Critical Studies on Terrorism
ISSN: 1753-9153 (Print) 1753-9161 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rter20
Visualising violence: legitimacy and authority in
the ‘war on terror’
Laura J. Shepherd
To cite this article: Laura J. Shepherd (2008) Visualising violence: legitimacy and authority in the
‘war on terror’, Critical Studies on Terrorism, 1:2, 213-226, DOI: 10.1080/17539150802184611
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Critical Studies on Terrorism
Vol. 1, No. 2, August 2008, 213–226
ARTICLE
1753-9161
1753-9153
RTER
Critical
Studies on Terrorism
Terrorism, Vol. 1, No. 2, Jul 2008: pp. 0–0
Visualising violence: legitimacy and authority in the ‘war on terror’
Laura J. Shepherd*
Critical
L.J.
Shepherd
Studies on Terrorism
Department of Political Science and International Studies, European Research Institute,
University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK
(Received 3 December 2007; final form 11 March 2008)
This paper explores the relationship between visual representation and claims to legitimacy in
the current George W. Bush administration’s ‘war on terror’. Drawing on discourse theoretical
works that focus analytical attention on the power of visual representation in communicating
authority and legitimacy, this paper argues that crucial to such communicative acts is the
rendering of a receptive audience complicit in particular interpretations of the images in
question. While various visual representations construct political subjectivity and agency in
different ways, common to all interpretations is the centralisation of an authoritative narrative. It
is argued that this authorial voice must be challenged in the formulation of a politics resistant
to dominant discourses of security/counter-terrorism in the West.
Keywords: discourse; representation; legitimacy; authority; ‘war on terror’
Introduction
I know few people who cannot remember where they were on 11 September 2001. I was at
work. After work I sat in front of my television, keen to receive news of the events and thus
bound to watch images of the twin towers falling over, and over, and over again. From its
assumed inception, visual representations were mobilised in service of the ‘war on terror’ and
functioned to construct narratives of legitimacy and authority. Morris (2004) has described the
experience as ‘the imagistically reiterated event of a catastrophe whose traumatic dimensions
seemed to afflict the media with a veritable repetition compulsion’ (p. 405) and, having sat
through the repetition on the day in question, I concur. It has been argued that this is unsurprising,
as ‘the attacks [on the US] in September were calibrated to leave an indelible image-trail behind
them’ (Boal et al. 2004, p. 12). However, the repetition of these images through televisual and
print media left an image-trail of its own.1
The various ways in which the ‘war on terror’ has been represented through visual imagery
relates directly to the politics of the war and corollary claims to legitimacy and authority made
by the Bush administration in its conduct of the war (for example, Feldman 2005, Shepherd
2006). The ‘war on terror’, as a response to the events of 11 September 2001, was in part
communicated by and made meaningful through visual representation. These representational
practices are discursive practices, as I explain below, and, as such, construct an intelligible
reality that then itself acts as a referent for the construction of meaning. The analysis in this
paper is illustrative of how representational practices are intrinsically related to power and
claims to authority. That is, the George W. Bush administration’s ‘war on terror’ was in part
*Email: L.J.Shepherd@bham.ac.uk
ISSN 1753-9153 print/ISSN 1753-9161 online
© 2008 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/17539150802184611
http://www.informaworld.com
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made possible through the dissemination of specific interpretations of representational practices.
Furthermore, critical engagement with the war is enabled in much the same way.
In this paper I interrogate three separate sets of images related to the ‘war on terror’ with the
intention of demonstrating how central visual representation is to claims of legitimacy in the
‘war on terror’. Following a brief discussion of the theoretical framework informing my investigation, in the second substantive section I analyse two different sets of photographic images that
are deployed in the construction of narratives about legitimacy and authority of/in the ‘war’, to
draw attention to the ways in which both oppressive and progressive politics are reliant on the
truth claims symbolised by the power of photographic imagery. First, I offer an interpretative
reading of a photo essay featured on the White House webpages dedicated to the memorialisation
of ‘9/11’ [sic].2 Through this official visual representation, the Bush administration constructs
and communicates a specific narrative about the events of 11 September 2001, and also makes
implicit claims about the legitimacy of subsequent actions and its authority as a political agent in
undertaking these actions. Counterposed to this account, I offer an interpretative reading of an
Amnesty International (2007) report on the detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Similar
to the Bush administration, Amnesty International attempts to communicate a narrative of
legitimacy and authority concerning the ‘war on terror’ and associated practices using visual
representations. While the narrative presented is very different, the practices – and the implied
authority of the images themselves to act as an insight into the issue – employed are the same.
