Awesome! Destruction pornography and the loss of empathy

You might know that one of my hobbies is photography: landscapes, architecture, fencing and occasionally events I'm at. While I've never photographed serious disorder or destruction, I can really feel the pull for the photographer.

Today, I've been writing a lecture on Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, a novel which alternates between the documentary and the mythic as it attempts to explain the mass misery of the Dustbowl and the suffering of one fictional family within the fleeing mass, the Joads. I'm thinking aloud about the tensions between the novel form and wider society, about didacticism, naturalism, propaganda, proletarian fiction and bourgeois form etc. etc. I'm illustrating the lecture with a series of pictures from the Dustbowl, particularly those of Dorothea Lange, whose most famous image is a kind of Okie Madonna:

Is this photograph exploitative? It looks posed, to evoke the traditional Christian Madonna and Child, building in all sorts of cultural expectations about gendered expectations, motherhood and maternal emotions. It's a didactic picture to some extent: perhaps we're meant to feel outrage at these people's condition even while we admire her fortitude and beauty.

These images make me think too of the very popular trend for what I call destruction porn. You know the kind of thing: evocative pictures of wrecked buildings or even cities. They seemed to start with the destruction of Chernobyl, then Detroit and were popularised by urban explorers breaking into abandoned hospitals, cinemas and factories (I've done a little of this myself) and all share an aesthetic.

Detroit

The lighting is low and natural. Wrecked machines feature strongly, while an abandoned toy or dusty medical implement lies in the foreground.

Chernobyl

That Chernobyl one is pretty much the money shot of the urban destruction photographer: a gas mask for an apocalyptic thrill, a child's shoe for added pathos. (That shot, by the way, is from totallycoolpix.com, which tells you all you need to know about the moral sensibility of its photographer and fans). Damian the unscrupulous war reporter in Drop the Dead Donkey always carried around a broken teddy bear and a 'blood-stained plimsoll' for this very purpose.



These pictures are always urban, perhaps because the photographers and viewers get a little frisson from the sense that Western Industrialism isn't – as we were promised – Progress, inevitable and one-way.

Im starting to think there's something entirely decadent about this kind of thing - the idea of taking the photographer's tour of derelict Detroit fills me with horror. It feels like a tour round Bedlam or a colonial trip to the Reservation. Why not just hang about in a funeral parlour or A+E snapping the dead and wounded for Instagram? It's not even difficult photography. Decent SLR, no flash, tripod, prime lens, long exposure and narrow aperture. As to composition: lazy and clichéd. Gerard Manley Hopkins got it right:

NOT, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more.

Which leads me to the latest twist on this vampiric art. I've been following the reports of Kiev's rebellion through the newspapers and social media. I read the Guardian, which has a particularly brilliant picture editor. There's always something to make me gasp or admire the skill of the photographer. Today's images from Ukraine were no different.

It's hard to photograph this kind of scene. Once you've seen one riot, you've seen them all, though the architecture and the rebels' knowing medievalism (a full size ballista!) helps them stand out for the cameras. It's also dangerous, obviously. To take 'good' photographs and not be killed in the protest is astonishing.

But. The Guardian has a photo-gallery up of these and similar images and I'm not convinced that they're offered as evidence of an awful, awful event. They seem to be offered as a spectacle, something technically stupendous (the composition!) and begging for comparison with so many other apocalyptic: in Baudrillardian terms, the spectacle has replaced the event, which can't be so neatly captured.

But the Guardian isn't what most bothers me. On Twitter, these and many other images are being passed round without any reference to what's actually happening in the Maidan. Instead, 'before and after' shots are offered to emphasise the sheer scale of destruction: this isn't empathy or political support. The images which are circulating are those which most resemble video games, particularly the 'Cursed Earth' ones in which heavily-armoured players fight off radioactive mutants or aliens. They also resemble John Martin's massive Victorian canvases:

Pandemonium

The Eruption of Vesuvius

Martin's work perhaps had the effect of making his viewers consider their own hubris and folly, but mostly what paintings like this do is aestheticise suffering and play on the viewer's knowledge of what's about to happen, which those in the pictures lack. I find this utterly smug, decadent and pretty repulsive. 

Fallout 4 deliberately mimics a well-known Chernobyl shot here, reducing a massive catastrophe to a violent Bildungsroman with an evocative backdrop:

while Resistance is merely one of many which sets ultimate battles between humans or humans and aliens in a ravaged urban backdrop reminiscent of Homs or Kiev:

Which is all a very longwinded way of saying that the kinds of images circulated today, and the comments people are making, disturb me. They aren't empathetic. They seem informed by the scale of destruction and the aesthetics of the image rather than what's signified: a classic state of Baudrillardian hyper-reality, fuelled by video games, but also by the propaganda of states which encourage 'shock and awe' while simultaneously promoting the idea that war is as clinical and harmless as playing a video game.

