European Journal of Social Theory

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The visual fix: The seductive beauty of images of violence

Jane Kilby
European Journal of Social Theory 2013 16: 326 originally published online 14 March
2013
DOI: 10.1177/1368431013476539

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Article

European Journal of Social Theory

16(3) 326–341
The visual fix: The seductive ª The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/1368431013476539
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Jane Kilby
University of Salford, UK

Abstract
This article questions the value of photographs of violence and suffering. Taking Nancy
Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois’ anthology Violence in War and Peace (2004) as a
point of departure and return, it will explore the significance of the inclusion of images of
explicit violence when they readily acknowledge they risk both indifference and voyeur-
istic interest. Key to my analysis is the centrality of the body to the images. Scheper-
Hughes and Bourgois are wary of reducing questions of violence to bodily suffering, but
the admission of so many images of physical violation undercuts their critique of the
primacy of the physical in our accounts of violence. The use of the body as a brute
signifier of violence is deeply problematic, not least because it is tied to questions of race.
Ultimately, it is argued, they attempt, unconsciously, to fix the nature of violence – which
they deem slippery because it is irrefutably social – in the (visualized) body.

Keywords
body, photographs, race, understanding/witnessing, violence

Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois’ (2004) anthology Violence in War and
Peace is possibly the best text on offer for anyone hoping to make sense of violence.
Impressively exhaustive and wide-ranging, the anthology offers a wealth of texts, includ-
ing extracts from the canonical writings on violence and its aftermath by Giorgio Agam-
ben, Hannah Arendt, Pierre Bourdieu, Loı̈c Wacquant, Noam Chomsky, Veena Das,
Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon, Judith Herman, Stanley Milgram, Jean-Paul Sartre,
Elaine Scarry, and Michael Taussig; and while showing an anthropological bias (the
editors are both anthropologists – and the anthology is understood by them to be bringing

Corresponding author:
Jane Kilby, Centre for Social Research, School of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences, Crescent House,
The Crescent, Salford, M5 4WT, United Kingdom.
Email: j.e.kilby@salford.ac.uk

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Kilby 327

anthropological insights to the field of violence studies), the anthology is itself broadly
interdisciplinary, including not only, as indicated above, the writings of philosophers,
political and social theorists, psychotherapists, psychiatrists, and literary critics, but also
the work of journalists (Philip Gourevitch), novelists (Tadeusz Borowski, Joseph Con-
rad, George Orwell) and visual artists (Art Spiegelman). Overall, then, the 62 readings,
which are organized into 11 sections (including ‘Conquest and Colonialism’; ‘Why Peo-
ple Kill’; ‘Violence and Political Resistance’; ‘Gendered Violence’; ‘Torture’, and
‘Aftermaths’) make for an incredibly rich commentary on violence understood in its
broadest sense.
Indeed, it is hard to imagine whether any major act, expression, form, history, scene or
structure of violence is not referenced by the anthology: the Congo atrocities at the turn
of the twentieth century; the extermination of Northern Californian Indians inaugurated
by the Gold Rush; the violence of racist mythology; the lynchings of African Americans
in the southern states of the US, the violence of bio-politics; the Holocaust; the Rodney
King affair; the bombing of Iraq; 9/11; El Salvador; civil war; slavery (Belgian Congo);
gang and prison rape; violent protest and uprising, including the IRA dirty protests dur-
ing the 1970s; the ‘utterly banal violence of children dying of hunger and maternal des-
pair in Northwest Brazil’; genocide (Cambodia, Rwanda); dirty wars (Argentina);
Nicaragua; torture; the structural violence of racism, and the violent legacy of apartheid,
colonialism and imperialism; revolutionary violence; ethnic cleansings; state terror;
guerrilla wars; vigilante justice and the ‘‘‘little’’ violences’ that express ‘the pathologies
of class, race, and gender inequalities’ (2004: 19).
More important, however, than the testimony offered by the readings is the rationale
for their inclusion. As a whole, the readings help serve the central purpose of the anthol-
ogy which Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois define as the attempt to ‘‘‘trouble’’ the distinc-
tions between public and private, visible and invisible, legitimate and illegitimate forms
of violence’ (p. 4). To this end, and beyond the division of texts into 11 sections, the
anthology is organized around groups of readings that ‘constantly juxtapose the routine,
ordinary, and normative violence of everyday life (‘‘terror as usual’’) with sudden erup-
tions of extraordinary, pathological, excessive, or ‘‘gratuitous’’ violence’; while many of
the other readings ‘grapple with the relations and continuities between political and
criminal violence, state violence and ‘‘communal’’ violence, and the relations between
social inequalities and individual and collective pathologies of power’ (p. 5). Via a strat-
egy of juxtaposition and a creative choice of readings, Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois are
clearly pushing the reader to question the ways in which we normally make sense of
violence.
Concerned, however, that readers might still find the choice of readings eclectic and
the rationale thus disorienting, they offer ‘a few generative key words and terms [ . . .
which] serve as a kind of map through the maze of disparate readings’. These include:

Bourdieu’s ‘symbolic violence’ and his related notions of ‘misrecognition’; Taussig’s ‘cul-
ture of terror, space of death’; and Benjamin’s ‘modern history as a state of siege’; Conrad’s
‘fascination of the abomination’; Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’; Primo Levi’s ‘gray zone’,
Basaglia’s ‘peace-time crimes’; Scheper-Hughes’s ‘everyday violence’ and ‘invisible gen-
ocides’; Farmer’s ‘structural violence’ and ‘pathologies of power’; Kleinman’s ‘social

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328 European Journal of Social Theory 16(3)

suffering’; Agamben’s ‘impossibility of witnessing’; Foucault’s ‘bio-power’; and, finally,

our ‘violence continuum’. (Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2004: 5)

And lest they have not yet justified their choice of texts, they conclude that all ‘the selec-
tions are infused with an ethnographic, anthropological sensibility in which scientific
observation is combined with moral and political witnessing’ (p. 5).
In sum, the texts have been selected by Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois to promote a
certain sensibility and way of thinking: to ensure, that is, a certain questioning and the
making of perhaps less obvious connections and conclusions. Key, then, to the editors’
choice of texts is their desire to recover the art of ‘anagogic thinking’. This type of
thinking, which they attribute to Erving Goffman, among other mid-twentieth-century
radically critical thinkers, is interpreted by them as the ability ‘to perceive the [implica-
tion] of symbolic and structural relations’ (p. 21). Whether anagogic thinking is exactly
what, or only that which, they are striving for; and whether the ability to perceive the
implication of such relations can only be attributed to sociologists such as Goffman, it
remains the case that they are keen to encourage a dynamic form of thinking, one which
includes also a ‘defensive hypervigilance to the less dramatic, permitted and even
rewarded everyday acts of violence that render participation in genocidal acts and pol-
icies possible . . . perhaps more easily than we would like to recognise’ (p. 20). It is
essential they argue that ‘we recognise the existence of a genocidal capacity among
otherwise good-enough humans’, thus the need, stoked in part by the readings they offer,
for ‘a constant self-mobilisation for alarm, a state of constant hyperarousal’ (pp. 20, 21).
Thus, for Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois it is critical that we constantly – and with ever
heightened consciousness –– rethink the terms by which we understand violence. It is a
demand for which they are to be commended.
Given this amount of careful thought on the part of the editors, it is strange that
Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois offer no rationale for the 12 images that puncture the
anthology at discrete intervals, five of which are by the world-renowned, yet controver-
sial, photographer Sebastião Salgado, and four of which are graphic images of mass
dead, including scenes from the Holocaust and Rwanda. This absence is, no doubt, a con-
sequence of the fact that they did not select the images themselves. But this is hardly an
excuse, not least because as Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois acknowledge:

Anthropologists who make their living observing and recording the misery of the world have a
special obligation to reflect critically on the impact of the brutal images of human suffering
they foist on the public. As medical anthropologists our terrain is the suffering body. The texts
and images we present to the world are often profoundly disturbing. When we report and write
in an intimate way about scenes of violence, genocide, and extreme social suffering, our read-
ers have the right to react with anger and to ask just what we are after (after) all? Indeed, what
do we want from our audience? To shock? To evoke pity? To create new forms of totalising
narrative through an ‘aesthetic of misery’? What of the people whose suffering is being made
into a public spectacle for the sake of the theoretical argument? (2004: 26)

In keeping, then, with many critics, Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois are mindful of the
questions prompted by photographs of violated people (Apel, 2005; Apel and Smith,

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Kilby 329

2007; Azoulav, 2008; 2012; Batchen et al., 2012; Butler 2009; Gronstad and Gustafsson,
2012; Hariman and Lucaites, 2007; Linfield, 2010, Luckhurst, 2008, 2010; Reinhardt
et al., 2007; Sliwinski, 2011). Indeed, ever since the publication of Susan Sontag’s On
Photography in which she reflects on the horror of first looking at photographs of
Bergen-Belsen and Dachau, critics have debated the politics and value of such images.
For Sontag, that is, ‘One’s first encounter with the photographic inventory of ultimate
horror is a kind of revelation, the prototypically modern revelation: a negative epiphany’
(Sontag, 1978, cited in Luckhurst, 2008: 162). This powerfully agitated experience of
having one’s eyes opened to the horror of violence without the experience of enlighten-
ment – of knowing, that is, what one is looking at – is, however, soothed by the aestheti-
cism of photography per se. Thus, Sontag goes on to argue that photographs are
‘analgesic’: ‘they can and do distress. But the aestheticizing tendency of photography
is such that the medium which conveys distress ends by neutralizing it’ (Sontag,
1978, cited in Luckhurst, 2008: 163). Twenty-five later with the publication of Regard-
ing the Pain of Others, Sontag remains suspicious, as do many, including myself.
Take, for example, the image, ‘The Lynching of Lige Daniels’. As the title of the
image is likely to make clear, it is the picture of a black man hanging. What is immedi-
ately striking about the image, however, is the crowd of white men and boys gathered at
his feet, for not only did they gather happily for his death –many are dressed in tidy
clothes, hats and ties, but they are clearly happy to be photographed at the scene of exe-
cution. That is, they are looking, for the most part, directly at the camera, some with
smiles on their faces. The image is thus compelling: drawn to men who look out at us
across time and space (the image is accredited to Center, Texas, August 3, 1920), the
viewer is forced to ask about the spectacle of racist violence for white communities.
To this extent, the image invites a shock of questions. How could this happen? How
could anyone ‘enjoy’ the spectacle of a man being hanged? How could anyone be that
racist, that inhuman?
These initial questions are quickly trumped, however, by the power of the image itself.
It has a disturbing tranquillity, an effect, of course, of the crowd’s utter indifference: as if
they have not just witnessed a man brutally murdered. But it is also an effect of the formal
properties of the image: Daniel’s body hangs centre frame, with the crowd arrayed per-
fectly at his feet, but while the crowd look toward the camera, Daniel’s limp torso is turned
away from us, a parallel for the large (poplar?) tree missing from the image. And while his
head is jerked backward by the action of the noose and his weight, it is also backlit by the
(late afternoon?) sun as it strikes with burning intensity over the top of court house in the
background and through the tree’s branches and leaves. The glare of light is such, however,
that the rope is invisible amid the tangle of leaves and branches. Thus, Daniel’s body
appears to be levitating: simply suspended in time and space.
It is hard, then, not to be captivated by this particular image, and harder still to imag-
ine that it would prompt a ‘constant hyperarousal’ toward – and sophisticated question-
ing of – the racist logic of lynching. If this were the aim, then, why not use the image of
the 1981 lynching of Michael Donald which, lacking a 1920s crowd challenges the ease
by which we can project the horrors of racism on distant others, as does the blue of
Donald’s jacket and jeans. What, then, are we to make of the image of Lige Daniels,
of whom we know little except that he was 16 years old and falsely accused of murder?