In the second section I problematise the ambiguity of photographic imagery which the two
accounts described above attempt to arrest. To do this, I identify three different interpretations of
the images of torture that were captured at Abu Ghraib prison, Iraq. I do not ‘read’ the images
themselves in this section. Rather, I argue that the three interpretations of these images
identified in this article construct particular understandings of the US and the ‘war on terror’,
using the images collectively as a site at which various identities are performed. In drawing
together multiple readings of the images of torture of Iraqi detainees, I show how a politicised
understanding of visual representation in the ‘war on terror’ is both central to, and productive of,
resistance to dominant ways of understanding the depictions of torture and their wider situated
context. Crucially, the three different interpretative narratives of the images from Abu Ghraib
make different claims to legitimacy and about authority in the context of the ‘war on terror’. In
conducting this investigation, I draw attention to the interpretation of the images of torture as an
exercise in knowledge production and argue that it must be recognised as such.
It is precisely through questioning the reproduction of visual representations and their
multiple interpretations that it is possible to formulate a political space from which to speak.
This is the broader aim of the article, based on three smaller claims. The first of these concerns
the suggestion that visual representations are crucial to our understanding of the ‘war on terror’,
that such representational practices have a politics, and therefore that they communicate claims
to legitimacy in ways that must be critically analysed. Second, I illustrate this through analysis
of the ways in which the images of torture from Abu Ghraib have been interpreted as a visual
representation of both the legitimacy and the illegitimacy of the ‘war on terror’.
The third claim addresses the complicity of all who reproduce interpretations of the images –
or indeed the images themselves – in the discursive construction of knowing/acting subjects. It
is from this perspective that I problematise three interpretations of the images at Abu Ghraib,
and, in the concluding section, challenge the notion that ‘reality’ can somehow present itself
unmediated to interpretation. The existence of multiple readings of the images is a product of the
competition over claims to authority and legitimacy in a given discursive terrain, but recognising
that we are all complicit in the reproduction of this discursive terrain is necessary – if a little
uncomfortable.3 There are political and ethical dimensions to disseminating the images, many of
which are graphic and deeply disturbing, and I do not feel comfortable with the suggestion of
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‘othering’ implicit in the representation of the images as objects of analysis (for example,
Amoore 2007). The impact of the pictures ‘depended in part on accepting that the photographs
were windows into another world’ (Taylor 2005, p. 40) and it is precisely this suggestion that
I seek to critique, as I argue that it is a familiar world, our world, that these images depict. In this
article I aim not only to question existing interpretations of the images, but also to question the
processes of knowledge reproduction that function to establish the limits of discourse about
imagery in the ‘war on terror’ more broadly.
Theoretical framework: on discourse and imagin(e)ing
This investigation analyses discourses that attempt to fix the meaning of various photographic
images deployed during the ‘war on terror’. While photographs have an immediacy and a claim
to truth (on the grounds that they apparently represent an unmediated vision of the ‘real’),
I argue that all images are inherently ambiguous and, in order to serve in the production of a
politics of security or counter-terrorism, efforts must be made to arrest that ambiguity and discipline the images. This disciplinary action occurs at the discursive level, in the interplay between
non-linguistic and linguistic representational practices. Discourses are recognisable as systems
of meaning-production, rather than simply statements or language, as systems that fix meaning,
however temporarily, and enable us to make sense of the world. All three sets of images
discussed below make distinct claims about who is and is not a legitimate actor in the ‘war on
terror’, who can be a knowing and coherent subject, and how relationships of power and authority
are configured. These claims are not simply read from the images but, crucially, are filtered
through text – both in my own analysis and in the discourses that attempt to effect closure on the
ways in which the images of torture are made meaningful.
If discursive practices both manifest and construct discourse through representation and
reproduction, then practices of representation and reproduction are the sites at which it is
possible to locate power in a given discursive terrain. Thus discourse-theoretical analysis is
concerned with representation as a source for the reproduction of knowledge (Hall 1997, p. 43).
Visual representations enter into the analysis here, conceived of as ‘[r]epresentations [that]
produce meaning through which we can make sense of our experience and of who we are’
(Woodward 1997, p. 14). The politics of the image in this context, as opposed to the written text,
is a particular one. ‘[P]hotographic images, especially, can organise perception in less rational
ways … masked by the appearance of having captured reality’ (Cloud 2004, p. 289). That such
‘reality’ appears unmediated allows greater freedom of interpretation through appeal to that
which is ‘obvious’ or ‘evident’ in the images, as if the image was ‘merely descriptive’, or spoke
for itself.
