Satiated and Denied

Abstract

Today realism is in any event strategic. -Friedrich Kittier (1) For political, ethical, and historical reasons--as well as for pleasure--modern culture has esteemed horrific and atrocious images of war. From the earliest examples of war photography to the latest developments in media technologies, this appetite for visual realism has been both satiated and denied. However, it is not the desire to see horror and abominations that is the problem; rather, the issue is how we see and engage these images of atrocity. Who shapes these perceptual fields, for what reasons, and under what conditions? The how of seeing--which techniques and desires reveal or mask war--makes war and visual realism a question of ethics and politics. REALISM Often associated with modernism, realism renders people, places, and things in a true-to-life objective fashion. Unlike literature or painting, photographic realism raised audience expectations for the genre. Once emancipated from the tripod, portable cameras gave birth to an unprecedented demand for close-up and graphic depictions of death and decay. Only cameras can capture and embalm death, Susan Sontag argued in 1977. (2) Through photography, the twentieth century nurtured its taste for visual atrocity, which became an aesthetic norm--a testament to its truth and matter-of-fact reality. In comparison to fallible humans, a machine's slice of reality was incontrovertible. If the horrors and injustices of war are made visually explicit, many believe, an appropriate response of outrage will result. In 1924 Ernst Friedrich set out to accomplish this with his book War Against War!, filling its pages with numerous images of war atrocities under the guise of shock therapy. (3) This notion was reinforced during the Vietnam War--the first war to receive daily television coverage--as images of death, coupled with photographs of children running from napalmed villages, shocked and horrified Western viewers. As televised images of death entered the homes and lives of those far away and safe, graphic images of war incited passionate anti-war protest and political action. Today, the same link between images of war and political activism does not hold. The sheer number of international wars waged in the past fifty years, coupled with a growing appetite for immediate and graphic evidence of the violence, has made the horrors of war common, banal, and everyday. (4) Many argue that we, denizens of the first world, have become politically and ethically numb--hypnotized by the hypodermic needle of visual media. Are the realities of war still real to us? THE DEATH OF REALISM That reality has imploded into its inverse, a hyperreal--a series of media effects and simulations--is not an uncommon view among contemporary critical theorists. From Jean Baudrillard and Guy Debord to Paul Virilio and Slavoj Zizek, one encounters a slew of sophisticated arguments explaining the fundamental erasure of truth, origin, authenticity, and reality. In 1995, Baudrillard argued that the first Gulf War did not take place, and that what we witnessed was not a genuine war, but a media spectacle. In Ecstasy of Communication (1988), Baudrillard analyzed how media images have been brought too close, made too real, and as a result, have imploded into their opposite: a hyperreal that simulates reality in a better, yet more artificial, fashion. (5) Consider the 1992 Breadline Massacre and the 1994 Market Massacre in Bosnia. In both cases, large-caliber shells were launched on public markets in Sarajevo, killing and wounding dozens of civilians and creating, in Sontag's words, some exceptionally gruesome sights for the foreign journalists' cameras. (6) This is precisely the implosion of reality Baudrillard diagnoses--or simply, the CNN-effect that creates a reality of war by way of simulated spectacle. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Two decades earlier, French theorist Debord similarly argued that society had become a visual spectacle for capitalist consumption. …