As for those in Maidan Square? Great pics, guys! Good luck with whatever it is you're after! See you!

Update: moronically, I'd completely forgotten until reminded by @qui_oui that Susan Sontag has already considered all this in her book about photography, Regarding the Pain of Others in which she attacks the way news photography fuels a consumerist appetite for destruction shorn of compassion or empathy. Every new atrocity is simply food for our jaded appetites. Yes, we need to know about the horrors of the world, but what are we doing with this knowledge other than marvelling at the images? Much as I object to the Guardian's photo-gallery, Sontag objects to the glossy magazine presentation, shorn of intermediating, interpreting words.

What a piece of work is a man

Firstly, a word with Mr Peter Rhodes about 'news values'.

I made a passing comment recently about my university restructuring its departments, resulting in a Faculty of Arts. People have been referring to it as FArts, which isn't very funny but is fairly predictable. My preference would be for the more accurate Faculty of Arts and Humanities, but I'm just not that bothered.

Although I can't link you to his column in the Express and Star as it isn't considered worthy of webspace, Mr Peter Rhodes thought that my comment was a) worth repeating (without payment) and b) 'whistleblowing'. Then again, he does think that the term 'school lunch' is bourgeois political correctness. Unless he's joking. I can no longer tell these days.

Whistleblowing is when you reveal dangerous, illegal or unethical activity in the workplace. It's worth column inches. I'm very pleased that Mr Peter Rhodes is a regular reader of Plashing Vole, because he might learn something. Not because I'm particularly well-informed, but because he's even less well-informed. It's just a shame that he feels it's important to recycle lame fart gags rather than reconsider whether, for instance, supporters of equal marriage are 'fascist', as he claims (clue: fascists put gay people into concentration camps and make them wear pink triangles, rather than legalising marriage between same-sex couples).

Anyway, that's as much space as Mr Peter Rhodes deserves. But I'm afraid I'm going to upset him again by telling you all what I did in class today.

The first class of the day was a two-hour lecture on Shakespeare, with me as the boss's minion. Or lovely assistant, depending on how myopic you are. An introductory session, we spent a lot of time talking about the cultural blocks around having a rich and dynamic relationship with Shakespeare. We talked about the way Shakespeare has been appropriated by the state and cultural authority as in some way emblematic of Englishness and Britishness. For instance, this 1944 Olivier version of Henry V was clearly part of the patriotic propaganda drive:



But it needs some editing to make it Glorious Brits versus Evil German Scum. Principally, the lines in the next scene in which Henry orders 'every soldier kill his prisoners' are cut - we can't have a king of England, or English people, committing war crimes (even though they did, and do, quite a lot).

We talked about Shakespeare as a businessman, as perhaps being Catholic, perhaps being homosexual, of definitely being a creation of each age. There is no Shakespeare, we said: there are Shakespeares. There's the man churning out bums-on-seats material and negotiating the political vicissitudes of a dangerous period. There's the uncouth dullard who slipped into obscurity for 150+ years after his death,  to be revived in cut-down versions and tragedies with happy endings (really: in one popular staging, Romeo and Juliet wake up and live happily ever after). There's the prophet of Empire (the Victorians saw The Tempest as justifying Empire as a means of civilising the brutes and the anti-Imperial Shakespeare, such as the Irish seashore version I saw this summer which played The Tempest as an examination of the evils of invasion and colonisation. There's Straight Shakespeare and Gay Shakespeare, all working off the sonnets, and there are Conservative and Lefty Shakespeares. Most of these send the guardians of conservative culture off the deep end, but they're all there in the texts, waiting to be uncovered. That's why Shakespeare (and his contemporaries) are so fascinating. Yes, you end up less certain at the end of the course than at that start, but I consider that an intellectual victory.

Our point was that you could easily do a degree in Shakespeare Studies without even opening a copy of the plays because in the absence of authorial intent, all texts and especially plays, can be read (or not read) in a variety of ways. Shakespeare didn't leave manuscripts, didn't do interviews in the Sunday papers, didn't arrange publication of the plays (the cash came from performances, and he co-owned a production company). There's no Authorised Version, only varying texts cribbed from actors' notes and friends' memories. Hence the Shakespeare Industry, which puts him up on a pedestal. World's Greatest Playwright. Timeless. Immortal. Always Relevant. Englishman of the Ages.

