In Praise of Thought: The Spectacle of War
Through the lens of Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism, and Susan Sontag’s On Photography and Regarding the Pain of Others
*Articles and references cited in-text via hyperlink are also provided at the end of this essay.
Photography has become less a means of recording life and more a way of experiencing it. With the proliferation of the internet, a global cache of images has emerged, an evident byproduct being the illumination of realities outside of our own—especially realities of suffering. Is it ethical to watch another suffer from afar? Is it ethical to look away? If awareness of another's suffering is to be realized through the recording of it, one would be keen to approach such images—and the way they are framed—with a thoughtful eye.
In Susan Sontag’s essay On Photography, published in 1977, she urged viewers to approach photographs like any other art: as an interpretation of reality that cannot be divorced from an artist’s intentions. A photographer indeed frames a moment through a lens of belief, can retake an image repeatedly until a certain intent is conveyed. In this way, Sontag saw a photograph as a record stripped of context, framed to reveal not necessarily what is, but rather what the artist wishes it to reveal.
Sontag went further. She wrote of the camera as an aggressive apparatus that can be wielded over a subject. A photographer, she argued, creates a digital catalogue of ascribed value by determining what in a scene is important, and by exclusion, what is not; they seek to define beauty (and in many cases, strive to make everything beautiful, including violence and suffering). In this way, Sontag saw photography as a tool of dominance. She wrote, “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power (On Photography 542).”
On Photography was written in the midst of the Vietnam War. Sontag certainly recognized photography’s inherent journalistic value, acknowledging its importance as a necessary record of world atrocities—especially poverty, abuse, and war. But she questioned whether it held an ability to conjure empathy where there is none; she did not believe an image could sway an opposing moral belief: “To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate (On Photography 542).”
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Empathy is an act of imagination. When one seeks to understand another through empathy—to place oneself in another’s “position—” one imagines a particular scenario or circumstance as if it happened to them. They may do so through the use of photography, but also through cinema, books, or perhaps even memory, recalling a personal experience in hopes of eliciting some parallel feeling. Therefore, one’s capacity for empathy is completely proportional to one’s own depth of imagination.
In many ways, it makes sense that someone would relate more readily to someone that looks like them, has experienced similar trauma or triumph, or is part of the same religion, culture, or background; the imagination would naturally be less limited in its capacity. There are those who find it imperative to continuously seek expansion to the limits of their imagination; these are the “empaths” among us. But there are many who find their own walls comforting, choose to reside happily within a narrowness of belief.
Art can serve as an essential pathway to a broader imagination. Images seek to challenge how we see ourselves and each other; images can be visceral. Yet there is no substitute for direct experience. Though we will all endure some level of pain, loss, and grief—difficult but useful emotions to draw from in empathy—there will always be certain events that remain wholly unimaginable without a direct presence, no matter the number of pictures taken, videos recorded, or novels written.
The unimaginable and unfathomable will always include oppression, occupation, and more acutely, war.
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Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism was published in 1979 as a scathing indictment of what he viewed as America’s increasing narcissism. In particular, he saw the Nixon era as a turning point for what he called a “spectacle of politics,” where the image of political leadership became substitute for any inherent substance of policy or action. With Nixon, media and information became the ultimate vehicle for political theater; Nixon’s desire to assert control over his own image so superseded any substance of his presidency that it became his eventual downfall, culminating in the infamous Watergate scandal. Lasch wrote of this kind of societal abstraction of representation over substance as ultimately leading to a deep sense of unreality for politicians and citizens alike: “But the substitution of symbolically mediated information for immediate experience—of pseudo-events for real events—has not made government more rational and efficient, as both the technocrats and their critics assume. On the contrary, it has given rise to a pervasive air of unreality, which ultimately befuddles the decision makers themselves. (The Culture of Narcissism 97).”
When Lasch was writing in 1979, photographs were certainly utilized in visual media to moderate information, mold ideas of “truth.” But print was still widely relevant. Today, image reigns over print as an irrefutable arbiter of fact, which Sontag noted should stoke pause. Context, she noted, is the essential foundation of an image. We should not only investigate who procures the images we consume, but also how the images are framed within a larger narrative by both media and government.
