In the second essay of the book, “Torture and the Ethics of Photography: Thinking with Sontag,” Judith Butler wants “to consider the way in which suffering is presented to us, and how that presentation affects our responsiveness. In particular, [she] want[s] to understand how the frames that allocate the recognizability of certain figures of the human are themselves linked with broader norms that determine what will and will not be a Grievable life.” First she looks on the relatively new practice of “embedded reporting.” Embedded reporting in the First Gulf War is an example of egregious of framing. The reporters who accompanied the US military units follow along with their assigned unit into “battle” where they would “see” what was really going on. These military units would be “close” to the front lines but not at the front lines for the safety of the reporters. The news networks also ceded some control over the content of the stories that emerged – this was required if they ever wanted to be let back into any embedded unit. This was a lot of power over the story that the Pentagon exercised over a “free” press. “By regulating perspective in addition to content, the state authorities were clearly interested in regulating the visual modes of participation in the war….And although restricting how or what we see is not exactly the same as dictating a storyline, it is a way of interpreting in advance what will and will not be included in the field of perception.”
According to Butler when we make sense of data, a narrative, or of an image we are always under some structure. For example when we watch a science fiction movie no one objects to the unreal nature of the images – we suspend our disbelief. A frame is made up of the context, the genre, the form, the source etc. of all the categories that are examples of structures that communicate affect. Thus any photograph comes with implied or explicit frames that seek to affect you. “If state power attempts to regulate a perspective that reporters and cameramen are there to confirm, then the action of perspective in and as the frame is part of the interpretation of the war compelled by the state. The photograph is not merely a visual image awaiting interpretation; it is itself actively interpreting, sometimes forcibly so.” These active interpretations may be contrary to the original photographer’s intention and can take up a life of their own especially when captioned, ordered, or recontextualized. This is why the Pentagon was in such a panic mode when the photographs of the torture at Abu Ghraib prison came out. “Rumsfeld claimed that publishing the photos of torture and humiliation and rape would allow them ‘to define us as Americans,’ he attributed to photography an enormous power to construct national identity itself. The photographs would not just show something atrocious, but would make our capacity to commit atrocity into a defining concept of American identity.”
How is it that the affect generated can lead to political change? It is not from the shocking quality of the photographs. Shock is great for attracting attention but not sufficient for political change. Butler quotes Susan Sontag: “‘Let the atrocious images haunt us.’… We see the photograph and cannot let go of the image that is transitively related to us. It brings us close to an understanding of the fragility and mortality of human life, the stakes of death in the scene of politics….If we can be haunted, then we can acknowledge that there has been a loss and hence that there has been a life: this is an initial moment of cognition, an apprehension, but also a potential judgment, and it requires that we conceive of grievability as the precondition of life, on that is discovered retrospectively through the temporality instituted by the photograph itself.” Images that are shocking but not haunting likely show us who we are in a novel way but not psychologically troubling way. A haunting image hints at an unresolved psychological conflict. Susan Sontag, speaking about the Abu Ghraib photos, claimed that they were ‘of us’ and was vilified for it. The haunting nature of the photos is only to those who have a problem with torture; who believe that evil people torture; who believed that the USA was not engaged in torture; and who believe they America is a good country with good people. All these internalized myths create the haunting conflict as we try to resolve and/or make sense of a contradiction in our identity – either through political change or acceptance.
“To learn to see the frame that binds us to what we see is no easy matter. And if there is a critical role for visual culture during times of war it is precisely to thematize the forcible frame, the one that conducts the dehumanizing norm, that restricts what is perceivable and, indeed what can be.”
In her third essay, “Sexual Politics, Torture, and Secular Time,” Butler looks at how the notion of secular time (that is the idea that humanity is advancing, progressing, and improving all the time and that we in “western” civilization have moved furthest along this trajectory) is a frame that co-opts sexual politics in order to justify and commit acts of torture and oppression toward those deemed to be less advanced. “[H]egemonic conceptions of progress define themselves over and against a pre-modern temporality that they produce for the purposes of their own self-legitimation....my thesis is simply that there can be no consideration of sexual politics without a critical consideration of the time of the now. My claim will be that thinking through the problem of temporality and politics in this way may open up a different approach to cultural difference, one that eludes the claims of pluralism and intersectionality alike.” Pluralism, or the recognition and affirmation of diversity in a political body, is the toleration of differences such as opinions and cultural practices but it puts us in a sticky situation where we should not judge, a moral relativism, but we do to when it comes to major differences – in other words pluralism works best when there is no need for it. Intersectionality is the theory of interlocking oppressions: those most marginalized belong to the most out-groups in terms of race, class, sexual orientation, gender, etc. Intersectionality is great for identifying oppression but seems less useful in marshaling political movements for the most marginalized. Butler would like us to consider a new way of looking at difference that she believes is more likely to raise the possibility of unifying diverse groups into coherent political action. The unifying oppression is state violence. It cuts across all social boundaries to some extent but it has the virtue of being felt by all to some degree where particular vectors of intersectionality do not.
Butler is particularly concerned about four examples of how hard earned freedoms are being used to arbitrarily oppress. “But the question is whether [newly earned freedoms] are articulated not only differentially, but also instrumentally, in order to shore up particular religious and cultural preconditions that affect other sorts of exclusions.” The first example she brings up are value tests. Some nations have instituted a tolerance exam for new entrants which she believes “is part of broader coercive effort on the part of the state to demand that they rid themselves of their traditional religious beliefs and practices in order to gain entry into the Netherlands”. A typical question shows a picture of two men kissing and asks do you have a problem with this image? What is happening is freedom of expression and sexual preference is being pitted against freedom of religion. Modernity, as the liberal religion of the “West” with its dogmas of toleration and freedom, are being used to oppress and curtail different expressions of freedom. This pattern and tactic of dividing the people against each other along intersectional lines can be overcome by the realization that it is state violence that is the cause of the oppression.
A second example is the privileges given to the nuclear family. Despite the new rights of gay marriage there are still notions of how anything less than male and female parents (including single parents and blended families) will raise sub-normal children which is used to limit access to other state services. “In other words, disruptions in family formation or in kinship arrangements that do not support the lines of patrilineality and the corollary norms of citizenship rationalize state prohibitions and regulations that augment state power in the image of the father, that missing adult, that cultural fetish which signifies a maturity based upon violence….[these] are culturally specific rules or laws that set a limit to contractual relations in the sphere of family and kinship and, indeed, to the field of recognizability.”
A third example of “western” freedom justifying oppression is in the notion of the latest manifestation of our “civilizing mission” that justifies a notion of a clash of civilizations. “If the Islamic populations destroyed in recent and current wars are considered less than human, or ‘outside’ the cultural conditions for the emergence of the human, then they belong either to a time of cultural infancy or to a time that is outside time as we know it. In both cases, they are regarded as not yet having arrived at the idea of the rational human. It follows from such a viewpoint that the destruction of such populations, their infrastructures, their housing, and their religious and community institutions, constitutes the destruction of what threatens the human, but not of the human itself. It is also precisely this particular conceit of a progressive history that positions ‘the West’ as articulating the paradigmatic principles of the human—of the humans who are worth valuing, whose lives are worth safeguarding, whose lives are precarious, and, when lost, are worth public grieving.”
The fourth example is the creation of the Arab Mind – a fiction to justify particular forms of torture that are allegedly culturally more guilt inducing (for example the use of female interrogators). The problem is that in the act of torture we create the Arab Mind in the victim and in the publication of the torture we also create the Arab Mind in the population. It is a form of subject formation on a cultural level that disseminates an attitude that is reinforced through created stereotypes.