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Sep. 10th, 2006 06:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
map_of_the_worldSo I finished reading Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag
It was really nice to read something completely different from the branches of humanities I usually study obviously it is all connected but this is kind of at one remove so I can interrogate what I think without worrying that it’s just what my lecturers have taught me to think.
So anyway it’s about the politics of photo journalism during war time.
pictures do not, in fact, show what war as such does. They show a particular way of waging war a way...routinely described as "barbaric" in which civilians are the target
But actually I think it is a myth that wars have ever been fought just by the military if we define the military as those who choose to be there, who choose to be soldiers rather than those who are conscripted or beholden to land owners. Throughout most of history settlements were burnt, civilians kidnapped and sold as slaves, women raped, crops and livestock pillaged. Even if you don’t factor in the conscription issue isn’t it pretty much civilians that are the target and the military that are the shield this is pretty much the real idea behind the misnomer "collateral damage" I’m sure.
the destructiveness of war...is not in itself an argument against waging war unless one thinks (as few people actually do think) that violence is always and in all circumstances is wrong.
I think the problem with this that most people who are anti war but pro occasional necessary violence would in no way condone the kind or escalation of violence that is needed for war. Like I think self defence is okay but here and now self defence not "oh that person might beat me up in three years time so I have to protect myself" kind of reasoning. And pre emptive strikes are never self defence. If you think some one is going to hit you I think it is much more instinctive to block the blow or run away, not hit them first. So I think that the level of violence war creates is an argument for not waging war.
She does point out that ideological filtering happens even with photos which are often offered much more as truth than other accounts of events
images offering evidence that contradicts cherished pieties are invariably dismissed as having been staged for the camera
I hate that people don’t believe that their own "side" commits atrocities why haven’t we learnt yet that war breaks something inside people and that to be able to fight another person humans have to other them and once we have otherd them can do anything to them because they don’t register as human.
She argues that violence turns anyone subjected into it into a thing I would argue that perpetrators have to see the victim as a thing but that doesn’t make it so. she does argue later though that there is no difference between perpetrators and non perpetrators except circumstance by saying that one persons barbarian is just another person's "just doing what ever body else is doing" and that the argument that normal people commit atrocities needs to be flipped on its head maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what barbarians look like (they look like everybody else) I’m not suer about this because people are not automatons they do have choice in what they choose to do so I don’t know how much, if any barbaric behaviour is excusable.
I do like the way she engages with the fact that photographs are not absolute that photographs of an atrocity may give rise to opposing responses. A call for peace. A cry for revenge; or simply the bemused awareness ...that terrible things happen and that photos mean nothing unless we know what they are of All photographs wait to be explained or falsified by their captions which can give rise to truth twisting blatant falsehoods and propaganda. Apparently it is not unusual for one picture to be used by opposite sides as propaganda showing the apparent atrocities of the other side.
she also talks about the more mainstream propaganda of ommission in that we should be really aware that the pity and disgust that...pictures inspire should not distract you from asking what pictures, whose cruelties whose deaths are not being shown She picks this idea up later in the book when she asks why are there holocaust memorial museums but not slavery memorial museums and says this it seems is a memory judges too dangerous to social stability to activate and create…to have a museum chronicling the great crime that was African slavery in the United States of America would be to acknowledge evil was here.
which is true but I'm not sure it is just a political failing, I think that humans are wired to believe that bad things don’t happen where they are that if we all actually thought how unsafe the world is we would all have nervous breakdowns so only those who actually experienced it or have very strong connections with it carry the memory. This would also suggest that what is considered as collective memory is as she says no such thing and what is generally considered to be collective memory is controlled from the top down by those in power who decide what they want to be remembered (which actually disenfranchises those who do hold the memories of atrocities even more, because they are very powerfully silenced if what they remember isn’t part of a "collective memory" then it effectively didn’t happen.)
I think also If bad things haven’t happened to you it is much easier to brush of information that tells you that bad things are happen to other people. She says so far as we feel sympathy we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence but I don’t feel sympathy when I hear about or see images of atrocities. I feel angry but maybe this is because I have been on the receiving end of what would (if they had happened in war time) be considered atrocities, also I have an awareness of connections and that what we do affects things that happens elsewhere there are no civilians as Julian Barnes says and everyone should learn where the connections lie.
