readings: Regarding the Pain of Others

Regarding the Pain of Others
May 16, 2003

Live, from Baghdad, the first act of Shock and Awe, brought to your living room by CNN/Al-Jazeera/BBC vicariously as the ultimate reality-TV hit show. Upon witnessing the brightly lit Baghdad sky on CNN, "Susan Sontag":http://www.susansontag.com said, "[I]t makes me ill. It makes me fearful. I begin to tremble a little...because I remember the fear that you feel on the ground when the sky is like that." (discussing war "with Bill Moyers":http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_sontag.html) In the media-savvy age, we cannot live a day without tuning in, or looking at the scenes and photographs of turmoil from all over the world. Most recently, we were bombarded by the media representation of the war in Iraq. Whether they represented the display of military might, or suffering of the receiving end, they were the two aspects of the same presence. These images invoked different emotional experiences in all of us�horror, fear, anger, sadness, or arrogance. And at some point, we numbed ourselves against them, and exposed ourselves to the beginning of forgetting and indifference. In her book, "Regarding the Pain of Others":http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0374248583/002-0842461-3823267, Sontag reveals a critical observation of the images of war and turmoil, and our rapacious appetite for them. She looks at the representation of suffering in photographs and how they are used, viewed, and misunderstood. In the early chapters she traces the history of the representation of war and turmoil from ages ago predating the invention of film. Then she offers some insights on the sometimes twisted career of photographs of suffering. The imageries of war forces us to seek a response that we think is proper from the vocabulary of memory, experiences and present feeling, and this vocabulary we shape from the selective experiences we take in, whether it is cultural, political or religious experiences�collective or personal. Sontag argues that the seldom objective nature of response retrieval can undermine the true nature and causes of suffering, and lead to misunderstanding of the situation. The author reminds us that for everything that appears obvious in a photograph, there is a portion that is hidden and implied, and she urges us to look for it to understand the represented better. It is not an easy task because we spectators are easily sealed in within the confines of the photos framed by editors, owners, politicians and popular wisdom. This reminds me of a passage written in the 12th century by an Islamic philosopher�Yahya Suhrawardi�on the rules of knowledge and definition:

The use of a word to signify its whole conventional meaning is called "intended signification." ...Its use to signify a concomitant of the meaning is called "concomitant signification." Signification by intention includes concomitant signification, because nothing in existence is without concomitants. � "The Philosophy of Illumination":http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0842524576/002-0842461-3823267

In other words, for everything that IS, all that it IS NOT accompanies the subject to complete its definition and representation. To be aware of only the obvious is to be exposed to only one side of the coin. Sontag also discusses the impact of the proximity of suffering on the truthful representation in the photograph. She illustrates from a series of examples that the closer it is to home, the representation of that suffering becomes less frank, or further detached. Which suffering is then worthy? Which is more represented? She ends the book with the difference between the images we see on television and elsewhere and what we get form them; and what really takes place in the environment of war:

These dead are supremely uninterested in the living, in those who took their lives and witnesses and in us. Why should they seek our gaze? What would they have to say to us? We, this we is everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went through. We don't understand. We don't get it. We truly can't imagine what it was like. We can't imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is and how normal it becomes. Can't understand. Can't imagine. That's what every soldier, 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.

War is spectacular for us to watch from a safe distance, but we need to bear in mind that there is the receiving end of this force facing the dreadful outcome�first-hand and in its totality�whatever our stand on war is...which brings me to the next book: "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning":http://think.patchesandmarble.com/archives/books//2003/05/000016.html. "Regarding the Pain of Others":http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0374248583/002-0842461-3823267 by "Susan Sontag":http://www.susansontag.com Published February 2003 ISBN: 0-374-24858-3

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