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Atrocity, celebrity, deictics:

a new heurethics for media

A Dissertation Submitted to the

Division of Media and Communications

of the European Graduate School

in Candidacy for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

By Peter Hulm

June 2004

Dissertation defended August 2004

Awarded: Magna Cum Laude

Defense Committee:

Avital Ronell (New York University)

Diane Davis (University of Texas at Austin)

Wolfgang Schirmacher (European Graduate School)

The thesis was revised, taking into account material published in 2005, in accordance with the Committee’s comments and discussions with the reviewer Mark Daniel Cohen. Acknowledgements to all four for their valuable suggestions.

In quotations from authors, / indicates the break between pages cited.

1. Abstract

Atrocity presents a unique challenge both to media and to philosophy. Atrocity, not suicide, it is suggested, is the key issue for modern philosophy[1]. Atrocity annihilates all attempts to give life meaning and destroys forever a subject’s possibility of seeking justice as well as the individual’s relation with the world. For media, concerned with assembling the contingent into socially approved meanings, atrocity remains an irreducible anomaly. The suffering of victims never really becomes news more than momentarily, while the issue never goes away from the public agenda, but remains there unresolved. The difficulties, it is suggested, come from the philosophical challenges posed.

But, along with celebrity, atrocity is a major tool of modern politics[2], employing the same tools of repression and panopticism in a totalitarian biopolitics. Rather than an anomaly, atrocity is only human behavior acting at one extremity.

Posthumanism[3], particularly in its practical applications that form the core of thinking for Jacques Derrida and Gregory Ulmer, Donna Haraway and Avital Ronell, provides guidance on how the media, to do justice to atrocity, can create a new ‘heurethics’ (ethics that requires invention), starting from the standpoint of ‘positioned knowledge’ (deictics). A number of contemporary artists, ranging from Chantal Akerman and Claude Lanzmann to Steven Spielberg, Peter Greenaway and Jean-Luc Godard, open doors on the same vistas.

This dissertation introduces a number of new terms into communications theory: language-event, the culture of interruption, the penumbra of the present, aporias of knowledge, terminality, bricollage, deictics and heurethics (among others). It also challenges a number of traditional conceptions within specific disciplines, particularly the political and social sciences, with regard to violence, justice, celebrity, and, of course, atrocity.

Table of Contents

Atrocity, celebrity, deictics: a new heurethics for media 1

Abstract 3

Prologue: Watching Ronald Reagan’s Funeral 6

Funerals as Rituals 6

Re-creating the Teflon President 7

The power of television myth 8

The Problem of the ‘Natural’ 9

The subject produced by interpellation 11

Jean Baudrillard’s Critique of the Subject 12

Reagan’s funeral as a language-event 13

The excluded subject and the accidental 16

The discourse of immediacy 17

Derrida’s Questions on Mourning 18

Contesting the Real 19

Fitting the event to the discourse 20

Discourse transposition 21

The Culture of Interruption 22

Rethinking institutions 26

1. Atrocity and Aporias of Knowledge 27

Aporias of choice 30

2. Atrocity and the Discourse of Violence 33

Tribal violence 34

Defining violence 35

Misreadings of violence 35

Punishment 36

Redress for wrongs 36

Community, kin and outsiders 38

Compensation rules define the tribe 39

A threat of violence maintains the law 39

Drawing boundaries 40

Intimidation and ‘lynching’ 40

Violence as Other 41

Placing violence in society 43

Violence and terrorism 44

Violence and the media 45

Forcing Knowledge into Repressed Memory 52

3. The irreducibility of atrocity 53

Defining atrocity 55

Positioned thinking 56

The ‘justifications’ for atrocity 57

Terminality 58

The assumption of power over bare life 60

Terminality without ideology 61

Apocalyptic visions 62

Tyrannical thought 63

War as preservation 63

The excluded middle 64

Two Views of Evil 64

The questionable banality of evil 65

The banality of good 67

The new disciplinary order 68

Science and technology vs. the citizen 69

The place of language 71

Atrocity and humor 72

Motors of prejudice 73

4. Experiencing and Inflicting Atrocity 75

Seeking to remain inside the law 75

The first hours 76

The destruction of narrative 76

Retaining the human 77

Surviving atrocity 77

The difficult of speech 78

Inflicting atrocity 79

5. Witnesses and bystanders 82

Percepticide 82

Celebrating defeat 83

The politics of the blind eye 84

6. Atrocity and Justice 85

Crime and punishment 85

Nietzsche and Rawls 86

Derrida and Justice 88

Private experience and public presentation of atrocity 89

7. Atrocity and celebrity 91

Twelve characteristics of celebrity 91

Napoleon, the self-made celebrity 94

Visibility, observability and gossip 95

The power of crowds 96

The twilight of the icons 99

8. Extralude 101

9. Aporisms: atrocity, celebrity and the arts 102

Godard and Disenchantment 104

Greenaway: Waiting for Prospero – or Oblivion? 108

Chantal Akerman: The Claims of Silence 110

Claude Lanzmann: Mission Impossible 111

David Lynch: The Feeling of What Happens 112

Steven Spielberg: The Claims of Sentimentality 113

Joseph Heller: Getting into Death 121

Orwell’s Sadists 124

Imagining Argentina: Hollywood does Argentina’s dirty war 127

10. Reporting Atrocity 130

What is unspeakable in atrocity? 131

11. A postmodern critique of media 134

Media and crowds 134

News on television 138

Television’s Technologies of Desire 141

The idle gaze 141

In the moment 142

The male gaze of news vs MTV 143

The degree zero style in news 144

The delegated gaze 144

Advertising: the concatenation of images 145

12. A deictic ethic and aesthetic 146

Refusing the delicious fruit 147

Developing a new relationship to experience 148

Re-thinking the Unthinkable 149

Understanding the Event 151

The place of technology 152

Indiscernibility 152

13. Deictic media practices 154

Positioning knowledge 156

Heurethics 158

Valuing Stories 158

The traps of knowledge 159

Deictic strategies: (1) Performative philosophy 160

Deictic strategies: (2) Interactivations, wild sociology, meta-cinema 161

Deictic strategies: (3) Making the political personal 162

Deictic strategies: (4) Question your qualia 165

Deictic strategies: (5) Paralinguistic parallelisms 171

Deictic strategies: (6) The citizen journalist / journalist citizen 174

Deictic strategies: (7) The Death of the Reader 189

Multiplex television 199

The meaning of contingency 199

14. Conclusion 201

Epilogue: Reviewing the Photos from Abu Ghraib and the Video Biography of John Kerry 205

The Photos at Abu Ghraib 206

John Kerry’s Video Biography 207

Bibliography 209

Prologue: Watching Ronald Reagan’s Funeral

“The patient is not cured because he remembers. He remembers because he is cured.” – Jacques Lacan[4]

Funerals as Rituals

Funerals, like poetry, make nothing happen[5]. Both seek to eliminate the accidental. Given that, except in dreams, the contingent is always insistently present, both poetry and rituals are judged by their effectiveness at incorporating what cannot be predicted and assigning it a meaning in the form itself. The process of ritualization thus determines what is significant and what is not. As a result, in ritual, there are only two ways of dealing with the contingent. Where it cannot be absorbed into the symbolic occasion (such as the death itself), it is ignored. Otherwise, it is considered a challenge to the ritual’s ability to give meaning to itself (the assertion of its sacredness[6]). Out of this continually unresolved tension society makes its meanings.[7]

Mary Douglas, Irish Catholic-born and the modern anthropologist most concerned with rituals in industrial societies, concedes that in common usage “ritual has become a bad word signifying empty conformity” (1970:19). Against this, she argues that even today societies use ritualism “to signify heightened appreciation of symbolic action”(26). Translating this into postmodern terms, with its “incredulity towards metanarratives” (Lyotard 1979:xxiv) – whether Marxism, progress or anthropology – this suggests that ritual must somehow today create the meanings it wishes to assert and win appreciation for its symbolic actions, and it can do this most easily by calling on a storehouse of readily available significations already current in society, reshaping these to its immediate purposes. That is, one must be alert for the ways in which traditions are (re-)constructed through ritual, and the deliberate efforts to enlist such meanings for other objectives[8].

Re-creating the Teflon President

All of these purposes can be identified in the national funeral of former US President Ronald Reagan on 11 June 2004[9]. Media described it as “a work of art” (Flamini 2004[10]) and an example of his mastery of timing (Kelly 2004[11]), while a “perennial dissident” (Noam Chomsky) said it was reminiscent of a Soviet funeral (Gilgoff 2004[12]). It was also reported as a puzzle for television programmers, who had to decide: “To what extent do you honor the man and to what extent do you examine the presidency?” (Johnson 2004).

Two comments from the written press can give a flavor of the reactions to the attempts to write the new history and invoke the transcendental in Reagan’s death after a decade suffering from Alzheimer’s. Two Wisconsin columnists wrote: “The seemingly endless media adulation and myth-building surrounding the drawn-out death and funeral of Ronald Reagan is [sic] in keeping with his media-savvy, Teflon-coated presidency” (Rampton and Stauber). A journalism professor’s syndicated editorial, recalling the unacknowledged divisiveness of the Reagan presidency, received the heading: “Coverage respectful, and rose-colored” (Janensch). He gave television an ‘A’ rating for its coverage of the funeral itself, but a much lower-grade for its analysis of Reagan’s presidency.

Clearly, this rose-colored myth-building in 2004 was largely a product of the television industry. On Reagan’s death the print media were much more critical than 25 years before when they had joined television in promulgating the myths of Reagan as a ‘Teflon’ President and Great Communicator. The major newspapers and magazines of the 1970s wrote of Reagan as widely supported when in fact he was “the least popular president in the post-World War II period” (Schudson and King 125). [13]

The power of television myth

Reagan was considered a Great Communicator for other reasons than his ability to communicate with the public. Schudson and King suggest one reason is that he won legislative victories, particularly over budgets, because of a Republican Congressional landslide, when he showed willingness to compromise. This helped make him popular in Washington, and the landslide came about because he was effective in activating the extreme right-wing constituency (137).

“The final factor in manufacturing the sense of Reagan’s general popularity,” write Schudson and King, “was the belief in Washington, by now an article of faith, that politics today is in the television age and that a man with Reagan’s evident personal charm on the television screen has practically irresistible power to shape public opinion” (137).

The succeeding 25 years may have sharpened the gap between print and broadcast media (and their sense of each other as cultural competitors), but one further observation needs to be set against this presumption. “Print journalists in particular tended to overrate the power of the television image” (138), despite little evidence that television forms public opinion (ibid). Among the fables created about the Reagan presidency were that he was more popular than his policies (which is typical for presidents) and that his popularity united the country[14] (244). These myths were all at hand and available for exploitation during television’s coverage of the funeral. But how they should be analyzed depends on a somewhat lengthy explication of communication theory in the past three decades, and particularly the contribution of postmodernism to major problems in conceptualization, before returning to the details of the funeral as presented on television.

The Problem of the ‘Natural’

There are three obvious ways in which posthumanists[15] can challenge anthropological interpretations of how ritual can enlist myths for exploitation – particularly if they take their cue from Roland Barthes and his problematization of the “natural” in culture (1957:199, Cashmore and Rojek 1999:35[16]). On this basis, the postmodernist can ask: who makes these new histories, for what purpose and what is the place of the spectator in these rituals? To the first question, and perhaps the second, the history of television professionals’ relation with Reagan provides a straightforward answer. For television, giving importance to Reagan, even in his passing, asserts the industry’s own sense of power as a creator of meaning.

According to cultural theorists, the integration of individuals as subjects into the ritual processes of mass communication takes place through interpellation (Hartley 1994:155), a concept derived from the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser[17] via Lacan[18], and sometimes also translated as ‘appelation’. The most important aspect of interpellation/appelation is that the symbolic order which calls on (‘hails’) the individual as a subject not only offers a framework of meaning. It is also inescapable – “outside of which it is impossible to live” (Hartley 155)[19]. Though criticized in the 1970s for being too essentialist and abstract (too often the interpellator was understood to be “ideology in general”), the concept regained life as an indicator of how ideologies (considered as forms of discourse) create competing images of their subject (Laclau 1977/Hartley 155-6).

The father of postmodernist reflection in philosophy, Jean-François Lyotard, agreed that with the break-up of grand narratives “a self does not amount to much” (1979:15), but he also argued that the “communication circuits” that run through each individual give subjects tolerable “mobility” within the system. “It may even be said that the system can and must encourage such movement to the extent that it combats its own entropy; the novelty of an unexpected ‘move,’ with its correlative displacement of a partner or group of partners, can supply the system with that increased performativity it forever demands and consumes” (15).

At the same time, Lyotard warned theorists against presuming that competing discourses could be reconciled in consensus, as Juergen Habermas seems to believe (1973). “Consensus is only a particular state of discussion, not its end,” Lyotard notes (65). Its end, he declares, is “paralogy” (66) – “a plurality of formal and axiomatic systems” (43), recognizing the heterogeneity of their pragmatic rules (65). He writes of postmodern science as “the search for instabilities” (53). Like Thomas Kuhn (1962), Lyotard notes: “There are two kinds of ‘progress’ in knowledge: one corresponds to a new move (a new argument) within the established rules; the other, to the invention of new rules, in other words, a change to a new game” (43). Derrida and Gregory Ulmer have made the search for new ‘games’ in communication a centerpiece of their life’s work (see p154).

Applying these ideas to the Reagan funeral, the critical theorist can demonstrate that the media presented a number of discourses. It is easy to identify the surface features, relating to the ‘statesman’, world leader, popular President, creator of a decisive turning in history, supply-side politician, loving husband, victim of Alzheimer’s – discourses which could only be brought into agreement by excluding discussion of the ‘out-of-touch’ politician, dangerous risk-taking leader or ‘voodoo’ economist.

The subject produced by interpellation

But none of the early philosophical theorizing, except by Lyotard, dealt with the subject that is produced by interpellation. Since then, the Slovene philosopher Slavoj Žižek, working as a Lacanian in opposition to an environment of late-capitalist Socialism, has concerned himself with a central question: the individual whom ideological interpellation demands. He cites a story by Czechoslovakia’s Vaclav Havel as an indication of how ideology in Communist Europe really worked. In the story, a small-time grocer always speaks privately against the regime, but on May 1 (Labor Day) he decorates his shop with communist slogans: “Havel’s whole point was that private disobedience coupled with public obedience is precisely the way the system functioned – that there is not only nothing subversive in this [...], but that the ideal subject of real socialism was precisely the one who did not believe in the system, who had this distance built in” (Canning. 1993).

The price of participation in this ideology was clearly not belief in its tenets. Žižek suggests that hardly anyone believed in the public confessions that formed a key element of Stalinist show trials. “There is a whole logic of secrets that are known by everybody but still must not be publicly discussed. In Eastern Europe, the moment that they were publicly pronounced, the whole system experienced this as a total catastrophe,” he comments[20].

Other societies, perhaps those living in Lyotard’s world of paralogy, are not so vulnerable to exposure of their secrets. “Western countries are more cynical in this respect: the pronouncing of something does not have this catastrophic effect,” Žižek observes. “Nobody cares, the whole system goes on” (Canning 1993). Indeed, it can be considered a strength of its form of democracy (see particularly the work of Noam Chomsky for a documentation of the various forms of public blindness[21]).

A major characteristic of this situation is that the subject produced by interpellation is not just disenchanted by ideology, but may – in pluralistic societies – engage with competing, fragmented ideologies. This is quite in line with Gramsci’s theory of how domination is exercised. The more prominent civil society is, the more likely it is that hegemony will be achieved by ideological means, but this domination cannot be complete, because of the dual consciousness created: one imposed by the dominant class and the other resulting from the knowledge of everyday experience (Abercrombie et. al. 1994:195, 189). It also finds support in Max Weber’s differentiation of classes into status groups (1920/1948:405).

Jean Baudrillard’s Critique of the Subject

It is precisely this illusory sense of freedom in our distance from ideological symbols that Jean Baudrillard subjects to fundamental critique. His sharpest apothegm: “It is the world that thinks us: it is the object that thinks us” (1999:144). At the start of his publishing career, in Le Système des objects/The System of Objects(1968), Baudrillard focused on the symbolic relationship with objects within which members of the consumer society are encouraged to construct their lives. Two years later, in La société de consommation/Consumer Society (1970), he typified the consumer in post-industrial society as a consumer of meanings rather than objects. In this world where “we have pursued every avenue in the production and effective overproduction of objects, signs, messages, ideologies and satisfactions[...] all we can do is simulate the orgy, simulate liberation” (1990:3). When all reality can be manipulated, one can speak of the “vanishing of history” (1992:1). “We have flown free of the referential sphere of the real and of history” (ibid). “The sphere of the real is itself no longer exchangeable for the sphere of the sign” (1999:5). Individuals are no longer even sure what is happening to the resources that determine their ability to function in the world. “The interesting element in the tragicomedy on the stock exchanges in recent months is the uncertainty as to whether a catastrophe has occurred” (2000:21). He told Der Spiegel magazine in 2001: “I believe that human rights have already been subsumed by the process of globalization [...]. They belong to the juridical and moral superstructure – in sum, they are advertising” (Wolin 2004).

Such challenges to Enlightenment ideals of rational society and the autonomous subject are shocking to many. One social commentator could find no resonance in Baudrillard’s aphorism about 9/11: “The attacks represented a glorious, long-awaited instance of wish-fulfillment [….] something the entire world had long dreamed of and desired” (Wolin). In the magazine The New Republic Richard Wolin described such ideas as “odious,” suggesting that “left-Heideggerians” are “simply incapable of naturally appreciating the validity and the worth of democratic political institutions.”

However, if one is awake to the possibility that consciously shocking events can represent unacknowledgable wish-fulfillments, that interpellation can be an extremely ambiguous channel for ideology, that competing discourses may not be reconciled by consensus, and that rituals are constructed at each performance rather than simply inherited from a tradition, the Reagan funeral provides an exemplary guide to contemporary media practices and how they deal with what can be termed a language-event.

Reagan’s funeral as a language-event

A language-event is the result of a public incident where the media in particular feels under pressure to choose, or invites its audience to choose between or appreciate, competing forms of discourse[22] to describe what happened (without necessarily providing the means by which to decide). This describes almost all in the ‘consciousness’ industry[23] that is classified as news. An example from the first anti-Iraq War suggests the questions to be answered. Respected French and Belgian newspapers (Le Monde and Le Soir) described photos of US prisoners displayed on television as “war crimes,” “shameful comedy,” or “sadism and cynicism” while publishing only portrait views of the servicemen. However, the media used photos of Iraqi prisoners on their knees without any of the similar framing (Collon 1992:155). The newspapers seem to have had no difficulty in deciding which discourse was appropriate in each case[24].

The call to appreciate (rather than simply experience) competing forms of discourse is rarely a strategy of institutional media, though it has received increasing attention since Susan Sontag’s ‘Notes on Camp’ (1966). Derrida points directly to the media’s role in manipulating language-events in discussing the feeling that 11 September 2001 was an unprecedented event: “This ‘feeling’ is actually less spontaneous than it appears: it is to a large extent conditioned, constituted, if not actually constructed, circulated at any rate through the media by means of a prodigious techno-socio-political machine” (Borradori 2003:86). How such “spontaneous” feelings are constructed is the subject of this discussion.

The reason for using the term language-event is to indicate that the play of discourse vocabularies and references are not fixed, that they are even more fluid than Lyotard’s concept of ‘language games’[25], and require a decision on what rules to apply, unless, as often, the audience is encouraged to treat the event as entertainment, and even when, as Baudrillard has consistently argued, these discourse systems seek to ‘think us.’ As in language, meanings are created through the interplay of discourse frameworks (the associations linking words) rather than by reference to a reality whose content is treated as self-evident.

The term language-event also points to Ferdinand de Saussure’s structural linguistics with its view of language as a closed system of signs (1916, cited by Cashmore and Rojek 1999:419) and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s extension of Saussure’s ideas to all cultural processes (1958). John Fiske points out: “Thus all the episodes of a television series may be seen as various paroles [expressions] of its deep structure or langue. [.../] Viewed in this way, all westerns would be specific versions of the same myth of The Western” (1982/1990:124/5). However, this construction should not be construed as metaphysical since the argument of this dissertation rejects a static, ahistorical view of genre, structure or discourse[26], taking its inspiration from Derrida’s notion of différance (the experience of a continually postponed resolution to a dilemma. i.e. an aporia). The assertion of such stable forms is, in fact, a form of discourse, one that is regularly adopted by media.

In news, the play of discourses operates particularly in the stories of odd events, where the discrepancy between the mundane and the miraculous is stressed in the form of the treatment. For example: “A light plane crash has claimed [the] life of an experienced navigator” (Langer 1998.83). The challenge comes in dealing with what John Langer calls “the narrative of the foolish victim” (99). The event is usually foregrounded before revealing the foolishness of the victim (99+). Broadcasters will often insert the event in their ‘foolishness’ discourse without actual words but through sheer contrast between the start and finish of the story. The whole episode constitutes a language-event.

Other references in the term ‘language-event’ are to the analyses of Walter Lippmann and Daniel Boorstin. Lippmann in 1922 spoke of the “pseudo-environment” (10) created by mental images of events that people do not experience, leading to conditions in which “men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities, and [...] in many cases they help to create the very fictions to which they respond” (ibid). These fictions could range from complete hallucination to a scientist’s conscious use of a schematic model. “By fictions I do not mean lies,” Lippmann stressed. But the responses remain a language-event.

Boorstin’s coining of the term “pseudo-event” (1961) carried a different implication. He was concerned with the proliferation of events organized solely to be covered by the media. However, this overlooks the many occasions, such as funerals, which are elaborately staged and covered by the media but cannot be described as “pseudo-events.” Much of modern politics hovers on the edge of ‘pseudo-event’, and only gains meaning when treated as a language-event[27]. Baudrillard’s concentration on the way in which modern society is “substituting signs of the real for the real itself” (1988:167) has aroused sharp criticism for the events he ignores, though he has regularly (as with 11 September) demonstrated the domination of the ‘unreal’ over the real in the way in which society constructs its meanings from events.[28]

The term also points up a paradox. So often considered a visual medium, television news seeks continually to make of its material a language-event[29]. The images are continually suffused in language: explanation, interpretation, commentary – even broadcasts of sport, where commentators have long been among the most famous broadcasters[30]. A language-event indicates that the same kind of structural change is taking place as Roland Barthes saw in operation when editors link text to a news photograph[31], providing the interpellative discourse by which the viewer is supposed to interpret the image (in fact, images that do not require such commentary are often considered uninteresting).[32]

Television does have a number of events that do not fall within this category: weather forecasts (as Baudrillard suggested), and most prominently, political addresses[33]. News practices over the past 150 years, however, have been to make more and more of the political process a language-event (see Michael Schudson’s ‘The Politics of Narrative Form’[34]). And this was very evident in the treatment of Reagan’s funeral service.

The excluded subject and the accidental

With regard to Reagan’s funeral, instead of simply broadcasting the event, major news channels such as Fox (which earned the highest viewer ratings on cable television[35]), intercut the service with tributes and panel discussions of the Reagan legacy. In the case of Fox News, very few criticized Reagan’s presidential performance or subjected it to historical analysis. The discourse was very much of honoring a national leader, whose funeral was described as “Lincolnesque” (Kelly 2004)[36]. It was a reminder that a chosen discourse excludes more than it includes. This applies particularly to systems concerned with their own maintenance (Douglas and Wildavsky 1982:101) in an environment where hierarchical organization (“hierarchy relies on explicit controls” 180) seems less and less essential (“the more the means of production are ideas rather than things” 160). The subject constructed by interpellation in this event was the respectful celebrator of a universally popular president[37].

Where did this leave those for whom this interpellation was misdirected? Definitely outside the discourse society which the funeral projected. By the insistence on the heroic theme of Reagan’s presidency, these subjects were also made aware of this exclusion and of the contemporary power that could impose this signification on public memory.

To remember otherwise, for that moment, was somehow to be culpable of failing to allow one’s memory to forget, as if this represented one of the major strategies for integrating with society. Thus, through continued repetition, the question is asked of the subject: “Haven’t you forgotten yet?”

This pressure becomes even more powerful if the media, usually through the discourse of professionalism, treats the question as natural, uncontrolled. As psychotherapist Adam Phillips notes of a similar process: “Accidents [i.e. ‘natural’ and ‘uncontrolled’ events] become the best way, indeed, the only way of doing some things. Accidents [are] disowned intentions; other voices speak through our mistakes. [...] The idea of accident – of the apparently unintended, the contingent – gives us access to otherwise unavailable desires or parts of the self. [...] Conversely, without a notion of accident or contingency we would not be able sufficiently to disown them” (1994:12). On television, the direct broadcast can play the same function.

The discourse of immediacy

However, nothing on television, as in dreams, is accidental. Even the unscripted can be integrated into a discourse of actuality, immediacy, the ‘live’ or uncensored, a badge of credibility. Michael Arlen, the New Yorker’s television essayist in the 1970s, pointed out: “Virtually nothing created for the public is created either intuitively or innocently” (1977:3). The actuality of the Reagan funeral was subsumed in another discourse as well: that of embodying the nation’s sense of itself through television, while excluding disturbing memories of a different view of the ‘Great Society.’ Forefronting this aspect of the language-event, one journalist (for the print media) described the funeral as “both a reminder of television’s power to unite the nation in ceremony and a test of how strongly the nation still clings to its civic rituals” (Johnson 2004).

Needless to say, so far as the television industry was concerned, it passed both tests. But its form, set out in 300 pages of plans (UPI 2004), was designed to recall President Eisenhower’s funeral (ceremony in Washington National Cathedral) and President Lincoln’s (also a Republican), rather than the previous national funeral (of Democratic ex-President Lyndon Johnson) 30 years before. The Reagan funeral also effectively displaced earlier ceremonies as a reference.

Derrida’s Questions on Mourning

Certainly one of the televised funeral’s prime functions was to project an institutional view of the form in which the language-event of someone’s passing should take place. Among modern philosophers, Jacques Derrida has shown perhaps the most sensitivity to this aspect of funerals. In the words of the editors of a collection of his homages to deceased friends: “Derrida is acutely aware of the dangers involved in speaking of the dead in the wake of their death, the dangers of using the dead, and perhaps despite one’s own best intentions, for one’s own ends or purposes. [...] The funeral oration is a genre beset on all sides by bad faith, self-delusion, and, of course, denial” (2001:6,7).

Such considerations open up perspectives on the conventional discourse untouched by the media debate over the funeral. Speaking in memory of his friend Roland Barthes, Derrida warned against the effort “to maneuver, to speculate, to try to profit or derive some benefit, whether subtle or sublime, to draw from the dead a supplementary force to be turned against the living” (51). He is sharply aware of the danger, as his editors point out, of “what might appear to be simple acts of fidelity” (introduction: 6), such as imagining that the theme he chooses would interest the person who has passed away (51). Speaking of one’s relations with the deceased carries an unavoidable risk of “reappropriation,” Derrida notes in his homage to Jean-François Lyotard (225). The editors summarize: “There is always in mourning the danger of narcissism, for instance, the ‘egotistical’ and no doubt ‘irrepressible’ tendency to bemoan the friend’s death in order to take pity upon oneself. [...] Political calculation, personal retaliation, narcissism, attempts at achieving a good conscience – these are just some of the dangers to which [such] texts are, by their very nature, exposed” (introduction: 7). Calls for forgiveness from the dead can mask the fact that “it is often because we do not wish to admit that the dead can no longer respond to us, can no longer, for example, offer us their forgiveness” (ibid).

How can one write without composing, manipulating and placing words? Derrida at one point dreams of writing with a syringe, finding the vein would allow the writing to pour out on its own “without any labor or responsibility, without any risk or bad taste or violence” (Circumfession 1993:12, cited on 7). But there can never be any writing without responsibility, and a recognition that we betray those we mourn by using the homage to others as a pattern for understanding the deaths of those closer to us (introduction: 8). Even using personal memories in an effort to do justice to his memories opens up questions – which Derrida continually asks – about the tact or taste of doing so.

Derrida’s strategy to temper the pathos is “to refuse to present a picture of one’s relations with the friend that excludes all difference or conflict,” his editors note (8). Without trying to claim the “last word”, as Derrida underlines in his text on Max Loreau, this strategy presents a series of aporias (a refusal of binary oppositions) that mobilize speech rather than paralyzing words. Only “in us” can the dead speak and only by speaking of the dead can we keep them “alive,” that is, within ourselves (36). But, he warns, “each time” [we must acknowledge] “our friend to be gone forever, irremediably absent... for it would be unfaithful to delude oneself into believing that the other living in us is living in himself” (1989:21). Derrida notes that when he writes a homage to Barthes, the words “will no longer reach him, and this must be the starting point of my reflection” (35). In mourning, Derrida’s editors summarize, “we must recognize that the friend is now both only ‘in us’ and already beyond us, in us but totally other, so that nothing we say of or to them can touch them” (11).

Contesting the Real

“There are no facts, only interpretations.” – Friedrich Nietzsche[38]

Reagan’s funeral, like any funeral, was replete with aporias of the kind identified by Derrida, who has said: “nothing is more unbearable or laughable [in mourning than] all its inevitable spectacles” (44). But the “society of spectacle”, Guy Debord’s term that became a springboard for Baudrillard’s investigation of simulation and staging of events, has corrupted the capacity to distinguish the real from the fake: in such an elaborately planned ceremony, how can viewer read the behavior of Nancy Reagan? Does it make any sense to ask whether her tears were genuinely felt, given the symbolic framing these so insistently received? “She held Old Glory [the US flag that had covered Reagan’s coffin] close to her heart and put her head down on the coffin [in fact, the flag was in her hand and held folded on the coffin[39]]. Finally, she began to cry. Her family gathered around her; in that moment, at least, she no longer seemed so alone” (Newsweek 2004).[40]

The family, of course, consisted of their two long-estranged children who have criticized fiercely their parents’ unconcern with them, their father’s politics and the present Administration’s (King 2004).

It would, in theory, have been possible for television to have put together a program schedule closer to Derrida’s efforts to mourn without showing bad faith. Analysts could have examined Reagan’s reputation critically on the lines indicated earlier this section. Reagan’s illness could have put a focus on the real effects of Alzheimer’s (he rarely recognized his family for the last three years)[41]. Television could have found individuals whose contacts with Reagan covered broader aspects of his public character. Paul Janensch remembers Reagan leaving a briefing for editors on the budget in order to go riding (only his love of riding was recalled in the funeral). In a 1984 debate with Presidential opponent Walter Mondale, Janensch reports, Reagan, then aged 72, was rambling and incoherent. Mrs Reagan, sitting nearby, seemed “clearly upset.” All that was recorded by the commentators, Janensch adds, was Reagan’s quip at the next debate that he would not exploit his opponent’s “youth and inexperience”.

However, it would have been difficult in the framing offered to have drawn a picture of Reagan as responsible for numerous atrocities (from Libya to Nicaragua), the militarization of Central America and the Caribbean (as one journalist in Britain recalled later), or that he was barely cleared of wrongdoing in the Iran-Contra scandal by claiming he could no longer remember salient facts. The person who most symbolized this aspect of Reagan’s Presidency, the Marine Colonel Oliver North, was reported as telling the Los Angeles Times he did not attend the service because he realized he would be a “distraction” (UPI 11 June 2004: ‘North Will Skip Reagan Funeral’).

Fitting the event to the discourse

One reason why little has taken place in television to challenge the discourse forms currently used to frame events is that the media do not like to appear to create new forms of discourse, outside the larger framework of ‘media as public representative’ (which in turn leads to its concern with ‘special interests,’ corporate performance, the damage done by strikes and the question of whether behavior constitutes a political scandal)[42]. Reagan’s son Ron told Larry King he did not believe the funeral itself had much to do with his father but rather embodied the desire to stage an event at which people could ‘feel good’ (King 2004).

Similarly, elections – despite the negative reporting on politicians – are considered triumphs for the democratic system. A number of journalists, not just commentators, spoke of frustrations with Al Gore when he contested the Florida results – not because of the challenge but because he did not concede defeat when the process took longer than expected (largely because of Republican counter-moves)[43]. W. Lance Bennett observes. “Election coverage tends to elevate the symbolic role of publics” (1997:115).

In such circumstances, the media works to dampen down a language-event so that it fits accepted discourse. When an unemployed man set himself on fire in front of a TV news crew in what he presented as an act of despair in protest against the Reagan administration’s social and economic policies, “this news story, with its highly unconventional form of political action and its equally radical message, was quickly replaced by official pronouncements from local authorities (none of whom were at the scene of the original event) that the man was not in his right mind. The news media then completed the repair operation on the momentary tear in the seamless web of cultural meaning by condemning the decision to report the story in the first place as bad journalism” (116). It takes artists working outside the commercial system to bring such events back into public awareness and consideration: the Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky, whose work consistently seeks a form of public discourse that depends on individual response[44], dramatizes a similar incident in Nostalghia (1983) with a character who is clearly mad but whose desperation to create a new form of discourse confronts the protagonist with his own failures.[45]

It should not be presumed that the media, in seeking to find an acceptable form of discourse, necessarily choose a single perspective when presented with a language-event. Quite the opposite. As the section later on master-signifiers notes (see page 61), the material is often put together in a way that enables it to reflect multiple, often contradictory representations (the drama of news). In treatment of ‘outgroups’ such as Jews and blacks, media will often present or play on stereotypes that cannot cohere into any single picture. It is even suggested that a single answer to the puzzle presented in the news ends its interest for journalists. For other events, such as the funeral of Ronald Reagan and similar rituals, a multiple response would fail to respond to the perceived need for ‘closure.’ Of course, the ‘closure’ (end of discourse) is provided by the media, rather than by officialdom, the community or those who claim to lead the community. That is, the event, as treated, becomes a means by which the media exercise control.

Discourse transposition

One common strategy of control is for media to adopt the discourse mode of another genre in order to present its material[46]. Film analyst Richard Maltby has suggested that many Hollywood films recast historical events through such transpositions (1995): Casablanca shows how World War II would look as a romantic thriller, North by Northwest demonstrates how the Cold War could be a comic cliffhanger, Gone With the Wind rewrites the Civil War as a plucky uneducated woman’s story common in 1930s Hollywood films. Maltby points out that story-telling itself holds no privileged place among the pleasures which a movie offers (324), a characteristic which has so far been neglected in studies of news practice, despite the rise of discourse studies. There is a difference. What is style for Hollywood films represents the content of much news: passing time reconfigured as suspense, spectacle, implausibility, character inconsistency, and melodramatic coincidence (344). In fiction films, Maltby observes, the incoherence enables the viewers to escape the constraints of reality and for a time to enjoy the phantasy operations of dreamwork (outlined by Freud in Traumdeutung/The Interpretation of Dreams). They thus “allow the repressed of the text to return in some parallel imagined version, no less implausible than the one on the screen” (344).

News practice sets itself against (or in dialog with) the discourse of fiction by insisting on its own ‘reality’ (not simply realism), while seeking to incorporate more and more of fiction’s technical devices into its vocabulary: staging, suspense[47], the focus on strong emotions, excitement, conflict, spectacle, courtroom drama, and interrogation. This, say the news broadcasts, is how reality would look if it was fiction, but it is real.

Ronald Reagan’s funeral, as broadcast on Fox News (‘Farewell to Ronald Reagan’), was not only designed to be as spectacular and moving as a conventional propagandistic fiction about a funeral (though in news terms the expected was a guarantee of its validity rather than a program lacking interest for a viewer). It also adopted a format that permeates many of the communication systems of electronic societies. It was an extended hymn to a culture of interruption.

The Culture of Interruption[48]

From telephones to video games, from email spam to advertising, from political sound-bites to television debates, from soap operas to quiz shows, from stand-up comedians to computer viruses, the modern individual has become used to the flow of his or her time being continually interrupted. Most cultural studies’ interpretation of the phenomenon tends to put the emphasis, falsely, elsewhere. Soap operas do not just cater for women whose day is fragmented into numerous short tasks[49]. As in news, the narrative speed – and the decision to break away from the story at any point – is dictated by the broadcasters (interruptions to such programs rarely lead to a repeat of the missed sections).

The “speed and constant fragmentation of regular television programming discourage thoughtful concentration and meaningful reflection,” as one student complained after taking part in a writing project on television programmes (Soleil 1999). But that is not all. Broadcasting according to such standards creates an expectation that its output will not require concentration or reflection, and nor will other cultural products. As a result, society, report many critics, has lost the generalized capacity to regard its commercial artistic products critically. Most recently, Curtis White lamented that his intelligent friends were unable to see any fascistic manipulation in Stephen Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan[50]: “They didn’t know how to ‘read’ the film.[…] When I called my friends’ attention to the fact that Spielberg had chosen to have the initial decision not to kill made by a multilingual intellectual (and coward), their response was usually along the lines of ‘What’s Spielberg got to do with the fact that he was a coward?’[…] They didn’t know how to abstract the integument of structure from a piece of narrative art in order to begin to talk about how the thing means (i.e. creates an ethical world)” (2004:42).

The reduction of television advertising to under 30 seconds per spot has not simply encouraged the repetition of key parts less than a minute later to reinforce its message (Beeson 1997). It also exploits the facility offered to deceive the viewer into believing the subject has been left behind and then returning to insist on it again despite the convention of linearity. To understand the effect, one needs to imagine the feeling created by the same technique used in phone calls or conversations: the message becomes very close to an order (which may or may not be received as coming from an appropriate source in conversation).

The reduction in the average film or tape segment of someone speaking within a news story from more than 40 seconds in 1968 to less than 10 seconds in the 1980s (Hallin 1997:57[51]) has done more than produce politicians who speak in sound-bites. It has done more than disempowering voters by dealing only with criteria for choice that have nothing to do with the abilities most appropriate for the job – that is, focusing on candidates’ ability to project ‘leadership’ qualities rather than whether they can exercise considered judgement of the issues (and not just their media and voting impact). It also gives the media the power to decide whether issues receive longer treatment, for example. Broadcasters can always claim that short clips are the standard in current practice or that a politician is uninteresting on television (e.g. Al Gore or John Kerry) and therefore should receive less air time. In addition, it absolves the media from dealing with issues from both sides except on the most salient topics (salience being created as much by the authorities and media as by public concern).

Even (particularly) in technologies that seem to give power to the individual, the interruption culture has taken over. Unwanted emails from people the receiver does not know choke many Webmail accounts. But they have also made users accustomed to the obligation of dealing with waste as part of their daily working and private life, as well as to accepting targeted promotions (even those that are falsely targeted at the moment – a precisely targeted message comes almost as a relief).

The prevalence of shoot-em’up video games on most consoles is not just an encouragement to powerless teens to indulge in phantasies of random violence in a sphere of virtual irresponsibility. Most of the games require the players to submit themselves completely to the demands of the moment, whatever the program decides.

The independence which the remote control gave to viewers, and the significance of who had control over the remote, which seemed so large when first reported by David Morley – it was usually the man, said Morley (1986:520) – have become less remarkable now that many households have more than one set. But viewer control has become even less important since television programming has taken over the “surfing” rhythm, anticipating the interruptions that viewers themselves might practice.

In fact, all these experiences have accelerated the movement from one experience to the next at speeds usually not determined by the subject. What this means for the individual’s perception, experience and capacity to deal consciously with such challenges has been highlighted by Derryck de Kerckhove, director of the McLuhan Programme in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto. He speaks of the collapse of the interval between stimulus and response in watching television. Similarly, German media theorist Hertha Sturm observes that television denies viewers the half-a-second it takes for the mind to process the information from complex stimuli (1988:39, cited by de Kerckhove 1995:10-11). In a test, de Kerckhove discovered that his nervous system was reacting faster than his conscious mind to television stimuli (8). He concluded that with stimuli moving so fast, “TV talks to the body, not the mind.”

Across the board in modern societies, citizens now expect to be interrupted during their day (from the late 1990s on, holiday advertisements have often sold the idea of being free from interruption). On television, programming provides this staccato rhythm as it moves through the day. Even in the early 1980s a 30-minute news programme on a commercial station in Australia could contain as little as 17 minutes of news once the title sequences, headlines, teasers for later items, advertisements, sport, weather and sign-offs were excluded (Bonney and Wilson 1983:289, cited by Langer 1998:32). That is, the programme offered over one-third (nearly 37%) of obvious interruptions, even ignoring the fragmentary nature of much news presentation.

Writing of the rupture which advertisements make with their surroundings, linguistics professor Guy Cook suggests that the common post-modern concepts of ‘situation’ (relating to the non-linguistic environment) or ‘intertextuality’ (texts related by some thematic link) do not cover the ways in which advertisements make no direct reference to the discourse in which they are embedded (1992/2001:34)[52]. Cook focuses on the meanings created by accidental juxtapositions and contrasts, and “the rarity of any cross-reference” between ads and their accompanying discourse (35). He notes that while television programme producers do not see the ads which punctuate their shows, advertising agencies can buy space in specific programmes and exercise considerable control over any interaction between the two. Similarly, advertisements have (often wittily) confused the boundaries with the programme in which they occur, using elements that would normally occur in the programme itself. Cook points out: “On television, such imitation is often humorous and unconvincing” (37). Nevertheless, this is an almost exclusively one-way street[53]. Though the continuation of advertisements in the midst of breaking stories of major disasters has aroused public criticism as intrusive, television news in return uses its abandonment of advertising breaks during crises as a commercially-enticing rupture in the ‘normal’: the suspension of interruption guarantees the significance of its material.

The primary motor of the interruption culture[54] on television is the news system itself. Its emphasis on the ‘now’ leads to a “fragmentation of social process, evacuating history,” note Peter Golding and Philip Elliott (1979:413). “In a real sense reason disappears as actors flit across the journalistic stage, perform and hurriedly disappear. [...] Industrial relations appears not as an evolving conflict of interest but as a sporadic eruption of inexplicable anger and revolt. [...] Similarly, the political affairs of foreign lands appear as spasmodic convulsions of a more or less violent turn, while international relations appear to result from the occasional urge for travel and conversation indulged in by the diplomatic jet set” (ibid).

It is therefore no surprise that the most prevalent forms of the interruption culture are found in talk shows (formerly discussion programs), news broadcasts (often referred to as shows, even by their anchors), interview programs (‘Hard Talk’ and ‘Straight Talk’ are the titles of two popular British versions). To its victims, journalists often present the demands in terms of the need to keep viewer interest. However, the verbal and visual interruptions (changes of angle and distance, interspersing of newsreel shots, cutaways to the presenter or audience) assert decisively the control of the medium over the interviewee/on-the-spot journalist/expert/panelists etc.

In the Reagan funeral, apart from the cutaways to panel discussions and tributes, the restless cameras, sometimes panning down the cathedral wall, sometimes focusing on the pillars, sometimes fixing on the Reagan family, on other participants, and on the flag-covered coffin (often with a disconcerting predatory swoop reminiscent of Hitchcock, at least to an informed viewer[55]) ensured that attention was jerked from one image to the next. The standard rhythm of news-cutting was only slightly slowed, while the camera operation was active enough to suggest it was wielded by a mildly curious, impatient and uninvolved visitor rather than the result of careful planning to provide a series of engaging images.

Nevertheless, interruptions take place only within a strict format. Television is pre-eminently the media of programming, that is, of repetition. Golding and Elliott suggest that the impression of sameness goes along with the experience of fragmentation in news presentation (413), but one of the functions of repetition, as with ritual, is to celebrate the ability to impose order on experience. As a corollary, what cannot be pressed into order is not repeated. The repetition of the crash scenes of 9/11 can represent a desperate search to unriddle the enigma, to allow everything to return to order in society, as felt by the media and by the Administration, with its continual reminders that Americans were able to cope with the suddenly catastrophal world.

Many critical theorists believe with Umberto Eco that television ‘texts’ must contain unresolved contradictions that the viewer can exploit in order to find structural similarities with their own social relations and identities (Eco 1979 and Fiske 1986), i.e. that these texts offer polysemy with space for resistance and negotiation. But viewers of the Reagan funeral would nevertheless find it difficult to insert any other form of subjective positioning than embracing the discourse of immediacy or submission to the culture of interruption.

Rethinking institutions

The processes at work in the Reagan funeral can be found through the news business and many aspects of public life: aporias of knowledge, aporias of choice, a refusal to turn the spotlight on anything more than the penumbra of the present, manipulation of language-events in favor of an institutional discourse, the transformation of the contingent into an ahistorical, almost ritual transcendent set of values, the ‘accidental’ exclusion of other discourses, and the destabilization of the individual who resists interpellation and subjection by the hegemonic ideology.

These features of the communications system create many of the difficulties of the media in handling stories of atrocity, and explain much of the media’s treatment of celebrities. However, as Jacques Lacan reminds us, the media must cure itself before it can treat these issues honestly, rather than the other way around.

Mary Douglas sums up the dilemma neatly in How Institutions Think (1986). It is institutions that confer identity (55), institutions remember and forget (69), institutions do the classifying (91), institutions make life and death decisions[56] (111). She also concludes. “Once it were conceded that legitimated institutions make the big decisions, much else would be changed. [...] Once it were conceded that the big decisions always engage ethical principles, then philosophers would not focus single-mindedly on individual moral dilemmas” (126).

This remark contains a salutary recognition that the individual may not be a sovereign agent with free choice and that the community affords a means of self-discovery (127). However, it fails to clear a number of stumbling blocks. The subject still needs to make a choice and the community may be a restricting rather than liberating place to make one’s discoveries. The deliberations of Jacques Derrida on justice, taking their inspiration from both Nietzsche and Lyotard, provide a way through such dilemmas. However, the magnitude of the obstacles need to be considered first, starting with the human tendency to ignore a problem when it becomes too large or threatening to contemplate.

Atrocity and Aporias of Knowledge

In Forbidden Knowledge, Roger Shattuck writes of facing an unresolvable conflict in attitudes towards atrocity. One the one hand, there is the common declaration that to understand completely is to forgive completely[57]. But there is also a suspicion that if we knew the whole truth governing any action we would condemn that person completely[58]. Each step of exploration can arouse a mixture of revulsion and fascination.

Shattuck found such a conflict in reading the novelistic works of Sade. The only parallels in his life, he reports, were his experience in battle and watching surgery (298). Both times he felt a sense of essential violation of the human body combined with an almost detached (willfully detached) sense of ‘scientific’ purpose. “Revulsion accompanied arousal to produce a kind of visceral trembling that resembles stage fright,” he remembers.

Media face the same dilemma in handling stories of atrocity. Here, though, the essential prurience has to be masked in ‘objectivity,’ public interest and social shock. The news business sets up a system of discourse by which society allows atrocities to be brought to public attention, but it then also uses this system to bury atrocities under a stream of news ‘principles’ such as immediacy, news value, relevance, novelty and public importance that consign the report of the atrocity to oblivion (see The Culture of Interruption, p. 22).

The Australian journalist John Pilger seems particularly awake to the media’s willed blindness to such problems. He reports once seeing a video of bulldozers pushing bodies into mass graves in Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War, projected as the background to a television journalist’s studio monologue[59]. “The memory reached back to similar scenes at Belsen, Dachau and Auschwitz,” he notes (1992:2). But the important point was: “To my knowledge the BBC’s subversive blink was the only time the British public was allowed to see the extent of the slaughter in the Gulf”(2).

Southern California

“No place on Earth offers greater security to life and greater freedom from natural disasters than Southern California.” – Los Angeles Times, 1934 (epigraph, Davis 1998).

Such managed social blindness does not appear only in wartime. Even where atrocity, oppression or violent revolt are not in question – merely potential catastrophe – society can blank out obvious knowledge[60]. The Los Angeles Basin of Southern California is subject to regular hurricanes, flooding, landslides, earthquakes in a savanna and ‘Mediterranean’ fire-controlled landscape (Davis 1998:5-35). Further, Southern California, “often to its own surprise, has developed a style of urbanization that not only amplifies natural hazards but reactivates dormant hazards and creates hazards where none existed” (Wesley Marx:1977). Fire historian Stephen Pine says of Southern California: “If savannas are fuses, the Mediterranean landscapes are the explosives” (1991, in Davis 1998:14). The urbanologist Mike Davis adds: “Historic wildlife corridors have been turned into view-lot suburbs, wetland liquefaction zones into marinas, and floodplains into industrial districts and housing tracts.[...] As a result, Southern California has reaped flood, fire, and earthquake tragedies that were as avoidable, as unnatural, as the beating of Rodney King and the ensuring explosion in the streets. In failing to conserve natural ecosystems it has also squandered much of its charm and beauty” (9).

However, Davis’s essential point is that these problems are exacerbated by the system of discourse in California media and government: “The social construction of ‘natural’ disaster is largely hidden from view by a way of thinking that simultaneously imposes false expectations on the environment and then explains the inevitable disappointments as proof of a malign and hostile nature”(9). Sometimes interpreters of the catastrophes invoke apocalyptic language, with dismissive exaggeration. After a two-week storm in 1995, a Los Angeles Times columnist wrote: “There’s no question that [we are] caught in the middle of something strange…maybe God, as the biblical sorts preach, is mad at us from making all those dirty movies” (Davis 1998:6). Part of the ‘staging’ of the region’s history describes Los Angeles as the product of human “ingenuity in bringing water to what would otherwise be a treeless waste” (pioneer real estate developer Boyle Workman in The City that Grew, 1935, cited by Davis:10). Davis points out: “Los Angeles, for most of the Holocene (the past 11,000 years) at least, has been no more a ‘treeless waste’ than Valencia or the Côte d’Azur (which have the same annual rainfall). In fact, the earliest written descriptions of the region, the eighteenth-century diaries of the Franciscan padres, eulogized its waterscapes and natural fertility” (10).

But development that ignored the topography of Southern California means that “hundreds of thousands of family homes and apartment buildings urgently need expensive seismic reinforcement, and [...] precast concrete buildings are probably too dangerous to be tolerated in areas of unstable soil. We need, in a nutshell, to spend billions in mitigation in order to prevent hundreds of billions in damages. But nothing is less politically realistic in the present climate, and the ostrichlike consensus is to ignore problems that are too big to fix” (54).

In an increasingly globalized world, such epistemological stupidity and existential “bêtise” have become of more and more urgent interest to philosophers (Avital Ronell 2001 and Jacques Derrida 2004).

Switzerland and the Alps

The same kind of willful blindness was found in Switzerland in planning against invasion during the 1914-18 and 1939-45 wars in Europe. Elias Canetti suggests that the Alps give the Swiss a feeling of security and unity. As a result, “the Swiss plans for defense during the last two wars expresses this equation of nation and the chain of the Alps/ in a curious way. In the case of an attack all the fertile land, all the cities and all the centres of production were to be left undefended. The army was to retire to the mountains and would only have fought there. People and country would appear to have been sacrificed” (1960:204-5). The core of this strategy remains in Swiss defense policy.

A Red Cross visit to Theresienstadt

In both these cases, the enormity of the implications has paralyzed thought, not just in a small segment of society – as has been suggested with regard to Jews in Germany or in ghettos and camps[61] – but across the whole of society. In a chilling filmed interview, the cinéaste Claude Lanzmann exposes this mechanism through the testimony of a delegate of the International Committee of the Red Cross who visited both Auschwitz and Theresienstadt (Lanzmann:1995). The man saw nothing of the crematoria, the starving and sick, the terrified or the system of repression. The delegate wrote a notorious report describing Theresienstadt in 1944 as being “almost like a small town”. Even 30 years later he said he was most struck by the “passivity” of the Jews. Despite having learned that they were starving to death and had been trained by the Nazis for their performance for the previous three months, he declared that on the basis of what he saw in 1944 “I’d sign it [the report] again today.”[62]

In The Drowned and the Saved Primo Levi discusses the many kinds of memory suppression practiced by oppressor as well as the victim. “Behind the ‘I don’t know’ and the ‘I do not remember’ that one hears in courtrooms there is sometimes the precise intent to lie, but at other times it is a fossilized lie, rigidified in a formula. The rememberer has decided not to remember, and has succeeded: by dint of denying its existence, he has expelled the harmful memory […] Lawyers for the defense know very well that the memory gap, or the putative truth, which they suggest to their clients, tends to become forgetfulness and actual truth. […] The best way to defend oneself against the invasion of burdensome memories is to impede their entry, to extend a /cordon sanitaire. It is easier to deny entry to a memory than to free oneself from it after it has been recorded” (1986:17-18).

The destruction of Dresden

The bombing of Dresden, the “Florence on the Elba,” during the 1939-1945 war came from the same aporia of thought. The Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia reports: “During World War II, on the night of February 13, 1945, 800 Allied bombers released a firestorm of bombs on Dresden, killing up to 135,000 people and demolishing 80 percent of the city to no significant military advantage” (2002). This is chillingly discreet, compared to Kurt Vonnegut’s assessment (as a prisoner of war in Dresden) that the city had no military targets, was beautiful enough to deserve sparing from bombs if at all possible, and did not advance the Allied military cause (Slaughterhouse Five). Bombing, the British already knew, only increased the communal solidarity among its victims rather than solely terrifying them (Sebald). The firebombing two months before the suicide of Hitler was apparently carried out to demonstrate to the public at home that the Allies were capable of scoring a spectacular strike against Germany after the Nazi’s last serious Nazi offensive (the Battle of the Bulge in December-January) which took the supposedly defeated Germans 50 km into Belgium and Luxembourg against Allied armies (Encarta).

It is not necessary to attribute any psychological reason to the Allies for the firebombing of Dresden[63] but the similarity between fires and dynamic, destructively minded crowds has struck more than one observer. Canetti says fire and crowds share so many characteristics – fire is the same wherever it breaks out, it spreads rapidly, it is contagious and insatiable, it can break out anywhere and with great suddenness, it is multiple, it is destructive, it has an enemy, it dies, it acts as thought it were alive, and is so treated – that fire and the crowd can stand for each other. “Fire is one of the most important and malleable of the crowd symbols which have always played a part in the history of mankind” (89)[64].

Perhaps the main idea to retain here, however, is the practice – from California to Britain’s Bomber Command – of an all-consuming subjectivism, “the device” that in Nietzsche’s terms keeps us, through language, from seeing the truth (‘On Truth and Lie in a Nonmoral Sense’). This aporia of self-knowledge can be dubbed an example of philosophical “terminality” (see page 58) for its utter conviction of having considered all that needs to be taken into account. In a situation of terminality, justice is impossible, unthinkable, while atrocities are all too probable.

Aporias of choice

The media critic Noam Chomsky suggests that newspapers and commercial television in the United States regularly exercise what might be termed “aporias of choice” – deliberate blindness towards problems that seem too difficult to confront. “That’s the kind of thing that’s very easy in journalism or any of the other ideological disciplines,” he told an interviewer. “You just ignore what you don’t like, and if you are on the side of the powerful, it is easy to get away with” (1994:151). The Vietnam war was an example of US aggression, but newspapers began calling for withdrawal only in late 1969, 18 months after Wall Street “turned against the war,” Chomsky concludes: “Some elementary truths are too outrageous to be allowed on the printed page” (155). Thus, the Washington Post reported that the US compelled Marxist Sandinistas in Nicaragua to hold their first free election in 1990 (157), ignoring a free election held in 1984 “except that it came out the wrong way, so therefore it was wiped out of history by the US” (158). “You just can’t say certain things within a deeply totalitarian culture like ours” (158). In general, the “mask of balance and objectivity is a crucial part of the propaganda function” of the news media, he argues (153).

In a thought closely paralleling Derrida’s concern with the tyranny of presence, Chomsky expresses concern about the loss of unrecorded knowledge. “I know that if /I don’t write about something within a couple of years it will be gone. [...] All of us feel like this. You’re so far out of the mainstream that the few people who follow these issues closely and who write about them know that if they don’t deal with something it’s out of history” (159). “As an individual, you would have to be a fanatic to find it out” (159).

Primo Levi writes suggestively: “The entire history of the brief ‘millenial Reich’ can be reread as a war against memory, an Orwellian falsification of memory, falsification of reality, negation of reality” (1986:18).

Among these issues, which for the major media outlets are not part of history, Chomsky points to the relation between US aid and torture. A 1980 study by Lars Schoultz of US aid and human rights violations in Latin America, Chomsky reports, found that “US aid tends to flow to the most egregrious human rights violators in the hemisphere.[…It] has nothing to do with need, [...] it includes military aid, and [...] it runs through the Carter period. In the Reagan period it shot through the roof” (160).

Blinding oneself to the obvious

Freud, of course, was the pioneer in exploring ways of blinding oneself to the “blindingly obvious” (Burgin 1996:94), often using his own experience to illustrate and explain such aporias, forgettings and displacements. In The Uncanny (1919) the occasion is his continual wandering back into a street of ‘painted ladies’ in an Italian provincial town one summer afternoon (389). In Screen Memories (1899) it is the constructed memory of gathering yellow flowers, attributed to someone else (56, but see Burgin:222 and Freud 1901/1924:84). The first experience created a feeling “which I can only describe as uncanny” (390), which he traces to “whatever reminds us” of a “repetition-compulsion in the unconscious mind” (391). Screen Memories is about the later reconstruction of childhood images before a sense of narrative is established in the mind. The memories are therefore assembled in the manner of dreams (particularly involving displacement, compression and repression). The common characteristic in Freud’s accounts is the dissolution of narrative sense-making in these experiences which are then reconstructed according to a preconceived pattern, as it is in the ‘aporias of choice,’ where whatever does not fit into the meta-narrative is rejected.

As this dissertation will later report, atrocity often involves the destruction of subjective narrative sense in favor of what the English artist and art philosopher Victor Burgin, following Freud, has called “brecciated time” (1996:179). In the second of his Introductory Lectures Freud warns against expecting dreams to present “a logically arranged narrative.” Freud comments: “On the contrary, it is as a rule like a piece of breccia, composed of various fragments” (1916-17:181-2). As the later descriptions of the experience of atrocity suggest, the destruction of narrative (see page 76) is one of the regular tools of persecutors, both in the compulsive-repetition of experience they seek to impose on victims, and the ‘uncanny’ feelings evoked in many people who find themselves in the midst of a catastrophe, as well as the fragmentary, narrative-resistant nature of their memories in recall.

Blindness to one’s situation is also used by prejudiced communicators to blame the Jews for failing to resist the Holocaust, for example, among them Eichmann (Rhodes 2002:279). Richard Rhodes quotes the Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer who points out: “Psychologically, Jewish responses to knowledge of impending destruction were no different from similar responses of other groups. Russian or Polish peasants on the point of execution by German troops, French resistance fighters caught and sentenced to death, Serb villagers confronting Croat or German murderers – people facing inescapable destruction behave in much the same way. The range of reactions extends from numbed fear and hysterical crying to heroic defiance. We value the latter, which was indeed widespread. But the other kinds of response are no less human, no less understandable or worthy of empathy” (Rhodes 2002:279).

“It is a thought-provoking fact that the first industrial production lines were in fact slaughter lines in the Chicago abattoirs,” writes French anthropologist Noëlie Vialles (1994:51). Modern slaughtering, she reports, is arranged to dilute responsibility by dividing the job into separate functions (stunning and throat-cutting) usually performed by employees out of sight of each other. “We are left without any ‘real’ killing at all, nor do we have any one person who ‘really’ kills; by separating the jobs, you completely dilute the responsibilities and any feelings of guilt, however vague and held in check” (45-6). The industrialization of slaughtering was designed to reduce the psychological disturbance workers could have felt: “The thought vaccum and the lack of identification with one’s job that are elsewhere experienced as distressing features of production line work, here constitute on the contrary a prerequisite for ‘getting used to it’”(51). Richard Rhodes accepts the analogy with Einsatzgruppen (2002:200) but also notes its limits: “Himmler [who grew ill at his only sight of Jews being murdered] wanted his victims to be killed without bloodshed and his SS men to be just like other workers, which is the fundamental reason he switched the method of killing from Einsatzgruppen executions to gas vans and gas chambers. [But] Himmler knew his project was fundamentally futile, or he would not have bragged ad nauseum about the ‘duty’ of making his SS men ‘hard’”(282). The dissociation of responsibility worked for Eichmann, while the American criminologist Lonnie Athens’s four-stage brutalization of violent criminals seems to Rhodes a sufficient explanation of the barbarity of Nazi murderers (2002:21). This runs counter to explanations such as Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s in Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996) that put the emphasis on motivation: “People must be motivated to kill others, or else they would not do so” (54). Rhodes insists: “Motivation is not sufficient by itself to produce serious violence; people must also have undergone prior violent experiences; they must have learned to be violent and must have come to identify themselves as violent. Otherwise their intense hatreds will emerge as ugly but nonviolent behaviors, such as expressions of contempt, denunciations, discrimination, ostracism” (21). The distinction is important for the next sections, first for its relevance to ways in which violence even in a society without government may be a force maintaining order without leading to a violent environment, and for the ways in which other groups may embrace violence (and seek to accustom others to violence) to achieve their social ends.

Atrocity and the Discourse of Violence

Violence occupies an anomalous and – to a large extent – misjudged place in political theory. A senior professor of modern violence describes it as “the original sin of politics” (Apter 1997:vii). At the same time, he admits: “History is a virtual chronicle of political violence either from above or below, for or against the state, and as drama, spectacle, and power” (ibid). Modern anthropologists, however, have expressed surprise that “violence has such a central position in Western theories of power and human nature”, suggesting that study of other societies can “disturb and unsettle our received understanding of violence” (Barnard & Spencer 1996:500). By contrast, Hannah Arendt pointed out in the early 1970s that “violence has been singled out [...] seldom for special consideration” (1972:87)[65].

Reversing Karl von Clausewitz’s famous dictum “war is simply a continuation of political intercourse, with the addition of other means”[66], many other theorists have been tempted to propose that political life can be considered as war by other means, unless government has a monopoly on approved violence[67]. Most notably, Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century suggested that life without authority to keep people in awe of power was “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short” [68][69].

Against the standard view of violence as the ultimate kind of power in society[70], Arendt points to another tradition – “no less old and time-honored” (1972. 110), which inspired the 18th-century revolutionists (including the American), in which violence and power are separate. “All political institutions [...] petrify and decay as soon as the living power of the people ceases to uphold them” (111). Power, she adds, “is never the property of an individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together” (113).

She comments. “It is, I think, a rather sad reflection on the present state of political science that our terminology does not distinguish among such key words as ‘power,’ ‘strength,’ ‘force,’ ‘authority,’ and, finally, ‘violence’ – all of which refer to distinct, different phenomena (112). [….] Power is indeed of the essence of all governments, but violence is not. Violence is by nature instrumental; like all means, it always stands in need of guidance and justification through the end it pursues” (119).” As for terror, it is “the form of government that comes into being when violence, having destroyed all power, does not abdicate but, on the contrary, remains in full control. [...] Every kind of organized opposition must disappear before the full force of terror can be let loose” (122).

One can question the transition lines that Arendt draws between violence and terror, the thought that terror installs itself when violence does not ‘abdicate’ and the suggestion that a terror regime can only operate at full force when it no longer has opposition. Today, it seems callous to describe the brutalities in Sierra Leone, Liberia and 1970s Argentina as simply violence rather than terror, to suggest that terror in Yugoslavia followed unbroken on the eruption of violence, or to minimize the amount of opposition in these countries to the terror that occurred. She does, however, provide a healthy corrective to ideas that all kinds of violence are equal and form an inevitable element of governmental power.

Tribal violence

The anthropologist Lucy Mair stressed that the Hobbesian contrast between the state of nature and civil society is “a logical rather than a historical argument” (1970:10). She points out: “In a number of primitive [i.e. pre-literate or small-scale] societies fighting is recognized as a legitimate means of obtaining redress for an injury, though in those cases it is not, as Hobbes imagined, a means of dominating others” (ibid).

The other neglected aspect of violence in political theory is that ‘tribal’ societies, as attested by the British anthropologists E.E. Evans-Pritchard and M. Fortes in 1940 (see under Evans-Pritchard), have very clear ideas about what kind of violence is considered legitimate and rules about ceasing hostilities[71]. Mair similarly notes: “Every society has an ideal of family unity such that disputes between kinsmen are expected to be settled without any outside intervention” (10). And in primitive societies, people trace the links of kinship much further than in the western world, she adds.

One could even argue, as many modern moralists do without drawing the comparison, that industrial society tends to narrow the range of kinship and widen the range of conflicts in which violence is used to settle or control disputes, the complete opposite of Hobbes’s view. “To Hobbes, where there was no law there must be anarchy [….] Even a casual observation of actual primitive peoples shows that they are not constantly engaged in internecine fighting; that they recognize rules of conduct which they can state, and that these rules are obeyed sufficiently often for people to know what they are entitled to, and can expect of others, in any of the recurrent situations of life” (Mair 18).

Defining violence

Because of the central position of violence in Western theories of power and human nature, anthropological evidence tends to be discounted by political scientists. The anthropologist Jonathan Spencer sees his discipline as offering a broader view, one which challenges the standard connotations of the term. “Cultural accounts of other people’s ideas about violence, gender and / personhood can serve to undermine powerful Western assumptions about human nature” (361/2), he suggests. “Even in societies with an explicit concept which we could translate as ‘violence,’ not all acts involving the deliberate inflicting of physical pain, marking or damage to another’s body are defined as ‘violent.’ Are sacrifice, circumcision, tattooing, fighting, and biomedical procedures ranging from appendectomy to electro-convulsive therapy, all usefully classifiable as acts of ‘violence’[72]? Do we dismiss acts of witchcraft and sorcery which are clearly intended to cause bodily harm, even if we doubt their efficacy?” (560)

Spencer argues: “Anthropology’s most useful contribution has probably been its documentation of the fact that violence is pre-eminently collective rather than individual, social rather than asocial or anti-social, usually culturally structured and always culturally interpreted” (599).

Misreadings of violence

The opposite view plays a prominent part in sociobiological arguments (ibid). The Austrian naturalist Konrad Lorenz, for example, argued that human beings, in contrast to other animals, particularly dogs, lack a programmed ‘brake’ against their aggression in disputes. The animal behaviorist Desmond Morris, however, suggests Lorenz’s theory “was based on a complete misreading of canine behavior” (39).

Arendt pours scorn on similar ‘biological’ efforts, common in the 1960s, to explain “the riddle of ‘aggressiveness’ in human behavior” (1972:124) by pointing to animal parallels. “If we define man as belonging to the animal kingdom, why should we ask him to take his standards of behavior from another animal species?” she asks. “The answer, I am afraid, is / simple: it is easier to experiment with animals” (124-5). The result: “man acts irrationally and like a beast if he refuses to listen to the scientists or is ignorant of their latest findings” (126). She concludes: “Violence is neither beastly nor irrational – whether we understand/ these terms in the ordinary language of the humanists or in accordance with scientific theories” (126-7) and “absence of emotions neither causes nor promotes rationality” (128).

Arendt suggests that “violence, being instrumental in nature, is rational to the extent that it is effective in reaching the end that must justify it,” but this means it can only pursue short-term goals (140). “And indeed, violence, contrary to what its prophets try to tell us, is more the weapon of reform than of revolution” (140).

These are normative rather than descriptive terms, but they do seem to differentiate between the varieties more exactly than her earlier formulations of the line between violence and terror. Violence becomes terror when it is used to pursue long-term goals. However, either can involve atrocity, and Stalin’s terror seems to have been remarkably short-term in its aims (to get rid of those he mistrusted at that moment or might distrust later) with no indication that he could have ever created a Soviet Union of trusted servants. It is not going too far to say that all modern social violence aims to create a situation of terror in which the absence of violence is as powerful as the brutality itself, as the later section on experiencing atrocity suggests.

Punishment

In another faulty generalization with regard to justice in society, Emile Durkheim, in his seminal The Division of Labor in Society (1893), presumed mistakenly that “repressive penal law, inherently punitive and vengeful” predominates in primitive conditions, as against “restitutive” legal systems aiming to restore social harmony (Lewis 1976:48). These arguments are a consequence of his larger theory of a movement from communal to anomic societies as a part of industrial development. The Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget, while accepting the contrast between “distributive” and “retributive” punishment (and similarly the cultural link between justice and punishment), came to quite the opposite opinion after his research team questioned children aged 6-12. “The sense of justice, though naturally capable of being reinforced by the precepts and the practical example of the adult, is largely independent of these influences, and requires nothing more for its development than the mutual respect and solidarity which holds among children themselves,” he reported. “It is often at the expense of/the adult and not because of him that the notions of just and unjust find their way into the youthful mind. [...] The rule of justice is a sort of immanent condition of social relationships or a law governing their equilibrium. And as the solidarity between children grows we shall find this notion of justice gradually emerging in almost complete autonomy” (1932:190-1).

Piaget did find that children, asked to think of a punishment themselves, would choose “astonishingly severe” expiatory punishments (203), but concluded that the children were doing no more than selecting the kind of punishment they were used to receiving from adults, and the older the children the more “distributive” the punishment they favored (“The equalitarian notion of justice begins to assert itself with sufficient strength to overcome the authority of the adult” in cases of tale-telling (ibid, 191).

Redress for wrongs

The attempt here is to show how violence is a term that requires some interpretation of the society in which it is used in order to understand its particular application. Focusing, however, on the range of behaviors grouped around the issue closest to the concern here – that of justice – it makes sense to look at how some societies without a government have dealt with obtaining what Mair calls redress for wrongs[73].

The examples will show that in many cases ‘primitive’ societies accept there can be no appropriate redress[74], that many alternatives to the violent settlement of disputes are approved and encouraged in communities without government or the power of enforcing its customs, and that the Other is recognized as existing in many grades, even when recognizing what Derrida calls “the (infinite) irreducible alterity of the Other [...] that which does not come to an end, despite my interminable labor and experience” (1964:142).

The institutionalization of law and justice – of the concept of “fairness” rather than of obtaining pardon – has reduced the range of instruments society allows us to bring into discourse[75]. Even worse, institutionalization has associated justice most explicitly with the equally disturbing boundaries of citizenship (as ancient Athens exemplified and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice dramatizes), rights which organized society alone claims the power to confer. The following section deals at some length with the variety of norms which enfold, restrain and legitimate violence in ‘primitive’ societies because even political science specialists often overlook these differences and the situations in which modern society sanctions (that is both allows and disapproves of) violence, from soccer hooliganism to gang warfare, teenage ‘wilding’ (Frankenberg 1966) and ‘embedded terrorist’ activities such as the IRA (Apter 1997b).

After considering how communities without governments deal with situations of violence, modern societies are reviewed where violence can be considered idiomatic (the term was used by the novelist Nathanael West about the US[76]). First, it considers societies where violence is situational (in Western Europe, Colombia and Northern Ireland), then where it could be described as systemic (forming an accepted part of the system, as in the US), and then institutional as in Nazi Germany. The aim is to identify the features which gradually incorporate violence into politics and pave the way for atrocity as a standard tool of government.

Community, kin and outsiders

Reviewing several African societies without government, Mair makes the point: “A very large part of the violence that does characterize many primitive societies occurs because the rules to which everyone subscribes in principle are broken in particular cases. This is where Hobbes was wrong” (35). She also marks a dividing line of responsibility between kin, community and outsiders. “Every primitive society recognizes in some way that fellow citizens have mutual obligations which do not extend to aliens, and in the societies which have the least government these obligations are concerned with the limits of the use of force,” Mair notes. “If we give the very broadest meaning to the phrase ‘the rule of law,’ we can say it is a situation in which peaceful relations are regarded as normal, and there has to be something to justify a breach of these relations” (35).

She adds: “Among the Nilotic peoples not much justification is needed,” but the descriptions of these societies suggest that this phrasing remains somewhat infected by Western political theorizing, as do many current discussions of Africa’s ‘failed states.’[77] Many of the terminological divisions created in British social attitudes during its colonial and expansionary period have imposed themselves on scientific vocabulary in the disciplines most allied to administration such as political theory and anthropology, current when many of the field studies in Africa took place.

The first set of divisions noted by Mair are between the individual and kin, kin and the community, the community and tribe (“populations that call themselves by one name and speak one language but do not recognize one common chief or other type of government”: 15), the tribe and the people, the people and others.

While recognizing that conflict and competition take place within the family, “every society has an ideal of family unity such that disputes between kinsmen are expected to be settled without any outside intervention” (10), she reports. But in pre-literate societies it is not always easy to draw the line: “in such societies people trace the links of kinship much further than they do in the western world” (10). Even when societies base a social duty on common descent, they include adoption as “the earliest and most extensively employed of legal fictions” (Maine 1959), particularly when marriage is expected to be with outsiders.

Compensation rules define the tribe

What does this mean for the way in which Nilotic peoples see their society? A group of people related through males recognize themselves as being of a single lineage. “Lineages have corporate rights in property; they consider themselves to be injured as a body if one of their members is injured, they support him [only males are involved] in seeking compensation, and the compensation is shared among them. On the other side the lineage kin of a wrongdoer, or at least those most closely related to him, are liable to help him pay the compensation which he has incurred” (37).

In fact, compensation can be used as a defining concept for the tribe. “The Nuer political community is that group within which compensation is payable for homicide. In fighting between tribes no payment is accepted in atonement for a killing, and this is what justifies us in describing such fighting as war” (Mair 38: the insight is Evans-Pritchard’s).

Compensation is paid in cattle, but the injured party usually has to seize the cattle due. A public discussion may sometimes take place of how many cattle are owed, but if the debt is resisted and a person is killed, it is “both the right and duty” of the murdered person’s lineage to kill the slayer or one of his close kin. If this retaliation does not take place immediately, compensation may be offered and accepted. “But the acceptance of compensation is not an alternative to vengeance,” Mair insists. “It is a means of putting an end to hostilities when people have had enough of the disorganization that they cause” (37).

A threat of violence maintains the law

Mair also underlines: “Both the vengeance and the compensation are ways of recognizing that killing is the/ breach of a rule” (37-8). Similarly, “the knowledge that a man who considers himself wrong will not hesitate to fight, though at first sight it may seem to indicate a condition of lawlessness, is what maintains the law (40). Because kinsmen and village-mates are bound to support someone involved in a conflict, “the people who are not directly involved in a quarrel will do all they can to prevent it from reaching this point” (40).

