The Production of Outrage: The Iraq War and the Radical Documentary Tradition

Abstract

Now we are engaged in two wars. And we may not think that there are two them because they are inextricable. The first conflict is the one seen in what is seen (and thought to be stored) in still and moving images. We speak explosions, armored vehicles, and Baghdad streets as caught by digital video cameras. This is the imaged conflict, a conflict which in one historical moment might have been understood as of war, inhumanity and deprivation. Images of? Forty years ago, critical theory began to insist on moving as representations, and in the following decades academics have talked about the ideological standing-in function the while ordinary people talked about violence on the screen. Now both mindsets seem hopelessly off the mark. Today we must talk about the infinitude moving on, around, through, under, and over the U.S. engagement in Iraq. This is the Iraq war imaged everywhere on every media outlet, and always available in all formats and by means every conceivable device. It is, as we know, a most infuriatingly stupid and wasteful war and I would like nothing more than to rage against it for the next several pages, but that is not my topic. The two wars, or the inextricable conflicts that define our time, are not, however, equally available. The one war, that one thought to have been caught, (thought to now exist in imaged form), is available everywhere to be seen; the other war, the one over the imaged war, is not exactly viewable. It is not on view because it is the war about how we view-how we see what we see as well as what we make the that we see and what they make us. It is a question the conditions everyday engagement that make the imaged war accessible or inaccessible, available or unavailable; that determine dissemination or distribution. It is about digital delivery systems that are themselves systems delivery. It is these systems, as they carry these war images, that are undergoing something cataclysmic. The systems question taken up by both media historians and corporate media industries sometimes goes by the name convergence.1 Here, I want to put on hold the contemporary question convergence, the sometimes scary collapse everything into the digital (which may or may not be the right question), in order to return to a longer history critical discourse about the and in relation to the real historical events they reference, which still has relevance. These are events with which, in the radical documentary film tradition, filmmakers have been passionately engaged. To some degree, it is the same old war, this war against images. There is the public distrust that has to be re-educated, a distrust earlier educated by a suspicious academic elite, suffering perhaps from what Martin Jay identified as iconophobia.2 I put more stress, however, on the high- over low-culture hierarchy here. Think the high modernist conception the as too given, too lazily over-dependent on the world.3 Somewhere in the melange common sense, this image-as-excessive notion meets mindlessness, barbarism and chaos. Think, for instance, the way people speak being by images. The terminology itself is a dead giveaway. It is so often said that we are bombarded with images and much less often with or assaulted by words. Why? Words belong to a long tradition letters and literacy still defined against the that so easily reaches the letterless, so-called illiterate. One might think that the realization the new ubiquity moving devices would make suspicion (really image bashing) obsolete. But we are still in transition, living the paradox. Thus, in the technologically uneven and asymmetrical moment, are both distrusted and declared harbingers a brave new world instantaneity and supra-intelligence.4 A telling example the war against comes from the New York Times Magazine, an ideal source for taking the temperature an elite public antagonism toward high circulation images. …