In recent years:
terrorism has taken on an iconic, fetishised and, most significantly, a highly optical character. After
witnessing the televised images of kamikaze planes hitting the World Trade Centre … we were all
too ready to agree with President Bush: ‘Evil now has a face’. (Der Derian 2005, p. 26, original
emphasis; also Williams 2003, pp. 524–528)
Therefore, investigating visual representations in the ‘war on terror’ and interrogating the face
ascribed to evil is central to critical understanding of security politics at this time. It is not
enough to accept or acknowledge that visual representations join textual representations in service
of the formulation of both oppressive and progressive politics. It is crucial to understand how
visual violences are perpetrated, perpetuated and rendered both meaningful and meaningless
through attempts to arrest the inherent ambiguity of imagery in the constitution of legitimacy
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and authority in the ‘war on terror’. As Butler (1997) eloquently argues, in her analysis of hate
speech, ‘the opening up of the foreclosed … requires opening new contexts, speaking in ways
that have never yet been legitimated, and hence producing legitimation in new and future forms’
(p. 41). The notion of unmediated ‘reality’, then, and of a coherent subject who experiences such
reality, is abandoned, along with the ability to speak on behalf of other coherent subjects:
[D]ispensing with the unified subject does not mean ceasing to be able to speak about our
experiences … only that our words cannot be legitimately deployed or construed as larger or longer
than the moments of the lives they speak from; they cannot be anointed as ‘authentic’ or ‘true’ since
the experience they announce is linguistically contained, socially constructed, discursively mediated, and never just individually ‘had’. (Brown 1995, pp. 40–41).
Traversing the liminal space between the fictive and the real, through interrogating and
interpreting the ways in which legitimacy and authority have been framed in the ‘war on terror’,
requires that such claims to legitimacy, authority and coherent subjectivity must be challenged.
While the ethical dilemma of whether or not to reproduce the images is unanswerable
(Dauphinée 2007, p. 153), the realities that are reproduced through their interpretations are lived
daily and the critical interrogation of such visual representations of violence represents a
useful interjection in the formulation of a politics resistant to dominant discourses of security/
counter-terrorism in the West.4
Images of progress from the White House, images of detention from Guantánamo Bay
The image-trail of 11 September 2001 directly affects the ways in which various institutions and
agencies constructed understandings of the event, and subsequently constructed support for, or
critiques of, the ‘war on terror’. As Giroux (2004) comments:
[p]hotographic images do not reside in the unique vision of their producer or the reality they attempt
to capture. Representations privilege those who have some control over self-representation, and they
are largely framed within dominant modes of intelligibility. (p. 790)
The two narratives about the US-led response to the events of 11 September 2001 that I discuss
here, constructed and communicated through images of progress and images of detention, could
not be more different. Counterposing white men in ties with brown men in orange jumpsuits, the
images available through the White House website5 and from Amnesty International (2007),
functioning as representational practices in the ‘war on terror’, have been deployed in the telling
of radically disjunctive stories about the legitimacy and authority of the ‘war’. The aim is not to
tease out the truth of these imaginings, but to illustrate the partiality of visual representations, as
described above. Below, I discuss the images in relation to three different concepts represented
in both sets: legitimacy, power and authority.
In the first set of images, through the ascription of authority to the Bush administration and
to the president himself, discussed further below, the response to the attacks on New York and
Washington are constituted as legitimate. This is particularly true of the second photograph in
the series, which depict Bush meeting with ‘his’ [sic] National Security Council. All eyes are
fixed on the President, who is centrally located in the frame and bracketed by ceremonial
flags of the US and the Seal of the United States. Similarly, the final image fixes Bush from the
shoulders upwards in front of the American flag, conveying both his authority and his agency as
a legitimate political actor. Conversely, the first page of the Amnesty International report
Close Guantánamo (2007) calls the prison camp a ‘symbol of injustice’, suggesting its illegitimacy in contemporary global politics. The subjects featured in the accompanying image are
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depersonalised – their faces are not shown – and distanced from the receptive audience, as the
cross-hatching of the wire fence between camera and prisoner/prison guards blurs the image.
The infamous orange jumpsuits feature frequently in the Amnesty International (2007)
report, the jumpsuits that became so critically symbolic of the US detention policy at
Guantánamo in the formation of an oppositional political agenda. ‘Even more than the written
accounts are the images that flash on television screens throughout the Muslim world: caged
men in orange prison jumpsuits, on their knees’ (Sengupta and Masood 2005). Further depersonalising the prisoners at Camp Delta en masse, throughout the report prisoners wearing the
jumpsuits constitute a collective entity, whereas individual head-shots are used to raise awareness
of the plight of ‘the Guantánamo detainees’ (Amnesty International 2007, pp. 4–5). The implication
seems to be that whether imprisonment or punishment is individual or collective, it is neither
legitimate nor legal (Amnesty International 2007, p. 12). The hierarchies represented in both
sets of images, however, reproduce the notion that the US is firmly in control of events. In the
Amnesty visual narrative, representatives of the US state in the form of military personnel stand
watch over the detainees and are seen to manipulate and manoeuvre individual prisoners
(presumably) to suit their aims (Amnesty International 2007, pp. 1, 13). The physical contact
depicted is hostile and aggressive (and, in the case of the first image, also suggestive of concerns
about literal contamination, as the guards appear to be wearing latex surgical gloves), but
nonetheless embodies a position of power. The physical contact illustrated in the White House
photo essay similarly situates the US state, in the figure of Bush, in such a position, although the
contact is paternal and comforting in this instance (White House 2001, images 4, 6). In both the
images that show Bush supporting people using physical contact, the contact in question is a
hand on the back of the person, a gesture meant to reassure and also to demonstrate authority – it
is highly reminiscent of a fatherly pat.
