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Article Excerpt
It seems a good in itself to acknowledge, to have enlarged, one's sense of how much suffering caused by human wickedness there is in the world we share with others.
--Susan Sontag
In 2003, Susan Sontag published Regarding the Pain of Others (RPO), her lyrical, incisive re-examination of the questions she had raised in the 1970s in On Photography (OP). In the later work, she uses Virginia Woolf's 1938 anti-war essay, Three Guineas, to frame her analysis, examining the way in which Woolf appealed to images of the Spanish Civil War to pursue her own questions about images depicting atrocity. In a brilliantly executed argument about the difference gender makes when responding to the horror--or supposed heroism---of war, Woolf appealed to images of physical destruction and human carnage as a way of establishing a neutral ground for thinking about the violence of war. According to Woolf, in Sontag's reading, images are capable of building a bridge across the gender divide concerning war and violence (RPO 4-5). In her analysis of Woolf's argument and its deployment of images, Sontag troubles the neutrality, the univocal nature, and the simplicity of photographs depicting human suffering. Sontag first disrupts the rhetorical "we" of Woolf's argument. As Sontag notes, the audience for these images of suffering includes those who have personally experienced the violence depicted, those opposed to war who have not personally suffered its ravages as well as those who have inflicted the pain (RPO 7-8). The complicated nature of the audience generates a variety of responses. Some will experience the images as a memorialization of loss and grief, others will experience them as an indictment of human cruelty and barbarism, while a few may experience them as an encouragement to continue fighting:
There are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding--at a distance, through the medium of photography--other people's pain. Photographs of an atrocity may give rise to opposing responses. A call lot peace. A cry for revenge. Or simply the bemused awareness, continually restocked by photographic information, that terrible things happen. (RPO 13)
After fleshing out the problematic clash of objectivity and subjectivity in photography, Sontag concludes her study of Woolf's treatment of images by quoting Woolf's statement that photographs "'are not an argument; they are simply a crude statement of fact addressed to the eye'" (26). As Sontag observes in opposition, "The truth is that [photographs] are not 'simply' anything, and certainly not regarded just as facts, by Woolf or anyone else" (26).
The remainder of Regarding the Pain of Others examines the moral challenges posed by this lack of simplicity in the photograph: the plurality of meanings which can be applied to images of suffering, the multiplicity of uses to which they can be put. As Sontag had written almost three decades prior, photographic images establish not only "a grammar [but], even more importantly, an ethics of seeing" (OP 3, emphasis added). For Sontag, photographic images have never been primarily interesting for reasons of aesthetics in a pure or formal sense, but always for reasons of morality and politics (OP 16-18, 23-24). In what ways do images of suffering shape, stir and suppress our moral imaginations and our understandings of the fact of human suffering? How, if at all, does an image of human suffering goad the conscience of the spectator to respond to that suffering? What kind of information, if any, does an image of human suffering give us? What is the relationship between looking at images of suffering and working to alleviate that suffering or to prevent subsequent suffering? Under what conditions do images of human suffering dull our moral sensibilities, inure us to the tragedy and horror of contemporary life on the planet and render us less and less willing to respond with compassionate acts toward the victims of violence, war, torture and cruelty? Because photographs of suffering do not have a simple nature or meaning, the ethical force of these images--the ways in which, consciously and unconsciously, we internalize them and respond to them--remains uncertain and unpredictable. Sontag's analysis of photographs depicting human suffering, therefore, is neither a naive championing of their power to generate a compassionate, non-violent politics of resistance nor a dogmatic proclamation of their ability to deaden ethical sensitivity to others' pain. Sontag's awareness of the complicated nature and function of images forces her to articulate a sophisticated moral assessment of images of human suffering. Sontag's analysis understands the risk associated with the circulation of images of suffering; the questions she poses have to do with the nature, scope and management of that risk.
Given that Sontag's concern is the relationship between images of human suffering and the ethical response to violence and cruelty, it seems that Christian theological meditations on the moral significance of the suffering of Christ and Christian martyrs as well as Christian understandings of the relationship between the believer and the images of such suffering could provide useful analytic touchstones. In Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag acknowledges that Christian images are part of the "long pedigree" of the "iconography of suffering" (RPO 40). Citing "the innumerable versions in painting and sculpture of the Passion of Christ, and the inexhaustible visual catalogue of the fiendish executions of the Christian martyrs," she acknowledges that Christian iconographies of suffering, as attempts to instruct, encourage and admonish, strive for an ethical change in the viewer (RPO 40-41). Sontag also acknowledges that Christian images of suffering, including both the Passion and the Pieta, provide formal structures for depicting the suffering and pain of others (RPO 79-81). In her discussion of Georges Bataille's understanding of images of suffering, she characterizes the interpretation of suffering as a transformative experience, as a religious sensibility regarding pain and violence (RPO 98-99). With this characterization, Sontag implicitly acknowledges that the notion that images of suffering could ever have an ethical influence is related, in some way, to a theological frame of reference. Sontag fails, however, to give any detailed attention to the range of understandings of images of suffering available in the Christian tradition. Not only are her references to Christianity infrequent (they are, in fact, limited to those just mentioned), her characterization of Christianity's understanding of suffering is fairly simplistic. In her reading, the value of suffering in the Christian imaginary is always linked with sacrifice and martyrdom. At the same time, Sontag fails to acknowledge the ways that the Christian imaginary continues to shape the interpretation of images of suffering, for believers and non-believers alike. When discussing the unique and wholly modern character of photographs of the violence of war, Sontag goes so far as to characterize images of "the sufferings endured by a civilian population at the hands of a victorious army on the rampage" as "a quintessentially secular subject" (RPO 42-43). While the specific content of such images--civilians killed in the hostilities of war--may be secular, images depicting the unmerited suffering of innocent persons are hardly--or, at least, contestably--"quintessentially secular." Most Christian theologians as well as many non-Christian cultural critics would identify the narrative of the cross as a drama about the suffering of an innocent victim. Given an American cultural and political context that is steeped in an implicit (and, sometimes, explicit) Christian rhetoric of heroic sacrifice, Sontag's failure to grapple in a serious way with Christian understandings of the meaning of suffering and the power of images of suffering diminishes the richness and power of her project.
In this essay, I will ask how Sontag's analysis might be modified through an engagement with certain Christian understandings of images of suffering. At the same time, I will seek to demonstrate how Sontag's interrogation of the moral terrain of images of suffering serves as a corrective to any simplistic Christian understanding of the power of images of suffering. With this analysis, I hope to demonstrate both that Christian narratives, images and theological categories influence seemingly secular cultural forms and discourses in unacknowledged and unarticulated ways and that the Christian tradition contains a sufficient variety of resources such that it can provide useful tools for cultural analysis and progressive political engagement. The explicit argument, then, will concern modifications and potential corrections to Sontag's analysis; the implicit argument, however, will relate to the value of theological discourses for cultural analysis. I restrict my focus to Christianity both because this is the only religious tradition...
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