Violence and Visibility in Modern History

J. Martschukat, J. Martschukat, Kenneth A. Loparo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137378699
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

Despite the claims of Steven Pinker and others, violence has remained a historical constant since the Enlightenment, even though its forms and visibility have been radically transformed. Accordingly, the studies gathered here recast debate over violence in modern societies by undermining teleological and reassuring narratives of progress.

C H A P T E R 1

VIOLENCE AND VISIBILITY: HISTORICAL AND THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES

Jürgen Martschukat and Silvan Niedermeier

1. FROM ABU GHRAIB TO A RESEARCH AGENDA FOR VIOLENCE AND VISIBILITY

In early 2004, the world was shocked by the publication of photographs showing the abuse of Iraqi detainees by American guards in the prison of Abu Ghraib. Many pictures presented perpetrators grinning into the camera while standing proudly next to their victims who had been forced to undress and pose in humiliating positions. As the photographs indicate, the act of picture taking itself was part of the violence against the prisoners in Abu Ghraib. Using their private digital cameras, the guards took hundreds of pictures from various angles, depicting the willful degradation of the prisoners and posing for the camera with their victims. The images were saved on private laptops, were shared with colleagues and friends inside and outside of the Abu Ghraib prison complex, and served as visual trophies of their participation at the war. Quite obviously, the private production and dissemination of these pictures sought to generate pleasure on part of their viewers, also by visibly underscoring claims of white superiority and “oriental” inferiority. However, when American news magazines and TV channels published these images in April 2004, the majority of the readers and viewers expressed a sense of shock. Following their publication, the criticism of “Operation Iraqi Freedom” intensified immensely, not the least due to the severe violations of human rights that had been exposed by the images.¹

The Abu Ghraib prison photos indicate that the visual presentation of violence can have various and contradictory effects: While the pictures were taken to arouse pleasure and to reaffirm racialized and gendered notions of superiority among the participant observers, the very same pictures generated a severe criticism of America’s “War on Terror” and its flagrant human rights violations. Yet this public irritation was also double-edged: In its intensity, the popular outrage caused by the images clearly showed that the visual documentation of the torture in Abu Ghraib through tourist-style souvenir photography caused a more troubling cultural uneasiness than the practice of detention and torture itself. When the pictures appeared, a public debate about coercive interrogation tactics as part of the detention practices in the “War on Terror,” such as waterboarding, forced nudity, painful stress positions, and sleep deprivation, had been running for two years.² Thus, although the use of torture in the war against Iraq should not have taken the American and international public by surprise, politicians and newspaper commentators deplored the events at Abu Ghraib as unique and extraordinarily shocking.³ Only very few critics pointed out that they are embedded in a long history of racist violence and torture in the U.S. and Western societies in general, and that they also relate to the everyday treatment of prisoners in American supermax prisons.⁴

The diversity of reactions to Abu Ghraib points to different but interrelated characteristics, which shape the meaning of violence in modern Western societies in general. On the one hand, these reactions show that modern Western societies, perceiving themselves as based on the principles and politics of Enlightenment and as endowed with respect for the individual and its physical integrity, tend to react with moral repulsion to certain kinds of violent acts and to their visual representation in particular. Here, violence is often perceived as excessive and particularly repulsive when it is committed by agents of the community and the state. On the other hand, Abu Ghraib and the post-9/11 system of detention and interrogation remind us of the fact that even widely rejected forms of violence such as torture practices are still alive in modern Western societies, despite ongoing attempts to contain and abolish them. Most characteristically, torturous violence is not performed publicly, but in hidden places and shielded from the eyes of the public.⁵ At the same time, Abu Ghraib indicates a specifically modern inclination to capture concealed acts of violence visually and present the visualization to different audiences with different intentions, such as to arouse pleasure or create fear and anxiety. As historian Karen Halttunen has argued and as Bruce Dorsey shows in this book, both an enlightened and modern sensibility, a modern media revolution and a stigmatization of violence fostered a growing and new kind of pleasure through the visual consumption of violence and cruelty, which Halttunen calls “pornography of pain.”⁶