Finally, the two sets of images represent authority quite differently. As mentioned, Bush is
represented as an authoritative figure in the White House images, and the US military personnel
are represented as authoritative in the images produced by Amnesty International. However, the
wider question of political authority is silenced in the former and central to the latter. The
authority of the Bush administration to act, and that there was widespread public support for its
actions, is depicted in the White House images through the representation of civilians (White
House 2001, image 4). Despite being ‘figures of authority’ in their own right, the doctors
represented in the White House image-narrative are positioned to the right of the frame, looking
on as Bush, who appears a head taller than everyone else in the picture, comforts ‘family
members’. The positioning of the doctors renders them apparently subservient and certainly
marginal to the main focus of the image, which is Bush and his control over the situation. Similarly, in another image from the same narrative, Bush (again depicted as oddly tall) consoles ‘a
family’ during a visit to New York (image 6). The continued reference to ‘family’ and evocation
of closeness, values and validity lend weight to the visual suggestion of authority constructed
through the images. There is no dissent or even disharmony evidenced in the pictures; even the
first image of Bush amid the wreckage of the World Trade Center is magisterial and commanding
(image 1).
Conversely, the images deployed by Amnesty International represent an explicit challenge
to the performance of political authority represented in the White House narrative of events. The
rough treatment of detainees – symbolised by the dragging of a bare-foot figure dressed in
orange over gravely ground to a waiting line of US soldiers – is suggestive of a lack of respect
for human dignity and rights, thus undermining the claims made by the Bush administration
concerning the proper exercise of political authority (Amnesty International 2007, p. 11).
Further, the soldiers are depersonalised through representation of the backs of their heads
(pp. 11, 13) or by their placement in frame beyond the focus of the lens, which functions to
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suggest that the authority depicted cannot be tied to a sovereign actor. Rather, the authority is
displaced and dispersed, symbolic of a loss of control and, crucially, a lack of accountability.
The issue of accountability is central to the construction of a viable political authority in
contemporary democratic societies, and in marking accountability as an absent presence through
visual representation, Amnesty International lends critical impetus to its narrative.
The two sets of images discussed in this section are quite different in content yet similar in
context. Both sets are mobilised in the production of specific narratives about the legitimacy of,
and political authority in, the ‘war on terror’. Both sets are accompanied by text that aims to
render the images decipherable, meaningful, and thus to fix the viewer(s) of the images in a
specific relationship to the images themselves – as interpreter of a predetermined visual terrain.
Finally, both sets of images rely on the willing suspension of analytical disbelief, in that the
narratives supporting both sets of images purport to communicate the truth about the events that
they depict. Both truths, however, cannot logically co-exist. Accepting the veracity of both sets
of images is to accept competing and wildly divergent narratives about legitimacy and authority
in contemporary global politics. Of interest here is the use of imagery to simulate transparency
of meaning and stimulate acceptance of the matter/reality depicted in the shots. In the following
section, I complicate this analysis further by investigating three ways in which these discursive
practices of simulation/stimulation pertain to the same set of images, in order to demonstrate
that it is not simply the case that different sets of images tell different stories – the ineluctable
element of interpretation demands that we take seriously the ways in which the same visual
representations are made diverse in the ‘war on terror’.
Images of torture from Abu Ghraib
The images of torture of Iraqi detainees that took place at Abu Ghraib prison just outside of
Baghdad were released to the media in late April 2004. According to CNN (2004):
[t]he Army [had] been investigating the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib since January, but
the case erupted … when CBS broadcast graphic photographs of American troops posing for
photographs with naked, hooded prisoners.
The reproduction of the first images out of Abu Ghraib was unauthorised by the White House,
and there was strong opposition to the release of further photographs. These images became the
dominant representation used in ‘mainstream media’ of the US presence in Iraq, replacing the
previously widely reproduced image of the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein (Giroux
2004, pp. 779–780), and became central to a range of narratives concerning the legitimacy of
the occupation of Iraq (and the ‘war on terror’ more broadly) and the authority of various actors
involved/envisaged in the images (for a brief discussion of these competing narratives, see
Dauphinée 2007, p. 144).
