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The Pornographic Barbarism of the Self-Reflecting Sign1

Dr. Paul A. Taylor
(Institute of Communications Studies, University of Leeds, United Kingdom).

I.  Introduction

Fundamentally, such violence is not so much an event as the explosive form assumed by an absence of events. Or rather the implosive form: and what implodes here is the political void… the silence of history which has been repressed at the level of individual psychology, and the indifference and silence of everyone. We are dealing, therefore, not with irrational episodes in the life of our society, but instead with something that is completely in accord with that society’s accelerating plunge into the void.2

Despite the heated debates and huge mass public demonstrations about the rights and wrongs of Gulf War II in 2003, the biggest shifts in the British and American publics’ perception of the conflict occurred through a series of vivid, defining images at various crucial stages. Thus, what proved to be undue optimism was at its peak during the fall of Baghdad and the Ozymandias-like toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue, complete with a forewarning of the cultural misunderstandings to come when a US soldier momentarily draped the Stars and Stripes around the statue’s face. Further grounds for Western triumphalism were provided with the images of a disorientated and disheveled Saddam shortly after his capture on December 13th 2003, with the bathos of his last underground hiding-place that contrasted markedly with the pictures of abandoned palaces. In early May 2004 the flip side of this ability of images to dictate the political climate became apparent when President Bush and Prime Minister Blair came under sustained pressure because photographs of prisoner abuse in Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib jail appeared in the world’s media. There are two key aspects to the subsequent furor that are illuminated by Baudrillard's notion of the ob-scene and the consistent attention he pays throughout his work to the excessively explicit, de-symbolized nature of the contemporary mediascape.

1) The unequal relationship between the effect the pictures had compared to the words of previously unheeded imageless reports. Amnesty International, for example, had reported months earlier, in February 2004, allegations of torture and serious human rights violations without any impact; and,

2) The question arises as to why did these images make so much more of an impact compared to the large number of previously witnessed scenes of more conventional military violence and its civilian victims?

            The thesis offered here as an answer to this question is that, even if only for a short while and for reasons perhaps still not adequately articulated or fully recognised, the “Pornographic” nature of the Abu Ghraib photographs spoke to a strong sense of unease in the public. Despite politicians’ protestations about a few bad apples spoiling the barrel, the Western public had an intuitive sense that the photographs represented something deeper about the society that sent out such troops. It is this “something” this paper seeks to explore.

            Perhaps the most iconic and evocative of all the abuse photographs was that of an Iraqi man being subjected to the faked threat of electrocution. The prisoner is perched atop a box in a makeshift shroud, covered with a hood reminiscent of the Ku-Klux-Klan and pretend electrodes attached to his hands. The image is particularly evocative for Christian viewers. It resonates with connotations of the crucifixion and the representation of Christ the Redeemer with welcoming hands outstretched at his side. This article explores the profound implications such a poignant tableau has for our conceptualization of political violence and what it says about the nature of a society that could create the image of an abused, Christ-like figure standing on a box. For those who remain relatively impervious to any unusual level of moral disquiet over the Abu Ghraib pictures, the paper also raises a pragmatic political issue for consideration. This is the extent to which there is a link between the social processes that constructed the prisoner abuse scandal and the wider political environment of the international Coalition’s "War against Terror".

The paper concludes by arguing that a keen understanding of the West’s unhealthy relationship to the mediated image may lie behind the malevolent orchestration of such heavily mediated events as the 9/11 tragedy. Marshall McLuhan3 offers the myth of Narcissus as a defining metaphor for the West’s problematic relationship to the screen. Following McLuhan and Baudrillard, it is argued that the failure of military intelligence which led to 9/11 is at least partially due to a myopic perspective upon our own culture. Dealing with international terrorism might be a lot easier if we stopped waging very real and bloody war on an abstract noun (terror) and instead sought to emulate the malevolently keen media savvy of such figures as Osama bin Laden. Although it is obvious the West desperately needs to develop a more sophisticated and less reified understanding of the Islamic Other, this would actually be much easier if we were more sensitive to the processes of meaning-construction within our own heavily mediated culture. This culture is increasingly pornographic in a manner both reflected in the Abu Ghraib photographs but also perhaps somewhat obscured by the misleadingly exceptional status claimed for them by our politicians.

II. The Self-Reflecting Sign

From the mutation and conflation of confessional culture and mediated ‘real life’ had emerged the broader trend of the barbarism of the self-reflecting sign.4

Bracewell refers above to the “self-reflecting sign” as a defining feature of the contemporary mediascape. It is not the self-reflexive sign, which would involve a sense of reflection upon an image’s substantive meaning – rather, this article uses the conventional concept of pornography and Baudrillard’s concept of the ob-scene to explore how the self-reflecting sign refers to the image that has no meaning beyond its own tautological facticity. We shall see how literal Pornography – [upper case “P”] – acts as a trope for the dominant social values of self-reflecting signs and their visual excess – pornography [lower case “p”]. I  examine the present day manifestations of this extenuated social porn, and its profound political consequences, evident across a spectrum of confessional, confrontational, and violent media formats. Just as the obsessively repetitive attention paid by the media to the terrible images of the 9/11 tragedy occluded more substantive considerations of the event’s significance, so too do debates about the Abu Ghraib images threaten to obscure the deep social causes and consequences of the symptoms they reflect.

The images of abuse caused widespread shock in the West (interestingly, in the Arab world, instead of shock, the pictures tended to be met with a mixture of anger and a resigned sense of déjà vu5. There may also, however, be an element of denial in the Western response. Thus even some US Senators and Congressional Representatives highly critical of Donald Rumsfeld during his evidence to both Houses, took the opportunity to emphasize how this behaviour was not representative of US forces in general (see, for example, Senator Joseph Lieberman’s comments6). Similarly, speaking to the media while standing alongside King Abdullah II of Jordan in the White House garden on May 6th 2004, President Bush said “sorry for the humiliation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners”. He then went on to say that he was “as equally sorry that people seeing these pictures didn’t understand the true nature and heart of America”.7 Although these assertions may be true, they still distract from a key element of the disgust the images produced which is the central focus of this chapter: their pornographic rather than Pornographic nature.

Per leggere tutto il saggio: http://www.ubishops.ca/BaudrillardStudies/vol4_1/taylor.htm