I offer the reader a series of snapshots, a quick and spontaneous look at some key events and ideas and inventions of the nineteenth century, of which there seem to be almost an endless supply. I do not intend this book as detailed history. It is rather the history of an idea, the disappearance of human essence. As the reader moves through these chapters, I hope that these stills, as they did in the nineteenth century, will begin to take on an animated life, creating a kind of moving picture with a clear narrative—that is, a more complex and flowing and continuous story about the period.
As Curtis did with Native Americans, I am trying to record a record of disappearance—no easy feat. I am trying to offer up a positive that I have developed out of a negative. The original has long since vanished. I can only click and snap, knowing full well that I am dealing with perhaps the most evanescent subject imaginable, disappearance. Jean Baudrillard, the French critic, talks about what he calls the “genealogy of disappearance.” He argues that “it’s when things disappear that you seek to verify them . . . and the more you verify, the more reality fades . . . Things present their credentials through language. But that merely holds up a mirror to their disappearance.”6 I attempt here; I try. My project is one of reconstruction and assemblage. I work with remnants and scraps of information: I am sleuthing.
As photography records shadows, this book opens just as the century dawned, in 1800, with a shadow falling across Great Britain, Europe, and America, and growing longer and longer as the years went by. The book closes with a story of a wandering young man, in a German fairy tale, who sells his shadow to a magician. In the middle looms the dark outline of the Civil War, the horrendous struggle over black and white—the substance and form of writing with light, but not the kind of ghost writing we do with the word processor. I refer to one much older, to the nineteenth-century invention called photography, also an immersion, etymologically, in writing with light: phos (light) + graphia (writing).
I have chosen as a title for this introduction “Pictures at a Deposition.” My title plays, of course, with Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, which Mussorgsky wrote in 1874 as a series of piano pieces in homage to his architect friend Viktor Hartmann. Mussorgsky intended his music to replicate the rhythm and pace of a visitor walking through the galleries of an art museum and pausing periodically to look at works of art. And while Mussorgsky’s title refers to paintings, his use of the word pictures also deliberately echoes the new technology of reproduction, the camera.
And finally, I have changed the exhibition to a deposition, shifted the scene from the gallery to the courthouse, from the painter to the policeman, from art to the art of killing. I am trying in this book to make sense out of a terribly violent and important crime scene—the murder of the human being. In a certain sense, I want to interrogate the evidence—as Sherlock Holmes or Sigmund Freud, or a perceptive art historian like Giovanni Morelli, might do—to reach the truth of things, to uncover a revealing theme from the period. I do it not for the sake of the nineteenth century alone, but for what the clues might tell us about our own time and our own condition. I do it so that we might learn something about what we are doing wrong in this period. I am troubled by the violence and terror of our own period and, by understanding it, I hope to change it.
Over the course of these pages, we are witness to a deposition, then, an inquiry about the meaning of this mass disappearance of the human being in an attempt to finger the culprit or culprits. At a deposition, witnesses give testimony under oath. We listen to what they say, and we try to determine if they are telling the truth. We do not necessarily take all witnesses at their word. We look for details and listen for alibis. We concern ourselves with consistencies and inconsistencies. This requires close reading and careful listening, and it also involves a good deal of very careful looking. Body language offers a glimpse at honesty—gestures and expressions, too. For—to continue with my controlling image—the camera does lie. It’s a recording machine, but it does indeed lie. We need to be on guard. Consider our iconic prisoner from earlier in this introduction, the one draped in his pointed hood and with electrical wires dangling from his hands.
We now know his name. Or at least we know his nickname. Thanks to an essay by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris titled “Exposure: The Woman Behind the Camera at Abu Ghraib,” in The New Yorker, we know that his captors, for some reason, called him Gilligan. Nicknames that the GIs gave their prisoners, like Claw, Shank, Mr. Clean, Slash, Thumby, and so on, made them “more like cartoon characters, which kept them comfortably unreal when it was time to mete out punishment.” And so, perhaps, we have here a passing reference to Gilligan’s Island. We also learn, according to an Army sergeant named Javal Davis, that almost “everyone in theatre had a digital camera” and sent hundreds of thousands of snapshots back home. Davis said that GIs took pictures of everything,from detainees to death. . . . I mean, when you’re surrounded by death and carnage and violence twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, it absorbs you. You walk down the street and you see a dead body on the road, whereas a couple months ago, you would have been like, “Oh, my God, a dead body,” today you’re like, “Damn, he got messed up, let’s go get something to eat.” You could watch someone running down the street burning on fire, as long as it’s not an American soldier, it’s “Somebody needs to go put that guy out.”