As a result, though no-one can be compelled to settle a dispute peacefully, the societies have developed recognized procedures of peaceful settlement for those who wish to end a quarrel. These include seizing cattle by stealth to avoid becoming involved in a fight. Even if this is done openly, people will not resist the action if they consider the claim just. “If it is resisted, other people will try to persuade the disputants to invoke the good offices of a man who may be described as a professional mediator. This is a person with special ritual powers, including that of performing the rite of reconciliation to end a feud which has been started by the killing of a man” (41). Single combat is the usual way to deal with adultery or an insult, in which the combatants use only a club rather than a deadly spear, and bystanders do what they can to separate the men.

Drawing boundaries

Outside the village framework, hostilities can be more serious, particularly at dances, cattle camps and water-holes, where men from several villages gather. Even here the practice is to try to limit the violence. The mediator, whom the Nuer call “the leopard-skin chief”, will try to hoe a boundary line between the two sides. If someone is killed, the village will try to encourage the kinsmen to accept compensation, and in a dance meeting between villages, men divided by a grudge will take care to place themselves far apart so avoid knocking against each other and provoked into an exchange of insults (43). “In accepting compensation, the kinsmen of the dead man are not implying that their loss is something that a payment can make good. One the contrary, when they do accept cattle as a settlement of the feud, they use them to make a marriage whereby the lineage may gain more sons” (44).

An extension of efforts to limit damage can be found in wars between Nuer tribes: “Houses were not destroyed, women and children injured, nor captives taken, though all these actions were permissible in wars against other peoples” (39). Mair notes that wars are defensive or offensive – there is no attempt to seek redress for a right that is infringed, and compensation cannot be offered (i.e. the same grounds as modern wars between nation-states).

At the smaller scale, the lineage rules of support mean that in many villages, marriage has (as in Bosnia) put many people on both sides of the dividing line, and an unsettled feud can make it impossible for any social life between relatives. This provides a major impulse to settle the dispute. On the larger scale, it might seem that warfare and violence will carry no penalties, either in compensation, revenge or the pollution of death. These rules apply throughout the tribe, but would not be effective against a fellow-tribesman whose home and kin live far away. And these killings are neither avenged nor atoned.

But these large tribal sections do not war against each other continuously, even when there are unsettled feuds between their members. Their relations are “appear to be for much of the time in a condition of uneasy armistice. [...] Sometimes a tribe may formally split in two, and thus recognize that the hostilities which have accumulated between its sections have become irreconcilable” (46).

Thus, conflicts do not regularly develop into wars, and a division of the tribe is considered more acceptable as a solution. Some of these Nilotic peoples do not approve of continuing a feud over a killing. “If revenge is not taken at once, then it should not be taken at all,” Mair reports of the Nuer. “It does not seem that honor is held to call for a show of intransigence” (53).

Mair concludes. “A modicum of respect for recognized rights is secured because all members of the political community know that those who violate the rules must expect retaliation; and at the same time the perseverance with which retaliation is pursued is tempered by the general desire that people should be able to pursue their normal avocations in peace” (52).

Intimidation and ‘lynching’

The Kikuyu of East Africa bring together in the same system both direct vengeance and judgment by persons speaking for the community as a whole. In the early part of the 20th century, kinsmen of a murdered man would attack the murderer’s home and either take a life in vengeance or lay waste the crops. But the elders on both sides were then expected to intervene and persuade the injured group to accept compensation, according to Jomo Kenyatta[78] (1930, in Mair 56).

Among those tribes which do consider killing of enemies as a key part of warfare, the Luhya’s 20 tribes turn to violence to increase their herds and extend the area available for cultivation (they are both cattlekeepers and farmers). But the more powerful tribes do not claim land by formal conquest. They seek rather to intimidate their neighbors to keep homes and fields at a distance (Mair 54, citing Wagner 1949).

In his introduction to African Political Systems (1940), Radcliffe-Brown recorded that some Kenyan tribes would lynch a heinous offender – a practice which continues today[79] and is usually considered now to exemplify lawlessness rather than community justice. Radcliffe-Brown, however, considered it a legal action. The British anthropologist also recognized, in Mair’s words (19), that “the right to seek vengeance supports the law against killing, since people will separate men who are quarreling if they can, so as to prevent a feud from starting” (though he would not consider the feud as a legal action).

Among the Kikuyu and Kamba, the community as a whole have occasionally put a person to death, not in revenge, but for specific offences, in what has been described as ‘organized lynching’ – another colonial term which suggests unlawfulness rather than social vengeance. The offences, it is recorded, included theft, refusal to pay a debt, or exercise of witchcraft. The act required a decision by the elders after hearing the charges, and also the consent of the nearest relative. All the people offended would be required to attack the man with weapons (Middleton 1953, cited by Mair 60). “Even in this case of concerted action, however, the initiative does not come from any authority; the elders do not order it, they merely permit it,” she notes (60).

Violence as Other

It is a shortcoming of Professor Mair’s survey of societies without government that she gives little indication of the occasions that might lead to the taking of a life. She simply takes the reaction to murder as the “critical example” for judging how a society deals with violence. Reporting that one feud led to about 50 deaths in 20 years according to a Sudanese District Commissioner in 1932 (50), she observes that this is “a figure that might not seem very shocking to a modern army commander or road safety authority.” In Kenya, she indicates that while homicide calls for immediate vengeance, there are more disputes over claims for property. And she adds: “The Kikuyu are unlike the Nuer in that they would not proceed directly to seize what was owing to them; they would get the elders of their kin group to go and claim it on their behalf, and if the claim was disputed,/ then it would be argued out before such elders as the parties chose” (56-57, summarizing Dundas 1915). “The elders themselves [in the view of the anthropologist studying them] did not consider that their duty was to pass judgement and sentence, but simply to put an end to strife” (57).

From this summary overview, it can be seen how the language of pre-modern anthropology applies the terminology of political liberalism to societies. It disguises a not-so-hidden agenda of assimilating violence into a bureaucratic system of colonial rule. Its inability to incorporate a different vocabulary forms part of this intimidatory project (see the section of this dissertation dealing with terminality on page 58 and after). Violence becomes a property of the Other, while the administration professes to offer law and order.

Violence and the American West

The same process of deformation has operated with regard to the American West. Larry McMurtry, a western writer himself, notes: “Most of the traditions which we associate with the American West were invented by pulp writers, poster artists, impresarios, and advertising men; excepting, mainly, those that were imported from Mexico, whose vaqueros had about a three-century jump on our cowboys when it came to handling cattle” (2000).

The interest here is in the use made of the west’s conceptions of law and violence. Lansford W. Hastings observes in one of the widely read handbooks of western travel Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California (1845) that his party of 160 decided after traveling a few days that they did not need a code of laws “other than the moral code [...] found recorded in the breast of every man”. They did pass a decree to exterminate all dogs within the area. “When a few dogs were legally executed,” reports historian Daniel J. Boorstin, “the opposition hardened. Some dog owners threatened to kill anyone who killed their dogs” (1965:82). The captain reconvened the company and they rescinded the decree by a near unanimous vote. Hastings recalled: “This was our first and last effort at legislation.”

In the west, miners “courts” were assemblies of whoever was around and anyone could call it into session. “Those who doubted the urgency of a meeting would simply stay away” (Boorstin 1965:86). “We needed no law until the lawyers came,” wrote one pioneer of the mining camps (84). Boorstin comments: “We have good reason to believe that their life was at least as orderly, and perhaps a good deal more so, than life in settled eastern communities. Unguarded property was generally safe. [...] Though there were no police, provisions and tools were seldom stolen” (85). He attributes this partly to the conditions of life: ‘the very techniques of gold mining increasingly emphasized co-operation and group loyalty” (83), while the value of a goldseeker’s time ($16-$100 a day) led them to prefer speedy justice; there were also few jails or paid guards. “Banishment, whipping, or death became the most popular forms of punishment. [...] The law was invisible precisely because it was pervasive” (84).

Cowboys, a later development in the history of the west (from the 1860s on), found “the west was a good place for the refugee from older laws, but it offered no refuge from community,” observes Boorstin (1973:18). “Men had to suppress their personal hatreds, confine their tempers, and submit to the strict law of the trail, otherwise they might find themselves abandoned or strung up or sent off alone hundreds of miles from nowhere” (19). “Without the benefit of law, rangers had divided the range among themselves by a system that was informal, that had no standing in court, but was enforced by the cattlemen themselves” (19). Line-riders patrolled ranch limits trying to keep their cattle separate from the neighbors’, while the Great Roundup was a community ritual similar to those found in the African tribes that Mair surveyed. “On the remote range any cowboy [...] could quickly transform somebody else’s property into his own [...] by the simple process of shooting [an unbranded] calf’s mother. The roundup, a public ritual, was designed to help cowboys resist these temptations” (25).

As for the much chronicled cattle wars, the bloodiest (the Lincoln County War in New Mexico) caused around 60 deaths, and only one man was brought to trial for a killing[80]: Billy the Kid, who had been born in New York. The Governor called the outlaw to a meeting and, in front of witnesses, promised him a pardon if convicted but Billy refused (some doubted the Governor’s word – a Civil War hero, he was later to earn even more fame as the author of Ben Hur). “The bad man of the West,” asserts Boorstin, “simply carried out west the criminal ways of a settled society” (41). The Johnson County “war” of 1892 in Wyoming resulted in three deaths – two men killed before the real start of shooting and the Texas Kid, executed for a murder only indirectly caused by the hostilities (33). However, the big cattle ranchers used a court injunction to impound a documented account of their invasion of the land inhabited by small stockholders and farmers. They had the book burned, the writer-publisher charged with sending obscene matter through the mails, and his publishing business closed. “The [Cattleowners’] Association even succeeded in extracting the copyright copies from the Library of Congress (33). It took over 50 years for the story to be publicly told, in Jack Schaefer’s novel Shane (1949), later made into one of the most famous western films.

But the film itself, directed by George Stevens, represents the high point of the “aestheticizing tendency” of the western in the words of the genre’s most assiduous student, Robert Warshaw: “The legend of the West is virtually reduced to its essentials and then fixed in the dreamy clarity of a fairy tale” (1954:159). Warshaw sees little of the history of the west embodied in the myth of the western. “The true ‘civilization’ of the Western movie is always embodied in an individual, good or bad is more a matter of personal bearing than of social consequences, and the conflict of good and bad is a duel between two men. [...] His value must express itself entirely his own being – in his presence, the way he holds our eyes – and in contradiction to the facts. [...] He no longer believes in this drama and nevertheless will continue to play his role perfectly; the pattern is all” (156).

The dangers of myth

Richard Slotkin has spelled out the dangers of the gunfighter myth (true or false) as a national self-image for the United States. Myth is “a poetic construction of tremendous economy and compression and a mnemonic device capable of evoking a complex system of historical associations in single image or phrase” (1993:5-6, Ulmer 2003:258). But “sooner or later defeat in war, changes in modes of production, internal imbalance in the distribution of wealth and power produce a crisis that cannot be fully explained or controlled by invoking the received wisdom embodied in myth”.

Gregory Ulmer has critiqued the inadequacies and misdirections of the western gunslinger myth, noting with John Fiske (1993): “The idea that the images of the culture need to be controlled for propaganda or ideological reasons is an old one” (Ulmer 2003:318). For Ulmer, this opens up a possibility to deliberately seek to change the national myth to one more productive of acceptance of the Other rather than confrontation (his preference is for a jazz ensemble). Through his EmerAgency project Ulmer is trying to tap into images spawned by the culture which remain uncontrolled and perhaps still useful for community problem-solving (2003:xiii).

Placing violence in society

One of the plainest statements on the place of violence in society is to be found in Masters of Death by Richard Rhodes (2002), who draws on the violent-socialization theory of US criminologist Lonnie Athens (21). Rhodes states (19): “Governments control violence by monopolizing it. They authorize military and police forces to use violence but deem criminal any other individual or institutional use. [In the five centuries of modern administrative development] the common belief has emerged that government violence is rational (or at least deliberate and intentional), while private violence is irrational, aberrant, the product of psychopathology rather than deliberate intention. […] In fact […] violence is an instrumentality, not a psychopathology or a character disorder. Violence is a means to an end – domination and control – one of many possible means. Since its essence is injury, its efficacy in the long term is marginal, but its short-term advantages are obvious.”

Rhodes may neglect the philosophical grounding for violent acts and speaks rather one-dimensionally compared to the anthropologists about the place of violence in society but he does remove it from discussion purely as psychopathology (whether treating violence as a priori crazy or positing a general tendency in humans to ‘aggression’). He points out: “The violence that police and military apply illegally – against noncombatants, for example, or against citizens who have not committed a crime or are not resisting arrest – is similar to the violence they use officially. Ironically, such illegal but otherwise comparable acts by violent officials are often characterized as ‘irrational’ or ‘crazy’”(20).

A broader view comes from Hans Toch, leader of a psychological survey that pioneered the use of “peer interview” techniques (prisoners interviewing violent criminals, police officers questioning violent colleagues) 25 years earlier. It is also interesting for its contrast with pre-1970s work: “Unlike previous students, we did not approach violence as personal disorder, nor did we relate it to hypothetical antecedents and correlates. We did not concentrate on rage or aggression, nor on the ability to control it. We did not catalogue styles of destructiveness […] and convert them into classifications. We did not link violence to conventional instruments or labels. […] We saw violence as a form of social conduct comparable to other forms of social conduct. We assumed that physical force is a characteristic personal reaction, and that it is invoked by some people with the same consistency that persuasion, or retreat, or self-insulation, or humor, or defiance is employed by others. […] We also felt that the study of violence could tell us much about society. Violence, after all, is a social response. […] Violence can be understood in terms of its social incentives. This fact is of practical importance. It suggests remedies in the shape of social reform as well as of individual rehabilitation” (1969:10).

Toch points to similarities between police and (in the US) ghetto rioters, quoting with approval the journalist Colin McGlashan: “The black kids and the white cops – their pride, their fear, their isolation, their need to prove themselves, above all their demand for respect – are strangely alike: victims both, prisoners of an escalating conflict they didn’t make and can’t control” (Toch 1969:11).

Highlighting the similarities, however, fails to acknowledge that the police have power over the degree of visibility given to the rioters, to their celebrity, which the urban blacks for the most part do not. The myths are repeated but fail to connect with the subjective experience of either police or rioters.

Violence and terrorism

Apart from looking at Northern Ireland violence and the Italian Red Brigades era, this dissertation will not consider terrorism in any detail. By 1984, over 100 definitions had been recorded (Schmid 1984). Perhaps the most restrictive modern definition, the 1937 League of Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of Terrorism, ignored the origins of the word in the French Revolution as the practice of the ruling regime directed against the general population. In its essential part, it defined acts of terrorism as “criminal acts directed against a state and intended or calculated to create a state of terror…” (2). The U.S. State Department's official definition in 1985 widened the scope considerably in the light of Iran’s state sponsorship of terrorism as “the threat or use of violence for political purposes by individuals or groups whether acting for (my italics) or in opposition to established governmental authority when such actions are intended to shock, stun, or intimidate a target group wider than the immediate victims” (2). Terror by state authorities remained ruled out of the definition.

Even in 2005 the United Nations General Assembly remained blocked in its negotiations for “A Comprehensive Convention Against Terrorism” because of disagreements on whether to include a reference to state terrorism, as well as how to distinguish in the convention between a “terrorist organization” and a “liberation movement” (Deen 2005). But, as Richard Schaffert points out in his study of media and terrorism, definitions that focus on one or the other, or (like Martha Crenshaw’s 1989 definition) restrict terrorism to domestically challenging the state’s monopoly on the use of force, are too narrow to be applicable in general (Schaffert 1992:3). Definitions that focus rather on the method used have gained broader acceptance from scholars, writes Schaffert, but these tend to ignore “the importance contemporary terrorists place on the symbolic nature of their victims. In modern times, the victims of a terrorist atrocity seldom are the direct objects of the terrorists' coercion. They most often are only symbols that are related to a more expansive political target that the terrorists wish to intimidate” (4).

Nevertheless, in the face of difficulties in distinguishing between accepted or inappropriate perpetrators and goals, aims and causes, the historian Walter Laqueur was driven to describe terrorism “as an insurrectional strategy” that is “truly all-purpose and value-free” (1977:45). Schaffert points out that many modern terrorist groups are neither insurrectional nor value-free (al-Qaeda might be an example). Donna Schlagheck wrote even in 1988: “Terrorism is not an instrument solely of the weak; terrorism has often been used by states to govern, and it has become an increasingly common instrument of foreign policy” (1988:13).

What is common in existing definitions is that terrorism involves “random violence against symbolic targets possessing publicity value toward the achievement of political goals” (14). Both the first and last terms can be questioned in the light of 9/11. The World Trade Center was not randomly chosen, and no political goals were declared for the acts. The emphasis remains on publicity and symbolic targets. Schaffert emphasizes the role of the media: “Without the media there is no terror, only murder and mayhem” (47).

Violence and the media

Commentaries that emphasize how common it is for modern societies to use force either officially or unofficially help provide a more nuanced reading of Weber’s famous declaration: “The claim of the modern state to monopolize the use of force is as essential to it as its character of compulsory jurisdiction and of continuous organization” (1920:156). What is seen as essential by many political theorists is to accept the state’s ability to determine what is considered the legitimate use of force[81], and that citizens should as a result feel that they are absolved from responsibility for evaluating, judging or ensuring the justice of the use of force.

A more fruitful use of Weber’s ideas is to consider such statements within what Talcott Parsons described as Weber’s “two deep underlying convictions” which contrast with the dominant tone of much economic thought (1947:31): “the conviction of the fundamental variability of social institutions” and of “the inherent instability of social structures” (32). This highlights the appropriate contrast between modern societies and the African nations that form the subject of Mair’s report, and the way in which modern violence operates invisibly outside the perimeters of “legitimacy” without much capacity (as distinct from the African societies) to operate against that violence. It also suggests why ubiquitous media find themselves under pressure (to which they all succumb) to insist on the particular nature of their society’s institutions as fixed (while paradoxically offering citizens ‘freedom’) and at the same time as stable[82]. An ideological struggle in such societies thus becomes a battle of publicly promulgated myths[83].

In many situations, society’s claim of sole legitimacy with regard to violence makes the “debate” often seem to be between a voice that has almost sole access to conventional media channels and an opponent who is not heard or is camouflaged. Elliott and his colleagues observe that the framework of “objectivity” within which British television operates “conceals the processes of selection and decision involved in the reports” (269), particularly the restriction of dissenting voices to “accredited” pressure and interest groups. This produces what Elliott and co. describe as a “closed” form of presentation: “Television presentations are likely to be at their most ‘open’ where insurgency takes place within nondemocratic states in which legitimate channels of dissent are either restricted or closed and in which state repression is a prominent feature of the system of rule” (271).

Not that the media have sole control over what is treated as legitimate violence, atrocity or celebrity. The IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands achieved celebrity without any access to British media, so that Sinn Fein were able to bring out tens of thousands of people for his funeral (Elliott 196:270). Jean Baudrillard suggests in the face of the “formidable concentration of all processes by the technocratic machine” (2001:15) the terrorists of 9/11 sought to “change the rules of the game” because this was their only alternative. Similarly, Slavoj Žižek, recalling a line from the Wachowski brothers’ Matrix (1999) (“Welcome to the desert of the real”), asks: “Was it not something of a similar order that took place in New York on September 11? Its citizens were introduced to the ‘desert of the real’ – for us, corrupted by Hollywood, the landscape and the shots of the collapsing towers could not but be reminiscent of the most breathtaking scenes in big catastrophe production” (2002:15). However, the actions could also be interpreted as making citizens aware of the unreality of the ‘non-political’ oasis in which they lived (the message of the Matrix).

Fictional television and film products (often in pseudo-documentary format) usually claim a more open and less restricted right to deal with terrorism and violence issues than news (see Elliott et al. 1986). However, the ideology promoted may be even more intolerant than in current affairs. Reviewing one of the most successful action-adventures produced in Britain during the 1980s, The Professionals, Elliott and colleagues remark that it “places terrorism firmly within a criminal rather than a political frame and defines it exclusively in terms of the violence it entails […] It legitimates the state’s use of violent countermeasures by arguing that exceptional threats to the social order require exceptional responses in which consideration of civil liberties, democratic accountability, and due process, are held in abeyance in the interests of efficiency” (278)[84].

A discourse theory of violence

Bureaucratic society has taken over (and often abandoned) the responsibility for preventing violence for which many traditional societies have developed sophisticated mechanisms of pressure on the individual while defending the right of aggrieved persons to redress. It also sets up frameworks, even within the entertainment system and within professional services concerned with violence, in which atrocity is not visible. At the same time, the environment in which violence occurs is rigorously excluded from consideration in discussions of violence except at the banal level which talks of “the roots of violence” such as poverty – as if this problem could be solved as easily as a broken limb. The language in which such issues could be considered is thus restricted at all levels, but nowhere more effectively than in political theory.

One of the most potent myths in political theory is of potential revolution. Even in societies which accept the discourse of law and order, it is accepted that sectional violence can break out, with the possibility that “what begins as spontaneous outbreaks, riots, demonstrations, or for that matter street violence becomes self-sustaining” (Apter 1997a:11). Many theoreticians have mapped how they think the violence turns into a revolutionary movement (Marx, Mao Zedong and Barrington Moore particularly). But David Apter argues that only through discourse theory can political scientists explain why “principles hitherto non-negotiable can suddenly turn into interests for bargaining” (20) and “negotiation does indeed break out, and in the same kind of rashes that political violence does” (21).

This sets aside cost-benefit forms of analysis using theories of bargaining, coalition and rational choice (7). It also excludes treatments of “political violence as individual pathology” (7), or as social pathology arising out of “asymmetries of power and access, of classes, of systems of political economy like capitalism or socialism” (7). Apter, it should be noted, sees the social pathology interpretation as close to the “radical therapy” arguments of thinkers such as Franz Fanon “for whom political violence purges dependency, exorcises deeply internalized inferiorities, frees one from remaining an accomplice of foreign and colonial authorities who impose on mind, spirit and body” (8). From here, he suggests, it is another short step to “violence as spectacle” in the work of Georges Bataille, Guy Debord or the Fluxus art movement (8). In fact, each step in the hierarchy moves language to the forefront of the “communicational” system that includes violence.

Discourse theory looks back to Plato’s Republic for its “mytho-logic” (Roland Barthes’s term) and draws on new French theory to consider how discourse communities of violence are formed (11). The myth – “some triggering or focal happening which might ordinarily hardly cause comment suddenly stops time and resets it” (12) – becomes embedded in a narrative reconstruction of reality to create a redemptive and transformational logic of violence. It becomes “self-validating and self-sustaining” (13).

However, discourse theory does not explain developments in all types of political violence. It works more effectively to analyze “logocentric” violence rather than struggles over power and wealth (the Italian Red Brigades rather than Colombia’s endemic violence). Because of its focus on how bureaucratic societies can defuse violence, detach it from its claimed community and turn a violent movement into one that looks for peace, the history of two persistent outbreaks of violence – in Italy during the 1970s-1980s and in Northern Ireland – are worth examining in some detail, with a glance at the Peruvian and Mexican guerrilla movements.

The rise and fall of the Red Brigades: the split between action and text

David Moss points out that in Italy guerrilla violence represented a contrast to ordinary politics[85]. Its perpetrators considered it a necessary element in social transformation. The general public, on the other hand, saw it as a rejection of politics (1997:86). As a result, explanation was essential for the left-wing Red Brigades. They also addressed their actions to a “not-yet ‘revolutionary’ working class” (86), which made the writings even more important. Left-wing groups even rejected recourse to violence such as bomb massacres or executions that did not require some explanation for understanding (87-8).

Intellectuals in the movement provided the texts designed to offer the rationale for action. But at the same time, the Red Brigades repudiated the idea of creating a clearly distinctive political identity or engaging in “sterile ideological conflict” with other Left-wing groups (93). Their belief was that the logic of dialectical materialism would make their acts intelligible even before they were explained. The Turin “column” of the Red Brigades regularly waited until the response to their acts had taken place so that they could declare the aim of provoking consequences that had already taken place (87).

As a result, the boundaries of the frame of violence in which the Red Brigades worked became more and more fluid, an echo of what had happened in Nazi Germany, Stalinist USSR, Argentina and former Yugoslavia as a result of the practiced rather than declared ideology. “Each [move of the boundary] marked a rupture with the previous limits to the use of violence. The inauguration of kidnapping (1972), “kneecapping” (1975), deliberate murder (1976), and the murder of a kidnap hostage (1978) represented the realization of hitherto merely latent possibilities. A similar shift was achieved by widening the categories of victim: the Red Brigades, for example, began with neo-Fascist targets in the factory, added Christian Democrat politicians (1975) and left-wing activists and sympathizers (1979), and finally included defectors from the group itself (1981) (89). At the same time, 95 percent of the violence involved destruction of vehicles and minor damage to property, a low-level activity that helped the Red Brigades to increase its membership from two in 1969 to 269 in 1979, and most of these were operational for less than one year (Galleni 1981:176).

When Portugal, Greece and Spain changed regimes, right-wing violence in Italy declined from lack of international support (96). The extreme left lost its ‘Other’ and after the mid-1970s could no longer claim to be reacting to Fascist provocations (98). But four-fifths of Left-wing violence after 1969 took place between 1976 and 1979, and became increasingly dangerous (Galleni, cited by Moss. 89). Even in this period, two-thirds of participants in left-wing violence took no part in any attack on individuals, and two-fifths had no direct role in violence of any kind (della Porta 1990:167). Most became involved as friends or relatives of other participants. Such fragile commitments were not a rupture with open politics or family life (Novaro). In Rome, for example, some 20 Red Brigades members were responsible for virtually all of the 32 murders and woundings between 1976 and 1982 (Moss 1997:101).

But as violence grew it became more difficult for perpetrators to combine their efforts with grassroots politics (103). At the same time, the difficulties of explaining themselves became more intense for the Red Brigades, partly through these internal tensions. When the former Prime Minister Aldo Moro was kidnapped 1978 and later killed, “the document explaining the meaning of the attack was only distributed one year after the kidnapping and had been authored, not by those directly responsible, but by the intelligentsia.” Moss comments: “Notoriously, the ‘official’ [Red Brigades] version of the attack failed to fix its meaning. Other interpretations have been in competition ever since” (Moss 1997:105). If anything, the action revealed the clandestine conflicts within the Brigades (105), much as the Falklands/Malvinas war uncovered the divisions within the Argentine military.

The decline from that point was rapid, from 2,139 attacks in 1979 to 174 in 1982, though killings continued sporadically until 1988 (106). In the meantime, Italy’s “repentance legislation” between 1980 and 1987 led many rank and file to renounce violence.

“Significantly, the participants who found it hardest to dissociate themselves from violence were the intelligentsia. [...] The contrast [...] suggests the effects of different connections between writing and violence,” Moss observes (108). The Communist Party, reclaiming its position as the Resistance leader from the Second World War, organized demonstrations in protest against the most serious acts of violence (114). Similarly, “by comparison with initiatives taken in other European states – the introduction of the berufsverbot [sic] and legal restrictions in Germany or the nature of police enquiries and judicial direction in cases involving the IRA in Britain, and the drastic innovations in Northern Ireland itself – the Italian state’s responses seem a model of restraint” (113).

Shadow boxing with the Other

It is no surprise that a 1991 film about this period (Year of the Gun, dir. John Frankenheimer), drawn from a novel written by a Rome-based American, is a black-comedy cum horror story about a journalist whose political thriller using people from his environment is taken for reality by the Red Brigades and leads to disaster. Throughout, the history of the Red Brigades suggests an echo of the Nazi party’s early days and Peru’s Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso): “It insists on a revolutionary logic in which peasants are the class with radical chains. Hence they can no longer be ‘Indians.’ They are redefined as peasants. They must think like peasants according to the Maoist [doctrine], as modified by Leader Guzmán. If not they are against both their history and their destiny. The penalty is death. Many have paid it” (Apter 1997a:5). This shadow boxing with an imaginary ‘Other,’ on behalf of a non-existent “community” whose members must be punished for their failure to see themselves as beneficiaries, is combined with an internally directed discourse whose appeal has been directed to intellectuals (DeGregori 1997:75).

The Mexican Zapatista activists – who called themselves “the first informational guerrilla movement” because of their use of the Internet and exploitation of iconic symbolism (Castells 1997:79) – faced the same problems. The Zapatistas called for democratization of the political system. “But they were never able to make precise the meaning of their political project, besides the obvious condemnation of electoral fraud,” reports Manuel Castells. The leftist opposition party even suffered in the August 1994 election for having sought the Zapatista leader’s support (82).

Defending liberties, individualizing responsibility

In Italy, nothing the Government did in the Red Brigades period supported the group’s claims of a civil war in the making, though government did come close to some people’s limits after the 1978 kidnapping of Aldo Moro[86]. Moss reports: “No national rules were introduced to restrict freedoms of speech or opportunities for public protest; and no delegation of authority to defend public order was made to the army [...]. Decisions on what and how to publish were left to individual editors and media staff; and local police chiefs were empowered to determine what demonstrations to permit or ban. Most of the harsh sanctions to which the politically violent were subject derived from the application of measures introduced in the early 1970s to combat the rise in serious non-political crime. [...] Only a small minority of Italians (one in six) claimed that state responses to violence had actually curtailed democracy and individual freedoms” (Moss 1997:113).

Moss also says that the government deliberately avoided offering its armed opponents a unifying identity, as well as protecting its democratic credentials: “Both the government and senior police officers were notably reluctant to use the term ‘terrorism’ to describe clandestine political violence, preferring the more generic term ‘subversion’. [...] Although the term ‘terrorism’ was formally introduced into the penal code in 1978, it was deliberately given no explicit definition: its interpretation was specifically delegated to local / magistrates whose decisions carried no general significance. Moreover, every law which made use of the term also introduced means to escape the penalties – a strategy which displayed the reversibility of the passage towards involvement in armed struggle [...] Official policy thus resisted measures that would be likely to encourage the users of violence to recognize themselves, or to perceive that their opponents recognized them, in a single identity. Calls to declare illegal the multitude of ‘autonomia’-oriented organizations, or the umbrella structure of ‘Autonomia Operaia’ itself, were rejected, thereby avoiding any encouragement to all full-time and fringe users of violence to see themselves unified in a common outlaw status” (113-4).

The Italian authorities also individualized the responsibility of Red Brigades members through meetings with victims’ families: “The history of violence which had been written in collective, segmentary mode, yielded to a history accounted for in the minutiae of individual biographies, allowing a generous place for coincidence and chance and divesting many attacks of the meanings ascribed to them at the time” (109). The government proclaimed the absolute division between politics and guerrilla violence, even though this led it to publicly refuse to consider letters and appeals purportedly deriving from Aldo Moro (122).

Thus, whatever the isolated and apparently rare abuses of individuals, Italian authorities countered the rise in political violence by refusing the subversives’ attempts to frame the events in extremist discourse or to allow the violent minority to claim to be speaking for an hypothetical community of the future[87].

The IRA in Northern Ireland: revolt without a text

The IRA, by contrast with the Red Brigades and Shining Path, can refer its members to a community and an identifiable, concrete set of enemies. However, its theoretical justifications lack canonical texts (Arthur 1997:245) or a leader to embody those ideas (240). It can be said to fit the model of a protest movement which is “confrontational and violence-prone and relatively uninterested in rectifying this or that economic, social, or political ill, or providing greater political access to those deprived by reason of religion, gender, ethnicity, race, language, class, role, or other affiliations” (Apter 1992:22). The challenge is to explain why, in the charge made by the leader of the ‘peace faction’ of Northern Ireland politics in 1985, the IRA and its political wing Sinn Fein retain widespread support when “people describing themselves as Irish republicans have killed six times as many human beings as the British army, 30 times as many as the RUC (police) and 250 times as the UDR (Protestant armed group).” John Hume pointed out: “In the last 20 years republicans have killed more than twice as many Catholics as the security forces and the last ten years have killed more than the Loyalists” (Arthur 286). Civilians on both sides accounted for more than half the fatalities (32.38% Catholics and 20.64% Protestants) between 1969 and 1989.

Paul Arthur suggests the IRA has been able to count on community support because it is able to tap into a meta-narrative of a “risen people” (240), with a well-entrenched admiration for self-sacrifice, and rarely acknowledged recognition of “the degree to which the violence is ‘controlled’ as if it operated under strict rules of the game” (235). Reviewing nearly 200 years of Northern Irish history, John Darby comments: “Northern Ireland’s conflict is remarkable for the limitations on its violence rather than for the violence itself” (1986).

This control contrasted with Lebanon in the 1980s or former Yugoslavia, notes Arthur. In Northern Ireland, many of the escalations in violence took place when these rules were transgressed – by British policies, Protestant mob raids into Catholic districts, even by the IRA itself when in October 1990 a Catholic civilian was strapped into an explosives-laden lorry and forced to drive to a border checkpoint where the IRA blew up the truck by remote control (285).

“Establishment insensitivity” and loyalist rhetoric has helped the IRA maintain itself despite such reverses (286). In the face of a regime it can claim is immoral, the IRA was able to use the same language as a 19th-century Irish nationalist MP, William O’Brien, who described violence as “the only way of securing a hearing for moderation” (236).

Within their communities, the IRA maintained their own version of law and order, while the police and army were associated with violent control (Apter 1990:164). The communities were not just divided by religion. In an echo of Mair’s Kenyan tribes, Protestants and Catholics called on territoriality as a dimension of their sense of identity. Historian Frank Wright spoke of Northern Ireland living in the “tranquility of communal deterrence” rather than peace (1987:viii). Going back to the 1800s, John Darby found that Northern Ireland lived under a territorially intimidatory culture: “Local minorities were driven by violence and fear to move to other communities in which they could become part of a majority. They were often willing to encourage the expulsion of ethnic opponents from their new community” (252).

The 1981 hunger strikes by IRA prisoners which proved a turning point in the configuration of Northern Ireland politics was able to recall an ancient Irish tradition which recognized the rite of “fasting against a person of exalted state in order to enforce a claim against him” (271). The campaign differentiated between their sacrificial ideology and the military ideology of those outside. “The Catholic ghetto had no trouble identifying with the very ordinariness of the striking prisoners. Except for two on the run all lived at home in ordinary jobs or were unemployed. All had come of age during the civil rights campaign. Two were very religious and seven came from staunchly republican families or areas with a history of resistance” (277).

This differentiated IRA violence from Colombia’s, Arthur argues: “Unlike Colombian political violence the Irish were demonstrating that it was more about death and sacrifice than about killing. It had more in common with the Shi’ite discourse of violence with sacrifice to the point of martyrdom” (280). He also suggests that, following Heidegger, the hunger strikes could be seen as a chosen form of self-destruction preferable to succumbing to collective devastation, demonstrating that one was not caught up in the movement of history but controlling history (Wyschogrod 1983:125).

The deaths led Sinn Fein and the IRA to change strategy towards electoralism. The struggle between the political and armed wings resulted – after a number of “mistakes” by the IRA (281) – to the triumph of Gerry Adams and political dialogue.

Forcing Knowledge into Repressed Memory

What, then, is the lesson of discourse theory for philosophy with regard to violence? That the language of political violence is deeply embedded in a structure of associated ideas and practices that vary from culture to culture, and that the links between the vocabulary and the justifications for its use have to be created and demonstrated rather than assumed.

As in the history of the Red Brigades, this intertwining can be refused. Jean-Paul Sartre has come under attack from both Hannah Arendt and moral philosopher Michael Walzer for declaring in a preface to Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (18-19): “To shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: there remains a dead man and a free man” (Walzer 204). Walzer points out that the killing of French teenagers in a milk bar, as shown in the historically accurate film The Battle of Algiers (1956, script published 1973), “is not easily reconstructed as an existentialist encounter between masters and slaves” (205). As the film makes clear, though, this was precisely how the perpetrators intended their violence to be ‘read,’ with the victims representing the oppressors and the bomb planters providing a surrogate liberation for those who did not take part.

Discourse, however, does not solely give voice to allowable expressions. It excludes others[88], and can force some kinds of knowledge into repressed memory, as the Red Brigades attempted in Italy, the Nazis nearly succeeded in Germany, and the Argentine military and Yugoslav militias sought in their time of domination.

What is the knowledge that is so threatening it must be suppressed? Psychotherapist Adam Phillips is certain: “Death is the catastrophic knowledge, the truly forbidden thing, that everyone has to be protected from because no one can be. And yet, as Freud shows, the protection racket – like all protection rackets, and particularly the one arranged with oneself – leaves us radically unprotected” (1994:xx). Violence, in these circumstances, leads to terminality – the search for an ultimate enemy and the annihilation of the Other[89].

The irreducibility of atrocity

“A for Auschwitz. B for Belsen. C for Cambodia. D for Dresden. for Deportation. E for Ethiopia, for Ethnic Cleansing…. F for, what’s F? Famine. … Mao’s Great Leap into, 1959. Stalin’s ditto, Ukraine 1933. Fundamentalism. There’s usually more than one horror for each letter.” – Christine Brooke-Rose Next (1998: 3).

Christine Brooke-Rose, perhaps the most postmodern of British authors, calls it “the century’s alphabête” (1998:3). The past hundred years, Lenin’s prophesied century of revolution, have been a century of atrocity – and not just for its victims[90].

Atrocities go beyond sheer brutality, inhumanity, oppression or systematic persecution. They seem to call into question the very notion of civilization, not just in the society where atrocities take place, but in the places that become aware of them. They represent, therefore, a philosophical as well as a political challenge[91].

For Alain Badiou, atrocity[92] can be said to typify our world[93]. Perhaps most interestingly, he also sets out an agenda for thinkers: “Philosophy is required to ensure that thought can receive and accept the drama of the event without anxiety. We do not fundamentally need a philosophy of the structure of things. We need a philosophy open to the irreducible/singularity of what happens, a philosophy that can be fed and nourished by the surprise of the unexpected” (1999:55-6).

This dissertation argues that defining atrocity in the conventional way is wrong-headed: atrocity is a term which only the victims can legitimately use – not the perpetrators or the mechanisms of social control or mediation such as the press. The idea of an objective (Platonic, essentialist, permanent, non-contingent) definition of atrocity is, in this sense, impossible. Instead, it depends, to use Donna Haraway’s terms, on positioned thinking[94], and on the framework for that perspective. However, this does not mean the abandonment of thought. Nor does it preclude comparison between kinds of atrocity, so long as there is no attempt to suggest this involves any form of internal ranking[95]. There is a difference between European and American enslavement of Africans, Nazi extermination of Jews and US forcing of second-generation Japanese Americans (Nisei) into camps during the Second World War (Ruscher 2001:11). To suggest that the irreducibility of atrocity means they must all be considered of the same order or that whether one person was tortured or six million is simply a matter of degree seems more like an excuse for intellectual unwillingness to confront the issues involved.

Defining atrocity

One can start from the provisional position that atrocity is an abuse against which it is impossible to make a demand for justice. Nevertheless, it should be recognized that such a ‘definition’ does not take us anywhere except on a path of exploration, where the end may be a long way from the beginning[96]. Should the term be confined to violent abuse? Within the framework of a ‘camp’ or hostilities? Or is violent treatment just one extension, a development in extremis, of what has become a normal social process of dealing with the Other? Can it only be understood via positioned thinking?

Positioned thinking

In conventional political philosophy, positioned thinking is open to the objection that it attempts “to build an objective ethic on a subjective basis” (Ginsberg 1965:27, writing of the general problem of using subjectivity as the basis for morality). This leads one into the problematic area, much discussed in philosophy and never resolved, of requiring us to treat one person’s desires as of equal validity as another’s (whether Hitler’s or Gandhi’s). However, this thesis argues, the difficulty of resolving the question arises because the issue is not one that presents itself in real life: people do not in their relations with each other treat all desires as equal, or other people’s standards as equal to their own, and subjecting such ideas to rational criticism does not necessarily change those convictions[97]. David Hume agreed: “Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them” (1739-40/1978:415). Bertrand Russell himself admitted (in Morris Ginsberg’s summary) that “reason ‘by itself’ is no cause of action” (cited by Ginsberg: 28).

Subjectivism has a long history in philosophy, of course. Usually it is mentioned only to set it aside before turning to the social or public demonstration of the idea of justice, of justification or ‘human values.’ Despite the earlier efforts of Leibniz to align the subjective with the universe of mind and experience[98], it is only since Schopenhauer that subjectivity has been placed at the core of philosophy, a stream that leads through Nietzsche and Husserl to Heidegger, Lacan and Derrida. This may seem to place this thought-style in opposition to Kant, who argued for a public life constituted around rational argument rather than the subjectivity of the arguers (Borradori 2003:57)[99]. But it is one of Derrida’s achievements to have revived Kantian ideals – to show their continued relevance and helpfulness – in a world that challenges the Enlightenment bases of such thought.

If this broader definition of atrocity – this fundamental challenge to our social thinking – is accepted as a starting point, the question then becomes how to tackle the most common device for living with atrocity: its willed invisibility, and the place of violence in political life.

The ‘justifications’ for atrocity

It should be clear from the outset that atrocity does not require ideology, psychopathology or historical prejudice to energize it. Hitler’s acknowledged obsession with Jewry drew on social anti-Semitism in Germany (and much of Western Europe) of the late 19th and early 20th century, but any psychological characterization of anti-Semitism can hardly be carried over to Stalinism, Argentina’s ‘dirty war’ (though certainly anti-Semitic in part), to Uganda under Amin or the war of Yugoslavian separation.

Even the projection of historical causes onto present atrocities can also be misleading if it applies the same kind of abstractions onto current sufferings as have typified previous events. Such strategies are often tied to pop-psychologizing of the most obvious sort. For example, Tim Judah, a normally careful British journalist and expert on Yugoslavia, writes: “In our time, much of the Kosovo conflict can be related to the fact that too many Serbs have never been willing or able to rid themselves of the idea that the Albanians, with whom they shared a state for the best part of a century, were not to be treated as equals. Rather, they thought of them as people who could be/patronized or dismissed as belligerent peasants” (2000:16-17).

The fault here is not in the unverifiable generalization, but the failure to distinguish between the public presentation of Albanians by Serbs (in private conversations as well as in the media) and how much such prejudices were constructed and fostered rather than springing out of personal experience. Writing of the atrocities committed by Serb militia in Kosovo after 1912, Judah admits:

“One of the most vexed questions when it comes to atrocities is just how high up the chain of command the orders come from. As far as [Leon] Trotsky was concerned, there was little doubt. He recounts this episode which he says had become well known. Serbia’s King Peter was on his way to Kumanovo where he met a party of Albanian prisoners under escort. He ‘stood up in his car, in all his little height, and shouted: “What use are these men to me? They should be killed – not by shooting, that would waste ammunition, but with clubs’ ” (Trotsky 1995:292, cited by Judah.19).

The report of the American Carnegie Endowment Commission in 1914 on the Serb and Montenegran takeover of Kosovo makes it obvious that ethnic cleansing is no new practice in Yugoslavia (and can be compared to 19th-century Northern Ireland, as reported above):

“Houses and whole villages reduced to ashes, unarmed and innocent populations massacred en masse, incredible acts of violence, pillage and brutality of every kind – such were the means which were employed and are still being employed by the Serbo-Montenegrin soldier, with a view to the entire transformation of the ethnic character of regions inhabited exclusively by Albanians” (cited by Judah:18).

The only mystery is the lack of detail to enable us to judge Giorgio Agamben’s suggestion that Yugoslav ‘rape camps’ are a distinctive step forward in the history of the ‘camp’ as a political foundation for modern society.

We should also be clear that ethnic cleansing, early in Yugoslav history, was approved by the professional as well as the brutal classes. Vaso Čubrilović, “a distinguished historian at Belgrade University” (Judah 2000:23), presented a paper to the Yugoslav government in 1937 arguing for the expulsion of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo and again in November 1944 to the new Communist authorities (Berisha 1993:15, 85-6). But one should be wary of drawing the conclusion that ethnic cleansing in the 1990s should be judged as the same kind of atrocity as in the 1930s. The Tito Communists persecuted Albanian separatists in 1956 but did not drive out populations by atrocity, and they pardoned convicted “spies” and “subversives” 12 years later (Judah 35, 37).

Nevertheless, Judah should be credited for challenging “the belief [expressed by Rebecca West in 1937], which endures to this day, that when people hate each other, or have been manipulated into hating each other, that/relative wealth and standards of living have anything to do with it.” He remarks. “In that case, then the relatively prosperous Yugoslavia would never have collapsed in blood in 1991” (25-6).

Terminality

What lies behind all the practices of atrocity in recent times is the claim to finality in the judgments applied, a desire to go, as it were, to the end of thought. This, the French philosopher Alain Badiou has suggested, is today the meaning of Evil in a secular world: “Evil is the desire for ‘Everything-to-be-said’” (2003.67). It remains part of a larger trend in industrial society: of what may be called terminality.

Terminality encompasses all essentialist and teleological thinking[100]. But it is not purely a term of abuse. It seeks to cover a philosophical tendency, a thought style, that represents a considered response to the challenges of experience. It therefore includes art that attempts to exhaust the forms it uses, from James Joyce and Samuel Beckett in literature to Robert Rauschenberg and Marcel Duchamp in the graphic arts to Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern in music[101]. Terminality is a particular style of the modern movement. The exemplars of this thought style in the graphic arts are Rauschenberg’s White Paintings (completed in 1951), which influenced John Cage’s 4’ 33” silent piece, and Duchamp’s readymades. The 25-year-old Rauschenberg described the paintings as “canvases organized and selected with the experience of time and presented with the innocence of a virgin” embodying “the plastic fullness of nothing” (Joseph 2000:91). Salvador Dali understood the puzzle that led Duchamp to his “readymades”[102]. Dali wrote: “One day, when all objects that exist are considered readymades, there will be no readymades at all” (Cabanne 1971:14). The essence and contingency of the world will be one. Which, of course, can already be considered to be so, as Antisthenes the Cynic suggested to Plato[103]. Antisthenes declared that he could see a horse but not horseness (Lindsay 1910:ix).

However, the framework of terminality leads us to believe otherwise. Its most obvious appearance in contemporary political life (with the demise of Marxism as official policy) can be seen in America’s long-standing conviction of being a loner state and self-sufficient. Todd Gitlin wrote of “the fantasy” in 1986, examining car commercials: “We witness the fantasy of ultimate, self-sufficient innocence in Reagan’s dream of a ‘Star Wars’ shield which presumably guarantees national security – although the same gentlemen who today call ‘Star Wars’ ‘the only thing that offers any real hope to the world’ have been telling us for forty years that nuclear deterrence was so foolproof as to be, itself, that hope[…:]whatever technology has rendered problematic (including human life itself), technology can save […] ‘Star Wars’ represents the triumph of absolute, abstract wishfulness” (161).

In philosophy, the line of terminality stretches from Plato to the German Idealists[104], those whose vocabularies Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger have sought to criticize and replace, particularly terminality’s attempt to reach a final resting point of thought. Derrida, whose deconstructionist practices seek to put an end to such metaphysics, finds terminality in “the concept of centered structure [...requiring] a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude” (1967:352, my italics).

He also points out some of the often unrecognized dangers. Referring to this metaphysical quality as ‘finality’ Derrida writes in Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (a topic which is particularly apposite in relation to atrocity): “Each time forgiveness is at the service of a finality, be it noble and spiritual (atonement or redemption, reconciliation, salvation) – each time that it aims to re-establish a normality (social, national, political, psychological) by a work of mourning, by some therapy or ecology of memory, then the ‘forgiveness’ is not pure – nor is its concept” (2004).

But a major strand of terminality, from Plato to Christian teachings through to Darwin’s functional explanation of sex and Freud’s late theories of the operations of civilized society (1930), attempts mainly to counter the impulse to Be in the World through pleasure. Primo Levi writes of the dangerous temptation to simplify history, by a “Manichean tendency which shuns half-tints and complexities: it is prone to reduce the river of human occurrences to conflicts, and the conflicts to duels” (1986:22). He stresses: “This desire for simplification is justified, but the same does not always apply to simplication itself. […] The network of human relationships inside the Lagers was not simple: it could not be reduced to the two blocs of victims and persecutors” (23).

For newspaper editor Jacobo Timerman, ‘disappeared’ and tortured under Argentina’s military regime in 1977, the temptation of violent terminality is philosophic: “The chief obsession of the totalitarian mind lies in its need for the world to be clearcut and orderly. Any subtlety, contradiction, or complexity upsets and confuses this notion and becomes intolerable. […] The president of the Argentine Federation of Psychologists was dragged by her hair through the hospital corridors where she practiced her profession because – according to the mentality of the Argentine military – an arrest […] without infliction of violence would have been an acknowledgment of the validity and logic of her existence. And this in turn would mean acknowledging the existence of a world other than its own hermetic one. Which is intolerable” (95). This led to both the repression of modern psychiatry and also the physical elimination of psychiatrists in Argentina, as well as the abolition of majors in sociology, philosophy and psychology, Timerman reports. The military regime “strove to eliminate physically all those who in any way participated in the world it wanted to modify. A mere modification of sociology education was considered inadequate” (1980:95).

The assumption of power over bare life

Timerman, imprisoned and tortured in the 1970s, likewise identifies the coercive simplifications of terminality as lying at the heart of brutality towards opponents, and particularly to impose an attitude on reality, even at the risk of destroying reality: “Simplicity [is] recurrent in all totalitarian/ ideology: to ignore the complexities of reality, or even eliminate reality, and instead establish a simple goal and a simple means of attaining that goal.\Curiously enough, Argentine politics during the last fifty years has in a sense been governed by this equation, applied in extravagant ideological formulas” (Timerman 1980:12-13).

In Homo Sacer (1995) Giorgio Agamben considered the paradox that Hitler tenaciously implemented a euthanasia program against those suffering from hereditary illnesses even though the victims – mainly children and old people – were in no condition to reproduce themselves and his extermination program imposed an organizational burden on the state apparatus (141). Agamben’s judgment: “The program, in the guise of a solution to a humanitarian problem, was an exercise of the sovereign power to decide on bare life” (142). This assumption of power lies behind every infliction of atrocity. Any psychology-based interpretation of a person’s propensity to carry out an atrocity must take this political dimension into account.

Agamben also sees modern Western politics as a struggle to create a system that creates “a single and undivided people” (179) despite the “contradictions and aporias” (178) involved in creating a united structure from both the rulers and the “people,” i.e. “the poor, the disinherited, and the excluded” (176). He adds:

“The extermination of the Jews in Nazi Germany acquires a radically new significance in this light. As the people that refuses to be integrated into the national political body (it is assumed that every assimilation is actually only simulated), the Jews are the representatives par excellence and almost the living symbol of the people and of the bare life that modernity necessarily creates within itself, but whose presence it can no longer tolerate in any way. And we must see the extreme phase of the internal struggle that divides People [the political idea] and people [the excluded] in the lucid fury with which the German Volk – representative par excellence of the People as a whole political body – sought to eliminate the Jews forever. With the Final Solution (which did, not by chance, involve Gypsies and others who could not be integrated), Nazism darkly and futilely sought to liberate the political scene of the West from this intolerable shadow in order to produce the German Volk as the people that finally overcame the original biopolitical fracture. (This is why the Nazi leaders so obstinately repeated that in eliminating Jews and Gypsies, they were actually also working for the other European peoples)” (179).

Slavoj Žižek also sees the appeal of terminality along the lines of Badiou. He suggests the perpetrator of an atrocity may be tempted by a direct confrontation with the Lacanian Real – “as opposed to everyday social reality” (2002:5). “In the trenches of World War I, Ernst Jünger was already celebrating face-to-face combat as the authentic intersubjective encounter: authenticity resides in the act of violent transgression” (6)[105].

Terminality without ideology

It is also Žižek who fully confronts the challenge to philosophy of atrocities such as those in Rwanda, where little ideology (as distinct from prejudice) seemed involved. In The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989:125), he discusses anti-Semitism and the failure of empirical refutation of the grounds for hating or despising Jews to end anti-Semitism. In the eyes of their despisers, Jews can be seen as upper and lower class, intellectual and dirty, impotent and highly sexed (125). And when they do not display any of these characteristics, it is a sign of their duplicity “that is a basic feature of the Jewish nature” (49).

The expression of terminality is most clearly explicated in a later work, Enjoy Your Symptom! (1992/2002), where Žižek takes a completely ‘non-political’ example, the shark in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, to show the process at work. Drawing on the work of Jacques Lacan, Žižek suggests that the film dramatizes what makes the shark more than shark, in Lacanian terms the object a, just as the anti-Semitic figure of the Jew is the sublime object encapsulating more than can be found in any Jew. In Jaws, the shark can be treated as the force of nature fighting back (against human encroachment on its territory), the violent power of sex (the shark appears after two teenagers attempt to have sex in the water), even a means of punishment for the excesses of capitalism (taking revenge on the townspeople’s greed in refusing to close the resort). But in each case, as Žižek points out, the shark constructs society in its image (see Butler 2005:45), making these aspects visible. In a circularity of thought, the shark is seen as embodying tendencies that have been attributed to she shark. The shark provides “the empty form/frame which offers space for the appearance of the monstrous content” (133). Using the example of Hitchcock’s The Birds, Žižek notes that the readings of the film are not simply cosmological, ecological or familial (in 1991b:97-8). As Butler points out (summarizing 1997:158): “The birds of The Birds would lose their power if they were reduced to any one of these possibilities – and it is part of the effect of the master-signifier [a term developed by Žižek from Lacan’s ideas on the signifier] that it is able to cover up their radical inconsistency, the fact that they cannot all equally be true” (2005:155)[106]. As will be argued later, in dealing with the objects of prejudiced communication, the mass media work to ensure that the possibilities are kept open. Thus Saddam Hussein was both the ally of Al Qaida and its enemy, the internationally impotent, nationally insecure oppressor of his people and a threat to international peace[107]. The apocalyptic tone that characterizes such discourse represents a means of preserving the undecidability, the aporia (the différence, in Derrida’s famous term).

Apocalyptic visions

The British journalist Marina Benjamin has investigated the appeal of such apocalyptic visions over the 20th century’s last decade. For those who imagine destruction or terminalistic violence, it is “as though little bits of the future were visiting the present by way of presaging the end of the world. [...]The allure of generality, of totalizing visions of the world and the events unfolding within it, cannot be so easily set aside. [...]The popularity of horoscopes, psychic phone lines, homeopathic therapies, crystals, the whole New Age package, suggests that our tolerance threshold for cosmologies which resist easy explanations is shifting” (1998:22-3). The fact of the enigma suggests the existence of a truth (to reprise Barthes).

Along with these apocalyptic visions goes the habit of magical thought that surrounds every act of tyranny. Joan Didion records how this affected the US in El Salvador in the 1980s. US military personnel in-country were never to exceed 55, she was told. “If the number got up to 55, and it was thought essential to bring in someone else, then a trade was made. the incoming American was juggled against an outgoing American, one normally stationed in Salvador but shunted down to Panama for as long as necessary to maintain the magic number” (1983:85).

This might seem to exemplify simply the mythology of statistics in public life[108], but as Didion, points out, this forms solely part of a wider system of sacred ignorance. “Everything to do with the United States Military Group, or MILGP, was treated by the embassy as a kind of magic, a totemic presence circumscribed by potent taboos. The American A-37Bs presented to El Salvador in June of that year were actually flown up from Panama not by Americans but by Salvadorans trained at the United States Southern Air Command in Panama for this express purpose. American advisers could participate in patrols for training purposes but could not participate in patrols in combat situations” (85).

Tyrannical thought

Terminal (totalitarian/absolutist) thought applied to human society finds its first apotheosis in Plato, but hits a high point of thought translated into action in the French Revolution. No-one was more apparently terminal in his conclusions than Saint-Just. His first speech to the Convention at 25 was to call for the head of Louis XVI (Garaudy 1939:87). But the young lawyer started his career with a best-seller that comforted the bourgeois in its apologia for efforts to halt the Revolution[109]. One academic editor of his works describes L’Esprit de la Révolution as “the systematization of bourgeois ideology” in 1791 (Liénard 1976:14, my translation).

Nevertheless, the fundamental attempt to impose abstraction on the Real can be identified even in the words of the 23-year-old. The editor of a popular edition of his works, Alain Liénard, observes that in this first volume where Saint-Just favors an “aristocratic democracy”, “this work is in fact blind to the reality of his period. Saint-Just, as a lawyer, assimilates the law to reality [...] the old political-legal idealism” (13). In such a perspective, “laws are not bad. [...] They therefore take absolute priority over moeurs [customs, behavior, morals],’ says Liénard (13). Saint-Just himself says: “You correct behaviors in vain if you do not correct laws” (1908:272).

Saint-Just is also typical of terminal thought in his search to return society to what he considered its original state of sociability. This was in complete opposition to the democrat Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who believed that sociability and language are learned (13)[110]. For Saint-Just, in a view that has been linked to that of the sans-culottes, promoters of the original ‘Terror,’ the aim of Revolution is not so much to force society back to its original state as to annihilate history: “History has led men, via alteration by alteration, from a state of nature to the current state. In fact, it is a refusal of history” (14). Tyrannical thought not only seeks to demolish the sense of history, of past linked to the present, for its victims, but also to annihilate what these victims contain of history that can serve as a reproach to these everyday tyrants. They must be remade or destroyed.

Proclaiming a ‘return to Lenin’ (in the same way as Lacan said his teaching was a return to Freud), Slavoj Žižek sees both Christian fundamentalism and Leninism (rather than Marxism) as responding to an “unconditional ethical demand” (2001:1) for a position that is radical enough to ensure that “our intervention changes the coordinates of the situation” (3). He asserts: “A Leninist, like a Conservative, is authentic in the sense of fully assuming the consequences of his choice“(4).

War as preservation

The great Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis parodies this tendency of thought in Quincas Borba/Philosopher or Dog? (1892) with a speech by the philosopher Quincas Borba:

“Suppose the existence of a potato field and two famished tribes. There are not enough potatoes to feed both tribes; so one of them gathers its forces to cross the mountain to the other slope where potatoes are abundant. If the two tribes were to divide the field of potatoes peacefully, there would not be enough for sufficient nourishment, and they would die from starvation. Peace, in that case, is destruction, war is preservation./One of the tribes exterminates the other and collects the spoils” (11).

If this seems exaggerated in its monomania, consider the case of an American prospector named Norman Foose. On 10 July 1958 he shot two Mexican children standing on the sidewalk in the New Mexico town of Cuba. He told police he wanted to do something about the population explosion. “If the population increases at the present rate, there won’t be enough food for everyone, and we’ll all be living on a few square feet of land” (Wilson: 1972:39). The British writer Colin Wilson, a specialist in analyzing sensational murders, comments in an echo of Hannah Arendt: “There is something about this story that epitomizes the crime of violence in the late twentieth century. There is the dream-like appearance of logic, and then – absurdity. The motive seems elusive or insufficient, as if some vital piece of evidence is being withheld [...] the feeling that the violence goes deeper than its obvious motivation” (39). The comparisons with Arendt’s comments on the Holocaust are obvious (see page 130).

The excluded middle

A familiar mechanism of both left and right tyranny is to punish “moderates” (see page 48). The US embassy in El Salvador, Joan Didion reported in 1980, was careful to describe members of the opposition as “a broad-based coalition of moderate and center-left groups” – rather than as “out-and-out Marxists” as a later US Ambassador was to do in less careful times (1983:94). Among the US allies in the country a different kind of discourse was prevalent: “The right in El Salvador never made this distinction: to the right, anyone in the opposition was a communist, along with most of the American press,/the Catholic Church, and, as time went by, all Salvadoran citizens not of the right (94-5). In El Salvador, she notes, “’left’ may mean, on the beginning, only a resistance to seeing one’s family killed or disappeared” (95).

In this world of discourse, even aid can be seen as exploitive, by the right as well as by the left. The Women’s Crusade for Peace and Work, linked to El Salvador’s ARENA movement, accused the United States of “blackmailing us with your miserable aid, which only keeps us subjugated in underdevelopment so that powerful countries like yours can continue exploiting our few riches and having us under your boot” (96). Didion comments: “This ‘blackmail’ motif, and its arresting assumption that trying to keep Salvadorans from killing one another constituted a new and particularly crushing imperialism, began turning up more and more frequently” (97). The Ambassador, when he told the San Salvador Chamber of Commerce that American aid depended on “progress” in reducing murders, was asked: “Are you trying to blackmail us?” (97).

Such reactions are not just part of the tyrannical society, however. They can be found in numerous sectors of modern life.

Two Views of Evil

Stanley Milgram’s 1950s demonstrations of our capacity to inflict pain on others, and the submissive attitudes with which we reconcile ourselves to such actions (1963), caused consternation at the time, for reasons that area not clear, except those of social hypocrisy. Two novelists, considering Britain’s worst case of individual atrocity – the sexual murders by Fred West from 1967 to 1994 – draw the parallels with the social fabric of country life. V.S. Naipaul wrote that West demonstrated “not absolute cruelty; more a casualness, the attitude of a man who looked after lower, dependent creatures, superintending the entire cycle of their lives; capable of tenderness, yet living easily with the knowledge that though a cow might have produced so many calves and given so much milk, it would one day have to be dispatched to the slaughterhouse in a covered trailer” (cited by Burn:175).

The author Gordon Burn himself suggests of West: “It was the cruelty of the man who looked after animals. [...] Fred West was unable to understand the difference between killing a farmyard animal and killing a human being. [...] He would remember the names of almost none of the people he murdered” (174-5).

At the same time, Burn records that in English rural society, incest (often starting – and continuing – as rape) was common practice. “Incest was still common in rural communities like Much Marcle in the years after the war. [Fred West’s father] Walter West took it for granted that it was his right to begin his daughters’ sexual life. ‘Boys don’t do it properly,’ Fred West would tell his own daughters when they were growing up. ‘Dads know how to do it right.’ He said that his father had done it to his sisters and made it clear that he intended doing the same to them. He’d say, ‘Your first baby should be your Dad’s’ ”(141).

This case seems a paradigm of the sociopathology of evil – it hardly merits the designation of terminality – except in West’s indifference to others. Psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman also insists on the “commonalities, between rape survivors and combat veterans, between battered women and political prisoners, between the survivors of vast concentration camps created by tyrants who rule nations and the survivors of small, hidden concentration camps created by tyrants who rule their homes” (1992/2001:3). One may question the linkages at the level of the oppressors (West and Shipman thought they were treating their victims well) but at the level of the victims the traumas are often the same. “People who have endured horrible events endure predictable psychological harm,” Herman observes.

The questionable banality of evil

Another explanation for unthinking cruelty is found in Hannah Arendt’s arresting phrase “the banality of evil.” She coined the term to counter moral or psychological explanations for the Shoah when she remarked a lack of obvious depravity or madness in the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. Instead, she was struck by Eichmann’s concern to maintain administrative efficiency in delivering Jews to be murdered in the exact quantities that the death camps could cope with. Rather than seeking to “prove a villain” like Shakespeare’s Richard III, he was notable to her mainly for his “sheer thoughtlessness” concealed in clichés and surface normality (1963/5:287).[111]

Without denying this portrait of Eichmann[112], one can doubt that this represents anything like the whole truth about Nazism. From the beginning, the Nazi leaders were aware of the moral reprobation their extermination of Europe’s Jews would cause in the world and sought to dissimulate the evidence of the mass slaughter taking place. Eichmann himself attended the January 1942 Wannsee conference generally credited with organizing the implementation of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” and said at his trial: “The discussion covered killing, elimination and annihilation” (Rhodes 2002:236). A Directive issued by Reinhard Heydrich in September 1939, “The Jewish Question in the Occupied Territory,” reminds Einsatzgruppen (murder squad) chiefs that “the planned overall measures (i.e. the final aim) are to be kept strictly secret. [...] The ‘final aim’ is not mentioned further. (Eich/mann, when confronted with the document at his trial, said right away that it could mean only ‘physical extermination’” (Dawidowicz 1975:154-5). The Wannsee conference took place after mass shootings and gassings had started in early 1941. Heydrich reported: “Even now practical experience is being gathered that is of major significance in view of the coming Final Solution of the Jewish Question” (182). The language of Hitler’s writing (in Mein Kampf) and speeches deliberately plays on words which can be interpreting as promising the elimination of Jews (Dawidowicz 1975:204). Himmler used equally ambiguous language in addressing SS Gruppenführer (205).[113]

Nothing in later atrocities of the 20th century suggests that the large-scale killings take place in a situation of ignorance or that they are simply a by-product of an official effort to suppress opposition: from Argentina to Yugoslavia, from Rwanda to Azerbaijan, the torture and death of ‘outsider groups’ were the admitted and frequently public objective of policy, carried out with an open aim of using atrocities as a means of intimidation.

The Slovene philosopher Slavoj Žižek also points to a shortcoming embedded deep in Arendt’s theory of the banality of evil –“the thesis of the indifference of Nazi executioners (they were not propelled by pathological hatred , but by cold-blooded, indifferent, bureaucratic efficiency) contained in the Arendt notion of the ‘banality of Evil’” (2000:26). He observes: “They can afford to be indifferent, since it is the “objective” ideological apparatus that ‘hates’ on their behalf” (27). This objectivization of symbolic institutions Žižek calls “Durkheimian” (26) in its perverse terminality: “There is an ‘objective’ socio-symbolic system only insofar as subjects treat it as such” (ibid). Žižek contrasts this with Jacques Lacan’s notion of the “big Other” – “the dimension of non-psychological, social, symbolic relations treated as such by the subject. […] The Institution exists only when subjects believe in it, or, rather, act (in their social interactivity) AS IF they believe in it. So we can well have a perverse global politico-ideological system and individuals who, in the way they relate to this system, display hysteric, paranoiac, etc., features” (ibid).

In fact, Arendt’s portrait of Eichmann takes this fully into account, as Eichmann did in pleading “not guilty in the sense of the indictment” (Arendt 1963/5:25). The challenge is, first, to Plato’s rationalist argument that if people knew what they were doing would be wrong, reason would persuade them not to (Lang 1994:48). The second challenge, which Eichmann put forward in his own defense, is to Kant’s Categorical Imperative. Eichmann told the judges he had lived his live according to Kant’s moral precepts and (Arendt reports) gave “an approximately correct definition of the categorical imperative” (Arendt 1963/5:175-6). He argued that when he was put in charge of the Final Solution, he was no longer a “master of his own deeds” and unable “to change anything” (as Arendt reports).

The banality of good

Rather than the banality of evil, one can as easily speak of the ‘banality of good’ in a bureaucratic society. In a world ruled by rationality, good and evil are more, not less, difficult to distinguish. “The vocabularies of Locke and Voltaire and Jefferson have led us to judge men upon a simple scale of good and evil,” John Ralston Saul observes. “A man who uses power to do evil is in theory judged to have been conscious of his acts and to be as fit for punishment as a perpetrator of premeditated murder. But the technocrat is not trained on that level. He understands events within the logic of the system. The greatest good is the greatest logic or the greatest appearance of efficiency. He is therefore unpremeditated when he does good or evil. On a bad day he is the perfect manslaughterer, on a good day the perfect unintentional saint. What’s more, the people who succeed at this kind of training are those whom it suits best. They therefore reinforce this amoral quality” (1992:22-3).

In the modern world this form of education is central to almost every profession, Saul notes: “If you examine the creation of an architect, for example, or an art historian or a professor of literature or a military officer, you will find the same obsession with details, with the accumulation of facts, with internal logic. The ‘social scientists’ – the economists and political scientists in particular – consist of little more than these elements” (23).

In his autobiographical novel about British work on a nuclear bomb, C.P. Snow mentions an estimate that one explosion over a town would kill about 300,000 people instantly and as many more from the effects later. He writes in The New Men: “Anyone who worked on the inside of scientific war saw such documents. And most men took it as part of the day-to-day routine, / without emotion. It had to be done, if you were living in society, if you were one ant in an anthill. In fact most men did not need to justify themselves, but just performed their duty to society, made the calculations they were asked to make, and passed the paper on” (1954:98-9).

Under such circumstances, writes Saul, Robert McNamara, a “quintessential man of reason” (23-4) and “no doubt [...] also a decent man” (23), has become “one of the great figures of this technocracy” (23):

“While secretary of defense under Kennedy and Johnson, then as president of the World Bank, he shaped the Vietnam War, was central to launching both the nuclear arms race and the commercialization of the arms business and was again central to creating the financial structure which led to the current Third World debt crisis.[...] The pure logic which on paper would win the war was the same logic which he applied to the massive recycling of the money deposited in the West by oil-producing companies, which in turn led to the Third World debt problem” (23).

Saul observes: “What is astonishing about our systems is that the personal decency, or lack of it, of our leaders should have so little effect upon the impact of their actions” (23).

Berel Lang suggests that, as Hannah Arendt’s later studies of lying in politics indicates, she was already developing a broader view of ‘evil’ that accounted for her inconsistency in arguing that it was right to execute Eichmann even if he did not in some sense know what he was doing (Lang 1994:49). It could also have been because the question she could not raise publicly at the time was the one closest to her: how could a philosopher of the stature of Martin Heidegger, her former lover, have embraced Nazism, acted against Jews such as herself, and never backed away from this stance after the end of the war? She was certainly highly sensitive to the ways in which politics can mislead well-meaning people to the point of approving systematic atrocities.

The new disciplinary order

Saul’s psychological contrasting tends to disguise another clash that typifies modern societies: the disparity between professional expertise and democratic processes, one in which the infliction of atrocity can enjoy open social approval and little concern. Drawing largely on the work of Michel Foucault, the US political scientist Frank Fischer spells out in Citizens, Experts and the Environment how professions have become repositories of “techniques and practices that disperse power and social control away from the formal centers of governance” (2000:25). Among these professions, of course, are the military, the police, and local administrators.

The new disciplinary order can appropriate almost totally the way in which “rules are constructed, objects and subjects are defined, and events for study are identified and constituted” (25). Most important: “At the same time, they remain irreducible to – and unidentifiable with – any particular institutional form or power in society.” (25) “Power is not located in any particular subject; nor is there any single agent to rebel against” (26). Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 paints a picture of this process at work.

There is a certain ambiguity about the use of power in such typifications. From the point of view of the victims, the power exercised against them is quite plainly situated in an individual or a system. Nevertheless, the debate makes clear that the Nazis called on standard images of expertise, science and professionalism to justify their world picture.

Similarly, Latin American military and police drew on their self-image of professional expertise against unreliable and disorderly democratic systems in their campaigns against ‘left-wing’ activists. Rwanda seems a more difficult case. Nevertheless, the murder squads saw themselves as operating in the name of a more technologically enabled society. “Talk of democracy all too often serves as little more than a thinly veiled disguise for elite governance,” argues Fischer (1), noting: “Racist, nationalistic, and class-based/attitudes [...] pervade Western political systems” (1-2).[114]

Science and technology vs. the citizen

The fundamental mechanism identified by Fischer is that “ideologies function to blur and conceal important distinctions. The idea of the information society, as ideology, serves to conflate techno/logical advance with social progress (Winner 1977)” (12-13). Britain’s most prolific serial killer Dr Harold Shipman, who killed over 200 elderly people according an official inquiry, was described by a psychiatrist as “arrogant [...] domineering” but believed he was using medicine to help his victims, who sometimes thanked him for their fatal morphine injections (according to TV programs such as CNN, BBC 24 and Sky News on his 58th birthday, the 13th of January, the day after his suicide). His high numbers of death certificates, the vagueness of his diagnoses (“old age” or “heart problems”), the coercion of fellow doctors to co-sign the death certificates, the disparity between his diagnosis of deaths (heart attacks) and the appearance of victims (as if sleeping), were ignored by authorities for years because of his professional status.

Hannah Arendt identified something of the same attitude to outsiders in the university and think-tank specialists who became the higher civil servants who advised on US policy in Vietnam. The reporter Neil Sheehan called them, in a term which echoes their self-congratulatory mode, ‘problem-solvers’ (Arendt 1973:14). She notes: “They were not just intelligent, but prided themselves on being ‘rational’, and they were indeed to a rather frightening degree above ‘sentimentality’ and in love with ‘theory’, the world of sheer mental effort” (Arendt 1973:15).

The result was that “they were eager to find formulas, preferably expressed in a pseudo-mathematical language” (15), while they “lied not so much for their country – certainly not for their country’s survival, which was never at stake – as for its ‘image’”(15).

These military officers and intellectuals believed that politics was a variety of public relations, and the importance therefore was to be credible rather than truthful, leading to a web of lies, Arendt argues. “Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear” (12). Thus the temptation to proclaim policies that “probably could not be carried out” (18), phony body counts, doctored reports of damage (10), the invention of aggression such as in the Tonkin Gulf incident (18) – “getting rid of [reality’s] disconcerting contingency” (16), not to deceive the enemy but for propaganda at home (17).

Arendt makes the point: “Reason’s aversion to contingency is very strong; it was Hegel, the father of grandiose history schemes, who held that ‘philosophical contemplation has no other intention than to eliminate the accidental’[115]” (16).

In Paroxysm (1997), Jean Baudrillard extends this point to science. First he insists on its terminality: “Science […] claims to provide a final and objective meaning” (35). Then he notes how the dissolution of the Cartesian distinction between the subject and object disturbs the human sciences: “The fact that disciplines like economics or history, and all sciences in general, have an internal principle of intelligibility as a function of their postulates, but nowhere else, means that they are increasingly unsettled by uncertainty” (ibid). And he adds: “The exact sciences don’t escape this, since they, too, are on the fringes of their undecidability between subject and object” (36).