Sontag was concerned about a photograph’s exploitative nature, fearful that life mediated by images would lead to the same “unreality” Lasch wrote of. She noted, “Except for those situations in which the camera is used to document, or to mark social rites, what moves people to take photographs is finding something beautiful (On Photography 587).” She feared that a photograph meant to illuminate suffering would ultimately be used or repurposed as an aesthetic representation of suffering, rather than to communicate the reality of suffering itself. “Cameras miniaturize experience, transform history into spectacle. As much as they create sympathy, photographs cut sympathy, distance the emotions (On Photography 587).”
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In Gaza today, civilians turned journalists—some as tender as 9—are using press vests and cell phones to record their own unfolding tragedies. In other instances, civilians are recording and uploading videos directly or sending them to local journalists as sources. Journalists and their families in Gaza have been under constant threat, many have been killed in targeted attacks. And yet Western media has been reluctant to use or even investigate their reports as verified sources. Worse yet, flagrant censorship by social media platforms (namely Meta) has continuously removed Palestinian “content.”
We have seen a confluence of mediated information met with unmediated access to the focus of the media’s frenzy. We are bearing witness to a world event covered by camera phones in the hands of civilians on the ground. What do we make of these images—recorded evidence that is otherwise excluded from government and corporate-sanctioned sources (sources we are traditionally taught to trust?) How do we reconcile a record captured on the ground that directly refutes official “information?”
The images and video coming out of Gaza today present a novel spectacle—a spectacle of war—and we are granted front seat access to the ensuing horror: terrorizing images that uncover the gruesome reality of military bombardment. Previous images of war were often framed by outside journalists to be published in editorially run newspapers— photographs that were static, glossy, well-framed. Excruciating in their intimacy and immediacy, the images from Gaza today, broadcasted directly to the internet, lay bare a true brutality of war and serve to assuage Sontag’s fears; these are not aesthetically haunting images in so much as the content haunts. There is no beauty framed in videos of women and children shot point blank while sheltering in a school; or in a child’s head severed from a bomb indiscriminately dropped to level an entire neighborhood; nor in a child’s gauged out eye or flesh burnt to the bone by white phosphorus. There is only true and unbearable repulsiveness.
These images should stun us. Sontag remained steadfast that a photograph could never speak for itself. “What the moralists are demanding from a photograph is that it do what no photograph can ever do—speak (On Photography 605).” She argued context as imperative. A photograph’s presentation in the media is not the only relevant context; an image lives within an invisible historical background, one that is acutely relevant and often detrimentally ignored. Images of Palestinian and Israeli suffering alike share a painful history.
The media has attempted to frame this mortifying spectacle—a child’s voice crying out from under rubble; a toddler’s skull blown open exposing tender brain matter; a shocked mother attempting to shake her lifeless child awake in vein—in a way that deems it not only justifiable, but more severely, not quite real. Sontag previously warned, “Photographs cannot create a moral position, but they can reinforce one—and can help build a nascent one (On Photography 540).” And Lasch warned us of spectacle: there is a real fear that a digital war viewed through a fractured virtual reality might degrade its victims.
Certainly, in order for such atrocities to occur in plain view, a campaign of dehumanization is required. “Human shields,” “terrorists,” and “collateral damage” are the carefully considered language that has built a bedrock for our theater of war. Certain children are positioned in the media as nameless faces we watch suffer in detachment—children of the “enemy," perhaps—while others are placed on the front page as sympathetic protagonists.
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In 2003, a year before her death, Sontag published an addendum to On Photography. With time and age came wisdom and a meditation on the more essential nature of photography—notably, war photography—as well as a continued reckoning of the voyeur, the Western eye of privilege watching suffering from afar. Regarding the Pain of Others was written in response to Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas, answering the question: “How in your opinion are we to prevent a war? (Regarding the Pain of Others 9).”
