The red badge of authenticity: a review of Regarding the Pain of Others.

Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan SONTAG. New York., Picador, 2003, 131 pages/$11.00

    "War is the father of all things"--Heraclitus

The era of mass media has allowed certain women to establish unique niches for themselves as arbiters of taste, fashion and morality. Operating outside of, or apart from, the heavy male hitters of academe and other venues of institutionalized aestheticism and comportment, figures such as the still authoritative Martha Stewart, Julia Childs, Dear Abby, Miss Manners and Doctor Joyce Brothers have brought Modernism to the masses by offering advice, solace, and in the case of someone like Oprah, the elevation of a folkish sensibility into what used to be called middle-brow taste. No longer confined to the private salons and drawing rooms of their eighteenth and nineteenth century predecessors, these women have connected especially well with audiences left confused by rapid changes in technology, social and sexual mores, politics and family life--audiences unanchored to either working class traditions or the spiritual stability and inner peace that only old money can buy.

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To be sure, few of these doyennes have set about to position themselves in the upper reaches of the cultural stratosphere quite so self-consciously as Susan Sontag. Essayist, novelist, playwright and short story writer, reviewer, even filmmaker, Sontag has become the closest that the field of American belles-lettres has to what the French used to call a maitre de pensee, someone of the stature of a Claude Levi-Strauss, Michel Foucault or Jacques Lacan, someone who must be read less for pleasure than out of sheer obligation. Publishing at a steady if unprolific clip, Sontag now appears in The New Yorker, The New York Times and The New York Review of Books, as the cosmopolitan intellectual become accessible, commenting on a range of contemporary concerns that move well beyond the field of high art. She has taken on the persona of what the ancient Roman republic would have recognized as a "censor," a guardian of collective taste and morality, a public intellectual, and as such, the member of an endangered species whose distinguished predecessors have include John Dewey, Lewis Mumford, Christopher Lasch, Robert Jay Lifton and her contemporary Noam Chomsky. Now largely replaced by media pundits or credentialed talking heads on TV news specials, special interest think-tank ideologues and technical specialists, public intellectuals once functioned, if not flourished, under conditions which now seem obsolete, i.e. a literate audience, academic careerism and hyper-specialization, and above all, a contemporary suspicion of all claims to moral certainty. Still, Sontag maintains a remainder of that niche for herself so that reading her almost satisfies on the level of pure nostalgia.

The traditionally tight-knit community of fine art and documentary photography has generally held Sontag at a suspicious arm's length, when it deals with her at all. Sontag is not 'one of us,' not someone who has ever worked as a photographer, ever published or exhibited, someone who certainly knows how to pose for a portrait but has no apparent knowledge of or interest in telling one f/stop from another. Even Beaumont Newhall and John Szarkowski came trailing with clouds of darkroom fumes behind them, A.D. Coleman was semi-hip, and Andy Grunberg impressed one as dour but still sympathique. But Sontag operates out of a decidedly European-inflected literary sensibility, and she has morphed from the free-spirited, liberating aesthete of Against Interpretation (1966) into the perceived slash-and-burn antagonist of On Photography (1977). Nor is she easy to pigeonhole. For example, Sontag has never overtly identified herself with any kind of programmatic feminism, preferring to position herself well above the fray while alluding to decidedly feminist themes in her novel In America (2000). The terms "Modernism" and "Post-Modernism" have apparently never passed her lips. Yet like Martha Rossler, Janet Malcom, and even Laura Mulvey, she remains the elephant in the (dark)room, a kind of eminence grise, difficult to understand or ignore.

Sontag's latest forays into photography are the paperback release of Regarding the Pain of Others and "The Photographs Are Us," an article that appeared in the May 23 (2004) edition of The New York Times Sunday Magazine. The former originated as a lecture delivered at Oxford University and, like many works in this genre, conveys the sense of someone of interest being asked to think out loud. It is Sontag at her best and worst, making huge and provocative generalizations, choosing a few ready examples to buttress her points, coining a phrase and using the novelist's prerogative in claiming to speak for everyone in her constructed universe. Here, at least, she makes plain the basis of her hostility towards photography as "both a faithful copy or transcription of an actual moment of reality and an interpretation of that reality--a feat literature has long aspired to, but could never attain in this literal sense" (p. 26)

Moreover, photography is the only major art in which professional training and years of experience do not confer an insuperable advantage over the untrained and inexperienced, and for many reasons, among them the large role that chance (or luck) plays in the taking of pictures, and the bias toward the spontaneous, the rough, the imperfect. (There is no comparable level playing field in literature, where virtually nothing owes to chance or luck and where refinement or language usually incurs no penalty; or in the performing arts, where genuine achievement is unattainable without exhaustive training and daily practice; or in filmmaking, which is not guided to any significant degree by the anti-art prejudices of much of contemporary art photography (pp. 28-29).