Without attempting to write off the real achievements of science in improving quality of life, one can nevertheless see how the rational has come to claim a determining part in political, economic and social discourse, just as Marcel Duchamp’s readymades assert the ubiquitous nature of rationally produced objects. The effects of this rationality have been tellingly dissected by John Ralston Saul in Voltaire’s Bastards, who notes: “The essence of rational leadership is/control justified by expertise. To admit failure is to admit loss of control. Officially, therefore, we haven’t had a depression since the 1930s. And since most experts – the economists, for example – are part of the system, instead of being commentators in any real, independent sense, they contribute to the denial of reality. In other words, there is a constant need in our civilization to prefer illusions over reality, a need to deny our perceptions” (11).

Such rationalization is by no means universal among scientists. The finest, whose position in society does not depend on using the status of science as a protection against attack, recognize the limitations. In a demonstration of how scientific method has produced tangible advances in human understanding of the laws governing the universe, Richard P. Feynman observes of physics: “It is impossible […] by picking one of anything to pick one that is not atypical in some sense. That is the wonder of the world” (1965:27). “All our […] laws – they are not exact. There is always an edge of mystery, always a place where we have to do some fiddling around […]. This may or may not be a property of nature, but it certainly is common to all the laws as we know them today” (33). As early as 1950 Norbert Wiener wrote that Newtonian physics, which described a universe “in which the whole future depends strictly upon the past,” could “never be either fully justified or fully rejected experimentally and belongs in large measure to a conception of the / world which is supplementary to experiment” (1950/1954:13-14). He points out: “We can never tell by our imperfect experiments whether one set of laws or another can be verified down to the last decimal” (14).

The statistician Gerd Gigerenzer, in a study demonstrating how much professionals in modern society misuse or misunderstand statistic inference, declares: “The creation of certainty seems to be a fundamental tendency of human minds” (2002:9). Mathematics professor John D. Barrow goes further: “The desire for complete seamless explanation infests most examples of crank science” (1998:3) “We can recognize mature scientific theories by their self-limiting character”[116] (ibid: viii).

Napoleon, one of the earliest exponents of the machinery of celebrity (see page 94), was a devotee of facts: “At the Napoleonic court, the saying was, If you want something from Napoleon, give him statistics” (Gigerenzer 2002:32). As Adorno suggested in his study of astrology columns (The Stars Down to Earth, 1947), anti-scientific ideologies promote what Gigerenzer calls “the illusion of certainty” while science, with the growth of probability theory, has become relativistic. However, this is not simply the specialty of crackpot theory: “Certainty has become a consumer product,” Gigerenzer observes. “It is marketed the world over – by insurance companies, investment advisers, election campaigns, and by the medical industry” (2002:14), even in matters of scientific controversy such as mad cow disease, where declarations of beef safety left completely unexplained the limited reliability of testing (ibid).

Terminality in scientific attitudes extends even to linguistics, particularly scholars trying to bring the discipline closer to ‘hard’ science. Some linguists see the sentence as the upper limit of linguistics, ignoring the fact that the shared situational, cultural and world knowledge means that the perception of connections between sentences varies between individuals (Guy Cook 1992/2001:149). Others have tried to make of discourse analysis a rule-driven form of study “quite alien to the open, context-dependent and indeterminate nature of discourse,” Cook observes. “The idea that discourse may be governed by factors which vary between people and places is quite alien to ‘scientific’ linguistics” (149).

The place of language

One can see the process of terminality and coercive vocabulary in operation in everyday language, particularly with regard to military questions. Robben and Nordstrom (1995) have remarked on the common human effort to tame the experiences of war through euphemistic language: “What has remained of the chaos of warfare is a rational and coherent structure of death as manifested in such expressions as ‘a war machine,’ ‘do the job,’ ‘a surgical operation,’ and ‘an order is an order.’ An unintended and harmful effect is that these analyses tend to rationalize and domesticate, if not justify, the use of violence. The equation of war with the rationality of military strategy and an army of men with a ‘war machine’ turn war into a teleological phenomenon.” (10).

What seems to have struck journalists and other observers about the wars of Yugoslav secession is that lies and half-truths were so widespread on all sides. Tim Judah writes: “What was and was not actually true now became lost in a[n] increasingly bitter war of words – and lies.” After quoting one of the senior nuns at the Orthodox Deviċ monastery as speaking of “Albanian youths who harass them day and night,” Judah finds it “unlikely that this happened ‘day and night’.” (2000:43), adding “Serbian and Albanian propagandists […] went to war armed with statistics, lies and half-truths.” Warren Zimmerman, US ambassador in Belgrade from March 1989 to May 1992, records in his memoir Origins of a Catastrophe: “During my first few weeks in Yugoslavia, I found that Miloseviċ’s trampling on Albanian rights was almost universally popular among Serbs, and not just those with a limited grasp of political issues./ There was no use dismissing these crackpot ideas as the maunderings of intellectuals; they were prevalent throughout Serbian society, from shopkeepers to peasant farmers to journalists” (1996, cited by Judah 57-8).

Considering the “blindness and willed stupidity” of ordinary Germans during the build-up to the killing of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and other victims of the Nazis during World War II, Primo Levi remarks on the role of language, speaking of it in the same paragraph as the copious liquor given to units killing thousands behind the front lines in Russia: “The well-known euphemisms (‘final solution,’ ‘special treatment,’ the very term Einsatzkommando[…], which literally meant ‘prompt-employment unit’) disguised a frightful reality, were not only used to deceive the victims and prevent defensive reactions on their part: they were also meant, within the limits of the possible, to prevent public opinion and those sections of the army that were not directly involved, from finding out what was happening” (1986:18).

The Austrian philosopher Hans Meyer – who took the name Jean Améry, was tortured by the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz as a Jew though he did not consider himself Jewish – reported suffering from the mutilation of his German mother tongue in the camp, making him a stranger in his own country (Levi 1986:108-109). Levi points to another aspect: “The greater part of the prisoners who did not understand German – that is, almost all the Italians – died during the first ten or fifteen days after their arrival. […] Knowing German meant life (72,74). “For all of us survivors, who are not exactly polyglot, the first days in the Lager have remained impressed in our memory in the form of an out-of-focus and frenzied film, filled with dreadful sound and fury devoid of meaning” (72). In Matthausen, an even more polyglot camp, according to another report, the rubber truncheon was known as der Dolmetscher [the interpreter] (Levi 1986: 71). Levi comments: “It is an obvious observation that where violence is inflicted on man, it is also inflicted on language” (76).

In-groups and out-groups

In the less-violent world of prejudiced communication, what is known as “linguistic intergroup bias” is found across the spectrum of in- and out-groups: rival horse-racing groups, northern vs southern Italians, environmentalists vs hunters, and African-Americans vs European Americans, as well as towards paraplegics and alcoholics, among differing age groups, people of varying political persuasions and friends vs enemies (Ruscher 2001:29). Behaviors matching stereotypes are described in abstract terms (e.g. “lazy,” “disagreeable,” “argumentative”). In contrast to verbs, Janet Ruscher notes, “adjectives are the most abstract characterization, because they are detached entirely from specific behaviors or objects” (28). Behavior that goes against the stereotypes, however, tends to be concretely described. “A concrete characterization minimizes the need to revise the stereotype and casts the behavior in ephemeral terms. […] Characterizing incongruent behaviors in a more concrete fashion helps maintain stereotypic beliefs” (28). Like group epithets, this use of language emphasizes a person’s group membership rather than individuality (20). This application of terminal thought also easily paves the way for more active discrimination: “A communicator may, for example, claim that an outgroup member is ‘aggressive’ rather than noting that ‘he hit someone yesterday.’ The former, abstract characterization provides a stable disposition for predicting future behavior and may help justify dealing with the outgroup through forceful means” (3).

Similarly, researchers have investigated a common Need for Closure (“people who want a definitive answer” – Ruscher 2001:33) and found those with a high need for such closure experiences exhibited a higher linguistic intergroup bias, i.e. stereotyping (Webster et al. 1997). Emplifying how stereotyping gains prominence in an interruption culture, D.M. Webster and colleagues ran a noisy printer during an experimental session: “Being distracted prompts people to want a quick decision and interferes with thinking ability; again stereotypes are quick and easy ways to think about others. As expected, the noise pressured participants to come to a decision quickly about the target, and they therefore relied on their stereotypic expectations” (Ruscher 2001:33).

What lies beneath

Communication rules, of course, are as much about what is suppressed, obliterated or excluded by the social context. What seems banal in ordinary contexts – and therefore excluded by literary and media production – can turn out to be extremely important in maintaining the social fabric (that is, in constructing a society that on the surface is egalitarian). The sociologist Erving Goffman reports this exchange:

A: “Do you have the time?”

B: “Sure. It’s five o’clock.”

C: “Thanks.”

D: [Gesture] “’T’s okay.” (1976:16).

He points out that apart from the rules about who can open a conversation and with whom (25), this dialog includes an opening form which softens “the potentially offensive consequence of encroaching on another with a demand” (16). This is met by a form that indicates the effort to nullify offense is acceptable, followed by an expression of appreciation by the questioner, and a final message that enough gratitude has been displayed (ibid). This ritualistic/ceremonious form is notable absent from exchanges between prisoners and their jailers as well as between celebrities and the public or media, a deprivation to which Jean Amery was particularly sensitive. Such violation of boundaries is also a standard ploy in humor.

Atrocity and humor

Humor seems to spring inevitably from conditions of atrocity, whether in Nazi concentration camps (Primo Levi 1958) or Argentina’s torture prisons (Diana Taylor 1997), and, as an attempt to alleviate a horrific existence and assert oneself as an individual (and one’s disguised protest at the state of one’s world), might not seem to need examination. But when one looks closely at the kind of humor a less obvious dynamic appears, one closer to the forms of prejudiced communication.

To take as few examples as possible for the purposes of discussion:

Argentinian military officers called their torture table a parilla, a common name for a domestic grill (Taylor 1997:152). Jacobo Timerman writes that his guards described a session on the torture machine as “a chat with Susan” (1980:6-7) and dying under torture was called “dying in Susan’s arms” (7). One punishment for prisoners was known as “looking for oil,” another the “choo-choo shock” (82). Sometimes the humor blends imperceptibly into camp jargon and self-protective discourse: the Nazis insisted on calling their prisoners “Stück” (piece) while an inmate who lost all energy to preserve himself was known to the others as a “Muselmann” (Muslim), as Levi reports (22,131). Levi also records the jokes older prisoners regularly played on a newcomer: “You can send him to the most ferocious of the Kapos to ask him (as happened to me!) if it is true that his is the Kartoffelschalenkommando, the ‘Potato Peeling Command,’ and if one can be enrolled in it” (34).

It is clear that the humor here is quite different in character from Roberto Begnini’s Life Is Beautiful, which, rather surprisingly, Slavoj Žižek considers much more accomplished than Spielberg’s Schindler’s List at rendering the horror of the Holocaust (2000:28). However, the painful laughter that Begnini seeks to provoke at a father’s imaginative efforts to reinterpret the concentration camp into a game for his son is not humor that anyone in the film can share.

The jokes reported by actual prisoners spring much more from humor’s sadistic roots, its claim to rewrite the world of experience with language, i.e. its terminality, an expression of the power of its perpetrators. The humor may also represent a form of solidarity, even with their victims, as Levi’s anecdotes suggest. By adopting the domineering practices of their captors in treating newcomers, the prisoners could feel more like masters of their environment, even if the humor was based on their anxieties at their real helplessness to control their fate. The US novelist Reynolds Price writes of his ultimate distate for comedy: “Maybe a comic vision, even at its most humane – as in Huck Finn or The Ponder Heart or Chekhov – must always condescend: because the author – perceiving and revealing the comic weaknesses of his people – implies (unconsciously usually, I guess) the absence of those foibles (however gentle) in himself” (1 August 1957, in 1998:103).

At the same time, practical jokes that did not result in death for their victims could also assert an equality as well as difference. Nor should one neglect the magical thinking which takes place in extreme situations. As the novelist Jonathan Franzen writes in an essay on smoking: “What serious smoker hasn’t felt the surge of panic at the thought of lung cancer and immediately lighted up to beat the panic down? (It’s a Cold War logic: we’re afraid of nuclear weapons, so let’s build even more of them)” (1996:147). The assertion of humor, particularly of the sadistic kind, seems to have operated in part as a magical way of warding off disaster to oneself.

Motors of prejudice

As Joan Didion’s reporting from El Salvador indicates, once the forces of terminality are at work, the language itself is deformed and becomes performative: making people guilty by declaring them so. It is equally misguided to link social prejudice to any general characteristics of the population that is terrorized. Writing of the run-up to the Holocaust, Hannah Arendt highlighted the lack of social justification for much prejudice.

“Antisemitism reached its climax when Jews had [...] lost their public functions and their influence [in West European society], and were left with nothing but their wealth. When Hitler came to power, the German banks were already judenrein (and it was here that Jews had held key positions for more than a hundred years) and German Jewry as a whole, after a long steady growth in social status and numbers, was declining so rapidly that statisticians predicted its disappearance in a few decades. [...] To a statistician Nazi persecution and extermination could look like a senseless acceleration of a process which would probably have come about in any case” (1951:4).

What should be acknowledged here is – as Arendt noted – the socio-political dimension of anti-Semitism. She found the sources of German anti-Semitism in Jewish exclusion from the power structure of European society:

“Only wealth without power [is] felt to be parasitical, useless, revolting, because such conditions cut all the threads which tie men together. / Persecution of powerless or power-losing groups may not be a very pleasant spectacle, but it does not spring from human meanness alone. What makes men obey or tolerate real power and, on the other hand, hate people who have wealth without power, is the rational instinct that power has a certain function and is of some general use. Even exploitation and oppression still make society work and establish some kind of order” (5).

The uniqueness of anti-Semitism is not just that it led to Shoah, in Claude Lanzmann’s reluctant term[117]. It runs like a secret thread through almost all modern atrocity in countries of the world’s industrial arc[118], to the point where anti-Muslim prejudice in the wars of Yugoslav secession tends to be discounted (acknowledged but then ignored rather than explored). Joan Didion wrote of the small Central American country of El Salvador during the 1970s.

“The manipulation of anti-Semitism is an undercurrent in Salvadoran life that is not much discussed and probably worth some study, since it refers to a tension within the oligarchy itself, the tension between those families who solidified their holdings in the nineteenth century, and those later families, some of them Jewish, who arrived in El Salvador and entrenched themselves around 1900. I recall asking a well-off Salvadoran about the numbers of his/acquaintances within the oligarchy who have removed themselves and their money to Miami. ‘Mostly the Jews,’ he said” (1983.32-3).

Experiencing and Inflicting Atrocity

“What counts as self and what counts as other is a perspectival question or a question of purposes.” – Donna J. Haraway 1998:75.

The fundamental experience of prejudice that reaches the extreme of abuse and atrocity is that the subject learns to be the Other, as well as what it means to be Other to someone whose thought is terminal. The summary of Michael Humphrey puts a welcome emphasis on the impact on others as well as on the innocence of the victims:

“Atrocities are acts of excessive violence which identify and victimise categories of individuals in order to terrorise both potential victims and those who become its spectators. The excess is in the transgressive character of the acts; against innocents (non-combatants), public places, in its bodily mutilations. The violence is transgressive because it is beyond any expectation of the victims and beyond their comprehension, or the comprehension of witnesses. The very horror of atrocity terrifies those who face it and causes disbelief in distant audiences (2002:1).”

Elaine Scarry has focused on the experience of the victim:

“Atrocities confront individuals with an existential crisis of the self and the need to make sense of the world. This unanchoring moment of horror is the 'space of terror', a liminal space between consciousness and non-consciousness, in which the limits of subjectivity are exposed. It is a fundamental human psychological limit that [Julia] Kristeva (1982) refers to as ‘the abject’. It is an internal bodily experience of fear, horror and pain in which the very self is brutally confronted and threatened with the reality of its own extinction. Pain stands in at the limits of felt experience for death” (Scarry 1985).

However, this section will deal with both abusers and their victims, since so much of the experience binds them together (though at the expense of the victim). Primo Levi, too, speaks of “a paradoxical analogy between victor and oppressor […] Both are in the same trap […] A person who was wounded tends to block out the memory so as not to renew the pain; the person who has inflicted the wound pushes the memory down, to be rid of it, to alleviate the feeling of guilt” (1986:12, sentences rearranged).

Seeking to remain inside the law

One of the major struggles that any atrocity victim faces is to assert a right to exist within the legal framework of society. With the revived concept of homo sacer, Giorgio Agamben suggests this struggle lies at the heart of modern politics, since the homo sacer, “in the sense that this term used to have in the Roman law of the archaic period [is] doomed to death” (1996:22). It can mean the difference between life and almost certain death. Hannah Arendt has recorded that Jews in prison were safer than in concentration camps, because they could claim the protection of the law.

The Nazis’ efforts to build a state that embodied its discriminatory laws, as in Stalin’s Soviet Union, required them to take special steps to put some places outside the law’s control, Himmler’s creation of Dachau as a concentration camp took place in 1933 under a law which put it “outside the rules of penal and prison law, which then and subsequently had no bearing [i.e. influence] on it. […And throughout all further legislation] the camp’s absolute independence from every juridical [i.e. legal] control and every reference to the normal juridical order was constantly reaffirmed” (Agamben 1995:169, with some suggestions of changes in translation). Elsewhere, he writes: “The camp is the structure in which the state of exception is permanently realized” (1996:40).

Agamben also points out: “One of the few rules that the Nazis obeyed throughout the course of the ‘final solution’ was that Jews and Gypsies could be sent to extermination camps only after having been fully denationalized (that is, after they had been stripped of even that second-class citizenship to which they had been relegated after the Nuremberg Laws)” (1996:22). This made them truly sacred – in other words, doomed.

Jacobo Timerman writes of the struggle in Argentina to recover legal status: “I was kidnapped by the extremist sector of the army. From the outset, President Rafael Videla and General Roberto Viola tried to convert my disappearance into an arrest in order to save my life” (29).

The first hours

One constant among atrocity sufferers is that of initial beatings or torture, no matter what different experience follows. Captured during the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Arthur Koestler recalls a sergeant asking the Chief in the police station in an official tone: “Una flagelación?” Koestler explains: “Flagelación is the term used for the first beating-up to which an arrested man is subjected in Spanish police stations. It is illegal but general practice carried out in most countries of Europe. In France it s called passer à tabac, and in German die erste Abreibung.” (96). Koestler was saved by being a journalist.

Primo Levi writes of the sequence of events (“the entire sinister ritual”) occurring on arrival at a concentration camp: “kicks and punches right away, often in the face; an orgy of orders screamed with true or simulated rage; complete nakedness after being stripped; the shaving off of all one’s hair; the fitting out in rags” (1986:24). The experiences varied from camp to camp but were basically similar. “It is difficult to say whether all these details were devised by some expert or methodically perfected on the basis of experience,” Levi observes, “but they were certainly willed and not casual: it was all staged and this was quite obvious” (ibid).

The destruction of narrative

Another core experience is the destruction of the subject’s narrative experience by torture and brutality. Just how far this destruction of the subjective sense of narrative can go in the experience of atrocity can be appreciated if one considers the basic structure of narrative as identified by A.J. Greimas: Subject/Object, Sender/Receiver, Helper/Opponent (1966). The ‘actant’ of an atrocity destroys all these binary structures to claim sovereignty over all the victim’s experience.

Christopher Burney, a British agent imprisoned alone in a cell in occupied France during World War II, reported, in Solitary Confinement (1952): “One does not suffer the passing of empty time, but rather the slowness of the expected event which is to end it” (Benjamin 1998:60). Destruction of narrative sense extends to memory. Jacobo Timerman recorded: “Memory is the chief enemy of the solitary tortured man – nothing is more dangerous. [...] I managed to develop certain passivity-inducing devices for withstanding torture and anti-memory devices for those long hours in the solitary cell. I refused to remember anything that bore on life experience” (36). He planned a book. “Now I can’t remember a single line. For a time I recalled paragraphs, but now they are profoundly buried. And the thought that they may resurface is as frightening as the notion of reliving those solitary hours” (36).

Timerman also organized a bookstore in his mind. “Thinking in terms of a prolonged span of time is/ extremely useful when there is no fixed sentence, for it annihilates hope, and hope is synonymous with anxiety and anguish. [...] A detailed task of this sort could easily keep me occupied for days. Following the same method, I organized a newspaper in Madrid, another in New York, my life on a kibbutz, and a film by Ingmar Bergman on the solitude of a tortured man[...] Deliberately, I evaded conjecture on my own destiny, that of my family and the nation. I devoted myself simply to being consciously a solitary man entrusted with a specific task” (36-7).

Retaining the human

How prisoners retain a sense of the human remains a key challenge for many victims – the humanity not just of their co-prisoners but of their torturers as well. A prisoner in the notorious Argentine navy mechanics school during the ‘dirty war’, Nilda Actis, recalls stretching her hand out to her torturer at one point and squeezing his hand briefly. She stresses that her gesture was not designed as an appeal for help and recalls that the man continued the torture afterward (Pequeneza).

Perhaps we can understand it as Robert Antelme testified from his experience of the camps (1994:11): “an almost biological assertion of belonging to the human race” (Agamben 1995:10). Another Argentine prisoner, identified as Mario, records the same impulse, even when it could not be expressed in action (in Feitlitz 1998): “I got to a point during torture where I’d think to myself: ‘This torturer, this guy torturing me now, is a man like me.’ I mean, I knew very well that I had never and would never use an electric prod on anyone. But it was important for me to realize that he was not a martian, not a cockroach, but a man like me. And this was borne out later, by a man known as Blood, for instance, who worried about his daughter doing well in school” (80). Mario says:

“This attitude was important on two levels. It helped me get along with them, to talk with them. And it was crucial in terms of my identity. Because if I looked at them like martians, I was doing the same thing they were. I was like them. So it helped me survive day to day, but even more importantly, I could inhabit my self” (81).

This can be contrasted with the rebellion that Albert Camus sees as the existentialist position. Camus tells us that “rebellion in man is his refusal to be treated as an object” [The Rebel. 1950. 250]. “To refuse to be treated as an object is to affirm oneself as a person, and that is to affirm the dignity (worth or value) of personal being” (Macquarrie 1972:209). Actis and Mario refused to treat their torturers as objects.

Jacobo Timerman similarly records that his “mechanism of withdrawal” into the future when damaged by physical pain after an interrogation, hunger or need for a human voice, contact or a memory, enabled him to “avoid lapsing into that other mechanism of tortured solitary prisoners which leads them to establish a bond with their jailer or torturer” (37).

Surviving atrocity

It seems that all authors who write on atrocity agree that the major concern is those who do not survive, who cannot speak[119]. And in a time of atrocity, speaking of those who might be surviving can be dangerous. “Every individual whose freedom was solicited in the years 1976-78 by the central power[in Argentina], the Catholic Church, or some international organization immediately ‘disappeared’ [in regional prisons under the control of individual military officers],” writes Jacobo Timerman (1981.27). To be noticed, as in the Nazi extermination camps, was to be condemned. Primo Levi lists courage actions by several people during his time in Auschwitz. “These, and innumerable others, died not despite their valor but because of it” (1986:3).

How did victims, then, survive atrocity? In his study of trauma, David Aberbach starts from the most obvious baseline: he “reiterates [Bruno] Bettelheim’s point that the people who survived best in concentration camps were those who were most able to numb themselves” (Phillips 1994:86). In Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, Simon Srebnik, one of the prisoners forced to work in the crematorium of Chelmno at the age of 13, reported: “It didn’t affect me” (1985:91). Flip Müller, a Czech Jew who survived five liquidations of the Auschwitz ‘special detail’, told Lanzmann: “I was in shock, as if I had been hypnotized [...] I was so mindless, so horrified, that I did everything [the squad leader] told me” (49). However, as the Müselmänner in their indifference to themselves suggest, there are degrees of numbness, and it is reported that women did not succumb to the sense of shame that Levi remembers (1986:59)[120]: women “were better able than men to endure their degradation despite suffering the same, or even worse, deprivation than did the men,” says Gabriel Motola (1999). “This is especially apparent in the texts of female survivors of the Holocaust.” His explanation: “Women tended to look after each other, to share their food more liberally, to listen and provide comfort to each other. Men on the other hand generally hoarded their meager supplies for themselves and, worse perhaps, endured their emotional grief in silence, refusing to communicate their fears and despair and discouraging their fellow sufferers from doing so.” The concentration camp humor served also as a way to suppress discussion – not just as a disguised way of finding language for the unspeakable.

The difficult of speech

“Perhaps we have no concept and no meaning available to us to name in any other way this ‘thing’ that has just happened, this supposed ‘event’.” – Jacques Derrida on the catastrophes of 11 September 2001 in Borradori (2003:86).

The primary conclusion of those who suffer atrocity is that it is impossible to put the experience into language, impossible to communicate to a third party, along with the irrefutable need to try to make others understand what was experienced, to bear witness (often on behalf of others). Giorgio Agamben records: “We are told that the survivors who came back – and who continue to come back – from the camps had no stories to tell, and that, to the extent to which they had been authentic witnesses, they did not try to communicate what they had lived through, as if they themselves were the first to be seized by doubts regarding the reality of what had befallen them, as if they had somehow mistaken a nightmare for a real event. They knew – and still know – that in Auschwitz or in Omarska they had not become ‘wiser, more profound, more human, or more well disposed toward human beings’; rather, they had come out of the camps stripped naked, hollowed out, and disoriented. And they had no wish to talk about it.” (1996 122:1). And Agamben adds: “All due differences notwithstanding, we too are affected by this sense of suspicion regarding our/own witnessing. It seems as if nothing of what we have lived through during these years authorizes us to speak” (122:2). This insight will be discussed later in Reporting Atrocity, in the section on credibility (page 83).

Jacobo Timerman records. “In the long months of confinement, I often thought of how to transmit the pain that a tortured person undergoes. And always I concluded that it was impossible. It is a pain without points of reference, revelatory symbols, or clues to serve as indicators” (34).

He depicts the aporia of all who have to deal with experience of atrocity: “I’m trying to forget it. Every day, since my release, I’ve been waiting for some vital shock to take place, some deep, extended nightmare to explode suddenly in the middle of the night, allowing me to relive it all – something that will take me back to the original scene, purify me, and then restore me to this place where I am now writing. But nothing has happened, and I find this calm terrifying” (34).

Looking back after his release, Timerman records: “The first question I’m asked concerns the torture I underwent. Yet, for the man who’s been tortured and has survived, this is perhaps the least important topic. In conversations with other prisoners, I discovered the following curious fact. our preoccupation revolved around how long we’d been in jail, our family’s situation / and economic needs; and if by chance the topic of torture came up, it was only via a random remark that didn’t seem of consummate interest to anyone. [...] Sometimes, on hearing the howls that rose from the basement, a prisoner might say, as if in passing, ‘They’re giving someone the machine.’ /Torture forms part of an ordinary routine, something already undergone and now the turn of others – some of whom will survive, others not. It occupies a very limited place in the life of the tortured person, and when he’s newly freed and able to speak openly and be openly questioned, he’s astonished at the importance mankind attaches to the subject ” (38-9).

If anything, victims of torture expect a different kind of attention (dealt with later in the section on reporting atrocity, page 130) but, for some, any focus on their experience is too much, or not enough. Primo Levi reports: “It has been observed by psychologists that the survivors of traumatic events are divided into two well-defined groups: those who repress their past en bloc, and those whose memory of the offense persists, as though carved in stone, prevailing / over all previous or subsequent experiences. Now, not by choice but by nature, I belong to the second group” (1981:10-11).

Inflicting atrocity

The first question to answer about torturers and murderers is not so much whether they gain pleasure (a suspect word) from their actions but rather how they and other quite different people who carry out atrocities routinely and without apparent emotion have come to see the body as the ground for their theoretical structuring of the world. The anthropologist Mary Douglas suggests we often overlook the oddness of this manner of thinking because it is so common: “The organic system provides an analogy of the social system which, other things being equal, is used in the same way and understood in the same way all over the world,” she writes in Natural Symbols, summarizing her earlier, 1966 work Purity and Danger (1970:12).[...] A natural way of investing a social occasion with dignity is to hide organic processes. Thus social distance tends to be expressed in distance from physiological origins and vice versa” (12). The vice versa includes removing dignity from social status by forcing on victims an awareness of their organic processes. We thus find, in many accounts of atrocities, indignities related to bodily functions deliberately imposed as an expression of the power relationship (Timerman, Levi.)[121].

Jacobo Timerman, after months in Argentine atrocity cells, concludes that the torturer and prisoner “seem to feel some need of the other” (37). “For the torturer, it is a sense of omnipotence, without which he’d find it hard perhaps to exercise his profession – the torturer needs to be / needed by the tortured; whereas the man who’s tortured finds in his torturer a human voice, a dialogue for his situation, some partial exercise of his human condition – he asks for pity, to go to the bathroom, for another plate of soup, he asks for the result of a football game” (37-8).

For atrocity murderers their victims are allowed only the qualities which they permit or inculcate, and any characteristic that has any mystery, any secrecy to it, may have to be eradicated. This view is perfectly mirrored in one famous declaration attributed to Ibérico Saint Jean, governor of the Province of Buenos Aires, in 1976: “First we will kill all the subversives, then we will kill their collaborators, then . . . their sympathizers, then . . . those who remain indifferent; and, finally, we will kill the timid” (Feitlowitz 1998.32). Prisoners were repeatedly told: “You don’t exist. . . . You’re no one. . . . We are God.” (49).

Whether or not the attribution of this statement to Saint Jean is true, the thought mechanism behind such attitudes has been explicated by Žižek in terms that give some sense to the question of whether torturers enjoy their power. In Lacan’s reinterpretation of Freud, the Real – which is not simply external or empirical reality[122] – is where the symbolic order of language fails (that is part of its definition). In the face of the “eternally corrosive” Real (Daly 1999:496), Žižek suggests that ideology provides a false symbolic coherence. “Ideology subsists in the fantasy of mastering the Real by providing straw enemies – ‘fictional’ embodiments of the Real – which ‘if only they could be eliminated’ would enable social harmony to be realized and the circuit of enjoyment to be completed. […] In Nazi discourse, for example, it is the Jews who are made responsible for stealing German enjoyment and preventing harmony (thereby denying the immanent impossibility of such harmony). The central paradox, therefore, is that what is concealed by imputing to the other the theft of enjoyment is that we never possessed what was allegedly stolen from us” (Daly, ibid).

Ideology here should not be understood as representing a collection of ideas about the Other but rather as an (often serial) assembly of attitudes, rather in the same way as Jean-Paul Sartre saw anti-Semitism as being based on an emotion rather than thought. The terminality both of ideology and prejudice is then clear. Even more important, enjoyment is seen as part of this terminality, and the roots of persecution can be traced to a suspicion that the Other, in both despicable and the surreptitiously enviable aspects, is privy to an enjoyment which the persecutor cannot have. This can even reach to a suspicion that the Other not only enjoys but exults in the enjoyment.

At the same time the persecutor must not acknowledge this desire for enjoyment. Many horror films exploit this repression. In Jaws, for example, the fascination of the shark resides in the viewer’s fantasy of being able to exert the same kind of power as represented by the violence towards an ever-broader swathe of society. The mounting difficulties faced by the film’s ostensible heroes only strengthens the viewer’s feeling of potential strength. The fully presented image of the ‘villain’ is usually delayed as long as possible. Up to that moment it is seen only as fragments. Its emotional effect draws on the same psychic resources as what Lacan calls ‘the fantasy of the fragmented body’ (Dor 1985:95). This is succeeded, in Lacanian theory and horror films, by the recognition of the Other as a real being. For Lacan, the child experiences an initial confusion between self and other (Dor 96). This can be likened to the shock for the spectator at the first full sight of the terror object (a confusion on which the film has previously built the viewer’s enjoyment). The work of psychic separation then takes place, and in the cinema the spectator joins the side of the victors against the villain rather than continue the confusion with the Other. This may be the explanation why so many plot denouements are peremptory, even careless, in providing a ‘realistic’ solution which enables the heroes to prevail. The mind will accept virtually any mildly plausible reason to resolve the climactic identity confusion.

Nevertheless, the fundamental message about the Other remains as Freud expressed it in Civilizations and Its Discontents: “[For human beings, a] neighbor is not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to take out their aggression on him, to exploit his labor without recompense, to use him sexually without his consent, to take possession of his goods, to humiliate him and cause him pain, to torture and kill him. Homo homini lupus [Man is a wolf to other men]” (1930:48). In this fantasy world of terminality, all desires require complete satisfaction, and desires are never ending, no matter how often or how fully satisfied. This, then, is the secret of tyrannical thought, terminality or persecution: despite always seeking to finally complete its project, it can never be satisfied that it has achieved its end. It can never finish its task.

Witnesses and bystanders

“A witness is always at risk for attesting to some truth rather than others,” – Donna J. Haraway (1998:160).

One of the spurious controversies that have grown up around atrocity concerns the knowledge which ordinary people may have of what is taking place (on a par with the debate over how much a country’s leaders knew of the atrocities committed in their name). Leaving aside the obvious point that terrorist regimes deliberately employ this knowledge as a means of cowing the general public[123], many of the acts are blatant. Reporting on Argentina in 1977, V.S. Naipaul speaks of Ford Falcons used to kidnap and ‘disappear’ people. “The killer Falcons are easily recognizable. They have no number plates. The cars – and the plainclothesmen they carry – require to be noticed; and people can sometimes stand and watch” (152).

Similarly, the role of silence in controlling the recognition of atrocity needs to be acknowledged. Naipaul writes of Argentina: “The authorities have grown to understand the dramatic effect of silence. It is part of the terror that is meant to be felt as terror” (152). Later: “Almost everyone in Argentina now knows someone who has disappeared or been arrested or tortured” (154).

Percepticide

Reviewing the years of Argentina’s “disappearances,” Diana Taylor terms the self-blinding of a population to what is taking place before their eyes as “percepticide” (1977:122): “The military violence could have been relatively invisible, as the term disappearance suggests. The fact that it wasn't indicates that the population as a whole was the intended target, positioned by means of the spectacle. People had to deny what they saw and, by turning away, collude with the violence around them. They knew people were “disappearing.” […] Those in the vicinity were forced to notice, however much they pretended not to.”

She also hints at an explanation for the blindness: “Other spectators who have suffered similar violence – Elie Wiesel watching the Nazis exterminate the man who destroyed one of the chimneys at Auschwitz, Rigoberta Menchú watching her brother being tortured and burned alive – have judged this watching to be the most dehumanizing of acts. To see without being able to do disempowers absolutely” (1997:122). To be seen seeing what was taking place would constitute an open challenge to the oppressors.

Joan Didion records an interview with El Salvador’s President Magaña about a military officer who died in a helicopter crash on the day she had tried to speak to the colonel. “Where exactly had the helicopter crashed? [President Magaña:] ‘I didn’t ask him [the pilot…] This is very delicate,’ he said. ‘I have a problem there. I’m supposed to be the commander-in-chief, so if I ask him, he should tell me. But he might say he he’s not going to tell me, then I would have to arrest him. So I don’t ask.’ This is in many ways the standard development of a story in El Salvador, and is also illustrative of the position of the provisional president of El Salvador” (1983.69). This willful ignorance, she suggests, forms part of the “mechanism of terror” (21).

Judith Lewis Herman sees the same process at work within ‘ordinary’ society: “The knowledge of horrible events periodically intrudes into public awareness but is rarely retained for long,” she writes. “Denial, repression, and dissociation operate on a social as well as an individual level” (1992/2001:2).

Celebrating defeat

In the wars of Yugoslavia’s dissolution, reporter Martin Bell notes, “both sides made use of the images of the [Vukovar Hospital] surrender – the Serbs to celebrate their victory and the Croats to parade their defeat. […] It suited the Croats to sacrifice their own and to play the card of victimhood. They understood the strength that lies in weakness. The political and military leaders in all these wars were as willing to inflict suffering on their own people as on their enemy. They would then display that suffering as evidence that they were the victims of aggression” (Bell 2003:15).

Bell describes the practice as “a truth of battle that isn’t sufficiently noted, if it’s noted at all. That is because, like many truths, it is unsettling and inconvenient.” Bell’s argument: “Through the transforming power of public opinion and the televised images of violence, the winners lose and the losers win” (2003:15). This conclusion may be challenged, but it firmly positions television and public response at the heart of the political process.

Even outside the circle of witnesses or among people who have nothing to fear from the knowledge, atrocity has difficulty in finding its way into discourse without being rejected immediately or exploited. The British soldier Arthur Dodd, sent to Auschwitz “for disrupting the German war machine” and later an escapee, recalled addressing a public meeting in his Northern English home town immediately after his return and talking of the sufferings of the other concentration camp victims. Others on the panel were given heroes’ attention, he noted, while he was asked no questions, was met with silence, and was ignored when the meeting broke up. He told a television interviewer that he believes people were incredulous or thought he was lying completely (Discovery. 1999, rebroadcast 5 January 2004[124]).

Eerily this recalls a common fear of former prisoners. Primo Levi reports: “Almost all the survivors, verbally or in their written memoirs, remember a / dream which frequently occurred during the nights of imprisonment, varied in its detail but uniform in its substance: they had returned home and with passion and relief were describing their past sufferings, addressing themselves to a loved person, and were not believed, indeed were not even listened to. In the most typical (and most cruel) form, the interlocutor turned and left in silence” (1986:1-2).

Levi underlines: “It is important to emphasize how both parties, victims and oppressors, had a keen awareness of the enormity and therefore the non-credibility of what took place… (1986:2).

The politics of the blind eye

The politics of the blind eye continues into modern society. A 2002 study of human rights, recalling the behavior of officials and the public under the Nazis, “challenges us with a striking contemporary parallel: the policies of West European governments towards immigrants and asylum seekers” (Owen 2003:17). The journalist and historian Gitta Sereny suggests “some of the same forces are at work: the assertion of differences between ‘us’ and ‘them’; the failure to accord ‘them’ the moral respect we would expect for ourselves; and the subtle denigration of those seeking asylum or citizenship by the press and even the agencies of the state itself” (Owen:17). The lesson, suggests Oxford professor of politics Nicholas Owen, is that “through the establishment of routine and complex procedures, [certain types of] organizations can discourage the individual from perceiving, and hence questioning, the larger moral situation in which they are playing a part” (19). This seems a rather bland and unhelpful formulation, given the evidence both of the ways in which educated individuals can be “morally compromised” (18) along with common claims of “ignorance of the problems” (18).

George Steiner puts it more tartly: “Education has shown itself incapable of making sensibility and cognition resistant to murderous unreason. Far more disturbingly, the evidence is that refined intellectuality, artistic virtuosity and appreciation, scientific eminence will collaborate actively with totalitarian demands or, at best, remain indifferent to surrounding sadism. […] The icon of our age is the preservation of a grove dear to Goethe within a concentration camp” (2001:4).

Atrocity and Justice

“A justice that can only be found – in The Twilight Zone” – Forrest Whitaker, introduction to TV series of the same name.

Following Plato, Aristotle (in Laws bk vi p737) set the terms under which the philosophy of justice has usually been treated. That is, in terms of law and regulations: “Injustice arises when equals are treated unequally, and also when unequals are treated equally” (as quoted by Ginsberg 1965.7). As Morris Ginsberg has pointed out, this statement “throws no light on what is to be done by, to, or for equals and unequals” (7). However, until Derrida, apart from Nietzsche philosophers of justice have concerned themselves particularly with the rules[125].

Ginsberg himself wrote: “To discover the content or coherence of justice it is necessary to establish a body of rights and duties and to examine them in the light of the formal principles of equality” (7). He also argues: “Justice therefore [since laws can be unjust or unjustly administered] requires that the law-makers should themselves be subject to the law” (10) and “as was already pointed out by Kant, [...] states have a duty to establish the rule of law. This entails that they must abandon their claims to be judges in their own cause and that they are under an obligation to create an international authority with power to enforce its decisions” (12)[126]. Further: “Justice is conceived as concerned mainly with the negative injunction not to hurt or interfere with others” (12).

Here, too, Ginsberg is interested in extending the idea of justice to “the positive task of determining what can be done to secure an equitable distribution of the conditions of well-being for all concerned” (12). His framework, therefore, is unable to deal with the question of what to do when injustice is manifestly perpetrated, except through compensation or punishment.

Crime and punishment

“The demand for justice is a modification of envy and lays down the condition subject to which one can put envy aside.” – Sigmund Freud (1933a.168-9).

The Nobel economist Gary S. Becker employs the same oppositional terms in looking at crime and punishment (1968:39). This has one major advantage: “The economic approach does not take refuge in assertions about irrationality, contentment with wealth already acquired, or convenient ad hoc shifts in values” (1976:7). However, Becker has to admit that the ultimate concern of economics is: “How many offenses should be permitted and how many offenders should go unpunished?” (40)[127].

Richard Rorty even argues: “There is no way to bring self-creation together with justice at the level of theory. The vocabulary of self-creation is necessarily private, unshared, unsuited to argument. The vocabulary of justice is necessarily public and shared, a medium for argumentative exchange” (1989:xiv).

Thus John Rawls can argue for “justice as fairness” (1971:11). Similarly, fair division procedures seek to allocate goods in ways that generate envy-free allocation and give these a central place in such concerns (Brams and Taylor 1996:1-2). As a result, the study of fair-division procedures can give more structure to theories of equality and justice. But their conclusion is: “There are, with all procedures, tradeoffs” (235).

“We do not think our fair-division procedures can settle the debate of whether, for example, justice can be achieved without order, or an order must first be imposed on society – perhaps in violation of individual rights – before justice can be administered. Or, to take another example, must the lot of the worst-off member of society be improved, as Rawls (1971) argues [...], or should help be provided to less needy but possibly more numerous members of society[...]?” (234).

If more than two people or groups are involved, “one cannot guarantee the three properties of equitability, envy-freeness and efficiency,” Brams and Taylor concede. “Although one can always obtain two of these three properties, it is not clear which one to sacrifice – or, indeed, the conditions under which, and the degree to which, any sacrifice will be necessary” (235).

Nietzsche and Rawls

The major problem in applying such rules in political theory is that people do not start with similar capacities or endowments: “in fact, inequalities of this sort are viewed as a central problem in political theory” (Rawls: 235). Nearly 120 years before, Nietzsche made almost the same point, but with a different purpose and a different conclusion: “Justice (fairness) originates among approximately equal power [...] The initial character of justice is barter. [...] Justice is requital and exchange on the assumption of approximately equal positions of strength. For this reason, revenge belongs initially to the realm of justice: it is an exchange” (1878:92/64). Nietzsche thus throws open the question of how justice is possible among unequals, and how it is possible to create a situation of equality.

This is the strategy of John Rawls in what “may well be one of the most influential moral theories of the twentieth century” (Johnson 1985:49). He seeks to create this equality through a “veil of ignorance” among parties devising a just system: “they do not know the various alternatives will affect their own particular case and they are obliged to evaluate principles solely on the basis of general considerations” (118).

It is a distributional system of justice that recognizes its debt to Kant’s doctrine of the categorical imperative (1971:118), a major effort to get around the problems of a utilitarian concept of justice (average utility) and develop a social contract theory of justice (with reference to John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau). Rawls gives little attention to Nietzsche, describing him and Aristotle as perfectionists (22)[128]. Nevertheless, the Nietzschean challenge, which Derrida accepts, remains most cogent indicator of what Rawls’s theory lacks.

Rawls has come under attack from two directions – from the practical end, particularly on whether his ideas will lead to the end he presumes, and from the philosophical end, notably his argument that institutions cannot be used to impose a vision of humanity (Lovin 2002:10). The formal constraints he imposed on his theory suggested he was not in “contact with the way that the political and moral life is actually lived,” according to critics, since “what we ask for in the courts, in the legislature or in election campaigns must be based on ‘public reasons’ that everyone accepts. Political arguments have to begin with what we already agree on” (ibid).

However, in later writings, particularly Political Liberalism (1993), Rawls did accept that people have comprehensive ideas about what is good, which they try to persuade others to share, citing 19th century abolitionists and civil rights leaders as examples of how ideas can change the basic structures of society without violating his requirement of public reason.

This seems to be barring the dog from one door while letting it in by another. In Political Liberalism he says: “In Theory a moral doctrine of justice general in scope is not distinguished from a strictly political conception of justice. Nothing is made of the contrast between comprehensive philosophical and moral doctrines and conceptions limited to the domain of the political. In [...] this volume, however, these distinctions and related ideas are fundamental” (xviii).

Russell Hittinger notes a number of other changes in the philosopher’s views that are not fully confronted: “If justice as fairness is based upon a general moral theory, then it would seem that citizens must endorse a comprehensive philosophical doctrine in order to reach consensus about the principles which ought to inform the institutions of the polity. He now points out that this is an impractical expectation. Rawls also had in mind a narrower goal for Theory, which was to show how rational agents can reach consensus about the principles of justice for the purpose of political institutions. Rawls now acknowledges that there is something ‘unrealistic’ about the possibility of reaching a practical consensus when the comprehensive theory itself affords occasion for dispute (p. xvii)” (Hittinger 1994:585 ff).

Rawls did, however, highlight a major flaw in conventional thinking about fair systems of distribution: that behind a veil of ignorance, participants will not necessarily choose options, as the great welfare economist John Harsanyi suggested, that would benefit them “as if they had an equal chance of being anyone” (Zuckert 1994). Instead, the rational person would look at the position of the potentially worst-off participant in the proposed scheme and attempt to make that participant as well off as possible (ibid).

Theorists, particularly of a Marxist persuasion such as G.A. Cohen, argue that such considerations require a formal commitment to equality, because of inherent inequities in society (Smith 1998). However, the argument remains firmly in the public sphere, and leaves little room for the personal acceptance of the challenge of conceptions of justice for the individual.

By contrast, this thesis argues in favor of giving attention to the other side of the argument: that only if we accept the claims of the private on the public can we develop a concept of justice that ‘does justice’ to the claims, among others, of atrocity victims. For his part, Alain Badiou has warned against “commonsensical discourse” that accepts competition “between ‘tolerance’ and ‘fanaticism,’ between ‘the ethics of difference’ and ‘racism,’ between ‘recognition of the other’ and ‘identitarian’ fixity” (1998:20).

Derrida and Justice

In ‘Force of Law’ Derrida questions the whole issue of legitimation and of evaluation (932). “And his main claim,” notes Richard Kearney, is that “while deconstruction appears not to address the problem of justice, it has been in fact doing this all along – albeit indirectly. The reason it has been indirect is, Derrida explains, because it is impossible to speak directly about justice, to thematize and objectify it without betraying it” (Kearney 1993:36).

In a study of Derrida’s ideas on justice, Kearney summarizes what he sees as Derrida’s ‘ethical re-turn’ to issues that culminate in his notion of ‘hospitality’: “While he is prepared to concede that law is deconstructable – to the extent that it claims to be founded on something, e.g. conventions, rules, norms, or nature itself – this is not so of justice. Justice is beyond such claims and considerations for Derrida. Justice is deconstruction and deconstruction is justice (945). / Why? Because justice is the experience of aporia, the impossible, of the undecidable. Moreover, says Derrida, a desire for justice whose structure would not be such an experience of aporia would have no chance to be what it is, namely a ‘call for justice.’[...]

“Law, in contrast to justice, can be accounted for in terms of a good rule applied to a particular case (i.e. what Kant would call a ‘determinant judgement’). Justice, on the other hand, is incalculable by definition for it entails moments in which the decision between just and unjust cannot be insured by a rule” (947).

In what is clearly leading in a straight line to ‘hospitality’ as a principle for treating others, Derrida asserts: “Justice involves singularity. It concerns the ‘other as other’ in a unique situation, irreducible to principles of duty, rights, or objective law. In fact, what Derrida calls justice is very close to what Levinas calls ethics, as would appear evident from his claim that ‘to address oneself to the other in the language of the other is, it seems the condition of all possible justice (949)’”(Kearney: 36).

In this sentence, with its source in Lyotard as well as Levinas, lies the way out of the aporia of conventional views of justice. So long as an outside standard is applied to a demand for justice, it cannot be decided. Atrocity, like Derrida’s justice, refers to subjective experience rather than a social act, though it is a subjective experience of utter openness to the Other. Like justice, it is given a social dimension for political reasons.

Private experience and public presentation of atrocity

But can there be any meeting point between the private experience of atrocity and the public presentation of atrocities? This thesis argues that the answers of those who have spoken most powerfully of atrocity suggest the question is wrongly phrased. Just as the experience of atrocity is individual, the response must be individual. A socially determined account can only fall into the trap of statistical comparison and public history. However, this is a solution for the producer of an account of atrocity, not for its reception. For that answer, another justification must be found. And while the producer can work out of a psychological impulse, the capacity for reception requires a philosophical response.

Without falling into psychologism that devalues an idea because it springs out of individual experience, one can point to Derrida’s reaction to being excluded from his Algerian lycée as a Jew and signed into a Jewish lycée: “It is there, I believe, that I started to recognize, even to contract this sickness, this discomfort, this disturbance that, all my life, has made me unable to accept ‘communal’ experience, incapable of any kind of joining” (Derrida and Roudinesco 2001:182). In many ways, Derrida’s political thinking has striven to find an ethics that justifies itself without demanding the concept of community[129].

This is of a piece with his thinking on philosophy. He remains distrustful of Heidegger’s efforts to declare an end to philosophy by overturning metaphysics, a major inspiration for deconstruction. “One reason why the idea of the end of philosophy does not survive Derrida’s scrutiny,” writes Robert Bernasconi, “is that it creates an opposition between the inside and outside of philosophy, and so maintains the very logic which is at issue” (98).

Derrrida’s sense of justice contrasts with the law: “Dogmatism and ideology are the results of worshipping the law for its own sake, or revering it as adequate to each singular decision that has to be made,” Kearney writes in summarizing Derrida’s argument (40). This comes very close to the identifying the terminality-imbued foundation for dogmatism and ideology. Messianic Marxists, Derrida argues, can fall prey to such temptations (1045), neglecting the historic conditions which make it impossible to render justice immediately. Eschatological thinkers such as Heidegger, at the other pole, also risk neglecting the ethical responsibility involved in meeting singular demands for justice (“a practically infinite right”) made in each singular historical moment (1045).

In the same essay Derrida takes the argument a step further. The essay was designed as a response to claims that deconstruction is inimical to concerns with justice. He suggests that deconstruction can be considered as a “politics of the émigré or exile” (1982:119). Kearney explains: “This involves a defense of the homeless or nomadic subject against the absolutist ideologies which victimize and scapegoat the ‘alien’”(1993:41). These implications are likewise drawn by Derrida: “Since, moreover, it takes two to play the ethical game of responsibility, deconstruction is committed to a reinscription of not only the ‘other’ but also the ‘subject.’ [...] Far from seeking to ‘destroy the subject,’ he seeks [...] to ‘resituate’ it in terms more vigilant and responsive to the other” (1982:125)[130].

Atrocity and celebrity

“It doesn’t matter how you live or what you do wrong, as long as you are on TV people will respect you.” – Bart Simpson to Krusty the Clown, in The Simpsons: Bart the Fink[131].

From atrocity and justice to celebrity might seem a long and inconsequential leap. However, it is suggested here that both issues cluster around the same elements. A revaluation of the discourse of celebrity in modern societies is as necessary as for atrocity and for many of the same reasons. Critical journalists such as Martin Bell are well aware of some of the ways in which celebrity and atrocity-prone invisibility are used in modern society. He writes: “In the early twenty-first century the real CNN effect [rather than “the tendency of governments to adjust their policies to cope with the something-must-be-done demands generated by TV coverage of a humanitarian crisis”] is a phenomenon of the battlefield. It can take two forms, and involves either the exploitation or obstruction of the media. One option is that […] television should be embedded with the military […] This was the innovative model for the Second Gulf [the ‘embeds’…] / It enabled some of the best and worst of war reporting – truth and hype in various proportions. […] The alternative doctrine, applied in Afghanistan, is that military operations should be conducted, as far as possible, by surrogates in and out of the cameras’ range” (2003:37-8). This thesis argues that such manipulations are not restricted to, or even characteristic solely of, battlefields in technologically advanced societies.

Twelve characteristics of celebrity

The characteristics of celebrity, as identified by Francesco Alberoni over 40 years ago (1962)[132], bear an uncanny similarity or antipodean opposition to atrocity (75-98). Atrocity and celebrity manipulate many of the same fields of discourse, the same theoretical channels, and the same structures in society.

Alberoni’s classic work sets out 12 characteristics of celebrity:

1. Celebrities are persons “whose institutional power is very limited or non-existent, but whose doings and way of life arouse considerable and even sometimes even a maximum degree of interest” (75). Today, this seems an unnecessarily restrictive definition, except that it points to a similarity with atrocity victims.

2. “Each individual member of the public knows the star, but the star does not know any individuals” (77). In atrocity, one can replace the public with the torturer and the star with the victim.

3. “The relationship between star and public lacks an element which we would label ‘mutuality’”(77). Though the meanings of mutuality need to be explored in more detail, the similarities between actrocity and celebrity here are salient.

4. “The charismatic element of ‘stardom’ does not get transformed into a power relationship” (79). This is debatable, even with regard to the period before 1962. However, it is particularly, and deliberately, true of atrocity. Alberoni’s phrasing, however, is worth consideration because of the usual sociological meaning used for charisma in relation to power. Apart from the suggestion elsewhere in this study that charisma can be negative (attract persecution), it can also be noted that the potential for power that arises from a victim’s charisma must be firmly pushed aside by the atrocity perpetrated.

5. ‘Stars’ form an elite – “A primary feature of [an exalted group in a stratified society] is the existence, among members of this particular stratum, of a higher degree of interaction than is found between members of the other strata” (81). Again the application to atrocity victims seems to need no comment, though ‘elite’ would appear to be a strange term, and somewhat contradictory even in Alberoni’s usage: an ‘elite’ must have a place in society’s structure to be one, while his list of characteristics of celebrity suggest that stars hold a place outside this structure. Both celebrity ‘elites’ and atrocity victims are members of what social psychologists call “outgroups” (Ruscher 2001:2), though Alberoni makes little exploration of how dynamically these terms can be used.

6. Another feature is “a certain degree of isolation” (81). A recent social-psychological overview of prejudiced communication points out that such speech “keeps [an] outgroup separate for reduced contact” (Ruscher 2001:6).

7. “Observability” is practically unlimited (82). This seems hardly true today of stars but certainly of atrocity sufferers.

8. “Stars form a social group with very fluid and uncertain limits” (84). At first glance, this might seem not to apply to atrocity victims, until the history of broad persecutions is considered. It might seem hardly necessary to document such assertions in the case of Stalin’s purges of the 1930s, 40s and early 50s, but Martin Amis records that Stalin “spoke often and interestedly about purging from as early as 1920” (2002:167). Making a philosophical point about the voracious nature of ideology, Slavoj Žižek has observed (as cited earlier) that in anti-Semitism “Jews are understood to be both upper and lower class, intellectual and dirty, impotent and highly sexed” (1989:125, cited by Butler 2005:48): “they are only to be defined by their very ‘polysemousness,’ their contradictoriness” (summarized by Butler).

9. “Stars are those members of the community whom all can evaluate, love or criticize. They are the chosen objects of collective gossip, the channels of which are the mass media of communication” (85).

10. “Stars are not objects of envy[133]. Further, the elite of the stars is not in general perceived as a privileged class; their very existence is not regarded as a clear and brutal witness to social injustice” (84). Today one might argue that their privileged status is a condition which many would like to share.

11. “The moral evaluation of the stars is more ‘indulgent’ than that reserved by the public for those who are socially nearer to them” (91). The reverse is true of atrocity victims, who have to be socially distant for modern society to treat them indulgently, in contrast to the harshness with which those closer are judged.

12. “Their status is always potentially revocable: by the public” (93). This, too, seems to take a more complacent view of the celebrity process than an era of ubiquitous media might display. Following Žižek (see page 66), one can argue that the envy of celebrities, the attempt to exclude them from conventional structures, is carried by the system rather than by the individuals. Hence the apparent mood swings of crowds, channeled to a large extent by the media.

Something of the process by which media (and those who know how to exploit the process) create a fascination with celebrity can be understood from the writings of the British psycho-analyst D. W. Winnicott, an English Lacan – he was one of the earliest British professionals to speak admiringly of Lacan’s work (Poirier 1982:219-220). Winnicott speaks of the experience of relating to objects or phenomena as the key element in cultural experience and critical in developing a sense of freedom[134]. At the same time, Winnicott links this area to a baby’s experience of “unthinkable anxiety” or an acute confusional state that characterizes the experience of atrocity (see page 75 on). For Winnicott, at the time when the mother and infant in their relation are in process of creating the baby as a separate individual, the child’s mental representations depend on the mother’s continual absence and restored presence. The return calms the child’s anxiety. If the return does not take place within a few minutes the baby becomes traumatized. “Trauma implies that the baby has experienced a break in life’s continuity” (5). The result is either primitive defenses against repetition of unthinkable anxiety or the “confusional state that belongs to disintegration of the nascent ego structure” (ibid)[135].

Using Alberoni’s indicators, it can be seen how closely celebrities and atrocity victims operate in the same universe, and how much they represent polar images of each other. Victims of atrocity and celebrities, using Alberoni’s criteria, are alike in having no institutional power. With regard to US politics, this schematic distinction can be contested in American politics for celebrities, at least from Ulysses S. Grant and Eisenhower, both military leaders turned politician, to J.F. Kennedy the “war hero” turned Senator, and Arnold Schwarzenegger the beefcake film star become Governor. In fact, this generalization is a fundamentally contested concept, since it is argued that, in modern societies, celebrity is a path to power, just as victimization is not only the experience of powerlessness but also the path to further victimization.

A somewhat more up-to-date discussion of celebrity is found in John Ellis’s Visible Fictions (1982/1992). As a cinematic phenomenon, stars are incomplete images outside the cinema. The effect is increased by the way film insists on what is shown as being absent, what Roland Barthes called the ‘photo effect’ (in Camera Lucida). Ellis suggests this contributes to the idolization of stars such as Marilyn Monroe, whose every gesture can seem overcast by her tragic story (59). Similarly, “the supposed personality of the performer became a means of describing or specifying a particular film” (92). Yet this personality is not usually the ostensible subject of a film. Stars are photographed for publicity media carrying out mundane activities and then involved in exotic events. Their sexuality, personal and family life will be discussed, in a way not true of other public figures who appear in the news. Ellis observes: “Mass newspapers / use stars for their own ends. […] Stars have a soldering function: they hold the news and the personal together by being both public and intimate, by being news only in so far as they are persons” (95-6). For Ellis, the star image is an invitation to cinema as the synthesizer of all the star’s disparate and scattered image elements (97). This close/remote, similar/remote, possible/impossible relationship with the viewer creates cinema’s key place in the modern psyche: “Desire is both permitted and encouraged, yet knows it cannot achieve any tangible form of satisfaction, except the satisfactions of looking” (98).

Nevertheless, the film performance of a star involves “a large degree of overt fiction” (98) and remains comparatively rare (two or three films a year), though a regular effect of film performance is the impression that the star is caught unawares (e.g. Cary Grant’s eye movements). “They mark the absorption of the star into the fictional character. The star seems to be feeling the emotion of the role at that point as his or her own emotion. The star is not performing here, so much as ‘being.’ In other words, what the film performance permits is moments of voyeurism…” (99). As a result, the fiction film becomes the only authentic record of a real life despite all the photo sessions, TV and film biographies and memoirs (ibid).

In the face of this “cultism, of an inquisitive voyeuristic kind, or a fascinated fetishistic type” (104), the star can underplay in contrast to the unknown section of the cast or create an effect of ‘performance’ divergent from that of the supporting cast (104-5).

In contrast to this cinematic situation, television does not produce a play between the ordinariness and extraordinariness of its performers. Ellis says this is because it does not participate in the photo effect, and in fact, promotes immediacy rather than absence (105-6). But this argument is difficult to sustain in the face of developments since the 1980s, when television in both the UK and US became both commercial and universal. However, it is true that television stardom involves continued visibility rather than capitalizing on rarity, as Hollywood stars have been able to do and use this godlike distance to close the gap with power when they return briefly to Earth, as Arnold Schwarzenegger has demonstrated.

Napoleon, the self-made celebrity

Celebrity as a path to power is not a purely American phenomenon. In a biography of Napoleon, the historian Steven Englund notes of the Corsican emperor that the first French dictator was “a master of self-presentation” who reportedly declared on St Helena: “What a novel my life has been.” From early on he created newspapers to report back on his achievements to the French public. “Contemporaries,” notes Englund, “enjoyed [his military dispatches] for the serial novel that they were.” His reminiscences Memorial of Saint Helena became one of century’s best-sellers.

Reviewing the biography, Englund’s fellow historian David A. Bell, underlines Napoleon’s ‘modern sensibility and mastery of the celebrity system: “He knew […] how to address himself to millions of followers in a modern language so as to create a bond that was both strikingly powerful and intimately personal.” Englund writes: “To a degree unique among the politicians of his era, perhaps any era, Napoleon cultivated the garden of his myths of his State and himself in all sectors. Indeed, if one constructs the notion of ‘propaganda’ loosely as ‘the collection of methods utilized by power with a view to obtain[ing] ideological and psychological results’ [Jacques Ellul, Histoire de la Propagande (1967:3)], then the breadth of Napoleon’s motivation and grasp in managing public opinion, is never-ending – from the printed to the spoken word, from paintings, sculpture, music, and porcelain to parades and feast days, from awards and decorations to uniforms and furniture” (317). Metternich, Englund notes, told his government: “The newspapers alone are worth an army of 300,000 to Napoleon” (317).

Napoleon was also a master of the symbolic lie or iconic falsification. “Consider David’s portrait of Bonaparte crossing the Alps on a sleek, light gray charger in 1800. [...] He crossed the St. Bernard pass on a mule, and he was wrapped in furs, without a flowing red cape. [...] Not all people naively believe David depicted literal reality; rather they understood that there are literal and metaphorical truths. A painting of Abraham Lincoln does not show an actual event either, yet its non-veracity does not detract from its truth,” Englund suggests (318).

Visibility, observability and gossip

“I am an advertisement for a version of myself.” – pop singer David Byrne, cited by Poster (2001:171)

Certainly with regard to visibility, celebrities and atrocity victims are polar opposites. atrocity victims seldom know their tormentors personally (either literally or as more than the figures of terror they represent), but they are known to their captors to whatever degree the torturers want. The lack of mutuality governs both celebrities and victims in their relations with the Other. What makes the victim “charismatic”[136] translates into a deprival or lack of power. Victims and celebrities each form an “elite” in which interreactions with others of the same group are more common than with outsiders, along with social isolation.

Observability is not within the choice of atrocity victims or (as Alberoni controversially suggests) celebrities. Membership of the atrocity group, despite apparently obvious marks such as color or Jewish background, is as fluid at that of celebrities’, it is suggested (as was indicated by the many problems that Germans had in determining whom to treat as Jewish, the white South Africans in deciding who was colored, and the Argentine torturers in deciding whom to treat as the enemy).

With regard to collective judgments and gossip, the judgments of victim groups are often imposed. Gossip (except negatively phrased) is forbidden. The mistreatment of atrocity victims is not regarded as a social injustice, while the standards by which they are evaluated tend to be much stricter than for the public, while their status is determined by the atrocity perpetrators. Similarly, intrusion into the “private” lives of celebrities is frequently bemoaned but rarely prevented. Gossip – speculative discussion of intimate details that the persons themselves have not communicated – is celebrated rather than condemned[137].

Panopticism

Apart from noticing Alberoni’s psychologizing language (the concept of the public is only superficially examined), we can also note a parallel in such typification with Michel Foucault’s “Panopticism” in discussing systems of punishment. “The major effect of the Panopticon [a model prison design proposed by the British 18th-century Utilitarian Jeremy Bentham to enable one prison guard to survey all prisoners at once[138][139], is] to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. [...] The surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action” (201).

In modern technological society (and the zoom lens, flashlight and low-lumen video camera are part of this technology)[140], the Panopticon can extend into all realms of life, and particularly into those sectors which society has decided should be public. Foucault seems to move towards this position later in life. Prison, he writes later, “acquits all the other institutions of being prisons by presenting itself as being applicable only to those who have committed a violation”(1975:85). Thus prison “continues to play its role in the pyramid of social panopticisms” (86).

The power of crowds

Another shortcoming of Albinoni’s portrait of celebrity is its static depiction, neglecting the dynamics of publicity in modern society, and particular the role of the anonymous mass in the celebrity system. Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power offers a 575-page examination of the crowd’s will to action[141]. Canetti is concerned particularly with the physical crowd, but the mechanisms he uncovers determine also the invisible mass of people on the receiving side of a television screen. Canetti writes: “The most important occurrence within the crowd is the discharge. Before this the crowd does not actually exist; it is the discharge which creates it. This is the moment when all who belong to the crowd get rid of their differences and feel equal” (1960.18). “It is for the sake of this blessed moment, when no one is greater or better than another, that people become a crowd” (19).

Clearly, the action which produces discharge can be positive (a staple of many Hollywood films, and can even celebrate its own inaction, its stillness, as in many ceremonies remembering war victims). But in practice society makes better use of its destructive tendencies. The television crowd constitutes itself as such at this moment. the announcement of who is being thrown out of the competition for Pop Idol/American Idol/Star Academy (for obtaining the fewest viewer votes) or who has been voted to leave Big Brother. The lack of irony in the title drawn from Orwell’s nightmarish 1984 represents a freakish twisting of connotative language that appears in many situations of atrocity, most obviously in the Nazi description of extermination as Sonderbehandlung (special treatment). At the point of expulsion, the individual viewer’s fear of exclusion from society is transformed (discharged) as a feeling of sharing group power in ejecting a participant from a ‘show’: this is catharsis in the strict Aristotelian sense (a purging of our fears through spectacle). However, this competition mechanism is now exploited in television news as well as in entertainment.

The importance of the crowd in the celebrity system can be gauged from the minimal attention given to viewer call-in polls on political issues, though these represent the opinions of concerned voters as much as those of lobbyists, compared to the intense scrutiny which television journalists and political leaders give to ‘street’ opinion polls no matter how wide the margin of error. In the first place there is no crowd, no moment of discharge, and the poll leads to no result. In the second, the polled voters are presumed to represent a crowd seeking discharge, and policies may change. Where this discharge is supposed to take the crowd is discussed in the following section.

The electronic crowd of individuals

Canetti also argues that a crowd is either open and must grow to survive, or it is a closed crowd that puts its stress on permanence (17). The television manipulators of crowds for entertainment and media purposes seek to create a hybrid: one that does not disintegrate as soon as it stops growing, bolstering its sense of permanence, while giving the impression that it is continuing to grow. Their solution is a crowd of individuals. This is sometimes called an audience, whose association is not just of people listening but also hints at a meeting of lower-status individuals with royalty.

There is, certainly, this side to the relationship. Jean Baudrillard has noted how affluent society speaks to its citizens as if they are free, active and discriminating while requiring them to be passive, subservient consumers living with restricted choices. However, the term “audience” neglects the other side of Baudrillard’s equation: its members must actively consume to meet the economy’s cyclic and recyclic demands (1986:151-2).

Nevertheless, this consumption is anonymous. The television programs which seek to activate their viewers regularly show close-ups of the audience, validating the social acceptability of the cruelty of the treatments meted out (whether the satire in the 1960s show That Was the Week That Was and its US equivalent Saturday Night Live as well as current ‘reality’ shows). Other shows of similar competitive cruelty in front of audiences rely on a (malevolent) godlike figure: Ann Robinson in The Weakest Link, or Donald Trump in The Apprentice and to some extent Simon Cowell as a judge in the Idol talent shows. They become the lightning rod for the injustices of the system (Canetti speaks of Rulers and Paranoiacs) while the live audience is encouraged to be partisan.

In each case the viewers are treated as if they go along with the cruelties enacted onscreen and they have no choice. These viewers can be likened to Canetti’s invisible crowds, the dead, who require “people with special gifts, called Shamans, who have the power to conjure up and subdue the spirits and turn them into their servants” (48). Slogan, Canetti suggests, comes from the Celtic Scots: sluagh means ‘spirit-multitude’ (fighting ghosts) and sluagh-ghairm the battle-cry of the dead (49). “With their venomous unerring darts they kill cats and dogs, sheep and cattle. They fight battles in the air as men do on the earth” (49).[142]

The irritable crowd

One other characteristic of crowds highlighted by Canetti merits discussion. “One of the most striking traits of the inner life of a crowd,” he reports, “is the feeling of being persecuted, a peculiar angry sensitiveness and irritability directed against those it has once and forever nominated as enemies” (24). However, these enemies are not solely outside it. “An attack from outside can only strengthen the crowd,” he writes. “An attack from within, on the other hand, is really dangerous. [...] It is an appeal to individual appetites and the crowd, as such, regards it as bribery, as ‘immoral’” (25). Television, particularly of the demagogic kind, takes on this irritability and feeling of persecution, of values threatened which it presumes (without asking) that its viewers share, and by asserting its values as “objective” or trustworthy (CNN self-advertisements: how could any viewers effectively show distrust except by excluding themselves from the ‘community’ of CNN watchers?) or “fair and balanced” (Fox News slogan), it coerces viewers into adopting its perspective on events.

Curbing the excess

Any society, defined as a system that seeks to control the meanings and values that circulate within it – i.e., in the Nietzschean term taken over by Georges Bataille and Derrida, the excess that seeks potentially disruptive expression within that society – faces a similar problem both with celebrities and possible atrocity victims: both possess Weberian charisma. Their iconic status – which suppresses their singularity, the characteristic which Derrida expects a true democracy to respect (Fred Ulfers pers. comm. 8 June 2004) – leaves both celebrities and atrocity victims open to manipulation but also provides a potent source of their power. The very quality which Alberoni singles out to distinguish celebrities from rulers of society, their lack of an institutional position, increases the excess of energy (the charisma) at their disposal because – not having been elected or placed in a hierarchy by formal rules – they apparently cannot be ejected, except by the will of the crowd.

This assumption is by no means true, of course. But such is the charismatic power of those singled out by the crowd that the ejectors need to create the impression that the elimination, whether of celebrities or atrocity victims, Jews or Soviet citizens under Stalin, responds to the general will, that great amorphous force invoked repeatedly in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ideas of democracy and in the French Revolution’s most bloodthirsty phase.

For these reasons, one of the major activities of society’s controllers is to wage an unremitting war against these charismatic elements, to the point where their elimination no longer arouses protest. Since a host of uncoordinated, simultaneous battles would be costly and risk calamitous defeat, society can best direct its energies to creating a system of suppression and management that gives the appearance of celebrating rather than challenging its positively charismatic figures while neutralizing its negatively charismatic victims.

The twilight of the icons

The process can be seen at work in the most anodine setting: a television program ostensibly celebrating the top 100 popular culture icons (VH1 2004) broadcast on a major pop music channel. Comments will focus on the similarities with the way in which victims of atrocity are treated, since this aspect is of major concern.

The first characteristic of this program was that though these featured celebrities were/are all people (except for the cartoon characters), they are categorized as icons by the program-makers (thereby already losing a large part of their individuality). The second characteristic is that they were ranked (from 100-1), subordinating them to a control and competitive positioning in which they had no choice or part as human beings. The order of presentation, from 100 to 1, though it could be justified in terms of suspense and standard pop show presentations, is contrary to the standard television practice with regard to real competitions (news, politics and sports) where the winners appear first, and the losers hardly at all. Since the 100 were not named in advance, the procession upwards through the list left open a large field, strengthening the power of the (celebrity) judges over the charisma of the performers. Those named at the beginning were already eliminated, while those so far unlisted (and their supporters) were theoretically continually uncertain whether they would appear at all or in what position. The crescendo style builds on the analogy of the eliminatory quiz show. News programs exercise a version of the same device for the same reasons, often making their middle segment the most visually enticing and exciting, rather than the ‘official’ bulletins that precede it, and flagging it as such.

In all such “open games,” where the rules are uncertain, the program-makers must maintain a delicate balance in order to sustain their control without antagonizing the audience (who could switch channels and reduce the advertising revenue of such programs). They must demonstrate their ability to dominate the medium without making ‘envy’ (in Freud’s sense of a destructive energy) manifest to the viewers for which they are shamans and ‘mediators.’ As a result, some of the sequences are built around the equivalent of visual puns, i.e. holding two meanings present at the same time, but only for lower-ranked (though not lower-status) celebrities. Woody Allen, a filmmaker and comedian who often stars in his own films, is shown twice in stills kissing a woman, an allusion to the scandal of his sexual relations with an adopted teenage stepdaughter whom he later married. Bill Clinton, a figure from the political rather than popular culture world, is shown first playing saxophone (noting visually his presumption to seek to extend his charisma into another sphere), grinning with his family and then kissing the intern with whom he said he did not have sexual relations (a statement that repeatedly flashed onscreen and which he was also shown mouthing), rather than scenes of his political activity as President of the world’s major economic power. By showing that the editors could feel free to ‘play’ with Clinton’s “iconostash” of powerful images, the channel could assimilate him into the world of meanings where it holds sway and claims to mediate its viewers’ wishes, to deliver them as an appreciative or destructive crowd.

Extralude

Aporisms: atrocity, celebrity and the arts

Stendhal syndrome, Angel says, is a medical term. It’s when a painting, or any work of art, is so beautiful it overwhelms the viewer. It’s a form of shock. When Stendhal toured the Church of Santa Croce in Florence in 1817, he reported almost fainting from joy. People feel rapid heart palpitations. They get dizzy. Looking at great art makes you forget your own name, forget even where you’re at. It can bring on depression and physical exhaustion. Amnesia. Panic. Heart attack. Collapse.

– Chuck Palahniuk, Diary (2003:104).

