Beyond the Rhetoric of Pain 1138366544, 9781138366541, 9780429397851

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction to Beyond the Rhetoric of Pain
1 Visualising Pain: A History of Representations of Suffering in Medical Texts
2 Mirrors and Shadows: Photography as a Way of Sharing Pain Experience in Medical Pain Consultations
3 Atrocity and the Pain in Law
4 Choked by the Brutal Fact of Being: The Concept of Pain in the Early Works of Emmanuel Levinas
5 ‘I Honestly Felt Sick’: Affect and Pain in Viewers’ Responses to Holocaust Films
6 Memory Beyond the Anthropocene: The Tactile Rhetorics of Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia de la luz and El botón de nácar
7 The Proper Name of Our Dispossession: Notes on Filming the Blood of the Martyrs of the Arab Revolutions
8 ‘Needs to Be Done’: The Representation of Torture in Video Games and in Metal Gear Solid V
9 Narratives of Pain, Apology, and Silence in Filmic Re-Representations of Forgiveness: The South African Rainbow
10 Notes toward a Working Definition of Mopecore
11 Pain and Writing: An Interview with Diamela Eltit
Introduced by La narrativa de Diamela Eltit: escritura antes que literatura
12 Translating Pain
Index

Citation preview

Beyond the Rhetoric of Pain

Beyond the Rhetoric of Pain presents a fresh, interdisciplinary approach to the current research on pain from a variety of scholarly angles within literature, film and media, game studies, art history, Hispanic studies, memory studies, philosophy, and law. Through the combination of these perspectives, this volume goes beyond the existing structures within and across these disciplines, framing new concepts of pain in attitude, practice, language, and ethics of response to pain. Comprised of 14 unique essays, Beyond the Rhetoric of Pain maintains a common thread of analysis using a historical and cultural lens to explore the rhetoric of pain used in different fields and to push beyond the standard narratives within those fields. Combining scholarly and practice-focused approaches and methodologies, this volume questions the ethical, social, and political demands pain makes upon those who feel, watch, or speak it. Arranged to move from historical cases and relevance of pain in history towards the contemporary movement, topics include pain as a social figure, rhetorical tool, artistic metaphor, and political representation in jurisprudence. Berenike Jung is a research fellow at the Institute of Media Studies, Department of Philosophy at the University of Tübingen. She completed her PhD in Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick in 2016. A book based on her PhD, The Invisibilities of Torture: Political Torture and Visual Evidence in U.S. and Chilean Fiction Cinema (2004–2014), is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press. The link between (moving) images and their political or ethical dimension continues to anchor her current research on the role of affect, the body, agency, and performativity in digital media and cinema. Stella Bruzzi is the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University College London and a Fellow of the British Academy. Before her appointment at UCL, she was a professor of Film and Television Studies and Chair of the Arts Faculty at the University of Warwick. She has written the highly acclaimed New Documentary, amongst many other publications. In 2011 she was awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship, and her current writing project, Approximation: Documentary, History, and the Staging of Reality, will be the culmination of that research.

Warwick Series in the Humanities Series Editor: Christina Lupton

Titles in this Series Classicism and Romanticism in Italian Literature: Leopardi’s Discourse on Romantic Poetry Fabio A. Camilletti Rome, Postmodern Narratives of a Cityscape Edited by Dom Holdaway and Filippo Trentin Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920 Edited by Gemma Goodman and Charlotte Mathieson Picturing Women’s Health Edited by Kate Scarth, Francesca Scott and Ji Won Chung Knowing Nature in Early Modern Europe David Beck New Jazz Conceptions History, Theory, Practice Edited by Roger Fagge and Nicolas Pillai Food, Drink, and the Written Word in Britain, 1820–1945 Edited by Mary Addyman, Laura Wood and Christopher Yiannitsaros Beyond the Rhetoric of Pain Edited by Berenike Jung and Stella Bruzzi

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge​.com

Beyond the Rhetoric of Pain

Edited by Berenike Jung and Stella Bruzzi

First published 2019 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Taylor & Francis The right of Berenike Jung and Stella Bruzzi to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data CIP data has been applied for. ISBN: 978-1-138-36654-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-39785-1 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

List of Figures List of Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction to Beyond the Rhetoric of Pain

vii ix xiii 1

B ereni k e J un g

1 Visualising Pain: A History of Representations of Suffering in Medical Texts

11

J oanna B our k e

2 Mirrors and Shadows: Photography as a Way of Sharing Pain Experience in Medical Pain Consultations

35

D eborah Padfield

3 Atrocity and the Pain in Law

51

A ndrew W illiams

4 Choked by the Brutal Fact of Being: The Concept of Pain in the Early Works of Emmanuel Levinas

69

Z uzanna Ł adyg a

5 ‘I Honestly Felt Sick’: Affect and Pain in Viewers’ Responses to Holocaust Films

83

S tefanie R auch

6 Memory Beyond the Anthropocene: The Tactile Rhetorics of Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia de la luz and El botón de nácar A lison R ibeiro de M enezes

101

vi Contents 7 The Proper Name of Our Dispossession: Notes on Filming the Blood of the Martyrs of the Arab Revolutions

120

P eter S nowdon

8 ‘Needs to Be Done’: The Representation of Torture in Video Games and in Metal Gear Solid V

137

I van Girina

9 Narratives of Pain, Apology, and Silence in Filmic Re-Representations of Forgiveness: The South African Rainbow

159

D erilene ( D ee ) M arco

10 Notes toward a Working Definition of Mopecore

177

J ohn P roctor

11 Pain and Writing: An Interview with Diamela Eltit

193

D iamela E ltit, B ereni k e J un g

Introduced by La narrativa de Diamela Eltit: escritura antes que literatura 193 S erg io Rojas

12 Translating Pain

221

M aureen F reely

Index

229

List of Figures

1.1 ‘Amputation Below the Knee’ in Charles Bell, Illustrations of the Great Operations of Surgery, Trepan, Hernia, Amputation, Aneurism, and Lithotomy (London: Longman, 1821), permission thanks to the Wellcome Library, image L0072193 15 1.2 J. Sampson Gamgee, History of a Successful Case of Amputation at the Hip-Joint (The Limb 48 Inches in Circumference, 99 Pounds Weight) (London: John Churchill and Sons, 1865), between pp.14–15 18 1.3 Duchenne de Boulogne, Selections from the Clinical Works of Dr. Duchenne (de Boulogne), translated and edited by G. V. Poore (London: The Sydenham Society, 1883), p. 93 21 1.4 T. K. Monro, ‘A Case of Sympathetic Pain: Pain in Front of the Chest Induced by Friction of the Forearm,’ Brain: A Journal of Neurology, 18.4 (1895), 566 23 1.5 Verne T. Inman and Howard D. Eberhart, ‘The Lower-Extremity Clinical Study – Its Background and Objectives,’ Artificial Limbs, 2.1 (1955), 18 28 1.6 Richard A. Sherman, ‘Stump and Phantom Limb Pain,’ Neurologic Clinics, 7.2 (May 1989), 250 29 2.1 Deborah Padfield with Linda Williams, untitled from the series face2face, 2008–2013, Digital Archival Print © Deborah Padfield 43 2.2 Deborah Padfield with Linda Williams, untitled from the series face2face, 2008–2013, Digital Archival Print © Deborah Padfield 43 2.3 Deborah Padfield with Linda Williams, untitled from the series face2face, 2008–2013, Digital Archival Print © Deborah Padfield 44 7.1 Filming the blood of Ali Talha. Souk Al-Jumaa, Libya, 27 February 2011. Still frame from YouTube 122 7.2 Keeping vigil around the blood of the martyr Karika. Cairo, Egypt, 20 December 2011. Still frame from YouTube 125

viii  List of Figures 7.3 Touching the blood of the martyr, Sanaa, Yemen, 18 March 2011. Still frame from YouTube 129 7.4 We are all Hamza: location unknown, Syria, 3 June 2011. Still frame from YouTube 131 8.1 Quiet’s electrocution scene from the trailer. Still frame from Metal Gear Solid V trailer 139 8.2 A prisoner’s waterboarding in a military camp. Still frame from Metal Gear Solid V trailer 140 8.3 Snake performs a ‘chokehold’ on an enemy while the interrogation interface emerges over the characters. 152 Screenshot from Metal Gear Solid V 9.1 Family, Coetzee, and Father Dalton around Daniel’s grave. Still frame from Forgiveness 168 9.2 Magda Grootboom. Still frame from Forgiveness 172 10.1 Dan Walsh & Jim Davis, Garfield Minus Garfield 187 10.2 Daniel Leonard and Jim Davis, 3eanuts 187

List of Contributors

Joanna Bourke  is a Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of ­London, and fellow of the British Academy. She is the author of 14 books, including The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers ­(Oxford University Press, 2015). She is currently the principal investigator on a five-year Wellcome-Trust project on ‘Sexual Violence, Medicine, and Psychiatry.’ Stella Bruzzi is the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and ­Humanities, at the University College London, and Fellow of the British Academy. Before her appointment at UCL, she was Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. She has written the highly acclaimed New Documentary, amongst many other publications. In 2011 she was awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship. Diamela Eltit is a well-known Chilean writer. Since 2007, she has held a teaching appointment as Distinguished Global Visiting Professor at New York University and teaches a Creative Writing Program. In 2014/2015, she was invited by Cambridge University to the Simon Bolivar Chair at the Center of Latin American Studies. She has been honoured repeatedly by international organisations, among them the Modern Language Association in the United States and Casa de las Americas in Havana, and she received the Premio Iberoamericano de Letras José Donoso in 2010. Among her numerous publications are Lumpérica (1983), El Cuarto Mundo (1988), Jamás el fuego Nunca (2010), and Sumar (2018). Maureen Freely  is Chair of the Faculty of Arts at the University of ­Warwick and President of English PEN. She is a writer with seven novels to her name and many other strings to her bow. Well known as a translator of the Turkish Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk into ­English, she has also translated several classics and works by Turkey’s rising stars. For many years she worked as a journalist in London, writing about literature, social justice, and human rights. As chair of the Translator’s Association and more recently as President of English PEN, she has campaigned for writers and freedom of expression internationally. She teaches at the University of Warwick.

x  List of Contributors Ivan Girina,  PhD, is a Lecturer in Game Studies at Brunel University London. He holds a PhD in Film and Television Studies from the University of Warwick and his research is currently focused on the aesthetic influence between cinema and video games. Ivan is also cofounder and member of the Editorial Board of the international academic journal G|A|M|E – Games as Art, Media, and Entertainment. He has published on a variety of topics such as video game aesthetics, film and new media, media literacy and education, and Italian regional cinema. Berenike Jung, PhD, is a research fellow at the Institute of Media Studies, Department of Philosophy at the University of Tübingen, Germany, where she teaches film studies, digital media, and visual cultures. Her publications include Narrating Violence in Post-9/11 Action Cinema (2008) and The Invisibilities of Torture  in U.S. and Chilean Cinema (forthcoming in 2019). In her research, she explores ethical and ­political-ethical questions related to audiovisual media. She holds a PhD in Film and Television Studies from the University of Warwick in the UK, and she has been working and studying at New York University, Université Paris VIII, and in Valparaíso, Chile. Zuzanna Ładyga, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the Department of American Literature, University of Warsaw. She is a specialist in contemporary literature, literary theory, and the interface of continental and American philosophy. She has published on Donald Barthelme, David Foster Wallace, ethical philosophy, and postmodernist fiction and aesthetics. She is the author of Rethinking Postmodern Subjectivity (2009) and the editor of Barth, Barthelme, Coover (2015). Her new book, The Labour of Laziness in 20th Century American Literature, is forthcoming in 2018. She is the Vice President of the ­European Association for American Studies. Derilene (Dee) Marco, PhD, is a Lecturer in the Media Department at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. Before this she held a postdoctoral position at the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town South Africa. Dee holds a PhD in Film and Television Studies from The University of Warwick in the UK. Her research has largely focused on thinking about trauma, memory, and sensibilities of belonging in post-apartheid South African films. Her research interests also span more broadly to include areas of race in popular media and representations of intersectionality in visual culture. She teaches in the areas of global cinema, feminism, and the media and post-colonial media from the global South. Deborah Padfield, PhD, is a visual artist specialising in lens-based media and interdisciplinary practice and research within Fine Art and

List of Contributors  xi Medicine. She is a teaching fellow at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL (where she also received her PhD), and a teaching fellow in Arts and Humanities at St George’s University of London. In 2001, her collaboration with Dr Charles Pither at St Thomas’ Hospital led to a touring exhibition, pilot study, and book, Perceptions of Pain. Her recent collaboration with Professor Joanna Zakrzewska and facial pain clinicians and patients from UCLH led to several exhibitions, symposia, the UCL CHIRP-funded project Pain: Speaking the Threshold, and several publications, including a series of essays in the Lancet. She lectures and exhibits nationally and internationally and is the recipient of a number of awards. John Proctor, MFA, is a Lecturer at the Department of Academic Writing & Composition and Department of Communication & Media Studies at Manhattanville College. He teaches academic writing, media studies, and communication theory, and runs a weekly writing workshop for inmates at Rikers Island. You can find him online at ­NotThatJohnProctor.com/. Stefanie Rauch, PhD, is a research associate at the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies as part of the collaborative AHRC-funded project, ‘Compromised Identities? Reflections on Complicity and Perpetration under Nazism’ (2018–2021). In her current research, she explores oral narratives to evaluate the ways in which changing public images affect private discourses and self-representations among German and Austrian men and women, who had been complicit in sustaining the system and assisting the crimes of the Third Reich. She received her PhD in History, which focused on the reception of films about the Holocaust in Britain, from the University of Leicester. Alison Ribeiro de Menezes is a founding Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Warwick. Her research focuses on cultural memory in Spain, Portugal, and Southern Cone Latin America. Previous books include Juan Goytisolo: The Author as Dissident (­Tamesis,  2005), A Companion to Carmen Martín Gatie (with Catherine O’Leary, Tamesis, 2008), and Embodying Memory in Contemporary Spain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). She has been awarded research funding by the Irish Research Council, the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the European Union. Sergio Rojas is a philosopher and Professor of Literature at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Chile. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University Paris VIII (France), Texas A & M University (USA), University of Costa Rica, and University of San Andres (Bolivia). He has lectured at several universities in Latin America, Europe, and the United States. Among his books are: Escritura neobarroca (2010), El arte agotado (2012), Catástrofe y trascendencia en la narrativa de

xii  List of Contributors Diamela Eltit (2012), and Las obras y sus relatos III (2017). He is currently working on a book on the figure of the Cartesian cogito in the work of Samuel Beckett. Peter Snowdon is a deprofessionalised filmmaker and deinstitutionalised scholar. His feature-length found footage film The Uprising, made entirely out of YouTube videos from the Arab revolutions, won the Opus Bonum Award for best world documentary on its debut at the 2013 Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival. His booklength study of the politics of online vernacular video is forthcoming from Verso. Andrew Williams  is a Professor of Law at the University of Warwick and the author of the 2013 Orwell Prize winning book A Very British Killing: the Death of Baha Mousa.

Acknowledgments

The editors are grateful to the publishing team at Routledge, the Institute of Media Studies at the University of Tübingen, the Department of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick, and University College London for their generous support in creating this volume. Special thanks must go to Warwick’s Humanities Research Centre and their grant for a Doctoral Fellowship Conference, which planted the foundational seed for this book. Above all, Professor John King must be thanked, who was both steward and guardian angel for this project, with generous help, support, contacts and always the right words at the right time. Many thanks to Professor Tim Lockley and of course Sue Rae from the HRC, who provided multifold and patient help, and especially also to Associate Professors Karl Schoonover and Fabienne ­Viala, who were wonderful and deeply appreciated moderators during the conference. We also wish to thank Dr Tomas Peters and Rodrigo Rojas, who were extremely helpful in editing translated texts and facilitating contacts. So many people have offered intellectual and emotional input along the way, and we deeply appreciate and thank them all.

Introduction to Beyond the Rhetoric of Pain Berenike Jung

After a laboured, contorted, and belated response to the torture i­mages that emerged from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2004, the last ­presidential race saw several candidates proclaiming their renewed support for such measures. The freshly minted winner of the electoral vote declared that even if torture does not produce intelligence, ‘they deserve it anyway,’ and, in his first TV interview as president, Mr Trump ­announced that he ‘feels’ torture works. Bluntly phrased perhaps, the 45th U.S. President certainly voiced a common sentiment: to insist on the primacy of one’s feelings, in spite of scientific, factual evidence to the contrary.1 Is this a backlash, a momentary relapse, or the culmination of a long-standing development? Were the contorted phrasings and euphemisms of the George W. Bush administration (‘enhanced interrogations’) simply a stepping stone? Does the insistence to declare the duck to be indeed a duck and not an ‘enhanced chicken’ even matter? We seem to be living through an age of ressentiment. In our ­polarized world, where issues that should be grounded in fact have become a matter of opinion, one must wonder about the proper place for both scholarship and emotions in academic and public discourse. How and when can emotions enter as legitimate rationale, perhaps even offer a kind of methodology? What place should be reserved and defended for scholarship in an age of post-truth and post-fact? And how will an interdisciplinary volume collecting research around the subject of pain be conducive to answering such questions?

The Rhetoric of Pain The eponymous phrase of a rhetoric of pain already combines two sides which are traditionally often framed in opposition: pain and speech. For instance, in her seminal work The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry o ­ pposes violence and language, arguing that physical pain resists narrative ­description. This inexpressibility of pain was said to lead to a discrepancy of experience, to the mis-description of violent activities, and the

2  Berenike Jung hypothesis that the pain of the other is fundamentally closed off from us. Paradigmatically, Scarry writes, to have great pain is to have certainty; to hear that another person has pain is to have doubt. 2 Yet we can be hurt by speech; we are vulnerable to language.3 While Scarry’s conceptualisation of pain as inherently inexpressible has been subject to critical interventions,4 her work remains an important and insightful starting point to explore the relation between violence, the body, and language. Going beyond such dichotomies may make it necessary to explore new territories for thinking about pain. As the ­contributions assembled here show, pain can provide a nexus, in which feeling and thinking, expressed in writing, may overlap. Rather than situate pain as either a feeling or a neurological effect, we can frame it as a way of experiencing and understanding the world, something that may even accompany us in the construction of a world. This volume explores possibilities of a different kind of approaching this ‘abject’ or ‘unsavoury’ topic of pain, in search of a different grammar, of re-invigorated, more encompassing speech acts. While the recovery and acknowledgment of the emotional spectrum shapes the overall quest, we have not given up on the possibilities of writing and of scholarship, broadly conceived of as rhetorical practices, to help us access and develop new meaning. Rhetoric in this book refers to rhetoric of science, but also leads the reader to the fraught relation between language and pain. Going beyond the rhetoric of pain invites the reader to explore the chapters of this anthology as companion pieces, perhaps even in productive antagonism. We hope that the interplay between each chapter’s finite universe will open new lines of thought. Going beyond the rhetoric of pain may also entail the examination of the role that law, historical discourse, or the political power differential may play in shaping their channels of communication, in even acknowledging their existence, in circumscribing agency and right to speak and to be heard in a court of law. *** Another way of beginning this introduction would have been to take a personal route. In 2016, I completed my PhD thesis on the Invisibilities of Torture, about factual cases of torture and how these were reflected in selected Chilean and U.S. contemporary films. 5 Upon learning my topic, my interlocutors usually recoiled and backed off, no matter how much I emphasised that my focus was not on graphic violence but on the ways in which art can enlarge our understanding of what we mean  by and

Introduction to Beyond the Rhetoric of Pain  3 what it is that we speak of as torture. On highly divisive issues, i­ncreased scientific literacy does not convince sceptic participants or lessen polarisation; and the case of torture was no exception. Both science (the data on the effects of torture) and representational criticism (rectifying distorted portrayals of its efficacy or of historical facts) have enacted little perceivable change regarding the ‘political fiction’6 that the point of torture is, in fact, to gather intelligence. It was maddening. Why does the belief in torture’s purpose and efficacy remain undisturbed by factual evidence to the contrary? Part of the explanation is that the tropes of torture, which Darius Rejali called its ‘folklore,’ 7 pervade all levels of discourse. It is difficult to un-learn the grammar of the ‘popular imaginaries’ of such things, and to replace them with larger, more precise but also more complicated explications. This is why it is necessary to explore the forms in which we come to know or to believe in one thing over another. Indeed, there are historical and conceptual links between torture and truth – from slave torture in ancient Greece,8 the medieval spectacle that demonstrated sovereign power,9 to the modern ‘enhanced’ interrogation. To know – to grasp, seize, catch, behold, possess, penetrate, pierce – something means also to touch it physically, to have a bodily connection. We conceptually link physical pain to truth – our gut feeling, the truth of pain felt in our bodies – and this is why physical pain can be used to communicate. Even in representations of pain, it is the audience who, by passing moral and aesthetic judgment, determines its meaning.10 The audience’s response is rooted through physical sensation, perceived as certainty in the body: when we witness a representation, we have a visceral reaction that feels true, and that’s what we choose to believe. This indeterminacy of the representation means that symbolic forms may give shape, but that the phenomenon also exceeds language. It is therefore necessary to explore the effects of the ‘recovery of emotion as an important yet neglected, or even denigrated aspect of media consumption.’11 As John Durham Peters suggests about the moral dimension to witnessing: [to witness] consists in having respect for the pain of victims, in ­ eing tied … to someone else’s story of how they hurt.12 b The task at hand, then, is not to disembody pain, to gouge out its ­emotional core, its softer tissue. On the contrary, the interventions in this book acknowledge our own human involvement in the research; they lay out the importance of reading large, historical stories together with small, personal ones and thereby of returning agency to victims or ­survivors of pain. In order to do this, it is necessary to stretch our imagination of the possibilities of communication beyond the usual rhetorical suspects.

4  Berenike Jung

Interdisciplinarity This volume focuses on moments of synchronicity and overlap in inquiries across academic disciplines. Combining theoretical perspectives from visual studies, law, history, and philosophy with more personal and experiential approaches, the contributions collected in this volume provide a map of current research on a wide variety of ways in which pain can be thought, represented, and explored. Thus, this book draws together discussions which too often take place in isolation from one another, opening the vista on many ways of rapprochement. A high-stakes, elusive, and unavoidably hybrid phenomenon, pain crosses many fields, making an interdisciplinary approach particularly fitting. The frequently cited examples of mirror neurons and neuroscientific research on embodied perception,13 for instance, demonstrate how pain research has generated prominent examples of interdisciplinary cross-pollination. Such research suggests that our sensory experiences of the world are shaped by embodied perception, confirming a view of the world proposed by social sciences. Humanities, on the other hand, realising that emotion, cognition, and physical reactions are intertwined, dethroned a concept of the individual self as a stable, unique, and separate. What we can see in such debates is how the phenomenon of pain sutures perspectives of the natural sciences and humanities. Researchers of philosophy or the humanities often concentrated on the question if and under which circumstances we can recognise the pain of the other (or perhaps, advancing even deeper into the epistemological rabbit hole, how to be certain at least of my own pain.) We do not want to appropriate or to assume knowledge of the pain of others. And yet we can choose to emphasise either what separates or what connects us. At this juncture, the struggle to solve ‘my pain’ in difference to ‘the pain of the other’ does not appear the most promising path to pursue. Sara Ahmed calls this pain of the other – which one perhaps cannot know14 but feels nevertheless affected by – the ‘sociability’ of pain. The pain of the other, rather than demarcating an epistemological endpoint, might, on the contrary, help me (retaining for the moment that notion of a unique and stable self) to acknowledge that “my mind” is always also present in the observation of minds. Observing visual translations, the neuronal network of brain scans, say, tells us little about how people feel and experience their pain. Even in medical and judicial approaches to the topic of pain, there are by necessity always elements of narration, personal history, interpretive work, and subjective perception. Especially in our current data-obsessed times, it is important to remember that science is not “neutral” – and that this does not lessen its value. History – rightfully – humbles science, revealing its transitory nature: scientific models are only valid and supreme until better ones are found. The questions we ask and those we ask not, and the way in

Introduction to Beyond the Rhetoric of Pain  5 which we ask them, shape what data can tell us. As some of the chapters assembled here demonstrate, our instruments of analysis merit frequent re-examination. They show that to address medical and judicial pain, for instance, our tools of analysis call for refinement. The intuitive, intimate relation between “my” language and “my” pain is reflected in various ways in the contributions to this volume. There is, for instance, a variety of styles and forms of expressions to be found here: Stefanie Rauch transcribes her interviewees’ colloquial language, John Proctor cites rap lyrics as they are sung, Maureen Freely reflects on the abyss between the stories of pain she has been translating and the events they describe, and an interview with the Chilean writer Diamela Eltit is offered both in Spanish and translated into English. ­Giving voice to other p ­ eople’s pain may also mean to let them speak as they do, while acknowledging one’s own role in hearing them, in the attempt to communicate across the different worlds that languages or dialects or code-switching encompass, as well as to connect the languages in which body, mind, and heart speak to us. *** The book falls into three parts. The first one is comprised of four chapters which investigate specific aspects of pain in law, medical history, and as a philosophical concept. In part two, five chapters explore representations of pain in film, video games, and online videos. The ­selection here consciously tried to un-think Eurocentrism,15 with contributions on and from the Global South, with Chilean and South African Films, videos from the Arab Spring, and Japanese video games. Due to the nature of the object, each contributor inevitably brings part of him- or herself to their work. This reflexive and personal quality unites all of the interventions assembled here, but is made explicit in the final section of the book, with three chapters in which translators and writers delve into their own intimate relation with writing, thinking, and feeling, covering the issues at hand in a personal and more dialogic fashion. In her historical work on the Story of Pain (2014), Joanna Bourke emphatically countered Scarry’s generalisation of the incommunicable nature of pain. Rather than examining pain as a category by itself, Bourke proposes focusing on the category people-in-pain, which returns agency to the person-in-pain. In this article on ‘Visualization of Phantom Pain,’ she historically traces the ways in which physicians have represented pain and responses to pain visually – or absented from doing so – in mainstream medical texts. The dramatically different metaphors they chose reveal the influence of culture on the body. Bourke pivots on the example of phantom limb pain. In this rare case, physicians attempted to represent what pain actually feels like: ‘the only times physicians

6  Berenike Jung visually reproduce what pain feels like is when the body is absent altogether.’ The phantom body of this kind of suffering, a challenge to mind/ body dichotomies, had to be visualised to be tamed. Building on Bourke’s framework, Deborah Padfield identifies the ­potential to return agency to the person-in-pain by providing, with photography, the visual as a different grammar. In ‘Mirrors and Shadows: Photography as a way of sharing pain experience in medical pain consultations,’ she argues that images make pain shareable and visible to others. They serve to highlight and help to understand the subjectivity of pain, shifting the emphasis to a more holistic comprehension, from reading to perceiving. Padfield describes to us the rationale and results of the face2face project where sufferers of chronic pain were co-creating this improved, enhanced visual rhetoric. In ‘Atrocity and the Pain in Law,’ Andrew Williams writes about the place of pain in modern law. As he points out, to inflict pain and suffering, to kill and destroy, is only in exceptional cases constrained by legal rules. Much suffering is a priori excluded from law: ‘the starting presumption in law is that personal suffering will not be ‘recognised’ as worthy of legal response.’ Thus, the very act of naming a victim is a legal one. Williams explores how the contradictory need to both accept suffering as an inevitable and necessary in warfare and to identify when inflicted suffering becomes legally intolerable has induced a sense of inherent ­ambiguity in the rhetoric and practice of law. In ‘Choked by the Brutal Fact of Being: The Concept of Pain in the Early Work of Emmanuel Levinas,’ a nuanced close-reading of Levinas’s ‘On Escape,’ Zuzana Ladyga explores the revolutionary potential of Levinas’s rhetoric in this text. Levinas’s use of the pain lexicon suggests that certain states of the body offer revolutionary potential for the mind by attending to the fact of our existence as material objects. Images of choking, metaphors of ‘enchainment,’ or of our ‘suffocating weight,’ are ‘hyperbolic invitations to a more empirical kind of ontological inquiry than philosophy has traditionally allowed.’ This concerns in particular the haptic or tactile sense, as well as a proprioceptive awareness of one’s body. Contrary to the ‘antibiological bias’ of Western thought, Ladyga finds here a radical strategy, a concern to use the body as prime object and method of inquiry into being. This rhetoric, she argues, aims at eliminating the ‘pattern of symbolic appropriation,’ the concern for the transcendence of the human condition. Levinas’s insistence on prioritising bodily experience over philosophical abstraction suggests that the key to philosophical ‘revolt’ is to approach the body not as that which ‘collides with our freedom’ but as ‘the exercise of that freedom.’ For ‘“Needs to be Done”: the representation of torture in video games and Metal Gear Solid V,’ Ivan Girina offers an in-depth analysis of the representation, function, and effect of torture in video games, particularly through the example of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. Informed

Introduction to Beyond the Rhetoric of Pain  7 by both game and visual studies, Girina interrogates the ­aesthetics and politics of pain  and torture in these video games across various levels of discourse. Contextualised within the ­often-controversial representation of violence in this medium, Girina’s detailed and medium-specific analysis  of  the game, looking both at its ludic structure as well as its narrative aspects, enhances our perspective and understanding of these phenomena. Stefanie Rauch offers an empirical study of the kind that has rarely been done before: a series of qualitative interviews with UK subjects about recent Holocaust films. In order to speak to the relationship between affect and cognition in the reception of such films, she differentiates along the films’ aesthetic invitations and ‘claims to the historical real,’ as well as prior conceptions and frames of historical understanding and knowledge on the part of the interviewees. In ‘“I Honestly Felt Sick:” Affect and Pain in Viewers’ Responses to Holocaust Films,’ Rauch emphasises that emotions (both those represented on screen and those experienced and reflected upon by viewers) are a productive lens through which to analyse Holocaust film reception. Films, including the dramatised and emotionalised fiction species often chided by critics, may offer an emotional engagement that leads to a deeper, critical understanding of history. However, pain in particular may also act ‘as an equalizer, seemingly eradicating meaningful distinctions between perpetrators and victims, between suffering pain and inflicting pain.’ Next, in ‘The Proper Name of our Dispossession: Notes on Filming the Blood of the Martyrs of the Arab Revolutions,’ Peter Snowdon offers an emotional reading of a persistent trope found in videos of the Arab Spring: retracing the blood of a man just killed by the state. This trope of the bloodline creates a zone of indistinction and opacity which opens a symbolic connection between dead and living, martyrs and mourners. The trope, Snowdon argues, fulfils a much broader function and contains a deeper meaning, which he spreads out across several components. The filmer becomes a symbolic surrogate for the deceased; through tactile gestures, the film acts out the desire to touch the blood and to connect to the dead; the blood and the act of tracing it embody a relational quality and thus connect filmer and viewer to the dreams of the revolutionaries. In ‘Narratives of pain, apology and silence in filmic re-representations of forgiveness: The South African Rainbow,’ Derilene (Dee) Marco discussed some of the more problematic, neglected aspects of discourses surrounding South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Committees. Through the analysis of selected scenes in Forgiveness (Ian Gabriel, 2004), Marco explores how a discourse of enforced forgiving and a dogmatic conception of ‘Rainbow-nation unity,’ enacted through self-serving whiteness and upheld by the film’s Western gaze destabilises a recently won power by Black victims and counteracts the possibility of silence as resistance, of expressing pain in silence.

8  Berenike Jung In ‘Memory Beyond the Anthropocene: The Tactile Rhetorics of ­ atricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia de la luz and El botón de nácar,’ Alison P Ribeiro de Menezes focuses on nostalgia and longing, tactility in visual rhetorics. Ribeiro explores the ‘tactile rhetorics’ employed by Chilean director Patricio Guzmán in his films Nostalgia de la luz and Botón del mar. Guzmán creates powerful metaphors both to channel the pain of the relatives of Latin America’s desaparecidos and to propose a means of overcoming such historical trauma. While honouring the concrete pain of the victims, tactile images enmesh the human and the non-human, visualising scale and time. She explores how his films provide an imaginative encounter facilitated by art’s ability to open our eyes to seeing otherwise, to re-enchant a disenchanted world. John Proctor’s contribution begins with a touching story narrating the anguish of his small daughter about the death of a fictional cat. The incommensurability of her pain in this nightly repeated event seem both to offer an outsized variation of hurt and to remind us of its purest form. Her grief taps into a deeper truth, which Proctor connects to both a historical and a very contemporary pain. The nostalgia for the innocent Fifties, whose imaginary mythology keeps rearing its distorted head, resembles the safe, never-changing world of childhood stories. For ‘Notes Toward a Working Conception of Mopecore,’ Proctor’s angled entry into this contemporary condition of a kind of mourning is mopecore, which he defines as ‘foremost a critical and personal lens … a ­fusion of mourning and melancholia.’ The mopecore gaze, searches for that which punctures the text, following Barthes’s lacerations, where grief punctures the text. In contrast to the response triggered by the current data deluge, this contemplative gaze allows to be uninhibited in emotional exposure to fear, regret, tension, remorse, the permanent knowledge of mortality, an existential angst. Proctor consults an array of late-­t wentieth century thinkers and theorists as well as representations in literature, film, and television, to demonstrate the proximity of laughter and tears, but he also opens up an intensely personal and deeply touching witnessing of this moment. Like Proctor, Maureen Freely introduces a very personal connection into her work. In ‘Translating Pain,’ Freely tells of how her own childhood in Turkey shapes her experience and sensibility of translating ­stories and thus, histories from contemporary Turkey. These include family histories from the Armenian genocide and Orhan Pamuk’s Nobel-prize winning novel Snow. Reflecting on her hopes that her translations offer an opening into these words and worlds to others, Freely concludes that she shall neer truly understand the pain she has translated; but she insists that while ‘violence is rarely senseless … almost always, silence is.’ The writer Diamela Eltit is counted among the literary superstars in Chile; yet, while her work is well-known to scholars of Latin American culture, her often modern and deeply explorative use of language does

Introduction to Beyond the Rhetoric of Pain  9 not translate easily. This volume presents, both in her native Spanish and in English translation, an interview I conducted with Eltit while she was a visiting scholar at Cambridge in 2015. Within the informal language of the interview, we witness Eltit’s thoughts on writing and language in relation to pain. A truly collaborative labour of love, ‘Pain and Writing’ – or ‘Dolor y Escritura’ – is introduced by Chilean literary scholar Sergio Rojas. Where the interviewer acts as curious reader who poses probing questions to Eltit about her process and vision of the world and her experience as a Chilean, Rojas opens a way of entering her complex and ­challenging style by contextualising Eltit’s political and literary contributions. He offers us the thesis that Eltit’s work is first and foremost writing, in Roland Barthes’s sense of a scriptable [scriptible] text, where the reader may emerge, as the author dies.16 *** While the emphasis shifts, there is a high degree of continuity across these sections. Underpinning the project of Beyond the Rhetoric of Pain is an ethical and political belief that the questions discussed here are not to be cordoned off into parochial disciplinary nooks and crannies, nor to be separated from our embodied lives as researchers and human beings. We need to engage with both the factual and the emotional truths. While art may offer healing, poetic truths and an opportunity for ‘working through’ trauma, there is also a need for the corroboration of atrocity, for evidence based in the facts of the material world. Today’s task is to examine how our scientific tools can be both ­defended and improved to foster the enhancement of knowledge and to enact necessary change. Interdisciplinary academic scholarship certainly presents challenges, as we advance our research within different ways of thinking, naming, and organising the world. And yet we need to communicate across the divide(s). That we must not allow our differences in approach and point of view to erect separate realities has now become more apparent and more urgent than ever.

Notes 1 Jane Mayer, ‘The Black Sites. A Rare Look inside the CIA’s Secret Interrogation Program,’ The New Yorker Online, 13 August 2007; Katherine Eban, ‘Rorschach and Awe,’ Vanity Fair Online, July 2007; Ali H. Soufan, Daniel Freedman, and Adrian Kitzinger, The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War against Al-Qaeda (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2011). 2 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 3 Cf. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (London: Routledge, 1997); Jean Franco, Cruel Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013).

10  Berenike Jung 4 Cf. Joanna Bourke, The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004); Elizabeth Dauphinée, ‘Politics of the Body in Pain,’ Security Dialogue, 38.2 (2007), 139–55. 5 Berenike Jung, The Invisibilities of Torture: Political Torture and Visual Evidence in U.S. and Chilean Contemporary Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming in 2019). 6 Scarry, The Body in Pain, 47. 7 Darius Rejali, Torture and Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Faisal Devji, ‘Torture at the Limits of Politics,’ in Michael Flynn and Fabiola F. Salek (eds), Screening Torture: Media Representations of State Terror and Political Domination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 239–55. 8 Page DuBois, Torture and Truth (New York: Routledge, 1991). 9 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Penguin, 1991). 10 Jennifer R. Ballengee, The Wound and the Witness: The Rhetoric of Torture (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2009). 11 Lisa Blackman, Immaterial Bodies: Affect, Embodiment, Mediation (London: SAGE, 2012), 70. 12 John Durham Peters, ‘Witnessing,’ Media, Culture & Society, 23 (2001), 707–23. 13 See, for instance, Vittorio Gallese and Michele Guerra, ‘Embodying Movies: Embodied Simulation and Film Studies,’ Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, 3 (2012), 183–210. 14 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004). 15 Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London: Routledge, 1994). 16 I am grateful to Rodrigo Rojas and Dr. Tomas Peters for helping me with transcribing and polishing the interview.

1 Visualising Pain A History of Representations of Suffering in Medical Texts Joanna Bourke

Pain is a phantom, a spectre that haunts clinical encounters. Physical suffering is the chief symptom impelling people to seek medical help, yet its subjective nature and invisibility routinely thwart diagnostic and curative processes. The fact that pain can be felt only by the person-in-pain means that sufferers are required to communicate their subjective sensations through language. This creates formidable problems. Many sentient beings (including infants, the comatose or unconscious, and some physically and mentally impaired people) lack the ability to put their thoughts or sensations into words. Even people-in-pain who possess sophisticated cognitive skills often seek silence and seclusion. Their linguistic creativity is impaired. Sufferers feel alienated from themselves, complaining of a disconnection between ‘me’ and ‘my body-in-pain.’ Like physicians and other caregivers, they may also be haunted by the invisibility of their own pain. This is the phantom that pain surgeon René Leriche was referring to in his classic text The Surgery of Pain (1939). He admitted to feeling intensely ‘distressed’ at being ‘powerless to understand’ the other person’s suffering. He portrayed surgeons like himself reaching out to help their patients, even sympathetically touching the ‘region of pain,’ only to be ‘surprised that you can feel nothing, and yet at times, by your touch, even exciting dreadful recurrent spasms of pain.’ There was simply ‘nothing to be seen,’ he lamented.1 Leriche was an exceptionally empathetic surgeon. Although he lamented the invisibility of the other person’s pain, he was aware that physicians could apprehend something of the nature of their patients’ suffering by observing their facial and bodily gestures. For example, ­L eriche described a consultation with a man suffering from trigeminal neuralgia, an agonising nerve disorder of the face. He instructed physicians to ‘Look at him: while you are speaking to him.’ At first, the patient seemed to be ‘listening to you, calm, normal, perhaps a little preoccupied.’ But then, Of a sudden, he becomes rigid: the pain is there. His face becomes screwed up. There is depicted in it a terrible expression of pain, of grievous pain. His eyes are closed, his face is drawn, his features

12  Joanna Bourke distorted. And immediately he lays his hand on his cheek, presses it against his nose, sometimes rubbing it vigorously; or, more frequently, he remains rigid in his pain, which appears to bring everything in him to a stop. 2 Physicians, therefore, could identify the inarticulate, yet unmistakable, facial and gestural language of distress. These renderings of suffering rendered pain tangible. Leriche’s meditations on the nature of pain – its invisibility yet the ability of observers to witness at least some components of its nature and intensity through visual observation – are the themes of this chapter. In recent decades, there has been a growing literature on visual representations of pain in the modern period. Historians have analysed the art of pain in broadsheets, cartoons, and periodicals such as Punch.3 The portraits of suffering painted by great artists such as Charles Le Brun have been meticulously examined.4 Not only is there a growing philosophical literature on ‘representationism’ with regards to painful sensations, 5 but attention has also been paid to the ways people-in-pain themselves have sought to represent their sensations visually.6 There are also eloquent writings on artist-surgeons (such as Henry Tonks, pioneer plastic surgeon during the First World War) who sketched or painted their patients, but whose art was kept separate from their clinical practise.7 In contrast, in this chapter, I explore the way physicians have represented pain visually in mainstream medical texts. In my book The Story of Pain (2014), I argued that linguistic representations of pain within medical texts became progressively ‘thin’ through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.8 During this period, authors of medical books and articles gradually stripped their prose of rich metaphors and metonyms, increasingly favouring the much more austere language of the biological sciences. Nineteenth-century physicians, who prided themselves as ‘men of feeling,’ reinvented themselves as ‘men of science,’ with empathetic detachment being seen as the most appropriate comportment of physicians vis-à-vis their patients. This chapter explores a similar shift in the way pain was represented visually in Anglo-American medical and surgical texts from the early nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. I will be arguing that, in the earlier period, visual representations of pain were welcomed because they served to bolster arguments about gestures and facial expressions as a ‘natural language’ that served to ripen the ‘manly sensibility’ of surgeons. Anaesthetics and other technologies disrupted this aesthetics. Gestures and facial expressions were dulled, as dismembering took place on insensible bodies, whose cries and movements (if, indeed, there were any) were automatic reflexes. It was in the nineteenth century that body and mind, pain and suffering, were sheared apart – the surgeon’s expertise concentrating on the body with its ghostly, inscrutable signs.

Visualising Pain  13 There is one notable exception to this argument, however. As I will show, the metaphorically thin visual representation of pain in medical commentary from the mid-twentieth century was disrupted when surgeons turned to phantom limbs. From the 1950s, representations of phantom limb pain encourage a re-turning towards the visual. In the context of phantom pain, elaborate metaphorical commentaries reappeared, supplemented with imagery that not only stylised the body (almost always male) but even attempted to represent what pain feels like. Put another way, the absent bodily part that still feels (because the amputee continued to visualise and impart sensation to it) encouraged surgeons to also visualise and impart sensation to absence. *** At the outset, it is important to acknowledge that medical texts only rarely provided visual representations of pain. This is the case throughout the period explored here. There are proliferations of images of lesions, encrustations, and diseased tissues and organs – with their implicit acknowledgement of painfulness – but explicit visual commentaries on pain-as-such are uncommon. Nevertheless, where pain imagery did exist, it was significantly more common in earlier texts. No account of visual representations of pain in the nineteenth century can fail to acknowledge the greatest surgeon-illustrator of that period: Charles Bell. He published lavishly illustrated medical texts, designed not only to enlighten artists about the nature of the human body (including skeletal structures, muscle groups, and the location of fat deposits) but also to instruct surgeons in their craft. His most famous work was Illustrations of the Great Operations of Surgery, Trepan, Hernia, Amputation, Aneurism, and Lithotomy, published in 1821. This book was notable for Bell’s drawings and engravings of men whose facial expressions were contorted in obvious agony. Bell believed that ‘when the demonstration’ of surgery ‘is presented to the eye, that knowledge is most easily conveyed.’ There was ‘much professional knowledge, which he [the surgeon] cannot easily attain by any other means.’ In other words, interpreting the patient’s facial expressions was more reliable than employing the senses of touch, smell, and sound; it was even more effective than listening to a patient’s verbal descriptions.9 Being able to ‘read’ facial expressions of pain was essential because Bell viewed pain as important in its own right, as opposed to a sign of something else (which, as we shall see, preoccupied latter physicians). As Bell put it in The Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression as Connected with the Fine Arts (1844), Pain is affirmed to be unqualified evil; yet pain is necessary to our existence; at birth, it rouses the dormant faculties, and gives us

14  Joanna Bourke consciousness. To imagine the absence of pain, is not only to imagine a new state of being, but a change in the earth and all upon it…. Sensitivity to pain is destined to be the protection; it is the safeguard of the body.10 From this perspective, pain expressions communicated God’s will. Bell’s interpretation of pain and pain expressions were fundamentally affected by his experiences on the battlefield. Many of his representations of pain were based on the time he spent tending to the wounded after the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. It had been an ­emotionally fraught experience in which (as Bell wrote in a letter to the politician Francis Horner) the ‘decencies of performing surgical operations were soon neglected.’ The cries of the wounded ‘all beseeching to be taken next’ (that is, operated on) was traumatic. Before long, his clothes were ‘stiff with blood’ and his ‘arms powerless with the exertion of using the knife!’ It was this horror that led Bell to muse on the nature of surgical sympathy. He marvelled that it was ‘more extraordinary still’ to find that his mind remained ‘calm amidst such variety of suffering.’ After all, he concluded, to give these desperate patients ‘access to your feelings was to allow yourself to be unmanned for the performance of a duty.’ He believed that it was ‘less painful to look upon the whole than to contemplate one object.’11 His use of the word ‘unmanned’ is important. For Bell, manliness was a subject for both surgeons and patients. He illustrated this dynamic in a sketch entitled ‘Amputation Below the Knee.’12 In the top third of the sketch (see Figure 1.1), Bell portrayed the ­surgeon as a manly figure who wielded his knife (as he put it) ‘more like a sabre, than a Surgeon’s scalpel.’13 Bell was clear about the masculine gendering of the surgeon’s sensibilities. He insisted that it was a ‘vulgar error’ to imply that the surgeon had to be ‘diverted of the common feeling of Humanity’ in order to ‘do his duty.’ This error was typically made by women, Bell claimed. In his words, Let my lady’s maid still suppose, that he must be a brute whose ­ ccupation soils his hands with blood. It is not supposed that she o can have very accurate notions of the difference of his service who inflicts the wound, and of his who closes it; but for a reasonable man, and most of all, for one educated to Surgery, it is very ridiculous to assign as a reason for not doing his duty, that his feelings prevent him. The surgeon should not ‘stand … like the foolish maid, who holds her apron betwixt her pretty eyes and the object of her horror.’ Neither should the surgeon ‘boast of feelings’ since

Visualising Pain  15

Figure 1.1  ‘Amputation below the Knee’ in Charles Bell, Illustrations of the Great Operations of Surgery, Trepan, Hernia, Amputation, Aneurism, and Lithotomy (London: Longman, 1821), permission thanks to the Wellcome Library, image L0072193.

Any thing [sic] like a flourish on such an occasion, does not merely betray vanity, but a lamentable want of just feeling. It is as if a man said – Look at me now – see how unconcerned I am, while the ­patient is suffering under my hand! Rather, the surgeon must ‘forget himself, in the desire to give aid to ­ nother.’ His maxim? ‘Think only of your patient.’14 Manliness was a also required of patients. In ‘Operation at the Shoulder Joint to Amputate the Arm,’ Bell portrays the facial expression of a soldier undergoing an amputation. Only when the pain was unbearable – at the dislocation of the joint – would such a man, with his ‘strong manly features,’ swoon away.15 Bell believed that his sketches would serve to educate surgeons in their task. However, they were also explicitly intended to be aesthetic representations of the expressions. At the time Bell drew these sketches, he was meeting with the German physician Johann Gaspar Spurzheim, ­renowned proponent of phrenological thought, which claimed to be able to determine personality, intelligence, emotions, and a host of other characteristics by the analysis of facial architecture.16 Combined with Bell’s deeply held religious beliefs – most famously set out in The Hand: Its Mechanism and Vital Endowments as Evincing Design (1833) – Bell ­regarded facial expressions and gestures as a ‘natural language.’17

16  Joanna Bourke Indeed, if we are to understand Bell’s combination of surgical instruction with visual representations of suffering, it is crucial to recognise the popularity of phrenology and physiognomy within medical circles. As Samson Davis explained in Principles of Physiognomy and Natural Language, The corporal gestures constituting Natural Language, are not merely the expressive vocabulary of the passions and sentiments; they also at the same time … serve to accomplish, or to assist in the fulfillment of their aims. In other words, the expressions of pain served the purpose of ‘gratifying the mental affections they portray’ by ‘their physical effects on the body, putting it in a suitable condition to fulfil their object, and by their irresistible moral influence over the minds of spectators, through the amazing power of sympathy.’18 In such schemas, a special role is assigned to sight. Again, Davis explained that the ‘language of the passions and affections’ are ‘naturally affected and called into activity by certain peculiar objects.’ When a person sees these ‘passions and affections,’ their response is ‘as necessarily awakened into action as vision is on the presentation of light to the eye.’ In other words, whenever we witness the expression of any feeling, no matter how expressed, we irresistibly experience the corresponding feeling…. This is Sympathy, or fellow-feeling; and a wide and a beautiful ­ordination it is! – the source of all the finer joys and the charities of life, and a necessary constituent in the character of a fully-sentient being!19 This was Bell’s purpose in drawing images of suffering. While the public were viewing Waterloo in terms of ‘enterprise and valour,’ Bell admitted to a friend that he believed that visual representations of pain would remind people of ‘the most shocking sights of woe … accents of entreaty, outcry from the manly breast, interrupted forcible expressions of the dying, and noisome smells.’20 In other words, there was a moral message in his sketches. There was also a clinical message, as the expressions of agony were an integral part of the healing process for three reasons: they prepared the fractured-body for the trial ahead; they equipped the surgeon for his act of ‘forget[ting] himself, in the desire to give aid to another’; and they primed the public for their act of sympathy. Bell was undoubtedly exceptional, but other physicians during the first half of the nineteenth century also sought to represent suffering through facial expressions and gestures in medical or surgical texts. For example, in The Physiognomy of Diseases (1849), George Corfe explicitly attempted to educate physicians in the ‘look of pain.’ Corfe was the

Visualising Pain  17 resident Medical Officer at Middlesex Hospital, London, where he had worked for 18 years. He considered the individuality of each and every patient to be paramount. In his words, ‘I consider God alone The One who kills and who makes alive, who wounds and who heals.’ This explained why a patient might suffer ‘the same form of disease’ as another patient and be ‘of the same sex and age, with symptoms closely similar, with the same care bestowed by the same accomplished physician,’ nevertheless, one might die and the other live. 21 Because of the deity’s ultimate power, it was misleading to generalise from large numbers of sick people. Rather, physicians had to judge each patient on their own merits or – more appropriately – on their own ‘face.’ Corfe emphasised the ‘great importance of the study of disease through the index of the countenance.’22 He encouraged physicians to pay attention to each and every aspect of a person’s face. They should gaze into their patient’s eyes, for example, with their variations, the shadows, the languor, the lethargy, the imploring look for help, the impatience, the terror, the anxiety, the havoc which disease is making, and the stamp of which is pictured in the eye, its brows, and its lid…. Then we view the brow, that wonderful appendage of expression in a human face: this, too, has its silent language; it may be overhanging, corrugated, raised, or depressed, whilst the lid exhibits its alternations of puffiness or hollowness, of smoothness or unevenness, of darkness or paleness, of sallow or brown, of white or purple. 23 The physician, too, needed to have an acute visual sense. The physician’s eye was a ‘wonderfully penetrating organ,’ he exclaimed: it was ‘the grand instrument employed in primarily searching out the patient’s real state.’ Through a careful study of facial expressions, the physician would learn ‘to recognize the disease of the patient, before he interrogates him as to his sufferings, aliments, or the history of his illness.’24 Astute witnessing took precedence over patient-narratives. Corfe professed to b ­ eing in awe of physicians who, ‘upon physiognomical presentation’ alone, could ‘survey the features of a patient who has some hidden disease’ and be able to ‘immediately detect and declare it.’25 Faced with a patient, the doctor should ‘first run his eye over the face, and get that by heart, so to speak’ – in other words, by gazing on the face of the person-in-pain, the physician could not only diagnose the ailment but also act with his heart swollen with sympathy. 26 Like the majority of physicians of this period, Corfe was influenced by Johann Kaspar Lavater, a Swiss poet, Protestant pastor, and physiognomist. By the time Lavater died in 1801, his Essays on Physiognomy: Designed to Promote the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind (1775–78) had been published in more than 14 cheap, as well as expensive, editions

18  Joanna Bourke in English. 27 Lavater’s theory of the face paid attention to pathognomy and craniological approaches to facial interpretation. Both the gestural features of a person’s face, or those expressive movements of the facial muscles that were in flux depending upon a person’s emotional state or passions, and their innate features were crucial in judging a person’s essential nature. As Corfe recognised, it was a theory that proved useful in diagnosing illness. Corfe was highly respectful of Lavater, going so far as to quote him as advising physicians that the ‘physiognomy of the patient frequently instructs him [the physician] better than all the verbal information he can receive.’ It is ‘astonishing how far physicians have carried their sagacity in this respect.’28 Another example of a surgeon who paid close attention to facial and gestural languages of suffering was Joseph Sampson Gamgee, ­prominent surgeon from the Queen’s Hospital, Birmingham. In 1865, he published History of a Successful Case of Amputation at the Hip-Joint (The Limb 48 Inches in Circumference, 99 Pounds Weight) (1865). 29 Although his text was intended to be read only by surgeons (it provided detailed surgical analyses of an intricate operation), Gamgee also included ­before-during-and-after photographs. These photographs provided visual evidence of his patient’s Christian resignation to fate before the operation, followed by his agonised visage during the trial of the amputation (see Figure 1.2), and finally the surgical triumph in its aftermath. Similar to Bell’s narrative, it was important to Gamgee that his patient displayed ‘calm courage.’ Like Corfe (but not their successors later in the century), Gamgee paid considerable

Figure 1.2  Joseph Sampson Gamgee, History of a Successful Case of Amputation at the Hip-Joint (The Limb 48 Inches in Circumference, 99 Pounds Weight) (London: John Churchill and Sons, 1865), 14–15.

Visualising Pain  19 attention to the specificities of his patient’s life as well as his countenance and ‘constitutional soundness.’ Readers are told the man’s name (Joseph Bramwell) and given extensive information about his family and working life. This specificity was important because Gamgee (like Bell and Corfe) believed that it was dangerous to generalise: all patients were unique. In his words, So varied are the conditions of life, so numerous and decided the peculiarities of individuals, especially in disease, that it is reasonable to expect that in therapeutics, however powerful the aid afforded by the guidance of general principles and indications, practice must in great measure be empirical in particular cases.30 Gamgee also shared a vision of operative surgery as one that ‘makes the greatest call upon the highest and most varied faculties of our nature.’ Surgeons were required to possess a judicial mind to elicit evidence from nature – ever eloquent and varied, but, in our domain, in great part speechless…. In surgical action resource cannot be too fertile, enthusiastic love of the art too ardent; the hand cannot be too cunning or too bold; but equally ­necessary is extended erudition, power of mental grasp, patience and accuracy in the minutest details, and delicacy of touch. For such surgeons, he believed that there was little need to include ­linguistic descriptions of pain because the ‘natural language’ of facial expressions and gestures were eloquent enough, indeed (apropos the Tower of Babel), they could even be a superior language to words. This helps to explain why, in Gamgee’s On the Treatment of Wounds and Fractures: Clinical Lectures (1883), the patients portrayed in his wood engravings are given facial expressions. Indeed, Gamgee depicts faces even when the injuries or pathologies being shown are a long way from their face (for example, a leg fracture).31 The final medical influence in this period that drew attention to the importance of facial expression was that of French neurologist ­Guillaume Benjamin Amand Duchenne de Boulogne. In a series of experiments, Duchenne used the adept application of electric currents to cause an old man’s facial muscles to contract in ways that would accurately mirror human emotional expressions. For Duchenne, the individual’s ‘spirit’ was ‘the source of expression’ and by activating the muscles, he was able to ‘make the facial muscles contract to speak the language of the emotions.’ His chief text, The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression (1862), was accompanied by 100 photographic prints – the first series of published physiological experiments to be illustrated in this way. Indeed, photography was crucial to Duchenne’s pioneering work. Not only were

20  Joanna Bourke emotions too fleeting to be accurately captured by a painter but also, he believed, photography was ‘as true as a mirror.’ For Duchenne, the surface was the story: technological manipulation of the face revealed all that was to be known about the emotions. Like Bell, however, Duchenne’s experiments also had a fierce religious purpose. For Duchenne, there was Divine purpose behind every muscle in the body. On the rare occasions where he failed to find such a purpose, Duchenne expressed ‘genuine chagrin,’ although he claimed never to have doubted his initial premise.32 In Duchenne’s words: In the face, our Creator was not concerned with mechanical necessity. He was able, in his wisdom, or – please pardon this manner of speaking – in pursuing a divine fantasy, to put any particular muscles into action, one alone or several muscles together, when he wished the characteristic signs of the emotions, even the most fleeting, to be written briefly on man’s face. Once this language of facial expressions was created, it sufficed for him to give all human beings the instinctive faculty of always expressing their sentiments by contracting the same muscles. This was important, since it meant that facial expressions were a ‘language universal and immutable.’ Pain, therefore, involved the movement of the muscle ‘corrugator supercilii.’ Furthermore, this pain muscle was a superior one since it was one of the ‘independent muscles that express diverse passions or states of the spirit, by their isolated contraction, in a most complete way.’33 Duchenne reproduced the ‘pain expression’ in his clinical publications. Like Bell, Corfe, and Gamgee, in his clinical lectures, Duchenne also gave his patients facial expressions even when the face was a long way for the pathology being discussed. Figure 1.3, for example, shows Duchenne depicting a woman with curvature of the spine (lordosis), who is portrayed with a pained expression. 34 *** From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, however, surgical and other medical journals paid progressively less attention to facial ­expressions and gestures. In part, this was due to the professionalisation of medicine which rendered the emotional lives of patients of less relevance to surgeons and other physicians. The introduction of diagnostic classification systems and changing medical technologies rendered patients’ descriptions of pain more peripheral to the healing process. Hospital medicine focused not on individual peculiarities but generalisations based on large numbers of people. The growth of laboratory medicine enabled physicians to bypass patient-narratives in their search for an ‘objective ­diagnosis’ based on knowledge taken from microbiology, chemistry, and

Visualising Pain  21

Figure 1.3  D uchenne de Boulogne, Selections from the Clinical Works of Dr. Duchenne (de Boulogne). Translated and edited by G. V. Poore (London: The Sydenham Society, 1883), 93.

physiology. The invention and employment of anaesthetics reduced the emotional investment of surgeons to the tortuous suffering they were inflicting on their patients. Rather than writhing in pain, their patients were now unconscious bodies capable of being manipulated in relative silence. In the words of one surgeon, writing only eight years after the invention of chloroform, the ‘shrieks of sufferers … were all hushed.’ With the new anaesthetic, the surgeon’s nerve was now all strung: calmly, deliberately, he could do his work among human tissue. Unimpeded by muscular ­contractions – unembarrassed by the sufferer’s violent contortions – unharassed in his mind by the sensitive cries of woe, he persued his manipulations as on breathless, lifeless forms.35 Bell’s lamentations in Illustrations of the Great Operations of Surgery about the wounded soldier who was ‘miserably racked with pain and spasms’ while his arm was excised at the joint was no longer necessary.

22  Joanna Bourke The surgeon did not need to be reminded not to ‘boast of feelings’; he was not required to convince the ‘lady’s maid’ that he was not ‘a brute whose occupation soils his hands with blood.’ As surgeon David Cheever put it bluntly in 1897: as a result of anaesthetics, the surgeon ‘need not hurry; he need not sympathize; he need not worry; he can calmly dissect, as on a dead body.’36 This was a world away from Bell’s surgical practise. The expressive face and contorted body were no longer thought to provide physiological respite, nor was it assumed to incite manly sympathy in the breast of the physician. As a result, the sentient body was increasingly excised from texts. ­I nstead of dramatically expressive, individualised faces, textbooks simply reproduced schematic bodies, with the pathological ‘site’ simply shaded in. On the rare occasion when the patient’s face was visible, it was expressionless. For example, the photograph in Figure 1.4 was published in 1895 in Brain: A Journal of Neurology and shows the image of a man suffering from chest pain.37 There was no attempt to represent a pained facial expression. Rather, the painful parts of this patient’s body were literally written upon his body. Given how rare it is to see a face or, indeed, a photograph of a person-in-pain in medical journals of this period, it is hard to avoid speculating that this image was published primarily ­because of interest in the sailor’s tattoo. In contrast to the highly expressive faces and gestures of the earlier ­period, pain was increasingly represented on the surface of the body, ­t ypically conceived of in geographical terms as ‘pain maps’ or what ­L eriche called the ‘regions of pain.’ The emphasis placed on the localisation of pain in these images is not coincidental. By the late nineteenth century, it was widely accepted in medical circles that the sensation of pain was caused by some bodily pathology that should be able to be ‘localizable to a discrete, specific part of area within the inner body,’ as historian Daniel Goldberg has explained. Therefore, ‘if the patient experiences pain, then such a lesion must perforce exist, even if medical techniques of the time simply did not permit discernment of the lesion itself.’38 The specificity theory of pain focused on the way pain travels (the geographical metaphor is important) from the skin to a pain centre in the brain. That theory – effectively a reiteration of René Descartes’ image of pain, in which filaments and animal spirits were replaced by nociceptive impulses and endorphins – was perfectly in line with geographical visualisations of pain. Neurologists might concede that they were not always able to identify the precise location, but insisted that there was a lesion somewhere – they just hadn’t found it yet. 39 It was a short step from such a view of pain to the idea that it was always manifested as a visible pathology located within material structures and tissues inside the patient’s body. ‘Invisible’ pain could be discounted.

Visualising Pain  23

Figure 1.4  T  . K. Monro, ‘A Case of Sympathetic Pain: Pain in Front of the Chest Induced by Friction of the Forearm,’ Brain: A Journal of Neurology, 18.4  (1895), 566.

