Regarding The Pain Of Others (2004) - Plot & Excerpts
Meh. Like the stars say: "it was ok." This was my first time reading anything by Susan Sontag, and after hearing so much positive about her, I guess I was expecting more. She's lauded as this great social critic, but I read things more insightful than anything in here about 394 times a day around on the web, even just 10 minutes on Tumblr yields more important ideas...I'm not sure what it was that left me scratching my head: that she didn't clearly state a thesis, that if she did it was unsupported, if she was just recording meandering. And then I was annoyed that she would state some claim (the veracity of which I was not convinced) that I felt needed to be explained, expanded, or just clarified. But she just forged right on, assuming what she said was self-evident (one example: she asserts that compassion is basically a use-it-or-lose-it phenomenon; maybe it is and maybe it isn't but where does she get that idea from? science? anecdotal evidence? her own experiences?). She doesn't have a bibliography or references; she cites some things in-text, but not many.I didn't really feel like I learned anything. The ideas that I thought were worthwhile--"What is called in news parlance 'the world' is (unlike the world) a very small place, both geographically and thematically, and what is thought worth knowing about it is expected to be transmitted tersely and emphatically"--I have already been extensively exposed to.Other points she makes I disagree with. For example, she talks about photographs of lynchings and wonders what the point of looking at them could possible be, besides making us "feel 'bad'." She then says that these images lie in a "remote past," because apparently racism magically doesn't exist anymore for Susan Sontag? It's not like those smiling white people had relatives and children that they passed their views onto or anything. Gee, I didn't realize that everyone just ~*~stopped being racist~*~ when the Civil Rights Act was passed! No more value in learning about lynching and slavery because, come on guys, it's in the PAST and all you're doing is trying to assign BLAME but the time for that is OVER, I mean who can you really BLAME anyway, they were just doing what everyone else is doing!!! Seriously, these are things she implies if not outright says: "One person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.' (How many can be expected to do better than that?)" p 92; "Whom do we wish to blame?" p 93. And if you are a person who thinks there's value in looking at & learning about atrocities committed by people who were just doing what everybody else was doing, guys, WHO CAN BLAME THEM REALLY???? then apparently, to Sontag, you just feel the "tug of obligation" (her phrase)...because someone could only possibly care about the legacy of black slavery in this country out of some desire to be seen as "right-thinking" (her words) and to win points, not because it actually affects you personally, not out of a commitment to justice, not because you actually care about actual human beings who are actually being hurt by actual policies and actual attitudes that exist in actual fact today. She also conflates being American with being white, which is, from my point of view, pretty problematic.Further, when talking about third world suffering (Rwandan genocide, Sierra Leone, AIDS, though she doesn't mention the millions of starvation deaths that happen every year around the world), she basically puts forth some "EUROPE had it WORSE!!" stuff on page 71 (the actual quote: "Comparable cruelties and misfortunes used to take place in Europe, too; cruelties that surpass in volume and luridness anything we might be shown now from the poor parts of the world occurred in Europe only sixty years ago.") Lady: What is your fucking point? I know it has something to do with how the faces and bodies of POC are not given as much respect at those of white Americans (totally valid) but your way of expressing it does not jive with my idea of respect or even clarity. I absolutely think we need to see positives images, images of solidarity and success for people in third world countries, which I think might maybe be something Ms. Sontag is trying to say she is possibly on board with...but really I can't tell because she is seemingly passive-aggressive about being supportive of POC.Other complaints: She says that pictures of suffering are "reminders of failure," leaving aside the fact that the suffering covered in this book (war, human-on-human atrocity versus wrath of nature) was not accidental, was in fact planned, was wanted and acted upon by other people--so, all those failures are actually some kind of twisted success for certain people. She uses the word "exotic" to refer to people and places; she says "all images that display the violation of an attractive body are, to a certain degree, pornographic" (who decides what is and isn't attractive? she doesn't seem to think it's even possible that there might exist an image of injury or pain whose intended purpose isn't "sensationalism"--that the "sensationalism" she sees in it could just be a projection of her own mind); she says if you're shocked by the extent of the cruelties that humans can go to then you are not a "moral or psychological adult" (because apparently being disillusioned that humans can do really awful things is "superficial"--her word); she says that in order to forgive and make peace, one MUST forget (that wouldn't qualify as forgiveness in my book); she complains that after looking at a photograph, "the strong emotion will become a transient one ... the photographer's intentions are irrelevant to this larger process" p 121 (fucking duh; don't people learn in, like, preschool that emotions are temporary? r u srs lady? that's your indictment of war photography: "the bad feelinz, they don't last 4ever even if u want them 2"?).So, apparently, once I started writing this, it turns out the author said a lot of things and made some assumptions that really bothered me. To be clear, I am in agreement with one of her ending points (and actually quite a few things she said throughout): photographs can only be jumping-off points. It is pretty useless to look at a lynching photograph without then having a discussion about what it means, what happened and why it happened, how that legacy still impacts our society. I absolutely agree with her that the media and images can be used to narrow our world view instead of expand it, that what gets shown on television or in newspapers is not necessarily a question of what is newsworthy or important and generally tend to reflect the views & values of the organizations and people already in power (which are pretty harmful). But, I mean... I already knew those things. I've already read a lot about and taken a class on media in society. I didn't really feel enlightened by this book, only occasionally enraged... :\(I would give her another shot, though, her writing style was decent and I like the WAY she thinks, just not necessarily what she says.)