Discussion of art’s treatment of celebrity and atrocity will require another excursion into theory, largely because, outside Adorno’s concern at the ways in which an “administered society” seeks also to control products of the imagination (as well as their circulation), art is mainly treated by critics and historians only from an “aesthetic” viewpoint, as autonomous works whose valuation takes place in a critical vacuum divorced from the processes of their society, and sometimes each other. The language employed similarly suffers not just from a lack of definition but from its badge of respectability only in a discourse of what Pierre Bourdieu spoke of as “cultural capital”[143], identifying the standing of its user rather than designating any property of the artistic work.

As a result, even comparatively enlightened critics put an emphasis on ways in which artists challenge ideas in society, or the history of art, rather than the more typical struggle of the artist: to use their imagination to find a form that embodies their intuitions about perception in a non-“symbolic” way.

Given the horrific experiences of victims of atrocity and the impossibility of doing justice to atrocity in fictional form, why should any producers of creative works, such as Stephen Spielberg or Roberto Benigni (unlike Doestoyevsky who squarely faced the challenge of finding evidence of God’s grace in the worst of life), concern themselves with atrocity? The immediate answer is that they can make large amounts of money if they can provide a formula for the general public to feel absolved of the greatest crimes of our time (while stirring their esthetic concern). But even creative artists who cannot be accused of a native insensitivity to the larger questions have felt obliged to explore the experience of atrocity. From Joseph Beuys to Vladimir Nabokov and Martin Amis to Damien Hurst, from Goya to Benjamin Britten, the power of their work is inexplicable without taking the impact of atrocity in modern history into account. This dissertation does not pretend to offer an explanation for their – or other artists’ – concern with atrocity, often in disguised or masked forms. But the strategies employed by such artists is of critical concern for media producers who seek to find a way to deal with atrocity in a form that does not presume to judge the experience of perpetrators or victims[144]. The philosopher Richard Rorty has concluded that works of art today carry more weight in their treatment of moral issues than conventional ethical discussions (1989:xvi. See page 150).

It must be admitted that a number of artists seem to be obsessed with atrocity but show little concern for its challenge to philosophy, among them Stanley Kubrick and J.G. Ballard. They offer sociological insights but rarely engage in the philosophical issues. For example, Graham Greene seemed to find the idea of evil – sometimes disguised as fanaticism –a sufficient explanation of atrocity. The French Catholic filmmaker Robert Bresson, similarly, makes powerful films about the inexplicability of grace (an almost Jansenist pessimism about human potential suffuses his work) but offers little for philosophers of cruelty to explain, even in his films based on Dostoevsky’s novels (Pickpocket, Une Femme Douce). Very much the same aesthetic point is the driving energy behind Flannery O’Connor’s works from “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (1955) to The Violent Bear It Away (1960). They therefore do not feature here in any detail.

However, a commercial director, Alfred Hitchcock, can stand as the paradigmatic artist who, though recognized as dealing with horror, coats the implications via a manipulative narrative that buries their meaning[145]. Similarly, Peter Brook’s Marat/Sade (1967), drawn from the play by Peter Weiss, takes a view of the psychiatric institution of Charenton inspired by Foucault to lay bare society’s rule by repression, but also shows and suggests that only a fantasy revolution is possible against such controls (the asylum both makes possible and is the only world seen as possible for the revolt, which is staged as an orgy of fascistic individual pleasures rather than communally liberating). The possibility of an affirmative social revolution is denied.

Others for whom atrocity is central to their artistic production as a recurrent theme are rarely recognized as dealing with the issue because of the framework in which atrocity appears, particularly Jean-Luc Godard, Chantal Akerman and Vladimir Nabokov.

“Listen to me,” I say. I shout, “If I wanted to feel anything, I’d go to a frigging movie.”

– Chuck Palahniuk, Choke (2001:155).

In the first place it is necessary to situate these artists. The ‘positioned knowledge’ and creative strategies they employ put them outside the mainstream which commercial critics inhabit. In fact, their most sensitive reviewers have often been ‘non-professionals’ in criticism such as philosopher Richard Rorty (Nabokov), actress Delphine Seyrig (Akerman) or student communards (Godard). It is therefore necessary to take the long way round in discussing their treatment of atrocity.

Godard and Disenchantment

Your handwriting. The way you walk. Which china patterns you choose. It’s all giving you away. Everything you do shows your hand.

– Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby (2003:132).

Jean-Luc Godard makes probably the most charmless films in the history of cinema. His only rival is Peter Greenaway. This statement should be read as a description not a judgment. His films highlight the extent to which other directors rely on charm to make their movies acceptable. the charms of narrative, character, theme, story, spectacle, display, ‘content,’ personality, photography, fluidity of editing, voyeurism, spectator distance, personal involvement, ‘realism’ or willful fantasy.

Godard’s stylistic originality – his strategy of disenchantment, demystification, and deconstruction of conventional efforts to disguise the coercive messages that film often seek to pass – frequently hides from critics the extent to which his films are political, not just in their theoretical monologs, but in their concern with the practical realities and violence of modern politics, particularly torture and assassination (Le Petit Soldat, Les Caribiniers, and Made in USA, i.e. particularly in his least discussed works).

In Made in USA (1964), what is striking in retrospect is his fidelity to the knowledge of politics which modern society provides. As a result, in explicating the film, the normally careful Richard Roud confesses in what became the first English-language text on Godard (MacCabe 2000:375): “The plot is extremely confusing. [...] The reason for this confusion is quite simple: Godard’s desire for realism. Nobody knows to this day who killed Ben Barka and how it was done [...] And, Warren Report or not, no one yet knows the full story of the Kennedy assassination [both referred to in the film]. Any film about these events would, according to Godard, be false and dishonest. Just as Les Caribiniers seemed to many stupid and nonsensical, so Made in USA seems to many confused and absurd. The reasons are similar in both cases. But at least anyone could follow Les Caribiniers, whereas the same is not true of Made in USA. Godard’s justification for this confusion lies in the impossibility of our understanding some aspects of both the Kennedy assassination and the Ben Barka affair” (104)[146].

Finally, and with much hesitation, Roud finds Made in USA a failure. Godard himself told Colin MacCabe (75): “Things were too mixed up. I wanted to say too many things.” It was filmed to help out producer Georges Beauregard when Godard had already been commissioned to make One or Two Things that I know about Her (Roud 1967:101). Godard had just seen Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep (103) and said he was inspired by the idea of a remake with Anna Karina in a trench coat (103). The most common response seems to have been: “It is his slightest film since Alphaville, perhaps even since Bande à Part. Conversely (a word that seems to turn up very often in articles on Godard), it is also one of the most difficult” (Ian Cameron 114). “It’s no surprise that the film’s Swedish distributors caught a terrible cold with it, for Made in USA is the least exportable of Godard’s films” (116).

Its difficulties have been ascribed to his efforts to use anti-narrative techniques and fragmentation of plot at the same time as setting out an exposition of the absurdity of the contemporary world: “In fact, according to traditional views of aesthetics, it is wholly proper to have the form express the content. But this has not been Godard’s way before, and it doesn’t work too well here” (Roud 115). Cameron, too, recognizes Made in USA as having a “centre-less structure” (114). But many of the “meaningless” remarks, Cameron notes, prove to have significance. In a bar Anna Karina notes that “during a war 70+14 make 40” (a reference to three French disasters – the 1870 Franco-Prussian war, the outbreak of the First World War and assassination of the Socialist leader Jean-Jaurès, and the collapse of French defenses at Sedan in 1940 (116).

In this respect, MacCabe remarks: “It is not usual to consider A bout de soufflé a political movie; the conventional wisdom is that Godard does not reflect on politics until Le Petit Soldat, and yet the terms of the problems of politics are already assembled in the first film” (50). More significantly, he points out: “Godard has never simply accepted the form of the political” (51). Towards the end of the film, Godard’s commentary asserts: “We were certainly in a film about politics: Walt Disney plus blood” (MacCabe 2000:177).

For a “slight” film, Made in USA carries some heavy political baggage: “References to Kennedy, to Ben Barka, to the murder of the mayor of Evian and to the fates of the 17 witnesses to the Kennedy assassination as well as to the fact that Paul [Anna Karina] wanted to write a book on Lee Harvey Oswald, underline the impression that assassination is the international reserve currency of politics. Richard [Paula’s murdered boyfriend] wrote that ‘le fascisme était le dollar de la morale’ [Fascism was the dollar of morality]” (Cameron 1967:121). Similarly, “torture is a normal part of the political underworld’s activities. Marie Dufour [one of the briefly seen characters] was tortured with a razor blade. Mme Celine, the charwoman from Une Femme Mariée, turns up walking with a limp. We learn that she has been tortured. [She says.] ‘Toujours le sang, la peur, la politique, l’argent. [Forever blood, fear, politics, money]” (121). Twice the film insists, via the cover of a paperback book, that the revolutionary left is back to its starting point: “gauche année zéro”, as Cameron also notes (120). The film ends with an observation that Left and Right are outdated notions, and questions have to be posed in other terms (121). Cameron also picks up on Godard’s concern with politics as war (“since Le Petit Soldat” – 121), the illusion of war as a game (in Les Caribiniers), war as entertainment (in Pierrot le Fou), and politics as a bad movie (102)[147].

But for Godard, the Kantian separation of ethics from esthetics does not operate in the modern world. As Richard Roud observes: “Godard’s characters often quote Lenin’s statement that Ethics are the Aesthetics of the future” (129). Godard himself is quoted as noting: “It may be true that one has to choose between ethics and aesthetics, but it is no less true that whichever one chooses, one will always find the other at the end of the road. For the very definition of the human condition should be in the mise en scène itself. / Literary critics [...] often praise works like Ulysses or Fin de Partie [Beckett’s Endgame] because they exhaust a certain genre, they close the doors on it. But in the cinema we are always praising works which open doors’”(129).

The parallels with Theodor Adorno hardly need stressing, particularly if one reads Adorno’s “after Auschwitz, writing poetry is barbaric” as a challenge rather than a condemnation. Somehow, in his works that foreground atrocity (though ignored by critics), Godard seeks through imagination to open those doors. The devices of apparent confusion, “illogicality” and ludicrous sentimentality (political in Godard’s case) are adopted wholescale by David Lynch in Blue Velvet.

Writing at the turn of the millennium, Colin MacCabe draws a conclusion that differs from earlier critics: “What the film actually demonstrates is the complete inability of the form to deal with the reality of a politics which eludes the easy solutions of the thriller genre. In some ways, the simple and somber message of the film is the inability of the left to cope with the development of consumer capitalism: ‘Left Year Zero’ is a repeated slogan as the film builds to its anticlimax” (2003:177).

Godard described his aim around that time as “to show and to show myself showing” (MacCabe 2003:176). Made in USA represents the last of his films working within the old narrative structure (many of the characters are named after Godard’s favorite American directors), demonstrating through its manipulation of the plot elements and scenario the disintegration of such strategies in the face of modern politics. The film he was making at the same time Deux ou trios choses que je sais d’elle (Two or Three Things I Know About Her) brings the post-narrative form to center stage. In his later public pronouncements Godard has been care to “refuse all generalities in favor of specifics” (MacCabe 2003:256). He has also tried to make television that in Six fois deux/Six times Two (1976) refuses to use all the basic conventions of television (MacCabe 2003:259). The programs were well received by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze for Godard’s search to speak with all his interlocuters “on equal terms” (ibid 258) but the general reaction was dismissive for making television “extremely arduous viewing” (ibid 259).

His company’s second project for television France tour detour deux enfants/France tour detour two children (1979) uses repetition and direct address and follows a normal day for two small children through 12 half-hour programs. It demonstrated, however, that “the forms of communication which should enable us to speak to one another are so fixed in routine and so stereotyped that they are all but impossible to use,” MacCabe notes (2003: 260). He adds: “As if to prove Godard’s point, the programmers sat on France tour detour deux enfants, eventually broadcasting them in four slots (three programs a slot) dedicated to great film directors (ibid). In his 1990s work, Histoire(s) du cinema/History(histories) of the Cinema (1978) Godard seeks to allow ‘the eye to negotiate for itself’ (MacCabe 2003:299) through the blending of multiple images onscreen, almost like a Finnegans Wake of cinema.

This technical expertise, an attempt to tell the history of cinema visually, as he had dreamed of at least since 1980 (19), was not just a demonstration of formal mastery: “The failure to prevent or record the camps is one of the major, if not the major, theme of the Histoire(s)” (MacCabe 2003:327). The juxtaposition of Elizabeth Taylor’s smile with footage of the Nazi concentration camps became “the most discussed sequence” from the first part (ibid 299)[148]. Godard’s commentary points out that George Stevens, maker of the film A Place of the Sun from which the Taylor still is taken, made his first film in color at Auschwitz and Ravensbrook. The concentration camp still comes from D-day to Berlin by Stevens. Godard’s commentary also brings to the forefront the double reality hidden behind these stills: “He analyses the force of Taylor’s smile in terms of Stevens’s desire to celebrate life after this experience of death. On the other hand this scene fits into the major theme of the histories – that the cinema is guilty for allowing the camps to happen, for not recording history accurately enough either to stop the killing from happening or to understand what happened” (MacCabe 2003:299).

In Histoire(s), which is likely to be viewed later as the most important of Godard’s statement films (as distinct from his dramatizations), Godard begins with the statement: “The cinema substitutes for our regard (with regard to us) a world which matches (is in line with) our desires (1998:18-21, my translation[149]. What those desires include is indicated later when a photo of Mussolini behind a cine-camera is titled “Ordinary Fascism” and juxtaposed with Errol Flynn (reputedly a Fascist sympathizer[150]) and the title “Captain Blood” (227).

To investigate the implications for media philosophers, it is necessary to go back to Made in USA and Godard’s most extensive comments on the film in a seminar summarized in Godard’s first attempt at a history of cinema (1980). His memories may be colored by his failing relationship with the star Anna Karina: “Karina remembers Godard being so unpleasant to her on set that even Coutard was moved to comment that he shouldn’t treat her so badly. Many bitter and unspeakable things were said” (MacCabe 2003:178). But accepting that Godard considers Made in USA less than satisfactory (“It is not very good because there are a lot of extremely confused things in it” – 1980:155), the explanation for the confusions is instructive.

Whereas the film he was making in parallel introduces us to Godard’s favorite device of the unreliable commentator (a voice-over whose statements are not to be taken on trust), Made in USA represented a fiction he had constructed “purely commercially” (1980:156). Godard also complains that, in contrast to American filmmakers, he is similar to most Europeans in being unable to construct a narrative: “The strength of the Americans is that they tell stories all the time […] but I didn’t know how to tell stories” (157), but in contrast to the Americans, Europeans have a sense of history (ibid). Furthermore, “censorship at the time was more ridiculous than I was” (ibid). Godard adds: “What was most interesting was above all the colors: there was a certain amount of research into colors; but that does not make a film” (156).

Here Godard is confessing he was unable to produce a purely commercial narrative film in the thriller genre that embodied a sense of history, while working under “ridiculous” censorship. Who could have thought that he would be able to? No wonder, as Le Mépris/Contempt made clear, Godard admired so much a European director who, it seemed, could do just this: Fritz Lang (Godard, though, has shown no interest in the gothic style, and Lang’s cartoon-like plots exclude explicit history as rigorously as Godard includes such references). Godard also seems to exaggerate the cleavage between Made in USA and the more formally inventive film he was making with the same crew in parallel. Significantly, “the shots of the tortured young girls are shots that were filmed for Deux ou trois choses” (1980:156).

The 1990s onwards, with the films of Quentin Tarantino, David Lynch, Spike Jonze, Paul Thomas Anderson and David Cronenberg’s more adventurous experiments, have put Made in USA in a less absurd light. In spite of the contrasts between the two directors, Made in USA could even seem to take its place alongside Ingmar Bergman’s films of bleak social perceptions such as Silence, Shame or Anna’s Passion. Given Godard’s experience with the inadequacies of narrative to deal with political horror, one can understand his complaint to New York’s film critics (refusing their award in 1995) that they had failed “to prevent Mr Spielberg from reconstructing Auschwitz” (MacCabe 2003:327). “From very early on,” writes Colin MacCabe, “Godard held that the only way to film the camps would be from the perspective of the home life of one of the guards” (ibid).

The fractured elliptical style, its black jokes[151], acceptance of the social framework in which torture routinely takes place, this is Godard’s picture of society as viewed by one of the guards. In his seminar on Made in USA, Godard suggests that detective thrillers are so popular because the investigator “corresponds to the notion of liberty which people have (which is not necessarily freedom) – someone who walks around hands in pockets [as Karina does in the film], who does nothing, who is not forced to work at a machine like a factory worker, who does not have any heavy governmental responsibilities or anything like that, who smokes a cigarette, who can go into a pub, who can grab someone by the collar and ask them questions…It must represent the ideal of freedom for the West. Those are the real heroes, the police officers, even if people do not like them” (1980:159).

Greenaway: Waiting for Prospero – or Oblivion?

“The more you know about art, the more it sounds like witchcraft.”

– Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby (2003:195).

Peter Greenaway’s films, for many viewers, appear (like Godard’s) to exhaust their genre. They are full of domestic (rather than political) atrocities – a 17th-century draughtsman is sexually exploited by a rich family and then murdered for his presumption (The Draughtsman’s Contract, 1983), in Z and Two Noughts (1986), after the death of their wives in a car accident, two zoologist brothers study the process of decay in fleshly matter before dying themselves. Like Ballard, Greenaway can be said to be inspired into poetry by lists, the world as catalog rather than narrative (Manovich 2001:239). Prospero’s Books (1991) divides Shakespeare’s Tempest into the story of 24 books. The narrative is transformed completely into catalog. However, his lists, his films as self-conscious databases of scenic material, are challenged ironically by histories of catastrophe and decay. Greenaway’s films make repeated references to violence, without seeking to exploit the violence for participatory excitement. “Many things die violently every day,” is a line in Drowning By Numbers (1988), but many of his films demonstrate this conviction[152].

It is not going too far to see in Greenaway’s preference for numbering systems in his projects (art installations as well as films) not just a counterweight to narrative but also to the pulse of time. He has written: “If a numerical, alphabetic color-coding system is employed, it is done deliberately as a device, a construct, to counteract, dilute, augment or complement the all-pervading obsessive cinema interest in plot, in narrative, in the ‘I’m now going to tell you a story’ school of filmmaking” (Pascoe 1997:9-10, cited by Manovich 238). One reason why The Draughtsman’s Contract has been his biggest success is that the film keeps before the viewer the double tension between his effort to subvert narrative and the irresistible onward pressure of story[153].

In The Language of New Media (2001), Russian-American film theorist Lev Manovich has suggested that new media are characterized by numerical representation (27), modularity (30), automation (32), variability (36) and transcoding (45). The last three characteristics need some explanation: automation refers to the mechanical/machinelike format used for products, variability requires “potentially infinite versions” (36), while transcoding refers to translation into another format, e.g. from the conventions of the printed page to virtual spaces (47), or in Greenaway’s case from databases to narrative. Making allowance for the questionable terms used to specify the potentialities of new media, theorists can easily see how the filmmaker uses its facilities: “Throughout his career, he has been working on the problem of how to reconcile database and narrative forms. Many of his films progress by recounting a list of items, a catalog without any inherent order.[…] His favorite system is numbers. The sequence of numbers acts as a narrative shell that ‘convinces’ the view that she is watching a narrative. In reality, the scenes that follow one another are not connected in any logical way” (238).

While noting that Greenaway’s earlier films such as The Falls (1980) followed this database logic, Manovich offers no explanation of why the director should have chosen this strategy. It is treated purely as a question of aesthetic experimentation with no relation between the form and content – no sense that there was any content challenging Greenaway to find an adequate form in his films. Yet, as many of Greenaway’s films indicate through their subject matter, cruelty and gratuitous suffering are a major theme of his creative work. Windows (1975) focuses us on the openings which a number of people have used to commit suicide. As early as 1984 he began work on A TV Dante. In 1989 he made Death in The Seine, working on the 404 people whose bodies were recovered from the French river between 1795 and 2001 (Berthin-Scaillet 1992-3:25). Act of God (1981), Greenaway’s first film for television, deals with 10 people who were struck by lightning (23).

Nor does Greenaway see his aesthetic games as offering an ‘artistic’ way out of the imprisonment of an comprehensively administered world. The 45-minute fiction-documentary Vertical Feature Remake offers a humorous parody of art biographies in the Borges style (perhaps Pierre Ménard, author of Don Quixote). Eventually all its pretentions trip over its form. The contradictory nature of organized knowledge is recognized in the citation from the director found on the first page of the major website devoted to Greenaway: “Creation, to me, is to try to orchestrate the universe to understand what surrounds us. Even if, to accomplish that, we use all sorts of stratagems which in the end prove completely incapable of staving off chaos”[154].

In the works of Greenaway’s ‘maturity’ such as The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover (1989), Prospero’s Books (1991), The Baby of Mâcon (1992) and Pillow Book (1996), the cruelty and the power are joined together (as distinct from The Draughtsman’s Contract or Zed and Two Noughts) and the dilemmas are treated in various ways that involve staging, creativity, control and the indifference to others’ suffering which such powers may entail. For Greenaway, the artist as magician does not (as in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest) enjoy the tranquility of mastery in the face of all forms of brutishness. Artistic craftsmanship is unable to halt the cruelty that spreads throughout society in all its forms, but this cruelty may also be price of our artistic treasures. How did Dante come by his knowledge of the suffering in the circles of Hell? Greenaway has an inkling but this knowledge cannot be dramatized, only presented, only staged.

Chantal Akerman: The Claims of Silence

“We may say that the patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out. He reproduces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it.” – Sigmund Freud 1914:150.

Critics have given much attention to the surface of Chantal Akerman’s work. The most frequently recommended study by Ivone Margulies is entitled Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday. From this perspective, her Jewish background and concern for the Jewish past represents a foreign intrusion into her basic themes rather than a central element in her filmmaking and an explanation for some apparently puzzling silences. Noting her determined interest in filming Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Manor and the Estate, Margulies describes this “epic book” as “a form quite alien to her aesthetic” while acknowledging that this interest showed how much Jewish experience “is an important focus for her” (195) Histoires d’Amérique (1976) presents us with milky pictures of a New York skyline while Akerman tells Jewish jokes. As Margulies notes: “The film is about memory; tradition is the moral core of this remembrance.” (196).

More significantly, however, this memory is not recalled in images by this supremely visual memorialist, someone so aware of the importance of the present moment that a recurrent Akerman strategy is to slow the passing of time down to the point where moving pictures evoke the contemplative power of paintings.[155]

Akerman makes films that treat her Jewish heritage in the same way as Georges Perec, as much by what is left out as what is obscurely included. Perec wrote La Disparition (1969) without using the letter ‘e’, teasingly pointing to the disappearance of an everyday element of language (and the certificate issued by the French Ministry of War Veterans about his mother’s disappearance headed Acte de Disparition)[156]. In W or The Memory of Childhood (1975), the reader is expected to pick up on the references to Chaplin, his mother’s death “in the camps” and the cryptic reference to the film M (banned by the Nazis when they came to power in 1933). These links are laid out explicitly by David Bellos in his biography of Perec (1995:400, 550-553).

How usable can this be as a strategy for dealing with atrocity? The question is misplaced. Akerman’s documentary on a Texas murder of a black man (South) uses its last minutes to simply trace the route taken by the truck that dragged the young man to his death. Her film of a return to Poland, the country of her parent’s birth, points without commentary to a country road and landscape so many Jews had to follow to their extermination. The weight of history is palpable, though unspecifiable, sending viewers back to their own landscapes to revisit their sense of the past these contain.

Akerman has raised these difficulties herself in one of the most enlightening discussions of her work. She questioned whether her mother would be able to watch film of the extermination camps. “What are you allowed to show about the camps? That's the biggest thing a filmmaker should ask himself. It's the same problem whether you're talking about documentary or fiction,” she pondered. “The Americans took some images of the camps when they arrived there. When you see those images, they are totally frightening and horrifying, of people totally destroyed. With the image alone it is not possible to be totally aware of what it was for the people to be in that situation. In a way images are foreclosing, and it's totally right for an extreme case, because images will never say what the people have gone through. In a way that's why you should have other strategies to speak about it” (pers. comm. 2001[157]).

One of the closest indicators of the force of Akerman’s practice can be found in the Renaud Camus “affair” in France in 2000. La Campagne de France, published in April 2000, was a diary containing a number of anti-Semitic and racist passages (Derrida and Roudinesco 2001:52). Jacques Derrida signed a petition launched by Claude Lanzmann describing these texts as “criminal” (Le Monde 25 May 2000). The book was withdrawn from retailers but sent back to the bookshops in July with blank spaces replacing the offending passages (Derrida and Roudinesco 2001.52). For those who knew of the scandal, the blanks stood in for the racism. They lost none of their salience by being only white space, indicating the racism of Camus for some, the censorship of ‘truths’ for others, and for any postmodern observer a focus on racism discourse in contemporary society.

Chantal Akerman can teach media practitioners that they do not need always to present a picture for their story, and that it is often more honest to the experience for them not to.

Claude Lanzmann: Mission Impossible

“Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.” – Walter Benjamin (1940.255).

Superficially, the films of Claude Lanzmann resemble conventional documentaries, but of an unusually pure type. They bear a similarity, at least on first glance, with what became known in UK television history as Face-to-Face interviews, after a program of the same name that subjected an individual in extreme close-up to prolonged questioning from a relentless interviewer (John Freeman). From this point of view, Lanzmann could seem less ascetic than Freeman. His films include a number of staged scenes, atmospheric pans and traveling shots, and Michael Moore-type confrontations with former Nazis and crypto-anti-Semites.

However, it is a mistake to forget that Lanzmann started adult life as a philosophy student and almost completed his dissertation (on Leibniz) (Joan Grossman pers. comm. 2004).It is hardly surprising, therefore, that his films are impregnated with a philosophical attitude to his subject.

While Spielberg’s movies protest against the social dehumanization of individuals, Claude Lanzmann insists in his testimonial films on the Shoah that the everyday experience of the extermination camps was both banal and extremely demanding on the individual, ordinary in its horrific procession of atrocities and impossible to assimilate to any metaphysical scheme of meaning. His films, he underlines, are conceived as works of art not documentary (pers. comm. 2003), supremely self-conscious (rather than self-obsessed).

At the same time, he puts the highest value on an honest confrontation with the reality. He apparently criticized another recorder of camp experience (Jorge Semprun), who, Semprun says, was dismissed with the words: “He makes literature out of it” (Girod: 2001). Lanzmann was speaking more accurately than perhaps he knew. Semprun’s novel The Long Voyage (winner of the Formentor prize) is built around conversations in a railroad wagon to Buchenwald between the author and a “guy from Semur” who dies just before the end of the book. Reading the manuscript for a publishing house, the critic Jean Paulhan described the conversations of this “honest” book as “excellent,” condemning the rest as lackluster. Semprun reports: “I invented the guy from Semur, I invented our conversations: reality often needs some make-believe to become real. In other words, to be made believable. To win the heart and mind of the reader” (1994.261-2).

Semprun’s choice of words is significant for considering Lanzmann’s work, since they describe a series of goals which the filmmaker rejects. He does not seek to create the real through make-believe or fiction, but rather through a conscious representation of the truth (though deliberately not by representing it). Much, he insists, was unbelievable but happened. He challenges, rather than seeks to win over, those who watch his films.

Simone de Beauvoir, once his lover and obviously a sympathetic observer of his efforts, says of Shoah (1985), the 9.5-hour film of memories of the Nazi extermination camps, that it is “neither fiction nor documentary” (Beauvoir 1985.iii). “The greatness of Claude Lanzmann’s art,” she writes, “is in making places speak, in reviving them through voices and, over and above words, conveying the unspeakable through people’s expressions.” It is also a form of philosophical honesty.

David Lynch: The Feeling of What Happens

Atrocity and a kind of weird celebrity – a charisma that is personally disturbing because so linked to violence – hovers around the films of David Lynch. The novelist David Foster Wallace has tried to capture something of the atmosphere in an article that hovers, equally hypnotized, around Lynch’s Lost Highway (1996): “This is one of the unsettling things about a Lynch movie: you don’t feel like you’re entering into any of the standard unspoken/unconscious contracts you normally enter into with other kinds of movies.[…] we lose some of the psychic protections we normally (and necessarily) bring to bear on a medium as powerful as film” (170). In Blue Velvet (1986), Wallace suggests, “Lynch carefully sets up his film […] so that we (I, anyway) find some parts of the sadism and degeneracy [Jeffrey Beaumont] witnesses compelling and somehow erotic, it’s little wonder that I find Lynch’s movie ‘sick’ – nothing sickens me like seeing on-screen some of the very parts of myself I’ve gone to the movies to try to forget about” (167).

What makes Lynch’s films disturbing is not that he treats violence in any novel way (for example compared to Greenaway or Luis Bunuel’s Chien Andalou) but that the framework in which it appears makes no attempt to smooth down the shock value (a similar process is the key to the painter Francis Bacon’s power to disturb). Wallace summarizes this ambience well: “The absence of linearity and narrative logic, the heavy multivalence of the symbolism, the glaced opacity of the characters’ faces, the weird ponderous quality of the dialogue, the regular deployment of grotesques as figurants, the precise, painterly way scenes are staged and lit, and the overlush, possibly voyeuristic way that violence, deviance, and general hideousness are depicted – these all give Lynch’s movies a cool, detached quality, one that some cineastes view as more like cold and clinical” (167).

Wallace notes Lynch’s references to Hitchcock’s Psycho and Vertigo – “more like intertextual touchstones than outright allusions” (158) – but fails to draw the resemblance to perhaps Hitchcock’s most sadistic film, Marnie, which has the same mixture of lush, high-gloss concentration on scenes that seem to fascinate Hitchcock (Marnie stealing from the office safe while others are around) but treating others perfunctorily, even stagily (the backstreets of Baltimore, the blood seeping across a teashirt in an almost de Kooning iconic way). Marnie, like Lynch’s best work has the disturbing quality of a bad dream, partly because of the indifference, so common to dreams, to enlivening elements that do not match the subconscious interests of the dreamer. Wallace observes: “The absence of point or recognizable agenda in Lynch’s films [stops normal] subliminal defenses and lets Lynch get inside your head in a way movies normally don’t. This is why his best films’ effects are often so emotional and nightmarish (we’re defenseless in our dreams, too)” (171).

Lynch’s films – and this is the lesson for this thesis – show the viewer, even force the viewer to participate in[158], this defenseless across a spectrum that spreads out from the violence across the whole of (usually small town) life. If the authoritarian personality (in Adorno’s phrase) is also a submissive personality (provided there is an authority to submit to), Lynch’s films create a world where the dream world of authoritarian violence exists co-terminally with one of ridiculous banality (as Žižek points out: 2000), and neither seem quite real despite the latter’s insistence on its normality and the former’s interruptive power over defensive sentimentality. Where Greenaway subordinates his scenes of post-violence into a finely organized database of the gaze, Lynch embraces the chaotic while glazing his images with a paranoid aestheticism. This fracture in conventional responses to everyday life recalls the accounts by Levi, Remy and Timerman of the rupture of confidence in the stability of relationships which the experience of torture leaves.

Steven Spielberg: The Claims of Sentimentality

“To understand the imagery of mass culture, we must recognize that […] even when there is a surface show of ‘reality’ (most famously in Normal Rockwell’s covers for the Saturday Evening Post), the purpose is to convey a dream or a nostalgia; or both.” – Paul Barker (1977).

It is no secret to anyone watching a Steven Spielberg movie that for him the adult world is uniformly terrible: irremediably temporary in its comforts and frequently implacable in its cruelty. His closest creative relation, even closer than with D.W. Griffith (whose instinctive sympathies, along with a superbly manipulative sense of theatre, went towards virginal young women rather than children as such), must surely be Charles Dickens. It is then perhaps no surprise that along with being an immensely successful popular artist, Spielberg has many detractors who accuse him of sentimentality, cheap emotional manipulation, insensitive suspense plots, unquestioning acceptance of Hollywood genre, and consolatory Hollywood resolutions to his films. Cultural critic Curtis White even describes Saving Private Ryan (1998, 8.3 out of 10 by vote on the Internet Movie Database site[159]) as “a crypto-fascist work of historical revisionism” for angling his World War II story of heroism under fire to make the German whose life is spared the killer of the American who saved him(2004:44). It is not clear that Spielberg saw the story this way: it fits too closely the way that Spielberg has depicted all adult human relations. It can be just as easily interpreted (and more plausibly in the light of Spielberg’s background) as indicating a higher moral worth to the American soldier than the enemy prisoner, one of the risks of humane feeling which its heroic for someone to take. What tends to be ignored is how much Spielberg generalizes his disgust with the adult world beyond the individual’s experience. Much of the postmodern writing on Jaws (by Žižek among others) treats the film as an exposé of a self-satisfied and corrupt society (see page 61)

Similarly, rather than considering Schindler’s List (1996) for an indication of how Spielberg deals with atrocity, it is easier to see his approach plainly through AI: Artificial Intelligence (2001), a science-fiction fairy story that might on the face of it seem to have little to do with the cruelties of an indifferent society. Claude Lanzmann has criticized Spielberg’s Holocaust film for implying that the story of the Shoah is that people were able to survive rather than that almost all died, and for failing to make clear that most people rounded up and sent to extermination camps died within a couple of hours of arriving, rather than experiencing days or months of existential brutality (pers. comm. 2001). In AI none of the robots escape, and in contrast to Godsend, which appeared the same year, the evil permeates all adult society rather than the robot boy David (a clone in Godsend). But it has to be admitted that the sentimentality in the final third of AI vitiates its power to deal with the issues it raises, and demands explanation. The structure and content receive extended treatment here because Spielberg’s failures in a genre that depends on instant legibility are as illuminating as the film’s successes, and the manipulation of disturbing experience through hidden ‘text’, characteristic of popular art, is even more important in a ‘children’s stories’[160].[161]

The sentimental in art

The sentimental (an insistence on a stereotypical emotional response to a scene or situation) is a way in which material that is more disturbing than what is presented can be still brought into play without articulating it. This, in fact, is the major reason that literary critics often reject the sentimental. Oscar Wilde said: “I cannot read of the death of Little Nell without laughing.” But a major wellspring for Dickens’s sentimentality was the indifference with which the death of a real-life Nell was encountered. Similarly, his sentimentality arises from his failed attempt to enact on the page the Victorian belief that a public show (of feeling or action) could represent an adequate response to human tragedy (and for many readers of the time his attempts did succeed in representing this conviction).

In drama and narrative, sentimentality can play the same role as message redundancy in the popular press (both in news stereotypes and advertisements): the broader the public, the less can be taken for granted that they will share the same world outlook, and the greater the need to reinforce the framework by which events are to be judged (Fiske 1982/1990:13). Where this framework is “a false representation of reality (ideology)” [to quote Jean Baudrillard on simulation (1981/94:12-13)], it is likely to be even more insistent.

However, such sentimentality will only be judged as coercive if it fails to be accompanied by a more interesting sub-text. AI, and this is Spielberg’s strength in his best films, is full of such unarticulated dialogue. Like most films about artificial intelligence, AI, through displacement, is really about what it means to be human. Spielberg makes this clear in the opening scene (after the prologue), Professor Hobby (William Hurt) replies to the black woman who questions whether a human being could come to love a robot, even one created to love human beings: “In the beginning didn’t God create Adam to love him?” All of the robots in AI are gentle, without hate or resentment. The humans are full of suspicion, regrets and vindictiveness. After sticking a pin in the android Sheila, Professor Hobby asks: “What did I do to your feelings?” She responds: “You did it to my hand” (2:48) – a schizophrenic reaction for a human, but a situation whose human analogies remain disturbingly close to the surface, particularly since we are not aware that she is a mecha (mechanical robot) before he sticks the pin in her.

The most emotionally charged scene deals with the abandonment of David the android by his mother. It is exacerbated by the thundering music of John Williams, as if this is not just one little boy being abandoned but all little children. It also bristles with key thematic lines: “Is it a game?” “I’ll be real for you.” “Stories are not real.” “I’m sorry I never told you about the world.” Delivered in a series of operatic (almost unintelligible) screams and sobs, they are easy to miss or dismiss in the swamp of music.

But the terrors of being abandoned and the guilt at failing to live up to a child’s demands, articulated at full throttle, are here conjoined with an equally brutal description of the future world as it is imagined to exist: ‘flesh fairs’ to destroy redundant and resented androids, threatened destruction, the helplessness of parents to protect their children against society’s heartlessness.

The scene climbs, nevertheless, altogether well over the top for many people. However, its very exaggerations can make the scene bearable for a child viewer. The noise – which for children is often associated with play and pleasure – stresses both the importance and the manageability of the traumatic break: in the first 20 minutes of the film, the Swinton couple’s house is full of silence, and the moment when the emotional breakthrough for the married couple with their adopted android David comes in a burst of noisy laughter from the boy.

Some kind of explosion is needed in the narrative, since the previous scene is one of repeated deception by the mother. Here, in long-trusted melodramatic style, David puts a range of significant (and unlikely) questions in series directly to his ‘mother.’ Her answers are irrelevant or known only to us: “Are they happy tears?” “What are we having for dinner tonight?” (“David, you don’t eat”, the mother points out). After this scene of painfully suppressed communication, the mother blurts out the truth with a series of warnings that are immediately confirmed as accurate predictions: the mecha hunting and roundup scene.

Typically for Spielberg, the hunt is filmed with as much relish for the hunters as sympathy for the robots: the motorbikes are styled like angry wolves, the hunt director is dressed like a 19th century balloonist and acts like a Hollywood pirate. The vicarious anxiety felt by the viewer is displaced onto surrogate participation in purposive action rather than simply sharing the panic of the hunted. Spielberg sees no artistic weakness in breaking the carefully established rapport with his audience through the android boy when a switch in viewpoint can relieve inescapable anxiety (a device that determines the closing third of the film). A successful commercial filmmaker is as much a skilled manipulator of sentimentality and melodramatic techniques as a prisoner of them (Douglas Sirk, Val Lewin, John Carpenter and Kurosawa are among the pantheon of such craftsmen and artists).

The commodification of personal relations

Though easily patterned by critical theory as an Oedipal drama, in which the boy is displaced at the behest of the father only to be reunited alone with the mother in a dream future at the price of death, AI can be deconstructed even more fruitfully as an explication of irremediable commodification of our most intimate relations – a situation continually challenged and reaffirmed. The Oedipal story operates only as a screen for a less manageable dilemma.

As made clear also in Minority Report (2002), the story of a police force that supposedly, by tapping into the projected dreams of specially gifted mediums, could act to prevent crimes before they are committed, Spielberg is not concerned with philosophic coherence in his stories. Indeed, I suggest, he even embraces the unbelievable (the machine that can love in AI) with the same ends as advertisements. A belief in magical responses to events and particularly magical solutions is a prerequisite of responding to the narrative (and one reason why so many critics were turned off). David in fact goes through the film very much like a half-hypnotized television addict. The Quest, in Spielberg’s version, is like a shopping expedition. Even David’s first scene – the hesitant footsteps and the focus on his shoes – so clumsy in terms of the narrative, delays his appearance in the same teasing way as a TV ad, concerned only with the impact of the immediate[162]. In this world, sentimentality represents no lapse in creativity, but rather a guarantee of normality, of a framework of emotions the viewer can endorse, in its espousal of the stereotype.

Mode jerking

One peculiarity of AI is certainly its major shifts in mood from “act” to “act” – from terrible family drama worthy of a Greek tragedy, to Mad Max spectacle / Blade Runner darkness and concrete philosophy, to wispy fairy tale with Utopian coda. Such ruptures in mood were typical of the original director of the project, Stanley Kubrick. They are not typical of Steven Spielberg, the film’s eventual director, just as the domestic-scale fairy story was not typical of Kubrick’s bombastic imagination. But the switches do seem deliberately close to the way in which dreams progress from scene to scene: the mood changes that re-energize the narrative momentum lead only to a reassertion in another form of the anxiety that generates the dramatic tension of the story. The production designer Rick Carter, in the bonus CD about the film, says Spielberg told him that Kubrick spoke of “mode-jerking” and that “this was supposed to be a kind of an entertainment in Rouge City. […] I realized that this whole movie is like mode-jerking” (‘From Drawings to Sets’, 1:00).

In fact, the film represents an almost textbook example of how movies can use dreamwork’s primary processes according to Freud – that is, condensation, displacement, symbolization, obliviousness to the categories of space and time, and toleration of contradictions (Rycroft 1968/1972: 37). Carter says the film represents “one dream that forms the basis of David’s experience” (7:00). It also provides an answer to psychoanalytical critic Christian Metz’s question: “Why then, after all, do good films as well as bad ones often tell stories?” (Metz 1993:ix).

AI offers clear allusions to ‘fairy’ tales ranging from the comparatively old (such as the 19th-century Pinocchio and the 20th-century Wizard of Oz, both as interpreted by Hollywood) to the futuristic (the films Mad Max II, Blade Runner and Planet of the Apes most obviously). But these operate almost as screens for the dream processes employed in this fantasy. The narrative continually provides a (happy or unhappy) resolution to its thematic material, but the film continues and the theme of death as the price of happiness returns insistently in another guise. Narrative thus functions as a way of suggesting development and contingency (the story) while continually falling back into timelessness and the unchangeable (the theme). The correspondences between situations, familiar as a way of exploring alternative destinies in narrative (e.g. King Lear and Gloucester, Edmund and Edward, the three daughters of Lear in the Shakespeare play), operate in AI not just to displace an unacceptable fate (death without having supplanted the Father in the eyes of the Mother) onto a substitute self. Narrative also enables the dream to continue beyond the realistic resolution, to escape reality-testing, and through its appeals to conventional expectations of dramatic form, to satisfy the consumer’s demands for a utopian ending (that is, a transformation of our anxieties into a climactic state of pleasure).

Cain and Abel revisited

Anyone who doubts the Father’s Oedipal role in AI might consider that Mr Swinton announces David’s arrival to his wife with “I love you, don’t kill me” (10:15). And this is offered as the solution to a situation in which husband and wife seem irreparably separated, at least emotionally, by their deep-frozen son (they are shown driving in silence towards the semi-coffin where the son is kept). The executive of the Cryogenics firm looking after the body (and robot producer) notes that the wife “can still be reached” as if she has departed from the marriage). The robot enters her life as a conscious emulation of the appearance of E.T. the extraterrestrial (key figure of an earlier Spielberg child fantasy). This is a seemingly unnecessary nod to the spectator, rather than to the mother or a warning to her against the father, since neither gives signs of being aficionados of what would by then have been remote film history. But it is also a graphic echo of the Cyrogenics icon that represents David’s first memory (in its color and blurred focus).

The film delays giving us a full shot of the android. The horror-style build-up simply signals to us the shock to the mother that the robot is so human in appearance but also tells she is not quite in control of her feelings, since he looks so normal. The father, of course, is presented as treating the introduction of the robot into their house as an experiment, but leaving most of the relationship to be created by the mother. “He’s a gift – from you,” Rachel Swinton tells her husband. Her acceptance acknowledges the Father’s right to dispose of the child.

Brian Aldiss, the author of the story on which AI was based (Supertoys last all summer long) saw the story as a drama about “a boy who was never able to please his mother” (xviii). Spielberg’s film is about a boy whose mother abandons him and then, finally, completes her life (and his) by doing everything he wants (in a resolutely non-sexual way, an exclusion that only points up the repressed desire, i.e. to become the father). Using classic theory’s recasting of the Oedipus story, we can consider AI’s message to be that the child finally recognizes that displacing the Father and possessing the Mother will result in the death of both the child and the mother, but that this culmination of its wishes can offer the ultimate and unalloyed satisfaction, provided that the right magical behavior is followed.

At one level, the android David’s story is simply that of the Swintons’ real son writ large. The ‘real’ boy Martin first appears almost as a machine (in a frozen state and encased in a glass topped tomb/incubator/space travel pod, just as David ends the main story encased in a helicopter in frozen waters). He is abandoned reluctantly by the mother when the father provides the substitute of an android (why did they not have another child? Well, in a sense they do). The abandoned child then incredibly comes alive (“David! The most wonderful thing in the whole world has happened. This is Martin. This is my son.”) and is restored to the mother’s love. David, too, is abandoned by the mother, again at the instigation of the father. Perhaps it is here a good occasion to note the obvious: that since David is an android, the father and mother can represent something more archetypal than being simply his parents, while his guiding thought – to become human (for the mother) – is another way of making the mother his mother (the father is Oedipally excluded from this drama).

Incredibly, too, David is revived and incredibly his mother is restored to him (the incredible is the only possible solution in dreams), and him alone, for one day. The echoes of Cain and Abel, within the Oedipal framework, are taken almost for granted. To highlight only the most insistent (non-realistic) example: David backs into the water clinging to Martin to escape from his human tormentors and his act is interpreted as an attempt to kill Martin. But when Martin is pulled out of the water by rescuers, David is left on the bottom and the camera switches to an overhead view of him lying there arms raised, legs out, like a stiffened corpse, as if he had been murdered. We had previously seen the legs of Martin from David’s viewpoint from the bottom of the pool as the son is lifted out. The overhead shot is therefore redundant, and we never learn why David should not have been able to simply swim up to the surface and climb out.

“Flirting is, in a sense, all children can do sexually with their parents, assuming the parents maintain the Oedipal prohibition. And by doing this they nurture the child’s sense of possible and future selves.” – Adam Phillips 1994:xxiii.

Clone story

In the essay ‘Clone Story,’ Jean Baudrillard offers a post-modernist version of the archetypal Cain and Abel male-child relationship, apparently inspired by Lacan’s argument for the “mirror-stage” of an individual’s psychological development: “When the double materializes, when it becomes visible, it signifies imminent death” (1981/1994:95). In AI the human son Martin “dies” with the appearance of David the robot. David is doomed by the reappearance of Martin, and after discovering all the simulacra of himself, he commits suicide. His relationship to Martin is underlined by the scene at the pool just before falling in: the boys around chant “mecha”, “orga” to distinguish between robots (mecha) and humans (orga), but the way the scene is set up (in a tight circle with no distinguishable difference between the two types), it is as if they are mirror images of the same overarching type of person[163]. And each inherits Teddy the supertoy bear, which becomes the focus of the two boys’ first battle (Teddy, like all children, runs to the mother rather than any of the two boys when asked to choose between them), while David, in an echo of Martin’s obvious desire, kills his clone at Professor Hobby’s office.

The reason for suicide

In one sense, the film comes to an end with David’s suicide (out of despair). The rest of the story tells of his miraculous rescue and willingness to die (exercising his capacity for unreasonable hope) in the expectation that he will be reunited with his mother.

What kind of mother is she, though? Between Mother and Son (whether Martin or David) the relationship is shot through with anxiety and guilt, resentments and misunderstandings. Being a good son (David) seems just as dangerous as being a bad boy (Martin). The good women in David’s life are all artificial (the robot nanny and the Blue fairy statue: “Very reminiscent of the Virgin Mary” said one of the animators on the bonus CD: ‘Animating AI: 06:00). David, it is emphasized, is simply programmed to love no matter how he is treated (as many children feel about their relationship to their parents) and this is the only distinguishing mark of their relations. The mother is notably ambivalent: willing to treat the ‘son’ badly and concerned particularly with her own dilemmas (“I’m sorry I never told you about the world,” is as far as she goes in admitting her complicity in his fate). Her waking message is “I do love you”, which represents not only an emphatic statement but can also be read as a correction of his childish feelings of the opposite (the child’s unassuageable fear).

The drama can then be summarized as the discovery by the boy that he is replaceable by someone exactly like him (and in contrast to Martin his violence and resentment is then turned against himself), while his mother is unreliable in the shadow of the father. This Darwinian dilemma can only be settled by the expulsion of the father. The discovery that the father has already made plans to replace (clone) him rules out this option. After an earlier foregrounding of his uniqueness (he is described as being the first of the line), he comes face-to-face, literally, with the fact that this assertion has become a lie and with the question of why anyone should choose to live if they are bound to be exactly like everyone else.

The public drama

Many of AI's puzzles can be untangled if it is considered a drama of public rather than private concerns, as Daniel Mendelsohn has suggested was the normal pattern of Greek drama (2003). Its unusual blend of techno-speak and apocalyptic ominously-phrased language at the very beginning of the film provides an obvious clue to how it should best be read. The second scene, in which the issue of human attitudes towards robots is presented, is couched purely in terms of political and public debate, ending with a public discussion between a woman and the professor on the ethical dilemma posed, to which Prof. Hobby responds in a way that suggests humans can consider themselves as God in relationship to robots, that is, in creating them to love Him (ironically in view of the clear indication that human beings are creating their own disaster). David's story appears in this framework almost like a case study designed to exemplify the issues raised in this first discussion. Read in this way, the scenes in which he does not appear are not a failure to dramatize from David's point of view but a display of the ‘third-person’ format of case studies.

In dramas of social issues, stereotyping is a common form of linking the public and the private (whether in church or political art). The tableaux staging of critical scenes, melodrama, switches of viewpoint, episodic narrative, hand-me-down symbolism: these are all acceptable in ritualistic dramas and masques. Whether such conventions are accepted, however, depends on the society in which they are used, and literary critics (outside of 17th-century specialists), inspired by Romantic notions of the artist, rarely treat such conventions as aesthetically viable.

AI is, in fact, as becomes clear later, the story of the attempt to understand the end of humanity as recounted by robots from the future: and the opening words indicate strongly that the disappearance is a result of self-destruction (not a physical cataclysm as implicit in Spielberg's dinosaur films). As suggested by Manuel De Landa in War in the Age of Intelligent Machines: “The robot historian of course would hardly be bothered by the fact that it was a human who put the first motor together: for the roles of humans would be seen as little more than that of industrious insects pollinating an independent species of machine-flowers that simply did not possess its own reproductive organs during a segment of its evolution” (1991:3).

In fact, David is explicitly identified as the last 'person' (i.e. the first robot) able to record what happened before the robots took over. His Quest takes him only to encounters with other artificial beings (of whom Gigolo Joe is the most aware, the only one apparently to perceive the hatred and evil of human beings in the face of their obvious inferiority to mechas). The Blue Fairy is a human-imposed ideal whose inadequacy and unreality is manifest (a static figure in the panoply of movie robots, and one that certainly cannot invest David with ‘humanity’ – there seems to be no unambiguous English word for such an action).

The paintings David makes despite knowing that they would confuse his ‘mother’ if she saw them are nevertheless his form of testimony to later generations (and to us, the people of today) to the terrible way humans were. The final sentence contains a dreadful irony that remains obscure unless we understand the film as the story in this way. David goes to “the place where dreams are born” – rejecting the option of staying in a place where he can keep memories of human history alive.

Hollywood non-humanism

Minority Report, too, uses as its dramatic engine the exploitation of ‘freaks’ by more capable humans (and, in the climactic revelations, by the representative of the system itself) in the name of technology. Indeed, Spielberg's concern with the failings of humanist readings of experience can be traced through Saving Private Ryan to Schindler's List (and possibly The Color Purple). From Schindler's List onward, Spielberg's selection of films to direct can be interpreted as attempts to find a non-humanist answer to unbearable experience through various Hollywood genres, each representing a different political solution to the social dimension of the problem: the court-room drama (Amistad), the narrative of communal experience, usually subverted by its focus on a hero (Schindler's List), the heroic buddy narrative (Saving Private Ryan), the fairy tale (AI) and science fiction (Minority Report). It was Richard Maltby (1995) who pointed out that Hollywood regularly recycles historical experience in genre format, as if to say, for example, this is what World War II would have looked like if it was a Hollywood western (Tiger at the Gate) or a crime novel (Casablanca).

Spielberg's success with these materials is very much a reflection of the individual genre's ability to assimilate the problems to its own terms (better in Amistad and Schindler's List than in AI and Minority Report). In this respect, staying firmly within the bounds of Hollywood convention, Spielberg is not a major artist of the subversive kind, as distinct from Budd Boetticher, Val Lewin, Alfred Hitchcock or Orson Welles, His conventionality has more in common with that of Howard Hawks or Vincent Minnelli. However, his willingness to use clichés from his past (the echo of E.R.), to take over biker/horror stereotypes without assimilation into the story (the chase scenes before the flesh fair), and the willingness to substitute spectacle for the spectacular in the amphibicopter’s voyage through Coney Island to the Blue Fairy (contrasted to Michael Jackson’s pop video on the same theme) suggests that he remains a minor craftsman even within these conventions. Nevertheless, AI exerts considerable emotional power in its first two parts from its theme of isolation, which Spielberg has revealed, in talking about E.R., drew on his own experience as a child of divorced parents. It may also have drawn on his Hollywood experiences as a ‘superkid’ director.

Spielberg remains one of the most adventurous of Hollywood directors in presenting disturbing themes seriously. But AI suggests that having taken his character to the brink of suicide, Spielberg was unable to find a credible solution to the dilemma he had explored (The Interpreter represents the optimistic version of experiencing atrocity), with the result that each of the scenes that follow (the self-sacrifice of another android, the Blue Fairy, the arrival of successor robots, the resurrection, the temporary recall of the Mother, the idyllic day, David's death, and the closing scene) become successive ways of trying to provide a resolution, working finally in tandem to close his narrative while allowing us to survive[164].

This might seem an over-extensive treatment of a minor artist from an extremely narrow perspective. However, Spielberg’s relationship with the sentimental parallels the challenges facing any form of public speech about atrocity – and, in his case, seems to be personal as well as social in inspiration. Spielberg’s career shows that stereotyping people as victims can nevertheless work on audiences with an emotional power that goes beyond sentimentality when the process taps a deeper vein of personal experience and through this personal trauma to archetypal situations that are creatively reworked at the unconscious level.

Joseph Heller: Getting into Death

“I learned to say no.” – Sammy Singer in Joseph Heller’s Closing Time (1994.6).

Death as an atrocity is the abiding theme of Joseph Heller, explored through verbal paradoxes that conceal as much meaning as they encapsulate. Nearly 30 years after Catch-22 Heller recapitulates this judgement in the sequel: “[Catch-22’s cowardly hero Yossarian] had made up his mind to live for ever, or at least die trying” (1994:6) The point being, of course, that he will die no matter how hard he tries to live. In Heller’s books death works hand in hand with the prison of language to mock personal experience (the subjective). Probably no English-language writer since James Joyce has depended so much on the linguistic form in which experience is depicted rather than on the attempt to communicate that experience. William Burroughs may be more experimental but in his works experience becomes almost completely detached from language. In Heller the language is mockingly yoked to the experience only to show its inadequacy. Heller’s single play, We Bombed in New Haven, is a reference not just to theatrical failure but also to military action (he was a bombardier in the Second World War) and focuses on the ways in which war parodies theatre.

Even without suffering, human beings, in Heller’s philosophy, have no reason to rejoice. Yossarian checks himself into a hospital at the age of 68 though he seems to have nothing wrong with him. “Nurses had little more to do for him than look into his room each shift just to make certain he wasn’t dead yet and needed nothing done to keep him alive. ‘Is everything all right?’ each one would inquire. ‘Everything but my health,’ he sighed in response. ‘You’re in perfect health.’ That was the trouble, he took the trouble to explain. It meant he had to get worse. ‘It’s no joke,’ he joked when they laughed” (1994:16).

What makes Heller unusual among modern novelists is that his characters represent almost schematic philosophical positions, as the description of Yossarian makes clear (almost entirely focused on his attitude towards death), while Heller’s aphoristic style makes it clear that they continually think philosophically. “He worried about the reckless sentimentality of extending concern to a person who needed it” (1994:19). Shortly afterwards, the oncologist Dr Teemer tells Yossarian. “Did you know that more Americans die each year of diseases related to smoking than were killed in all of the years of World War II?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Then I suppose we might as well go ahead. Should I hammer your knee to test your reflexes?’ ‘For what?’ ‘For free.’ ‘Can’t we at least do a biopsy?’ ‘Of what?’ ‘Of anything that’s accessible and simple.’ (1994:23). The sheer lack of seriousness in its treatment of human interaction provides a telling distinction from Samuel Beckett’s mordant stories and plays. Socratic dialogue here celebrates its meaninglessness as a way of dealing with philosophical dilemmas: “Great crimes are committed by people whose conscience is clear” (1994:28).

Taken seriously, Heller’s answers to the philosophical challenge of death represent a pessimism as deep as Schopenhauer’s (and pessimism here seems too light a word to describe the convictions of both writers). “Want a sound idea? Get a job now with a company with a good pension plan and a good medical plan, any company and any job, no matter how much you hate it, and stay there until you’re too old to continue. That’s the only way to live, by preparing to die.’ ‘Oh, shit, Dad, do you really believe that?’ ‘No, I don’t, although I think it might be true.’” (29).

His advice cannot be taken seriously, but at the same time Heller clearly suspects that no other answer makes sense despite its absurdity. The parallels with Buddhist quietism are obvious, but the dangers of such an adaptive position remain, as is made clear in Herman Melville’s Bartelby the Scrivener, the office worker who is driven to extinction because he declares he would ‘prefer not to’ submit to other people’s demands (1856:68).

The tyranny of superficial relations

Something of the tyranny of superficial relations is echoed in Yossarian’s leave-taking from Nurse MacIntosh when he leaves the hospital in Closing Time: “She[...] said she would miss him. He replied with perfection that he would not give her the chance, wondering, even as he gazed sincerely into her earnest blue eyes and warmly pressed her hand good-bye, whether he would ever even remember to want to see her again” (33). Here the modern Bartelby is as much the tormentor as the victim, and the tormentor of himself in acknowledging his fallibility. The self is not even dependable to the subject.

Here, then, is Heller on truth: John Yossarian telephones the office of his successfully crooked businessman figure Milo Minderbinder, where Milo’s son also works:

“’Anything new?’ he began, to Milo’s son.

‘Not as far as I know.’

‘Are you telling me the truth?’

‘To the best of my ability.’

‘You’re not holding anything back?’

‘Not as far as I can tell.’

‘Would you tell me if you were?’

‘I would tell you if I could.’” (59)

[Yossarian then discovers that Milo I has already given his son the name of a private detective before he was asked.]

“‘How did he know I was going to ask?’

‘That’s impossible for me to say.’

‘How are you feeling, M2?’

‘It’s hard to be sure.’

[...] ‘Are things all right?’

‘Wouldn’t I want to tell you if they were?’

‘But would you tell me?’

‘That would depend.’

‘On what?’

‘If I could tell you the truth.’

‘Would you tell me the truth?’

‘Do I know what it is?’

‘Could you tell me a lie?’

‘Only if I knew the truth’” (59).

Looking back at World War II, Heller notes a psychological appeal of volunteering that (in its phraseology) seems to ignore killing and death: “We read about the war in the newspapers, heard about it on the radio, saw it done gorgeously in the Hollywood movies, and it looked and sounded better to us than being home in my father’s junkshop, like I was, or in a file cage like Sammy in the insurance company he worked for, or, like Winkler, in a cigar store that was a front for the bookmaking operation his father ran in back” (1994:132). The wording simply highlights what is omitted.

Realpolitik and crime

Realpolitik flourished in the policies championed by Henry Kissinger during the last quarter of the 20th century. Heller maps out its implications in a world without a superpower. To continue to have enemies and develop profitable weapons, the US will have to borrow from the people it seeks to antagonize. ‘“The Germans will lend,’ said Wintergreen [Heller’s callous scientist figure]. ‘So will Japan. And once we have their money,’ added Wintergreen triumphantly, ‘they have to make sure we win any war against them. That’s another good secret defensive feature of our wonderful offensive defensive attack bomber’” (73).

This leads even to apocalyptic paradox: “All of us are in the race of the century to come up with the ultimate weapon that could lead to the end of the world and bring everlasting fame to the victor who uses its first.” (75).

But in an actively hostile social world, Heller focuses on the individual life in a way that recalls Seneca but with the philosopher as a stand-up comic: “Whoever starts out with a dream to succeed in public relations?” the 68-year-old PR success John Yossarian tells his son, while advising him to aim at precisely that level of achievement.

Heller is much more than simply a joke-maker. In Closing Time, one of his characters is in Dresden with a tall shy man from Indiana named Vonnegut (like the author of Slaughterhouse-Five) and an old German-speaking guy named Schweik, who insists “I’m a good soldier” (137). Gustav von Aschenbach, the historian who dies in Venice in Thomas Mann’s novella of that name, is a constant reference. One chapter is entitled Dante and contains much talk of The Divine Comedy. The cover of Closing Time depicts a Bergmanesque Totentanz. This from an author who reports his favorite authors as a young man were Damon Runyon, Robert Benchley, P.G. Wodehouse and Irwin Shaw (1998:93). His current references are not authorial one-upmanship, however. Heller’s novels represent sustained attempts to reject the framework imposed on life by the more ‘serious’ writers as well as exposing the inadequacies of the entertainers’ refusal to take themselves seriously.

For example, a woman gives out the city morgue’s telephone number as hers to dates she does not like (20). Hospitals play a major role in most of Heller’s novels. They represent a safe place to be, provided you are healthy. At the same time, Yossarian reflects in Closing Time, echoing his experience in Catch-22, “a hospital was a dangerous place. People died there.” (1994:20). Horrific events happen to those who come to hospitals to be cured (in typical Heller fashion, this victim is a Belgian “financial wiseman” who starts off speaking little English. “He had taken to this country to be made well, and the doctors had taken out a hunk of his larynx because he certainly would have died had they left it all in. Now it was not so certain he would live. Christ, thought Yossarian, how can he stand it? [...] The man had no way to make his feelings known but to nod or shake his head in reply to insistent questions fired at him by his wife, who had no serviceable way to relay his responses” (30).

Life outside the charnel house

Heller’s typical strategy is to show that life beyond the charnel house is even more malevolent and meaningless: “Outside the hospital it was still going on. Men went mad and were rewarded with medals. Interior decorators were culture heroes, and fashion designers were the social superiors of their clientele.” (50). To which the answer is: “And why wouldn’t they be? Have you forgotten what we look like naked.” (50). Looking down from his high-rise apartment on the poor, homeless, criminals and psychopaths in the streets below, Yossarian remarks: “It was hard not to hate them all” (52) while the educated and well-off “chat with some fluency about something other than business matters to well-informed others who imagined egotistically that they were affecting world events by talking about them” (53).

“It was nobody’s fault, of course,” Heller adds in his patented style of suggesting that the blame can be apportioned. Riding in a rented limousine with a woman friend, she cries at one point. “‘My God, what’s that?’ ‘The bus terminal.’ ‘It’s awful, isn’t it? What the devil is it for?’ ‘Buses. What the devil did you think it was for?’” (53).

This leads to another of Yossarian’s lectures on society: “As measured by official standards, [things] had not often been better. This time only the poor were very poor, and the need for new prison cells was more urgent than the needs of the homeless. The problems were hopeless: there were too many people who needed food, and there was too much food to be able to feed them profitably” (56).

However, the individual can apply nothing more than individualist survival strategies. “What was wanted was more shortages, he added, with just a small smile. He did not volunteer that by now he was one more in the solid middle class who was not keen to have his taxes raised to ameliorate the miseries of those who paid none. He preferred more prisons” (56).

A comic writer on pain

Heller’s strategy, of course, is to repeatedly insist on how war is experienced by the lower-ranked soldiers and middle-class awakening to the fact that only the very rich could hope to securely protect themselves against the realities of modern city life or war. “We did not often see the human figures we were shooting at until they were dead and we passed them lying stiff on the ground. [...] It was almost like being back in a Coney Island shooting gallery or a penny arcade./ Except it wasn’t always much fun.” (Closing Time.330). “It would have happened the same without me – the ashes, the smoke, the dead, the outcome. I had nothing to do with Hitler and nothing to do with the state of Israel” (341).

Martin Amis described Heller as “a comic writer whose chief interest is pain” (1986:126). This overlooks Heller’s continuous grudge against the person inflicting the pain. In God Knows, the fictional memoirs of a dying King David, he says: “God and I had a pretty good relationship – until he killed the kid” (Amis:127). Amis notes that Heller has made God “a lively presence, a nasty piece of work” (127).

Orwell’s Sadists

“Memory is always the enemy of structure. The latter flourishes upon method and is frustrated by content.” – John Ralston Saul (1992:14).

In a letter about 1984 George Orwell made clear that he did not think the society he described would necessarily arrive although he believed something similar could arrive (“already partly realized in Communism and Fascism”). But he was more concerned that “totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere, and I have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical consequences,” he told his correspondent, a member of the United Automobile Workers (1968:564). In a letter to his friend the writer and reviewer Julian Symons, Orwell regrets “the vulgarity of the ‘Room 101’ business” (565). “I was aware of this while writing it, but I didn’t know another way of getting somewhere near the effect I wanted.” However, the scenes, perhaps because of their gruesome crudity, have become famous: “The last chapters in 1984 have become a part of our cultural heritage” (Great Books. 1984, Civilisation Channel, 30 December 2003).

Rather than assessing 1984’s success as fiction (and it can be argued that Orwell was right in his judgement), it is only necessary to consider the philosophical failings (and the many accurate touches) of the ‘Room 101’ section to explain why the scenes cannot help but appear vulgar.

It is easy to find the echoes of Orwell’s concerns in 1984 in the events of his time as reflected in his correspondence and essays: a 1947 review of James Burnham’s recent book on the contemporary world struggle (“Fusion with the United States is widely realized to be one way out of our difficulties”)(371), an exchange with Arthur Koestler on refugees (433), a phrase in a piece on European unity noting the possibility that “the world falls apart into three unconquerable super-states”(429).

In many ways, too, 1984 is Orwell’s rethinking of E.I. Zamyatin’s We (written around 1923). His review of the book in 1946 describes the story of the earlier book in terms that seem to be describing, with some transformations, his later novel. “D-503, [...]a gifted engineer [,…] is constantly horrified by the atavistic impulses which seize upon him. He falls in love (this is a crime, of course,) with a certain I-330 who is a member of an underground resistance movement and succeeds for a while in leading him into rebellion” (1968:97). “These people […/] even indulge, at the moment when their curtains are down, in such vices as smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol. [...] D-503 [undergoes an operation and is then able to] betray his confederates to the police. With complete equanimity he watches I-330 tortured. [...] It is [the] intuitive grasp of the irrational side of totalitarianism – human sacrifice, cruelty as an end in itself, the worship of a leader who is credited with divine attributes – that makes Zamyatin’s book superior to Huxley’s [Brave New World]” (97-8).

Richard Rorty finds in 1984 a depiction of the cruelty that humans can inflict on each other but not on other animals: as O’Brien wishes, to “tear human minds to pieces and put them together again in new shapes of your own choosing” (177). Elaine Scarry, he adds, has developed this point to the conclusion that “the worst thing you can do to somebody is not to make her scream in agony but to use that agony in such a way that even when the agony is over, she cannot reconstitute herself” (177). Rorty comments: “People can, their torturers hope, experience the ultimate humiliation of saying to themselves, in retrospect, ‘Now that I have believed or desired this, I can never be what I hoped to be, what I thought I was. [...] I no longer have a self to make sense of” (179). The breaking is the point of the torture. “The putting together is just an extra fillip. [...] What matters is that there is no way of going back and forth [between alternative explanations of the world]” (179).

O’Brien’s declaration that “The object of torture is torture” rather than getting people to obey, “is the central sentence of 1984,” Rorty declares (189). Both John Strachey (in ‘The Strangled Cry’, Twentieth Century Interpretations of 1984) and Raymond Williams (in Orwell, Fontana, 1984) feel the book falls off in the climactic section. But Rorty thinks this due to a misjudgment. “The last third of 1984 is about O’Brien, not about Winston – about torturing, not about being tortured” (180). “The fantasy of endless torture – the suggestion that the future is ‘a boot stamping on a human face – forever’ is essential to 1984” (182). “If we take O’Brien not as making large general claims but as making specific empirical predictions, he is a much more frightening figure. [...] He is as terrifying a character as we are likely to meet in a book” (183).

This raises the question of plausibility. For those taking the defense of psychological implausibility, “the only torturers are insensitive, banal people like Eichmann” (184). “Orwell helps us see that it just happened that rule in Europe passed into the hands of people who pitied the humiliated and dreamed of human equality, and/that it may just happen that the world will wind up being ruled by people who lack any such sentiments or ideas” (184-5). “Orwell’s vision was of a world in which [...] human solidarity was – deliberately, through careful planning – made impossible” (189).

Clearly though, as indicated in his letter to an American trade unionist cited above, Orwell did not consider this an inevitable future nor an attack on English socialism. O’Brien’s sermons are Orwell’s imaginative theorizing about the end of totalitarianism, of terminality in politics. What critics have found implausible relates more to the generalized explanations rather than to the events, which presented by themselves would seem to be a quite realistic account of how a person can be broken by torture. After making explicit reference to Nazis and Russian Communists (278), Orwell has O’Brien state dogmatically that dictatorships seek power over people even more than over things. “How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?” he asks, and gives as the reply: “By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own?”

This is a law which applies to the torturers as much as the victims. In his survey of repressive action in Central America and Argentina during 1977-1984, Ariel C. Armony quotes a retired captain: “It was viewed as particularly important that personnel from the three branches of the armed forces participated [in the operations], because in that way we would all be contaminated” (1997:7). This has a philosophical as well as a dimension (i.e. it involves an assertion or performative demonstration of values). As Slavoj Žižek has pointed out, radicalism means “fully assuming the consequences” of choice (2001:4). In ideology, this means showing willingness to act irrationally. The exemplary example of this is Heinrich Himmler’s address to SS Group Leaders on 4 October 1943 in Poznan, “one of the most horrifying testaments in the German language,” in the view of historian Joachim Fest (1963:177): “We shall now discuss [a very serious subject] absolutely openly among ourselves, nevertheless we shall never speak of it in public. I mean the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people” [he here makes clear the equivalence of the ambiguous publicly used term “evacuation” with the actual fact of extermination…].”Most of you know what it means to see a hundred corpses lying together, five hundred, or a thousand. To have gone through this and yet – apart from a few exceptions, examples of human weakness – to have remained decent, / this has made us hard. This is a glorious page in our history that has never been written and never shall be written” (177-8).

However, Orwell’s avuncular depiction of O’Brien, though thorough in its cynicism, remains one-dimensional compared to the characters of the figures in the Nazi state whose position was closest to O’Brien’s, in particular Reinhard Heydrich. “Luciferian” in his coldness (Fest:152), known to his subordinates as ‘the Blond Beast’ (155), he remained a deeply split personality despite his appearance of being, as the Nazi newspapers portrayed him, “a man all of one piece” (155). Convinced he had Jewish ancestors, teased in school as Jewish, without any surviving evidence that this was so (an indication of the prevalent anti-Semitism in German society at that time), he was cashiered from the Navy after a court martial for an affair with a young girl (156). While the propaganda painted him as a loving father and family man who devoted his free evenings to chamber music, he spent his nights in “alcohol and the pleasures of night life enjoyed with forced intemperance” (158). Fest reports: “One of his colleagues has described the haunting and profoundly revealilng occasion when Heydrich came home at night to his brilliantly lit apartment and suddenly saw his reflection in a large wall mirror. In an attack of cold rage, he ‘whipped his pistol from his holster and fired two shots at this double,’ the ever and tormentingly present negation of himself” (158).

In contrast, O’Brien stands as a terminally fantastic creation, on a par with (and nearly as pleasurable as) the essay Orwell prints to close 1984: ‘The Principles of Newspeak,’ which put a new word into the English dictionary (NSOED). His derisive portrait of the distortions of ideological language has gained more influence than his depiction of what he considered the essential menace in totalitarianism, and can be considered, after decades of ideological jargonizing, a major influence on current intellectual sensitivities to the language of coercive politics.

Imagining Argentina: Hollywood does Argentina’s dirty war

Imagining Argentina is both a prizewinning book (1987) by U.S. author Lawrence Thornton (1937-) and a film (2003) by the British playwright turned Hollywood filmmaker Christopher Hampton (Carrington, script for The Quiet American). The book received universally good reviews, the film was booed by the press at the Venice Film Festival, then given a six-minute ovation the next night () and nominated for the Golden Lion (). Reviews both by critics () and by cinemagoers (at ) have tended to be dismissive. Thornton’s first novel, the book won the 1987 PEN/Hemingway Award among other prizes.

Yet both book and film are remarkably similar in story and narrative style: during Argentina’s ‘dirty war,’ a children’s theater writer becomes convinced after his journalist wife is ‘disappeared’ that he can imagine the fate of other desparecedos as he searches for his partner. The narrative intercuts tales of the circumstances of how people are arrested by plain-clothed security officers in green Ford Falcons with his imaginings of their life (and frequent death) after that point.

The story parallels many actual events in the ‘dirty war.’ The woman journalist is abducted after writing a column reporting the kidnapping and killing of young students who protested an increase in bus fares. The writer goes to the red-fronted Ministerial Palace to demand information about the arrest of several mothers of sequestered civilians and two nuns. A navy officer pretends to have lost his sister in order to capture what he hopes will be subversive statements on tape. The non-political theatre director is thrown from the air into the sea (by helicopter in the film rather than by plane as actually happened, and victims are conscious rather than drugged). The theatre is attacked by security forces and damaged (a similar theatre was burned down). Seemingly innocuous plays become imbued with secondary meanings, and are understood as such, when the repression takes hold. The film and book end with declarations by the relatives of the victims of ‘Never Again’ (Nunca más).

However, immediacy and specificity typical of film images undercut what the book could treat through the inherent abstraction and symbolism of language, leading a number of viewers (amateur and professional critics) to complain of its absurdity. “Thornton, who has never lived in Argentina, fails to engage with this country's reality,” wrote Peter Thompson on the spike Website after the book won several prizes and the film[165]. “Thornton undermines the seriousness of his novel's message by superimposing whimsy on a painful, and unresolved, chapter of Argentine history.” Three major omissions: those seeking information about their ‘disappeared’ loved ones met a wall of silence, while the book suggests the visions of the writer protagonist could influence the fate of people arrested; the writer suggests “So long as we do not let them violate our imaginations we will survive,” but in fact any citizen who might dissent from the official line was liable to be picked up; and while Thornton reports that popular resistance brought down the military government, in reality it took the Falklands War with Britain. Thompson also faults Thornton for implying that democracy in Argentina afterwards flourished in “the clear Argentinean sky,” when repression had left behind a society “that is, to this day, deeply conformist.” Even in 1995, one infamous torturer won 73% of the votes in his constituency to become mayor.