All crap. This stuff gets in the way of close, informed readings of the texts. Resistance to Shakespeare is often a result of this patronising guff, most often found in education ministers' speeches and little-Englander editorials in the Daily Mail. Once you've cleared all this cultural undergrowth, you can start reading the texts: asking how (and whether) they work on stage and on screen, what the cultural context was, what perspectives are being privileged and which are being silenced. I'm with Derrida: the author's dead. His opinion no longer matters, but the words he (probably) wrote do, and so does the relationship the reader and audience have with those words.

What we want to do is strip away the unthinking hierarchisation of Shakespeare v other authors, English Literature versus Others (such as MacAulay's assertion that a single shelf of European literature was worth 'the whole native literature of India and Arabia') and get back to texts and contexts. Down with Great Men. This is what the know-nothings refer to as Cultural Relativism and Political Correctness Gone Mad. We need to do this: there's nothing intellectually stimulating or informative about constructing league tables of playwrights. You can't compare The Frogs, Hamlet and Shopping and Fucking in qualitative terms: what you can do is compare technique, staging, setting, their relationships to each other and their contexts and learn things through those comparisons. This isn't controversial in my world, but there are plenty of reactionaries (most of whom haven't seen a play since they were the Third Ass in their primary Nativity) who think this is treason, subversion and filth.

As an encore, I went straight into a class which pulled apart the concept of universal morality based on utilitarianism, Bentham and Mill's formula which problematically relates ethics to a complicated calculation of pleasure, pain-avoidance and consequences while covertly relying on very subjective ideas (we don't agree on what constitutes happiness, nor on how to acquire it). We successfully demolished conventional bourgeois morality in one two-hour slot and thus it was a day well-spent.

Peter: if you're lacking material for next week's column, you're welcome to turn up at any of my classes.

Time to lay off Nick Clegg?

Instinctively, no.

But I ask the question after listening to a simply magnificent philosophy paper by my friend and fellow union activist Cecile. She asked two simple questions:
1. Do the public demand a higher morality from politicians?
2. Should they?

Her response - closely argued - was yes, and no. Yes, 'we' demand a higher standard of personal and professional judgement, and 'no', because the scope, type and consequences of politicians' decision-making is philosophically no different to other spheres. The giant supermarket's sourcing decisions can transform millions of peoples' lives for better and worse. Violence is not reserved to the state other than legally. Other people are equally in the public sphere. Impartiality is not necessarily the same as justice.

I have two points to make on this one, though I do agree with the main thrust of the paper.

1. How do we know what the public wants? I know what Polly Toynbee wants. I know all too clearly what the editors of the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph claim that the public wants. But these publics are selective at best and imaginary at worst. Furthermore, a second's thought reveals that what a person says they want and what they really want can be a long way apart. Every poll says that we want more nurses, teachers and hospitals. Every election reveals that we don't want to pay for them. (Not me by the way. I like tax and the things it brings). We all perform a version of ourselves edited to match social expectations. OF course we say we want a moral political class - but nobody ever read Alan Clark's diaries for his account of everyday life in the MoD.

2. Secondly: my Occam's Razor approach to the question of whether we should expect a higher moral standard from our politicians is that we should because they ask us to. Every appeal from a politician to vote for them, trust them or believe in them is predicated on the promise that they are capable of behaving in a moral fashion.

We all know that this is a massive lie. But that shouldn't mean that we let them off the hook. We should expect them to make the effort, and we should hold them to account when they fail. If they make unattainable promises ('an ethical foreign policy' - for which I yearned without every expecting to happen - springs to mind, or John Major's 'back to basics'), let's use these promises as a big stick with which to beat them.

Like most people, I'm a lazy, backsliding, oafish creature. I don't want to be governed by people like me. I want to be governed by people not swayed by a neat line, not tempted by another hunk of cheese or one more pint, or a flash of a stocking. Of course, rule by saints would be oppressive and cruel (e.g. the Commonwealth), but a gesture in the right direction would be nice.

This, dear reader, is why I've spent the past year haranguing Mr. Paul Uppal, my mediocre MP. He stood for election on the basis that he thought he was the 'best person' for the job. HE raised expectations, not me. He has consistently failed in his public duty and personal qualities, behaving in a dishonest, disingenuous and selfish fashion at every turn. In a sense, I prefer the old-fashioned Tories. Alan Clark et al. never mentioned morality. They never claimed to behave morally. Thatcher never claimed to be acting in the best interests of society. They announced that they were going to impoverish the many for the benefit of their friends, and proceeded to do so. That so many people were fooled into voting for them was our fault and our downfall. There was an honesty in the Old Tories' rapacious selfishness which is far more respectable than the honeyed humbug of our smooth-tongued and no less evil New Tories.

