Intensive Media

Aversive Affect and Visual Culture

A. McCosker

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137273505
• eBook ISBN: 9781137273512
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

There is something unsettling, but also powerful, in the encounter with individual and collective experiences of human suffering. Intensive Media explores the discomfort and fascination initiated by instances of pain and suffering, their 'aversive affects', as they trouble but also vitalise contemporary media environments.

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Pain: Aversive Affects and Micropolitics

Everything is simply an encounter in the universe, a good or bad encounter.

Deleuze and Parnet, 2002, p. 45.

There is something unsettling, but also powerful, in the encounter with individual and collective experiences of human suffering. This book explores the discomfort and fascination such experiences provoke, their aversive affects, as they trouble but also vitalise contemporary media environments. Aversion entails impulsive recoil or even revulsion, but also attracts and initiates the modification of bodies as they are brought into conjunction and affect one another. Likewise, pain designates one of those complex aspects of individual and collective experience that sets in motion a dynamic field of aversive affects. It will become clear, however, that as objects of attention both pain and aversion quickly unravel. As a driver of aversive affect, pain emerges and vanishes in the form of intensity. And as intensity, the aversive affects of pain are volatile and contingent.

In the contexts of crisis, conflict and suffering explored throughout this book, aversive affect operates micropolitically to make explicit or hide the material conditions that surround instances of pain in all its specificity. That is, in so many scenarios, personal, social and political stakes are set around the thresholds of intensity that give rise to a ‘sense’ of pain and the unpredictable valences of its aversive affects. And it is in this sense that Intensive Media, and each of its case studies develop outwards from the middle of what has been referred to as ‘the problem of pain’, a problem that traverses media, communication, art, sociality and politics in their confrontation with affect, biology and neurophysiology.

In her influential book The Body in Pain (1985), Elaine Scarry argues that pain is distinguishable by its inexpressibility. For Scarry, pain serves as the very paradigm of doubt. Only by recourse to a variety of indirect signs, behaviours or verbal expressions can pain appear to others. But more than this, ‘physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned’ (Scarry, 1985, p. 4). Scarry’s thesis on pain is phenomenological: ‘it is precisely because [pain] takes no object that it, more than any other phenomenon, resists objectification in language’ (Scarry, 1985, p. 5).¹ While it can be ‘world destroying’ for the sufferer, Scarry sees an individual’s own pain and the pain of others as two ‘wholly distinct orders of events’ (Scarry, 1985, p. 4). It follows then that the problem of pain remains simultaneously a problem for communication, mediation technologies and practices, and the media ecologies in which they function. However, my approach seeks to avoid the subjectifications of phenomenology to understand pain as experience, affect, image and event, as an intensifier of media ecologies. Each material manifestation of pain constitutes the media through which pain is expressed. Developments in technical media simply further modify and often jeopardise that process. For these reasons, I begin Intensive Media with a detailed account of pain as experience, aversive affect, neurophysiology and image event. And while in the case study chapters of this book pain is at times more visible than others, it is my argument that pain remains that which intensifies and shapes aversive affects and the micropolitics they instantiate.

As a vital intensifier of media and a key source of aversive affect, pain both resists communication and operates as a highly generative conduit for media production, circulation and attention. Pain, and the aversive affects that flow from and around it intensify media, create powerful intimacies, constitute communities – local, global or networked – corporealise communication environments and direct attention. By engaging our nociceptive capacity (our ability to feel or sense pain), pain images wield the capacity to both repulse and attract – often simultaneously – and in doing so produce social discord and enable social integration and shared experience. I will look at how, as citizens of global media cultures, our inherent vulnerability to the intensities and aversive affects of pain, while often highly problematic and unpredictable, stands as both a requisite and a catalyst for individual and collective thought and action in many key spheres of social life. Understanding the productive potential of the aversive affects that surround and even obscure pain within media and communication environments, however, requires some conceptual development. Here and throughout the book I will elaborate on recent theoretical approaches to trauma, media event and encounter, intensity and affect, and the broad framework of new materialism and non-representational theory within which the aversive affects and micropolitics of pain might be productively situated.