I’ve always thought that one of the things it would be fairly reasonable to have written on my headstone would be, “He often missed the obvious”. I was saying to people at work the other day that there was a part of this book where I thought, “god, how did I get to be 50 and never think of this before?” It was the bit where she talks about the holocaust and holocaust museums and then questions why America doesn’t have a museum to the victims of slavery – you know, those victims are still walking about amongst us to the extent that black American disadvantage is a continuing manifestation of that history and the subsequent imposed ways of thinking caused by that history. Why is there no real museum dedicated to the holocaust that occurred to the Australian Aboriginals? We have a holocaust museum here in Melbourne too. Her discussion of the nature of ‘remembering’ is probably worth the effort in reading the book.Not that this book requires much effort – if there is one thing you can say for Sontag it is that she is a remarkably clear writer and thinker. In many ways this book is Sontag coming back to themes she discusses in On Photography and not always coming to the same conclusions. There is a really nice part of the book where she discusses drawings of the sufferings of war done by Goya where he writes under them captions that say things like, “Look, this actually happened, I'm not making this up.” The point being, in part, that we don’t expect to need to say things like that under a photograph. We might question whether it is a truly representative photograph, but we generally don’t question whether it is true. We still expect today that what we see photographed is a manifestation of the light that struck the lens. She talks about the faking of photographs, particularly war photographs – rearranging bodies or the staging of events after the event to make it look more like we think it ‘ought’ to have looked – but even then, even as a staged event, we still think of photography as telling a kind of truth even if it is one that needs to be explained and qualified.Over the last month or so there has been an exhibition at the State Library of Victoria called Rome: Piranesi's vision. Piranesi did scenes of Rome and also visions of Ancient Rome – reconstructions in the shape of maps as well as imaginative drawings. And over the last month or so I’ve attended a couple of lectures on his images. Now, I’d always just thought that if someone was going to do views of a city that, you know, they would sit down somewhere and draw what they saw in front of them. I can be naive like that. But actually, what Piranesi did was to ‘improve’ Rome. Not just making buildings look better – but shifting them so that they would be next to other buildings and in also not being too concerned if he missed a couple of windows here or some doors there. He was going for pretty, rather than accuracy. I was so surprised at this, it is hard to say. I had always just assumed that these drawings would be ‘accurate’ – photograph accurate. I also thought the maps, even maps of places that didn't exist anymore, would also strive for a kind of accuracy too, but these spent more time trying to be pretty too, despite knowingly ignoring stuff. Often photographs, particularly war photographs, need to be approached in much the same way that Piranesi’s visions of Rome need to be approached.We look at images of the holocaust and a large part of the point of that is ‘to remember’ – except, the holocaust occurred before most of us were born – so the verb, ‘to remember’ probably isn’t quite the right one. Rather, the point of looking at these images isn’t to remember, but to learn and understand with the hope that we learn that this should never happen again. Except, it does happen again. If there is one thing that the photographic archive of the 20th century proves time and again it is that people are all too able to commit the most god-awful atrocities, often with a kind of gleeful abandon. I can’t remember who said it, possibly Zizek, that America is the oddest place, atrocity after atrocity occurs there (think of school shootings) and somehow after each new atrocity people can still say, in all seriousness, that the country has just ‘lost its innocence’. We need to get over this idea that we can still be ‘innocent’ – this is one of the things that Sontag says we can learn from looking at images of past atrocities. I think this is a particularly important book to read this year, preferably before August. Soon we are going to go through an endless reliving of World War One. And you know that we humans much prefer the romance of war to its horrors. That we even make the horrors seems somehow romantic. Before you get swept away with how much fun war is, perhaps learning to think about the moral and ethical questions that lie at the heart of looking at images of the pain of others is a useful exercise. For that reason this book is a useful place to start.
What do You think about Regarding The Pain Of Others (2004)?
I think her ending basically sums up the whole endeavor: "We, don't understand. We don't get it. We can't imagine what it was like...That's 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."Although this makes for good subway-reading (don't have to focus much), there still seems to be not much original thought and reads like some smart blog entries (apart from one or two sections which could have gone further, specifically, the one where she compares the inadequate story told by an image and those told via other mediums).
—Hamad
Well, I thought this was going to be about something other than what it is, which is just some thoughts on warporn, deathporn, painporn--things Sontag seems to have an almost necrophiliacly prurient interest in. I never look at this stuff. I don't want to see it. I don't understand people who do; all I know is that they twist themselves into ethical knots trying to justify and give a larger meaning to their nasty little fetish.I might pay attention to what Sontag wrote if she, herself, had actually ever done something to alleviate the suffering she enjoyed looking at in the photos she made sure she saw. But she never did. She was a ghoulish crowd of one, appearing vicariously at the accident scenes of civilization and staring, staring, staring as if she could never get enough of it.Funny thing is that I see horrific injuries and death, and the ensuing emotional fallout, all the time in my work. I try to understand. I try to help. But I don't want to look at it any more than necessary to accomplish my job. I look away when I encounter dying and death that doesn't concern me. Why? Because I respect the privacy of the person who endures this. When one of my patients is dying, I hold his hand, I kiss his forehead, I whisper secrets in his ear, I pray for his soul. But I do not stare at him, taking in every physical sign of his suffering and anguish. And I certainly would not take a photograph of his corpse and display it in a museum.
—Wanda
This book is about images of human suffering and human wickedness. It is very well written. Sontag is brilliant. A review here will not do it justice. Read the book. Here is an excerpt: "To designate a hell is not, of course, to tell us anything about how to extract people from that hell, how to moderate hell’s flames. Still, it seems a good in itself to acknowledge, to have enlarged, one’s sense of how much suffering caused by human wickedness there is in the world we share with others. Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood." -- Susan Sontag
—Danny
