Visual Global Politics

Roland Bleiker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780415726061
• eBook ISBN: 9781317930884
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

We live in a visual age. Images and visual artefacts shape international events and our understanding of them. Photographs, film and television influence how we view and approach phenomena as diverse as war, diplomacy, financial crises and election campaigns. Other visual fields, from art and cartoons to maps, monuments and videogames, frame how politics is perceived and enacted. Drones, satellites and surveillance cameras watch us around the clock and deliver images that are then put to political use. Add to this that new technologies now allow for a rapid distribution of still and moving images around the world. Digital media platforms, such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, play an important role across the political spectrum, from terrorist recruitment drives to social justice campaigns.

This book offers the first comprehensive engagement with visual global politics. Written by leading experts in numerous scholarly disciplines and presented in accessible and engaging language, Visual Global Politics is a one-stop source for students, scholars and practitioners interested in understanding the crucial and persistent role of images in today's world.

1 Body

Elizabeth Dauphinee

 

 

 

 

Our culture is suffused with images of death and injury in war. Our ability to engage critically with these images depends on our capacity to recognise and challenge the politics of pain – the politics that is often obliterated by the image itself. The photograph – and even the video – no matter how horrific or painful, does not speak for itself. It is mediated by the photographer’s framing of the scene, by the viewer’s gaze, and by the explanatory (political) narratives that circulate around the image. And while the photograph might purport to express some “truth,” this truth is not self-evident in the image, nor is it politically neutral. For example, the American soldiers who photographed the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib likely did not anticipate that their snapshots would become evidence in what has become one of the most infamous torture scandals in US history. Rather, they were more likely performing the act that we would normally associate with the tourist souvenir (Winn 2004; see also Lisle 2000). Steven Winn (2004), writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, described the photographs from Abu Ghraib as tourist-like – the “hurried, candid action shots of a camera hungry to catch it all.” But as with any text, the author’s intention is not an indicator of how something will be received.

We know, of course, that the “souvenir” photos from Abu Ghraib unleashed a storm of criticism and outrage at the conduct of the US invasion of Iraq. There was no shortage of attempts to explain both the photographs and the torture. Feldman (2005: 204) argued that the photographs from Abu Ghraib can be understood as part of the whole “shock and awe” program that framed the invasion of Iraq. Others viewed the photographs of the torture as evidence of the increasing brutality in American life (Sontag 2004b), or as proof that the US intervention in Iraq, presented in part by the Administration as a salvific enterprise, was, in fact, a hypocrisy (The Nation 2004). And, seeking to downplay the photographs and the torture they depicted, conservative American commentators, such as Rush Limbaugh (2004), argued that the torture was no more than a “hazing ritual” equivalent to “emotional release” for combat-weary US soldiers. Donald Rumsfeld, the US Secretary of Defence, refused to discuss the word “torture,” instead using the word “abuse” to describe the violence against Iraqi prisoners (Rumsfeld, cited in Sontag 2004a).

Body

Historically, studies focusing on what we today call “global politics” generally ignored the obvious point that bodies are the targets of war and war-related violence. In her path-breaking book, The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry (1985: 63) made a simple and extremely powerful observation: that the purpose of war is to injure. It is an obvious truth that war produces torn, bleeding, burnt, and obliterated bodies. These bodies are the currency with which wars are “won” and “lost.” To train the weapons of war on landscapes, cities, and infrastructures is to target the human bodies that built these spaces and that dwell within them. Of course, one claims (and must claim) that there are other “goals” in war – goals more noble and important than the destroyed bodies and lives that are required to achieve them. But regardless of the “political” causes of war, the tactic of war is universal: to out-injure one’s opponent to the point of submission.

The simplicity of Scarry’s observation feels almost tautological. It seems obvious that the logic of war is bodily injury and death. But images of dead, torn, and bleeding bodies do not just circulate in unregulated or apolitical contexts. Governments work hard to hide the volume of injury and death that war-making entails. At its most instrumental level, this involves the outright attempted control of the images associated with dead and injured bodies. For example, Richard Nixon successfully opposed the use of the Freedom of Information Act to suppress the images associated with the massacre at My Lai in Vietnam in 1968 (see Liptak 2009). Both George W. Bush and Barack Obama have attempted to block the release under the same Act of images depicting US soldiers torturing Iraqi detainees. The US Office of War Information suppressed many images of the Second World War, including those that showed the effects of the atomic bomb on the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (slavick 2009).