Seeing pain

The profusion of the experience, and problem, of pain across contemporary media environments and visual cultures has been considered most substantially through the medium of photography, and in relation to the mediation of war, conflict and related forms of human suffering. In this context, both Susan Sontag, in her last book Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), and Judith Butler in two recent volumes, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2010) and Precarious Life (2006), share Scarry’s concern for the volatility or even silence that often accompanies human suffering. In her final book, Sontag revisits her early criticism in On Photography (1977) of the bankruptcy of the photograph of suffering in its inevitable turn to cliché, this time more ambivalently, perhaps more hopefully. Sontag both describes and affirms what she sees as two dominant and contradictory positions on the power of the visual in the mediation of pain. On the one hand, she identifies ‘the determining influence of photographs in shaping what catastrophes and crises we pay attention to, what we care about, and ultimately what evaluations are attached to these conflicts’ (Sontag, 2003, p. 105). From this perspective, photographs frame, and thus exclude. Across broadcast media more generally, ‘television news producers and newspaper and magazine photo editors make decisions every day which firm up the wavering consensus about the boundaries of public knowledge’ (Sontag, 2003, p. 68). On the other hand, indicating the ambivalence of the problem, Sontag repeats Scarry’s concern about the expressibility of pain, but in relation to the proliferation of information and image:

in a world saturated, no hyper-saturated with images, those that should matter have a diminishing effect: we become callous. In the end, such images just make us a little less able to feel, to have our consciousness pricked.

(Sontag, 2003, p. 105)

The failure of photography to ‘accuse’ and ‘alter conduct’ is at stake here; but in bringing about shock, Sontag laments, photographs of pain do not aid understanding; or worse, they leave individuals confronted by the global scale of the suffering of others, feeling ‘that the sufferings and misfortunes are too vast, too irrevocable, too epic to be much changed by any local political intervention’ (Sontag, 2003, pp. 79, 89).

The contradiction embedded in these two positions on pain and the visual corresponds with Bolter and Grusin’s (1999) broader observations about the remediating processes of new media technologies. I want to emphasise the importance of the ever transforming medial logics and forms, communication technologies and practices, in the mediation of pain. In Bolter and Grusin’s analysis, ‘remediation’ involves the contradictory imperatives of immediacy, where media technologies come to disappear while offering seamless access to the world, and a hypermediacy of overcoding, overabundance and media saturation. Pity, compassion, empathy and action in relation to the suffering of others are all made possible through ever-developing technologies of immediacy, but also dissipated in the corresponding hypermediacy. Though this understanding of media saturation and ‘analgesia’ – or numbness to the pain of those around us – was central to Sontag’s own early writing in On Photography, there is a hint of optimism in her later work:

Let the atrocious images haunt us. Even if they are only tokens, and cannot possibly encompass most of the reality to which they refer, they still perform a vital function. The images say: This is what human beings are capable of doing – may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, self-righteously. Don’t forget.

(Sontag, 2003, p. 115)

Judith Butler sums up this more optimistic ambivalence to the photograph of pain: ‘Sontag concedes that photographs are transitive. They do not merely portray or represent – they relay affect’, but nonetheless, ‘in times of war, this transitive affectivity of the photograph may overwhelm and numb its viewers’ (Butler, 2010, p. 68). Engaging directly with Sontag’s thought on how we can regard the pain of others, Butler attempts to think through this ambivalence in the context of the US war on terror, Israeli aggression in Gaza, and the circulation of photographs of torture and depravity in Abu Ghraib prison in order to offer a critical response to what she sees as the ethical failures behind the powerful media and governmental framing of a global war on terror.

Crucially, Butler begins not with the photograph or image more generally, but with the body and its corporeal vulnerability: ‘The critique of violence must begin with the question of the representability of life itself: what allows a life to become visible in its precariousness […]?’ (Butler, 2010, p. 51). Where Scarry and Sontag ultimately and in different ways lament the failure of language and image for the sufferer, Butler argues that the interpretation that takes place in the expressive work of a photograph of suffering has the ability, though not always realised, to carry affect beyond the time and place of its production to achieve apprehension, and even recognition (Butler, 2010, pp. 63–100). Fundamental for Butler, particularly in the case of war, is the operation of the frames through which a life can be apprehended in its precarity and become properly recognisable and hence grievable. Vulnerability is this shared capacity to be injured or harmed. Although scholarship on pain and the visual often privileges photography over other forms of media (e.g. Reinhardt and Edwards, 2007, p. 9), these frames are assembled through an integrated media ecology. The sensibility of a pain image, whether still or in the duration of video and cinema, in the flow of television, or the networked spaces of the internet is tied to vulnerability; and vulnerability facilitates the circulation of sensation as aesthetic force, requires ethical conduct and offers a catalyst for thought, action and sociality.