David Stratton in Variety wrote of the film: “Though undoubtedly made with good intentions, Imagining Argentina fails on almost every level” (8 September 2003). The writer’s behavior, Stratton comments, is “borderline idiotic.” John Walsh reported in Britain’s The Independent after the festival showing in which the film was booed: “Instead of responding to the graphic torture scenes with horror and compassion, some of the heartless Venice audience collapsed in laughter and began to jeer and catcall. Observers blame the film's terrible reception on Hampton's decision to shoot the film in English, his inclusion of a scene in which [the writer played by Antonio] Banderas blithely strums a guitar while his wife and daughter are being brutalized elsewhere, and to end the film, a little crassly, with the on-screen words ‘Never again!’ Some viewers didn't wait for the final credits but walked out with cries of ‘Shame!’ “(4 September 2003). Jenny McCartney and Chris Hastings in the Daily Telegraph came closer to recognizing the difference between the word and image: “What was magic realism in the novel translated into something a little closer to farce on screen” (7 September 2003). Critic David Gritten is quoted as observing: “The character's sixth sense fails him when it comes to his own wife, so he has to do things like follow a lone flamingo with this scrunched-up expression on his face as a guide to where she is. It was inadvertently funny.”

‘Tedious and worse’

Viewers in the public found the film “tedious” and worse: “This was a bad movie on a very serious subject. The acting was awful (particularly Banderas, who is arguably the worst male actor ever) and the characters were cartoonish. Whoever directed this movie has obviously never been to Argentina and his mental image of the place is based on childhood memories of Speedy Gonzalez and Ricky Ricardo. Armed gauchos swooping down on Ford Falcon-driving oppressors and shooting them dead? Salsa music and plumed Carnaval carioca dancers in the streets? I thought any minute Zorro too would show up, bravely engaging the represses with his gay sword. This movie is offensive and an insult to the memory of those who died in the Dirty War. Shame on the directors and the cast” (). Equally dismissive, a viewer in New York commented on imdb: “The characters are stereotyped – Banderas as the forever eye-rolling seer, the military captain whose facial nerve damage identifies him as especially evil, the government spy who goes ‘heh-heh-heh’ as he disappears into a dark alley, the goons who are greasy-haired and monosyllabic . . . Then there is the disconcerting cluelessness that creeps over one when events in the film don't make any sense. Why was the playwright (Banderas) not taken by the squads (since everyone else around him was)?” Notably, most of the critical viewers were from the US, while those from other countries – particularly people who had lived through military regimes – thought the drama moving.

The difference between the immediate and the imagination

Given the similarities between the incidents in the book and the film, the failures of the movie version must be found elsewhere than in the story itself. In fact, it offers an instructive example of the difference between the immediate and the imagination. The book itself found no difficulty in suggesting the conditional nature of the writer’s visions. In the film, the conditional was undercut by the realistic gloss given to its presentations. What in the book became an act of imaginative sympathy by the main character became a simple transposition of reality in the film.

It is a challenge which faces any documentary filmmaker in dealing with atrocities: how much documentation, how much dramatization, can be used without vitiating the credibility of its presentation. Chantal Akerman insists, as in all her films, on the opaqueness of our confrontation with the outside world, whether other people (from her first Saute Ma Ville) or landscapes that have seen horrors (D’Est). Claude Lanzmann refused all attempts to re-stage situations except when (as at the beginning of Shoah) we are led to understand that we are witnessing a re-staging for a particular reason. Steven Spielberg was able to use Hollywood’s fantasy tradition to explore the subjective experience of atrocity, and the presentation of atrocity as a social challenge, in AI, a strategy that he could not employ in the ‘realistic’ (i.e. heroic) Hollywood tradition that he called into use for Schindler’s List or Saving Private Ryan.

Christopher Hampton, whose career has been built within a realistic tradition of theatrical representation, was unable to find a form within this framework to encompass his vision of the book, perhaps as much an indication of the difficulties of encompassing the subjective experience atrocity within the conventions of cinematic realism.

Reporting Atrocity

The first point to note about reporting on atrocity is that no explanation in conventional rational terms seems to justify the abuses that have taken place. Reviewing the anti-Semitism that led to Shoah, Hannah Arendt wrote. “There is hardly an aspect of contemporary history more irritating and mystifying than the fact that of all the great unresolved political questions of our century, it should have been this seemingly small and unimportant Jewish problem [the role of the Jewish people in world politics] that had the dubious honor of setting the whole infernal machine in motion.” (1951.3).

Working in guerrilla-torn Mozambique 25 years later, anthropologist Carol Nordstrom abandoned the “futile search for explanation because war plays ‘conceptual havoc’ with analytical tools and categories developed in the peace and quiet of our comfortable offices. [...] She [became] alert to meaning, creativity, and imagination as strategies of survival and reconstruction amid the people of Mozambique.” (Robben and Nordstrom 1995.18).

Reporting on her experience of the rumors circulating around the riots of 14 July 1989 in Mogadishu noted that all the clearly discrepant accounts had “a uniformity of narrative construction: they make sense of a situation that most people in Mogadishu at the time could not make much sense of. In short, they stitch together what may well be correct facts but in doing so omit gaps, as if correlations can always eventually be linked by causal arrows, with the strength of detail then proving causality” (50).

Notably, “because knowledge could not be substantiated on the streets, information that came in the form of rumor was often treated as knowledge and, in a sense, became knowledge./ Somalis and expatriates ran parallel rumor mills. [...] One way to enhance standing (of a sort) in the expatriate community was to become a source of information about Somalis. One then became a sort of bank: as with gossip, the rule seemed to be that the more one was able to divulge, the more information one was likely to receive to divulge elsewhere. Networks were key,[54] not only for the receipt of information but also for the construction and dissemination of reputation. Essentially, then, there was what amount to an economy of rumors” (53-4).

Expatriates, however, sought to couch rumors in a way that they seemed to have originated from significant and important sources. “Quite often arguments arose.[...] At times it seemed as though people forgot that, at best, these were only rumors they were discussing; they acted as if rumors were property” (54). The sources, most people knew, were office colleagues, government acquaintances or cleaning women. “Nonetheless, the façade of unimpeachable sources and information was maintained by the use of the third-person plural, the mysterious (numerous) ‘they’”(54). But the anthropologist’s own random network of Somalis had prepared her for confused accounts, when she sought descriptions of Somali life. “The Somalis I knew were usually very precise about couching everything they suspected to be rumor as rumor and not as ‘a’ (possible) truth or ‘the’ truth. Rather, information was usually offered as the best possible explanation for making sense of a situation according to whatever a person happened to have heard up until that particular moment. Information was never considered unimpeachable or fixed.[...] There was no centralized credible news media in Somalia, and far too often the government engaged in the dissemination of disinformation” (54).

She cautions: “We can suggest that while the creation of an apparently substantial narrative out of chronological facts may neaten reality enough to make the description of it seem factual, its very tidiness should alert us to the dangers of connecting dates rather than confusions: perhaps the difference between ‘making’ sense and conveying a sense” (50).

The problem of meaning

Giorgio Agamben highlights a more fundamental problem in reporting atrocity than making public sense of atrocity situations. “Suspicion regarding one’s own words [about atrocity] arises every time that the distinction between public and private loses its meaning. What exactly did the inhabitants of the [concentration and labor] camps, in fact, live through? Was it a political-historical event (such as, say, in the case of a soldier who participated in the battle of Waterloo), or was it a strictly private experience? Neither one nor the other. If one was a Jew in Auschwitz or a Bosnian woman in Omarska, one entered the camp as a result not of a political choice but rather of what was most private and incommunicable in oneself, that is, one’s blood, one’s biological body. But precisely the latter functions now as a decisive political criterion” (1996: 122.2). In other words, the victims suffer from the private being made public or political. “In this sense, the camp truly is the inaugural site of modernity,” Agemben adds. “It is the first space in which public and private events, political life and biological life, become rigorously [?ed. strictly/formally?] indistinguishable. [...] There is not one single instant in which he or she might be able to find shelter in the realm of the private, and it is precisely this indiscernibility that constitutes the specific anguish of the camp”(1996:122).

What is unspeakable in atrocity?

Another dimension is found in the common unwillingness of victims to speak of what took place. The presumption often is their experience has been too traumatic for them to attempt to recall them: “The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable” (Herman 1992/2001:1).

This has led to George Steiner’s famous dictum: “The world of Auschwitz lies outside speech as it lies outside reason” (cited by Hayden White 1992:33) and the question of Alice and A.R. Eckhardt: “How is the unspeakable to be spoken about? Certainly we ought to speak about it, but how can we ever do so?” (ibid). The historian Berel Lang even criticizes fictional or poetic writing on the genocide, arguing that only the most literal chronicle could pass the test of “authenticity and truthfulness” and escape seeming gratuitous and misrepresentative (1990:144-5).

It is precisely this view which the postmodernist historian Hayden White contests. Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1986) treats the Holocaust in a comic book satire where Germans are cats, Jews are mice and Poles are pigs. It is, says White, “one of the most moving narrative accounts that I know of” (1992:31), not least because it integrates into its story of events it is trying to discover “the difficulty of discovering and telling the whole truth” about even a small part of what happened. This “absurd mixture of a ‘low’ genre with events of the most momentous significance” (32) shows itself, in Hayden White’s judgement, much more critically self-conscious than German historian Andreas Hillgruber’s effort to separate the “tragic” story of Wehrmacht defense of the Eastern front in 1944-5 from the “end of European Jewry” in Zweierlei Untergang: Die Zerschlagung des Deutschen Reiches und das Ende des europäischen Judentums (1986).

In fact, Hayden White argues that cultural modernism is “still concerned to represent reality realistically, and it still identifies reality with history” (1992:41). But the reality is not the kind envisaged by 19th century realism and classic historical discourse. Modernism is simply acknowledging “a reality that included among its supposedly unimaginable, unthinkable, and unspeakable aspects: the phenomena of Hitlerism, the Final Solution, total war, nuclear contamination, mass starvation, and ecological suicide; a profound sense of the incapacity of our sciences to explain, let alone control or contain these; and a growing awareness of the incapacity of our traditional modes of representation even to describe them adequately” (1992:41).

Events and stories

Four years later, reviewing Oliver Stone’s mixture of fact and fiction about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in JFK, White notes how modern writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Virginia Woolf have contrasted events with stories (1996:74-79). He points out: “The uses made in courtroom presentations of television images of Los Angeles police beating a black man (Rodney King) had the effect of making this seemingly unambiguously documented event virtually unintelligible as an event. […] Accidents have traditionally served as the very archetype of what historians formerly thought of as events, but the accidents in question were always of a certain kind, namely, the sort that yielded to the imperatives of storytelling and followed the rules of narrativization. Not only are modern postindustrial accidents more incomprehensible than anything earlier generations could possible have imagined (think of Chernobyl), but the photo and video documentation of such accidents is so full that it is difficult to work them up as elements of a single objective story” or manipulable (74). The interminable replays of the explosion of the 1986 NASA Challenger space shuttle, wrote Michael Turits, tried to “reconstruct the too brief event as a visually intelligible accident” (cited by Hayden White): “What had been promised as a clarification of what happened actually produced widespread cognitive disorientation, not to say a despair at ever being able to identify the elements of the events in order to render possible an objective analysis of their causes and consequences”(73). One result is that traditional techniques of narration become unusable except in parody (74).

The problem of narrative

Gertrude Stein is one of the few modernist writers to theorize the problem of representing events in narrative. In lectures at the University of Chicago in 1936 she declared: “In real life that is if you like in the newspapers which are not real life but real life with the reality left out, the reality being the inside and the newspapers being the outside […] never is the outside inside and never is the inside except in the rare and peculiar cases when the outside breaks through to be inside. […] And so in the newspapers you like to know the answer in crime stories in reading crime and in written crime stories knowing the answer spoils it.[…] And then there is another very peculiar thing in the newspaper thing it is the crime in the story it is the detective that is the thing” (59).

But such distinctions are no longer so easy to make. When the famous African-American athlete O.J. Simpson was shown on television in a slow chase with police along Los Angeles freeways under suspicion of murdering his wife and a male acquaintance in 1986, spectators rushed from their sets into the road to cheer Simpson and become part of the television coverage. Hayden White asks: “What is the inside and what the outside of this event?” (85).

Living symbols

Conventional television also finds it difficult to give a voice to the non-celebrity even though it sees itself as mirroring (while in fact identifying and flattering) the public in its attitudes, as Daniel Hallin points out. In the 1985 seizure of American civilians in Beirut, “the hostages and their families were clearly the stars of television drama. […] But their role on television was primarily symbolic, and to the extent that they began to become participants in political discussion, rather than symbols of American courage, this made television people quite nervous; even as the hostages were being lauded as heroes, quite a bit of commentary was devoted to explaining them away (“the Stockholm syndrome”) [in which hostages are said to identify with their captors] and counteracting some comments that were proving politically uncomfortable” (Hallin 1986:38).

Photographs of victims, too, tend to focus on suffering outside the Anglo-Saxon world for Anglo-Saxon sources, and exclude those which could suggest atrocity by western armies, as John Pilger has noted (see page 27). Such indifference is not new, notes Susan Sontag. In The Tempest (perhaps 1611/first published 1623), Trinculo’s reaction to seeing Caliban is to put him on exhibition in England[166]. “The exhibition in photographs of cruelties inflicted on those with darker complexions in exotic countries continues this offering, oblivious to the considerations that deter such displays of our own victims of violence,” writes Sontag. “The other, even when not an enemy, is regarded only as someone to be seen, not someone (like us) who also sees” (2003:72).

Victims of suffering themselves resist efforts to relativize their experience. When the British photojournalist Paul Lowe put on a display of photographs he had taken during a year in the besieged Sarajevo alongside others he had taken earlier in Somalia, the Sarajevans objected to the inclusion of the African pictures because this was “demoting Sarajevo’s martyrdom to a mere instance” (Sontag 2003:113). Sontag stresses: “Photographs of the victims of war are themselves a species of rhetoric. They reiterate. They simplify. They agitate. They create the illusion of consensus” (6).

A postmodern critique of media

“Imagine a world, one easily conceivable today, where governments, businesses, lobbyists, candidates, churches, and social movements deliver information directly to citizens on home computers. Journalism is momentarily abolished., [...] Each of us our own journalist. [...] Journalism – of some sort – would be reinvented” – Michael Schudson (1995: 1-2)

This new journalism, according to Schudson, writing in 1995, would look very much like the old journalism – journalism in the form he envisaged it at that time in the United States. Citizens would rely on public officials for news. They would trust especially what the White House sends. The President would still set the national agenda. The credibility of sources would be vouched for by their accessibility. Analysts without commitment to special interests and people able to interpret both politicians and politics would sift and filter the flood of information available (1995:1-2). For Schudson, this means a professional press corps. Commercial publishers would appear as soon as market incentives were strong enough, and a party press once political parties adopted coherent perspectives on policy, while government would provide its own voice to promote its own views (ibid)

In less than ten years, this vision has started to look thoroughly old-fashioned, particularly for its confidence that the information industry would be able to resist change because its structure answered consumers’ needs. Developments have taken digital societies in quite different directions. “Tabloids and Internet journalists were the first to publish everything from Clinton’s trysts with Gennifer Flowers and Monica Lewinsky to Prince Charles’s dirty phone calls with Camilla Parker Bowles,” Douglas Rushkoff pointed out only four years after Schudson (1999:5). Reliance on public officials, trust in the White House, Presidential power to set the national agenda, and credibility via accessibility and interest-free journalism had all gone by the wayside. The sifting and filtering by professionals also ran into some major problems of credibility. At the end of May 2004, climaxing a series of earlier revelations about distortions and inventions by its reporters, the New York Times issued an apology for failing to question the US Administration’s basis for going to war with Iraq a year and a half before[167], which the marginal media such as the Internet site had been doing all along. Several other newspapers followed suit.

The most satisfactory framework for understanding the situation of news in society is postmodernism. The reference is particularly to Lyotard’s concern (1979) for “the ways in which technologies have transformed our notion of what constitutes knowledge” (Sedgwick 1999:295). This posits “a crisis in our ability to provide an adequate ‘objective’ account of reality” (ibid). One result is that “the frontiers of self are effaced and transformed” (McRobbie 1994:16) and “so too are the boundaries which mark out separate discourses and separate politics” (ibid).

Media and crowds

Such fluidity and fragility of the personality has been associated particularly with individual experience of self-alienated city crowds in industrial society, first identified by the British poet William Wordsworth in a London which had topped over one million in inhabitants by 1800 – compared to 581,000 for Paris (Wrigley and Scofield, 1981, cited by Plotz 2000:195). Earlier writers on cities such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in his Italian Journey (of 1786-8), Carl Philip Moritz recording his trip through Britain in 1782, or Heinrich Kleist on Paris in 1801, reveled in “the pleasant feeling of sanctioned anonymity” (Plotz:18)[168]. Goethe exalted: “Nowhere can I be more alone than in a large crowd through which one pushes one’s way” (1989:58). He commented of the Naples streets: “Only amid such a multitude and so much activity do I feel really quiet and solitary: the noisier the streets, the calmer I become” (cited by Plotz:19). These writers emphasized the freedom offered by “the tumult of purposeful strangers” (as Plotz describes them). In addition, “being relieved of the pressure of others’ observations frees one motion. The crowd functions as a virtual emptiness [,…] an escape one could not manage in, for example, a foreign village” (Plotz:19). Plotz notes that since Homer’s description of crowds as swarms of bees, the metaphors used assert a difference between the narrator and the crowd (23). But in Wordsworth’s encounter with London crowds, in contrast to his moving among French crowds a few years earlier during the Revolution (also described in The Prelude), a new note is sounded, something absent from contemporary newspaper accounts or journals (39).

Realizing that “the face of every one / that passes by me is a mystery” (1805: lines 596-7), Wordsworth expresses alarm that “all the ballast of familiar life – / the present, and the past, hope, fear, all stays, / all laws of acting, thinking, speaking man – / went from me, neither knowing me, nor known” (603-6). In what Plotz describes as “the idea of overwhelmingly repetitive mutual incomprehension” (28) – Wordsworth speaks of “blank confusion, […] what the mighty city is itself to all […] to the whole swarm of its inhabitants, an undistinguishable world to men […] reduced to one identity by differences that have no law, no meaning, and no end” (695-705) – the poet recognized an “oppression” (706) that challenges even the highest and strongest minds (706-7). Seeing a blind beggar who carries a paper on his chest telling his story, Wordsworth reflects: “This label was a type / or emblem of the utmost that we know both of ourselves and of the universe” (617-620). The crowd also deprives him of the capacity to distinguish between reality and spectacle[169]: “The shapes before my eyes became / a second-sight procession, such as glides / over still mountains, or appears in dreams” (600-603). In this experience of a “frightening loss of control”, where no communication is possible, self-understanding vanishes as well (Plotz:28).

The threat of the crowd

The new social phenomenon of the London crowd, disrupts not only social but physical and psychological laws in unexpectedly powerful ways (34), and the poet himself risks losing his identity (35). In reviewing Poe’s description of the London crowd, Benjamin notes the writer’s emphasis on individual body parts and gestures “far from what is commonly advocated as the model of social realism” (1939:171), as if this exemplifies their reality, the observer’s experience, and the only way to apprehend them.

This psychological threat to identity (challenging the existentialist conviction that the world makes room for the individual through the sense of isolation it creates) pushed its way to the forefront of political concerns with the mob during the rest of the 19th century and beyond. The term “crowd”, taken from the Old English verb to push (NSOED), appears as a noun in modern English in the 16th century. But in the 19th century it was re-applied to radical politics to Chartism’s huge “simultaneous meetings and petition processions of the 1840s “by those unwilling to grant them the status of demonstration, assembly, march, or congregation” (Plotz:2). The excitement and latent threat that seemed endemic in the crowd was to stimulate Elias Canetti’s imagination and lead him to write his major artistic works, fiction and drama as well as Crowds and Power.

The salience of the crowd has become a major question in political and cultural theory, under many disguises, from democracy to pop culture. At the same time, manipulating the crowd and the crowd’s experience of itself (as well as of the world) has become a major social function of the media. Walter Benjamin, who situates the conjunction of individual and communal experience in rituals (1939:159), argues that the aim of media (he speaks only of newspapers but plainly considers this as the exemplar of media) is “to isolate what happens from the realm in which it could affect the experience of the reader” (158). He also contrasts the media treatment of events with those of the story: “The replacement of the older narration by information, of information by sensation, reflects the increasing atrophy of experience” (159). At the same time, he notes how little information will help another reader because newspapers appear in large editions (159).

One-way communication

The experience offered by traditional media is largely of reading a newspaper, watching a news broadcast or watching a ‘reality’ show. And it is rarely that of a story as Benjamin understood its essential characteristics – whose telling “embeds it in the life of the storyteller in order to pass it on as experience to those listening” (159). As Raymond Williams noted: “Much of what we call communication is, necessarily, no more in itself than transmission: that is to say, a one-way sending” (1958:291).

Such concerns lead in a direct line to Theodor Adorno’s concerns with ‘mass media’[170] and the culture industry, that is, with the control and symbolic positioning of the crowd, even a crowd of individuals. Using newspaper astrology columns as his archetypal model, Adorno suggested astrology is not simply an expression of dependence (and awareness of individual dependence) but also as an ideology for dependence – “as an attempt to strengthen and somehow justify painful conditions which seem to be more tolerable if an affirmative attitude is taken towards them” (1974:155). Noting the similarities with paranoid thinking, particularly the conviction that the system under which they live is irrational, Adorno observes: “People even of supposedly ‘normal’ mind are prepared to accept systems of delusions for the simple reason that it is too difficult to distinguish such systems from the equally inexorable and equally opaque one under which they actually have to live out their lives” (156).

The construction of the individual in the crowd

What kind of crowd experience does television celebrate? Todd Gitlin, in a study of car commercials and action series, suggests it is the ideal of being “loners in groups” (1986:150). He notes a transition from series built around individual heroes such as Gunsmoke and Have Gun Will Travel to the group series such as The A-Team and Miami Vice (151).

In a survey of children’s television in the same book, Tom Engelhardt notes the same trend for commercial reasons: “If your show advocates cooperation then you can’t be easily be faulted [by child development experts and the FCC (Federal Communications Commission). […] And if it so happens that you’d prefer to sell groups of little bears/puppies/fairies/ponies, then how useful to have wholly admirable reasons for suggesting that a parent plunk down a couple of hundred dollars. […] ‘Ten Care Bears are better than one,’ as one Care Bear special put it” (96). And only in the ads for children’s toys rather than in programs is violence integrated into behavior: “Only here, in the ads, can you actually feel the urge to smash, insult, destroy – all connected to the urge to rush out and buy” (94).

Throughout this, television offers what Pat Aufderheide in her companion essay on MTV calls “an alternate world” for people to imagine themselves in (119). At the same time, the emphasis is on an experience of “euphoria, a high, an intoxicatory or hallucinogenic intensity” (Jameson 1991:28) characteristic of postmodernity in the influential definition by Fredric Jameson (first published in 1984). In music television these are “short bursts of sensual energy,” in the words of a TV producer, with sets designed to look like an ideal basement for a teenager’s hide-away (Aufderheide in Gitlin 1986:119). Music videos take place in an “eternal present” (133). This penumbra of the present extends today largely into news, just as history documentaries often play on the ‘revelations’ which the present can throw on the past.

The juridical crowd

Another common strategy used by television in its construction of the crowd of individuals is what Michael Sorkin calls “the juridical mode” (in Gitlin 1986:168). He notes how the use of judges and ‘expert’ panels (composed largely of people without expertise, i.e. like the viewer) “recurs as a device for establishing the authority of TV’s various simulations,” whether a contest featuring ‘ordinary people’ imitating lipsynching popstars or a “show trial” People’s Court (173) or game show[171]. On television, the juridical mode usually encourages the viewer to be a judge (and therefore participant)[172], for example many ‘reality’ shows whether Big Brother or A Place in the Sun, while other forms such as news have a test component, particularly in the ‘newsbreak’ or ‘tease.’

“Statements concerning postmodern individuals are normally based on analyses of postmodern cultural works, or of postmodern environments, rather than on analyses of people. Such statements are problematic….” (Reimer 1994:208, cited by Blumler and Gurevitch 1996:122).

This is a somewhat disingenuous charge. Most of the postmodernist descriptions of media practices and control find confirmation in the conclusions presented by researchers who consider themselves far away from postmodernism, and postmodern accounts of a media-permeated (if not dominated) world provide a more coherent explanation of social practices than the conventional political economy or cultural studies approach.

The manipulation of public opinion remains, but it is no longer open. From ‘loyalty’ cards to home shopping channels that adjust their messages in real time according to the flow of telephone orders, the automation of coercive practices through high-technology means that “the coercer has vanished into the machinery,” notes Rushkoff (13). In a study of television, Joshua Meyrowitz made a similar point: “Although television demystifies visible authorities, invisible elites retain enormous power” (1995:39). The difficulty is to know how to assess the power of these hidden elites with which televisions is involved.

News on television

“Thinking anything adequate about commercial television may well involve ignoring it and thinking about something else.” – Frederic Jameson.

It is notoriously difficult and risky to generalize about television. Over a dozen years ago John Ellis highlighted the indifferent flow of programming: “Broadcast TV is extensive and ever-present: it gives the impression of carrying on regardless of what anyone in its audience is doing. A critic’s attempt to catch all of broadcast TV is doomed to failure like all paranoid attempts to pin everything down, to know everything” (1992:2). However, the documentary form has received “negligible attention”, notes cinema studies professor Bill Nichols in his pioneering study (1991:x). The documentary, with its derivatives (“television news and advertising, political campaign messages, propaganda and pornography”) makes claims to offer “evidence from the world” (ix), but its status as “discourse about the world” (x) is “something of a terra incognita” (xi).

However, in contrast to cinema, television has established itself as society’s major source of news[173] and, as an extension of this, of documentary production. At the same time, the producers of news on television (even ‘happy news’) focus on “events outside the normal flow of life” (Ellis 1982/1992:16), producing “an excessive concentration on one form of event (or one perception of what an event might be)” (ibid). As G.K. Chesterton wrote in The Wisdom of Father Brown nearly a century ago: “Journalism largely consists in saying ‘Lord Jones Dead’ to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive” (1914)[174].

Nor does news television do much to give people a sense of living in history, rather than with the past: “Current affairs and news do not construct history; and hardly ever situation the present in terms of the past” (Ellis 17). Ellis identified a 20-year cycle for TV historical narrative, creating “a radical gap between the immediate present and the distant past” (1982/1992:18) between news and documentaries, a gap which a number of more recent programs have sought to close. Nevertheless, Ellis’s general point remains valid: “TV is persistent in working over history for us, yet at the same time it cuts us off from our history” (17).

TV News as mood massage and game show

At least since Walter Lippman’s Public Opinion (1922), it has been a commonplace that the media in democracies are engaged in a permanent open struggle, supporting or against the government, to define what constitutes news[175]. Less commonly highlighted, largely because the result of this earlier struggle is an abstraction administered as “objective news,” is the fact that mass media also seek to define the viewer’s response to news. Jean Baudrillard was one of the first to integrate media news practice into the theory of how consumer society functions (La société de consommation[176] 1970). It certainly represents the most sophisticated anthropology of consumption, and this analysis must form the starting point of any survey of the place of television news in the digital age.

Baudrillard insists on two aspects of consumer society that are particularly relevant here. First, consumption is essentially of signs (values/meanings) not goods (148) – in fact, much advertising seeks to exalt the sign at the expense of the actual product. Baudrillard suggests: “Opulence, ‘affluence,’ is only in fact the accumulation of the signs of happiness” (27), which he likens to Melanesian Cargo Cults (28-29). Second: “What characterizes the consumer society is the universality of fait divers (disaster stories) in mass communications. All political, historic, cultural information is received in the same anodine and miraculous form of the fait divers” (31, my translation).

As Baudrillard sees it, the relationship between a consumer and modern society’s products is of curiosity rather than emotional interest, investment or engagement or indifference (32). Such a relationship is found most completely in the gadget. There novelty takes precedence over utility, and the relation is not of utility or symbolic but “ludique” (playful), a playfulness that manipulates abstractly the signs that enjoy fashionable status. It therefore represents consumerism rather than any more engaging a relation, however much it appears to be a passion (174). This applies both to video games (174) and high art (174), to education (156) and department-store shopping (24).

The viewer’s curiosity must therefore be validated, particularly with regard to news of events that would normally not seek to be visible[177]. However, nothing in television is accidental. Imagine, says psychotherapist Adam Phillips, what it would be like to live in a world in which “everyone was able – and had the capacity – to free-associate, to say whatever happened to come into their mind at any given moment” (67). Television, through its programming, offers a vision of this world. Everything has meaning, at every instant, as if television always had access to the ordering world of the unconscious. Even when something is treated as accidental, this is the result of a decision.

It is not the viewer’s meaning, however. John Ellis notes the specific placing of television viewers in relation to events through its practices, offering like cinema “knowledge-in-security” and “regimes of intelligibility” (1982/1992:18). Ellis writes: “The viewer is provided with a view: one that is comprehensive. The viewer is equally kept separate from the events involved: editing will provide a mobility of physical viewpoint that is always more than the sum of the physical points of view[178] […]; the narration will provide more information than that possessed by any one character. Equally, factual programmes will provide terms which place every individual contribution, either by the techniques of voice-over in a documentary, or by the privilege that the presenter of a studio discussion has to speak directly to the viewer” (19)[179].

The domestic, casual scene

At the same time, television exploits its difference from cinema to provide serial or series-oriented content to be watched “in domestic conditions on a casual basis” (Ellis 1982/1992:24) while (because it offers a small image of low definition) making sound “crucial in holding the spectator’s attention” (ibid). Along with the ‘conditions of reception,’ television’s factual programmes insist on a distinction between fact and fiction, which as Jean-Luc Godard pointed out, we do not consider fundamental to other forms of representation (Ellis 1982/1992:112). As Ellis points out: “Arguments about documentaries and their supposed truthfulness very quickly become arguments about the integrity of the programme-makers involved, for it is with their guarantee of the source of the material that the distinction between fact and fiction rests” (113)[180].

The practices of television can be more easily understood by looking (as the section on artistic creation looked at a film for children) by considering what has been learned about making television programs for children. The education director of the pioneering and long-running Sesame Street television series lists three main tools for keeping pre-schoolers’ attention: humor[181], anticipation, and program diversity (116-131). Gerald Lesser, a professor of developmental psychology, reports that the anticipation effect was discovered by accident but proved “apparently powerful in sustaining attention” (121). Similarly, the makers of Sesame Street found that program diversity went against conventional wisdom (at least among children’ TV programmers): “In television production, it is sometimes assumed that a ‘theme’ within a program will link together its elements and help to sustain attention. This proved wrong, producing instead a feeling of sameness” (124).

Nevertheless, Lesser fails to specify a characteristic of TV which is common across both entertainment and information television: programs are “highly divided into segments, which are relatively self-contained events which have slight connections with ensuing events in their separate segments” (Ellis 1982/1992:25). Similarly, humor, anticipation and diversity are major tools of the interruption culture.

Television’s Technologies of Desire

“For a totalitarian regime, the ideal citizen isn’t a chest-thumping Nazi, but rather the man for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (meaning the reality of the experience) and the distinction between true and false (meaning the standard way of thinking) no longer exists.” – Hannah Arendt, cited in Autodafe.

Apart from the ways in which language is deployed to create (and exclude) public meanings by the media, the framing of discourse through technologies of presentation also demands examination, if only because apparently literal images can so easily claim assent from the spectator as true while being staged, systematically or for momentary credibility.

The idle gaze

The starting point for a consideration of television’s (and documentary film’s) technological tools of control must be not the image but the frame: the window that determines the object of the spectator’s gaze. In fictional presentations, the blank frame is regularly exploited as an aesthetic element, whether Jean-Luc Godard’s “blackboard” for the start of a lesson in dialectics, Orson Welles’s “lights-out” as the magician’s voice begins to cast its spell, Bergman’s offscreen noises and voices before the start of Persona, or the dislocation of the spectator’s position from privileged witness to passive viewer (except in seeking to identify individual participants) at the end of a film as credits roll. Stereotypically, blank screens can indicate a loss of consciousness.

The same devices may be used in documentary, but in television news and current affairs a blank screen usually indicates that the screen is warming up or there is a transmission failure, a disturbance to expectations. Where deliberate, blank screens are usually accompanied by sound in order to signal to viewers that the blanking is part of the construction of the work. But in all circumstances, the blank gaze is more disturbing on television than in cinema: the accidental is always a threat on television.

While gazing is “the constituitive activity of cinema,” whether fetishist or voyeuristic[182], Ellis suggests that broadcast television “demands a rather different kind of looking: that of the glance. Gazing at [i.e focusing exclusively on] the TV is a sign of intensity of attention that is usually considered slightly inappropriate to the medium” (1982/1992:50). This overlooks the ways in which television exploits the approved forms of demanding attention (whether the “seriousness” of its journalists or topics before the 1980s or the techniques of rupture and interruption – suspense, mystery, enigma and deferral – since then, and its claims to offer a knowledgeable window on the world. As Ellis acknowledges: “Its most active proponents [sic, participants] are children, watching despite their domestic circumstances, learning the ways of the world and its narratives” (ibid).

In the moment

One of the attention-getting techniques which cinema is unable to exploit is a major characteristic of television. TV “assiduously maintains a general sense of the live and instantaneous nature of its representations” (Ellis 1982/1992:38). However, the emphasis that television gives to live broadcasts is as much an admission that most broadcasts are heavily controlled as it is a declaration that the screen will be open to the contingent. In any case, the unexpected on television is always is constrained within strict bounds. As a frustrated reporter in Bruce Almighty, Jim Carrey was ludicrous in his exaggerations with a supposedly career-stopping diatribe to camera but the performance (because so unlikely) indicated plainly how narrow is the range of permitted behavior on live broadcasting. Television promises, as film does not, that it will keep its images within bounds. Pans and dollies, camera movements that can potentially lead the viewer into uncontrolled territory, have become commonplace in fiction films. They remain rare in factual television, which favors the zoom and the reporter walking towards the camera to demand, direct or keep attention.

Documentary film theorist Bill Nichols contrasts the viewing window offered by documentary with that used in fiction films: “In fiction, we look in upon a well-lit room, overhearing and overseeing what occurs inside, apparently unbeknownst to the occupants[183]. […] In documentary, we look out from a dimly lit room, hearing and seeing what occurs in the world around us” (1991:112). More significantly, he contrasts the mode of presentation: “We enter a fictional world through the agency of narration. […] We enter the world of documentary through the agency of representation or exposition, […] allowing us to reconstruct the argument” (ibid)[184]. But while documentary shares the implications of fiction’s “constructed, formal, ideologically inflected status” (110), it asks us to consider its products as a representation of the historical world “rather than a likeness or imitation of it” (ibid)[185].

In a very influential study, Laura Mulvey took up one implication of this difference: the Hollywood [fiction] film (and Hitchcock is a master hypnotist in this genre) offers its viewers a scopophilic pleasure in an “imagized, eroticized concept of the world” (1975:308), one that sets out its topics for the “male gaze” where action is a privilege of the male figures or pseudo-male women (ibid). Advertising, as it is presented in Frederick Wiseman’s Model (1980), exploits the same realm of fantasy (Nichols 1991:95-98).

The male gaze of news vs MTV

Such frameworking rarely translates directly to the documentary or non-fiction production (Wiseman’s film contrasts the fetishizing of the model and panty hose in the advertisement with the everyday conditions of its production). On television, the “male gaze” is largely incorporated into the structuring of news: the “business look” of male news anchors and the panel format, the direct forms of address to camera by women whose very formality is subservient, the “public presentation” style of news sets, the programming of news at times when men are most likely to be watching (and in control of the remote).

Such frameworks are being gradually dismantled as a generation that is less receptive to such structuring determines what channels are watched: MTV presenters, variety-style breakfast shows reminiscent of children’s television (sometimes with the same anchors), Fox News opinionation and shout-down discussions and talk-show style examination of public affairs all encourage a less submissive view of news programs. Dismissed as offering news as entertainment, they nevertheless make abundantly clear the ideological claims of mainstream news structures (to objectivity, seriousness and respectability) and have led to a number of cosmetic changes (news presenters without ties, anchors in cardigans on British TV).

CNN has consciously exploited this formalism by fronting obviously foreign-sounding news presenters to assert Ted Turner’s principle that all nationalities have equal status (provided they assent to its conception of news)[186]. But Christiane Amanpour, the fiercely partisan but equally professional chief correspondent for the network, has yet to sit in the news anchor’s seat and direct coverage in such a broadcast, except as an on-the-spot event celebrated as news.

The degree zero style in news

In place of Hollywood scopophilia, Nichols suggests documentary productions engage the viewer’s epistephilia, the desire for knowledge (1991:96), as does television news[187]. However, distinctions must be made between news broadcasting and documentaries with regard to the attitudes of the makers embodied in the styles they use (see page 165). Bill Nichols remarks that news “objectivity” (what Barthes called the “zero-degree style” of natural, ‘commonsense’ representation – “ideological and institutionally enforced”, as Nichols points out) presents events in a way that “empowers the institutional apparatus for the production of news more than the viewer, and often more than those who, in fact, make the news” (1991:128).

This posture of “innocent neutrality” (Nichols 1991:128) is exposed when imposed on powerful figures: in 1988 the TV anchor Ted Koppel flagged a question to the politician Jesse Jackson that he would want answered after the commercial break. Jackson started to reply but was cut off by Koppel. “The segment ended with a close-up shot of the effectively gagged, and stymied, Reverend Jackson. […] That it would be tolerated was quiet testimony to the power of the institutional apparatus. The sense of objectivity becomes a pose of innocence behind which stands hierarchy, control, and, in this case, arrogance” (Nichols 1991:281).

The ideological uses of such practices have been explored in the Prologue and after. The philosophical implications are discussed in the next section, from page 146 on.

The delegated gaze

In contrast to cinema, whose work is to create “a curious and expectant spectator, anxious to find out, the resolution of whose anxiety becomes the point of intelligibility of the film” (Ellis 1982/1992:25)[188], television operates as if the viewer has delegated looking to the TV broadcaster, who in return is expected to offer a diversion: “The viewer is able to glance at a TV look on the world outside, a world separate from the domestic place of the TV viewer and their complicity with TV’s look at it” (ibid) while cinema offers relative anonymity as a member of the audience.

In return, television can transmit or produce single films but only by reference to a notion of ‘cinema’ (ibid). This puts a question mark over all cinematic devices with regard to television, which in fact applies cuts, pans, editing and similar constructive techniques for topics (such as political occasions, reports from abroad, segments on celebrities, science matters) where the broadcaster can be accepted as taking deliberate control. Film of 9/11 has ‘naturally’ moved from prolonged segments from a particular viewpoint to a product of montage. By contrast, the Abu Ghraib photos were featured first as a very restricted selection of abuse photos, then as a more expanded collection in the two months that followed, and then were reduced to a handful of images that were treated as iconic (see page 201).

The other characteristic of television most noted by commentators (and practitioners) is the segmentalization (Ellis 1982/92:121) of its output. “Segmentalisation is TV’s own creation,” observes John Ellis (121). This is not in conflict with Raymond Williams’s “extraordinarily influential”[189] definition of television as ‘flow’ (1974:77), since he pointed rather to the illusory and delusory nature of watching television: “the replacement of a programme series of timed sequential units by a flow series of differently related units in which the timing, though real, is undeclared, and in which the real internal organisation is something other than the declared organisation” (93). He was also firmly aware of the way in which television involves interruption: “‘interruptions’ are in one way only the most visible characteristic of a process which at some levels has come to define the television experience” (ibid). Williams noted that rather than producing programs which are interrupted by other elements, television produces units that form a “kind of montage without overall meaning” (Ellis 1992/2001:117, Williams 1977:96). As John Ellis points out, however, Williams oversimplified the commodity that is television form, “which has very little to do with the single text” (Ellis:118).

Advertising: the concatenation of images

It is ‘spot’ advertisements that producer-critic John Ellis sees as the quintessence of TV. Not just for the “exhilaration” produced by watching them because of their short span or intensity of meeting, or for their expensive sheen and precisely calculated effects, their diversity or being a “supremely televisual product” giving viewers a chance to see the medium used for itself (1992/2001:118). In advertisement segments, segments incite each other. Sometimes they together promote “a domestic consumerist relation to objects” (118) – perhaps less accurate as a generalization with the advent of community and public relations advertising (all conform to the language of TV advertising, however, and in a sense promote this way of viewing issues). “But their organization together is something new to Western representations,” Ellis declares (118). “Advertisements on TV cannot be scanned or ignored like the page of a newspaper: they demand short bursts of attention, producing an understanding that rests at the level of the particular segment involved and is not forced to go further, is not made to combine as a montage fragment into a larger organization of meaning. Thirty seconds by thirty seconds, the ‘spot’ advertisement expands but does not combine: it is the furthest development of broadcast TV’s segmental commodity” (118-9).

Together, the observations of Williams and Ellis indicate how a culture of interruption can appear as a culture of ‘flow.’ Segmentalisation stretches “across virtually the whole of TV’s output,” Ellis observes (119): “The form that tends to be adopted by TV fiction, in this sense, is the same as TV news, with a continuous updating on the latest concatenation of events rather than a final ending or explanation. Even though events are frequently intercut in the series and serial, there is habitually no parallelism implied between the events beyond a simple one of simultaneous occurrence and general connection between the characters” (120-1). In fact, television series practice since the 1990s has been to play with parallelism and contrast to bring out themes.

A deictic ethic and aesthetic

“If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.” – Thomas de Quincy. ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” (1827-54), cited by Tripp 1970/1976:716.

Atrocity demands not just an ethic but also an aesthetic, since its presentation remains a fundamental element of visibility. The preceding section examined ways in which television’s broadcasters determine the kind of visibility they give to issues and individuals while claiming that the constraints come from the technology. It deliberately omitted consideration of the philosophical/phenomenological implications of such practices, touched on briefly in the Prologue.

In late 20th-century society and beyond, television’s news programming, along with its current affairs and documentary allies, has become the modern panopticon of Michel Foucault (see page 96), with a detective’s rights to go anywhere (as Godard suggests, see page 108). Its interruptive structure and practices, its destruction of narrative pleasures (including those of a climactic ending), its ‘policing’ of events through news anchors, on-the-spot reporters and interviewers, suggest something of the fears an administrative society always has of Being in the World through pleasure (see the section on Terminality, page 58 and after). As early as 1908, Freud linked sex drives to curiosity[190], but he did not go so far as to point out the sexual pleasure underlying such explorations.

News television hedges itself around with techniques to separate epistephilia (the obsession with knowledge) from scopohilia (the erotics of looking), with regard to its subjects and to its consumers[191]. News broadcasting both insists on and denies its constructedness: it is extremely formal in structure and reports what is unexpected, at least in its public self-descriptions[192]. Curiosity on television is extremely constrained. True, what Nichols calls the taboo on looking (1991) and an equally forceful taboo on enjoying what one sees is broken by the camera’s panopticon gaze, similar to the scopophilic gaze encouraged in pornographic films or the ethnographic, “scientific” gaze directed to old National Geographic images of nude women (and sometimes men)[193].

Nevertheless, images of the collapse of the Twin Towers, the massacres at Srebrenica or the abuses at Abu Ghraib were presented iconically rather than informatively in news programs and were not at all framed so as to satisfy any demand for knowledge. Nichols declares (194): “News reportage urges us to look but not care, see but not act, know but not change[194].” In fact, only advertising is designed to offer pleasures of knowing and looking[195], to allow the viewers to care, act and change their lives: it is no accident that a frequent refrain among viewers is that advertisements are more interesting than news. Nor is it surprising, in these circumstances, that the pleasures which viewers report from television are minor (Argyle 1996:82).

Refusing the delicious fruit

One problem in seeking a philosophical approach to dealing with atrocity is that artists who confront the challenge achieve only temporary respite from the dilemmas through their works. The subject continually returns and demands to be treated anew in its radical specificity. Many have ended their lives through suicide[196], in Benjamin’s case apparently as a result of his anticipation of the atrocity to come. The obvious conclusion is that atrocity has no adequate philosophical response.

By contrast, Jacobo Timerman describes suicide as “too obvious a subterfuge” for an actrocity victim (1980:91). Thoughts of suicide in the face of atrocity bring into the daily life of the victim a way of “living on an equal footing with one’s jailers,” he suggests. “More than a decision or a hope, it’s an occupation – its dimension so profound, so biological and awesome, that it’s a palpable presence. […] It introduces the possibility of achieving a level of destruction akin to the destruction unremittingly being inflicted upon you. […] It fills the Time of the prisoner’s time, and the Space of the prisoner’s cell. […] All this inherent violence transmits a sensation of physical capacity and inevitability to the prisoner who’s undergone torture. It contains an element of romantic audacity, the sense of a completed story” (90).

Though suicide is “the primary temptation” (91) in response to the continual humiliation, with “the somber, austere, incorruptible flavor of vengeance,” the thought of suicide is a subterfuge because before taking the fateful step, the prisoner also realizes at some time that he or she will not commit suicide because there is no opportunity, strengthening the humiliation and feeling of defeat, Timerman recalls. “The thought of suicide occurred to me often. But I discovered then that it was a temptation rather than a premeditated decision. The idea of suicide, its temptation, would appear like a delicious fruit in situations where only death could arouse some sensation of desire. But the opportunity for suicide did not arise during these early weeks of interrogation and torture,” Timerman notes (88).

Developing a new relationship to experience

The strategy suggested here takes its inspiration from Gregory L. Ulmer and the approach he has developed most explicitly in Internet Invention (2003). In a post-literate world suffused with electronic media products, he proposes we should develop a new relationship to experience and accounts of experience, one that overturns conventional theoretical discourse using definitions in favor of a performative treatment of arguments (Ulmer 2003.44) and a focus on what Barthes called the punctum, i.e. “the relationship between the details in the image and the memories and their associated emotions that the detail awakens in the viewer” (Ulmer 2003:44)[197]

The starting point for a person developing an aesthetic in relation to atrocity, then, is the individual experience and another individual’s experience of that person’s testimony. The simple fact of recounting an experience implicates the hearer, as James Elkins, has suggested of ‘seeing’ in The Object Stares Back[198], though the ‘reporter’ must somehow separate from the “dissolution” of viewer and the object that Elkins sees is the inevitable result of looking.

Re-thinking the Unthinkable

“The artist’s strongest protest against injustice, his best defense of the underprivileged of the world, is to tell their stories as works of art.” – Bernard Malamud (cited by William Kennedy: 1963:95).

Whoever embraces justice as a guide for dealing with atrocity must abandon the conventional ethical distinction between right and wrong[199]. This was clearly seen by Schopenhauer. In the words of his English interpreter Patrick Gardiner: “For Schopenhauer right is a merely ‘negative’ concept, parasitic upon the idea of wrong. [...] Schopenhauer’s concern was, I think, to emphasize [...] the restricted scope of the ideal of justice. [...] For a fuller realization of the nature of/morality we must look to the kind of behaviour and character that falls under the more positive concept of moral goodness. Here we find more than simply a refusal to injure one’s neighbour or to restrict his liberty of action in the illegitimate furtherance of one’s own interests; we find an actual desire to help him, to go to his aid when he is in difficulties or pain, to alleviate his sufferings, and to do these things at personal hardship or cost to oneself” (1963:272-3).

Alain Badiou makes clear the distinctions: “Each of us, and not only the philosopher, knows that today, if we are confronted with the inhuman, we must make our own decision and speak in our own name. One cannot hide behind any great collective configuration, any supposed force, any metaphysical totality which might take a position in one’s stead” (1999.54).[200]

Baudrillard, who early on in his career was a translator of Nietzsche (person. comm. 2001), starts from something like the same point when he argues that in what he calls the resurgent principle of Evil: “There is no moral dimension or guilt [...]: the principle of Evil is merely synonymous with the principle of reversion and the principle of adversity). In systems moving towards total positivation – and hence de-symbolization – evil simply equates, in all its forms, with the fundamental rule of reversibility” (Baudrillard 2000:3).

This is clearly a theory at odds with John Rawls’ interpretation of ‘justice’ in social action. As explicated by a prize-winning computer ethics specialist: “Rawls recognizes that we can’t arrive at an account of justice and the fairness of social arrangements by reasoning about what rules particular individuals would agree to. He understands that individuals are self-interested and therefore will be influenced by their own experiences and their own situation when they think about fair arrangements.” (Johnson 1985:49).

Such blurring of the distinction between social arrangement and justice is precisely what this thesis argues against. However, even rejecting the philosophical ambitions of Rawls’ theory, we must still confront its undoubtedly influential and useful social content (presuming a ‘veil of ignorance’)[201]. And here the first stumbling block must be its authoritarian framework (the concern with social arrangement rather than satisfaction).

Social implementation

For all that the American neo-pragmatist Richard Rorty has elucidated some of the traps in conventional thinking about justice, he seems to give little weight to the problems of the social implementation of his principles (though they are clearly social in their implications). For example, he notes that human solidarity does not consist of what is left after clearing away “prejudice” or arrived at by reflection (1989:xvi). It depends on “the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers. [...] That is why the novel, the movie, and the TV program have, gradually but steadily, replaced the sermon and the treatise as the principal vehicles of moral change and progress” (xvi).

In line with this, recognizing that human self is created by the use of a vocabulary rather than expressed in a vocabulary, Rorty observes that the Romantic claim that imagination rather than reason is the central human faculty depends on “the realization that a talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well, is the chief instrument of cultural change” (7).

Rorty is also keenly aware of the need for a new vocabulary in philosophy, with suggestions about how this can be sought: “Interesting philosophy is rarely an examination of the pros and cons of a thesis. Usually it is, implicitly and explicitly, a contest between an entrenched vocabulary which has become a nuisance and a half-formed new vocabulary which vaguely promises great things./[...] The method is to redescribe lots and lots of things in new ways, until you have created a pattern of linguistic behavior which will tempt the rising generation to adopt it, thereby causing them to look for appropriate new forms of nonlinguistic behavior, for example, the adoption of new scientific equipment or new social institutions. [...] It does not pretend to have a better candidate for doing the same old things which we did when we spoke in the old way” (9).

Authoritarian research

Deconstruction’s starting point, too, is a rejection of all authoritarian pretensions, on either side of philosophy – its thinkers or its subject. Two of these pretensions are ‘scientific method’ and ‘professionalism’. Psychologist Hans Toch discusses some of the problems in relation to interviewing violent criminals: “Most social researchers sense some difficulty in the initial approach to subject populations of vastly different backgrounds from their own. Some react at this juncture with an elaborate process of ingratiation, or ‘gaining of rapport,’ in which the research and the research are presented in the (presumably) best light. This posturing is often transparently insincere and always wasteful. Worse, it usually achieves merely a wary and delicate stalemate, during which only a hit-and-run raid for data is possible before the subjects discover what has happened to them. /During rare moments of honesty we may admit that even when we induce subjects to cooperate, our dealings with them are seldom the exciting adventures we tell our students about. And the main problem here may not be one of communication and social distance at all – it may have nothing to do with habits of dress or the use of colloquial language. It may be that our subjects understand us only too well, knowing that what we ask is unreasonable and unfair. After all, we are supplicants and, at worst, invaders demanding booty of captive audiences. In return for vague promises or a modest remuneration we expect a person to bare his soul or to make controversial and potentially incriminating statements. The ‘communication’ is one-way: the researcher maintains his position as a recipient of non-reciprocated information” (1969: 46).

Such pretensions are open to the same charges that Derrida makes against the law in the name of justice. Toth adds: “We also make our informant aware that we are interested in him not as a man but as a ‘subject’ – a representative of a type, or a case, or an item in a sample. He knows this because he knows who he is and who we are. He knows that he is being approached because he is the inhabitant of a ghetto or a prison, because he is a ‘consumer’, or because he acts as an informer. And he knows that his aims are being subordinated to our own” (46).

Understanding the Event

The poststructuralist French scholar Alain Badiou has developed a philosophy of the subject as a construction rather than a position: “a subject emerges through an autonomous chain of actions within a changing situation” (Feltham and Clemens: 6). “In Badiou’s philosophy there is no such thing as a subject without such a process of subjectivization” (7). This is hardly new as an insight. The English novelist (and Parisian university teacher) Christine Brooke-Rose observed, after a career devoted to fiction based on this proposition: “Each of us is many; identity is wholly constructed and deconstructed by our world” (1993/2002.44).

What enables this subjectivization is what Badiou describes as an Event. His explicators Feltham and Clemens note: “A subject is born of a human being’s decision that something they have encountered, which has happened in their situation – however foreign and abnormal – does in fact belong to the situation and thus cannot be overlooked. Badiou marks the disruptive abnormality of such an event by stating that whether it belongs to a situation or not is/strictly undecidable on the basis of established knowledge. [...] It entails [...] the active transformation of the human being” (6-7).

What can this event be? Badiou’s example is love. “When two people fall in love, their ‘meeting’ [...] forms an event for them in relation to which they change their lives. [...] Love changes their relation to the world irrevocably” (7).

In atrocities, the perpetrators seeks to provide such an event, and to create a subject who has no subjectivity. The subjectivization is all of values which the atrocity perpetrator seeks to impose[202].

Philosophy, too, makes thought an event (thought rather than reading or learning, in Schopenhauer’s sense[203]). It changes one’s relation to the world. In this fact lies its use for the consideration of atrocity.

The place of technology

Is there a credible alternative to the philosophy of the subject? The writings of Adorno, Baudrillard and Derrida, not to speak of Freud and Heidegger, have foregrounded the role of technology in our experience of life[204]. Neil Postman has documented how technology changes language and meanings as well as lives[205]: “Technology creates new conceptions of what is real and, in the process, undermines older conceptions” (1992:12). Wolfgang Schirmacher notes the way in which media now frame so much of our seeing, thinking and the limits to our possibilities: “The telephone answering machine has changed our style of personal communication as lastingly as the computer changed the flow of writing. With the feature ‘call screening’ we are present and absent at the same time, becoming free and open to choose the ‘essential moment,’ as the Zen masters put it” (‘Media Aesthetics in Europe’).

Castells concludes from his review of economy, society and culture in the information age that “people increasingly organize their meaning not around what they do but on the basis of what they are, or believe they are” (1996:3). Deictics attempts to unite these two conceptions by a dialog between the self and the self in action (agency). In this respect, media practice represents only an example of a larger possibility.

Indiscernibility

The first acknowledgement to make about atrocity is its indiscernibility. This is the term Alain Badou uses to refer to the particularity of an experience that helps make subjectivity: “For every property or concept you come up with to describe this new thing, there is something in that new thing which does not quite fit [the listing]” (Feltham and Clemens 2003:30). “When someone tries to tell you about a new experience, whether it be meeting a person or seeing a work of art, they have a lot of trouble describing it accurately and, every time you try to help them by suggesting that it might be a bit like the person x or the film y, they say, ‘No, no, it’s not like that!’” (ibid).

The US literary critic Harold Bloom suggests that “every poet begins (however ‘unconsciously’) by rebelling more strongly against the fear of death than all other men and women do” (1973.10, cited by Rorty (1989:24). This ‘death’, on examination, turns out to be “the failure to have created” (Rorty 1989:24). However, one could equally argue that this death applies to the passing of the moment, and for victims of atrocity this moment has been one when they have urgently wished to die. They have thus lived through the aporia of the poetic apprehension of life and its thanatic opposite.

Deictic media practices

“The eye leads to the I.” – Fred Ulfers, after Nietzsche (pers. comm. 8 June 2004)

Deictic has two related meanings according to the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary:

• In logic, from the 19th century. “Designating or pertaining to reasoning which proves directly”. It contrasts with “elenctic” where proofs are offered indirectly, e.g. via questions, the form made famous by Plato’s presentation of Socrates.

• The second meaning is linguistic, and similarly is traced back to the 19th century. “Serving to relate that which is spoken of to the spatial and temporal context of the utterance; spec. demonstrative.”[206]

This thesis uses the word in both senses: the proofs which subjective experience can offer and a philosophy which depends on the spatial and temporal context in which the utterance takes place are conflated to provide a congery of strategic approaches to atrocity. Perhaps not unexpectedly, they include: welcoming narrative, listening, willingness not to demand a comprehensive account of experience (acceptance of fragmentation), humility in the face of others’ experience, patience, and empathy. More demandingly, this requires – as with all philosophies – that the voyager on this journey is ready to be changed by the experience. This philosophical approach to experience can be called bricollage, conflating Claude Lévi-Strauss’s use of the French term bricolage (1962/1972.16) with collage, the technique identified by Gregory Ulmer as coming into its own in an age of electracy (pers. comm. 2003)[207].

In the novel Almost Heaven (1998), Marianne Wiggins neatly summarizes a reporter’s conventional response to the aftermath of an atrocity: two young soldiers have been given the job of disposing of a Muslim infant crucified through its arms to a tree in Serb-held territory: “The commander of the Dutch UN unit he was following stared at the ground while two of his soldiers pried the baby off the bark with service knives. Holden [Garfield, the reporter, this is Don DeLillo’s funny names territory] could have stared at the ground, too, or at the sky or at the brilliant sunlight dancing on the treetops, but he didn’t. He stood there, off to one side, and watched. At first he thought that he was watching out of habit, because observing, watching, was his job. A reporter isn’t paid to blink. But even as he watched, before he’d started to compose a word about it, he knew the people that he worked for wouldn’t print a piece about a Muslim baby nailed to a tree in effigy of Jesus Christ by some race-crazed Christians in some godforsaken outpost in the Balkans during July, during what was, back home, the height of baseball season. He knew whatever he might write about the baby had one chance in a million of ever seeing print on a USA news page. He knew, too, that if he wrote about the effect the incident itself, but not the body, had on the innocent young blond guys from Holland, well then, hallelujah, there was a feature in the making. After all, not the baby, not the victim, was the media technique most journalists employed back home, wasn’t it, when covering crowd-pleasing stories. What he should focus on in this particular atrocity, to get the story of this particular atrocity into print, was Not.The.Baby. The baby shouldn’t be the issue. What the issue should be was the effect of war and atrocity not on those who waged war or on those who are victimized by its atrocities – but on People Like Us who merely watch. […/] but however much Holden tried to focus his thoughts on anything but not the baby, the dead baby held its ground, as if it was already a ghost” (1998:16).

The Rebirth of the Author

Deictics proposes what might be termed the re-birth of the Author. Roland Barthes recorded the Death of the Author after asking the question of a text: “Who is speaking thus?” (1968:142). He was dealing with Balzac’s ambiguous story Sarrasine, but the indecipherability of the voice that speaks the sentences quoted could be applied with even more force to modern media presentations. Barthes declares: “As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to act directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself, this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins” (142). He reminds students that in ethnographic (pre-literate) societies, this writing is carried out by a mediator, shaman or relator “whose ‘performance’ – the mastery of the narrative code – may possibly be admired but never his ‘genius’” (ibid).

In modern media, the essential narration is the medium itself. Individual applications of the narrative forms bear the same relation to this convention as parole to langue in the writings of Barthes (1997:7-8). It makes communication possible within the structures of the media but only by accepting the subject’s virtual extinction[208]. Roger Fowler’s study of news language speaks of a ‘public idiom,’ a style which “encodes an ideology which is already embodied in the language, implanted there by existing social and discursive practices. The journalist has little control over the values and beliefs which are found in the language” (1991:46).

The ideology, the values framing the language, is expressed in language that enables the reader to find its values and beliefs. However, the discursive interaction between the text and reader is rarely an “impersonal, mechanical, uncreative and restrictive” experience. Fowler notes that newspapers (though this also applies to other media) “have to be lively, because they offer themselves as brand of entertainment, and because they must disguise the fact that they are actually a form of institutional discourse. […] The basic task for the writer is to word institutional statements (those of the newspaper, and those of its sources) in a style appropriate to interpersonal communication. […] The task is not only stylistic, but also ideological: institutional concepts have to be translated into personal thoughts. [And] the fundamental device in narrowing the discursive gap is the promotion of oral models […], giving an illusion of conversation in which common sense is spoken about matters on which there is consensus” (47).

A similar observation in relation to television comes from Daniel C. Hallin: “Television, it is / said, is personal: the news is brought to us not by anonymous writers but by individuals selected in no small part for a persona that combines authority with likability” (1986:27). Morning news programs, Hallin observes, promote an “aura of informality so important to the intimacy of morning news” (16).

Positioning knowledge

As a start, the deictic media practitioner must determine where he or she stands. Not in the geographic, hierarchic or ideological sense. These are conventional questions which all working journalists must ask themselves, if only to determine whether they need eliminate or embrace their biases. ‘Liberal’ journalists routinely seek to compensate for these perspectives from their ‘reporting’ (the term carries its own liberal bias), usually in the name of objectivity. ‘Committed’ journalists, whether of the Left or Right, tend to refer their perceptions and judgments to a wider set of criteria (those of terminality), claiming thereby to achieve “balance” or be “fair” in answer to the prejudices of their opponents (FoxNews 2004).

The starting point is the self, but as Schirmacher has underlined, this self is not simply the ego: “This self is not the ego of domination or the subject of modern times but the activity of ‘care for self’ of which the late Foucault found traces a long way back. [...]The Self is in no way satisfied by being apart and single. The Self wants to overcome its separateness without losing its specialness” (‘Media Aesthetics in Europe’). In the postmodern era, the media’s rigidities make it vulnerable to the jujitsu of Derridean thought: “Interruption, hesitation, postponement, violence: as post-modern preparations for a different way of acting, these have not yet lost their touch,” notes Schirmacher (2000).[209]

Outside philosophy an approach to deictics can be found in systemic functional linguistics (SFL), an analysis of discourse which recognizes that “although we can assign a name to each of these phenomena, a clause, a text or a culture are not ‘things,’ but social processes that unfold at different time scales” (Martin and Rose 2003:1). “Culture unfolds through uncountable series of situations,” the researchers in Australia point out, “as our lives unfold through such situations as learners, speakers and actors, producing texts that unfold as sequences of meanings” (ibid). Using texts concerned with the Truth and Reconciliation process in South Africa after apartheid, the two linguistic specialists underline: “The social processes round the issue are very complex, involving all kinds of discourse and a great range of interests. The social meaning transcends the meaning of the individual texts through which it is negotiated” (6). Drawing on the ideas of the dialogic discourse pioneers M. Bakhtin and Michael Halliday, the book notes how often narratives are filtered through a series of reflectors that may or may not be accurate, both at their source and at their point of reception. For example, one text comes from Desmond Tutu, quoting a story broadcast by the radio (SABC) as coming from a letter sent in by a woman listener (24). Similarly, the story itself refers, often through direct quotation, to many other sources of judgments and events (heteroglossia or ‘different voices’ in the vocabulary of Julia Kristeva, and frequently also projection (Halliday’s term), as, for instance, in sentences such as “He said: he and three of our friends have been promoted – ‘We’re moving to a special unit.’”(44) or the ‘scare quotes’ by which a speaker identifies the form of words as not being her ‘choice’: “those at the top,”, “cliques” and “vultures” (47). SFL is also alert to way in which communication imposes a requirement for conventional discourse to immediately identify the genre through which it communicates, whether narrative, scientific report or political argument, among others (7).

However, as practiced by Martin and Rose, SFL fails to identify a space in discourse where these regulations can be circumvented or challenged, or the many ways which the artists featured earlier have found the possibility of presenting a new understanding of deictic knowledge.

A project of invention

The recommended launching pad for a new media practice is Gregory Ulmer’s “project of invention” drawing on the lessons from “a matrix crossing French poststructuralist theory, avant-garde art experiments, and electronic media” (1994.xi). Ulmer’s effort is particularly relevant because it applies to a “picto-ideo-phonographic” age (xi) – Jacques Derrida’s theory of writing. And this theory is part of the French philosopher’s larger concern with doing justice (applying a humane standard without making claims for our ‘humanity’) to the text that represents our experience of the world. At the same time, Ulmer’s reference back is to what is most inclusive in Plato’s vision of community, particularly chora, a sacred region that appears in emotional statements about places (70), “an area in which genesis takes place”(48).

Referring back to Derrida again, Ulmer thus recuperates for a post-metaphysical world the practices from an essentialist era that can be applied without absolutist metaphysics. The (rationalist)“method” that Ulmer sees as a major product of Platonic thought and standard “authorizing theory for invention” is assimilated into a heuristic approach to theory (8), one that focuses on the practice of analogy and chance (8) to generate a counter-Cartesian (11)“anti-method” (12.) that sets no bounds on curiosity (24) or experiment (32)[210].

Ulmer’s strategy is also eminently practical in considering how to apply classical practices in a digital environment. “Even if the classical rhetoric developed for alphabetic practices is inadequate for electronics, it is a good point of departure for imagining an electronic way of reading, writing and reasoning” (27). In its later development (2003), with his invention of the EmerAgency (a “virtual consulting agency” designed to act as “a ‘fifth estate’ in community problem solving”)(xiii), Ulmer’s project recognizes that “the kind of ‘belonging together’ experienced in electronic culture will not be the same as what was fostered by the novel and print journalism” (2003:5).

Heuretics and electracy

Presenting his project as an educational program, Ulmer declares: “The purpose of this course is to approach electracy by trying to invent it (what I call ‘heuretics’ – the use of theory to invent forms and practices, as distinct from ‘hermeneutics,’ which uses theory to interpret existing works)”(4). But rather than producing a new way of teaching (“learning is much closer to invention than to verification” 1994.xii), the aim here is to find new forms for media practice.[211]

Heurethics

“There is no ‘subject’ in a narrow case history; modern case histories allude to the subject in a cursory phrase […] which could as well apply to a rat as a human being. To restore the human subject at the centre – the suffering, afflicted, fighting, human subject – we must deepen a case history to a narrative or tale: only then do we have a ‘who’ as well as a ‘what’.” – Oliver Sacks (1985:x).

Ulmer’s practice of heuretics also helps to invent a code of behavior in this world of electracy, a heurethics that seeks to engage the major dilemmas facing post-metaphysical praxis (application of theory in action), particularly through Ulmer’s encounter with the theories of Jacques Lacan. Ulmer first approached Lacan to study his use of “baroque” style (1985:190) in contrast to the “classical” tone of university discourse (a distinction later taken up by Gilles Deleuze in The Fold (1988), and used by Ulmer in suggesting an electronic ‘rhetoric’ (pers. comm. 8 June 2004). Acknowledging that “Lacan’s phallogocentric ideology” is rightly criticized by Derrida (1985:189), Ulmer points out that Lacan’s technique in his seminars can be used in a way Derrida approves: “retaining its structure while abandoning its reference” (189).

Lacan faced an audience mixing “those who knew too much about theory and those who knew very little” (1985:191) but satisfied both groups, the declared aim of many media practitioners. Similarly, Lacan’s aim was not to transmit information (192), which again aligns his practices with many working in television, conventionally considered to be poor in delivering detail but very good at dramatizing issues. In another point of intersection with media practices (and the discussion of atrocity), Lacan follows Freud in emphasizing that “the real cannot be apprehended or investigated except through the intermediary of the symbolic” (193). For many issues in television the symbolic is a human testifier, a witness, an expert, a commentator, a spokesperson, someone who speaks of what is absent.

Valuing Stories

The poet to the boy. “If you listen carefully, at the end you will be someone else.” – The Mahabharata by Jean-Claude Carrière and Peter Brook, 1989.

The philosopher Richard Rorty, rejecting metaphysics as a guide to moral change and progress[212], called for “a general turn against theory and towards narrative” in establishing solidarity, recognizing that there is no metavocabulary that can enable philosophers to include all possible ways of judging and feeling (1989:xvi). However, his place for narratives would be for stories that “connect the present with the past, on the one hand, and with utopian futures, on the other” (xvi). This dissertation argues for a broader, and superficially less ambitious, role for narrative, stories and art as filtered by the media. Narratives should seek to ‘do justice’ to the experience of others, no matter whether these experiences are irretrievably past or completely disconnected from possible utopias.

Mark Turner, a linguistics scholar, emphasizes the role of narrative and story in the way we build our picture of the world: “Principles of mind we mistakenly classify as ‘literary’ – story, projection and parable […–] make everyday life possible. The literary mind is not a separate kind of mind. It is our mind. The literary mind is the fundamental mind. [...] Story is a basic principle of mind. Most of our experience, our knowledge, and our thinking is organized as stories. The mental scope of story is magnified by projection – one story helps us make sense of another. The projection of one story onto another is parable, a basic cognitive principle that shows up everywhere, from simple actions like telling time to complex literary creations…” (1996:v).

One might stress that story is not narrative, and Peter Greenaway, a critic of narrative’s fundamental claims to organizing experience, has shown how other elements can be brought into the effort to do justice to artistic insights into the human condition (see page 108).

Nevertheless, virtually every writer has faced a life-long war with words against their propensity to steal experience and turn it into a public form and abstraction. Roland Barthes may have considered Bertolt Brecht’s discovery of the “social gest” (he cites the image of a poorly dressed man struggling against a guard) as “the most intelligent concept ever produced in dramatic theory” (Barthes 1977:73). This is Brecht (and Barthes) at their most didactic. Against this one can set another German-language playwright and author, Arthur Schnitzler, who in Dream Story (1926) has his almost angelically depicted heroine declare to her errant husband: “Neither the reality of a single night nor even of a person’s entire life can be equated with the full truth about his innermost being.” (99).

A heurethics of media practice must acknowledge the power of both arguments without succumbing to the iconic manipulation of conventional media practices or meaniningless relativism[213]. As Godard did with films, media practitioners need to take on board (a sloppy phrase for a process of learning and struggle rather than an event) the idea that there are histoire(s) rather than simply a historical narrative that is news, that the news process both destroys and creates stories.

The traps of knowledge

A deictic approach acknowledges that many of the tools to hand impose, as Heidegger suggested of technē, solutions masquerading as technology at our service, frameworks which provide the answer through the way they pose the questions (Fiske 1986/1993:239 and Kisiel 2002:74). As the earlier sections have tried to show, this framework includes the way in which violence in society is treated, allowed into discourse (or excluded from it), to a bureaucratization of the instruments and processes of social justice (in which the individual is supposed to acquiesce even acknowledging its injustice). It is a framework that can be traced back to Platonic essentialism, carried through to the Reformation and forward into scientific methodology in its abstract totalitarianism that can best be termed terminality for its effort to reach the end of thought rather than treat any generalization as provisional and ultimately inaccurate. The struggle to impose ideas upon reality, and on human bodies, extends into the domestic sphere with the abuse of children and spouses, and becomes as free of animus or passion through the social technology of language and law, which can embody the hatred and callousness denied by its officers such as Adolf Eichmann or observers such as the Red Cross delegate who visited Auschwitz, while ordinary people who see pre-atrocity arrests and ‘disappearances’ can still refuse to acknowledge the violence of their society.

In modern culture, obvious depictions of atrocity are denied by ‘humanist’ critics, even when the issue is central to their work: George Orwell is treated as a fabulist or science-fiction writer (therefore, excluding more than literary consideration of his themes), Vladimir Nabokov’s tales of cruelty are examined purely for their stylistic mastery of the English language, Claude Lanzmann’s films receive consideration only for their adequacy in bringing home the horror of history: his insistence on the artistic nature of his work is rarely examined (rather than the questions he poses, the debate rages over whether his methods are acceptable), Jean-Luc Godard’s continual focus on violence in everyday life of modern society is, likewise, seldom highlighted, just as his political stance is usually dismissed as being conventionally leftist, though he has insisted on the difference between demonstrating in the streets in support of a slogan and filling the streets in protest against the conditions of one’s life, which he finds more authentic as a form of politics (MacCabe 1980:146[214]).

Deictic strategies: (1) Performative philosophy

All these artists offer what can be termed a performative rather than analytical approach to dealing with philosophical challenges. In The Human Condition (1958:195), Hannah Arendt puts a similar distinction at the heart of political life: between praxis (action) and poiesis (making), with the suggestion that the major Greek political theorists (Plato and Aristotle) preferred the predictable craftsmanship of poiesis to the unpredictable boundlessness of praxis. Paradoxical as it may seem, the artists lean more to praxis, being willing to launch into the unknown, as the just-cited remarks of Godard make clear[215]. It is also the essential argument of The Human Condition: that “in human affairs it is actually quite reasonable to expect the unexpected, and that new beginnings cannot be ruled out even when society seems locked in stagnation of set on an inexorable course” (Canovan 1998:xvii). Arendt finds the sources of this hope in what she calls natality, which makes action “the one miracle-working faculty of man” (1958:246). How much this goes against the direction taken by her mentor is emphasized by Margaret Canovan in a 1998 edition of The Human Condition: “In sharp contrast to Heidegger’s stress on our mortality, Arendt argues that faith and home in human affairs come from the fact that new people are continually coming into the world, each of them unique, each capable of new initiatives that may interrupt or divert the chains of events set in motion” (xvii).

In these terms Jacques Derrida’s ideas on justice represent praxis rather than poiesis. Justice cannot be deconstructed because, unlike the law, it has never been – it cannot be – constructed. As with all Derrida’s work, ‘doing justice’ to atrocity requires abandoning all constructions of the Other, and finding the deceptiveness of apparent oppositions. As Colin MacCabe has written of Jean-Luc Godard’s later work: “The radical demand that Godard addresses to the viewer is to actively participate in the production of meaning. The emphasis is always / on a joint exploration, on the dissolution of an object under investigation, the interviewee, and a subject who investigates, the interviewer acting as a the representative of the viewer” (1980:145-6).