Given this location-based understanding of pain, it is interesting to observe that visual representations of pain appeared most frequently when physicians wanted to illustrate a particular kind of pain, that is, ‘referred pain,’ or pain that did not straightforwardly relate to the site of lesion or disorder. Referred pain is a well-known clinical phenomenon: hip disease can cause pain in the knee, tongue cancer is felt as earache, gall bladder disease appears as shoulder pain, angina pectoris leads to achy arms, and so on. In other words, physicians turned to images most frequently when they needed to illustrate the ‘location of pain’ that was not at the ‘correct location.’ In this way, referred pain was a phantom, lurking where it oughtn’t be and, therefore, potentially misleading ­patients and physicians alike. ‘Pain maps’ were intended to provide the key: if the patient pointed to her knee, the pathology was

24  Joanna Bourke likely to reside in her hip; if she pointed to her shoulder, the physician needed to check her gall bladder or heart. There was no attempt to represent either ­patients’ outward responses to pain (as Bell was doing, with the aim of eliciting a reaction from witnesses) nor their subjective feeling of pain (which could be gauged by the extremity of facial contortions). Rather, the representations were concerned simply with the location of pain on the surface of the body. These images took a number of forms. Occasionally, they involved images of patients in classical poses. For example, in Glentworth Reeve Butler’s The Diagnostics of Internal Medicine (1901), referred pain was posed by the classical figure of Diana, an erotic image which contained no implication that her ‘pain’ was particularly ‘painful.’40 More typically, the authors of these textbooks provide their readers with schematic images, all expressionless. Some are shown with heads; others, without. Some even have heads floating above the torso.41 Gender is also largely excised, unlike the relentless emphasis on manliness in earlier representations. Over 90% of such schematic images are male or of indistinguishable sex, even if the patient being discussed is identified as a woman.42 This emphasis on location (as opposed to expressive displays of subjective feelings) was consolidated from the 1940s when diagrammatic representations were put to further diagnostic use by the introduction of ‘pain maps’ (sometimes called ‘pain charts’). These were discussed in 1947 by Prague-based neurologist Rudolf Cerný during an international conference of physicians held in London. In an article that was subsequently published in the Journal of Neurosurgery, Cerný coined the term ‘autodermography,’ a clinical practise that involved patients drawing their pain onto their own skin. Cerný had conceived of autodermography while working with leprosy patients in Africa. He noticed that his patients would often ‘demonstrate the painful areas by making scratches with their nails on the skin.’ He decided that it would be useful in his practise to ask patients to use a dermographic pencil to ‘draw on his skin … his own area of pain or rather projection of pain.’ To his delight, he found that ‘one obtains, in a short time, accurate pictures of pain distribution, dys- or paraesthesia, made without influence of the examiner, and providing accurate clues to diagnosis and localization.’ He concluded that ‘this subjective method surpasses the well-known ­so-called “objective” method.’43 Cerný’s cumbersome neologism ‘autodermography’ never became popular but, two years later, New Zealand physician Harold Palmer published an article entitled ‘Pain Charts.’44 His idea was simple: instead of patients being invited to draw on their own skin, they would be given a large piece of paper, on which was printed a schematic image of the front and back of a body, and asked to ‘mark in on the charts’ the location of their pains.45 Different colours were used for different types (‘feels’) of pain, and patients were asked which of the pains would he or

Visualising Pain  25 she most want to be removed. Palmer’s idea was favourably reviewed in Lancet. The editors of that journal observed that the map was useful because pain was ‘the most difficult symptom to interpret.’ Not only were there a ‘great variation in patients’ reactions to it,’ but also ‘many people find it hard to describe its location and other characteristics.’46 Pain maps were the solution. There was, perhaps, another reason why Palmer’s pain maps proved ­appealing. The clue is in the subtitle of his article: ‘A Description of a Technique Whereby Functional Pain May Be Diagnosed from Organic Pain.’ In other words, ‘pain maps’ were intended to allow physicians to distinguish between pain that was the result of ‘an organic lesion of the tissues’ and pain that was due to a ‘functional nervous disorder.’47 This was a crucial difference since organic lesions were of considerable higher status than functional disorders, which were always accompanied by suspicion about whether they were ‘real’ pain. In interpreting their patient’s ‘pain maps,’ physicians were taught that patients who sketched non-­symmetry regions of pain were likely to be suffering ‘real’ pain; those who shaded in symmetrical regions of sensitivity or ill-ease should be suspected of functional nervous disorders. Palmer even marvelled over the fact that ‘this symmetry is sometimes depicted with almost artistic fidelity’ – a decidedly suspicious attribute.48 Again, this was a long way from the earlier physicians discussed in this chapter, for whom the greater the suffering, the more extreme would be its facial and gestural manifestations. In this way, ‘pain maps’ echoed wider clinical opinions that the more elaborate or ‘artistic’ representations of pain, the greater the likelihood of hysteria or feigning. This was summed up succinctly by George ­Engel, the psychiatrist who formulated the highly influential biopsychosocial model of illness. In 1959, Engel advised clinicians that elaborate ­patient descriptions of pain increased the chance that they were ‘reflections of the degree to which the pain is entering in psychic function in a more complicated fashion, now serving purposes far beyond the simple nociceptive function.’49 The strongly normative component of the ‘pain maps’ was typical of the geographical model of pain representations more generally. In the words of Allan Walters, the President of the Canadian Neurological Society, writing in 1961, psychogenic pains could be identified because they ‘travel in quite unanatomical directions; may stab or shoot through; may flit about; or may be felt all over.’ In cases of psychogenic pains, he observed that the ‘boundaries of a region in pain are as independent of the physical innervation of those parts as a London fog is indifferent to borough boundaries or traffic routes.’50 Such pains were not only less ‘real,’ they were unruly as well. ***

26  Joanna Bourke In the 1970s, however, medical texts began, once again, to show an interest in facial expressions, although not in gestures (which earlier ­generations of physicians had paid attention to). This was driven in part by evolutionary debates, including the renewed interest in Charles ­Darwin’s 1872 classic The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (which reproduced some of Duchenne’s photographs).51 It was also influenced by new psychological research claiming that facial expressions of the ‘core emotions’ were universal. Particularly influential were psychologist Paul Ekman and his collaborators who, from the 1970s, photographed and analysed emotional expressions from all over the world. These photographs were eventually used to develop the Facial Action Coding ­System (FACS). FACS allowed any facial expression to be described in terms of the 46 unique actions the face is capable of making. 52 According to E ­ kman, ­facial expressions were universal, although there were variations based on culturally diverse display rules. 53 The research concluded that the core expressions of pain involved brow lowering, eye closure, orbit tightening (that is, narrowing of the eyelids and raising the cheeks), and levator contraction (that is, upper-lip raising and perhaps wrinkles at the side of the nose). 54 Widespread adoption of such views reignited interest in ‘reading’ pained faces. This was seen as particularly pressing in the context of infants, comatose or unconscious patients, the physically and mentally impaired, and non-human animals. As with the ‘pain maps,’ these visual representations of pain were quickly used to adjudicate on the reality of verbal declarations of pain. 55 Importantly, while Bell had assumed that facial expression of pain encouraged sympathy, these physicians argued the opposite. In ‘Expressing Pain: The Communication and Interpretation of Facial Pain Signals,’ published in the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior in 1995, Kenneth M. Prkachin and Kenneth D. Craig cited research that purported to show that pained faces were counterproductive in clinical encounters. Work by F. J. Keefe and J. Dunsmore suggested that ‘conscious efforts to communicate pain through guarded movements, facial expressions, or extreme ratings of pain’ actually ‘upset and even enrage clinicians.’56 Prkachin and Craig observed that Clinicians, adjudicators, insurance investigators, and family members often propose that the financial or social consequences of pain displays, rather than the experience of suffering, represent their true source. This was why clinicians should be aware of ‘non-verbal leakage’ in pained facial expressions or the ‘display of signals that betray the true underlying state.’57 ***

Visualising Pain  27 So far in this chapter, I have argued that from the nineteenth century to the late twentieth century, visual representations of pain became less common in medical texts. Unlike the lavish attention paid by surgeons like Bell to facial expressions, later authors tended to use schematic ­images of bodies where, if they did include faces, were almost always expressionless. When facial expressions did return to medical textbooks in the 1970s, they were primarily used to ‘see’ the pain of speechless human and non-human animals. They also contained an element of ­suspicion about the veracity of patient’s complaints. There is one major exception to this history of visualisation of pain, however, and that is when physicians turned their analysis to phantom pain. Unlike other forms of pain, when physicians represented phantom limb pain, they not only cited rich metaphoric descriptions by patients and reproduced complex localisation of images, but they also included stylized attempts to visually depict ‘what pain actually feels like.’ In some aspects, visual depictions of phantom pain conformed to those who used to visualise other forms of pain. Physicians drew ‘pain maps’ of phantom pain, following the tradition of localisation, with the painful areas shaded in.58 Medical journals also reproduce photographs of sufferers of phantom pain, largely inexpressive: the diagnostic label of ‘phantom limb’ was itself intended to ‘stand in’ for suffering. 59 There were also images evoking Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, with discussions about equilibrium.60 However, in addition to these visualisations, there are images that are not present in other artistic/clinical representations of pain, that is, medical writers also attempt to visualise what this kind of pain actually feels like. In other words, the only times physicians visually reproduce what pain feels like is when the body is absent altogether, that is, with phantom limb pain. There are some striking things to observe when looking at these visualisations of phantom limbs. Most importantly, these visualisations are about pain. In other words, they are not representations of responses to pain (as in facial expressions) but are metaphors for pain as an agent in its own right. The earliest twentieth-century example I have found is in the 1955 edition of the journal Artificial Limbs, where Verne T. Inman and Howard D. Eberhart provide a lengthy study of lower limb amputations. Not only do they record patient descriptions of phantom limb pain, but they also reproduce them. Visually, there are images of ‘telescoping’ (that is, a sensation as if the foot were close to the upper thigh), toes growing out of the stump, and ants walking over the absent limb. The images also show the absent limb being stabbed with a red-hot poker, rudely prodded with a finger, and hit with a hammer (see Figure 1.5). As Inman and Eberhart noted, amputees routinely used ‘language akin to that of the torture chamber’ and they speculated that since ‘the tearing and squeezing sensations are felt in a part of the body known to

28  Joanna Bourke

Figure 1.5  Verne T. Inman and Howard D. Eberhart, ‘The Lower-Extremity Clinical Study—Its Background and Objectives,’ Artificial Limbs, 2.1  (1955), 18.

be missing,’ this meant that ‘the suffering is heightened.’ In other words, the amputee’s ‘imagery’ was actually ‘made more vivid by the ghostly character of the phantom.’61 In 1989, Richard A. Sherman used similar metaphors for the pain of phantom limbs. Like Inman and Eberhart, Sherman had considerable experience working with patients suffering from phantom limb pain: he was the head of the Psychophysiology and Biostatistics Service at the Fitzsimons Army Medical Center in Aurora (Colorado). They drew on influential theories about phantom limbs that explain the phenomenon as arising out of attempts by the brain to ‘maintain the body image and scheme gestalt’ of the ‘whole’ body (as Julius Hoffman put it as early as 1955).62 Sherman pictured a homunculus in the brain, representing visually on a scale model the relative space that the bodily limbs and other parts occupy on the somatosensory cortex and motor cortex. His illustrations also made explicit reference to the Gate Control Theory of pain. This theory was introduced by Ronald Melzack and Patrick Wall in 1965 and postulated that there was a ‘gating mechanism’ in the dorsal horns of the spinal cord that allowed the perception of pain to be modified.63 Crucially, the Gate Control Theory insisted

Visualising Pain  29 that sensory, cognitive, affective, and motivational processes influenced people’s experience of pain. In Sherman’s visual depictions of phantom pain, he sketched in the sensory Homunculus which was influenced by ‘Interpretation’ (attention, beliefs, attitudes), ‘Magnification’ (anxiety, stress, depression), and finally to the lightning rod of painful ‘Intensification.’ Crucially, though, Sherman visualised the feeling of pain itself as a knife that stabs, a fire that burns, an electrical current or lightning that shocks, and a vice that is too tight (see Figure 1.6). These are graphic metaphors, but the depiction of the patient lacks facial expressions or even gestures: the young man sits placidly, obediently.64

Figure 1.6  R ichard A. Sherman, ‘Stump and Phantom Limb Pain,’ Neurologic Clinics, 7.2  (May 1989), 250.

30  Joanna Bourke Part of the reason for the willingness of physicians dealing with phantom pain to attempt to visualise sensation is because this kind of pain issued a severe challenge to the mind/body split. Phantom limbs required physicians to consider the whole person, rather than devising the patient’s experiences divided into pain/body and suffering/mind components. The timing of this shift is significant. Visualisations of phantom pain can only be understood in relation to the long-standing debates about the nature of pain. When Charles Bell was publishing his sketches, humoral conceptions of the body were still dominant. Indeed, Bell was influential in the shift from conceiving of the body-in-pain as one in which pain was fluid, moving in the hollow spaces of the body to one which focused on the way specific nerve fibres responded to noxious stimuli. Bell was the first scientist to identify the difference between sensory and motor nerves, making him the founder of clinical ­neurology. This also meant that his ideas were to become important about debates about the localisation of pain, which was crucial for the specificity theory of pain. Phantom limb pain cut through such ideas and proved a perfect case study for Ronald Melzack and Patrick Wall’s 1965 Gate Control Theory of pain, which postulated that there was a gate-like mechanism capable of modulating pain signals prior to perception. Pain was sensory, affective, and cognitive. Indeed, as Ronald Melzack put it in his 1989 article entitled ‘Phantom Limbs, the Self, and the Brain,’ The phantom represents the normal experience of the body. It is not a pathological entity due to a psychological aberration, or due to an abnormal functioning of the brain. It is the body we always feel…. It is evident that our experience of the body can occur without a body at all. We don’t need a body to feel a body.65 *** To conclude: pain is the phantom, haunting medical textbooks. D ­ espite the fact that pain is of intense anxiety, even terror, for most people who see physicians, it is remarkable how little attention is paid to it in clinical writings. Visual representations of pain are even rarer. They were relatively more common in the nineteenth century, however, becoming increasingly rare during the move from personal medicine, to hospital, and then laboratory medicine. In the modern period, the one exception to this ‘thinning’ of visual representations of pain is when physicians turned to phantom limb pain. This kind of suffering issued a challenge to mind/body dichotomies. There was no material object capable of reacting either to Charles Bell’s scalpel or to Rene Leriche’s hand. As Leriche put it, there was simply ‘nothing to be seen.’ Faced with the

Visualising Pain  31 phantom whose presence couldn’t be doubted, the kinaesthetic and synaesthetic powers of physicians were awakened; the phantom had to be visualised, and tamed.

Notes 1 René Leriche, The Surgery of Pain. Translated by Archibald Young (­London: Ballière, Tindall, and Cox, 1939), 27 and 29. 2 Ibid., 30–31. 3 For example, see Roy Porter and G. S. Rousseau, Gout. The Patrician ­M alady (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); Danny Rees, ‘Down in the Mouth: Faces of Pain,’ in Rob Boddice (ed.), Pain and Emotion in Modern History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 164–86; ­Suzannah ­Biernoff, ‘Picturing Pain,’ in Anne Whitehead, Angela Woods, Sarah ­Atkinson, Jane Macnaughton, and Jennifer Richards (eds.), The ­E dinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 163–85. 4 Danny Rees, ‘Down in the Mouth’; Javier Moscoso, Pain: A Cultural History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 5 For an example, see Murat Aydede (ed.), Pain: New Essays on Its Nature and the Methodology of Its Study (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2005). 6 For example, Deborah Padfield, Perceptions of Pain (Stockport: Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2003). 7 See Samuel J. M. M. Alberti (ed.), War, Art, and Surgery. The Work of Henry Tonks and Julia Midgley (London: The Royal College of Surgeons of England, 2015); Suzannah Biernoff, Portraits of Violence: War and the Aesthetics of Disfigurement (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2017); Suzannah Biernoff, ‘Flesh Poems: Henry Tonks and the Art of Surgery,’ Visual Culture in Britain, 11.1 (Mar. 2010), 25–47. 8 Joanna Bourke, The Story of Pain. From Prayer to Painkillers (Oxford: ­Oxford University Press, 2014). 9 Charles Bell, Illustrations of the Great Operations of Surgery, Trepan, ­Hernia, Amputation, Aneurism, and Lithotomy (London: Longman, 1821), iii–iv. 10 Charles Bell, The Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression as Connected with the Fine Arts (London: John Murray, 1844), 156. Also see Charles Bell, The Hand; Its Mechanism and Vital Endowments, As Evicing Design (London: John Murray, 1852), 211. 11 Letter from Charles Bell to Francis Horner in July 1815, in Bell, Letters of Sir Charles Bell Selected From His Correspondence with His Brother, George Joseph Bell (London: George Murray, 1870), 246–47. 12 Charles Bell, ‘Amputation below the Knee,’ in Bell (ed.), Illustrations of the Great Operations of Surgery, Trepan, Hernia, Amputation, Aneurism, and Lithotomy (London: Longman, 1821), Permission Thanks to the Wellcome Library, image L0072193. 13 Charles Bell, Illustrations, 74. 14 Ibid., vii. 15 Letter from Charles Bell in July 1815, in Bell, Letters of Sir Charles Bell, 241–42. 16 Letter from Charles Bell in July 1814, in Bell, Letters of Sir Charles Bell, 217 and 220. 17 Charles Bell, The Hand, 211. Also see Charles Bell, The Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression as Connected with the Fine Arts, 156.

32  Joanna Bourke 18 Samson Davis, Principles of Physiognomy and Natural Language (London: Simpkin and Marshall, 1843), 27–28. Emphasis in original. 19 Ibid., 34–35. 20 Letter from Charles Bell to Francis Horner in July 1815, in Bell, Letters of Sir Charles Bell, 248. 21 George Corfe, The Physiognomy of Diseases (London: James Nisbet and Co., 1849), 2. 22 Ibid., 2. 23 Ibid., 10. 24 Ibid., 9. 25 Ibid., 2. 26 Ibid., 10. 27 John Graham, ‘Lavater’s Physiognomy in England,’ Journal of the History of Ideas, 22 (1961), 562. 28 George Corfe, The Physiognomy of Diseases, 5, quoting Johan Kaspar ­Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy: Designed to Promote the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind. Translated by H. Hunter, vol. I (London: J. Stockdale, 1910), 1798. 29 Joseph Sampson Gamgee, History of a Successful Case of Amputation at the Hip Joint (The Limb 48 Inches in Circumference, 99 Pounds Weight) (London: John Churchill and Sons, 1865). 30 Ibid., 6–7 and 21. 31 For faces displaying ‘pain,’ see Joseph Sampson Gamgee, On the Treatment of Wounds and Fractures: Clinical Lectures (London: J & A Churchill, 1883), 27, 28, 95, 177, 212, 237, 324, and 329. 32 Emanuel B. Kaplan, in G. B. Duchenne, Physiology of Motion Demonstrated by Means of Electrical Stimulation and Clinical Observation and Applied to the Study of Paralysis and Deformities. Translated and edited by Emanuel B. Kaplan (Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott, 1949), xiii. 33 Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne de Boulogne, The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression. Translated and edited by R. Andrew Cuthberton (­Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 24. See the discussion of the ‘pain muscle’ on pp. 60–68. 34 Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne de Boulogne, Selections from the C ­ linical Works of Dr. Duchenne (de Boulogne). Translated and edited by G. V. Poore (London: The Sydenham Society, 1883). For images with pained faces, see 49, 52, 49, and 93. The image reproduced here is from p. 93. 35 Walter Blundell, Painless Tooth-Extraction without Chloroform. With ­Observations of Local Anæsthesia by Congelation in General Surgery (London: John Churchill, 1854), 2–3. 36 David W. Cheever, ‘What has Anaesthesia Done for Surgery?,’ The Semi-Centennial of Anæsthesia (Boston: Massachusetts General Hospital, 1897), 42. 37 T. K. Monro, ‘A Case of Sympathetic Pain: Pain in Front of the Chest Induced by Friction of the Forearm,’ Brain. A Journal of Neurology, 18.4 (1895), 566. 38 Daniel Goldberg, The Bioethics of Pain Management: Beyond Opioids (New York: Routledge, 2014), 38 and 40. 39 Andrew Hodgkiss, From Lesion to Metaphor. Chronic Pain in British, French, and German Medical Writings, 1800–1914 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000) and Daniel Goldberg, The Bioethics of Pain Management, 38–43. 40 Glentworth Reeve Butler, The Diagnostics of Internal Medicine (London: Henry Kimpton, 1901), 39.

Visualising Pain  33 41 Henry Head, ‘On Disturbances of Sensation with Especial Reference to the Pain of Visceral Disease,’ Brain. A Journal of Neurology, 19 (1896), 153–276 and Henry Head, ‘An Address on Certain Aspects of Pain Delivered Before the Sheffield Medico-Chirurgical Society, December 8th, 1921,’ The British Medical Journal, 1 (7 January 1922), 1162–6. 42 Allan Walters, ‘Psychogenic Regional Pain Alias Hysterical Pain,’ Brain. A Journal of Neurology, 84.1 (March 1961), 3. 43 Rudolf Cerný, ‘Autodermography: A New and Simple Method of Demonstrating the Propagation of Pain and Disorders of Surface Sensibility,’ Journal of Neurosurgery, 4.2 (March 1947), 188. 4 4 Harold Palmer, ‘Pain Charts. A Description of a Technique Whereby Functional Pain May Be Diagnosed from Organic Pain,’ New Zealand Medical Journal, xlviii (1949), 187–213. 45 Ibid., 187. 46 ‘Mapping of Pain,’ The Lancet, 254 (2 July 1949), 20. 47 Harold Palmer, ‘Pain Charts,’ 187. 48 Ibid., 188. 49 George L. Engel, ‘“Psychogenic” Pain and the Pain-Prone Patient,’ American Journal of Medicine, 26 (June 1959), 9034. A very similar argument was made by E. Guttmann and W. Mayor-Gross, ‘The Psychology of Pain,’ The Lancet, 241 (20 February 1943), 225. For a more lengthy discussion, see my book The Story of Pain. 50 Allan Walters, ‘Psychogenic Regional Pain Alias Hysterical Pain,’ 6–7. 51 Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1899). 52 Paul Ekman, The Facial Action Coding System: Investigator’s Guide (Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press, 1978). 53 Paul Ekman, Wallace V. Friesen, and Silvan S. Tomkins, ‘Facial Affect Scoring Technique: A First Validity Study,’ Semiotica, 3.1 (1971), 37–58; Paul Ekman, ‘Duchenne and Facial Expression of Emotion,’ in Duchenne de Boulogne, The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression, 282; Paul Ekman and Wallace V. Friesen, ‘Constants Across Cultures in the Face and Emotion,’ in Henry Clay Lindgren (ed.), Contemporary Research in Social Psychology. A Book of Readings, 2nd ed. (New York: Wiley, 1973), 336–47. 54 Miriam Kunz, Kenneth Prkachin, and Stefan Lautenbacher, ‘The Smile of Pain,’ Pain, 145 (2009), 274. 55 Marilyn L. Hill and Kenneth D. Craig, ‘Detecting Deception in Pain Expressions: The Structure of Genuine and Deceptive Facial Displays,’ Pain, 98 (2002), 136 and 141; Kenneth M. Prkachin and Kenneth D. Craig, ‘Expressing Pain: The Communication and Interpretation of Facial Pain Signals,’ Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 19.4 (winter 1995), 198–99. 56 Kenneth M. Prkachin and Kenneth D. Craig, ‘Expressing Pain,’ 202. They were citing the work of F. J. Keefe and J. Dunsmore, ‘Pain Behavior: Concepts and Controversies,’ APS Journal, 1 (1992), 97. 57 Kenneth M. Prkachin and Kenneth D. Craig, ‘Expressing Pain,’ 195. 58 For example, see Ed Lee and Kevin Donovan, ‘Reactivation of Phantom Limb Pain after Combined Interscalene Brachial Plexus Block and General Anesthesia: Successful Treatment with Intravenous Lidocaine,’ Anethesiology, 82 (1995), 296. 59 For example, see Julius Hoffman, ‘Facial Phantom Phenomenon,’ Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 122.2 (August 1955), 144. 60 Leon Gillis, ‘Pain in Phantom Limb,’ British Medical Journal, 1 (5 June 1948), 1108.

34  Joanna Bourke 61 Verne T. Inman and Howard D. Eberhart, ‘The Lower-Extremity Clinical Study – Its Background and Objectives,’ Artificial Limbs, 2.1 (1955), 15–20. Emphasis added. 62 Julius Hoffman, ‘Facial Phantom Phenomenon,’ 147. 63 Ronald Melzack and Patrick Wall, ‘Pain Mechanisms: A New Theory,’ ­Science, 150.3699 (19 November 1965), 971–79. 64 Richard A. Sherman, ‘Stump and Phantom Limb Pain,’ Neurologic Clinics, 7.2 (May 1989), 249–64. In his notes, readers are told that the figure was originally drawn by Lianne Ruppel of the Eisenhower Army Medical Center based on sketches by the author and modified for this article by Karen Wyatt of Fitzsimmons Army Medical Center. Attempts were made to contact these people, but we received no reply. 65 Ronald Melzack, ‘Phantom Limbs, the Self, and the Brain,’ Canadian ­Psychology, 30 (1989), 4.

2 Mirrors and Shadows Photography as a Way of Sharing Pain Experience in Medical Pain Consultations Deborah Padfield (Adapted from an original article first published in the inaugural edition of Qualia, 1)

The Mirror Photographic art, like the mirror, can allow us to see ourselves, by freezing time to allow reflection. In the context of pain encounters however, perhaps we need to question what it is we see when we look at another in pain: is it them or ourselves – their pain or ours? I believe the polysemy of photographs can help prevent us from seeing only reflections of ourselves and encourage us to tolerate the complexity and ambiguity of, in Susan Sontag’s words, ‘the pain of others’;1 the pain of not knowing, of resisting the desire to ‘solve,’ and of accepting not having an answer. The multiple interpretations evoked by an image force us to check and re-check via the image that we are understanding one another and encourage us to grapple with sensations and feelings not our own. Building on Elaine Scarry’s seminal work on pain, 2 community artist and academic Petra Kuppers describes how ‘Pain flees outward toward imagination, from the dense matter of bodies to perception itself…’3 It is possible we can employ imagination and the photographic plate, itself a mirror, to re-integrate perception, image, and language reflecting back to us the ways in which we, like all substances, have ‘relations which express all the others,’ making us, in Stafford’s words, ‘perpetual living mirrors of the universe.’4

The Shadow Scarry asserts that physical pain – unlike any other state of consciousness – has no ­referential content. It is not of or for anything. It is precisely because it takes no object that it, more than any other phenomenon, resists objectification in language.5

36  Deborah Padfield It is arguable that many persistent pain states do have relationships to ­external events or objects which exacerbate, intensify, and complicate the pain. These pain states could be seen as ‘of or for’ something. Pain ­itself could therefore be conceived as a shadow referential of other objects and relations. The shadow inhabits a realm of obscurity, of ­concealment, and of absence of light and visibility. It has a relationship to an object other than itself, rather than being a tangible object. It eludes our grasp, it evokes ambiguity, elusivity, and fear: it is consequently the perfect metaphor for pain. I believe the spontaneity of the creative process allows it to touch the shadows, to reach the unconscious and via the image bring elements to the surface to be discussed and shared. It exposes what needs to be retrieved and reflected on, bringing it into consciousness and the daylight of the consulting room. This chapter examines the potential for photographs to improve interaction in the medical pain consulting room through the example of a recent Fine Art Medical Collaboration at University College H ­ ospital, London, UK. It will focus on one specific series of images – the shadow sandwich – exploring the multiple interpretations it elicited, which, ­arguably, parallel the way multiple experiences of an encounter can co-exist in the consulting room.

The Need to Communicate and Find a Shared Rhetoric for Pain Chronic pain and musculoskeletal disorders are associated with some of the poorest quality-of-life indices. This complex phenomenon we call pain relies on communication for its diagnosis, and is therefore unlikely to be resolved by techno-centric or pharmaceutical medicine alone. With no biomarkers, pain remains a subjective sensation relying on the ­patient’s story, and dependent on the sufferer being able to express it. In this context, any tool that can help elicit a patient’s story has potential to benefit patient care. Medical Anthropologist Arthur Kleinman argues for the value of integrating the ‘physiological, psychological and social meanings’ of pain and illness.6 Narrative medicine is one means of achieving this as it allows the patient to be heard, begin healing, and may be just what we need to reduce the unequal burden of pain and improve the quality of pain care for all.7 The use of visual methodologies in qualitative research design is increasing8 as is the use of photo elicitation to promote healing from trauma. Images are an innovative and valuable means of triggering pain ­narratives, and art, in particular photography, a means of sharing and reflecting on experience.

Mirrors and Shadows  37 Narrative medicine practices have coalesced from the intersection of literary studies, creative writing, disability studies, and narrative ethics with the health-care disciplines of nursing, social work, and medicine. The resultant practices are more able to elicit and work with stories of illness and fractured life worlds than they could in the past, and acknowledge the role of expressive storytelling and story-­listening in medicine as forms of exploration, assimilation, and communication that promise better understanding and improvement of health care.9 When it seems there is no available language to communicate, to describe experience, people resort to metaphor.10 Metaphors are crucial to how we understand and communicate with each other.11 Visual metaphors add sensation to verbal language reminding us that, though processed in the brain, pain is experienced via the body, resonating in the space between those living with and those witnessing pain. Consultant paediatrician Bozhena Zoritch argues that medical and non-medical models have locked horns for too long and that we need ‘methods of entanglement, cohesion, and collaboration.’12 Negotiation across the photographic surface allows for entanglement and collaboration to take place, facilitating the piecing together of fragmented lives in a reciprocal relationship of care while democratising the pain encounter.

Face2face and the Space between Word and Image The face2face project at University College Hospital13 – set out to address pain’s incommunicability and explore whether photographic images co-created with pain patients – could provide an alternative ­language for the communication of pain. It became apparent that the i­mages were not providing an alternative language as originally ­envisaged but re-­invigorating existing language, initiating a symbiotic relationship between words and images capable of generating new language. The seed of this idea dates back to Perceptions of Pain in 2001,14 a collaboration between myself and pain specialist Dr. Charles Pither, then medical director of INPUT Pain Management Unit, St Thomas’ Hospital. In 2003 and 2004, the images created during Perceptions of Pain were exhibited widely, piloted in clinics across the UK, and published in a book alongside essays and patient testimonies.15 Feedback from this showed a demand for the images to be more widely available and suggested further in-depth research was warranted. In 2008, I began collaborating with facial pain specialist Professor Joanna Zakrzewska, developing the face2face project with facial pain patients and clinicians from UCH. Facial pain has all the difficulties associated with musculoskeletal pain as well as additional challenges ­associated with the role of the face in communicating and social functioning. We were still researching whether and how photographic images

38  Deborah Padfield of pain co-created with pain sufferers could help them communicate their pain to treating clinicians, and whether images could expand the dialogue around pain in the consulting room and thus improve mutual understanding. The difference to the earlier work was that this time I worked longitudinally with patients before, during, and after treatment or management developing a series of images representing different levels of pain, reflecting and feeding into changes patients had made in their perception of their pain. A central aspect to all of these projects was the collaboration with pain sufferers to produce photographic images of their pain. These were negotiated differently with every participant, but what was essential was that they were co-created so as not to re-appropriate someone else’s ­experience of pain, which can happen all too easily along the diagnostic corridors of the hospital. Control of the lens confers power over how an illness is seen and understood by others, as photographer and activist Jo Spence demonstrated so powerfully with her own illness.16 By the time pain patients have arrived at a specialist centre, they will almost inevitably have been on the passive receiving end of countless medical imaging processes. Participating in the co-creation of photographic images returns agency; I would suggest that the process can only be beneficial when sufferers have agency within it.

Co-Creative Process during face2face The sessions were held individually, mostly in rooms booked in the hospital but occasionally at other locations, significant for and selected by participants, such as derelict buildings in east London or in a participants’ garden in West Hampstead. The sessions were audio-recorded. The aim was to co-create photographic images which, as closely as ­possible, represented the pain sufferers’ unique experience of pain. The sessions (numbering between nine and twelve) happened at three points during the treatment journey: before, during, and after management/ treatment in order to prevent sufferers from being trapped not just within their pain but also within a single negative image. This meant each person worked with me for between six months and a year. The arc of time allowed changes sufferers had made in their perception of pain to be represented along with a sense of movement and transformation, where present, and produced a collection of images reflecting a broad range of intensities and pain qualities. Changes were always guided by the pain sufferer and no attempt was made to direct the process into reflecting a ‘positive’ journey. Sessions usually began with questions about how the participant’s pain might be visualised: were there any metaphors they already had for it, or could it be reflected through particular materials, colours, light (or absence of light), or significant objects? All participants were asked to

Mirrors and Shadows  39 bring an object to the first session, which they felt represented an aspect of their experience of pain. Frequently used as metaphors for pain, the objects shifted the discussion towards personal rather than collective meaning and provided a starting point for the photographic process. The photographs were taken by me, using a high-resolution digital camera, and always in consultation with the sufferer. These would later be uploaded onto a computer and reviewed in subsequent sessions. A selection of those photographs – deemed to be ‘successful’ (as photographic) representations and close to the sufferer’s experience – were made by myself and the patient together. These would then be modified following the session and sometimes printed, or stitched onto, or collaged with by the sufferer. Sometimes the photograph would be re-taken during the next session and refined when what the sufferer wanted the image  to communicate became more evident. The process brings into focus the importance of constructive dialogue between artist and sufferer and the role the artist plays as an active participant in the construction and reflection of narrative. It highlights ways in which narrative emerges through the communicative process.

Why Use Photography? There is a dark room. A shutter opens. The room is flooded with light that threatens to bleach the interior white…Across the darkness, the fall of light is thus graphed by the grid built into the window of the converging lens and the geometry of the walls whose rectangulate architecture orchestrates the relation of the central opening to the focal plane and to the frame marked by the boundaries of that plane’s flat surface. This carefully constructed room has an old name. It is a camera.17 Here, theorist John Tagg employs the metaphor of the house for the camera, a meeting point of exterior light and interior darkness into which it penetrates and onto whose walls it leaves traces of events beyond itself. This is a useful metaphor with which to begin exploring the specificities of photography that make it a particularly apposite medium for projects visualising pain and the subjective experience of others. It is also a useful metaphor through which to view pain as Sontag demonstrates (discussed later).

Camera/House The house, a contained space where light enters through constructed apertures, is comparable to the interior of the body bounding the self, entered only via its natural orifices or those artificially constructed by

40  Deborah Padfield medicine or injury. The house opens out as a metaphor for the psychological space of the mind or the photographic frame delineating and capturing one perspective, one moment in flux continuing beyond and external to its frame. To have visibility within a psychological space or within the physical space of the body, to produce a photograph at all, there has to be light, a space through which it travels and a surface onto which that light falls, resulting in exchange or ‘alchemy.’ Tagg goes on to define the room as training light, graphing it – quite literally, photo-graphing, subjecting light to the punctual rule of the room’s inbuilt geometrical law. The camera is, then, a place to isolate and discipline light, like a room in Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon.18 Like that room in the Panopticon, ‘the cell of the camera has its utility both as a training machine and as a device for producing and preserving text.’19 Here photography is associated not with a safe space, but with one of surveillance. This single metaphor brings together photography’s dual functions as both containing space, orchestrating a meeting between light and darkness, offering a membrane between internal and external worlds and its more dangerous function as a space of surveillance. Both of these intrinsic qualities of photography underline the importance of involving the subjects themselves in the representation of their experience, in order not to objectify their experience. The pain is a house, with many rooms. Or, he is a house in which the pain lives. Or, they both live in the house together. 20 In this quote from ‘Man with a pain,’ Susan Sontag uses the metaphor of the house to represent pain. Pain is depicted as a contained or containing space, a private, defended space, that is difficult for the external world to enter. This meeting point of dark and light, of internal and external is as pivotal to pain as it is to photography and it is at this intersect that our work with images and pain rests. In examining the spaces between word and image, the perspectives of clinician and patient, medicine and art, are we also exploring the function of liminal space, and questioning what role images can play in helping us understand or navigate it?

The Wound as Liminal In terms of the body, a visible lesion or wound might be seen as a significant liminal site for the meeting of interior and exterior worlds, of what is visible and what is normally invisible. Petra Kuppers describes the wound or scar as:

Mirrors and Shadows  41 a locus of memory, of bodily change. Like skin, a scar mediates between the outside and the inside, but it also materially produces, changes, and overwrites its site. 21 The photograph could also be conceived of as a wound, or as its consequence, the scar. A wound punctures what we expect to see – punctures the safe boundaries of self and other – and draws upon individual association and cultural memory, signifying beyond its self. Roland Barthes captures this beautifully in his conception of the photograph as a wound when he writes: I wanted to explore it not as a question (a theme) but as a wound: I see, I feel, hence I notice, I observe, and I think. 22 Barthes identifies the ability of photographs to reflect beyond the limits of their frame, to look beneath what is apparent. The photograph is not an exact ‘copy’ or a literal ‘representation’; it is a construct, it has an author, it involves selection and framing. Thus, Barthes moves away from his initial position that a photograph simply denotes, towards accepting that it can also connote. He describes this as the ‘punctum’ in a photograph. Further drawing on the metaphor of the wound, this punctum is the element that is able to elicit affect: A Latin word exists to designate this wound, this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument: … This second element which will disturb the studium I shall therefore call punctum; for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole – and also a cast of the dice. A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me). 23 Barthes continues to emphasise the punctum as a detail: in order to perceive the punctum, no analysis would be of any use to me … it suffices that the image be large enough, that I do not have to study it (this would not help at all), that, given right there on the page, I should receive it right here in my eyes. 24 This last notion of ‘receiving’ the image ‘right here in my eyes’ is a striking parallel to Marshall and Bleakley’s argument that clinicians should ‘receive’ rather than ‘take’ a history. 25 Barthes saw the punctum not as a result of the photographer’s intention, but dependent instead on its impact on the viewer. In other words, the punctum ‘pricks’ because of the relationship between the photograph and the viewer. 26

42  Deborah Padfield In the photographs produced during face2face, the ‘punctum’ is not always accidental and has not been solely achieved as a result of the relationship between the image and the viewer. On the contrary, it has emerged from a lengthy process and out of complex exchanges between myself and the person with pain. Nevertheless, those elements which ‘prick’ or elicit deeper psychological meaning for the patient are ­frequently only recognised when viewing the final photograph. One participant remarked: I didn’t realize until I saw the photograph but it is about having the inner and the outer experience at the same time. It is because you have inserted the collage between my face and my hand. It is about touch. Another patient observed: Seeing the photograph made me realize what I had done to myself. The challenge in representing chronic pain is that the wounds felt are seldom visible and often not even tangible. This is why giving them form, making them tangible, sharable and visible to others becomes central. It is also important to remember that photographs do not just allow us to recollect personal experience or to elicit personal narrative – they also create it. Where Tagg suggests that the production of images ­‘animates’ rather than discovers meaning, 27 I believe it both discovers and animates. Meaning is at once constructed and revealed during the co-­creation process. This is another reason why it is vital that pain sufferers play an active role in both creation and interpretation. During the research process a series of co-created images was publicly exhibited, Figures 2.1–2.3 are an example of some of these. Visitors were invited to respond to the photographs and to leave their written interpretation as well as a description of their own occupation. It was a series in which a pain sufferer attempted to give visual form to her pain through the concept of a shadow sandwich. It was the shadow element in this series of images that most people responded to, suggesting its significance. Their interpretation seemed to be influenced directly by the discipline in which they worked, echoing the different agendas present in the consulting room, 28 which influence the clinical encounter. I was interested in how the polysemy of the photographs facilitated a multiplicity of interpretations and when and how these interpretations intersected or conflicted with those of the sufferer. The subjectivity of interpretation parallels the subjectivity of pain. Like pain, it resonates in relation to the past as well as the present. Evidencing the different ways in which individuals construct meaning through images thus provides a glimpse into the (various) ways in which significance and meaning are conferred on

Figure 2.1  D  eborah Padfield with Linda Williams, untitled from the series ­face2face, 2008–13, Digital Archival Print©Deborah Padfield.

Figure 2.2   Deborah Padfield with Linda Williams, untitled from the series ­face2face, 2008–13, Digital Archival Print©Deborah Padfield.

44  Deborah Padfield

Figure 2.3  D  eborah Padfield with Linda Williams, untitled from the series ­face2face, 2008–13, Digital Archival Print©Deborah Padfield.

pain experience. The process demonstrates the need for a flexible and negotiated dialogue capable of interweaving multiple interpretations. Your ‘shadow’ is not the same as my ‘shadow,’ just as my ‘pain’ is not the same as your ‘pain.' Images make this explicit.

Multiple Interpretations: Multiple Voices/Pain as a Shadow A shadow is by definition indistinct, poorly delineated and transient. In language, ‘shadow’ is often used metaphorically to suggest diminished abilities, power, strength or beauty, as in ‘a shadow of his/her former self.’ The shadows in the picture (Figure 2.3) suggest that the pain reduces the sufferer to something weaker, less individual, less active, more anonymous than they would otherwise be; that other people may not be able to see them and value them as they otherwise might; that the sufferer’s own self-image is that of someone who is less than a full, complete individual … The absence of colour and perspective reinforces my impression of a diminished existence. (Linguist) This description by the linguist viewing the photographs, is very close to the sufferer’s own testimony: It’s just a way of explaining that you really don’t feel like the person you were at all… there’s almost no relationship, there’s such an

Mirrors and Shadows  45 emptiness inside of you cause you just feel completely burned, like there’s an empty shell. The series of images (from which figs 2.1–2.3 are taken) reveals significant aspects of chronic pain experience: the loss of identity, the multifarious impact of loss, and the existence of related shadows. It is worth noting that the shadow isn’t necessarily always negative. Carl Gustav Jung, for instance, defined the shadow as the personification of particular aspects of the unconscious personality. If the shadow represents the unlived and repressed side of the ego, giving the shadow form could be a positive thing. Jung, however, also claims this interpretation is a misunderstanding and that ‘the shadow is simply the whole unconscious.’29 A radiologist, psychotherapist, artist, clinician, writer, social worker, and architect also interpreted the shadow in different ways, but they all identified the shadow metaphor as central to the image’s construction of meaning; and each time their professions influenced their readings of the image. I see the images in terms of the relationship between you (Deborah) and the patient as well as the journey of her treatment. … In the first image she is just a shadowy figure as she has not yet revealed herself to you. In the second image she appears as a patient – the bread on the examining couch. In the third image it seems to me that she has revealed a lot about the nature of her pain – she is the pain in a sense in the form of the mouldy bread… (Psychotherapist) The first image is of a faint shadow – a silhouette of a child or girl’s head cast onto a wall showing hands raised in a manner that seems placating, defensive or beseeching. This is haunting and ­insubstantial. … It suggests the soul within, rather than the substantive body. Its posture suggests that the soul is not at ease but it is difficult to tell clearly what the source of their anxiety is. (Radiologist) Lost, confrontational. Consumed by shadow. Again I sense the distancing created by pain. The shadow gestures differ from each other. Confusion. Feeling separated from body/self. (Artist) The shadow – she is almost there, almost not there. … The shadow ever sent from stone, from bread, sinking into matter … The gesture in shadow, the blurred disappearing form with formlessness, concentric circles of rain on water, and the eye travels upwards looking for her. (Writer)

46  Deborah Padfield Is the shadow malevolent? Ambiguous, feels as though she is subjected to something … I see a circle rather than a line, returning. (Artist and Psychotherapist) Pain is a powerful emotion and if present on the face it is so much more devastating. It results in loss of identity, the patient feels that her own life has gone and pain has now taken over her identity. The patient has now come to seek help from a health care professional and is hoping that they will be able to make sense of what has happened to her. (Clinician) The image is a representation of how the patient sees herself and also how she feels others perceive her. … The shadow is of a woman of black Afro/Caribbean descent who portrays herself as this shadow due to a possible lack of identity. … Racial differences are often misunderstood and misdiagnosed by health care professionals and language can also be a possible barrier… (Social Worker) The portrait is absent, it is spacialised through shadow … Are these the hands of the artist, of the doctor, of the patient, I cannot tell, all subjects converge… (Architect)

Membrane and Meaning The number of interpretations arrived at for one aspect of one image reveals the multiplicity of potential meanings of all the photographs. The space between meanings could be visualised as a membrane through which exchange needs to flow both ways in order to arrive at a deeper mutual understanding. Accepting that we do not all see an image in the same way forces us to negotiate. If language becomes negotiated in response to the images, can it remain negotiated in response to pain, and in a clinical context can it feed into a negotiated dialogue during the rest of the consultation? Napier et al. 30 argue that ideas about health vary widely across cultures and should not be merely defined by measures of clinical care and disease. This applies even more to beliefs around pain, which are not only culturally constructed but also intensely personal. Can the significance of each individual’s experience of pain be revealed through discussing the images? Is the next step in this research journey the development of a cross-cultural iconography for pain, co-creating images with people from a range of cultures learning from a variety of personal and collective frameworks for pain? Funding permitting, this suggests itself as a fruitful future route.

Mirrors and Shadows  47 What is worth noting is that, in the interpretations above, the shadow is frequently linked to notions of ambiguity and to a lack of resolution. These images do not depict pain as resolved, they depict pain alternating and spiralling around the same issues in a continuum. If pain were conceived of as a material, as artist Johanna Willenfelt proposes, 31 would that material in fact be a shadow? Photographs, with their ambiguity and polysemy, open up avenues of communication that might otherwise have remained closed. The ­images aim to elicit a sharing of knowledge; to expose what an individual ­patient is experiencing, and not what they should be experiencing, albeit in the hope that transformation is possible through dialogue. Through analysing these images, my belief is growing that they reflect an emotional journey of direct relevance to pain perception and experience.

Conclusion We know the photograph is a construct resulting from processes of ­selection, creation, and re-presentation, yet in our minds it is still aligned with notions of documentation and authenticity. It is thus a perfect medium for validating the processes of the life of another, which make up their subjective reality. Photography is more than a medium; it is a way of making known, a process of shaping experience. As social psychologist Alan Radley writes, photographs gain their meaning from the acts that produce them.32 I have only touched lightly on notions of ownership through the ­involvement of the subject in the creation of the photograph. When the images are used as a resource in the clinical setting with new patients, those being asked to select from this bank of images (to take into their consultation and use as springboards for dialogue) have not been ­directly involved in making them, but have nevertheless been involved in acts of ownership through selection of the images. 33 For me this highlights the sometimes invisible and apparently insignificant acts, which make up a negotiated duel over ownership of illness experience and its language, over the body and its texts, which we should pay more attention to. Images serve to surpass those dynamics of a duel simultaneously highlighting and mitigating them. Barbara Stafford has written extensively on the art object in relation to analogy and visual metaphor as means of understanding the human body in the context of neuroscience and consciousness theory. 34 She ­emphasises the instinctual as opposed to logical nature of the leap which the visual metaphor makes from the known to the unknown, claiming that ‘the body cannot be “read,” it is “perceived, visually, sensually.”’ Could not the same be said of the photograph, which stands in as a visual metaphor for the body in pain? We do not just ‘read’ it; we perceive it visually and sensually. If we only ‘read’ it, we omit the most insistent

48  Deborah Padfield aspect of the pain experience itself – that it is experienced with and through the body. Its representation demands a material and corporeal element. It cannot be communicated via language alone. Elizabeth Grosz provides a re-definition of subjectivity which we could use to approach pain and the image.35 She theorises the body as part of the construct of subjectivity rather than something affected by it. In a similar way, the photograph acts as a physical object while signifying subjective experience. The image has been projected onto a surface that during the co-creation process may have been torn, etched or stitched into in a way that parallels how narrative and experience are etched into our bodies. Can such a corporeal conception of subjectivity bring us closer to the lived experience of pain, removing the need for distinction between psychological and physical suffering? In his programme notes to Stockhausen’s Carre (Square), composer Jonty Harrison writes: Black and white are normally seen as opposites and, thus, mutually exclusive. However, says Stockhausen, by creating between them a scale of various shades of grey and then reordering the scale into a series, we effectively draw the apparent opposites of black and white into a higher unity – not black as the opposite of white, but black as a degree of white.36 Could a visual language help create a similar scale for pain which allows shifts in perception necessary to accommodate both somatic and affective elements within one definition, framing them not as opposites but as degrees of each other? Could this bring us closer to a re-definition of pain which includes both physical and emotional pain that many, including physician and academic David Biro, argue for?37 Can photographs help bring pain out of the shadows and into the light of our shared humanity? Can images transform space into a membranous material within which the possibility of meaningful two-way exchange is enhanced, supporting my long- held hope for fluid two-way exchange to become normal practice within medical dialogue? Come with me; for my painful wound Requires thy friendly hand to help me onward (Sophocles, Philoctetes)

Notes 1 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003). 2 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).

Mirrors and Shadows  49 3 Petra Kuppers, The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 76. 4 Barbara Marie Stafford, Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images ­Chicago (London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), 126 (Referencing Leibniz). 5 Scarry, The Body in Pain, 5. 6 See Arthur Kleinman, The Illness Narratives, Suffering, Healing & the Human Condition (USA: Basic Books, 1988); Arthur Kleinman, ‘Catastrophe and Caregiving: The Failure of Medicine as an Art,’ Lancet 371/9606 (2008), 22–23; Arthur Kleinman, ‘Care: in Search of a Health Agenda,’ Lancet, 386/9990 (2015) 240–41. 7 Carmen R. Green, ‘Being Present: The Role of Narrative Medicine in Reducing the Unequal Burden of Pain,’ Pain 152 (2011), 965–66. 8 See Paula Reavey, Visual Methods in Psychology: Using and Interpreting Images in Qualitative Research (London: Routledge, 2012); Also Isabella E. Nizza, Jonathan Smith, and Jamie Kirkham, ‘Put the Illness in a Box’: A Longitudinal Interpretative Phenomenological analysis of Changes in  a Sufferer’s Pictorial Representations of Pain Following Participation in a Pain Management Programme. British Journal of Pain (October 2017), 2049463717738804 (temp citation as not yet assigned to an issue). 9 Brian Hurwitz and Rita Charon, ‘A Narrative Future for Healthcare,’ ­L ancet 381/9881 (2013), 1886–87. 10 See David Biro, The Language of Pain. Finding Words, Compassion and Relief (New York: WW Norton & Co, 2010); Also, David Biro, ‘Psychological Pain: Metaphor or Reality?’ in Robert Gregory Boddice (ed.) Pain and Emotion in Modern History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 53–65. 11 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 12 Bozhena Zoritch, ‘Entangled Story of Attachment Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD),’ Paper presentation. Association of Medical Humanities Conference, Keele University, 2017. 13 The project had several strands: art workshops for clinicians and patients to attend together; the co-creation of photographs with facial pain patients before during and after treatment; an artist’s film, the creation of an image resource (54 pain cards/images of pain) integrating photographs from both Perceptions of Pain and Face2face as an innovative communication tool for clinical use, subsequently piloted by ten specialists (see Deborah Padfield et al., ‘Do Photographic Images of Pain Improve Communication during Pain Consultations?’ Pain Research & Management 20/3 (2015), 123–8; ­Deborah Padfield et al., ‘The Body as Image: Image as Body,’ Lancet 389/10076 (2017), 1290–91; Elena Semino et al., ‘Images and the Dynamics of Pain Consultations,’ Lancet, 389/10075 (2017), 1186–87. For more information please see: www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/research/mphil-phd/deborah-pad field, www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/research/projects/pain-speaking-the-threshold. 14 Perceptions of Pain was a collaboration between myself and Dr Charles Pither with staff and patients from INPUT Unit, St Thomas’ Hospital, ­London where I worked individually with pain sufferers once a week on the four-week residential pain management programme to co-create photographic images which reflected their experience of pain. For more information please see Padfield (2003), Padfield et al. (2010) and Padfield (2011). 15 Deborah Padfield, Perceptions of Pain, 1st edition. (Stockport: Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2003). 16 Jo Spence, Putting Myself in the Picture (London: Camden Press, 1986).

50  Deborah Padfield 17 John Tagg, The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 1. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Susan Sontag, ‘Man with a Pain,’ Harper’s Magazine April (1964), 72–75 (73). 21 Kuppers, The Scar of Visibility, 1. 22 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (London: Vintage, 1980), 21. 23 Ibid., 26–27. 24 Ibid., 42–43. 25 Robert Marshall and Alan Bleakley, ‘Lost in Translation. Homer in English; the Patient’s Story in Medicine,’ Med Humanit 39 (2013), 47–52. 26 Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never before (London: Yale University Press, 2012), 103–4. 27 John Tagg, ‘Power and Photography: Part One, a Means of Surveillance: The Photograph as Evidence in Law,’ Screen Education 36 (1980), 17–55. 28 Diane Kenny, ‘Constructions of Chronic Pain in Doctor-Patient Relationships: Bridging the Communication Chasm,’ Patient Education and Counseling 52.3 (2004), 297–305. 29 Marie-Louise von Franz, Shadow and Evil in Fairytales, Zurich. Spring Publication for The Analytical Psychology Club of New York (1974), 5. 30 David Napier et al., ‘Culture and Health,’ Lancet 384 (2014), 1607. 31 Johanna Willenfelt, ‘Documenting Bodies: Pain Surfaces,’ in R Boddice (ed.) Pain and Emotion in Modern History (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 260–76. 32 Alan Radley, ‘What People Do with Pictures,’ Visual Studies, 25.3 (2010), 268–79. 33 For detailed methodology please see Deborah Padfield et al., ‘Do Photographic Images of Pain Improve Communication during Pain Consultations?’ Pain Research & Management, 20.3 (2015), 123–28; Claire Ashton James et al., ‘Can Images of Pain Enhance Patient–Clinician Rapport in Pain Consultations?’ British Journal of Pain, 11.3 (2017), 144–52. 34 See Barbara Marie Stafford, Body Criticism, Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993); Stafford, Visual Analogy: Consciousness as the Art of Connecting (London: MIT Press, 1999) and Stafford, Echo Objects. 35 See Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies, Toward a Corporeal Feminism ­(Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1994). 36 Karlheinz Stockhausen (2010) quoted in Jonty Harrison (ed.), Programme Notes, Birmingham. 37 David Biro, ‘Psychological Pain: Metaphor or Reality?’ in Robert Boddice (ed.), Pain and Emotion in Modern History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 53–65.

3 Atrocity and the Pain in Law Andrew Williams

Introduction Do we rely too much on law to shape and judge collective responses to human pain and suffering? Talal Asad suggested, when it comes to torture at least, that ‘perpetual legal struggle has now become the dominant mode of moral engagement in an interconnected, uncertain, and rapidly changing world.’1 Arguably such domination is widespread, crossing many forms of human action and interaction. Indeed, my starting premise for this chapter is that modern law and its systems have ­become instrumental in the recognition (or not) of, and response to (or not) suffering endured as a result of injury deliberately inflicted or because of failures to act. 2 For some, no doubt, this might not be a problem. There are those who will consider that law can provide an independent, informed, and authoritative institutional review of suffering with a notional purpose of addressing that suffering in some way (retrospectively or for the future). They will consider it to be a good and sensible thing that law offers a seemingly extra-political effective way of focusing attention, responding to pain, healing individuals and communities, bringing perpetrators of suffering to account, providing guidance for preventing repetition, and (in essence) identifying when the infliction of pain and suffering is societally intolerable. But is law fit for such purposes? My underlying proposition here builds on previous work in relation to human rights: it is that despite its promoted qualities, modern law is ill-conditioned to respond to pain and suffering other than in a highly limited context. 3 Though claim may be laid for its emancipatory potential, law consumes its own prospects. Through its structures, principles and processes, law is conditioned and framed by sufferance rather than insufferability: in other words, the starting presumption in law is that personal suffering will not be ­‘recognised’ as worthy of legal response through the hearing of suffering or the attribution of responsibility for that suffering.4 Only as exception does pain and suffering register in law.

52  Andrew Williams If I am right in this, then the more we allow law to dominate our ‘moral engagement’ with the pain of others (as perhaps a collective gateway to acknowledging the worthiness of suffering to demand a societal response), the less likely we are to do anything collectively to alleviate suffering of any kind or respond to it in a way that respects those who have suffered. Suffering then remains a general condition to be endured, a personal and individual experience that has only occasional purchase collectively. And the attribution of responsibility for inflicted pain becomes the exception not the norm too. Law then serves, with its tendency for sufferance, to mirror individual and collective deflections of responsibility. It operates as a deflective process in its own right. Responses to suffering become viewed politically and socially not as imperative but as optional, charitable and only occasionally recognized in law. Whether this can be remedied through the adoption of some alternative non-legalistic process, I cannot say. But if correct, my argument would suggest the search for a just approach to pain and suffering should be encouraged. To test my proposition, I will focus on an area of modern international law that purports to address the most egregious forms of the deliberate infliction of suffering on human beings: what is often called ‘atrocity’ in the contemporary development of the laws of war and what has become known as international criminal law. For, if law and legal process tends to sufferance in this extreme situation – when one might think it should be morally obliged to presume the necessity of response – then how much more likely will it do so in less acute situations? To undertake this examination, I consider how modern law’s structures, principles, and processes have operated in response to atrocity to indicate whether my proposition regarding the tendency of modern law holds true. Frequently, but not exclusively, the context for these legal actions has been at the end of war. 5 Justice after conflict, the attribution of responsibility in particular, has since at least 1945 become increasingly law’s territory. However, it would be naïve to presume political settlement has had no role to play. After all, no justice scheme exists wholly outside of politics of one form or another. But the power and myth of law rests in its ability to condition thinking politically and publicly. Its influence in (mis-)directing responses to suffering is acute, either by ­operating as an official acknowledgement of actionable suffering or by discounting it and thus encouraging nothing to be done.

Structure Niklas Luhmann’s interpretation of law as a bounded system, whose structure is conditioned by a ‘binary code of legal/illegal’ provides a starting point for my analysis.6 He wrote,

Atrocity and the Pain in Law  53 everything that enters the law’s sphere of relevance can be either lawful or unlawful, and anything that does not fit into this code is of legal significance only if it is important as a preliminary question in decisions about justice and injustice.7 Law operates, he suggested, so as to maintain a monopoly of judgment when a question is brought before it. Luhmann continued, [o]nly the law can say what is lawful and what is unlawful, and in deciding this question it must always refer to the results of its own operations and to the consequences for the system’s future operations.8 Nothing is ever predetermined to the extent that the law and its processes are merely confirmatory in nature. There is always an argument to be made, proof to be furnished, and judgment to be reached within the legal/illegal dichotomy. Nor is the binary construction unsettled by the fact that legal decisions may be subject to some form of review and ­appeal in most conceptions of modern law. This possibility is a centrepiece of many rule of law theories. But although hierarchies of decision-making may be deemed essential, the legal/illegal divide is reinforced at each stage. As Luhmann suggested, ‘every communication that makes a legal assertion is an internal operation of the legal system.’9 Though victim and perhaps society alike may condemn some suffering and point to those deemed responsible, the legal response remains highly controlled, requiring a certainty in deciding whether some act is lawful or unlawful. When it comes to atrocity committed in war and the pain and suffering endured as a result, some might think there would be little difficulty in determining behaviour as unlawful or not. The term ‘atrocity’ indicates a monstrous act of cruelty which is self-evidently wrong, self-evidently beyond what is generally acceptable even in the violence of wartime. It is beyond the limits of violence as circumscribed by the ‘law of arms’ as Shakespeare called it in Henry V, and is now more usually termed the ‘law of armed conflict’ or, perhaps wistfully, ‘international humanitarian law’. But even here, the legal/illegal divide operates. In particular, the apparent contradictory need to both accept suffering as an inevitable and necessary aspect of warfare and identify when suffering inflicted becomes legally intolerable has induced a sense of inherent ambiguity in the rhetoric and practice of this area of law. This is evident in the history of defining when conduct in war breaches what is considered just and when acts of mass violence are considered worthy of universal condemnation. Simply reflecting on the general ­development of the laws of war, or jus in bello as it appears in philosophical tradition, demonstrates this tendency. Though I will come to the problems of principle in the next section, we cannot escape the

54  Andrew Williams lawful/unlawful structural divide as a means of either tacitly condoning or ­accepting any form of suffering. That is the condition that flows from acts of legal definition as well as interpretation. There is no space in ­between for doubt to flourish. So, in deciding when any particular act in war is to be condemned, one has to turn to written convention, those codes and rules states have agreed should restrict what is permissible in war between them. Frequent reference to ‘customary’ law may suggest that what many states do in practice also operates as a means of setting standards, but written law will invariably provide consistency for decision makers. The war convention, such as it is, has developed over many years and has found most recent expression in the 1977 Additional Protocol 1 to the 1949 Geneva Conventions (AP1).10 One of the expressed ‘basic rules’ appears in Article 35(1): ‘In any armed conflict the right of the Parties to the conflict to choose methods or means of warfare is not unlimited.’ The double negative may seem clumsy, but it is present for a reason. Rather than state that warring forces are limited in what they can do, the phrase ‘not unlimited’ implies a general licence, and indeed a ‘right,’ to inflict pain and suffering, to kill and destroy, which is only exceptionally constrained by legal rules. For many this makes sense. Once at war, military necessity dictates that what may be regarded as undue legal interference in military conduct beyond some minimal restriction would prevent the object of war (defeating an enemy) being realised. Traditionally, entering into war may be a legal act that defines exception to the normal operation of law (allowing deliberate killing and infliction of destruction), but modern law (through the conceit of IHL) presumes that it can carry on governing conduct by states and their agents. A balance is therefore struck, perhaps unconsciously, between (a) the desire to let the military fight to its full and unfettered capacity in order to win the war and (b) the naïve hope that casualties (on both sides and in respect of combatants and civilians) can be kept to a minimum in the process. As the weight is heavily in favour of military licence (expressed through the double negative mentioned above) killing and injury of anyone is prima facie lawful. The deaths of civilians will be accepted, even anticipated, as ‘collateral damage’ unless and until specific evidence is provided that would prove an intention to commit a war crime. The mere fact of large numbers of civilian casualties alone is no proof of an offence under the laws of war. Provided an attacker isn’t targeting civilians deliberately, the loss of life is legally tolerated unless disproportionately ‘excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated’ (a largely subjective test by this wording).11 A second, older structural legal divide lends greater emphasis to this licence to cause death regardless of who is killed. The traditional doctrine, stretching back to medieval Christian thought, that separates the

Atrocity and the Pain in Law  55 justness of embarking on a war (jus ad bellum) from the conduct of war (jus in bello), provides the foundation for the generally accepted premise that whatever the reasons for going to war, just or unjust, each party will be judged according to their adherence to the specific laws related to fighting. According to the latest iteration of the laws of war, there is to be no ‘adverse distinction based on the nature or origin of the armed conflict’ so that all parties (virtuous or nefarious) have to fight in compliance with the rules.12 The rightfulness of going to war is therefore judged independently of any assessment of how the war is fought. So, whether or not a war is legal provides no indication of the lawfulness of any particular pain and suffering incurred by those subjected to attack. Though the primary perpetrators of an illegal war may be prosecuted in theory for a crime of aggression, those who cause the direct deaths and suffering of the people unlawfully attacked cannot automatically be deemed to have acted unlawfully. Only if particular killings and injury are separately proven to breach the laws of war, does the law condemn that infliction of pain. Legally (and, for some, ethically) this structural divide is questionable. Some philosophers, notably Jeff McMahan, have challenged the ­morality of generally removing the responsibility of combatants for being party to an unjust war.13 Michel Foucault, on the other hand, reflected the views of those who doubt the value of attaching any form of justice to conflict: as he remarked to Noam Chomsky in their famous TV debate on the subject in 1971 (although in the context of class war), ‘One makes war to win, not because it’s just.’14 The just war theory attempts to have it both ways: the reason for going to war has to be justifiable and when in war, however that might come about, with good reason or not, winning must still be constrained by law that limits the means by which that victory can be achieved. Most contemporary interpretations of law accept this conceit. Context makes no difference. Any objective institutional response to suffering in war flows from this. All combatants, whoever they are fighting for, have the legal right to kill and inflict injury and general suffering. They will not be judged unless they breach the rules regarding fighting fairly. Slaughter thus remains permissible because that can be and often is the consequence of war, just or not. Of course, we can use the crime of aggression as a way to prosecute the leaders of a state for an aggressive war (as occurred at Nuremberg but not since), but otherwise we’re looking for specific acts of atrocity (whether committed by aggressor or defender) to open the door for law to become engaged. Even when a suspected ‘atrocity’ has occurred, which might imply a legal commitment to respond, the structure of law does not allow the identification of what is legally insufferable to be adopted too readily. The most serious and deliberate infliction of suffering is deemed worthy of law’s attention only in particularly prescribed and proven circumstances. As Raphael Lemkin (the inspiration behind the term ‘genocide’)

56  Andrew Williams recognised, law provides opportunities as well as limitations. In the middle of the Second World War and in its aftermath, he strove to name the enormity of the crime that was the Holocaust. But, he saw the necessity of it being enshrined in an international legal instrument for a reason: To have ethical and political force, the rule of law must be given content in accordance with grim reality. How could the restoration of the rule of law be taken seriously when the destruction of nations and races and religious groups was not yet established as a crime under the law of nations?15 Despite all the evidence he had accumulated of the annihilation of p ­ eoples by the Nazis, which was clearly available to the Allies at the time, law still required words and terms and set obligations to have effect. The structuring through the binary of legal/illegal demanded this. The concept of jus cogens, which perhaps most closely shadows any notion of insufferability in international legal theory, is a direct consequence of such binary structure. It is supposed to reflect norms ‘accepted and recognized by the international community of states as a whole as a norm from which no derogation is permitted’.16 The International Law Commission has said jus cogens have been created to ‘prohibit what has come to be seen as intolerable.’17 Certain sufferings are supposedly ‘outlawed,’ defined as illegal in all circumstances. But trying to pin down exactly what forms of violence and suffering are automatically deemed against the law remains highly contested. This manifests itself in the whole naming approach that law’s structure requires. Though there is no complete approved list of wrongdoings or atrocities that are outlawed, many see the particular naming of a type of wrongdoing as vital to responding to suffering. To call something illegal, on the right side of the binary condition, is a victory. This was Lemkin’s position. And, with changing social understanding of what should or should not be tolerated, the advocacy for adding to such lists (of human rights abuses or international crimes, for instance) changes too. But this also reinforces the notion of the ‘list’ or the ‘catalogue’ of wrongs (i.e. what is deemed insufferable in law) as tyrant in the ­response to suffering. So, for instance, international law’s ‘oppression of women’ and their experience of suffering in war, as Griffin Ferry, ­H ilary Charlesworth, Christine Chinkin and others have pointed out, the specific suffering of women in conflict is only allowed to register as an adjunct to the male experience of war. Ferry says the whole doctrine of just war theory (which still influences law’s approach to war) ‘excludes women by its very structure, an absence that foreshadows later conceptualisations of women as objects, rather than actors, in war.’18 She argues that medieval notions of chivalry, which view women as virtuous chattels of men, harmed only when the sensibilities of men are harmed,

Atrocity and the Pain in Law  57 persist in IHL instruments and do not account for the scope and depth of sexual violence done to women or the weight of suffering borne by them during and in the aftermath of war. Unsurprisingly, the antidote for some is to alter these instruments, to add to the catalogue of wrongs, so that a more balanced gendered view is possible. It seems a reasonable path to pursue. But it’s equally the case that the whole aim of seeking inclusion is a reinforcement of the exclusivity that law promotes. If some suffering isn’t on the list, then it isn’t recognised as suffering worthy of law’s response. Though one oppression may become included, others remain unaddressed. Worse still, if there is no list, then there is no legal wrong. Advocates for justice then become fixated on the list rather than responding to the wrong. There is some evidence for this effect of law’s structuring in the ­response of the Allies at the end of the Second World War. The evidence of mass atrocities committed by the forces of Germany and its Allies – ­revealed in the liberated concentration camps in particular – brought about a ­legal panic. Despite what appeared to be obvious wrongs, an underlying discomfort flowed from the executive decision by the Allied powers to pursue some kind of justice and retribution through law rather than summary punishment of those deemed responsible. But, there was little, if any, clarity about the limits of jurisdiction or the charges that could be levelled against the leaders of state and the particular individuals who had killed, tortured, and inflicted pain. The crimes were far ­outside people’s experience. As one team of investigators reported at Bergen-Belsen, a ‘single instance of murder or brutality appears in the nature of a drop in the ocean in the light of the many thousands of deaths caused over a period of time by the joint deeds of all concerned.’19 The evidence transcended the words and notions they had of ‘crimes.’ They needed new terms, a completely fresh language to express the enormity of their discoveries. As I have mentioned, Raphael Lemkin had already confronted this dilemma. Coupling the Greek genos with the Latin cide, Lemkin coined the term ‘genocide’ to describe the planned killing of a race or people with the intent to annihilate such a group. 20 He itemised aspects of destruction from the economic and political to the religious and the moral and the physical too. Even in 1944, he was able to chart how the ‘Jews for the most part are liquidated within the ghettos, or in special trains in which they are transported to a so-called “unknown” destination.’21 His advocacy eventually led to the adoption of the Genocide Convention in 1948, too late for use at Nuremberg against the Nazis or the thousands of other trials held throughout Europe after 1945. Instead, the concepts of war crimes and crimes against humanity were applied. Even these caused significant difficulty. ‘War crimes’ were defined as ‘violations of the laws or customs of war’ in the Nuremberg Charter and drew on established international agreements on how war should

58  Andrew Williams be fought. 22 The definition meant that the only suffering, which could amount to a war crime, would be that inflicted on a national of the opposing side in the conflict. Killing or torture of any person of one’s own citizenry could not qualify. This led to the sometimes-absurd process where British prosecutors felt inhibited in charging SS concentration camp guards and commanders unless they could find particular victims who were nationals of an Allied country. Frequently this wasn’t difficult, given that the Nazis had transported millions of victims from occupied Europe to the camps for extermination or labour, though it also meant prosecutions failed to get underway despite clear evidence of mass murder. ‘Crimes against humanity’ was the term supposed to resolve that legal constraint. The definition adopted by the Nuremberg Charter included ‘murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population before or during the war.’23 But such a crime still had to be committed in association with a war of aggression. Peacetime atrocity was not included – nor was the infliction of atrocity in pursuit of a defensive rather than aggressive war. This was a great regret for Lemkin and one of his motivations for pursuing, successfully, a new convention to address genocide as a crime separate from any war. The law has developed since then, with the concept of ‘crime against humanity’ evolving through legal judgment particularly since the end of the Cold War at the International Criminal Tribunal instituted to pronounce on specific atrocities committed in the conflict within the former Yugoslavia. 24 On the face of it then, the evolutionary nature of law might suggest its capacity to change in accordance with altered perceptions of what is to be considered intolerable. But the very fact that law has to wait upon some formal endorsement and its own recognition and description of wrongdoing, demonstrates the contingent and exceptional nature of response. Some would again say this is a good thing: if law is to possess power and certainty, sufficient to allow people to behave accordingly and to curb excesses, then it cannot be open to sudden and perhaps emotional alteration. Time and deliberation is needed before new certainties are legally noted. Such is the cautious nature of law embedded in its structure.

