The red badge of authenticity: a review of Regarding the Pain of Others

Afterimage, Jan-Feb, 2005 by Peter Wohlheim

Finally, Sontag begins winding down the book by referencing themes that she first asserted in On Photography. The first is that the media selectivity of images frames general concepts of what constitutes "real" wars as opposed to marginal armed conflicts. The second is that rather than "shock and awe," such images produce shock and numbness, compassion fatigue, and narcotized state of mind. The plethora of atrocity pictures first heightens and then flattens by creating a "culture of spectatorship" (p.105). But in a gesture of public auto-critique somehow reminiscent of French intellectuals of the 1970s, Sontag rejects both positions; "To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breath-taking provincialism. It universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment" (p. 110). And the tendency to dismiss the politically activist potential of war photographs contains its own quietist political agenda, such that "Citizens of modernity, consumers of violence as spectacle, adepts of proximity without risk, are schooled to be cynical about the possibility of sincerity" (p.111).

Sontag concludes "with the understanding that moral indignation, like compassion, cannot dictate a course of action," (p. 117) and only results in frustration and anger. Only seriousness and narrative can save us because "narrative seems likely to be more effective than an image. Partly it is a question of the length of time one is obliged to look, to feel" (p.122). Yet in the end, even narrative comes across as futile because both readers and viewers do not get it. We truly cannot imagine what it was like. We cannot imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Cannot understand, cannot imagine. That is what every soldier; and 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 (pp.125-126).

Does Sontag number herself among those who "get it"? The answer can be found in her book Illness as Metaphor as well as her essay "Why Are We In Kosovo?" (New York Times Magazine, May 2, 1999, pp. 52-55); the latter illustrated with photographs. In both instances Sontag places herself as an insider, as one who knows from the direct experience of being there. It was her own bout with cancer that, Sontag tells, allowed her to unpack the similes, analogies and other pejorative figures of speech that stigmatized that illness to the point of making people reluctant to seek early diagnosis and medical intervention. And the three years she spent in Sarajevo tempted her to now criticize a "geographyless American's friend vision of European countries being only slightly larger than postage stamps" (p.52), and blast away at America's willful ignorance of the genocide perpetuated upon the Bosnian people and their attempt to create a multiethnic Balkan democracy.