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330 European Journal of Social Theory 16(3)

Part of problem with the Daniel’s image is its archival status, which renders the vio-
lence of racist lynching an anachronism, thus making it difficult to connect it to the
violence of racism today. This, however, is only part of problem, and one that could
be remedied by the use of other images such as Michael Donald’s. The problem more
precisely is that the power of such images turns on the sight of the dead and suffering
body, as do 10 of the 12 images included in the anthology. Indeed, strictly there are
no images of violence, but images of the body bearing the consequences of violence.
This is obvious (although often occluded: the photographs that shocked Sontag were
most likely images of piles of corpses, not of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau per se), but its
significance is not, and it is the aim of this article to make clearer why we should be sus-
picious of images of the brutalized body.

Twelve images: one truth?

As already noted, Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois do not completely ignore the questions
prompted by the use of images of suffering. Indeed, they acknowledge how easily they
can compromise and subvert ‘the project of witnessing, critiquing, and writing against
violence, injustice, and suffering’ to which the anthology is dedicated (p. 1). On the one
hand, that is, they express an anxiety concerning the ways that ‘naive’ fieldworkers can
fall prey to delusions of political activist grandeur or becoming pornographers of vio-
lence. ‘Here,’ they argue ‘we are thinking of Clifford Geertz’s insightful critique of the
privilege of the first-world ethnographic authority . . . and, by analogy, of the images of
the AIDS sufferer that Benetton used on billboards to advertise their line of clothing’
(p. 26). While, on the other hand, if perhaps in a manner logically at odds with the notion
of the pornography of violence, they argue that their years of witnessing violence have
taught them that the more people see images of suffering and death, the greater the
images’ invisibility. ‘Shock reactions to blood and violence are readily extinguished’,
they write, with people everywhere having ‘an enormous capacity to absorb the hideous
and go on with life and business as usual’ (p. 26).
This way of framing the debate over images of suffering is typical, but also proble-
matic on two related counts (aside, that is, from the already noted contradiction). First,
how do we know that people everywhere have an enormous capacity to absorb the shock
of images of horror? What evidence is there to suggest that images of horror feed a spe-
cifically pornographic appetite? Measuring the impact of images of violence is very dif-
ficult, as decades of media research into the impact of violent images prove; and as
Carolyn J. Dean (2004: 20) argues, pornography – as the term adopted to explain our
seemingly prurient interest in images of suffering – ‘appears to mean so much and yet
its meaning is so hard to pin down’: pornography, she concludes ‘seems elegantly to
account for the exhaustion of empathy, and yet turns out not to explain anything at all’.
Thus, while Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois name the problem of the consumption of
images of suffering as pornography, for example, Bourgois worries that his ethnographic
depiction of Puerto Rican crack dealers might contribute to ‘‘‘a pornography of vio-
lence’’ that submerges the structural causes of urban destitution under lurid details of
blood, aggression and gore’ (2004: 427), there is no attempt to clarify who revels in the
detail, when, where, how and why. There is simply an assumption that we know to what

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Kilby 331

he is referring. This is not to deny that there is a problem, but to query whether the term
pornography aids our understanding. As Dean (2004: 42) concludes, it is time to either
abandon it, or interrogate it in great depth.
Second, because the terms of debate are speculative, we risk a preoccupation with
questions of who we are in relation to images of atrocity. Indeed, with little empirical
research to determine how ‘people everywhere’ respond to images of horror, and with
no way of comparing the response across decades of change, it is not surprising that crit-
ics rely on their own response to establish a critical language. Again, Sontag is illustra-
tive: the concept of the negative epiphany is developed on the back of her response to the
images of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau, which she came across by chance in a bookstore
in 1945. She writes:

Nothing I have seen . . . ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously . . . When I looked at
those photographs, something broke. Some limit had been reached, and not only that of hor-
ror; I felt irrevocably grieved, wounded, but a part of my feelings started to tighten; something
went dead; something is still crying. (Sonntag, 1978, cited in Luckhurst, 2008: 162)

Her response to the images might have been and might remain typical, and there is no
doubt that the questioning prompted by her response is and remains important.
However, there is also something faintly unsettling about the place of affect in the
analysis of photographs of atrocity. It would be harsh to suggest that there is a narcissism
operating here, but nonetheless there is something faintly unsettling about the concern
with how we do and do not respond to images. So, for example, there is something trou-
bling about Sontag’s response to the images that issued from Abu Ghraib, such that she
declared: ‘The photographs are us. That is, they are representative of distinctive policies
and the fundamental corruptions of colonial war’ (Sontag, 2004: 3, cited in Luckhurst
2008: 174–5). The qualifying statements works to prevent a possible misreading of the
opening claim, but there is, nonetheless, reason to pause to consider the (momentarily)
eclipse of the victims. Sontag is conscious of this charge, as Judith Butler (2009: 99)
notes in her defence of Sontag.
I am not looking to censor critical self-reflection or affect more generally, but rather I
am looking for a critical understanding of how, why and when both come into play, and
the consequences for our understanding and politics of violence. The same could be said
of Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois who maintain that ‘for those whom the representation
of hunger, misery and violence is central to their life’s work’, there is, they argue:

the need to continually resensitize their audiences as well as themselves to the state of emer-
gency in which we live. To do so we must locate the proper distance from our subjects. Not
so distant so as to objectify their suffering, and not so close that we turn the sufferer into an
object of pity, contempt, or public spectacle. We need to avoid the aestheticization of misery
as much as a descent into political rhetoric and polemics. (Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois,
2004: 26)

Theoretically, this is an important recognition of the need to acknowledge the rights of

those who are victims of hunger, misery and violence. But what this demand means in

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332 European Journal of Social Theory 16(3)

practice is difficult to apprehend, and whether the 12 images included in the anthology
are appropriately measured is easily debated. The work of Salgado in particular has been
the subject of intense debate, championed by some, charged with aestheticization by
others (Gold, 2011; Rudel, 2011; Salgado et al., 2002; Sassen, 2011; Stallabrass,
1997; Wolford, 2011). So, for example, in his treatise on the ways in which we deny vio-
lence and suffering, Stanley Cohen ‘find[s] [Salgado’s] work a wholly aesthetic response
to suffering. The photos are beautifications of tragedy, with gratuitous hints of religious
symbolism’ (2000: 299). They are, Cohen argues, ‘coffee-table’ images, with Roger
Luckhurst (2008) adding, for example, following Julian Stallabrass, that given the price
tag attached to them, they are only ever likely to land on the coffee tables of the liberal
middle classes. Equally, if for different reasons, images such as the iconic photograph of
SS officer Eichelsdoerfer, who was forced to stand among rows of concentration camp
dead at the end of the Second World War, have likewise been the subject of particularly
fraught debate (Liss, 1998; Struk, 2004; Zelizer, 1998); while images of Rwanda, such as
the ones reproduced in the anthology, have likewise been the focus of critical question-
ing (Möller, 2010).
Blind, it seems, to this critical literature, Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois consider
photographs more generally, and more simply, it seems, as evidence of the ‘state of
emergency’ in which we have lived and continue to live (whether or not they prompt
a response). They are understood, that is, to attest to the reality of famine, domestic vio-
lence, genocide, migration, civil war, torture, slavery and forced labour. In keeping with
many, Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois value photographs for their power of evidence; and
while wary of the abuse and misuse of images, they uphold this position. Twelve images:
one (evidential) truth. Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois do not, however, argue this via a
discussion of the indexicality of the photograph, for example. Instead, Scheper-
Hughes recounts how when working in a rural squatter camp in post-apartheid South
Africa, she was invited to photograph the wounded bodies of three young thieves who
had been flogged by members of their own community. Scheper-Hughes recalls how she
was reluctant to photograph them until her field assistant told her she must ‘do it for
evidence’: as testimony to the brutality and cruelty of the rough justice that was a daily
feature of life in the camps of post-apartheid, then transitional, South Africa.
As it transpires, Scheper-Hughes was right to be reluctant, since her decision to photo-
graph the young men was followed by a decision to take one of them to hospital which by
turn resulted in death threats and a demand that she present herself at a camp meeting to
justify her actions. It was, she writes, probably the most terrifying moment in her career;
and yet for both Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, it serves as an example of the ways in
which anthropologists must bear witness to the violence and suffering they are privy
to, and how they must take sides, and when necessary forgo the privilege of neutrality.
The photographs that Scheper-Hughes took of the young wounded South African men
are, as she understands it, evidence of the crimes she witnessed, and symbolic of her
place ‘inside human events’; expression, that is, of her willingness to adopt a ‘more
human role of engaged witness over scientific spectator’ (2004: 26–7).
There is no doubting the political passion of both Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, and
while I am less convinced than they that ‘empathic and engaged witnessing’, which they
qualify as a ‘‘‘being with’’ and ‘‘being there’’’, is a time-honoured method, I share their