In order to understand these fundamental contradictions in the modern history of violence, which are manifested by Abu Ghraib, we need to turn to the Enlightenment, humanitarianism, and the origins of modern state formation in Europe and North America.⁷ First, it needs to be taken into account that with the dissemination of the social contract in the eighteenth century, the power to employ violence in human society was understood as emerging from a contract among free individuals, and not as a divinely ordained sovereign right any longer.⁸ Henceforth, and this is a second most important change, the only legitimate purpose of the modern state was the well-being of its citizens and the protection of their life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Third, in a “turnabout of attitudes,” as described by historian Lynn Hunt,⁹ the human being was conceptualized as free and endowed with natural and human rights, which included its physical integrity and protection—a claim that has been undermined by differences in race, class, and gender from its very beginning.¹⁰ Thus, Enlightenment thought and politics brought forth a powerful critique of violence, although violence was never meant to be abolished but held in check and controlled, and its legitimate use was strictly confined to agents of the state. Yet state violence had to be reduced to a minimum and renounce any kind of cruelty, as the Baron de Montesquieu argued in “The Spirit of Laws” from 1748 or as expressed by the eighth amendment to the American Constitution, forbidding cruel and unusual punishment.¹¹ From the eighteenth century to the present day, renouncing wanton violence and cruelty have been crucial to the self-perception of the enlightened modern state and society as advanced and civilized. While wanton violence and cruelty came to be seen as barbaric and uncivilized, the controlled use of violence came to be seen as a sign of progress and civilization.

This constellation has led to constant reasoning, arguing, and struggling about the adequate and legitimate forms of state violence. It has also fostered a drift toward hiding state violence from the public instead of performing it on stage, particularly when it tended to smack of excess and cruelty.¹² At the same time, cruelty and the transgression of normative boundaries have been constant companions of the modern state, and they have continuously aroused moral indignation and political conflict. One example of the twisted logic of modern enlightened states is the history of capital punishment, which was meant to be executed in a soft, sanitized, and publicly invisible manner so that the act of state killing seemed to square with a civilized self-image.¹³ Other examples include the persistence of hidden torture practices despite their legal and moral condemnation,¹⁴ the use of violence and force at national borders, the prison industries and everyday police actions against those people forced to live at the margins of society due to the color of their skin, their ethnic background, their social position, or their sexual orientation.¹⁵ Moreover, the cruelty and violence of modern warfare is often hidden behind the disguise of a fight against global terror, humanitarian intervention, or military operations pretending to hit with “surgical precision”—a metaphor that connotes a carefully contained violence and even healing, which is favorably attached to modern acts of violence.¹⁶

Violence and Visibility explores these ambivalences and quandaries in the history of violence more deeply. It concentrates on violence by the state and its agents and focuses on Germany and the United States. Since the nineteenth century, Germany and the United States have been perceived as paradigmatic sites of Western modernity. Their culture and society have been similarly shaped by the central dynamics of modernization including urbanization, mechanization, industrialization, the emergence of mass societies, and a shared belief in economic growth and progress.¹⁷ Also, both German and American societies have been shaped by strong social and geographical differences (urban vs. rural or North vs. South) and have been characterized by rigid systems of racial differentiation and oppression, though very different in their style and their dramatic consequences. In addition to that, both countries embarked on violent-ridden overseas imperial missions in the late nineteenth century. At the same time and as the contributions to this volume show, both countries developed visual strategies and techniques in dealing with the realities of violence and warfare, which can be taken as symptomatic for Western societies in general. Nevertheless, this should not preclude us from engaging in further investigations into the relationship of violence and visibility in other Western and non-Western societies.

The book argues that we need to examine the changing forms and visibilities of violence in order to cope with the avowed aversion to physical violence, its concurrent persistence, and even pleasure-generating effects. We claim that in order to sustain this tension, violent practices are either adjusted to historical notions of decency and are thus not necessarily less violent or cruel, but considered as more appropriate at the particular moment in history, or camouflaged and veiled behind curtains. Sometimes, violence is deliberately made visible to reinforce a notion of superiority among a particular group of people, to arouse pleasurable excitement or horror, or both. Thus, as this book argues, in order to make state violence appear legitimate, its forms and visibilities have been constantly modified, and specific practices and politics of visualization or concealment have rendered the existence of manifold practices of violence in the name of state and society compatible with a self-understanding as modern and civilized.

It is important to note that we understand visibility first in the phenomenological meaning of the term as “being-visible,” which raises questions regarding the settings and the specific audiences of violent acts. A second though intertwined understanding of visibility is embedded in recent cultural theory and discourse analysis. It asks us to investigate the conditions of possibility for specific types and acts of violence to come into view while others are concealed. This two-way, yet intertwined perspective on visibility is fueled by a methodological impetus from the currently developing field of visibility studies, which calls upon ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1 Violence and Visibility: Historical and Theoretical Perspectives
• 2 Torture By Any Other Name: Prelude to Guantanamo
• Part I Visibilities of Crime, Policing, and Punishment
• Part II Visibilities of Warfare
• Bibliography
• Index