“Instants of Truth”

Abstract

Lacking the truth, [we] will however find instants of truth, and those instants are in fact all we have available to us to give some order to this chaos of horror. --Hannah Arendt (1) Susan Sontag believed that capitalist societies require images in order to infiltrate the culture of everyday life, legitimate official power, and anaesthetize their subjects through visual spectacles. (2) Such images also enable the circulation of information along with militaristic modes of surveillance and control. Sontag argued in her later work that war and photography have become inseparable, and as a result, representations of violence no longer compel occasions for self and social critique. Rather, shocking images increasingly emerge as a mode of entertainment--advancing the machinery of consumption and undermining democratic relations and social formations. She was particularly concerned about what I will call an of depravity--an that traffics in images of human suffering that arc subordinated to the formal properties of beauty, design, and taste--thus serving to bleach out a moral response to what is shown. (3) For Sontag and many other critical theorists, the of depravity reveals itself when it takes as its object the misery of others, murderous displays of torture, mutilated bodies, and intense suffering while simultaneously erasing the names, histories, and voices of the victims depicted. In a meditation on the extermination of bodies and the environment from Auschwitz to Chernobyl, Paul Virilio refers to this depraved form of art as an aesthetics of disappearance that would come to characterize the whole fin-de-siecle of the twentieth century. (4) An example of this mode of was on full display in the mainstream media's coverage of the photographs depicting the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. As Mark Reinhardt points out, the dominant media had no doubts about showing the faces of the victims--thus violating their dignity--but expressed widespread indignation over reproducing the naked bodies of the victims, claiming that it would demonstrate bad taste. (5) In this instance, concerns of beauty and etiquette displace subject matter while sheltering the viewer from any sense of complicity in such crimes. As I will argue below, the release of the Kill Team photos gestures to an even darker side of the of depravity. In this particular instance, images of death emerge in a historical conjuncture in which desire, aggression, and pleasure do more than erase the subject of suffering or potentially pose for the viewer what Roger Simon has called a difficult encounter. (6) On the contrary, the kill team photos register a new kind of subject situated within a market-driven society that is less about satisfying desires than endlessly producing them, though in this case the desires and the pleasures they construct are linked to the death drive, and to modes of aggression in which pleasure finds its object in the most obscene forms of violence, i.e., the taking of the lives of others deemed as expendable, excess, and disposable. I want to build on the relationship between and violence by drawing upon a notion of the aesthetic that merges spectacles of violence and brutality into forms of collective pleasure--constituting an important and new symbiosis between visual pleasure, violence, and suffering. My emphasis here is not on the sadistic impulse and its relationship to as a matter of individual pathology, but on what I call the depravity of aesthetics, an aesthetic that registers a larger economy of pleasure across the broader culture. This differs from the of depravity addressed by Sontag, Walter Benjamin, Virilio, and others focused on suffering through the formal qualities of beauty and design--registering the consumption of images of human pain as a matter of personal pleasure and taste rather than part of a broader sociopolitical discourse. …