Clearly, such envy requires little evidence by way of support; it appears to speak for itself and Sontag badly asks the reader to take it at her word. That the professional careers of most photographers such as the recently deceased Cartier-Bresson refute every one of these points seems irrelevant. The editors, publishers and author of these sentiments have apparently decided to 'let Sontag be Sontag,' a degree of literary license few others would be permitted to exercise or claim.

Another strange element needs pointing out before addressing Sontag's main thesis. The book begins oddly enough, by citing correspondence between Virginia Woolf and an unnamed attorney regarding the potential power of disturbing images to prevent another war. It is an interesting and historically instructive place to start any meditation on combat-related photography, perhaps as good as any other, but Sontag underscores Woolf's suspicion that men and women come to the topic from irrevocably different perspectives insofar as warfare represents a quintessentially male activity, a field of action in which men can find fulfillment and gratification. Sontag ends her book with the follow-up question, "Is there an antidote to the perennial seductiveness of war?" and immediately adds, "And is this a question a woman is more likely to pose than a man? (Probably yes.)" (p. 122). The bellicose Golda Meir, Indira Ghandi and Margaret Thatcher aside, this supposed dichotomy should have cautioned Sontag to further examine her assumption of a homogenous and universal audience for photography, an assumption that has served as an ideological underpinning of the visual arts since the invention of optical perspective in the fifteenth century. Mark Twain famously cautioned that only editors, royalty and people with tapeworms were entitled to speak of "we," but Sontag obeys no such cautions. Hence a style which comes across as supremely self-confident, yet often reckless with the facts. She writes from a perspective that could charitably be identified as phenomenological, or less charitably as entirely impressionistic and ultimately self-absorbed.

The second striking oddity, for a book primarily about photography, is the use of one of Goya's etchings from his series The Disasters of War (1863), and specifically a highly cropped plate depicting one of Napoleon's grenadiers contemplating a hanged Spanish civilian, with equal measures of emotional detachment and self-satisfaction. To be sure, Sontag does reference Goya, yet only within the framework of a breezy 18-page tour through the entire history of war-related imagery that illustrates the various forms of violence done to the human body. "In each instance, the gruesome invites us to be either spectators or cowards, unable to look" (p. 42). But she also argues that the immediacy of the camera's gaze means that photographs are less involved with "the artist's skill of eye and hand" than with the "shame and shock in looking at the close-up of a real horror" (ibid.).

On another disappointing note Sontag, who once promoted the works of New Wave French novelists and filmmakers, now joins the same anti-Gallic bandwagon that has everyone from the U.S. Senate lunchroom to Jack-In-The-Box searching for more 'patriotic' terms for pommes frites. Sontag, the one-time fan and promoter of Sartre, Artaud, Godard, Robbe-Grillet, Resnais, Barthes and Levi-Strauss, now stoops to pot shots at the French, "licensed to be hyperbolic as the English are to understate" (p. 107) and prone to Post Modern beliefs in hyper-reality as "something of a French specialty" (p. 109), not to mention the superficial analysis of "several "French day-trippers to Saravejo during the siege" (p. 110) of the most recent Balkan war.