It was really nice to read something completely different from the branches of humanities I usually study obviously it is all connected but this is kind of at one remove so I can interrogate what I think without worrying that it’s just what my lecturers have taught me to think.
So anyway it’s about the politics of photo journalism during war time.
pictures do not, in fact, show what war as such does. They show a particular way of waging war a way...routinely described as "barbaric" in which civilians are the target
But actually I think it is a myth that wars have ever been fought just by the military if we define the military as those who choose to be there, who choose to be soldiers rather than those who are conscripted or beholden to land owners. Throughout most of history settlements were burnt, civilians kidnapped and sold as slaves, women raped, crops and livestock pillaged. Even if you don’t factor in the conscription issue isn’t it pretty much civilians that are the target and the military that are the shield this is pretty much the real idea behind the misnomer "collateral damage" I’m sure.
the destructiveness of war...is not in itself an argument against waging war unless one thinks (as few people actually do think) that violence is always and in all circumstances is wrong.
I think the problem with this that most people who are anti war but pro occasional necessary violence would in no way condone the kind or escalation of violence that is needed for war. Like I think self defence is okay but here and now self defence not "oh that person might beat me up in three years time so I have to protect myself" kind of reasoning. And pre emptive strikes are never self defence. If you think some one is going to hit you I think it is much more instinctive to block the blow or run away, not hit them first. So I think that the level of violence war creates is an argument for not waging war.
She does point out that ideological filtering happens even with photos which are often offered much more as truth than other accounts of events
images offering evidence that contradicts cherished pieties are invariably dismissed as having been staged for the camera
I hate that people don’t believe that their own "side" commits atrocities why haven’t we learnt yet that war breaks something inside people and that to be able to fight another person humans have to other them and once we have otherd them can do anything to them because they don’t register as human.
She argues that violence turns anyone subjected into it into a thing I would argue that perpetrators have to see the victim as a thing but that doesn’t make it so. she does argue later though that there is no difference between perpetrators and non perpetrators except circumstance by saying that one persons barbarian is just another person's "just doing what ever body else is doing" and that the argument that normal people commit atrocities needs to be flipped on its head maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what barbarians look like (they look like everybody else) I’m not suer about this because people are not automatons they do have choice in what they choose to do so I don’t know how much, if any barbaric behaviour is excusable.
I do like the way she engages with the fact that photographs are not absolute that photographs of an atrocity may give rise to opposing responses. A call for peace. A cry for revenge; or simply the bemused awareness ...that terrible things happen and that photos mean nothing unless we know what they are of All photographs wait to be explained or falsified by their captions which can give rise to truth twisting blatant falsehoods and propaganda. Apparently it is not unusual for one picture to be used by opposite sides as propaganda showing the apparent atrocities of the other side.
she also talks about the more mainstream propaganda of ommission in that we should be really aware that the pity and disgust that...pictures inspire should not distract you from asking what pictures, whose cruelties whose deaths are not being shown She picks this idea up later in the book when she asks why are there holocaust memorial museums but not slavery memorial museums and says this it seems is a memory judges too dangerous to social stability to activate and create…to have a museum chronicling the great crime that was African slavery in the United States of America would be to acknowledge evil was here.
which is true but I'm not sure it is just a political failing, I think that humans are wired to believe that bad things don’t happen where they are that if we all actually thought how unsafe the world is we would all have nervous breakdowns so only those who actually experienced it or have very strong connections with it carry the memory. This would also suggest that what is considered as collective memory is as she says no such thing and what is generally considered to be collective memory is controlled from the top down by those in power who decide what they want to be remembered (which actually disenfranchises those who do hold the memories of atrocities even more, because they are very powerfully silenced if what they remember isn’t part of a "collective memory" then it effectively didn’t happen.)
I think also If bad things haven’t happened to you it is much easier to brush of information that tells you that bad things are happen to other people. She says so far as we feel sympathy we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence but I don’t feel sympathy when I hear about or see images of atrocities. I feel angry but maybe this is because I have been on the receiving end of what would (if they had happened in war time) be considered atrocities, also I have an awareness of connections and that what we do affects things that happens elsewhere there are no civilians as Julian Barnes says and everyone should learn where the connections lie.