Imag(e)ining the enemy
There was a case to answer for the Bush administration, which focused initially on distancing
itself from the horrors depicted in the photographs. ‘The President made it very clear that he was
disgusted when he saw these photographs. And the President made it very clear that this does
not represent what the United States stands for’ (McClellan 2004). This interpretation of
the images draws on conventional narratives of authority and power in global politics in its
reproduction of the Bush administration as the legitimate ‘Figure of Authority’ to whom the
perpetrators are answerable (Shepherd 2006, p. 23). In his testimony to the US Senate Armed
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Services Committee Hearing on the treatment of Iraqi prisoners, Donald Rumsfeld commented
on the difficulties of controlling the release of the images, at a time when ‘people are running
around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them
off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise, when they had not even arrived in the Pentagon’
(Rumsfeld transcribed in Washington Post 2004). There are three aspects to this comment that
are worthy of investigation. The first is the representation of the photographs as ‘unbelievable’.
This suggests that the images might be less than credible, initially, but also removes the images
from the realm of public acceptability. In describing the photographs as unbelievable, Rumsfeld
suggests that the images are outside of a zone of normality, thereby bracketing them from existing
debate over the legitimacy of the US presence in Iraq. Second, the emphasis on the illegality of
‘passing off’ the images to the media, taints the photographs with the dubious morality of the
criminals – acting ‘against the law’ – who sought to disseminate the images to the public.
Finally, the discursive delimitation of authority is clear from this statement. The images ‘had not
even arrived in the Pentagon’, which is where, implicitly, they should have been sent first. The
authority and legitimacy of the Pentagon is thereby reinscribed, as the Bush administration
becomes the repository of legitimate dissemination of the images.
This interpretation, constructed as a response to the images, centred on the publication of the
images as the problem. As Sontag (2004) comments:
[t]he [Bush] administration’s initial response was to say that the president was shocked and
disgusted by the photographs – as if the fault or horror lay in the images, not in what they depict.
The representation of the ‘whistle-blowers’ in the media served to remind ‘us’ – in this interpretation the receptors of the images – that there were still ‘honourable men and women’ who were
doing the right thing. ‘The abuses became public because of the outrage of Specialist Joseph M.
Darby, an M.P. [who] … “came across pictures of naked detainees… . He felt very bad about it
and thought it was very wrong”’ (Scott Bobeck cited in Hersh 2004). The effect of the unauthorised release of the photographs is constructed in terms of the impact on troop morale and corollary effects on the ongoing occupation of Iraq: ‘[Y]ou don’t want to see innocent people
inappropriately maligned by virtue of the release of the photographs’ (Cheney 2004). These
innocent people are ‘the honourable men and women of the [US] armed forces, who [were] courageously and responsibly and professionally defending our freedoms across the globe’ (Rumsfeld transcribed in Washington Post 2004).
In this construction, the images are responsible for the trauma caused to ‘all of those
thousands who are serving honourably and well [who] now have an additional burden of stress
to carry … given the wide dissemination of disturbing digital photos’ (Bartone 2004, p. 15). The
dissemination of the photos, as in the statement from Rumsfeld analysed above, caused the
problem, according to the logic of this interpretation. It is the photos that are ‘disturbing’, and
the photos that are responsible for the ‘additional burden of stress’ carried by the troops as a
result of their dissemination. This interpretation precludes the notion that the existence of the
images requires the Bush administration to admit that the images are in any way a product of
their context. ‘Accountability means we … mete out swift and sure justice to the perpetrators. …
it does not mean we beat ourselves to the point of questioning the righteousness or justice of our
cause’ (Limbaugh 2004).
‘Bad apples’
The discursive disciplining of the subjects and objects represented in the Abu Ghraib images,
and the attendant claims of the Bush administration to continued legitimacy, hinged on the
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acceptance of the narrative of exceptionalism: ‘While a handful of abusive US troops is an
exception, the same is not true of our enemy, whose true nature we dare not forget’ (Limbaugh
2004). According to this representation, the rest of the troops, upon witnessing the instances of
violence and torture, came forward to alert the rest of the (civilised) world about the events. This
construction renders ridiculous the notion that the US should reflect on the production of the
images. As Thomas (2004) expresses it:
The hand-wringing about these abusive incidents not reflecting ‘who we are’ is the stuff of touchyfeely television shows. Who are we? We are a free people who send their sons and daughters to
other nations in order to lift the yoke of oppression and allow others to be free.
The second interpretation I identify rests on the soldiers as ‘seers’ – unquestioningly receiving
and disseminating the images – and situates the Bush administration and the American public as
the correspondent meaning-makers. The dynamics of power and morality read very differently
in this construction, and the ‘bad apples’ defence is a central signifier. The troops involved in
the production of the images of torture are depicted in this construction as ‘posing, gloating over
their helpless captives’ (Sontag 2004). These ‘helpless captives’ and the abusive US troops
are seen in this construction, with the latter bearing full responsibility for the horrors of the
violences depicted. Crucially, in this narrative, the ‘war on terror’ is still represented as a legitimate
exercise, and authority still resides with the Coalition. The troops are acting outside of this
approved authority and, as such, their actions are rendered deviant but their agency is constituted
as individual rather than collective. ‘[W]e – and the rest of the world – are … bothered by the
fact that the US soldiers in the pictures (and presumably those taking the pictures) clearly got a
kick out of what they were doing’ (Brison 2004).