Sontag was writing on the precipice of war in Iraq, with the clarity of distance from the Vietnam War and Bosnian genocide. She was also writing in the wake of September 11th, an event that would eventually lead to our ideological war on “terror,” where we would unleash our own form of terror on millions of innocent civilians. (Note the semantic dichotomy often used by the United States: “terror” when our citizens are killed by a foreign entity; “necessary,” “accidental,” and “unavoidable” when we inflict similar carnage on innocents elsewhere.) For Sontag, world events would have undoubtedly clarified her position on photography and urged her to consider its more essential value: as a device to bring awareness to suffering and, hopefully, through awareness prevent such atrocities in the future.
Near the end of Sontag’s life, enough atrocity had occurred—continues to occur—that Sontag restructured her thinking. In Regarding the Pain of Others, she concluded that regardless of one's privilege of distance—or perhaps because of it—looking away from another’s suffering is not a moral option.
She ultimately rejected the fear that images of suffering would anesthetize. Instead she concluded: What other option do we have? “Images have been reproached for being a way of watching suffering at a distance, as if there were some other way of watching. But watching up close—without the mediation of an image—is still just watching (Regarding the Pain of Others 121).” We may never know the utter destruction of a bomb—the panic of being buried alive beneath rubble; the piercing pain of shrapnel entering flesh; or the unfathomable agony of having a limb amputated without anesthesia—without personal experience. “We don’t get it. We truly can’t imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can’t understand, can’t imagine (Regarding the Pain of Others 129).
If it is happening to anyone, anywhere—it is our human obligation to bear witness. It is our responsibility to not look away. Palestinians have been forced to perform their very real suffering for our empathy, in an appeal that we stop killing them. It has been the ultimate humiliation, the apex of our country’s terroristic crimes. Regardless of our perceived inability to "help," Sontag urged, “Such images cannot be more than an invitation to pay attention." An image of suffering challenges us, asks of us: “Who caused what the picture shows? Who is responsible? Is it excusable? Was it inevitable? Is there some state of affairs which we have accepted up to now that ought to be challenged? (Regarding the Pain of Others 120.)”
Because so many doubt the Palestinian existence—a well-documented occupation, a 16-year blockade, a history of prolonged psychological and physical terror, the persistent and illegal destruction of their homes, and blatant false arrests and unlawful detainments—the least we can do is be present to their story. The world doubts Palestinians still as they film their own death.
To look away is to justify the slaughter of more than 20,000 people, an estimated 70% of the death toll reserved for women and children. To look away is a choice. To hold one’s own fragile narcissism—the privilege to disconnect, the audacity to deny—above another’s suffering is a choice. Yet choice begets consequence. To refuse to bear witness to an atrocity, however far away, is to choose a world where it is acceptable, under any circumstance, for an army to murder more than 8,000 innocent children.
We are collectively constructing the world we must share; we will all certainly be held to the same standards we accept for another. I suspect more suffering for us all.
Sources:
Tantura, documentary by Israeli filmmaker Alon Schwarz; tantura-film.com.
"Gaza media office says 100 journalists killed since Israeli attacks began;" aljazeera.com.
"Video shows dozens of bodies after alleged attack at UN-run school in Gaza;" cnn.com.
"Rain of Fire: Israel's Unlawful Use of White Phosphorus in Gaza;" Human Rights Watch, hrw.org.
"As Gaza Hospitals Collapse, Medical Workers Face the Hardest Choices;" nytimes.com.
"Israel's Occupation: 50 Years of Dispossession;" Amnesty.org.
"Timeline: the humanitarian impact of the Gaza blockade;" oxfam.org.
"A Palestinian Poets Perilous Journey Out of Gaza;" newyorker.com.
"Israel demolishes Palestinian homes near separation wall;" www.aljazeera.com.
"Israel/OPT: Horrifying cases of torture and degrading treatment of Palestinian detainees amid spike in arbitrary arrests;" amnesty.org.
"Gaza death toll: why counting the dead has become a daily struggle;" reuters.com.
"'War is stupid and I want it to end:' Injured Palestinian children speak;" aljazeera.com.
President Biden sued for complicity in Israel's genocide in Gaza; aljazeera.com.
Wikipedia: Palestinian genocide accusation.
Books and Essays: