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The Effects of the Pictures

Alphonso Lingis Journal of Visual Culture 2006 5: 83 DOI: 10.1177/147041290600500106 The online version of this article can be found at: http://vcu.sagepub.com/content/5/1/83.citation

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by which this war is now dominated is what the several analyses and critiques of this small collection of pieces also seek to advance, each and together. Note
1. Nicholas Mirzoeff s recent book on the Iraq war and global visual culture (2005) also begins this task. Mirzoeff was not asked to contribute to the writings presented in this section partly because of the general availability of his book.

References
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) (2005) Court Orders Release of Images of Detainee Abuse at Abu Ghraib, 29 September: www.aclu.org/International/ International.cfm?ID=19189&c=36 Mirzoeff, N. (2005) Watching Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture. New York: Routledge.

The Effects of the Pictures

Alphonso Lingis 1945, pictures of Auschwitz. Pictures of naked bodies piled up on top of one another. During the war, the conflict was defined as a conflict of ideologies, Nazi, Fascist, Democratic, and Socialist. After the publication of these pictures, Germany, land of Max Planck, Heisenberg, Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, became the land of death camps. 1972, Vietnam. Pictures of a nine-year-old girl running naked, screaming, burning with napalm. This picture is what remains of the war. The strategic importance of the Indo-Chinese peninsula, of containing the spread of Soviet and Chinese Communism, the domino theory this discourse has been forgotten. 2004, Abu Ghraib. Pictures of naked bodies piled up on top of one another. Derisive laughter of the torturers. Laughter of Spc. Sabrina Harman, her head bent next to the crushed head of a captive bludgeoned to death in Abu Ghraib prison. For Muslims from Morocco to Mindinao, from South Africa to Uzbekistan, the rhetoric of liberation collapses before these pictures. For the judgement of public opinion across the world, the reality of the American occupation of Iraq is defined by these pictures. Governments that practiced torture of prisoners Czarist Russia, Chile, and Argentina, and France in Algeria do not make public the practice of state torture; people are just disappeared. When the German public, after the war, came to know, their representatives acted to institutionally ban torture, and capital punishment too. The lithographs of Goya entitled The Disasters of War were published 49 years after the end of the Napoleonic occupation of Spain, the photographs of Auschwitz were published immediately after the war, but

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those of Abu Ghraib were published in the middle of the occupation of Iraq. No pictures have been propagated more insistently by the media than the pictures of Abu Ghraib; every American saw them and saw the subsequent revelations from Guantnamo, Baghram, Camps Bucca, Mercury, and Tiger, and the far-flung gulag of secret US prisons. But for the American public, they in the end provoked no question affecting national policy. In the presidential elections John Kerry made no allusion to them, and the public re-elected George W . Bush with a significant majority; Bush promptly elevated Alberto Gonzales (who had defined the policy of state torture of captives) to the post of Attorney General. In 2004, a group of the nations top legal experts Alan Dershowitz of Harvard, Jean Elstain of the University of Chicago, Oren Gross of Minnesota, Sanford Levinson of the University of Texas, and Richard Posner of the University of Chicago Law School, in a collective volume entitled Torture sought ways of institutionalizing torture in the war on terror. Support our troops bumper stickers appeared on cars across the nation. In a postindustrial social economy where not production but markets are the problem, where citizens are less and less needed as producers and more and more as consumers, the soldier becomes the sole genuine hero, an individual integrally subordinated to order and utility, but at the same time superhuman in the savage and exuberant release of excess energies against a demonic enemy. That 20-year-old Spc. Lynndie England, who joined the National Guard when she could not hold a job at Wal-Mart, could find herself dragging naked men with a leash across the floor like dogs elicited the sympathy, empathy, and envy of ordinary Americans. Although the captives of Guantnamo are for the most part low-ranking soldiers delivered over by Afghan warlords and those of Abu Ghraib are individuals randomly rounded up or denounced by informers, they were depicted as humans who even in captivity have exorbitant powers. The ones in the Abu Ghraib pictures had instigated revolts in the prison, the prisoners in Guantnamo had spat on, bitten, thrown shit on their guards; hundreds went on a hunger strike. Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld repeatedly said the prisoners at Guantnamo are not ordinary suspects; they are evil men, and they will not be tried, because if acquitted they will spread hatred for the torturers of Guantnamo wherever they go. The State Department is seeking out far-away countries that, for payment, will keep them imprisoned without trial for the rest of their lives. Questioned about the 800900 prisoners aged 13 to 15 in Afghanistan, the 107 aged 8 to 18 in Iraq, a Pentagon spokesman said, Age is not a determining factor in Detention. Age does not necessarily diminish threat potential. This identification of the captives as beings of savage, demonic powers destructive of the world of work and reason, of civilization, each of them an incarnation of Osama bin Laden, explains the vengeful compulsions and excesses of the torturers, but also elicits an unavowable identification with the captives. The upsurge of a religion militant, vindictive, and Apocalyptic in America, in the image of its image of Islam, is but a surface epiphenomenon of the communion of the American public before the pictures of Abu Ghraib.

