States of Matter. Image (mis)management

Writing in The New Yorker within days of the September 11 terror attacks, Susan Sontag pushed back against the “self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators”. Voices granted the licence to speak seemed intent on “a campaign to infantilise the public”.

By some unstated consensus, “cowardice” had attached itself to the attack as an epithet, though the word was “more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves”. Courage, said Sontag, was “a morally neutral value” and for all its repugnance, 9/11 was not an act of cowards.

Drawing the linkage that was strictly off-bounds in those fevered days, Sontag urged an acknowledgement that 9/11 was not about “civilisation” or “liberty”, but an “attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions”. It was tempting to ingest the bromides then being liberally dispensed, but people needed to guard against the collective sense of delusion a “robotic” President was fostering.

Sontag was soon reeling at the excoriation that followed, when she was called everything from a “traitor” to a “moral idiot” and a dupe for “Islamic fascism” who deserved to be “drawn and quartered”.

First priority for her was dispelling the accusation of having trivialised human suffering. But with all that, Sontag could not help wondering about the unstated consensus within the US media, to sanitise the more vivid images of devastation. With no public discussion of any sort, media executives seemed to have arrived at the “extraordinary consensus” that these images would be “demoralising for the country”.

In March 2003, Sontag published an extended meditation on how media images were a window through which people witnessed unspeakable horrors from afar. Regarding the Pain of Others was her last book, and by the time she died in December 2004, the US was deeply mired in Afghanistan and Iraq, fighting by the template established in the 1991 Gulf War, when all the public saw “were images of the techno war: the sky above the dying, filled with light-traces of missiles and shells — images that illustrated America’s absolute military superiority over its enemy”.

If at all there were horrors occurring on the ground, these were caused entirely by the enemy’s perfidy in placing civilians at the receiving end of the shower of righteous weaponry.

As the conflict metastasised into all-out ethnic warfare that spilled beyond designated theatres, the “powerful interdiction” against showing the dismembered human body ceased to apply. As Sontag put it, “the more remote or exotic the place, the more likely we are to have full frontal views of the dead and dying”. Sympathy and outrage at the barbarities a distant people inflict on each other are natural impulses. But there also is reassurance that those witnessing from a distance “are not accomplices to what caused the suffering”.

The stirring image sparks reflection, but also affords the luxury of elective action. A public interrogation could emerge out of this ambiguity and that was a risk the war strategists were unprepared for. Early in the military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US war lobby virtually banned the media — which by then had deeply internalised the virtue of acquiescence — from funeral ceremonies for fallen soldiers.

Media imagery created that bubble within which the righteous war was waged, but rather than quieten matters, only multiplied the rage of the other. In 2004, the al-Qaeda Islamic militia in Iraq published its manifesto, listing among its strategic principles, the need to draw the US into open battlefield engagements. Once the armies of the faithful began to inflict visible harm, the bubble would burst, inducing others who resented the invasion of their lands to join. Rather appropriately, the al-Qaeda manifesto, now an operational guide for the Islamic State militia, was titled ‘The Management of Savagery’.

Savagery is a strategic choice that plays variously within different audiences. It is a weapon in the hands of the militias that have proliferated in the vacuum caused by the collapse of state authority across a wide expanse of the Arab world.

A recent effort to leverage differences in perception was the deeply distressing picture of five-year-old Omran Daqneesh, wounded and dazed, after a particularly heavy bombing of the besieged Syrian city of Aleppo. Unlike three-year-old Aylan Kurdi, who drowned last year while fleeing Syria’s chaos, Omran survived, but his eyes were full of sadness and reproach at how the world had done nothing to stop the carnage.

It later emerged that the hauntingly vivid image had been carefully set up to stir the indifferent Western conscience. The shoot — a term that Sontag reminds us, suggests a disturbing likeness between the act of killing and the recording of it — was set up by a man earlier pictured in celebratory mood with a gang that had beheaded a 13-year-old boy. Within the domain of “elective action”, this was a political group intent on pre-empting Western choices.

Clearly, the war of images creates no sense of moral ascendancy. Indeed, it does little else than reinforce indifference, where every political group is seen as no better than another. As Sontag reminds us, the world since 9/11 has uniquely been about how certain “privileges are located on the same map” as the suffering of others. The war of images could temporarily obscure knowledge about how these are connected, but never banish it.

Sukumar Muralidharan is an independent writer and researcher based in Gurgaon

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