Principle If the structure of law emphasises sufferance, if only through its convoluted and limited means of recognising suffering as worthy of legal response, what role does legal principle play? Of course, both structure and principle are intimately connected. Crucially, the generally and internationally recognised principles of non crimen sine lege (no crime without law) and nulla poena sine lege (no penalty without law), both

Atrocity and the Pain in Law  59 serve to emphasise my point regarding law’s structure that demands pain and suffering is only recognised as criminally inflicted if there is some legal definition of wrong in place. To be a crime, to be punished for committing that crime, requires law to name the wrong first. That is an almost sacrosanct condition for modern law. It was challenged, if not flouted, in the aftermath of the Second World War when the Nuremberg Charter came to articulate a crime of aggression. Previously, going to war could not be considered an illegal act: it was the prerogative of any state to protect its interests militarily if so decided by the government of that state. But, though this principle was transgressed for the purposes of prosecuting members of the Nazi government, and the crime of aggression is now accepted as an actionable crime in international law, the two principles (no crime without law and no penalty without law) have not been jettisoned. Indeed, the Allied legal authorities went out of their way to confirm the general applicability of the principles, finding convoluted reasons for treating the Nazi case as an allowable exception. Other more detailed principles of IHL, further demonstrate modern law’s tendency towards sufferance, in particular, the condemnation of weapons or means of warfare that cause ‘unnecessary suffering’ and/ or ‘superfluous injury’. Articulated since at least 1907, this aspect of the ‘humanitarian’ principle is now found in Article 35(2) AP1. It is supposed to dictate that armed forces should refrain from fighting in such ways that go beyond what is necessary to obtain victory. Yet, no one quite knows what the terms mean. Agreement has never been possible, which is reflected in a statement issued by medical experts prior to the enactment of this provision, which concluded that [u]nnecessary suffering is a term implying numerous medical parameters. From a strictly medical standpoint it seems impossible at the present stage of medical knowledge to objectively define suffering or to give absolute values permitting comparisons between human individuals. Pain, for instance, which is but one of many components of suffering, is subject to enormous individual variations. Not only does the pain threshold vary between human beings: at different times it varies in the same person, depending upon circumstances. 25 The official commentary on the article noted the difficulties associated with the subjectivity and objectivity of pain that such a provision alludes to even as regards a single victim. It declared that it is still very difficult to compare an injury in one part of the human body with another in a different location. Likewise, general effects caused by a local injury are subject to many variables and make comparison among different individuals difficult. 26 Hence, by the use of ‘injury’ to accompany suffering so as to indicate some possibility for objective assessment, it is being presumed that one

60  Andrew Williams can tell whether a particular wound was needed to incapacitate a combatant or not. But, what amounts to ‘superfluous’ and ‘unnecessary’ is impossible to predict outside any specific military situation. Invariably, issues of military necessity interfere to determine what should be suffered or not, what is tolerable or not. Some weapons have been specifically outlawed to avoid the problem of interpretation: dum-dum bullets, laser blinding rays, asphyxiating gases, and anti-personnel mines have all been the subject of particular international conventions banning them. The very fact that individual treaties have been needed to outlaw such weapons demonstrates the weakness of the underlying principle. The arbitrary nature of achieving political agreement and identifying particular weapons as prohibited ensures a condition of ambivalence – no better illustrated than in the case of nuclear weapons. Despite the obvious inability to distinguish between military and civilian targets and the long-term environmental and human health effects of nuclear explosion, the International Court of Justice could not agree that the weapon automatically and inherently breached IHL. 27 The panel of 14 judges was split equally: a metaphor perhaps for the enduring ambivalence of law. The Court stated that it could not ‘conclude definitively whether the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be lawful or unlawful in an ­extreme circumstance of self-defence, in which the very survival of a State would be at stake.’28 The legal tendency towards sufferance is accentuated by more general principles of jurisdiction. These appear as an acknowledgement that even atrocities can be and are to be held in sufferance depending upon where and when they were committed. Though the (thin) principle of universal jurisdiction for appalling international crimes has been recognised in some legal systems, there is an inherent reluctance to make this anything other than an exception rather than the norm. Law places matters of sovereignty before fundamental principles of respect for human rights so that limitations on the basis of territory, time, and personality consistently affect the ability of legal arenas (both international and domestic) from determining even the most blatantly inflicted sufferings. The principle of locus standi (those rules which decide when someone has the right to appear and make a claim before a court) removes classes of persons from recognition within many, if not all modern legal systems. Others are excluded by reason of incapacity, inarticulacy, or inability to convey suffering in a language or form acceptable in law, reminding us of the restrictive nature of law’s ability to hear accounts of suffering. 29 Though the idea of universal jurisdiction for particularly egregious international crimes may influence some national courts to ‘hear’ prosecutions of individuals for wrongdoing committed outside their domestic jurisdiction, the generally accepted position is that the exercise of any state law beyond its territory is avoided. The whole saga of the UK courts’ approach to alleged war crimes committed by British troops in Iraq is but

Atrocity and the Pain in Law  61 one example of a national legal system ill-disposed and unwilling to assume jurisdiction.30 Even when jurisdiction is eventually acknowledged, the principle of complementarity in international criminal law intervenes to emphasise preference for the national position. Complementarity was adopted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) as the governing principle in determining where an individual alleged to have committed an international crime (genocide, war crimes, or crimes against humanity) should be prosecuted. The underlying supposition is that the best location for that to happen is in the country where the crime was committed. Generally, with some restricted exceptions, only where the state concerned is unable or unwilling to prosecute an alleged perpetrator is the ICC entitled to intervene. There is good reason for this: giving individual states the responsibility to deal with those who have committed atrocities on their territory ensures that the ICC doesn’t become inundated with investigations. It can then f­ ocus upon the most serious crimes which are not being addressed locally. But this position reflects more the legal preference for respecting state sovereignty than finding the most efficient way of challenging impunity. It is no surprise that the success of the ICC in bringing perpetrators to account for the infliction of atrocity has so far been minimal. In the UK/ Iraq case, the ICC has been aware of serious allegations of unlawful killing and ill treatment since 2003 and began to look more closely at them in 2014. Even now, some 15 or more years since the alleged crimes were committed, the ICC Prosecutor continues to watch how the UK authorities investigate the claims. They have yet to intervene substantively, thus making the possibility of any prosecutions, should they eventually be deemed warranted, highly unlikely.

Process After structure and principle, modern legal processes provide the third element of law that demonstrates a tendency towards sufferance. Again, these processes restrict the suffering that may be addressed and those whose experience may be recognised. Many lawyers would agree that for human rights to capture law’s attention, for instance, there has to be clarity around ‘three issues: violation, violator, and remedy.’31 Without any or all of these, law will lack the certainty it demands before it is engaged. This is a self-restricting template: the recognition of each of these three elements rests with the law – the law determines, through its rules of evidence, whether a violation has occurred and who might be identified as responsible. The law also determines the scope of remedy, accepting only those previously sanctioned by law. This circularity results in a process of law, perhaps again best described by Luhmann, as a system ‘normatively closed, cognitively open’. 32 In other words, the law operates

62  Andrew Williams according to norms established by and through law even though it isn’t blind to how other systems (social, economic, political etc.) operate. Core constituent parts of this process are matters of attribution (identifying someone responsible) and causation (identifying a connection between a decision by that responsible person and the infliction of some intolerable violence). This proves extraordinarily difficult where violence is inflicted as a result not of a sequence of orders but the development of a culture that tolerates abuse. If suffering is endemic (perhaps, as in the guise of discrimination or some lack of care for any particular community or category of persons), law’s processes make proving responsibility highly problematic. The history of struggle against all forms of discrimination may occasionally point to success in some legal action, but these infrequent victories do as much to chart law’s general resistance as its propensity to address some particular suffering head-on. Equally restrictive in legal process is the denial of ‘voice.’ Determining who is allowed to speak in law, who is allowed to be heard, to recount pain and suffering, lies at the root of law’s sufferance and contribution to suffering. Whatever other constraints of process the law might impose (often referred to, rather vaguely, as ‘access to justice’), the stringent control over the right to be heard is the most pernicious. This operates at various levels. The first is in the identification of those individuals who have suffered. Without that initial recognition, there is no acceptance of suffering other than in the most abstract form. The very act of naming a victim is a legal one, contingent on a presumption of the three-part requirement of violation, violator, and remedy. Without all components fulfilled to law’s satisfaction, no voice of suffering can be heard in law. The fact of suffering (medically accepted as physical and/or psychological) is never sufficient. So, for instance, the impact of a degraded environment on people’s lives, a failure to distribute and administer medicines, food, water, or shelter (readily available on a global scale should the political will of rich states be present), insidious and persistent poverty in a grossly unequal society, injury and suffering as ‘collateral damage’ in war, do not register easily in law as worthy of response. They are not self-evident legal wrongs, lacking an obvious violator. Many are treated as ‘suffering’ to be expected of lived existence or, for some, the result of ‘(bad) luck.’ Freud may have claimed that religion reflected the need to distance oneself from suffering in the world, but the same remark might be made for law, given that law, and international law in particular, has been portrayed persistently as civilising and emancipatory. 33 Contrary to this faith in law lies the enduring quality of sufferance inherent in law that I have been proposing throughout this chapter. The inaptly or, perhaps, oxymoronically, named international humanitarian law is a case in point. IHL responds to what Freud claimed was the last of three key sources of suffering: ‘from our own body, which is destined to decay and dissolution,’ ‘from the outer world, which can rage against

Atrocity and the Pain in Law  63 us with the most powerful and pitiless forces of destruction,’ and from our relations with others. 34 Those extreme (violent) relations and those who will offend law are the stuff of IHL, which seeks to apply some kind of control over them whilst accepting extreme violence as its context. We don’t even have to look at political statements about a tragically destructive situation to understand this: when Rory Stewart (then UK Minister for International Development) said that the ‘only way of dealing with [ISIS fighters] will be, in almost every case, to kill them,’ he was merely reflecting practice of the UK Government and the total warfare waged seemingly on all sides of the current conflicts in Iraq and Syria. 35 Though arguably a breach of one particular law of war (that of article 40 AP1: ‘It is prohibited to order that there shall be no survivors, to threaten an adversary therewith or to conduct hostilities on this basis’), the general approach of IHL is nonetheless permissive of the right to kill and injure, to inflict pain and suffering on anyone. It may be that ‘the civilian population … shall not be the object of attack,’ that military objectives are to be the only legitimate target, but once past that condition, IHL introduces a subsidiary and contrary test. 36 An attack ‘which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof’ is prohibited, if that loss or injury or damage ‘would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated’.37 Known as proportionality, this principle provides licence to inflict all three of loss of life, injury, and damage. For any suffering to be deemed disproportionate requires an assessment of the specific context in which that suffering occurs. Inevitably, that is a military appraisal or at least an appraisal that takes its cue from the perspective of the military. Only then can particular suffering be deemed unmerited, unnecessary, or a mistake. The latter becomes the forgiving factor in the assessment of whether suffering inflicted is to be condemned within IHL. There are so many contemporary examples of this (dynamic/process) that it might appear absurd to mention one. But, the US bombing of the Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan in October 2015 reflects both the promise of law to take the pain and suffering of civilians in war seriously and its overwhelming tendency to accept it. In that case, the firing of missiles at the MSF Trauma Centre was referred to by the US military as a ‘tragic incident,’ who announced they were ‘committed to learning from’ the case in order to minimise ‘the risk of civilian casualties in future combat operations.’38 The US Central Command report of more than 700 pages concluded that the air strike, which killed 42 patients and medics, was caused by ‘human errors, compounded by process and equipment failures.’ Its central legal argument, though, was that the term ‘war crimes’ ‘is typically reserved for intentional acts – intentionally targeting civilians or intentionally targeting protected objects.’39 The suffering resulting from this

64  Andrew Williams ‘mistake’ had no reference point in IHL terms as far as the US military was concerned. Responsibility for compensation (which took the form of discretionary ‘condolence payments’ to families affected as well as funds to rebuild the hospital) was accepted but personal responsibility was not. There is nothing to suggest the conclusions reached were ­legally questionable. The nature of the laws of war allows massive loss of life and injury as part of the inevitable and permissible outcome of military conflict. The proportionality test is an almost insignificant restraint. Indeed, it serves to allow civilian casualties so long as they do not exceed some unknown and perhaps unknowable quantity. Those who have endured are at best rendered as numbers and are heard only when that number somehow reaches a point which offends the legal view of what amounts to ‘too much.’ But the restriction on voice in law’s processes also appears in situations of the most egregious crimes committed in war. Some suggest this is to be expected. Elaine Scarry, for instance, makes much of the ‘inarticulateness’ of pain as an experience, or its tendency to silence ‘all else’, or at least to make ‘all further elaborations – that it violates this or that human principle, that it can be objectified in this or that way, that it is amplified here, that it is disguised there – all these seem trivializations, a missing of the point, a missing of the pain.’40 In war, there may also be significant political and emotional pressure to encourage that ­silence. The UK government has persistently tried to deny liability for injuries caused by alleged government failure to supply proper equipment to its troops or otherwise look after its own soldiers where it had the resources and opportunity to do so.41 It has used the convoluted legal process as a means to resist such claims, causing families of injured or killed personnel to spend years and substantial sums of money in risky court proceedings. But Scarry’s consideration of silencing in war is also present at the heart of IHL. Scarry identifies the use of language applied as an ‘active redescription of the event: the act of injuring, or the tissue that is to be injured, or the weapon that is to accomplish the injury is renamed.’42 I have already mentioned ‘collateral damage’ as an odious term designed to obscure the reality of the inevitable consequence of military action. Suffering then is only prohibited in so far as it is regarded as ‘unnecessary,’ and injury to civilians not directly targeted is only unlawful if it is ‘excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.’ These are legal words that enable interpretation to avoid any reminder of the nature, scope, and depth of pain any person or persons will inevitably suffer. There have been particular struggles against aspects of this condition: recognition of the suffering of women in war (and peace for that matter) has been a matter of increasing significance in the past few decades. Catharine MacKinnon articulated her contempt for law in 1993 when she declared that ‘from objectification to killing,

Atrocity and the Pain in Law  65 from dehumanisation and defilement to mutilation and torture to sexual murder, this abuse occurs in forms and settings and legal postures that overlap every recognised human rights convention but is addressed, effectively and as such, by none.’43 Though sexual violence in war has been identified by the ICC as a crime to be given specific attention, the legal provisions are ambiguous in how serious they reflect this determination. Article 76 AP1 may be titled the Protection of Women but provides that ‘Women shall be the object of special respect and shall be protected in particular against rape, forced prostitution, and any other form of indecent assault.’ Whereas other actions are ‘prohibited’ leaving less room for avoidance, the injunction here is to ‘respect’ and ‘protect,’ an obligation of significantly less resolve. There is much more one could say on the voice of the sufferer and how law serves to restrict its audibility. Space prevents a fuller exposition here. Nonetheless, it is important to re-situate the issue of voice in the context of the requirement of identifiable ‘violation.’ One of the conceits of IHL is that all sides to a conflict should operate according to the law and should be held responsible if such law is breached. But, if there is no process for sufferers to be heard in law, then how can that responsibility flow? The ICC offers the prospect for victims of any alleged international crime presenting their claims direct to the Court’s Prosecutor. But, unless the claim is matched by many other sufferers of the same crime, nothing will follow. The Prosecutor can only proceed if she can make a case not only that the state whose agents were responsible for the crime have been unwilling or unable to prosecute them, but also that the crime is ‘of sufficient gravity to justify further action by the Court’.44 What gravity means in this context is not fixed. But the court has to be convinced that the scale, nature, and manner of the alleged crime are serious enough.45 Though the ICC has made efforts to take victims’ accounts more seriously, giving the survivor-victim herself a nominally weightier role than simply that of potential eye-witness, all the tendencies of legal process that promote doubt rather than belief still apply. In criminal charges, the test remains ubiquitous: proof of crime must be established beyond reasonable doubt. This links us back to law’s need for the identification of a ‘violator.’ The presumption of innocence as law’s golden thread in many Western legal traditions operates in consideration of the laws of war as well as any domestic crime. At the very least, there has to be a potentially identifiable person responsible before the law becomes engaged. And even then, a link between the alleged person responsible and the suffering inflicted has to be established. So, in the numerous trials of Nazi ‘minor war criminals,’ as they were described, conducted by the British Armed Forces after the Second World War away from the Nuremberg Trial, it was rarely considered enough for an accused to be found responsible and guilty merely by membership of the SS, for instance, or by reason

66  Andrew Williams of their participation in the running and operation of concentration camps. At the first major camp trial in 1945 in relation to Bergen-Belsen and ­Auschwitz, acquittals of a number of SS followed the failure of the prosecution to establish a particular act of violence against a particular victim. There was no guilt by association even for those high up the command structure. At Nuremberg too, acquittals of members of the German government followed the judges’ majority decision that proof of complicity with the crimes against peace and humanity or war crimes didn’t automatically flow. The restrictions on voice and identification of violator ensure that law’s processes contribute significantly to the legal tendency to see s­ uffering as only worthy of response in exceptional circumstances. Maybe, this is all any institutionalised process can do. But it is a condition that is vital when exploring how the rhetoric of pain is received in law.

Concluding Remark My argument in this chapter is condemnatory. I maintain that modern law is ill-conditioned to respond to pain and suffering as a result of its inherent qualities of sufferance. Whether that is a result of its role as a construct of the state and therefore more concerned with preserving order than responding to suffering as a process of justice requires much further consideration. But blindly accepting law’s increasing domination as the determining institution for the recognition of when pain provokes collective responses may be undesirable. In particular, if we have any global pretentions to address the most serious forms of pain and suffering deliberately inflicted, which we might call atrocity, then a much more sophisticated and wide-ranging approach is needed. Leaving the matter in the hands of law is likely to disappoint any seeking some effective remedy, redemption, or retribution.

Notes 1 Talal Asad, ‘On Torture, or Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment’ in Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das and Margaret M. Lock (eds.), Social Suffering (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997), 285 at. 304–5. 2 I do not intend to dwell on the distinction between pain and suffering either philosophical or legal. As far as the latter is concerned, the phrase ‘pain and suffering’ is (in UK law) traditionally used to encompass the acute and chronic experience of both physical and mental hurt. So, for the purposes of this chapter I’m happy to see the terms ‘pain’ and ‘suffering’ as interchangeable. It follows that I don’t accept, say, Jamie Mayerfeld’s determination that they are not synonymous, reserving a separate position for ‘physical pain’. I accept though that suffering has become useful in its ability to convey more general conditions not traditionally seen as painful, but rather as life conditions to be endured: see Jamie Mayerfeld, Suffering and Moral Responsibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) 23 et seq.

Atrocity and the Pain in Law  67 3 Andrew Williams, ‘Human Rights and Law: Between Sufferance and Insufferability’, Law Quarterly Review, 123, (2007, January), 133–58. 4 As working definition I use the formula I first adopted some time ago. By sufferance I mean the ‘acknowledgement of suffering but the active toleration of its presence. In other words, it is not a condition of ignorance. Rather it implies the awareness of suffering but a determination not to act in response.’ By insufferability I mean the ‘acknowledgement that a condition is intolerable, cannot be tolerated, and demands action as a consequence. Indeed, nothing less than an active response will do. Otherwise, the condition will not be insufferable. It implies a promise to combat the condition concerned, outlaw it, to maintain it in view, and ultimately to eradicate it.’ See Williams ibid. 5 I say ‘end’ as although condemnation of atrocity frequently occurs during conflict, the possibilities for imposing law and legal process on those accused of such crimes are limited. Post-conflict, issues of transitional justice are more prevalent. 6 Niklas Luhmann, ‘Law as a Social System,’ Northwestern U.L.R., 83/136 (1989), 140. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 139. 9 Ibid., 141. 10 1977 Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (AP1). One can trace the codification of the laws of war back many centuries but from the mid-to late nineteenth century international agreement between states has become the norm following the creation of the International Committee of the Red Cross. 11 Article 51(5)(b) AP1. I come back to these issues when I address the principles in section II. 12 Fifth paragraph Preamble AP1. 13 See for instance Jeff McMahan, Killing in War (Oxford University Press, 2009). 14 For a review of the debate: see Peter Wilkin, ‘Chomsky and Foucault on Human Nature and Politics: an Essential Difference?’ Social Theory and Practice, 25.2 (1999), 177–10. 15 Raphael Lemkin, Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael L ­ emkin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 114–15. 16 Article 53 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. 17 International Law Commission Draft Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts 2001, Article 40. 18 Griffin Ferry, ‘Oppression through “Protection”,’ Law and Inequality 35.57 (2016), 59. 19 See War Crimes Investigation Team WO309/1584 National Archives. For fuller examination of this process, see Andrew Williams, A Passing Fury: Searching for Justice at the End of World War II (London: Jonathan Cape, 2016). 20 Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation – Analysis of Government – Proposals for Redress (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944). 21 Ibid., 89. 22 For a version of the Charter see http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/imtconst.asp. 23 Ibid. 24 See http://cld.unmict.org/notions/show/214/crimes-against-humanity# for detailed examinations of the judgments of the ICTY on crimes against ­humanity and its meaning.

68  Andrew Williams 25 “Statement concerning unnecessary suffering presented by the informal working group of medical experts” at the second session of the Conference of Government Experts on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons, 1976. 26 International Committee of the Red Cross Commentary to AP1 available at https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/applic/ihl/ihl.nsf/INTRO/470. 27 See the International Court of Justice’s Advisory opinion on the legality of the threat or use of nuclear weapons 1996 available at www.icj-cij.org/files/ case-related/95/095-19960708-ADV-01-00-EN.pdf. 28 Ibid. 29 Peter Goodrich’s The Languages of Law from Logics of Memory to N ­ omadic Masks (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990) classically demonstrates the many and varied ways in which ‘victims’ are prevented from communicating their sufferings before the law. 30 See Andrew Williams, ‘The Iraq Abuse Allegations and the Limits of UK Law’ Public Law July (2018) 461–481. 31 Kenneth Roth, ‘Defending Economic, Social and Cultural Rights’ Human Rights Quarterly 26.1 (2004), 63–73 (68). 32 Niklas Luhmann, ‘Law as a Social System.’ 33 Sigmund Freud, Civilisation and Its Discontents (London: Jonathan Cape, 1930), 28. 34 Ibid. 35 The Guardian 22 October 2017 www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/oct/22/ only-option-is-to-kill-british-isis-fighters-in-syria-says-minister (accessed 9 May 2018). 36 Article 51(2) AP1. 37 Ibid. 38 US Central Command Investigation Report 2015 https://info.publicintelligence.net/ CENTCOM-KunduzHospitalAttack.pdf. 39 Ibid., 2. 40 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 60. 41 See for instance R(Smith) v Secretary of State for Defence [2010] UKSC 29 where various claims were brought on behalf of soldiers killed by friendly fire or as a result of inadequate protective equipment or vehicles being provided by the military/government. 42 Scarry, The Body in Pain, 66. 43 Catharine A MacKinnon, ‘Crimes of War, Crimes of Peace’ in Stephen Shute and Susan Hurley (eds.), On Human Rights (Oxford University Press, 1993), 83–109 (85). 4 4 Article 17(1)(d) Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. 45 Situation on the Registered Vessels of the Union of the Comoros, the H ­ ellenic Republic and the Kingdom of Cambodia (ICC-01/13-34) Pre-Trial Chamber I (16 July 2015), para. 21.

4 Choked by the Brutal Fact of Being The Concept of Pain in the Early Works of Emmanuel Levinas Zuzanna Ładyga In the opening lines of his philosophical debut ‘On Escape’ (1935), ­Emmanuel Levinas writes: The revolt of traditional philosophy against the idea of being ­originates in the discord between human freedom and the brutal fact of being that assaults this freedom. The conflict from which the revolt arises opposes man to the world, not man to himself. … The individual is called upon to loosen the grasp of the foreign reality [réalité étrangère] that chokes it, but this is in order to assure the full flowering of its own reality.1 For readers unaccustomed to Levinas’s style, the passage may seem so hyperbolically grim that one may interpret it – in fact, some have – as a phenomenological description of endogenic depression. 2 Even for those more familiar with Levinas’s vocabularies of suffering in Totality and Infinity or Otherwise Than Being, the opening lines of ‘On Escape’ arouse curiosity about the brutality of Levinas’s image: why does he picture the phenomenal interspace between the sensing individual and the fact of living as a space of violence, a space where life strangles its human victim? At first glance, the image seems oxymoronic. Generally speaking, if choking – a sudden arrestment of breathing that threatens to block all life functions – may be said to involve brutality, it is the brutality against one’s biological existence rather than the brutality executed by this ­existence as such. Yet, Levinas reverses this logic and presents the real ‘fact of being’ itself as that which suffocates one to death. In his paradoxical optics, life appears as ‘foreign’ rather than ‘one’s own.’3 It actually prevents one’s own reality from ‘flowering,’ that is to say, from an aliveness of another kind.4 Twelve years after ‘On Escape,’ in Existence and Existents (1947), Levinas will refer to this inescapable character of being as the il y a (the There Is)5 – the swarming murmur of reality that never seizes – but in the

70  Zuzanna Ładyga 1935 piece, he does not own this neutral concept just yet. Far beyond its opening lines, ‘On Escape’ abounds in images of physical pain: choking and violent grasping, enchainment, and tutelage. No doubt this rhetoric is part of Levinas’s deliberate strategy of writing, a strategy where none of ­ xymoron. the references functions metaphorically as a hyperbole or an o Levinas means them literally, rather than as indicators of something else. His references to physiological reactions represent ontological states rather than, as abstract, ontological discourse would normally have it, the other way around. In that, Levinas’s strategy is as radical as its goal because the philosopher does not hide the fact that ‘On Escape’ is a ­radical intervention into the Western ontological tradition. As he boldly puts it in the opening sentence of the essay, he wants a ‘revolt.’6 The aim of this essay is therefore to explore the nature of Levinas’s revolt and its potential for transgressing the limitations of traditional philosophical discourse. My exploration starts with an analysis of the language of physical vulnerability in ‘On Escape,’ and later moves on to Existence and Existents, which I read as a continuation and development of Levinas’s early strategy. While the insistence on biological vulnerability remains the main theme of Existence, Levinas’s rhetoric of suffering becomes much more nuanced here than in the 1935 essay; the image of choking gives way to images of laziness (paresse) and ­fatigue. Inherent to both texts, however, is Levinas’s insistence on prioritising bodily experience over philosophical abstraction. By tracing the trajectory of Levinas’s intervention, I wish to demonstrate how Levinas’s handling of the language of the body maps the limits of philosophy’s capacity to address the question of pain and suffering. One way of approaching Levinas’s rhetoric of vulnerability in ‘On Escape’ is to understand the historical context of his 1935 essay. Just as it is the case with Levinas’s later work, ‘On Escape’ is his response to Heidegger’s notion of the fear of nothingness as that which primarily defines being. While for Heidegger, life’s fundamental characteristic is the fear of nothingness which exceeds it, for Levinas, what is far worse, limiting and dreadful than nothingness is life itself and the ‘brutality of its existence,’7 i.e. the fact that the overbearingly tactile presence of being cannot in any way be escaped. Therefore, what Levinas holds against the entire Western philosophy (represented by Heidegger) is its nurtured ‘petit bourgeois’ concern for the transcendence of ‘the limits of human condition,’ ‘without ever having envisaged the meaning of ‘finite being.’’8 In other words, philosophy’s search for that which lies beyond the finiteness of material existence is a way – a blasé ‘game’ in fact – of escaping the most profound question of material life.9 Escape does not originate only from the dream of the poet who sought to evade ‘lower realities’; nor does it arise from the concern to break with the social conventions and constraints that falsified

Choked by the Brutal Fact of Being  71 or annihilated our personality, as in the romantic movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Escaping is the quest for the marvellous, which is liable to break up the somnolence of our bourgeois existence. However, it does not consist in freeing ourselves from the degrading types of servitude imposed on us by the blind mechanism of our bodies. (my emphasis)10 In other words, if there is any ontological problem that philosophy should attend to most scrupulously, it is the inescapability of our bodily existence, rather than fantasies of putting it behind via concepts such as transcendence or nothingness. Levinas insists on annulling the divide between the language of high philosophy, on the one hand, and the language of embodied existence, on the other. Here, however, we encounter one of the first impasses of Levinas’s approach. Levinas says the body should be the prime object and method of inquiry into being, but at the same time, he cannot but depict body mechanisms in strongly dismissive terms – the body is ‘blind’ and it imposes on us ‘degrading types of servitude’ – which reduces the interventionist potential of his project. Inasmuch as the recognition of the body and its rehabilitation into ontological investigation carries the promise of a revolt, the philosopher seems to nip this revolt in the bud by moral qualification. Or does he? Hidden within the rhetorical impasse of the passage is also a concession that the tangibility of biological life cannot be transcended by philosophy’s symbolic means, both in the sense of being contained by those means and being conquered and denied by them. The elementary truth that there is being – a being that has value and weight – is revealed at a depth that measures its brutality and its seriousness … it is not that the sufferings with which life threatens us render it displeasing: rather it is because the ground of suffering consists of the impossibility of interrupting it, and of an acute feeling of being held fast. (rivé)11 In the superficial reading of this passage, the concreteness of bodily weight is, for Levinas, a cause of suffering – the biological envelope of the body appears to Levinas as a straightjacket which holds him fast, causing pain. Thus, Levinas’s terminology may at first glance seem like a perfect case of what the philosopher Catherine Malabou has labelled the ‘antibiological bias’ of Western thought, where the symbolic is always in the end privileged over the biological, as it translates the latter into symbolic terms.12 According to Malabou, even those philosophers whom we usually ­associate with being interested in the biological body fail to acknowledge

72  Zuzanna Ładyga its tacitly physiological dimension. Martin Heidegger’s famous concept of attunement (Stimmung), for example, pivots on an acknowledgement of skin as a sensory organ that actively participates in one’s tuning in with the world, which is nevertheless the acknowledgement that Heidegger fails to make when he renders physiology of touch in purely abstract terms. According to Malabou, the tendency to privilege abstraction over concreteness can also be found in the writings of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben, thus confirming antibiological bias in contemporary philosophy. What bias? Contemporary philosophy bears the marks of a primacy of symbolic life over biological life that has been neither criticized nor deconstructed [original emphasis]. Symbolic life is that which exceeds biological life, conferring meaning upon it. It refers to ­spiritual life, life as a ‘work of art,’ life as care of the self and the shaping of being, peeling our presence in the world away from its solely obscure, natural dimension. Foucault’s concept of body and Agamben’s concept of bare life bear witness to this unquestioned splitting of the concept of life. Paradoxically, they expel the biological that is supposed to constitute their core—and it thereby becomes their unthinkable residue.13 Levinas may be said to partake of this tendency only if we discuss him at the superficial level that registers ‘weight,’ ‘suffering,’ ‘and ‘sense of being held fast’ as meta(phorical) commentaries, and if we neglect ­L evinas’s experimental uses of the pain lexicon aimed, precisely, at eliminating the pattern of symbolic appropriation. But if we acknowledge his radical strategy, it will become apparent that Levinas, far from expelling the body from philosophical investigation in fact tries to reestablish the body as its only, veritable instrument. The difference between Levinas and Malabou’s philosophers extends even further. While as a result of their biological bias Foucault or ­Agamben do not see the possibility of ‘biological resistance to (bio)power’14 i.e. believe only in the body translated into the language of philosophy, Levinas maintains the connection between the body and resistance or freedom. He writes that the key to philosophical ‘revolt’ is to approach the body not as that which ‘collides with our freedom’ but as ‘the exercise of that freedom,’ thus prompting us that his metaphors of ‘enchainment’ or ‘suffocating weight’ are the terms one needs to unpack experientially, sensing how they register in body perception.15 These terms, to put it differently, are not Levinas’s way of reducing biological life to figures of speech; they are hyperbolic invitations to a more empirical kind of o ­ ntological inquiry than philosophy has traditionally allowed. The word that Levinas suggests for this revolutionary practice is ‘excendence,’16 that is a practice of resisting the urge to go beyond

Choked by the Brutal Fact of Being  73 the confines of one’s body in favour of an embracement of its haptic case. ‘The ground of this theme is constituted – if one will pardon the ­neologism – by the need of excendence,’ he writes in ‘On Escape.’17 The neologism, as Bettina Bergo explains in her translator’s notes ‘is modeled on trans-scendence adjoining ‘ex-’ or ‘out’ to the Latin scandere, ‘to climb,’18 which indicates an action closer to heightening the perceptivity of one’s own body rather than getting out of or fatally hurting it. For Levinas, therefore, it is a particular practice of the haptic sense that is the key to a new empirical brand of phenomenology he proposes. The excendence approach starts with the perception of the physical weight of being which is revealed for example in the phenomenon of malaise of nausea, when we can grasp ‘the moment where being takes on its weight.’19 In nausea that precedes vomiting, Levinas explains, the feeling is that of being ‘revolted from the inside; our depths smother ­beneath ourselves’ our innards ‘heave.’ 20 There is, in this state, an organic ‘refusal to remain there, an effort to go out’ coming from within, which in its despair (because of its impossibility) brings the nauseated person to ‘the very experience of pure being’ about which there is ­‘nothing-more-to-be-done.’ 21 There is no splitting of the concept of life here, to use Malabou’s phrase, nor is there a symbolic conference of meaning upon biological life. On the contrary, it is the biological welling up from within that confers that meaning upon the ontological concept. Another example of the experience of pure being in ‘On Escape’ is the perception and the pressure of one’s own body weight: It is in this kind of being that beings – not in its relations with its cause – that we find the paradox of a being that begins to be, or, in other words, the impossibility of distinguishing, in this being, what takes on the weight [of being] from that weight itself. 22 The paradox of being and its existential weight is that it is indivisible from what biology knows as proprioception. Proprioception is the knowledge of the body’s location in space, made possible by sensory receptors called ‘proprioceptors’ located in the skin, muscles, and joints, whose combined input helps maintain a sense of bodily integrity. A ­ ccording to the neurophysiologist Charles Sherrington who coined the term proprioception in 1906, proprioceptors are to be distinguished from ‘interoceptors,’ which provide the brain with information about internal organs, and ‘exteroceptors,’ which provide information about the external world. 23 As inferred from the Latin prefix proprio- (‘one’s own’), proprioception has to do with the ability to sense that our bodies are ours, as it yields knowledge of the body’s coherence and orientation in space, the positioning and movement of our limbs and torso, the sense of effort, force, and heaviness. In short, the ‘direct, immediate and spontaneous

74  Zuzanna Ładyga knowledge of the body’ contributes to our sense of body ownership and the knowledge that our body belongs to us and not someone else. 24 All conscious awareness of being in the world as well as all reflection about separateness, sovereignty, and freedom – all ‘meditation on the ‘meaning of life,’ pessimism or optimism, suicide or love of life’ – starts with this elementary perceptivity. 25 Levinas’s recognition of the capacities of sensory perception is not in discord, here, with most contemporary neuroscience, which approaches the haptic organ – our skin – as ‘a blanket with a brain in every micro-inch:’26 skin and touch are as rich and paradoxical as any other part of our humanity. Touch is the unsung sense—the one that we depend on most and talk about least. We know the illusions that our eyes or ears can create. But our skin is capable of the same high ordering and the same deceptions. It is as though we lived within a five- or six-foot-tall eye, an immense, enclosing ear, with all an eye or ear’s illusions, blind spots, and habitual mistakes. We are so used to living within our skins that we allow them to introduce themselves as neutral envelopes, capable of excitation at the extremities (and at extreme moments), rather than as busy, body-sensing organs. We see our skins as hides hung around our inner life, when, in so many ways, they are the inner life, pushed outside. 27 For Levinas the pain of existence is not some ephemeral existential ­emotion but a primary sensation, sensed in the skin’s outer layer as in the proprioception of one’s weight and heaping, and in its inner, interocepted layer as in the case of nausea. Bodily experiences are the very experiences of pure being about which? there is nothing-more-to-be-done, that is to say, that they are untranslatable into the language of philosophy, while remaining or ‘leading us,’ as the philosopher puts it, ‘into the heart of philosophy.’28 In short, it seems that the object of Levinas’s revolt is the very same antibiological bias that Malabou is talking about when she criticises Foucault and Agamben. Unlike Foucault’s or Agamben’s references to the biological body, Levinas’s are emphatically not ‘related to the training of bodies or the regulating of conduct,’29 but function as initiation points for phenomenological inquiry into biological life, which refuses to reduce them into philosophical concepts. In this way, Levinas shelters the biological from the symbolic appropriation and performs the muchneeded deconstruction of the arbitrary opposition between the tactile and the abstract that goes under the label of antibiological bias. In Existence and Existents, Levinas continues his inquiry into the modes of haptic perception of bodily weight about which there is nothingto-be-done by referring to concrete bodily states and moods such as

Choked by the Brutal Fact of Being  75 laziness (paresse) and fatigue, claiming that the two states, although never ‘examined by pure philosophical analysis outside of moral preoccupations, are, in their very occurrence, positions taken with regard to existence.’30 Levinas thus situates laziness and fatigue at the very heart of the ­problematics of being and therefore at the forefront of his philosophical intervention. Again, as was the case with ‘On Escape,’ his choice of terms is deliberate; to focus on such banal and apparently transparent notions is to oppose the entire Western philosophical tradition, which dismisses laziness and fatigue as obstruction to the force of reason31 and the main obstacle to Enlightenment.32 For Levinas, in contrast, the uncanny presence of laziness and fatigue at the ‘margins of normalisation’33 is precisely what he finds eye-opening. In his view, both experiences attest to what Maurice Blanchot has called ‘the limits of thought.’34 Thus, following Blanchot, Levinas finds in the not-doing-anything of laziness and fatigue the most fundamental existential moment of a refusal to be, a refusal which is empirically impossible – we can only experience it after we’ve been plunged into being – but whose impossibility gestures towards the limits of thought. In this way, he reasons, laziness and fatigue open up the question of exteriority, which is to say, a fundamental ontological question. Levinas’s desire to reignite philosophy’s interest in experiences that have always occupied its margins resonates with Heidegger, who in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, opens his analysis of attunement (Stimmung), by arguing for a philosophical relevance of prosaic dispositions in the following way: Attunements are the fundamental manner in which we find ­ourselves disposed in such and such a way . . . And precisely those attunements to which we pay no heed at all, the attunements we least observe, those attunements which attune us in such a way that we feel as though there is no attunement at all, as though we were not attuned in any way at all – these attunements are the most powerful. 35 Heidegger’s suggestion that we should look for answers to fundamental philosophical and, indeed, metaphysical questions in the phenomena where nothing seems to be happening, and which we scarcely ever ­consider important at all paves the way for Levinas’s claim about laziness. Not only because laziness shares the etymological paradigm with Heidegger’s boredom (the German Langeweile literally means ‘long while’ and signifies ‘long, and/or free time’), on the grounds of which Heidegger develops his concept of Stimmung, but also because laziness is a mood, or a sentiment, whose meaning consists, primarily and exclusively, in a feeling that there is no attunement – in doing and feeling nothing. Crucially, this doing and feeling nothing in laziness, is just as

76  Zuzanna Ładyga much an (in)activity of the mind that wanders around in, to use Locke’s words, ‘lazy recumbency and satisfaction on the surface of things,’36 as it is an act of the body. As medieval theologians already observed when tracing the influence of Demon Meridianus in slow movements of the monks, laziness articulates itself primarily in the loose pose of the body, in relaxation of its outer shell. The issue of the skin threshold is thus crucial to philosophical inquiry into moods inasmuch as it is also that which the discipline finds most problematic. Because laziness seems for Levinas to be the mode whose entire meaning is indivisible from the issue of body’s materiality, it is one that puts the traditional mind/ body dialectic into question in the most radical way. This is, therefore, how he announces his attempt at challenging philosophical tradition in ­E xistence and Existents: To see the truth of the operation [of how the existent relates to ­existence], let us ignore all attitudes towards existence which arise from reflection, attitudes by which an already constituted existence turns back over itself. The attitudes involved in the meditation on the ‘meaning of life,’ pessimism or optimism, suicide or love of life, however deeply they may be bound up with the operation by which a being is born into existence, take place over and beyond that birth. We must try to grasp that event of birth in phenomena which are prior to reflection. Fatigue and laziness, which have never been examined by pure philosophical analysis outside of moral preoccupations, are in their very occurrence, positions taken with regard to existence.37 Levinas says that the only way to grasp the instant of one’s coming into existence is to turn to experiences that precede conscious thought, reflection, and attitude. He also intimates that the precedence of those modes is not simply temporal, in the sense that pre-reflective phenomena come before, but also ontological, in the sense that they are prior to reflection. Notably, the quality that makes a phenomenon prior in both senses of the term is apparently not present in all pre-conscious phenomena, but is uniquely specific to fatigue and laziness, which entail ‘the refusal to exist.’38 Fatigue and laziness are ‘made up of that refusal.’39 Because ‘refusal is in’ laziness and fatigue; it is their very structure:40 the two sentiments not only lend themselves to ‘pure’ philosophical analysis, but also indeed ‘must’ become its object. In other words, not only is laziness relevant to philosophical inquiry into existence, but also it is absolutely essential to it as its occurrence articulates the limits of our understanding of what existence is.41 Clearly then, apart from undermining Immanuel Kant’s relegation of laziness into the sphere of moral predispositions,42 Levinas also works against the formula of transcendental deduction which places the conditions of possibility outside the empirical experience. Not only

Choked by the Brutal Fact of Being  77 does he reinstate the cause ‘prior’ to reflection into the sphere of perceptual experience of doing nothing, but also, as we shall see, he identifies in this experience a specific mode of pre-conscious perceptivity. Using the example of fatigue, Levinas says: Conceived as muscular exhaustion or toxicity by psychologists and physiologists, it [fatigue] comes to the attention of a philosopher in an entirely different way. A philosopher has to put himself in the instant of fatigue and discover the way it comes about. Not its significance with respect to some system of references, but the hidden event of which an instant is the effectuation and not only the outcome.43 The experience of fatigue is therefore prior to any philosophical deliberation, and a philosopher must draw his conclusions from immersing in the sensation rather than from distancing him/herself from it. This line of revolt against the Kantian a priori via emphasis on perception makes most sense when read in the context of Heidegger’s Being and Time, which defines attunement in terms of self-localisation among the phenomena of the world, or Befindlichkeit. It is precisely in Befindlichkeit, the sensation of corporeal orientation in space and time, that Heidegger situates the precondition of all attunements. Moreover, Heidegger identifies the character of this sensation in explicitly Kantian terms, as ‘the condition of possibility,’44 thus indicating that perception of our body’s abjectness may indeed mark a blank spot in the concept of the transcendental. At first glance, Levinas’s claims about laziness and fatigue in Existence and Existents seem to differ from Befindlichkeit only in the ­degree of concretisation – the former marks orientation vis-à-vis the world whereas laziness and fatigue denote the sense of being burdened by its presence. But it is precisely this degree of concretisation that makes all the difference. The sense of orientation which Heidegger’s German term captures linguistically is amplified by Levinas through the insertion of laziness-as-withdrawal, and thus highlights the idea that the essential component of one’s sense of existence should be sought in the act of refusal to be attuned rather than in the act of attunement as such. Simply put, Levinas thinks there is something about the way one attends to the spatial burdensomeness of one’s body in laziness and fatigue that very literally actualises the impossible refusal to being. As an Object-­ Oriented ontologist would put it, the experience of inactivity expressed in laziness and fatigue compels us to a unique kind of attention to the fact of our existence as material objects.45 When Levinas develops the idea, it becomes clear that the attention to one’s objectness takes place on a specific level of perception. The impossible dissent, which is built into the structure of existence, is most purely

78  Zuzanna Ładyga revealed not in the contents of the experience of laziness and fatigue, but in its form, that is to say, in the very arrangement of the perceptive apparatus of the body. Levinas’s phrase ‘position with regard to existence’ should thus be understood in a very literal sense, as a bodily pose. For when ‘we take fatigue and laziness as contents, Levinas argues, we do not see what is effected in them,’ namely, the event of refusal to act and to engage with existence – a hopelessly ‘impossible’ event of ‘an impotent non-acceptance.’46 The lazy/weary pose enunciates an objection towards activity on the somatic level, in a fleeting event of corporeal selfmapping, before any faculty to act upon and transform this objection into reflection or awareness becomes activated. Consequently, what Heidegger’s Befindlichkeit denoted semantically, Levinas’s laziness and fatigue capture somatically, as laziness and fatigue situate the event of existence on the surface of the ontico-ontological membrane of the human skin. In Levinas’s preliminary remarks about laziness and fatigue, fundamental questions about the essence of existence are interspersed with empirical observations of ordinary, somatic states of perception. The extent of this ‘somaticization’47 of philosophical jargon is gradually ­revealed as Levinas develops his argument to explain that the event of laziness is expressed through ‘inhibition:’ laziness concerns beginning, as though existence were not there right off, but preexisted the beginning in an inhibition. There is more here than a span of duration, flowing imperceptibly between two moments.48 The position of refusal is now concreticised even further. It is not simply a pose, but a pose of inhibition, that is to say, a poise. The withholding of action and movement occasioned in laziness does not have the temporal structure of retrospective withdrawal or seizure of perceptive f­ aculties; rather, it functions as a threshold phenomenon from the vantage point of which all future sensory experience can be derived. What we colloquially call laziness emerges from Levinas’s analysis as a preparatory instance of attention-scaling, whose purpose is to calibrate channels of more complex interactions with the world on the level of sensibility and reflection. In other words, if we normally associate laziness with the opposite of poise (in the sense of readiness to pounce), i.e. with looseness and rest, it is because we fail to observe that laxity, when considered on the level of heed, is a manifestation of specifically understood, deeper tension within our perceptive apparatus. The emphasis on inhibition adds to the empirical sense that L ­ evinas gives to position, for, as remarked earlier, Levinas does not use the term ‘position’ in a strictly philosophical sense, as an assertion of an assumption performed by reason, but in the sense of positioning one’s limbs, head, and corpus, which in the case of a lazy pose is lax, almost

Choked by the Brutal Fact of Being  79 lifelessly limp, as if entirely made up of a refusal to move. Inhibition is thus a crucial term in Levinas’s somatic semantics (or should we say ‘semantics’) of the prior position, because the arrestment of senses that inhibition presupposes is for Levinas a distinct kind of sense itself. This at least seems to be the meaning of his assertion that the phenomenon of refusal to act effects itself, as if it belonged to a different order of faculty arrangement. It effects itself, ‘just as in the order of experience, vision alone is the apprehension of light and hearing alone the perception of sound.’49 The special properties of the power of refusal suggest that Levinas understands inhibition occasioned in laziness in terms of sterēsis, 50 as the ability to suspend faculty that is prior to and more fundamental than the power to activate the senses. Just as the power of vision finds its essence when the eyes are closed, being finds its essence in the suspension of activity. If inhibition is a kind of sense, how does it work and on what level of perception? While the concept of sterēsis concerns any privation of ­faculty, Levinas focuses on one specific case of its suspension, the inhibition of action and movement. He argues that this sense or mode of perception, which characterises paresse-as-prior-position, coincides with ‘an impulse’ at the beginning of action, which ‘conserves itself’ the moment it occurs.51 As ‘in William James’ famous example, it [the position] lies between the clear duty of getting up and the putting of the foot down off the bed.’52 Thus, just as for James physical gestures precede and shape their affective content, Levinas’s prior position enunciates the refusal in the pose of inhibition, which only later may become the content of a reflection. In short, paresse is Levinas’s term for an experience of self-conserved reflex suspension that has to do with the distribution of oneself ‘in relationship with a place,’ with the world. 53 This experience is entirely prior to any conscious reflection. Consciousness, Levinas says, ‘comes out of rest, out of a position, out of this unique relationship with a place … out of an immobility.’54 The position of rest is ‘a commitment which consists in maintaining itself in uncommittedness’ and which is ‘a condition.’55 Everything that follows from this state, for example, sensory ‘contact with the earth’ and conscious ‘emotions,’ is already secondary and obstructive to the sense of ‘gathering oneself up’ that is effected in inertia.56 One might conclude, therefore, that Levinas not only associates the prior position with the body at rest, given that ‘the body [is] the very advent of consciousness,’ but also that he is also careful to disambiguate the level of bodily perception he prioritises.57 What he has in mind is ‘the irruption in anonymous being of localization itself,’ namely, the impulse of self-mapping. 58 The impulse of self-mapping that Levinas isolates in the experience of laziness is the haptic sense of proprioception. If in ‘On Escape,’ L ­ evinas was only hinting towards this possibility, the discussion of laziness clearly invokes the haptic sense. That proprioceptive awareness of one’s

80  Zuzanna Ładyga body might be relevant to the analysis of existential matters seems to be the fundamental underlying assumption of Levinas’s concept of ‘position with regard to existence’ in his 1947 text. His extreme empiricism in this respect can be interpreted as an attempt to describe the sense of dissent to being as neither an act of volition nor an act of protest against necessity. Laziness construed as an exercise of the will, a decision to escape it, or a heroic protest against its undeniable presence would no longer be an elemental suspension of engagement in being. Thus, Levinas develops a radical vision of a poised body, a body whose entire life function is suspended (if only for a brief moment), in order to draw attention to his insight on the nature of freedom that this position captures, i.e. that freedom is never fully available unless in suspension. In Levinas’s radical vision, the position and the body are one and the same thing. As he puts it, the body ‘as a means of localization’ of the sense of self-weight ‘is not an instrument, symbol, or symptom of a ­position, but is position itself [my emphasis].’59 Therefore, against the conventional understanding of lazy languor, the philosopher says that there is more to laziness than relaxation. In Levinas, laziness is ­‘neither peace nor softness;’ it only ‘weighs us down.’60 The phrase weighs us down, borrowed from Heidegger’s Fundamental Concepts of ­Metaphysics (1929),61 brings together empirical perception and philosophical reflection, framing laziness as a mode of sensory awareness of one’s body, a sense of suspension, a state prior to unconscious muscle tension, and thus prerequisite to all activity. In Levinas’s model of prior position, the sense of suspension is communicated at the semantic level by the word paresse, derived in French from parare, to prepare, which emphasises the sense of priority that Levinas insists on in his argument. According to John Llewelyn, ‘the essential laziness and lethargy with which Levinas is concerned here is a prevaricatory preparation that constitutes and accomplishes the effortfulness of the beginning of an instant.’62 As a prearrangement, laziness is a rudimentary phenomenon of self-location, a state of heightened ­proprioception that makes us, so to speak, alert to the fact that our existence is inscribed within, indeed defined by the materiality of the body. The trajectory of Levinas’s thought on proprioception – from images of self-weight in ‘On Escape’ to images of poised poses in laziness and fatigue as philosophical positions in Existence and Existents –illuminates his later ethical concepts of ipseity (being unable to get out of one’s skin) and the wholly Other (who is forever exterior to me but whom I am always already exposed). Indeed, Levinas’s whole idea of ethics as a continuous experience of being always already put into question on the cognitive level by the irreducible presence of the Other seems to be indivisible from his investigation of the limits of perception in the early texts. This being said, however, it is difficult to agree with critics who want to position Levinas as less of an ethical thinker than a ‘thinker of immanence.’63 Recalling Levinas’s notion of excendence, it seems more accurate to place him at the

Choked by the Brutal Fact of Being  81 intersection where, to recall Malabou’s phrase ‘the splitting of the concept of life’ in philosophical discourse notoriously occurs. Levinas’s engagement with rhetoric of bodily vulnerability in ‘On Escape’ and Existence and Existence seems to be an effort to prevent this rupture and reassert the primacy of bodily sensorium to philosophical praxis. Or at least, to isolate the instance of the splitting if only to remind philosophy that the painful burden of life will always elude its symbolic appropriations.

Notes 1 Emmanuel Levinas, On Escape: De L’évasion. Translated by Bettina Bergo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 49–50. 2 C. Fred Alford, Levinas, the Frankfurt School and Psychoanalysis (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), 69–70. 3 Levinas, On Escape, 49. 4 Ibid., 50. 5 Emmanuel Lévinas, Existence and Existents (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1978). 6 Levinas, On Escape, 52. 7 Ibid., 56. 8 Ibid., 50–51. 9 Ibid., 53. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., 52. 12 Catherine Malabou, ‘The King’s Two (Biopolitical) Bodies,’ Representations, 127.1 (Summer 2014), 98–106. 13 Catherine Malabou, ‘One Life Only: Biological Resistance, Political Resistance,’ Critical Inquiry, 42.3 (Spring 2016), 431. 14 Malabou, ‘The King’s Two (Biopolitical) Bodies,’ 101. 15 Levinas, On Escape, 53, 55. 16 Ibid., 54. 17 Ibid., 54. 18 Ibid., 115. 19 Ibid., 70. 20 Ibid., 66. 21 Ibid., 67. 22 Ibid., 70. 23 Charles Scott Sherrington, The Integrative Action of the Nervous System (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1947), 132. 24 Andy Hamilton, ‘Proprioception as Basic Knowledge of the Body,’ in René van Woudenberg, Sabine Roeser, and Ron Rood (eds.), Basic Belief and Basic Knowledge: Papers in Epistemology (Frankfurt [am Main]: Ontos, 2005), 273. 25 Ibid. 26 Adam Gopnik, ‘What the Science of Touch Says About Us,’ The New Yorker, 9 May 2016, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/16/what-the-scienceof-touch-says-about-us. 27 Ibid. 28 Levinas, On Escape, 56. 29 Malabou, ‘One Life Only,’ 431. 30 Levinas, Existence and Existents, 24. 31 John Locke, The Philosophical Works and Selected Correspondence of John Locke. Of the Conduct of the Understanding, 5th ed. (Charlottesville, VA: InteLex Corporation, 1995), 83.

82  Zuzanna Ładyga 32 Immanuel Kant, ‘An Answer to the Question: What Is enlightenment? (1784),’in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays. Translated by Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1992), http://public.callutheran.edu/~brint/ Modern/Kant1.pdf. 33 Pierre Saint-Amand, The Pursuit of Laziness: An Idle Interpretation of the Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). 34 Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, Theory and History of Literature, vol. 82 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 196. 35 Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, ­Finitude, Solitude, Studies in Continental Thought, vol. 17 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), 67–68. 36 John Locke, The Philosophical Works and Selected Correspondence of John Locke. Of the Conduct of the Understanding, 5th ed. (Charlottesville, VA: InteLex Corporation, 1995), sec. 28: 62. 37 Levinas, Existence and Existents, 24. 38 Ibid., 25. 39 Ibid., 24. 40 Ibid., 25. 41 Ibid., 24. 42 Immanuel Kant et al., Lectures on Anthropology, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 503. 43 Levinas, Existence and Existents, 30. 4 4 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 184. 45 Levinas, Existence and Existents, 25. 46 Ibid., 24. 47 John Llewelyn, Emmanuel Levinas: The Genealogy of Ethics, Warwick Studies in European Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 33. 48 Levinas, Existence and Existents, 26. 49 Ibid., 25. 50 Giorgio Agamben, ‘The Power of Thought,’ Critical Inquiry, 40.2 (2014), 480–91. 51 Levinas, Existence and Existents, 27. 52 Ibid., 25. 53 Ibid., 70. 54 Ibid., 70. 55 Ibid., 70. 56 Ibid., 70. 57 Ibid., 71. 58 Ibid., 71. 59 Ibid., 72. 60 Ibid., 28. 61 Heidegger’s discussion of fundamental boredom in Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics employs the notion of Lässigkeit, or laxness: a “peculiar ­casualness” that gives rise of a sense of emptiness, which nevertheless ‘weighs on us.’ Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 122. 62 Llewelyn, Emmanuel Levinas, 37. 63 Dave Boothroyd, ‘Touch, Time and Technics: Levinas and the Ethics of Haptic Communications,’ Theory, Culture and Society, 26.2–3 (1 March 2009), 340.

5 ‘I Honestly Felt Sick’ Affect and Pain in Viewers’ Responses to Holocaust Films Stefanie Rauch

Holocaust films and documentaries represent some of the most ­horrific violence and pain inflicted on human beings in twentieth-century ­Europe. Susan Sontag’s disquiet that photographic images of violence may not only repulse but also ‘allure’1 equally applies to Holocaust films, which represent violence in a wide variety of ways. These range from traditional documentary formats, which use archival footage (derived mostly from perpetrator sources), to more experimental or post-modern formats, which eschew such images, to feature films, in which persecution, torture, and murder are either implicitly or explicitly evoked. Many of these films have been the subject of fraught academic and public ­debates for several decades, with critics denouncing them for their ­potential to desensitise, trivialise, and distort. It is notably less the violence per se, but rather the format through which it is portrayed that arouses suspicion. The highly emotionalised, often melodramatic depiction of pain and suffering in feature films is thought to have a powerful impact on viewers. What laypeople outside the disciplines of memory studies, history, and education make of films about the Holocaust has been the subject of much discussion and, indeed, apprehension. An affective engagement with these issues is regarded with optimism by some, and anxiety by others. 2 While the affective power and societal impact of Holocaust films are often taken as a given, how viewers actually respond – cognitively and affectively – to such on-screen violence remains, bar a handful of ­studies, largely unexplored. 3 The predominance of quantitative methodologies in media and communication research on the one hand, and the influence of Frankfurt School approaches on Holocaust Studies on the other, has allowed little room for nuance. Viewers continue to be framed as, more or less, passive ‘receivers’ of whatever ‘message’ has been encoded by the filmmakers. In this chapter, I draw on a series of qualitative ­interviews as part of an exploratory study I conducted between 2011 and 2012 with 68 people, most of them British, about their interpretation of select films. It challenged empirically unsubstantiated assumptions about the impact and effects of Holocaust films on viewers. The study established that the reception of such films is multi-faceted

84  Stefanie Rauch and cannot be fully understood through textual analysis alone. Preconceptions, emotions, and perceptions of authenticity ought to be considered in the analysis of film reception.4 This chapter will reflect on laypeople’s responses to representations of violence, and to both the suffering and the inflicting of (physical and emotional) pain in Holocaust films. It will explore affective engagement with Holocaust films by viewers, the relationship between affect and cognition in the reception of such films, and an ethical dimension to watching films about the Holocaust, and to watching pain, in particular. The aim is not to dismiss textual analyses of Holocaust representations and merely substitute with viewing experience, but to add nuance to and enhance existing work. I adopt British Cultural Studies approaches, recasting viewers as actively engaged participants in a non-linear communication process of making sense and meaning. 5 Through the lens of violence, pain, and suffering, I will argue that while Holocaust films are recognised as representations, they are regarded as representations of something real. Viewing them is imbued with importance and a particular code of conduct (self-policing of emotions from the outset). I will further demonstrate that the emotional engagement and empathy such films can foster is not limited to the victims of Nazi crimes but can extend to those who were perpetrators of, or otherwise complicit in, persecution and murder. The films selected for the study represent different genres and focus on a variety of topics. Conspiracy (USA/UK, 2001) is a BBC/HBO TV docudrama directed by Frank Pierson, which dramatises what is now known as the ‘Wannsee Conference:’ the infamous meeting of 15 senior National Socialist officials from the SS, the party and the civilian ministries on 20 January 1942, to discuss the ‘Final Solution.’ Mark Herman’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (USA/­G ermany, 2008) is a film about the friendship between the son of a death camp commandant and a Jewish child inmate of that same camp. The Reader (USA/­ Germany, 2008), directed by Stephen Daldry, focuses on ­G ermany’s ‘coming to terms with the past’ through the lens of protagonist ­M ichael and his relationship with Hanna, a former guard at Auschwitz. Edward Zwick’s Defiance (USA, 2008) is an action-packed film about Jewish partisans who survived the Holocaust in the Belorussian forests. Finally, The Grey Zone (USA, 2001), a film by Tim Blake ­Nelson, takes on the subject of the Jewish Sonderkommando, the inmates forced to work at Auschwitz-Birkenau’s crematoria, and their uprising of October 1944. I will firstly explore the relationship between affect and cognition, and its ramifications for the reception of Holocaust films; and secondly, the ethical challenges of ambiguous portrayals of victims and perpetrators. ***

‘I Honestly Felt Sick’  85 I honestly felt sick … at the end, oh, I am just, my stomach was just churning that people could actually sit there, quite calmly, and discuss murdering millions and millions of people. It’s chilling.6 Froma I. Zeitlin suggests that certain representations may be functioning as ‘vicarious witnesses.’ These are marked by ‘an obsessive quest to assume the burden of memory, or rememoration, by means of which one might become a witness oneself.’7 And Joshua Hirsch argues that although there is no such thing as a traumatic image per se … an image of atrocity may carry a traumatic potential, which, as it circulates among individuals and societies with common conceptual horizons, may be repeatedly realised in a variety of experiences of vicarious trauma.8 While the question of vicarious witnessing or vicarious trauma may prove more elusive and challenging to answer, the films under discussion undoubtedly had a strong emotional impact on some of the respondents in this study. Charlotte (57, administrator), whose response to ­Conspiracy I quoted above, made her moral and emotional outrage at what the film depicts felt throughout the interview. In part, this seemed an aspect of her personality and due to her professed interest in the Holocaust. In his study of intergenerational memories of the Second World War and the Holocaust among English families, Thomas McKay found that his interlocutors ‘would focus on the distress it caused them to hear about events associated with the Holocaust.’9 This phenomenon certainly also plays a role here. More importantly, Charlotte’s affective responses to the film owed to the dissonance between the horror of what was discussed but not shown (the genocide of the European Jews), and how it was discussed (mostly in a matter-of-fact, bureaucratic, and at times joking manner), coupled with Charlotte’s knowledge about the historical event. In other words, affect and cognition are closely intertwined: if she had not already known about the outcome of the Wannsee Conference, she certainly would not have experienced the same strong emotional reaction to the film. Knowing that it ‘really’ happened, and what happened, acts as a catalyst for affect. Yet her knowledge also enabled her to make sense of her strong, almost overwhelming visceral response, as it conforms to her established frame of reference. In other words, the on-screen violence need not be overwhelming on a cognitive level if it resonates with existing ideas and understandings. Vivian C. Sobchak has argued in this context that meaning is ‘constituted as both a ­c arnal matter and a conscious meaning,’ and ‘grounded’ in ‘having sense’ and ‘making sense.’10 The few scenes in each film which attracted the attention of several respondents tended to be highly emotive, that is, sentimental, tense,

86  Stefanie Rauch or violent. Preference for certain scenes and characters revealed much about viewers’ empathetic engagement with a film. Among respondents who watched The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, many referred to a scene in which a Jewish man (Pavel) bandages the foot of the camp commandant’s son after a fall, for which the commandant’s wife eventually thanks him. Participants would predominantly interpret the scene as part of her inner struggle – her ambivalence towards her husband’s ‘work’ and the persecution of the Jews more generally – and much less in terms of Pavel’s humanity and his past life as a doctor. In The Grey Zone, several Jewish women, slave labourers in a munitions factory, smuggle explosives to the Sonderkommando men in the crematoria in support of the uprising. As the camp leadership grows suspicious, they torture the women for information and then begin killing other inmates of their barracks to force them to talk; the women finally commit s­ uicide rather than confess or endanger other inmates. These scenes were recalled by all of the female respondents who watched this film as part of the study, but by none of the men, who were much more concerned with the actions of the male Sonderkommando members. In one scene, a woman is tortured and revived by a doctor, all the while being questioned by the SS. Louise (20, student) recalled the scene ‘as quite powerful,’ explaining that it ‘was just horrible’ and ‘striking’ how ‘they weren’t even going to give her any respite in being unconscious.’11 Meera (37, managing director) articulated how she empathised with the women’s selfless acts and their suffering: It’s a desperate story, isn’t it … they came across very powerfully … they were in a situation where they couldn’t immediately affect, erm, what was going on, erm, but they were trying … even if it meant endangering their own lives. Erm, yeah, I think that was very, very powerful … and I think the torture scenes were, you know, that’s when you, erm, you know, when you really thought, you know, gosh, you know, what they were still going through. Again, they had no idea what’s happening on the other side, whether what, you know, whether what they’re smuggling over is reaching anybody … they were doing all of that without, you know, without any hope of being rescued or, you know, themselves. It was just, I mean from, from what I saw, it seemed to be purely to see, er, to see what they could do to stop this killing-machine. Er, so I think they, they came across very powerfully.12 In supporting the uprising, the women, isolated and without hope of rescue, provide the only heroics in the film. James E. Young alerts us to the ‘spectacle’ of regarding the pain of women, when ‘idealised icons of victimisation, innocence or even resistance come to substitute for the stories women might be telling about themselves.’13 But in the female

‘I Honestly Felt Sick’  87 respondents’ reactions to women’s suffering in The Grey Zone, we find that assigning heroic behaviour to the women and empathy with what they might have been going through need not be a mutually exclusive exercise. The gender aspect is of interest: understanding might come easier if we can identify with a character or real person, and gender appears to play an important role for selecting the features that seem most relevant to us.14 More generally, stories and particular aspects from a film were recalled either if they confirmed participants’ preconceived understandings or if they were shocking, unexpected or contradictory to respondents’ knowledge. For instance, Harriet (60, consultant and student) talked about a scene from The Reader, in which the protagonist Hanna withholds information that would not only lessen her prison sentence, but also reveal her inability to read and write. Harriet explains that I’ve been in education all my life and I, I think it’s totally credible that this horrendous crime of, you know, killing all these, you know, millions of people and yet, the shame of not being able to read and write, so I’m, I mean having being in adult education, that’s exactly how most adult illiterates are so it’s totally credible to me that she wouldn’t have exposed herself as not being able to read or, and write and, and how that, erm, you know, it seems so small, doesn’t it, in comparison to the nature of the crime, so and almost as though she’s totally … uncomprehending …15 The scene resonates with her professional understanding, which helps her make sense of Hanna’s otherwise barely intelligible behaviour, in terms of suffering from her shame for being illiterate. Respondents recall scenes, and perhaps already focus on them at the time of watching the film, because they recognise them within the framework of their own prior knowledge. Viewers’ affective responses can also be linked to personal characteristics, to demographic or professional background. But some scenes are recalled because they challenge existing knowledge and ideas. Judy (32, administrative clerk), for instance, reflected on why the ending of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, in which the commandant’s son is killed in the gas chamber together with the Jewish camp inmates, left such an impression on her: … the scene where they’ve dropped the gas into the chamber and the door’s been shut and you can just hear the noise and the scrabbling to try and get out because I, I’ve, erm, read a couple of books about … Auschwitz and other concentration camps and that’s the one thing whenever I thought about people going into the gas chamber, I’ve never assumed that they would sort of scrabble and try and get out, erm, the first time I saw the film that really, I found that quite

88  Stefanie Rauch upsetting, and I don’t know why, when I actually thought about it afterwards, I don’t know why I hadn’t assumed they wouldn’t try and get out but it’s, erm, it always seems sort of quite horrific when the guy’s saying ‘oh, it’s just, it’s just a shower, don’t worry,’ erm, and I think, thought that they kind of go in there almost just thinking, ‘ok, we’re, we’re going in for a shower,’ is, is much, that kind of makes the end and the end of it, much worse because you know, you know what’s gonna happen …16 We see, once again, how closely connected affect and cognition are: the scene’s emotional impact is even greater as Judy knows all along what will happen to the Jews forced into the gas chamber. She tries to comprehend and explain why the scene has such an impact on her, suggesting it is because she had never thought about the victims trying to escape the gas. Perhaps she had assumed that the perpetrators’ disguise of the gas chambers as showers convinced victims right until their death, and she may not have appreciated the particularly painful nature of the death by gas the victims suffered. There are also echoes here from the myth of Jewish passivity. Her discomfort may further stem from the deliberate shock value of the scene and her empathy with the victims’ despair. The scene affects her both because of its inherent emotive power and because it taught her something she had not previously considered. Of particular note is the fact that she readily questioned and reorganised her understanding upon watching the film. Films and affective responses to them can act as a vehicle for reflecting on a film and its emotional impact. The two films based on fiction, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and The Reader, proved most apt to facilitate such introspection. Sam (19, student) voiced his discomfort with his reaction to The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. The film focusses primarily on Bruno, the camp commandant’s son, but is less concerned with the Jewish child, Shmuel. Sam was concerned about his compassion being concentrated on Bruno: … and you felt really bad about his [Bruno’s] death without somehow not being able to focus on the amount of other people who died there … I suppose this is … required of him as a protagonist and you want to kind of feel towards him rather than everybody else but I did find it kind of, I’m not sure if I felt cheated but I, it, it’s just, you just feel sad about him, you d-, I don’t know, because you didn’t see much history of the, the Shmuel kid, just, he was just an excess character, he was just there.17 There is thus potential for facilitating viewers’ criticality even or especially in highly emotionalised and fictionalised films. By contradicting received knowledge or expectations, these can foster critical reflection on

