Perilous Light
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Last Modified: April 30, 2008 Issue: April 2008 |
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Perilous Light: On the Visual Representation of Distant Suffering
A public lecture by Fuyuki Kurasawa, given on March 28, 2008 at the Institute of Political Economy, Carleton University.
How is visuality — understood here as the mutual constitution of the visual and the social (W. J. T. Mitchell) — implicated in the mediated construction of instances of distant suffering in various parts of the world, and what are the effects of such implications? After a brief history of the visual representation of humanitarian crises by Euro-American civil society institutions, the presentation turns to a consideration of the perils and prospects of humanitarian visuality. In particular, I turn to an inescapable aporia of this visual economy, the simultaneous production and negation of the otherness of vulnerable subjects. Finally, the presentation discusses certain strategies for a critical visuality, notably a defence of the image’s interpretive ambiguity as well as practices of phenomenological reintensification and structuralist expansion of the image.
Three key concepts are worth keeping in mind:
- Visual economy: The distribution and circulation of relations of power that constitute and structure the socio-visual field.
- Distant suffering: Instances of mass suffering and extreme situational and structural violence that are perpetrated outside the North Atlantic region and which are represented visually via the media.
- Humanitarian visuality: The set of visual conventions that are consistently reproduced in images of humanitarian crises over time.
PART I: Lecture
PART II: Question & Answer
Fuyuki Kurasawa is Associate Professor of Sociology, Political Science, and Social and Political Thought at York University. He is the author of The Ethnological Imagination: A Cross-Cultural Critique of Modernity (Minnesota, 2004), and The Work of Global Justice: Human Rights as Practices (Cambridge, 2007).
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I enjoyed the lecture and it made an evening’s babysitting a lot more interesting than it would have been without it. However, a great deal of the lecture seemed to be spent working out a schemata of the field rather than engaging with it. Kurawawa suggested a “phenomenological” and a “structural” mode of tackling the alienation that is provoked by the images of which he gave examples - which turned out to be saying that we should try to feelaffected more on the one hand and understand the context of the suffering on the other. Totally laudable and no-one can disagree with that. But how? This was skated over by showing how we might misunderstand the imagery in the photographs from the Canary Islands and Beirut. It seemed to posit an idealised compassionate informed subject, the absence of which was the topic of his lecture.
Obviously to sort out terms of reference and map the terrain first is important, but I was hoping for something a bit more practical and engaged. The question of what to do in the face of the pornography of suffering is a central one in contemporary society and the issue of what we can actually do about this which will produce beneficial results for those photographed is more important than diagrammatic representations of the relationships between the actors involved.
Cliff, you raise some good points. I have always resisted visual representations of all sorts without appropriately contextualizing them in their broader political discourse in a clear, non-ambiguous way (at least as much as possible). Others value the ambiguity that a lone picture can evoke, and cite ample empirical evidence of its effectiveness in encouraging people to take part in political struggles with full knowledge of the structural dimensions of those struggles.
Thus, I also found a definitive, implementable solution wanting, but then again, I would be fearful of a definitive answer when it comes to the political terrain. As both reproducers of representations of distant suffering (on our blogs, or in descriptive narratives), and in the explanations that we give for them when passing on information about them to our discursive counterparts, and as consumers of said representations, “we” must learn to interpret and transmit the content of the events they represent “critically”. This requires walking a fine line that does not banalize the experiences of “distant sufferers” in advancing the structural component, but that also does not lose the underlying explanation in the process of capturing the translated experience of those “distant sufferers”.
For me, this is achieved most successfully when visual representations are accompanied by text, however there are many forms that this might take. The key is that we always remain conscious of the discursive landscape through which we transmit our visual representations, which is continuously shifting. It means there can never be a static strategy for representing the ‘other’ (whether suffering or not), only the general guidelines that Kurasawa outlined.
That’s an interesting and tolerant response Matthew which makes me uncomfortably aware of my urge to look to Kurusawa as a public intellectual with all the answers, or at least, a programmatic description of how we should respond to this issue. Your statement about how you prefer to contextualise images with the help of text points the way to a more nuanced reaction. Do you think academics could have an educational role here, or do you think that the image as such is as free as a poem in terms of interpretation?
Cliff, my intent wasn’t to put you up on the ropes! But it was to broaden the scope out a bit from simply looking at academics (whether aspiring scholars or not), to include the much broader social reality implicit in the vacuous label “public discourse”. I have no doubt that despite the best intentions of scholars of all disciplines, images and text will continue to be interpreted in a variety of ways, some with more vile intent than others. I also think that academics have a place here in choosing one interpretation or another to defend, using their status authority to legitimate their positions within certain power structures. But this space shouldn’t be theirs alone. The problem isn’t ultimately an elite-elite one, but an elite-mass one, meaning that more people need to engage in debates about distant suffering (and here I’m personally thinking of ‘textual’ debates) before we really see drastic changes to our political economy.
Thus, Kurasawa’s talk is merely a catalyst for a discussion between you and I, which we can only hope will be expanded on by others, read by others still, and discussed in private settings around the world. Luck permitting, in the long run, we will create a discourse on the politics of representation that didn’t exist before. So when I say that we can’t fix a concrete plan for outright representation, I mean that any such plan must occur processually, contingent on the dynamic interplay of the involved interlocutors. On a structural level, this kind of idea is heavily criticized because of the seemingly improbable demand for wide-scale social education. But I don’t really believe that most people are incapable of “high-level” discourse, it just depends on what tools they are given. That said, the values hinted at by Kurasawa don’t require a post-graduate education to express (if it’s by those with said education through which they are most often expressed).
I’m sure I’m being a little dense without clarifying what I mean, so to sum up: yes, academics have an educational role here, but we need a much broader education coming from diverse quarters of society. Often the most effective comments come not from the classroom, or while donning the officialdom of an academic position, but when academics speak their mind as a regular citizen (or resident).