We see here that the drive to catalogue and circulate the bodily injuries of war is juxtaposed with the simultaneous desire to hide these injuries from the public eye. In some cases, the scale of injury and death is so profound that the volume of information required to keep track of it is mind-bogglingly enormous. The massive volume of people who died in Nazi concentration camps, for example, required an entire bureaucracy to document the deportations and manage the killing operation. While the methodical execution of millions of people can be documented over time in well-organised bureaucratic contexts, this is no longer the case with the advent of the nuclear age. The physicist Leo Sartori, writing in 1983, notes that “In the case of all-out nuclear war, the scale of destruction is so great that the specific numbers almost don’t matter.” In a world where total obliteration is technically (and maybe also morally) possible, it is hard to conceive of the destruction as perpetrated against individuals – instead, we see whole societies of people destroyed or reduced to the constant threat of destruction. In a world that has seen the mechanised death camp obliterate generations, it is easy to forget the assault to the individual’s body in the larger political context of “genocide.” That the murder of the body is the goal of war is almost ancillary to the optimal train timetable that ferries people to their deaths, to the air burst of an atomic weapon over a city, to the remote performance of a massacre via drone strike, or to the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, and elsewhere. And in this modern world, the click of the camera arises to document all of it.

Managing images

With the advent of photography and its vehicles of mass dissemination – the television broadcast and later the internet – the effective management of the body-in-war became more difficult. Governments could enforce the ban on publication of grotesque photographs during the Second World War; but by the time of the Vietnam War, a television in virtually every American household made this control much more difficult. Nixon’s attempts to suppress the images emerging from Vietnam were ultimately fruitless. Despite attempts to tightly control the press in Afghanistan and Iraq by embedding them directly with US forces, it has proven to be impossible to control the images that circulate electronically, including those of the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

But if dead and injured bodies are the currency of war, why is there such a drive to hide this from the public eye? What do we actually encounter when we see the images of this kind of bodily degradation and pain that threaten the acts associated with war?

The answers are more varied and complex than the images themselves might at first suggest. We might be able to identify the use of war photography for a number of seemingly apolitical “purposes.” For example, photography is a key part of the scientific information-gathering process on the damage that various weapons can inflict on human bodies. In Hiroshima, US scientists meticulously documented the injuries that the atomic bombing caused to bodies – including flesh burns, keloid scarring, tumours, cancers, and organ failure. Importantly, the bodies were examined, but not treated (slavick 2009). This scientific documentation helped to build a corpus of knowledge about the bomb that would in turn contribute to a more complete understanding of the medical and biological impacts of radiation. The goal was not to treat the victims, but to gather information about the injuries. To put it bluntly, American scientists continued to “test” the bomb long after it was detonated by gathering intelligence on its biological effects. In 2008, the Walter Reed Army Medical Centre published a book of photographs of combat trauma alongside the surgical procedures of acute battlefield “injury care.” While this textbook shows some of the most horrific bodily wounds of war, its goal is not to shock nor is it to simply document injury, but instead to show how such massive wounds are triaged and treated. The value of the lives in the photographs does constitute an important politics – namely, that injured US soldiers can and should be treated and saved. But as a “medical” text, it also depoliticises the war conditions within which the injuries were sustained and prevents us from asking the deeper questions about why these people were sent to participate in an activity whose very goal was always the destruction of their (and others’) bodies.

When we see photographs of destroyed and tortured bodies, we are predictably fascinated and horrified. Organisations like Human Rights Watch, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and Amnesty International rely on this anticipated feeling of horror and utilise photographs of violence in order to generate support for political campaigns that seek the elimination of torture and other human rights violations. They rely on the ability of the photograph to communicate the reality of bodily pain to people who are not experiencing that pain – to people who can only imagine that pain (Scarry 1985: 9).

