Notes on Susan Sontag’s book, Regarding the Pain of Others
Notes on Susan Sontag’s book, Regarding the Pain of Others.
Over the last two weeks I’ve been reading Susan Sontag’s book, Regarding the Pain of Others, and it has offered up many questions about the representations of war, memory through images and the detached response that people have as spectator of war through media, and much more besides. I have posted here some of the sections that I found most thought provoking with regards to my area of research, I hope they are not too confusing or undermined by their removal from the context of the greater text.
In this section Sontag considers two older ideas of hers that she considered in her book On Photography:
“The first is that public attention is steered by the attentions of the media – which means most decisively, images. When there are photographs , war becomes “real”.Thus, the protest against the Vietnam war was mobilised by images . The feeling that something had to be done about the war in Bosnia was built from the attentions of the journalists – “the CNN effect”, it was sometimes called – which brought images of Sarajevo under siege into hundreds of millions of living rooms night after night for more than three years. These examples illustrate the determining influence of photographs in shaping what catastrophes and crises we pay attention to, what we care about, and ultimately what evaluations are attached to these conflicts.
The second idea – it might be seen as the converse of what has just been described – is that in a world saturated, no, hyper saturated with images, those that should matter have a diminishing effect: we become callous. In the end, such images just make us a little less able to feel, to have our conscience pricked.”
Sontag later suggests that still images can in fact retain their initial power. She reminds us of iconic images that retain their impact and serve to “remind” even after years of exposure to them. See: LIFE Magazine, 100 images that changed the world. http://digitaljournalist.org/issue0309/lm08.html.
Sontag also points out that:
“the power to shock is one thing, but not much help if the task is to understand.” [Should] “image of carnage be cut back to, say, once a week? More generally should we work toward an “ ecology of images”? There isn’t going to be an ecology of images. No committee of Guardians is going to ration horror, to keep fresh its ability to shock . And the horrors themselves are not going to abate.
Peace as the normal base state of the world?
“Central to modern expectations, and modern ethical feeling, is the conviction that war is an aberration, if an unstoppable one. That peace is the norm, if an unobtainable one. This, of course, is not the way war has been regarded throughout history. War has been the norm and peace the exception.”
Thoughts on memories of atrocities that are given weight and those that are not:
The atrocities of the concentration camps, much documented and revisited, as opposed to the “130 thousand German women raped by victorious soviet soldiers unleashed by their commanding officers in Berlin in 1945…….These are memories that few have cared to claim.”Or report.
Images of far away suffering.
“What to do with such knowledge as photographs bring of faraway suffering? People are often unable to take in the suffering of those close to them. For all the voyeuristic lure - and the possible satisfaction of the knowing, this is not happening to me, I am not ill, I am not dying, I’m not trapped in a war – it seams normal for people to fend off thinking about the ordeals of others, even others with whom it would be easy to identify.”
The diclaimer.
“So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence.”
“The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the Knowledge that has been communicated. If one feels that there is nothing “we” can do – but who is that we? - and nothing “they” can do either - and who are they? – then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic.”
Sontag suggests that the “we” is the rich world that controls the media and representation, or not, from around the Globe.
"To speak of reality becoming a spectacle... universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world...."
Notes on modern cynicism (and sincerity seen as weakness?)
“Citizens of modernity, consumers of violence as spectacle, adepts of proximity without risks, are schooled to be cynical about the possibility of sincerity. Some people will do anything to keep themselves from being moved. How much easier from one’s chair, far from danger, to claim the position of superiority. In fact, deriding from the efforts of those who have borne witness in war zones as “war tourism” is such a recurrent judgement that has spilled over into the discussion of war photography as a profession.”
Forgetting as heartless, or as key to the future?
“Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value ion and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead. So the belief that remembering is an ethical act is deep in our natures as humans, who know we are going to die and who mourn those who in the normal course of things die before us – grandparents, parents, teachers and older friends. Heartlessness and amnesia seem to go together. But history gives contradictory signals about the value of remembering in the much longer span of collective history. There is simply too much injustice in the world. And too much remembering (of ancient grievances: Serbs, Irish) embitters. To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited.”
Quote from First publishers weekly review:
“Sontag reminds us that sincerity can turn a mere spectator into a witness, and that it is the heart rather than fancy rhetoric that can lead the mind to understanding.”
