Now Reading: Regarding the Pain of Others
Now
This is the first in a series of entries devoted to Susan Sontag's book, On Regarding the Pain of Others.
Links to the next entry can be found at the bottom of each. There are a total of 20 entries for this book, each one illuminating and reflecting on a selected portion of the book.
The process of writing these entries became a particularly personal journey as I worked my way through concerns and questions that have haunted me in my own work in art for many years. The many hyper-links throughout the texts are intended to draw the would-be reader even further into the subject.
This small book is an extended essay (126 pages) exploring representations in photographs, paintings and visual media in general of suffering, pain, injustice and the agonies of war. She introduces her subject with a discussion of Virginia Woolf’s, Three Guineas. Woolf wrote Three Guineas in response to a question from a male lawyer who has asked: “How in your opinion are we to prevent war?” Woolf initiates her response by saying that a dialogue between them may not be possible because a vast gulf separates them: he is a man and she is a woman. And, at least in reference to war, most men see it, and images relating to it, much differently than most women. “Let’s see, Woolf writes, ‘whether when we look at the same photographs we feel the same things.”
Sontag observes that “…someone who accepts that war...can become inevitable, and even just, might reply that the photographs supply no evidence, none at all, for renouncing war – except to those for whom the notions of valor and sacrifice have been emptied of meaning and credibility….in fact, there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding other people’s pain. A call for peace. A cry for revenge. Or simply the bemused awareness, continually restocked by photographic information, that terrible things happen.”
There is an interesting connection between the representation of the pain of others and the program of the avant-garde in its effort to shock.
Peter Bürger: Theory of the Avant Garde: “The problem with shock as the intended reaction of the recipient is that it is generally nonspecific. Even a possible breaking through the aesthetic immanence does not insure that the recipient’s change of behavior is given a particular direction. Dada manifestations are typical of the nonspecifictiy of the reaction. It responds to the provocation of the Dadaists with blind fury. And the changes in the life praxis of the public probably did not result. On the contrary, one has to ask oneself whether provocation does not strengthen existing attitudes because it provides them with an occasion to manifest themselves. A further difficulty inheres in the aesthetics of shock, and that is the impossibility to make permanent this kind of effect. Nothing loses its effectiveness more quickly than shock; by its very nature, it is a unique experience.”
Go to Regarding the Pain of Others: #2 Capa