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Kilby 333

desire to bear witness to the horrors of the world, even ‘though we may not always be
certain about exactly what this means or what is being asked of us at any particular
moment’ and even if it feels somewhat trite (p. 27). Like many critics, that is, they have
read Foucault, and are indebted to his insights. And yet like an increasing number today,
they worry that the critiques made possible by his work are losing their value. Scheper-
Hughes makes this point when discussing the importance of Salgado’s photography. She
writes:

Many of our Berkeley students, overly sensitized by the writings of Michel Foucault, have
come to think of any kind of field work – with a camera or with a tape recorder or even with
a notebook and pencil – as a kind of invasive, almost inquisitional search for fundamental
‘truths’ to be extracted from Indios and peasants, squatters and boat people, reduced to mere
objects of our discriminating, incriminating, Western gaze. But given the perilous times in
which we and our subjects live, these clichéd critiques seem petulant – an excuse for doing
nothing. (Scheper-Hughes, 2002: 33)

This is an important critique, which has more general application: the idea that we should
not take pictures and not ask others their truth is problematic, if not a greater hubris than
agonizing over our privileged status and deconstructing the conceit that is ‘truth’. Which
is not to say that the acts of taking pictures and listening to others are not problematic:
they are and they are easily romanticized (which they should not be); but there is also
need and reason for a witnessing of the lives of others.
However, not everyone sensitive to Foucault’s work offers clichéd critiques of
witnessing, nor is witnessing usefully conceived as ‘being with’ and ‘being there’, since
these concepts privilege ontological immediacy and physical co-presence. How do we
bear witness to Lige Daniels, for example? Is it possible? How might a reader of
Foucault, such as Butler, help challenge the logic and humanism underpinning the work
of Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois? What kind of aesthetic is adequate to the horrors of
violence? Does it require an anti-realist aesthetic such as that offered by Ken
Gonzales-Day, who takes lynching postcards and other archive materials and removes
the lynch victim and rope from the image. Thus, not only is the viewer robbed of looking
at the violated, lifeless body, but so is the gathered crowd, forcing the contemporary
viewer to ask a different set of questions, more thoughtful questions: what led the men
there? What would it have taken for such violence not to have happened? Paradoxically,
by removing the body, upon which we all fixate, Gonzales-Day’s Erased Lynching
series, literalizes the truth of the violence: the crowd saw nothing in effect (see also
Ledbetter, 2012, for a discussion of Gonzales-Day’s work).

The economy of seeing

The idea that photographs and visual documentary more broadly can function as simply
and as innocently as Scheper-Hughes’ anecdote implies is, of course, open to critique.
Photographs, visual stills and documentaries cannot guarantee their status as evidence,
nor their place apart from systems that produce and reproduce violence. For it remains
the case that what we perceive and what we experience in looking are structured in

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334 European Journal of Social Theory 16(3)

accordance with gendered and racial logics. Indeed, this is the abject lesson of the Rod-
ney King affair, as Allen Feldman argues in his excellent ‘On Cultural Anesthesia: From
Desert Storm to Rodney King’, which is included in the anthology. In keeping with a
number of key thinkers, including Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács and
Michel Foucault, Feldman argues that:

The construction of the modern political subject entailed the stratification and specialization
of the senses and the consequent repression of manifold perceptual dispositions . . . The
mass media has universalizing capacities that promote and inculcate sensory specializations
and hierarchical rankings such as the priority of visual realism and the often commented on
gendered and racial gaze. Like the normative optics of gender and race, objective realism,
the depictive grammar of the mass media, should not be perceived as an ahistorical given; it
is an apparatus of internal and external perceptual colonialization that disseminates and
legitimizes particular sensorial dispositions over others within and beyond public culture.
(2004: 207)

Seeing is valorized not because it is natural to us. Quite the contrary, seeing is valued
because it is complicit with power. What we see and how we see are governed by the
mass media (which photography might question but is not apart from it): what we see
is the result, in other words, of a set of ‘complex interactions of perception, space, time,
facticity, consumption, and material culture’ (p. 208). The ‘perception of history’,
including the perception of histories of violence (such as the history of lynching), are
‘irrevocably tied to the history of sensory perception’ and the ‘depth structures of
neo-colonial racial logic’ (pp. 208, 210). Thus, for Feldman, the perception of Rodney
King’s pain and suffering was a function of the highly controlled perception of the, then,
ongoing violence of the first Iraq War (Desert Storm), with the latter itself a function of
the perception of Vietnam (the US military, state and mass media could not afford to
allow bodies to simply appear as they did during Vietnam). For Feldman, that is, it is
possible to make bodies appear and disappear, along with the violence they are subject
to. This is not the act of disappearing that Gonzales-Day offers: Gonzales-Day makes
bodies disappear in order to render the violence visible, or at least to render it an object
of thought. There is no violence at work as such. The contrary is true when we are offered
images of the brutalized black body.
Spectatorship is cultivated along lines of gender and race (and class and sexuality) –
we are given to see in certain ways, and as such what we experience in looking at images
of atrocity does not originate with or else belong to us. Empathy is not a natural response
that can be harnessed or otherwise tapped for social and political change, but are
‘responses’ governed to a greater rather than lesser degree by power. As John Tagg
rhetorically asks, for example, ‘What is the function, the office, of ‘‘realistic’’ represen-
tations of ‘‘misery’’ in the bourgeois state?’ (cited in Luckhurst, 2008: 167). For as long
as critics debate the moral economy of looking at images of violence, they ignore, then,
the ways in which power has set the terms of what we will see. Scheper-Hughes and
Bourgois understand this in that they readily acknowledge the notions of both symbolic
and invisible violence, but they fail to grasp their profundity. There is no ‘seeing for real’
as such.

