The many forms of porn
I understand that the execution of Nick Berg is viewable on the internet. Why would anyone watch this? I don’t understand: why would you look? The Washington Post had an article about Berg that included a photograph of his father collapsing to the ground, a distraught relative at his side. An older man, skinny, all arms and legs, sunken in on himself, in utter grief over his son’s death. Seeing that was enough, I can imagine the rest. If anyone still needs to see the video after seeing Mr. Berg’s grief, well, you have no imagination. Narrow-minded ideologues of all stripes want to colonise your imagination, cripple it, fill it with junk or pornographic obscenity, make you incapable of using it, until all you can do is watch with cold, paralysed eyes, hands folded in your lap — or poised on your computer mouse. Surrealists, situationists, and strange artists have dreamed that the world would change if imagination came to power. Maybe they knew that there are differences between pictures and media, between the ways of conveying matters, and between dissemination to a tiny handful versus to a massed many. Goya didn’t have video, and if he had, he would have used it differently. Today, however, technology banishes the elitism of the 19th century artist’s craft, and any asshole with a video camera thinks he’s Goya. Who saw Goya’s etchings when he first made them? Who had access? Just a few, whereas now everyone’s potentially a captive audience for tv and video and the rest. Break out of jail, set your imagination free.
When you said that “[n]arrow-minded ideologues of all stripes want to colonise your imagination, cripple it, fill it with junk or pornographic obscenity, make you incapable of using it,” I knew exactly what you meant. I have been resisting all week, in my own way, by refusing to keep viewing the pictures on the news (and of course, I won’t be turning to the internet either to find that footage, or any other footage of this kind). I don’t want my imagination to be colonized, nor though I want it inured in the wake of the barrage of horrifying images.
In my own small way, I have been resisting by writing more (offline) forcing my imagination to capture images beyond the screen that’s been put up and filled for us…. And – you probably already know this, or you would have not written this post – the trick is not to let your imagination loose, but to focus it. I am thinking here of the way Simone Weil has talked of attention … I am not sure of the exact quote from her work, but as I was searching for it, I found Iris Murdoch’s commentary on Simone Weil in “Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals” in which she highlights Weil’s insistence on focusing on the reality in all matters related to suffering. Here is Murdoch in relation to a passage she quotes from Weil, who is talking about suffering as an affliction that manifests itself in fantasies of revenge, all of which diverts us from the reality of the true nature of that loss… (it’s hard to do this justice within the confines of a comment….):
“We must experience the reality of pain, an not fill the void with fantasy. The image of balance: the void as the anguished experience of lack of balance. We have been unjustly treated, insulted, humiliated: we want to get our own back, to get even, if need be to hurt innocent people as we have been hurt. We console ourselves with fantasies of bouncing back. We yield to the natural gravity (pesanteur) which automatically degrades our thoughts and feelings. (Imagery of the mechanical, in Simone Weil, in Freud, in Canetti’s “Crowds and Power.”) Instead of this surrender to natural necessity we must hold on to what has really happened and not cover it with imagining how we are to unhappen it. Void makes loss a reality. Do not think about righting the balance, but live close to the painful reality and try to relate to what is good. What is needed here, and is so difficult to achieve, is a new orientation of our desires, a re-education of our instinctive feelings. We may think here of Plato’s image of the soul as a charioteer with a good horse and a bad horse, struggling with the bad horse and pulling him up violently, ‘covering his jaws with blood.’ (Phaedrus 254E).” [Iris Murdoch: Metaphysics as a Guie to Morals]
A long quote and an oblique reference, I know … but the point is that when it comes to the imagination, in these times, perhaps less of it is more … and the sense of despair and desolation that haunts us, well that needs to be reclaimed by our moral [read as “ethics”] sensibility….
Comment by maria — May 16, 2004 #