Representing the Experience of War and Atrocity

Interdisciplinary Explorations in Visual Criminology

Ronnie Lippens, Emma Murray, Ronnie Lippens, Emma Murray

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030139254
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores how the experience of war and related atrocities tend to be visually expressed and how such articulations and representations are circulated and consumed. Each chapter of this volume examines how an image can contribute to a richer understanding of the experience of war and atrocity and thus they contribute to the burgeoning field of the "criminology of war". Topics include the destruction of war in oppositional cultural forms - comparing the Nazi period with the ISIS destruction of Palmyra - and the visual aesthetics of violence deployed by Jihadi terrorism. The contributors are a multi-disciplinary team drawn mainly from criminology but also sociology, international relations, gender studies, English and the visual arts. This book will advance this field in new directions with refreshing, original work.

© The Author(s) 2019

Ronnie Lippens and Emma Murray (eds.)Representing the Experience of War and AtrocityPalgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13925-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Ronnie Lippens¹

(1)

Keele University, Keele, UK

Ronnie Lippens

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

Visual criminology Totem and taboo Sensory criminologyAestheticsExperience

End Abstract

Eye

Sigmund Freud never wrote much about war and related atrocity. All his contributions on the topic collected by Maud Ellmann in On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia (2005) don’t really make for a massive volume and it is probably fair to say that the works in there that do deal with war specifically are probably among those by the great psychoanalyst that never managed to achieve sustained impact across the humanities and social sciences. There is one exception though: Totem and Taboo (published originally in 1913, just before the outbreak of the First World War) is still widely read and cited. And not only is it the case that Freud’s essay is still resonating across time, it is also crucially important for the very theme of this collection. Indeed, Totem and Taboo , one could argue, is Freud’s speculation on the birth of humanity. At the point when the horde of savages morphs into the human condition, there is atrocious bloodshed. In fact, humanity emerged in and through the very act of slaughter—righteous slaughter, indeed—whereby the savage Law of the tyrannical father (the alpha male of the horde, in a way) was replaced with the institutional Law of the band of brothers who, one could say, decided to not just act as a ‘society’, but to institute the very idea of a society itself. In other words, humanity came about when the raw Law of nature, or sheer biological life, was left for a new form of life—human life—in which human, institutional Law became the organising principle. It is worth noting that the institution of institutional and instituting Law is centred on a moment of deliberate reflection. This is the moment when the band of brothers gets together, and decides to act, in unison, according to something that we would recognise as the deliberate institution of Law. Human society, and the Law that embodies it, then, rest upon the capacity, in the no-longer-purely-biological-organism, to reflect. This capacity in turn rests upon the capacity, in the organism, to put distance between itself and the situation, and to imagine a world that is not there, and that has yet to be instituted. And, Freud seems to suggest, this process of institution is bound to involve violence. Someone, or something, will have to be sacrificed—in Freud’s parable this something was pure, ‘savage’ biological life—if the new is going to have to emerge. Human society, and its building blocks (i.e. Law), rest upon deliberate sacrifice. They rest upon violence and bloodshed. The image of the new that suddenly crystallised in the reflecting minds of the brothers, that is, the shape of the Law and the forms of life to come, were bound to lead to slaughter: slaughter of the old. The mind’s eye, in a way, always harbours the potential for destruction and ‘righteous’ slaughter.

It should perhaps come as no surprise that Freud’s Totem and Taboo has had quite an impact on legal theory (see e.g. Fitzpatrick 2001). But for our purposes here there is more in Freud’s story that is worth noting. No sooner had the band of brothers killed off the savage father and his biological, tyrannical Law, than guilt and mourning struck. The very process of reflection-killing-institution had, of course, turned the mere biological organisms into human beings, and their reflective capacity could not but prompt them to see and feel, to contemplate, and consequently, to mourn the momentous loss they had caused. The newly instituted Law—and the shape of human society—could not, and cannot, be taken for granted. In a world of reflecting human beings, with their mind’s eyes filled with images, the Law needs an anchoring point. That anchoring point is the Totem. The totem not only allows the emerging human society to mourn the loss of what once was—for example: the ancestors—but, as the embodiment of the Law, it also allows human society to form and take shape around an image, that is, something that can be seen, sensed, felt, and that therefore engages the body. The totem also, in other words, mournfully taps into the natural, biological dimension of life. The totem hasn’t forgotten. For all its institutive force, it also, at the same time, remembers. In early human societies, this notion of the image could be taken quite literally. The totem was a very visible, sensory thing. It was carried around, or stood there, wherever the tribe lived or went, and instituted their customs, their Law. Looking at the totem, sensing it, the eye looks to the future (and imagines it, hopeful) and to the past (mournful) at the same time. That mourning loss is a sensory, indeed a bodily experience, is, to most, a truism. But to mourn loss is also a human thing to do. It is done by a reflective being that uses its biology, or its senses—its eyes in particular—to accomplish it.

