering in the first half of the course will not only serve as tools that will enable us to discuss how other, more obviously literary works function as tokens, but will, in truth, present individual tokens in and of themselves.

I look forward to working with you this semester. The questions we will ask will be difficult because they will be authentic; that is, they are they are real questions that are being asked because their answers are truly unknown. Hopefully, by working our way through them (and you should realize that we are unlikely to fully realize their answers), we will learn a little something about the world—and this will necessarily help us to understand a bit of ourselves because, as can never forget (thank-you for reminding us Susan Sontag), we are inextricably and forever a part of this world.

Thank-You.