Seers, Seeing, Seen: Politics of the Visual in the War on Terror

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Seers, Seeing, Seen Politics of the Visual in
the War on Terror

• Laura Shepherd
• University of Bristol
• 2005 
• Laura.Shepherd_at_bristol.ac.uk

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Structure and Analytical Strategies

• Discourse-theoretical analysis
• Representations are never merely descriptive,
  but always normative, and, as such, exclusionary
  (Butler 1994 166)
• Knowers, Knowing, Known (Hawkesworth 1989)
• Seers, Seeing, Seen
• Imag(e)ining the Enemy
• Bad Apples
• Bad Barrel
• Different/ Distant The Recalcitrant Body Politic

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Abu Ghraib was the central maximum-security
penitentiary for political and other prisoners
under the Saddam regime in Iraq. Now it contains
detainees from the US occupation.
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Imag(e)ining the Enemy

• The President made it very clear that he was
  disgusted when he saw these photographs
  (McClellan 2004a).
• You dont want to see innocent people
  inappropriately maligned by virtue of the release
  of the photographs (Cheney 2004).
•  These innocent people are the honourable men
  and women of the U.S. armed forces, who were
  courageously and responsibly and professionally
  defending our freedoms across the globe
  (Rumsfeld in The Washington Post 2004).

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Bad Apples

• The White House rhetoric focused narrowly on the
  disgraceful conduct by a few American troops
  who disregarded our values (The White House
  2004).
• It does not represent America, nor does it
  represent American values (Rumsfeld 2004).
•   The actions of a few do not represent the
  hard work of the many of our men and women in
  uniform (McClellan 2004b).

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Bad Barrel

• Central to this narrative is the business as
  usual construction that sees the bad apples
  defence as both unspeakably inadequate and
  completely disingenuous (Burnham 2004).
• We have raised two generations of men (and
  women) with graphic, obscene images which have
  made degrading behaviour sexy, normal and
  exciting (Bruce 2004).
• What is most surprising about the abuses
  committed against civilians at Abu Ghraib prison
  in Iraq is the fact that they came as a surprise
  at all (Stokes 2004).

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Different/ Distant The Recalcitrant Body Politic

• Our relation to an imaginary of external threat
  and violence cannot be understood without
  simultaneously engaging the savagery of the
  internal domestic landscape we viscerally know
  and inhabit but which is deleted from all our
  favoured self-representations (Crary 2004 429).

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Militarism The glorification of military ideals
and the predominance of the military in the
administration of state policy
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To sell records clothes even stamps
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Those infamous photographs made us uncomfortable,
as well they should. We are all seen in the
images of torture from Abu Ghraib, we are all
seers of them and in seeing them make meaning
from them.