The totem however always comes with the taboo. As the embodiment of the Law, the totem is always particular; and so, of course, is the Law. The Law is always this law. Or that law. It never just is ‘Law’. That may have been the case at the time of the savage hordes, when life was lived according to a divinely natural biological Law. But after the Fall (as the Bible had it in its version of the story of the birth of humanity) into the human, all too human obsession with good and evil, this is no longer the case. The Law in the world of humans is always anchored to this or that totem. But there are so many totems. In a world of reflective beings that cannot but incessantly imagine new worlds, and that are very often inclined to put some distance between themselves and the totem/Law in whose space they find themselves, the latter tend to multiply unrelentingly. In a world of beings that have the capacity to reflect themselves out of and into worlds, the anchors that hold them in place can quite easily be cut loose (and that, paradoxically, is why the totem is often imagined in the first place, i.e. to stabilise, attract, to anchor, to fix, and to destroy all that threatens to undermine it). But by looking at the totem, reflecting upon it, and then, oh taboo!, imagining new worlds—new totems, new Law—the eye generates once again the potential for destruction and slaughter which, once it has taken place, will lead to further institutions of totem/Law, and to further mourning. The human eye will keep on seeing, sensing, and reflecting. It will keep on generating totem/Law and taboo. It will keep on destroying, instituting, and mourning. It will keep on either attacking or defending totems tooth and nail.

The psychoanalytically inspired anthropologist Ernest Becker had something very insightful to say about the above. In his book Escape from Evil (1975) Becker argued how the human being, having left the purely biological condition, and having acquired reflective ‘God-like’ powers, could no longer live with the memory of its sheer creature-like, slimy origins, nor with the thought of its impending, equally creature-like, slimy demise. Living in a chasm of Angst that spans between its laughably mortal origins and its God-like aspirations, the human being is prepared to cling to anything that promises salvation. In a bid for immortality the slimy-but-reflective-creature-that-would-be-a-God creates, and clings and submits to ‘meaning systems’ which allow it to delude itself comfortably. The ‘meaning systems’ provide the terrorised human being with the delusion that its life does indeed have meaning, and that a life lived within the bounds of its ‘meaning system’ does in a way promise some level of almost divine immortality. But with such a groundswell of sheer anxiety underpinning the creature-that-would-be-God, leading to its unrelenting investment in ‘death denying’ ‘meaning systems’, or ‘immortality projects’, any threat to the latter is likely to be met with violence and righteous slaughter. There is not a million miles between Freud’s Totemic Law and Becker’s notion of ‘immortality project’. And as Mark Featherstone has discussed here, in his reflections on inter alia Nazi art and the Nazi imaginary more broadly, the more such immortality projects delude themselves that they are able to access and preserve the absolute purity of a divine Real, the deadlier the consequences. Woe to those that are impure and that do not fit!

Experience

In his contribution to this collection Patrick Van Calster revisits prehistoric humanity. It turns out that at the very dawn of humanity—Freud’s and Becker’s focus as well—violence, warfare, and atrocity was already very much in the mind’s eye of the emerging reflective, institutive human being who, with his band of brothers (assuming warfare was indeed a male undertaking), was readying himself for the battle to institute their totemic Law. It was also very much in the eye of the mourning human being who, after the slaughter, by torchlight, gazed at the scenes depicted on cave walls, trying to make sense of what on earth had happened, and what on earth might still be going on. Whether French historian and philosopher George Bataille should be consulted here to make sense of this cave art, as Van Calster suggests, remains to be seen. But Bataille did have a point. The human being may be harbouring an ineradicable inclination to cling to destructive meaning systems and immortality projects, as Becker would have argued, as a mere creature this human being is also very much drawn to what Bataille (1957) called ‘continuous life’. Continuous life is life before or beyond the functional and divisive (‘discontinuous’) strictures of civilisation, or Totemic law. It is life at the most basic biological level. The warrior who in his mind’s eye sees the slaughter unfold and the troglodyte who then studies the patches of paint on the cave’s wall may both have been engaging in ‘continuous life’, that is, in a purely sensory manner, and in a bid to achieve a level of ‘sovereignty’ away from the totem’s functional structures and its Law. But they may also have been contemplating the loss, and the institution of their totemic law instead. Or, more likely perhaps, as the creature-that-wanted-to-be-a-God, they may have been doing both at the same time. The historical record shows that scenes similar to those that took place in prehistoric Lascaux have played out thousands of times since the dawn of humanity. Seeing, and sensing Francisco Goya’s The Third May of 1808 , or his prints on the Disasters of War , is probably as gripping an experience as those gone through by our early ancestors in their caves. It is as reflective or contemplative an experience—a ruminative one, one could say—as it is a sensory one. As mournful an experience as it is a hopeful one.

Some of the contributors to this collection are writing from a background in criminology. There is in this author’s opinion scope for a ‘sensory criminology’ (Lippens 2017), that is, a criminology that not just tries to get to grips with the aesthetic and sensory experience of life, but that, at the same time, also realises that in aesthetic and sensory...