July 09, 2003
Regarding the Pain of Others#5
Rick's fifth entry on Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others is about our horror at human suffering. The image selected is Titian's painting, The Flaying of Marsyas.
A description of the painting is here. In the painting Marsyas is being skinned alive. The painting expresses horror in the form of is a myth. This is the sublime in Edmund Burke's sense. Burke associates the fear of death, dismemberment, terror, and darkness (e.g., a howling wilderness) with feelings of the sublime. This account transforms aesthetics and this powerful current leads to Adorno's shudder.
Sontag makes the following remark about the sublime as horror:
"An invented horror can be quite overwhelming....But there is shame as well as shock in looking at the close-up of a real horror. Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it; say, the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph was taken; or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be."
We do not need myth. We have plenty of examples of historical horror that readily come to mind. There are those of innocent people killed in war (from nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima) or of people being brutually tortured. We think of the Gulag of the former Soviet Union, the German Holocaust, the killing fields of Cambodia and Rawanda.
So there is a role for art to express the horror of the twentieth century. There is no doubt that instrumental economic reason needs to create spurious irrational enclaves (criticism, populism etc), and it treats art as one of them in its seemingly rational world. However, as noted in a previous post, the language of asethetics lends a voice to human suffering. If art's conception of truth is couched in the language of suffering, then it ought to speak about the big historical horrors. It is a form of knowledge.
Let me give an example from Australia in the form of the deep suffering of indigenous people, due to genocide. By this is meant the destruction of people by white Australia through systematic violence and systematic racial discrimination. That has yet to happen. Consequently, the white Australian nation is haunted by its history, and shamed by the revelations of the Bringing Them Home Inquiry. The ghosts of the past do inhabit the nation, and will do so until the unspeakable is expressed. Art can express the suffering contained in the words Genocide, Trauma, Guilt, Shame, Willful Forgetting, Denial
That is the historical example of horror that resonates with Australians. Each people would have their own historical horror.
The writing of history often aims at 'calming the dead who still haunt the present, and at offering them scriptural tombs' through the technique of 'that was then and this is now'. It renders the past at once quite strange and quite inconsequential through some form of forgetting. So art can speak.
What is missing in Australia are the great works of art that express the suffering and horror of the destruction of a people. Modern art has yet to give expression to this suffering. For the sake of the argument let us say that we have a great work of art that expresses, or lends a voice, to the historical suffering of indigenous Australians.
Sontag is right about shame. As Kay Schaffer observes in relation to The Bringing Them Home Inquiry:
"The shame experienced and recounted by the victims is an altogether different phenomenon from the shame experienced by white respondents to testimonies of oppression. For indigenous Australians, shame comes from becoming a mere object for another, rendered inarticulate, constantly under surveillance, yet never acknowledged, being discounted, ignored, and trivialised by people in authority, reduced in their daily lives to an abjected or an objectified status, seducing them to a kind of non-existence. Their shame was not only effected by the gaze of their oppressors and the internalisation of values that structured their difference as inferiority but also, and significantly, through the practices of non-recognition by the dominant Australian community that shamed them in to silence."
Shame is different from guilt.
Where I differ from Sontag is at the point of her recoil from the horror. I suggest that we should confront the horror.
My point of difference with Sontag is with her claim that:
"Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it."
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A particular response that Sontag does not mention is concern. Concern is triggered by great works of art. In Aesthetic Theory (pp.346-7) Adorno says that:
"Concern is not some repressed emotion in the recepient that is bought to the surface by art but a momentary discomfiture, more precisely a tremor during which he gives himself over to the work. He loses his footing, as it were, discovering that the truth embodied in the aesthetic image has real tangible possibilities...experience congeals in an instant, and for it to do so the whole of consciousness is required rather than some one-dimensional stimulus and response."
Concern as tremor is not a pleasurable experience as it gives rise to the ego being shaken up and to the historical shudders. Our historical shudders have primal roots in a fear of the horrible that is coupled to a sense of helplessness. The historical memory of shudder needs to be translated and the strangeness that grips us made understandable.
As Adorno puts it, art "remains loyal to shudder not by reverting to it, but by preserving its legacy."
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at July 9, 2003 04:48 PM | TrackBack