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The Montreal Review, October 2010

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"Regarding the Pain of Others" by Susan Sontag (Picador, 2004)  

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Regarding the Pain of Others begins with an example of differentiation. Sontag reminds us about Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas published in 1938, but written during the previous two years, in the climax of the Spanish civil war. The book was Woolf's reflection on the roots of war, a reply to a letter from a prominent London lawyer asking her "How in your opinion are we to prevent war?" In Three Guineas, Woolf took a feminist position - it is not my war, she wrote, it is yours - the men's war in your men's world. "The killing machine has a gender, and it is male."

How do we perceive the images of war from our personal position of men, women, mature or young, educated or not enough, Americans or others, relatives of the victims or strangers? No "we" should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain, writes Sontag. The child killed by bombs is neither a "Palestinian child", nor Bosnian or Jewish. The photographs of the starving children of occupied Biafra, published in the late sixties in the London's Sun, were not disturbing images of dying "African" children. They were images of children. And because they were only children these photographs that circulated the globe aroused one of the biggest and bravest humanitarian actions in history. As Philip Gourevich wrote recently, the pictures from Biafra helped spread forth the growing wish of the West to find a way to seek honour on the battlefield without having to kill for it. 1 Thanks to the modern techniques of picturing and image distribution, we are reminded, more and more often, that pain is universal and that evil is real. Pictures bring victims' suffering near to us. They should make us engaged with the pain of others.

However, there is an inevitable distance between object and subject, between witness and victim, distance that is not only in the kind and in the level of suffering we (we as observers, and others as victims) experience, but simply in space and time. From here comes the problem of the limits of our personal responsibility and our ability to understand the pain of others. In front of an image of atrocity, writes Sontag, you are often in the position of a "spectator" or "coward." Both positions are uncomfortable. 2

Sontag's book is an attempt (but not only this) to solve the problem of distance between us and other's pain imprinted on photography or film, or if not to solve it then at least to understand it. This is an important and noble task, because in our world of overflow of images and screens, of information chasing the calamity on its heels, we are really threatened to lose our sense of reality, and worse, to lose our sense of sympathy to people who suffer. It reminds me Adam Smith, who is remembered today with his theory of "invisible hand" from his book The Wealth of Nations. Smith, unfortunately, is less known with his magnus-opus The Theory of Moral Senses where he positioned the sympathy in the center of social gravity. Once we lose our sense for sympathy, we lose our humanity. In Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag is alerting us about the dangers of the wearing out of our moral feelings. She does not argue that the realities of war and violence must be kept in secret, but she asks when the seeing of images of the other people's pain is ending with moral engagement and action and when the result is apathy and inaction.

The danger of image "oversaturation" is a modern phenomenon. It is an inversion. In the past, the majority of people did not see the horrors and misery of war, they knew only about war heroism and honour. They were unable to take the realities of war seriously. We can excuse their naïveté. One of the greatest examples of the results from the belligerent state propaganda prising war heroism and sacrifice was the public excitement at the beginning of the First World War. In 1914, after nearly hundred years of peace, Europeans did not remember what war is. Moreover, they believed that war is good. Today the images of violence are everywhere. They were behind the vigorous public opposition against the war in Iraq (they played a huge role in anti-war sentiments during the war in Vietnam), but they also help the spread of apathy. Today, we are radiated by a constant flow of pictures and visual reports of scenes of bloodshed in the Middle East and Africa, supplemented by the virtual reality of war movies and computer games. The overexposure makes us to forget or to want to forget that violence and suffering are real.

A woman from Sarajevo shared her war experiences with Sontag. 3 She told her that seeing the destruction of nearby Vukovar on the TV, she thought to herself "O, how horrible!" and switched the channel. 4 Not after long Sarajevo was destroyed by the Serbian army. Is it normal to "switch the channel"? It is normal in some cases. But unfortunately it becomes a normality. We can switch the channels because we feel helpless to do something, because we fear, or because our helplessness and fear has grown into apathy.

The constant picturing, showing of an unstoppable war, might teach us of quiet ignorance. I remember how angry I was in the very first days of the Gulf of Mexico oilrig disaster. I followed the news daily. And day after day I heard bad news - reports for growing amount of oil spilled in the ocean, revelations of BP's lies, governmental inaction, and consecutive, unsuccessful attempts to tap the gusher. To give my dime for a future green policy I took interviews with oil experts, scientists and environmentalists. After nearly two and a half months of full emotional engagement, I felt fatigue. The disaster was unstoppable. I stop watching and following the news. I even stopped being so angry. I became like somebody who is concerned with his own survival and life, an ignorant egoist. The massive media exposure of unstoppable atrocities might lead to the same capitulation.

Images of war have the opposite goal of creating apathy. Sontag notices that in the long history of art it is hard to find paintings of suffering from natural causes such as illness or childbirth. Depicted in visual art and media suffering is caused mostly by "wrath, divine or human."5 Non-natural suffering is preventable, and because of that, its images have the goal to shock us, to awake our moral feelings. Showing atrocities is to invoke indignation and if possible to trigger action against them. There is a moral appeal in this. Sure, there are also temptations the images to be used as propaganda and manipulation, but generally, the visualization of suffering is against evil, it aims to invoke our good, human side.

Susan Sontag was born in New York City on January 16, 1933, grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and attended high school in Los Angeles. She received her B.A. from the College of the University of Chicago and did graduate work in philosophy, literature, and theology at Harvard University and Saint Anne's College, Oxford... | read more |

The actor George Clooney said recently in an interview for BBC, that he is a man who is constantly, "fortunately and unfortunately," in front of the camera. So he decided to go to the "darkest places" in the earth (an echo of Conrad's journey to the "heart of darkness" or Africa) to make them visible. Clooney is popular with his advocacy for resolution of the Darfur conflict and his humanitarian work. It is right and our duty, I think, to bring camera in dark places. It won't be a "colonial reflex," as Sontag calls the inclination of showing human suffering in exotic places far from the civilized world. It would not be if we show also the "unpatriotic" images of pain in the dark places of our own society. The pain of others must be exposed and made felt for all who are in "safe."

The image of suffering, photography or movie, is a memory that speaks directly, and it speaks in one language to all generations. The danger of exhaustion from the overflow of images of victims of violence is always present, it cannot be evaded in modern world and it should not be treated with artificial measures of media control. Like engagement, exhaustion cannot be a permanent human state. More important, despite the risks involved, our duty is not to close eyes in front of other's people pain. This is, I think, Sontag's conclusion and this is my own, too.

-- T.S.Tsonchev

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1 Philip Gourevitch, "Alms Dealers" (The New Yorker Magazine, October 11, 2010), p.104. Gourevitch's article is a review of Linda Polman's book "The Crisis Caravan: What's wrong with Humanitarian Aid?" (Metropolitan; $ 24). Polman's view to humanitarian aid is quite unorthodox, she argues against commercialization of violence (often through deliberate media campaigns) to attract aid money. Or as Gourevitch says, "Sowing horror to reap aid, and reaping aid to sow horror, is the logic of the humanitarian era" according to Polman. (105.)

2 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), p. 42.

3 Susan Sontag staged Beckett's Waiting for Godot in the summer of 1993 in besieged Sarajevo. She spent in Sarajevo much of the time between early 1993 and 1996 and was made an honorary citizen of the city.

4 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), p. 100.

5 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), p. 40.

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