The reported use of photographs of torture as a screensaver on the computer in the interrogation room at Abu Ghraib symbolises this construction (Brody 2004). Apparently, ‘[t]he
photographs tell it all’ (Hersh 2004). What they tell in this interpretation is that the Bush
administration is distanced from the events, as this construction also delimits the boundaries
of culpability. ‘The good news in the prisoner abuse scandal is that is does not characterize the
vast majority of our soldiers and military leaders’ (Bartone 2004, p. 15). This construction
allows the Bush administration to continue to defend the presence of US troops in Iraq
through such discursive distancing. ‘As we seek to bring stability and democracy to Iraq and
to fight terrorism globally, our greatest asset as a nation is the moral values that we stand for.
Those values have been compromised’ (Levin transcribed in Washington Post 2004). In
this narrative, then, the problem is not the images, but the few ‘bad apples’ who were not
conducting themselves appropriately.
It is within this discourse that the link between sexuality and the images of torture was most
strongly forged, as the cultural context mentioned above was described as one of excess,
amorality and sexual indiscrimination: ‘The day that US lawmakers viewed the roughly 1800
still photos and an undisclosed number of videos from Abu Ghraib … CBS News reported that
the images “amounted to hard-core porn”’ (Brison 2004). The link between the reproduction of
the images and the reproduction of pornography rested on the recognition of the images as
sexualised – ‘the bobby-sox girl soldier [sic] who points at a man’s genitals, the mock orgy in
Abu Ghraib, the British rifle in the prisoner’s mouth’ (Fisk 2004) – and on the construction of
the cultural and conceptual mappings shared by the perpetrators of the violence as permissive of
their actions. Moral and political authority in this construction rests with the global public along
with the Bush administration – anyone, in fact, who is not actively complicit in the production of
the images themselves, whether in front of or behind the camera – as ‘the photographers don’t
even seem aware that they are recording a war crime’ (Bourke 2004).
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The complexities of blame in this construction are furthered by the refusal of the Bush
administration to engage with critiques. Far from accepting that ‘in the photographs of humiliated Iraqi prisoners, what we get is, precisely, an insight into American values’ (Žižek cited in
Robin 2004, p. 18), White House rhetoric focused narrowly on the ‘disgraceful conduct by a few
American troops … who disregarded our values’ (White House 2004). This refutation of a wider
permissive context for the tortures was reinforced through significant discursive labour: ‘[I]t
does not represent America, nor does it represent American values’ (Rumsfeld 2004). ‘These
acts were wrong. They are inconsistent with our policies and our values as a Nation’ (Bush
2004). ‘[T]he actions of a few do not represent the hard work of the many of our men and
women in uniform’ (McClellan 2004).
‘Bad barrel’
If the cultural context of the troops ‘can be said to have induced a “few bad apples” in one prison
to misbehave, then everyone else in the chain of command, from the commander-in-chief down,
is off the hook’ (Rich 2004). This is precisely the construction of identity that is critiqued in the
third interpretation of the images I identify. In this construction, the images ‘were the inevitable
product of a criminal colonialist enterprise, launched on the basis of crude lies’ (Laurier 2004).
Building on the discursive link between the photographs from Abu Ghraib and pornography,
this construction centres on the suggestion that it is the cultural context that is culpable. ‘[W]e
have raised two generations of men (and women) with graphic, obscene images which have
made degrading behaviour “sexy”, “normal” and “exciting”’ (Bruce 2004).
The contestation over morality and blame in the context of the images from Abu Ghraib
takes on a different form in this narrative. Central to this narrative is the ‘business as usual’ construction that sees ‘[t]he “bad apples” defence [as] both unspeakably inadequate and completely
disingenuous’ (Burnham 2004). From different perspectives, and for different reasons, it has
been argued that ‘[w]hat is most surprising about the abuses committed against civilians at Abu
Ghraib prison in Iraq is the fact that they came as a surprise at all’ (Stokes 2004). The ‘bad
apples’ in this construction are a product of the ‘bad barrel’. ‘The issue is not whether a majority
or a minority of Americans performs such acts but whether the nature of the policies prosecuted
by this administration and the hierarchies deployed to carry them out makes such acts likely’
(Sontag 2004) – and, on this view, the answer is a resounding yes (Dodd 2004).
While the Iraqi detainees are still seen in this construction, this interpretation emphasises
their positioning as subordinate to the US troops represented in the images, troops who occupy
the privileged discursive position of dominant over submissive, coloniser over colonised,
masculine over feminine. This is a construction that finds it harder to tie gender to sexed bodies.