The problem of global ethical conduct, as it might be facilitated or hampered by media and communication technologies and within networked media environments, has spurred extensive interdisciplinary scholarship concerned with the mediation of disaster, crisis and conflict in particular, underpinned by theories of cosmopolitanism (Boltanski, 1999; Chouliaraki, 2006; Silverstone, 2007). In establishing such a cosmopolitan mediated space, or ‘mediapolis’ to use Silverstone’s term, one of the challenges has always been to understand the blurred lines between global events, medial and aesthetic practices, and the political – a problematic explored at length by Jacques Rancière (2009; 2007; 2004). Art practices and the very nature of aesthetics are implicated, for Rancière, within forms of politics (understood more broadly than statecraft) and sociality. Rancière has sought to understand the political aesthetic beyond simply the political commitment of artists or the political effects of individual artworks or movements. His broad aim has been to trace the ‘metapolitical’ functioning of art as it ‘redistributes the sensible’ (2004). That is, art always functions at one remove from direct political intervention. As Ben Highmore explains, art prepares ‘the ground for new experiences, and [opens] up spaces for new subjectifications. Art in the era of the aesthetic regime of art is always political but its politics is often one that acts as a pedagogic intervention’ (Highmore, 2011, p. 49). In a fashion not too dissimilar to aspects of John Berger’s (1972) Ways of Seeing, artworks function, for Highmore (2011, p. 51), as ‘part of the general economy of aesthetics in their pedagogic role of alerting us to different kinds of alertness’.

The normally hidden, sequestered ‘atrocity’ of pain becomes, in this way, problematic territory for the production and deployment of art as political aesthetic. The collection of essays by Reinhardt et al. (2007), titled Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain, offers a notable recent example, questioning the place of suffering in contemporary visual culture as a series of responses to the associated exhibition held at the Williams College Museum of Art during 2006. The ubiquity of death, destruction and trauma across visual culture is posed here as a problem for aesthetic practice, in the juxtaposition of what is usually conceived as photojournalism but might be reframed as art. The art of suffering becomes problematic – we could use the term obscene – in the sense that it draws attention back to the question of what art can and should do, what action or reaction might be conceived as the outcome of this kind of encounter. In the Beautiful Suffering collection, Mieke Bal is most troubled by this question: ‘I feel grief, compassion, and anger. But those feelings have nowhere to go’ (Bal, 2007, p. 93). The politics of art, of exhibition and of framing that situates the photograph of suffering as a display object reaches throughout the twentieth century, through schools of thought and debate that, in particular, took aim at the potential of art after Auschwitz, to paraphrase Theodor Adorno’s famous adage. A political art has as its concern the nature of expressibility, and of what might remain ‘unrepresentable’ (Rancière, 2009). These debates have been tested most explicitly in relation to the Holocaust, but are not restricted to the trauma experienced in that context.

In similar terrain, while it has come to provoke a diverse field of study growing since the 1980s and extending into the post 9/11 era, the word trauma carries an important double sense of both psychic wound and bodily injury. In medical sciences trauma designates the damaged body treatable through methods of surgery and therapy. In the diverse field of ‘trauma studies’, through the work of writers such as Cathy Caruth, Dominick Capra, Ann Kaplan, Allan Meek and many others, the notions of psychic wound and physical injury are extended to whole populations, events, collective encounters and historical eras. Suffering, pain, human catastrophe becomes the catalyst for art and cultural production, a repository for collective memory as well as the material through which healing is thought to take place. Within this field of scholarship, there is often a sense that pain – as trauma – is positioned as aberration, as the accident or anomaly in relation to which art is to undertake its remedial work. Attempting to negotiate these issues and approaches, Jill Bennett (2005) explores the problem, and art, of trauma in contexts such as Colombia and Northern Ireland as a kind of indirect force able to bring into being a visual language for experiences of conflict and loss, and in this way forges an approach that emphasises the generative capacity of affect.

It is the pedagogic role of the aesthetic in visual media and communication environments that moves pain as subject matter, experience, event beyond its negative characterisation as trauma. And for this reason I move away from approaches developed within trauma studies to conceive pain more broadly in its complex, dynamic and productive dimensions as aversive affect. The aim is to highlight its ability to intensify and vitalise the social ecology that traverses politics, mediation, communication and aesthetics, not as anomaly but as part of the normal state of affairs. This approach aligns more with John Dewey’s aim for his 1934 book Art as Experience; the book’s task is ‘to restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience’ (Dewey, 1980, p. 3; cited in Highmore, 2011, p. 38). That is, the goal here is to understand art in its social context, and alongside other media and communicative forms, as both sensory and intellectual response to the world, and as it connects the intensities of the gestalt media form with the rhythms and energies of life (Highmore, 2011, p. 39). For both Dewey and Rancière, the aesthetic designates the exterior form of ‘interior’ life, ‘the sociality of passions as they circulate in ways that are interpersonal and transpersonal. This is a material world made up of seemingly immaterial things’ (Highmore, 2011, p. 23). But the irony of the interplay between the material and immaterial needs some elaboration on the path to understanding pain as affect and intensive media.

