The Spectacle of Spectral Violence: Indifference and Photographed Atrocity

Elsa Fiott ‘... With Feeling’ Postgraduate Symposium April 2014

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Elsa Fiott

University of Malta

The Department of English’s Postgraduate Symposium

‘... With Feeling’

(April 2014)

The Spectacle of Spectral Violence

Indifference and Images of Atrocity

Why is it that decent, well-meaning and responsible people find themselves intrigued by

catastrophe when they see it on television?

Once you have seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.

- Don DeLillo, White Noise

The imaginary proximity to the suffering inflicted on others that is granted by images

suggests a link between the faraway sufferers – seen close-up on the television screen – and

the privileged viewer that is simply untrue.

- Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

All our contemporary passions arise from this: objectless, negative passions, all born of

indifference, all built (in the absence of a real object) on a virtual other, and thus doomed to

crystallize for preference on any old thing at all.

- Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime

The ennobling solicitations of sorrow, of mourning, of drastic loss...

- George Steiner, ‘Tragedy, Pure and Simple’

* * *


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I am going to be speaking about a facet of the research I have currently undertaken for my

MA dissertation on the subject of photographed reality and indifference. Rather than giving

you a research overview in the form of a strict argument, I have decided to present what I

hope to be provoking, if inconclusive, questions about the matter. This requires a warning: in

this paper, I will be pursuing tentative lines of thought that I remain uncertain about, and at

the same time, I have decided to be less cautious in the few assertions that I do make

throughout this paper because I feel that at this stage, it is more worth-while to provoke

reactions then to waste 20 minutes tarrying back and forth in the hope of making undeniable

claims. I think that’s enough disclaimers for the time being, so I will start.

I Looking at the real with real feeling

A photograph – any photograph – seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more

accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects.

Despite the presumption of veracity [...] the work that photographers do is no generic

exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth.

- Susan Sontag, On Photography

The image is a thing that is not the thing: it distinguishes itself from it, essentially.

- Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image

I chose to deal with photographic representations of death and violence because the

photographic medium can be said to counter the problem of mediation that other art forms,

like literature or art, are necessarily plagued with. One would think that this lack of

interference in photography would make for an unsullied record of the real. In other words,

when we look at photographed atrocity, we are startled because we know that what we are

looking at is real. It is generally felt that as decent human beings (whatever that might mean)

we ought to feel something upon looking at such records of pain, suffering, violence,

mutilation, rape, genocide, starvation, torture (and the list goes on).

However, there are as many arguments as there are counter-arguments for this view of

photography as a record of the real, which means that photography cannot be so easily relied

on to evoke immediate feeling, or what Sontag calls ‘a full-hearted response’.1 Indeed, the

feeling that is evoked – if it is evoked at all - is often subdued. We are, after all, looking at

images, and to call photographs images as opposed to records of the real, is significant in

terms of whether photography is on the side of mediation or immediacy.

1 Sontag 2003, p.73.


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Even if we move away from considerations of photography’s empirical credibility, there is

still the problem of wide-spread indifference upon regarding photographed horror. To give a

trivial but possibly apt example, we see the latest footage of whichever war-torn country is

currently in the spotlight, furrow our eye-brows in concern which for most of us amounts to

little else beyond alleviating our conscience, and then we go on to look at cat-memes or

whatever. We switch from gasping ‘oh my god’ to saying ‘life goes on’ with an oxymoronic

commensurability that mirrors the way news glides from Syria to Sports.

II Why aren’t we feeling?

Living with the photographed images of suffering [...] does not necessarily strengthen

conscience and the ability to be compassionate.

- Sontag Sontag, On Photography

We are in a social trance: vacant, withdrawn, lacking meaning in our own eyes. Abstracted,

irresponsible, enervated. They have left us the optic nerve, but all the others have been

disabled. It is in this sense that information has something of dissection about it: it isolates a

perceptual circuit, but disconnects the active functions. All that is left is the mental screen of

indifference, which matches the technical in-difference of the images.

- Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime

The traumatic event has been whitewashed. All archives are whitewashing devices. The event

is distanced from us once and for all by the very means available to us for remembering it.