Here, we begin to witness the development of ‘iconic’ photographs, such as the girl Kim Phúc running from her napalmed village in Vietnam, or the hooded, crucified prisoner at Abu Ghraib. However, these photographs come to be “iconic” in ways that erase the suffering of individuals and the political causes of what is actually happening to them – that is, their war-mediated trauma. The photograph becomes an “empty signifier” – a pornographic image of others’ pain and suffering that becomes little more than a repellent curiosity. Sliwinski (2004: 154) argues that “the helplessness and horror of bearing witness to suffering brings with it the demand for a response, and yet one’s response to photographs can do nothing to alleviate the suffering depicted.”

The still photo also tends to petrify the artefacts of violence. This petrification lends itself to all kinds of different narratives, with different ethical and political implications. Bodily pain and death are easily pressed into the service of various political projects. But Sliwinski (2004: 151) argues that “despite the drive to narrate, at some point in the encounter with images, the viewer falls silent, too, suggesting the technology demands narrative, but also resists that demand.” There is no necessary politics associated with the images and, in fact, the images themselves flatten the physical pain and sensationalise the terror associated with the torture such that it becomes almost impossible for a viewer to respond.

What is instructive here is that, in delivering the testimony of their torture, the prisoners at Abu Ghraib stated over and over again that they were stripped, injured, raped, and terrorised, and that all of this was then photographed or filmed, suggesting that the filmic aspect of recording the prisoners’ ordeals was understood by them to be part of the torture (see Dauphinee 2008).

Images of pain

Why are we horrified by images of people in pain? Is it because “they” are “others” to us, as Sontag claims? Perhaps. But there is also something about the bodily pain experience itself that isolates the sufferer. The drive to make visible the body-in-pain alienates the viewer of the image. This is because the body-in-pain cannot narrate its calamity. Joanna Bourke (Bourke 2014: 41; see also Wilcox 2015a) observes that pain “[evicts us] from the land of the human.” For Scarry (1985: 5), pain is unsharable because it resists objectification in language. Unlike other interior bodily states, pain takes no object. If we love, we love someone or something. If we are hungry, it is hunger for something or someone; if we have fear, it is fear of something or someone. But pain resists this objectification. Because of this, Scarry understands pain to be uniquely world- and language-destroying. This does not mean that we can’t “see” the pain-filled body, but that our ability to connect with that pain is automatically reduced, whether we are witnesses to or perpetrators of the pain. Bourke (2014: 45) understands this when she says that “The voyeuristic jolt of seeing a stranger weeping at a road accident should not be compared to the sadist’s delight in inflicting injuries. Both, however, point to an element of cruelty in human culture.”

These elements form or are formed within the crucible of our socio-political and philosophical orientation toward our relationships with other people. The torturer isolates the victim from himself and from his world, which includes the language that cannot express the interiority of the pain. Pain is therefore mainly narrated as an experience that isolates the sufferer. Scarry (1985: 13) argues that to have pain is to have certainty; to hear about another’s pain is to have doubt. Because of this, the image of the body-in-pain inevitably flattens the experience of pain – it reduces people to representations of their plight, to images of starvation, of dismemberment, terror, torture, and agony, where images become stand-ins for human suffering, where people become bodily canvases for the torturer’s inscription of pain and the political interpretations that follow. For Hannah Arendt, the suffering of the concentration camps was so indescribable that the survivor could hardly narrate his experience. Had he returned from the camp to report on his experiences, he would not have been believed, she wrote (Arendt 2000: 125). Similarly, she (2000: 120) notes that “anyone speaking or writing about the concentration camps is … regarded as suspect; and if the speaker has resolutely returned to the land of the living, he himself is often assailed by doubts with regard to his own truthfulness, as though he had mistaken a nightmare for reality.”

