The Sublime Spectatorship of War: The Erasure of the Event in America's Politics of Terror and Aesthetics of Violence

In: Millennium: journal of international studies, Band 34, Heft 3, S. 767-791

Abstract

In order that the war which the United States is fighting in Iraq be presented as acceptable, successful and perhaps pleasurable to the American public, an aesthetic imagination that relies on the sublime has been mobilised. This sublime aesthetic of war, relayed by contemporary media and popular cultural forms (photo-journalism and television shows in particular), consists of producing spectacular, violent and shocking images of `others' in distress or harm's way in places where America's wars are being fought. The recent FX network programme Over There and some photo-journalistic displays of dead or tortured Iraqis in news magazines or commemorative volumes are examples of the logic of sublime spectatorship. An ideology of America at war is enabled through a visual experience that consists of forcing the spectator's imagination not only to go through unbearable and shocking images but also to transcend this initial painful experience by discovering beyond it readily available reasons and larger-than-life truths that can make sense of it all and justify those horrific scenes. The production of sublime spectatorship is indeed an ideological exercise. The sublime images examined in this article suggest that an ideology of American humanism as/in war is at stake. It is an ideology that postulates that only Americans (even if they are soldiers) are equipped to provide hope, morality and humanity to the Middle East (starting with Iraq). This article argues that the sublime image of war transforms the idea of what counts as an event today into a spectacle that requires understanding, acceptance and even enjoyment to be achieved by the audience, but only at the cost of going through the ordeal of the unpleasurable image and of finally adhering to a set of ideological beliefs. Yet, in a counter-ideological fashion, this article also concludes that a more resistant event or image today, one that might open up the political to new and unplanned critical and democratic possibilities, becomes visible too.