- Jean Baudrillard, Paroxysm

So why aren’t we feeling? There are many tentative answers to this question. The way a

photograph is exhibited or its level of dissemination, for example, can either invite reverence

and feeling to the reality behind the image, or diminish it. Consider the impact of viewing a

large printed photograph in a well-lit space in an exhibition room, as opposed to seeing the

same photograph amongst other similarly harrowing photographs in a Google Image results

page. Critics have often made much out of whether an image is viewed on its own, or

whether it is accompanied by a narrative or some kind of contextualising device. There is the

issue of prolonged and repetitive exposure, as well as the problem of juxtaposition. Think of

a news web-page which simultaneously features a harrowing photograph and a weight-loss

advert in very close proximity. Whichever way you look at it, there seems to remain a

discrepancy between our expectation of feeling upon looking, and what we actually do feel

upon looking.


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Hannah Arendt speaks of ‘the banality of evil’, whereas Judith Butler alerts us to ‘the

digitalization of evil’.

The answer to the question, ‘Why are we not feeling?’, that I’m most interested in is this. The

availability and accessibility of such records increases our knowledge, but the knowledge we

gain is one in which the real is replaced by data and information. ‘All things exist only in a

recorded version’, Jean Baudrillard writes.2 The event is substituted by its record, while the

record takes on the actuality of the event it replaces. Information thus becomes actualised,

with the result that that which is mediated is mistaken for the immediate. ‘Our true

necropolises’, Baudrillard writes, have become ’the computer banks’; the place for the dead

is now ‘microfilm and archives’.3 This mass storage of recorded death is meant ‘to bear

testimony’, ‘But to what?’ Baudrillard asks.4 We record that which has emotive potential

rather than experiencing the event in an emotionally significant manner. On a similar note,

our cursory reaction to these images is what we now call feeling. If what Baudrillard calls

‘the epidemic of information’ is what we mistake for the real, our cursory reaction upon

encountering this information is our own surrogate for raw feeling.5

2 Baudrillard 2008, p.53.





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III Spectral reality and Spectral feeling

Kevin Carter, 1993.

Unsurprisingly, a world of images turns us into narcissists ‘doomed to our own image’ and

significantly, to ‘our own “look”’ so that it becomes impossible for us to extend our gaze to

the other, or to be afflicted by the other’s gaze on us (Baudrillard ,The Perfect Crime, p.131).

Where does this crisis of the real – the real as spectacle - leaves us, and the ghost or shell of

our feeling? When reality is a spectacle and we are spectators of violence and pain, both that

reality and our capacity for compassion is diminished, which is why we can speak of spectral

reality and spectral feeling.

Perhaps some of you might feel that it would be more pertinent to speak about the callous

photographer-cum-voyeur who thrives on making images of real pain as opposed to


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attempting to intervene in the situation he is witnessing. Many have argued that the

photographer who took this shot, for example, should have helped the starving child rather

than exploiting its aesthetic potential. Kevin Carter, incidentally committed suicide shortly

after receiving the Pulitzer prize for feature photography for this photograph, but I will have

to side-step the issue for now because of time constraints and focus instead on the indifferent

viewer.

This image illustrates the problem of indifference because it has become a hackneyed symbol

for a hackneyed ethical problem (starvation, the problem of Africa, Western responsibility).

When I look at this picture, I find that its emotional appeal is too obvious. It is almost as if

looking at this image, or being made aware of its existence, somehow satiates our ethical

concern, as if this photographic education were the only component in ethics. At the risk of

being too cynical, I would suggest that one could then apply Levinas’s ethics and then be

content with that. Oh look, here we have a perfect example of the Other, who is making an

appeal on me through its vulnerable position: the emaciated and fragile limbs, the crouching

back, the burdened head drooping in exhaustion. This, of course, is a reductive understanding

of the value of academia, but in so many ways, an academically ethical understanding of this

picture is sometimes not much more than an intellectual pat on the back.

And yet, let’s not give indifference a reductionist reading either. Indifference is as

multifarious as feeling. Indifference could be a form of desensitization that stems from over-

exposure, or it could be the result of a wilful self-protecting decision. It could be politically or

philosophically tinged, or it might stem from hopelessness. Indifference is often a coping

mechanism that counters ‘our extreme difficulty in accepting the meaninglessness of utter

catastrophe’.6 One could speak of both a universal indifference – summed up by the general

idea that ‘life must go on’ – or it could be culture-specific. Some of us might feel that I am

being too harsh on feeling, while others will agree that ‘feeling’ without action is effectively

useless and thus amounts to indifference as an abdication of political / ethical responsibility.

