The Art of Cruelty Read online

  As if a test were needed of how much sadism reality television participants, audiences, and producers are willing to indulge, on March 17, 2010, French TV broadcast something called Le jeu de la mort, or The Game of Death, a faux game show which re-performed the Milgram experiment on eighty unknowing contestants. The contestants had been told that they were taking part in a game-show pilot, in which they were to administer electric shocks to other contestants when they answered questions incorrectly. A smiling host and vociferous studio audience, rather than a taciturn guy in a lab coat (as was the case in Stanley Milgram’s experiment), urged the behavior on, but the results were remarkably similar: sixty-four of the eighty contestants were willing to deliver shocks that could have killed their recipients, had there been any actual receivers.

  But beyond prime time, which the digital age may be rendering a quaint outpost, more literal renditions of the Running Man scenario—and ones that offer their viewers slightly more participation than that of armchair schadenfreude—are now available via a few strokes of your computer keyboard. Consider, for example, the Texas Virtual Border Watch Program, in which “The Texas Border Sheriff ’s Coalition (TBSC) has joined BlueServoSM in a public-private partnership to deploy the Virtual Community Watch, an innovative real-time surveillance program designed to empower the public to proactively participate in fighting border crime.” In other words, the TBSC has placed cameras along the U.S.-Mexican border in Texas at so-called high-threat spots for border crossing or drug trafficking, and now invites the home viewer to log on, pick a spot, and start “directly monitoring suspicious criminal activity via this virtual fenceSM.” Viewers can watch the live feed from one of the “virtual stake outs” for as long as they like—the New York Times recently interviewed a housewife from Rochester, New York, who reported watching for at least four hours a day.

  While controversial, the BlueServoSM project should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the Minutemen and its offshoots, whose volunteers have been (non-virtually) patrolling the U.S.-Mexican border, looking for “illegals,” since 1995. “It’s just like hunting,” explained Chuck Stonex, a prominent member. “If you’re going out hunting deer, you want to scout around and get an idea what their pattern is, what trails they use.” Stonex, along with Minuteman founder Jim Gilchrist and other leading figures, has since taken a more defensive stance, after one of their principal associates, Shawna Forde, was arrested in June 2009 in connection with the murder of two members of a Hispanic family in their home in Arivaca, Arizona; one of those killed was a nine-year-old girl. But the chilling new anti-immigration law signed by Governor Jan Brewer of Arizona on April 23, 2010, which authorizes police to demand proof of any person’s immigration status should “reasonable suspicion exist that the person is an alien,” has breathed new life into the “hunt ’em down” mindset, in both Arizona and the nation at large.

  With BlueServoSM, the condition of spectatorship is not so much abolished as it is recast as a form of empowerment: you, too, can defend the homeland, without ever having to leave your home! The project eerily combines the appeal of a spectator sport with language more typically reserved for left wing–sounding community activism: Innovative. Proactive. Participation. Partnership. Coalition. Community. Empowerment. (Especially poignant: “public-private partnership”—in the age of Blackwater [now called Xe] or the Tea Party, every vigilante need be prepared for a trademark!) Last time I visited the BlueServoSM site, there were fifteen cameras rolling on scenes of bucolic calm. My favorites were Camera 5, which featured a still patch of golden weeds with the directive, “During the day watch for subjects on foot carrying large bags,” and Camera 10, which featured a swiftly moving river alongside the directive, “During the day if you see four or five men in a boat report this activity. At night if you see vehicle, boat, or people movement report this activity.” The static, unending nature of the footage bears a weird resemblance to the endurance-based, art house aesthetic of, say, Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964)—a film that consists of eight hours and five minutes of continuous footage of the Empire State Building—or that of a virtual yule log, albeit one of a more sinister variety.