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Kilby 335

To the extent, then, to which the question of viewing cannot be reduced to voyeurism
(if conceived as a perversion of a normal response), the verdict returned by the Simi Val-
ley jurors is not simply a question of blatant racism (if understood, that is, as a wilful act
of not-seeing the violence). This is the point argued by Judith Butler in her 1993 article
on the Rodney King affair ‘Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White
Paranoia’. According to Butler, the video, which should have been incontrovertible evi-
dence of the violence King endured, can only be understood within ‘a racially saturated
field of visibility’ (1993: 15–16), one which actively shapes what can be seen and what
can count as visual evidence, and is itself the condition of possibility for seeing. Thus,
Butler argues:

This is not a simple act of seeing, an act of direct perception, but of the racial production of
the visible, the workings of racial constraints on what it means to ‘see’ . . . This is a seeing
which is a reading, that is, a contestable construal, but one which nevertheless passes itself
off as ‘seeing,’ a reading which became for the white community, and for countless others,
the same as seeing. (1993: 16)

Of importance, here, and in keeping with Feldman, is the naturalization of acculturated

perception as seeing, a hegemonic triumph that erasures the historicity of how – and
what – it is to ‘see’. Evidence, including visual evidence, is the product of (a history of)
reading. This constitutes a profound reorientation in our thinking: images of violence do
not speak for themselves, even when we might vehemently believe or claim that they do.
‘What the trial and its horrific conclusions teach us’, then, as Butler argues, ‘is that there is
no simple recourse to the visible, to visual evidence, that it still and always calls to be read,
that it is already a reading, and that in order to establish the injury on the basis of visual evi-
dence, an aggressive reading of the evidence is necessary.’ For the injury to be manifest, it
has to be read as such; and while the ‘more human’ and engaged witness might more readily
look for – and enforce – that reading (as opposed to the scientific spectator), Butler’s point is
not that the engaged witness sees the evidence more clearly for being more human. Indeed,
Butler is easily misunderstood on this point, hence she stresses that:

It is not a question of negotiating between what is ‘seen,’ on the one hand, and a ‘reading’ which
is imposed upon the visual evidence, on the other. In a sense, the problem is even worse: to the
extent that there is a racist organisation and disposition of the visible, it will work to circum-
scribe what qualifies as visual evidence, such that it is in some cases impossible to establish the
‘truth’ of racist brutality through recourse to visual evidence . . . The visual field is not neutral
to the question of race; it is a racial formation, an episteme, hegemonic and forceful. (1993: 17)

The significance of Butler’s argument is sobering for it demands, at the very least, that
we question how easily the image of Lige Daniels is read as evidence of violence. We are
no less a product of history, of our time and place than the men of 1920s’ Texas: to imag-
ine otherwise would make us less than human, not more than. To imagine that we can see
through the racism that saturates the visual field is to risk collapsing the distinction
between the ‘more human, engaged witness’ and ‘scientific spectator’, such that we
become not only ‘objective’ but omnipresent in our powers of seeing.

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336 European Journal of Social Theory 16(3)

Witnessing violence: the ugly picture?

The problem with images of suffering is that they appeal to our desire for transcendence.
Thus, Scheper-Hughes is critical of Salgado’s pretence to a universal language, com-
plaining that his ‘universalizing images of global suffering . . . suggest an almost time-
less, spaceless quality to human experience’, such that the ‘specificity of evil and of
suffering is lost’ (2002: 41). Echoing the criticisms of T. J. Clark, who would like a
‘photography of causes, not faces’ (p. 25), Scheper-Hughes thinks that Salgado ‘needs
to give us more text’ by which to anchor the images in time and space and to grasp the
connections between ‘economic globalization and the Rwandan genocide’, for example
(p. 30). Or, if not more text, then, more images of the perpetrators, who are:

invisible: assumed, depersonified, institutionalized, systematized and thereby both hidden

(and protected) within the anonymous everyday structures of economic, social and struc-
tural violence. Consequently the face of evil has no face and is left up to mere abstractions –
‘globalization’ – the North, the post industrial robber barons, the indifferent, uncaring,
affluent world. (2002: 30)

Indeed, Scheper-Hughes is adamant that we must ‘expose the face – individually and col-
lectively – of the human beings that demand or that create that suffering’ (p. 30). This is
perhaps a better strategy, although clearly not without risk. The perpetrator is a seductive
figure, hence the popularity of criminal profiling and forensic psychology. That said,
Scheper-Hughes is mindful of the problems of exposing the perpetrators, or rather she
is mindful of the complexity of violence, for, as she goes on to argue,

we may have to come face to face with what Primo Levi called the gray zone: those social
spaces where everything is not quite so black and white, where victims become killers and
survivors become sadists, and where even the innocent sufferers become co-conspirators
and participants in their own execution. (p. 31)