Finally, the book also abounds with weird asides, in the form of strange parenthetical remarks, footnotes and oddly placed zingers. Discussing the brief post-World War I popularity of pacifism, Sontag observes that "even Freud and Einstein were drawn into the debate" on the origins of war (p.5). "Even"? But if the founders of psychoanalysis and atomic energy had not joined the discussion, wouldn't that have been more remarkable? The footnotes offer a treasury of tangential information, such as the fact that French author Simone Weil died in a British sanatorium (p. 12), the number of British casualties during the Battle of the Somme (p. 25), a two-paragraph history of the aerial bombardment of civilian populations (pp. 30-31), a positive comparison of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage over Walt Whitman's poem "Drum-Taps" (p. 52), Walker Evan's distaste for the work of Margaret Bourke-White (p. 77), a capsule review of Andy Warhol's silk screens (p. 101), the first publications of Robert Capa's photographs of a Spanish Republican falling from a bullet wound (p. 33), the British bombing of Kurdish villages in the 1920's (p. 67), and trends in contemporary war museum design (p. 102). Any reader hoping for a coherent, linear form of exposition will find their head spinning among the mixture of mystifying miscellany that peppers this text. If anything, Sontag's style can only be described as hectoring, more sniping than frontal attack, irritating and occasionally maddening in its circumlocution. One is never quite sure about exactly what she wants to say, just that she insists on chipping away at received wisdom and conventional sensibilities. There may be a calm center to this hurricane of words, but readers are certainly challenged to find it. And what is one to do with the oh-so-clever title of the book, which puns on "regarding" as both a visual and cognitive facility?

But on to the general crux of Sontag's concerns. In the first chapter of Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag lays out the observation that even photographs of the worst atrocities remain powerless to prevent armed conflict, and may be used to reinforce of inflame militancy as much as incite abhorrence of the unforgiving destructiveness of war. Despite or perhaps because of their graphic portrayal of war's bloody ruin, "all photographs wait to be explained or falsified by their captions" (p. 10), which is again to say that they depend upon the written word for the assignment of their meaning. From here, Sontag embarks on a critique of war photography as a species of news reporting and therefore as compressed, biased and almost wholly impressionistic. The dangers that Sontag sees here are that representations get so confused with actuality that images become the basic frame of reference for perception, memory and interpretation in modern society. "The understanding of war among people who have not experienced war is now chiefly a product of the impact of these [photographic] images" (p.21) published in the daily news. Here Sontag asserts that still photographs, far more than video or film clips, stand in the place of memory, compacting information so that "The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb" (p. 22), that is, an easily processed and mentally portable overgeneralization. And what the photograph of war memorizes is shock, but at such a prolific rate as to approach "normality."

Meditating on a synoptic art history of images of torture and mutilation. Sontag now adds that "there is shame as well as shock in looking at the close-up of a real horror" (p. 40). Comparing a Goya etching of a war-related facial mutilation to its photographic equivalent, Sontag draws the corollary that "Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it-say, the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph was taken, or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be" (p. 42), a theme she reiterates at the conclusion of this book. From there Sontag jumps to another subject, that of the deliberate staging and manipulation of war photographs for maximum dramatic effect, which strangely now "seems on its way to becoming a lost art," (p.58) as though that involved not a gain in truthfulness but a loss in the audience's suspension of disbelief in the camera's literalism. Yet Sontag offers little proof that media-saturated and savvy audiences have ever looked at photographs with that level of naivete.

Continuing on in this vein, Sontag offers a precis on the censorship of war photography by military authorities bent on maintaining public support and morale. As has been recognized since the battlefield reporting began, the first casualty of any war is truth, but for Sontag there is no modern war without photography either. Insofar as photography provides the prime standard against which the objectivity of reporting gets measured, it is simultaneously caught up in considerations about national security, aesthetic taste and propriety, and what Sontag describes as "belief in the inevitability of tragedy in the benighted or backward--that is poor--parts of the world" (p.71). "Generally, the grievously injured bodies shown in published photographs are from Asia or Africa. This journalistic custom inherits the centuries-old practice of exhibiting exotic--this is, colonized-human beings" (p.72), as opposed to images of the American war dead whose faces and mutilated bodies are often obscured through any number of optical devices.

By the middle of this book Sontag is now ready to address the thorny issue of the artistic value of war photography, thorny because "morally alert photographers and ideologues of photography have been increasingly concerned with the issues of exploitation of sentiment (pity, compassion, indignation) in war photography and of rote ways of provoking feeling" (p.80). Here Sontag contrasts aesthetics with morality, an old Puritan perspective: "Beautifying is one classic operation of the camera, and it tends to bleach out a moral response to what is shown." Instead, "For photographs to accuse, and possibly to alter conduct, they must shock" (p. 81). Yet even so, "Shock can become familiar. Shock can wear off. Even if it doesn't, one can not look ... As one can become habituated to horror in real life, one can become habituated to the horror of certain images" (p.82). The only saving grace here lies again in words because "People want to weep. Pathos, in the form of a narrative, does not wear out" (p.83). Without words, photographs remain "the visual equivalent of sound bites" (p.86). Sontag even goes one step further by declaiming that "all images that display the violation of an attractive body are, to a certain degree, pornographic" (p.95), titillating and perversely erotic. For Sontag, this helps trap us, the viewers, in a state of apathy, passivity and gratitude that we are witnesses rather than victims of the world's cruelty.