Deictic strategies: (2) Interactivations, wild sociology, meta-cinema

Dissolution, however, need not be the final result of performative philosophy. Peter Greenaway’s most recent work involves a number of disparate forms of artistic production and makes conceptual art objects of near-readymades, i.e. industrially produced goods but chosen for their associations rather than derisively (pers. comm. 20 August 2005). His multiple-form projects might be called interactivations for their efforts to stimulate the imagination across a number of disparate forms. Though Greenaway points to Jorge Luis Borges as an intellectual ‘justifier’ of his projects, another ancestor can be found in James Agee’s work with photographer Walker Evans, Now Let Us Praise Famous Men (1941), particularly in the meditative sections, on an encounter with a black couple on the road (37-41), a pair of workman’s overalls (240-244) or a child’s gaze (363-4). These all break the bounds of conventional narrative and seek to go beyond the normal elements of a sociological presentation (his method has been described as ‘wild sociology’[216] but its application in bricollage is to open the imagination to alternative forms of presentation). Significantly, Agee declared early on in his research that neither the form nor content would be acceptable to his commissioner, Fortune magazine (O’Neill 1974:50-70).

For his part, Greenaway has described his efforts through exhibitions to create “an expanded meta-cinema” and “form of three-dimensional cinema with stimulus for all five senses where the viewer is not passively seated, can create his or her own time-frame of attention, and can (as good as) touch the objects he is viewing and certainly have a more physical-visual relationship with them” (1993b: section 4). He traces his attempts to associate cinema and exhibition back to The Belly of the Architect (1987), built around an effort to put together a public showing of the drawings of an 18th-century architect Etienne-Louis Boullée whose designs were made in stone. The published script includes an appendix, stretching to some 70 pages, of ‘postcards’ supposedly sent by the film’s architect protagonist to an address in Paris where he believes Boullée spent his last months. The 1996 script of The Pillow Book starts with a section called 26 Facts about Flesh and Ink, 1984 (Greenaway made a film entitled 26 Bathrooms, released in 1985). An Appendix gives the text of the 13 ‘books written on skin,’ while another provides ‘excerpts from Nagiko’s journal’ (113-6).

For Prospero’s Books (1991), Greenaway made fake volumes, supposedly 24, partly in reference to Jean-Luc Godard’s suggestion that cinema tells the truth 24 times a second (section 15). The Organising Principles exhibition displayed 14 of the magical books (section 15). It also included boxes, cases and crates, game boards, and his paintings, though not related directly to the film[217].

Deictic strategies: (3) Making the political personal

A major shortcoming of structuralist approaches to media production, particularly approaches based on de Saussure’s semiology, is that the latter apparently[218] considers language and thought as quite separate, as Guy Cook points out (1992/2001:67). Deciphering communication then becomes a simple matter of decoding the message from its medium (as in Williamson 1978). Even more significantly, from the viewpoint of contemporary media studies, de Saussure put the emphasis on textual aspects, even while accepting the psychological and physical as being part of the communication, with a presumption that the concepts used by those who employ a code are similar enough to mean substantially the same ideas for everyone. Cook notes that de Saussure was largely responsible for the tripartite division (68), leading some linguists to suggest that paralanguage (elements that carry meaning that can reinforce or contradict the textual meaning) should be understood as a separate semiotic system. Furthermore, paralanguage is not binary in the same way as language. As Cook notes: “One cannot specify the number of different smiles and squeezes and laughs available in one person’s repertoire” (72). As early as 1929, Michael Bakhtin, writing under the name of his colleague Voloshinov, argued that the differentiation between language and paralanguage derives from an overemphasis on written discourse (1929/1988:52-62): as Derrida was later to show through deconstruction, while supposedly believing in the primacy of speech, what is analyzed is usually written.

Erving Goffman was a pioneer in focusing on such aspects of communication, though his work seems not have been followed by deliberations of comparable sophistication. In 1981 he wrote: “Everyone knows that when individuals in the presence of others respond to events, their glances, looks, and postural shifts carry all kinds of implication and meaning. When in these settings / words are spoken, then tone of voice, manner of uptake, restarts, and the variously positioned pauses similarly qualify. As does manner of listening” (1981:2). What distinguishes Goffman from other sociolinguists (“microanalysts of interaction” in his words, 1981: 1) is his emphasis on the importance that listening and silence, ritualization (2), the “participation framework” (e.g. for a listener), and the common embedding of other discourse (from other people, other times, other places) play in conversation (3). Goffman is very alive to the fact that gestural displays cannot be adequately covered by the usual term “expression” (3), just as he recognized how poorly terms such as ritual, ceremoniousness, politeness and expression cover the exchanges that depend on cultural definition and constraints on the available forms of communication (17-19).

The environment changes acceptable forms of conversation in obvious ways: in a noisy room, Goffman notes, the answer to the question: “What time is it?” might be the display of five digits on the responder’s hand (7). Cultural variation can produce forms of communication that go against all modern society’s norms. The Indians of Warm Springs reservation in Oregon have a rule that forbids young women, on grounds of modesty, from immediately answering questions: a question may be followed “by silence or by / an utterance that bears no relationship to the question. Then the answer to the question may follow as long as five or ten minutes later” (Virginia Hymes, cited by Goffman 1976:25). This seems to echo the polite refusal of food in western society, but it would seem very odd on television or radio. Silence, Goffman adds, is interpreted differently if it occurs at the beginning or end of an exchange, or in the middle (when it might be read as a break in fluency)(25). Goffman further notes that in reporting on exchanges we tend to ignore such paralinguistic features (which he called back-channel communication if these are used to offer feedback). In literature and media productions, these tend to be indicated only sketchily or iconically, or else caricatured (2). However, they are rarely foregrounded seriously in our reports or commentaries on communications, or else become stylized indicators (as in The Thin Blue Line).

Coercive metaphors

Similarly, Peircean semiotics gives “exclusive devotion to similarities” and concludes with “an air of finality once these similarities are observed, which blinds it to what is unique” (Cook 75), a strategy taken over by structuralism and by linguists such as Noam Chomsky. As Guy Cook has observed, in a largely neglected point, this not only downplays the surface forms in the search for underlying structures, the language used is also metaphorical and pejorative (1992/2001:76): “Ironically, in both semantics and linguistics, the claim that deep structures are the most important is insinuated through this purely surface metaphor.” In an extension of the argument about scientism as an example of terminality, one can note that social privileging of the written word also values ‘objectivity,’ with facts treated as being independent of their speakers and situations. Cook remarks: “Many written texts aspire to eliminate all traces of either the situation in which they were composed, the process of/ composition, or the person who originated them” (76-7), and the nature of writing – displacing language from the time and place of its composition – makes this possible (ibid).

On the road to mystory

Computerized communication today places itself some way between impersonal communication and face-to-face interaction. Emails privilege spontaneity (one reason for users’ frustration with impersonal spam that takes on an informal, personal character: the opposite of readers’ reactions to tabloid style). The capacity to make expressive and communicative use of formatting and illustrative resources available to computer users provides a range of devices that previously were only considered acceptable in very personal communications. Edward Lear’s communications in the 19th century and illustrated diaries have remarkable similarities in form to emails and websites in the early 21st century.

However, as Gregory Ulmer indicates in Internet Invention, most communications today do not embrace the full range of communicative devices available (as comparison of emails with advertising will indicate). Nor does use of the technology (particularly cut-and-paste and multimedia) lead automatically to a creative engagement with the issues at hand. The new technologies most frequently provide stochastic (arbitrary), mechanical and iconic material. Digital communication almost exclusively offers reverse interactivity (the individual is treated via algorithms rather than being involved in a mutually interactive experience).

Against this, Ulmer offers the pedagogic genre he calls “mystory” (2003:5) as part of a program “for citizens to move from consumers to producers of image discourse” (6). This involves identifying the ‘images of wide scope’ that are “the founding pattern of their signature style of learning and making anything” (ibid). Its link with a deictic approach to treating public issues – it is, in fact, an exemplary example of deictics – arises through a confrontation of the subject with the object at the point of meaning where both are encompassed in a larger environment. Ulmer notes Eric Havelock’s argument for “the invention of the ‘self’ as a byproduct of the experience of interacting with the page” (8).

However, Ulmer’s pedagogy asks his students to find the objects and images where, in the vocabulary of Barthes, they identify a punctum (a personal connection that cannot be found by any other observer in the general meanings to be drawn from whatever they are observing). “Each discourse level of the mystory must be document with details that address the senses,” Ulmer insists. “If the History information concerns the Alamo, for example, we want not an abstract discussion of manifest destiny, but Davy Crockett’s coonskin cap” (6).

The wider image and EmerAgency

The process explores the feeling evoked by the image, what it reveals about the world, and how the subject should react to these discoveries. Ulmer credits the notion of the “wide image” to Gerald Holton’s study of scientific creativity, linking it to Nietzsche’s suggestion that at a secret point in everyone’s experience “the aphorism of thought intersects with the anecdote of life” (18)[219]. At the same time, the nature of “agency” is being transformed, both individually and collectively, in the digital era. Through what he calls an EmerAgency, Ulmer is developing a practice for helping individuals generate a version of their wide image before engaging in problem-solving in their careers (ibid). Unconsciously echoing Cook, Ulmer notes that in conventional textbooks it is unnecessary to include the background, orientation and purposes of their authors. “No such consensus exists regarding electracy, and one purpose of the EmerAgency is to assist in this very invention” (27). As a result, Internet Invention is a first-person textbook that does not seek consensus, and proposes this approach as an institutional practice for electracy (28).

The categorical image

As Ulmer points out, a major question is how the image becomes categorical (43). In line with deictic practice, the justification is the intersection of the autobiographical and the ‘metaphysical’ rather than (in fact, completely in contrast to) its socially accepted significance. Thus individual images can become a Brechtian “social gest” (“the most intelligent concept ever produced in dramatic theory”, according to Roland Barthes 1977:73). What Ulmer is seeking is the way to a thinking that is “meditative” (as Heidegger put it in his Discourse on Thinking) rather than calculative (instrumental, empirical, utilitarian) as the apparatus of modernity (in Heidegger’s view) seems to impose (64).

Similarly, Ulmer insists, “electrate people do not experience their ‘being’ as ‘selfhood’” (74).

Deictic strategies: (4) Question your qualia

In philosophy, the subject is conventionally treated as coming into the world without preformed characteristics. In a secular world, the individual is then considered to discover values by interaction with the human, social and cultural environment, which are in turn projected back onto the world. This is true even of the French existentialists. Summarizing the existentialist argument in an introduction to a selection from Jean-Paul Sartre’s writings, Stephen Priest writes: “We have no pre-determined essence” (2001:16). Sartre himself said as much (“existence precedes essence” ibid: 28) but in the context of an effort to bring Martin Heidegger into the existentialist camp (which the German philosopher resisted). It remains a fundamental weakness of existential philosophy, since all values are then taken from the environment but only some are judged to be authentic while others demonstrate ‘bad faith.’

With more hesitation[220], one can find in Heidegger a similar strain of thought, with his idea of Geworfenheit, that human beings are thrown into the world. This is certainly the source of Sartre’s argument (2001:16). The question that Heidegger puts, as Slavoj Žižek indicates in On Belief (2001), is “what if we effectively are ‘thrown’ into this world, never fully at home in it, always dislocated, ‘out of joint,’ and what if this dislocation is our constitutive, primordial condition, the very horizon of our being? What if there is no previous ‘home’ [the home that religions provide] out of which we were thrown into this world?” (9). From this point, however, Heidegger declares later on in Being and Time (359), in the capsule summary by Hubert L. Dreyfus: “Our being is never fully accessible since […] we dwell in our understanding like fish in water [and] our understanding of being is distorted. […] Everyday Dasein does not want to face up to its own interpretive activity” (35)[221].

Contrast this with Freud’s assertion in 1910: “A child has its sexual instincts and activities from the first; it comes into the world with them” (71). Against this, the existential argument seems very close to the long-discredited distinction between facts and values (see Murdoch 1992:35). Another objection to such theories can also be made if they ignore the fact that consciousness always comes with qualia, the “inner, qualitative” (Searle 1997:8) characteristics that give a tone or mood to human experiences and memories, and usually determine the valuation of them.

Overconfidence

Similarly, social studies have found that “people often place unwarranted confidence in their own predictions about future events,” both in their basic judgments and in assessing the risk that they might be wrong (Mnookin et al. 2000:159). In cases that disputants were told would come to arbitration, the people involved “systematically overestimated the chance that their own offer would be chosen – by more than 15 percent on average” (ibid 160). Robert Mnookin and his Harvard research team added: “Comparing one’s own assessment with an advisor or with a group of peers has been shown in some instances to increase judgmental overconfidence. There is some research (not involving lawyers) suggesting that consulting with others does little to improve the objective accu/racy of a person’s predictions, and instead makes that person more certain that his prediction is right” (160-1).

Other investigations have shown that decision-makers tend to attach greater weight to prospective losses than to prospective gains (they are loss-averse), even when using an arbitrary reference point to determine what is a gain or loss (ibid). Faced with a loss, people regularly will take a risk if there is any chance, however small, of avoiding this loss. One result: “defendants may decide unwisely to litigate rather than settle out of court because they choose to risk a large loss rather than accept a small but certain one” (ibid).

All these finding suggest that even if human beings enter the world without tendencies to behave in a particular way (which seems unlikely), their behavior in later life is closely determined by qualities they do not take solely from the environment. The presumption of a neutral standpoint, so important in journalistic and rational investigation, is a professional delusion.

The delusion of neutrality: endowment effects, reactive devaluation and mindsets

How the delusion affects behavior has been shown in other studies of what are known as the endowment effect, reactive devaluation and adversarial mindsets.

The endowment effect relates to the overvaluation placed by owners on their property rather than a similar object they do not own. When people were randomly given a coffee mug to take home or sell, and others asked how much they would spend to buy a mug, the median asking price for sellers was US$7.12, while the median offer from buyers was $2.88. Thus, those who owned a mug demanded more to be compensated for losing it (Mnookin et al. 164). The endowment effect seems to work in the same fashion when people have information, particularly in mass media, even though giving information away does not mean that one’s exclusive knowledge is then lost.

Reactive devaluation relates to the finding that a proposal received from a person seen as an adversary is declined even though an identical offer from someone perceived as neutral or an ally would be accepted. In addition, “a concession that is actually offered is valued less than a concession that is withheld, and […] a compromise is rated less highly after it has been put on the table than beforehand” (ibid 165).

The mindset issues have also been described as the challenge of the legal culture but relate to questions that go well beyond the legalistic. Mnookin and his researchers write: “Tacit cultural assumptions about what game you are playing can have a profound influence on negotiation and the ease with which cooperation can be established” (167). In one experiment, subjects were asked to play a game under identical conditions except that one set was told it was playing “The Community Game” while the other was informed the game was “The Wall Street Game.” The researchers found “those subjects playing ‘The Community Game’ cooperated more frequently and more durably than those playing ‘The Wall Street Game.’ The latter tended toward defection, based on their assumptions about what Wall Street play is like” (167). In many places, lawyers are expected to play a Zero-Sum game, or to adopt an adversarial or hired-gun mindset. In fact, Mnookin’s book and project were designed to overcome such presumptions.

Rashomon & Co

For deictic media practice, the lesson is not just that investigators must take into account the variety of viewpoints and frameworks brought to events by the people they interview (as in Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon: their own positioned knowledge is unlikely to be reliable). The expository mode[222] of documentary film, observes Bill Nichols, “emphasizes the impression of objectivity and of well-substantiated judgment” (1991:35). Propaganda regularly seeks to co-opt such techniques, while many campaigning filmmakers, even admitting their bias, adopt the expository style of filming, though the common practice is that “the ‘logic ‘of the text is a subordinated logic; as in law, persuasive effect tends to override the adherence to the strictest standards of reasoning” (ibid). Alternatives to such Nazi-worshiping exemplars of the expository style such as Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will can be found not just in Chantal Akerman’s political films or Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. Sky (Uaka) by Paula Gaitan (1989) uses Robert Flaherty-style poetic filming of an animal ritual honoring the dead among the Xingu in the Brazilian Amazon. “Built almost entirely around the type of suspense utilized by Flaherty in the famous sequence of Nanook hunting the seal where we only grasp the significance of actions retrospectively, but without the ‘pay-off’ we get in Nanook [of the North, 1922], without any concluding summation or holistic frame,” reports Nichols (36).”Sky leaves us with a sense of textures, colors, and rhythms, actions, gestures, and rituals that elude any one strategy for comprehension without ever suggesting that the events are incomprehensible or merely raw material for poetic expression.”

This may not go far enough. The filmmaker remains outside the scene. The style suffers from the disadvantages of its attractions, usually by “eliminating reference to the process by which knowledge is produced, organized, and regulated” (35). Nichols also argues that the expository mode raises ethical questions of how the text speaks objectively or persuasively, and “what does speaking for or on behalf of someone or something entail in terms of a dual responsibility to the subject of the film and to the audience whose agreement is sought?” (34). However, the questions are not raised within the film, and the form suppresses any impulse to debate among those addressed, except within the terms the film allows.

Beyond the expository

One way of bringing the filmmaker and the knowledge-gathering process into the picture is Gregory Ulmer’s recommended strategy of finding the punctum in the issue confronting the camera lens and relating the political questions to what he calls ‘mystory’ rather than public history (see page 164). This is no talking cure for professional dilemmas, however. The filmmaker, while making clear the personal link to the scenes being filmed, must be careful not to take centre-stage, at the risk of appearing ridiculously self-regarding and of using the experience of others to assert the importance of one’s own subjectivity.

Earl Morris helped a wrongly convicted man to prove his innocence through The Thin Blue Line (1987). But he insisted that making a “good/movie” (Nichols 45-6) came first, and Nichols remarks of the PBS documentary: “Morris […] emerges less as stalwart defender of the innocent than as ironic observer of how facts become woven into disparate and conflicting narratives […]. He does not amass evidence with a conviction that it leads directly to the truth. In fact, he leaves us, at film’s end, with the discomforting sense that although Randall Adams was almost certainly innocent, justice depends upon ascertaining truths that evade determination and cannot be guaranteed” (99). At a greater distance in time, the film’s stylization and consistent treatment of Adams as an object for the camera (particularly through cut-off shots) front-stage the director’s control over the material rather than the injustice done.

This is partly the effect of the expository style, as Nichols notes. People interviewed in such films “retain little responsibility for making the argument, but are used to support it or provide evidence or substantiation for what the commentary addresses. The voice of authority resides with the text itself rather than with those recruited to it” (37), even when presented through a commentator, whose stance is not as a social actor engaged with the world (38).

At the narrative level, expository documentaries tend to build their suspense around the need for a solution to the issue presented. “The felt need itself can be as much a product of expository organization as of narrative suspense” (38).

Excluding the amateur

Mainstream broadcasting occasionally imports amateur recordings into its programs (President Jack Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, Texas; the Rodney King beatings, the Indian Ocean tsunami of 26 December 2004). But despite the growth of what is known as guerrilla video and copwatch, or the Freespeech TV movement at and sourcecode participatory media productions at , and the products of Peter Gabriel’s Witness Program to put videorecorders in the hands of human rights organizations on the ground (), hardly any television programs, even on community access channels, make the variety of perspectives offered by citizen television filmmakers a central part of their strategy of issue presentation. The exceptions may be in the Netherlands (which has guaranteed access to minority interests), and a few others on Britain’s Community Channel (), which has featured a number of grassroots programs, though many are made by professional filmmakers in the standard expository mode, and the release form requirements are unlikely to be fulfilled by any amateur video photographers (they require proof of written permission to film in public places). Such conditions tend to emphasize the special expertise of mainstream professionals and encourage reliance on standard expository methods, rather than encouraging new approaches as presented in the sourcecode guerrilla video trainer on its website, and are typical of the British public broadcasting system.

Subverting exposition

In Representing Reality Nichols sets out four characteristics of the documentary: the image in documentary is indexical (presumed to represent an object in the real world), images do not allow for negation, documentary relies heavily on the spoken word, and it is usually built around the presentation of a problem and is solution (1991:3-31). The editing is therefore ‘evidentiary’: “Classic documentary will tolerate gaps or leaps in space and time as long as there is continuity in advancing the argument” (20). Nichols also suggests that documentaries can be considered according to their ‘mode’ (style of presentation): expository, observational, interactive and reflexive (32).

The categorization breaks down almost immediately. Though the documentaries of Robert Flaherty and Humphrey Jennings embrace an observational style, their construction is so shaped to make an indirect argument through evocation of a way of being in the world that Nichols classifies the works as expository (36) even without a “voice-of-God” commentary (34).

The reflexive is the closest to deictic practice, in questioning the approaches it uses, whose invention Nichols credits to Dziga Vertov (33). However, Nichols admits the narrow focus of such labeling: “One of the oddities of the reflexive documentary is that it rarely reflects on ethical issues as a primary concern” (59). Given the examples of Chris Marker’s documentaries, the ‘non-fictional’ films of Orson Welles or John Berger’s television series Ways of Seeing (1974), the reflexive label requires much closer consideration. That so many documentaries fall into the other three categories is largely a result of institutional pressures that encourage the filmmaker or authoring agency to position themselves as an absence that is rarely noted (43) – i.e. meeting the principle of ‘objectivity.’ However, the lack of ethical focus in the reflexive documentaries taken into consideration by Nichols points to an inadequacy which Ulmer’s pedagogy seeks to remedy.

Malleable images

In It’s All True (filmed 1941-2/assembled 1993) and F for Fake (1973) and even the last completed film of Orson Welles, Filming Othello (1978), the ‘documentaries’ became meditations on the malleability of film images in the hands of the maker of Citizen Kane (which is in many ways a film about the failure of a man to manipulate his image). It’s All True, with the Flaherty-style restaged drama ‘Four Men on a Raft,’ uses the TV-spectacular style ‘The Story of Samba’ to controversially focus on black rather than white Brazil (Berg and Erskine 2003:175) and mixes the expository, observational and interactive modes to achieve a reflexive style simply by contrasting these modes within one film and by admitting its unfinished quality. F for Fake plays with the documentary approach to magicians, forgers and confidence tricksters to present a film that is a self-professed confidence trick, with re-enacted (forged) scenes and a display of the magical editing powers of Welles. It includes a parody of the newsreel sequence on Kane that opens Citizen Kane, this time dealing with Howard Hughes (described as the original source of the Kane story rather than William Randolph Hearst). How much of this is to be taken as true cannot be established.

Rather than simply raising the issue of the veridicity of images and documentary claims, however, Welles challenges the viewer to take as cavalier a pleasure in manipulation of his presentation of events as the creator. Filming Othello combines interview footage shot years and miles apart to produce, as well as a documentary on the difficult adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, “essentially a meditation on the amorphous state of reality, especially when considered as the manipulable raw material of the artistic process” (Berg and Erskine 108).

Questions without solutions

Welles relishes his role as magician and allows viewers to seem him as a faker, but does not take the audience into his workshop (for example the editing room) in the way that Claude Lanzmann puts at the heart of Shoah (which is very much a film by one filmmaker about witnesses to the Holocaust, rather than Night and Fog’s attempt to appear as an authoritative picture of the death camps[223]). Chris Marker, in film essays[224] such as Letter from Siberia (1957) and Sans Soleil (“Sunless,”1982), adopts the expository voice, but subverts its godlike claims by exploring a puzzle to which he finds no solution. The earlier film even offers three different voice-overs (positive, critical and neutral) for shots of a Russian intersection. In Sans Soleil the expository voice (Alexandra Stewart in English) speaks of a photographer sending letters containing Marker’s experiences written in very much his voice but described as someone who is not Marker but named after his much-travelled grandfather: “We rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?” In The Last Bolshevik (1992), Marker pays homage to filmmaker Alexander Medvedkin through testimony to camera that shows both the Russian’s naiveté and the cost of this naiveté: in the midst of famine he filmed what he thought was Kulak (the peasant landowning class) indolence. This led to their slaughter by Stalin. The International Movie Database describes it as “A terrifying and brilliantly cinematic denunciation of cinema”[225].

In the 1982 film Marker also throws into question the indexical credibility of the image with the opening scene of three girls he met on a road in Iceland who, the film later reveals, lost their home in a volcano eruption shortly afterwards (and they are presumed dead). The film explores, through various byways, the meaning of the sense of happiness the photograph inspires in him, even in retrospect.

The life of a sage

Gregory Ulmer’s pedagogy for electracy notes this scene from Sans Soleil as showing “where an emblem of happiness may lead when it is extended into an art meditation on a fetishized scene” (2003:278). The film takes the viewer through associative links from Hitchcock’s Vertigo to the farewell letter of a Japanese kamikaze pilot as the filmmaker seeks to understand the image. However, Ulmer also points out that “states of mind are not determined, necessary, not essences, but historical cultural defaults” (279). He adds: “The ‘uncanny’ is an effect of position” (280) and his (academic) life has been marked by his fantasy that the life of a “sage” is extraordinary (“I wanted to be a sage the way my friends wanted to be doctors, lawyers, or cowboys,” 285) and by “the assumption that wisdom is exotic” (281). Ulmer’s pedagogy attempts to incorporate such recognitions into teaching and public policy with a website of later developments at http:// nwe.ufl.edu/~gulmer/longman/. James Agee’s Now Let Us Praise Famous Men can be read (has often been read) as an educated, privileged writer’s struggle to find a personal connection beyond that of condescending charity to the poor of Alabama through the surprisingly (to him) alien experiences and objects of their lives. The book is a record of failure (for Agee though not necessarily for the reader) through a triumph of imagination that allows the writer to conceive himself alarmingly as the unpredictable Other and acknowledge his sexual interest in a poor child as well as an exploration of all the puncta[226] which his time among the sharecroppers provoked.

Ulmer’s EmerAgency project with the Florida Research Ensemble, took as its first goal “to use the materiality of the Miami River site (as nature and as culture) to visualize the complex processes by means of which the community selects and constructs the "problems" it will address and the ‘policies’ it will pursue”[227]. The Ensemble included an architect and photographer as well Ulmer. Miami MiAutre (Miami My Other) finds its image punctum in the dirty mattress of one of the slums, recalling to the activist/photographer Barbara Jo Revelle games involving a mattress in her childhood. Within a group of artists Ulmer has noted that most of his pedagogy might seem obvious (pers. comm. 2004), since the concepts of mystory and wider images (finding significant, inexplicably powerful images linking the personal past with public utterance) are conventional means by which creative producers function. However, from the deictic standpoint, this gives a dimension to the image which is usually notable by an absence that is taken for granted. Marker’s films provide this dimension through commentary, a dimension that includes the inscrutable as well as the explanatory (he is one of most personally secretive directors about the details of his life). The MiAutre project foregrounds the search, the personal history, the personal experience, the reactions of interviewees to the interviewer, the accidental and the histrionic as part of the story in the same way as Agee did for another era.

This is not to suggest that every film about historical reality must show the making of the film as its subject, but it would perhaps be interesting if every reportage showed its part in every story. Certainly, the relationship between the television program producers and their audiences, particularly in pretensions to naturalness and spontaneity. Focusing on the placing of cameras (particularly refusing an interviewee a face-to-camera statement), the organization of interviews, the statements made to the interviewee about the nature of the questions and the use that might be made of them, would go a long way to deconstructing the situation. It was just this aspect of television filmmaking that Jacques Derrida challenged in refusing to ignore the camera and practices of filmmakers in Derrida (2002).

Deictic strategies: (5) Paralinguistic parallelisms

One major difficulty in achieving and applying a deictic vision of philosophic practice, even in the unrarefied environment of the media, is the lack of vocabulary to describe and differentiate not only the non-linguistic aspects of everyday experiences but also their role in human sense-making and their impact on analysis and judgement. Philosophy’s contribution to aesthetics has been one of its weakest claims to originality, while the philosophical field of everyday aesthetics is comparatively new (going back 25 years at the most) in its efforts to go beyond the Kantian distinction between the sublime and the agreeable (Light and Smith 2005).

There may even be a physical reason for this difficulty: the split between the left and right hemispheres of the brain in the tasks which each side carries out – the left being concerned mainly with language and details and the right usually with moods and outlines. A recent book for the general public dealing with brain research notes: “Much advertising is designed to exploit the gap between the impressionable right brain and the critical left. Those advertisements that use visual images rather than words to convey messages are particularly likely to impinge on the right hemisphere without necessarily being registered by the left” (Carter 1999:41). As a result, decisions escape critical scrutiny while the reasons given in public explanation draw on the resources of the left brain, providing a rationale for the differentiation even in the absence of evidence (ibid).

Paralanguage

Guy Cook’s work on advertising has highlighted the weakness of the semiotic approach in its universalizing ambitions similar to trends found in evolutionary psychology and linguistics, neglecting what is unique in their simplifications (1992/2001:75-6, see page 163 for more detailed discussion). This, he notes, relates particularly to paralanguage: “In face-to-face communication, important meanings may be conveyed by eye contact, gestures, body movement, clothing, touch, body position, physical proximity, voice quality, volume, pitch range and laughter; in writing, the same is true of page and letter sizes, fonts and handwriting style” (71). These paralinguistic examples can reinforce or contradict the textual message (and their instabilities have been explored by Derrida in the parallel columns of Glas (1974) and numerous other texts since Writing and Difference (1967).[228] Cook stresses: “An analysis of advertising will not get far with a linguistics which excludes paralanguage on principle [as literary criticism ignores paralinguistic aspects of literature]; for advertising, like many other types of discourse, carries a heavy proportion of its meaning paralinguistically” (1992/2001:74).

The borderland of talk

First, advertising, in a different way from literature, “inhabits a borderland between writing and speech” (80). Joint authorship is the norm (81) and advertisements do not draw attention to their human sender. By associating writing with pictures, they “anchor their communications firmly to a specific non-linguistic situation, simulating the paralanguage of face-to-face interaction” (ibid). In literature (with George Herbert, Lewis Carroll, concrete poetry, and Lawrence Sterne) such use of paralanguage and simulations of face-to-face interactions tends to be the marginal, whimsical, ‘childish’ exception rather than the norm as found in advertising.

Cook demonstrates that “the number of ways in which advertising exploits the paralanguage of writing is staggeringly large” – from a spectacle ad using blurred writing to publicity for tourism to Australia with text upside down (84). Advertising exploits iconicity with words, such as a Maxwell House advertisement that puts together text and coffee cups in the shape of a roofed house (85). Other logos and ads exploit conventional letter shapes to create an iconic representation of their product or something associated with it (the G of Guinness is sometimes a picture of an Irish harp). Advertising mixes icons and arbitrary signs, such as the ‘I love Paris’ stickers with ‘love’ replaced by a heart (87).

In all these ways, advertising returns communication to the stage which Derrida calls the picto-ideo-phonographic (1967a:27-73). However, this is not solely the domain of advertising. The self-referential is a standard trope of popular culture (music, vaudeville acts like Jack Benny’s, sitcoms such as Roseanne) while the pictographic is common in unpublished diaries and collage gifts among friends). Advertising, nevertheless, provides a convenient starting point for the discussion of what is involved in much public communication.

The demise of the indexical icon

Guy Cook is able to provide examples of writing provoking iconic behavior (mimicking two sides of a tennis court), writing used iconically (a drink advertiser increasingly shading the hollow letters of the product’s name to suggest the filling of a container with liquid), indexical graphology (such as addresses printed to look handwritten n junk mail), and writing that imitates another system (such as a ‘Chinese’ herbal hair conditioner using a script reminiscent of Chinese characters) to make a reference to another culture, as well as foreign characters themselves (a shorthand script to advertise The Economist). The eighth type given by Cook uses a typeface signify the product (an ad for The Independent which simply used the newspaper’s masthead typeface to state: “It is. Are you?” (84-92).

“It is difficult to categorize this kind of signification within the semiotic terms employed so far,” Cook points out (92). But he also raises an issue which is more closely related to the philosophical application of deictics. The indexical practice provides an element of mood evocation, of ‘brand personality.’ “The signification is both indeterminate and powerful. Advertising therefore adores it” (92). Many household objects – from ethnic pottery to high-tech products – embody the same indexical, associative, denotative and communicative aspect, as Jean Baudrillard observed in his first sociological study (1968), with the additional development that the indexical nature of the object may have vanished (the ethnic pottery need not have been obtained from or produced in the country it evokes).

Interactivity, the Web, and paralinguistic discourse

The effects of Internet on linguistic practices are also subject to distortion because of the unthinking application of writing-focused standards to picto-ideo-phonographic and paralinguistic production. The interactivity said to be characteristic of the World Wide Web and digital television is quite different from face-to-face interaction or even an email exchange (93), with massive limitations to the current digital modes of communication, though such limitations can be exploited for artistic purposes. Patrick Marber’s Closer (2004, directed as a film by Mike Nichols) exploits some of the ambiguities by having the male writer protagonist pretend to be a woman on an Internet sex chat line. Cook points out: “Literary discourse in novels does not exploit the capacity of mass communication or live performance to reinstate both speaker and situation to its texts” (94).

Sound and voice are likewise important tools in advertising – “Choral singing – so common in ads – carries with it a message of solidarity, of social harmony, and of friendship” (95). Even ads that pay lip-service to the ‘modern, liberated woman’ are likely to have a male deliver the final voice-over (95). Regional or working-class accents are used for humor or cheaper goods and services such as bank loans (96).

As Cook notes, the language chosen for scientific prose, avoiding reference to either the sender or the situation (as in this text itself), “imply a belief more in keeping with magic than with science: that a particular form of words somehow alters what happened, deleting the real agent as well as the grammatical one” (101). Goffman makes a similar point about grammatical studies of language (which in Goffman’s view rarely goes as far as communication): “It is not that the grammarian’s perspective can make sense out of even single, isolated sentences, but that these sentences are the only things his perspective can make sense out of. Moreover, without the general understanding that this effort is an acceptable, even worthy thing to do, the doing could not be done” (1976:30)[229].

However, many forms encourage the subjective, the personal, the specific, the ambiguous and indeterminate. But advertising, which enlists such techniques for commercial ends, is often judged and criticized as if it were descriptive, Cook points out (102-3).

Pragmatic meaning

In addition to these paralinguistic and rhetorical aspects of communication, some linguists have focused on a text’s pragmatic meaning, what is meant and how it operates in a specific context, in addition to supposedly shared and stable semantic meanings (103). Cook’s emphasis is not just how pragmatic meaning can be conceived as depending on the interaction of semantic meaning with context. He also takes into account the interpretation which the user puts on the communication: “a word has many aspects for its user other than its denotation […] and its pragmatic function. These aspects of a word are so many and so vast that knowledge of them will vary considerably from user to user” (103). It is the less determinate, less rule-bound types of meaning that are most frequently exploited in advertising : “to focus on logical and literal meanings is to miss the point” (104).

Advertising[230] has little in common with logical public debate but adopts the forms of personal interaction, and the communication itself is rarely discussed among the people who have seen the advertisement. Thus advertising often uses strategies that distract from or add to the literal meaning of language (105) through graphics, deviant spellings, fusing words, and puns (secs machine for a watch). Connotation (the vague association of an object or word for the speech community or groups or individuals within it) are a major technique. “Connotations are both variable and imprecise,” Cook observes. “The connotation of ‘dog’ might include such different qualities as loyalty, dirtiness, inferiority, sexual promiscuity, friendliness” (105). Naming of products – especially perfumes and cars – frequently exploits the associative qualities of particular words. Roger Fowler’s Language in the News (1991, see page 155) explores how such connotations are exploited in newswriters’ prejudiced speech through personalized vocabulary, nicknames, coercive terminology and narrative framing. The deictic point is that such methods form an integral part of the social communication system in the modern era. The techniques in which consumers/viewers/newspaper readers are trained for their everyday consumption of narratives are those employed for both atrocity and celebrity.

Stroboscopic life

The plethora and intrusion of images in modern urban life has led the Swiss journalist Christophe Gallaz (in Liberation, 18 August 1992:6, cited by Burgin 1996:232) to speak of the “stroboscopic” effect of news images on our perception of the world. The stroboscope isolates moments “by imposing a blindness to what comes before and after (Burgin 1996:233).

Deictic strategies: (6) The citizen journalist / journalist citizen

“With the exception of music, we have been trained to think of patterns as fixed affairs. The truth is that the right way to begin to think about the pattern which connects [all patterns] is as a dance of interacting parts…” – Gregory Bateson (1978, in Goleman 1985:7).

In Internet Invention, Gregory Ulmer emphasizes that for Jacques Derrida, “aporia is not necessarily a bad or a negative condition, but a ‘promise’ of an alternative logic” (2003:301). In providing a theoretical basis for electracy practice, Ulmer also takes on Derrida’s notion of the aporia of the gift: “to be a gift there must be no calculation or contract” (303).

The openings which the aporias of journalistic practice offer include a deictic appropriation of conventional techniques to unexpected ends, as with schoolchildren in New York State who used the news magazine format to make a video for their teacher about waste dumping from New York City in their community, revealing corruption between local authorities and gang-related New York contractors (EGS, pers. comm. 2001). Atom Egoyan’s installation work and Citadel, his hand-held video record of a trip to Lebanon which starts as documentary and ends in fiction (pers. comm 2005), indicates how creative filmmakers can respond deictically even to a home-movie occasion, and by its transformation brings home-moviemaking into the artistic realm (expressing and communicating something more than a simple record of experience). Chantal Akerman, Claude Lanzmann and Chris Marker among filmmakers use similar aporias as the heart of their artistic production (see Extralude above).

Another opening is provided by the inclusion of unconventional materials in addition to those expected in the standard framework. The deliberate search for ways to bring new perspectives into the accepted discourse is the essential characteristic of Gregory Ulmer’s EmerAgency Project. Peter Greenaway’s initiatives often fall under this heading.

Blogs and vlogs

Other efforts make use of the technological possibilities offered by the concatenation of digital communication forms. These have received much attention: weblogs (blogs), RSS feed (really simple syndication), and webcasting, among them. The British TV channel 4 has a site where individuals can upload their videos, provided these are documentary in style and no more than four minutes long, and get reactions from viewers and commissioning editors ( fourdocs/). Not surprisingly, these tend to use the conventional forms with the emphasis on more personal content. Freespeech TV has an activist website for videos entitled sourcecode () and solicits contributions with the message: “SourceCode accepts content from cameras, tape, dvds, cell phones, email. You shoot it, write it, perform it, present it, we'll put it on air” (). Its declared mission is “to bring you stories that mainstream television won't show” ( about), but its topics are political and social. Nor does it provide a framework for an equivalent of Chris Marker’s work, where the individual point of view is the impetus for all that is filmed, and the viewer’s response. Nor do such practices allow for Chantal Akerman’s hallucinatory style of presenting images as if they are screen memories (see Freud 1901/1924:84). Similarly, Claude Lanzmann’s foregrounding of the process of gathering testimony has no place in such clones of standard news presentation. In this respect, citizen journalists are not adopting deictic practices. However, by their journalistic efforts they are taking steps, sometimes successfully, to change what would otherwise be considered the Event.

Thus it was a blog (a personal Web journal) which brought down CNN news executive Eason Jordan for remarks during an off-the-record session at the World Economic Forum in Davos on 27 January 2005[231], when he first alleged that US soldiers had targeted US journalists in Iraq, then softened the charge when challenged to claiming that the soldiers had hit journalists[232]. The blog, created by a participant in the business leaders gathering, was picked up by more mainstream right-wing websites which tended to ignore the correction made immediately by Jordan. The emergence of blogging into the public arena (as distinct from hi-tech diaries)[233] has been traced to the hours after the 11 September 2001 attacks in the US (Allan and Zelizer 2004:357). The compilations of “personal journalism” from “amateur newsies” certainly “rendered problematic the familiar criteria defining what counted as news – as well as who qualified to be a/ journalist – thereby throwing into sharp relief the reportorial conventions of the mainstream news coverage” (357-8). Censorship in Afghanistan led to the spread of many blogs, while Steven Levy of Newsweek declared that blogs “finally found their moment” in 2003, when bombs dropped on the city of Baghdad[234]. CNN correspondent Kevin Sites, however, was ordered to shut down his separate weblog when it became popular[235]. Their popularity among professional journalists, suggested reporter Bryony Gordon, was because they did not need to follow Iraqi official restrictions or be monitored by Allied Forces (Allan and Zelizer 2004:359-360).

Consumer journalists

Dan Gillmor, author of a survey of the varieties of grassroots journalism in 2004, reported of a much more immediate effect at a conference in Phoenix, Arizona, 2002. He sat in the audience posting a weblog via a wireless link the conference had set up for participants. When a CEO complained of his difficulties, a lawyer in Florida read the blog and sent an email with a hyperlink (web page link) to a Yahoo Finance report showing how he had cashed in more than $200 million in stock while the company’s stock price was declining. Gillmor and another tech journalist published the information. As a result, the conference participants, many of whom were reading the weblogs, turned hostile (Gillmor 2004:xi). Gillmor took the lesson that the expertise of the audience can be added to real-time journalism (xii): “Tomorrow’s news reporting and production will be more of a conversation, or a seminar. The lines will blur between producers and consumers, changing the role of both in ways we’re only beginning to grasp now. The communication network itself will be a medium for everyone’s voice, not just the few who can afford to buy multimillion-dollar printing presses, launch satellites, or win the government’s permission to squat on the public’s airwaves” (xiii).

Gillmor’s vision, expressed here in terms that meet the standard language of public affairs (more immediately democratic feedback but without challenging the system which sets the terms for the discussion) is of a new public sphere (in line with the views of Jürgen Habermas), giving “new voice to people who’ve felt voiceless – and whose words we need to hear. They are showing all of us – citizen, journalist, newsmaker – new ways of talking, of learning” (xviii).

Blogs, and their successors video blogs (vlogs), rarely bring issues to prominence on their own. They need a lift from the mainstream sources, often those with their own agenda (see next section). For example, hardly any deal with the topics that won Pulitzer Prizes in 2004 – death and injury among American workers, massive wildfires in southern California, atrocities by an elite US Army platoon in the Vietnam war, aneurysm, admission to universities, and Wal-Mart employment practices, among them[236]. In fairness, most of these topics were covered in depth only by the award-winning newspapers.

Nor do blogs focus on such public issues as the choice of war (Iraq rather than North Korea), on US government interests rather than the four million killed between 1997 and 2003 in the Democratic Republic of Congo, despite the reported reserves of oil there (Boyd-Barrett 2004:267). Blogs seem rarely to tackle such issues, specializing in on-the-spot reporting of personal and public incidents and situations[237].

Action from values

Important though such initiatives may be, they likewise seem premised on the cliché that information is knowledge. Issue campaigners know this is not the whole truth. A former Greenpeace UK campaigns director Chris Rose tells visitors to his website: “If information truly were power, the world would be run by librarians”[238]. His argument is that campaigning is about motivating not educating: “All campaigns have some 'educational' effect but it is education by doing, through experience, not through being given information. Moreover, information is not power until it leads to mobilisation.”

Campaigning organizations such as Greenpeace focus on finding the value they wish to promote rather than information to convey.[239]. The most popular weblogs, too, tend to produce their texts out of the values they support rather than an assessment of the facts they uncover, very much in the same way as talk radio, a similarity noted by Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post (Gillmor 2004:11). Both mediums, Kurtz suggested, reach to “a bunch of people who are turned off by the mainstream media” (ibid).

The Writeable Web

Though blogs have received the most intense mass media attention (they tend to feature outrageous opinions that make ‘good’ copy just like AM radio talk shows), it is the reader-edited Internet sites known as wikis that offer some of the most deictically interesting developments[240]). Though most wikis allow anyone to edit their pages, vandalism against texts is a minor problem[241]. Texts do not need to reflect a consensus. The database system enables contrary opinions to be aggregated together or left on the page[242]. The continuous editing enables it to remain focused on the topic featured, in contrast to the UseNet Internet discussion format, plagued with “long, ranting threads that need to be sifted for signal” ( cgi/wiki?DoWikisHaveFiniteLifetime). Ways have developed of putting off ‘spoiler’ contributors[243]. However, a Los Angeles Times experiment with a wiki in its editorial section was shut down after two days when vandals inserted goats and pornographic pictures[244].

Blogs, vlogs, wikis and SMS (short text messaging on mobile phones[245]) all treat the technology for cooperation as transparent in the same way as conventional documentary handles film. To gain visibility they also rely on mass media to amplify their networks. The early successes were celebrated by Douglas Rushkoff in Media Virus (1994/96). Rushkoff sees mainstream media as essential in the process, and the message as being about values rather than information: “While media viruses may need protective shells in which to transport themselves, they also need to contain potent and effective viral code in order to replicate and spread. They exploit our repressed thoughts and energies, so their impact is only as powerful as the force we’ve been using to repress their agendas. Media viruses are not just the hidden agendas of our very popular culture – the closeted issues we have become too oppressive (or is it too politically correct?) to discuss in the light of day” (319).

Rushkoff is more concerned than Gillmor with the psychological impact of these technologies (he also points out that D.W. Griffith’s film editing was experienced by audiences as breaks in continuity). He notes that television editors introduced editing of less than the two seconds needed for a shot to be comprehended, breaking apart the linear story and “MTV must be thrashed as if on a skateboard” (1996:45). The newer technologies (among which he counts the remote TV control and the multiplication of channels as well as stroboscopic editing) have made viewers aware of the mesmerism practiced by television programming. “The ‘well-behaved’ viewer, who listens quietly, never talks back to the screen, and never changes channels, is learning what to think and losing his own grasp on how to think. This was the gap-evasive viewing style that ignored the basic reality of a discontinuous mediaspace, helping us convince ourselves that our lives could run smoothly and easily if we simply followed instructions” (Rushkoff 1996:49, see also the Prolog to this dissertation).

Short-attention-span lives

Noting regular complaints that children are losing the capacity to concentrate for longer periods on any topic, Ruskoff argues: “Attention span is not a power of concentration or self-discipline in the least, but rather a measure of a viewer’s susceptibility to the hypnotic effects of linear programming” (49). He sees this, and the concomitant broader range of attention which children bring to their media-surrounded lives (“multitasking” in front of the TV), as training for work on jobs that like stock broking require the ability to track many things that flash by on a terminal, talk on two phone lines at once, and conduct an electronic chat online via a screen at the same time (51). He also recognizes that images delivered in swift succession tend to become iconic, and that “the first time we encounter an icon, we need to interpret it and its context” (55). Thus a knife and fork could mean a cutlery store but in an airport or railways station it is likely to indicate a place to eat. “Once we are familiar with the icon, we only need to determine the way in which it applies to the situation at hand – the icon in its context” (ibid).

However, the underside of such technologies has received only belated attention. Rushkoff in his later work has pointed to the dependence of SMS-texters on someone else to determine the issue, the action to take and the form of the message. In addition, “what these efforts miss is the real reason affiliations are so politically powerful in the first place: It's because they represent lasting coalitions of constituents who are willing to put mass weight and effort behind their cause. […] They are simply instances of large numbers of people momentarily willing to take their orders from above. […] Reductive and essentially passive, these methods will ultimately favor the kinds of constituencies who take their commands from above, anyway. Once church leaders begin telling their flocks to sign onto action lists, it'll make Bono look like a sideshow.” ( TheFeatureArchive/ SMSactivism.html). Similarly, the technology of cellphones is tied up by the telephony industry to forbid programming of mobiles: “No matter how advanced our handsets, they are still treated like dumb terminals on the periphery – barely owned, and certainly not meant to be programmed by the end user” (). He has also recognized the conflict between TV-surfers and advertisers: “Advertisements are themselves violent acts – part of the escalating arms race between public relations and the public” (). He also acknowledges the difficulties of sifting through millions of messages to find the most useful or entertaining[246].

Eternal sunshine of the plotless mind

The emphasis on new capabilities offered to individuals by digital networking technologies tends to ignore both the lack of control this gives them and the ways in which authorities can restrict their use. Thai authorities, for example, blocked unregistered prepaid mobile phones in the southernmost provinces after mobiles were said to have been used to detonate bombs ( Thailand_forces_registration_of_ prepaid_ phones_to_thwart_insurgency). China’s control over Web access by individuals inside the country is well documented, while the formally private, non-profit US-based organization[247] responsible for managing the assignment of domain names (International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) backed away from an earlier decision to open negotiations to allow porn sites to use the xxx suffix in the face of a request by the US Department of Commerce stating that it had received nearly 6,000 emails and letters from individuals expressing concern. As noted: “ICANN, originally scheduled to become a self-regulating Internet organization, falls under DOC authority” (). The scandal broke just before a UN meeting in Tunis which delayed moves to hand ICANN’s powers to the United Nations, and a year before ICANN’s contract with the DoC runs out. The US Government has said it wants to privatize the business[248], and the xxx idea was unlikely to go through anyway[249], but it catalyzed the US Administration’s opposition to giving up control in the face of conservative opposition.

As a result, when Libya lost the use of its “.ly” suffix for five days in 2004, it had to get help from a sub-contractor of the US Department of Commerce (Victoria Shannon, ‘Tug of War over Net takes center stage.’ International Herald Tribune, 14 November 2005. Milton Mueller of the non-profit Internet Project said US officials “have no idea how it sounds to 200 other countries when they say, 'The Internet really is nongovernmental – except for us.' […]In the U.S., that contradiction becomes invisible” (ibid).

Similarly, the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology that enables businesses to track goods more easily than barcodes has required special efforts in industrialized countries that have strict privacy laws such as the UK, but the tags and biometric passports can be read remotely and undetected, and the cheap tags cannot be switched off (PCPro November 2005:32). This provides opportunities for tracking and exploitation by any authoritarian regime at much less cost than policing.

The countries most in favor of giving control over domain names to the UN were Saudi Arabia[250] and China, which impose strict controls on Internet use by individuals. China has also announced plans to force all pre-paid mobile phone users to register using their identity cards (AP 2 December 2005). In 2002 it blocked the Google search engine[251].

At the personal level, Internet chat rooms, mobile phones and SMS have been used to reinforce bullying of children at school. James Mathewson wrote in computeruser: “Kids are using various chat rooms, instant messaging, and text messaging to reinforce their playground bullying. […] I learned about this through a colleague at IBM named John Halligan. Halligan's son Ryan committed suicide at age 13 in 2003 after being repeatedly victimized by bullies, who teased him with the aid of the various communication methods teens use” ( 2412,3,1,1,1201,05.html). Harrassment of individuals via the Web’s capacity to spread lies and gossip via email have already reached the mainstream.

The strange attraction of viral marketing

Utopian descriptions of the new digital technologies tend to celebrate the convening power of mobiles, the Internet and similar networking devices without examining closely how the networking takes place, or how these groups are constituted. Malcolm Gladwell’s popular account of research into how information and fads spread through society (“the best way […] is to think of them as epidemics” –2000/2002:7) became a best-seller (65th in the Amazon book list[252]. His recipes for “viral marketing” turned out to be dependent on the unlikely combination of people with few friends hooked up by connectors –“that rare breed of socially prodigious individuals who not only maintain superhuman Rolodexes but also span many different social groups,” as sociologist Duncan J. Watts pointed out (2003:240). The arguments depend on a network of decision-makers who are poorly connected. If a network is well connected, no one individual can activate a decision, and the biological metaphor does not apply, and cascading is unlikely, while in poorly connected network without a connector, cascading is simply not possible (Watts: 240-1).

Mathematical patterning similarly thrusts into the background, where it does not ignore, the variety of ways in which people are linked together. A French-developed system of classifying people and life-styles in a dynamic format that reflects some of these complexities works with 3,500 variables and 36 broad micro-cultures (Cathelat 1990/3:24, 48). Even then, its creator, the sociologist Bernard Cathelat, warns against treating social attitudes ranging from passivity to dynamism as the most important variable determining a way of life (49), both because of the prominence it gives to fashionable majority stereotypes and its overemphasis on social change, undervaluing the resistance of familiar habits. “The variable is particularly informative and relevant for advertising, propaganda, ‘hot news,’ all of which are necessarily stereotyped, caricaturelike in their brevity, need to make an impact and look to the future,” Cathelat advises. “But if flows are a tool for commercial communications, in the socio-styles system they are just one composite variable among others. […] They say nothing about behaviour or living conditions. […] The same current does not affect people with different ways of life in the same way” (ibid).

Outlawing the subjective

Clearly, one of the challenges to media is to persuade their audiences to accept the stereotyping which Cathelat argues is typical of public communications, and which any individual member of the audience would reject as adequate description of their subjective position. Cathelat’s description can be rearranged, to suggest that the media make brevity and a strong impact the justification for such stereotyping. Nor is it strange, in this situation, that the media create structures which exclude any personal self-profiling that rejects stereotyping. Advertising offers its stereotypes – and self-objectification within its stereotypical roles – as the link to a desirable society, orgasmic experience and magical solutions to common problems (which in British television advertisements in the 21st century seem often just the ability to cope with unbearable irritation, in complicity with the audience). News programs often subject their interviewees to questioning designed to bring out the force of the stereotype (showing how stereotypical ideas can be defended passionately) rather than transmit information, argument or dialog.

Even when programs permit extended treatment, the coverage will usually be extensive rather than more intensive, unless the ‘depth’ is presented as a specialty, and then each segment is built around the same brevity of scene construction and treatment, with control vested in the format rather than in the subject (see page 141). Documentaries often play with simple oppositions for stereotypical pathos, whose link to ‘fact’ rather than fiction covers the lack of imaginative presentation. Typically, too, this is the approach of Stanley Kubrick in his films. He started as a documentary photographer, and the glaring embarrassments of his more ambitious movies come not from misjudgment but from the application of documentary stereotypes to fiction (after an hour Tom Cruise’s desperate, psychologically blind quest to be unfaithful to his wife in Eyes Wide Shut seems risible, though it can be paralleled by the experiences of writer Arthur Schnitzler’s alter-ego, Sigmund Freud[253]). Much of the skill of popular entertainers goes into reducing imaginative narrative strategies dealing with fundamental dilemmas to stereotypical, often fantastic endings that arouse our disbelief but are accepted[254] because they are so strongly willed (see Žižek on symbolic solutions to the disruption and incoherence presented by the Real, page 80). This partly explains the power of enigma in narrative (see page 22), a technique consciously rejected by Tolstoy[255].

Digital discourse and democracy

All these new technologies are subject to the limitations which Vilém Flusser pointed out in photography: that the discourse is limited by the “the possibilities contained within the camera’s [or technology’s] program” (1983:37) and the photograph [or technology] thus “serves the suspension of critical faculties” (ibid:63) while the search for “more and more perfect automation” (58) disguises the difference between seeing and photography, that people “can only photograph what can be photographed” (35). Flusser warns: “Anyone who takes snaps has to adhere to the instructions for use – becoming simpler and simpler – that are programmed to control the output end of the camera. This is democracy in post-industrial society. Therefore people taking snaps are unable to decode photographs: [t]hey think photographs are an automatic reflection of the world” (59). Similarly, “the automaticity of the camera intoxicates” (58). In this sense, all these technologies impose philosophical terminality on their users. Using photography as a paradigm, one can take over Flusser’s argument that “apparatuses are simulations of thought, playthings that play at ‘thinking’ […] in the Cartesian model. According to Descartes, thought consists of clear and distinct elements (concepts) that are combined in the thought process like beads on an abacus, in which every concept signifies a point in the extended world out there. If every point could be assigned a concept, then thought would be omniscient and at the same time omnipotent. For thought processes would then symbolically direct processes out there” (67). Such a concept of thinking does not match what is known today of how thinking takes place, and is philosophically faulty (Flusser points out: “This omniscience and omnipotence are impossible, because the structure of thought is not adequate to deal with the structure of extended matter,” ibid). Nevertheless the terminality of the structure exerts its power over the user. Communication researchers have found that people treat computers, television and new media like real people and places (Reeves and Nass 1996).

What is not often recognized that a form of discourse, equally constraining, comes along with this technology. Photographic art seems almost exclusively concerned with (or at least celebrated for) ways of subverting this restricted form of communication. The vocabulary nevertheless remains dominant: holiday snaps have a common look, just as news photographs do, even the most creative forms of fashion photography. The creative writing professor Luc Sante pointed to the similarities between the smiles of atrocity witnesses photographed at US lynchings and the guards who tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib[256]. Linguistics professor Deborah Tannen specializes in how discourse styles can be identified according to gender, with implications for the exercise of power (1994), as well as in email language (1990). In The Language War (2000) Robin Tolmach Lakoff takes a larger view, suggesting that the communications battle is over “who has the right to tell the story” and now “the media are becoming the creators of our reality, not merely its conduit” (260). The Clinton-Lewinsky saga was a scandal over consensual behavior in which it was never clear what had taken place (or how this amounted to a high crime or misdemeanor that justified impeachment even if the President had “lied”), while many of the press commentators drew parallels with cheap fiction of the 1960s such as Peyton Place (263-268). The allusions to popular culture by such journalists are not innocent. They take for granted the power to manipulate the framework and depiction of events for the purpose of the public’s aesthetic pleasure – an ironic, Baudrillard-style twist to Keats’s dictum that “Beauty is Truth,” an approach that contains its own heurethic of terminality.

Against such pessimism, cultural theorists such as John Fiske – in a description that has been traced to Michel Serteau’s identification of “semiotic guerrilla warfare” (1984) – have suggested that the cultural economy[257] favors forces of resistance and difference. Consumers, whether children turning a commercial into a scatalogical song or Aborigine filmgoers reinterpreting Rambo for their own culture or kinship networks rather than patriotism, become “active producers of their own meanings and pleasures from the text” (314-5). Fiske concludes: “There is no singular blanket resistance [to television as domination], but a huge multiplicity of points and forms of resistance, a huge variety of resistances. These resistances are not just oppositions to power, but are sources of power in their own right: they are the social points at which the powers of the subordinate are most clearly expressed” (316). With regard to new technologies, for example, media teacher Michael Verdi has argued that even classifying the vlog as a genre limits innovation[258] of the kind such as the moblog (a video uploaded from a mobile phone, first recorded from Denmark in May 2000[259]).

These apparently contradictory conclusions are united by Derrida in his insight that “meaning is always in process, a momentary stop in a continuous flow of possibilities” (Storey 1996:60), that “it is only when located in a discourse and read in a context that there is a temporary halt to the endless play of signifier to signifier” (ibid:61)[260], and that even outside this framework may be found the ‘trace’ of meanings from other contexts [261], The play of meanings which gives power to subordinate readings and uses of technology and technology-bound discourses provides both a limitless freedom and a restricted, controlled boundary to that freedom: viewers do not decide directly which television programs are made, the sensitivity of the light-capturing capacity of a camera, who has access to Internet technology, or whether an event is news (President Clinton’s actions were continually depicted as a scandal despite polls indicating public indifference to the issues treated).

Rituality and ethics

Such terminality in the form of the discourse recalls the process by which rituals embody meanings (see Funerals as Rituals), particularly the recognition that rituals create meanings as much as represent them (Miller 2001, citing Maya Deren). However, as in all rituals, the subject is no longer present as an individual but only as the role permits. As the anthropologist Mary Douglas points out, even in a self-proclaimed egalitarian society, institutions (that is, bodies charged with maintaining the observance of rituals) put the actor ahead of the individual: “If the President of the United States [fell] victim to kidney disease […] he would be rushed ahead of the line” (1986:125), though she also suggests: “No one would protest” (ibid). Ritual is not simply an empty procedure. Its acceptance carries implications for real life. Michael Sandel, in a criticism of Rawls’ Theory of Justice (1971) that applies to many contemporary discussions of justice (1982), has challenged social theory that presumes “an unencumbered, unhistorical individual agent”[262]. In fact, people “conceive their identity […] as defined to some extent by the community of which they are part. For them, community describes not just what they have as fellow citizens, but also what they are, not a relationship they choose” (Sandel 1982:150). This contrasts with Rawls’ first account of community (subjects cooperate out of self-interest) and his later version (community is partly internal to the individual but people are still individuated before the community experience and presumed incapable of change). In Sandel’s view, the human agent discovers his or her ends through community. “The strong view requires a complete overhaul of vocabulary and a shift of assumptions,” Douglas observes. “Instead of being centered on the conditions of choice, a different kind of moral philosophy would be centered on the conditions of knowledge” (1996:127). She makes the general point: “Once it were conceded that the big decisions [by communities] always engage ethical principles, then philosophers would not focus single-mindedly on individual moral dilemmas” (126).

Similarly, the new digital technologies cannot be exploited without a sense of their communal potential, or a sense of the individual as part of that community. This is hardly an original insight, but the presumptions even of scholarly researchers have tended to cloud their understanding and judgement of other cultures (see page 41). Douglas notes: “anthropologists analyzing the concept of the gift in Melanesia find themselves shackled by the Western concept of altruism because it is based on the distinction between self-interested and other-interested motives. The distinction fouls up interpretation in cultures where the motives of selves are always thought to be other-directed” (Douglas and Nye 1998:9).

The reverse failing is also common, with regard to what anthropologists used to call “the performing self” (Cohen 1994:42). Now out of favor in anthropology, it is still applied in other social sciences and public analyses of the public behavior of individuals (ibid). This treats the individual as being in a strategic relation with society, with the self “driven largely by a calculation of how to gain an advantage over others” (ibid). As Anthony P. Cohen observes, political rhetoric these days, far from being used to gain the audience’s compliance with the speaker’s intentions, as traditional theory would have it, often works despite incoherent discourse because “the audience constructs the speaker’s intentions as being the same as theirs” (46). Drawing on sociologist Max Atkinson’s studies of effective political speeches, Cohen comments: “Rhetoric is not merely a tactical device to be employed in pursuit of some identifiable strategy: rather, the complicity being sought may itself be the objective” (47). In the same vein, the political scientist Maurice Bloch argued that coercive speech is “a form of power for the powerful rather than simply a tool of coercion available to anybody” (1975:23). But if the cultural rules of politics and rhetoric are treated merely as impositions on the self, “as entailed in role theory, or ‘theories of the state.’ or games theory” […] “the importance of the self as the essential dynamo of social process is gratuitously ignored” (50).

A deictic strategy will not only exploit the potential of the new technologies but also recognize their limitations and try to make these visible at the same time as they are used, including the styles of discourse. Coverage of the Reagan funeral (see Prolog) would have been improved by a recognition of how much of the event and the history was constructed, and not just in a tone of exposure[263] but of explanation of how these things are done in modern society. This would take into account Reagan’s reputation in the media and with the general public at the time and later, his campaigns (failure in 1968, echoing Nixon on Cambodia in 1968, this time over hostages in Iran), his actions in office (public, secret and private), the controversies (reaganomics, the sacking of air traffic controllers, delays in recognizing AIDS, support for Saddam Hussein in the Iraq-Iran war, Nicaragua, Iran[264], Lebanon, Grenada), the story of his Alzheimer’s, the patterning of the funeral (its deliberate recall of Lincoln’s funeral, the near-shooting down of a governor’s aircraft, the turning away of visitors to the Rotunda), the details of who did and did not attend (North, Paul Martin of Canada) and their reasons, international views of Reagan (much more critical in Europe), sources for background information, and follow-up on the media treatment of the occasion[265]. The funeral on 11 June 2004 was perhaps too early to have engaged many bloggers (blogging came to mainstream public attention worldwide with the 26 December tsunami devastation of Thailand’s resorts, southern Sri Lanka and Somalia’s coastline). Nevertheless, it has been a regular topic in newsgroups and blogs since then.

In the same way, media coverage of the John Kerry campaign video and the Abu Ghraib photos (see Epilog) could have dealt seriously with the organization of the Democratic Convention, the making of the video, the omissions, the controversy of Kerry’s war service (and whether this was not a side issue compared to Kerry’s change of heart about the legitimacy of US presence), the common experience of the carnival and lawlessness in wartime (to which Kerry’s own reaction provided an interesting contrast to the abuses at Abu Ghraib), the parallels to other detention centers in Iraq, and the shadow of Guantánamo over the campaign and the scandal. Informed coverage would discuss how such topics came to be excluded from the discourse as well as the content. At the very least, it would open up the possibilities of social change, in line with Hannah Arendt’s arguments about praxis (see page 160), rather than accepting the dialog as fixed. If the ritualistic nature of such events is made plain, the interruptive mode of 1990s and 21st-century television would not appear as a destruction of narrative in favor of coercive discourse but an explication of multitudinous strands of textual manipulation (an awareness of the conscious exploitations of intertextuality) involved in any public event.

Deictic strategies: (7) The Death of the Reader

“Outed” gay teacher Howard Brackett (Kevin Kline) who still thinks he is heterosexual: “I want my life back!”

TV anchor Peter Malloy (Tom Selleck): “It’s not going to happen.” -- In and Out (1997), script David Rudnick, director Frank Oz.

This scene from In and Out might seem the paradigmatic challenge to the deictic philosopher: the first gay mainstream film to become a major commercial success, based on Tom Hanks’s acknowledgement to a gay teacher when receiving the 1994 Academy Award for Philadelphia (1993), the film depends on its actors’ star quality for a mild and self-conscious “suspension of disbelief” and on their acting ability to make credible the comedy and pathos of the situation: the imdb Website lists a number of obvious goofs in continuity, particularly about the date and organization of Hollywood’s premier awards[266]). Who, then, to recall Roland Barthe’s question (see page 155), is speaking thus in this scene? Certainly none of those most obviously present are speaking from any visible positioned knowledge[267]. Even the names they sport in the film seem hardly to belong to their characters (which are really camp Kline and macho Selleck – not identifying them as these stars would spoil much of the fun, if for example Kline’s part was played by Pee-Wee Herman (Paul Rubens), with whom his camping has many similarities). The film’s narrative follows very much the same trajectory, too, as Albert Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus, with very much the same conjuring trick as Camus gives at the end to find a philosophical reason not to commit suicide[268], only in this film the character admits to himself that he is homosexual after spending the previous 90 minutes denying to his provincial world that he is gay. A number of film-watchers have suggested the implications would have been more interesting if the teacher had discovered that he was definitely not gay, despite his flamboyant hands, dancing and fondness for Barbra Streisand albums. In fact, it would have been truer to the film’s narrative if the ambiguity was left unresolved for the spectators. Until the final minutes, the movie is staged as a biting satire on small-town prejudices (Hitchcock’s cozy, ignorant community from Shadow of a Doubt, 1943, transformed into a belligerent, knowing pack of middle-aged bigots). The echoes are of Orwell’s 1984 in its conviction that society can remake individuals in the image that it wants (rather like Hollywood movies, which – the film manages not to suggest[269] – impose a sexual code on its characters that only a homosexual could find possible to accept).

But the fundamental mechanism that gives the narrative its energy is the idea that other people may know any individual’s character better than the persons themselves (Kline’s subjective resistance to the “outing” provides most of the comedy scenes). Not coincidentally (and most satisfying for a Freudian), the most dogmatic roles in the movie are given to the teacher’s parents. As if the community judgement is a sentence on the teacher whose self-defense condemns him to act out the crimes of which he is accused, a narrative reminiscent of Kafka’s The Trial, Kline’s gestures become more visibly flamboyant as the film proceeds. What starts out as a variation on Enemy of the People moves into the territory of Shakespeare’s enigmatic later works (Macbeth, Anthony & Cleopatra, Hamlet and King Lear) where a new note is struck in English literature with tragedies of characters whose deepest motives and values are a mystery to themselves, and whose voyages of self-discovery lead to a stripping away of all that previously protected them from self-knowledge. Camus, Kafka, 1984, Shakespeare’s most complex tragedies – the referencing might seem otiose or pretentious, but the ambition is not to yoke together Hollywood fluff with major exercises of the literary imagination in the style of reputation-seeking, splash-making newer critics of the cinema: the aim is to indicate the relentless triviality that the film had to embrace (and ultimately failed to engage in its cause) if it was not to raise the larger, more serious questions of human self-awareness. The final, ineffective section, in which a gay student declares himself publicly as a homosexual and the rest of the audience stand up and announce themselves as (symbolically) gay, fails because (as in AI, see page 117), when the public labeling is rejected, the question of self-knowledge arises, and the implications of the self-discovery, dilemmas that cannot be resolved by social or technical devices[270]. To transpose this mechanism to another field, it offers the equivalent of sex when the need and demand is for love. The resolutions can only be accepted psychologically by embracing the strategy of sentimentality (see page 115), giving assent to adoption of a formal, ritual-focused discourse about the meanings embodied in an event. It seems worth noting here that public acknowledgement of homosexuality has become in American film a way of treating philosophical issues without raising dangerous questions of class, politics, discrimination against blacks and women, or ordinary justice. Philadelphia, Angels in America, The Hours, The Boys in the Band, The Cage Birds and in its way In and Out, were able to look at philosophical discussions of death, responsibility and the affections through a narrow focus that did not expand the questioning to wider society (though spectators were free to speculate on their own).[271]

The limits to self-knowledge

How blind can individuals be to their own nature? Or to put it another way, what are the limits to self-knowledge? How dangerous is such blindness? What are the tools that enable human beings to see themselves more accurately? And is this worth striving for?

A deictic search for the answers starts with the essential insight of Descartes, the whipping boy of postmodernism. Once Descartes had concluded that by thinking one exists[272], he went on in Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) to consider how someone might be deceived into thinking they exist. In one of philosophy’s most famous and favorite thought experiments, he imagined an evil demon who tried to trick him about absolutely everything (as if he were simply a brain in a vat) [273]. Descartes concluded that the demon could not convince anyone they existed if they didn’t. But more significantly for future discussions, he gave the demon infinite powers of trickery. But how likely is this? Daniel C. Dennett, one of the century’s premier philosophers of consciousness, describes this as “an impossibility in fact” (1991a:4). The amount of information that needs to be generated to practice such a deception is too great even for a Cray supercomputer to handle: “Making a real but counterfeit coin is child’s play; making a simulated coin out of nothing but organized nerve stimulations is beyond human technology now and probably forever” (6). “…If you really want to fool someone into thinking he is in a cage with a gorilla, enlisting the help of an actor in a gorilla suit is going to be your best bet for a long time” (7).

Descartes had nevertheless already observed that the physical and phenomenological processes of experiencing provide their own limitations on understanding (he came to the idea of the evil demon after considering the deceptions practiced by dreams). Dennett acknowledges that misjudgments of the outside world can take place if experiences are produced “entirely inside the mind (or the brain)” (7). But these are never strong enough to sustain the illusion for long, he suggests (unlike Descartes): “Amputees don’t see or hear or (so far as I know) smell their phantom feet ” (8) […Even the purely mechanical part of Descartes’s story must be wrong as an account of relatively strong hallucinations: there is no way the brain as illusionist could store and manipulate enough false information to fool an inquiring mind […] Passivity is not an inessential part of hallucination but a necessary precondition for any moderately detailed feature and sustained hallucination to occur” (9).

This turns out not to be an argument against the possibility of the mind completely misreading what is taking place outside the brain. The neurophysiologist Antonio Damasio reports an epileptic patient who was mentally blind to the doctor but seemed to see a cup of coffee from which he drank and a small metal vase of flowers which he touched, reviving only as he reached the door to leave the consulting room. Dennett himself has investigated diagnoses of Multiple Personality Disorder (known since 1994 as Dissociative Identity Disorder in the clinicians’ handbook) and concluded: “The possibility of developing multiple selves is inherent in every human being. Multiplicity is not only biologically and psychologically plausible, but in some cases may be the best – even the only – available way of coping with a person’s life experience” (1991b:54). Allucquère Rosanne Stone has provided a less pathological account of multiple personality, suggesting that some people (in contrast to the doctors’ view of MPD/DID) “consider themselves multiples but do not suffer blackouts and claim to retain awareness of what the alter personalities are doing when they are out” (1995:63). She remarks: “Their accustomed mode of existence, sharing a single body with several quasi-independent personalities, is emblematic of a fair percentage of everyday life in the world of virtual systems” (ibid).

The constructed self

“There are […things] which a man is even afraid to tell himself.” – Fyodor Dostoevsky (1864).

Physical equivalents to these disorders are easy to find. Damasio writes of a woman who became almost motionless and speechless for some six months when a stroke damaged her cingulate cortex. “Contrary to what a casual observer/ might have thought her mind had not been imprisoned in the jail of her immobility. Instead it appeared that there had not been much mind at all. […] The passivity in her face and body was the appropriate reflection of her lack of mental animation. She had no recall of any particular experience during her long period of silence; she had never felt fear; had never been anxious; had never wished to communicate” (1999:102-3). This akinetic mutism is also found in some Alzheimer’s patients: “All semblance of autobiographical self disappears. Eventually […] even the simple sense of self is no longer present. Wakefulness is maintained and patients respond to people and objects in elementary fashion – a look or a touch, the holding of an object – but there is no sign that the responses issue from real knowing” (104). Certain stroke victims or others with brain injuries will believe they are blind but be able to reach for objects with ordinary precision (Goleman 1986:67): blindsight occurs because “what their eye sees is never transmitted to the part of the brain that brings vision into awareness,” reports Daniel Goleman. “Blindsight suggest a startling possibility about the mind: that one part may know just what it is doing, while the part that supposedly knows – that is, awareness – remains oblivious” (ibid). Timothy Wilson reports on Korsakoff’s syndrome (brain damage resulting from alcohol abuse), which makes patients unable to form memories of new experience (2002:24-6). An amnesiac had no conscious awareness of having previous met a Swiss physician who concealed a pin in his hand when he met her but later refused to shake his hand (ibid).

