Newsnight Review discussed Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others.
(Edited highlights of the panel's review taken from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight Review.)
TIM MARLOW:
Peter Hitchens, you are a journalist
who's spent some time looking at this
kind of issue and putting yourself on the
front line. Do you think issues
desensitise in the end?
PETER HITCHENS:
Immensely. I can tell you that when I
went to Somalia, before George Bush I's
great failed intervention and saw the
famine there, I was angry with myself
because I didn't feel more when I saw
the scenes; I'm a child of all this
television coverage of famine and
disaster, I'd seen it for years. I was
simply seeing something I'd already
seen on television. It didn't make the
impact it should have done.
I was cross with
myself because I thought I should have
felt more and I'm convinced it's because
I'd been desensitised. When she asks in
the book, "What's the evidence?" I can
tell her, that's the evidence. I think if
she's changed her mind it's not because
the facts have changed, it's because we
now have liberal wars and the days when
she first set out her views on this, most
wars were conservative. Now liberal
wars happen and they are by and large
set off by television coverage of some
region of doom which we are all
supposed to intervene because it will be
better if we intervene, whether it be Iraq
or Kosovo. Since that began, the liberals
have all started saying "well actually
images of war are good because they
bring this about". I think that's the real
change. What's really happening, which
she gets close to here but doesn't quite
admit it, she says, "So far as we feel
sympathy, we feel we are not
accomplices to what caused the
suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our
innocence as well as our impotence. To
that extent it can be, for all our good
intentions, an impertinent if not
inappropriate response." Actually I
would half agree with that. What we are
doing is using these foreign parts as a
playground to let our conscience loose
and that's what many of us do. We then
respond by wanting to make ourselves
feel better rather than make the country
involved be better.
GERMAINE GREER:
I find this essay seductive in a way, I
mean it's beautifully written; it's lovely
to watch her muscular mind dealing with
this issue. But the issue is ostensibly
watching the pain of other people. Its
about the iconography of victimhood. It
starts off being about the casualties of
war, including civilian casualties and it
raises issues and then leaves them
hanging. I have a feeling its intensely
self-censored. For example, she starts off
talking about the gender of war and uses
the Virginia Woolf example from Three
Guineas and then just walks away from
it; just leaves it hanging there. Then at
one point she says that war is the greatest
crime of all after arguing we must have
wars, we will always have wars. And not
accepting the idea that conflict is one
thing and technological warfare on the
scale of the Iraq war, for example, is
another. This is a very different state of
affairs where you have maximum
civilian casualties. The odd thing is its
published in 2003 but it make no
mention in the war of Iraq which
actually changed a lot of that bottom
line.
MARK KERMODE:
For a book with so many boldly
declaritive statements, I mean every
single page has statements like, you
know, "Memory freeze frames its basic
unit is the single image" and, "only
under strange circumstances will war
genuinely become unpopular". I mean
it's full of these little gnomic phrases
and yet actually, what it ends up being is
completely inconclusive, which I think is
its greatest strength. In response to
something Peter said, whatever your own
personal experience of it may be, I don't
buy that you would desensitise to the
real world by images of those things. I
mean that may be how its been
experienced but I don't actually think
that that's what happened. I think that
one of the things this book does, which
is beautifully handled, is that she
interrogates the meaning of images that
we take to be absolute and shows them
all to be completely fluid. I think that as
a piece of essay writing its wonderful.
That phrase you used, "seeing her muscular mind
work", is exactly what...I mean it's a
very, very physical muscular piece of
writing and I think its inconclusiveness
is its triumph.
TIM MARLOW:
Do you think this is in some ways a
cathartic act then for Susan Sontag, she
is purging her own feelings of worry and
guilt?
PETER HITCHENS:
Well I think everybody is now
increasingly concerned by this because
we see this night after night and we are
supposed to feel something and
increasingly we don't know what to feel.
Ought we genuinely to care? And when
we say we care, do we really care? I
think in most cases I think we probably
don't but I think we like to think we do.
So to that extent yes but actually I don't
think she answers the problem, which is
that you cannot because you see
something on the television or in a
photograph; you cannot be there; you
cannot have power over it because you
can see it. That is the real problem we
face and the delusion of modern
politicians that if you can see it you can
alter it comes straight out of the fact that
we are actually constantly pretending
that what we see on television is as close
to us in reality as it is on the screen.
MARK KERMODE:
But that is the answer to the question, is
that interactivity is the answer so in a
way she does answer...
PETER HITCHENS:
But actually when you have seen the
thing on television and you see it face to
face its diminished for you and you can
tell me that it isn't so, but I can tell you
that it is.
GERMAINE GREER:
But there has been a much bigger, I
mean there's been a huge change. In the
case of Kosovo we saw victims. We saw
victims of ethnic cleansing and so on.
Our hearts went out to them and we felt
sympathy and we felt indignation. We
felt them in manageable portions and we
took action...
PETER HITCHENS:
We felt so sympathetic we went out and
bombed the Serbs as an act of sympathy.
GERMAINE GREER:
We had to be got on side. Its all
propaganda. The other thing that she
falls between two stools in arguing about
whether photographs are records or
whether they are fiction. And its true
every picture tells a story. What it
doesn't do is give you a fact.
We don't know
how many civilian casualties there were
in Iraq and we were never allowed to see
any of them. The whole point of
imbedded soldiers was we took the eye
line of an aggressor. From her point of
view its enormous change. I feel
frustrated she didn't deal with it or
acknowledge it. She seems to be, like
you, still watching black-and-white
films, still watching film noir, still living
in that world of New York and not
engaging with the fact that kids fight
wars with their PlayStations.