nedward writes:

Susan Sontag revisits many of her assertions about photography in her latest book, appearing 25 years after On Photography, now considered a classic of cultural criticism. Regarding the Pain of Others is for the most part a detached reading of the ethics and aesthetics of visual representations of war, violence, and suffering. In her musing, she moves from discussion of Goya’s paintings to photography of the American Civil War, photojournalism of war in the Middle East and Bosnia as well as images of downtown New York just after the attacks of September 11.

She saves her passion not to attack the voyeuristic misuse of representations of pain but in order to critique the writing of others. She is quite clearly angry at recent French thinkers on media and those theorists who accept their thinking on the “spectacle.” She sums up the argument: “Each situation has to be turned into a spectacle to be real—that is, interesting—to us. People themselves aspire to become images: celebrities. Reality has abdicated. There are only representations: media (109).”

Not only does Guy Debord get blamed for instigating this analytical preoccupation but also Jean Baudrillard--especially for his influential assertion that war, when viewed via contemporary media, appears as a simulated event. It is worth quoting Sontag at length if not for the acuteness of her thinking but for how pointed her remarks are:

To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism. It universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world…It assumes that everyone is a spectator. It suggests, perversely, unseriously, that there is no real suffering in the world. But it is absurd to identify the world with those zones in the well-off countries where people have the dubious privilege of being spectators, or of declining to be spectactors, of other people’s pain…There are hundreds of millions of television watchers who are far from inured to what they see on television. They do not have the luxury of patronizing reality (110,111).

Sontag has a point, of course: the pronouncements of Western intellectuals on media and war are specific, perhaps, to their own experience and reflect global imbalances of power (and hence this is true of her own position as a controversially important New York intellectual who had “the luxury” to go and direct a Beckett play in Sarajevo during war).

Sontag, though she appears to eschew the study of popular media as anything other than a symptom, has identified a strand of media studies that follows upon Debord and Baudrillard. For example Douglas Kellner’s most recent book, Media Spectacle, uses Debord’s notion of the “society of the spectacle” to describe and analyze American popular media and politics. In Kellner’s view, it is all spectacle in the States now. Its hard to disagree. His readings are shrewd. But, in my opinion, he relies too much on the term. The meanings of “spectacle” become so elastic and seemingly appropriate to all events in media culture that the term’s usefulness is placed in jeopardy.

To me, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is not a spectacle per se, nor is the X-Files. If the spectacle is, as Kellner indicates “a tool of pacification and depoliticization…which stupefies social subjects and distracts them from the most urgent task of real life” (2,3), then it is more important to look at the changing institutional and social construction of the entire medium of television than to involve oneself in micro-readings of specific programs advancing the notion of spectacle as omnipresent. These two programs are worthy of analysis of course—their elaborations of gender relations, their ways that they both subvert and reinforce genres of television, their representations of authority and the omnipresence of paranoia, the involvement of fans in rewriting scripts, and so forth. But these shows are not spectacles in the same way that the Clinton Sex Scandal or the U.S. invasion of Iraq (as shown on CNN) are spectacular: they are not the parading of state power as a form of entertainment that masks socio-political actualities.

In this way, Kellner’s book can be seen to fuel Susan Sontag’s anti-media studies tirade and her refusal to accept its access to always already available categories (“well if it’s not a simulation, than maybe it’s a spectacle”). I agree with Sontag to this degree: English-speaking theorists should not rely upon those French theorists and their terms for insight—and lord knows, I am guilty of this tendency. Yet recent events remind us that Baudrillard and Debord remain pertinent to understandings of American culture.

Susan Sontag has long celebrated French intellectualism and culture (she especially championed Roland Barthes, among other writers and filmmakers). One worries that—even unbeknownst to herself--she is jumping on this silly American bandwagon that carries anti-French cargo in the aftermath of the absence of French support to American imperial presence. Since Alexis de Toqueville, America has benefited from French participant observation—and indeed I believe we still have much to learn from Baudrillard’s insight into the mediated landscape of America as well as Foucault’s excursions in San Francisco’s sexual undergrounds—and, of course, to the French new wave’s explorations of the traditions of popular American cinema. French intellectuals and artists have long accepted how complicated and contradictory—and, at times, inspiring--American culture is. Americans instead want to simplify (that ole bottom line thinking). Sontag should be wary of clinging to words like “reality.” For her, reality exists in actual suffering; those who insist upon the spectacle as subsuming the real event are provincial and irresponsible. It is more appropriate then to travel to war, witness and record it, and remember it first hand. But suggesting that reality can be found especially in the body and in embodied suffering is so American--it smacks of simplistic American renderings of confusing, heady occurrences. As Cher once said (in a film): “Snap out of it.”

Sontag’s attack on trends in media and cultural theory is one that deserves to be responded to by intellectuals and critics, if for no other reason that we can see that she really means it—she is outraged. At the risk of sounding patronizing, one is often angry at work that one does not understand or misreads (and ironic rhetorical stances are annoying to many Americans right now, who in my opinion, are dangerously indulging in the tenderness of their bruises after “9/11”).

Regardless, it is worth emphasizing over and over that the current invasion on reality is willfully carried out by Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney, et al. and not just the major news networks who carry and frame their messages in spectacular fashion. French intellectuals are blameless for this surprise attack on realness—and it is one that has caused much actual pain. After all most Americans believe that their country went to war against Iraq in order to go after Al Qaeda. Sorry to say, but Baudrillard’s ironic assessment of simulated realities is still appropriate, and now more than ever—even if he’s not getting a percentage of The Matrix’s gross earnings.

Details Sontag, Susan
Regarding the Pain of Others
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. 131pp.
U.S.A. $20.00

Kellner, Douglas
Media Spectacle
London: Routledge, 2003. 192pp.
U.S.A. $24.95