Photography And The Pseudo-Event: Abu Ghraib Friday May 5, 2006
Daniel Boorstin’s book The Image was published in 1962, which makes it un-contemporary. This is significant – I sometimes find the only way of developing original insight is by seeking it in unusual and ‘alternative’ places; this is why I’ve previously studied subjects like Chinese and Indian philosophy, and Western systems like Tarot card symbolism. 1962 is effectively an ‘alternative place’.
I first heard about Boorstin’s book indirectly, on Radio 4. A university lecturer was berating the news media for giving us reports about current soap opera stories. He described them as ‘pseudo-events’, and I thought what a penetrating concept that was, widely applicable to many aspects of contemporary society. I searched for “pseudo-events” in Google, didn’t expect to get any results, and was surprised and impressed when it led me to Boorstin’s book.
The concept of the pseudo-event is central to Boorstin’s analysis. The Big Brother TV show is a pertinent example: “In many subtle ways, the rise of pseudo-events has mixed up our roles as actors and as audience – or, the philosophers would say, as ‘object’ and as ‘subject’. Now we can oscillate between the two roles” (p 40). Photography is centrally implicated in this analysis; the pseudo-event is a “synthetic novelty” (p 21) where, for example, “the Grand Canyon itself (is) a disappointing reproduction of the Kodachrome original” (p 25).
The pseudo-event is essentially a vacuous, meaningless occasion with a false cultural significance, generated through the media. ‘Celebrity culture’ is a substantial part of it:
Our age has produced a new kind of eminence. This is as characteristic of our culture as was the divinity of Greek gods in the sixth century B.C. or the chivalry of knights and lovers in the middle ages. It has not yet driven heroism, sainthood or martyrdom completely out of our consciousness. But with every decade it overshadows them more. All older forms of greatness now survive only in the shadow of this new form. This new kind of eminence is ‘celebrity’ (p 66).
Celebrities are famous for being famous. Their distinction is closely related to their image, rather than their achievement; they are “human pseudo-events” (p 75).
The pseudo-event “derives interest from the process of making it…fans enjoy watching the process of celebrity-making. The same is true of works of art” (p 174). Thus, we have the popular Big Brother and their various spin-offs, the recent programmes documenting aspirant pop stars and – less obviously perhaps – people like Tracy Emin, Sarah Lucas and Damian Hirst. Ultimately, these people do not say anything that has not been said before and, like their predecessor Andy Warhol, they manipulate the public to enhance and elevate their status through notoriety. They are esteemed for their celebrity value, which Boorstin calls a pseudo-event. Viewed in this way, it is not something to get excited about but rather, that it points to what Christopher Norris in his critique of contemporary thinking Uncritical Theory calls a “cultural malaise”. Walter Benjamin also referred to this in his famous essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical reproduction:
The film responds to the shrivelling of the aura with an artifical build-up of the ‘personality’ outside the studio. The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the perosn but the spell of the personality, the phony aura of a commodity (Illuminations, 1999: 224).
The pseudo-event has four main characteristics:
1) It is not spontaneous, but planned in advance – like a press conference.
2) It is produced in order to be reported – like the press release.
3) Its relation to an underlying concept of reality is unclear – motivations and the psychological context are more important than actual events.
4) It is self fulfulling and tautological – the fact that it is presented as important creates its own importance.
The cultural history of America over the preceeding 50 years is an important indicator of cultural change. Boorstin documents the growing trend of the pseudo-event, over that period of time in the US. It’s where it began, and it has since spread to the UK.
Boorstin also refers to Edward Bernays and his 1923 book Crystallising Public Opinion. About three years ago The BBC ran a superb series called The Century of the Self, where one or two programmes examined the influence of Bernays, and how he manipulated mass consciousness using the psychology of his uncle, Sigmund Freud.
Bernays realised that the techniques of war propaganda could be applied to other areas of social and cultural life. He realised the term ‘propaganda’ was unacceptable, so he changed it to ‘public relations’. Before Freud and Bernays, consumer society, celebrity society and political ‘spin’ did not exist.
Corporate advertising, religion, politicians and the art/music/movie industry deliberately appeal to the irrational and instinctual part of the human mind. On one of the BBC programmes, they stated that political writer Walter Lipman said society needed an elite that could control what he called “the bewildered herd”, based on psychological science. Bernays called this “the engineering of consent”, where you appeal to inner desires and longings, and use it for your own purpose.
If you link products, narratives and personalities to emotional desires and feelings, they become powerful emotional symbols. Consumerism and religion rely on this; Joseph Goebells used the same methods to help the plans of his Fuhrer.
If you appeal to the imagination rather than rational thinking, you gain power. Napoleon knew this, and once said that ‘imagination rules the world’.
For me, the Abu Ghraib photographs exemplified the pseudo-event as generated by photography. First, no one condoned or accepted that behaviour; the protest was unequivocal and legal redress was invoked from the beginning and decisive in its outcome. But second, they did not – despite the world-wide effect those images created – have implications for the legitimacy of the war. Rather, they were shocking images supremely convenient for anti-war rhetoric, like sleazy tabloid tales discrediting personalities rather than ideological positions. And indeed, Piers Morgan, editor of a low-life non-news paper, was famously implicated in the use of false images on the basis of their undoubted shock! horror! value.