  On the flip side of such a “if you see something, say something” policing projects lies a human rights organization such as the Hub, which describes itself as “the world’s first participatory media site for human rights.” I’m thinking in particular of the Hub’s Witness project, whose motto is “See It, Film It, Change It,” and which aims to use “video and online technologies to open the eyes of the world to human rights violations.” The operation of Witness is twofold: one, to give people cameras and train them to videotape atrocities or injustices they may be suffering or witnessing; two, to invent a circuitry by which one can upload one’s own videos and view those of others, presumably as a prelude to taking a form of action after viewing. For convenience, one can scroll through the videos by category (armed conflict, children’s rights, discrimination, violence, women’s rights, and so on), or by “most viewed” (Japanese sexual slavery during World War II has occupied this slot for some time now).

  As the creators of the Hub well know, the employment of image or moving image in service of mobilizing an individual or a populace is tricky business. For this reason, the Hub aims to zero in on the little window of time between an upsurge of outrage or sympathy and the onset of apathy—to hurl an otherwise fleeting emotion into action before it dissolves. (What action consists of is a difficult, debatable question—right now the “take action” tab on the Hub’s Web site links to “a growing portfolio of advocacy tools to help allies and users call for action,” ranging from signing email petitions to writing members of Congress to sending money to a variety of organizations to creating “offline events.”)

  I mean it as no slight to the Hub when I say that I find the smorgasbord of human suffering offered on its site repellent. Not because “it is difficult to look” (though sometimes, of course, it is), but because the physical and mental activity of Web surfing, which consists of rapid image flow, the distillation of long, complex stories and situations to 2-inch-high, four-minute snippets, one-click decision-making, happenstance isolations, juxtapositions, and linkages that have an eerily leveling effect on content and context, is, in my experience, an exceptionally poor means by which to contemplate the horrors of human trafficking, child prostitution, landmines, and the like. For better or worse, one’s experience of surfing the Hub is shaped by the do-I-or-don’t-I-want-to-watch-this question, as in: Do I or don’t I want to watch a Tibetan pilgrim being shot dead by the Chinese police at Nangpa La Pass? How about cell phone footage of a man being hung upside down and sodomized with a rod in an Egyptian prison? Or the testimony of women in Bangladesh whose faces have been disfigured by acid? Well intentioned and effective as the operation may be, scrolling through such choices makes me feel as though I’ve arrived at the hub of a problem rather than its solution.

  INSOFAR AS “image flow” isn’t going away any time soon, it certainly makes sense to try to harness the powers of YouTube for all kinds of social causes as well as for entertainment. But there are also perils. And one is that in a cultural moment defined (by some, for some) by image flow, the question of what one should look at, along with attendant inquiries into the nature and effect of the images blowing by, has a creepy way of overtaking almost all other questions. This may in fact be part of the so-called image regime’s raison d’etre, rather than a puzzling side effect. In any case, it can lead to cul-de-sacs, red herrings, or distractions fatal to the primary issue at hand.

  For example, in a director’s statement about his Abu Ghraib documentary, Standard Operating Procedure, filmmaker Errol Morris names the principal question posed by his film as, “Is it possible for a photograph to change the world?” But what could the answer to this question—be it in the negative or the affirmative—really mean? As Sontag puts it in Regarding the Pain of Others, “The image as shock and the image a
s cliché are two aspects of the same presence”—a notion that partially explains how the iconic image of the hooded prisoner at Abu Ghraib forced to hold a foreboding wire in each hand could literally sicken one’s stomach when first viewed, then move on to become a much-parodied image (e.g., on the satirical posters that appeared throughout the New York subways not long after the Abu Ghraib story broke, posters that borrowed the distinctive design of Apple’s iPod campaign, but substituted the word “iRaq” for “iPod,” and featured the silhouette of the hooded man in lieu of the iPod’s silhouetted dancer). It isn’t that this photograph played no role in the unfolding of human events—clearly, it did. But after nearly 200 years of photography, it may be that we are closer than ever to understanding that an image—be it circulated in a newspaper, on YouTube, or in an art gallery—is an exceptionally poor platform on which to place the unending, arduous, multifaceted, and circuitous process of “changing the world.”