The ubiquitous representation in the media of Lynndie England, ‘the thumbs-up girl of prisoner
abuse’ (Burnham 2004) reinforces this uneasiness. As Burnham comments:
[I]n her role of dominatrix over Iraqi men England exposed the sexualisation of national conquest.
As participant in the militarised construction of the masculine she inaugurated a brand new
frightening archetype: dominant-nation female as joyful agent of sexual, national, racial and
religious humiliation. How’s that for liberation?
The admission that ‘[t]here was sadism on the night shift … sadism that was not authorised’
(former Defence Secretary James Schlesinger cited in CBC News 2004) leaves open the possibility that there was sadism at Abu Ghraib that was authorised. Furthermore, the recognition of
‘institutional and personal responsibility’ (CBC News 2004) in this construction focuses on the
ways in which the troops in the images are products of their cultural context:
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L.J. Shepherd
[T]hese soldiers are coming from a country that barely distinguishes Iraq from Afghanistan… . Our
political leaders … encourage us not to think of Iraqis as human beings. It’s no wonder, then, that
average Americans could treat Iraqis so inhumanely. (Myers 2004)
Conclusions: disciplining visual violence
The immediacy of a modern … specifically visual media has a powerful interpellative nature in which
viewers, once made aware, are rendered complicit in acts and events, because if one is granted knowledge about an event, that knowledge involves a certain degree of consent. (Tracy 2005, p. 87)
The existing interpretations recounted above, of the pictures taken at Abu Ghraib, variously situating ‘the enemy’, ‘the bad apples’ and ‘the bad barrel’, allow for a distancing, the claim of difference, a sense of Otherness read not only against the Iraqi detainees but also against the ‘bad
apples’ and the ‘bad barrel’. This, ultimately, is the recognition for which I argue in this paper:
the visual violences of the Abu Ghraib pictures are unsettling, and in order to distance ourselves
from the images it is crucial that ‘we’ are not ‘them’, however ‘they’ are configured. The cleavage between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is necessary to salve consciences and maintain claims to a lack of
culpability, but highly problematic, given that ‘the exclusion … happen[s] at the level of presumption, as an epistemological condition of political judgement’ and is therefore rarely examined or problematised (Butler cited in Breen et al. 2001, p. 18). While Burnham (2004) is
scathing of the societal structures supported by those who ‘elect representatives who feed the
military monster [and] honor sadistic hyper-masculinity, awarding those who portray it best
with governorships’, I argue that the collective responsibility could – and should – be felt much
more widely. The crux of this argument is that it would not have been possible to make meaning
of the images if they depicted scenes that did not resonate so strongly with dominant discourses
of gender, race, class and sexuality that entrench and reinforce inequalities along these axes of
exclusion.
To disrupt the categories of identity laid out above, I argue that the global public is also
represented in the images, as a necessary presence required to render the images meaningful, at
the same time as such an audience is required to be both receptor and interpreter; the same is
true for the Bush administration and the soldiers themselves. My attempt to disrupt the categories of knowing/authoritative subject and attendant claims to legitimacy of the ‘war on terror’ is
undertaken to draw attention to the ways in which meaning does not reside in the image or the
actor, but in the cultural context of its reproduction and representation. The discursive terrain
that ‘we’ – those who have had access to these images in some form or another – inhabit is
delimited by discourses of gender, class, race and ethnicity.
Making sense of the images draws on these discourses, in the ways mentioned above, but
also in the insufficient critical attention paid to the ways in which ‘we’ as subjects are
positioned, and can enjoy privilege, through their practice. When I saw the images of torture
depicting the violences perpetrated at Abu Ghraib, I saw myself in them, as I am marked – made
sense of – by the same discourses through which the images are (re)produced. The first interpretation that I outline above demonstrates the ways in which the Bush administration systematically attempted to construct an understanding of the images from Abu Ghraib that made the
images themselves problematic. The ‘bad apples’ defence focuses primarily on individual
agency, the ‘bad barrel’ critique on structural forces. The discourse-theoretical alternative that
I offer here refuses these interpretations. As Campbell (1998) argues, ‘counternarratives do not
function as simple assertions of “the truth” in order to overcome all distortions and/or falsehoods, for they are neither free from nor beyond the politics of historical representation’ (p. 87).
Instead, the ‘counternarrative’ I offer prioritises the critical investigation of the reproduction of
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the discursive terrain that not only allowed for these horrific events to occur, but for their capture
on film, their dissemination and interpretation, and the processes through which meaning was
made of them.
