Atrocity and Aporiae

Abstract

In this article, I consider the practice of teaching with or about the Abu Ghraib images, and argue that such pedagogy is inherently founded on ethical and visual aporiae: dilemmas that are irresolvable but nonetheless demand solutions. These aporiae originate in the inseparability of the torture from its being photographed, as the images are documentary evidence of that violence, but also instruments of it. Because the idea of “transparency” underestimates the complexities of the visual questions posed by Abu Ghraib and misleadingly implies that they can be satisfactorily and permanently answered, I suggest that the first step for any ethical teaching on Abu Ghraib is to query transparency itself and dispense with its concomitant pedagogical emphasis on cultivating “visual literacy” in our students and empowering them to critically decode images. Because our students are already so much more powerful than the subjects of the Abu Ghraib photos, I argue instead for an emphasis on self-reflexivity, visual epistemologies, and the politics of spectatorship. This shift has the potential to illuminate our enmeshment in state visualities and our vexed relationships to the tortured prisoners themselves, rather than forcibly rendering them visible and transparent once again, this time in the name of education.