‘I Honestly Felt Sick’  89 the impact of a film. The more documentary-oriented films – ­particularly Conspiracy and The Grey Zone – had this effect to a much lesser degree. Their claim to historical authenticity – by virtue of being based on ‘true stories’ and employing a realist aesthetics – often effaces their value as works of art, thereby overwhelming some viewers and discouraging them from critically engaging with such films. Knowledge, however limited, about the wider history referred to in Holocaust films exacerbates, or lowers, the films’ emotional impact while also providing the components for the interpretative repertoire by which to make sense of both the films and the emotions raised by them. I will now address another consequence of viewers’ social, cultural, and political embeddedness by returning to Sontag’s question of ‘allurement.’ To suggest anyone may be ‘allured’ by watching representations of violence in the context of the Holocaust, whether ‘real’ or re-enacted, would initially appear outrageous to most. Indeed, the very question of enjoyment or even pleasure is rarely ever posed when discussing such films. Similar to the context of atrocity photography, where artistry ‘is equated with insincerity or mere contrivance’ and considered manipulative,18 the question of the artistic merit of Holocaust films is hardly raised. Affective responses are viewed and indeed experienced through a filter of what is acceptable and appropriate. During a screening of Schindler’s List in 1994 in the USA, some high school students on a field trip, ‘most of whom are black, had laughed at a scene in which a Nazi soldier casually shoots a Jewish woman. The theatre owner stopped the projector, turned on the lights, and told the students to leave.’ In the wake of media attention, students issued a public apology, and the school scheduled ‘assemblies and workshops, where students have listened to historians, psychologists, and counsellors talk about tolerance, black history, and the news media,’ and received a visit from director Steven Spielberg.19 The notion of responding appropriately to Holocaust films is much more widespread and internalised than the extreme example above might suggest. It was evident, for instance, in Charlotte’s response cited earlier, when she voiced her visceral reaction to Conspiracy. The phenomenon of respondents at pains to distance themselves from any enjoyment of the films was mostly found among those who watched The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and Defiance. These two films are more entertaining and conventional in many ways, featuring humorous moments and likeable characters. But as they are ‘Holocaust films,’ there is an expectation (voiced by the respondents) that their primary purpose is not entertainment but education, commemoration, or engendering an emotional connection. Respondents characterised or condemned The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and Defiance as entertaining, and many clarified that they did not take pleasure from watching them. Benjamin (22, postgraduate student), for example, talked about the former film’s portrayal of Bruno’s sister’s increasing infatuation with Nazi ideology. He seemed

90  Stefanie Rauch to feel the need to qualify his response, and was keen to distinguish between enjoyment and appreciation: ‘I thought that was particularly well done, erm, not that I say it was enjoyable but, erm, I liked the way that that was put across …’20 Most poignantly, Sam, whose reflection on The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas I cited above, got rather agitated talking about this issue of enjoyment, entertainment, and what a Holocaust film might be for. Asked about his thoughts on such films more generally, he responded in the following way: I think it is probably good that they are made but it’s, like, it’s hard to sit through a lot of them, I couldn’t just go, ‘I’m gonna have a Holocaust film day,’ you know, just enjoy it, you know, it’s not, they are, they’re not really there to be enjoyed, they’re there to kind of, as a reminder, so it’s a different kind of genre of film, they’re not entertainment films although they can be entertaining, I suppose, at certain points, of the jokes, the light-hearted kind of feel of it and all movies are basically entertaining by their nature, er, but they are there as a kind of, they’re a work of art, they’re kind of monument to this thing, it’s just a physic-, or a creative monument to the, erm, the, the emotions and the deaths and ideas of the Holocaust …21 There is, therefore, a considerable amount of self-censorship, performance, and self-policing at work as regards Holocaust films, which, arguably, is specific to this type of film. The reluctance, or even injunction, to enjoy or be entertained through Holocaust films (which is equated with trivialising the events they represent, and reflecting negatively on the person enjoying such a film) can find expression in condemning filmmakers for choosing a more entertaining format, and audiences for ­reacting inappropriately. Defiance, in particular, was at the receiving end of such accusations: its director, Ed Zwick, was suspected of making the film merely to make money or purely for entertainment. The film’s defiant portrayal of Jewish resistance, community, and survival using action film tropes and conventions was at odds with viewers’ expectations of what a Holocaust film should and should not do. One of them was Andrew (63, retiree), who claimed that the film was not ‘eliciting a great deal of sympathy or more sympathy [with the victims] than you would have anyway. I think he just created a film, an action film that he wanted to make some money with, for the box office.’22 For some viewers, watching Holocaust films appears to constitute an emotionally challenging type of memory or education work. Even though Andrew’s critique of Defiance for choosing an entertaining action film format and for not fostering more ‘sympathy’ for the victims was echoed in other interviews, for most interviewees the film succeeded, to varying degrees, in creating or reinforcing compassion with

‘I Honestly Felt Sick’  91 the victims. Whereas Conspiracy’s depiction of the use of ­dehumanising, bureaucratic language to describe the genocide of the European Jews put the absence of any Jewish characters in the film into sharp focus, Defiance’s portrayal of a Jewish partisan community lent itself particularly well to an empathetic engagement with the film’s characters and their plight. Theodore (27, police constable) felt that ‘you could imagine yourself being in that situation,’ while Yasmin (20, student) judged the film to be a bit disturbing in some parts like, erm, when you saw the, them [the Germans] coming closer, kind of, you could feel their panic and every time something bad happened, it felt like, you felt it for them, so it was a bit disturbing to watch because obviously we know the his-, historical background to it.’23 Defiance does not shirk away from portraying conflicts within the group of partisans. In fact, two conflicts are among the film’s key drivers: differing ideas as to what should be the group’s priority – fight the Germans or ensure the survival of as many Jews as possible – and infighting about distribution of provisions within the group. But the portrayal relied on established, familiar cinematic tropes, such as fights among brothers, and a well-known cast including Daniel Craig, Jamie Bell, and Liev ­Schreiber. Similar to Defiance, The Grey Zone largely omits the perpetrators and instead focuses on the Jewish characters. But almost all of The Grey Zone’s Jewish characters are compromised and far from likeable; even Hoffmann, one of the more sympathetic protagonists, beats another Jewish man to death. This may be why many of the respondents discussed a rather unremarkable scene near the end of the film, in which two of the Sonderkommando men have a brief conversation about where they are from, after the uprising is crushed and shortly before they are shot by the SS. D.G. (22, sales assistant) wondered about the scene, … you live with these people like for so long and you know nothing about them until like that guy at the end actually realised it, ‘probably, we’re actually neighbours,’ they lived next door to each other and they didn’t even realise, and they were like arguing … I ­suppose … it’s not something you talk about in a conversation, is it, you don’t get, you’re not allowed to talk, you’re kept in solitude. I think the more personal you make it the more harder it gets…24 The Grey Zone’s unsympathetic, or at minimum ambiguous characterisation of its protagonists left many interviewees struggling to try and reconcile their knowledge and familiarity with more conventional representations of the Holocaust with what The Grey Zone offered them. In the quote above, D.G. was trying to interpret the scene in light of

92  Stefanie Rauch the characters’ otherwise tense, hostile interactions with one another. He was interviewed as part of a group, whose other three respondents to this film were similarly at pains to make sense of the Jews in the ­Sonderkommando, particularly in one scene, where Hoffmann beats another Jewish man to death. Siobhan (20, shop assistant) voiced her incomprehension at Hoffmann’s behaviour, while Sarah (48, student) mused that he ‘lost it.’ D.G. suggested that ‘it was more to do with the fact that he didn’t wanna upset the other people going in because they were trying to let them die peacefully,’ or that ‘it just got to such a point where it didn’t matter anymore whether he killed these … people or not because … they’re already dead anyway.’ Siobhan recalled another scene, in which an SS man says to one of the Jewish doctors how it was so easy to make them [the Jews of the Sonderkommando] exactly like them [the Nazis], to turn against their own people and yet they were gonna die anyway. So it does make you think about that … how could they do it. 25 While the others in this group continued to try and understand and rationalise the Sonderkommando’s behaviour, Siobhan was unable to empathise with their predicament, instead adopting a stance (ascribed to an SS man in the film) that interpreted the Sonderkommando as becoming or acting like the perpetrators. If viewers felt challenged by ambiguous, unfamiliar, and unconventional portrayals of victims, how did they react to the characters who inflict pain as perpetrators? Among the respondents, interpretations of perpetrators’ motivations ranged from citing ‘superior orders,’ ‘coercion,’ ‘fear,’ or ‘bullying,’ suggesting opposition to or ignorance, of the genocide, to musing about emotional disorders or human nature. These interpretations ascribed little agency to the perpetrators, who were instead cast as victims. Such reactions indicate wide-ranging assumptions about actual perpetrators. The cinematic depiction of psychological suffering of perpetrators and bystanders, 26 or indications of their inner ambivalent stance played a crucial role for such interpretations but also resonated with existing patterns of thought and understanding among respondents. Ruth (64, artist and educator), who possessed considerable knowledge about the Holocaust, talked about the mother in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. Ruth expressed her emotional response to watching the film when she emphasised how ‘it was very moving and particularly to see how the Nazi’s wife, the Nazi general’s wife was affected, and how she was so powerless.’27 Ruth’s compassion focused on the wife of the death camp commandant, who unravels as she gradually finds out about the camp’s true purpose to which, we are led to believe, she was previously ignorant. This portrayal of alleged powerlessness and deeply felt sentiment

‘I Honestly Felt Sick’  93 resonated with Ruth’s existing frame of interpretation. But some also reflected in a more critical and self-aware manner about the way in which on-screen perpetrators behave. In Conspiracy, Wilhelm Stuckart (a Nazi Party lawyer, official and a state secretary in the German Interior Ministry) is played by well-known actor Colin Firth. The character of Stuckart seems to play to Firth’s star persona, which revolves around playing essentially ‘nice,’ if somewhat awkward characters. Building on this star perception, the audience is initially led to believe that Stuckart disagrees with what will become the ‘Final Solution’ until a sudden anti-Semitic outburst reveals that this assumption was wrong. Nigel (40, warehouse operative) reflected on the ‘journey’ he went through with this character: The, er, lawyer character [Stuckart] who’d drawn up the Nuremberg Laws, erm, he was sort of treated in, in the first half of the film, he was kind of treated a bit sympathetically, like they were trying to get our sympathies towards him, ‘cause he was kind of saying, ‘what you’re deciding is wrong,’ kind of thing, but then later on in the film he, he’s talking about, he’s talking about how he feels towards the Jews and it is just as terrible as all the other views about the Jews and that, it sort of, it plays with your emotional connection to that character, you’re sort of drawn towards him and then you’re like kind of dashed … whereas the other sort of guy who was against it, he’s just kind of against what’s going on, really, but just goes along with it to, for a quiet life kind of thing, and so you don’t really feel, you know, you don’t go on an emotional journey with that character really. 28 Through the twist in Stuckart’s portrayal and the casting of Firth as Stuckart, audience expectations are being played with and, ultimately, disappointed. At best, it could prompt audiences to reflect upon their own expectations to encounter at least one righteous character. At worst, Stuckart’s anti-Semitism could be downplayed and overlooked in favour of focusing on the earlier part of the film where he emphasises the importance of the rule of law as opposed to the unruliness of the SS. The latter response was, in fact, more common than Nigel’s insights, as several respondents focused on what Stuckart said about legality and ignored his anti-Semitic views. The casting of Firth may contribute to reading the character in this way, as well as many interviewees’ lack of detailed historical knowledge about the Holocaust, the Nuremberg Laws, and the Wannsee Conference. In any event, the scene can either foster reflection or allow an uncritical acceptance of Stuckart as morally superior to the other men at the meeting. Perpetrators and bystanders were commonly seen through a sympathetic, exculpatory lens. They were frequently framed as victims, and never more so than among respondents to the film The Reader. In this

94  Stefanie Rauch film, we witness Hanna’s emotional pain, which results not from her past as a concentration camp guard but from her shame about being illiterate. We also witness the physical pain she inflicted as a guard through the accusations by the judge and a witness statement. Any visual re-­enactment of her crimes, however, is absent. Perhaps the most poignant example for the respondents’ reception of the film is provided by ­Stephanie (20, student). Her emotional engagement with the film and her empathetic identification with the character of Hanna becomes apparent in her response to my question of how the film compared with others she had seen. To her, The Reader ‘makes quite an impact,’ and she praised ‘the new perspective it opens up that people don’t really consider,’ which she felt was missing from school education. She explained: ‘cause it’s very unfair, erm, that normal German people suffered as well but they’re never really thought about, it’s almost like, ‘shame on you,’ for being part of that society and that now their pain and an emo-, erm, almost like an emotional debt, really, whereas the, the Jews and, I mean I know I’m just, erm, let’s talk about the Jews but everyone that’s like physically suffered, that was a physical suffering as well as emotional but like the, the society as a whole hasn’t really healed, I wouldn’t say so, from this thing that they [the G ­ erman society] carry round with them ‘cause it … because they carry around this, (-) like almost like a stigma, I’d say and I don’t think people think about how they were, it wasn’t really their … it wasn’t a choice.29 Stephanie initially stumbled over her own reading when she tried to contrast the suffering of ‘normal German people’ and that of ‘the Jews,’ quickly arriving at the limits of such an attempt. Rather than abandoning this train of thought, she recovered her concern for German Gentiles by denying their agency, concluding ‘it wasn’t a choice.’ Stephanie’s leap from Hanna, the fictional former guard at Auschwitz and during one of the so-called death marches, to ‘normal Germans [who] suffered as well’ is significant. The film resonates with Stephanie’s prior understanding of German Gentiles’ agency during the ‘Third Reich,’ their war-time suffering, and of post-war Germany’s complex processes of ‘coming to terms’ with the Nazi past. But the film’s focus on Hanna and its emphasis on injustices done to her clearly shifts attention onto Hanna and away from the Jews – of whom we encounter only two in this film and, importantly, not during their ordeal suffered at Hanna’s hands. Similarly, in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, the pain of the camp commandant and his wife losing their son – relatable and universal – strikes a chord among some respondents. Lara (43, student) recalled the film in the following way: it comes across that all people are the same, they all feel the same, they all feel the same pain, they go through the same emotions. Er,

‘I Honestly Felt Sick’  95 you got, you’ve got the, those that are dying through these events and on the other side of the fence you’ve got the, the German ­officers and they lose a son through it and they actually go through all the emotions that anybody would, er, their, their son had gone in voluntary … he got in there on his own although he gone, he ain’t gone voluntary into the gas chamber, er, that really hurt them which it would do for anyone … if it’s the same thing or not ‘cause they’re all forced in there, aren’t they, all the people, it does bring across that they all feel it, they’re all hurt by it, all go through the same emotions, erm, even these people who are down as being monsters have got another side to them. 30 Of note is the passive voice here, and the lack of cause-and-effect-­ relationships, which was widespread in conversations about both ­fictional and actual perpetrators. Lara contrasts ‘those that are dying through those events,’ whose Jewish identity remains opaque, and the ‘German officers’ on the ‘other side of the fence,’ who ‘lose[s] a son through it,’ which masks the organised killing of millions through the SS and their accomplices in the camps and beyond. This example reminds us of the cognitive difficulty to reconcile that those who feel pain can also be the ones who inflict pain on others. Lara’s summary of the film omits the fact that the boy was killed in the very machinery of death run by his own father. The historical truth is that the simple fact that these parents can hurt already sets them apart from their Jewish victims: whole communities were wiped out, without anyone left to mourn them. In many cases, surviving relatives will never even fully know the fates of their family members. The ‘hurt’ identified by Lara was also of concern to Stephanie, who contrasted The Reader with The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas in the ­following way: their boy obviously gets killed in the same way as … anyone in the concentration camp would have been killed … and … it’s their pain for losing their little boy that’s quite upsetting … but … I just think this is different in the way that she’s just a normal person living a normal life, she just takes a job and the next thing you know, she’s in court for war crimes and like three hundred murders … it’s just like … one of these choices, like I make a choice to get on the bus and the next thing you know I did something that caused someone to die … it was just like progression to her life and … then she was accused of all these things.31 Pain acts as an equaliser, seemingly eradicating meaningful distinctions between perpetrators and victims, between suffering pain and inflicting pain. Indeed, it is the inflicting of pain which is frequently turned into the suffering of the perpetrator. In Stephanie’s reading, Hanna appears

96  Stefanie Rauch as the real victim, someone who made an allegedly innocent choice and then progresses to mass murder without any further agency. The pain of others is difficult to watch, and connects viewers with those who suffer, including some of the historical perpetrators. Pain and empathy, or at the very least sympathy, are therefore closely linked. Assigning agency and an active voice to perpetrators, who inflict pain but may also suffer pain of their own, would complicate or preclude sympathy and ­empathetic identification, perhaps even necessitate self-inspection. As Sue Vice has noted in relation to novels, readers may experience ‘unease’ when ‘contemplating perpetrators, and the psychic costs of their actions’ due to ‘the uncomfortable and challenging nature of the self-scrutiny that this entails.’32 But if perpetrators are considered to be passive, there is little or no need for justification and self-scrutiny. Perhaps, then, such responses point at the viewers who ‘protect’ themselves from feeling empathy with ‘actual’ perpetrators and what that would, in turn, suggest about their own morality. Dominick LaCapra writes that ‘Empathy is an affective component of understanding, and it is difficult to control.’ He further argues that: empathy is bound up with a transferential relation to the past, and it is arguably an affective aspect of understanding which both limits objectification and exposes the self to involvement or implication in the past, its actors, and victims. As I have already tried to argue, desirable empathy involves not full identification but what might be termed empathic unsettlement in the face of traumatic limit events, their perpetrators, and their victims. 33 The above-cited responses by Nigel to Conspiracy or by Sam to The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas come close to the ‘empathic unsettlement’ deemed ‘desirable’ by LaCapra (which in itself implies a certain ­anxiety and monitoring of ‘appropriate’ responses). Much more common, however, was a type of ‘moral reflection’34 and engagement resulting from empathetic identification. This was especially apparent with viewers of The Reader. In the film, when the judge asks Hanna about the selection process in the camp in which she was a guard, Hanna replies: ‘What would you have done?’ The judge is unable to respond. Possibly in reaction to this scene, respondents considered how they would have acted in Hanna’s situation. They mused what they would do if put in Hanna’s shoes; reasoned that they could not judge her as they would have done the same as her; or concluded that the times were different then. They interpreted Hanna’s voluntary membership in the SS and her crimes as a camp guard along these lines. Richard (35, programmer), who along with four of his friends took part in a group discussion about the film, argued that Germans at the time were afraid of starving, due to

‘I Honestly Felt Sick’  97 memories of the post-First World War period and the financial crash of the 1920s. Against this backdrop, he continued: Richard: you’ve got a family to support and someone says, ‘here’s a good job but you gotta do some bad things,’ || Mary (34, teacher): What would you do to keep your family alive? ||| you know, I, I, as I said, I, I honestly don’t know what comes first, your family or your morals, it, that, that’s an interesting question. Marina (26, student): Will they, will they explain to you, ‘you have to do bad things,’ in the first place when they offer you the job? Richard: Well, no, they probably don’t and _. || Daniel (32, unemployed): Well, no, they never come to you, ‘right, we gotta go and kill loads of things,’ ||| You fall into it. || Daniel: they say, ‘we’re gonna build a new society.’ ||| Richard: And it sounds all good and then you suddenly realise what that actually means but by then it’s too late, even in a position where, ‘well, okay, I can say ‘no’, I’ll get killed and my family will starve’ … I can understand … enough to know that I don’t understand that fear .35 The Reader can encourage a complex and self-reflexive engagement with the perpetrators. The discussion above went, of course, well beyond the film and taps into the respondents’ prior understandings and broadly framed moral questions. Of particular note was a distinct reluctance to pass judgment. Acknowledging one’s own capacity for committing atrocities can be an important step towards developing a deeper understanding. As Katherine Stone argues, ‘identification is not necessarily incompatible with ethical complexity.’36 But ultimately, here, empathising with Hanna (or the German Gentile population more generally) ­appeared to eclipse considerations of individual agency or the question of why respondents thought they might react to social and political pressures in a similar way, and how they could prevent this; their deliberations were generally defensive rather than contemplative. Katharina Hall warns that ‘empathetic identification’ with the German memory and experience during the National Socialist period tends ‘to obscure the Jewish experience of the Holocaust and to allow an avoidance of an engagement with the issues of responsibility and guilt.’37 Indeed, we can relate these results to Alison Landsberg’s concept of ‘prosthetic memories’ produced through films and exhibitions, which envisions empathy generated across class, gender, and ethnic boundaries. 38 In the case of films focusing on perpetrators’ pain and ambivalence, empathy can also transcend ethical boundaries. The Reader, and to a lesser extent The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, facilitated empathetic identification with the side of the persecutors. Neither film incorporated both the perpetrators’

98  Stefanie Rauch and the Jewish perspectives equally. Perpetrators and their families can emerge as victims in the reception of these films. It is important to ­emphasise that the interpretations cited above were not formed in a vacuum, but resonated with existing patterns and frames of thought and understanding. Emotions clearly play an important role in the reception of Holocaust films, which are, by their very definition, films about violence, pain, and suffering. The excerpts from interviews with viewers provide snapshots which are indicative of wider trends. They suggest that pain and emotions (both those represented on screen and those experienced and reflected upon by viewers) are a productive lens through which to analyse Holocaust film reception. Such inquiries help shift attention away from the film text (and its presumed cognitive and emotional ‘effects’ on viewers) on towards the relationship between the text and the viewer, the agency of the viewer, and the wider context in which they are embedded. It clearly matters what viewers bring to the text in terms of knowledge, personality, and interests. Affect, closely linked with cognition, can be a powerful vehicle for an empathetic engagement with the victims of the Holocaust, for introspection, and even for ‘empathic unsettlement.’ Viewers may abhor the ­violence, pain, and suffering presented to them – they may either not enjoy a film or deny that they do, in fact, enjoy the experience – yet they feel obliged to continue watching; to watch a Holocaust film becomes memory work.39 But we have also witnessed the limits of empathy as a critical tool in this context, that require us to reconsider the ethics of affect, particularly in relation to representations of pain. The suffering of perpetrators often eclipsed or at least counterweighed their own infliction of pain on others, a process that was eased if films omit (visually) depicting explicit violence against victims. The representation of violence is thus as important as a lack thereof. A more nuanced cinematic engagement with violent actors is welcome, and chimes with the on-­going trend in historiography.40 But the shift towards ambiguous portrayals of victims and the encouraged identification with perpetrators does not necessarily facilitate a fuller understanding of historical realities or introspection among viewers beyond the point of recognising one’s own capacity for evil. Resonating with their wider interpretative frameworks, viewers’ ­responses to these films stop short of considering personal responsibility in how to prevent, monitor, or challenge such capacity.

Notes 1 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 95. 2 See e.g. Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia

‘I Honestly Felt Sick’  99 University Press, 2004); Christian Gudehus, Stewart Anderson, and David Keller, ‘Understanding Hotel Rwanda: A Reception Study,’ Memory Studies, 3 (2010), 347–48. 3 See e.g. Wilhelm Hofmann, Anna Baumert, and Manfred Schmitt, ‘Heute haben wir Hitler im Kino gesehen: Evaluation der Wirkung des Films des Films ‘Der Untergang’ auf Schüler und Schülerinnen der neunten und zehnten Klasse,’ Zeitschrift für Medienpsychologie, 17.4 (2005), 132–46; Marco Dohle, Werner Wirth, and Peter Vorderer, ‘Emotionalisierte Aufklärung: Eine empirische Untersuchung zur Wirkung der Fernsehserie ‘Holokaust’ auf antisemitisch geprägte Einstellungen,’ Publizistik, 48.3 (2003), 288– 309. Due to these studies’ preoccupation with German audiences, they tend towards an overall focus on ‘attitudes’ towards the Nazi past and its legacy in the present. 4 For details on the methodology, demographic information, and comparison of the reception of ‘true stories’ vs. fictional films, see Stefanie Rauch, ‘‘The Fundamental Truths of the Film Remain’: Researching Individual Reception of Holocaust Films’ Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 18.2 (2017), Art. 14, http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114fqs1702140 [accessed 15 September 2017]. In this chapter, I use real names or pseudonyms when citing from and referring to individuals interviewed as part of this study, in accordance with their express wishes. I would like to thank the respondents, who volunteered to participate in this study. 5 Stuart Hall, ‘Encoding/Decoding,’ in Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis (eds.), Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79 [1980] (London: Routledge, 2005), 117–27, esp. 123–24. 6 Interview with CH, Conspiracy, 13 May 2011: [lines] 16–19. 7 Froma I. Zeitlin, ‘The Vicarious Witness: Belated Memory and Authorial Presence in Recent Holocaust Literature,’ History & Memory, 10.2 (1998), 6. Michael Rothberg, Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 8 Joshua Hirsch, Afterimage: Film, Trauma and the Holocaust (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2003), 16. 9 Thomas McKay, A Multi-generational Oral History Study (University of Leicester: unpublished thesis, 2010), 175. 10 Vivian Carol Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 73. 11 Interview with LS, DL and OS, The Grey Zone, 28 March 2011, 89–93. 12 Interview with MR, The Grey Zone, 17 May 2011, 409–33. 13 James Edward Young, The Stages of Memory: Reflections on Memorial Art, Loss, and the Spaces Between (Amherst and Boston: University of ­M assachusetts Press, 2016), 107. 14 See also Anna Reading, The Social Inheritance of the Holocaust: Gender, Culture and Memory (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002). 15 Interview with HL, The Reader, 7 December 2011, 83–90. 16 Interview with JE, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, 28 September 2011, 154–65. 17 Interview with SC, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, 15 February 2012, 18–23. 18 Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 26–27. 19 ‘Laughter at Film Brings Spielberg Visit’, New York Times, 13 April 1994, www.nytimes.com/1994/04/13/us/laughter-at-film-brings-spielberg-visit. html [accessed 9 August 2017].

100  Stefanie Rauch 20 Interview with BR, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, 15 November 2011, 72–73. 21 Interview with SC, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, 15 February 2012, 461–69. < … > indicates para-verbal expressions. 22 Interview with AL, Defiance, 11 January 2012, 189–91. 23 Interview with TR and JT, Defiance, 8 March 2011, 289; Interview with YA and MC, Defiance, 4 November 2011, 7–10. 24 Interview with SW, SA, JO, and DG, The Grey Zone, 12 September 2011, 121–28. 25 Ibid., 96–109. 26 For more on the debate about ‘perpetrators, victims, bystanders’ of genocide and the limits of these categories, see e.g. Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators Victims Bystanders (New York: HarperCollins, 1992); Christina Morina and Krijn Thijs (eds.), The Bystander in Holocaust History (New York: Berghahn, 2018); Adam Jones (ed.), New Directions in Genocide Research (New York: Routledge, 2012). 27 Interview with RJ, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, 27 September 2011, 17–20. 28 Interview with NC and MK, Conspiracy, 9 December 2011, 90–100. 29 Interview with SP, The Reader, 26 October 2011, 212–24. 30 Interview with LW, The Reader, 1 February 2012, 169–79. 31 Interview with SP, The Reader, 26 October 2011, 232–39. 32 Sue Vice, ‘Exploring the Fictions of Perpetrator Suffering,’ Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies 2.1–2 (Spring/Fall, 2013), 16. 33 Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, MD and London: John Hopkins University Press, 2001), 102–3. 34 Katherine Stone, ‘Sympathy, Empathy, and Postmemory: Problematic Positions in Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter’, The Modern Language Review, 111.2 (2016), 455. 35 Interview with RP, MG, DP, MS, and EJ, The Reader, 11 October 2011, 921–47. Utterances in || … ||| mark an interruption of the current speaker by another person. 36 Stone, ‘Sympathy, Empathy, and Postmemory’: 466. 37 Katharina Hall, ‘The Politics of Memory: Memory and the Dynamic of Empathetic Identification within Historical Accounts of National Socialism and the Holocaust,’ The Journal of Holocaust Education, 8.3 (1999), 43–44. 38 Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory. 39 On memory work, see e.g. James Edward Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1993); Richard Crownshaw, The Afterlife of Holocaust Memory in Contemporary Literature and Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 40 See e.g. Olaf Jensen and Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann (eds.), Ordinary People as Mass Murderers: Perpetrators in Comparative Perspectives (­Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

6 Memory Beyond the Anthropocene The Tactile Rhetorics of Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia de la luz and El botón de nácar Alison Ribeiro de Menezes French philosopher François Laruelle argues in his book, General ­Theory of Victims, that we are living in the era of the victim, yet we can know nothing of victimhood except its symptoms: ‘the victim is the phenomenon that renders the experience of evil accessible to us.’1 As a result, the victim can become both over-exploited by mass media and confined within a radical passivity. Because of the twentieth-century’s deconstruction of humanism, Laruelle maintains, man is ‘being-­disappeared’ or, in the original French, ‘être-disparu.’2 Laruelle thus describes the effects of twentieth-century science and philosophy as a disappearing of man (to which one might add gender critiques that would remove the term ‘man’ itself), who can only ‘insist by his effects.’3 Such comments find an unexpected connection in one particular material reality of victimhood, that of ‘the disappeared.’ For Laruelle, ‘victims are the vector of evil, its body-vector, evil in flesh and bone insofar as it was effectuated and written into the materiality of lived bodies.’4 This makes victims more than objects of knowledge and compassion, however. If we bear in mind the definition of vector as an organism that transmits a pathogen, it also makes victims the transmitters of history and memory. Victims would thus seem to retain agency through the transmission of suffering. The question is, what is meant by agency in this context? I shall return that point in my conclusion. In the domain of memory studies, victims are often closely entangled with cultural and historical representations, as well as with ethics and politics, as Robert Elias reminds us. 5 As I have argued elsewhere,6 memory’s bodies, especially in contexts such as torture, enforced disappearance, and state terror, are generally regarded as objects rather than subjects: initially the material objects of torture and suffering, they become, through remembrance, the objects of others’ gazes and others’ politicized manipulations at the same time as they elicit affective and emotional responses from those who view and/or remember them. They are also frequently the objects of transnational gazes, as memory’s

102  Alison Ribeiro de Menezes images now circulate globally, evoking both national- and cultural-­ specific traumas as well as becoming instrumentally linked to other, parallel or comparable but not identical, traumas. The global valency of the term, ‘the disappeared,’ which originated with Southern Cone Latin American dictatorships, illustrates precisely this point. In recent years, memory studies have turned toward a focus on entanglements of embodied and emplaced memory. This has occurred at the same time as a materialist and affective turn in cultural theory, in which the body has been, as Laruelle notes, broken down into its constituent material substances. It then becomes understood not in terms of constructionism, but in terms of ‘intensities’ that represent non-cognitive disruptions and discontinuities in conscious experience. Classic theorists of affect regard it as pre-cognitive and pre-ideological, rendering the political little more than a consequence of visceral, pre-subjective forces rather than intentions, meanings, or reason. This poses a conundrum for memory studies, most particularly with regard to discussions of civic memory campaigns and committed artistic memory work, both of which may draw upon emotive images and solicit affective responses in order to convey a specific ethical or political message. If the ethical and political are no longer personal but instead unintentional, and significantly influenced by pre-cognitive forces, and if affect is triggered independently of objects in the world, this begs a series of questions for those cultural approximations to the past that employ an ethical frame. We might then ask: in what ways are the political and the affective entwined, and might this be one of the ways in which victims work as vectors, transmitting particular affects in a semi-concealed manner and catching us out through their infectious agency? Sara Ahmed has argued that ‘affect does not reside positively in the sign or commodity, but is produced as an effect of its circulation,’ creating an ‘affective economy.’ 7 The more a sign circulates the more affective it becomes, through processes of metonymic proximity and metaphoric displacement that draw upon hidden histories of affective encounter. This concealed historicity creates a ‘stickiness’ to the sign which may adhere, creating a ‘blockage’ that ‘stops the word moving or acquiring new value.’8 The affective turn is a desire for re-enchantment that goes to the heart of embodied memory, which I understand in two senses: first, as a focus on bodies and individual victims, whether living, suffering, or deceased; and second, as a process of remembrance that stresses, utilizes, and plays upon embodied practices, affective resonances, and tactile translations. Moving beyond Ahmed’s sense of the potency of affect generated through circuits of cultural exchange, I aim to reinscribe the materiality of objects in a process of affective remembering seen as a ­re-encounter that builds bridges across times and spaces. I shall do so with reference to the two most recent films of Chilean director Patricio Guzmán. I draw on Jill Bennett’s notion of an art that is ‘transactive’

Memory Beyond Anthropocene  103 rather than ‘communicative,’ that is to say, art that, rather than being simply communicative, sets out to examine ‘how affect is produced within and through a work, and how it might be experienced by an audience coming to the work.’9 Bennett’s objective is to shift from a focus on the art of trauma, understood as the deposit of primary experience, to art’s engagement with trauma, taken to be a form of conceptual engagement that examines not the affinity of empathy but ‘feeling for another that entails an encounter with something irreducible and different, often inaccessible.’10 Art, in this approach, is not representation but encounter, arguably offering a means to avoid the flattening of historical and cultural specificity in the appearance of globalized memory cultures, where transnational connections may efface the specificity of experience. It is thus in the dynamic between the artwork and the spectator that an affective and a critical function may emerge. This is a process that also underlies the writings of Laura Marks on ‘haptic visuality,’ my starting point in reading Guzmán.11 In The Skin of the Film, Marks begins with the proposition that cinema has a tactile and contagious quality, ‘something we viewers brush up against like another body.’12 The circulation of a film among different viewers thus becomes a series of ‘skin contacts that leave mutual traces.’13 Guzmán, I argue, takes this proposition further, exploring the translation of qualities from one sense modality to others, but also, in his filmic wanderings, expanding temporal and spatial perspectives by examining, in the words of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘a past surpassing human enframing.’14 This shift beyond a fixedly linear, human temporality, and beyond the boundedness of earth-centred topographies, geographies, and geologies, emphasises a ‘connective materialism’ in which not simply the image but the actual materiality of the universe and the objects and human bodies within it are the connective tissue of a tactile and sensory approach to traumatic memory. In this, Guzmán counters Laruelle’s suggestion of man as disappeared by remembering and re-­ embodying the disappeared of Chilean history, understood in the widest sense as the victims of an Anthropocene history,15 through the material entanglements of the human with natural – geological and m ­ aritime, rocky and watery – environments. Guzmán also offers a view of agency that, while not removing responsibility and accountability (both of which are essential concerns of memory work), is more concerned with actants than agents, and sees these actants as enmeshed in a cosmic whole greater than, but inclusive of, society.16 Late-twentieth-century Chile, as Lessie Jo Frazier notes, is for many a ‘site of mourning of lost radical projects.’17 Chile seemed, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, to be pursuing a democratic road to socialism, not only embodying the hopes of more than just the Chilean radical left, but also appealing to a watching international audience. However, Chile was transformed on 11 September 1973 into a brutal dictatorship that,

104  Alison Ribeiro de Menezes along with the neighbours who followed suit – Uruguay and Argentina – sadly gave the world the term ‘the disappeared,’ or ‘desaparecidos’ in Spanish.18 Chile has since 1989 been undergoing the slow unravelling of the consequences of the 1973 coup, and confronting the memory of the violence of General Pinochet’s dictatorship. Much of the process of democratization occurred under the watchful eye of the dictator himself, as Pinochet remained a background presence, holding the reins of military power and retaining a political role as Senador Vitalício, or Senator for Life. There were periods of greater and lesser human rights mobilization and greater and lesser success in terms of restorative justice, depending on national and international circumstances. The memory horizon in Chile has thus been characterised by what Steve Stern terms a slow unravelling via the formation and then gradual undoing of a ‘memory impasse’ consisting of points of contention that irrupt in public discourse at particular moments, sometimes unexpectedly.19 Yet, as Frazier argues, to isolate the 1973 coup and the subsequent violence perpetrated by the Pinochet regime as an aberration in Chilean history is to turn it into a singular moment of trauma that obscures continuities in the process of nation-state formation in Chile. 20 It is also to establish a nostalgic, melancholy relationship between the past and the present, in which earlier periods and events, notably the immediate pre-coup years of Allende’s Unidad Popular, are shut off from the present and no longer regarded as having any relevance for contemporary debates. 21 No longer accessible to the present, the past then becomes essentialized as a source of irrecuperable loss, offering neither the possibility of mourning nor lessons or transformative potential for the future. We face what Chilean cultural critic Nelly Richard has called a ‘unprocessed mourning.’22 Chile has been regarded, as Stern notes, as Latin America’s ‘German problem:’ a country that seemed (inexplicably) to tip over from a civilized order that embraced democracy and the advances of science, into extreme barbarism.23 But this classic Latin American trope – the contrast of civilization and barbarism that dates back to the early nineteenth century – is not particularly helpful when approaching issues of memory. Indeed, it seems to essentialise the two terms of the comparison, locking history into a cycle of pendulum swings from the one to the other. As Stern notes towards the end of his long survey of memory in contemporary Chile, The making of memory … is neither a linear process of triumph nor an ever-growing recovery of the totality of the past. It is a social process pushed and pulled by social conflicts. It is a selective process of finding meaning. It is a process that makes silences even as it makes memories. At times the selectivity of and the contentiousness of memory yield not simply a problem of flat denial of historical

Memory Beyond Anthropocene  105 facts or truths but, more subtly, the use of some slices of history to cover up others. 24 Confronting this shifting nature of memory is no doubt frustrating for memory and human rights activists. Progress – as they might understand it – towards recognition of, and recompense for, abuses has been slow. In Chile, dead victims of the dictatorship play a particular role in the memory horizon, as Frazier notes: ‘the conferring of martyrdom on the deceased validates the activists who speak on their behalf even as it threatens to undermined activists’ own claims (as survivors) to a morally grounded political agency of their own.’25 It is perhaps, in such a context, understandable that the memory of these dead might point to the problem of what Adorno labelled the impossibility of representation after Auschwitz. In the case of Chile, this would leave us, in effect, in the territory of a melancholy nostalgia and an unprocessed mourning for an unrepresentable past. The first of Guzmán documentaries discussed here, Nostalgia de la luz, certainly raises this issue. Nevertheless, must nostalgia be unproductive? Need we view it only as an indication of unprocessed mourning? Towards the beginning of her study On Longing, Susan Stewart observes: Nostalgia is a sadness without an object, a sadness which creates a longing that of necessity is inauthentic because it does not take part in lived experience. Rather, it remains behind and before that experience. Nostalgia, like any form of narrative, is always ideological: the past it seeks has never existed except as narrative, and hence, always absent, that past continually threatens to reproduce itself as a felt lack. Hostile to history and its invisible origins, and yet longing for an impossibly pure context of lived experience at a place of origin, nostalgia wears a distinctly utopian face, a face that turns toward a future-past, a past which has only ideological reality. 26 The nostalgic’s longing is, according to Stewart, ‘prelapsarian,’ which is to say a desire to erase the gap between nature and culture so that ‘lived and mediated experience are one.’27 For Stewart, the crisis of the nostalgic is the crisis of the sign itself, that fundamental slippage between signifier and signified. As a result, ‘nostalgia is the repetition that mourns the inauthenticity of all repetition and denies the repetition’s capacity to form identity.’28 A similar sentiment lies behind Nelly Richard’s discussion of the problem of representation in the wake of the coup, which she formulates as the need to find a means ‘to express the loss of sense, but without renouncing to recritically conjugate the sense of loss.’29 One might well read Guzmán’s documentaries as nostalgic expressions of melancholy loss, but the matter can also be approached from

106  Alison Ribeiro de Menezes another angle. Guzmán, like the nostalgics Stewart is thinking of, is fundamentally a seeker who frames the search for authenticity – as much focused on the activity of searching as on the goal – as an ontological problem: Our terror of the unmarked grave is a terror of the insignificance of a world without writing. The metaphor of the unmarked grave is one which joins the mute and the ambivalent; without the mark there is no boundary, no point at which to begin the repetition. Writing gives us a device for inscribing space, for inscribing nature. 30 If we take writing to include visual narrative, then this would seem to point to a productive form of nostalgia as a means to an end; as a means, that is, to re-discover the trace as well as the need to overcome the absence of a trace, which is the very fear that Stewart formulates as the terror of an unmarked grave. Stewart’s concern, and one that she shares with Guzmán, is with scale.31 Boundaries and frames are ultimately gestures of comprehension, ways of making sense of experience by shaping it, delimiting it, and creating perspectives upon it. The structuring of experience is fundamentally cultural, and Stewart explores it in terms of magnitude. Contrasting the miniature and the gigantic, for instance, she writes, Whereas the miniature represents closure, interiority, the domestic, and the overly cultural, the gigantic represents infinity, exteriority, the public, and the overly natural.… We find the miniature at the origin of private, individual history, but we find the gigantic at the origin of public and natural history.32 It is here that Guzmán parts company with Stewart’s perspective, for she retains an anthropocentric view of time and space, whereas the Chilean director is at pains in both Nostalgia de la luz and El botón de nácar to signal the limits of such a framing by attempting to step outside it. He explores a new materialist approach to the memory of trauma, thinking geologically through deep time and deep space, and thus reframing our material and emotional universe.33 This is partly, but not simply, an ecological approach. It does not so much move beyond the anthropocentric to embrace the ecological, as reveal the imbrication of the anthropocentric within the ecological, and vice versa. Guzmán embraces the ‘vertigo of inhuman scale’34 and rethinks agency beyond the small-scale frames of the Anthropocene. Nostalgia de la luz takes, as its starting point, the director’s own sense of nostalgia for a lost childhood innocence. From the beginning, this self-reflexive documentary and its sequel, El botón de nácar, flaunt their status as creative responses to the question of memory in contemporary

Memory Beyond Anthropocene  107 Chile. As James Cisneros writes of recent Chilean memory works, citing Nelly Richard, they are a ‘conjugation of shards of experience, temporal ruins, and epochal vestiges’ which function as ‘citations, ellipses, and repetitions’ turning the present into a ‘“disjunctive knot” by reading the archive against the grain of a linear chronology that keeps the past at bay.’35 The tendency to read Guzmán’s work in a Benjaminian frame through the trope of fragments and ruins is common. 36 Readings have also relied largely on historical citation and a focus on the inclusion of objects, without addressing the role of astronomy and the implications of the use of a cosmological frame. That is to say, most critics have not answered the dilemma posed by Richard: how to express a loss of sense and, at the same time, find a means adequate to expressing a sense of loss? In a groundbreaking article that opens up a new thread of analysis, Nilo Couret explores the way in which Nostalgia plays with scalarity, ‘toggling between the human, the geologic, and the cosmic in order to tease out the corporeal implications of scale and its relation to the past.’37 Scale, in this view, makes images readable or meaningful by establishing relationships of distance and proximity. In what follows, I build on this by exploring Guzmán’s use of scale and perspective as part of a tactile, haptic cinema. The director deploys not only a ‘refractory’38 and elliptical visual style, but also a sensory rhetoric that aims – along the lines of Marks’ haptic visuality – to bridge the gap between screen image and spectator. Guzmán thus goes beyond the idea of rhetorics as verbal persuasion, to establish an affective connection between the suffering of the victims of violent disappearances and their families, on the one hand, and the viewer, on the other. Toggling in Couret’s reading, or oscillation in mine, is the crucial underpinning movement reminding us that we are ‘dealing with multiple scales and not simply an accumulated past.’39 Traditionally, we recognise five bodily senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Beyond this, we may also refer to vestibular sense (balance and equilibrium), thermoception (heat and cold), proprioception (the kinaesthetic sense of the movement and relative positions of parts of the body), chronoception (a sense of the passage of time), and the perception of pain. Haptic perception, in Marks’ definition, is ‘the combination of tactile, kinaesthetic, and proprioceptive functions [which constitute] the way we experience touch both on the surface of and inside our bodies.’40 In haptic visuality, Marks argues that the eyes function as organs of touch. To this we might add, with regard to Guzmán’s cinema, that the ears also function in this manner, since sound plays a significant role in conveying the materiality of the environments filmed. One could argue that this focus on haptic identification runs the risk of a usurpation of the victim’s experience by the director and viewers, but Marks’ interest, echoing the comparable approach of Jill Bennett, is in the ways in which the haptic creates a ‘visual intimacy [that] engenders an ethical

108  Alison Ribeiro de Menezes relationship between viewer and viewed.’41 This is a transactive relationship, reminiscent of Kaja Silverman’s notion of ‘heteropathic identification’42 in which there is an oscillation between proximity and distance, between identification and separation, that encourages the spectator to ‘fill in the gaps in the image’43 without asserting ownership over the experience it expresses. As Marks notes, ‘Rather than making the object fully available to view, haptic cinema puts the object into question, calling on the viewer to engage in its imaginative construction.’44 Marks goes on to explore this as an erotic relationship, but one that points to the limits of sensory knowledge rather than offering a plenitude of sensory fulfilment.45 And it is the limitation of sensory identification experienced at the same time as the desire to overcome it that perhaps points to a more subtle form of understanding than a binary of complete separation from the victim versus complete usurpation of his or her position.46 I shall return to this issue in due course, but first I turn to a discussion of the victims of historical violence addressed by Guzmán’s two films. Nostalgia de la luz focuses particularly on the victims of the ­Pinochet coup and repressive dictatorship. It interviews former prisoners and survivors of torture, exiles, and relatives of the disappeared. For instance, Luís, ‘un transmisor de la historia,’ explains how prisoners in the ­Chacabuco camp, a former saltpetre mine, fabricated a sidereal pointer to gaze at the stars and so felt a sense of liberty even in prison. Miguel, ‘el arquitecto de la memoria,’ offers insights into the Chacabuco prison camp with his kinaesthetic sense of the prison’s spaces. Víctor, the son of a former exile expelled by the dictatorship, discusses his ambiguous relationship with Chile. And Violeta, whose brother is one of the disappeared, explains her insistent search for his body in the Calama area of the Atacama Desert. The second half of El botón de nácar addresses the dictatorship’s barbaric means of disposing of the victims of enforced disappearance at sea, but the film also widens this focus, in its first half, to include Chile’s maltreated indigenous communities as the victims of colonization and historical ‘progress.’ In this, it connects with the allusions to saltpetre mining in Nostalgia and thus extends the temporal range of Guzmán’s works to the Anthropocene era as one in which a particular notion of industrial progress, underpinned by an enlightenment epistemology, has prevailed over other worldviews. Both the disappeared and the indigenous are transformed by Guzmán from objects of knowledge into subjects enlisting the viewer’s compassion. Photographs feature heavily in his presentation. On the one hand, we have a familiar collage of representational images of the disappeared, their photos fading and physically disintegrating with the passage time, thus conveying the tactile fragility and tenuousness of our link to these missing individuals. On the other hand, we have ethnographic drawings and photographs of indigenous Patagonians who stare defiantly back at the gaze of the explorer who supposedly represents civilization. This

Memory Beyond Anthropocene  109 discourse is a familiar colonial one which Guzmán displaces with the voices of surviving indigenous who recount their way of life and articulate their dying languages for the director. But, at least on the face of it, neither of these approaches to victims moves beyond the representational, into the terrain of a transactive encounter. In what ways, then, does Guzmán establish an oscillation between identification with, and distancing from, these victims, and between a sensory experience and an awareness of its lack, in his films? How does he evade the dangers of the spectator’s over-identification with the victims portrayed? Nostalgia centres on a series of oscillating spatial perspectives, which move between the vastness of the infinite, envisaged as our universe, and the intimacy of the minute object that belonged to a lost individual or some detail in nature, such as salt crystal formations in the Atacama Desert. Botón adds to this a strong sense of temporal oscillation, swaying between the linearity of historical or human-focused chronology and the achronological co-existence of Patagonian indigenous peoples with those explorers who photographed them. Both films move between the intimacy of the individually understandable perspective, and the infinitude of the almost ungraspably gigantic. Of course, the spatial shifts of Nostalgia already imply enormous temporal contrasts between deep time and the intimacy of personal history. And the temporal coincidences of Botón also imply the spatial co-existence of different worldviews in one territory. Such dramatic movements in space and time demand an intellectual response to make sense of the connections that Guzmán draws, but the director also deploys affective strategies to infect the spectator with a sense of compassion for the victims whose experiences are examined. In this, we might see another form of oscillation, namely between the cerebral and the bodily affective. Guzmán begins Nostalgia with his own narrative voice-over recalling a peaceful Chile slumbering before the upheavals of the 1970s. The Chile of Guzmán’s youth, when he became interested in astronomy, is described as ‘un remanso de paz aislado del mundo.’ This peace is disrupted by the Chile of Allende, an ‘aventura noble’ that is truncated by the violence of the 1973 military coup. In Botón, the coup is dramatically compared to the explosion of a supernova, intensifying that sense of the coup as an unparalleled catastrophe, a moment of originary, melancholy trauma. In both films, but especially in Nostalgia, the coincidental discovery of the importance of the Atacama Desert for astronomy in these years of upheaval offers an uncanny parallel: astronomy’s search for the origins of the universe and of life, a quest that is both spatial and temporal, parallels the search of some Chileans to discover the fate of their disappeared relatives, victims of the dictatorship’s violence and repression. Here, a scientific discourse comes to stand metaphorically for Chile’s silenced history, while small objects of memory and fragments of bones stand metonymically and synecdochically for that history’s  missing

110  Alison Ribeiro de Menezes victims, of whom they are the traces. Guzmán’s aesthetic is a rhetorical one with three dimensions or movements. First, one investigative process (astronomy) stands metaphorically for another (forensic archaeology). In this instance, the substitution is that of one investigative process for another, akin to a comparison, and we might say that scale is maintained. Second, objects – shoes, spoons, clothing – evoke their former owners or users metonymically. Third, small fragments and especially bones, stand in a synecdochic relation to a missing, irrecoverable whole. In the second and third cases, the relations are of contiguity and the scales diverge. We might then relate this to the earlier discussion of the gigantic and the miniature, with the extremes of scalarity indicating, on the one hand, a loss that is so enormous that it verges on the sublime and, on the other, the abjectness of a horror perpetrated against individuals that is intimate and intense in its painfulness. Oscillation is thus the structuring principle of Guzmán’s documentaries, and the spectator is drawn into this spatial and temporal movement through a haptic visuality centred on sight and supported by sound and touch. Nostalgia would seem to privilege above all the act of looking via the metaphor of the telescope, although the connotations of the word pearl, or nácar, with its creaminess and sense of reflected light, are also strongly visual. Guzmán insistently returns to images in which particles of dust moving within rays of sunlight evoke density and texture, giving a three-dimensional depth to the two-dimensional flatness of the cinema screen. By showing the particles contained within a ray of light, Guzmán self-consciously flaunts the very elements of which his artistic medium is composed. When, at the end of Nostalgia, Violeta, the sister of a desaparecido, views space through an old German telescope, the dissolving of the image of her smile into and out of stardust creates a sense of re-enchantment, as if her quest to find her brother had somehow been eased, if not resolved.47 In the opening of Botón, such visual reflexivity is reiterated and intensified: the stars in the sky are reflected rippling off waves to become an almost blinding sparkle. Guzmán thus disintegrates representational images into their component elements of light and shade, drawing the spectator into an active relationship to the film and requiring of him or her an imaginative deciphering and reconstruction of the cinematic image, which itself seems to oscillate between the representational and the abstract, between integration and disintegration, between the whole and its fragments.48 This emerged partly as a result of the locations chosen for filming. As Guzmán notes in interview with Rob White: In the desert you can only film in the morning and the evening. The sun is too powerful in the middle of the day. So at that time, when we couldn’t film in the desert, we chose to film little things—little details, tiny stones, rays of light, reflections, shadows, cracks between

Memory Beyond Anthropocene  111 objects and their undersides. The resulting images of the substance of materiality look abstract, and it’s really quite impressive.49 If the sense of sight leads to an interrogation of the very components of cinema as a representational medium, sound also bridges the distance between the spectator and the intensely material reality presented. N ­ ostalgia establishes a musical counterpoint between the crackling granularity of the salty desert sand and the howling void of the wind. Oscillating between the grainy texture and magnified crunching of the former, and the sense of emptiness of the latter, Guzmán’s scenes of the Chacabuco camp and former saltpetre mine bring together seemingly disconnected events in history. The miners’ abandoned clothing and shoes are reminiscent of stock images evoking the Holocaust, in which piles of shoes and glasses stand metonymically for the individuals who wore them. The music of the metal spoons, swaying in the wind, creates a melancholy sense of loss which intensifies the viewer’s shock at encountering open coffins with mummified human remains. And it is the trope of embodiment, especially seen through human remains, which provides the connecting thread across time and space in Nostalgia. The enormous ALMA telescope, with its mouth-like gaping aperture and multiple antennae, is personified in its description as an ear intended to ‘escuchar los cuerpos cuya luz no llega a la tierra.’ More than simply employing synaesthesia, Guzmán plays upon the polysemy of ‘cuerpo’ to bridge the gap between the human and the inhuman. If astrologers look upwards in their search for celestial bodies, which register as sound waves and are translated into images, Chileans look down into the earth in search of their missing loved ones, who exist only as bone fragments. They also encounter other historical traces, bodies that have sometimes survived across long periods of time through mummification. These remains are implicitly compared to fossils, the traces of animal remains inscribed into rock. The landscape that Guzmán presents is thus pregnant with ‘mensajes de lejos,’ hidden secrets whose discovery the spectator experiences through the director’s tactile, haptic cinematography. The sense of touch is allied to the action of inscription, in a dual movement that implies both reaching out and leaving traces. Thus, astronomy is described as touching the sky in the opening of Nostalgia, but the spectator is also drawn to reach out to the individuals interviewed in Guzmán’s film. And Nostalgia is in many senses a poetic collage of achronological traces. The more obvious examples of this include the quasi-abstract figures of pre-Columbian drawings marking an ancient route across the desert; the debris of the Chacabuco camp, and the close-up of Luís’ hand caressing the indents of his name graffitied on a wall there;50 or Miguel’s use of kinaesthetic memory to redraw a plan of the prison where he was held. However, the sense of touch becomes a haptic form of experiencing death and loss with Guzmán’s shifting from

112  Alison Ribeiro de Menezes images of mummified hands, swaddled in ancient fabric, to close-ups of the relatives of the disappeared handling minute human bone fragments. Here, the immensity of time is bridged in the metaphor of an ancient, indigenous, mummified hand reaching into the present, in contrast to the traumatized hands of the present day which are frustrated in their search to recover and bury a complete body. ‘Yo lo quiero entero,’ says Violeta of her brother who was disappeared by the dictatorship, but the fragments of bones that she has are no more than ‘restos de restos de los desaparecidos de la dictadura.’ It is difficult to watch these scenes, and in particular the tactile caressing of the bone fragments, without the temptation to rub one’s own fingers together in a gesture of empathetic identification. Mummification is, of course, a natural process through which time and decay are, to an extent, defeated and bodily remains preserved. In comparison, the violence of the dictatorship achieved the opposite, an almost complete erasure of bodily remains, with only the mourning of relatives indicating the missing person through the pain of an unexplained loss. The relatives’ desire is thus to write their loved ones back into history – to reinscribe them physically. Touch becomes restorative in Nostalgia, with Víctor’s mother discussing the role of massage in helping torture survivors. And Guzmán’s camera offers a tactile gaze, caressing a human skull that is visually compared to the surface of the moon. This is a haptic visuality which proposes that the medium of cinema is self-consciously material, that astronomy involves a relationship of touch as much as of sight, and that memory can not only defeat the ravages of time, but also bridge the human and the non-human. The calcium of our bones, in the central conceit of Nostalgia, can be traced back to and inscribed in the big bang. And memory is materialized in the suggestion that ‘tiene fuerza de gravedad,’ that is, it affects material bodies like the force of gravity. As a result, one might say that Guzmán bridges the human and non-human in order to overcome the inhuman in history.51 If Nostalgia explores the Atacama Desert, a landscape so devoid of water that it is the only entirely brown area of the earth’s surface visible from space, then Botón focuses on water in its various forms as sea, river, rain, and ice. The opening images of Patagonia seen from the air present the region as organic, with the vast watery inlets of this glaciated landscape somehow evoking the folds of the human brain, the seat of thought and memory. Water is a medium of communication in Guzmán’s vision; it channels the force of the universe to the earth and to living things, mediating between the stars and us. In this, water is also a channel for memory, symbolized in the drop of water contained in a 3,000-year-old block of quartz found in the Atacama Desert. In filming this semi-transparent rock, Guzmán contrasts its rigid edges with a foregrounding of its veiny texture, and adds a soundtrack that seems

Memory Beyond Anthropocene  113 to oscillate between the resonances of movement in deep water and the sound of a heart beating.52 The quartz, and the drop of water it contains, function as a bridge between Guzmán’s two films, but the director’s cinematic aesthetic is more than simply associative. Building on Nostalgia, the proposition of Botón is that the human/non-human divide is a misleading one. Water arrived on our planet on a comet from space, but it is not just life-­ giving. Water is alive, 53 and Guzmán’s extreme close-ups of raindrops convey a beautiful liquid materiality wobbling with the rustle of the leaves on which the drops lie. Water sings, and indigenous people are in communion with it to the point that they can channel its music. ‘Cada gota de agua es una respiración,’ the breath of life. Conveying this is not just a vocal but a bodily act for Claudio, the anthropologist whom Guzmán interviews. If water sings, what it channels for the spectator of Botón are the lost voices of Chile’s disappearing indigenous communities as well as the memory of the Pinochet dictatorship’s disappeared. Arguing that modern Chile has become disengaged from its most plenteous environment, the sea, as well as from key aspects of its own history, Botón proposes an affective re-encounter mediated by the tale of Jemmy Button. A native of the Yaghan people from Tierra del Fuego, Button was captured by Captain, later Vice-Admiral, Robert FitzRoy on the first voyage of HMS Beagle to Patagonia. Button was supposedly taken to England in exchange for a pearl button, hence his name. A year later, in 1831 FitzRoy returned Button to Patagonia during the second voyage of the Beagle, on which Charles Darwin also travelled. ­Guzmán describes Button’s experience of moving between Patagonia and ­England as one of extreme time-travel between different planets. The arrival of the English explorers is presented as the beginning of the end for southern indigenous peoples, a moment of originary trauma. FitzRoy, whose voyages had helped to chart the southern seas, enabled the opening up of the southern Atlantic to a colonialism that begot racial discrimination: ‘Durante 150 años un grupo de hombres blancos gobernó con mano firme un país silencioso.’ One might wish to object to this rather impressionistic collapsing of a century and a half of history into a single narrative of repression, which comes to an end in Guzmán’s version with Allende’s revolution, but the analysis provides the pivotal link between the two sets of victims whose experiences are recovered in Botón: the indigenous, the silenced voices of that 150year time span, and the disappeared, the silenced voices of more recent Chilean history. The protagonist of Guzmán’s tale is as much the pearl button as it is the historical Jemmy Button. The button functions as a keepsake, a surprising bridge between different times and stories or, in the words of historian Gabriel Salazar in the film, ‘un punto que se magnifica.’

114  Alison Ribeiro de Menezes Handled in close-up, in a manner reminiscent of the caressing of bone fragments in Nostalgia, the button becomes a point of encounter not only between two disparate stories of disappearance and historical impunity, but also between these stories of suffering and the spectator. Thus, when Guzmán’s camera pans over photos and drawings of the indigenous or of the disappeared, and when it later scans the faces of a reunion of survivors from the dictatorship’s camp at Isla Dawson, it seems to have acquired the ability to caress these images in a gentle gesture of compassion. The final connection is provided by what is perhaps the most affective aspect of Botón, the recovery from the sea of an iron rail like those used in the disappearance of bodies by the dictatorship. The recovered rail is filmed in such a manner as to emphasise not only its materiality, but also the corrosive effect of salt water in creating a colourful pattern of messages that speak to the viewer across time: ‘el agua y sus criaturas han tallado estos mensajes, aquí están los secretos que los cuerpos dejaron en los rieles antes de fundirse con el agua y tomar la forma del oceano.’ Some of the conical-shaped growths on the rail recall the salt formations of the Atacama Desert in Nostalgia, and attached to the rail is a pearl button. As Salazar notes, ‘allí en ese punto está todo condensado, apretado, densificado,’ the history of the rail is entwined with the history of the button, rippling out in circles that might even lead us to Villa Grimaldi, Chile’s infamous torture house. Watching a re-creation of the disposal of a body in the manner the regime used – the wrapping and weighting of it, and its dumping from a helicopter into the sea – the spectator feels the brutality of such a double act of murder, the killing first of the individual and then the assassination of their memory through the erasure of all traces of their existence. The traumatic legacy of such violence is channelled effectively in ­Guzmán’s interview with poet Raúl Zurita, a former torture victim of the Pinochet regime who was detained at the outbreak of the coup and held for a time on the cruiser Maipo. Zurita’s acknowledgement of the trauma of relatives of the disappeared, who have no bodies to dignify and honour in burial, happens to be intensified by the slight ­Parkinson-inflected tremble of his body movements. Trauma is, in a sense, embodied in Zurita’s status as torture survivor as well as conveyed by his own physical movements.54 Bridging categories such as victim and perpetrator, he suggests that as human beings we are all responsible for acts of inhumanity. Within the universe, he proposes, everything is in dialogue, in one great conversation, ‘un gran mirarse mutuamente.’ If the indigenous of Patagonia believed that the dead lived on as stars, and if, as is suggested in Nostalgia, our bones are derived from the calcium in stars, then Guzmán would seem to offer a sort of enchanted closure in these two films. In this, his works evoke recent challenges to the anthropocentric framing of history.

Memory Beyond Anthropocene  115 Guzmán’s proposed means of overcoming historical trauma, particularly in Botón, is to shift the spectator’s attention from pain and suffering to the mutual enmeshment of the human and the non-human, and towards a recognition of the powerful agency of ‘deep time and inhuman forces.’55 The material world, whether in the form of rock, sand, or water, is not just a metaphor to convey the human story, but a central – if often unacknowledged – force shaping that very story. Non-human agency – or perhaps better, the assemblages56 of human actions and non-human forces – comes to the rescue, in a sense, channelling the pain and suffering of victims and re-enchanting our disenchanted world through the vibrancy of matter. As Jane Bennett has put it, the re-enchantment of the world can function as an ‘affective force’ that might ‘propel ethical generosity.’57 While the implication of Zurita’s remarks is that we need to find just such a humble sense of our own enmeshment in the forces of history, it is, to borrow Cohen’s phrase, ‘the vertigo of inhuman scale’ which seems to have offered a solution for one victim, Valentina, at the end of Nostalgia de la luz. 58 The daughter of disappeared parents, Valentina was raised by grandparents who were forced by the regime to choose between sacrificing their granddaughter and sacrificing her parents. She has found peace through her job as an astronomer. In thinking time and agency beyond the small frames of human time and space, 59 she has encountered a different balance and perspective, recognising the trauma of her own story without it dominating her world entirely, or seemingly infecting that of her children. ‘La astronomía da otra dimensión al dolor,’ she says, since we are all part of a cosmic energy. Valentina seems to echo Bennett, for whom fragmentation, disjunction, and the inability of the whole to be whole again, are some of the preoccupations of our contemporary sense of disenchantment with material reality. In this context, Bennett argues that the role of the imagination in changing our perspective is very powerful: it can heal, because it allows us to ‘see things otherwise.’60 In Nostalgia de la luz and El botón de nácar, it is the oscillation between different scales that opens up the space to see otherwise. ­Oscillation also facilitates an engagement on the part of the spectator with the film’s victims and their grieving relatives, without the assumption of full understanding or even usurpation of their experiences. We thus see an illustration of Jane Bennett’s proposition – a suggestion also echoed in Zurita’s words – that ‘the ethical responsibility of an individual human now resides in one’s response to the assemblages in which one finds oneself participating.’61 Within these assemblages, victims indeed seem to function as vectors of memory and suffering, retaining a form of agency or affective action that can indeed unsettle us from prior assumptions through the space of the imaginative encounter facilitated by art’s ability to open our eyes to seeing otherwise.

116  Alison Ribeiro de Menezes

Notes 1 François Laruelle, General Theory of Victims. Translated by Jessie Hock and Alex Dubilet (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015), xiii, 2. Closely related is Annette Wieviorka’s The Era of the Witness. Translated by Jared Stark (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2006), which views our current age as characterized by a focus on bearing witness to acts of inhumanity as a means to recover the stories of history’s victims. 2 Ibid., 19. 3 Ibid., 20. 4 Ibid., 28. 5 Robert Elias, The Politics of Victimization: Victims, Victimology and ­Human Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 6 Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, ‘The Enchantment and Disenchantment of the Archival Image: Politics and Affect in Contemporary Portuguese Cultural Memories,’ in Fearghal McGarry and Jennie M. Carlsten (eds.), Film, History and Memory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 65–82. 7 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 45. 8 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 92. 9 Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 7. 10 Bennett, Empathic Vision, 8. 11 Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2000) and Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). 12 Marks, The Skin of the Film, xvii. 13 Ibid., xvii. 14 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 8. 15 By Anthropocene I understand the era in which human action has had its most significant impact on the earth, that is, since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Although Guzmán remembers the Pinochet dictatorship’s victims, I do not want to suggest, as is sometimes suggested in the world play of memory scholars, that the past thus becomes re-membered. There is no easy resolution to history’s traumas in Guzmán; the lost bodies of the dictatorship remain lost in his documentaries, reduced to fragments that echo Laruelle’s dismembering of man. 16 I draw here on the work of Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 17 Lessie Jo Frazier, Salt in the Sand: Memory, Violence, and the NationState in Chile, 1890 to the Present (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 2. 18 The initial formulation in Chile was ‘detenidos desaparecidos,’ denoting the political character of the repression against these individuals and the fact that they were disappeared by the forces of the state, frequently following detention. 19 Steve J. Stern, The Memory Box of Pinochet’s Chile, vol. 1, Remembering Pinochet’s Chile: On the Eve of London 1998 (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2006), xxviii. On irruptions of memory, see ­Alexander Wilde, ‘Irruptions of Memory: Expressive Politics in Chile’s Transition to Democracy,’ Journal of Latin American Studies, 31.2 (1999), 473–500. 20 Frazier, Salt in the Sand, 17. 21 Ibid., 31–32.