Our relation to an imaginary of external threat and violence cannot be understood without simultaneously engaging the savagery of the internal domestic landscape we viscerally know and inhabit but
which is deleted from all our favoured self-representations. (Crary 2004, p. 429)
I suggest that we should look beyond our ‘favoured self-representations’, refuse the enticing
ethical escape-route offered by the interpretations mapped out above that are all organised
around logics of difference and distance. Such a politics brings to the forefront of critical
scholarship the recognition that we are all implicated in these interpretations, as we all make
meaning of our social context through the discourses available to us. Furthermore, it complicates
questions of authority and legitimacy, focusing on the issue of reproduction and the politics
involved in constructing ourselves as knowing subjects.
Politics of the visual in the ‘war on terror’ serve as a mechanism for the discursive construction
of identity. Using imagery to unpick the visualisation of violence and its relation to legitimacy
and authority in the ‘war on terror’ is not to minimise or intellectualise the ‘primal scene’
depicted in particularly the images from Abu Ghraib (Amoore 2007, p. 218), nor to suggest that
the policies and practices of the US in Iraq have been politically or morally justifiable. My
analysis does, however, allow for the recognition that the US constructed their justification for
the occupation of Iraq through discourses of gender, race, class and ethnicity that mark the US
as dominant, as representative of a hegemonic masculinity, a ‘civilised’ nation, the ‘free world’.
These justifications permitted those using techniques of torture at Abu Ghraib to conceive of the
identities that they were performing as legitimate. Accepting these constructions to any degree is
to accept that there is somehow a divide between ‘us’ and ‘them’, although the negotiations of
identity will be worked through differently in different embodied contexts.
This is not to imply that ‘the West’, if it is even possible to speak of such a construction, is
visible as a coherent and stable entity: we are all recognisable but in our own (fragmented and
undecideable) contexts. Those infamous photographs made us uncomfortable, as well they
should. We recognise the gendered and sexualised bodies of the subjects in the photographs
because our imaginings allow it. We recognise the sexualisation of the torture because our
cultural understandings at once affirm and deny it. We recognise the multiple forms of othering
represented both in and by the images from Abu Ghraib. While such a meta-narrative of entirety
might seem to overstate the complicity of ‘us’ in the reproduction of the images of torture,
accepting the privileges of gender, race and class that enabled the initial production of those
photographs reinscribes these boundaries – and corollary zones of marginalisation.
Acknowledgements
The author is grateful for the careful engagement with this work provided by the two anonymous
reviewers; their suggestions were both useful and encouraging. The author would also like to thank Anca
Pusca and Nicki Smith, University of Birmingham, for offering the opportunity to discuss this paper and
the ethical issues it raises at some length.
Notes
1.
2.
For coverage of the events around the world, see http://www.september11news.com/.
The memorialisation is represented thus on the White House webpages. I am uncomfortable with the
use of ‘9/11’ as shorthand to represent the attacks that took place in the USA on 11 September 2001.
As Jackson (2005) argues, ‘[s]uch practices are neither natural nor without consequences; rather the
224
3.
4.
5.
L.J. Shepherd
effect is to erase the history and context of the events’ (p. 7). By using the European representation
of the date in question, I aim to draw attention not only to my own geopolitical context but also to the
different histories that have been and can yet be written about the events.
I have made the conscious decision not to reproduce the images from Abu Ghraib here for the purposes
of analysis, as reproducing and representing these images, however critical the intention or intervention,
is problematic in that those depicted cannot give their consent. In a recent interview, Ali Shalal el Kaissi,
‘one of the photo-symbols of the violence of Abu Ghraib: the hooded prisoner, standing balanced on a
cardboard box’ commented, ‘[t]hat photo itself for me is a torture’ (cited in Coppola 2005). (On
the ethics of reproducing imagery of ‘the body in pain’, see also Dauphinée 2007.) While I could
reproduce the images from Amnesty International or the White House analysed with fewer ethical
complications, I have elected not to do so. By including web addresses for these latter images below,
I invite readers to investigate the images for themselves rather than rely on either the assumed transparency of the image to communicate a single meaning, or my own interpretation thereof. I appreciate
that this decision is not without its own complications, but I feel it (perhaps paradoxically) necessary
to absent the images from the above text in order to make the claim I seek to make concerning the
political currency of visual representation. My interpretation of the images in question is, of course,
open to interrogation.
Analysis is limited to the investigation of a discursive terrain bounded by the intelligibility of
language. Interpretations of the images discussed here that have occurred elsewhere, for example in
Iraq itself, are not necessarily available to me. However, it is possible to identify some subversive
processes through which not only the images, but also the acts of torture are being made meaningful in
Iraq. There is one particular mural in Baghdad that depicts the hooded figure of a detainee wired to
electric conductors, an image that has become iconic in the discussions of torture at Abu Ghraib,
shown in this instance with the Statue of Liberty throwing the switch. The caption below reads ‘That
Freedom for Bosh [sic]’. This example affirms that there is not only a politics and a culture of knowledge
production, but also a spatial context that is central to understanding (Caldwell 2004).
See the photo essay entitled ‘Response’ at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/september11/index.html/.
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