These following pictures remind us of some of these issues.

IV Ethics and the gaze of the passive onlooker.

Intrinsic to the perpetration of this evil is the shamelessness of photographing it.

- Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

Behind the condescending interest there always lurks the voracious countenance of the

vampire.

- Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime

6 Žižek 2012, p.181.


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I am going to have to sidestep any consideration of the place of feeling in photographing such

a situation (once again, because of time constraints). Let’s not, however, be too quick about

judging those photographers, when they are supplying us with something that we need to

look at. This ‘need to look’ signals that it is ‘our duty to look’, as Sontag states, and to know

what is happening, lest we forget, lest we remain impassive to how the others live and die.7

But the need to look also stems from our basic fascination with atrocity, ‘the pleasure we get

in flinching’.8 How many of us have felt repulsed by and attracted to atrocity in equal

measure? Žižek aptly refers to our fascination with catastrophe in terms of its ‘Janus-like

structure’.9 The second picture shows us that there are at least three types of voyeurs: the

photographed onlooker, the photographer, and, of course, us. We are dealing not only with

the problem of the disinterested viewer, but with the voyeur who is interested for the wrong

reasons. In fact, one of the most interesting features of public execution photography is not

the encounter with the dead and violated body itself, but the encounter with the gaze of the

onlookers.

7 Sontag 2003, p.83.

8 Sontag 2003, p.37.

9 Žižek 2012, p.21.


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But how far can we distinguish between the photographed onlooker and us? I would suggest

that when we see what it looks like to be fascinated by violence and to witness it

indifferently, our own impassiveness begins to collapse. But to what end? Do we not feel

indignant and ready to condemn the photographed onlooker, as if we are not guilty of our

own brand of indifference? I do not wish to undermine how significant the distinction is

between the viewer and the witness’s indifference, but I do not wish to use it as an excuse

either.

Moreover, I wonder whether anything can be made of recasting Levinas’s notion of the gaze

by considering instead, the impassive gaze of the onlooker. This passive onlooker is, after all,

confronting the gaze of the Other, but the effect this confrontation has on the photographed

onlooker is one of fascination rather than compassionate concern. Perhaps, ethics ought to be

reconfigured in a more comprehensive fashion, whereby the gaze of the passive onlooker is

also taken into consideration. I guess what I am suggesting is that in knowing that we need

feeling in order to be ethical, ethics has ignored just how pervasive indifference can be.

Ethics is necessarily a prescriptive rather than a descriptive enterprise, but perhaps, this

prescriptive impulse has lost sight of the reality it aims to change.

In most discourse, indifference is registered as a problem. To be feelingless is looked down

upon as inhuman or inhumane. The link between feeling and the human – a link which is

definitional, in that to be human is to feel – forms the basis for Judith Butler’s central

argument in Precarious Lives. For Butler, we remain indifferent to the death of others

because of a limited definition of what constitutes the human. Because we do not recognise

some deaths as grievable human deaths, Butler argues that these events are derealised and our

capacity for compassion is thus maimed. She tellingly states that ‘the derealisation of the

“Other” means that it is neither alive nor dead, but interminably spectral’.10

V The human and the banality of indifference

The inhuman part of it, the ability to keep one’s distance as a spectator and to rise above

things, is in the final analysis the human part...

- Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics

However, if we were to work with a realistically descriptive rather than an idealistically

prescriptive definition of the human in relation to feeling, wouldn’t it be equally justifiable to

define the human by virtue of its lack of feeling? There is hardly any need to cite evidence for

how unfeeling humans can be and of how intrinsic this desensitization seems to be to our

constitution; we could refer to any chapter in history for that, and our indifference as viewers

is a milder but still indicative facet of this. In her opening to Regarding the Pain of Others,

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Butler 2006, p.34.


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Sontag refers to Virginia Woolf’s assessment of the viewer’s indifference to photographed

violence. Woolf maintains that to be indifferent would be monstrous, but this ‘failure [...] of

imagination, of empathy’ that has prevented us from keeping the reality of violence in mind

is pervasive enough for us to legitimately re-delegate the traditionally abnormal status of

monstrosity to normality.11

This monstrosity of indifference is as banal or common as the

violence that such images capture. Both the monstrosity of violence and the monstrosity of

indifference are entirely normal and human.