Memory Beyond Anthropocene  117 22 Nelly Richard, ‘The Reconfigurations of Post-Dictatorship Critical Thought,’ Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 9 (2000), 273–82 (274). 23 Stern, The Memory Box of Pinochet’s Chile, vol. 3, Reckoning with ­Pinochet: The Memory Question in Democratic Chile (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010), xxvii. However, Mario Sznajder and Luis Roniger note that ‘even under formal democracy, Chilean political culture contained strong authoritarian and exclusionary elements enshrined constitutionally and reflected in the recurrent use of emergency laws promulgated whenever there was a political crisis.’ See The Politics of Exile in Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 160. Frazier also takes issue with the idea that the state violence of the Pinochet regime was the exception rather than the norm in Chilean history. She comments that the ‘scale and kinds of violence that followed the 1973 coup were indeed unprecedented for elite and some middle-class sectors,’ but for non-elite sectors in certain localities the experience was strikingly different; Frazier, Salt in the Sand, 27. 24 Stern, Reckoning, 268–69. 25 Frazier, Salt in the Sand, 196. She also argues that legal procedures in search of justice identified some victims as more useful than others, and thus ranked them; as a result, ‘the dead and their representatives were prioritized over the living’ (210). 26 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 23. 27 Ibid., 23. 28 Ibid., 23. 29 Richard, ‘The Reconfigurations of Post-Dictatorship Critical Thought,’ 275. 30 Stewart, On Longing, 31. 31 I do not intend to suggest that Guzmán is aware of Stewart’s work, but rather offer a reading of his documentaries in the light of her theoretical discourse. 32 Stewart, On Longing, 70–71. 33 Cohen, Stone, 9. 34 Ibid., 24. 35 James Cisneros, ‘The Figure of Memory in Chilean Cinema: Patricio G ­ uzmán and Raúl Ruiz,’ Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 15.1 (2006), 59–75 (59). Cisneros takes the phrase ‘disjunctive knot’ from Nelly ­R ichard’s, The Insubordination of Signs: Political Change, Cultural Transformation and Poetics of the Crisis. Translated by Alice A. Nelson and Silvia R. ­Tandeciarz (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2004), 18. Patrick Blaine reads Nostalgia as a new departure for Guzmán, based on its foregrounding of the ruins of modernity but does not offer a convincing reading of the role of what he terms the ‘almost hyperbolic’ (128) desolation of the landscapes that Guzmán lingers on; see ‘Representing Absences in the Postdictatorial Documentary Cinema of Patricio Guzmán,’ Latin American Perspectives, 40.1, (2013), 114–13. 36 For example, Juan Carlos Rodríguez, ‘Framing Ruins: Patricio Guzmán’s Postdictatorial Documentaries,’ Latin American Perspectives, 40.1 (2013), 131–44. 37 Nilo Couret, ‘Scale as Nostalgic Form: Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light (2011),’ Discourse, 30.1 (2017), 67–91 (69). 38 Cisneros, ‘The Figure of Memory,’ 60. 39 Couret, ‘Scale as Nostalgic Form,’ 81. 40 Marks, Touch, 2. 41 Ibid., 8.

118  Alison Ribeiro de Menezes 42 Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York and L ­ ondon: Routledge, 1996), 86. 43 Marks, Touch, 13. 4 4 Ibid., 16. 45 Ibid., 20. 46 Marks concludes, ‘What is erotic about haptic visuality … may be described as respect for otherness, and concomitant loss of self in the presence of the other. The going-over to the other that characterises haptic visuality is an elastic, dynamic movement, not the rigid all-or-nothing switch between an illusion of self-sufficiency and a realization of absolute lack…. A visual erotics that offers its object to the viewer but only on the condition that its unknowability remain intact, and that the viewer, in coming closer, give up his or her own mastery’ (20). 47 There is a clear element of enchantment in the shots. Nevertheless, Guzmán admits that the final sense of resolution for the mujeres de Calama is at best provisional: ‘There’s a moment of apparent reconciliation, when the astronomer is with the ladies by the telescope. But it’s a show, … when they got together it was quite difficult to begin with, but the astronomer had a very good idea. He said, “The moon has been watching the earth for millions of years. The moon knows everything that has happened on earth. Therefore we should ask the moon where those disappeared have gone.” This metaphor prompted a very emotional moment.’ Rob White, ‘After Effects: Interview with Patricio Guzmán,’ Film Quarterly, 2 July 2012, https://filmquarterly. org/2012/07/12/after-effects-interview-with-patricio-guzman/ (accessed 21 September 2017). 48 Couret describes this form of spectatorship as a process of ‘inscribing scale’; Couret, ‘Scale as Nostalgic Form,’ 88. 49 White, ‘After Effects.’ 50 Couret links this to Resnais’ Night and Fog; ‘Scale as Nostalgic Form,’ 77. 51 My reading diverges from David Martin-Jones in that I do not view ­Guzmán’s cosmological framing as the widest of a series of concentric circles in which time is viewed on increasingly larger scales, but focus upon the movement between and across these different scales; David Martin-Jones, ‘Archival Landscapes and a Non-Anthropocentric “Universe Memory”,’ Third Text, 27.6, 707–22. 52 Indeed, it also recalls an ultrasound of pregnancy, in which the foetal heartbeat seems mediated by is transmission through amniotic fluid. 53 The viewer is told in a voiceover that stone, likewise for native communities, is alive. 54 Zurita was a torture victim of the Pinochet regime, and his inclusion in Botón perhaps reminds us that torture is an assertion of power rather than a quest for knowledge. A member of the Chilean performance art group, the Colectivo de Acciones de Arte, established in 1979, Zurita was a practitioner and radical exponent of an art of public protest against the Pinochet regime. His responses included self-mutilation through the burning of his cheek, the dousing of his eyes with amonia, and a performance of public masturbation. In 1982 Zurita painted lines from Purgatorio over the sky of New York using planes trailing white smoke. In 1993 he excavated the phrase, Ni pena ni miedo, over a 3 km stretch of the sands of the Atacama, which Juan Soros likens to ‘an empty open tomb for victims who were not allowed a burial and grave’; see ‘Blurring the Boundaries between Land Art and Poetry in the Work of Raúl Zurita,’ Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, 45.2 (2012), 227–35 (230). Zurita’s poetry collection Purgatorio, of 1979, has been described by C.D. Wright as the ‘seminal literary text of

Memory Beyond Anthropocene  119

55 56 57

58 59 60 61

Chile’s 9/11/1973’; see Purgatorio: A Bilingual Edition. Translated by Anna Deeny, foreword C.D. Wright (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009), vii. Many of the collection’s poetic evocations of the Atacama recall ­Nostalgia, above all perhaps the closing epilogue to the eight-poem sequence on the desert, which screams out in conclusion, ‘COMO UN SUEÑO EL ­SILBADO DEL VIENTO / TODAVÍA RECORRE EL ÁRIDO ESPACIO DE / ESAS LLANURAS’ (Purgatorio, 52). Zurita opens his English-­language preface to this bilingual Purgatorio with the unfinished proposition, ‘As if poems were the earth’s dreams,’ xi. His work could be said to collapse the human and the natural to offer a vibrantly material poetic memory of trauma inscribed on human bodies and natural landscapes alike. Cohen, Stone, 4. I take the term ‘assemblages’ from the work of Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 23. Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Crossings, Energetics, and Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 3. Bennett writes elsewhere that there is a strong tendency in contemporary culture to view our world as disenchanted, frequently as a result of globalization and the intensifications worked on it by neoliberal politics and economics. See also Vibrant Matter, 23. Cohen, Stone, 24. In paraphrase Cohen, Stone, 27. Jane Bennett, ‘De Rerum Natura,’ Strategies, 13.1 (2000), 9–22 (11). Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 37.

7 The Proper Name of Our Dispossession Notes on Filming the Blood of the Martyrs of the Arab Revolutions1 Peter Snowdon The line of blood put me in mind of many things.

—Mohammed Rabie2

The martyr does not want your sympathy. The martyr wants you to overthrow the system. —Mosireen3

An archive of opacity How should we understand the countless images of the dead and dying which have circulated, both on and off the Internet, in the wake of the Arab revolutions that began in 2010–11? As Edward Ziter observed as early as 2013, images of death and violence have inexorably come to form the overwhelming majority of the videos that these uprisings have produced.4 Is this proliferation simply an inevitable consequence of these uprisings’ failure to establish any durable form of new dispensation, or even just to obtain from their governments some practical equivalent to the rule of law? Or are these images still able to excite and strengthen effective resistance? And if so, whose resistance? That of the civilian (though not necessarily non-violent) revolutionaries? Or that of the armed militias which have gradually absorbed and overwhelmed these movements, in the worst cases (as in Syria and Yemen) triggering their mutation into proto-genocidal proxy wars? Are these images being consciously accumulated against some impossible day when justice might finally be done to these regimes and their murderers? Should we see them as a symptom of the psychopathology of populations that have been oppressed and traumatised beyond breaking point? Or are they merely an unsightly side-effect of global media circuits in which violence and horror continue to have some currency, however devalued and debased? Indeed, beyond testifying to the convergence of neo-colonial voyeurism with grassroots desperation facilitated by contemporary techno-cultures

The Proper Name of Our Dispossession  121 of decentralised self-surveillance, what purpose can such videos possibly serve? What can be the sense of adding yet more images of death to the myriad such images already circulating both online and off? As Cécile Boëx quite rightly asks, who is even watching all these videos today? Those who post them must know that most of them will be lucky to gather views that exceed double figures. And yet videos documenting death, both individual and collective, continue to be made, and just as surely they continue to be posted online. 5 Together, they constitute a revolutionary martyrology which dwarves all its most obvious iconographic predecessors, as if designed to exceed and exhaust any rational explanation within which discourse, whether academic or activist, might seek to frame it and thus make it safe for ‘knowledge,’ or for ‘action.’ Indeed, perhaps we should understand the figural opacity of certain of these images not as an error or misfunction of the machine (whether it be a machine of propaganda or of ‘truth’), but rather as an allegory of the enigma of their own sheer proliferation, which exceeds all our attempts at calculation. For these images show us the dead not as objects of our pity or indignation, so much as in their inexhaustible arising – uncountable and so, inevitably, for the most part, unseen. As such, they inhabit an ambiguously liminal zone within the corporate electronic networks, where they wait for the lines of code that counterfeit their likenesses to be run, in order – however briefly – to reanimate them once again. These images are not simply a metaphor for this limbo in which their subjects – these dead-who-are-not-fully-dead – are condemned to stray. They are themselves one of the physical, organisational, and ontological forms that this in-between realm takes for us today. The fact that we cannot locate this space on any common geographical or conceptual map of ‘Middle Eastern politics’ (or ‘internet infrastructure’ or ‘social movement theory’…) is a sign, not of the non-existence of this liminal zone, but of the insistent challenge which these images – these presences – pose to our sense that we ourselves, in our inexplicably privileged externality as their ‘viewers,’6 may still inhabit something that is identifiable as ‘reality.’

Video as performance and as ritual Another bullet cracks the silence, not remarkably different from those that have preceded it. But this time a cry goes up in response. The forward movement of the crowd halts, and then reverses. From among the drab winter jackets a head appears jutting out horizontally, soused in bright red blood. Men gather around him to acclaim him as a martyr, while his body is lifted up and carried away – whether in the hope of saving what remains of his life, or to remove him out of reach of an enemy whose instinct would doubtless be to confiscate his corpse, conceal his identity, and thus deprive him of due mourning and burial.

122  Peter Snowdon

Figure 7.1  F  ilming the blood of Ali Talha. Souk Al-Jumaa, Libya, 27 February 2011.  Still frame from YouTube.7

The camera follows the body of the martyr for a while. And then, for some reason that is not immediately made clear to us, it stops, turns, and begins to retrace its steps. It is not that it has lost interest in the fate of the man, in what will be done to his body. But there is something else that is calling out to be filmed, something that is as or more insistent, more urgent, than this body. The camera turns its eyes to the ground, and starts to trace the trail of blood left by the body’s passage. As the man’s comrades scour his crumpled jacket for some indication of his identity, his name, the camera follows this erratic spattering of lines, blotches, dots and pools of red, back towards its origin, towards the place at which he fell (Figure 7.1). Ali Mohammed Talha was murdered by the Libyan security forces as he marched through the Souk al-Jumaa neighbourhood of Tripoli after prayers on 25 February 2011. The sequence of images I have described above form the last minute of a five-minute video that captures the lead-up to and immediate aftermath of his death. These images condense in a particularly powerful way a number of elements that together constitute a trope that is to be found in many videos across the vernacular ‘anarchive’ of the Arab revolutions8 – the trope of filming the martyr’s blood. There are many ways we could seek to explain this persistent, even obsessive practice of filming the blood rather than the man himself. We might dismiss it as an irrational (and more than slightly macabre) ­after-effect of shock. We could reduce it to the expression of a kind of empirical pragmatic incredulity (‘Is he really dead? How come the bullet hit him, and not me?’). Or we could reformat it as an exaggerated expression of the impulse to document, in which blood is reduced to a metonymy for murder. These interpretations fail, however, to account for the

The Proper Name of Our Dispossession  123 apparent regularity of that impulse. They also do their best to void these images of their experiential, sensory, and formal density. Viewed from this angle, the materiality and sensuality of blood evaporate, along with the larger part of its lived meanings. The initial opacity of these images thus becomes a convenient pretext for erecting explanations – whether psychological, sociological, or anthropological – on top of them, in order to absolve us of the need to really look at them. In this essay, I would like to consider such videos of the martyrs’ blood not as outliers which have little to tell us about the main body of the vernacular anarchive, but as being among these revolutions’ most emblematic, and most tangible traces – eloquent even in their insistent muteness. To do so, I will begin by looking more closely at the bare gestural outline of this trope, as exemplified by the closing moments of the video described above. I want to try and isolate its character as physical performance on the part of the filmer, before specifying the peculiarly cinematic forms which this performance induces.9 A human being is violently deprived of life. His body is immediately transported away from the place of his murder, in such a way that it leaves behind a trace in the form of a line marked out on the ground. This trace is left by his blood – that is, by an element commonly understood within many semiotic systems to contain the deceased’s life force.10 We understand these marks as blood, even when we do not see him bleeding, not only from our folk knowledge of physiology and our awareness of the likely manner of his death, but also from the colour of the line, including the way in which it may rapidly discolour; from its liquid, sometimes iridescent, surface texture; and the asymmetrical, often discontinuous, figures that it draws. Confronted with this sight, another human being – who is holding a camera – chooses to retrace the path that the body took when it made these marks on the ground, following the line of blood back towards its ‘source.’ The resulting video is a series of moving images; but it is also the record of a performance. In making this performance, the cameraperson has effected the same journey as the body of the martyr, but in ­reverse. In doing so, he11 simultaneously identifies with the deceased, and symbolically reverses the trajectory that led from the instant of death towards the grave. By retracing his path back towards the place (the moment) at which the martyr died, the filmer becomes a surrogate for the deceased himself, performing in his place a kind of symbolic return to life. The direction in which the camera moves thus has significance, because it deliberately contradicts the temporality of the dying body. Indeed, given the topography of street fighting, this movement is tantamount to repeating the path followed by the martyr while he was still alive – that is, towards the frontline, the place where rocks, bullets, and bodies meet.

124  Peter Snowdon The relationship between the filmer and the blood that this movement constructs is expressive of a kind of mutual fascination. On the one hand, the blood of the martyr seems to exercise some sort of hold over the filmer’s desire to look, a hold that exists independently of the presence of the martyr (supposing we continue to identify him with the body that has now been taken away). And on the other hand, the camera seems to behave as if it were in turn endowed with a kind of power over the blood of the martyr, and thus over the martyr himself. It is as if, by retracing the path left by his blood, the camera were able, if not to bring him back to life, then at least to temporarily arrest and staunch the flow of time that is carrying him inexorably forward into the realm of death. Through this performance, then, the camera seeks to reverse time. But this gesture is also a form of repetition. As such, it constitutes a first step towards the ritualisation of this short sequence of events that immediately follows upon the moment of the martyr’s death. By repeating them, albeit in reverse, the filmer, and the film he makes, designate them as repeatable by others. That is, he defines them not as a unique and arbitrary sequence of events that occurred at one time and at one time only, but as a model of behaviour, a set of instructions for action. By repeating them in their turn, whether with their bodies in the street, or in their imaginations as they watch them on the screen, those who value the martyr and his self-sacrifice can choose to identify themselves with him, and thus draw close to him. By following the trail of his blood – and/or by watching the video made by the cameraperson who carries out these actions on our behalf – we model our movements (real or imagined) on those of the filmer, and of the martyr before him. And through this repetition of another’s gestures, we take on ourselves both the symbolic refusal of the martyr’s death, and the commitment to really die like him should the revolution require it. By watching this video in which the filmer retraces the steps the martyr himself can no longer take, we too prepare ourselves to step into his absence. Not only to risk our lives as he did, but to take that risk for him, so to speak.12

A stone river of blood The ritual nature of such performances, and of the images they produce, are eloquently embodied in a short video uploaded in December 2011 by the Cairo-based revolutionary video collective Mosireen. This video is an act of homage to the martyr Mohammed Mustafa, also known as Karika, a member of the Ultras Ahlawy, who was shot dead on Qasr ­A l-Ainy street just off Tahrir Square on 20 December 2011. His death came during the period of struggle known as the Cabinet Clashes, in which 17 people died over five days, and almost a thousand were wounded (Figure 7.2).13

The Proper Name of Our Dispossession  125

Figure 7.2  Keeping vigil around the blood of the martyr Karika. Cairo, Egypt, 20 December 2011.  Still frame from YouTube.14

Karika’s death deeply affected his fellow Ultras, and seems to have played a pivotal role in determining the group’s politicisation.15 In this video, we see how revolutionaries chose to ‘frame’ the blood left on the ground as Karika was carried away. In the aftermath of his death, they surrounded this trace on both sides with an unbroken line of stones – stones very like the ones they were throwing in their confrontations with the security forces who killed him. In doing so, they used the instruments of their struggle, of their own ‘violence,’ to defend the ground that his blood had touched against encroachment. In creating a boundary between the space that was thus marked out and the remainder of the square outside it, they symbolically reasserted those much larger lines of defence through which they were redefining the forms and meanings of their city. In the video, the filmer tracks the line defined by the blood and the stones that mark it out, starting at one end, and continuing almost (but not quite) to the other. As he walks along, the lens pointed downwards at the ground, we see people standing or seated on either side at irregular intervals, as if they had come to pay homage to the deceased, or simply to meditate upon this anonymous and unintelligible mark into which some part of his being would seem to have passed.16 We hear political chants rise up from the crowd behind the filmer, and catch snatches of passing conversation. At one point, we see two revolutionaries who are holding up blood-stained kuffiyehs (their own? or those of comrades who have fallen?) as they might have held flags or placards to line a procession or a demonstration. When the camera arrives at a knot of men engaged in conversation from one side of the line to the other, it hesitates for a moment, and then the recording abruptly stops.

126  Peter Snowdon The importance of this short video is not adequately measured by the 9,799 views it had registered on YouTube as of 29 October 2017. For a start, extracts from it reappear in a number of other Mosireen videos. In particular, an extended quotation from this video provides the climax to Four Days of Death in December (77,611 views as of the same date), a short film about the Cabinet Clashes uploaded on 21 December 2011.17 In this montage, the sequence is preceded by footage of a young woman giving an impassioned speech while she holds up a small piece of white cloth stained with the blood of a martyr, who is not identified. The excerpt from the video of Karika’s dried blood is then shown – reformatted, slowed down, and without any sync sound – while the names of the martyrs of the previous four days are superimposed in Arabic script upon the image. The importance of this video for Omar Robert Hamilton, the member of Mosireen who made it, can also be sensed from the way in which it is translated and reimagined in his 2017 novel The City Always Wins. The novel explores the inexorable decline and fall of the Egyptian revolution as seen through the eyes of a group of media activists who call themselves the Chaos Collective. On 19 December 2011 (in the novel’s fictional chronology), Hamilton’s main character Khalil describes an action of his own that seems to be closely modelled on the author’s performance in making the video described above, though in Khalil’s case it occurs without the mediation of the camera: A stone river of blood drags through the asphalt of Tahrir. On its banks the mourners. The stain of a life slipping away. He walks silently along it. The square is empty now, dark and cold. This new battle has been long. Khalil follows the bloodline, follows the careful stones lining this new holiness. This must be where the bleeding began, the dark heat in the center of the square. They attacked in the afternoon, bullets racing ahead of men in body armor. This must be where he fell. He sees the men heaving a young body between them, sees clothes heavy with blood, the police giving chase. The death leads north. The square is silent now. They will attack again soon. Khalil sits down carefully on the ground next to a woman in a doctor’s coat. All along the bloodline are men, women, young boys sitting cross-legged on the banks with heads in hands and tears in eyes. ‘Who was this?’ he asks quietly, without looking at her. ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘Did he survive?’ Khalil asks. ‘I don’t know.’18 In this passage, Khalil’s actions are explicitly described so as to produce one of the key effects of the trope I have defined above, namely,

The Proper Name of Our Dispossession  127 the reversal of the temporal sequence of death. Khalil advances until he arrives first at the point ‘where the bleeding began,’ and then (if it is indeed a different place) at the point ‘where he fell,’ And when he gets there, it is as though the past suddenly opens up before him: without warning, he is no longer seeing the traces that are there in front of him that night, but the actual murder of the martyr – who here is left unnamed – as he imagines it must have taken place earlier that day. In this case, it is not Khalil who is creating a ritual, he simply participates in one that has already been established, and whose contours have been laid out on the ground. The required gestures are defined, not only by the trail of blood itself, but above all by the stones that frame it, thus adding a layer of more explicit human intentionality to the site. In doing so, they construe the spilled blood metaphorically, for Khalil at least, as a river – that is, not only as a liquid that is still moving, still ‘alive,’ but also as a movement that is channelled in a certain direction – even though the act of framing it also serves, on another level, to immobilise it in the present.19 The metaphor of the river is, of course, a commonplace. But it also connects this passage very directly to the chapter immediately preceding in which Khalil remembers a night during the 18 days (the initial phase of the uprising that led to the ouster of Mubarak). On that night, Khalil had walked alone along the river Nile, observing the long-absent bats which had, inexplicably, chosen that moment to reappear above its banks. Their return is interpreted by Khalil as a harbinger of the success of the revolution, confirming ‘the new world, the unthinkable happening around us.’20 And this prefiguration of triumph – ‘the people united … the bats set free’ – ­immediately calls up in his mind the ­tutelary figure of Mohammed Bouazizi, whose self-immolation in Tunisia in December 2010 sparked the whole revolutionary sequence that then unfurled across the region. Remembering how he had strained his hand out over the river towards the invisible presence of the bats, Khalil addresses Bouazizi directly, dedicating not only his own work to him, but the whole revolution: ‘This is all for you,’ he tells the absent-and-yet-present martyr. ‘Everything, now, is for you.’21 The transition from the bats above the river to Bouazizi suggests a connection that will only be made explicit at the very end of the novel. There, Khalil moves towards a provisional resolution of his struggle with the meaning and purpose of martyrdom. The bats cut through the air around me like an innocent. I think, sometimes, that our martyrs live their second lives in them, the bats, the true inheritors of the city. Khaled, Mina, Bassem, Toussi, Ali, Nadine, Michael, Mohamed, Shaimaa, Gika, Ayman, Hafez, Essam, Mahmoud, Karika, Mohab, Ramadan, and you, Doctor, whose name I’ll never know – sonic perfections unseen around us through the night. 22

128  Peter Snowdon The blood of Karika is not only an offering to the Egyptian revolution, then; it is also part of a much larger engagement with the seemingly endless chain of mutual obligation opened across the region (and beyond) by Bouazizi’s act of self-sacrifice. And the river – both the real river at the heart of the city, and the ‘stone river of blood’ that the martyr and his mourners have together created at the heart of Tahrir Square – is the liminal zone of the revolutionary process, the place where the dead and the living meet.

The impulse to touch To film blood so directly, so obsessively, and then to post the resulting footage online for everyone to see, might seem like a provocation. Not only is human blood often culturally constructed as impure or taboo, but it is also hard to imagine a more intensely haptic image, or – to be more precise – one that more strongly underlines the distance, and thus the desire, that would seem to separate looking from touching. 23 The sight of blood may forcefully elicit not only the desire to touch (sometimes so strongly that it must be masked as a movement of avoidance or repulsion), but also the memory of our own blood as we have seen and felt it emerge from our bodies – in menstruation and childbirth, in the case of injury, or during medical intervention. And in a society in which people live more closely with animals, and in which the act of slaughtering them is more intimately integrated with daily life, physical contact with some sort of blood is likely for many a common occurrence, and one not directly experienced as repulsive or threatening. The direct association of blood with touch – through the act of touching the blood of the other – can be seen in many videos in the vernacular an archive. Such touching may of course be involuntary, as in the numberless videos in which revolutionaries find themselves and their clothes spattered with the blood of those who have died around them. But there are also moments when the filmer captures a sudden impulse to touch the blood of the other directly, and so to literalise metaphorical expressions such as ‘the blood of the martyrs is on us’ (i.e. we must carry it until they have their rights, until justice has been done to them). Thus, in one particularly violent video from Yemen, filmed during the Friday of Dignity massacre in Sanaa on 18 March 2011 in which at least 45 protesters were murdered, 24 a man is felled by a single shot just to the right of the cameraman. We do not see the bullet strike him, but we hear the report, and almost immediately the filmer spins round to film him where he lies on the ground. The martyr is rapidly carried away by a group of comrades, whereupon a young man who had been standing, naked to the waist, just behind him, bends down and presses both his hands into the pool of blood that has been left on the ground. After a moment, he raises his right hand that is now covered in blood and gesticulates with it, as if to signify to us, or to himself, a complex emotion lying somewhere between grief, disbelief, and refusal (Figure 7.3). 25

The Proper Name of Our Dispossession  129

Figure 7.3  Touching the blood of the martyr, Sanaa, Yemen, 18 March 2011. Still frame from YouTube. 26

Tactile gestures such as these might seem to be the antithesis of the act of image-making, which is built on a distance between the lens and its object. Yet I think these videos also clearly express an acute (if inarticulate) awareness of the camera, the filmer, and the act of filming as being just as precariously embodied, and just as irrefutably material, as the blood that fills these images, even as it remains just out of reach. And this desire to reach out and touch the lifeblood of the martyr for oneself, to connect with his ‘bloodline,’ seems to be registered by the filmer too, despite the distance that inevitably separates him from the object that he films. Whence another particularly poignant type of image, exemplified by the closing seconds of the video of Ali Talha’s death, in which it is not someone else’s hand, but the shadow of the filmer himself that falls across the blood of the martyr where it lies on the ground, thus appearing to enter into some sort of ‘contact’ with it. 27 In videos such as these, it is as if through his shadow, the filmer could touch the martyr’s blood by proxy, imprinting his own image on it, and taking its colour on himself. In this fictional moment of contact between an immaterial form and an all-too material substance, we see a new bond being formed between the living and the dead – a bond that cannot be produced by blood alone, but which emerges from the tension established in these moments between the blood itself and the image of the blood made by the camera.

‘Everyone in Tahrir is Ahmed’ Ahmed Sorour died in Cairo on 26 November 2011, run over by a Central Security vehicle during the sit-in that preceded the Cabinet Clashes. In a video produced the next day by the Mosireen collective, his

130  Peter Snowdon mother is filmed as she sits outside the Zeinhoum morgue. Addressing the cameras of both independent television channels and video activists, she insists that they film the blood-stained shirt of her son, which another woman holds up for them to see. Then she launches into a long recitative: They shot him with bullets and ran over him. They shot him. Go Hussein Tantawi, and see. Go and see, you who say they are not shooting anyone. See what is happening to Egypt’s sons, what is happening to the youth. They have been thrown in the garbage. Our children have been run over and thrown in the garbage. Our children have been run over by the Central Security vehicles. But God is my compensation. Every one of them in Tahrir is Ahmed. Every one in Tahrir is Ahmed, and Ahmed’s blood will not be lost as long as they are in Tahrir. As long as they hold their ground. I will say Ahmed’s blood is lost when they leave. If they kneel before them, then my son’s blood is lost. As long as they stand firm, my son is alive. My son’s blood will not be wasted. Every one of you is Ahmed. Every one of them is Ahmed. Every girl is Ahmed. Every boy is Ahmed. They’ve all become Ahmed. Ahmed was just one. Now everyone in Tahrir is Ahmed. And they will get his right [avenge his death]. I swear to God they will get his right. God will not abandon his right, God will not let them get away with it.28 Many viewers of this video will be familiar with the campaigning trope ‘We are X’ (whether X is Neda or Charlie or some other equally improbable identification we are invited to assume). But there are at least two significant differences in the way Ahmed Sorour’s mother seeks to implicate others in her son’s struggle. First, it is not any distant sympathiser who is being invited to make this claim, to self-identify as Ahmed. Rather, it is the mother of the martyr who asserts that there is one specific group of people – the revolutionaries gathered in Tahrir Square – who are (whether they know it or not) her son. She chooses who is worthy to be so called, and in doing so, she inducts them into her family – make them part of her ‘bloodline,’ so to speak.29 This identification with her son is further conditioned on the fact that in order to be worthy, those summoned to this identity must be ‘in the square,’ and they must remain there until his death has been avenged. This means that ‘being Ahmed’ is conditional on fighting for Ahmed’s rights through actions that inevitably expose one’s body to the same kind of state violence that had just caused his death. The identification called for, then, is not an empty gesturing towards empathy from a safe distance, but the physical assumption of the same position he had occupied, and of all the very real vulnerability that this entails. In this video, the blood of the martyr thus becomes associated with the re-naming of the people – or at least, of that segment of them who are assembled in the square (or who are called to the square by being

The Proper Name of Our Dispossession  131 exposed to the sight of his blood and addressed by his mother’s voice, when she insists on the viewer’s responsibility as viewer: ‘Every one of you is Ahmed’). Just as she herself has been renamed by giving birth to him, thus becoming known not by the names given to her by her parents or her husband, but simply as Umm Ahmed (‘mother of Ahmed’), so the revolutionaries who follow the martyr are also renamed: they are now ‘Ahmed,’ too. This trope of naming in the blood of the martyr is restaged even more directly (if symbolically) in a short video from the early days of the ­Syrian revolution. The camera tracks around a group of young boys whose faces are never revealed to us. Across their torsos and their backs are painted a series of words in bright red, in homage to Hamza Al-­ Khateeb, a 13 year-old boy who was tortured to death while in the custody of the security forces in Deraa in May 2011. 30 On each of their bodies, along with a revolutionary slogan expressing their willingness to die if necessary, is written (Figure 7.4): ‘We are all Hamza.’ The same conjunction of symbolic blood with the proper name recurs again at the end of the Mosireen video, Martyrs of the Egyptian Revolution, first uploaded on 1 December 2011. After a seven-minute montage of scenes of violent confrontation and death spanning the previous ten months, the video cuts to an edited version of Umm Ahmed’s speech outside the Zeinhoum morgue. After about one minute, as Umm Ahmed is affirming that all the revolutionaries in Tahrir ‘are Ahmed,’ the video cuts again to an aerial shot of the square taken at night. The image is packed solid with the bodies of countless protesters, a visual synecdoche for the many more we assume to be filling the space beyond the limits of the frame. Their mass is traversed diagonally by a long ribbon of

Figure 7.4  W  e are all Hamza: location unknown, Syria, 3 June 2011. Still frame from YouTube. 31

132  Peter Snowdon material that is more or less recognisable as the Egyptian flag, though the lower black border tends to merge with the crowd, so what we see is essentially an extended, seemingly endless double line of red and white. As Umm Ahmed continues to assert that the revolutionaries in Tahrir will get justice for her son, a long credit roll unfurls across the scene, using three columns of small type to name every revolutionary who had died up till that date, including many who remain ‘unidentified.’ The full roll call lasts for an unbearably long time (almost three minutes). During all that time, the bodies in the square continue to walk, or to stand still, and the long river of colour that divides and connects them continues to billow and vibrate under the touch of their hands. Seen in this context, ranged behind the names of the martyrs, and surrounded by the numberless bodies of those who ‘are’ the martyrs – who have become part of their extended ‘family,’ who are now ‘all Ahmed’ – the colours of the flag seem less a symbol of the nation state, than of the new kind of imaginary community that is in formation there – a community that is inclusive, horizontally-defined, self-disciplined, and ungovernable. The red which was intended by the flag’s designers to symbolise the historic struggle against the monarchy and the British occupation now becomes the mark of the people’s ongoing struggle against the Egyptian army and its neo-colonial regime. This slightly-oblique top shot does not try to show us the people geometrically framed and thus safely contained within the square, as so many of the iconic media images of Tahrir Square do. Instead, by revealing them as a borderless assemblage whose constant pulsation animates, and in turn is animated by, the red-and-white line running through them (which is all that is left of their former national flag), this shot offers us a visual equivalent of what Mohammed Bamyeh hailed, at least during their earlier and more optimistic phases, as the ‘new patriotism’ of the Arab revolutions – a patriotism which differs from the old patriotism of the nation state in that it exists only in so far as it is ‘articulated from below and meeting no echo from above.’32

Martyrdom as the suspension of sovereignty At one point in The City Always Wins, the young lawyer Malik describes the Egyptian revolution not as a class war, but as a struggle between the young and the old.33 But it would, perhaps, be more accurate to describe it as a struggle between the biopolitics of the State, its administrative symbiosis of abstraction, calculation and violence, on the one hand, and the concrete, lived experience of solidarity and justice that unites revolutionary activists to the people on the other – what Khalil describes as their ‘networks of trust and consolation and revolution.’34 For, as both Ayman El-Desouky and Mohammed Bamyeh have argued, these revolutions were never reducible to a series of abstract demands, but

The Proper Name of Our Dispossession  133 remained instead obstinately rooted in vernacular forms of embodied relationship and reciprocity that no political or administrative ‘reason’ can ever replace.35 The possibility of such an implicate social order is entirely dependent upon the creation and defence of spaces – physical, affective, and ­intellectual – which can exist outside the State and its logic of governance that reduces the people to a measurable, countable ‘population.’ The persistence of the martyrs – like the return of so many other spirits and ghosts – is an insurrection against this vision of the world that denies even the possibility of a genuinely liveable form of life. That is why most of the revolutionaries in Hamilton’s novel have so little time for electoral politics: they know it is those among the living who line up to be counted who are really ‘dead,’ who are really to be pitied. The martyrs, on the other hand, inhabit a familiar zone of indistinction where what matters cannot be calculated, and where death and life are no longer experienced as simply opposed to one another. The images of blood that I have discussed in this essay are the embodiment of just such a relationality. And in them, that blood itself is never alone, but is always in relationship – to the camera, to the person who follows its line on the ground (or on the screen), and to the revolutionaries who keep vigil around it. The bloodline functions here not simply as an index of empirical death, or as a metaphor for some fusional imaginary order, but as a figural opacity that exists ‘beyond recognition,’36 but nevertheless demands that we bear witness to it. In doing so, the line of blood defeats all our attempts to identify it, to reduce its matter and its sensuality to a signification, and to use it to divide the living from the dead. As such these images take their place in a chain of revolutionary pedagogy which translates them beyond the historical and geographical ­ urio boundaries of their immediate occasion, as a point of access to what F Jesi called the ‘double Sophia’ – that wisdom which suspends all those binary categories that would separate life from death, men from monsters, and the continuity of history from the epiphanic irruption of revolt. Just as we need to learn to see that the moment of revolt does not oppose, but joins its own power of interruption to the linear time of history, so we have to learn to see how life would be entirely powerless without death: Death, that eternal present in which the mythic instant is immobilized, allows man to internalize the inorganic matter out of which he is composed. So death also presides over that moment when the inorganic components of man, during or after putrefaction, separate from one another so as to contract new relationships. 37 It is in this sense that these images can ground a new kind of collectivity. By releasing us from the residual fantasy of a fusional identity that lurks within the apparatus of capture of the state (whether democratic or

134  Peter Snowdon totalitarian), they can help us to avoid delegitimising our own force, and thus rendering ourselves up to its violence as willing – and virtuous – victims. Rather than identifying the martyrs of these revolutions as heroes who are inevitably also victims, these images of blood disidentify them, suspending their sovereignty both over themselves, and over us. In doing so, they open them up to the possibility of forms of relationship previously unimagined, and thus transform them into something new and strange: ‘the proper name of our common dispossession.’38

Notes 1 This text was written as part of the ‘Resistance-by-Recording’ project based at the Department of Media Studies (IMS), Stockholm University. The research was made possible by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond Reference No. P14-0562:1. Thanks to Kari Andén-Papadopoulos for her support for my work during the year I was a member of the project. All translations from the Arabic are by Yasmine Zeid, who also provided research assistance, and engaged me in illuminating discussions around the topics raised. I am deeply grateful to her, as I am to Karolina Majewska, Samah Selim, Laura ­Waddington and Mark Westmoreland who shared their comments on the draft text with me, and to Omar Robert Hamilton for graciously answering my questions about both Mosireen’s work and his own writing. Any remaining infelicities or errors are my own doing. All online videos and documents were accessed on 29 October 2017. 2 Mohammed Rabie, Otared. Translated by Robin Moger (Cairo and New York: Hoopoe, 2016), 1. 3 Mosireen, ‘Revolution Triptych,’ in Uncommon Grounds: New Media and Critical Practices in North Africa and the Middle East, Anthony Downey (ed.), (London and New York: IB Tauris and Ibraaz, 2014), 50. 4 Edward Ziter, ‘The Image of the Martyr in Syrian Performance and Web Activism,’ TDR: The Drama Review, 57.1 (2013, Spring), 130. 5 Cécile Boëx, ‘Figures remixées des martyrs de la révolte en Syrie sur ­YouTube. Réinterprétations politiques et innovations mémorielles,’ Archives des sciences sociales du religieux, 181 (Janvier-mars 2018), 95–118. Boëx suggests that it may be the martyrs themselves who are imagined as the ultimate audience for these videos, in default of any other. 6 Throughout, I use the first-person plural pronoun for the function of the viewer. In doing so, I hope to disengage the readings of these videos offered here both from my own personal reactions, and from those that might be imputed to any empirical sociological group. The function of the viewer may be assumed provisionally by anyone – including those who are figured in the video – and its privileges are precarious, just as its boundaries are uncertain and porous. The sense of these videos as an open invitation to any viewer to become more than just a viewer further positions this category as performative rather than descriptive, and provisional rather than essentializing. 7 Protest in Souq Al Jumma – Tripoli. Video uploaded by 17 February Revolution on 27 February 2011. Available online at www.youtube.com/ watch?v=RdlBRgi0BFc. 8 I use the term ‘anarchive’ to refer to the way in which the videos uploaded by revolutionaries from across the Arab region during this period compose less a hierarchical database than a sort of horizontally organized ‘temporary

The Proper Name of Our Dispossession  135 autonomous zone’ within the YouTube infrastructure. For more on this point: see Peter Snowdon, Seeing as the People (London and New York: Verso, forthcoming). 9 For a close reading of the whole of this particular video which anticipates, but does not include, the arguments made here: see Peter Snowdon, ‘The Revolution Will be Uploaded: Vernacular Video and the Arab Spring,’ Culture Unbound, 6 (2014), 401–29. 10 For an introduction to the cross-cultural complexity of blood and its associations: see Anne Stamm, ‘L’ambivalence du sang, symbole de vie, symbole de mort,’ Mémoires de l’Académie nationale de Metz, 171.7 (1990), 157–64. 11 Since the filmers of most or all of the videos discussed in this chapter would seem to be men, I use the masculine pronoun throughout. We should not forget that women filmed extensively during these revolutions, including in situations of violent confrontation; nor should we forget the heavily gendered nature of martyrdom. 12 For the idea of watching violent videos as a form of training procedure for political activists: see Maple John Razsa, ‘Beyond “Riot Porn:” Protest Video and the Production of Unruly Subjects,’ Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, 79.4 (2014), 496–524. 13 For background on the Cabinet Clashes: see Amnesty International, Brutally Unpunished and Unchecked. Egypt’s Military Kill and Torture Protesters with Impunity (London: Amnesty International, 2012), 17–22; I am grateful to Omar Robert Hamilton who made this video for clarifying for me the uncertainties caused by initial reports (later proved erroneous) that the blood in question was that of the martyr Rami Hamdi, who also died on the same day. 14 The Blood of the martyr Mohamed Mustafa 20.12.2012. (Title in Arabic). Video uploaded by Mosireen on 19 December 2011. Available online at www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0qJpSEMjAE. 15 Carl Rommel, ‘Respectable Rebels? Class, Martyrdom and Cairo’s Revolutionary Ultras,’ Middle East – Topics & Arguments, 6 (2016), 33–42. 16 This keeping vigil may also be a form of standing guard, of protecting these traces of Karika’s presence from being profaned by the forces of the regime. I am grateful to Mark Westmoreland for suggesting this intepretation to me. 17 Further evidence of this resonance can be found in an article by the novelist Ahdaf Soueif in which she singles out this passage when commenting on an early edit of Four Days of Death in December: ‘Egypt’s revolution has carved its path to parliament,’ The Guardian, 24 January 2012, available online at www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jan/24/egypts-revolution-­ parliament-ahdaf-soueif. Subsequently, a shorter extract also appeared in the video Egypt’s Military-Industrial Complex Exposed uploaded on 12 February 2012 by the revolutionary artist Aalam Wassef, and available ­online at vimeo.com/36636220. Both Soueif and Wassef misidentify the blood as belonging to Rami Hamdi. 18 Omar Robert Hamilton, The City Always Wins (London: Faber, 2017), 89–90. 19 Compare Evan Calder Williams’ reading of these images in Shard Cinema (London: Repeater Books, 2017), 320–23, where he argues that they uncover the existence of forms of “composition” – of images, and of struggles – that might be able to disarm the sort of capital-intensive “compositing” that is the point of departure for his larger argument in this book. 20 Hamilton, The City Always Wins, 88. 21 Idem.

136  Peter Snowdon 22 Ibid, 303. 23 On the relationship between the sight of blood and the desire to touch – as mediated in this case by the act of painting – see Georges Didi-Huberman, La Peinture incarnée (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1985). 24 Human Rights Watch, ‘Unpunished Massacre. Yemen’s Failed Response to the “Friday of Dignity” Killings,’ 12 February 2013. Available online at www.hrw.org/report/2013/02/12/unpunished-massacre/ yemens-failed-response-friday-dignity-killings. 25 Compare the gesture of the man filmed on the night of Karika’s murder, when he holds up his blood-soaked hand to the camera as he recites what he has just witnessed to a reporter from the Egyptian newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm (video available online at www.youtube.com/watch?v=B406R3Da5gU). I am grateful to Omar Robert Hamilton for pointing me towards this video. 26 Friday of Dignity Massacre in Change Square, Yemen: 13. (Title in Arabic). Video uploaded to YouTube by wewanttobefree1 on 3 June 2011. Available online at www.youtube.com/watch?v=usnmbXfLyok. 27 Compare the image of the cameraman’s shadow falling across a pool of blood in a video posted on 15 July 2011 by SYRIANMARCH and discussed by Cécile Boëx in op. cit. The video in question is now archived on Boëx’s Vimeo channel at vimeo.com/226279002. 28 This translation covers the first half of the video only. A lightly “fictionalized” version of these words is attributed to the character Umm Ayman in Hamilton's novel: see Hamilton, The City Always Wins, 52. The original YouTube video is available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7Twft4trYE. 29 There also exists a video following the trail of blood left by Ahmed Sorour as his body was recovered, available online at transterramedia.com/ media /2070 -blood-of-the-martyr-ahmed-sorour-att-the-council-of-­ ministers-in-cairo. The moment of his murder is recorded in two videos published on the Mosireen channel, available here: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Lt5cpdADWUk&bpctr=1507996385, and here: www.youtube. com/watch?v=URGkk8K2NEM). 30 Hugh Macleod and Annasofie Flamand, ‘Tortured and killed: Hamza al-Khateeb, age 13,’ Al-Jazeera English, 31 May 2011. Available online at www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2011/05/201153185927813389.html. 31 WEAREALLHAMZA. Video uploaded to YouTube on 4 June 2011, and subsequently deleted. Archived on my Vimeo channel at vimeo.com/ 238744098. 32 Mohammed Bamyeh, ‘Arab Revolutions and the Making of a New Patriotism,’ Orient, III (2011), 6, my emphasis. 33 Hamilton, The City Always Wins, 54. 34 Ibid., 35. 35 Ayman Al-Desouky, The Intellectual and the People in Egyptian Literature and Culture: Amāra and the 2011 Revolution (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Mohammed A. Bamyeh, ‘Anarchist Method, Liberal Intention, Authoritarian Lesson: The Arab Spring between Three Enlightenments,’ Constellations, 20.2 (2013), 188–202. 36 Kelly Oliver, Witnessing. Beyond Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). 37 Furio Jesi, Spartakus. Symbolique de la révolte. Translated by Fabien V ­ allos and Antoine Dufeu (Bordeaux: Editions de la Tempête, 2016), 234, my translation from the French. 38 Comité Invisible, A nos amis (Paris: Editions La Fabrique, 2014), 41, my translation.

8 ‘Needs to Be Done’ The Representation of Torture in Video Games and in Metal Gear Solid V Ivan Girina Introduction In 2013, Hideo Kojima presented the trailer of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, which portrayed multiple characters enduring torture and physical violence within the fictional military and political context that, together with its stealth game mechanics, became the franchise signature. In the wake of similar controversies surrounding the inclusion of playable torture sequences in other games, the media and the specialised press strongly reacted to the contents of The Phantom Pain trailer. Kojima responded to the accusations on the exploitative nature of these images by stressing their importance for the expressive growth of the medium. Crucial to the journalists’ concern and in Kojima’s apologetic reply was the exclusion of any playable element in The Phantom Pain’s torture sequences. By analysing the torture cut-scenes in relation to the interrogation game mechanics in which Snake, the protagonist, uses torture techniques to retrieve intel from the enemies, the chapter complicates the controversial understanding of the representation of torture offered by the trailer. Fundamental to this is the contextualisation of the procedural rhetoric of the game within the poetics developed by Kojima throughout the MG franchise. Drawing from Elaine Scarry’s seminal work on this topic, I propose a reading of The Phantom Pain that short-circuits its initial exploitative lure. Emerging from this analysis is the critical place of agency in the game, which interrogates the role of the player in relation to both the representation of torture and the overarching military epic.

‘Needs to Be Done’ At E3 20131 Hideo Kojima presented the trailer of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.2 While the game had previously been introduced to the media at similar industry events,3 here Kojima offered a longer look on his work to the public, displaying extended gameplay sequences and revealing the game’s Cold War geopolitical setting during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Following E3, an extended ‘Red

138  Ivan Girina Banned’ version4 of the trailer was released online, containing unseen footage from the cut-scenes5 which provided insights on the story and characters featuring in the fifth chapter of the franchise. The trailer was met with strong reactions among the specialised press who commented on the gross and brutal nature of its imagery, questioning the ethical character of its contents.6 Of particular interest were the first three minutes of the latest trailer featuring ‘several scenes containing graphic torture and violence,’ in which a woman and two men are tortured in the context of military imprisonment, using electrocution, batons, and water boarding.7 The first torture sequence opens on a soldier operating a charging cell. The camera pans over two cables connected to metallic rods, generating sparkles and smoke on contact. Composition and editing emphasise the threatening nature of the tools, anticipating the initiation of the torture sequence and, consequently, the experience of pain. The experience of pain is thus extended in time through a display of the tools associated with it, foretelling its exaction. These images are further complicated by the subject under interrogation: a barely-dressed woman whose face is covered by a black bag as she is being tortured by a group of male soldiers. Later in the trailer the character is revealed to be Quiet, a sniper soldier who, after attempting to kill the protagonist, Venom Snake, joins ranks and becomes part of his PMC (Private Military Company), Diamond Dogs.8 Together with the controversial torture trope, the sexualised portrayal of Quiet was a matter of concern to the press with regard to the representation of women offered by the game, anticipating the accusations of misogyny faced by the video game industry since Gamergate in 2014.9 The camera frames Quiet tied to a chair, her clothing comprised of a leather bra and gloves, worn out stockings, and military boots. A masked soldier approaches Quiet, pointing two metal batons directly to her chest, electrocuting her and causing her body to shake in convulsions. The camera pans down, seemingly censoring the image of pain, only to then reveal her feet spasmodically tapping against the floor before returning to the initial framing. Adding to the problematic character of these images is their spectacular quality. As a red light fills the interrogation room, the use of lens flare effects and the presence of luminous refractions against her overexposed skin imbue these images with gloss and plasticity, producing a sensuous experience for the viewer. The spectacle of the tortured body is, in fact, informed by the digital nature of these artefacts and invites the viewer to engage in a sensual ‘surface play’ characteristic of digital imagery.10 While the sexualisation of the character aggravates the sequence, the sensuous engagement with these images becomes a crucial instance to make visible the problematic structure of power embedded in Quiet’s torture scene, requesting the interrogation of their politics and the role of the player in The Phantom Pain. Also, in the second and third torture sequences the victims have their face covered by

‘Needs to Be Done’  139 a black plastic bag: while the first one is beaten up with a rifle and then shot to death in a military camp reminiscent of Guantanamo, the second undergoes waterboarding in an interrogation room.11 The covered face of the three victims is an important signifier of the power relations that are central to the structure of torture. This image literalises what Elaine Scarry terms, in her seminal investigation of The Body in Pain, the ‘inexpressibility of physical pain,’12 also negating on a visual level the victim’s gaze, consequently placing both the torturer and the spectator in a safe position. In feminist theorist Laura Mulvey’s terms, the gaze of the viewer spectates the event, as that of a voyeur who cannot be looked back at and cannot be seen.13 But the viewer’s positioning in pre-recorded material from the game does not reflect the status of the player. There is a divide between the experience of the trailer and that of the game which mirrors the difference between spectator and player. In his account on the nature of cybertexts, Espen Aarseth highlights the distinction between the pleasure of linear media and that of ergodic (from the Greek έργον: ‘work’ and οδός: ‘path’) texts: the ‘risk of rejection.’14 Aarseth notices that, unlike films and books, video games can be failed, as they require from the player a non-trivial effort to be traversed (Figures 8.1 and 8.2). As from its title, The Phantom Pain is explicitly invested in the confrontation with sufferance. The game goes as far as to provocatively play with its incommunicability, particularly through the character of Quiet, whose name embodies the impossibility of expression. As announced by the trailer intertitles, Quiet’s name reflects her mutism as she has been ‘deprived of her words.’ This detail contributes to the complexity of the torture sequence, as she cannot fulfil her role of informer in the interrogation. Later in the game, Quiet reveals she carries the ‘vocal cord parasite’ that the PMC Cypher intends to use to take over Anglophone

Figure 8.1  Quiet’s electrocution scene from the trailer. Still frame from Metal Gear Solid V trailer

140  Ivan Girina

Figure 8.2  A  prisoner’s waterboarding in a military camp. Still frame from Metal Gear Solid V trailer

countries. The virus, which the game’s anti-hero Skull Face intends to use to take vengeance over the hegemonic power of western culture, is triggered by the use of the English language and can spread through speech. On the one hand, as noted by the press, the sequence invites questions around the politics of torture as represented in the media. On the other hand, the fetishisation of the tools connected to pain as well as that of the female body reveal the nature of torture as something more than an unlawful excess in ‘intelligence interrogations.’15 The US military field manual for the collection of intelligence, published in 2006, provides a list of ‘prohibited actions’ in relation to interrogation techniques that include waterboarding and electrocution. Through the adoption of a vocabulary that separates the lawful and unlawful gathering of intelligence – also here – language is used to control and discipline the body, displacing the focus from the pain experienced by the subject interrogated during ‘torture,’ to the importance of the information gained through ‘interrogation.’ Using the terminology developed by Scarry, the problematic status of the trailer reveals torture as the ‘production of a fantastic illusion of power’ and its assertion.16 For Scarry, the incontestable and absolute reality of physical pain reifies and materialises the exhibition of power that represents the true purpose of torture: What assists the conversion of absolute pain into the fiction of absolute power is an obsessive, self-conscious display of agency. On the simplest level, the agent displayed is the weapon.17 Crucially, the reification of power is a statement on the agency of the torturer, which can only be uttered through the pain exhibited on the body

‘Needs to Be Done’  141 of the tortured. In visual terms, the agency of the torturer is vicariously shared with the spectator via camera, who takes part in the event as a witness through the photographic apparatus. The problematic relationship between torture, its representation and fruition is not exclusive to video games which are only an instance of wider discourses on media violence. But if the camera works as a proxy for the spectator, who is safely complacent to the event, how does the designed experience structure the agency of the player in video games? The interactive nature of the video game medium requires us to rethink the relationship between the viewer – now player – and the text. The concept of agency is fundamental to video game aesthetics, often used to discuss ‘interactivity’ while avoiding the conceptual vagueness of this term. In her seminal work on cyber-narratives Hamlet on the Holodeck, Janet Murray defines agency as ‘the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices.’18 Murray’s influential conceptualisation shaped the meaning of agency in game studies. Agency is understood as the player’s ability to make choices, which are afforded by a designed experience and meaningfully impact the virtual environment. Adapting Scarry’s 1980s theatrical metaphor of the ‘production room,’ the structure of torture can be understood in video games as an experience designed to provide a feeling of agency to its user. Nevertheless, as noted by Aarseth, the ergodic nature of video games can frustrate the player with failure, complicating the voyeuristic model of the spectator. The interactive character of video games is often identified as the source of the ethical problem with these representations, for it establishes a more direct form of engagement between the object represented and the player. Responding to the accusations around the exploitative nature of the trailer’s images, Kojima reassured the press that the player would not be able to interact with the torture sequences, and that these would only feature in the cut-scenes. Implicit to this argument is the assumption that the lack of interactivity can safeguard the structure of the representation. Moreover, Kojima stressed the importance of the adult contents in these sequences for the expressive development of video games as a medium, stating: ‘it’s something that needs to be done.’19 Crucial to Kojima’s apologetic reply was the exclusion of any playable element, consequently allowing the designer to retain control of the player’s experience: As the expressiveness of video games goes up, if you want to go beyond that it’s not something you can avoid. Of course, not all video games have to do this, and in my case it’s not something that I want to go through. If the violence will give new emotions that are important to the game, I want to put it in there, especially with this game where one of the main topics is revenge. I don’t want to walk around that. 20

142  Ivan Girina Despite Kojima’s explanation, commentators questioned in what way the lack of player interaction during these sequences could suffice to sanitise their imagery: ‘I do wonder why the scenes in Metal Gear Solid V aren’t interactive (especially if they have been in the past). Isn’t that the whole point of games or whatever?’21 Reinforcing the critics scepticism was the fact that The Phantom Pain was not the first chapter of the MGS series featuring episodes of torture. Previous examples are found in Metal Gear Solid22 and Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, 23 in which it is the player-character to be placed in the position of the victim. In the first instalment of the series, the protagonist, Solid Snake, is tortured on an electrocution bed. Here the player is required to press one of the control buttons in order to regain strength between the shockwaves inflicted on the player-character. The torture is not only physical, but also psychological. Ocelot, the torturer, warns Snake that any attempt at resisting the interrogation would lead to the death of his partner, Meryl Silverburgh. The player is presented with the choice of completing this stage in two ways: by managing to refill the strength bar in order to survive Ocelot’s torture or, alternatively, by surrendering the information. Despite Ocelot’s warning, it is the latter option that leads to Meryl’s death at the end of the game, implicitly punishing the player for taking the easy way out. Of particular interest in this sequence is the intense physical effort required from the player to complete this stage and survive the torture. Through the controller, the representation of torture in the game is tied to the haptic experience of the player. The stress and fatigue experienced by the player while relentlessly pressing the buttons on the controller formally mirrors the physical pain endured by Snake during the electrocution. In this way, the game attempts to convey the distress of the player-character to the player. Appealing to the interactive nature of their representation, video games require an engagement that is not exhausted by the interpretative work of a viewer and, instead, also involves a process of ‘configurative performance’ through which the text is fundamentally reconfigured by the player at each iteration and with each gameplay. 24 Video games do not exist without the performance of the player, and the trailer – a para-textual form that instructs the viewer’s reception of the text – is not able to provide a satisfactory account of the gameplay experience. On the one hand, video game trailers constitute important objects for the development of authorial discourses that guide the fruition of these artefact as art. 25 I argue that The Phantom Pain trailer instructs the player on the unjust and unreliable nature of interrogation techniques, that is then reflected via procedural rhetoric in the game. Conversely, trailers produce an opaque and partial understanding of the game which excludes an essential part of the play experience and opens them up to potential criticism. 26 Criticising the visual-centric understanding of video game aesthetic that populates industrial as well as

‘Needs to Be Done’  143 academic discourses, Graeme Kirkpatrick calls attention to the invisibility of its form, which he argues emerges only through the analysis of its material apparatus, with emphasis on the controller: No one talks about pressing ‘X,’ then ‘circle,’ then ‘triangle’ and no one feels that this is what they are doing, unless they are bored with the game, following a ‘walk through’ or using a cheat for the first time. Good play is about feeling and it seems that being able to feel what we are supposed to be feeling is, at least partly, a function of not looking at or thinking about our hands. 27 The non-mimetic nature of the button-pressing activity on a physical device critically informs the representation of violent iconography in videogames, as the interpretative activity of meaning-making is faced by countless iterations of player’s performance. For Kirkpatrick, such repetition generates a ‘cynicism’ in the player who, unlike a spectator or a reader, does not enter a ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ and instead constantly negotiates her critical distance from the text, being reminded of its ludic nature by the presence of the interface. 28 Such distance is registered, for example, in the ‘ridiculousness’ that characterises video game action whenever the player is explicitly required to press buttons, leading to an ‘eruption of a representation of the controller onto the screen.’29 The emergence of the interface on screen makes video game form visible during the excess or the failure of player’s performance, as for example in the Metal Gear Solid torture sequence. For game critic Steven Pool, the hyperbolic action that is characteristic of the series generates a ‘humorous self-consciousness’ that deconstructs the heroic and celebrative tones of its military fiction, making Metal Gear Solid an anti-war game.30 Poole’s analysis of the game is mostly focused on its narrative aspects, but the author notices how the game stealth core mechanics produce a non-violent alternative to conflict solution.31 Similarly, Nick Robinson argues that ‘the game offers a mainstream example of the consistent use of procedural rhetoric to offer a social critique of militarisation.’32 Based on Ian Bogost’s influential work on persuasive games, 33 Robinson draws attention to the importance of analysing video games’ procedural rhetoric from a socio-political point of view. The author outlines the complicity of the video game industry in promoting ideas of permanent warfare that serve the interests of the military-industrial complex, while also individuating the potential for critical engagement through these artefacts. Bogost defines procedural rhetoric as ‘the art of persuasion through rule-based representations and interactions rather than the spoken word, writing, images, or moving pictures.’34 Using Bogost’s approach to analyse the procedural rhetoric of The Phantom Pain, the problematic representation of torture offered by the trailer is complicated in the game. In

144  Ivan Girina fact, despite Kojima’s statements, the game deploys some interrogation mechanics that allow the player to take part in torture sequences. By framing the procedural rhetoric of the interrogation mechanics within the context of Kojima’s authorial discourse on the military-industry complex and warfare economy as enunciated by the trailer, the game can provide a space for the critique of what Scarry terms ‘the structure of torture,’ as much as an instance of its spectacularisation. Through the use of intertitles in the trailer, the heroic undertones generally associated with military narratives are deconstructed and deflated. The intertitles are juxtaposed with the images of torture previously analysed and provide a list of tropes associated with the rhetoric of military heroism (the nation, ideology, and justice) preceded by the locution ‘not for.’ The last caption makes explicit Kojima’s meta-critical intention by deconstructing the ideology of war-games and revealing the futile motive that generally moves the characters in these games: ‘only for revenge.’ Before proceeding with the analysis of the game, the press’ initial response to the Phantom Pain trailer needs to be understood as the result of the ongoing difficult relationship between video games, violence, and media culture.

Triangulating Torture: Video Game Violence, the Military-Game Complex, and the Procedural Rhetoric of the War on Terror The alarming response to the trailer mirrors larger concerns with the representation of military violence in video games and, more broadly, the relationship between games and violent behaviours. Similar concerns had, in fact, been raised in relation to games such as Splinter Cell: Conviction35 and Grand Theft Auto 5, 36 both of which display a variety of torture scenarios – here perpetrated by the protagonists and performed by the player – that have been alternatively criticised as unnecessary excess, as well as being appreciated for their subversive potential. 37 The representation of torture in video games is framed by anxieties surrounding the normalisation of military violence on civilians and the militarisation of society. For example, in the infamous ‘No Russians’ mission from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, 38 the player unwillingly takes part in what turns out to be a group of terrorists attacking an airport. More broadly, these preoccupations reflect the criticism moved against the representation of violence in video games tout court, especially accused of exceeding the affect experienced through other media. Found at the centre of this arguments is video games’ alleged capacity of directly influencing players’ behaviour by desensitising or even instructing a conditioned response. During the past two decades, video games have been one of the most studied media with regard to issues of violence. Such studies have generally been motivated by ‘regular bursts

‘Needs to Be Done’  145 of public concern in relation to violent games’ that periodically catch the interest of the public opinion: Death Race39 in the 1970s, Mortal Kombat 40 in the 1990s, and more recently Grand Theft Auto III41 in the 2000s.42 The reasons behind these controversies are to be found also in the relationship between the heightened perception of violent content in video games and the understanding of these artefact as toys for children. In a compelling account of the debates around violent games, Gareth Schott notes how, particularly in the wake of the Columbine shooting in 1999 and the 2011 Norway Attacks, the video game medium has been ‘placed under political and media scrutiny over the role it plays in the incitement and intensification of youth violence.’43 Schott also identifies as part of the problem the fundamental misconception of video game as a medium, which becomes apparent from the inappropriate methods often adopted to analyse their violent contents. In particular, empirical approaches have drawn most attention in their attempts to demonstrate or disprove a correlation between behaviour inside and outside the games. Many studies relied, for example, on subjects evaluating pre-recorded gameplay footage and edited cut-scenes from the games, without providing the opportunity to engage through play. Schott highlights how in those cases in which participants engaged by playing the games ‘[they] learned that ‘violence’ is contextualized and that players are presented with choices.’44 Hence, through gameplay, players are able of subscribing, resisting, and subverting violent contents. Despite the recurring episodes of media panic, scientific proof on direct relationship between playing games and violent behaviours remains inconsistent.45 One of the major flaws in these arguments is the assumption of a causal link between in-game and outside behaviour which stands for a broader misconception of play. The importance of play and its role in the definition and fruition of games has long been debated in game studies and represents one of its pillars. Johan Huizinga’s seminal work on this topic calls attention to the nature of play as a distinct activity: ‘play moves and has its being within a play-ground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course.’46 Similarly, Roger Caillois defines play as always ‘separate from real life.’47 More recently, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman proposed the influential metaphor of the magic circle, firstly coined in Huizinga’s work, to describe how play is defined within specific space and time boundaries, which also contain its social implications and consequences.48 While the rigidity of this model has been challenged by scholars suggesting the permeability of such boundaries, the concept of the magic circle still provides a useful metaphor to understand the distinct nature of play.49 By subscribing the rules of a game – whatever they may be – participants enter its magic circle (a sports field, a cardboard, an abstract social interaction) with a clear set of expectations of what these rules involve, and they are reassured that the consequences will be kept within the game itself. Even

146  Ivan Girina when presented with extreme situations, including the representation of torture, the borders of the ideal playground separate the application of rules inside and outside of it, as the events taking part within it are consequently always understood as part of the game, an activity to which all the participants willingly subscribe and which is distinct from daily life. Of importance to both Huizinga and Caillois’ arguments on play and culture are its voluntary nature and its dependency on rules, which are negotiated among players who, in return, willingly subject themselves. Notably, there are a number of constraints that apply to what qualifies as a ‘willing subscription,’ and theories of play often stress also the importance of the unproductive nature of games.50 Similarly, Bernard Suits’ playful treatment of game ontology in The Grasshopper, stresses the importance the player’s lusory attitude in accepting whatever means imposed by the rules in order to achieve the goal of the game.51 Both these aspects imply the self-reflexive purpose of the activity (one plays for play’s sake) and the absence of external motivation that may influence the player’s intention to engage (money motivates professional athletes who consequently cease being players and become professionals). In one of the most compelling attempts at summarising theories of play, ludologist Jesper Juul provides the following definition: A game is a rule-based system with a variable and quantifiable outcome, where different outcomes are assigned different values, the player exerts effort in order to influence the outcome, the player feels emotionally attached to the outcome, and the consequences of the activity are negotiable. 52 In light of these considerations, debates around video games and violent behaviours need to account for the contractual nature of rules, the separation of the game environment, and finally player’s awareness and willingness in taking part. Nevertheless, things become slightly more complex in the shift from traditional games to the video game medium. According to Juul, unlike other forms, the specificity of video games resides in their dual nature as both real and fictional objects: ‘To play a video game is therefore to interact with real rules while imagining a fictional world, and a video game is a set of rules as well as a fictional world.’53 Juul argues that, due to the strong representative quality of the medium, video games cue the player to make assumptions based on their real world knowledge in order to interpret in game events. 54 Hence, rules and fiction are interdependent as players will make assumptions on their real life experience in order to interpret the fictional aspects represented in the game.55 In video games, rules are often not formally presented, as opposed to traditional games, and these texts rely on representation to inform the player of their context, allowing her to infer and learn necessary actions and appropriate behaviours. For example,

‘Needs to Be Done’  147 in shooter games players are normally provided with fire weapons while the action is framed in hostile environments. Drawing from her knowledge of war and conflicts, the player will probably assume violence to be involved in armed conflict and that death would be part of such experience. Eventually, through trial and error, the player will learn that in order to beat the game, she needs to shoot all the enemies on screen, progressing through the levels. In the passage from ‘before’ to ‘after’ learning the rules of the game, the player will have partially negotiated her understanding of the fictional context of war that will now possibly involve a lot more killing than previously expected. The problem here is not the likelihood of the player going on a killing spree, as the act of killing remains always fictional and it is understood as such within the borders of the game. For Juul, what is ‘real’ about the game is the rule dictating that, in order to win the war, the player must shoot all the targets, and not the representation of killing itself, which is instead always perceived as ‘fictional.’ Consequently, fundamental to the study of video games is the understanding of how they shape players’ interpretation of fictional events through their ruled-based representation. Continuing the example provided before, at stake here is the ideological nature of war as an event addressed exclusively through military conflict. In his analysis of America’s Army, 56 developed by the US army, ­Robinson highlights how while providing a relatively accurate simulation of armed conflict in terms of both the science of warfare (weapons and vehicles simulation) and the ROE (Rules Of Engagement’), the game still promotes an ‘uncomplicated view of war and militarisation’ through its story and gameplay. 57 Moreover, the analysis of America’s Army procedural rhetoric exposes its enforcement of the ROE through a system of punishments and rewards which admonishes the use of friendly fire and behaviours against the army’s code, eventually leading to the suspension of the subversive player from the game session. 58 On the one hand, the game factually trains the player as a virtual soldier. The first version of the game was directly developed by the US military for training purposes and was then commercialised in 2002.59 Compliant players’ behaviour is rewarded with a ‘Honour Score’ through which the player can achieve higher military ranks, being appointed in charge of a team and experiencing higher levels of agency. On the other hand, the game’s constant foregrounding of authenticity is problematic in light of the false premise of equal fighting conditions, that cast two teams of players against each other in a fictional conflict between the US army and other foreign military forces. In fact, the members of each team see themselves and their teammates as part of the titular America’s Army while visualising their opponents as a foreign force.60 In this system, not only does the game portray a unilateral account of the war (both parties believe to be acting as US forces), but it also portrays each conflict as perfectly symmetrical, persuading the player of the equality of means

148  Ivan Girina and resources between the two sides at war, consequently incrementing the perception of its legitimacy. Through its game mechanics and its uncomplicated focus on action (the game presents little narrative, mainly in the form of mission briefings), America’s Army simulates conflict scenarios that are always resolved through military intervention suggesting that such approach is always both necessary and effective. Crucial to the discussion on the representation of torture, is what Robinson identifies as the game’s ‘sanitized portrayal of war’ which omits the causalities and sufferance of those (soldiers and civilians) injured in the battlefield.61 Unlike the sanitised war of America’s Army, through the representation of torture and pain, The Phantom Pain foregrounds disparity and dramatises sufferance, questioning the overall ideology of the conflicts that inhabit the game world.