Should we expect morality from our politicians? The difference between them and other sections of society is that they make a point of proclaiming it.

If they promise it, we should expect it.

(And if nobody aspires to a higher morality - however defined - we'll never get one).

Animals were harmed in the making of this video

Old news to some of you, but this is horrific: a team's owl mascot gets kicked off the pitch and dies.



Obviously there's something dubious about keeping an owl as any sort of pet, let alone casually booting it (Dan: anything on your conscience?).

But I'll say this: millions of people are abused, individually and collectively, every day, and nobody gets angry about it. We just turn away, or carry on colluding. Today, the Saudis are using the weaponry the UK sold them, to oppress the people of Bahrain. We might not like it, but we sure as hell won't feel as bad about as we do when watching this video.

The topic turns up in one of my favourite films, Grosse Pointe Blank, in which two assassins get upset over the death of a dog rather than on the many killings they've perpetrated.

Poor old Andrew

Mr Marr is rapidly declining mentally. Last week he uttered some rather confused and uninformed pearls of wisdom about blogging, this week he started a radio discussion of morality and politics by claiming that it was 'beyond issues of left and right'.

This is, of course, absolute balderdash. Both wings of politics have drawn on religious origins for their morality, then claimed that their ideological perspectives are moral. The soft left of the Labour Party claimed that it owed 'more to Methodism than to Marx', which was certainly true, while Blair allowed his neoliberal capitalist hodgepodge of ideas to be influenced by his belief in God (whom he occasionally seemed to confuse with voices in his head). (Incidentally, the Methodists and similar groups were great - they encouraged democracy inside and outside their chapels, trained thousands of workers as preachers and organised the working classes. Shame about the actual God bits).

The English Civil War, despite its unfortunate bouts of Catholic-massacring, was a leftwing religious event: God directly told the Parliamentarians that hereditary rule was evil. The result was a Republic which soon became an Iranian-style theocracy. If you read the Putney Debates, the Fifth Monarchists, the Ranters, the Diggers, the Levellers and most of the other groups during this time of astonishing ferment, you'll find God at the centre of their communist/socialist doctrines.

I'm from a different lefty perspective. For me, the abandonment of God is a moment of ethical and political liberation. In His place goes empathy towards your fellow humans, which to me means being very very very leftwing. As far as I can see, being rightwing is essentially denying empathy and promoting individualism: rightwingers are often religious in the classic Robinson Crusoe mould, in which self-help leads to God - from that flows selfishness and American politics.

Unfortunately, God isn't around to settle this one. The Old Testament God is clearly a Tory or New Labour interventionist - smiting, smiting, smiting. Always smiting the Palestinians and arming the Israelites - definitely a George Bush. The New Testament God is a bit different. Seems to be more about providing healthcare and being nice to everybody, though social services would have something to say about throwing His son out with the intention of having him crucified. A mixed report, one could say.

As for Marr - very poor indeed. He deserved this:

My Christmas message to you all

We all got a little bit heated last week, while discussing the role of bankers and politicians in destroying our economy.

I'd like to silence you (how I'd like to silence you) with a closing quotation from Thomas More's Utopia, from 1516. It's a complicated text: satirical, political, self-contradictory in places and morally complex.

But as this is a blog, I can ignore all that nuance stuff and just give you this, which I hope you agree applies to our current condition.

Hythlodaeus (who appears to represent one aspect of More's personality):

It appears to me that wherever you have private property and all men measure all things by cash values, there it is scarcely possible for a commonwealth to have justice or prosperity - unless you think justice exists where all the best things flow into the hands of the worst citizens or prosperity prevails where all is divided among very few.

When I consider and turn over in my mind the state of all commonwealths flourishing anywhere today, so help me God, I can see nothing else than a kind of conspiracy of the rich, who are aiming at their own interests under the name and title of the commonwealth. 

Weird science

Two wonderful things over on Pharyngula: the fish with a transparent head and barrel shaped eyes that located completely inside said cranium, and a link to a quiz: are your morals Biblically bona-fide? Take it now!

My result:

Your morality is 0% in line with that of the bible.

 

Damn you heathen! Your book learnin' has done warped your mind. You shall not be invited next time I sacrifice a goat.

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