  In his April 2008 Artforum review of Standard Operating Procedure, critic Paul Arthur noted something of the same. In thinking about Morris’s focus on the revelation that the man who identified himself publicly as the hooded prisoner turned out not to be the actual victim, Arthur writes, “Morris finds this revelation telling because it shows how massively disseminated pictures can mask their own provenance or ‘attract false beliefs.’ Really? I thought the images under consideration, especially when supplemented by salient verbal contexts, revealed more about policy than about epistemology, more about state-sponsored barbarity than about media deception.” In other words, one need not immerse oneself in horrific images or a debate about their epistemological status in order to apprehend and protest barbarities wherever they are to be found. Nor does one need to distract oneself with rehashings of the Milgram experiment, which uselessly reiterate what we already know about our capacity to cause harm under pressure (or, as the case may be, at simple invitation).

  One does, however, need to know what barbarities have taken place: there’s the rub. Enter President Obama, speaking about his administration’s May 2009 decision to suppress the release of a new spate of photographs that depict the abuse, rape, and torture of Afghan and Iraqi prisoners in American custody. “The most direct consequence of releasing [these photos],” Obama said, “would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in greater danger.” Mark down one vote for the idea that images have the power to cause injury—though to warn against such a thing in this case smells pretty rotten, given that the suppressed photos presumably depict our troops injuring others.

  Obama also skips over the most obvious direct consequence of releasing the photos: that Americans would see—along with the rest of the world—more evidence of the barbarities that have been committed in their name, on their supposed behalf, and on their dime. To state the obvious but oft-repressed or denied point, it isn’t the act of releasing photos that inflames anti-American sentiment; it’s the behavior captured by the photos. In the age of “the torturer with the Toshiba,” as art historian T. J. Clark has put it, no image flow can be fully marshaled. Nor can survivors and witnesses be unilaterally silenced. If you don’t want to inflame via images of the behavior, then you have to stop the behavior.

  Of course, it isn’t entirely clear that the United States meant to keep the news of its use of torture a secret. No regime hoping to gain power from its use of such violence (an impossibility, according to Hannah Arendt) ever has. Certainly the revelations from Abu Ghraib appeared as a mistake, a rip in the fabric; certainly the U.S. government has employed intense secrecy, censorship, and denial about everything from the Red Cross Torture Report to the exact interrogation methods used to the operations of “black sites” around the world. Certainly journalists from Seymour Hersh to Jane Mayer to Mark Danner to Scott Horton have had an enormously difficult time obtaining the information they need to inform the public about what, exactly, has gone on; certainly the CIA has classified and egregiously destroyed pivotal evidence, such as the videotapes depicting the 2002 interrogations of several terrorism suspects—tapes the CIA outrageously destroyed in 2005, in the midst of a federal investigation.

  And yet. On a parallel track run the monologues of Dick Cheney, who, since leaving office, has toured the talk shows, speaking with candor and pride about his role in “The Program.” Then there’s the ongoing consideration of the topic in the bright glare of television and the blogosphere, in which everyone from Bill O’Reilly to Andrew Sullivan to Christopher Hitchens to Elisabeth Hasselbeck openly debates the efficacy of torture, and the effect its use has had on our country—not whether or not we have done it. The Bush/Cheney dyad of denial/justification represents two sides of a single coin: Bush spoke the voice of delusion (it never happened, it will never happen); Cheney, the voice of justification (we had to do it, we should still be doing it). The average citizen can then ricochet between these two irreconcilable, collaborative poles until desensitization sets in, and with it, a begrudging (or, for some, an enthusiastic) acceptance of the practice.

  BACK IN 1965, Sontag declared that we live in “an age of extremity,” characterized by “the continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror.” Much of the art produced under the influence of Artaud—such as Nitsch’s—proceeds from this premise, and attempts to replace the crush of banality with some form of brutal, sensory overload. Even quieter works such as Jaar’s Untitled (Newsweek) depend on this by-now familiar dichotomy—one that places benumbing banality on one side, and unthinkable, rupturing calamity on the other.