The Phantom Pain: Haunting the Procedural Rhetoric of Torture The topic of torture and its representation in video games are generally debated within the context presented above: the effects of violent games in our society, the entertainment-military complex, and the persuasive power of War on Terror procedural rhetoric. Mark Sample offers one of few scholarly accounts specifically dedicated to this issue. The author’s analysis of Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell and 24: The Game specifically addresses the political dimension of ‘torture-interrogation.’ Describing some of the mechanics of Splinter Cell (for example, the chokehold manoeuvre in which the player-character approaches enemies from behind trapping them with his arm), Sample suggests that the game ‘presents the phantasy that perfect information is always the outcome of coercive interrogation.’62 Drawing from Scarry, the author calls attention to the power-centric nature of torture in these games, which enforces a language that casts the torturer as a seeker of truth against the tortured who hides it, ultimately recognising the self-referential nature of the process and stating: ‘Torture produces the truth of pain, the truth of power.’63 Coherently with the post-9/11 scenarios, in Splinter Cell and 24, the player must use torture to retrieve information necessary to progress in the game, and the interrogation techniques in both titles constitute one of the core mechanics of the game. In 24 (based on the homonymous TV show), the torture-interrogation is the culmination of some of the levels and is also thematised as a crucial tool in the battle against terrorism. Here, the torture mechanic involves finding a balance between sympathy and coercion in order to reach an ideal ‘Cooperation Zone’ in which the victim finally reveals the missing intelligence. Such a scenario unveils the procedural representation of torture as a puzzle in which the player is in charge of finding the right piece of information. The puzzle-like

‘Needs to Be Done’  149 structure reveals the assumption that all the pieces are always available to be found. Sample’s analysis of 24 concludes that the game reinforces the narrative according to which torture is not only an effective means to gain intelligence but also one that is ‘repeatable and scorable, possible to quantify and evaluate according to predefined rubrics.’64 Hence, while the mechanics of Splinter Cell produce a narrative on the effectiveness of torture-interrogation, 24 denies the incommunicability and language-­ resistant reality of pain by requiring the player to engage with its data in order to find the perfect amount that would grant cooperation. Finally, both games overwrite the reality of pain by empowering the interrogating player-character and the player with agency through a narrative of necessary counter-intelligence and successful interrogation.65 Sample’s proposition is that of a ‘counter pedagogy’ based on alternative forms of play that undermine the procedural rhetoric of torture.66 Nevertheless, such a redemptive possibility does not come in the same games that produce this logic, but rather through the subversive play of others such as The Sims,67 a simulation game that allows the player to micro-manage the life of a household and its inhabitants. While the game does not encourage or even motivate the use of torture within its logic, its voyeuristic procedural experience invites – within a sandbox structure – the player to literally ‘toy’ with her characters, occasionally placing them in impossible and often sadistic situations. Reporting the experience of a player who trapped two sims in a self-enclosed indoor space, Sample comments on the rapid deterioration of the two characters’ psycho-­physical conditions. While being monitored by the game interface, which is normally used to ensure their well-being, the two characters panic in anguish, as a fire accident causes one to die while the other survives standing on a paddle of urine left by the victim. Drawing from Giorgio Agamben’s work, Sample argues that the game illustrates ‘what happens when the state of exception becomes the rule,’ as rights are suspended by the institutions and the use of violence is normalised.68 For example, games such as The Sims can unveil the perversion of torture by isolating it from the military narratives that generally motivate it. Similarly, Eddo Stern’s Tekken Torture Tournament is a modified version of the famous fighting game in which the player is required to wear a set of electrodes on her arm that release electrical charges every time her player-character is hit by the opponent.69 Again here, the aesthetic quality of the video game is foregrounded by the emergence of the interface which, in return, makes visible its procedure and forces the player to critically engage with it. In his account of the military-entertainment complex and the ideological power of procedural rhetoric, Robinson endorses Bogost’s conceptualisation of the ‘possibility space’ which he identifies as an opportunity for political activism, not only through subversive play (like in Sample’s work) but also through the development of ad hoc ‘critical games.’ Such is the case of serious games and other independent productions

150  Ivan Girina aimed at raising critical awareness through gaming as, for example, Molleindustria’s The Best Amendment.70 The game satirises the use of fire weapons violence as a deterrent to violent crimes: the actions of the player are mimicked by each new wave of enemies leading to an escalation of violence and requiring ever increasing means of destruction. Nevertheless, as pointed out by Bogost, although potentially effective, such games generally reach a niche of players and often compromise their ludic elements in virtue of their political message.71 Robinson’s third proposition is the development of critical awareness through a political analysis of mainstream games, such as the MGS series.72 While Robinson recognises the scarce number of such titles, implicit in his argument is the idea of a hermeneutics of games that holistically considers procedural rhetoric in the context of their representational and narrative elements, creating a possibility space for their critique. For Bogost, the ‘possibility space’ is a semiotic grey area in which the game’s rhetoric can be explored through play engaging with the procedures of the game and raising critical awareness.73 Bogost, in fact, defines games’ rhetoric as based on procedures. Describing the nature of procedures (both digital and non-digital), he highlights how their structure, which is generally transparent, emerges whenever we fail at performing them, forcing us to formally engage in order to understand what went wrong. We often talk about procedures only when they go wrong: after several complaints, we decided to review our procedures for creating new accounts. But in fact, procedures in this sense of the word structure behavior; we tend to “see” a process only when we challenge it.74 As in Splinter Cell, the player in The Phantom Pain can also actively take part in the interrogation of enemies in order to gain intelligence, only this time the procedural rhetoric opens a possibility space for the player. In fact, the information obtained is never essential and is accessible also through other means. This mechanic is initiated by approaching an enemy from behind and can be triggered in two ways: by pointing a gun at the enemy’s back, or by trapping him using the iconic chokehold technique. Although the intelligence obtained through it can facilitate the game progression, by disclosing the enemies’ position or allowing the collection of resources that can be used to develop or improve tools and weapons, the information is repetitive, formulaic, and hardly (if ever) critical. In addition, such information is generally always available through other means. For example, Snake can choose to enlist his pet D-dog as ‘Buddy’ for the mission, which automatically identifies the location of targets, enemies, and resources in his proximity without alerting the security. Although apparently trivial, such an alternative is essential in the economy of the game procedures which relegates the

‘Needs to Be Done’  151 interrogation mechanic to one of many options. More importantly, reflecting its ­action-stealth generic formula, the game rewards the player for completing each mission with minimum causalities, granting extra points whenever Snake manages to traverse the enemy lines undetected. Of course, this system does not completely prevent the use of violence. Snake can develop a number of non-lethal weapons such as tranquillising guns and rifles, as well as some less conventional ones, such as a modified version of his bionic arm that releases a stun charge. Each engagement with the enemy, including the use of the interrogation mechanic, involves the risk of being detected and consequently losing precious points at the end of the mission. The choice of adopting a non-violent approach to action is also reflected, on a larger level, in the relationship between Snake and his army, extending the repercussion of the player’s agency through the implementation of managerial mechanics. In fact, according to the heroism score obtained by the player, the Diamond Dog’s soldiers will either celebrate or fear Snake, developing an affective dimension that attaches each player’s choice on the field to meaningful consequences. Similarly to The Sims, this affective dimension is monitored through a ‘Staff ­Morale’ index that determines the soldiers’ attitude inside the Mother Base and that has repercussion on strategic elements, such as soldiers’ performance and efficiency on the field during ‘Dispatch Missions’ in which they are sent around the world to collect resources. Bogost’s theorisation of procedures, their invisibility and their foregrounding through instances of failure can be productively informed by Kirkpatrick’s aesthetic critique of video game form and its affective nature. Kirkpatrick stresses how the visual-centric discourses that dominate video game aesthetics can be partly attributed to the invisibility of their haptic and affective labour, which instead is present in the ­minute-by-minute gameplay through the execution of patterns and actions via joypad.75 In this sense, Kirkpatrick’s approach can be used to expand Bogost’s procedural rhetoric from an exclusively cognitive level to one including also the aesthetic dimension. Video game form, as noted by Kirkpatrick, is first and foremost comprised of patterns that shape rhythmic performance. Such patterns are dictated by the procedures which rule the game and its mechanics. By informing the analysis of procedural rhetoric with aesthetic theory, the inner workings of the game can be not only understood – as suggested by Bogost – but also felt by the player. The interrogation mechanic in The Phantom Pain offers a lethal and a non-lethal option to conclude the interaction. Accordingly, the player can decide to stun the hostage, who will then pass out for about five minutes, or alternatively execute him. In the first scenario, the enemy will eventually regain consciousness (the time window varies from 30 seconds to 30 minutes) alerting the rest of the camp, consequently leading to tighter security. This determines an increased level of difficulty for the completion of the mission and lowers the chances

152  Ivan Girina to obtain a high score. In the second case, the killing of enemy soldiers results not only in a lower score, but can potentially activate a hidden mechanic in the game. In her study on the representation of PTSD in The Phantom Pain, Amy M. Green comments on this invisible procedure based on ‘Demon Points’ which are assigned to the player for each fatality: The game’s status screen never reveals to the player how many ­Demon Points have been accumulated. The only clue that this tally is occurring is a change in Snake’s appearance as he moves from one stage to the next.76 When the player reaches a predetermined threshold of points, Snake’s appearance changes, as the metal fragment on his forehead takes the shape of a horn and his clothes turn covered in blood. Snake’s dark double also affects the morale of the troupes, activating a chain reaction that extends from the single action on the field to a strategic and managerial level (Figure 8.3). In this sense, similarly to the torture sequence in the original MGS, the interrogation mechanic in The Phantom Pain confronts the player with choosing between two options: an immediate solution that provides release from the difficult gameplay situation – represented by the use of interrogation techniques to gain information and the execution of the enemy which trades heroism points for an easier experience; or the possibility to access the same information in a different way – without the interrogation or at least avoiding kills and keeping the stealth score intact – which conversely requires the player to sustain a potentially

Figure 8.3  Snake performs a chokehold on an enemy while the interrogation interface emerges over the characters. Screenshot from Metal Gear Solid V

‘Needs to Be Done’  153 more difficult course of action. The tension between the possibility of success and that of failure, between the efficiency of certain means and the effectiveness of others, makes these choices meaningful to the player who is prompted to reflect on her agency, as the procedural rhetoric of torture is complicated not only on a cognitive, but also on an affective level. During the execution of the interrogation, the player is never safe, and risks being detected while approaching the enemy, all in exchange for a trivial reward. Through the aesthetic analysis of the interrogation mechanic, the focal point of the torture interaction is no longer the need for intelligence, but the release of the performative tension of the player and her power over the game world. Scarry argues that, through torture it is not only the victim’s body which is manipulated, but that her whole world dissolves, reduced to a room and overwritten as a signifier of torture itself. The world of the tortured and her pain become a manifestation of the torturer’s power and agency. The appropriation of the world into the torturer’s arsenal of weapon is a crucial step in the overall process of torture for […] it is by the obsessive mediation of agency that the prisoner’s pain will be perverted into the fraudulent assertion of power, that the objectified pain is denied as pain and read as power.77 The metaphor of the world is literalised in The Phantom Pain, as the interrogation takes place on the field and the player gathers information on the virtual world, mapping it in order to achieve control of it. The torture-interrogation mechanic mirrors Scarry’s structure of torture as it becomes a manifestation of the player’s agency over the world through the tortured body. Nevertheless, unlike the agency of the torturer inside Scarry’s production room, player’s agency in the game is, by definition, never safe as the procedural rhetoric of the game reminds her of the possible consequences. The uncertain place of torture within the procedural rhetoric of The Phantom Pain does not emerge only through its mechanics but also from its representation. In fact, mirroring the formulaic character of the intelligence obtained, the interrogation is represented in a comic book style, substituting the vocal response of the victim with a suffocated mumbling sound that is then translated via subtitles. Scarry notes how, in torture, the relation between the ‘question’ and the ‘answer’ is falsified: the former is offered as the just ‘motive’ of the interrogator, while the latter demonstrates the ‘betrayal’ of the interrogated.78 In The Phantom Pain, the disparity between Snake’s ability to voice his questions and the victim’s inability to respond reveals the power relationship embedded in the structure of torture, making the interrogation a rhetoric (and occasionally parodic) exercise of power that does not really reward the player neither on a ludic nor on an narrative level. If the procedural rhetoric of torture-interrogation in the game 24 is a puzzle,

154  Ivan Girina that of The Phantom Pain is constructed as a wheel of fortune providing trivial information which is often not worth the effort required to perform it. On the other hand, when properly retrieved, intelligence can grant ‘Heroism points’ to the player, which increase Snake’s rank at the end of the mission. Nevertheless, as in any other game, even here the player’s gamble is never safe and the retrieval of the information is not assured, as the interrogated characters occasionally refuse to collaborate stating: ‘I got nothing to say to you.’ Like Quiet, Snake’s victims have all been deprived of their words. They embody the tale of oppression through linguistic hegemony and power, to which Cypher responds with the ‘vocal cord parasite,’ created to sterilise the ideology of the English-speaking world and to bring balance among countries. The ability of languages to shape power relationships is at the centre of The Phantom Pain since its opening credits and it is made explicit through Rumanian philosopher Emil Cioran’s quote: ‘It is no nation we inhabit, but a language. Make no mistake; our native tongue is our fatherland.’ 79 The speechless mumbling of the non-playing characters feeds in to The Phantom Pain’s parable of language, information, power, and pain. One of the ending screens informs the player about the number of languages represented in institutional places of power: There are an estimated 7,100 languages spoken in the world, but only six are designated as official languages of the united nations. One of these is English, and although it is the dominant lingua franca of modern times, less than 5% of the world’s population are native speakers. Like in a torture chamber, Skull Face’s world has been dissolved through language, unable even to express – in the English-reformed world – the loss of his country, his culture, and his mother-tongue. It is through pain’s resistance to language that Scarry individuates the analogy between torture and war: ‘its absolute claim for acknowledgment contributes to its being ultimately unacknowledged.’80 For Scarry, both these phenomena exceed our linguistic moral capacity. Yet such reluctance in describing pain makes us vulnerable to the power of the institutions that can appropriate its representations: the news, military manuals, medical accounts. The reaction of the press to The Phantom Pain trailer and Kojima’s apologetic intervention constitute an example of the discursive resistance of torture. In fact, just like the game, the trailer represents an instance of the spectacularisation of pain as much as an opportunity for its critique. The concept of the phantom pain describes the feeling of pain located in a missing part of the body. In The Phantom Pain, the missing limbs of Snake and Miller (co-founder of the Diamond Dogs) become reminders of the sufferance experienced by these characters in

‘Needs to Be Done’  155 the endless cycle of wars continuing with each new game. The game’s storyline declares the ideological and rhetorical nature of these conflicts, playing between hyperbolic celebration and meta-critical awareness. During a cut-scene after Cypher’s defeat, this rhetorical unveiling culminates in Miller’s speech: We hold our rifles in missing hands. We stand tall on missing legs. We stride forwards on the bones of our fallen. Then, and only then, are we alive. This “pain” is ours, and no one else’s. A secret weapon we wield, out of sight. We will be stronger than ever. For our peace. […] Still, doesn’t feel like this is over. …And I will never be whole again. But the nominal pain haunting the game title is, most importantly, that of the player. Echoing Miller’s words, when the game seems to be finally over (one of the characters wears a jacket ironically stating ‘Never Game Over’), the player is again given a choice: to quit the game or to repeat all the missions once more, with minimum variation and for an uncertain outcome.81 It is only after endless repetition and endless choices seemingly granted by the game, that the player discovers the rhetoric nature of this exercise in power. The very concept of agency is, in fact, interrogated by the game through a secret ending, in which the player finds out that her player-character, Punished (Venom) Snake, is only a clone of the original one. Staring at a mirror, Punished Snake remembers being a soldier who saved the real Snake’s life by shielding his body during an explosion at the end of the prequel Ground Zeros. Through reconstructive surgery, Punished Snake then goes on to take his place as an expandable diversion, another proxy figure, a pawn in the endless cycle of wars. U ­ sing frustration as a final aesthetic effect, the ending of The Phantom Pain reveals the rhetorical character of this exercise in power with regards to both its torture tropes and its military epic. Like Punished Snake, the player is stripped of her agency: left unable to voice her frustration, her (virtual) world dissolved by the procedural rhetoric of the game.

Notes 1 E3, also known as Electronic Entertainment Expo, is one of the biggest yearly gatherings in the video game industry. 2 Kojima Productions, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, Playstation 4, 2015. 3 A teaser of the game was first released in December at the Spike Video Game Awards 2012, showcasing early sequences of the game. The game was then officially announced in March at the GDC 2013, by Kojima himself, with a stunt: the designer entered the conference stage covered in bandages, initially hiding his identity like the protagonist of the game. 4 Unlike the previous version presented at E3, the trailer has been rated and PG 18. See KONAMI, ‘Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain’ E3 2013

156  Ivan Girina RED BANNED Trailer (Extended Director’s Cut), YouTube, 11 June 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMyoCr2MnpM (accessed 05 May 2018). 5 Cut-scenes are pre-edited sequences used in video games to deliver narrative elements that help to contextualise the activities required to the player by the game. 6 See Brian Ashcraft, ‘This Nine Minute Metal Gear Solid V Trailer Is Pretty Gross,’ Kotaku, 11 June 2013, https://kotaku.com/this-nine-minute-­ metal-gear-solid-v-trailer-is-pretty-g-512658946 (accessed 05 May 2018) and John Funk, ‘Extended Metal Gear Solid 5 Trailer Adds Scenes of Brutal Torture,’ Polygon, 11 June 2013, www.polygon.com/2013/6/11/ 4419914/extended-metal-gear-solid-5-trailer-adds-scenes-of-brutal-­ torture (accessed 05 May 2018). More concerns around the use of violence on military prisoners have been raised in relation to another instalment in the series, Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes (Kojima Productions, Playstation 3, 2014). The game functions as a prequel to MGSV and was used also as a tech demo. It was particularly criticised in relation to a collectable tape which contains the recording of a prisoner being raped. Cf. Ria Jenkins, ‘Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes Fails to Portray Sexual ­Violence Meaningfully,’ The Guardian, 09 April 2014, https://www. theguardian.com /technology/2014/apr/09/metal-gear-solid-ground-­ zeroes-sexual-violence (accessed 05 May 2018). 7 John Funk, ‘Extended Metal Gear Solid 5 Trailer Adds Scenes of Brutal Torture,’ Polygon, 11 June 2013, https://www.polygon.com/2013/6/11/4419914/ extended-metal-gear-solid-5-trailer-adds-scenes-of-brutal-torture (accessed 05 May 2018). 8 In the game, the player is given the option to spare or execute Quiet immediately after her capture. In the first case, the character becomes one of the ‘buddies’ available to the player as a support during the missions. 9 See Patricia Hernandez, ‘Three Theories as to Why Metal Gear Solid V’s Sniper Is So, Um, Sexy,’ Polygon, 09 July 2013, https://kotaku.com/threetheories-as-to-why-metal-gear-solid-vs-sniper-is-1276826053 (accessed 05 May 2018). 10 Andrew Darley, Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacle in New Media Genre (London: Routledge, 2000). 11 This scene was later revealed to be part of the story of the prequel to The Phantom Pain, Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes. 12 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 3. 13 Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ Screen, 16.3 (1975), 16–18. 14 Espen Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 2–4. 15 Anon., Field Manual 2-22.3: Human Intelligence Collector Operations (Washington, DC: Headquarters: Department of the Army, 2006), 5–21. 16 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain, 28. 17 Ibid., 27. 18 Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, updated edition (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017 [1997]), 159. 19 Martin Robinson, ‘Metal Gear Solid 5’s Torture Scene Will Be Non-­ Playable,’ Eurogamer.net, 20 July 2013, www.eurogamer.net/articles/201309-20-metal-gear-solid-5s-torture-scene-will-be-non-playable (accessed 02 February 2018). 20 Ibid. 21 Patricia Hernandez, ‘Kojima: Waterboarding, Torture ‘Needs to Be Done’ in Games Like MGS,’ Kotaku.com, 20 July 2013, https://kotaku.

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com/­kojima-waterboarding-torture-needs-to-be-done-in-ga-1357627385 (accessed 02 February 2018). Konami Computer Entertainment Japan, Metal Gear Solid, Playstation, 1998. Konami Computer Entertainment Japan, Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, Playstation 2, 2004. Markku Eskelinen and Ragnhild Tronstad, ‘Video Games as Configurative Performance,’ in Mark Wolf and Bernard Perron (eds.), The Video Game Theory Reader (London: Routledge, 2003), 195–220. Ewan Kirkland, ‘Discursively Constructing the Art of Silent Hill,’ Games and Culture, 5.3 (2010), 314–28. The promotion of video games in the past relied more extensively on the use of demo (short for demonstration) that allowed the player to play a portion of the game representative of the whole experience. Graeme Kirkpatrick, Aesthetic Theory and the Video Game (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 97. Ibid., 41. Ibid., 107. Steven Poole, Trigger Happy: Video Games and the Entertainment Revolution (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2004 [2000]), 195, 394. Ibid., 395. Nick Robinson, ‘Videogames, Persuasion and the War on Terror: Escaping or Embedding the Military-Entertainment Complex?,’ Political Studies, 60 (2012), 504–22 (515). Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Video Games (London: MIT Press, 2007). Ibid., ix. Ubisoft Montreal, Splinter Cell: Conviction, Xbox 360, 2010. Rockstar Games, Grand Theft Auto V, Playstation 3, 2013. Cf. Tom Bramwell, ‘Is the Most Disturbing Scene in GTA 5 Justified?,’ Eurogamer (16 July 2013), www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-09-16-isthe-most-disturbing-scene-in-gta5-justified (accessed 05 May 2018), and Peter Tieryas, ‘GTA V’s Missions Are the Ultimate Thrill Ride,’ Kotaku (27  ­August, 2016), https://kotaku.com/gta-vs-missions-are-the-ultimatethrill-ride-1785818905 (accessed 05 May 2018). Infinity Ward, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Playstation 3, 2009. Exidy, Death Race, Arcade, 1976. Midway, Mortal Kombat, Arcade, 1992. Rockstar Games, Grand Theft Auto III, Playstation 2, 2001. Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Jonas Heide Smith, and Susuana Pajares Tosca, Understanding Video Games: The Essential Introduction, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2016), 274. Gareth Schott, Violent Games: Rules, Realism and Effect (London: ­Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 1. Ibid., 8. Frans Mäyrä, An Introduction to Game Studies: Games in Culture (­London: Sage Publications, 2008), 90. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1955), 10. Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001 [1958]), 8. Katie Salen and Zack Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 95. Cf. Mia Consalvo, ‘There Is No Magic Circle.’ Games and Culture, 4.4 (2009), 408–17.

158  Ivan Girina 50 Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games, 5. 51 Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia (Toronto: ­University of Toronto Press, 1978), 38–39 52 Jesper Juul, Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 36. 53 Ibid., 1. 54 Ibid., 168. 55 Ibid. 56 United States Army, America’s Army (v. 3), Windows, 2009. 57 Nick Robinsons, ‘Video Games, Persuasion and the War on Terror,’ 512. 58 Andres Sundnes Løvlie, ‘The Rhetoric of Persuasive Games: Freedom and Discipline in America’s Army,’ in Stephan Günzel, Michael Liebe and ­Dieter Mersch (eds.), Conference Proceedings of the Philosophy of Computer Games 2008 (Potsdam: University Press, 2008), 70–91. 59 Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games, 75. 60 Cf. Andres Sundnes Løvlie, ‘The Rhetoric of Persuasive Games.’ 61 Nick Robinson, ‘Video Games, Persuasion and the War on Terror,’ 512. 62 Mark L. Sample, ‘Virtual Torture: Videogames and the War on Terror,’ Game Studies, 8.2 (2008). 63 Ibid., n.p. 64 Ibid., n.p. 65 For an analysis of the narrative justification to torture in post-9/11 cinema cf. Berenike Jung, Narrating Violence in Post-9/11 Action Cinema, T ­ errorist Narratives, Cinematic Narration and Referentiality (Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2010), 34–35. 66 Mark L. Sample, ‘Virtual Torture: Videogames and the War on Terror,’, n.p. 67 Maxis, The Sims, Windows, 2000. 68 Ibid., n.p. 69 Andy Clarke and Grethe Mitchell, ‘An Interview with Eddo Stern,’ in ­Videogames and Art, 2nd ed. (Chicago, IL: Intellect, The University of ­Chicago Press, 2013), 215–23. 70 Molleindustria, The best Amendment, Windows, 2013. 71 Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games, ix, x. 72 Nick Robinson, ‘Video Games, Persuasion and the War on Terror,’ 515. 73 Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games, 42. 74 Ibid., 3. 75 Graeme Kirkpatrick, ‘Controller, Hand, Screen: Aesthetic form in the ­Computer Game,’ Games and Culture, 4.2 (2009), 127–43. 76 Amy M. Green, Post-traumatic Stress Disorder - Trauma and History in Metal Gear Solid V (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 18, 19. 77 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain, 45. 78 Ibid., 35. 79 Translated in English in MGSV: The Phantom Pain from the original: Emil Cioran, Aveux et anathèmes, (Paris: Gallimard, Arcades, 1987), 21. 80 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain, 61. 81 On the meta-referential character of the MGS series cf. Bruno Fraschini, Metal Gear Solid: l’evoluzione del serpente (Milano: Edizioni Unicopoli, 2003).

9 Narratives of Pain, Apology, and Silence in Filmic Re-Representations of Forgiveness The South African Rainbow Derilene (Dee) Marco Ubuntu is very difficult to render into a Western language… We say, ‘a person is a person through other people’. It is not, ‘I think, therefore I am’. It says rather: I am a human because I belong.1

‘South Africanese,’ according to Pumla Gqola, is a sensibility of the people of post-apartheid South Africa. This sensibility is described as located in a ‘…site of affirmation, where speaking begins and silencing ends, (it) exists (as) a position defined by contradiction.’2 This contradiction, essentially ushered in through a discourse of belonging, remains loaded with meaning and promise, 24 years after the end of apartheid. In the immediate aftermath of the end of apartheid, this enthusiastically unflinching position meant that contradictions were located in hope and often, a distinct sense of positivity. Now, many of these same contradictions are located in disappointment. This paper deals with how this sensibility is and was, to a degree, conveyed in films that hold the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) at their core. The paper is also invested in thinking about the TRC in filmic representations, as Gqola describes, ‘…a site of affirmation…’ and is specifically invested in the complex role of a woman’s silence in the 2004 film, Forgiveness. 3 The term ‘TRC films’ has been used both in popular writing and in scholarship to describe fiction films which incorporate representations of the TRC in their narratives. The four fiction films were released in the same year, 2004.4 These have generally offered varied representations of the past and memory through the TRC, many relying on the real events or instances from testimonies. For one, the films incorporate the official history of the TRC, its reason for coming into being, and the people and institutions who made those decisions. In this instance, the films deal with retelling a painful history and enshrining a legacy about the SA TRC. Secondly, the films deal with very personal (and often unstable) narratives of personal and collective memory(-ies). These narratives are both influenced

160  Derilene (Dee) Marco and affected by the collective historical narrative of nation, belonging, and unity. One of the arguments of this paper is that many of these personal stories have gone unseen after official testimonies at the TRC, and many remain undealt with. The paper draws on the examples and representations of some of these personal stories within broader considerations of fiction film narratives about the TRC, to explore some of these intangible losses. Further to contradiction and ambiguities of ‘Rainbow Nation-ness,’ this paper considers the ways in which post-apartheid film oversimplifies and ‘demystifies’ how apology, forgiveness, and moving forward happens. This often occurs specifically through a deracialised approach to narratives that would not exist without race at the core. In this regard, some films which deal with the TRC seek to represent an unproblematised version of racial unity, emphasising racial dynamics in binaries and relieving whiteness, particularly white masculinity of their guilt and the burden of shameful acts. Sara Ahmed’s polemical ‘Declarations of Whiteness,’ allows the possibility to see the complexity of even the most self-reflexive versions of whiteness, coated in the discourse of forgiveness and apology, as problematic and, importantly, not necessarily part of a series of ‘white acts’ that rectify, make better, or generate new ways of being. Sara Ahmed writes that, declaring whiteness, or even ‘admitting’ to one’s own racism, when the declaration is assumed to be ‘evidence’ of an anti-racist commitment, does not do what it says. In other words, putting whiteness into speech, as an object to be spoken about, however critically, is not an anti-racist action, and nor does it necessarily commit a state, institution or person to a form of action that we could describe as anti-racist. To put this more strongly … declaring one’s whiteness, even as part of a project of social critique, can reproduce white privilege in ways that are ‘unforeseen.’5 In essence, Ahmed critiques what may underline various anti-racist and ‘transformative’ projects in a range of institutions and structures of power. This paper is invested in this critique at a number of levels: firstly, because one of the primary understandings of the TRC was that it was a non-racist space in which South Africans could experience humanity in one another. In other words, it required that the TRC, as an institution privilege anti-racist witness and testimony for the purpose of forgiveness. Secondly, one of the most important aspects of the TRC was in fact not self-reflexive whiteness, but rather acceptance that forgiveness was the only method for unified moving forward. What Ahmed references as ‘declaring one’s whiteness,’ was a marker on the landscape of the TRC, however, it is really in more recent years that self-reflexive whiteness has become ‘en-vogue’ in South Africa.6

Narratives of Pain  161 This paper is interested in thinking about fiction films about the TRC from such a critical point of view.7 Although a significant amount of work has been done on narratives around and within the TRC of SA, scholarship has generally shied away from considerations of representations of forgiveness and how these may or may not play a role in patterning new nation narratives that placate white fears alongside an acknowledgement of black pain. As Ahmed writes, …fear does not involve the defence of borders that already exist; rather, fear makes those borders, by establishing objects from which the subject, in fearing, can stand apart, objects that become ‘the not’ from which the subject appears to flee. Through fear not only is the very border between self and other affected, but the relation between the objects feared (rather than simply the relation between the subject and its objects) is shaped by histories that ‘stick,’ by making some objects more than others seem fearsome.8 This paper will examine moments of narrative and emotional contradictions in the film Forgiveness (Ian Gabriel, 2004). Through doing so, the paper aims to engage with two characters and themes: protagonist, Mrs Magda Grootboom’s silence in the face of the white perpetrator’s guilt and the film’s ability and emphasis even, in achieving forgiveness for Tertius Coetzee. The former character is the mother of apartheid activist Daniel Grootboom who was killed by apartheid police during apartheid. Tertius Coetzee is responsible for Daniel’s death. As Lesley Marx writes, the ways in which cinema deals with trauma is also always a confrontation with a degree of ethics.9 This emphasis on thinking about a genre that makes space for traumatic events to be ­re-represented is valuable for my discussion about Forgiveness’ self-awareness about race and how it appears to be consistently futile in the face of the reproduction of (problematic) whiteness. Marx’s analysis is also valuable as similar concerns around the representability of trauma also come forth in the film.10 Although not the focus of this paper, the notion of an ethical approach to re-representations of trauma filters into some of the broader concerns of silence and notions of palatable forgiveness. The question seems to be ‘Palatable forgiveness for whom?’ This paper explores Mrs Grootboom’s silence through a critical approach to ‘silence as dissidence,’ as written about by Nthabiseng ­Motsemme, instead of thinking about her silence as indicative of lack in some way.11 This association between lack and silence is often located in an understanding that one cannot articulate rather than in an assumption that one may choose not to. Through the use of two scenes of visitation and engagement between family and perpetrator, I argue that these scenes function as simulations of a TRC. Like the actual TRC, the visits are mediated by God and church, and thus a religious ethics,

162  Derilene (Dee) Marco which is physically represented through Father Dalton, and play on the same tropes that were seen in the ‘real’/factual TRC: desperation, anger, confusion, and ultimate forgiveness, to name a few. In existing work about the TRC, both the actual events that constitute this monumental time in the country’s history, and, as is the case in this article, cultural works that work with those events, the emphases have largely been on the (positive) workings of that institution. Even more of the focus has been on the milieu of the time and the climate of ‘Rainbow Nation-isms’ that came to being in the new nation post-1994. Scholars have pored over the various trials, some more popularly significant than others, even though the hearings were televised and on radio for the duration. In particular, it was the Human Rights Violations trials that played a pivotal role in the process of nation building and the larger (and ongoing) project of South Africa’s transformation from an apartheid state to a democratic one.

South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (SA TRC) sought to bring the atrocities of apartheid to light through two primary modes of inquiry: firstly, to provide a forum for perpetrators to confess to politically motivated crimes, and secondly, for families to ask for the details of what happened to family members who had gone missing or been killed by such acts during apartheid. The commission listened to testimonies of victims and perpetrators relating to events that occurred between 1960 and 1994. The hearings were part of a long process that started soon after the end of apartheid. Based on the Promotion of ­National Unity and Reconciliation Act, No. 34 of 1995, the TRC, a court-like structure which moved around the country, started its ­A mnesty hearings in 1996. The hearings only culminated in 2000, while decisions continued into 2001, and other branches of the TRC still exist today. The SA TRC followed a reparative justice model and not a retributive justice model as was the case of the Nuremberg trials. A major condition of this model was that the past be excavated with the end goal of the Rainbow Nation already in mind. The Commission was comprised of three committees: the Human Rights Violations Committee (HRV), the Restoration and R ­ ehabilitation Committee (R+R), and the Amnesty Committee. There was great national and international interest in the processes of the HRV and the Amnesty Committees as these pertained specifically to the hearings and testimonies of victims and perpetrators. However, the ramifications of the TRC, specifically related to reparations, have still not been adequately dealt with. Along with the national rhetoric around the terms of the new nation, the commission did not identify the complexity of ‘wrong doers’ in this situation. In other words, the price of amnesty and

Narratives of Pain  163 forgiveness was the same for the white apartheid security force officers and the freedom fighters who were part of the anti-apartheid arms struggle. The R+R Committee was mandated with the task of formulating proposals for the rehabilitation of victims of apartheid and aimed to restore their dignity and it is this branch of the TRC that still functions today, as it continues its attempts at formally restricting the systemic remains of apartheid.12 There is a great deal of existing scholarship about the SA TRC because it is considered an exemplary international model in truth, forgiveness, and reconciliation.13 Despite some of the similarities with other nations’ attempts at unpacking traumatic pasts for the outcome of truth and reconciliation, the South African situation is also unique. Mamood Mamdani critiques prominent scholars and politicians who constructed and endorsed the TRC as guilty of a too easy assumption associated with the TRC that ‘all justice is victor’s justice.’14 Mamdani considers South Africa’s negotiation for freedom and equality politically justifiable but morally and intellectually unjustifiable. His caution is being evidenced now in some of the contemporary debates in South Africa. He points to the fact that problems will arise from over-simplification of ‘several versions of truth’ to only one monolithic and ill-fitting version.15 This singular version is the ‘Rainbow Nation,’ a construction which, although blithely celebrated, has become a term and construct with which a new generation of post-apartheid youth are not invested in as a mode of self-representation. It is also in line with such caution that Marx’s discussion of TRC films as ethical work becomes something to keep in mind. Coetzee’s Journey to Forgiveness and the Grootboom Abyss Among the few signposts and landmarks along Coetzee’s journey into the humble coloured township of Paternoster are the shell covered graves, the image of the empty shore, portrayed quite unglamorously in this film (perhaps because it is the primary means of living for the community), and the small almost identical houses that reference apartheid’s forced removals of Black people around the country. In this way, the film has moments of privileging a Black point of view but focuses specifically on a ‘coloured’ community and in this way employs a somewhat unconventional tone in representations of post-apartheid TRC narratives.16 This is so particularly because while the TRC sought to bring to the fore Black pain, it often also, by virtue of what apartheid was, also reinscribed many racial categories of apartheid. Because South Africans in the category ‘African black’ were the most oppressed and violently treated during apartheid, Gabriel’s choice for focusing on a ‘coloured’ community is interesting and one of the reasons that make this film stand out outside of other re-representations of the TRC.17

164  Derilene (Dee) Marco Interestingly, the film also employs another unconventional overall point of view, which is that much of the film also incorporates Coetzee’s point of view. In fact, the opening scene is entirely Coetzee’s point of view, a position that very actively begins a process of endearment towards the perpetrator. The view from the driver’s seat shows a desolate, dusty street, until a young man runs up to the driver’s window and slams two live crayfish on the window. The ‘click clack clicking’ of the crayfish tentacles on the window is audible on the soundtrack as the young man shouts something about a cheap price, evidence of the economic conditions of the area. Coetzee is jolted by the seller but his expression soon returns to the same distracted and heavy expression of the opening shot. Coetzee’s point of view privileges his position in two ways in these opening moments: firstly, because there is a very distinct sense of worry on his face, emphasised by the medium close-ups to close-ups that show worried lines and tight lips. This sense of worry that opens the film, seems to tell the audience that something is not quite right. Secondly, this point of view privileges Coetzee because others who appear in the opening scene, seem to filter into the very empty, seemingly unimportant nothingness of the mise-en-scène. The two scenes which form the basis of the analysis for this paper both take place in the Grootboom household. The first occurs soon after Coetzee arrives in Paternoster. Set against the backdrop described above, and the heavy looming dark clouds, there is a distinct sense of ambivalence and unspoken danger but it is not clear for whom this danger exists. The Grootboom ‘stoep’18 is a large open-plan makeshift area from which the ocean is visible in the not-too-far distance. It has been haphazardly covered with weathered fishing nets to provide some shelter. In the wind, the nets are haunting as they flutter and evoke an impression of emptiness. The house’s once cream-coloured walls are now peeling and patchy, contributing to a sense of neglect and forgottenness. This is the derelict mise-en-scène in which the majority of this film takes place. Father Dalton and Coetzee’s first visit is captured in a tracking shot as they walk towards the camera and the family. This sense of approach seems to echo the opening scene from Coetzee’s point of view. Waiting outside the house are Mr and Mrs Grootboom. Coetzee passes Daniel’s sister and brother, Sannie and Ernest, and comes to stand between the parents and the children. Father Dalton offers that they should sit. Coetzee’s introduction is brief and precise: he is there to confess and apologise directly to the family for having killed their son and brother. We learn that the family was in fact not present at that TRC hearing, an additional part of the narrative which this paper will not expand on. Briefly however, their not having heard Coetzee’s public testimony makes that the events of testimony and forgiveness which follow in their household, even more poignant. It is as though the unseen testimony and ‘absent’ forgiveness has not lived a real life until Coetzee asks for it

Narratives of Pain  165 from the family themselves. This raises a much larger question of who was actually meant to have been forgiven by the TRC and to what degree did that forgiveness (and amnesty) manifest in reality, particularly for victims of the families of victims. Did the hearings humanise victims and their families at all? This scene utilises close-ups to convey the extreme and heightened emotions of each character. Facial expressions are not enough to convey Ernest’s resentment, Sannie’s rage, Mrs Grootboom’s heartbreak and confusion, and Mr Grootboom’s guilt and sadness. But facial expressions are also not enough to show Coetzee’s own guilt and brokenness about what he has done, his inability to work through, let alone past, the trauma.19 It is the children who quickly surpass the pleasantries when Sannie calls Tertius a ‘murderous, white bastard,’ shortly followed by Ernest who demands to know whether Coetzee has R1000,000 to give them because that would have been his brother’s annual income as an engineer. The siblings point to the loss of promise in their household as well as a loss of hope because neither of them has been able to go to University since what happened to Daniel disrupted their growth and development in profound ways. Ernest’s monetary concerns also highlight the issue of reparations, emphasising the inadequacy of verbal apologies, as occurred at the TRC hearings. The initial outburst also, for the first time, names Coetzee as ‘white’ and makes visible his whiteness and his shame. The children raise the issues not only of reparations and the ‘easy’ forgiveness through the TRC, but also of potential punishment for what he did. In their overtly angry stances and actions towards Coetzee, the children also ‘act up’ in ways that may not seem to be in line with the narrative of forgiveness. Sannie and Ernest seem to re-experience their brother’s death as well as the metaphorical deaths which took place in their own lives. The feeling of both these siblings being stunted because of the physical death of their brother can thus be read as multiple deaths for the family. Coetzee’s presence thus haunts them in a number of ways, and the existence of perpetrators in relation to the deaths of so many, both physical and metaphorical, continues to haunt the post-apartheid imagination. Although this scene, and moments of forgiveness littered throughout South Africa’s post-apartheid history, has been read along the lines of seeking forgiveness, I wish to argue that even the ongoing project of post-apartheid forgiveness is riddled in privilege. The logic behind seeing each of these characters play out their roles as enveloped in a larger national project of forgiveness, is affirmed through the characters of Coetzee and Mrs Grootboom. In the case of Coetzee, his constantly huddled shoulders and overall downtrodden appearance are meant to endear the viewer to him and to the depths of his struggle.

166  Derilene (Dee) Marco Mrs Grootboom has a similar composure, and when framed in the same shots, there is an unspoken (visual) link drawn between her ‘unspeakable’ pain and his. This point is further emphasised in the second scene I wish to elaborate on. While the first took place primarily outside the house, the second takes place in the living room. This scene is the one in which Coetzee testifies to the family, in a set up reminiscent of the TRC, and, which I argue is a kind of re-enactment of the hearing. Father Dalton, the local parish priest is also present again. Though never mentioned as such, Dalton seems to embody the Christian religious aspect of the TRC, through which all forgiveness was made possible. Throughout the actual hearings, the Commissioners travelled all over the country, from province to province, to hear victim and perpetrator testimonies. Stuck in the emotional memory of the very sensibility of post-apartheidness, is the Archbishop Desmond Tutu, an Anglican bishop and an anti-apartheid activist. Tutu’s words, behaviour, good humour, and the embodiment of the institution sanctified by God, made that he was a character closely related to Mandela in stature. Tutu, who is still alive, was able to speak to crowds of people about the national and collective project of forgiveness and made ‘Ubuntu’ into the term it is today. Father Dalton is never quite incorporated into the narrative in this large and meaningful way but his presence as a Christian priest makes it possible to draw certain links between his presence as a kind of peaceful mediator and the TRC commissioners, or even Tutu-esque. Seated in their modest and relatively dark (despite the time of day) lounge area, the Grootboom family appears similar to how they did the day before: a visibly upset mother, a protective father, and two angry adult children, who will never be able to capture their mother’s attention the way Daniel does. They are seated in a half-circle this time, with less physical distance among them. Sannie takes on the role of questioning and probes Coetzee by demanding and pressing him on the details of Daniel’s death. Sannie is set up as the interrogator but Coetzee’s focus as he speaks is on Magda Grootboom. The scene’s heavy reliance on closeups serves to create empathy for both victim and perpetrator and for the piecing together of the narrative of forgiveness, of working through the pain. In their volume, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela and Chris van de Merwe write that ‘A fundamental issue concerning trauma is the regaining of meaning after trauma … reviewing of one’s life narrative to incorporate the traumatic loss in the new narrative.’20 This notion of reviewing seems to take place for both perpetrator and victims in the film and is emphasised in Gobodo-Madikizela and van de Merwe’s work on trauma in the aftermath of the TRC. In this moment, the killer and mother are locked in sharing what the TRC conceived of as special and/or redemptive moments between perpetrators and victims or the families of victims. In this scene, this is mainly

Narratives of Pain  167 conveyed through Magda Grootboom’s longing expression as she listens to how her son was killed. She never vocalises what her blank stare might be imagining. These moments of testimony were meant to affirm the rainbow nation project and were simultaneously meant to create a sense of familiarity, even solidarity, between perpetrator and victim, between Black(s) and White(s). This solidarity would have been borne of moments in which the two previously oppositional people (victim and perpetrator), would now recognise that both sets of people had suffered, not only the victim or the victim’s family, in this instance. The moment of seeing the other’s pain too, even if the perpetrator, was the very foundation on which the TRC and Ubuntu was built. Such moments, in the narrative of the film and of nation, were also meant to affirm a singular narrative about post-apartheid and the overarching sensibility of Ubuntu 21 and unity. In such a constitution of narrative, there is little room for the fractured realities of different peoples who were all treated differently under apartheid and for whom notions of apology, forgiveness, and pain elicit different forms of rhetoric governed by different compilations of time, space, and emotion. What was consistently missing from these confessions at the TRC, and also from the one we witness in the Grootboom household, is the content of what Motsemme calls ‘the reconciliation text.’22 Motsemme writes that one of the single, most unifying symbols of the unfolding South ­A frica … that we must take into account to contextualize and make sense of the TRC, is the insertion of the ‘reconciliation text’, as embodied in the ‘rainbow nation’ rhetoric. 23 Motsemme, Cole, and other scholars’ comments around the theatricality of the TRC are also useful for this paper’s considerations of the characters in this film and the power located in the creation of a specific kind of rhetoric of pain (and forgiveness). 24 The identifiers, ‘perpetrator’ and ‘victim’ further aid in the making of ‘a powerful drama of history-in-the-making.’25 Sometimes this theatrical element may have seemed to be of more value than the very difficult work beyond the testimonies and the continuation of lives beyond the various deaths (Figure 9.1). In the midst of the confessional scene, we see Coetzee’s desperation to be freed of guilt as well as Magda’s unbearable heartbreak. The reliance on shot-reverse-shot sequences functions to keep us bound up in a kind of participant tension and, more importantly, a decision to be made whether to forgive Coetzee or not. This decision seems to be Magda Grootboom’s to make. Magda’s silence throughout the film is read as weakness. This is often emphasised in her husband speaking on behalf of them both or her children’s emotions standing in for a host of feelings within the household.

168  Derilene (Dee) Marco

Figure 9.1   Family, Coetzee, and Father Dalton around Daniel’s grave. Still frame from Forgiveness.

Magda however never says anything much beyond her laboured attempts at the work of the everyday: food, late afternoon soap operas, and checking on the family. Magda does in fact not make decisions. While Magda Grootboom holds the ultimate space for emotive power, it is remarkable to experience that the film also creates as much space for empathy for ­Coetzee. This, too, was what was identified as the remarkable power of the TRC: namely that emotions such as sympathy and pity could be granted to those who committed the horrendous acts that kept apartheid going. The film in essence reinscribes such emotions and associations, so that we, as viewers, too, feel empathy for Coetzee. In seeing his pain, we, as secondary witnesses of the dramatised TRC, render forgiveness not only possible, but also plausible, even natural. The sentiment is that if Magda, through her silence, is able to forgive, then so can we. Such considerations have largely led to a fraught and complex contemporary South Africa. Although not the focus of this paper, it is within these complex interstices of pain and forgiveness that many still sit. Motsemme writes that ‘the TRC assumed that the world was only knowable through words’ and that because of words, verbal testimonies would ‘organize’ a process of healing. 26 She argues for many of those silences to be read as ‘languages’ of their own, and as resistive choices, rather than about being ‘unable’ to speak. Considered in this way, Mrs Grootboom’s silence can also be read as an act of resistance and agency enacted both in the face of domestic patriarchy and historical injustices of the TRC. Like Motsemme, this paper also draws on Bibi Bakare-Yusuf’s critical engagement with Elaine Scarry’s work on pain.27 While Scarry argues for thinking beyond silence as nothingness, B ­ akare-Yusuf orients us to consider expressions of pain as always distorted through a range of insights

Narratives of Pain  169 but fundamentally through an understanding that pain can never exist in a referential state: Its non-referentiality prevents and inhibits the transformation of the felt experience of pain, leaving it to reside in the body, where the sufferer reverts back to a prelinguistic state of incomprehensible wailing, inaudible whisper, inarticulate screeching, primal whispering, which destroys language and all that is associated with language: subjectivity, civilisation, culture, meaning and understanding. 28 As encouraged by Bakare-Yusuf’s arguments, I read Magda Grootboom’s silence thus not as devoid of agency, nor is it meant to be read as pain that has no home. Bakare-Yusuf’s explicit questioning, ‘What is the unspeakable?’, 29 invites a reconsideration of the very terms we use to engage pain and trauma. To assume that Magda’s silence is misplaced or ‘wrong.’ is to assign it value according to a Western cultural system of understanding the world and, importantly, articulation of that understanding. Instead, Bakare-Yusuf invites a reading of how pain is expressed in the body as something that can be read from different vantage points that are not Western or even verbal. Of the multiple critiques in her work, it is this notion of pain not only as something that cannot be expressed with words, but also an awareness that such ‘unspeakable’ or ‘inarticulate’ expressions of pain are not to be dismissed as unimportant or lacking in complexity. Motsemme’s leaning on this argument in relation to women during the TRC, gives us a new set of tools with which to understand even the silence of trauma as riddled with agency, even if that agency is not understood in a Western register. Together, these two readings offer a compelling theoretical position from which to think about the various re-representations of silences in TRC re-enactments in films. To begin to use a different language for trauma and the body’s relationship to such experiences, allows for a kind of freedom which is also not quite written in a Western register. Through such a consideration, one may argue that some of the expressions of pain seen during the TRC hearings, for example, what has been described often as ‘unspeakable pain,’ has meant pain that cannot be understood from a Western position. Such a position, as seen both through the TRC (despite the overwhelming use of the term ‘Ubuntu’ as an ‘African’ way of dealing with pain), and the various (selective) ­re-representations of that testimonial pattern, thus reaffirms problematic racial hierarchies and does in fact not contribute to healing. Instead, such a system reifies problematic racial codes and practices of ­meaning-making through Western values. The two scenes examined here contribute to such a reading because Magda Grootboom never actually speaks in ways that register as important. The dominant image of Mrs  Grootboom is her doubled over; whether this physical act represents pain or anger or rage is completely unknown. Her physical

170  Derilene (Dee) Marco representation and (her) solemn facial expression, her dark or black clothing, in the dark household, consistently reaffirm Magda’s silence as unbearable sadness and grief. Although we might be able to read this/ her silence as resistance, the film itself, in composition and form, do not invite one to conform to such a radical reading of Magda’s silence. Later in the same scene, the camera zooms in on Ernest’s right hand, visible to the left of Coetzee’s head during the questioning, becoming a fist. As soon as Coetzee finishes his testimony, and while the room is still sombre, Ernest picks up an empty pot and lets out a long, deep, throaty scream as he slams the porcelain-like jug, can, mug onto Coetzee’s head. The moment shatters the illusion of a re-enactment of truth in good faith, as well as the illusion of homogenous forgiveness. Pain, in its physical and emotional iterations reoccurs repeatedly, just as the Freudian nature of trauma promises it will. Ernest and Coetzee are held in the same frame for a few moments, reflecting both of their mental states: Coetzee’s sombre remorse and ­Ernest’s violent anger angrily violent state. Ernest’s action releases the frozen tension: Sannie and Magda become hysterical, while the men in the room attend to Ernest and Coetzee. The scene is reminiscent of the previous afternoon’s first meeting, when Mrs Grootboom dropped a plate of ‘koeksisters’30 after Sannie reminded her why Coetzee was there: her son’s death. Both these incidents, punctuated by familial trauma infused with the overarching national theme of forgiveness, feature moments of objects breaking. The term ‘breaking’ in its continuous present tense is used to connote the ongoing nature of the brokenness, not marked by any foreseeable end. The film consistently invites us to review the victim perpetrator narrative through interwoven notions of pain, never only in the past and never quite gone. What is consistent, Forgiveness seems to comment, is that both perpetrators and victims felt pain because of apartheid.

Revenge or Forgiveness and the Politics of Neat Apologies There is a sub-plot to this film, which is not about forgiveness but about revenge. After Coetzee’s first visit to the Grootboom family, Sannie calls an activist friend of Daniel’s who is based in Johannesburg. On hearing that Daniel’s killer is in Paternoster, he instructs Sannie to keep Coetzee there for as long as she can. Three young men – black, coloured, and white – set out on a road trip to Paternoster to kill the man who killed their friend. This is not only about punishment, but also about vengeance. The full extent of this revenge is only revealed in the final scenes of the film. What lingers within narrative of the ‘Rainbow nation’ trio (black, white, and coloured) are questions about revenge and retribution, which have previously appeared in the film through the characters of Sannie and Ernest. However, as they are younger characters, the film seems to have two separate comments about who retribution is for and

Narratives of Pain  171 who may legitimately seek revenge. Both revenge and forgiveness may be divisive in this context. ­ aniel’s At the end of the film it is revealed to us/the viewer, that one of D friends had informed the police about Daniel’s participation in the resistance movement, thus setting him up for death. We learn that it was one of the trio, the black Zuko, who sold out. This twist/reveal drives home the film’s rather temperate and uncritical stance towards the Truth Commission and the larger politics of the end of apartheid. Further to these questions lingers another which has gone unanswered for two years: which of Daniel’s friends sold him out? Once we learn that it was not only Coetzee, the apartheid era policeman, but also the most unsuspecting character of the trio – the black Zuko, who had sold out, the very notion of perpetrator shifts. This is an important point because it drives home the film’s rather temperate and uncritical stance on the larger politics of the end of apartheid and the Truth Commission. While the moments that have led up to this point were suggestive of a kind of egalitarian pain, particularly through the ways in which Coetzee and Mrs Grootboom are represented. It is this final piece of the narrative that confirms the film’s position and moral compass to direct us towards an understanding that all races were affected by apartheid. The film seems to suggest an equivalency of pain, to offer an overarching comment that everyone’s (referring to all races) pain matters equally. The sub-plot also plays into a range of stereotypes. Most of all, power that had been afforded Black (black African, coloured, Indian) South Africans after the end of apartheid, seems taken away from them here, as the film makes the overarching comment that everyone’s pain matters. In other words, as reinforced by the actual TRC, victim and perpetrator pain, although not equal or the same, is still pain. Although perhaps useful for the project of nation building with the intention of diffusing a potential civil war, the way in which the TRC’s forgiveness project unfolded in the aftermath was that it seemed a too easy reconciliation. A physical confrontation between the trio and Coetzee takes place at the end of the film and leads to the perpetrator’s unexpected death. The end of the film is punctuated with Daniel’s family around his grave with ­Coetzee in the position of being part of the family and no longer a stranger. To return to the notion of understanding Mrs Grootboom’s inarticulate pain, it is in this final scene that we begin to see Magda’s pain as accessible because of Coetzee’s efforts. Further affirmation of Mrs ­Grootboom having moved beyond pain, comes from the young woman, Sannie, who appears not only to have forgiven Coetzee, but is also able to see the humanity in him. All characters are, by the end of the film, the true personification of ‘Ubuntu’ as encouraged through the TRC. It appears that the family has been able to work through the stages of grief and post-­traumatic stress: ‘acting out’ and ‘working through,’ to finally reach a place of true and, importantly, South African forgiveness. In her only verbal communication

172  Derilene (Dee) Marco with Coetzee, Mrs Grootboom instructs Coetzee to ask her son for forgiveness at his gravesite. After this she will give Coetzee her blessing to move on. It is while this final act of redemption takes place that Daniel’s three friends arrive at the dusty graveyard in Paternoster. Coetzee and the trio exchange looks of recognition. A series of shotreverse-shots reveals that this time, instead of Coetzee being the one opposite the Grootboom family, he is now on their side, shot in the same frame as them and protectively alongside Daniel’s grave, and the comrades are on the opposite side of the screen. Each camp is representative of the ‘Rainbow Nation’ both in race and historical composition: age, political credibility and historical trauma. In a move that displays just how far the victim family and perpetrator have come, Coetzee acts as a representative of the camp around the grave. He politely taps on the driver’s window and asks that the three join them as they pay homage to Daniel. He seems distinctly protective of the Grootboom family, a paternalistic element that further complicates the overall representation of unification as set out in the film. This paternalism is also noted as problematic here, in that whiteness during apartheid always held a sense of paternalism in its relationship to Black workers whether gardeners or domestic workers in homes. This sense of feigned ‘care’ also formed much of the basis for the deeply damaging position that many ordinary white South Africans claimed through the notion that they simply did not know the atrocities of apartheid were as pervasive as they were. The three men exit the car and stand in a semi-circle with the family looking on. Daniel’s mother vaguely recognises one of them. Coetzee takes the blame for the untimely arrival of Daniel’s comrades, thus protecting Sannie (the one who asked them to come) from later questions. The end of the film thus realises both forgiveness and revenge (Figure 9.2). The situation unravels soon after Coetzee and the family respectfully leave the graveside. The three comrades look unsure of what to do, now

Figure 9.2  M  agda Grootboom. Still frame from Forgiveness.

Narratives of Pain  173 that Coetzee has been forgiven and the reason for their journey seems to have fallen apart. In the midst of the final unexpected visit, Zuko, the black comrade, shoots Coetzee. As Coetzee bleeds to death next to Daniel’s grave, the three hurriedly scramble back to their car and drive off in the same blur of dust and sand that they arrived in. The film concludes with a final shot of Coetzee’s body next to Daniel’s grave, a reminder that throughout the film we do not see a single image or photograph of Daniel, nor does Forgiveness incorporate flashbacks. In a way, this lack seems to be one of the most authentic elements to the film, in that many families heard testimonies about loved ones who had been killed or who they had ‘lost’ in other forms, but rarely were those victims shown as witnesses at the TRC. Victims thus existed in memory(ies) or in imagination. This ghostly, haunting element of the victim in imagination occurs here again, in that Daniel’s presence, the very reason the narrative exists, is at the same time, a non-presence. The very nature of pain and trauma and mourning also oscillates between being real and unreal because now that Coetzee is dead, the film seems to ask: who will mourn for him? This final shot of the dead Coetzee next to Daniels’ grave, is a final comment on what appears to be something akin to a uselessness to forgiveness and a seemingly fatalistic end, not only to these two lives, but also to life after the end of apartheid. Who will really survive? And perhaps more poignantly, who deserves to survive? However, a more dangerous issue is how the audience has witnessed Coetzee’s torturedness and his deep need for forgiveness. Essentially, it is Coetzee the viewer might feel they know best, and this is because of the film’s investment in this character. We feel a great sense of empathy for him, throughout the film and particularly in his death. We do not feel a great sense of empathy for Zuko, largely because of how he is framed and represented throughout, and because we know so little about him. Where Zuko’s story echoes a stereotype about black men as violent and troubled, Coetzee’s story echoes a stereotype about white Afrikaner policemen as problematic but able to implement the change, a call and narrative of possibility consistently rendered as possible through the official narrative of the TRC and the attending sensibility of Ubuntu. Rather strangely, it appears that Forgiveness humanises Coetzee as much as it grants visibility to the Grootboom family. The film’s emphasis thus pivots on a slow but relatively constant reframing of Coetzee through the lens of Ubuntu, and thus turning Coetzee into someone exceptional who would have deserved to be in the new South Africa.

Conclusion Forgiveness is a complex piecing together of questions around who deserves to be forgiven, who deserves to be a South African, who has done the work of forgiveness, and whether catharsis erases injustice.

174  Derilene (Dee) Marco The film places Coetzee in a deserving position to encourage the viewer to vilify, or at the very least, dislike Zuko for killing someone who had done right by the victim’s family. This binary is part of the ongoing contradictions of living in the Rainbow Nation. While the film suggests this Western frame/reading of Coetzee’s (generalised South African pain), I wish to return to Bakare-Yusuf’s points about a ‘fitting’ articulation for pain and to the Ahmed's remarks on whiteness: …declaring one’s whiteness, even as part of a project of social critique, can reproduce white privilege in ways that are ‘unforeseen’. 31 Our deep awareness of and investment in Coetzee’s white subjectivity by the end of the film also means that we, as witness-viewers, are complexly woven into our own versions of forgiveness. We feel able to forgive him because Mrs Grootboom was able to begin to speak again because of him. Because of Coetzee, her pain becomes something that can be articulated and, importantly, understood. To return to the notion of the Western gaze, we begin to see M ­ agda’s pain as accessible because of Coetzee’s efforts. Her previous ‘inability’ to verbally express pain is read as ‘refusal.’ Contrarily, if we use ­Motsemme’s argument for silence as power, Mrs Grootboom’s ability to talk again then feels in fact not powerful, but instead an act(ivity) into which she has to be /has been assimilated. Her silence had been a choice, in how she lived and how she made sense of life. The end of Forgiveness then, appears to offer a kind of moral imperative that Magda Grootboom, as well as other victims and families of victims, are better off after they have spoken about/have been re-enabled to speak are able to speak their pain. In this process of speaking out the pain, Coetzee (and other remorseful perpetrators) are read as characters who make it possible to move forward.

Notes 1 Desmond Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness (London and Parktown: Random House, 1999), 34. 2 Pumla Gqola, ‘Defining People: Analysing Power, Language and Representation in Metaphors of the New South Africa,’ Transformation, 47 (2001), 94. 3 Ibid. 4 The other main feature films which incorporate the TRC are: Red Dust (Tom Hooper, 2004), In My Country (John Boorman, 2004) and Zulu Love Letter (Ramadan Suleman, 2004). 5 Sara Ahmed, ‘Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-Performativity of ­A nti-Racism,’ Borderlands E-journal, 3.2, 2004. 6 Here I reference the recent years’ student protests at universities around the country. The protests started at The University of Cape Town with the “Rhodes Must Fall” movement. This movement called for the removal of a statue of Cecil John Rhodes after a student threw faeces at the statue.

Narratives of Pain  175 The movement then developed to encompass much more and developed into a movement called “Fees Must Fall.” This movement called for free and decolonial education. These movements, led by a generation of young people, “Fallists,” came to articulate the challenges of race politics that had not been expressed in such ways before. The movements also made it impossible for white people not to acknowledge their whiteness. These movements also largely made possible certain articulations around white fears. 7 Gabriel’s film exists alongside three other 2004 films that premise the TRC in their narratives, two foreign productions with South African narratives and one by a South African director, although internationally funded. The issues of funding in the South African film context in many ways reflects those of other small cinemas around the world. 8 Sara Ahmed, ‘Affective Economies,’ Social Text, 79.22:2, 2004, 128. 9 Lesley Marx, ‘Cinema, Glamour, Atrocity: Narratives of Trauma,’ Social Dynamics, 32.2, 2006, 22–49. 10 Ibid. 11 Nthabiseng Motsemme, ‘The Mute Always Speak: On Women’s Silences at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,’ Current Sociology, 52.5, 2004, 909–32. 12 Government Gazette no. 22833 of 16 November 2001, Volume 6, section 6 is a detailed report of the processes and logistics of the TRC between 1998 and 2001, 733–87: www.justice.gov.za/trc/report/finalreport/vol6_s6.pdf, Final report of the TRC: www.justice.gov.za/trc/report/. 13 Aletta J. Norval, ‘Memory, Identity and the (Im)possibility of Reconciliation: The Work of the TRC in South Africa,’ Constellations, 5.2 (1998), 250–65.; Michael Cunningham, ‘Saying Sorry: the Politics of Apology,’ The Political Quarterly Publishing Co. (1999), 285–93; Rosemary Nagy, ‘The Ambiguities of Reconciliation and Responsibility in South Africa,’ Political Studies, 52 (2004), 709–27; Rosemary Jolly, ‘Rehearsals of Liberation: Contemporary Postcolonial Discourse and the New South Africa,’ PMLA, 110.1 (1995), 17–29; Tristan Anne Borer, ‘Reconciling South Africa/ South Africans? Cautionary Notes from the TRC,’ African Studies Quarterly, 8.1 (2004), 19–38; Catherine M. Cole, ‘Performance, Transitional Justice, and the Law: South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission,’ Theatre Journal, 59.2 (2007), 167–87; Annelies Verdoolaege, ‘Media Representations of the South African Truth And Reconciliation Commission and their Commitment to Reconciliation,’ Journal Of African Cultural Studies, 17.2 (2005), 181–99; Susan Vanzanten Gallagher, ‘“I Want To Say/Forgive Me”: South African Discourse and Forgiveness,’ PMLA, 117.2 (2002), 303–6; Martha Minow, ‘In Practice between Vengeance and Forgiveness: South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission,’ Negotiation Journal (1998), 319–55. 14 Mamood Mamdani, ‘The Truth According to the TRC” in Amadiume and An-Nam (eds.), The Politics of Memory: Truth, Healing and Social Justice (London and New York: Zed Books, 2000), 178. 15 Ibid. 16 The term coloured connotes people of mixed race and was a racial classification made during apartheid. 17 The population registration Act of 1950 classified non-white South Africans into the following categories: black African, coloured and Indian. Those who were classified as black Africans were the most brutally affected by apartheid. The Act was repealed in 1991. 18 A “stoep” is the Afrikaans word for porch. It is used colloquially by speakers of all languages in the country.

176  Derilene (Dee) Marco 19 The terms ‘acting out’ and ‘working through’ are used in this paper to reference psychoanalytic scholarship about trauma, relying on Freud’s ‘­Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through’ (1914). Further to this, these ideas are used in relation to Dominick La Capra’s work on screen trauma in ­Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001). 20 Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela and Chris van de Merwe, Narrating Our ­Healing: Perspectives on Working through Trauma (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), 6. 21 “Ubuntu” is an Nguni term associated with the notion of humanity, that one’s humanity is linked with that of others. Ubuntu is the term that was used by Archbishop Desmond Tutu as a term that was and is meant to embody the transition from apartheid to post-apartheid. 22 Motsemme, ‘The Mute Always Speak,’ 911. 23 Ibid. 24 Cole, ‘Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission,’ 2009. 25 Motsemme, ‘The Mute Always Speak,’ 913. 26 Ibid., 914. 27 Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, ‘The Economy of Violence: Black Bodies and the ­Unspeakable Terror” in Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick (eds.), Feminist Theory and The Body: A Reader (New York: Routledge University Press, 1999). 28 Sa’ez 1992: 137 in Bakare-Yusuf, ‘The Economy of Violence,’ 314. 29 Bakare Yusuf, ‘The Economy of Violence,’ 314. 30 Koeksisters are sweet plait like pastries covered in syrup. They are a South African Afrikaner traditional dessert which takes its own flavor in coloured communities because of the relationship between Afrikaans farm owners and slaves. 31 Ahmed, ‘Declarations of Whiteness,’ 2004.

10 Notes toward a Working Definition of Mopecore John Proctor

The text that is grieving has no thesis: only speculations. —Kristin Prevallet, I, Afterlife1

A couple of nights ago, my five-year-old daughter came into our living room well after her bedtime, sobbing uncontrollably. ‘Picky-Picky died again,’ she said between gasps. For the past few months, she has been brought to tears roughly 10–20 times while listening to the audio version of Ramona Forever, specifically the part in which Ramona has to bury Picky-Picky the family cat with her sister Beezus. 2 The story is told dispassionately: Picky-Picky is old, sleeps in the basement, and is found by Ramona after school one day in a permanent sleep. After burying the cat with her sister, Ramona is surprised to find her parents sympathetic, the chapter ends, and the book continues its central plotlines of getting an auntie and uncle married, Dad getting a full-time job while going back to college, and two young girls slowly growing older. But all my daughter retains in her emotional core is the death of the old family cat. This daughter of mine loves cats. They are currently her favorite thing in the world – perhaps the most important way she defines herself against her eight-year-old sister (a dog person), and the wellspring of pretty much all of her developing personal mythology. Every story she asks me to tell her must involve a kitty, preferably more than one. I find it interesting and not the least bit disturbing how many times she’s listened to this scene, knowing it’s coming and what it will do to her. But my daughter’s mediated grief, and that of most watchers of tear-jerking melodrama, is fairly simplistic and gestative, governed primarily by her immediate, individuated response. I used to watch Terms of Endearment with my mother over and over as a child, waiting for the scene where Debra Winger tries in vain to get her son to tell her he loves her before she dies of cancer. I still watch Terms of Endearment by myself on occasion, and I still have a hard time telling my mother I love her. These primordial responses indicate a deeper, historical grief implicit in the Beezus and Ramona series’ almost-60-year run.