In short, she asks, ‘Why are all the victims so beautiful, so good? Where is the ugliness
that I, at least, so often encounter in the slums, and native yards, and squatter camps of
the world?’ (p. 31). Indeed, this is key: there is no camera capable of capturing the com-
plexity of black-on-black violence in South Africa. The images could only be ‘ugly’,
hence likely appropriated by the right-wing media and redeployed as evidence of the bar-
barism of black South Africans, as she makes very clear in her article ‘Who’s the
Killer?’. The image cannot speak the history of South Africa.
If the image of violence in the squatter camps is a fraught one, the gang rapes that
feature in Bourgois’s ethnographic study of the Puerto Rican crack dealers are impossi-
ble to capture on camera. So while the Abu Ghraib images afford Butler the confidence
of saying that ‘the photos showed brutality, humiliation, rape, murder, and in that sense
were clear representational evidence of war crimes’ (2009: 78–9), those prosecuting
everyday, ‘peacetime’ rape are rarely, if ever, gifted such evidence: the refusal of con-
sent is difficult to image. Rape, for the most part, is not the spectacle it proved to be in the
prisons of Abu Ghraib, as the Puerto Rican girls know, likewise the men who routinely
experience rape in the US prison complex.

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Kilby 337

The witnessing of violence in its manifold forms requires a more complex aesthetic
than the visual ‘realism’ of photography; or if photography is to be deployed, then a less
direct aesthetic or privileged point of view is required, such as that offered by Jonathan
Torgovink, who interviewed the Tutsi women raped during the Rwandan genocide, and
then photographed them in the company of their children. The images and testimony are
reproduced side by side, and while the images are stunningly beautiful, they are not only
‘unbearably sad’ as Frank Möller argues: they also register survival and life (Möller,
2010: 129; see also Möller, 2012).
The problem of the body persists, however. Whether shown, or not, the body is con-
sidered key to both the ethical force of the image and our understanding of violence.
Hence Mark Ledbetter argues, for example, that it is ‘the body [seen] violated and bro-
ken, and not the body healthy, that provides transforming moments of ethical impor-
tance’ (cited in Gronstad and Gustafsson, 2012: xv). While more generally, Butler,
following Levinas, repeatedly places the sight of both the ‘face’ and the contorted body
at the centre of her ethic of witnessing the suffering of others. Via a close reading of
Levinas, that is, she writes:

Here the term ‘face’ operates as a catachresis: ‘face’ describes the human back, the craning
of the neck, the raising of the shoulder blades . . . And these bodily parts, in turn, are said to
cry and to sob and to scream, as if they were a face or, rather, a face with a mouth, a throat,
or indeed, just a mouth and throat from which vocalisations emerge that do not settle into
words. The face is to be found in the back and neck, but it is not quite a face. The sounds that
come from or through the face are agonized, suffering. (1993: 133)

While, on the other hand, violence is routinely, if not absolutely, understood as about the
body in the sense that violence of the perpetrator centres on the victim’s body. Hence
Leon F. Litwack provides a totally gruelling account of the rituals of mutilation to which
men, such as Lige Daniels, would be subject prior to execution, leaving him to deduce
that ‘The story of a lynching . . . is more than a simple fact of a black man or woman
hanged by the neck. It is a story of slow, methodical, sadistic, often highly inventive
forms of torture and mutilation’ (Litwack, 2004: 125). The infliction of violence is also
about the perpetrator’s body; hence Bourgois makes clear that the young rapists have to
train their bodies to rape: it does not come naturally; the logic of the gang rape while is
such that the men revel in each other’s physicality. Also, for many victims, and perhaps
especially rape victims, violence is traumatic because it is an experience rooted in the
body, hence making ‘the leap to’ words impossible (Culbertson, 1995: 169). And finally,
for Butler, again following Levinas, but influenced also by her reading of Hegel and Mel-
anie Klein, the face and body of the other as the register of difference invite as well pro-
hibit violence, hence we will never be free of the possibility of violence, regardless of the
violence of social and political norms.
Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois might well insist that ‘violence can never be under-
stood solely in terms of its physicality’, yet the body nonetheless haunts the images and
discourse that inform our understanding and politics of violence: the seemingly indispen-
sable base of our thinking. Indeed, symptomatically, Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois con-
sider the body their ‘terrain’, while Scheper-Hughes ‘ground[s]’ her discussion of the

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338 European Journal of Social Theory 16(3)

