Fear: Across the Disciplines

5. FEAR OF A SAFE PLACE

99 Jan Mieszkowski IN HER 1973 On Photography, Susan Sontag describes the West as “a society which makes it normative to aspire never to experience privation, failure, misery, pain, [or] dread disease, and in which death itself is regarded not as natural and inevitable but as a cruel, unmerited disaster.” The suggestion that human beings have difficulty acknowledging their own mortality is hardly novel, but Sontag draws an unusual inference from the observation, suggesting that “the feeling of being exempt from calamity stimulates interest in looking at painful pictures, and looking at them suggests and strengthens the feeling that one is exempt.”1 Her claim is that spectacles of death exert a profound influence over us not because in pondering them we tacitly acknowledge our own finitude but for precisely the opposite reason, that is, because such images help sustain our fantasies of indestructibility. Far from trying to hide from the harsh realities of mortality, we want to view them as regularly as possible . Beyond the psychological dynamics that may inform an individual ’s acknowledged or unacknowledged conviction that he or she cannot FEAR OF A SAFE PLACE 5 100 Jan Mieszkowski die, a variety of different issues about information media and the powers and limits of representation are raised by the obsessive spectatorial loop Sontag outlines whereby voyeuristic impulses and feelings of exemption mutually reinforce one another in an ever-intensifying circle. Perhaps the most important thing to say about Sontag’s argument is that recent experience would appear to contradict the assumption that people are compulsively interested in scenes of others’ misery. In the twenty-first century, anyone with access to a television, computer, or cell phone has an unprecedented number of opportunities to engage with the detailed documentation of privation and death twenty-four hours a day. Nonetheless, there is little evidence that people’s efforts to confirm their sense of being exempt from suffering drive them to view it more and more. Statistical studies of the media’s coverage of violence in the Middle East since the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, for example, suggest that the American consumer does not treat reports of war casualties with greater interest than reports of bloodless election frauds or the comical antics of foreign leaders on vacation.2 Popular taste would seem to demand not that the news be comprised of fearful spectacles of gloom and doom but that it change regularly and be presented in neatly packaged narratives with well-defined beginnings, middles, and ends. Sontag herself anticipates this state of affairs when she argues that if photographs initially make an event “more real,” repeated exposure to them ultimately has the opposite effect.3 Since the Vietnam War, when color images of severely injured and dying U.S. servicemen first became widely available on the evening news, the public’s blasé attitude toward its daily dose of horrors on tap has often been explained by the observation that an excess of information about the suffering of others desensitizes an audience, which becomes so familiar with scenes of atrocity that it no longer finds them terrifying. Repetition breeds complacency and, finally, indifference. Sontag’s version of this argument is striking for the way in which it divides it into two distinct models of repetition that have divergent effects: on the one hand, she offers a circular schema in which we look with ever-increasing frequency at pictures of other people’s woes because they somehow confirm the “reality” that these privations will not visit us; on the other hand, she offers a model of accumulation whereby the collection of endless scenes of misery deadens us to their poignancy, rendering them surreal and eventually unremarkable.4 One might suspect that the problem with Sontag’s argument is that it lacks a comprehensive account of the representational modalities peculiar to visual media such as photography or film. Art historians and media Fear of a Safe Place 101 scholars have long asked whether the reproducible images made possible by technological innovations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are organized by figures of deferral and belatedness, if not by irreducibly traumatic temporal paradigms. In the latter case, the viewing audience necessarily has an alienated relationship to its experience of these horror shows since that experience is defined by noncomprehension or by what one misses rather than by what one consciously registers. In this chapter, I argue that such discussions can...