178  John Proctor Over the last 20 or so years, Italian literary critic Franco Moretti has refined his theory of ‘distant reading,’ the antithesis of deep, immersive reading in which the reader doesn’t necessarily read at all, at least in the way we’ve been doing for the past 400-some years since Gutenberg’s printing press brought reading to the populace. Instead, utilizing data collection, retrieval, and codification technology, a modern reader may ‘read’ entire oeuvres, genres, and periods in toto by looking at comparative data points on them.3 I recoil instinctively from this Cliff’s Notes-­ variety ‘reading,’ but I have developed a similar but much rougher, less data-oriented circular model of late American history, of which Cleary’s Beezus and Ramona oeuvre serves as one data point. This model elucidates a deep, throbbing ulcer in the gut of modern mediated culture from which we will perhaps never heal, because we have continued refining ways of aggravating it without rupturing it. This model has been stewing in my mind since the 2016 American Presidential election. I rewatched Repo Man that November and it made me feel old and depressed, not only because the movie is over 30 years old and I’m over 40 years old, but also because I saw in it the horrific life cycle of satire: From skewering Reagan-era materialism in the early Eighties, to becoming an object of slacker satire in the late Eighties, to a ‘cult classic’ of the Nineties whose viewers only watched it to repeat key lines and enact favorite scenes, to its present place at the back end of HBO Go after perhaps the most ubiquitous symbol of Eighties materialism has now been elected president. When, in mid-April, my best friend texted to tell me that Emma ­Morano, at 117 years old the eldest person in the world, had died, all I could think was Beverly Cleary. All of her Beezus and Ramona books were written in the span of 50 years from 1950 to 1999, long enough to witness perhaps the period of greatest cultural tectonic shift in our mediated history. But the world of Klickitat Street never changes, or only slightly – enough to see two girls age five years over the fifty between Henry Huggins’s publication in 1950 and Ramona’s World in 1999.4 Thinking on this trajectory, I detect the nostalgic pull toward an imaginary 1950s that led 26% of voting-age Americans to vote for Donald Trump in 20165 in the hopes of bringing back salt-of-the-earth jobs and huckster values that no longer exist and/or probably shouldn’t. Henry’s industrious schemes to save $59.95 for a bike by selling boxes of bubblegum and preying on traditional female gender roles to resell a coupon for beauty treatment to Beezus6 speak to the ‘innocent Fifties’ mentality Joan Didion documented while observing a Jaycees convention in 1970: There was the belief in business success as a transcendent ideal. There was the faith that if one transforms oneself from an ‘introvert’ to an ‘extrovert,’ if one learns to ‘speak effectively’ and ‘do a job,’ success and its concomitant, spiritual grace, follow naturally.

Notes toward a Working Definition of Mopecore  179 But: There was … a kind of poignant attempt to circumnavigate social conventions that had in fact broken down in the Twenties … the voice of all those who have felt themselves not merely shocked but personally betrayed by recent history. It was supposed to be their time. It was not.7 Only the spirit-ghost of that mythological time seems to keep returning every 30 years –the pre-crash Twenties, the pre-upheaval Fifties, the pre-­ internet Eighties, now the Teens, which, according to self-­perpetuating American mythology, promise to be remembered as another golden age of adolescent self-delusion. (Almost exactly 30 years after Oliver North’s ­famous ‘I don’t recall’ replies to his involvement in the Iran-­Contra scandal, Jeff Sessions in June 2017 used the same line to defend his involvement in Russian hacking of the 2016 election. It almost felt like a tribute, or a cover.) And like the corporations that create and promulgate it, this cycle will far outlive Emma Morano, or Beverly Cleary, or me. In his nonfiction dystopian manifesto Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord recounts the Twentieth Century dispassionately as a gradual separation of workers from their work, representation from antecedent, medium from message, until all that is left is spectacle, ‘the nightmare of imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire for sleep.’8 Perhaps the thoughts that keep us up at night, that pull us out of our disquiet slumber to tell someone else about just how goddamn sad we are, are our only hope. These thoughts are as good a place as any to start toward a working definition of mopecore. *** It’s useful first to state what mopecore is not. Mopecore is not a genre; any text – or any thing, really, to which I’ll generally refer as a text hereforth – can be subject to the mopecore aesthetic. And while it is an aesthetic, it is not a theory, at least in any unified sense. Mopecore is foremost a critical and personal lens that assumes a text is grieving, in direct response to a world that is also grieving, perhaps at its own demise. Sigmund Freud, in his essay-chapter ‘Mourning and Melancholia,’ defines mourning, like dreaming or joke-telling, as essentially work, in which one is actively involved and which one will ostensibly finish. ­Melancholy, on the other hand, could aptly be described as a condition, over which an individual can exercise little control: [The observer] cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost, and it is all the more reasonable to suppose that the patient cannot consciously perceive what he has lost either. This, indeed, might be so

180  John Proctor even if the patient is aware of the loss which has given rise to his melancholia, but only in the sense that he knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him…. In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.9 The mopecore gaze, exercised not in work but in contemplation, represents a fusion of mourning and melancholia, in which the observer uses the text to mourn the melancholia of the world. Albert Camus, who resisted the term ‘existentialist’ for much of his career, nevertheless spent much of his energy trying to understand the relationship between mourning and absurdity, especially in his earlier work. The most overt expression of this exploration is his book-length essay The Myth of Sisyphus. In it, he defines absurdity as an existential condition: What, then, is that incalculable feeling that deprives the mind of the sleep necessary to life? A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between a man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.’10 The notion of absurdity, dovetailing with the hybridization of mourning and melancholy, is essentially the creeping suspicion that we, as critics and as people, are losing touch with our physical and metaphysical origins, gazing upon an endless, unfamiliar landscape dotted with fake news, social media bullying, and listicles explaining ourselves to us. Jean Baudrillard later called this the precession of the simulacra, in which the image outlives the real: Such would be the successive phases of the image: it is the reflection of a profound reality; it masks and denatures a profound reality; it masks the absence of a profound reality; it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum.11 Despite occupying similar critical space, Camus and Baudrillard could not occupy this space more differently. Camus’s mind runs hot, sometimes overturning itself in the maelstrom of human emotion; ­Baudrillard’s is cool and distant, speculating with a confidence that belies the abstraction of many of his premises. Occupying the temperamental space

Notes toward a Working Definition of Mopecore  181 somewhere between them is perhaps my favorite of the late-­TwentiethCentury thinkers, Roland Barthes. In a 2017 lecture, Wayne Koestenbaum summarized Roland Barthes’s lifetime critical trajectory as a process of mystification, demystification, and finally, remystification of the texts he studied.12 A surface reading of Koestenbaum’s reader-relationship with Barthes might imply most obviously a shared masochism: …[L]ove, Barthes proves, is not a feeling we take raw, but a condition that passes through the mediating scrim of plots, prejudices, and assumed positions. We get love through proxies; we can’t apprehend the thing itself, only the stylized miasma it stumbles through.13 But a deeper reading of Koestenbaum’s words reveals a more meaningful shared passion between these two minds: the desire to see through the proxy of any text or medium to its humanity, its (perhaps) unintended communication of the real that underlies the spectacle. Koestenbaum has called this the nuance of a text, but the term Barthes frequently employed is much more visceral. He looked into any text, especially in his later (remystifying?) work, for its lacerations. In A Lover’s Discourse and Camera Lucida, the final two book-length works he wrote, he mostly abandons impersonal critique, for which he employs the Latin studium (‘…application to a thing, taste for someone, a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment, of course, but without special acuity’),14 looking instead for what he calls the punctum, ‘… this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me.’15 Barthes is quick to add that the punctum is usually beyond the intent of a text’s creator, calling it ‘… that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).’16 Barthes’s contemporary and friend Julia Kristeva, in an essay published toward the end of Barthes’s life, attempted to give context to Barthes’s ‘strategy of desubstantification’ between the poles of writingas-­communication and writing-as-document: Between these apparently irreconcilable limits, Barthes points out the dialectic kinship, or rather, the common element of a transformed dialectic; he posits writing in the space of their separation, as an operation admitting of being clarified by understanding.17 Barthes’s punctum, then, is perhaps the laceration between the perceived permanence of a text and the creeping knowledge that any text is but one small space in a relentlessly surging timeline, a timeline whose expanse is dominated by boredom, repetitive and quotidian processes that push us along to eventual death. The punctum, in the art itself, is the moment of realization that, by the time a person experiences a text (especially but

182  John Proctor not exclusively a nonfiction text), the subject and the author are already dead. For instance, looking at a 1954 William Klein photo of a child smilingly having a gun pointed at his temple, Barthes identifies the punctum for himself as the boy’s bad teeth, and similarly, in other photos, the hands on a doorframe, the crossed arms of a boy, the bandage on the finger of a deformed child. Each of these ‘does not necessarily attest to the photographer’s art; it says only that the photographer was there, or else, still more simply, that he could not photograph the partial object at the same time as the total object.’18 The mopecore gaze, then, is looking not necessarily for the obvious and intentional grief, but into the holes – the punctures – in a text. A text can be anything through which we see not the directed grief of a piece, but the wounds it harbors. Barthes’s lacerations are but one manifestation of this metaphor. Leonard Cohen’s ‘crack in everything’ is also instructive toward our purpose in recovering the grief from texts: ‘That’s how the light gets in.’19 The light of which Cohen sings is, to the mopecore gaze, the world from which we’ve closed ourselves off – a world of fear, regret, tension, and remorse – in favor of predictability, comfort, and perceived immortality. It is a gaze into a text not as alternative to the world but as its mortal representative. The text and the gaze, perhaps ironically, unify in a grief that embodies Sartre’s great existential responsibility: I am abandoned in the world, not in the sense that I might remain abandoned and passive in a hostile universe like a board floating on the water, but rather in the sense that I find myself suddenly alone and without help, engaged in a world for which I bear the whole responsibility without being able, whatever I do, to tear myself away from this responsibility for an instant. For I am responsible for my very desire of fleeing responsibilities. 20 We are all, through the late-Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century processes of global industrialization, assembly-line specialization, the myth of progress, and the aforementioned media cycles that have replaced the natural cycles of the planet, been cut off from the world we inhabit, lacerated from our natural family. No wonder grief and loss are our central tropes in the Twenty-First Century. It seems too easy but also absolutely imperative to say that, by current American law, the only ‘person’ that can attain immortality is the corporation, whose amassed wealth inoculates it from the mopecore gaze. *** In that same essay on Barthes and literature, Kristeva posits the power of literature and art as a set of ‘operative symbols that suture the rifts between archaic subjectivist ideology on the one hand, and the development

Notes toward a Working Definition of Mopecore  183 of productive forces and means of knowledge on the other, while both preceding and exceeding these rifts.’21 If the crux, the light, and the fire are to be found in lacerations of the social construct, perhaps art is then a stitching of the wounds. Perhaps the stitches themselves, protruding from the open (but perhaps healing) wound, are the tangible representation of art. In ‘Mortal Man,’ the 12-minute mini-mixtape at the end of K ­ endrick Lamar’s maxi-mixtape To Pimp a Butterfly, 22 Lamar spends the first five minutes rapping to his id and the ghosts of Nelson Mandela, MLK, and Michael Jackson on his own place as a mainstream black male voice. He returns repeatedly to the refrain, ‘When shit hit the fan, is you still a fan?’ It’s a powerful rap that veers deeper just before five minutes in – Lamar’s voice, over the mix, almost whispers an imagined dialogue that until then has been scattered piecemeal throughout the songs on the album: I remember you was conflicted, misusin’ ya influence. Sometimes I did the same, abusin’ my power, fulla resentment—resentment that turned into a deep depression. Found myself screamin’ in a hotel room. I didn’t wanna self-destruct. … But while my loved ones was fightin’ a continuous war back in the city, I was enterin’ a new one—a war that was based on apartheid and discrimination. Made me wanna go back to the city and tell the homies what I learned. The word was respect. Just because you wore a different gang color than mines, doesn’t mean I can’t respect you as a black man, forgetting all the pain and hurt we caused each other in these streets. If I respect you, we unify and stop the enemy from killin’ us. But I don’t know. I’m no mortal man. Maybe I’m just another nigga.’ And with five minutes to go, Lamar says almost flippantly to a still-­ undisclosed confidante, Shit, that’s all I wrote. I was gonna call it ‘Another Nigga’ but it ain’t really a poem, I just felt like it’s somethin’ you prolly could relate to. Other than ‘at, now that I finally had a chance to holla at you, I always wanted to ask you about a certain situa—about a metaphor actually. Uh, you spoke on the ground. What you mean by that, what the ground represent? To which the voice of 20-years-dead Tupac Shakur reveals itself as the other end of Lamar’s dialogue, and responds like a departed ancestor: The ground is gonna open up and swallow the evil …. And the ground is the symbol for the poor people. The poor people is

184  John Proctor gonna open up this whole world and swallow up the rich people …. You know what I’m sayin’? It’s gonna be like, they might be some cannibalism out this mutha! The rest of the mix is Lamar seemingly in direct conversation with Tupac, searching for answers from his dead homie. Toward the end of the mediated conversation, Lamar asks the question, ‘How long you think it take before niggas be like, We fightin’ a war – I’m fightin’ a war I can’t win, an’ I wanna lay it all down?’ Tupac responds seemingly directly to Lamar: In this country a black man only have, like, five years we can ­exhibit maximum strength. And that’s right now, while you a teenager, while you still strong, while you still wanna lift weights, while you still wanna shoot back. ‘Cause once you turn thirty it’s like they take the heart and soul out of a man, out of a black man in this country. And you don’t wanna fight no mo’. And if you don’t believe me, you can look around—you don’t see no loudmouth thirty-yearold muthafuckas. Shakur was 25 years old when he was shot to death by a rival gang member. Lamar was 27 when he laid down this track. Both were speaking from a position, as young black men, of maximum strength. If the mopecore gaze is intact during even those brief, evanescent periods of maximum strength, it’s worth exploring, if only for a moment, the poststrength gaze. I teach a writing workshop at Rikers Island for men over 40 years old, almost all of them black. Of my regulars, one is still a loudmouth muthafucka, talking over me, spitting out improvised lines in response to our readings, and always pushing the others to lift their consciousness. He once, in a moment of quietude, ruminated about a hallway that divides the main building of the facility – younger inmates going one way and older inmates going the other – and how he’s spent much of his life since he was 16 years old going down one hallway, then later the next. But most of the men are quieter, wanting more than anything to find a skill that will allow them, on their next release, to avoid ending up back at Rikers again. Another, one of the quiet ones, spent much of our first weeks in the back, looking like he perpetually wanted to say something. One day, when we were talking about the poem ‘Outside the Capsule’ by Andre Hodeir that I’d assigned them the previous week, he raised his hand. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, his legs crossed, ‘But I wanted to share my experience with this poem.’ If you haven’t heard of Andre Hodeir, not to worry – neither had I before assigning his poem (sort of randomly, it turns out – Hodeir was before Garrett Hongo and Langston Hughes in a jazz poetry

Notes toward a Working Definition of Mopecore  185 anthology, 23 so I tacked it on while copying). It’s a fascinating but incorrigible list-poem composed of disembodied prepositional phrases, sentence fragments, exclamations, a faux FBI report, and a numbered list of instrument tunings that might be summed up as a linguistic approximation of an early jazz record. 24 ‘I didn’t know what to make of it for most of the weekend,’ he said. ‘It just seemed like words but no meaning. But on Sunday, I got to spend some time with the radio on in my cell, WQXR,’ a New York City classical music station, and reading this piece. I don’t know what was playing, but I just let it wash over me while I was reading, and I don’t know when it happened, but before I could even think about it, the music and the words seemed to be speaking to each other. I thought about the title of this piece and thought it must be some kinda time capsule—the words of one time talking to the music of another. It made me a little sad, but in a good way, like the voices of the dead was talking to each other. This man wrote some lovely pieces, including one in response to Brian Doyle’s hummingbird opus ‘Joyas Voladoras’ about another moment of being he had in a prison community garden with a hummingbird and a toad that he wrote the week Doyle himself died of complications from a brain tumor. Then, without warning, he was transferred upstate to continue his sentence. I probably won’t see him again in the abyss of the state correctional system. I’m not sure if Lamar or my student at Rikers sees the sadness in their work as intensely as I do – in fact, I think both of them probably see a hope and sustenance in Tupac’s and Hodeir’s words that I probably miss. Perhaps the mopecore gaze is primarily Euro-American, if only for this reason: Resistant members of a dominant culture, absent the directed rage of the people oppressed by it, find only a simulacrum of respite in witnessing, in sadness and horror, the strange fruit hanging from their family tree. *** I thought of the nomer ‘mopecore’ along with my colleague Liz Faber in a departmental meeting while talking about the film The Babadook, the TV series The Leftovers and The Returned, and Mary Shelley’s ­Frankenstein, which was our college’s common read that academic year. Neither of us could talk about any of these texts without commenting on how each, in its own way, is both sad and exhilarating, and not a little funny, darkly so, whether it was the mother yelling obscenities at her son in The Babadook, Frankenstein’s creature learning complex English at

186  John Proctor superhuman speed from overheard conversations of a peasant family, or the creators of two series, independently of each other, deciding to bring people back to life or have them disappear for no reason other than to witness the survivor’s guilt of those they left behind. If the question is whether to laugh or cry, the mopecore response is, Why not both? I remember watching Natural Born Killers in my dorm room when another guy came in during the scene with Rodney Dangerfield playing the drunken, lecherous, abusive father to Juliette Lewis’s character, and being put out when the guy laughed through the whole scene. Less importantly, I was an early 20-something under the mistaken notion that Natural Born Killers was a work of profound social commentary; more importantly, my blind loyalty to the film obscured my vision so that I couldn’t see that Oliver Stone had to have meant that scene to be laughed at. In this sense, the film is a work of narrative art, meant to be viscerally felt. In this violent, lacerating ­vision, anger and laughter, grief and joy, murder and creation are all part of the gaze. 25 Sometimes the lacerations in a text reveal meaning – or perhaps more precisely, nuance – that the original author never intended 26 (if, as ­Barthes has argued against, there really even is an ‘original’ author27). In my essay ‘How to Tell a Good Joke,’28 which is mostly on how not to tell a good joke, I explored pathos at the heart of much of the best humor and the fine line between a funny joke and a story or observation that’s just depressing and uncomfortable. One of the examples I cited was 3eanuts, a Tumblr blog whose statement of aesthetic purpose seems simple enough: Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comics often conceal the existential despair of their world with a closing joke at the characters’ expense. With the last panel omitted, despair pervades all. 29 An earlier, aptly titled blog has a similar aesthetic: Garfield Minus Garfield is a site dedicated to removing Garfield from the Garfield comic strips in order to reveal the existential angst of a certain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle. It is a journey deep into the mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and depression in a quiet American suburb. Peanuts and Garfield might stand at the top of the list of most widely read and innocuous comic strips of the Twentieth Century; they’re surely in the Top 5. I don’t think it a coincidence that Peanuts began its long run in the Fifties and Garfield is a product of the Eighties; both are ­perhaps-rightfully accepted as whitewashed, quaint, and even wholesome. As a thinker, Schulz was almost certainly more eccentric and crankier than Jim Davis, the creator of Garfield, and if he were alive at the inception of 3eanuts,

Notes toward a Working Definition of Mopecore  187 he probably would have sued for copyright violation (Davis, on the other hand, said in a 2008 Washington Post article that he is a fan of Garfield Minus Garfield30). It is a great service to them as texts, outside their roles as nostalgic signifiers of a Great America, to puncture them and let the hidden bile flow. To wit (Figures 10.1 and 10.2):

Figure 10.1  Dan Walsh & Jim Davis, Garfield Minus Garfield. Dan Walsh & Jim Davis, Garfield Minus Garfield (blog), http://­garfieldminusgarfield. net/day/2017/05/29/. ©Paws. Used by Permission.

Figure 10.2  D  aniel Leonard and Jim Davis, 3eanuts. Daniel Leonard and Jim Davis, 3eanuts (blog), http://3eanuts.com/post/158353264479. Used by Permission of Daniel Leonard.

But a solitary panel doesn’t quite reveal the scope of either project. The blog format serves both particularly well, revealing years’ and years’ worth of panels that, after an afternoon – or even a few minutes – spent with them without their most schmaltzy elements, feel like an altogether different, almost antithetical body of work, perhaps akin to a 3 a.m. conversation in the latter stages of intoxication, when they drop the pretense and let you know that they too wonder how and when this will all end, and then you both share a laugh at nobody’s expense but your own, two strangers turning into dust. The existential angst that fuels them, taken over and over ad nauseam (in the mode of Sartre’s Nausea) becomes high comedy, the kind that allows the reader, for a few moments at least, to transcend, observe, even break the cyclic order from which they came.

188  John Proctor In their attempt at disrupting the prevailing narrative through laceration, both blogs are similar to many of my favorite horror/slasher flicks. The horror genre just takes the idea of laceration more literally. What I’m proposing – or at least observing – is the shared space occupied between grief and horror. I would even argue that without the components of grief and masochism, the only pleasure to be gleaned from watching slasher flicks is sadistic. Violence without grief is torture porn. It’s revenge fantasy. It’s cheering on fights in the schoolyard and calling someone fat or ugly just to see their face fall. It’s fracking and blanket spraying. It’s not learning from our mistakes that hurt or destroy anyone but ourselves. It’s Making America Great Again.31 What unites The Leftovers, The Returned, and most notably, The Babadook32 is the determination of their creators and their characters to confront the lacerations from which no one fully recovers. Even the undead in The Returned must first confront the friends and family who have gone through years of grieving their loss, and then they must come to terms that their return is not full or permanent. The leftovers of The Leftovers, the 98% who didn’t disappear in a rapture that is completely random in selecting its 2%, don’t even get to properly grieve, many of them holding out hope that the disappeared aren’t actually gone while others wait for another rapture that might take them. Neither of these shows, despite (or because of) their scope, gives a glimpse into the grieving process as intensely personal as the 2014 ­Australian film The Babadook, a tight, claustrophobic look into a woman’s repressed grief over her husband’s violent death, which is never fully disclosed but occurred while he was on his way to the hospital for the birth of their son. The grief of the lacerated family bubbles to the surface continually though, even years later when her son is a troubled grade schooler and she is a troubled single mother. Their shared grief, unspoken by her (at first) but acted out ad nauseam by the boy, finds shape in the Babadook, the title character of a creepy book the mother finds in the basement. The few words of the book are rhymed couplets that, while ominous when paired with illustrations of a stenciled bogeyman, could be drawn from a tract on the stages of grief: I’ll wager with you, I’ll make you a bet. The more you deny the stronger I get. If it’s in a word or it’s in a look, You can’t get rid of the Babadook. I’ll skip most of the good parts – they are, after all, meant to be felt, not summarized – and get to the spoiler. After mortal combat to expel the Babadook from their house and their bodies, mother and son allow the monster to live in the basement where they found it, even feeding it bugs

Notes toward a Working Definition of Mopecore  189 and worms from the yard. In the words of my colleague Liz, ‘the monster represents trauma and a transition from melancholia to acceptance. The idea of melancholia, in the Freudian sense of mourning without accepting the loss of the object/person/etc., seems particularly important…’33 In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 34 Freud links the work of jokemaking with the work of dreaming: The thought which, with the intention of constructing a joke, plunges into the unconscious is merely seeking there for the ancient dwelling-­ place of its former play with words. Thought is put back for a moment to the stage of childhood so as once more to gain possession of the childish sources of pleasure. In The Babadook, the son is both a jokester and a novice magician. On many occasions, he says what his mother refuses to say, so much so that at one point his mother snaps at him, ‘You don’t have to say everything that comes into your head!’ In the movie’s final scene, we see him perform a feat of seemingly real magic, producing a dove from his hat. I see in him and in my five-year-old daughter the most mopecore of gazes, a view that pulls magic out of grief and horror, that makes us smile into the machine by pretending it’s mortal. *** To the mopecore eye, the text serves as a safe space within which to punish ourselves, a conscious triggering that ironically also has the power to heal. In the past couple of years conversation on intellectual and emotional safe spaces has reached a cacophonous crescendo. As a teacher, I try to listen to these conversations with an open heart and to contribute generously and judiciously. But I’m finding it not only more difficult, but also less helpful to separate my personal life from my critical perspective. Nick Cave, in his 1998 spoken essay ‘The Secret Life of the Love Song,’35 introduced me to the Portuguese term duende, a form of sadness that is somehow musical, almost secretly beautiful. Perhaps the most persistent grief the mopecore gaze unearths is the ineptitude of critical reasoning to get at the duende at which it hints. I don’t think it’s coincidence that I’m writing this chapter in 2017. It seems everyone has a 2016 story. The grief of most of them dovetails in their own variations with the larger cataclysms of a season of violent ruptures: Brexit, the Standing Rock protests and ensuing atrocities by state and local police, the election of Donald Trump. I’ll end this chapter with mine, or at least one of mine. I originally proposed it in 2015 after that departmental meeting. Our department chair Andy, as per usual, let us go off-topic from the discussion about Frankenstein. Besides talking about movies and TV shows

190  John Proctor that made us sad, we talked about our positions as permanently ‘visiting’ lecturers who worked for the equivalent of minimum wage with no chance of tenure. None of us mentioned then that Andy himself had stopped working on his dissertation at NYU to turn our little program from an academic ghetto into a functioning department of academic writing with actual faculty members, even if we were underpaid and on one-year renewable contracts. We talked about how much we liked talking about sadness, perhaps to avoid talking about our individuated grief. As we were winding down, I said something like, ‘Wow, we are some mopey motherfuckers.’ ‘Yeah,’ Andy said. ‘Hardcore.’ We all laughed. Liz and I spent the rest of the semester developing and refining what we meant by mopecore – which texts were most receptive to it, how we could talk about it critically, and how it fit within the balkanized geography of media theory. The following May, two weeks after the end of the school year, our department head Andy left his office agitated. He sent his mother a distressed e-mail, then drove to his favorite trail at Breakneck Ridge, hiked to the top, and jumped or fell to his death. I wish I could give any sort of rational explanation after more than a year of searching the cracks for shafts of light, but the most honest reckoning I can give is this: we spent the summer piecing our department back together again without any explanation from his parents or family of whether his fall was intentional. At his memorial at the start of the academic year, his parents confirmed that it was a jump and not a fall. We talked to student after student who asked, and sometimes demanded, to know what happened. I withdrew from my family and my marriage. Donald Trump was elected President. I left my family for a while in November to join the water protectors at Standing Rock. I left my family at a resort in ­Vermont on Christmas Eve with the sincere intention of driving our car off a bridge. I didn’t, and eventually, with lots of therapy, I’ve resumed functionality in my family and my workplace. I’m now looking back at those months and remembering a moment, the night before I left for North Dakota, expounding to my wife the 30-year cycle that is foundational to my understanding of mopecore. ‘Maybe this cycle is in our country, our world,’ she said. She paused. ‘Maybe it’s in you.’ Maybe it’s in you too. Maybe it’s in all of us.

Notes 1 Kristin Prevallet, I, Afterlife: Essay in Mourning Time (Athens, OH: The Essay Press, 2007), 15. 2 Beverly Cleary, Ramona Forever (New York: William Morrow and C ­ ompany, 1984), 61–75.

Notes toward a Working Definition of Mopecore  191 3 Kathryn Schultz, ‘What Is Distant Reading?’ Review of Distant Reading, by Franco Moretti, New York Times, June 24, 2011, Sunday Book Review, www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/books/review/the-mechanic-muse-what-isdistant-reading.html. Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Alexander R. Galloway, and James F. English. ‘Franco Moretti’s “Distant Reading”: A Symposium.’ Reviews of Distant Reading and The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature by Franco Moretti, Los Angeles Review of Books, June 27, 2013, https://lareviewof books.org/article/franco-morettis-distant-reading-a-symposium. In adherence to his principles and methodology, I haven’t actually read any of Franco Moretti’s work, gleaning my conception of distant reading from multiple reviews of it. I found these two the most instructive. 4 Review of Ramona Forever, by Beverly Cleary, Kirkus Reviews, 15 August 1984, www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/beverly-cleary/ramona-forever/. When the book was originally published this reviewer marveled, ‘It’s a measure of Cleary's talent and acumen that the Quinbys [sic] are as credible in the mid-1980s as they were in the mid-1950s.’ 5 Ryan McMaken, ‘26% of Eligible Voters Voted for Trump,’ Mises Institute, posted 9 November 2016, http://mises.org/blog/26-percent-eligiblevoters-voted-trump. 6 Beverly Cleary, Henry and Beezus (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1952). 7 Joan Didion, ‘Good Citizens,’ in The White Album (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), 93–95. 8 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Fredy Perlman and friends (Detroit, MI: Black & Red, 1970), 21. 9 Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia,’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV­ (1914–1916). Translated by James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1974), 245–46. 10 Albert Camus, ‘An Absurd Reasoning,’ in The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Translated by Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage, 1955), 5. 11 Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Precession of Simulacra,’ in Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor, MI: University of ­M ichigan, 1994), 6. 12 Wayne Koestenbaum, ‘After Barthes, New Forms of Cultural Close Reading,’ (Reykjavik: lecture, NonfictioNOW, June 1, 2017). 13 Wayne Koestenbaum, ‘In Defense of Nuance,’ in My 1980s and Other ­E ssays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 63. This essay was also published in roughly the same form as the introduction to Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, 2010 edition. 14 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida. Translated by Richard Howard (New York: The Noonday Press, 1981), 26. 15 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 26. 16 Ibid., 27. 17 Julia Kristeva, ‘How Does One Speak to Literature?’ in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Translated by Thomas Gora and Alice Jardine (New York: Columbia University, 1980), 104. 18 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 47. 19 ‘Democracy,’ featuring Leonard Cohen, track 6 on The Future, Columbia Records, 1992. 20 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Freedom and Responsibility,’ in Essays in Existentialism. Translated by unknown (New York: Citadel Press, 1995), 67. 21 Kristeva, Desire in Language, 100.

192  John Proctor 22 ‘Mortal Man,’ featuring Kendrick Lamar, track 16 on To Pimp a ­Butterfly, Top Dawg/Aftermath/Interscope Records, 2015. All lyric quotations are from this 12-minute closing track. 23 Sascha Feinstein and Yusef Komunyakaa (eds.), The Jazz Poetry Anthology (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University, 1991). 24 Andre Hodeir, ‘Outside the Capsule,’ in The Jazz Poetry Anthology, 87–91. 25 Natural Born Killers, directed by Oliver Stone, written by Quentin T ­ arantino and David Veloz (1994), DVD. 26 Koestenbaum, ‘In Defense of Nuance,’ 54, 57–58, 63. 27 Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author,’ in The Rustle of Language. Translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), 49–55. 28 John Proctor, ‘How to Tell a Good Joke,’ Diagram, 13.2 (Spring 2013), http://thediagram.com/13_2/proctor.html. 29 The blog’s creator, Daniel Leonard, recently wrote the chapter ‘3eanuts and the Existential Schulz’ for the anthology Peanuts and Philosophy: You’re a Wise Man, Charlie Brown! [Open Court, 2016]. 30 Amy Orndorff, ‘When the Cat’s Away, Neurosis Is on Display,’ ­Washington Post, April 6, 2008, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/­article/2008/04/03/ AR2008040303083.html. Davis notes in the article a shift in his own more recent portrayals of Jon ­A rbuckle, even giving him a girlfriend: ‘How much humor can you get out of someone’s unhappiness? Day after day for so many years—it was getting to me, too.’ 31 Pat Gill, ‘The Monstrous Years: Teens, Slasher Films, and the Family,’ ­Journal of Film and Video, 54.4 (Winter 2002), 16–30. In this essay, Gill provides a relevant punctum into teen slasher flicks of the Eighties, revealing teen protagonists with absent, ambivalent, or oblivious parents forming their own ad hoc families in self-defense against a monstrous entity whose sole purpose is to destroy them. 32 Some other horror/slasher flicks particularly receptive to the mopecore gaze that I don’t analyze here: Get Out, The Descent, The Changling, Pet ­Sematary (though Stephen King’s original book goes there more fearlessly), and The Bride of Frankenstein. 33 Elizabeth Faber, Google Doc correspondence, October 12, 2015. 34 Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Translated by James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1963), 170. 35 Nick Cave, The Secret Life of the Love Song, performed by Nick Cave, written for the Vienna Poetry Festival, CD released 2000.

11 Pain and Writing An Interview with Diamela Eltit Diamela Eltit, Berenike Jung Introduced by Sergio Rojas La narrativa de Diamela Eltit: escritura antes que literatura Sergio Rojas Ciertamente, de la misma manera que la ley no produce justicia, a veces la literatura no produce escritura. (…) Ése es mi deseo: escribir —D. Eltit: Conversación en Princeton1

La escritura de Diamela Eltit tiene un sentido político, por cuanto pone en cuestión no sólo la posibilidad de comprender unívocamente la realidad que se da en la experiencia, sino que también reflexiona críticamente la condición instrumental del lenguaje, orientado éste a disponer el orden de las cosas en un discurso que invisibiliza sus operaciones significantes. Su obra trasciende completamente el “contexto” de la dictadura de Pinochet, para reflexionar cuestiones tales como la historia de los sin nombre, el cuerpo insubordinado que altera las formas de identidad, las paradojas de la democracia en tiempos de neoliberalismo, la violencia de los lazos familiares, etc. La narrativa de Eltit no experimenta con las paradojas de la autoconciencia, sino que reflexiona y conduce hacia el extremo la devastación modernizadora desde la que ha surgido la subjetividad en este lado del planeta y de la historia. Todas las instancias de metalenguaje, discursos de segundo orden e ironías de autoconciencia escritural corresponden en su obra a un interés radical por lo Real, origen o fondo impresentable de nuestras representaciones del mundo, diferencia irreductible que acecha y amenaza permanentemente los frágiles recursos estéticos e ideológicos de nuestros ensayos de comprensión del mundo. Podría decirse que el monólogo y el soliloquio son, por ejemplo, recursos importantes en la escritura Eltit, pero sin la figura de la autoconciencia lúcida. Es decir, no estamos ante un modernista proceso de

194  Diamela Eltit, Berenike Jung subjetivación del mundo, sino de exposición del sujeto a la intemperie, incluso en la intemperie de los lazos de sangre (El cuarto mundo, 1988). En efecto, lo distintivo del habla de sus personajes es el modo en que padecen la intensidad inmanente de lo Real, todo lo contrario de una suspensión solipsista de la experiencia. El soliloquio neobarroco consiste en la imposibilidad de recuperarse plenamente la subjetividad a sí misma desde la intensidad de una experiencia que no termina de descifrarse. En Eltit la subjetividad del “narrador” está presa de un desesperado afán por comprender lo Real, por comprender lo que pasó, indiscernible de lo que le pasó. He aquí el carácter político de su literatura, que pone en cuestión el nihilismo pasivo que es propio de un cinismo que hoy se hace dominante como estrategia de “adaptación” a un mundo brutal e incomprensible. En esta escritura, lo que comienza como una interioridad hablante deviene textualidad. La narrativa de Eltit pone en obra un mundo devastado por fuerzas y lógicas que exceden no sólo la posibilidad de resistirlas, sino que también y ante todo desbordan la capacidad misma de comprenderlas. Los personajes que deambulan y hablan en estas novelas – sobre todo hablan, como en El Padre mío (1989) – existen en mundos inhabitables, donde el lenguaje no es tanto un medio de comunicación, sino más bien un recurso para no enloquecer, en una atmósfera que se ha llenado de conjeturas, una pseudo cotidianeidad sostenida apenas por simulacros siempre a punto de desvanecerse. La obra de Diamela Eltit se desarrolla a partir de la figura de la “muerte del autor,” porque trabaja en la devastación de la soberanía del sujeto, para hacer posible de esa manera el ingreso en un universo en que las p ­ alabras están en el lugar de lo real. Esta poética de la devastación ­alcanza inédita radicalidad en El Padre Mío (1989), haciéndose reconocible el recurso a la escritura como puesta en obra de un universo ­deshumanizado, en que la realidad no puede ser comprendida por los individuos que viven en ella. Estos ensayan y construyen patrones de sentido, organizan sus existencias, sus propósitos y expectativas a partir de formas de entendimiento de la realidad. Sin embargo, estas construcciones devienen al cabo insuficientes porque las lógicas que gobiernan el curso de los acontecimientos resultan ser algo absolutamente desmesurado. La literatura que pone en el lenguaje esa desmesura de lo real y, con ello, la inminente catástrofe de todo horizonte de sentido para los individuos que en medio de la intemperie intentan darle sentido al dolor, no implica de ninguna manera una suerte de “mensaje pesimista” para el lector. No encontramos aquí una “concepción fatalista” de la condición humana, sino que se trata de una escritura que conduce las representaciones humanistas de la existencia hacia su propio agotamiento. Una puesta en cuestión de la idea de la historia como progreso (Impuesto a la carne, 2010), una desconfianza en el desarrollo de una estatura moral de la humanidad que, de la mano de la civilización técnica, alejaría cada

Pain and Writing: Interview with Eltit  195 vez al hombre de su naturaleza “animal” para ser finalmente domesticada. Esta fue una idea a partir de la cual el sufrimiento iba a recibir un sentido desde la historia y el dolor del pasado y del presente sería redimido en el futuro. Pero la historia de aquella “domesticación” del hombre por el hombre describe un itinerario de sangre, arbitrariedad e impunidad (Por la patria, 1986). La escritura de Eltit no hace de ese dolor un “tema,” no es una tesis acerca de la historia ni una “toma de partido” por las víctimas. Más bien lo que hace es poner entre paréntesis la diferencia entre el bien y el mal como una diferencia trascendente que pudiese gobernar el conflicto de la existencia y de la cual pudiésemos aún esperar una orientación, sumidos en la facticidad. Al contrario, esta escritura da cuenta de un mundo en el que sus personajes intentan sobrevivir con las frágiles señas del sentido; una escritura que se dirige hacia el naufragio, que admite ser penetrada por la alienación, por la ceguera de afanes sin mañana, por la violencia de pasiones suicidas (Los trabajadores de la muerte, 1998), por la memoria de los derrotados (Jamás el fuego nunca, 2007), por la mala fe de los que permanecen muertos en vida (Mano de obra, 2002). Es frecuente el reclamo de que la obra de Eltit es de difícil comprensión, pero ¿qué significa en este caso comprender? El conocido concepto de “muerte del autor” hace referencia al hecho de que el autor – como origen autorizado de la escritura – no es sino el nombre que en un proceso editorial reúne y administra un determinado corpus textual, generando además la expectativa de un horizonte de sentido para ese corpus. Podría decirse que el lector comienza a comprender una novela “desconociendo” los propósitos del individuo que la escribió; más aún: inaugurar la dimensión del sentido del texto exige suprimir a ese individuo, y entonces el autor muere en la lectura. Como afirma Barthes: ‘el nacimiento del lector se paga con la muerte del Autor.’ Y esto se debe a que el universo en el que ingresa el lector no es el de los propósitos subjetivos del escritor; la escritura no es una vía de acceso a una supuesta interioridad del este: ‘cada una de mis novelas –señala Eltit– tuvo una energía, y esa energía fue disuelta al término de cada libro.’2 A partir de este momento, el “autor” se constituye como una suerte de ficción editorial necesaria, es un lugar antes que una identidad en el origen. Con todo, el “autor” no es un concepto que debamos considerar como una mera ilusión para entonces abandonar o corregir. Como señala Foucault: no basta repetir como afirmación vacía que el autor ha desaparecido. Asimismo, no basta repetir indefinidamente que Dios y el hombre han muerto de muerte conjunta. Lo que habría que hacer es localizar el espacio que de este modo deja vacío la desaparición del autor, no perder de vista la partición de las lagunas y las fallas, y acechar los emplazamientos, las funciones libres que esta desaparición hace aparecer.3

196  Diamela Eltit, Berenike Jung El “autor” es una de esas ideas que han ingresado desde hace un siglo en un proceso de agotamiento, un proceso que describe su propia historia hacia una radical lucidez sobre la materialidad significante de la obra, una conciencia de segundo orden extraviada en el lenguaje. En esto resulta especialmente gravitante la escritura que encuentra precisamente en la conciencia de la “muerte del autor” la condición de su contemporaneidad (Los Vigilantes, 1994); una escritura que prolifera animada por una cierta voluntad de cancelar la ilusión del yo soberano como garante trascendente del sentido y unidad de la obra. En la obra de Diamela Eltit nos encontramos con una escritura que pone en cuestión el deseo de ser “reconocida” como autor, al modo en que, por ejemplo, se reconoce a un autor en la calle (la voluntad de ser autor no es sino el afán de sobrevivir a la propia obra a la que debe su reconocimiento). Eltit no quiere “publicar novelas”: ‘yo no soy una escritora profesional; tampoco me gustaría serlo. Considero el acto de escribir más ligado a deseos y pulsiones que a obligaciones burocráticas.’ 4 En cada caso, el narrador se extravía en el lenguaje; en los monólogos y soliloquios se hace a la escritura de tal modo que toma cuerpo en ésta y toda referencia a un mundo trascendente resulta en último término diseminada en las palabras que proliferan en una dirección que se genera en esa subjetividad que busca en el ejercicio mismo de articular significantes una salida para el dolor. La disponibilidad instrumental del lenguaje como medio de comunica­­ ción resulta radicalmente alterada y con frecuencia arrasada por una subjetividad que se dirige hacia el lenguaje mismo en la imposibilidad del mundo: hay palabras, alguien está diciendo (algo), alguien está tratando de decir (algo). Que alguien trate de decir algo, he allí la cuestión fundamental. El lenguaje comparece entonces como el cuerpo de una imposibilidad de “decir,” y lo que debe expresar es precisamente esa imposibilidad. Una parte de la historia del arte en el siglo XX ha reflexionado el lugar vacante del sujeto y la crisis de la referencialidad del lenguaje. Pero hay siempre una trascendencia – un objeto y un sujeto – que se instala una y otra vez: algo se ha “querido decir,” alguien ha querido decir, hacia alguien se ha dirigido aquel que hablaba como esperando una respuesta, esperando el retorno de alguna de las viejas “soluciones.” Extremar los recursos ha sido en el arte contemporáneo la estrategia para “destruir” la figura del autor y dejar expuesto su lugar vacante. El trabajo de agotar el lenguaje ha de reiniciarse una y otra vez, esto lo denomino la emergencia del lenguaje. En cierto modo la tarea del arte ha consistido en afectar al lenguaje, exponerlo al acontecimiento de tal manera que, por ejemplo, la diferencia entre significante y significado y su potencial metafísico de significado sea conducida hacia su agotamiento. Se trata, por cierto, de un trabajo de máxima lucidez en el plano de los recursos representacionales del ­lenguaje, porque el agotamiento de aquel potencial metafísico del lenguaje

Pain and Writing: Interview with Eltit  197 exige hacer ingresar la barbarie allí en donde las categorías dominantes todavía podían “traducir” los acontecimientos a formas pre-dadas de sentido y significación. El arte trabaja contra la cultura, y de esto resulta su posible rendimiento crítico. Pensar sin ese futuro ya solucionado “culturalmente” es lo más difícil, y de esa dificultad surge la escritura. La narrativa de Diamela Eltit es una exigencia sobre el pensamiento, su lectura nos conduce en cada paso hacia un no-saber. Es una escritura que tensiona la dimensión propiamente narrativa de las historias (el “asunto” contenido en el habla de los personajes) con ciertas imágenes imposibles de resolver, imágenes que vienen con las historias pero que operan al mismo tiempo como “interrupciones” visuales del relato (Vaca sagrada, 1991). En suma, imágenes que en su intensidad cifran el exceso que esas mismas historias contienen. Leer significa en este caso hacerse a la dificultad de su escritura que resiste su traducción a representaciones. A propósito de Lumpérica (1983), por ejemplo, Idelber Avelar señala: ‘se trata, sin duda, de un texto ilegible, no exactamente en el sentido común y corriente, sino en la acepción barthesiana de lo que ya no puede ser leído, sólo escrito, el texto escriptible.’5 La escritura es el exigente trabajo de deshacerse de las representaciones y del saber ya adquirido acerca de la realidad. Eltit ha señalado: ‘mi interés se ha centrado en la posibilidad de establecer una determinada política literaria, pero esa política radica en la propia escritura y en el desafío y el riesgo que implica escribir.’6 Esto implica prescindir de aquellos juicios que atribuyen a la escritura de Eltit rendimientos mesiánicos tales como: “rescatar,” “reivindicar,” “resistir,” “recuperar.” En efecto, estos verbos describen una función teológica que es trascendente a la escritura. Si afirmáramos, por ejemplo, que su narrativa “reivindica” el margen del discurso, o que “rescata” al sujeto anónimo de la historia, etc., entonces la proliferación significante deviene significado, que se deja descifrar metafóricamente: “esto significa aquello otro.” Pero su escritura no responde a un conjunto de conceptos y representaciones (políticas, estéticas, etc.) previamente elaboradas o asumidas por la autora. Esos conceptos y representaciones existen, pero en la escritura se alteran sin cesar. Tampoco podríamos afirmar que la narrativa de Eltit “repara,” porque su asunto es más bien lo irreparable, es el ingreso en un mundo en el que los ideales y valores heredados, que hacían posible a los hombres llegar a ser sujetos políticos del mundo que habitan, se han agotado, presintiendo su orfandad en medio de la facticidad de la existencia.

Editors’ Introduction to the English Version Sergio Rojas, Professor of Literature at the University of Chile, offers an introduction to those unfamiliar with Diamela Eltit’s work, outlining her topics on “the marginal” and her contributions to the field of literature, her pushing, interrogating, questioning the role of language in our

198  Diamela Eltit, Berenike Jung construction of reality and meaning: even more than her daring topics, Rojas explains, it is how she writes that is excitingly political. Eltit’s work transcends the context of the Pinochet dictatorship. In her books, she reflects on the insubordinate body, the paradoxes of democracy in neoliberalism, the violence within ties, and the devastation wreaked by modernity. Her writing navigates towards the wreckages, to be penetrated by alienation, by blind worries, by the violence of suicidal passions (Los trabajadores de la muerte, 1998), by the memory of those who were defeated (Jamás el fuego nunca, 2007), and by those who keep on going as living dead (Mano de obra, 2004). Yet Eltit’s writing does not make such pain its “subject matter,” it does not offer a thesis about history, nor does it take sides with the victims. It is through writing that Eltit reflects on the conditions imposed by language, the possibility of unequivocally understanding the reality as we experience it, and the possibility to derive meaning from history, so that past and present pain would be redeemed in the future. Through her writing, she questions the idea of history as progress (Impuesto a la carne, 2010), the narrative of a moral development of humanity. The history of this “domestication” of man, by man, describes an itinerary of blood, arbitrariness, and impunity (Por la patria, 1986). As Rojas explains, Eltit’s narratives do not “repair,” because their subject matter is precisely that which is irreparable. Language appears as the embodiment of the impossibility to “speak,” and yet it must express precisely that impossibility. Writing, here, necessitates losing already existing representations and losing knowledge previously acquired about reality. Eltit’s narratives put into action a world devastated by forces that overwhelm our very capacity of comprehension. The characters that roam and speak in her novels – and speak they do above all else, as in The Father of Me (1989) – are orphaned in inhospitable worlds, where language is not so much a means of communication, but rather a last resort to not become mad. Reality cannot be understood by the characters who inhabit it. In this way, Eltit’s work enables entry into a universe where words replace the real, where ideals and inherited values have exhausted themselves. Images operate as visual “interruptions” of the story (Vaca sagrada, 1991), which, in their intensity, encrypt the excess that those same stories contain. It is often said that Eltit’s work is difficult, but what can it mean, in her case, to understand this work Eltit’s narratives are demanding for the mind, because reading them leads us towards more not-knowing. This universe, which the reader enters in Eltit’s texts, is not the subjective one of its author. As Idelber Avelar points out, Eltit’s Lumpérica (1983) is without a doubt, an illegible text, not exactly in the common and ordinary sense, but in the Barthesian meaning of that which can no longer be read, only written, the scriptable [scriptible] text.7

Pain and Writing: Interview with Eltit  199 In the best possible sense then, writes Rojas, Eltit’s work is first and foremost writing, and literature only in the second. Rojas suggest that the reader might begin to understand a novel by ignoring the intent of the individual who wrote it, that to inaugurate meaning from a text perhaps even requires suppressing that individual, so that the author dies in the process of reading, just as, following Barthes, the birth of reader is paid for by the death of the author.

Dolor y Escritura: Una Entrevista con Diamela Eltit Berenike Jung, Diamela Eltit Berenike Jung: Como escritora y académica, ¿tienes una filosofía —o idea— sobre el dolor en tu trabajo? ¿Qué elementos hay en tu trabajo con respeto a la cuestión del dolor? ¿Cómo se puede expresar el dolor? Diamela Eltit: La experiencia del dolor es común a todos. Nadie, absolutamente nadie, puede estar afuera de la esfera del dolor. El dolor está en distintos estadios de la persona: ya sea desde el punto de vista psíquico o físico. El dolor es parte de nuestra condición. Y, efectivamente, pueden haber circunstancias mucho más cercanas al dolor que otras, ya sea por enfermedades múltiples o por experiencias muy traumáticas —psíquicas—, o por el dolor que puede producir el dolor de otros. El propio dolor se representa en uno a través del dolor de otros. Uno puede comprender porque todos conocemos el dolor. Y en ese contexto tú puedes entender el dolor de otro y hasta sufrir por ese dolor del otro, que va más allá de una situación amorosa que una pareja puede sufrir en conjunto. Uno también puede tener un dolor social: por ejemplo, de personas que no has visto nunca, que no conoces, pero que su experiencia te resuena de forma muy cercana. Entonces, yo creo que el campo es muy amplio, porque hay dolores y dolores. Cada área tiene dolores y dolores y dolores y dolores … es, en cierto punto, casi interminables esta experiencia del dolor. Porque está en todas partes, porque se manifiesta de distintas maneras, por su intensidad. Nadie puede decir que tiene más dolor que otro, porque depende de cuál es el umbral del dolor del otro. Ahí uno puede preguntarse ¿cómo vive el otro su dolor? Esto genera un problema, porque, aunque su dolor lo provoque algo menos elocuente, sin embargo, lo puede vivir muy intensamente. Entonces, tampoco se puede comparar dolor y dolor. El dolor es objetivo, pero la experiencia del dolor es subjetiva. Uno de los problemas que he encontrado en mi trabajo dice relación con la distinción entre dolor y lenguaje. Elaine Scarry dice, el dolor físico no resiste simplemente al lenguaje, sino que lo destruye activamente. El dolor físico nos retrotrae a un estadio previo

200  Diamela Eltit, Berenike Jung al lenguaje: a los sonidos y llantos del ser humano antes de que aprenda el lenguaje. ¡Y Scarry dice eso con respeto a la tortura! Pero, al mismo tiempo, es necesario traducir o compartir esta experiencia dramática de la tortura, del dolor físico. Este requiere y exige ser traducido y compartido en el lenguaje. Entonces, ahí emerge una paradoja: ¡No se puede traducir, pero se necesita traducir! Entonces, me pregunto ¿cómo se traduce el dolor? ¿Se puede traducir el dolor colectivo, así como también el dolor que se experimenta de manera individual? Me refiero aquí a la violencia masiva y al genocidio perpetrado por la dictadura. ¿Puede traducirse ese dolor en la escritura o en otras expresiones del arte? La experiencia del dolor de cada uno de nosotros permite traducir una experiencia estética del dolor. Lo que resulta difícil es organizar un objeto que pueda contener ese dolor. Eso pienso que es más difícil. Todas las representaciones del dolor son problemáticas. Ese es el trabajo más fino por parte de la cultura. La tortura es visto como abyecta, contagiosa, incluso en el nivel de representación. Eso explica los esfuerzos de distanciamiento y los sentimientos de asco y disgusto asociado con la tortura. Si violencia como la tortura amenaza infectar, incluso al nivel de lenguaje, ¿necesitamos una nueva retórica de ese tipo de dolor hoy? Sea el cine o la literatura, la cuestión es como tú puedes lograr la representación del dolor: no el dolor, sino su representación. Se necesita que el dolor sea producido en esa obra. La representación es una forma de producción. Hay mucho discurso sobre el dolor que no produce dolor porque incluso puede producir un estereotipo del dolor. Puede, de hecho, estereotiparse la tortura. Un creador de cine, por ejemplo, podría producir un estereotipo de una manera de torturar, pero no dan cuenta del dolor en sí. Si te entiendo bien, entonces, ¿Podrían haber formas de representación más adecuadas que otras? Sí, hay representaciones que son estereotipadas, lugares comunes, que solo repiten el contexto, pero no el dolor. ¿Crees que es posible de entender o leer algunas de estas representaciones de otra forma —a pesar que son cómplices—, mostrando, por ejemplo, la seducción de la violencia? ¿Nuestras lecturas —o los significados que podamos extraer de una obra— no están determinadas por su forma? O dicho de otra forma, ¿hay representaciones que parecen cómplices pero igualmente son una obra de arte? Si una obra artística propone ese espacio, tiene que buscar un lenguaje para producirlo [el dolor]. Eso es el riesgo y el problema de la obra artística. Es su función buscar un mecanismo eficaz para que eso resuene. Eso depende en verdad del escritor, del artista visual, del cineasta.

Pain and Writing: Interview with Eltit  201 ¿Cuando tú escribes, piensas en tu lector? No estoy pensando en el lector. Ahora bien, uno siempre tiene un lector ideal —ficticio— que trabaja a favor tuyo, el cual no es complaciente, sino siempre crítico. Mi problema es con el texto y su organización: su eficacia y sus recursos. El lector está en otro momento. En tu trabajo histórico has abordado tanto ficción como texto documental de no-ficción. En base a tus libros sobre testimonio: ¿cuál es la diferencia de trabajar en el ámbito de la ficción y la no-ficción? Con un libro —más allá de toda la pasión que yo puedo imprimirle—, su resultado es, en último termino, responsabilidad mía. Más allá de lo que pase —para bien o para mal, no importa lo que pase—, el libro lo cargo yo como autora, aunque entiendo que entre el libro y yo hay una gran distancia. Cuando haces libros bajo otras circunstancias, tu responsabilidad crece mucho más: uno está acogiendo otro campo de sentido (especialmente si estás trabajando en un psiquiátrico o en un juicio político o con un indigente completamente poético). Tengo que tener respeto por el otro, primero. Y, en segundo lugar, respeto estricto por mí misma. Los dos tenemos que respetarnos. Y eso, que a mí me cautiva, debe tratar de hacerse fluido para los demás. Entonces la pregunta es cómo insertar el imaginario del otro —un elemento que tiene su propia estructura política— en el contexto de un libro. En el libro El padre mío, por ejemplo, puse los discursos delirantes que un esquizofrénico tuvo conmigo. En él incluí todas las conversaciones, porque lo que encontré interesante fue llevar esas voces que nunca, nunca, nunca, nunca iba a acceder al espacio público. Entonces, políticamente, me pareció muy audaz. Es, de hecho, uno de los libros con los que más cerca estoy. Veo en él un gesto político: llevar un yo fracturado —no es el yo épico, no es el yo de las grandes historias. De hecho, nunca supe cómo se llamaba en los tres años que nos vimos—, a otro sentido, a otra épica (la épica de la sobrevivencia), que me parece grandiosa. Entonces, eso me parece a mí distinto. Pero, además, tengo una responsabilidad que me excede a mí misma: lo más importante es estar a la altura del otro o de los otros. Tengo el compromiso de darle toda la estética posible a esas voces. En una conversación en Birkbeck, Sergio Rojas citó a una serie de obras de arte que son “invisibles”, en el sentido que ellas no son legibles como arte en su significado o impacto político —o separadas fuera o desde el arte—, si no hay información adicional. Él analizó esto como una afirmación política en sí misma: la idea no es combatir el olvido cuando ya ha ocurrido, este ya es parte del acontecimiento (‘la tortura ha desaparecido en el cotidiano - el olvido ya pasó.’) … Me pregunto si tienes una opinión al respecto, dado que algunos encuentran tu trabajo difícil. No sé si lees las críticas de tus libros … [Ríe] No. Bueno, muchas veces se lee que escribes sobre la gente marginal y eso es interpretado muchas veces como una metáfora de Chile. ¿Qué te

202  Diamela Eltit, Berenike Jung parecen esas lecturas sobre tu obra? ¿Se pueden comprender tus obras como ese “algo,” esa “forma,” que interrumpe en el espacio público para llenar ese vacío de discursos? Mira, yo no tengo una voluntad por trabajar temas o espacios. Es, más bien, una cuestión del funcionamiento de mi imaginario, lo que a mí me suena en mi imaginario. Hay cosas que, de hecho, no me resuenan. Entonces, yo más o menos he estado siempre en el mismo lugar, en parte porque mi fantasía, mi deseo, está puesto ahí. Yo he escrito siempre lo mismo, con variaciones: pero las variaciones de lo mismo posibilitan un texto distinto. Yo no soy una persona compasiva en el sentido católico. No tengo un manual de compasión. Miro a las personas de una forma, digamos, completamente par. No podría decir que un indigente tiene un lenguaje más o menos poderoso que el mío. No puedo mirar asimétricamente: yo miro más simétricamente esos lugares. No tengo una lógica basada en la asimetría. No me muevo en el espíritu compasivo, ni pienso que voy a redimir el mundo, ni pretendo cambiar Chile tampoco. No tengo esa cosa megalómana de la literatura. ¡Bueno, eso sería mucha ambición! [ríe] Esta cosa mesiánica literaria me parece insoportable. Tuve la suerte que mi madre fue comunista. Ella tuvo siempre una actitud no jerárquica en cuanto a las importancias sociales. No tuve un habla desde jerarquías ­sociales. ­Quiero decir que tampoco creo que los pobres sean buenos. No, no es eso. Hay márgenes y márgenes. No tengo una visión idealizada de los espacios. ¿Sientes que el arte —en su operatividad artística— tiene una responsabilidad o ética social? ¿Cómo piensas la noción clásica del arte por el arte? En mi trabajo, me surge como problema que las obras que veo obviamente tienen una responsabilidad ética, pero, al mismo tiempo, hablamos de una obra de arte o incluso una obra de entretenimiento. Una obra literaria no va a cambiar el transcurso social pero sí puede alterar el sistema literario. De hecho, los movimientos literarios son un conjunto de alteraciones. De otra manera, la literatura se petrifica. A mí me interesa, políticamente, revolver los signos y develar estas partes que las instituciones velan, tapan. Para poner un ejemplo común: hay toda una cultura muy terrible en relación a la sangre, que asusta, pero también tiene ese heroísmo. Pero hay un cuerpo que sangra siempre, que es el de la mujer. Nadie sabe mejor lo que es la sangre que las mujeres. No hay cuerpo que conozca mejor la sangre que ellas. Sin embargo, la cultura nunca ha trabajado esa sangre. Lo ha hecho, por cierto, comercialmente, para contenerla, que sea más cómodo vivir esta experiencia. Pero no hay un conjunto discursivo que recoja esa sangre, o que se pregunte por los efectos que tiene, en ese cuerpo, la sangre. En el caso de las mujeres, pierde toda su categoría simbólica y se transforma en una especie de secreto.

Pain and Writing: Interview with Eltit  203 Hoy, en pleno siglo 21, no se ha podido tener un pacto más o menos reconocible con la sangre de la mujer. Eso que quiere decir que ni las mujeres mismas han pensado su sangre de una manera más orgánica, más masiva, más política. Por ejemplo, el cine no recoge los ríos de la sangre de la mujer. Podría haber un cine hemorrágico. Nunca esto ha sido pensado bien por el arte. Escribí una novela sobre la menstruación —Vaca sagrada (1991)—, donde pensé la sangre desde el punto de vista erótico, político, en fin, desde todos los puntos de vista. Esa es mi novela más olvidada, más debilitada: justamente por eso, por la sangre menstrual. Porque no parece posible mirar la sangre de las mujeres como producción cultural, como materia cultural. El hilo de sangre es sólo posible para los griegos, la tragedia o la guerra. El arte puede socavar, penetrar lo monolítico del discurso público. Puede indagar en materias que existen pero que están interesadamente ocultas. Y también puede ser la sangre de la muerte. Pero la muerte podría desencadenarse a partir de la sangre del cuerpo de la mujer. Pero la sangre de la mujer solo se ha pensado como el inicio de la fertilidad o la infertilidad, pero es mucho más que eso, mucho más, mucho más … Es que la cultura ha trabajado su silencio. Se deja a la mujer bastante sola con su sangre. Hay un discurso más bien negativo al respecto, especialmente desde la Biblia en adelante. Entonces tú puedes hacer ciertas operaciones sobre el dolor o la exclusión o el silencio que pueden ser interesantes. En mi trabajo he encontrado una cuestión similar. Me refiero a la circulación de emociones, que, muchas veces, está hablado como si fuera completamente natural, pero es una circulación tanto social como cultural. En cuanto a la tortura, he pensado sobre la sensación del asco, pero incluso la sensación del dolor se puede ver como algo personal o socio-cultural también … que convierte el dolor del cuerpo de victima en un signo social y estas emociones circulan en los cuerpos de los que torturan y los que ven también … Estuve hace poco en un encuentro sobre artes visuales chilenas en París. Allí había una artista chilena que hizo una acción de arte en Santiago sobre los cuarenta años del golpe. A través de Facebook invitó a miles de personas a tenderse en las calles para representar a los detenidos desaparecidos. Fue muy respetable su acción: eso no está en discusión. Pero los detenidos desaparecidos son una categoría muy compleja porque no están ni muertos ni vivos. Es un between. Entonces no es sencillamente llamar a miles de personas a representarlos. Yo tuve algunos desacuerdos con ella en muy buenos términos. Entonces, mientras ella hablaba de su trabajo en París, entró un hombre con un bebé y el bebé empezó a emitir ruidos mientras hablaba. Después, lloró justo cuando afuera pasaba un auto de la policía, con el ulular de la sirena.

204  Diamela Eltit, Berenike Jung Entonces, mientras que esta artista mostraba sus imágenes en la computadora, yo pensaba: los detenidos desaparecidos están entre el balbuceo gutural de la guagua —un lenguaje pre-lingüístico— y las sirenas de la policía. Ese es el campo posible para pensar esa tensión. Por supuesto el trabajo de la artista era interesante y tuvo impacto, pero, desde mi perspectiva, no existía un vínculo realmente importante con la tragedia —esa escena— a la cual se pretendía nombrar. Sí, entiendo. Muchas obras de arte que pueden ser consideradas por la crítica como “lo mejor,” no necesariamente tienen una respuesta por parte del público. Sergio Rojas, cuando estaba en Londres, mostraba varias obras muy interesantes que necesitaban una explicación. Debía explicar lo que estábamos viendo. En otros términos, era un tipo de arte que necesita otra cosa más para ser entendido. Mira, acabo de ver una película musulmana de vampiros [A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, by Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014]. Y me ­pareció interesante, creativa, compleja. Porque, además, el vampiro es una figura muy interesante. Estoy pensando especialmente en la novela de Bram Stoker. La figura del vampiro ha sido, ciertamente, explotada por Holly­ wood. Pero ahora se inscribe en el ámbito musulmán y, además, en la película es una vampira mujer. Tú ves ahí que, ocupando los recursos tradicionales, puedes darle una vuelta a eso, porque el vampiro, que es tóxico-dependiente del consumo de sangre, es un adicto. Pero esa es una película en contra de las drogas protagonizada por el personaje más adicto de todos, el más adicto que ha creado la literatura y la cultura pop. Entonces es muy interesante la vuelta que le da. Otra cosa es que los medios de comunicación masiva muchas veces están en perfecto dialogo con los discursos de poder. Obviamente generan gustos. El arte masivo está en relación con las lógicas comerciales y su objetivo es construir estereotipos. Pero, en los bordes, siempre han habido movimientos que empujan a los centros. Estas películas, por muy marginales que sean, empujan a otras, van empujando a otras, las van interrogando. Muchas películas comerciales tienen que cambiar sus recursos, ya que otro cine —el periférico— las empuja o les exige transformaciones. De lo que sé, tú has vivido en muchas partes… ¡No tanto! – Oh, ¡lo googlé mal! [se ríen] Bueno, por lo menos has viajado a muchas partes. La primera vez que viví fuera de Chile fue en México, el año 1990 y estuve cuatro años. Luego, viví en Argentina durante tres años. Esa es mi vida fuera de Chile. Actualmente, realizo variadas estancias académicas y/o presentaciones en seminarios. Paso, en general, un semestre en Chile y un semestre en Nueva York. En este sentido, vivo medio año en Nueva York.

Pain and Writing: Interview with Eltit  205 Quería preguntar lo siguiente: en los lugares donde has vivido, cómo percibes las diferencias —si es que las hay— sobre cómo se discuten las memorias, las historias, el dolor. En otros términos, me interesan saber si encuentras que los discursos en América Latina, o bien en Chile, son esencialmente diferentes de otros lugares: ¿cómo se enfrenta la culpa colectiva, la vergüenza, la memoria? Y, específicamente, ¿existen diferencias nacionales en el discurso sobre el dolor? ¿Dirías también que tal vez existen dobles sentidos —en textos o en el cine, por ejemplo— que solo se entienden en un contexto local? Obviamente los debates son distintos en Latinoamérica en relación a otros países como Alemania, Inglaterra o los Estados Unidos. No porque sean más desarrollados, entre comillas, en un sentido clásico, sino porque sus propios grupos han sabido dialogar mejor —o han tenido una voluntad de poder— para llevar adelante ciertos pactos sociales. En estos países se ha avanzado en varios aspectos: matrimonio homosexual, derechos de maternidad, etc. En América Latina es mucho más difícil y no solo por asuntos religiosos. Ahora bien, me gustaría hablar de la noción de “culpa colectiva.” En el sentido de cómo se enfrenta una historia que nos avergüenza. En otros términos, me interesa saber tu opinión sobre si es posible que uno pueda separarse de esa culpa. Por ejemplo, diciendo que no es un problema mío o, por el contrario, aceptando que es una historia de la cual uno no puede escapar. Al nivel social, ¿hay formas de normalizar la culpa? Mira, hay culpa y culpables. Eso definitivamente lo hay. Hay culpables de crímenes que tienen que enfrentar sus responsabilidades judicialmente. Pero ¿qué ocurre si no hay justicia? ¿Qué pasa si no se llega a un juicio o a la verdad? Por ejemplo, se puede decir que eso está pasando ahora en los EE. UU. con respeto a los recientes casos de tortura en las guerras de Afganistán e Irak. Y también hay muchas personas en Chile que están insatisfechas de cómo se hizo justicia en los casos de derechos humanos. Eso, ciertamente, no significa que no hayan culpables. La ley, en esos casos, se suspendió por algún motivo. En el caso de Chile la justicia está interferida por interesas corporativos del ejército (militares). [Por ejemplo,] en el caso de España ni siquiera han desenterrado totalmente a las víctimas del franquismo. Pero claro, eso no significa que la dictadura de Franco no esté completamente consignada. España no ha hecho nada con respecto a los derechos humanos. Brasil, por su parte, ha hecho también muy poco. Sin embargo, la dictadura está inscrita en las mentes. Hoy en día en Chile los culpables están reconocidos. Los que quedan exculpados son los cómplices, esos que trabajaron con la dictadura y dicen que ellos que “no sabían” Estaban ahí, pero no sabían. Eso era muy similar en Alemania.