Nor is this disconnect necessarily pathological. Wilson surveys a range of studies indicating how little of an individual’s feelings make their way into the consciousness for recognition, analysis or assessment. Daniel Goleman reports on a comparison between the sworn testimony of the White House Counsel John Dean in June of 1973 about President Richard Nixon’s involvement in the Watergate break-in and the taped records. The researcher Ulric Neisser discovered: “Hardly a word of Dean’s account is true. Nixon did not say any of the things attributed to him” (1981, cited by Goleman 1986:94). Neisser concluded that Dean’s testimony in fact described the Counsel’s fantasy of the meeting as it should have been. The social psychologist Anthony Greenwald suggested that the primary distortion of memory is that “the past is remembered as if it were a drama in which self was the leading player” (1980). His explanation for the advantage of organizing information around a self is that, without this central framework, knowledge and behavior would not cohere. Damasio calls this the autobiographical self (1999:17), but Wilson (2002) focuses on the self-deceptions this entails (159-181). Freud’s powerful insight was that not only do people repress the experiences that cause them anxiety: they are also able to forget, at least consciously, that they have forgotten (in ‘Repression,’ 1915). The psychiatrist Ronald D. Laing noted that he was only able to “catch a glimpse” of himself operating such mechanisms when others told him so: “It is comparatively easy to catch someone else in the act” (1969:28). Wilson adds: “People are motivated to have an overly positive view of themselves” (2002:90).

As a result the self that is constructed can be at odds with what Wilson calls the adaptive unconscious, the non-conscious processor that acts quickly, hastily and arbitrarily in line with values and feelings that may be repudiated consciously: “The adaptive unconscious is […] more than just a gatekeeper, deciding what information to admit to consciousness [such as a person’s name at a noisy party]. It is also a spin doctor that interprets information outside of awareness” (31). The unconscious, Wilson demonstrates, sets goals, decides agendas, and usually works to maintain a sense of well-being. But the benefits of non-conscious mental processes can be offset by low self-esteem, prejudice towards others, and misjudgments about one’ abilities and situation. Even consciously anti-racist views can be undermined by automatic responses, as in the police shooting of a black student who reached into his pocket for his wallet, Wilson suggests (192). Similarly, individuals may not recognize their true feelings until a crisis precipitates awareness (as in many of Jane Austen’s novels): the extreme psychiatric condition is known as alexithymia (lacking words for emotions) but Wilson argues: “We are all alexithymic to a degree” (135). He recommends listening to one’s acquaintances to obtain better knowledge of one’s personality: a study among air force recruits found the correlation between an individual’s guesses of how others rated him and the actual result at 0.20 (where 1 would have represented complete agreement between the two ratings)(198).

Similarly, what is known in psychology as the discounting principle affects both adult and children’s judgement. Before the age of eight or nine, children tend to say that people who perform activities for a reward will like it more (the additive principle). After this age, they assume that people who do things for rewards like them less than people who do not. But even before this conscious principle is applied, it was found that children who were rewarded with a certificate for using felt-tip pens (a novelty) then played with them less on their own than those who had not been rewarded (57-8). Among adults, those who watched a film while disturbed by noise from next door said they enjoyed the movie more than those who watched without interference.

Human beings are generally poor predictors of how they will feel, at least in Western cultures. People misjudge the fleetingness of their reactions, whether happiness or grief (138 ff). They are bad at predicting the results of changes in their lives: “Virtually all the million-dollar [lottery] winners in New Jersey experienced harassment and threats and […] many lived in fear” (140). Nor do people’s expectations on life the law of psychological economy that it is not healthy to be euphoric or depressed for long (148)[274].

The dangerous self

The essential message that Wilson extracts from his and others’ studies of personality is that constructing an unchangeable narrative of the self is dangerous. He sees his and Freud’s ideas on psychological health as simply two different possible narratives that individuals can choose to apply to their lives, quoting Freud’s later view that “an assured conviction of the truth of the construction […] achieves the same therapeutic result as a recaptured memory” (1937: 368). Until now, however, most personality research has failed to meet the obvious standard for use: predicting with any certainty what people actually do. The researcher, Walter Mischel, argued this was because psychologists under-estimated the extent to which social situation shapes people’s behavior (1996:281)[275]. Recognition of this variable has been taken furthest by postmodern/poststructuralist psychologists such as K.J. Gergen and E,E. Sampson. They have argued, in the words of Kimberley Hoagwood (1993): “a revised view of the self is needed, one that recognizes the self as dialogical, as narratively constructed, as globally organized.” This has implications for therapy: “A poststructuralist method recognizes and celebrates instability and impermanence as constituent features of both the world and of the self. A narrow conception of self could be exchanged for a wider perspective that recognizes instability and change as central to the process of knowledge. This recognition, in turn, might free the ego from the constraints of self-focus, enabling what is too often unavailable now, an intellectual engagement with objects and events in the world.” Wilson suggests that one definition of a therapeutic narrative is one that gives people “a story that allows them to stop thinking about themselves so much” (219).

In most cases, this is the opposite of the experience of atrocity victims or celebrities. Those who have become famous regularly speak of a hallucinatory sense in which another life story has arisen before their eyes (rather as in In and Out) that seems to have only a tangental relationship to their everyday experience. The poststructuralist psychiatrists see the ways in which this experience is applying itself to more and more individuals. The French psychoanalyst J.B. Pontalis has written: “One shouldn’t write one autobiography, but ten of them, or a hundred, because, while we have only one life, we have innumerable ways of recounting that life to ourselves” (cited by Phillips 1994:73). In and Out captures the way in which media can seem to narrow drastically the number and type of autobiographies people can tell (even to themselves).

Using other people’s autobiographies

One of the autobiographies which individuals regularly tell themselves is through other people’s experience and their art. This has already been used by psychologists. People whose implicit motives were identified through a Thematic Apperception Test, were able to predict how they would feel in a real situation if they heard “a detailed, image-laden description of the situation” (Wilson 174). They “were able to avoid the kinds of introspection we have studied (analyzing reasons) that might obscure how they would really feel” (174). The finding is enough to make any news reporter suspicious of naively asking people how they feel about their experiences.

Another team of researchers asked hundreds of people to write about “an extremely important emotional issue that has affected you or your life” over three days. The team found that “writing about emotion experiences is distressing in the short run but has quite positive long-term effects. […] The people who improved the most were those who began with rather incoherent, disorganized descriptions of their / problem and ended with coherent, organized stores that explained the event and gave it meaning” (Wilson 177-8). However, this did not work as well right after severe trauma, when people were too upset to examine their situation objectively. Both Primo Levi and Jorge Semprun took years to find the impulse to write about their Holocaust experiences.

But if these memories are not repressed they become a compulsive repetition. Adam Phillips reminds those who do not know the use of forgetting: “If a trauma is, by definition, that which you cannot experience until you remember, then repetition is evidence of an unwillingness – or, more disturbingly, an inability – to forget” (1994:37). What does this repetitious memory shoulder out of consciousness? Phillips hints at the answer in another essay. Everything in the individual’s everyday world – books, room furnishings, the organization of the day – is designed, according to the poststructuralist psychologist Christopher Bollas, to provide “evocatively nourishing objects” and “potential dream furniture” for subjectivity’s fantasies (1993). For Bollas, “the Self is at once disseminated – all over the place – and intent, in relentless pursuit of what he calls ‘props for the dreaming of lived experience’[…]/ Living a day is more like dreaming a dream than waking up from one” (summary by Phillips 156-7). Using this as his springboard, Phillips observes: “In any day, Freud showed, quite unbeknownst to our conscious selves we are picking things out to use as dream material in the night ahead. So in what Freud calls the ‘dream-day’ we are living out a kind of unconscious aesthetic; something or someone inside us is selecting what it needs for the night’s work. Things in the day have a significance for us, are meaningful, in ways we nothing about until we work them back up in the quite different context of the dream” (157).

The insights of Bolas (and Phillips) are quoted at length because of their striking parallels with the artistic process. Bolas also considers that it is the “core catastrophe” to be trapped in someone else’s dream (often the parents’ but here, it is suggested, it could also be the media’s), “stifling a person’s internal repertoire of states of mind” (Phillips’ summary again: 158). Mental health requires an internal ‘parliament’ “full of conflicting, dissenting and coercive views” exercising a continuous “psychic vigilance in the face of the insidious violence of over-simplification” (ibid). Art offers ways to explore the dream-day of someone else’s fantasy, and its satisfactions depend on the capacity of the artwork to resist the over-simplifications[276].

The demise of intelligibility

The thread that links all of these deliberations is the insistence on the importance of narrative to making sense of experience (see page 158). The outburst of Kevin Kline’s character is a protest against being robbed of a self-narrative (life in the sense of biography). Much of art, too, even the most modern art, presupposes – sometimes challenges – the viewer/reader/listener to create a narrative as explanation. But much of art that acts counter to this impulse, that implicitly or explicitly rejects this mode of reading ‘texts’ (in the Barthian sense) is overlooked. Many of the most revered works of the modernist persuasion, from The Waste Land and Ulysses to Finnegans Wake and Beckett’s later works, are not just difficult (which is acknowledged) but deliberately inscrutable in parts[277] (which is rarely conceded by their explicators[278]). Such writings, art works and music include elements with obscurities that are meant to be teased out, private meanings that can be elucidated (or not)[279], but also present material that the artists themselves might find impossible to elucidate[280] (and many would refuse to[281]).

Examples, produced in a totally different spirit from William S. Burroughs’s cut-ups, include Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953), reproduced in Hopps and Davidson (1998:97). Rauschenberg described the cream-faced painting as “a legitimate work of art, created by the technique of erasing” (Tomkins 1965:211), In literature, Ezra Pound’s Cantos (1970) have been both dismissed (by others) and celebrated (by him) as “chaos and potential” (Brooke-Rose 1971:257-9) as well as “a botch” (Stock 1974:586). In terms that remain teasingly critical Pound said in 1966: “I picked out this and that thing that / interested me, and then jumbled them into a bag. But that’s not the way to make a work of art” (ibid 586-7). Authors such as Burroughs would disagree. Rather than being simply an artistic strategy as in Dada or Surrealism, this incorporation of the inexplicable, unintelligible or unreadable[282] into highly wrought productions sets these off against conventional narrative: compare Nabokov’s first-person, phantasmagoric The Eye (1930) with Transparent Things (1972) where the theme is: “Whenever we concentrate on a material object, whatever its situation, the very act of attention may lead to our involuntary sinking into the history of that object. Novices must learn to skim over matter if they want matter to stay at the exact level of the moment” (10). This is the period in which the critical reputation of both Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll have flourished, and unintelligibility (as a deliberate style) have reached the margins of popular culture in lyrics by John Lennon for the Beatles or In His Own Write or Spaniard in the Works[283].

The modern graphic arts are full of products that embrace this trend, many of the masterworks appearing in the Beaubourg exhibition that later became the book Formless (1995). But it perhaps worth pointing back in time to the works of Carel Fabritius (1622-1654), a pupil of Rembrandt who died in the explosion of Delft’s gunpowder store which destroyed one quarter of the city. The Goldfinch (1654) is a masterpiece of trompe-l’oeil, but The Sentry (also dated 1654) is an apparently plain scene whose components only gradually reveal their inscrutability. The sentry who is supposed to be on guard is seen asleep. Behind an arch can be seen the bottom half of a monk and a pig. A staircase is at the top right but it is unclear where it comes from or where it goes. The large central column supports nothing (it may be left over from an earlier building). The shadows of the man and his dog are apparently cast in different directions. The column casts no shadow. In other ways it seems to depict “a world on the verge of collapse”[284]. Whatever the explanation any particular element may receive, it would be hard to imagine any account of the painting that would untangle all the intelligibilities, and much of Fabritius’s work is equally inscrutable, including an explanation of why he was inspired to paint The Goldfinch, which though startlingly realistic at a distance is painted with sketchy strokes of the brush (a notable difference from most trompe-l’oeil techniques).

In music, the paradigmatic composer is John Cage, an influence on Rauschenberg and many adventurous musicians. His deliberate importation of unplanned material into concerts included environmental sounds (4 min 33 seconds), live radio programs (Imaginary Landscapes IV), live street noises, vegetables as instruments (Child of Tree) and domestic objects, various tape splices, plus the I Ching and star charts (Etudes australes) – all as compositional devices (almost a critique of Villém Flusser’s ideas about the technological limits imposed on photographic art by the camera). Not surprisingly, a collection of his seminal textual experiments is entitled Empty Words (1979), “a transition from a language without sentences (having only phrases, words, syllables, and letters) to a ‘language’ having only letters and silence (music)” (133). Remembering Norman O. Brown’s comment that syntax is the arrangement of the army and Thoreau’s remark that hearing a sentence was like hearing feet marching, Cage sought what he termed a nonsyntactical, demilitarized language (ibid). For Cage it was also a way back to Finnegans Wake, using the text to identify “found objects” (consciously picking up Marcel Duchamp’s term). Of course, this implies that some parts of the text offered him no objects to find, and the objects he picked up (using a selection technique he calls mesostics that selects individual letters from the run of words) were not those Joyce put there to be found (136). The implications for art (based on the same kinds of insight that Cage had, not his writings) are explored in Formless: A User’s Guide (1997) by Yve-Alain Bos and Rosalind E. Krauss, where Rauschenberg’s work has a pride of place.

All such approaches treat the text as unintelligible (even when in conventional syntax – “sintalks” in Finneganspeak, and uninteresting to Cage at first because of the old structure used). They imply the death of the Reader in the sense that Barthes uses it: as a co-creator, co-explorer of meaning. The abandonment of the Author necessarily leads to the death of the Reader to be replaced by the reader as victim, abuser, thief, appropriator, sampler or fetishist – to whom a section of a masterpiece may be as useful as the complete work (to Adorno’s abhorrence)[285].

Birds and cages

The essential question here, though, is whether such strategies to incorporate unintelligibility into the art work have more than aesthetic use. Cage’s genius was to point to esthetic pleasures to be gained from noise (both sound and informational noise) from the right context. He famously said, in a pun on his name: “I am for the birds, not for the cages in which sometimes people place them (1976:11). Whether this can be more than esthetic strategy for an artist, whether it can be used by someone whose conditions of work are to a large extent made by society, still needs to be explored.

Hannah Arendt pointed to the discrepancy between the violence of anti-Semitism and any reasons that could be advanced for hating Jews (see page 130). An examination of the Holocaust or Shoah cannot help but falter in incomprehension at the enormity of the persecutions inflicted on ordinary citizens, as 60 years later on Rwandans for equally incomprehensible motives, and 70 years later in former Yugoslavia. A deictic treatment of such events must, of course, acknowledge the unintelligibility of the contingent in such atrocities. But, it is suggested, a deictic media heurethic would also seek to foreground the unintelligibly contingent in much of what takes place visibly in public affairs (see the Epilog). This is the complete opposite of the idea of punctum which Roland Barthes found in the photograph. Instead of finding a link to personal history and emotion in a conventional or otherwise meaningless object, this would accept the unreadability of several elements in the ‘picture.” Among writers, Maurice Blanchot positions most of his fictional work at the margin where ambiguity is so intense that it casts doubt on the subjective experience of meaning. For example, in The Instant of My Death (1994), it is unclear to the narrator (who may or not be the protagonist) whether an escape from firing squad was a lucky accident or deliberately planned, and what this should mean for the escapee’s later life in a world where no meaning can be discerned. At this level of contingency, events provide nothing but anxiety and doubt for the individual’s efforts to find a nourishing source for the self-constructing fantasy of life-narrative. It is not explained how the narrator could know of the story and its effect if he is not the protagonist. In the United States, similar instabilities are explored by the writer Lydia Davis, a translator of Blanchot and also of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (whose first volume is a seminal work on the self’s blindness to its emotional demands). In a typical story she writes: “Though I try again and again I can’t remember exactly where or why this happened” (1983: 78).

It is easy to find equivalents of these experiences in almost any television news program: repeated shots of a film star turning up for premieres or award ceremonies with a voice-over commentary that makes no identification of the events and talks about other things, politicians shaking hands and turning to go into a building that may or may not be related to the event that is being narrated, a sports highlight is presented without any of the run-up to the ecstatic moment. As Erving Goffman pointed out, one of the conventions of a reproduction of a conversation in another medium is that “everything readers might not already know and that is required for understanding be alluded to, if not detailed, [in the medium, that is, here] in print” (1974:32). He adds, in regard to most conventional examples of sentences by grammarians for study: “The transcript or audio tape of an isolated statement plucked from a past natural conversation can leave us in the dark, due to deixis, ellipsis, and indirection, although audiences in the original circle of use suffered no ambiguity” (33).

Airline meals, audio atrocities, a bus route chronicle

An intermediate stage between embracing “irrelevancy” and excluding all mention of what the discourse considers irrelevant can be found on the Internet, where individuals maintain sites that value neglected aspects of everyday life. For example, in relation to air travel, sites include: an airline meals photo and rating site kept by a web designer in the Netherlands (), a photographic collection of airline spoons (), reviews of sleeping possibilities in airlines (), a site to choose the best seat on any particular aircraft (), and the US unclaimed baggage center in Scottsboro, Alabama, that sells luggage items passengers have left behind (). One popular site posts photos of people around the world adopting the phoon pose, one arm hooked forward, the opposite leg raised behind (). The essential element here is that the pose only has value if it takes place in front of a recognizable geographical site, while the unconventional pose ‘claims’ the place shown in the photograph like a piece of digital graffiti (something of the same inspiration seems to have operated at Abu Ghraib, see the Epilog). Another site, now offline, featured snaps of pavements ().

More critically, a site entitled Audio Atrocities () features excruciating English in video games (e.g. “Death can be a beau...ti...ful thing” in Dynasty Warriors 3, 2001, “no-one can hire my feelings” from Last Alert, 1990, and “you were almost a Jill Sandwich” from Resident Evil: Director’s Cut, 1997). One site specializes () in odd technical documentation, particularly illustrations. A site presents “dohs,” typographical or stylistic errors found on web pages (). Another collects ideas that people believed as children (): for example, watching television in black and white one child wondered when the world had turned into color. For those who enjoy mangled English, a site features the Japanese variant ().

A New Yorker has collected Manhattan payphone numbers with the idea that people will use them to talk to strangers (), though most phones now reject incoming calls and the site has become a general news source on payphones. A Japanese site features businessmen sleeping on stairs, in the middle of the street and on trains (). A Canadian site for several months profiled citizens who said they were willing to marry people from the US after the 2004 Bush landslide (). One still active site features strange food from around the world (). A group of people investigate exactly how much is inside boxed items such as glad wrap, salsa bottles and pumpkins (): a standard print cartridge turned out to have ink that was “about as expensive [as] Chanel No. 5 Eau Du Parfum ($80 for one 3.4 ounce bottle)” (). Kat Jungnickel began recording her daily ride on London’s Bus Route 73 from Victoria to Tottenham as an academic study in July 2003. It developed into an exploration of the history, passengers, their stories and the route’s place in London’s scene with contributions from others until the route was closed a year later ().

The way in which such sites become known or widely publicized remains little known (these were all featured in a roundup of favorite weird sites by the staff of .net magazine). A search for weird web sites on Yahoo produced 21,900,000 results. A similar search via Google produced 31.5 million results. So a simple search of the main Internet databases of sites seems an unlikely tool for the writers to have used. However, journalists are already regular surfers of websites and blogs, and can provide a channel to critical sites without necessarily classifying them as weird.

Multiplex television

Nevertheless, television – its news in particular – remains the dream-day world where nothing accidental is expected to happen (which made 9/11 such a shocking media event, paralyzing the usual capacity to forget). On the other hand, journalists are specialists in gathering contrary opinions. Usually these opinions are required to slog it out against each other in live gladiatorial bouts of no more than a minute at a time. With the advent of multiscreen facilities via cable and satellite, the arguments could run in parallel, with the viewer choosing which sound channel to tune into and when. Similarly, the preparations for public events, the side activities and the aftermath – all that takes place outside the frame of the event itself – could be multi-screened, foregrounding not only the constructions involved but also what is designated as irrelevant without insisting that the viewer focus on this aspect of an event. With the spread of DSL Internet connections, website addresses in the scrolling band used for news headlines at the bottom of the television screen (technically the ‘crawl’) could send viewers immediately to background and critical material (a rolling, continually updated list of exterior links). At the moment such links tend to be simply indicators of the channel or program’s home page. In the same way, producers could plan for viewers’ questions to be incorporated into the program as standard practice rather than to demonstrate the reach of the broadcast[286], i.e. the viewers should be given the opportunity to state their views as much as the interviewee.

The meaning of contingency

A number of filmmakers have found ways to use the contingent and bring out a significance that depends on their apprehension of the event or object they present. In South, Chantal Ackerman’s camera tracks silently along the route where a young black man was dragged before being lynched. Claude Lanzmann galloped along the path to the burial pits where many Auschwitz arrivals were murdered after the same frenetic walk. Chris Marker transformed a scrap of film showing three girls on road in Iceland into a meditation on the subject’s relation with the world. Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1969) suffuses the contingent with poignancy as the astronaut prepares to leave Earth (a complete contrast to Kubrick’s 2001 despite being the inspiration for the Russian filmmaker to tackle a science-fiction subject). Gregory Ulmer’s EmerAgency (in particular the filmmaker Barbara Jo Revelle) makes a rotting mattress in a slum area of Miami the focal point, the stud, that knits together all the problems evoked in such a community. In Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), Michael Moore uses the nearly seven minutes of inactivity by President George W. Bush (after being informed in a Florida elementary school that a second plane has hit the World Trade Towers in New York and that “the nation is under attack”) to speculate ironically on the President’s possible reconsideration of his political inaction and search for someone to blame for his mistakes (Moore 2004:19-20). What is significant here is that the data keeps its specificity in all these assemblages of meaning – and as just suggested (see pages 17 and 196), media inevitably impose values on meanings, just as meanings are constructed from information, which is how contingent data presents itself to the perceptions (see von Bayer 2003:15-17 for a discussion of information and subjectivity as the basis of physics).

A deictic appreciation of this process would remain continuously aware of how media imbues the contingent with value-infused meaning immediately it incorporates the specific into its program, and point up these values (as for example Moore does not, while the others all require or demonstrate an understanding of the values being explored). Despite such shortcomings, Moore’s documentary films, including Fahrenheit 9/11 are all built around the experiences of people in his home town (Flint, Michigan). A study of the architectural maps of Auschwitz, and the redesign of basement mortuaries, made it clear that the plans for killing were known to a much wider circle than previously claimed (). Jacobo Timerman considered why his torturers would seek to put a gloss on the conditions of his imprisonment. The Argentinian newspaper editor concludes: “The soldiers who tortured me [...] spoke of […] mirrored rooms where the electric shocks were applied and of the numerous observers who witnessed the episode from the other side. I think the tortures were performed in old buildings, disguised as commissaries, in small villages near Buenos Aires, generally some rebuilt kitchen or a large cell where an electric cable could be installed. Torture centers existed, of course, in military barracks, but always in basements or abandoned kitchens. The torturers, nevertheless, try to create a more sophisticated image of the torture sites, as if thereby endowing their activity with a more elevated status. Their military leaders encourage this fantasy; and the notion of important sites, exclusive methods, original techniques, novel equipment, allows them to present a touch of distinction and legitimacy to the world. This conversion of dirty, dark, gloomy places into a universe of spontaneous innovation and institutional 'beauty' is / one of the most arousing pleasures for torturers. It is as if they felt themselves to be masters of the force required to alter reality. And it places them again in the world of omnipotence. This omnipotence in turn they feel assures them of impunity -- a sense of immunity to pain, guilt, emotional imbalance” (1980:39-40). This is not to deny Iris Murdoch’s point that values determine the facts which have meaning (1992) but to suggest that reversing the approach to focus on information which seems meaningless from this standpoint can lead to discoveries of meaning whose resonance expands in the same way as the punctum.

Conclusion

“If one needs to make a tyrant of reason, as Socrates did, then there must exist no little danger of something else playing the tyrant.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols.

As will be clear by now, this exploration of ideas is not so much about philosophy’s treatment of atrocity as about the capacity of atrocity to overwhelm traditional philosophy’s claims to discover unconquerable values in reason that can and should govern an individual’s life. The same challenge can be found in celebrity, where the Aristotelian notion of the supreme good is undermined by the possibility that what human beings prize (and tend towards) is not the good but fame that is not contingent on achievement but on power[287]. Atrocity and celebrity come together in the trial of Socrates, which in Plato’s hands becomes a condemnation of democracy, as also in the strangely similar fate of Jesus Christ. Both these enigmatic philosophers, in their name of their philosophy, accept the injustice that is done to them by society[288].

Even at its most anti-rationalist, the grounds on which philosophy stakes its claim to offering enlightenment has been language and the presumption that communication is possible[289]. Apart from stressing the incommunicability of the experience of atrocity (which by its nature one would rather not have communicated, in any case[290]), this study has led through the many devious ways in which language is used to avoid communication, and where language does form part of communication, the framework and context usually have much more to say than the words (outside of the strange worlds of literature). If these are language-games, they are games in which everyone loses[291]. The only way they become communicative games are by limiting, using all the devices at one’s disposal, what can be said, or – more exactly – what will be understood. The celebrity phenomenon is almost all about the imposition of this restrictive discourse on individuals whom society makes famous, just as atrocity inflicts its discourse as well as its violence on those singled out by society’s representatives (whether parents or prison guards) for contempt. In many of the ways it is used, language is a device for signaling exclusion, for indicating those to whom no rules can apply, for diverting conscious attention from its blindness to the implications of its vocabulary[292], for demanding an end to thought. This is not just the language of the demagogue but also of most philosophy (one needs only to read Aristotle[293] and Hume on slavery).

As Jacques Derrida’s writings repeatedly demonstrate, doing justice is not simply a matter of finding the right language. Nor, he strongly implies without directly confronting the ideas of John Rawls, is it a question of finding the appropriate social formula to embody individuals’ understanding of rights. Derrida’s notion of hospitality, contrasting with ideas of friendship (which he sees as based on exclusionary judgments), requires an openness to others that refuses to label them the Other. It is a strategy that rejects and subverts all such manipulations of language, for celebrities as much as atrocity victims.

Bubble communities

“The only thing you can give is time.” – Jacques Derrida, Donner le Temps (Given Time)[294].

Derrida positions the individual plainly in the presence of the other as an individual. Deictics, as a philosophy of situational knowledge, insists on this relationship between individuals even in a public situation where one participant can claim professional status and the other comes into this relationship as a victim (of atrocity or celebrity). It also means rejecting the tyranny of immediacy (both of news and presence) in the relation, and questioning narrativity (as distinct from testimony and exploration of the environment) as the style in which to treat experiences. Philosophically, as Richard Rorty has proposed, art may be more illuminating than rational thought, presenting – for example – the experience of an observer with all its hesitations, limitations, temptations and misjudgments as well as its sudden insights and unshakable convictions (Vladimir Nabokov’s novels are exemplary satires of positioned knowledge that cloaks obsession and self-delusion). The biologist Edward O. Wilson, though a severe critic of Jacques Derrida’s discourse, has declared that while science involves reductionism with complexity, “the love of complexity without reductionism makes art,” a statement that apart from its terminality, could well describe Derrida’s philosophical program (1998:59).

The proliferation of digital media offers a number of ways to increase the complexity of perspectives on events, but each suffers from the restrictions of its technology: blogs, for example, tend to be chaotic in organization and have a high ratio of irrelevance to information, even when sorted through aggregators. It has been suggested that the video and messaging capabilities of cell phones made their first major impact on communication in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami of 26 December 2004[295]., but this was matched by blogs and mainstream comments describing the failure to use texting or cellphones to pass on warnings as an “information disaster”[296]

All these new technologies share the characteristic of linking ultra-temporary networks, hardly permanent enough to qualify as a community. Nevertheless, the commitments made at the time are real, though short term. The networks’ porousness enables participants to join or drop out at any time, rather than requiring the all-or-nothing obligations characteristic of terminality (whether an ideology, sect or rationality). The burden also shifts from the participant to the organization to demonstrate its credibility. This seems to give an advantage to fanatics whose commitment to an organization is deep and hard to shake. However, as Mary Douglas has shown, close-knit communities built on ideology have a tendency to splinter into further exclusionary groups (Douglas and Wildavsky 1982:111)[297]. The bubble communities created through new networks tend to fit the profile of a brand of environmental groups: mainly white, middle-class, professional people assembled as local intervention alliances[298]. Though a number of hierarchical, sectarian environmental organizations have claimed the lead voice on many issues, they avoid splintering by allowing independent local action (Douglas and Wildavsky 1982:147). As a result, there is a “trend for various issues to coagulate into one global stand against evil in all its forms” (ibid 150). The reduced cost of organizing (171), combined with dramatic warnings of the alternatives, so that people “minimize their maximum regret” (ibid), enables groups to maintain themselves. Groups that operate “precisely to avoid the costs of a permanent structure of power” in turn achieve their goals via temporary coalitions with more hierarchical groups (ibid). The mistake (for both participants and observers) is to seek or claim permanency in these alliances. It can be seen as an example of what Avital Ronell identifies as stupidity[299], a particular aspect of terminality that wants to declare an end to thought. Against this, one can set a transposition of the conclusions of Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavksy on risks in society: like relative safety, digital technology “is not a static but a dynamic product of learning from error over time” (195). “Anticipation to secure stability is a bad bet […] Without continuous experience in overcoming a variety of disturbances, organisms are likely to adapt to a steady state[300]. When dramatic change does occur, these organisms are more likely to perish both because the search for stability has used up surplus resources and because they have suppressed their capacity to cope with the unexpected. “The ability to learn from errors and to gain experience in coping with a wide variety of difficulties, has proved a greater aid to the preservation of the species than efforts to create a narrow band of controlled conditions within which they would flourish for a time but which leaves trees, crops and animals vulnerable to more severe damage when things change” (196). Philosophically, these reflections underline the dynamism (historicity) of such developments and, in contrast to terminality, the essential role which mistakes and errors play in developing a robust conception of how technology develops (compare Derrida’s understanding of différence). The corollary is that deictics understands and shows that any momentary stability is enforced, socially constructed, a product of ideology.

Similarly, when atrocity is seen as a standard practice throughout society, from treatment of children to the destruction of entire groups, particularly in service of an ideology, the search for psychopathology in abusers can be abandoned, and investigation of the social structures, processes and ways of thought that encourage and make use of atrocity can be recognized as more profitable. Thus, the counseling of Argentinian military by former SS leaders from Germany has been blamed for inculcating an ethic of torture in the forces of order[301]. Similarly, celebrity, far from being an empty concept, is understood as resulting from a deliberate emptying of meaning from a situation of power with the aim of better controlling the person who would otherwise be able to exploit this charisma in society for permanent ends, and this charisma can be reclaimed by those who know how to manipulate the forces of control or, as in President Reagan’s case, being able to count on these forces to foster his reputation, even after his disintegration as a person and his death.

Deictics suggests that the solutions should be read back into society, recognizing the kinship in the atrocity inflicted on children and prisoners as well as abused spouses and marginalized groups. As a result, the focus shifts towards the mechanisms by which society destroys as well as constructs meanings, excludes experience from discourse, fragments the individual’s narrativity in the interests of its own grander narrative, and selects victims for invisibility. At the same time, it tries to make visible the apparatus (the technê in Heidegger’s sense of the term) through which this discourse is conducted. Deictics thus seeks an ethic of justice that accepts the claims of the Other, while acknowledging that the limits of these claims set by subjective values make this always an unresolvable challenge. Deconstruction, analytical philosophy and existentialism meet here at the point where “asking whether the attitude that one has adopted is the right attitude comes down to asking whether one is prepared to stand by it. There can be no guarantee of its correctness, because nothing counts as a guarantee” (A.J. Ayer in Horizon, quoted by Iris Murdoch 1950). One can then embrace Ayer’s definitive pronouncement while accepting the caveats to be applied to almost every word, and particularly “facts,” from a deictic standpoint: “There is nothing to be done […], except look at the facts, look at them harder, look at more of them, and then come to a moral decision.” But the moral remains a Kantian decision, committing no-one else, an existentialist choice that engages the subject, that can be deconstructed for its sense of justice towards the Other.

In The Fire Next Time, the novelist James Baldwin posed a deictic challenge to Christianity as a lapsed member of a Harlem church. “The passion with which we loved the Lord,” he wrote, “was a measure of how deeply we feared and distrusted and, in the end, hated almost all strangers, always, and avoided and despised ourselves.” And it was this hatred which he rejected. “What was the point, the purpose of my salvation if it did not permit me to behave with love towards others, no matter how they behaved towards me? What others did was their responsibility […] What I did was my responsibility” (1963:41).

Epilogue: Reviewing the Photos from Abu Ghraib and the Video Biography of John Kerry

Photography, like violence (with which it has many similarities[302]) occupies an aporic place in modern society. Virginia Woolf, looking at pictures of atrocities from the Spanish Civil War and World War I, described photographs as “simply statements of facts addressed to the eye” (1938:13). Yet, as John Tagg insists, “the transparency of the photograph is its most powerful rhetorical device” (1988:35), with its own history. Photographic portraiture found its place not on “the exalted heights of autonomous Art” (Tagg 58) but in bourgeois homes, a coziness that disguised a less comfortable reality: that portrait photographs from early on were to be found in files “in police stations, hospitals, school rooms and prisons – and in official papers of all kinds” (58). Tagg underlines: “It was no longer a privilege to be pictured but the burden of a new class of the surveilled” (59).

As the official use of photographs in the late 19th-century slum clearance of the Quarry Hill area of Leeds in the UK gives evidence, photography can disempower its subjects. The photograph becomes a replacement for giving recognition to personal testimony. “At no time in the campaign for Quarry Hill’s clearance was any attempt made to consult the residents of the condemned area,” reports Tagg (135). Yet the photographs presented to the public inquiry were distorted, partly by the limits of the technology of the time. “The alleys are underexposed, dark, dingy; the spaces are foreshortened, compressed, cramped; the compositions are repetitious, bare, and brutal. [...] Certain places are not shown and there are no interiors” (Tagg 149).

Tagg points out that interior photos (or shots of the inhabitants) were not beyond the technology of 1897, as unused photos showed. But the Officer of Health declared there were alleys and interiors so dark they could not be photographed. “The very clutteredness and obscurity of the images argues for another space. a clear space, a healthy space, a space of unobstructed lines of sight, open to vision and supervision,” Tagg observes. “It is a space that will appeal to the police as much as to Medical Officers of Health and philanthropists; a desirable space in which people will be changed – changed into disease-free, orderly, docile and disciplined subjects; a space, in Foucault’s sense, of a new strategy of power-knowledge” (151). In his magisterial Towards a Philosophy of Photography, Vilém Flusser makes the more general argument:. “In choosing their categories, photographers may think they are bringing their own aesthetic, epistemological or political criteria to bear. [...] But what appear to be their criteria for going beyond the camera nevertheless remain subordinate to the camera’s program. In order to be able to choose camera-categories, as they are programmed on the camera’s exterior, photographers have to ‘set’ the camera, and that is a technical act, more precisely a conceptual act. [...] There is no such thing as naïve, non-conceptual photography. A photograph is an image of concepts. In this sense, all photographers’ criteria are contained within the camera’s program” (1983.36).

As the Quarry Hill history indicates, the photographer and official users of photographs may not approach image-making and image-using with the naïvety that Flusser fears is common among the consumers of such ‘texts.’ The aporic force of photographs springs from their unsolvable contradictions that, in Derrida’s insight, provokes speech, explanation, commentary or discursive framing. Though photographs “seem utterly real” (Walter Lippmann 1922:61) and in Camera Lucida Roland Barthes declares “in the Photograph, the power of authentication exceeds the power of representation” (89), fabrication and staging (even in some of the most famous photos) are commonplace[303]. Barthes came to the conclusion that the authentic record offered by the photograph, its “evidential force,” came from its presentation of “a reality one can no longer touch” (87). Thus, its testimony is of the unreachable. Similarly, the evidential power remains, for Barthes, one which has to be willfully summoned: this is the underlying point of his insistence on the spectator finding the “punctum” of a photograph, the pricking point that gives individual meaning to a photograph (he writes of a belt that has personal associations being uncannily reproduced in a photograph of a stranger) – the meaning/value does not lie in the photographic subject itself or its technical presentation. From this dimension, Barthes’ work on photography is about the inability of the photograph to create its own meaning, how its facticity is delusional. We are told that Robert Capa’s photograph of a Republic soldier was “shot” at the moment of his death, but this is not evident from the photograph. There have been suggestions that this claim may not be true (Sontag 6). In fact, it is hard to know how death could be captured on photographs (see Elkins 1996:111-4).

This same dilemma faces the photograph of any event. Photographs, through their technical limitations, represent poor witnesses of a felt reality, and quickly turn into the iconic[304], into the manipulated presentation (Henri Cartier-Bresson was committed to capturing the truth of a moment, but the results often became monumental). The instantaneity of the snapshot points to what is not represented, the moments that are not captured, Their ‘naturalness’ focuses attention on the way in which this form of presentation is used[305].

The Photos at Abu Ghraib

The opacity of photographs, their unreliability as testimony, their use as a means of exercising power, their ability to hide the moments not captured by the camera, can all be recognized in the digital shots that form part of the abuses committed at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq at the end of 2003 and early in 2004. If, as Avital Ronell suggests, the Rodney King abuses could be linked to American frustrations over the first Iraq war, Abu Ghraib’s photos can be seen as the working out of similar frustrations in the Second Iraq War. The first abuse was that reserve soldiers who were supposed to be sent home were kept on in Iraq for prison duty. The situation at Abu Ghraib made it obvious that the major crime of most Iraqis held there was to have been picked up by soldiers, while the tensions around the prison underlined the unpopularity of US control over life in Iraq.

The photos became a language-event – a challenge to the discursive vocabulary of media and public officials – from the beginning – starting with the decision by CBS to suppress the photos at the US Government’s request for several weeks. The changes in discourse through the succeeding months need not be tracked in detail: from the equivalent of holiday snaps (Rightwing radio commentator Rush Limbaugh), to the work of a few “bad apples” (President George Bush), to pranks by “soldiers who were allowed to get out of hand” (the Defense Department), to the revelations that these were part of standard practice to soften up prisoners before interrogation (General Taguba’s Report). The point for discussion here is the light the photographs did not throw on practices at Guantánamo Bay (still kept secret) and reaching further back into the US society: into prison life (the two non-commissioned officers charged with abuses were both guards in civilian prisons back home). One of the charged men had been accused of similar mistreatment of prisoners in a US prison.

John Kerry’s Video Biography

The Abu Ghraib abuses might seem a universe away from US Presidential candidate John Kerry’s campaign video (though part of the contemporary world). Yet its unspoken subject is atrocity in war and what to do about, and its equally audible message is that it is best not to respond to the challenge. The video is a compilation of silences: about the Vietnam war, Kerry’s challenge to the authorities, his first wife, his work in Congress, and his view of the economy, and what he learned behind closed doors on the Intelligence Committee between 1993 and 2000. The Annenberg Center’s points out that Kerry used his membership of the Committee as a prime qualification for office but he missed at least 76% of its public meetings (). This is a small point. The abuses at Abu Ghraib can be paralleled by everyday practices in Vietnam that led to Kerry’s opposition to the war.

As history professor Joanna Bourke has recorded of Vietnam, a “carnivalesque spirit” in military activities, even of the most brutal kind, was common (1999:37). “Combat gear, painted faces, and the endless refrain that men had to turn into ‘animals’ were the martial equivalent of the carnival mask: they enabled men to invert the moral order while still remaining innocent and committed to that order” (ibid).

This claim of innocence even while committing atrocity tends to be defended by the military establishment, Bourke points out, citing the My Lai massacre and its aftermath as typical. “Of the thirty individuals who were accused of criminal behaviour either during the massacre or in the cover-up, only [Lieutenant] Calley was convicted. Excluding the My Lai trials, there were only thirty-six court martials for war crimes committed by American troops between January 1965 and August 1973” (207-8). Calley did not serve any time in prison. By contrast, a man who burned his draft card spent 22 months in prison (208). And My Lai survivors complained in 1974, the focus on My Lai, “diverted attention away from other atrocities” committed in Vietnam (ibid).

John Kerry first achieved prominence by denouncing such outrages after having served on dangerous assignments as a volunteer in Vietnam. This is the basis of his claim to integrity in public service. However, the video biography shown at the US Democratic Convention in 2004 (“A Remarkable Promise”) was an exemplar of the reformulation of history and narrative effected by the interruption culture. Like the Quarry Hill photographs, the video was notable for its absences. Spectators also heard a speech whose foreign policy sections on Iraq did not touch on Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo prison. The emphasis in surrounding events was on his service in war (the group of supporters from his gunboat and a wartime buddy) rather than his opposition to the abuses carried out in the name of the Government.

Similarly, his war service can be interpreted somewhat differently than the homiletic presentation of the campaign video. Volunteering was a certain way for a graduate to enjoy the privileges of being an officer. Others, such as President Bill Clinton and President George W. Bush, avoided combat service. Intellectuals such as Carl Mitcham sacrificed their academic careers for reasons of conscience (Schirmacher 2002, pers. comm). But Kerry’s gives no indication of awareness of the controversy that dogged America’s involvement in the Vietnam War at the time. “I felt that the government had not been truthful with the American people. The war was not what it was described as” (4.50-5.00). This hides almost as much about the issues he tackled as the focus given to Kerry’s first wife and divorce (not mentioned). The obvious interpretation is that Kerry’s video did not want to raise questions about a Roman Catholic who is divorced or someone who was critical of military practices, not just military adventures (as Kerry seems to suggest in the film).

The more important point is that the fragmentation worked by the devices of cinematic editing does not assert that what we see is the whole truth, only a convenient account that creates a wanted mood. Such biographies call for anti-biographies, of both Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates, not – in Michael Moore’s strategy, as a demolition of a myth in Fahrenheit 9/11 (though that is needed) – but as an assertion of a different view of the kinds of truth that it is safe for society to tell itself. That is, to assert with Derrida that even in photographs there should be no hors-texte.

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[1] Camus, who described suicide as the major philosophical problem of our time (in The Myth of Sisyphus), also remarked: “The opposite of a man who commits suicide is a man condemned to death” (121).’

[2] From Stalin to Saddam Hussein, from Idi Amin to Caligula or Milosevic, atrocity has been regularly accompanied by a cult of personality.

[3] This blanket term embraces both poststructuralism, grammatology, deconstructionist practices and postmodernism.

[4] Écrits 1977, cited by Phillips 1994:65.

[5] W.H. Auden. “Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, /For poetry makes nothing happen. it survives/In the valley of its saying…” (‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats, 1940/1971). In funerals, however, the emphasis is on making sure that ‘nothing’ takes place, rather than solely on the saying. In more conventional philosophical terms, what takes place is what the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj }[pic]i~[pic]ek terms a re-mark ing. (19Žižek terms a “re-mark”ing. (1991:78). Just as Paul turned Christ’s failure and crucifixion into a triumph by declaring it as such, a death becomes worthy of a memorial ceremony by our holding that ceremony. The fact that the government and broadcast media are the decision-makers and presenters of that ceremony is set up to appear as natural and unchallengeable, of course, in a process exposed by Roland Barthes early in his career (see page 9).

[6] Durkheim identified three characteristics of the sacred (1912, summarized by Douglas 1986:113): it is dangerous (if profaned, terrible things will happen); any attack on the sacred rouses emotions to its defense; it is invoked explicitly (an artifact of society).

[7] Paul D. Miller, in Material Memories (2001), reminds us that the experimental film-maker and voodoo anthropologist Maya Deren said: “A ritual is an action distinguished from all others in that it seeks the realization of its purpose through the exercise of form” (1945:).

[8] In the standard anthropological view, ritual attaches the individual to society (Durkheim 1912:226). This was also the functionalist view of British anthropologists of the 1950s and 1960s (Mitchell 1996:490). In a later interpretation of its relation to society, ritual was seen to demonstrate the power of the transcendental over the everyday (Bloch 1989, cited by Mitchell 491). The modern view is that “rather than directly representing, or even concealing, social structure, ritual itself becomes part of the political process” (Mitchell 490). Ritual, then, is also “a principal site of new history being made” (Kelly and Kaplan 1990:141, cited by Mitchell 492). Nick Couldry speaks of media rituals in discussing the same process outlined in this prologue: Nick Couldry. (2003). Media Rituals: A Critical Approach. New York: Routledge. ISBN: 0-415-27014-6 (hbk)/ 0-415-27015-4 (pbk). In his use of the anthropological vocabulary: “media rituals are any actions organised around key media-related categories and boundaries, whose performance reinforces, indeed helps legitimate, the underlying 'value' expressed in the idea that the media is our access point to our social centre. Through media rituals, we act out, indeed naturalise, the myth of the media's social centrality. The term 'media rituals' encompasses a vast number of things: from certain 'ritualised' forms of television viewing, to people's talk about appearing in the media, to our 'automatic' heightened attention if told that a media celebrity has just entered the room” (Couldry, 2003, p. 2). For our purposes, he usefully points out: “Maurice Bloch and Pierre Bourdieu […] have connected ritual not with the affirmation of what we share, but with the management of conflict and the masking of social inequality. Unfortunately, in media analysis, whenever 'ritual' has been introduced, it has been in the context of a rather traditional idea (derived from a particular reading of Durkheim's sociology of religion) that rituals 'function' to confirm an established social order that is somehow 'natural' and beyond question” (Couldry, 2003, p. 4). However, he also declares, in an indication of the fundamental limitations of his approach: "the post-structuralist subtlety of, say, Derrida provides few clues to interpreting a television talk show or a televised state funeral)" (Couldry, 2003, p. xi).

[9] Many funerals are ceremonies rather than rituals. Large funerals are so minutely orchestrated to embody public meanings that they must be treated as rituals.

[10] “In its way, former President Ronald Reagan’s state funeral in Washington was a work of art. Actually it involved several of the arts…”

[11] “Reagan was always the master of timing, and even in death his words found themselves inserted into an extraordinary week in which the United Nations and the United States smoothed over some deep antagonisms that have at their root an ambivalence about and misunderstanding of America’s role in the world.”

[12] “The treatment of a former president as a figure to be worshiped,” he says, “is reminiscent of what took place when Soviet leaders died.”

[13] Notably, he beat President Jimmy Carter in the ratings only in one year in office for his first time (year 3), though Carter was depcited as notoriously unpopular with voters (126). In his first year Reagan held fewer press conferences than any other president in 50 years, and received poor reviews for his “oratorical skills” for all five events (130).

In addition, Schudson and King point out.

“At no time in Reagan’s first years was / the general public as charmed by Ronald Reagan as the news media. [...] The picture that reporters presented of Reagan as a Great Communicator did not arise from Reagan’s ability to communicate to the masses” (130-1). Political scientists also agreed that “one need not invoke anything at all about Reagan’s personal appeal to explain his 1980 victory (or his 1984 landslide) – a simple model of ‘economic voting’ fits the evidence very nicely” (133).

Nevertheless, magazines such as Newsweek, that described President Carter as “the least popular president to run for re-election since Hoover,” concluded that the election was a “rousing vote of confidence” in Reagan and his politics while noting that four out of five Reagan voters told exit pollsters they supported him because of Carter’s poor performance (133).

[14] William C. Adams reported Reagan’s low personal ratings in 1984 (Public Opinion 7 October/November 1984:6-9). George C. Edwards, reviewing opinion polls, noted in 1985 that Reagan polarized citizens “along partisan, racial, and sexual lines” (Public Opinion 9 June/July 1985:50-51). Political scientist Martin Wattenberg wrote:“Never before had a candidate come to office with such lukewarm backing from his followers,” describing Reagan as “extremely polarizing” (American Politics Quarterly 14 1986:243). All citations from Schudson 1995: 244-5.

[15] The argument of this dissertation is that posthumanists, those who reject the Enlightenment presumption that a humane society was protected within the capitalist or communist framework, are very much concerned with the values described as human but subject these to a more thorogoing critique than other philosophical approaches. Postmodernism and postmodernists will be used as synonyms, except where it is clear that thinkers cited would reject such labels.

[16] For a structuralist view, see also Williamson (1978:122+), for a discussion of how industrial ideology creates symbols of the natural, “which are then juxtaposed with […] manufactured goods so that meaning may be exchanged between them.”

[17] Writing about ideology in the 1960s, Althusser declared: “Ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing, ‘Hey, you there!” (1994:108).

[18] “Interpellation as a concept was described by Lacan in 1956 in his seminar on the psychoses. Lacan wanted to emphasize the structuring effect of language upon the subject. […]Lacan emphasized the structural relation between the I and the you of language and suggested that the ego was an effect of the you” (Alcorn 2000:337).

[19] An Althusian commentator on six major school shooting incidents in the US, including the killings at Columbine, suggested the cause was “a reciprocal breakdown in, to use Deleuzean language, the coding mechanism of ideology: there is reciprocal nonrecognition. It may be that not only was the ‘hail’ not heard, but that the hailing stopped, making these children essentially invisible within the system of production; of course, they remained profoundly within it. It is also suggestive of a fracture in Althusser’s theory of interpellation, since these students appear to have slipped into the ‘shade’ of power and discipline, while continuing to practice the now empty rituals of ideology, yet ceasing to be produced by that ideology. It had not transformed ‘them all’; it had not recruited ‘them all.’ This is one of the reasons that the violence has seemed so ‘senseless’”(Catlaw 2000:338).

[20] For the general application of this principle in public life see p27.

[21] In Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda (1991/2002), Chomsky suggests that media marginalize popular opinion (against cutting back social spending or increasing armaments, as in the Reagan years), without a way to organize or articulate their opinions in the mainstream. “People […] overwhelmingly […] assumed that they were the only people with that crazy idea in their heads” (31). What recognizing that much of this blindness may be self-imposed via society, Chomsky does not examine the process more closely except to consider it “the sign of a very well-run totalitarian culture” (62). In the run-up to the 1991 Gulf War, he reports, “the voices of the Iraqi democrats are completely excluded, and […] nobody notices it” (55). He speaks of “self-imposed totalitarianism” (65). At the same time, Chomsky notes the expansion of “dissident culture” (environmentalism, feminism, the anti-nuclear movement, strengthened in the 1980s by the solidarity movement): “I know myself that the kinds of talks I give today in the most reactionary parts of the country – central Georgia, rural Kentucky, etc. – are talks of the kind that I couldn’t have given at the peak of the peace movement to the most active peace movement audience” (39). However, his “propaganda model” of media is unable to incorporate a major segment of the population that supports dissidence. In fact, it seems closely modeled on Jurgen Habermas’s “public sphere,” where “citizens behave as a public body when they confer in an unrestricted fashion about matters of general interest” (1974:49). In his critique of this model, John Plotz suggests that the early 19th-century British public sphere was not a site of rational-critical conversation but “the arena wherein the disputes between various discursive logics were staged: the space, one might say, in which it was decided what could come to count as public conversation at all” (200:10). In what is very close to the challenge described here as a “language-event”, Plotz notes that writers of that time, from Thomas Carlyle and Charlotte Bronte to Thomas de Quincey or Maria Edgeworth saw aesthetic texts as moving within the public sphere as competitors to working-class crowds: “The crowd is an important test-case for the limits of the public sphere because – like the literary text – it is neither vestigial nor merely parasitic on the dominant world of rational newspaper debate, but a vigorous and emergent rival to many of the era’s most ingrained assumptions about the segregation of classes and the segmentation of public spaces” (10). […] When Maria Edgeworth builds the plot of Harrington around a series of violent crowds, she intends both to censure their wild democratic spirit, and to claim that she has found a way to incorporate an attractively attenuated version of that spirit into the novel itself” (11). Today films and television fiction make something of the same effort to interpret the activities of computer “hackers.” However, this dissertation would contest any attempt to generalize the 19th century experience into a world where the media play a ubiquitous role in the public sphere and strive to determine what forms of discourse receive approval.

[22] Another way of viewing this crisis is to consider the language-event as resulting from an occasion when ex-nomination (in the vocabulary of Barthes, 1957) is shown to be no longer beyond discourse. Barthes uses ex-nomination to indicate the process by which our language hides the fact that “obvious self-evident properties of ‘reality’ are actually products of an established way of looking at it, and not properties of the natural world itself” (O’Sullivan et.al. 1994:111, summary by John Hartley). Discourse is used in the conventional sense of the process in language of “making and reproducing sense(s)” as a “product of social, historical and institutional formations” (ibid 93). In established discourses “various subjectivities are represented already – for instance, those of class, gender, nation, ethnicity, age, family and individuality” (94). Texts, in the semiotic sense – including dress, car styling, gesture and film as well as words (317) – are the means by which the knowledge in discourse is circulated, established or suppressed (94).

[23] This term comes from Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Bewusstseins-Industrie (1962).

[24] Exactly the same happened in the Second War in Iraq: “In March 2003 we saw nothing wrong with showing television images of Iraqi casualties and prisoners, yet when al-Jazeera television did the same thing to ours, we responded with cries of outrage and accused them of breaches of the Geneva Conventions” (Bell 2003:150).

[25] See the earlier note on Judith Williamson’s description of advertising’s use ‘natural’ images to contrast with manufactured goods, sometimes in favor of ‘science’ and ‘progress’, sometimes in favor of the ‘natural’ as desirable rather than wild and dangerous (1978:123).

[26] Each genre product (e.g. each new western) adds to or throws into question, often consciously, the body of work that constitutes the genre. Steve Neale asserts: “genres are [...] best understood as processes. These processes may, for sure, be dominated by repetition, but they are also marked fundamentally by difference, variation and change” (463). Film studies professor Richard Maltby notes that Oklahoma (1955) is both a western and a musical. He concludes: “Rather than occupying discrete categories, therefore, most movies use categorical elements in combination” (1995:108).

[27] For example, a political broadcast, which is then both inserted in political and media history.

[28] The exclusions which a chosen discourse forces on perception of the event are dealt with on page 27 onwards.

[29] During a British coalminers’ strike in 1984-5 a study examining media coverage combined with audience surveys reported: “Concerns that the media set the agenda for public perceptions of issues are not supported by our data” (cited by Andrew Goodwin 1990:52).

[30] The early days of British television were described by its historian, Asa Briggs, as the “era of Radiovision” (cited by Andrew Goodwin 1990:43). Surveying the first 40 years of television news, Goodwin speaks of “a lack of a journalistic tradition in the BBC, which to this day rarely ‘breaks’ a story” (43) and “a pervasive fear of the visual in British television” (44). From 1955 on, television news pictures, i.e. sending out a camera operator no matter what was shot, became a more important part of British television (44) but it is also important to recognize that in framing reports, “some explanations receive more attention and validation than others” (57).

[31] “To describe is [...] not simply to be imprecise or incomplete, it is to change structures, to /signify something different to what is shown” (1977:18-19).

[32] A subsidiary reference is to D. Dayan and Elihu Katz’s Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (1992). Harvard University Press, which considers media from a ritual aspect, but puts all these events into three categories: contests, conquests and coronations: “Media events are […] monopoly communications, uncritically reproduced, that function as collective rites of communion” (Liebes and Curran, 1998:4). But the emphasis here is on the decision-making involved and the results of that choice of discourse.

[33] Jean Baudrillard suggests that the weather and its effects have retained the vitality which have been lost from political and similar news – “people suffer that like a dead (dévalitalisé) ritual” (2001a:89).

[34] “Some of the most familiar news conventions of our day, so obvious they seem timeless, are recent innovations: [...] 1. that a summary lead and inverted pyramid structure are preferred to a chronological account of an event, 2. that a president is the most important actor in any event in which he takes part, 3. that a news story should focus on a single event rather than a continuous or repeated happening, or that, if the action is repeated, attention should center on novelty, not on pattern, 4. that a news story covering an important speech or document should quote or state its highlights, 5. that a news story covering a political event should convey the meaning of the political acts in a time frame larger than that of the acts themselves. All these are unquestioned and generally unstated conventions of twentieth-century American journalism; none were elements in journalism of the mid-nineteenth century” (Schudson 1995:55).

[35] “Fox News rose to fifth on the week with 1.94 million viewers and even CNN got a big boost, coming in at No. 10 with 1.34 million viewers. By breaking its coverage of the Reagan funeral into hourly increments, Fox News took five slots in the basic cable Top 15 including the lead position as Friday’s 10 p.m. ET hour drew 6.21 million viewers. Other hours of mourning drew as many as 5.56 million viewers for No. 3 and as few as 4.18 million to tie Disney Channel’s “Zenon. Z3” for No. 7” (, 17 June 2004).

[36] Journalism teacher Paul Janensch wrote: “I didn’t expect or want the news media to do a hatchet job on Reagan. I don’t think critical reviews should have interrupted the coverage of the funeral. But when the news media looked back on his administration, most of those interviewed were his admirers, and – surprise! – they provided only the plus side”.

[37] The homily by former Missouri senator the Rev. John C. Danforth declared. “If ever we have known a child of light, it was Ronald Reagan. He had no dark side, no scary hidden agenda.” (Kumar 2004).

[38] From the Nachlass.

[39] The Reagan Memorial website has a photo of the moment (number 93 of the funeral and interment slideshow) at .

[40] See the section on Napoleon below (p), for discussion of [in]accuracy of representation as a standard technique in transforming events into symbolic forms.

[41] Some newspapers did carry articles on the prospects for the funeral business.

[42] Peter Golding and Philip Elliott provide some typical formulations of this point from what is known as the political economy theory of communications: “News production is rarely the active application of decisions of rejection or promotion to highly varied and extensive material. On the contrary, it is for the most part the passive exercise of routine and highly regulated procedures in the task of selecting from already limited supplies of information” (1979:405). Because news focuses on events that interrupt the normal flow of life in a society, it “is described as a social surveillance, registering threats to the normal fabric of society and explaining their significance. The news value of negativity is therefore an important contributor to the social values in news, defining by default both the status quo and the sources and nature of threats to it” (409). This thesis investigates why this process of definition excludes some of the major problems facing society, and whether this realm of discourse can be widened.

[43] See Jamieson and Waldman (2003:95-129): despite media arguments that the voters thought Gore should concede, neutrally phrased surveys found that “the country did not share the presumption that Gore should give up” (125).

[44] Gregory Ulmer suggests that Tarkovsky’s images and emblems take their meanings not from studium (the surface organization) but from punctum (the individual relationship to what is depicted) – the terms come from Barthes’ Camera Lucida. See Ulmer 2003:262-3. Such a strategy forms a critical part of Ulmer’s ‘heuretics’ (the logic of invention) in a pedagogy that recognizes the impact of digital technologies.

[45] The US Administration’s discourse during the 1991 war on Iraq led Baudrillard to declare, notoriously, that the Gulf War did not take place (1995). Avital Ronell has argued that the terms of the discourse were also propelled by George Bush Snr’s memories of World War II, when he was shot down. As a result, he was determined to exert American air superiority: “The war was less a matter of truth than of rhetorical maneuvers that were dominated by unconscious transmission systems and symbolic displacements, which nonetheless have produced real effects” (1993:13).

[46] This represents a postmodern (i.e. knowing) version of Marshall McLuhan’s aphorism that the content of a new media environment is the old environment. “The ‘content’ of TV is the movie” (1964:ix). He was, of course, aware of the implications, as in this 1974 comment on poetry: “The reader ‘puts on’ the poem as a mask. He becomes its ‘content’ by adjusting himself to use the poem as a means of perceiving the world” (1995:281). However, we had to wait until Baudrillard to see the full implications of handing oneself over to a technology as its content.

[47] Roland Barthes stressed the part played by enigma as a foundation for credibility in fiction, but news regularly uses this technique to gain acceptance for its products. Expectation, he wrote in S/Z, is “the basic condition for truth: truth, these narratives tell us, is what is at the end of expectation. The design implies a return to order, for expectation is a disorder” (76). However, compulsive gamblers, among others (such as sportsmen and women), have suggested that the pleasures of risk lie in taking the risk rather than the outcome. That is, the pay-off plays a minimal part in the pleasure, which is also a common complaint about narrative endings for thrillers, novels and even some philosophical works (The Independent 2004).

[48] For those who know Avital Ronell’s “TraumaTV: Twelve Steps Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1998a), the starting point here will seem the same, though the extension is made in these comments across the culture and the focus is on the implications for media production.

[49] Ann Gray argues that many women do not consider themselves as having specific leisure time in the home (1987, cited by Morley 1986).

[50] “At one level, as the film’s title announces, it is about the last surviving son of a family and the heroic efforts of a platoon of American soldiers to find him and return him safely to his mother. But at a second level, Private Ryan is about a command not to kill a German prisoner who then returns to kill Americans, most notably the heroic Captain Miller [head of the rescue team]. Thus the movie’s frightening lesson (one that I’ve come to think of as archetypally North American) is always choose death, for if you do not, death will come anyway, later, multiplied” (White 2004:42).

[51] Research in 2002 found average sound-bites for political candidates at 9.5 seconds (Raasch 2002).

[52] He puts forward the term ‘accompanying discourse’ (34), which is an adequate description of their place but not phenomenologically (the concern here).

[53] Cook remarks that even programmes about advertising ignore the advertising presented between its documentary, and notes only one exception: television chat show host Clive Anderson said in the middle of his program: “We’ve got to stop for a bit now while people try to sell you things you don’t want” (35).

[54] Alain Badiou speaks of the “profoundly illogical regime of communication” as typifying modern experience (1999:41), adding: “Communication transmits a universe made up of disconnected images, remarks, statements and commentaries whose accepted principle is incoherence. Day after day communication undoes all relations and all principles, in an untenable juxtaposition that dissolves every relation between the elements it sweeps along in its flow. And what is perhaps even more distressing is that mass communication presents the world as a spectacle devoid of memory, a spectacle in which new images and new remarks cover, erase and consign to oblivion the very images and remarks that have just been shown and said” (ibid). In contrast to this section, Badiou puts the emphasis on the incoherence created rather than the way coherence can be imposed via the experience of fragmentation.

[55] Presumably the producer thought this slice of film spectacular would be impressive for viewers (the type of shot is thought to have originated in D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance).

[56] Her example of this point: public opinion would not object if the President was moved to the top of the waiting list for a liver transplant, even though the person at the top of that list might feel unjustly treated.

[57] Shattuck’s reference here is to the French proverb: Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner (151).

[58] Shattuck cites T.S. Eliot’s lines from Gerontion as the paradigm of this view: “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?” (325-6).

[59] The Geneva Conventions provide for the dead to be “honorably interred” (Pilger 1992:121). See also , Article 17, paragraph 3.

[60] This dissertation was completed before Hurrican Katrina and the destruction of New Orleans. But most of the issues made here can be applied to this catastrophe: from the public blindness to the threat to the manipulation of risk awareness by media and the equally determined resistance to admission of culpability after the event.

[61] The young Jewish writer J.F. Steiner wrote in 1964 of the Jews as a people whose “six million members allowed themselves to be led to the slaughter like sheep” (“six millions de members se sont laissé mener à l’abattoir comme des moutons” (Finkielkraut 1989.:38).

[62] Theresienstadt was the only concentration camp that remained Adolf Eichmann’s own responsibility –”the only camp in which he had at least some of the power which the prosecution in Jerusalem ascribed to him” (Arendt 1963:81) and the only ghetto or camp to which representatives of the International Red Cross were admitted (Arendt:82). Lanzmann points out that the visit to Auschwitz never took the 25-year-old Red Cross delegate beyond an outer sidegate (pers. comm. 6 June 2004 )

[63] A similar firebombing of Hamburg occurred but has failed to lodge itself among the controversies of history.

[64] See the earlier note on Canetti’s “socio-philosophical” statements.

[65] She notes, “There exists, of course, a large literature on war and warfare, but it deals with the implements of violence, not with violence as such.”

[66] As cited by Julian Reid 2003, using the quotation from p731 of On War in an Everyman edition.

[67] This maxim appeared as parody in the anonymous Report from Iron Mountain (1967), eventually admitted to be the work of the New York freelance writer Leonard C. Lewin. Claiming to be inspired by Marxism (whose originator in fact “ruled out the use of violent means of revolution”, says Arendt [1972:90]), urban guerrillas in the Germany and France adopted Mao Tse-Tung (Mao Zedong)’s maxim that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” (1966). David Moss reports of the Italian Red Brigades’ ideology (examining their practice in line with Derrida’s logic of supplementarity, according to which seemingly fundamental distinctions can be deconstructed to show that each term displays the features of its opposite, 1976). “Violence represents the means by which political commitment can be fully realized [or] signifies the exhaustion of politics, just as political orders can rely can rely for legitimacy on the elimination of political violence from the social imagination” (Apter 1997b:86).

[68] “During the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called Warre [.…] the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.” http.// /etext02/lvthn10.txt

[69] We find Max Weber supporting a similar thesis. “‘Every state is founded on force,’ said Trotsky at Brest-Litovsk. This is indeed right. If no social institutions existed which knew the use of violence, then the concept of ‘state’ would be eliminated, and a condition which would emerge that could be designated as ‘anarchy,’ in the specific sense of this word. Of course, force is certainly not the only means of the state – nobody says that – but force is a means special to the state. In the past, the most varied institutions – beginning with the sib – have known the use of physical force as quite normal. Today, however, we have to say that a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. […] The state is considered the sole source of the ‘right’ to use violence” (‘Politics as a Vocation’ 1918:78).

[70] C. Wright Mills in The Power Elite:171.

[71] “If a man was wronged, his lineage supported him in seeking redress by force. When they got tired of fighting they invited an influential man to mediate between the two sides. […] There are other influences to make people keep the peace – or enough peace – in societies which have no policemen. […] The Tallensi in Ghana believed that their land could not prosper unless all were at peace when it was time for them to join together in their great religious festivals…” (Mair 17).

[72] One can also point to the fashionable practice of body piercing and tattooing, examined in Jagodzinski (2002: 251 and after, see page 78).

[73] Even the senior British anthropologist A.R. Radcliffe-Brown argues that society is created from “the organized exercise of coercive authority through the use, or the possibility of use, of physical force” (Mair 1970:20). The examples in the text indicate how narrow a view he took of the varieties of pre-literate society.

[74] Leaning on Lacan’s ideas, Slavoj Žižek makes a similar point with regard to abuses by Nazis against the Jews: “When, today, the Jewish community demands money for their suffering in the Holocaust, they are not indulging in cheap bargaining – it is not that thereby the perpetrators can simply pay the debt and buy their peace. One should recall here Lacan’s claim that money’s original role is to function as the impossible equivalent for that which has NO PRICE, for desire itself. So, paradoxically, financially recompensing the victims of the Holocaust does not relieve us from/ our guilt – it rather enables us to acknowledge this gift as indelible” (2001:17-18). It is an indication of how much such feelings have been transposed and wished away into bureaucratic institutions that Žižek should feel the need to insist on what might seem obvious.

[75] A typical statement of the received wisdom comes from the Task Force report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence in the US in 1970: “Violence is the breakdown of social order” (xxvii).

[76] “In America violence is idiomatic. […]/ For a European writer to make violence real, he has to do a great deal of careful psychology and sociology. […] But not so the American writer. His audience has been prepared and is neither surprised nor shocked if he omits artistic excuses for familiar events. When he reads a little book with eight or ten murders in it, he does not necessarily condemn the book as melodramatic.” – Contact, October 1932, in West 1997:399-400.

[77] For readers of Jacques Derrida, this concept may recall the French philosopher’s onslaught in On Grammatology against binarism (Norcross 1996:141), arguing that contrasts which cannot exist without each other should be considered as part of a continuum rather than exclusionary in the same way that Hegel’s Synthesis embraces, if not reconciles, Thesis and Antithesis (Schirmacher pers. comm. 2002). However, to anticipate later arguments, we can also point to Western manipulation of the notion of taboo, which as Franz Steiner indicates is paired with the word noa. “In the languages in which the word ‘noa’ occurs it means ‘aimless, vague, not tied up, not fixed to any purpose, free’. Taboo and noa are mutually exclusive. […] It is a misunderstanding to apply Durkheim’s notion of sacred and profane to taboo-noa contexts. Sacred-profane is a relation of tension and polarity; the profane threatens the sacred, the sacred has to be protected against the profane. These are concepts alien to the Polynesian taboo and noa, which are better understood by recourse to the simile of tying and untying” (Steiner 1956:41).

The Western discoverer of taboo, Captain James Cook, “and subsequent European visitors were never sure whether tapu [the Maori term] meant ‘sacred’ or ‘defiled’,” a recent anthropological encyclopedia reports (Barnard and Spencer 1996:542). Steiner records that the mid-Victorian Edward Shortland derived tapu from two words meaning “to mark” and “thoroughly” (Steiner 1956:32) gaining its religious significance secondarily, and is inclined to go along with Shortland’s explanation.

But he shows more interest in how “the problem of taboo became extraordinarily prominent in the Victorian age” (50): 1) as an attempt to account for aspects of religion that could not be reduced to rationality and 2) “Victorian society itself was one of the most taboo-minded and taboo-ridden societies on record” (51). Steiner remarks: “It must not be forgotten that scholars like [Sir James] Frazer [the last great ‘armchair evolutionist (Barnard and Spencer 1996:574), author of The Golden Bough (1890)] grew up among people who preferred, in certain circumstances, to say ‘unmentionables’ rather than ‘trousers’[combined with] a very sensitive awareness of avoidance customs as positive social factors and […] a very strictly departmentalized vocabulary” (51).

[78] This report by Kenya’s later President was the first account by any member of an East African people of their social organization.

[79] The author saw one such lynching at a distance from a window of a hotel in central Nairobi in 1994.

[80] In a similar exaggeration of the violence to be expected outside society, the dangers of pioneer life have been widely overblown. The debunking social historian James W. Lowen writes: “Throughout the entire West between 1842 and 1859, of more than 400,000 pioneers crossing the plains, fewer than 400, or less than .1 percent, were killed by American Indians” (2000).

[81] Weber’s formulation: “Today, the use of force is regarded as legitimate only so far as it is either permitted by the state or prescribed by it” (1920:156). Looking at the essential role of thugs in Mussolini’s rise to power, secret police-allied brigades in Central and South America, the militias as well as the military in the wars of Yugoslav succession or in West and Central Africa in the 1990s, political theorists need to interpret the terms “legitimate” and “permitted” in a more sophisticated way than offering simple quotation as in Elliott et al 1986:264.

[82] Curtis White points up what this paradox entails: “The Iraqis, for instance, are learning that their ‘free elections’ (if they ever come) are not free to produce certain kinds of results: they can’t elect Arab nationalists, they certainly can’t elect socialists of any stripe; they can’t elect Muslim fundamentalists; and they can’t elect persons out of step with Western free market theory. (Which is to say that they can’t elect anyone not open to the idea that their ‘oil-rich’ country won’t continue to get fleeced by Western markets.) The possiblility of freedom comes to the Iraqis only in the context of its impossibility” (2004:xii).

[83] Writing in the British cultural studies tradition, Philip Elliott and colleagues (1986) focus on UK television’s refusal to use terms such as “guerrilla,” “freedom fighter,” or member of a “Resistance” for members of the Irish Republic Army (IRA)(271), without giving the same kind of critical attention to the IRA’s description of its activities as a “war” (275).

[84] These comments could also apply without change to the successful US series 24, where the emphasis is notably on unquestioned torture to obtain information from both the guilty and the innocent in a battle against terrorism.

[85] He takes explicit inspiration from Derrida’s logic of supplementarity in which terms can be made to display the features of its opposite, found in Of Grammatology (1976).

[86] A Left-wing version of this period, relating particularly to communist theorist Antonio Negri, states: “The government called a state of emergency, using its extended powers to crack down on terrorist and non-terrorist activity alike. On 7 April 1979, more than 1,500 people, including Negri, were arrested. Negri was accused of being the secret leader of a web of clandestine terrorist organizations; he was held for four years before being tried. By then, the charges of masterminding terrorist activity had been dropped, but he was still held ‘morally’ and ‘objectively’ responsible for the violence” (Cowley 2003). It is a shortcoming of Moss’s account that the does not deal with these issues, except indirectly in citing the general belief that government measures had not restricted freedoms. Even if this is an accurate reflection of informed opinion at that time, it is a major omission to ignore a figure of Negri’s stature.

[87] This contrasts with Mussolini’s takeover in October 1922 with perhaps only 30,000 blackshirts to support him: “Mussolini’s achievement in seizing power with a movement whose strength in the country was unknown and against the forces of order and the state whose strength was all too well known, ranks among the greatest feats of political wizardry in history” (Steinberg 1990:186).

[88] The psychotherapist Adam Phillips observes that .psychoanalysis, too, “has always shown us the ironic sense in which definitions are sustained by their exclusions” (xxii).

[89] See the commentary below on Saving Private Ryan in the section on Stephen Spielberg’s A.I.

[90] Sample descriptions of the past 100 years include:

“Sir Isaiah Berlin called the present century ‘the most terrible century in Western history’ and in his intrepid, autobiographical history of the era, The Age of Extremes (1994), Eric Hobsbawm describes it as ‘without doubt the most murderous century of which we have record.’. […] As Hobsbawm points out, […] there has, since 1914, been a marked decline in our aspirations towards those standards which in former days were both hard-won and fiercely defended./From its inception […] the twentieth century has been less a century to celebrate than one to survive.” – Marina Benjamin (1998:8). “Many would add that it was also a classically Hobbesian century – poor, nasty, brutish…” (Macey 2000:ii). The New York Times declared on 26 January 1995. “In no previous age have people shown so great an aptitude and appetite for killing millions of other people for reasons of race, religion or class” (Apter 1997c:1). George Steiner observes: “When, however, allowance is made for selective nostalgia and illustion, the truth persists: for the whole of Europe and Russia, this century became a time out of hell” (2001:3).

Saul Bellow speaks of “the moronic inferno”, a phrase take over by the British writer Martin Amis -- and lifted by Bellow from Wyndham Lewis – for a 1987 collection of essays on America. Amis, however, insists: “The moronic inferno is not a peculiarly American condition. It is global and perhaps eternal. It is also, of course, primarily a metaphor, a metaphor for human infamy: mass, gross,/ ever-distracting human infamy. […] It exactly describes a possible future, one in which the moronic inferno will cease to be a metaphor and will become a reality: the only reality” (x-xi).

