‘Despicable beauty’: the embedded sublime and the poetics of violence in Iraq war reportage

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay argues that Iraq war reportage participates in an embedded sublime that offers aestheticized and racialized spectacles of war at a distance. The US military media embedding program aimed to decisively shape the media’s representation of the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq. But embedding journalists within military units proved challenging, as the programme confronted both the ironies of framed narratives and a destabilising media and internet environment. Reading Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead, Evan Wright’s Generation Kill, and Dexter Filkins’ The Forever War, I argue that their hypermasculine representations of war show a powerful desire for poeticized violence and for scenes of despicable beauty. These scenes draw on classical formulations of the sublime in Kant, depending on racial hierarchies and imperial narratives as they represent the killing and suffering of people of colour in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Global South. Yet the embedded sublime often produces an ethical hesitation in readers and viewers allowing them to participate as spectators of war at a distance. I explore strategies that challenge this logic in Iraqi blogger Riverbend's Baghdad Burning and journalist Nick McDonell’s The End of Major Combat Operations, resisting this tendency to embed, aestheticize and normalise representations of violence in the ‘The Forever War’ era.