When real horror and atrocity are so wide-spread and recurrent, when violence is so

constitutive to human activity, when evil – in other words – is not so evil after all, feeling

cannot be relied upon as if it were some kind of vestige of a morally-pristine human essence.

It seems to me that feeling requires a recuperative effort if it is going to serve ethics; ethics

itself can be defined as an attempt to recuperate a positive notion of the human, a way of

countering endemic indifference with feeling. In this sense, feeling does not always come

natural to us. We often have to perform with feeling; look away from images of death and

violence on our laptops and react once more, with feeling. I do not wish to state that humans

are essentially and reductively unfeeling beings. I simply wish to point out that this balance

between compassion and indifference as components of the human, though platitudinous as

an observation, needs to be better acknowledged if ethics is going to get past its own

definitional hurdles. To be ethical is not to be human; to be ethical is to be human with

feeling.

* * *

Some questions:

Before I take questions, I have a number of questions I would like to pose myself.

1. To start with, what is the place of a very specific kind of feeling, which I will call

reverential feeling, in the face of death and violence? Our contemporary age has seen

the quiet side-lining of death to the peripheries of our social existence – a

phenomenon which Baudrillard calls ‘the dereliction of death’.12

To juxtapose death

and ritual so easily is no longer viable. Perhaps, we require this ritualization of death

to feel that we are according death its legitimately apposite feelings: awe and respect.

This is of course ironic if we think of ritual as a form of mystification. Shouldn’t an

encounter with death that is unmediated by ritual show us the real thing? In which

case, why is the real thing not getting the immediate feeling it deserves? And can this

disaffected death ever be accorded reverence when ‘the aura of our world is no longer

sacred’?13

One would be inclined to state that there can be no death or responsibility

by proxy, but one would equally be inclined to describe our present situation as one in

11

Sontag 2003, p.7. 12

Baudrillard 1976, p.182. 13

Baudrillard 2008, p.75.


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which death, as well as feeling and the sense of responsibility that ensues, have been

relegated to precisely proximate but unrealistic statuses.

2. And moving on, one ought to be suspicious of feeling and the way ethics relies on

feeling, for feeling and ethics might well be playing the lead role in what Baudrillard

calls ‘the theatre of Western values’. Compassionate feeling often has a hidden

agenda. But if this is so, should we end the discussion here and submit ourselves to

our utter moral impotence? Or is this simply the starting point from which we begin to

accept the theatricality of our ethics, and move on to perform ethics in its least

theatrical form possible?

3. Or taking a step back, must we simply accept that our compassionate nerve has been

so irreparably severed? In other words, can we salvage feeling? Can we make

something of spectral feeling, whereby spectral denotes, not the amputated space that

is the lack of feeling, but the potential ability of feeling to haunt us? Spectral feeling

thus signals being haunted by ethical responsibility, the responsibility of feeling.

Perhaps, we must also be wary of patronising the reality that ethical feeling is reacting

to, to reshape Susan Sontag’s words. So much about our contemporary ethos has to

deal with diminished states, resignation and compromise. As we move away from

grand narratives and absolutes with capital letters, how much else is being

unintentionally discarded? By way of salvaging feeling without ignoring its inherent

problems, can we perhaps speak of the ethical voyeur? And would this serve to

adequately deal with the problems previously mentioned?

4. OR are we going about things in entirely the wrong way and simply expecting too

much out of feeling? Perhaps we need to take another step back and ask ourselves

why feeling counts so much. Where can feeling, even in its ideal form, lead us? What

can we do with our fits of rage and indignation?

5. I fear that at this stage I must ask my final question, which I believe to be unfair but

which still rears its ugly head. Once we have diligently gone through all the pros and

cons of an argument, once we have assiduously inspected all the nooks and crannies...

Now what?

Let me elaborate. Now that we have a better understanding of what feeling is or isn’t,

what are we going to do with this intellectual knowledge in relation to our

indifference and our frustrated desire for compassion? Academic discourse might lead

to a sounder ethical philosophy, but is that all? Is academia partially responsible for

further shrouding ethical feeling in a veil of abstract terminology and

conceptualisation? What role does academic discourse on indifference play in

sustaining that indifference? Is academic discourse conducive to indifference?

I ask these final questions with very anxious and concerned feeling.

Thank you.

The Spectacle of Spectral Violence: Indifference and Photographed Atrocity

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