Materialising communication in the perceptual fold

Aversive affect, and the pain events around which it emerges and disappears, as addressed throughout this book, serves as a catalyst for examining some of the primary sites at which the materiality of media and communication becomes apparent, and those instances where the material really matters – ethically, politically, aesthetically. In a recent compilation on materialist approaches to media, Packer and Crofts Wiley (2012, p. 3) ask with sufficient irony, ‘what could be less material than communication?’, before introducing the many ways theory has sought to ‘correct’ this misapprehension by ‘materializing communication’ in media infrastructures of space, technology and body, in the material strata of communication signals, in their economic conditions of production and encounter, the contexts within which meaning is constructed and in the materiality of discourse itself. Most of the approaches to the ‘problem of pain’ outlined above foreground the inadequacy and imperfection of communication as language, discourse, sign, signal and process – where something of the material experience of life itself is lost – as the basis for social critique. The materiality of communication itself is in this way necessarily suppressed, and so for Scarry, and to an extent Sontag, the problem of pain remains one of language conceived as immaterial and structural. But pain exemplifies the kind of event that is immanent to bodies, that ‘makes sense’ only as sensation that flows both through and beyond the boundaries of language, but at the same time intensifies or vitalises the sign and medium and foregrounds the extensive movement of affect as signal, in duration.

If technical media alter what the body is and how it interfaces with the world, as McLuhan (1973), Kittler (1999) and many others have argued, then sensate experiences considered intimate and even private, such as pain, become more diffuse and mobile as media forms and networks proliferate. Inversely, sensation and bodily experience challenge the material dimensions of the design and use of media technologies. Pain as sensation circulates and takes form within networks of mediated communication and specific technologies, even while it has serious implications for how they function or are designed. In the operation of traditional screen based and broadcast media, and in new mobile computational devices, bodies, affects and intensities matter.

Theoretical, empirical and archaeological accounts of the materiality of media and communication have come to the fore at a time when such devices and interfaces seem to be proliferating drastically. It is in this sense productive to follow matter, corporeality, and sensation as they traverse technical media and draw attention back to the medium and the encounter. Ironically, there are benefits in a shift toward non-representational theory in studies of aspects of visual and media cultures. As Matthew Fuller notes, ‘an attention to materiality is most fruitful where it is often deemed irrelevant, in the “immaterial” domains of electronic media’ (Fuller, 2005, p. 2). But this should be matched by an attention to the messiness of the human body in its ‘fleshyness’ (Parikka, 2012a, p. 95), a sphere of concern that has been so effectively conceived by feminist theorists such as Kristeva, Haraway, Butler, Braidotti, Barad and Grosz among many others (Braidotti et al., 2010, p. 22). Pain has always been part of that biopolitical contest over the body in the social reaching back to the influence of Cartesian mind/body dualism. Descartes’ lesser known formulation of the pain mechanism has also served to restrict our understanding of pain to that which takes place within the body as closed or autopoietic organism.

In Descartes’ classic account of pain represented by a flame burning the toe, the relation between external stimulus and pain equates with a rope and bell. The nerves are excited at the periphery, sending a signal to the brain, which reacts by sending a message back to the muscles to contract or withdraw from the stimulus causing the pain (Williams and Bendelow, 1998, pp. 156–57). In line with this tradition, bio-medical discourse often reduces pain to its function as signalling device and protective mechanism (Hall and Guyton, 2011, pp. 583–93).² Tissue, nerve or organ damage is targeted because the objective is always the elimination of the cause of pain by surgical, pharmacological or therapeutic means (Meyer et al., 2006). The register of pain is contained within the body, in the firing of nerve signals and their reception in the brain allowing the cause to be isolated and potentially negated. By implication...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Pain: Aversive Affects and Micropolitics
• 2. War: Visual Brutality and Affective Vectors
• 3. Torture: Obscenity and Complicity
• 4. Disaster: Intensive Encounters
• 5. Masochism: Painful Pleasures
• 6. Salvation: Medieval Vision, Affective Community
• 7. Illness: Putting It All Online
• Notes
• References
• Index