Finally, Sontag begins winding down the book by referencing themes that she first asserted in On Photography. The first is that the media selectivity of images frames general concepts of what constitutes "real" wars as opposed to marginal armed conflicts. The second is that rather than "shock and awe," such images produce shock and numbness, compassion fatigue, and narcotized state of mind. The plethora of atrocity pictures first heightens and then flattens by creating a "culture of spectatorship" (p.105). But in a gesture of public auto-critique somehow reminiscent of French intellectuals of the 1970s, Sontag rejects both positions; "To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breath-taking provincialism. It universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment" (p. 110). And the tendency to dismiss the politically activist potential of war photographs contains its own quietist political agenda, such that "Citizens of modernity, consumers of violence as spectacle, adepts of proximity without risk, are schooled to be cynical about the possibility of sincerity" (p.111).

Sontag concludes "with the understanding that moral indignation, like compassion, cannot dictate a course of action," (p. 117) and only results in frustration and anger. Only seriousness and narrative can save us because "narrative seems likely to be more effective than an image. Partly it is a question of the length of time one is obliged to look, to feel" (p.122). Yet in the end, even narrative comes across as futile because both readers and viewers do not get it. We truly cannot imagine what it was like. We cannot imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Cannot understand, cannot imagine. That is what every soldier; and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right (pp.125-126).

Does Sontag number herself among those who "get it"? The answer can be found in her book Illness as Metaphor as well as her essay "Why Are We In Kosovo?" (New York Times Magazine, May 2, 1999, pp. 52-55); the latter illustrated with photographs. In both instances Sontag places herself as an insider, as one who knows from the direct experience of being there. It was her own bout with cancer that, Sontag tells, allowed her to unpack the similes, analogies and other pejorative figures of speech that stigmatized that illness to the point of making people reluctant to seek early diagnosis and medical intervention. And the three years she spent in Sarajevo tempted her to now criticize a "geographyless American's friend vision of European countries being only slightly larger than postage stamps" (p.52), and blast away at America's willful ignorance of the genocide perpetuated upon the Bosnian people and their attempt to create a multiethnic Balkan democracy.

So it is as one who has lived through both forms of suffering first-hand that Sontag locates perhaps the last possible bastion of moral certainty in an era of philosophical relativism: the expertise and emotional authenticity that can only be generated by personal suffering and proximity to death. Photography, at its best, can only allude to that reality; at its worst, turn it into a mirror-house of images that allow for emotional detachment and denial. There is something quite Romantic, let alone existentialist about this cri de coeur in the face of an indifferent, unbelieving and hedonistic world. It also makes for good copy, and literary careers based on reputations for "telling it like it is" with unmediated, uncompromising honesty.

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If Regarding the Pain of Others indicts war photography's claims of delivering that honesty, Sontag's follow-up essay on the Abu Ghraib photographs, "The Photographs Are Us" (New York Times Sunday Magazine, May 23, 2004, pp.25-42) takes the additional step of asserting that digital photography has universalized "the deep satisfaction of being photographed, to which one is now more inclined to respond not with a stiff, direct gave (as in former times) but with glee. The events are in part designed to be photographed. The grin is a grin for the camera." Therefore, the Abu Ghraib photos were taken as an integral and even sexualized part of the process of torturing Iraqi prisoners. "There would be something missing if, after stacking the naked men, you couldn't take a picture of them ... An erotic life is, for more and more people, that whither can be captured in digital photographs and on video" (p.27). Rather than treat the solider-generated photos as uncensored counter-images to those taken by the officially "embedded" photojournalists, Sontag throws up her hands at the Republican administration which has declared an "endless war" against terrorism, which can only produce "thousands more snapshots and videos. Unstoppable" (p.42).