206  Diamela Eltit, Berenike Jung Es complicado. Porque el ‘no sabía’ se transformó en una coartada. No es una justificación, es una coartada. Se podría pensar que alguien no sabía. ¿Por qué? ¿Porque era ciego? Porque no quiso saber … Claro, porque no quiso saber. O puede ser que no sabía que sabía. Entonces, eso sería más honesto. Pasan generaciones y generaciones, y la memoria no se puede borrar tan fácilmente. Queda mucho por hacer. Otro ejemplo es Bolivia. Los bolivianos perdieron una guerra con Chile y quedaron sin acceso al mar. En Chile no se entiende que al pueblo boliviano les afecte ese hecho. No solo económicamente. Ellos sacan sus productos por las costas chilenas, obviamente. Chile les ofrece ese corredor económico. Pero, simbólicamente, necesitan el mar. Necesitan ese mar que perdieron. Chile no entiende eso. Los políticos chilenos dicen que es un tema político, que el presidente Morales usa el tema políticamente. ¡No, no entienden nada! Para los bolivianos, el mar es algo fundamental en toda su sociedad. Les produce un duelo permanente la perdida. Desde un punto de vista simbólico, la guerra no ha terminado. En una entrevista leí lo siguiente: ‘Diamela Eltit se considera una diagnosticadora, está interesada en curar enfermedades históricas, lo que significa que ella, antes de todo, está interesada en la vida.’ ¿Cómo puede tener lugar esta curación? Mira, yo viví la dictadura. Estuve todos esos años en Chile. Yo era una joven estudiante y mi vida cambió completamente. Había toque de queda a las 9 de la noche y yo, como joven, no podía salir. Teníamos todos los derechos suspendidos. Viví el shock de pasar de un sistema a otro. ¿Y tu madre era comunista? Si, mi madre era comunista pero nunca tuvo un papel importante. Era una militante de base. Tú tienes que desaprender para reaprender a vivir bajo la dictadura. Es un reaprendizaje. Necesitas olvidar ciertas cosas. No puedes hablar mucho porque no sabes quién es la persona que tienes a tu lado. Tú tienes que aprender a entender quién es esta gente con la que estás hablando. Detectar su vestuario, su lenguaje. Es bien complejo, bien fino. Debes pasar desde una sociedad más abierta —confiable— a una sociedad de la sospecha. Esto es, por cierto, angustiante. Pero lo peor fueron las matanzas. Eso no estaba en ningún lugar de mi cabeza. No tenía cabeza para entender eso. Fue una experiencia angustiosa, dolorosa, terrible. ¿Qué edad tenías? Tenía 23, 24 años. Me preguntaba: ¿por qué están matando gente? ¿Cómo podían torturar o matar a la gente en las cáceles clandestinas o en la calle? Si tú quieres, como ciudadana, yo nunca me recuperé. Hasta hoy. Nunca. En ningún instante. Sigo en duelo por esos años. Cada vez que leo sobre ese tiempo —o veo imágenes de ese tiempo— me surge un odio inconmensurable. No he perdonado a nadie.

Pain and Writing: Interview with Eltit  207 Me gustó cuando se murió Pinochet, estaba feliz. En 1986, cuando se hizo el atentado, lamenté que no lo hayan matado. No tuve ningún grado de compasión por él. Eso, como ciudadana. Otra cosa es como literata. Estudié literatura y a mí, como escritora, me interesaban y me interesan los signos y politizar lo espacios de la letra. Esa ha sido mi tarea. ¿Cómo voy a ser capaz de curarme a mí misma si ni siquiera he podido terminar mi duelo? ¿Cómo voy a poder curar a alguien si no soy capaz de hacerlo por mí misma? Entonces, recuerdo la experiencia angustiosa de ver los abusos. ¡Terrorífico! Estuve en Francia hace poco y estaban los militares en la calle. Y me recordaron el Golpe en Chile, porque siempre estaban los militares con metralletas en la calle apuntándote y una se acostumbró a esa violencia. Ahora bien, salir de la dictadura también fue un problema. Uno se había disciplinado en la dictadura. Uno tuvo que volver a hablar, a decir palabras que antes no decía. Tuve que reaprender y tolerar el silencio en torno al pasado. Yo escribo mis libros como puedo en base a esa historia. Cuando he estado en Chile siempre he tenido una percepción especial sobre cómo se comunican las cosas. Advertí que “algo” se está diciendo, pero no logré identificar con claridad el “qué” del contenido. No entendía lo que se estaba comunicando, pero sabía que algo estaba pasando. Es que la censura se quedó, hace muchos años ya… Tus libros pueden abrir ese “algo” que se quiere decir… Eso es el neoliberalismo. Chile es el laboratorio más grande del neoliberalismo, traído por los Chicago Boys. Otra cosa que me gustaría abordar contigo es ¿cómo ves la relación entre el dolor social —como el dolor que trae el neoliberalismo— y el dolor privado —que, a nivel “oficial,” aparece como separado o sin conexión? Fue un poco triste ver y vivir la transición en Chile. Chile logró salir de la dictadura por vía electoral pero a través de un pacto. Y ese pacto consistía en definir qué quedaría de la dictadura en el país. Como se sabe, Pinochet perdió su plebiscito —un plebiscito que pensó que iba a ganar—, pero se quedó como comandante en jefe del ejército. Después, cuando renunció, fue senador vitalicio (no elegido democráticamente). La dictadura no se terminó después de 17 años sino se después de 25 años, cuando lo detuvieron en Londres. Ahí se terminó su historia. Pierde su condición de intocable. Pero, desde esos años, la derecha chilena junto a la “Concertación” —y ahora la “Nueva Mayoría”— ha escrito a su gusto lo que nos rige. La violencia del capital —y su desmedido poder— cooptó el Chile actual. Este neoliberalismo fue muy traumático porque se produjo una anestesia. Primero, los poderes —todos— se pusieron de acuerdo, a través de un pacto, contra la memoria. Ellos decían: ‘hay que mirar para adelante. Miremos para adelante.’ Y ese mirar para adelante implicaba olvidar

208  Diamela Eltit, Berenike Jung todas las practicas ligadas a los DDHH. Por ejemplo, el informe Rettig se marginalizó. Los gestos de reparación fueron marginalizados con el fin de mirar para adelante. En segundo lugar, el pacto entre los militares, la derecha y la Concertación conservó la privatización de todas las empresas públicas. El excesivo capitalismo, fundado en una explotación sin límite, mantuvo sueldos frágiles y débiles leyes laborales, y, por lo tanto, el “milagro chileno” fue disfrutado por el uno por ciento de la populación que ganó todo. Un diez o veinte por ciento ha tenido una buena vida y el resto, el ochenta por cierto —casi todo el país—, ha tenido una vida pésima. Lo que se ofreció frente a la violencia del modelo —como alternativa frente a la angustia—, fue el consumismo. Y la gente compró, compró, compró de una manera alucinante y se endeudó de una manera alucinante también. Sin embargo, hasta 2006 —o sea 16 años después—, se produce el primer gran gesto contra ese estado de cosas, a través de los estudiantes secundarios, los llamados “pingüinos.” Pero se produjo después de 16 años de bombardeo contra la memoria a través del consumismo. ¿Cómo emerge, entonces, esta crisis? ¿Cómo surge este quiebre entre las lógicas del consumismo y la marginalización de la memoria? Si el consumismo era aceptado como normalidad, ¿cómo se resistió? Los grupos sociales no podían resistir la oferta de consumo. En la época de mayor crisis económica, a los cesantes se les ofrecían comprar a crédito. ¡Incluso un cesante podría tener crédito! Y podía pagar todo, incluso la educación. En este contexto, el consumo fue como un anestésico. La gente ahora está despertando, con todos los riesgos que eso implica. Además, los cuarenta años del golpe fueron claves para que los canales de la televisión pusieran a disposición documentos que tenían guardados por más de veinte años. Entonces, todo el mundo se escandalizó de la dictadura e inmediatamente empezaron a hacer teleseries, series, películas. Surgió un mercado. Se puso de moda. Como “Los Archivos del Cardenal”…. Vi solamente un capítulo de Los Archivos del Cardenal porque quedé impactada de la historia de amor como centro, que es lo más importante, obviamente, entre estos personajes… desde mi perspectiva es “soft,” edulcorado. Pero claro, hay otras instancias que son los estudiantes, los que, con su épica espectacular, han hecho una revisión histórica importante. Más allá de lo mediático-televisivo, en estos últimos años hemos sido testigos de cómo la Concertación intentó dar un anestésico para todos. Es interesante, esta palabra de anestésico… Última pregunta: Tienes un consejo para todos los que trabajamos sobre estos temas: ¿Cómo se puede escribir y trabajar sobre temáticas como el dolor de forma “compasiva,” pero también con la distancia necesaria, es decir, sin estar consumida por el tema?

Pain and Writing: Interview with Eltit  209 Cada persona tiene su propio carácter o forma de ver el mundo. Pero cuando uno entra en estos campos tan difíciles, uno lee de una forma más aguda los signos. Uno pierde la ingenuidad. No es tan fácil que tu caigas en el drama estereotipado. Uno ya sabe lo que está hablando. Hay gente que vive de la tortura, de los derechos humanos. Hace de eso su “empresa.” Uno sabe que son “comerciantes del dolor.” Estimo que estos temas permiten ver de manera más clara tu propia vida también. Hay un elemento biográfico en todo esto. Tu relación con los demás puede ser más importante en la medida en que entiendas la violencia. Todos los puntos que tienen estas historias individuales y colectivas, permiten hacernos pensar sobre mi propia vida.

Pain and Writing. An Interview with Diamela Eltit8 Diamela Eltit, Berenike Jung Berenike Jung: As a writer and academic, do you have a philosophy regarding the place of pain in your work? What elements in your work touch on this issue of pain? How can we (artistically) express pain? Diamela Eltit: The experience of pain is common to all. Nobody, absolutely nobody, can be outside the sphere of pain. Pain exists in different modalities, in the psychic or physical realm. Pain is part of our human condition. And, indeed, there may be circumstances that bring us much closer to pain, due to multiple illnesses, for instance, or very traumatic psychological experiences – and we can also feel pain that is produced by the pain of another. One’s own pain then manifests through the pain of others. We all know our own pain, but in that context, you can understand and even suffer yourself for the pain of another, beyond the situation encountered in a romantic relationship where a couple can share their pain and suffer together. One can also have a social pain: for example, you may feel pain for people that you have never seen, that you do not know, but their experience resonates very closely with you. So, I believe that the field is very broad because there are so many different kinds of pain, there is pain and pain and pain… In a way, it is almost endless, this experience of pain. Because it is everywhere, because it manifests itself in different ways, because of its intensity. No one can say that they have more pain than another, because it depends on the other person’s threshold for pain. You can ask yourself, how does this other person live their pain? This creates a problem, because, even though their pain might not provoke an eloquent response, they may nevertheless live it very intensely. Therefore, it is impossible to compare pain and pain. Pain itself is objective, but the experience of pain is subjective.

210  Diamela Eltit, Berenike Jung One of the problems I have found in my own work has to do with the relation of pain and language. Elaine Scarry says, physical pain does not simply resist language, but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to ­language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before ­language is learned.9 And Scarry says this when she talks about torture, and yet it is necessary to speak of and to share such terrible experiences as torture. This means extreme physical pain must somehow be translated and shared in language. But then, a paradox emerges: extreme physical pain is impossible to translate, but you need to translate it! How do you translate pain? And can collective pain be translated as well as individually experienced pain? I am referring to the massive violence and genocide perpetrated by the dictatorship. Can that pain be translated into writing or into other artistic expressions? The lived experience of pain allows us to translate an aesthetic experience of pain. What is difficult, is to create an object that can contain that pain. I think that is the most difficult. All representations of pain are problematic. They are among the most delicate works of culture. Torture is considered abject, contagious, even at the level of representation. That explains the distancing efforts and the feelings of disgust associated with torture. If violence like torture threatens to infect, even at the level of language, do we need a new rhetoric of that kind of pain today? Whether it be cinema or literature, the question is: how you can achieve a representation of pain – not of pain itself, but its representation. It is necessary that the pain be produced in that work. Representation is a form of production. There is a lot of discourse about [representations of] pain that do not cause pain because they just offer a cliché of pain. In fact, even torture can be stereotyped. A filmmaker, for example, could produce a stereotype of torture but not give an account of the pain itself. If I understand you well, there are then forms of representation which you consider more appropriate than others? Yes, there are representations that are stereotypes, commonplaces, that only repeat the context, but not the pain. Do you think it is possible to understand some of these representations in a different way – even though they remain complicit? They might show, for example, the seduction of violence. Are our readings – the meanings we can draw from a work – absolutely determined by their form? To put it another way, are there representations that seem complicit but which nevertheless also qualify as a work of art? If a work of art proposes that space, one has to look for a language to produce [the pain]. That is the risk and the problem of the artistic work. It is your job to find an effective mechanism for this content to resonate. That really depends on the writer, the visual artist, or the filmmaker.

Pain and Writing: Interview with Eltit  211 When you write, do you think about your readers? No, I don’t. Now, you always have an ideal reader – a fictive reader – who is in your favour, who is not complacent, but always critical. My problem is with the text and its organization, means and effectiveness. The reader remains for another moment. In your work you have approached both fiction and documentary formats. Based on your books in the field of “testimonio:” what is the difference between working in the realms of fiction and non-fiction? With a book – and this goes beyond all the passion I can offer – the result is, ultimately, my responsibility. Whatever happens – for better or for worse, no matter what happens – the book is my responsibility as author, although I understand that there is a great distance between the book and me. When you make books on other terms, your responsibility grows much more: you are embracing another realm of meaning (especially if you are working in a psychiatric hospital or at a political trial or with a homeless person who is utterly poetic). I must have respect for the other first. And secondly, I must have strict respect for myself. We both have to respect each other. So that what captivates me, should become fluid for others. The question is how to insert the imaginary of the other – this is an element with its own political structure – in the context of a book. In the book My father, for example, I put in the delirious speeches that a schizophrenic had with me. I included all these conversations, because what I found interesting was to bring in those voices that were never, never, ever going to have access to the public space. Politically, I found it very bold. In fact, this is one of the books that I feel closest to. I recognize in this person a political gesture, namely to carry a fractured self – this is not an epic self, not the self of the great stories; in fact, I never even knew his name during the three years we saw each other – to another realm of sense, another epic, the epic of survival, which I find fantastic! So, that seems different to me. But in addition, I have here a responsibility that exceeds me, personally: What is most important is for me to rise to the challenge of the other or the others. I have a commitment to give all I can, to give aesthetic shape to those voices. At a talk at Birkbeck in London, Sergio Rojas cited a number of artworks which are “invisible” in the sense that they are neither legible as art – separate from non-art – nor in their political meaning and intent without additional information. He analysed this as a political statement in itself: the idea is not to combat forgetting, for instance about the torture, because the forgetting has already happened, it is part of the event now.10 … I wonder how you feel about this, given that some find your work difficult. I do not know if you read the reviews of your books … [Laughing] No.

212  Diamela Eltit, Berenike Jung Well, it is often said that you write about marginal people and this is frequently interpreted as a metaphor for Chile. What do you think about those interpretations? Is it possible to understand your work as some kind of “other,” a form that disrupts public space and fills a void? Look, I do not have a volition to work on certain themes or spaces. It is rather a question of how my imagination works, of what resonates with me. There are things that simply do not resonate with me. I have, more or less, always been in the same [literary] place, partly because my fantasy, my desire, is there. I have always written the same thing, with variations: but the variations of the same make a different text possible. I am not a compassionate person in the Catholic sense. I do not have a “compassion manual.” I look at people straight, let’s say, evenly. I could not say that a homeless person uses a language more or less powerful than mine. I look at people or places symmetrically. I do not use a logic based on asymmetry, on hierarchy. I do not move along with a compassionate spirit, I do not think that I am going to redeem the world, nor do I intend to change Chile. I do not have that megalomaniac thing about literature. Well, that would be a lot of ambition! This messianic thing about literature seems unbearable to me. I was lucky that my mother was a communist. She always had a n ­ on-hierarchical attitude in terms of social importance. I did not inherit a type of speech formed by social hierarchies. I mean, I do not think the poor are good either. No, it’s not that. There are different kinds of marginalization. I do not have an idealized vision of these spaces. Do you feel that art has a social responsibility or ethic? What do you think of the classic notion of “art for art’s sake”? In my own research, it seems that the films I look at obviously have an ethical responsibility, but at the same time, they are [under different constraints or freedoms as] works of art or entertainment. A literary work is not going to change the course of society … but it can alter the literary system. In fact, literary movements are a set of incremental alterations. Otherwise, literature becomes petrified. It interests me, politically, to stir up our signs and to reveal the parts that the institutions watch over, that they cover up. To give you a common example: we have a terrible cultural relation to blood. It scares us, although it also contains the idea of heroism. But there is a body that always bleeds, which is that of a woman. Nobody knows blood better than women. However, culture has never worked on that kind of blood. There has been a kind of commercial work, of course, to contain it, to make it more comfortable to live through this experience. But there is no set of discourses that would pick up this kind of blood, that would ask about the effects that blood has on the bodies of women. In the case of women’s blood, it loses all its symbolic status and becomes a kind of secret.

Pain and Writing: Interview with Eltit  213 Even today, well into the twenty-first century, it has not been possible to arrive at a more or less recognizable agreement with the blood of women. That means neither have women themselves thought about their blood in a more organic way, a larger, more compact, more political way. For example, cinema does not include the rivers of female blood. There could be a haemorrhagic cinema! Never has this been well thought through by art. I wrote a novel about menstruation – Vaca Sagrada (1991) –, where I thought about blood from the erotic, the political point of view, actually, from all points of view. That is my most forgotten, most weakened, novel: precisely because of that, because of menstrual blood. Because it does not seem possible to look at the blood of women as a cultural production, a cultural matter. The thread of blood is only possible for the Greeks, for tragedy or for war. Art can undermine, penetrate what is monolithic in public discourse. You can inquire into matters that exist but that are hidden in interesting ways. And it can also be the blood of death. But death could be triggered by the blood of a woman’s body. The blood of women has only been thought of as the beginning of fertility or infertility, but it is much more than that, much more, much more … It is that culture has worked its silence. The woman is left quite alone with her blood. There is a rather negative discourse about it, especially from the Bible onwards. Then you can do certain motions on pain or exclusion or silence that could be very interesting. In my research I have encountered a similar issue. I am referring to the circulation of emotions, which are usually spoken of as if they were completely natural, but they are shaped by social and cultural mores. With torture, I have thought about the affective, of disgust, but even the sensation of pain can be seen as something personal as well as socio-­ cultural … something that turns the pain of the victim’s body into a social sign. And these emotional signs circulate also in the bodies of those who torture and those who watch and witness … Recently, I was at a meeting about Chilean visual arts in Paris. A Chilean artist had made an art installation in Santiago on the occasion of the 40 years’ commemoration “anniversary” of the coup: through Facebook, she had invited thousands of people to lie on the streets to represent the disappeared detainees. This performance, her action, was worthy, respectable: that is not in dispute. But the disappeared detainees are a very complex category because they are neither dead nor alive. They are a category of between. So, it is not a matter of simply calling thousands of people to represent them. I had some disagreements with her about this, on very friendly terms. In Paris, while she was talking about her work, a man entered with a baby, and the baby started making noise while she was talking. Then it

214  Diamela Eltit, Berenike Jung started crying, just as a police car was passing outside with their siren wailing. So, while this artist showed her images on the computer, I thought: the disappeared detainees exist between this guttural babbling of the baby – a pre-linguistic language – and the sirens of the police. That is a possible field to think through that tension. Of course, the artist’s work was interesting and had an impact, but, from my perspective, there was not really an important link with the tragedy – that scene – which it sought to name. Yes, I understand. Many works of art that can be considered by critics as ‘the best’ do not necessarily receive a favourable response from the general public. Sergio Rojas, when he was in London, showed several very interesting works, but they needed an explanation. He had to explain what we were seeing. It was a type of art that needed something additional to be understood. Look, I just saw a Muslim vampire movie [A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, by Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014]. And I found it interesting, creative, and complex. Because the vampire is a very interesting figure. I’m thinking especially about Bram Stoker’s novel. The figure of the vampire has certainly been exploited by Hollywood, but here the vampire is inscribed in a Muslim context and, moreover, it is a female vampire. You see here how, occupying the traditional means of cinema, you can give a spin to that figure. The vampire is an addict, it is dependent on the consumption of blood. But this is a film against drugs that stars the most addicted character ever created by literature and pop culture. So, the film gives a very interesting spin on this. Another issue is that the mass media are often in dialogue with the discourses of power. Obviously, they create a general taste. Mass media and mass art are in relation with the commercial logic and their objective is to build stereotypes. But, at the margins, there have always been other movements, which push the centre. These films, no matter how marginal, also drive and interrogate other films. Many commercial films are changing their way of doing things, because other kinds of cinema – the peripheral ones – push them and require their transformation. From what I know, you have lived in many places … Not that many … Oh, I googled badly! [both laugh] Well, at least you have travelled to many places. The first time I lived outside of Chile was in Mexico, in 1990, and I stayed four years. Then I lived in Argentina for three years. That is my life outside of Chile. Currently, I am on several academic residencies and I am giving presentations. In general, I spend one semester in Chile and one semester in New York, so in a sense, I live half a year in New York.

Pain and Writing: Interview with Eltit  215 I wanted to ask: how do you perceive the differences – if there are any – in the places where you have lived, with regard to how memories and stories of pain are discussed. In other words, I am interested to know if you find that these discourses in Latin America, or in Chile specifically, are different from those in other places. How do people handle collective guilt, shame, and memory? And are there national differences in the discourse on pain? Would you say that maybe there are double meanings – in texts or in movies, for example – that are only understood in a local context? Of course, the debates are more different in Latin America than in countries like Germany, England, or the United States. Not because these countries are more “developed,” in a classical sense, but because certain groups have been able to communicate better – or have had more resolve – to carry out certain social pacts. In these countries, there has been progress on several levels: homosexual marriage, maternity rights, etc. In Latin America, this is much more difficult, not only with regard to religious matters. Now, I would like to speak about the notion of “collective guilt,” in the sense of how we face a history that shames us. I am interested in your opinion about the possibility of separation from that guilt, either by saying, this is not my problem, I did not do anything, or by accepting that this is an inescapable history. On a collective level, are there ways to normalise guilt? Look, there is guilt and there are the guilty ones. Those definitely exist. There are perpetrators of crimes who must face their judgement, who must be held accountable. But what happens if there is no justice? What happens if we do not reach a judgement, an agreement on some kind of truth? For example, one may argue that this is happening now in the United States with respect to the recent torture cases during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And in Chile, too, there are many people who are dissatisfied with how justice was done and dealt with regarding human rights violations. Certainly, yet that does not mean that there are no guilty parties. In those cases, for various reasons, the law was suspended. In the case of Chile, justice is being interfered with by corporate and military interests. In the case of Spain, for instance, they have not even fully uncovered all the victims of the Franco regime. But of course, that does not mean that Franco’s dictatorship was not completely codified. Spain has not done anything about these human rights violations. Brazil, too, has done very little. Meanwhile, the dictatorship is being inscribed in people’s minds. Today in Chile, we recognize the culprits. Those who are exculpated are the accomplices, those who worked with the dictatorship and who say that they ‘did not know.’ They were there, but they did not know. That has been very similar in Germany.

216  Diamela Eltit, Berenike Jung It’s complicated. Because ‘I did not know’ became an alibi. It is not a justification, it is an alibi. If you think that someone did not know, why is that? Because he was blind? Because he did not want to know … Sure, because he did not want to know. Or maybe he did not know that he knew. That, then, would be more honest. Generations follow generations, yet memory cannot be erased so easily. There is still much left to do. Another example is Bolivia. When Bolivia lost the war with Chile, they were left without access to the sea. In Chile, people do not understand how much Bolivians are affected by this fact. Not only economically. They have to bring their products to the Chilean borders, obviously, and Chile does offer them an economic corridor. But, symbolically, they need the sea. They need that ocean they lost. Chile does not understand that. Chilean politicians claim that President Morales uses this as a political issue. No, they do not understand anything! For Bolivians, the sea is fundamental to their society. They feel a permanent sense of grief about its loss. From a symbolic point of view, that war is not over. In an interview with you, I read: ‘Diamela Eltit is considered a “diagnostician.” She is interested in diagnosing and curing historical diseases, which means that she, before all else, is interested in life.’ How can this curing and healing take place? Look, I lived through the dictatorship. I was in Chile during all those years. I was a young student and my life changed completely. There was a curfew at 9 o’clock at night and I, a young woman, could not leave the house. We had all our rights suspended. I experienced the shock of moving from one system to another. And your mother was a communist? Yes, my mother was a communist but she never played an important role. She was a grassroots militant. You had to unlearn everything and relearn how to live under the dictatorship. It is a relearning. You need to forget certain things. You cannot talk much because you do not know the person next to you. You have to learn to understand who the people are with whom you are talking. You have to detect that from their wardrobe, their language. It is very complex, a very fine-grained process. You move from a more open – trusting – society to one of suspicion. That is definitively distressing. But the worst was the killings. I could not find any place for that in my head. I could not understand it. It was a nightmarish, painful, and terrible experience. How old were you? I was 23, 24 years old. I asked myself: why are they killing people? How could they torture or kill people, in those clandestine prisons, or even on the street? In a way, as a citizen, I never recovered from that. Until today. Never. I continue to mourn those years. Every time I read

Pain and Writing: Interview with Eltit  217 about that time – or when I see images of that time – a bottomless hatred arises. I have not forgiven anyone. I was happy when Pinochet died. In 1986, when there was the attack,11 I regretted they did not kill him. I did not have an ounce of compassion for him. That is, speaking as a citizen. Another thing is to speak as a writer. I studied literature and, as a writer, I was and am interested in literary signs and the politicisation of literary spaces. That has been my task. How will I be able to heal myself if I have not even been able to achieve closure in my grief? How can I heal someone else if I am not able to do it for myself? Then I remember the distressing experience of seeing these abuses. Terrifying! I was in France recently and there were soldiers on the street. And they reminded me of the coup in Chile, because there was always military personnel in the street, with machine guns pointing at you and you got used to that violence. Now, leaving the dictatorship was also a problem. One had disciplined oneself during the dictatorship. One had to return to actually talk again, to say words that we had no longer said before. And I had to learn to tolerate the silence surrounding the past. I write my books as I can, based on that history. When I was in Chile, I always felt that there was a special way of how things are communicated. I could notice that “something” was being communicated but I could not clearly identify what that something was. I just knew that something was happening. Well, there was censorship for many years… Perhaps your books can open that “something” that wants to be spoken… That [something] is neoliberalism. Chile is the largest laboratory of neoliberalism, brought here by the “Chicago Boys.” How do you see the relationship between social pain – like the pain that neoliberalism brings – and private pain – which, at least at the level of official or public history, is typically separated or disconnect. It was a bit sad to see and experience the transition in Chile. Chile managed to exit its dictatorship by electoral means but also through a negotiated pact. And that pact defined what would remain of the dictatorship in the country. As we know, Pinochet lost the plebiscite – a vote that he thought he would win – but he remained commander-in-chief of the army. Later, when he resigned, he remained senator for life (not democratically elected). The dictatorship did not end after 17 years, it ended after 25 years: when Pinochet was arrested in London. That’s where his story finally ended, when he lost his status as invulnerable. But, since those years, the political right in Chile, alongside the “Concertación” – and now the “New Majority” – has governed to their liking.12 The violence of capital – and its excessive power – have co-opted Chile.

218  Diamela Eltit, Berenike Jung This neoliberalism was very traumatic because it became an anaesthetic. Firstly, the powers that be – all of them – agreed on a pact against memory. They said, ‘We have to look forward. Let’s look forward.’ And that looking forward meant forgetting all the human rights violations. For example, the Rettig Report13 was marginalized, and gestures of reparation were minimal, all in order to look forward. Secondly, the agreement between the military, the political right, and the “Concertación” maintained the privatization of all public companies. Excessive capitalism, founded on unlimited exploitation, kept the low wages and weak labour laws. Therefore, the “Chilean miracle” was enjoyed only by the upper 1% of the population, those who gained everything. Ten or twenty percent have had a good life and the rest – 80% by the way, almost the whole country – has had a terrible life. What was offered instead of the violence of the old model – as an alternative to distress and anxiety – was consumerism. And people went shopping! They were buying, buying, buying, absolutely insane, and they went into debt in an insane and amazing way, too. However, in 2006 – that is, 16 years later – there came the first big gesture against this state of affairs, initiated by a movement of secondary school students, the so-called “penguins.” But it came after 16 years of a bombardment of memory through consumerism. How could this crisis emerge then, this break with the logics of consumerism and the marginalization of memory? If consumerism was accepted as normal, how did they resist? Society could not resist the offers of consumerism. During the greatest economic crisis, the unemployed were offered to continue buying on credit. Even an unemployed person could have credit! And they could pay for everything on credit, including education. In this context, consumption was like an anaesthetic. People are now waking up to all the risks that implies. In addition, the “anniversary” of 40 years of the coup [2013] was key for television channels to make available documents that they had kept for more than 20 years. Then everyone was scandalized about the dictatorship and they immediately started making television series and movies; a market emerged for this material. It became fashionable. Such as “Los Archivos del Cardenal”14 …. I have seen only one episode of Los Archivos del Cardenal because I was struck by the love story at its centre, as the most important issue, obviously, between these characters… I find it soft, sweetened. But of course, there are other instances, as when students, those who, in a spectacular, epic form, have instigated an important historical revision. Beyond the realm of media and television, in recent years we have witnessed how the “Concertación” tried to give out anaesthetics for everyone. That is such a great term, anaesthetics… Last question: do you have any advice for those of us who work on such issues? How can you write

Pain and Writing: Interview with Eltit  219 and work on topics such as pain in a “compassionate,” a feeling way, but also with the necessary distance, without being consumed by the subject? Each person has their own way of seeing the world. But when one enters these difficult spaces, one reads symbols in a more acute way. One loses naivety. It is not so easy for you to fall into stereotyped drama. You already know what you are talking about. There are people who live off torture, off human rights. They make this their “business.” One knows that they are “merchants of pain.” I believe that these topics allow you to see more clearly your own life as well. There is a biographical element in all this. Your relationship with others may be more important to the extent that you understand violence. And all the intersecting moments between these individual and collective stories allow you to think about your own life.

Notes 1 Michael Lazzara (ed.), Diamela Eltit: Conversación en Princeton, PLAS Cuadernos, Number 5 (Princeton, NJ: Program in Latin American Studies, Princeton University, 2002), 5. 2 Claudia Posadas, ‘Un territorio en zozobras. Entrevista con Diamela Eltit’ en Signos Vitales. Escritos sobre literatura, arte y política (Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales, 2008), 300–10 (306). 3 Michel Foucault, ¿Qué es un autor?, en Entre Flosofía y Literatura (Buenos Aires: Paidós, 1999), 329. 4 Adrián Ferrero, ‘Pienso en la literatura como un campo geológico, siempre dialogante. Entrevista de Adrián Ferrero,’ en Signos Vitales. Escritos sobre literatura, arte y política (Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales, 2008), 293–99 (295). 5 Idelber Avelar, Alegorías de la derrota: la ficción postdictatorial y el trabajo del duelo (Santiago de Chile: Editorial Cuarto Propio, 2000), 235. 6 Posadas, ‘Un territorio en zozobras,’ 309. 7 Avelar, Alegorías de la derrota, 235. 8 Translated by Berenike Jung. 9 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 4. 10 Sergio Rojas, ‘Profunda superficie: El pasado no cabe en la historia’ (­London: Birkbeck, 30 April 2015). 11 On 7 September 1986, the paramilitary FPMR (Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front / Frente Patriótico Manuel Rodríguez) attempted, and failed, to assassinate attacked Augusto Pinochet. 12 “Concertación” is the name of centre-left coalition governments during Chile’s transition, and until 2010; in 2013, the centre-left coalition government called itself the “New Majority.” 13 The first National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation, La Comisión Nacional sobre Verdad y Reconciliación (CNVR), so-called “Rettig” after its chairman, ran from April 1990 until March 1991. The Commission was given a limited time frame and mandate for its investigation. Cf. Cath Collins, ‘Prosecuting Pinochet: Late Accountability in Chile and the Role of the “Pinochet Case”,’ Universidad Diego Portales/George Mason University (2009). Few copies of the Commission’s final report – the so-called

220  Diamela Eltit, Berenike Jung Rettig report – were printed; and the assassination of a Pinochet confidante, soon after its publication, resulted in its quick disappearance from the public view. Cf. Priscilla Hayner, Unspeakable Truths: Facing the Challenge of Truth Commissions (New York: Routledge, 2002), 128. 14 The television drama Los Archivos del Cardenal (2011–2014, TVN) recreates some of the most striking and symbolic cases of human rights violations committed or coming to light in the supposedly stable 1980s. The show is based on the historical records documented by the Vicariate of Solidarity, an institution founded by the Pope on request of Cardinal Raúl Silva ­Henríquez – hence the eponymous title which translates as The Archives of the Cardinal. The Vicariate denounced publicly the human rights abuses of the regime and provided legal assistance to 250,000 Chileans. Cf. ‘Los casos de la vicaria. Las historias reales que inspiran la serie los archivos del cardinal,’ www.casosvicaria.cl/ (accessed 10 May 2016).

12 Translating Pain Maureen Freely

When I say it pains me to write these words, I am not speaking metaphorically. Several weeks ago, I tripped and fell at the university where I work, fracturing my shoulder. It still hurts my wrist to write by hand, and typing for more than a few minutes makes my whole arm ache. I measure my day with painkillers as I sit here at home, waiting for the bone to knit. It’s only a matter of time, I know. I can already feel an improvement. Soon I shall be starting physiotherapy in earnest. Not long after that, I shall be racing for trains again, swinging briefcases and suitcases. But chasing after me will be a ghost to remind me of all the dangers I ignore at my peril. Small and straightforward my injury might be, but it has changed my relationship with the spaces through which I move. I walk down a flight of stairs and imagine missing a step. I do not miss a step, but when I sit down again I look at my bruises and I wonder how it was I managed to shield my head while falling. I am sure I did not lose consciousness. But then why was I so startled and confused when a passing student helped me up? I keep trying to reconstruct the seconds, but the seconds don’t add up. Even though I can remember exactly what I was looking at when I went down. And exactly how concerned that student’s face looked, as she gazed down at me. I was lying on my back by then. How did I get there? I want to know, but I cannot. All this from a simple trip and fall. No one else was involved. There was a new bump on the brick path that I failed to see. That’s how it happened. It’s all that happened. How much worse would it have been – how much greater and deeper the pain – had I been pushed down or struck, terrorised and tortured? These are not fanciful thoughts. As a translator, I meet such acts of violence almost daily. When I think about the real and imagined people whose pain I’ve translated in recent years, I have to wonder, yet again. Did I ever really understand what they went through, what they go through still? Why was I drawn to their words, and their testimony? What did I hope to achieve, by translating their pain from Turkish into English? These are some of the ghosts still with me: the dervish strung to the back of a pick-up truck, paraded from encampment to encampment, as

222  Maureen Freely the ropes eat away his wrists. The girl subjected to a bath of scalding water by a mother intent on washing away all trace of her rapist. The girl who is saved from a death march, to be renamed but never quite forgiven for her origins. The new recruit who is ritually brutalised by every superior officer crossing his path. The prisoners whose interrogators hang them from the ceiling, ride them like donkeys, and prod them with electric truncheons. The ones who are tossed out into the snow in their underwear, to endure what is known as torture without marks. The ones who are returned blankeyed and speechless to their prison cells. The ones who, after months of terror and torture, are abruptly released to make their way through a rainstorm and across muddy fields, with only a shared raincoat for an umbrella, and no idea of how far they must walk before they are able to board the bus for which they lack the fare. The Istanbul I knew as a girl was a gentle, sunny place where children were almost universally cherished. I say almost because there were always the wild ones jumping out through the bushes to lunge at us on the way to school, and the glowering ones who would congregate around our picnic blanket at undiscovered beaches, their hands clasped behind their backs. And the soldiers we were warned not to look in the eye. And the policemen, said to be a law unto themselves. Later on, in adolescence, there were the boys throwing themselves down on the pavement, to see up our skirts, the men shouting filthy curses from passing cars, and throwing the doors open and trying to pull us in. The taxi drivers whose necks pulsed with fury if we noted, oh so politely, that they were no longer taking us towards our home, but away from it. There were also the friends and the good-hearted strangers who protected us from these bad men, who warned us about what not to wear, what not to say, and where not to go. Later still in adolescence, it was not just the threat of sexual violence and retribution we had to worry about. As the student left turned vehemently anti-West, there were also the riots and the skirmishes, the boycotts and the Molotov cocktails. Not long after I left, the military stepped in to crush all dissent. On the nightly news, I later heard, they’d read out names of the students, teachers, lawyers, journalists, and writers who were still at large. Once these people were apprehended, those names dropped away. Those people faded from sight. It was only when I began translating accounts by Turkish political prisoners for Amnesty International that I found out what had happened to my classmates and so many others. As I write these words, I am again back at that desk staring at my translated words, remembering the classrooms, schoolbooks, and jokes we once shared. They had crossed over into hell without my so much as wondering how they were. How could I have turned my back for so long? What could I do, now that I lost my blindfold?

Translating Pain  223 My second translation project was an account of a year spent in a women’s political prison. It’s a book I still love. A book still read in ­Turkey. But in the late 1970s, when I was trying to place it with a publisher, no one outside Turkey seemed interested in knowing what happened inside it. So eventually I gave up. I still have the typescript, though. And it’s still a struggle to remain patient with editors and readers who perhaps have no reason to care about these stories, which must seem so very far away. I keep my calm by assuring myself that there must be some way to close that distance. Above all, I want these editors and readers to love all there is to love in this land of my sunny childhood. I want them to witness the beauty of the people, the poetry of their everyday life. Only then will they share the pain I feel upon seeing all that poetry and beauty trampled and defiled. And ask the same questions as I do, as I sit here with my ghosts: why they had to suffer so. To what end all this violence. How it is that violence breeds silence. What it means to break that silence. What it costs to speak out. What to do when, after all that, no one seems to hear. How to understand that vast sea of indifference, in which I too have swum. After failing to place the book about the women’s political prison, I went back to my own work. Taking my first ghosts with me, of course. They were there, shaking their silent heads, in the shadows of everything I wrote. Decades later, when I was lost inside an early draft of what would be my sixth novel – my second to be set in Istanbul – I took a few months out to translate a novel for my friend Orhan Pamuk. That novel was Snow.1 In charting the course of a coup in the city of Kars during a blizzard that has cut it off from the outside world, it compresses all that has gone wrong in Turkey over the past century into three violent days. The city’s old Russian and Armenian buildings are crumbling into the snowdrifts, the political Islamists are gaining support by offering basic supplies and free education to its poverty-stricken residents, and if you don’t run a coffeehouse or work for one of the state bureaucracies, you probably work as an informer for one of the security services. There are three of these: the police, the army, and the national intelligence service. All three are behind the coup, and also in competition. On the first day of the coup, our hero Ka – a poet-journalist on ­assignment – is taken in for questioning. The authorities want him to identify a boy they hold responsible for a killing. Following them down to the basement of the police headquarters, he finds four cells, each the size of a double bed. Lined along their filthy walls are young boys whose eyes are swollen from beatings. One looks up at Ka and says, ‘Sir, please don’t tell our mothers.’2 He recognises a few of them. When he pretends otherwise, the authorities drive him to the veterinary faculty to inspect another group of detainees. As he walks down this building’s icy hallways, he knows

224  Maureen Freely himself to be in a place where no one gives ‘a moment’s notice to other people’s pain.’3 Escorted by a strong but strangely gentle police officer who treats him as lovingly as if he were an old man struggling to walk, Ka visits three classrooms. So terrible are the sights here that he cannot take them in. Inside the first, he thinks instead about ‘the shortness of mankind’s journey from birth to death’. One look at these ‘freshly interrogated suspects’ and he knows ‘with absolute certainty that he and all the others in the room’ are nearing the end of their ‘allotted time: their candles would soon be extinguished.’4 He recognises the men in the second classroom, having seen them in a coffeehouse the previous day. They seem now have drifted off into a world of dreams. It is in the third classroom that Ka is overtaken by a ‘mournful darkness’ in which he feels ‘the presence of an omniscient power whose refusal to disclose all he knew made a torment of life on earth.’5 His eyes are open, but all Ka can see is red.6 If I experienced an epiphany of sorts while translating this passage, it is to some degree because the novel’s previous 185 pages were building up to it. In Snow, we have an anatomy of power and what sustains it. It is here, in these torture cells, we see boiler room of the edifice, the violence that keeps its machines running, and its people mired in silent terror. Its afterimage hangs heavily over the novel’s remaining pages. Rereading the passage now, in isolation, it seems not to carry the meanings I have ascribed to it. But then again, a story’s meaning resides not in a single scene, but in the way each scene illuminates the whole. When I think back now on Snow, it seems to me to fit together as perfectly as the snowflake that is its presiding leitmotif. Twelve years after seeing the translation into print, it is still there to confirm what I must have known, even as a child – that violence is rarely senseless. While, almost always, silence is. Returning then, to the questions with which I chose to lacerate myself at the beginning of this essay – no, I don’t think I shall ever truly understand the pain I have translated. If I’ve returned, over and over, to translate the pain of others, it is because it is coming to me from writers who have something to say about it. Which is why it doesn’t matter to me if there are other, messier motives in the mix. I cannot translate pain without wondering, often obsessively, about why and how these terrible injustices have been visited on another person, and not on me. Without thinking how to make amends for my good fortune. Without worrying if I might be robbing my sufferers of their dignity, to take their pain to a distant, foreign audience, for all to see. Without despairing of the politics of pain, and wondering if these stories I am translating into English might serve to confirm my readers’ worse prejudices about the land of my sunny childhood. Without asking myself if it mightn’t be better, just to leave the stories be.

Translating Pain  225 But at the end of all this agonising, I remember, once again, that I am translating writers who have chosen to break the silences in which they were once mired, and at great risk to themselves. I am thinking now of the grandchildren and great grandchildren of Armenians who in 1915 were either kidnapped or saved from the death marches and forcibly converted to Islam. Of the 25 grandchildren and great grandchildren whose testimony I translated, only two dared to use their own names. The silences in their families have persisted through the generations because the consequences of disclosure – in an authoritarian country that still teaches its schoolchildren lies about the Armenians while denying their genocide – are still too great. And yet there were things these people wanted to put on record. There were secrets they wanted to break, lies they wished to expose. I am remembering how it felt, to be sitting in my armchair translating them.7 I could hear their voices, struggling to tell the truth at the far end of a darkened room. What does it do to someone, to know they have a story inside them that they can never be taken out into the light? I am thinking now about the girl whose mother subjects her to the scalding bath that will perhaps erase all marks of her rapist. As this mother prepares to rub her down with a red paste made from a mandrake-like root, she informs her daughter that they will soon be paying their respect to the rapist’s family. For the rapist has now been killed by an unknown assailant who is probably a male relative of the victim. To ensure that no one ever hears about the rape or connects her family with the murder, mother and daughter must now play their parts. When the daughter rebels, it is again in silence. But her author, Sema Kaygusuz, puts it into words.8 Nowhere have I felt so keenly the embodiment of patriarchal violence as when I have been translating this writer’s stories. Policed and self-­ policing, her sufferers also resist – and when they do, they do so viscerally, with all the fury of truths too long suppressed. There is splendour in their rebellions, be they real or imagined, and in every sentence that describes them there is beauty, but when I leave their stories, I am unable to leave behind the weight of all the things they cannot say. As for the dervish, he appears in the middle of a novel called Reckless, by Hasan Ali Toptaş.9 Its hero, Ziya, has been doing his military service on the Syrian border. This is before the current troubles: the soldiers doing their nightly shifts in trenches are mainly on the lookout for smugglers passing in both directions across a minefield in which there seem to be no mines. Despite the bloodiness of the skirmishes in which they are routinely caught, the soldiers have far more to fear from the commanding officers that brutalise them at every opportunity, and sometimes, late on a drunken evening, use them for target practice. Then one night the guards bring in a dervish who has wandered across the border by mistake. The commanding officer has his arms and legs

226  Maureen Freely tied to the four corners of a pickup truck and drives him from encampment to encampment through the midday heat, as the ropes dig into his wrists, and skin drops to the floor of the trick in leathery strips. The dervish speaks no Turkish, only Arabic, and though he does not hide his suffering, neither does his hide his glittering contempt for his captor. He seems to look right through this commanding officer. He has other things in mind. What those things might be is a mystery to Ziya. But it is while he is guarding the dervish that night that – for the first and the last time – Ziya finds the courage to disobey orders. He brings the dervish secret food and water. The two exchange names. In the silent gap between their two languages, they make friends. What passes between them? And what of all the other dervishes that wander in and out of the pages of this book? In all my years in Turkey, first as a child, and later as an adult, I never got a straight answer about dervishes. I never knowingly met one, and I still do not know if they are more allied to the state-sanctioned Sunni Islam, or to the large and never counted Alevi minority, whose practices derive from Shia Islam. I have heard it said that the Alevis, and perhaps not just the Alevis, absorbed many aspects of Anatolia’s pagan religions. And that the Alevis – and perhaps not just the Alevis – descend not from Central Asian tribes, as Turks are meant to do, but from the peoples – some Christian, some not – that were already settled in Anatolia when the Turks arrived. I also know that the Sufi sects to which the dervishes are loosely allied have long been in conflict with the state, on account of the very great power they wielded at various points in Ottoman history, only to be banned and driven underground. Even from the early years of the Republic, continuing to this day, Turkey’s leaders have maintained their ties with these sects. In newly re-Islamized Turkey, we at last know which sects those are. But for almost a century, when secularism was both embraced and imposed, these allegiances were kept secret. One day I shall go into a library to find a book that sets out the full history of Anatolian religion, folklore and belief, and the full history of the false histories to which generation after generation have had to pay lip service, just to save their skins. Perhaps the book I long for exists already, is waiting for me to find it. But I suspect that the truth cannot yet be told in its entirety. In the authoritarian country that Turkey still is, the consequences of telling are still too great. In the meantime, I content myself with the telling words I have had the privilege to translate. With every discovery, I unearth another question, and another reason to love the land of my sunny childhood, with all its shadows and secrets and sufferers who deserve better. I can only hope that through translation I have opened their words and worlds to others who grow to care as much as I do, and grow ever more curious about them, knowing that the greater the silences that threaten to engulf them, the more they have to say.

Translating Pain  227

Notes 1 Orhan Pamuk, Snow. Translated by Maureen Freely (London: Faber and Faber, 2005). 2 Ibid., 186. 3 Ibid., 187. 4 Ibid., 188. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Ayşe Gül Altinay and Fethiye Çetin, The Grandchildren: The Hidden ­L egacy of ‘Lost’ Armenians in Turkey. Translated by Maureen Freely (New Brunswick and New Jersey: Transaction Publishing, 2014). Tuba Çandar, Hrant Dink: The Voice of the Voiceless in Turkey. Translated by Maureen Freely (New Brunswick and New Jersey: Transaction Publishing, 2016). 8 Sema Kaygusuz, The Well of Trapped Words: Selected Stories by Sema ­K aygusuz. Translated by Maureen Freely (Comma Press, Manchester, 2015). 9 Hasan Ali Toptaş, Reckless. Translated by Maureen Freely and John Angliss (New York, Bloomsbury, 2015).

Index

1973 coup, 104–5, 108–9, 114, 117n23, 213, 217–18; see also Allende; Pinochet Aarseth, E. 139 actants 103 affect 7, 41 affective 29, 79; dimension 151; economy 102; encounter 101–15; responses 83–98; turn 102; see also emotion Agamben, G. 72, 74, 149; see also (bio)power agency 92, 94, 115, 137, 168–9; of the torturer 140–1,153; of the viewer 98; of discourse 2; of victim 3, 5–6, 38, 101–2, 105; of perpetrator 92, 96–7; non-human agency 103, 106, 115; in video games 137, 147, 149, 151, 153, 155; see also actants Ahmed, S. 4, 102, 160–1, 174 Allende 104, 109, 113 amnesty 162, 165; Amnesty International 222 amputee 13, 27–8 amputation 13–15, 18, 27 anaesthetic 12, 21–2, 218 Anthropocene 103, 106, 108 116n15 apartheid 159–63, 165–8, 170–3, 175–6, 183; see also postapartheid; South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, reparative and retributive justice model apologetic 141, 154 apology 7, 89, 160, 167 army 28, 132, 147, 151, 217, 223

audience 3, 90, 93, 103, 164, 173, 224 Auschwitz 66, 84, 87, 94, 105 authenticity 47, 84, 89, 105–6, 147 authoritarian 225–6 Bakare-Yusuf, B. 168–9, 174 Barthes, R. 8–9, 41, 181–2, 186, 195, 197–9 Baudrillard, J. 180 Bell, C. 13–16, 18–22, 24, 26–7, 30 belonging 159–60 Bennett, J. 102–3, 107, 115 Bergen-Belsen 57, 66 (bio)power 72 black: history 89; pain 161, 163; point of view 163; victims 7; voice 183; see also white; race blood 7, 14, 22, 135n10, 152, 198, 225; trail of 122, 124, 127; Arab revolutions 120–34; bloodline 7, 126, 129–30,133; of women 212–13; see also vampire body 2, 3, 5–7, 11–14, 16, 20, 22, 24, 27–8, 30, 37, 39–40, 45, 47–8, 59, 60, 62, 70–4, 76–80, 101–3, 107–8, 112, 114, 121–4, 126, 130; see also embodiment Bogost, I. 143, 149–51 bystanders 92–3, 100n26 Camus, A. 180 catharsis 173 censorship 90, 138, 217 Chacabuco camp 108, 111 cliché 210 Cohen, J. 103, 115 Cold War 58, 137

230 Index ‘collateral damage’ 54, 62, 64 colonial 109, 113, neo-colonial 120, 132 compassion 88, 90, 92, 101, 109, 114, 212, 219 complicity 66, 143 concentration camps 66, 57, 87, 94–5; see also Auschwitz; Bergen-Belsen; Chacabuco; Isla Dawson; Villa Grimaldi consumerism 218 Corfe, G. 16–20 crimes against humanity 58, 66; see also Second World War; Nuremberg trial; human rights cut-scenes 137–8, 141, 145, 156n5 de Boulogne, G. 19, 21 death 8, 54–5, 57, 69, 84, 88, 90–2, 94–5, 111, 133, 139, 142, 147, 161, 165–7, 170–1, 173, 177, 181, 184, 188, 190, 213, 222, 224–5; of author 9, 186, 198–9; images of 120–34 Debord, G. 179 deep time 106, 109, 115 Derrida, J. 72 desaparecidos, los 8, 104, 110, 112, 116n18, 195, 203–4 despair 73, 88, 186, 224 dictatorship: Latin American 102; in Chile 103–5, 108–9, 112–14, 116n18, 198, 210, 215–18; under Franco 215; see also Pinochet; 1973 coup disappeared, the 101–4, 108, 112–15, 188, 213–14; relatives of 108, 112, 114–15 discourse 1–3, 7, 70, 81, 104, 109, 121, 141–4, 151, 159–60, 210, 212–15; see also rhetoric documentary 83, 89, 105–6, 211; see also re-enactment; authenticity ecological 106 embodied 9, 114, 124, 129; existence 71; memory 102; perception 4; relationship 133 embodiment 166, 198, 225 emotion: expressions of 19, 26, 83; as method 1–10, 47 emotional pain 3, 48, 84, 94 empathy 84, 87–8, 96–8, 103, 130, 166, 168, 173; see also feeling for; sympathy

ergodic nature 139, 141 ethics 37, 80, 98, 101, 161 exile 108, 180 existential 73–5, 80, 182; angst 8, 186–7; condition 180; despair 186; see also Camus exploitation 218; exploitative nature 137, 141 exploitative nature 137, 141 face: theory of 18; of victim 109, 115, 139 facial: Facial Action Coding System (FACS) 26; expressions of pain 11–5, 17, 18–20, 22, 26–7, 29, 37, 165, 170 fake news 180 feeling for 103 female: blood 213; body 140; gender roles 178; respondents 86; vampire 214 feminist theory 139; see also Mulvey, L. Ferry, G. 56 fetishisation 140 Final Solution 84, 93; see also Wannsee Conference First World War 12, 97 forgetting 183, 211, 218; see also memory forgiveness 7, 159, 160–8, 170–4; see also Ubuntu Foucault, M.55, 72, 74, 195 Frazier, L. 103–5 Freud, S. 62, 170, 176n19, 179, 189; see also Jung game: gameplay 137, 142, 145, 147; 151–2; Gamergate 138; mechanics 137, 143–4, 148–9, 151 Gamgee, J. 18–20 gang 183–4 gaze 7, 9, 17, 101, 108, 112, 139, 180, 182, 184–6, 189, 221; Western 7, 174 gender 24, 57, 87, 97, 101, 178 Geneva Conventions 54, 67n10 genocide 55, 57–8, 61, 85, 91–2, 210, 225 Armenian 8 gestalt 28 ghost 133, 179, 183, 221, 223 ghostly 15, 28, 173 grief 8, 128, 170–1, 177, 182, 186, 188–90, 216–17; see also loss; melancholy

Index  231 guilt 65–6, 97, 160, 163, 165, 167, 215; collective 215; survivor’s 186; white perpetrator’s 161 Gqola, P. 159 Grosz, E. 48 Guzmán, P. 8, 101–15 haptic 74, 111, 128, 142, 151; cinema 107–8, 110–11; sense 6, 73,79; visuality 103, 107, 110, 112, 118n46 healing 9, 16, 20, 36, 51, 168–9, 183, 216 Heidegger, M. 70, 72, 75, 77–8, 80 Holocaust 7, 56, 83–5, 89–93, 97–8, 111; see also Final Solution, concentration camps, Second World War; see also crimes against humanity; Nuremberg trial horror genre 188; see also monster Huizinga, J. 145–6 human rights 51, 56, 60–1, 65, 104–5, 162, 215, 218–19, 220n14 identification: empathetic 94, 96–7, 112; ‘heteropathic’ 108 identity 45–6, 95, 105, 121–2, 130, 133 imaginary 8, 133, 211; community 132 imprisonment 138, 179 incommunicability 37, 139, 149 inexpressibility 1, 139 informer 139, 223 injustice 53, 94, 168, 173, 224 intelligence 3, 140, 148–50, 153–4, 223 interactivity 141–2 interface 143, 149 international criminal tribunal 58; see also law interrogated 17, 137, 153–5, 214, 224 interrogation 1, 3, 111, 137–40, 142, 144, 148–53; enhanced 1,3 invisible 22, 40, 47, 105, 127, 152, 201, 211 Isla Dawson 114 joke 90, 179, 186, 189, 222 Jung, C. G. 45 justice 52–3, 55, 57, 60, 62, 66, 104, 120, 128, 132, 144, 162–3, 168, 215; see also injustice

Kant, I. 76–7 Kirkpatrick, G. 143, 151 Kojima, H. 137, 141–2, 144, 154 Kristeva, J. 181–2 Kuppers, P. 35, 40 Lamar, K. 183–5 Lavater, K. 17–18 law 51–66: and sufferance 51–2, 58–62, 66; jus ad bellum 55; jus in bello 53, 55; of war 52–3, 63–5 Lemkin, R. 55–8 Leriche, R. 11–12, 22, 30 Levinas, E. 6, 69–81 liminal 40, 121, 128 Los Archivos del Cardenal 208, 218, 220n14 loss 104–5, 110–12, 154, 160, 165–6, 180, 182, 188–9, 216; of identity 45–6, 60; of life 54, 63–4; sense of 111, 105, 107 ludic 7, 143, 150, 153 Luhmann, N. 52–3, 61 magic circle 145 Malabou, C. 71–4, 81 marginal 197, 201, 204, 208, 212, 214; marginalization 218; margins 75, 197, 212, 214 Marks, L. 103, 107–8 martyr 7, 120–34; martyrdom 105, 127, 132 Marx, L. 161, 163 masochism 181, 188 massacre 128 mass media 101, 214 materialism 103, 178 mediate 41, 105, 112–13, 118n52, 136n23, 161, 177–8, 181, 184; mediation: 126, 153; mediator 166 medical 4–6, 11–13, 16–17, 19–20, 22, 26–8, 30, 35–8, 48, 59, 62, 128, 154 melancholy 104–5, 109, 111, 179–80 memory 41, 85, 89–90, 97–109, 111–15; collective 159, 215; impasse 71, 104; prosthetic 97; studies 83, 101; traumatic 103, 106; see also trauma; loss metaphors 5–6, 8, 12–13, 22, 29, 37–8, 41, 44–5, 47, 60, 70, 72, 102, 106, 109–10, 112, 115, 121, 127–8, 133, 141, 145, 153, 165, 182, 183, 212; of pain 27–8, 36, 39–40

232 Index militarisation 143, 147 military 54, 60, 63–4, 137–40, 143–4, 147–9, 154–5, 215, 225; coup 104, 109, 217–18; see also Allende; Pinochet misogyny 138 monster 95, 133, 188–9 Motsemme, N. 161, 167–9, 174 mourning 8, 103, 121, 173, 179–80, 189; unprocessed 104–5; see also melancholy; grief Mulvey, L. 139 nation 56, 132, 144, 154, 160–3, 171; national 58, 60–1, 65, 84, 97, 102–4, 132, 165, 166–7, 215 neoliberalism 193, 198, 207, 217–18 neuroscience 47, 74 non-mimetic 143 normalisation 75, 144, 208 normalise 149, 205, 215 nostalgia 8, 101, 105–6 Nuremberg trial 55, 57–9, 65–6, 93, 162 ontological 6, 70–3, 75–6, 78, 106, 121 ontology 146 other, the 4, 80 pain: appropriation of 6, 72, 74, 81, 153; Charts 24; chronic 6, 36, 42, 45; expressions 11–17, 19–20, 22, 24, 26–7, 29, 139, 165, 167–70, 210; Gate Control Theory of 28,30; maps 22–7; person-in-pain 5–6, 11, 17, 22; share 6, 36, 42, 166, 210, 223; social 26, 36–7, 52, 207, 209, 213, 217 pathognomy 18; see also phrenological 15 patriarchal violence 224 patriarchy 168 perception 28, 30, 35 performance 14, 118n54, 121, 123–4, 142–3, 151, 213 perpetrator(s) 7, 51, 55, 61, 83–4, 88, 92–3, 95–8, 114, 161–2, 164–7, 170–2, 174, 215; see also bystanders; victim; informer phantom 5–6, 11, 13, 23, 27, 29–31, 154; limb 13, 27–8, 30 phenomenological 69, 74 phenomenology 73

photographic 19, 37–40, 83, 141 photographs 18. 26–7, 35–6, 39, 41–2, 44, 46–8, 108 photography 6, 19–20, 36, 39–40, 47, 89 Pinochet 104, 108, 113–14, 193, 198, 207, 217, 219n11, 220n13 player-character 142, 148–9, 155 police 91, 126, 161, 171, 189, 214, 222–5 politics 101, 121, 132–3, 138; of apartheid 171, 174n6; of apologies 170; of pain 7, 224; torture 140; politization 217 post-apartheid 159–60, 163, 165–7 Pool, S. 143 prison 1, 87, 111, 185, 216, 223; see also Rikers Island; Isla Dawson; rehabilitation prisoner 108, 140, 153, 156n6, 222 procedures 150–1 proprioception: 73–4, 79–80, 107; see also haptic; synaesthesia psychic 25, 96, 209 punctum 41–2, 181; see also studium race 56–7; anti-racist 160; categories in South Africa 160–1, 163, 171–2, 169, 175n17; deracialised 160; presidential 1; see also whiteness racial differences 46; discrimination 113; unity 160 Rainbow nation 7, 160, 163, 167, 170, 172, 174 rape 65, 156n6, 225; rapist 222, 225; see also patriarchy rebellion 225 redemption 66, 172 redemptive 149, 166 re-enactment 94, 166, 169–70 religion 62, 226 rememoration 85; see also memory religious 15, 20, 56–7, 161, 166, 215 revolution 113, 116n15, 120, 122–4, 127–8, 134 revolutionaries 125, 130–3 revolutionary 6, 72, 121, 124, 127–8, 131–3 reparative and retributive justice model 162; see also reparations reparations 162, 165 rehabilitation 71, 162–3 rhetoric: of pain 1–3, 6, 8, 36, 66, 70–1, 81, 155, 167, 210; of law

Index  233 53, 66; of forgiveness 162–3, 167; procedural in videogames 137, 142–4, 147–53, 155; see also incommunicability; inexpressibility; joke; trope; unspeakable; vernacular Richard, N. 104–5, 107 Rikers Island 184–5 ritual 121, 124, 127, 178, 222 Robinson, N. 143, 147–8, 150, sadism: sadistic 149, 188; see also masochism safe space 40, 189 Sample, M. 148–9 Scarry, E. 1–2, 5, 35, 64, 137, 139–41, 144, 148, 153–4, 168, 199–200, 210 Second World War 56–7, 59, 65, 79, 85, 102, 127, 151 self-policing 84,90 self-surveillance 121 Shakur, T. 183–4 shame 87, 94, 160, 165, 215; see also guilt Sherman, R. 28–9 silence 7–8, 11, 21, 64, 104, 109, 113, 121, 159, 161, 167–70, 174, 213, 217, 223–6 simulacrum 180, 185, 194 Sobchak, V. 85 solidarity 132, 167 Sonderkommando 84, 86, 91–2 Sontag, S. 35, 39–40, 83, 89 spectacle 3, 86,138, 179, 181 spectacularisation 144, 154 Stafford, B. 35, 47 stereotype 171, 173, 210, 214, 219; see also cliché Stern, S. 104 studium 41, 181 suffering 6–7, 11–12, 14–18, 21–2, 25–8, 30, 48, 51–66, 69–72, 83–4, 86–7, 92, 94–5, 98, 101–2, 107, 114–15, 226; recognition of 64; sufferance 51–2, 58–62, 66, 139, 148, 154 suicide 74, 76, 86 surface 24, 39–40, 107, 138 survivors 3, 63, 105, 114; of torture 108, 112; survivor’s guilt 186; survivor-victim 65 sympathy 14, 16–17, 22, 26, 90, 96, 120, 148, 168 synaesthesia 111

tactile 6–8, 70, 74, 102–3, 112, 129; cinema 107–8, 111; gaze 112; rhetorics 8, 101; see also haptic cinema Tagg, J. 39–40, 42 testimonio 201, 211; testimony 44, 160, 164, 167, 170, 221, 225; see also Rettig report; South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission torture 1–3, 6–7, 27, 51, 57–8, 65, 83, 86, 101, 108, 112, 114, 131, 137–44, 146, 148–9, 152–5, 188, 210–11, 213, 215–16, 219, 222, 224; cells 222, 224; porn 188; representation of 6; survivors of 3, 108, 112, 114; victim 114; see also agency; interrogation; survivors; politics; waterboarding; witness transcendence 6, 70–1 transition: in South Africa 176n21; in Chile 217, 219n12; transitional justice 67n5; see also neoliberalism; post-apartheid; reparative and retributive justice model trauma 36, 102–4, 106, 109, 113–15, 163, 165–6, 170, 173, 189; historical 8, 172; vicarious 85 traumatic 114, 166, 199, 207, 209, 218; events 14, 96, 161; image 85; memory 103; pasts 163; posttraumatic 171; PTSD 152 traumatized 120 trope 3, 7, 90–1, 104, 107, 111, 122–3, 126, 130–1, 138, 144, 155, 162, 182 Trump, D. 1, 178, 189–90 truth 3, 8–9, 70, 76; 95, 105, 121, 148, 163, 170, 215, 225–6 Truth Committee: South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) 7, 159–69, 171, 173–4; Rettig report 208, 218, 219n13 Ubuntu 159, 166–7, 169, 171, 173 Unidad Popular 104 unspeakable 169 vampire 204, 214 vernacular 122–3, 128, 133 victim 3, 6–8, 53, 58–9, 62, 65–6, 69, 84, 88–93, 95–6, 98, 101–3, 134, 215, 225; victimisation 86; victims of Chilean dictatorship 105, 107–10, 113–15, 117n25, 118n54,

234 Index 198, 103, 213; in video games 138–9, 142, 148–9, 153–4; under apartheid 162–74; see also agency, black, face, survivors, torture video games 5–7, 137–55; aesthetics 7, 141–2, 149, 151, 155; 24: The Game 148–9, 153; America’s Army 147–8; Call of Duty 144; Grand Theft Auto 5 144–5; Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain 37–55; Splinter Cell 144, 148–50; The Sims 149, 151; see also ageny; cut-scenes; interface; game; phantom; playercharacter; victim Villa Grimaldi 114 visceral 3, 85, 89, 102, 181, 186 visualising 46, 147; pain 13, 22, 27, 29–31, 38–9 voice 95, 131, 179, 183, 185, 211, 225; denial of 62, 64–6, 113; of perpetrators 96 voice-over 109; see also silence; inexpressability voyeurism 120 voyeur 139, 141, 149 vulnerability 70, 81, 130 Wannsee Conference 84–5, 93 war 7, 12, 54–66, 183–4, 155, 213, 216; anti-war 143; class war 132; civil war 171; war crimes 54, 57–8,60, 63, 66; war games 144; in

Iraq 60–1, 63, 215; just war 55–6; laws of war 52–3, 63–5; post-war 94; in Syria 63, 120; in Yemen 120, 129; see also Cold War; law; First World War; Second World War; Yugoslavia War on Terror 144, 148 watching pain 84 waterboarding 139–40 Western: register 169; position 169; gaze 7, 174; see also colonial whiteness 7 160–1, 165, 172, 174, 175n6; white masculinity 160; white privilege 174; whitewashed 186; see also black pain witness 3, 8–9, 12, 16, 24, 37, 65, 133, 136n25, 160, 173, 185, 223; vicarious 85; and watching 94, 141, 168, 173–4, 213; see also voyeurism; watching pain women 14, 64, 138: agency of 135n11; blood of women 212–13; film viewing 86–7; political prison 223; sexual violence against 57, 65; silence of 159, 213; suffering 56, 64, 86–7; see also female; gender; misogyny; patriarchy; rape wound 14, 17, 40–2, 48, 60, 124; in a text 182–3 Yugoslavia 58