displaced people of Alto do Cruzeiro in ‘the specter of missing, lost, disappeared, or oth-
erwise out-of-place bodies and body parts’ (2004: 175). So while Scheper-Hughes has
read her Foucault, such that she acknowledges that the body ‘requires a standing set
of quotation marks to indicate [its] contested status as both bio-existentially ‘‘given’’ (the
source of certitude as Wittgenstein [1969] saw it) and just as surely ‘‘made up’’ (and
the source of all doubt)’ (p. 253), there is no way we are meant to doubt the veracity
of the images: they are meant, amid the sophisticated discussions that make up the
anthology, to remind us what suffering looks like (and indeed feels like in some small
measure). The problem, however, is that the photographs do not have the capacity to
remind us that the body is ‘made up’: it all seems too real, hence there is no room in
which to question the role played by the body in our understanding and politics of
violence.
The only way we can achieve such questioning is to develop aesthetics that brings the
body into frame, but which works also to render visible the ways in which it is framed
(‘madeup’), hence prompting the kind of thinking that Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois
rightly demand. Art Spiegelman’s comic artbook Maus, which is the story of Spiegel-
man’s father’s experience of the Holocaust is a good, if rare example: not surprisingly
it features in the anthology. Spiegelman’s Maus was originally serialized in successive
issues of Raw, an avant-garde magazine edited by Spiegelman and his wife Françoise
Mouly, before being published in book form and winning the 1992 Pulitzer Prize. What
is unique, however, is not Spiegelman’s decision to incorporate himself within the story,
or its status as ‘comic’ testimony, but his decision to portray humans in animal form,
with Jews figuring as mice, Germans as cats, Poles as pigs, North Americans as dogs,
and the French as frogs. The ethics of Spiegelman’s decision has been widely debated,
with Spiegelman himself questioning his strategy as the section included in the anthol-
ogy makes clear: he is seen slumped over his drawing desk which appears raised up on a
heap of dead mouse bodies, while Spiegelman appears for the only time in human form,
with a mouse mask (Geis, 2003; Young, 2000). Whatever the merits of the debate, there
is, no doubt that Spiegelman’s project of witnessing engages the reader in reflective
thought, for while the reader gets used to inhabiting a world of violence peopled by
animals and experiences the horror of their lives, they are necessarily conscious of the
role played by caricature and stereotyping in the violence of the Holocaust. Here Wallace
Stevens’ poem could not be more apt: ‘Description is revelation. It is neither//The thing
described, nor false facsimile//It is an artful thing that exists//In its own seeming, plainly
visible//Yet not too closely the double of our lives//Intenser than any actual life can be’
(cited by Scheper-Hughes, 2002: 33).
Spiegelman, that is, neither valorizes the suffering body nor dismisses it. Nor does he
valorize the primacy of the visual over the textual – or vice versa, choosing instead to
hold them in creative tension (‘real’ photographs also appear in the comic). If anything
is a measure of the appropriate distance demanded by Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, it
is surely achieved by Spiegelman’s mound of twisted and contorted mouse bodies. They
are neither so alien, that we lack empathy; nor familiar enough that they can become
subject to excessive projection. Nor, it is important to add, does Spiegelman valorize the
victim: portraying his father as a mouse allows Spiegelman to portray him as a flawed
human, not superhuman for having survived the Holocaust; nor returning with insight

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Kilby 339

having been ‘inside the event’. Scheper-Hughes is right to be suspicious of the beauty of
Salgado’s images: it is all too easy to sanitize and idealize suffering. Suffering is, as
Scheper-Hughes argues, following Levinas, ‘irredeemably useless, worthless, for noth-
ing’ (2002: 31). Nor does Spiegelman mythologize or dismiss the perpetrators’ body.
Portraying the perpetrators as cats and pigs thus works to undermine the fascination with
fascist violence: a problem that taxed Gillian Rose in particular; and yet pace Rose doing
so without generalizing the potential of violence. For Rose, violence is a function of the
fact ‘we are human, all too human’; for Spiegelman, there are all sorts of human animals.
There is no avoiding the representation of violence, but getting it right is a critical task.

Conclusion
In his astute analysis of the images of atrocity, Luckhurst suggests that ‘Perhaps every
generation gets its defining image, traumatic image: Margaret Bourke-White’s photo-
graphs of Belsen in 1945 or Ron’s Haeberle’s images of massacre at My Lai in 1969’
(2008: 174), with the images of the World Trade Center attack and of Abu Ghraib ours.
I am sure many would agree, although I am equally sure that many of the Vietnam
generation would argue that the defining image was Nick Ut’s 1972, Pulitzer-winning
photograph of Kim Phuc running was naked down the road following a South Vietna-
mese Air Force napalm attack on her village. Certainly Butler concludes Precarious
Lives writing that it ‘was the pictures of the children burning and dying from napalm that
brought the US public to a sense of shock, outrage, remorse, and grief’ (2004: 150).
While Cohen concludes States of Denial with ‘his ur-image’: Don’s McCullin’s
(1969) photo of an emaciated albino boy who had survived the Biafran War: an image
Cohen says that has stayed with him for thirty years (2000: 299). As Cohen makes man-
ifest: the image of violence which, here, and almost always, is the image of the suffering
body functions as a founding text, a point of origin for political awakening. At issue,
then, is the desire for such an image: Butler cannot really believe that Ut’s photographs
alone brought the US public to its senses. The desire for an origin, as Butler knows better
than anyone, is always a retrospective fiction, one that looks to narrate who we are and
how we came into being (which here is a story of how we became and become political
animals). Admittedly, Cohen is mindful of the danger, here, and writes more knowingly
that he had thought he had found his ‘ur-image’: ‘something impossible to deny’, until he
realized that others would deny it. It was this recognition that led him to write his book.
This article was written for the opposite reason: it is time to start denying the image of
the suffering body a place in our understanding and politics of violence.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

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340 European Journal of Social Theory 16(3)

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Author biography
Jane Kilby is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences at the
University of Salford. She is the author of Violence and the Cultural Politics of Violence (EUP,
2007), and co-editor of The Future of Memory (Berghahn, 2010), and The Future of Testimony
(Routledge, 2014). She is currently working on a number of projects, including one exploring the
meaning of women’s violence.

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