Giorgio Agamben suggests this future has already arrived. For him, the ‘camp’ is the paradigm of modern political experience, declaring: “What happened in the camps so exceeds the juridical concept of crime that the specific juridico-political-structure in which those events took place is often simply omitted from consideration. The camp is merely the place in which the most absolute conditio inhumana that has ever existed on earth was realized: this is what counts in the last analysis, for the victims as for those who come after.” (Homer Sacer 166).

François Furet (1985/1989) sees their challenge to thought, but largely to historical reasoning. He speaks of the “enigmas” (7) which (as Agamben notes) “our century has proposed [sic. posed] to historical reason and that remain with us (Nazism is only the most disquieting among them)” (1995:4). Michel Foucault, in his last years, spoke of a “political ‘double-bind’, constituted by the individualization and the simultaneous totalization of structures of modern power” (Dits et écrits, 4:229-232) which he traced back to what he termed “biopolitics” (Agamben 1995:3/See also Foucault 1994/1997:74) where government claims sovereignty over life. The result: “For the first time in history, […] at once [sic. simultaneously] it becomes possible both to protect life and to authorize a holocaust” (Agamben:3). Graham Greene (1955) makes the same observation about the permeation of individual and totalitarian rights in noting Hanoi’s lack of entertainment or the well-to-do and the “endless compulsory lectures and political meetings” under Communism. These obligations, he suggests, might be for the peasant “better entertainment than he has ever known”… “We talk so glibly about the threat to the individual, but the anonymous peasant has never treated so like an individual before” (302, 303). This double-barrelled system of control Foucault called panopticism, from the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s plan of a prison where a central tower could keep an eye on every prisoner in each cell, without the prisoner knowing whether a guard was watching that particular cell or not.

Foucault outlines his views on panopticism in ‘The Punitive Society’ (reprinted in Ethics 1997:23-37). It is worth noting that he quotes with approval the distinction by N.H. Julius (1828) between “civilizations of the spectacle (civilizations of sacrifice and ritual, where it is a matter of giving everyone the spectacle of a unique event and the major architectural form is the theatre) with civilizations of supervision (where it is a matter of ensuring an uninterrupted control by a few over the greatest number; its privileged architectural form – the prison).” This has a clear link to Foucault’s own development of the contrast in Discipline and Punish, and Foucault’s challenge to Guy Debord: “He (Julius) added that European society, which had replaced religion with the state, offered the first example of a civilization of supervision” (Ethics 32). This dissertation attempts to show how a civilization of supervision can appear like a civilization of spectacle.

[91] Michael Humphrey writes. “Atrocities confront individuals with an existential crisis of the self and the need to make sense of the world” (2002:2). “While all violence threatens normative reality, atrocity – excessive violence –shakes the very foundations of both self and social existence” (3).

[92] Atrocious comes from the Latin atrox. fierce or cruel, though the New Shorter Oxford Dictionary hesitates between the French atrocité or the Latin atrocitas as the origin of atrocity, which is recorded first in English in the mid-16th century (NSOED: 1997).

[93] “We not must allow the global acceptance of the themes of liberal economy and representative democracy to dissimulate the fact that the world the twentieth century has given birth to is a violent and fragile world. Its material, ideological and intellectual foundations are disparate, disunited and largely inconsistent. This world does not announce the serenity of a linear development, but rather a series of dramatic crises and paradoxical events. Take two recent examples, the Gulf War and the fall of bureaucratic socialism. Add to these the war in Bosnia and the Rwandan massacres. But do not be mistaken: these events are only the first in a long series” (1999:55).

[94] Haraway has emphasized that “situated knowledges” (significantly in the plural) should be employed with the full range of its meanings: “It is very important to understand that ‘situatedness’ doesn’t necessarily mean place. […] Sometimes people read ‘Situated Knowledges’ in a way that seems to me a little flat. i.e., to mean merely what your identifying marks are and literally where you are. ‘Situated’ in this sense means only to be in one place. Whereas what I mean to emphasize is the situatedness of situated. In other words it is a way to get at the multiple modes of embedding that are about both place and space in the manner in which geographers draw that distinction.” (1998:71).

[95] Though perhaps hard to fit into an essentialist philosophical scheme, the argument is of the same sort as in comparing great poems.

[96] A major objection can be made that the definition does not cover those who are in no position to claim justice for themselves, i.e. animals and young children, unless one believes (as I do) that any maltreatment of such creatures is prima facie a case of atrocity.

[97] As Aldous Huxley put it: “That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given […] assent” (1927:1).

[98] “In the philosophy expounded by Leibniz, the universe is composed of countless conscious centres of spiritual force or energy, known as monads. Each monad represents an individual microcosm, mirroring the universe in varying degrees of perfection and developing independently of all other monads. The universe that these monads constitute is the harmonious result of a divine plan. Humans, however, with their limited vision, cannot accept such evils as disease and death as part of a universal harmony” (Encarta 2002). This can be considered as coming close to arguing that injustice is therefore part of universal harmony, but requiring belief in a divine plan to justify such a view. Schopenhauer abandoned the notion of the divine plan to focus directly on the injustice of life as experienced by the subject (see Schirmacher 1994).

[99] Nietzsche, of course, did not agree, seeing in Kant’s categorical imperative only a manifestation of the metaphysical desire to have categorical imperatives.

[100] The critic George Steiner has perhaps first claim on the term, but his use of terminality is completely opposite and refers to a “core-tiredness” of spirit (2001:2).

[101] The irony with which Rauschenberg, Cage and Duchamp use terminality, however, should not be overlooked. It was this sense of terminality’s limitations that enabled them to go on to explorations of bricollage (see below).

[102] Duchamp insisted. “The word ‘readymade’ did not appear until 1915, when I went to the United States. [...] When I put a bicycle wheel on a stool, the fork down, there was no idea of a ‘readymade’, or anything else. It was just a distraction (Cabanne 1971:47).

[103] “Plato and our [Western philosophical] tradition got off on the wrong track by thinking that one could have a theory of everything – even human beings and their world – and that the way human beings relate to things is to have an implicity theory about them.” (Dreyfuss 1991:1).

[104] And, of course, Marxism. The foremost mainstream critic of Marx’s theory of base and superstructure, Raymond Williams, wrote: “A Marxism without some concept of determination is in effect worthless” (1977:83). The emphasis is on the rigid logic of determination.

[105] It will later be argued that transgression forms the heart of a commitment to a terminal ideology, and that a lack of evidence for the ideological belief becomes a demand for the commitment.

[106] The linguistic scholar Robin Tolmach Lakoffsuggests in The Language War (2000) that the media played with the same kind of undecidability over Hillary Rodham Clinton’s personality and President William J. Clinton’s sexual life, as a means of keeping the issues alive as news. The forever undecided questions about Hillary Clinton were: icy or emotional (169), competent or incompetent (ibid.), radical or conservative (170), feminist or sexist (ibid.), straight or lesbian (171), saint or sinner/naughty or nice (ibid). The ambiguities over President Clintion are, she reports, he is indeterminate in gender (giving his wife an equal place in his home), he is racially indeterminate, too (“culturally black”) (274-5), he is the Great Communicator but he is also Slick Willie (275), he is both Insider and Outsider (276), he symbolizes “current uncertainties about the distinction, if any, between public and private” (277), he is Daddy and CEO: “Father-president must fulfil our private fantasies even as CEO-president expresses public power” (277-8), he is smart but he is dumb (278). These mechanisms are set in in the discussion of language-events (Reagan’s funeral as a language-event, p).

[107] About the second Iraq war, Žižek wrote: “If you want to understand why the Bush administration invaded Iraq, read Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, not the National Security Strategy of the United States. Only the twisted logic of dreams can explain why the United States thinks that the aggressive pursuit of contradictory goals – promoting democracy, affirming U.S. hegemony, and ensuring stable energy supplies – will produce success” (2004:42ff).

[108] Theodore M. Porter, a professor of statistics, argues that quantification has largely been applied to make people governable rather than offer an accurate picture of the problems being tackled: “Numbers alone never provide enough information to make detailed decisions about the operation of a company. Their highest purpose is to instill an ethic” (1995:45).

[109] “He expresses perfectly the self-satisfaction of the bourgeoisie and its deep desire to halt the Revolution” (Liénard 1976:13).

[110] Saint-Just also rejects the social contract as the answer to social justice: “Nature ends where convention begins” (1976:140). “To seek to establish a society by pact […] is the very way to destroy the society” (ibid), by introducing antagonist relations into a non-antagonist social relation (Liénard:17).

[111] In the introduction to The Life of the Mind (1978), Arendt later explained her motive for using the phrase: “I held no thesis or doctrine, although I was dimly aware of the fact that it went counter to our tradition of thought – literary, theological, or philosophic – about the phenomenon of evil. Evil, we have learned is something demonic. […] Evil men, we are told, act out of envy […/] However, what I was confronted with was utterly different and still undeniably factual. I was struck by a manifest shallowness in the doer that made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer – at least the very effective one now on trial – was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous. There was no sign in him of firm ideological convictions of or specific evil motives, and the only notable characteristic one could detect in his past behavior as well as in his behavior during the trial and throughout the pre-trial police examination was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but thoughlessness” (3-4).

[112] Ann Salzmann has noted that even on the basis of Arendt’s own words, Eichmann could not be considered a simple cog in the Nazi wheel or “merely a passive receiver of orders” (21). It was Eichmann who suggested to Rudolf Höss that exhaust gases in trucks be used to kill people (21); it was Eichmann who tried to dissuade Hitler from allowing Jews to emigrate to Palestine at the end of the war (32); it was Eichmann who hunted down individual Jews in the face of opposition from both the Reich’s ally, the Italian government, and the Reich Foreign Office itself (46-47)” (2000:131).

[113] Walter Laqueur comments. “A secret known to tens of thousands, if not in all its details, is not a secret. From Gestapo reports about the mood of the population it emerges that the fate of the Jews was widely known. It was certainly not a state secret of great sensitivity, and there is no documented case of anyone having been punished for divulging it” (2001a:198). “The great riddle is not how the Final Solution could have been kept secret for such a long time (it was not), but why there was such resistance on the part of Jews and non-Jews alike to acknowledge that systematic mass murder was taking place” (201).

[114] “The language and iconography of democracy dominates all the politics of our time, but political power is no less elitist for all that. […] A citadel of expertise [dominates] the high ground of urban-industrial society.” – Theodore Roszak, as cited by Fischer (5).

[115] Die Philosophische Weltgeschichte, Entwurf von 1830.

[116] He adds (in a comment that is significant for our discussion of bricollage): “Such limits arise not merely because theories are inadequate, inaccurate, or inappropriate: they tell us something profound about the nature of knowledge and the implications of investigating the Universe from within.”

[117] “The truth is that that was no word for what I did not even dare term ‘l’évènement’ [event/happening]. To myself, and almost as it was a secret, I called it ‘the Thing’. It was a way of naming the unnamable” (2004:6, my translation).

[118] This designation is designed to include Latin America but excludes the genocidal events in Cambodia.

[119] Primo Levi writes. “The worst survived – that is, the fittest; the best all died” (1986:63).

[120] “Few survivors feel guilty about having deliberately damaged, robbed, or beaten a companion: those who did so (the Kapos, but not only they) block out the memory; but by contrast, almost everybody feels guilty of having omitted to offer help” (59).

[121] One can see in body piercing and cosmetic surgery a reinstatement of this assertion of the importance of the body as well as of subjective treatment of the flesh as other. See godzinski 2002, quoting a writer in Mademoiselle: “So was it worth the pain? Yes, but not for the reason you’d think. I felt all my life that my thighs were punishing me. Now I’ve punished them. Perhaps this is the real satisfaction of having liposuction: doing something truly vicious to a body part you hate”. The emphasis worth noting here is on the experience of the body before the surgery. Jagodzinski comments: “The issue is about control ofthe body part and not over the body – as in body building, for instance. The sensual supplants the ascetic.” In what might seem a typical application of the theory outlined here, the researcher (as with many newspaper articles) takes no note of the sensual, not to say sexual pleasure, many people have reported from the objects placed in the body surfaces after piercing (see Jet:1999)

[122] Žižek writes: “As Lacan puts it, ‘reality’ is always framed by a fantasy, i.e. for something real to be experienced as part of ‘reality,’ it must fit the pre-ordained coordinates of our fantasy space” (1993:43).

[123] In her historic study of totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt observes: “It was recognized early and has frequently been asserted that in totalitarian countries propaganda and terror present two sides of the same coin. […] See, for instance, E. Kohn-Bramstedt, Dictatorship and Political Police. The Techniques of Control of Fear, London, 1945, p. 164 ff. The explanation is that ‘terror without propaganda would lose most of its psychological effect, whereas propaganda without terror does not contain its full punch’ (p. 175). What is overlooked in these and similar statements, which mostly go around in circles, is the fact that not only political propaganda but the whole of modern mass publicity contains an element of threat; that terror, on the other hand, can be fully effective without propaganda, so long as it is only a question of conventional political terror of tyranny. Only when terror is intended to coerce not merely from without but, as it were, from within, when the political regime wants more than power, is terror in need of propaganda. In this sense the Nazi theorist, Eugen Hadamovsky, could say in Propaganda und nationale Macht, 1933: ‘Propaganda and violence are never contradictions. Use of violence can be part of the propaganda’ (p. 22)” (1966:341)

[124] Also Colin Rushton (2002) Spectator in Hell. Pharoah Press, 1999. : “For some time Arthur Dodd kept his experiences to himself. When he initially spoke of them publicly, no-one really wanted to hear.

[125] Aristotle’s maxim has also been submitted to challenge when the concept of rights is extended to non-human animals. Peter Singer has argued: “The basic principle of equality […] is equality of consideration, and equal consideration for different beings may lead to different treatment and different rights” (1974/1999.482).

[126] How little this accords with nation-state ideas can be seen by the US (government and mainstream media) refusal to acknowledge the International Court of Justice’s condemnation of Washington for the mining of Nicaragua’s harbors.

[127] In an approach that can be easily applied to atrocity, Becker “follows the economists’ usual analysis of choice and assumes that a person commits an offense if the expected utility to him exceeds the utility he could get by using his time and other resources at other activities. […] Criminal behavior […] does not require ad hoc concepts of differential association, anomie, and the like” (46). Since this dissertation argues that psychopathic interpretations of atrocity mislead rather than illuminate its position in human behavior, Becker’s ideas do not receive further treatment here. However, Becker’s notes a differentiation in social attitudes towards those who are punished by detention and those it fines (imposing monetary compensation): “The anger and fear felt toward ex-convicts […] have resulted in additional punishments, including legal restrictions on their political and economic opportunities and informal restrictions on their social acceptance” (64). This is because detention does not compensate. “Moreover, the absence of compensation encourages efforts to change and otherwise ‘rehabilitate’ offenders through psychiatric counseling, therapy, and other programs. Since fines do compensate and do not create much additional cost, anger toward and fear of appropriately fined persons do not easily develop. As a result, additional punishments are not usually levied against ‘ex-finees,’ nor are strong efforts made to ‘rehabilitate’ them” (64). In considering atrocity, particularly with regard to Nazi persecution of Jews, one can ask what kind of compensation could have made the Nazis consider the Jews had “paid their debt to society” (64) and what kind of “rehabilitation” would have been possible. The answers – ‘none’ to both questions – indicate the limitations of this kind of accounting, as the discussion of violence in society has tried to indicate.

[128] “If [the good] is taken as the realization of human excellence in the various forms of culture, we have what may be called perfectionism. This notion is found in Aristotle and Nietzsche, among others” (22).

[129] In part, Derrida’s discussion of justice can be seen as reviving the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of his earliest points of reference. For Rousseau, pity is the foundation of morality because it “moderates in each individual the activity of love of oneself, contributes to the mutual preservation of the entire species. It carries us without reflection to the aid of those whom we see suffer; in the state of nature, it takes the place of laws, morals, and virtue” (1964:133). Where they part company is in Rousseau’s argument that reason is the foundation of democracy (Koziak 2000:9).

[130] Jean-Luc Nancy explored the philosophical implications of a Derridian ethics in ‘The Free Voice of Man.’ In ‘The Letter on Humanism’ Heidegger rebuffed suggestions that he should produce an ethics, “arguing that an ethics, like a logic or a physics, made sense only within the confines of the metaphysical tradition.’ […]Nancy argued that Derrida would have made a similar response [treating ethics] as the effectuation in practice of theoretical knowledge and thus as presupposing the prior establishment of the domain of the philosophical” (Nancy Fraser in Madison 1993:58). But, this does not set aside ethics in the terms in which Derrida wrote after the 1980s as Nancy’s argument makes clear: “Nancy inferred that deconstruction ‘does its duty’ (fait son devoir) when it rebuffs the demand for an ethics and instead deconstructs that demand, showing where it comes from and interrogating the ‘essence’ (in Heidegger’s sense of the ‘transcendentale’) of the ethical” (58).

[131] First aired 11 February 1996 (http.//shows/view_episode.php?episode_id=2503).

[132] The original work referred in Italians to divas rather than stars or celebrities. In the course of its transposition into broader cultural theory it has suffered some regrettable distortions of meaning and application.

[133] In language that is remarkably similar to Hannah Arendt’s on German anti-Semitism being possibly rooted in the Jewish exclusion from the oppressive relations of the time (see page 73), Alberoni writes. “Class resentment and the experience of injustice do not depend on the fact of contrasting inequalities with egalitarian ideals. […] They depend essentially on the fact that one perceives the existence of an autonomous illegitimate power underpinning the inequality” (94).

[134] “These phenomena […] belong to the experience of relating to objects. One can think of the ‘electricity’ that seems to generate in meaningful or intimate contact, that is a feature, for instance, when two people are in love. These phenomena of the play area have infinite variability, contrasting with the relative stereotypy of phenomena that relate either to personal body functioning or to environmental actuality” (1971:6).

[135] Winnicott describes this extreme state as unusual: “The majority of children do not carry around with them for life the knowledge from experience of having been mad.” For the purposes of this discussion, his additional comment is significant: “Madness here simply means a breakup of whatever may exist at the time of a personal continuity of existence” (5).

[136] This may be criticized as making a loose use of this term. However, it does introduce what is believed to be an otherwise unrecorded insight into the terminology of Max Weber that the German sociologist failed to note. charisma can be applied as much to powerlessness as to power. Though Weber insists he uses the concept of ‘charisma’ in a “completely ‘value-neutral’ sense” (1920/1948. 245), he in fact associates it repeatedly with the granting and exercise of power. A standard introduction to Weber even asserts: “Charisma presupposes a crowd of followers” (Freund 1966.114). However, as Weber indicates, charisma originally meant ‘the gift of grace’ and is taken from the vocabulary of early Christianity (1920/1947.328). It therefore applies to a quality attributed to an individual, usually by others, rather than solely the power exercised by an individual over others out of bureaucratic or legal structures. It is on the first aspect that this study insists. charisma represents a supposed attribute, a presumed quality that can inspire hatred as much as devotion. And in the case of prejudice, the hatred finds in the Other a charisma it must seek to destroy. Gerth and Mills, in their introduction to Weber 1920/1948, speak of the sociologist’s “Platonizing tendency” to nominalize behaviors, which this study seeks to challenge.

[137] In The Transparency of Evil, Jean Baudrillard suggests that between Good and Evil as presented in contemporary society, “there is only a difference of visibility and transparency” (1997:26).

[138] Definition from the New Oxford Dictionary of English, included with the Encyclopedia Britannica CD-ROM.

[139] Encyclopedia Britannica 2002 describes the scheme as “bizarre and spoiled by the elaborate detail that he loved” (in Bentham, Jeremy. mature works).

[140] “Today, wrote Ernst Junger in 1934, today any event worthy of notice is surrounded by a circle of lenses and microphones and lit up by the flaming explosions of flashbulbs” (Keenan 1995.202-4).

[141] Canetti was writing before any systematic study of the crowd. In his seminal critical survey The Crowd (2000), John Plotz acknowledges Canetti’s “unmistakable genius” (5) put points out that the Nobel Literature Prizewinner was influenced by Gustave Le Bon’s ahistorical Les Foules/The Crowd (1895), whose “brilliant insight” was to see that he could hypothesize a set of unchanging models for human psychology and social behavior from the “innate and timeless qualities” assigned to “the” crowd by reactionary writers to contain the unruly energies of revolutionary or suffrage-minded working-class assemblies (4). Others since Walter Benjamin have recognized how city life has changed society and experience. Plotz writes of London after 1800 (when it reached one million in population and could boast paved streets): “The city’s random crowds meant that chance encounters on London streets produced a new sort of social life, both a pleasant and a threatening urban anonymity. Mundane outdoor life came to include random encounters with strangers, inexplicable aggregations, sudden eruptions of violence, and permanent sites for encountering others en masse. On the other hand, the percolation of society through the streets in changing congeries took on a hundred guises, with a thousand unexpected effects. And […] the working classes showed themselves capable of lodging representative claims in a newly expanded public arena” (1). In fact, this was how the word “crowd” came back into use, as a pejorative description of radical demonstrations and mammoth Chartist meetings, notes Plotz (1-2). Among the effects, the Metropolitan police was formed as a result of the Gordon Riots (3), and cities were transformed architecturally by “Hausmannization” to handle and control large crowds (196). Plotz rightly insists on the contingent nature of these assemblages of people. This thesis is concerned in part with the transformation in crowds, their intentions, actions and “claim-making” (Plotz’s term: 2) – as well as their control – from the video to the digital age.

[142] The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary and the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary note the “host-shout” origin of slogan but do not recognize the reference to the dead.

[143] Bourdieu uses symbolic capital, educational capital and cultural capital in various circumstances. They are found most easily in extracts from his earlier researches and seminal work La Distinction, translated into English for the British journal Media, Culture and Society as ‘The production of belief: contribution to an economy of symbolic goods” (1977) and “The aristocracy of culture” (1984). For these extracts see Collins (1986:131-193). In this context, the introductory essay ‘Pierre Bourdieu and the sociology of culture’ by Nicholas Garnham and Raymond Williams (116-130) is also important. It explicates Bourdieu’s use of the concept of cultural capital somewhat uncritically (its equivalence with commercial capital is assumed, rehabilitating cultural production to Marxist theory) but provides an easy entrance to Adorno’s more sophisticated analysis of the culturally administered society.

[144] The challenge to art is summarized by Diana Taylor in her history of Argentina’s ‘dirty war’: “It can seem scandalous and at times even cruel of the artists […]. What’s to be gained, one might ask, by making a film […] which depicts the abduction, torture, and murder of the group of adolescents who protested the increase in bus fare? Or the scene from Funny Dirty Little War in which a good and innocent man is being tortured in a children’s classroom (another “little school”) under the disapproving gaze of the portraits of the illustrious Argentine founding fathers that grace the walls? How can novelists […] and dramatists […] produce a body of work about the violence inflicted on these victims without reproducing and capitalizing on that violence? And even when the aims are laudable, how can one represent the disappeared, by definition unrepresentable?[…] Artists (and scholars) are left literally holding the bag of their signifiers. The signified, banished to some offstage or off-scene, lies beyond the realm of visibility. We have no access to the signified, who will forever prove inaccessible to representation (1997:142,144).

[145] Where the atrocity is hardly disguised, as in The Wrong Man (1957), Hitchcock films become almost impossible to watch – “Let’s file The Wrong Man among the indifferent Hitchcocks,” he said (Truffaut 1966/1978: 301) – in contrast to the film he made immediately afterwards Vertigo (1958), where the relentless tormenting of James Stewart (both by Kim Novak and the plot, i.e. Hitchcock) produced perhaps Hitchcock’s strongest thriller.

[146] The same kind of confusions (of the spectator) can be found in David Lynch’s Eraserhead, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive.

[147] One should also note the references in Une femme mariée/A Married Woman (1964), on the surface a tale of adultery in the consumer society of the time, to Auschwitz trials, to the anti-Semitic and pro-German (but accepted as great) French writer Céline, and to Alain Resnais’ Nuit et Brouillard/Night & Fog (playing in the cinema where the lovers have an adulterous assignment), as Colin MacCabe points out (2003:166).

[148] Actually it is the other way round and she is not smiling (see Godard 1980: Vol 1.131-133).

[149] « Le cinéma substitute/ à notre regard/ un monde/ qui s’accorde/ a nos désirs » : each / indicates a new frame.

[150] This seems a slander. The nationmaster encyclopedia reports: Author Charles Higham published a controversial biography, Errol Flynn: The Untold Story (Doubleday, 1980) in which he alleged that Flynn was a fascist sympathiser and that he spied for the Nazis before and during World War II, but subsequent biographies—notably Tony Thomas’ Errol Flynn: The Spy Who Never Was (Citadel, 1990)—have denounced Higham’s claims as fabrications. Flynn’s political leanings appeared to be of a leftist bent; he was a supporter of the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War and of the Cuban Revolution ( updated on 6 May 2005).

[151] “In one of the most shocking moments of the film, Karina asks the character Donald [Siegal] (played by Jean-Pierre Léaud), ‘If you had to die, would you prefer to know beforehand or would you rather it was sudden?’ ‘I’d rather it was sudden,’ he replies. She shoots him, and all we hear from him as he dies are his cries for his mother” (MacCabe 2003:178).

[152] In Z00 (1986) a Dalmatian, swan and zebra are among those killed onscreen, along with the wives of the two brothers who die in a motor accident.

[153] It is no wonder that Greenaway repeatedly cites Eisenstein as the genius he hopes to find among young film-makers (pers. comm. 2003). Eisenstein was the Soviet director least interested in narrative, as distinct from presentation. Even compared to Dziga Vertov (Man with a Movie Camera 1929), Eisenstein opts for an operatic staging via scenes in blocks rather than Vertov’s fluid linear style.

[154] .

[155] More significantly for her aesthetic practice, Akerman makes films that do not pretend that their mood resides in the world itself, as Bill Nichols suggests that the superficially similar elegiac documentary filming of Robert Flaherty or the camera-eye vision of Fred Wiseman insinuate (1991:6/268).

[156] Harry Mathews wrote. “When I first learned that Perec had written a novel with using the letter e, I was horrified. It sounded [like] committing oneself to a concentration camp” (1996:109).

[157] The full text is at .

[158] Another of Wallace’s useful insights is how much we go to the cinema to be dominated: “Movies are an authoritarian medium. They vulnerabalize you and then dominate you. Part of the magic of going to a movie is surrendering to it, letting it dominate you” (169).

[159]

[160] The psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim insisted: “Fairy stories do not pretend to describe the world as it is, nor do they advise what one ought to do. If they did, the [listener] would be induced to follow an imposed pattern of behavior – which is not just bad therapy, but the opposite of therapy. The fairy tale is therapeutic because the patient finds his own solutions, through contemplating what the story seems to imply about him and his inner conflicts at this moment in his life. The content of the chosen tale usually has nothing to do with the patient’s external life, but much to do with his inner problems, which seem incomprehensible and hence unsolvable. The fairy tale clearly does not refer to the outer world, although it may begin realistically enough and have everyday features woven into it. The unrealistic nature of these tales (which narrow-minded rationalists object to) is an important device, because it makes obvious that the fairy tales’ concern is not useful information about the external world, but the inner processes taking place in an individual.” (1976:25). This section examines how much Spielberg insists on manipulating the options and why.

[161] Like all science fiction stories, it is a movie about what it is to be human. The philosophical questions about whether zombies can be human or whether humans are in fact zombies are debated in John Searle’sThe Mystery of Consciousness, in particular in his section on Daniel Dennett where he asserts that Dennett claims “there is no difference between us and machines that lack conscious states” (1997:107). Spielberg, for whom the imagination is a device to provide fantasy answers to his questions, simply presents us with a robot that can feel love, leaving aside the indepdendence that fantasy can give to the child (his own response to the Oedipal indifference of parents to their children). In AI David, as a robot, cannot envisage a possible or future self. Like Oedipus, “he couldn’t find or, rather, desire, anyone other than his parents” (Phillips 1994:xviii). AI can be seen as a drama of a child who completely renounces the capacity of imagination in life (replacing this capability with the fantasy of the Blue Fairy) – an ironic renunciation for an artist who has been a filmmaker since childhood and remembers his parents’ divorce as traumatic. For the child robot (and the film), this is seen as the price of being loved in return for loving. But he is nevertheless soon thrown into the world parentless, and hell turns out to be other people. For the child that renounced its imagination there is no longer any escape except through the debased form of a public fantasy (picked up through a book).

[162] It is in fact an echo of the first appearance of the extra-terrestrial in E.T.(see below).

[163] In The ‘Uncanny’ (1919) Freud treats the image of the double as being a way for the ego to fantasize its own survival.

[164] A full treatment of AI contrasting psychoanalytical and post-modern approaches to film and story can be found at .

[165] .

[166] “Not a holiday fool there but would give a piece of silver…When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian” (Act II scene 2, also quoted by Sontag 72).

[167] 26 May 2004. Michael Massing subjects the lengthy editors’ note to a critical review dated 27 May 2004 in The New York Review of Books of 24 June 2004 (6-10).

[168] Despite his love of Goethe, the essential critic of modernism in art Walter Benjamin apparently lacked knowledge of these earlier sources and wrote: “Fear, revulsion, and horror were the emotions which the big-city crowd first aroused in those who observed it” (1939:174). Certainly, by mid-century, writers such as Engels (“There is something distasteful about the very bustle of the streets, something that is abhorrent to human nature itself” – cited by Benjamin 1939:166-7) and Edgar Allan Poe (“For Poe it has something barbaric” – Benjamin 174), found the city crowd irremediably disturbing.

[169] In view of earlier comments on the modern culture of interruption, one can note how often Wordsworth insists on the way in which scenes force themselves on his attention. “Twas my chance / abrupt to be smitten with the view” he writes of the beggar (7:609-10).

[170] Williams was adamant: “There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses” (1958:289). For him the mass media were the media who treat others as masses, one of “certain problems of a modern democratic society which could not have been foreseen by its early partisans. The existence of immensely powerful media of mass-communication is at the heart of these problems, for through these public opinion has been observably moulded and directed, often by questionable means, often for questionable ends” (288).

[171] The extension of the juridical mode to life outside television and its basis in history is documented by Avital Ronell in The Test-Drive (2005, pers. comm 2004)

[172] Some game shows, particularly the British such as Mastermind or The Weakest Link, encourage the viewers to put themselves in the test position.

[173] “Broadcast TV is prone to create rather different regimes of knowledge from those favoured by cinema: in particular it is able to sustain a category of ‘news’ as a definition of a significant proportion of its output. Cinema has never really been able to produce news. Its privileged form has been the self-contained fiction” (Ellis: 1982/1992:15).

[174] This is another of Chesterton’s typical half-truths (though they are usually entertaining): in this way the media assert the importance of Lord Jones in a panoply of celebrities designed to form part of the fabric of meaning in the lives of those who are construed, and encouraged to construe themselves, as ‘ordinary people.’ The practice imposes anonymity as well as celebrity.

[175] “Professional journalistic norms are the same for both press and television. […] The broadcasting institutions are formally obliged to observe accuracy and impartiality in news reporting. […]Neutrality and impartiality […] influence the selection and presentation of news. [But] when one talks of balance or neutrality in the presentation of news, there is a good chance that the area of application is restricted, covering only balance between the standpoints of certain well-established or elite groups” (Halloran et al. 1970:28).

[176] The French play on words cannot be translated by a single English word: the title translates both as ‘society of consumption’ and ‘society of consummation’ (completion) – See Harraps Shorter French-English dictionary. The English translation Consumer Society (Poster 1988:29-55) also loses the echo of the influential study by Guy Debord Le société de Spectacle (1960)/Society of the Spectacle (1983), cited by Baudrillard.

[177] The Canadian film-maker Atom Egoyan poses this question of himself in Citadel, after accidentally filming two men making love as part of his obsessional record of a family trip to Lebanon. His wife, he points out in the voice-over, thought it was acceptable for them to watch the two men but not to film them. He asks the viewer (and ostensibly his son later in life) whether he was not being simply stupid in trying to record everything that might be photographable as a validation of living.

[178] The full quote is: “view of any one character in a fiction.”

[179] Ellis concludes: “The viewer is placed in separation from events, called upon to judge rather than to be participant, to assess rather than to be partisan.” This seems inadequate, both as a description of how viewers are asked to react in the 21st century, and how modern television calls to individuals to constitute themselves as part of a reacting crowd.

[180] The phraseology may disguise the important fact that television largely satisfies the individual’s demand for a space of where fact and fantasy co-exist. This space, as identified by the psychiatrist D.W. Winnicott, is that of infant play as well as of creativity. He wrote in a letter to his French translator: “There is a constant struggle in the individual throughout life, distinguishing fact from fantasy, external from psychic reality, the world from the dream. The Transitional Phenomena belong to an intermediate area which I am calling a resting place because living in this area the individual is at rest from the task of distinguishing fact from fantasy” (Rodman 1987:123).

[181] “Televised teaching of children is so completely dependent upon the effective use of humor that we must begin to understand it” (Lessor 1974:116).

[182] Ellis makes the following distinction: “Fetishistic looking implies the direct acknowledgement and participation of the object viewed” (Josef von Sternberg’s films). “This contrasts with the voyeuristic emphasis on the film pretending that is is not seen whilst all the time constructing itself for the viewer […] Where voyeurism maintains (depends upon) a separation between the seer and the object seen, fetishism tries to abolish that gulf” (1982/1992:4).

[183] This is an overgeneralization, of course, as is seen in Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake (1947) using a first-person view, the “home video” first part of American Beauty (1999) by Sam Mendes, or Chris Marker’s Level Five (1997). Many films involve an address to the spectator (not just to camera) from the final shot of The Great Train Robbery (1904) to Laurence Olivier in Richard III (1955) and Alfie (1966).

[184] Since this section largely recasts the ideas of Bill Nichols on documentary, it uses his terminology wherever possible, though it obviously criticizes some of the ideas. In fact, this forms the basis of the last film by Orson Welles, F for Fake (1974), which for much of its time offers both a representation of a historical world and a critique of the capacity of creative people (art forgers, fraudsters and stage magicians as well as filmmakers) to manipulate or invent facts and images.

[185] This, too, seems too broad a statement. Certainly since Battleship Potemkin (1925), and recently in many television docudramas, the representation is either conditional or openly questioned.

[186] CNN broadcasters have said they receive strict instructions that no news is to be described as “foreign,” in contrast to Fox News’s frequent use of “over there” to indicate places outside the United States.

[187] The terms themselves, with their assertion of obsession, need not be accepted. What epistephilia does emphasize, usefully, as a term is that the knowledge to be imparted in non-fiction broadcasting plays a larger part than the images. Similarly, the appeal of documentary to the viewer is on this basis, whether the actual documentary constructs or presents what it pretends is a representation of the historical world.

[188] Hardly true of Michelangelo Antonioni’s films, and all that have learned from his style.

[189] Roger Silverstone (2003: viii) in Williams 1974, reissued 2003.

[190] “Women’s upbringing denies them the opportunity to take an intellectual interest in sexual problems, even though they have an extreme inherent curiosity, and frightens them by condemning such curiosity as unfeminine and the sign of a sinful disposition. In this way they are deterred from thinking at all, and knowledge loses its value for them” (1908b:100).

[191] The oppositional terms are used by Nichols (1991:96). See page 143.

[192] Most television news, of course, provides highly organized and long planned coverage of predictable events, in which the presence of the reporter or camera enables an event to qualify as news.

[193] At this point it is, perhaps, possible to insist that pornographic films closely tie pleasure to knowledge (as well as sexual arousal).

[194] He makes the argument forcefully with regard to politics on television: “The enormous emphasis on electoral politics in the news, for example, only underlines the point: candidates and races are objects of spectacle and dramatic structure more than the focal point for participatory engagement. In fact, only half the eligible voters in the United States vote in presidential elections. Everyone, however, is represented as an active participant in such elections, a subject position adequately served, apparently, by attending to the news rather than voting” (1991:194).

[195] Its fetishist similarities with pornography have often been noted (particularly Nichols 1991:95-8, and Žižek on fetishism 2001:14).

[196] Primo Levi and Bruno Schultz are among the most famous. Asked why he speaks only of the German and not also the Russian camps, Levi declares: “The German camps constitute something unique in the history of humanity, bloody as it is. To the ancient art of eliminating or terrifying political adversaries, they set a monstrous modern goal, that of erasing entire peoples and cultures from the world.” (391)

[197] “The point of a photograph to stimulate involuntary personal memory is the point of departure for an electrate institutional practice.” – Ulmer 2003.44. “The punctum juxtaposes to ideological (mis)recognition an alternative, a personal memory based not on the public archive but a private repertoire.” (ibid.) “It is important to remember that the obtuse or ‘third’ meaning [called up by the punctum] has been at work all along, but that the literate apparatus was not suited to exploit it fully. […] The arts never left off making images throughout the epoch of literacy, even if images rarely were granted cognitive, let alone scientific, status” (45). Baudrillard describes the punctum as the place in the picture that is empty of meaning, the point where the viewer’s own feelings and memory can link up to the representation*.

[198] “There is no such thing as just looking. Looking immediately activates desire, possession, violence, displeasure, pain, force, ambition, power, obligation, gratitude, longing” (31). “Our ‘objective’ descriptions are permeated, soaked, with our unspoken, unthought desires” (33). “There is no scene in which a single beholder stands and absorbs facts and forms from an object while remaining impassive.” (43). “Whatever calls itself ‘I’ must always move, as Martin Heidegger said, ‘in the between, between man and thing.’[...] What I have been calling the observer evaporates, and what really takes place is a ‘betweenness’ (for lack of a better word): part of me is the object, and part of the object is me. There is no such thing as a pure self, or a pure object apart from that self. [...] This [is] an idea we recognize every day when we say a person or image is ‘inside’ us or that we are ‘lost’ in a scene or a memory. [...] Looking has force: it tears, it is sharp, it is an acid. In the end, it corrodes the object and observer until they are lost in the field of vision. I once was solid, and now I am dissolved. that is the voice of seeing.” (44-5).

[199] That is, in the Aristotelian sense (pragmatic and socially understandable use of these terms), as distinct from Kant’s categorical imperative (see Arendt 1958).

[200] Badiou also spotlights the sticking point in such a view: “In order to take a position in one’s own name when faced with the inhuman, a fixed point is needed for the decision. An unconditional principle is needed to regulate both the decision and the assent. This is what everyone calls today the necessity of a return to ethics. But let us not be mistaken. Philosophically, the return to ethics necessitates the return of an unconditional principle. There is a moment when one must be able to say that this is right and this is wrong. […] There must also be utterances of which it can be said that they are unconditionally true.” (54). However, where this point is not answered by Schopenhauer’s substitution of ‘desire’ for ethics in truly moral behavior, it is suggested that Badiou’s own thinking provides the tools to deal with this dilemma, particularly with a recognition of the ‘indiscernibility’ of experience and the disruptive nature of events.

[201] The shortcomings of the Rawlsian social justice theory can be most clearly appreciated in reading Agamben’s essay on the ‘camp’ in Homo Sacer, where he points out that the concentration camp can be traced back not just to the Spanish in Cuba in 1896 or the British in South Africa during the Boer Wars but even to provisions for protective custody promulgated under Prussian law in 1850 (167-8). As he observes, too, the first concentration camps in Germany were the work of the Social-Democrat governments, interning communists and foreigners (mainly East Europeans and therefore, no doubt, including Jews). All these measures were taken under conventional law (though under laws of exception rather than of ordinary criminal legislation, a distinction dropped by the Nazis in 1933).

[202] A small example from Primo Levi in Auschwitz: “Driven by thirst, I eyed a fine icicle outside the window, within hand’s reach. I opened the window and broke off the icicle but at once a large, heavy guard prowling outside brutally snatched it away from me. ‘Warum?’ I asked him in my poor German. ‘Hier ist kein warum’ (there is no why here), he replied, pushing me inside with a shove (1958:35).

[203] “Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else’s head instead of with one’s own” (Schopenhauer 1851/1994:6).

[204] Freud writes in Civilization and its Discontents: “What is the use of reducing infant mortality when it is precisely that reduction which imposes the greatest restraint on us in the begetting of children, so that, taken all round, we nevertheless rear no more children than in the days before the reign of hygiene, while at the same time we have created difficult conditions for our sexual life in marriage…..And, finally, what good to us is a long life if it is difficult and barren of joys, and if it is so full of misery that we can only welcome death as a deliverer?” (1930.38-39). These, of course, are questions that answer themselves.

[205] “The telegraph and the penny press changed what we once meant by ‘information.’ Television changes what we once meant by the terms ‘political debate,’ ‘news,’ and ‘public opinion.’ The computer changes ‘information’ once again. Writing changed what we once meant by ‘truth’ and ‘law’; printing changed them again, and now television and computer change them once more. [Technology] redefines ‘freedom,’ ‘truth,’ ‘intelligence,’ ‘fact’, ‘wisdom,’ ‘memory,’ ‘history’ – all the words/ we live by” (1992:8-9).

[206] An example of cognitive study’s consideration of deixis (“The function or use of a deictic word, form, or expression” – Oxford Shorter English Dictionary) in narrative practices can be found in Duchan et al. (1995).

[207] Characteristically, Derrida uses the noun to refer not just to the act of pointing but also the use of this device to avoid naming what one is pointing to. In a comment on “9/11” Derrida told Giovanna Borradori: “The index pointing to this date, the bare act, the minimal deictic, the minimalist aim of this dating, also marks something else. Namely, the fact that we perhaps have no concept and no meaning available to us to name in any other way…” (Borradori 2003:86). The current section examines how this impossibility of naming in any other way, this aporia, can be turned to a communicative use that emphasizes the necessity of communication at whatever level.

[208] One can see the same process dramatized in AI (see page 115), while James Agee’s difficulty with journalistic writing testifies also to the almost insuperable problems of overcoming the Promethian restrictions of media practices on authors.

[209] Deictics shares obvious similarities with the ideas of Kurt Lewin (1890-1947), a former member of the Berlin Gestalt School, who developed what became known as Field Theory (in A Dynamic Theory of Personality, 1935). In Susanna Millar’s summary, field theory says that “the behaviour of the individual depends on the total situation in which he finds himself. His responses will vary with his age, personality, present state, and all the factors present in his environment at any given moment. Whether a balloon is a coveted toy or looks dangerous will depend on the child’s age and development, as well as on the context in which he sees it. […] A piece of cardboard, caressed as a baby one minute, may be torn up the next” (1968:48).

[210] Ulmer points out that “any attempt at a postmodernist method is contradictory (an impossible possibility)” (25).

[211] The innovatory quality can be appreciated by contrasting Ulmer’s strategy with the approach seen by Colin MacCabe as the only post-modernist position: “If we reject the humanist claim on eternity and the political promise of aesthetic salvation, then perhaps all that is left is individual witness” (2003:333). Ulmer stresses the community relationship and involvement in this act of witnessing, as in fact Godard seems to do, when he described the audience for his films as 100,000 friends around the world (ibid).

[212] The English novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch wrote Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals.

[213] The latter point is the main charge of Terry Eagleton against Stanley Fish: “A superficially historicist, materialist case - our beliefs and assumptions are embedded in our practical forms of life - leads not only to a kind of epistemological idealism, but to the deeply convenient doctrine that our way of life cannot be criticised as a whole. For who would be doing the criticising?” (London Review of Books, 2 March 2000)

[214] In a summary that is worth quoting at length, MacCabe writes: “For Godard we only communicate at the moment when we, too, are listening to what we say, when we listen to ourselves to understand the message being produced. It is only at the moment that we pay attention to our position as a viewer, of ‘where and when we find ourselves there,’ that any communication can take place. This view of communication is spelt out in Leçons de choses when Godard analyses the behavior of the sailors from the battleship Potemkin in Odessa in 1905. What is important for Godard is that when the sailors went into town to bury one of their comrades, they didn’t know in advance what they were doing. That they were demonstrating is true but Godard insists that their demonstration cannot be understood in terms of the comtemporary fixed political form. They were attempting to show people something, to indicate what they had done on their ship. They were demonstrating, not going to a demonstration. The emphasis in Godard’s analysis is that the communicating subject’s own ignorance of what is being said is a crucial factor in any real act of communication. [Godard’s theory of communication is thus directly opposed to a communication theory which holds to a model of sender, receiver, message and channel. There is no message independent of the relation between sender and receiver and that relation is not understood in terms of some neutral channel but rather as a complex which cannot be analysed into three separate component elements] / Godard’s example of a stereotyped form which is incapable of communication is the contemporary political demonstration. Because everybody knows exactly what is being expressed, nothing is communicated”(MacCabe 1980:146).

[215] The paradox can be easily untangled. As Arendt understands it, poiesis is related to labor and work (to making) that replicates rather than to action which creates, and she was critical of Marx for conceiving political action in terms of work and labor. “To understand political action as making something is in Arendt’s view a dangerous mistake. Making – the activity she calls work – is something a craftsman does by forcing raw material to conform to his model. The raw material has no say in the process, and neither do human beings cast as raw material for an /attempt to create a new society or make history” (Canovan 1998: xi-xii).

[216] John O’Neill. 1974. Making Sense Together: An Introduction to Wild Sociology. Harper & Row.

[217] Greenaway explains: “There is no direct generative association between the three sets of objects – the museum did not spawn the paintings, the paintings did not give rise to the books, the books are not illustrative of the museum objects – but all three are arranged to compliment [sic: complement] one another and to support the ideas of the exhibition’s title” (Section 15).

[218] More recent work has insisted on the spoken and provisional character of Saussure’s ideas against “a number of fabricated illusions about his thought and the way he spoke” found in the reconstructed lectures that are treated as definitive work (Nada K. Doany and Robert Hopper 1994:11).

[219] Holton notes that Albert Einstein continually referred back to his father showing him a magnetic pocket compass at the age of four or five. The notion that something deeply hidden in reality must form a continuum, in the same way that the magnetic continuum held the compass needle, guided Einstein in his physics thinking (Ulmer 2003:20).

[220] The misinterpretations of Heidegger’s argument are documented by Hubert L. Dreyfus in Being-in-the-World (1991), where he insists: “We are not to think of Dasein as a conscious subject. Many interpreters make just this mistake” (13).

[221] The translated version reads: “Our being amidst the thing with which we concern ourselves most closely in the ‘world’ guides the everyday way in which Dasein is interpreted, and covers up ontically Dasein’s authentic being” (359).

[222] “The expository text addresses the viewer directly, with titles or voices that advance an argument about the historical world. […] It [remains] the primary means of relaying information and persuasively making a case since at least the 1920s” (Nichols 1991:34).

[223] Marker assisted Resnais in making the film and is sometimes credited as assistant director, though he appears second on the list of Assistant Directors in the film’s titles. The commentary declaimed in standard French rhetorical fashion is by former deportee Jean Cayrol, which nevertheless is soon reduced to (or rises to) enumerating the plain details of what took place. The exhortatory style embraced by one of the victims can be compared to Spielberg’s use of the sentimental – doubtful that the message will otherwise be believed, that neutrality will seem like indifference.

[224] The cinema essay can be traced back to Jean Vigo’s A Propos de Nice, though Marker is usually credited with at least bringing this style to its most perfected form.

[225] At .

[226] As Ulmer, paraphrasing Barthes, explains, the punctum is associated with “the experience of identification and ‘mourning’.” (44).

[227] At .

[228] A sampler of Cook’s assertions about paralinguistic communication: “Although paralinguistic behaviour signifies, and is thus in a broad sense semiotic, the nature of its signification is quite different from that of language. […] Many paralinguistic phenomena [in contrast to language] are graded. They are a case of more or less, not either/or. […] There are an infinity of different degrees in any paralinguistic phenomenon. […] One cannot equate graded paralinguistic phenomena with language by translating or paraphrasing it into words. Paralanguage is literally beyond complete description in language, because it belongs to a different kind of communication from language. […] In these respects, human paralanguage maintains the graded scaling used by animals. [But] the analogy with animal communication is misleading, for while the communicative behaviour of an animal is, generally, speaking, common to all members of that species, human paralinguistic communication varies considerably. […] Many aspects of it are beyond conscious control. […] Many paralinguistic features communicate relatively permanent features of a particular individual, including sex, social class and age. […] Language never occurs without paralanguage. […] It is possible to argue, as many linguists do, that paralanguage is of no concern to linguistics, because language is best understood when it is rigorously isolated from such distracting phenomena […] but it is a view which has mesmerized and impoverished later linguistics” (1992/2001:72-3).

[229] Goffman also quotes Richard Gunter in attacking linguistics (Sentences in Dialog, 1974, Hornbeam, 17) where it comes close to analytical philosophy: “A deeper suspicion suggests that all isolated sentences, including those that linguists often use as examples in argumentation, have no real existence outside some permissive context, and that study of sentences out of context is the study of oddities at which we have trained ourselves not to boggle” (1976:31).

[230] George Gordon notes: “Advertising has occupied a peculiar corner of American culture for a long time, because it is the subject of widely ambivalent emotional and cognitive dispositions" (1971:130).

[231]

[232] He had reported that Iraqi intelligence had planned to attack CNN journalists in 2003 (). In an explanatory statement he said: “I never meant to imply U.S. forces acted with ill intent when U.S. forces accidentally killed journalists” ( esn_res.html).

[233] Dan Gillmor’s We the media (2004) credits Justin Hall with launching the first serious weblog when a sophomore at Swarthmore College in 1993, coding pages in HTML to publish “Justin’s Links from the Underground” (12).

[234] A blogging monitor reported thousands of blogs covered Hurricane Katrina’s impact after 29 August 2005 ( and . cgi-bin/bloggersblog.pl?bblog=831051), while one web site owner set up an unofficial database for people to seek missing New Orleans inhabitants (. laf/).

[235] A CNN spokesperson was quoted as saying that covering the war “is a full-time job and we’ve asked Kevin to concentrate only on that for the time being” (cited by Allan and Zelizer 2004:359).

[236] .

[237] Stuart Allan, for example, observes: “Above dispute, in the view of many commentators, was that some of the best eyewitness reporting being conducted was that attributed to the warblog of "Salam Pax" (a playful pseudonym derived from the Arabic and Latin words for peace), a 29 year-old architect living in middle-class suburban Baghdad. Indeed, of the various English language warblogs posted by Iraqis, none attracted a greater following than Salam's "Where is Raed?" (dear_raed.), which had begun to appear in September 2002.” (Allan 2004:360).

[238]

[239] Rose advises: “Normally the task is to find the pieces of an issue or concern which are unacceptable to a big enough group of people to get the effect you need. Find out what would motivate them to support your cause – plot your campaign pathway across that concern. In general it is better to campaign against a small part of a big problem, where that part is 99% unacceptable to the public, than to campaign against say half of the overall problem, where that is only unacceptable to 1% of the population ().

He also urges campaigners to focus on action rather than creating a story for the press: “Let the press write the headlines and draw the cartoons. Don’t try to achieve that by writing press releases in headlines you’d like to see. Make the real stuff happen. Follow the film-makers’ rule ‘show – don’t tell’. Things that aren’t real for example, are ‘addressing the issue’, ‘working on ..... the subject’, ‘developing awareness’ and ‘reaching the public’. Things that are real could include: occupying a tree, releasing a dove, conducting a survey in a shopping mall, visiting your MP, writing a letter, sending an e mail, speaking to a crowd, or invading the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant” ().

[240] “The name is based on the Hawaiian term wiki, meaning "quick", "fast", or "to hasten" (Hawaiian dictionary). Sometimes wikiwiki (or Wikiwiki) is used instead of wiki (Hawaiian dictionary” – . The original wiki was created by computer programmer Ward Cunningham in 1995 ().

[241] “Studies from IBM have shown that most vandalism to Wikipedia is reverted in 5 minutes or less” – .

[242] The original WikiWikiWeb has a page entitled Why Wiki Works Not at as well as a Why Wiki Works section ().

[243] One wiki participant suggested that two people should work together to stop a ‘toush’: “Two people team up and remove the venom. The first one removes the venom, the second makes a minor change on the page so he can't simply re-paste it. After a while he should get the message” (Robin Harwood, ).

[244] See . The original editorial was edited over 150 times in its short life ( launches_editorial_wiki).

[245] Gillmor reports: “The first inkling among journalists of China’s SARS epidemic came in an SMS from inside the medical profession there” (2004:33). Howard Rheingold documents the rise of ‘smart mobs; using such technology: “Street demonstrators in the 1999 anti-WTO protests used dynamically updated websites, cell-phones, and "swarming" tactics in the "battle of Seattle." A million Filipinos toppled President Estrada through public demonstrations organized through salvos of text messages” (.) A New York Times article on Rheingold’s book added: “The Sept. 11 terrorists used such devices [cellphones] to plan and coordinate their attack, and the victims used them to convey information – and, in the case of United Airlines flight 93, learned of the other attacks and took action that may have prevented even more devastation” (John Schwartz, “Motivating the Masses, Wirelessly” 22 July 2002. at technology/22NECO.html?ex=1133586000&en=cd073c41dfc4e863&ei=5070&8hpib &oref=login). The review of the published book added a darker side to SMS texting: “[The November 2002] Miss World eruption in Nigeria was triggered partly by texting: angry Muslims used their phones to pass on news of an article praising the pageant. Within days, more than 200 people had been killed.” (Clive Thompson, “Smart Mobs,” 15 December 2002 ).

[246] In 2003 Rushkoff wrote of ‘collaborative filtering’ through which the most viewed stories rise to the top but this is still not commonly used except to a limited extent in special sections of sites such as Yahoo and more aggressively as a commercial marketing tool by .

[247] The status is discussed by A. Michael Froomkin in ‘Wrong turn in cyberspace.’ Duke Law Journal, 1 October 2000. He writes: “The United States government is managing a critical portion of the Internet's infrastructure in violation of the Administrative Procedures Act (APA) and the Constitution [because it] violates the nondelegation doctrine.” He adds: “The board remains composed of the nine original unelected directors, supplemented by nine selected by so-called constituency groups, who in turn are selected by ICANN. Internet users and individual domain name registrants remain unrepresented at the board level, although ICANN is in the process of organizing a limited representation for the public.” He points out that not all of the relationship is public and reports “substantial evidence” that the DoC has “directly instructed ICANN on policy matters.”

[248] See The Independent 17 November 2005.

[249] Rupert Cornwell, among others, wrote, in the UK’s Independent (9 November 2005): “Probably [the xxx website suffix idea] was going nowhere in any case; even pornography groups objected to it.” However, he also reproduced the simple explanation that the US had stumbled: “The episode was seeming proof of what critics have long maintained, that when push came to shove, America dictated how the internet is managed. […] The damage was done” (sentences rearranged).

[250] Xeni Jardin reported on NPR Special: UN control of the Internet and open information: “Filtering software has already been used by governments including Iran, Myanmar, Saudi Arabia and other countries to block controversial Web sites” (14 October 2005:1600-1700 EST).

[251] Reporter Christopher Bodeen of AP added: “Authorities apply blocks to prevent Internet users from viewing sites run by Falun Gong, human rights groups and some foreign news organizations. Police monitor chat rooms and personal e-mail and erase online content considered undesirable. Internet portals have been warned they will be held responsible for sites they host” (‘China blocks Google search engine amid calls for media controls ahead of Communist Party congress’, 4 September 2002, AP Worldstream),

[252] See bbs_1 /103-6673976-5000642?n=507846&s= books&v =glance.

[253] As recorded earlier, in ‘The Uncanny’ (1919) Freud writes of three times wandering back into a street of “painted ladies” against his wishes in a town where he is a stranger (see page 31). Freud recognized the parallels. He wrote to Schnitzler in 1906: “For many years I have been conscious of the far-reaching conformity existing between your opinions and mine on many psychological and erotic problems; and recently I even found the courage expressly to emphasize this conformity ("Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria," 1905). I have often asked myself in astonishment how you came by this or that piece of secret knowledge which I had acquired by a painstaking investigation of the subject, and I finally came to the point of envying the author whom hitherto I had admired. Now you may imagine how pleased and elated I felt on reading that you too have derived inspiration from my writings. I am almost sorry to think that I had to reach the age of fifty before hearing something so flattering” (1960:251).

[254] This was Hitchcock’s really unique talent: virtually all his endings were implausible (as distinct from Fritz Lang’s coolly disdainful manipulations), but he was able to make the viewer so anxious for a wish-fulfillment resolution to the tensions he aroused that almost any solution was accepted. What Hitchcock put in those endings was usually something so spurious that it highlighted the manipulation and maintained the power of the subversive earlier scenes.

[255] “The Raid has shape, through and through, just as War and Peace has, but in both there is a refusal of contrivance. Nothing is 'planted' for later use; there is no suspense; the reader is stationed squarely in a moment, or a succession of moments, with no more power to see round and beyond it than the characters. And it is for these very reasons that events in Tolstoy's stories can have such a shattering effect. For the reader is unprepared; he or she can make no calculation, based on past experience of plot devices, as to what kind of thing lies ahead. Most nineteenth-century novels – shall we say, for instance, Mansfield Park or Wuthering Heights or The Idiot – are guessing-games, in which at least we know where the enigma lies. It is 'What are the Crawfords really like?' or 'What lies hidden in Heathcliff's heart?'. There are no such games played in Tolstoy.” – P. N. Furbank, ‘Introduction,’ The Raid and Other Stories. Trans. Aylmer Maude and Louise Maude. Oxford University Press.

[256] “Like the lynching crowds, the Americans at Abu Ghraib felt free to parade their triumph and glee not because they were psychopaths but because the thought of censure never crossed their minds” (2004).

[257] The objection is to Pierre Bourdieu’s suggestion (1980) that culture circulates in the same way as economic capital: “Bourdieu’s institutionally validated cultural capital of the bourgeoisie is constantly being opposed, interrogated, marginalized, scandalized, and evaded, in a way that economic capital never is” (1987:314).

[258] See .

[259] See: . TextAmerica appears to be the most common place where mobloggers post their videos and photos but, perhaps not surprisingly given the US bias against politically engaged communication, none of the contributions seem to deal with such events. The same goes for . which specializes in more conventional video. Both specialize in bizarre (i.e. creative) uses of the photographic possibilities of bloggers’ mobile phones. They tend to be limited in their exploitation of the possibilities, however, in comparison with videos made for delivery to mobile phones. In mid-2004 a video, text and audio storage center opened on the Web: . It gained support from the Open Source movement, with 20,000 visitors on the first day and 3,000 early members but its content seems hard to distinguish from other moblogs. also offers free hosting for videos that “seek to teach and explore ideas in a meaningful and healthy way” () but the overwhelming majority are classified as family videos (233), humor (356), performance (205) and personals (220) from a total of 3,707 in mid-December 2005. An MSNBC listing of journalism via vlogs included: vlogger Steve Garfield on political workers getting too close to polling places in the Boston primary in the third quarter of 2004; Ryanne Hodson (then an editor at WGBH) filed in-house commentary on PBS pulling bunny Buster’s visit to a lesbian household (). The problem with all vlogs is that unless vloggers add text they cannot be indexed for search engines. One software seller is promoting its tool for educational purposes (see ). In September 2004 wikepedia opened a media repository (), reporting a total of 351,272 media files at the end of 2005.

[260] As John Storey points out, while Saussure argued that the sign is made meaningful by being different, Derrida insists that the meaning is “always deferred, never fully present, always both absent and present” (60). Derrida speaks of “the indefinite referral of signifier to signifier […] which gives the signified meaning no respite” (1967b:25).

[261] The reference is to Derrida’s notion of ‘différance’ and ‘trace’ in Writing and Difference (1973).

[262] This is Douglas’s summary (126).

[263] The first great industrial-era editor (Thomas Delane of The Times of London) is reputed to have declared that the press lives by disclosure.

[264] “His denial of awareness of the Iran-Contra scandal was belied by quotations in now-archived notes by his defense secretary, Casper Weinberger, that he (Reagan) could survive violating the law or Constitution, but not the negative public image that ‘big, strong Ronald Reagan passed up a chance to get the hostages free.’ In December 1985, Reagan signed a secret presidential ‘finding’ describing the deal as "arms-for-hostages." Reagan-era papers which might provide further details were originally scheduled to be released starting in 2001, but President George W. Bush enacted a rule change to allow many of these to be withheld indefinitely” – ..

[265] One major topic might be the reason for his popularity with the media. Wikipedia suggests: “Whatever may be said of Reagan, he was an advocate of liberty and above all, free speech. Unlike Richard Nixon before him, Reagan never attempted to suppress criticism, even when it was directed at him. This is one reason why his legacy has better survived the test of time than Nixon's. Those who honor Reagan's memory would also cherish the right of free speech and the right of public dissent” ().

[266] See .

[267] A second-order narrative behind the surface story is of a celebrity’s reaction to the outrages on private life imposed on someone who becomes famous beyond all possible expectation. Hollywood, show business and the media’s mores play a substantial inter-textual part in the film’s meta-story: the teacher is outed at a Hollywood awards ceremony, his guide to the new gay world is a television anchorperson, and he comes to acknowledge his gayness when he acknowledges his enjoyment of dancing.

[268] Maurice Blanchot points out that in this polemic and L’Etranger (1943), the novel that works out in narrative the experience of Absurdity (the ever-present imminence of a meaning-destroying death), Camus achieves a resolution to his challenge by a simple literary conjuring trick: “He makes of the absurd not that which disturbs and breaks everything but that which is amenable to arrangement and which even arranges everything. In his work the absurd becomes a denouement; it is a solution, a kind of salvation” (‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ in 1943: 57. See also ‘The Novel of the Stranger”, 1943: 217). The Absurd in Blanchot’s use of the term finds itself realized in The Disaster, the topic of his later book of meditations and fragments. For the moment, one can simply note the similarity between this reflection on absurdity and the famous passage in The Writing of the Disaster, particularly when we reach the section on the sky: “The feeling of absurdity is unable to be grasped. It can be felt in the most ordinary situations, but the analysis that seeks to express it finds only insignificant traces. The man who suddenly thinks that he is getting old, that the word tomorrow, ‘later’ will no longer have any meaning for him, feels himself brushed by the absurd; similarly, if he looks at a face, a stone, a piece of sky, by escaping from habitual images, he can be struck by an irreducible feeling of strangeness; and there is the impression of nonmeaning that comes to us not through exceptional states of our thinking but from the coherence and logic of our mental mechanism: the rational, from a certain point of view, is also the absurd” (‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ in 1943:54). In Disaster Blanchot prefaces his description: “(a primal scene?)” (72). Blanchot’s unspoken conclusion is that suicide is not an answer to the challenge of meaninglessness, and nor is Camus’ answer of revolt, since the rationality that formulates this question is part of the absurdity.

[269] This is often the way Hollywood deals with its most deeply-embedded issues. AI, for example, treats of abuse and neglect in normal families by pretending to talk about a robot while demonstrably forgiving a monstrous child for every crime against the android.

[270] This was the essence of Heidegger’s complaint against techne.

[271] A later film in which Kline again plays a homosexual, De-Lovely (2004), the film “biography” of Cole Porter, has none of the In and Out mannerisms, and provides a working-out of the idea of marriage when one partner is homosexual while leaving open the question of what erotic experiences went into Porter’s sexually charged songs.

[272] The phrase in Discours de la Méthode (1637) is in French: “Je pense, donc je suis” rather than the Latin cogito ergo sum and its more usual translation would be “I am thinking therefore I exist.” The epigrammatic style disguises the sense Descartes wanted to put on his formulation: animals and plants, for example, exist. His search was for undoubtable knowledge, and concluded that the only form that existed was that he was a thinking thing, and that this working mind was the gift of a benevolent God (in the Meditations). Knowledge does not presuppose conscious awareness, however. “Sensation and preception do not depend on consciousness, still less on self-awareness. They exist throughout the animal and plant kingdom,” points out John Gray (2002:59). He adds: “Very little that is of consequence in our lives requires consciousness. […] Our nearest evolutionary kin among the apes have many of the mental capacities we are accustomed to think belong only to ourselves. [….] There is nothing uniquely human in conscious awareness” (61). The debate is now perhaps closed. But what remains are the questions of self-awareness.

[273] in section 12 of Meditation 1 (at ).

[274] Wilson suggests consciously working through the probabilities of events (and not consider them as taking place in a vacuum) to gain a more accurate estimation of how one will feel (about winning a football game, for example). He notes some studies that 30 percent of parents who lost babies as a result of sudden infant death syndrome never experienced significant depression, that 82 percent of bereaved spouses were doing well two years after the deaths (141), and assistant professors overestimated the duration of their unhappiness if they failed to get tenure (145): professors who received tenure were not significantly happier five years later than those denied tenure (155). He also observes that those who find some meaning in a tragedy or can gain something positive from the experience recover more quickly (141). At a less dramatic level “one study found that when adolescents were in extremely good or bad moods, it took them only 45 minutes, on average, to return to their base level of happiness” (143). In contrast to Benjamin Franklin, who recommended making lists of positive and negative points in relation to a decision over a series of days, Wilson suggests not analysing one’s feelings about preferences too long (172), since 10 minutes are usually enough, unless the analyser is an expert. People find it easy to give reasons but these tend to be suspect. “Introspection,” he writes, “should not be viewed as a process whereby people open the door to a hidden room, giving them direct access to something they could not see before. The trick is to allow the feelings to surface and to see them through the haze of one’s theories and expectations” (173).

[275] There are studies on which Asians score better (Wilson 227).

[276] This should not be understood, however, as privileging the difficult and complicated over the simple, as Adorno’s aesthetic theory seems to do. In a fragmentary world, the work designed to be immediately intelligible can act as a shard of a larger-scale, multiple-authored work of considerable symbolic power, part of a transitional product, or a summation of a particular insight (such as a Japanese haiku). Popular songs provide a way for ordinary speech to take on the ambiguities and referential reach of poetry – and an exploration of these references can make clear the craft of composers such as Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer or Rodgers and Hart (see Clive James 1970). On another level, in the philosophy of David Hume, it has been remarked more than once, “we meet there with admirable simplicity and clarity in each individual sentence, and yet find an overall intricacy of logical architecture and involved argument which often baffles and exasperates the student just as much in its own way as does the writing of Hegel or Kant” (Robinson 1962:129).

[277] Dylan Thomas himself apologised for “constant anatomical symbols” in his poems (1988:192) but also said of Light breaks where no sun shines that he had been banned by the BBC (untrue) because “The little smut-hounds thought I was writing a copulatory anthem. In reality, of course, it was a metaphysical image of rain & grief” (190). “Of course” is a typical Thomas joke.

[278] In what way do Eliot’s notes to The Waste Land increase understanding of the poem itself? In Finnegans Wake the individual phrases are stirring and evocative but the meaning quickly dissolves into dreamlike particularity (as Joyce intended): starting to read anywhere is immediately stimulating but usually (perhaps always) produces bafflement in less than a page. Summaries of events supposedly depicted (the narrative) provide no reason for anyone to finish the book. The reader is left to follow the “riverun, past Eve and Adams” even if if leads one “back to Howth Castle and environs.”

[279] e.g. Gertrude Stein’s later writings, particularly Tender Buttons.

[280] This was the program of Surrealism.

[281] This was the program of the Dadaists, from the obfuscations over the meaning of Dada to what united its members. Even Tristan Tzara’s Manifesto (1960) committed only him and reads more like a parody of artistic manifestos.

[282] Passages of Beckett’s Malone Dies (1951) and much of The Unnameable (1953) have been put into this category.

[283] To use the language of information theory, one may say that media inevitably transform data into information and information into meaning which in turn is assembled as value. The unintelligible in media is information that has not reached the level of meaning. This applies to the work as a whole, though the elements usually have a sense, at leasat linguistically of their own: Burroughs’s phrases have individual meanings but he deliberately fragmented and dissolved their contribution to overall meaning.he same can be said of Beckett’s works in this area: in fact, the works require their words to provide information rather than be simply data in order to be unintelligible.

[284] Benjamin Moser has examined these discrepancies in a review of an exhibition and catalog of Fabritius’s works, published in the New York Review of Books 14 July 2005.

[285] See ‘On the Fetishist Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,’ (1938) in Adorno 1991:32.

[286]Andrew Crisell writes of radio phone-in shows: “Phone-ins exist primarily to demonstrate the presence and understanding of an audience rather than to ascertain what any individual member of that audience may think (1986/94:62).

[287] “What is good? – All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man” – Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, 2.

[288] The language of Christianity is often taken over to describe Socrates (who like Jesus was detested, philosophically, by Nietzsche for similar reasons). One example, from Anthony Gottlieb: “Socrates is the saint and martyr of philosophy. No other great philosopher has been so obsessed with righteous living. Like many martyrs, Socrates chose not to try to save his life when he probably could have done so by changing his ways” (Monk and Raphael 2000:7).

[289] Herbert Kohl said of Wittgentstein: “In his Philosophical Investigations it is certainly possible to detect […] something of a child’s wonder that communication exists at all" (1965:120).

[290] In Stephen Soderburgh’s remake of Tarkovsky’s Solaris, the character who has survived the worst experience tells the investigator: ““I could tell you what happened but I am not sure it would help you understand what happened.”

[291] John R. Searle finds Wittgenstein’s treatment of the structural rule aspect of communication “very unsatisfying, It does not tell us what the role of the rule structure is” (1995:140).

[292] “It is part of the mechanism of domination to forbid recognition of the suffering it produces, and there is a straight line of development between the gospel of happiness and the construction of camps of extermination so far off in Poland that each of our countrymen can convince himself that he cannot hear the screams of pain.” – Theodor Adorno, Mimima Moralia, 1974: 62-3 (1951:106).

[293] See Martin Harvey. 2001. ‘Deliberation and Natural Slavery.’ Social Theory and Practice. Vol. 27. Issue: 1: 41.

[294] cited by Avital Ronell in an interview (1994) with Alexander Laurence ().

[295] Canada’s CBC website reported on 30 December 2004: “Much quicker than the mainstream media, the internet provided images and news of the destruction. Websites such as gave firsthand accounts from bloggers who lived through the waves and quickly posted pictures, videos and descriptions. Others like offered information on how to donate to specific areas and how to find out information about loved ones” (). Through specially billed SMS messages the UK and Spain each raised over $2 million for relief, among many countries ().

[296] See and .

[297] “No matter how patient the people or how wise the leaderas, built upon such an institutional basis, the community has now way to proceed except by accusing one another of sinister alliance with the world outside, thus provoking expulsions and splittings.”

[298] “Most local intervener groups value flexibility and speedy action. Elaborate rules and procedures designed to maintain absolute equality would hamper them” (Douglas and Wildavsky 1982:147).

[299] Collaborator Diane Davis notes in an article on Stupidity (2004): “One of stupidity's many guises, Ronell says several times, is the claim to absolute Knowledge or Intelligence” ().

[300] In addition to these biological examples, Douglas and Wildavsky point to the same rules in operation (and their violation) with regard to The Titanic and the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit system (where development of a computerized scheduling system led to neglect of coping with breakdowns that were never supposed to occur).

[301] See the History Channel Series: The SS: A Warning From History (2002), supervised by Prof. Guido Knopp, and particularly ODESSA ().

[302] Simone Weil, as Susan Sontag records (2003:12), wrote that violence turns anybody subjected to it into a thing. “Might is that which makes a thing of anybody who comes under its sway. When exercised to the full, it makes a thing of man [sic] in the most literal sense, for it makes him a corpse’ (Weil 1940:24). The sociologist Douglas Ezzy, asserting the importance of Weil’s critique of the credo of efficiency in industrial society (known as Taylorism), adds. “It is important to note, not least for its relevance to working, that people become ‘things’ not just in death, but when the use of force deprives people of their consent and their power to refuse” (2001:631). Almost everyone photographed is a victim of the photographer, and from the earliest days of photography. “The head-on stare, so characteristic of simple portrait photography [...] signified the bluntness and ‘naturalness’ of a culturally unsophisticated class” (Tagg 1988:36).

[303] Susan Sontag (2003) records that Roger Fenton, often described as the first war photographer, sent to the Crimea by the British Government, was instructed not to photograph the dead, the maimed or the ill. He won fame for his photo entitled “The Valley of the Shadow of Death”, recalling a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson commemorating a British cavalry charge, that showed an empty rock strewn with rocks and cannonballs (50-53). “However, it was not the landscape across which / the British Light Brigade charged, and [he] had the cannonballs scattered on the road” (53-4). Felice Beato, whose photograph of Lucknow during the Sepoy Rebellion in 1857-8 became similarly famous, in fact scattered old human bones around the courtyard that was the scene of the massacre it depicted (54). Matthew Brady’s team rearranged some of their recently dead for their photos at Gettysburg in the American Civil War in 1863 (54), The re-staging of the planting of a flag by US marines on the heights of Iwo Jima during World War II has been widely reported (56). The shooting of a Vietcong suspect in a Saigon street by Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc Loan in 1968 was similarly staged: the general led the prisoner out into the street where journalists had gathered (59). Robert Doisneau waited more than 40 years to reveal that he hired a man and woman to pose as lovers for his much-reproduced 1950 Paris photo of a couple kissing (55),

[304] Discussing comic books and Walt Disney cartoons, Douglas Rushkoff points out that “for clarity, and against adult intuition, the parts of a drawing with the most impact on the plot or characters tend to be the most simply drawn. […] Icons transmit important information better and more quickly than detailed pictures” (1996:54).

[305] The images of Saddam Hussein’s statue being pulled down in a Baghdad square in April 2003, described by the Boston Globe as “the first feelgood moment of the war,” were staged, it was suggested later, in the face of “wide-angle views of what then appeared to be a relatively empty Firdous Square, populated by some 200 people who were mostly US troops and journalists, that appeared the following day” (Allan and Zelizer 2004:117). These questions were followed by “reports that the square was sealed off from the crowds, that foreign troops (using a US armoured vehicle) pulled down the statue rather than local people, that pro-American free Iraqi forces were brought into the square rather than a naturally evolving crowd” (ibid).

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