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What dominates in the photographs taken at Abu Ghraib and the recent FBI report of practices at Guantnamo was the bizarre sexual degradation of the captives. Female interrogators dressed in thongs and halters who rub their genitals and then rub menstrual blood onto the faces of the captives are very knowingly intended to make the Muslim captive polluted and thus unable to pray and invoke his God. The photographs feature men forced into homosexual acts and piled up, naked penis upon buttocks, in a grotesque forced homosexual orgy before the gleeful smirks of young American women. These were scenarios of degradation enjoined by military intelligence officials who had read anthropological accounts of Islamic culture and mores; they were staged as specifically Muslim degradations. But whenever there is state practice of torture, there is a circle between the torturers and the policy-makers in their unbloodied bureaus; the torture that is approved is the torture that the torturers devise in experimentation, not by their rational intellects but by their subterranean compulsions. Depicting the captives as homosexual both depicts them as outside social norms and as members bound together by much more than the accepted fraternity of soldiers a return of the Spartan army. There is then something exceptionally triumphant in the derision of women guards, and exciting to American viewers constrained by fear of AIDS to sexuality with only those they know best where sexuality is forbidden its dissolution into orgiastic convulsions with the alien. To be sure, this vertiginous fascination with horror is itself horrifying, and the voluptuous anxiety aroused produced a defensive screen. The insistent projection of the photographs to the American public was contrived to provoke intense feelings of disgust and repugnance. President Bush gave the watchword: Americans view these images with disgust and repugnance. The intensity of disgust and repugnance across the land functioned as evidence, in each viewer, of his or her own core decency, his or her instinctual moral integrity. The aroused feeling of their own core moral integrity convinced them that, apart from these few perverts, the 150,000 National Guardsmen and enlisted servicemen and women there were brave, generous, idealistic liberators Senator Lieberman even insisted: kind. In his first public statement after the release of the photographs, Secretary of State Colin Powell declared: Now the world will see American Justice. The army itself was charged with the investigation and with punishing these few of its troops, for violation of its own code of conduct. The public was reassured of the irreproachable integrity of the army, whose procedures would now be installed in the interim Iraq Government, for the public trial of Saddam Hussein, immediately arraigned. The photographs had functioned to convince the American public of their intrinsic righteousness, and the intrinsic righteousness of a collective action taken in their name by citizens like themselves. Immediately after the attack of 9/11 on the control centers of American military and economic power, the American war president had identified the attackers as irrationally motivated by pure evil, and, by contrast, the American

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population as good. But launching, from Florida, long-range high-altitude bombers to reduce Afghanistan to rubble was too obviously a massive outburst of revenge to convince the Americans of their intrinsic goodness. It was the photographs of Abu Ghraib, the disgust and revulsion they aroused, that made their intrinsic goodness evident to them. They returned President Bush to office by a majority, seeing in him one like themselves.

Alphonso Lingis was Professor of Philosophy at the Pennsylvania

State University. Amongst many other books, he has published Abuses (University of California Press, 1995), Body Transformations: Evolutions and Atavisms in Culture (Routledge, 2005) and The First Person Singular (forthcoming).

War Porn
Jean Baudrillard World Trade Center: shock treatment of power, humiliation inflicted on power, but from outside. With the images of the Baghdad prisons, it is worse, it is the humiliation, symbolic and completely fatal, which the world power inflicts on itself the Americans in this particular case the shock treatment of shame and bad conscience. This is what binds together the two events. Before both a worldwide violent reaction: in the first case a feeling of wonder; in the second, a feeling of abjection. For September 11th, the exhilarating images of a major event; in the other, the degrading images of something that is the opposite of an event, a nonevent of an obscene banality, the degradation, atrocious but banal, not only of the victims, but of the amateur scriptwriters of this parody of violence. The worst is that it all becomes a parody of violence, a parody of the war itself, pornography becoming the ultimate form of the abjection of war which is unable to be simply war, to be simply about killing, and instead turns itself into a grotesque infantile reality-show, in a desperate simulacrum of power. These scenes are the illustration of a power which, reaching its extreme point, no longer knows what to do with itself a power henceforth without aim, without purpose, without a plausible enemy, and in total impunity. It is only capable of inflicting gratuitous humiliation and, as one knows, violence inflicted on others is after all only an expression of the violence inflicted on oneself. It only manages to humiliate itself, degrade itself and go back on its own word in a sort of unremitting perversity. The ignominy, the vileness is the ultimate symptom of a power that no longer knows what to do with itself. September 11th was a global reaction from all those who no longer knew what to make of this world power and who no longer supported it. In the case of the abuse inflicted on the Iraqis, it is worse yet: power no longer