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Abstract
In this article we investigate the imagery that came to light with the Abu Ghraib scandal. We take up both the original photographs of humiliation and torture that were published by 60 Minutes and The New Yorker in 2004, and examples of the many varied responses that have since then emerged on the internet in the form of caricatures and imitations. In analysing this imagery we introduce the theoretical concepts of the uncanny and of repetition. By analysing both the form and the content of these various images, we argue that it is necessary to introduce a further theoretical concept: comedy. Drawing upon our analysis, we conclude by discussing what the Abu Ghraib images can tell us about the present state of Western culture.
Notes
1. The tapestry had been donated to the Security Council by Nelson Rockefeller in 1995.
2. They were hardly debated in the 2004 presidential election in the United States, and Alberto Gonzales, the juridical advisor to President Bush, who had drafted the memo that stated that the United States had the right to use torture in the war on terrorism, was appointed Attorney General in 2005 after Bush was re-elected.
3. Eisenmann points out that, even though George W. Bush did suffer a decline in support from the electorate in 2005 and 2006, it is hard to connect this decline to the Abu Ghraib scandal or the increasingly open use of torture. “Given this history, it is reasonable to assume that the majority of US citizens are not much bothered by the fact of US torture. While a Gallup Poll conducted immediately after the release of the Abu Ghraib photographs indicated that 54 per cent of Americans were “bothered a great deal” by the revelations, a year later the number had declined to just 40 per cent. In December 2005 an AP/IPSOS poll revealed that 61 per cent of Americans agreed that torture was justified on some occasions” (Eisenmann Citation2007, p. 8).
4. Susan Crile made a series of Abu Ghraib paintings, as did Fernando Botero, who explicitly stated that he wanted to do for the horrors of Abu Ghraib what Picasso had done for those of Guernica: make people remember. However, there were also other images – caricatures and cartoons – that displaced the content of the original photos in, we will claim, a very innovative way.
5. It can be assumed that there were made many more photographs of the kind we have seen published. For instance, in May 2009 President Obama announced that a new series of photographs had been unveiled, but that they would not be revealed to the public. While there may have been something additional to learn about the motives, psyches, form of power, societal structures, etc., that emerged amongst the prison guards in Abu Ghraib from the study of these images, the interest we have in the pictures is directed towards society as a whole. In this respect, it is only the pictures that are in fact publicly available that are of interest.
6. As the stories of the torture and of the new series of photographs continue to emerge in global media, this is a point that we become less and less convinced of. Moreover, the former administration – first and foremost former Vice President Dick Cheney – seems less and less intent on claiming that they did not know of the torture (euphemistically naming it enhanced interrogation techniques) that took place in Abu Ghraib or in Guantanamo for that matter (Cheney Citation2009).
7. A point that has been made very clear by Sontag: “All photographs are memento mori”, she claims. “To take a photo is to participate in the mortality or vulnerability of another person” (Sontag Citation1979, p. 15).
8. There is an obvious rejection that should be considered here. Of course we are not comparing the events of Holocaust and Abu Ghraib in order to say that these two are effectively the same. These two crimes are of entirely different scope and severity. Nor are we making this point to say that George W. Bush is a new Hitler. The point is rather that, as different as the events of Auschwitz and Abu Ghraib may be, there are nevertheless elements of the former that are reoccurring in the latter. These are precisely the strange logics of totalitarianism and torture that we have expounded above.
9. A link that should be understood quite literally, seeing that wires were connected directly to the genitals of the victims.
11. Indeed, it is worth noting that they did not. With their many repetitions and representations, neither Botero nor Crile, nor the many caricaturists of the internet, have been able to turn the tide of forgetting and make the cruelty and torture of Abu Ghraib and elsewhere the centre of the political agenda.
12. It is exactly as the sign of something entirely private, that women’s underwear is placed upon a prisoner’s head – his primary access to the public sphere – but the public and the private still remain separate in their togetherness. It is precisely not revealed that the prisoners’ own public life contains in itself a necessary element of the private; his access to the public is simply removed – both literally and symbolically. Likewise, it is exactly as a way of saying that “here is nothing at all which could count as human”, that a prisoner is put on a leash, but thereby the human and the non-human remain entirely out of touch with each other. In this well-known picture the guard – Lynndie England – is positioned as the only thing human, while the prisoner is placed on the ground as something infinitely less. As instruments of torture these measures serve precisely to separate human and non-human, public and private. In the torture in Abu Ghraib the living and the mechanical, the human and the non-human, the master and the slave may have switched places, but they were never allowed to come into contact with one another.
14. See, http://legofesto.blogspot.com/
16. We have previously discussed the principled nature of Eichman’s evil in Laustsen and Ugilt Citation2007.
17. It was of course claimed that these activities were necessary to soften prisoners up for later interrogation activity. Normally, one would say, however, that the possibility of obtaining information decreases the further away the victim gets from the torture. The torture ceases to be a punishment for not revealing what the torturer wants to hear.