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[ 69 ] The question was never [how] to get away from facts but [how to get] closer to them, not fighting empiricism but, on the contrary, renewing empiricism. Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” In one of the most quoted phrases from Whitman’s Civil War notebooks, our national poet remarks that “the real war will never get into the books.” More recently, one of the legends of French documentary cinema made the same point about his own chosen medium, with a bit more specificity. Chris Marker noted that, “As long as there is no olfactory cinema [. . .], there will be no films of war.” (“Smellies,” I guess you would have to call them, in the way we used to refer to “talkies.”) Marker adds that this absence is “prudent, because if there were such films [. . .] there wouldn’t be a single spectator left.”1 Granted. When I say “the real war,” smellies are certainly not what I have mind. Claims for “realism” in Marker’s sense are the product of a category error, and the pronouncement that “there will be no films of war” simply calls attention to it. In the final decades of the last millennium, in the throes of our poststructuralist , pomo, hip, pop, hip-hop, new-agey middle age, we became old friends with dictates that once amused, startled, or scandalized. From Guy Debord’s “society of spectacle” to Jean Baudrillard’s “the simulacrum is the truth,” clarion calls marched us forth daily into the brave new regime of the sign, semiotexters hung out on every street corner, and pixelated simulacra winked at us from every TV screen. War was no exception (it may have even become the rule). I’ve already noted, in an earlier chapter , Michael Ignatieff’s study of the Kosovo conflict, Virtual War. On the other side of the Atlantic, in Figures de la guerre, the art historian Hélène Observers The Real War and the Books 4 [ 70 ] CHAPTER FOUR Puiseux begins with Magritte and ends with Bosnia on TV, describing the latter as a form of absurdist dinner theater. A French media center’s study of Bosnian war coverage found its own chosen literary precedent in a more distant century, analyzing the Sarajevo siege in terms of the Aristotelian conventions for tragedy. Perhaps reactionary, a bit nutty, or simply sadly confused, in this chapter I speculate about the presence of, not just realism, but reality in certain very disparate accounts of war. Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others on this issue doesn’t mince words. In her opinion, “To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism. It universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment [. . .] There are hundreds of millions of television watchers who are far from inured to what they see on television. They do not have the luxury of patronizing reality” (110–11). Salutary though such words are, they aren’t much help to the even smaller, self-educated segment of that rich part of the world, those viewers who wish to deprovincialize themselves. Given the spectacle, this fit though few must wonder , what is the reality here? How can we possibly know? The short answer is we can’t. We have to do our homework and then make our best guess. What alternative is there? The vast majority of citizens of this country, despite the fact that we are presently conducting two wars (and are engaged in some capacity in numerous additional conflicts), find and feel themselves in the position of external observer, not that of active participant. Yes, we voted for this government (or not), and yes we pay our taxes (or not), but such levels of responsibility and engagement don’t compare to that of the soldiers themselves or their families. Meanwhile, the daily experience of life in the countries where these wars are being waged is rarelyevendreamedof.Andyet,werethereworldenoughandtime,someof us—including many unlikely ever to see the shelling or its consequences any place other than on our screens—would prove ourselves conscientious. We keep our eyes open; we want to know the truth. In a mediated world, what this comes down to is: we want to know whom to trust. But we also need good study aids, and Sontag’s diatribe doesn’t help. Her beef with the Baudrillards, Debords, and their lesser legions is, in essence, the...

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