Here, and in some shorter pieces in the New Yorker and the New York Times, Sontag stands at the confluence of two trains of thought: contempt for the so-called excesses of democratic societies, and concerns with American imperialism and the projected emergence of a globalized Pax Americana. The first of these is aesthetic, the second political, but both inform her ambivalently negative attitudes towards still photography. The "excess of democracy" thesis originally took root among left-leaning existentialists during the 1920s and 30s when, reeling from the First World War and the rise of Fascism, writers such as Henri Bergson, Otto Spengler, Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Ortega y Gasset and even members of the Frankfurt School influenced widespread denunciations of modernism's tendencies toward massification, alienation and dehumanization in every sphere of public and private life. Heidegger and Ortega dwelt particularly on the trivialization of everyday conversation, an exchange of idle chatter in which each participant feels equally entitled to voice intellectually empty ideas. The cultural elitist in Sontag (a considerable part of her authorial voice) similarly despises photographs as too easy to produce as cheap opinions, subjective claims to what was important in the photographer's eyes disguised as reports of tangible and hence significant slices of reality. But, Sontag warns, not everything can be important although photography perpetuates the fantasy and illusion that it can.

Secondly, in several public appearances and a few written pieces, Sontag raises the issue of how the United States has taken on the role of what one could call a stealth empire, assuming the mantle of imperium under the guise of spreading free market and political democracy. This has become an increasing preoccupation of figures on both the left and the right, beginning with G.W. Bush's frank declaration of "American internationalism." Rejoinders to this Pax Americana have been issued by Gore Vidal (The Decline and Fall of the American Empire, Odonian Press, 1992), Noam Chomsky (Hegemony or Survival, Metropolitan Books, 2003) and), Chalmers Johnson (The Sorrows of Empire, Metropolitan Books, 2004), among others, with both sides agreeing that globalization also entails the doctrine of pre-emptive military action, the projected of military and economic dominance in every strategic part of the globe regardless of treaties or other obligations, and the reformulation of America as a national security state. For her part, Sontag raises the specter of "the extension of power by a state that believes it cannot be challenged" either domestically or abroad ("War: Real Battles and Empty Metaphors," New York Times Op-Ed, September 10, 2002). The kind of Family of Man photography that promotes an upbeat "love conquers all" sentimentality Sontag finds morally reprehensible in its naivete. And, she contends, even the most accurate, fair-minded reporting of news fails to yield any historical perspective that would allow Americans to finally understand their unwitting roles in the fundamental transformation of our own institutions in the name of security from further terrorist attacks.

Unfortunately for most readers, especially those involved with photography, all this could have been issued as a challenge rather than a pessimistic and convoluted condemnation. For example, Sontag could call for a reinvention of the photo-essay, a format which favors complexity and the synthesis between words and images, rather than dwell on the individual image as she does. She might also acknowledge that since the set up of the military reserve system in the aftermath of Vietnam, warfare is not as distant an experience for Americans who now see their family members, colleagues and employees effectively conscripted to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan. And contrary to her assertion that the photographs taken in Abu Ghraib "Are Us," she might remind herself that George Bush never earned the popular vote in the 2000 election, and that the public still remains highly divided on the question of Iraq. Finally, Sontag could offer something more than personal sensibility, or the generalization of her own perceptions into moral and aesthetic fiat; a bit of mass media audience reception theory would certainly with some reality-testing here.

Sontag should at least entertain the idea that the rise of torture, in the modern, bureaucraticized and systematic sense of the Counter-Reformation and Spanish Inquisition, at least coincides with the widespread growth of printed texts and literacy, rather than imagery. And unlike the many moralists who insist on "ought" instead of "is," Sontag might acknowledge that in a mediadominated culture, where war photographs will continue to be printed and broadcast, perhaps the best one can do is educate oneself and others in the kinds of critical thinking and viewing skills that, once sparked by the voice of conscience that Sontag attempts to represent, might help catalyze opposition to the spectacle and actuality of modern warfare, terrorist and otherwise. But that would involve speaking with an audience of viewers and photographers, rather than at them. It's not exactly Sontag's strong suit.

PETER WOHLHEIM, PhD. is an Associate Professor in the Department of Commuication and the Canadian Studies program at Boise State University.