  The moral of this dichotomy is that distraction by the banal obviates a necessary focus on the all-too-real calamitous. This equation became ubiquitous in the weeks and months after 9/11, when media commentator after commentator lamented the fact that instead of focusing on the real threat from Al Qaeda, Americans spent the summer of 2001 unforgivably obsessing over the latest incarnation of Britney Spears. But really this is a self-flagellating, essentially nonsensical diagnosis, especially in its supposition that Americans would have been better off spending more of their time worrying about an impending terrorist attack, the shape of which they could have had no foreknowledge. (The next seven years and four months of the Bush administration provided a good picture of what a populace in thrall to such anxiety might look like—and what it might tolerate from its leaders—and it wasn’t pretty.)

  After 9/11, Sontag’s formulation would seem to have more adherents than ever, on both the right and the left. See, for example, the leftist collective RETORT’s Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (2005), which repeatedly pits the eviscerating “false depth” of consumerism (i.e., unremitting banality) against claims that “we have never been closer to hell on earth” (i.e., inconceivable terror). But is it true? Or more precisely, for whom is it true, and who presumes it to be true for others? Do we really live under the aegis of these opposing threats, or is it the very reiteration of them as our two primary ontological options (and our unthinking acquiescence to such a formulation) that acts as a truer threat to our enlivenment, to our full experience of the vast space between these two poles—a space which, after all, is where the great majority of many of our lives takes place? And if, as David Graeber has suggested, revolutionary action is “not a form of grim self-sacrifice,” but rather “the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free,” what good does it do us to charge those who refuse to live under the aegis of these two grim choices with false consciousness, with not truly understanding the stakes of the age?

  Compare, for example, the “troughs of blood and wine,” the “extreme noise from the orchestras” of Nitsch’s Six-Day Play with John Cage’s Zen-inspired 4'33'', first composed in 1952, in which Cage famously asks audience members to sit in complete silence for four minutes and thirty-three seconds, in order to awaken to the sounds going on around them, to hear all the ambient noise of which they woul
d have otherwise been unaware. In light of the heightened state of perception conjured by Cage’s piece—its profound capacity to “return us to our senses” via an emptying out of input rather than an overload of it—one may begin to wonder whose interests it serves to keep us believing in, and riveted by, the mythos of this “age of extremity,” which focuses on knocking oneself out rather than tuning in.

  Perhaps more controversially still, given our inarguable complicity in all kinds of systemic forms of global injustice: is there any space left for not watching, not focusing, not keeping abreast of all the events and atrocities unfolding in the world, as an ethically viable option? “Why are we watching the news, reading the news, keeping up with the news?” asks Annie Dillard in For the Time Being, a book that sets forth the deeply unfashionable argument that our times are not uniquely grievous—that they are, in fact, not unique at all—and further, that their vicissitudes may make no intrinsic demand on our attention, or on our conscience. That enlivenment may consist of quiet, even monastic retreat, rather than bombardment or disembowelment. “Who can bear to hear this, or who will consider it?” Dillard wonders.

  In completely disparate circles—such as those of leftist political philosophy, for example—a distinct but not wholly unrelated idea of “engaged withdrawal” has also begun to hold sway. Rather than fixate on revolution, this strategy privileges orchestrated and unorchestrated acts of exodus. As Italian political philosopher Paolo Virno has put it, “Nothing is less passive than the act of fleeing, of exiting.” In anarchist circles, this withdrawal bears a relationship to the idea of the “TAZ,” or “temporary autonomous zones” (as elaborated by writer Hakim Bey; Graeber prefers the term “provisional autonomous zones”): ephemeral but crucial gaps in an otherwise suffocating global capitalist order, gaps that, at the very least, make other forms of social organization and perception seem momentarily possible.