Because the experience of the body-in-pain cannot be easily accessed, its imagery is also an obscenity. However, for all our voyeuristic fascination with pain, pain is also associated with an elemental unpleasantness – even impoliteness. Bourke (2014: 42), for example, observes that “Mind–body dichotomies are so engrained in Western culture that chronic pain is routinely viewed as something blameworthy and disruptive.” At some level, then, it is simply impolite to be a victim of torture – to have one’s ruined body ruin another’s breakfast. Paul Kirby (2016: 156) writes about his encounter with the image of a Congolese fighter clutching the severed genitals of some unnamed enemy: “I come across this in a glossy Saturday supplement magazine which asks its readers to consider this photo alongside others culled from war zones, and to judge which is ‘the best.’ This is during breakfast. I cannot purge that shot or the manner of its discovery, and reproduce it in my thesis.” As Kirby’s experience also suggests, however traumatic our encounter with the war-image might be, the range of our possible responses is governed by a deep sense of isolation. In the helplessness of his revulsion, all he can do is reproduce the image. This tells us something about the political and ethical hopelessness associated with our in-ability to respond meaningfully to the suffering of others (Sontag 2003).

Constrained already by the inability to corroborate the experience of pain in the body of another, the introduction of photographic imagery further inscribes this distance. As we have seen, Sliwinski (2004: 151) argues that “the technology demands narrative, but also resists that demand.” In simpler terms, the photograph never speaks for itself, but any attempt we make to speak for the photograph is also deeply limited, and says more about us than it does about the victim of torture in the photograph. In this sense, pain is cultural and ideological as much as it is physical. For Sliwinski (2004: 158), “there is something to be seen and therefore known in images of suffering, but it is not the traumatic experiences of others. Rather we are asked to look and imagine their terror, but in this looking [we encounter our] own failure to see.” Bal (2005: 159) expresses it this way: “Compassion without an identification that is both specific and heteropathic leads us to an emotional realm where the fear of violence can be made objectless.” Put plainly, this means that our visceral reaction to images of violence are about us – about our ruined breakfasts and the anxieties associated with the experience of vicarious trauma.

The visual politics of the body

In the silence that Sliwinski identifies, there are possibilities for making a different response. The body is an ideological entity before it is anything else. It is our socio-political culture that enframes our engagement with the body and with the body-in-pain. While Scarry notes that pain itself takes no object, bodily pain can be and is routinely mobilised into narratives of war and conflict. We suffer “for” something, or “because” of something – because American soldiers need “emotional release,” or because American cultural life is increasingly brutal. Whether as martyrs, tortured prisoners, or battlefield casualties, pain and suffering are ascribed meaning – both socio-political and ideological. The task for those of us who have only the photographs is to ask how else we might understand the things we do to one another.

2 Borders

Shine Choi

As Nevzat Soguk (2007: 283) poetically put it, “Borders have lives of their own. They move, shift, metamorphose, edge, retract, emerge tall and powerful or retreat into the shadows exhausted, or even grow irrelevant.” I explore the life of the inter-Korean border and how it is brought to life in the South Korean comics Oh! Hangang by Hur Youngman.

I examine image–text relations in comics and how drawing the world by hand creates an aesthetic of exaggeration and distortion that helps us understand what borders are and do. Borders are inherently spaces of contradictions. They are spaces of encounters and divisions that separate and unite. They are visible yet invisible, fixed yet mobile, rigid yet porous, and remote yet so central to politics. Comics are a form that exploits contradictions between, among others, image and text, interiority and exteriority, visibility and invisibility...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Mapping visual global politics
• 1 Body
• 2 Borders
• 3 Celebrity
• 4 Children
• 5 Climate
• 6 CNN effect
• 7 Colonialism
• 8 Compassion fatigue
• 9 Culture
• 10 Democracy
• 11 Development
• 12 Digital media
• 13 Diplomacy
• 14 Drones
• 15 Empathy
• 16 Face
• 17 Famine
• 18 Fear
• 19 Finance
• 20 Foreign policy
• 21 Gender
• 22 Geopolitics
• 23 Humanitarianism
• 24 Human rights
• 25 Icons
• 26 Identity
• 27 Indigeneity
• 28 Invisibility
• 29 Memory
• 30 Militarisation
• 31 Nation
• 32 Peace
• 33 Perpetrators
• 34 Pictorial turn
• 35 Protest
• 36 Rape
• 37 Refugees
• 38 Religion
• 39 Roma
• 40 Satellites
• 41 Security
• 42 Sexual violence
• 43 State
• 44 Surveillance
• 45 Territory
• 46 Time
• 47 Trauma
• 48 Travel
• 49 Violence
• 50 War
• 51 Witnessing
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• List of illustrations
• Bibliography
• Index