Quote from First publishers weekly review:
Over the last two weeks I’ve been reading Susan Sontag’s book, Regarding the Pain of Others, and it has offered up many questions about the representations of war, memory through images and the detached response that people have as spectator of war through media, and much more besides. I have posted here some of the sections that I found most thought provoking with regards to my area of research, I hope they are not too confusing or undermined by their removal from the context of the greater text.
In this section Sontag considers two older ideas of hers that she considered in her book On Photography:
“The first is that public attention is steered by the attentions of the media – which means most decisively, images. When there are photographs , war becomes “real”.Thus, the protest against the Vietnam war was mobilised by images . The feeling that something had to be done about the war in Bosnia was built from the attentions of the journalists – “the CNN effect”, it was sometimes called – which brought images of Sarajevo under siege into hundreds of millions of living rooms night after night for more than three years. These examples illustrate the determining influence of photographs in shaping what catastrophes and crises we pay attention to, what we care about, and ultimately what evaluations are attached to these conflicts.
The second idea – it might be seen as the converse of what has just been described – is that in a world saturated, no, hyper saturated with images, those that should matter have a diminishing effect: we become callous. In the end, such images just make us a little less able to feel, to have our conscience pricked.”
Sontag later suggests that still images can in fact retain their initial power. She reminds us of iconic images that retain their impact and serve to “remind” even after years of exposure to them. See: LIFE Magazine, 100 images that changed the world. http://digitaljournalist.org/issue0309/lm08.html.
Sontag also points out that:
“the power to shock is one thing, but not much help if the task is to understand.” [Should] “image of carnage be cut back to, say, once a week? More generally should we work toward an “ ecology of images”? There isn’t going to be an ecology of images. No committee of Guardians is going to ration horror, to keep fresh its ability to shock . And the horrors themselves are not going to abate.
Peace as the normal base state of the world?
“Central to modern expectations, and modern ethical feeling, is the conviction that war is an aberration, if an unstoppable one. That peace is the norm, if an unobtainable one. This, of course, is not the way war has been regarded throughout history. War has been the norm and peace the exception.”
Thoughts on memories of atrocities that are given weight and those that are not:
The atrocities of the concentration camps, much documented and revisited, as opposed to the “130 thousand German women raped by victorious soviet soldiers unleashed by their commanding officers in Berlin in 1945…….These are memories that few have cared to claim.”Or report.
Images of far away suffering.
“What to do with such knowledge as photographs bring of faraway suffering? People are often unable to take in the suffering of those close to them. For all the voyeuristic lure - and the possible satisfaction of the knowing, this is not happening to me, I am not ill, I am not dying, I’m not trapped in a war – it seams normal for people to fend off thinking about the ordeals of others, even others with whom it would be easy to identify.”
The diclaimer.
“So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence.”
“The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the Knowledge that has been communicated. If one feels that there is nothing “we” can do – but who is that we? - and nothing “they” can do either - and who are they? – then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic.”
Sontag suggests that the “we” is the rich world that controls the media and representation, or not, from around the Globe.
"To speak of reality becoming a spectacle... universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world...."
Notes on modern cynicism (and sincerity seen as weakness?)
“Citizens of modernity, consumers of violence as spectacle, adepts of proximity without risks, are schooled to be cynical about the possibility of sincerity. Some people will do anything to keep themselves from being moved. How much easier from one’s chair, far from danger, to claim the position of superiority. In fact, deriding from the efforts of those who have borne witness in war zones as “war tourism” is such a recurrent judgement that has spilled over into the discussion of war photography as a profession.”
Forgetting as heartless, or as key to the future?
“Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value ion and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead. So the belief that remembering is an ethical act is deep in our natures as humans, who know we are going to die and who mourn those who in the normal course of things die before us – grandparents, parents, teachers and older friends. Heartlessness and amnesia seem to go together. But history gives contradictory signals about the value of remembering in the much longer span of collective history. There is simply too much injustice in the world. And too much remembering (of ancient grievances: Serbs, Irish) embitters. To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited.”
Quote from First publishers weekly review:
“Sontag reminds us that sincerity can turn a mere spectator into a witness, and that it is the heart rather than fancy rhetoric that can lead the mind to understanding.”
Quote from First publishers weekly review:
posted by Phsteve at 11:13 PM