It would be surprising, given the heinous Shakespearean madness of armed conflict: “cry havoc, and unleash the dogs of war” – if situations like Abu Ghraib never occurred. War is the breakdown of civility, the outcome of hatred and irresolvable enmity, in sociological terms what psychopathy is to the human mind: it’s not balanced, predictable, or pleasant. The Abu Ghraib photographs testified to that, rather than the heinous undesirability of the US administration – an opinion I may agree with, but where I have reservations about the Abu Ghraib story, consistent with the notion of the pseudo-event and its photographic generation. There’s no doubt, those prisoners suffered at the hands of unruly US soldiers and it was regrettable. However as the colloquial adage advises, shit happens, and there is no reason to think war is immune to the problematic vagaries of human behaviour – every reason to think otherwise, in fact. The real horror of war, the brutal violence and suffering, lies in the images we don’t see: the loss of limbs, loss of heads and loss of loved ones, on a tragically large scale.
What happened at Abu Ghraib was structurally similar to the position of Kurtz in Copolla’s Apocalypse Now based on Conrad’s novel with the revealing title, Heart Of Darkness. It was therefore absurd to conflate it with the attitude and decision-making process at the White House, whatever you may think of the it. My own thoughts are not complimentary, but Abu Ghraib is not part of them. When you deconstruct the media world in terms of its images and ideas and how they are generated and re-circulated, you can see its about surface and not depth. Images reflect the subconscious of society and tie together its emotional truths, and in that respect the Abu Ghraib photos were like the repressed US psyche. But here’s the thing: the repressed unconscious is messy and primitive. Read Greek myth to understand this, which was the inspiration for some of Freud’s most primary ideas. Lacan described three semantic categories he called the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic. VDU war games as we saw in the first Iraq invasion were ‘imaginary’; Baudrillard thus declared that The Gulf War Never Happened. The Abu Ghraib photographs were ‘real’, although what they testified to is debateable.
The massive US criticism was a reaction responding to the shocking images as an instinctive way of dealing with them: blame the ‘father’, in psychoanalytic terms, whom in this case comes from Texas. There’s an emotional logic which was never considered, primarily because it has no place in either political or civil discourse. Imagine a young man or woman sent to Iraq who sees their close friends shot, mutilated and killed. Imagine what it’s like dealing with an enemy who kidnaps and beheads people, broadcast to the world. Consider for a moment, how you might feel when dealing with people inspired by a primitive religious based ideology that divides the world according to believers and non believers, in absolute and supremacist terms. Try to imagine what it must be like, if you have such people in captivity who you know possess strategic information. You are instructed, maybe, to give them copies of a primitive religious manual while simultanously advised to apply physical and psychological pressure to gain information. It’s only a matter of degree; any prison is deeply unpleasant as a physical and psychological experience: captors are not buddies, and you sleep on concrete not a luxury bed.
In the first Iraq war, US tanks had louspeakers over which they broadcast sexual taunts: your wife is a good lay, your weenie is woeful. The reaction? – the men jumped up from hidden positions, outraged and “offended”, and were then cut down with machine gun fire. They were prepared to die if you “offended” them – a strange and primitive situation amenable to a strategic advantage. It appears there was a similar strategy at Abu Ghraib: sexual humiliation, on the basis of a known psychological profile. Get them mad, make them feel less than men, and you reduce them to a useful compliant condition. Undoubtedly what happened at Abu Ghraib would have been traumatising for anyone, but it did have a particular context and origin.
Somewhere in the chain of command, it was sanctioned and advised. I don’t think Lyndee England for example, was the real concern: she was junior military personnel. And of course, in the private enclosed environment, where the psychological atmosphere must have been peculiar, deranged, hellish, like something from Hieronymous Bosch or Apocalypse Now, it went too far and it went wrong and it got disclosed to the world. A world that could not deal with it, except in the terms of political discourse. Kurtz was assassinated, and his philosophy was to extend his strategy into actions we condemn as immoral. He did that, on the basis that war is itself immoral and thus niceties and particularities are neither relevant nor logical. His insanity is created by circumstances he himself did not create, which is the psychological trauma experienced by any active soldier. Islamic beheadings are similarly deranged, outside the parameters we construct around war, morality, and civil behaviour. And the important point is they are sanctioned, conducted with exultation, and embedded in a psychopathic religious ideology where they serve as gestures to a fictitious deity. Imagine, if you will, you are interrogating such people in prison…this is not a fanciful indulgence about the Other, but a reasonable psychological question.
Anyway, Kurtz was assassinated and Lyndee England was tried and convicted. However in both cases, the real problem was not that wayward individuals had gone astray but lay, rather, in the terms of a wider context resting on two factors that were not addressed. Firstly, the chain of command and structures of power by which the situation exists in the first place. Kurtz is all-powerful in his own jungle domain, but shadowy US officials can eliminate him if they wish. Secondly, the psychology and gravity of emotion that is undoubtedly a factor in such extreme circumstances: a factor that would apply to anyone, where it may be convenient to blame and condemn others, but where that convenience serves a political purpose that fails to acknowledge its full psychological depth and resonance.
The Abu Ghraib story was a pseudo-event, in the sense that it was irresistibly, conveniently and powerfully linked to a rhetorical situation which – in the process – undermined our sense of the reality of war and whatever objections we may have to it. A human (military) situation became embedded in a political rhetoric, consistent with Boorstin’s analysis of the media-generation of false stories. The real story was, shit happens and this was regrettable, within a psychodynamic context we can judge only with great difficulty: “the horror, the horror” of war, and how people react within it. Kurtz is insane, but consistent with the psychological insight of RD Laing we can acknowledge that his behavour does make sense in the context in which he is situated. The pseudo Abu Ghraib story was, the Bush administration was responsible, it exemplified their basic attitude, the war was wrong, etc. etc. This strange and questionable blend of rhetoric and reality is a typical occurence and outcome of the media.