The star of The New Yorker piece, the one who took more pictures than anyone else, was a twenty-six-year-old specialist named Sabrina Harman, who served as an MP at Abu Ghraib. She took her pictures, she says, because she couldn’t believe the horrific assaults by MPs against the prisoners. Like her buddies, Sabrina liked to have a good time, and the camera made the torture and degradation fun. Or, at least she tried to make it so. The encounter with Gilligan turns out to be a mock electrocution—the wires carried no electricity. Gilligan knew a bit of English and so perhaps he understood they had nothing but fun and games in mind—“besides, the whole mock-electrocution business had not lasted more than ten or fifteen minutes—just long enough for a photo session.” Harman explains, “He was laughing at us towards the end of the night, maybe because he knew we couldn’t break him.” To borrow a bit of the lighthearted spirit from King Lear, “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.”
This should not surprise us, that the most iconic picture from the Iraq War is a staged one. One hears the same thing about the group of GIs raising the flag on Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima in the Second World War. The camera begs for staging and props; the photograph leaves us with a version of the truth: We must read the images with care and skepticism. Gourevitch and Morris end their essay with a cogent analysis of the immediacy of that photograph of Gilligan:The image of Gilligan achieves its power from the fact that it does not show the human form laid bare and reduced to raw matter but creates instead an original image of inhumanity that admits no immediately self-evident reading. Its fascination resides, in large part, in its mystery and inscrutability—in all that is concealed by all that it reveals. It is an image of carnival weirdness: this upright body shrouded from head to foot; those wires; that pose; and the peaked hood that carries so many vague and ghoulish associations. The pose is obviously contrived and theatrical, a deliberate invention that appears to belong to some dark ritual, a primal scene of martyrdom. The picture transfixes us because it looks like the truth, but, looking at it, we can only imagine what that truth is: torture, execution, a scene staged for the camera? So we seize on the figure of Gilligan as a symbol that stands for all that we know was wrong at Abu Ghraib and all that we cannot—or do not want to—understand about how it came to this.
We react to this photograph, Morris wants to say, in part because of the disappearance of the human form. The photograph allows us to imagine and ponder the inhumanity of human being to human being. Harman and her buddies staged it just that way because that is the situation they wanted—that’s the one they hoped for in their imagination and in the
ir mind’s eye. In a sense, it is pornographic, as much a fantasy as a prostitute in a maid’s dress or a nurse’s uniform. In a serious distortion of reality, the photograph of Gilligan gives us a more perverse look at Guantánamo than if the photograph shot the truth. Harman and her buddies did more than torture the prisoners. They tortured the truth. In their staged presentation, they offer a candid view of themselves.
How it came to this: a staged photograph, “an image of carnival weirdness.” Harman and her MP cohort saw torture as entertainment, Abu Ghraib as an amusement park, except that some poor unfortunate souls wound up losing their minds, destroyed for all time as functioning human beings. Of course, others got horribly mutilated and even died. The single iconic piece of evidence for an investigation of Abu Ghraib turns out to be a result of that instrument from the nineteenth century, a series of photographs taken with detective cameras. Entertainment, disappearance, and torture all meet at that place where human rights received a wholesale suspension, Abu Ghraib. It is the end of the road in a journey toward disappearance that begins in the nineteenth century.
ONE | What Is Life?
WITH THE ARRIVAL of the new century, in 1800, the world, like a Humpty Dumpty egg, cracked wide open. Every belief and construct that held reality together simply loosened its grip. Even that most basic of entities, the human being, gave up its old, enduring definitions and fell in line as just another construct in need of serious rethinking. The century owes that radical shift, in part, not to a scholar, but to a little known pediatrician, Charles White, who published a treatise in 1799 that took on monumental importance, titled An Account of the Regular Gradation in Man, and in Different Animals and Vegetables; and from the Former to the Latter. In his Account, White predicted that the longest lasting and most static of philosophical ideas, the Great Chain of Being, would soon give way to something much more dynamic. Though he did not yet call it by name, we know it as the theory of evolution by natural selection.
The Chain had provided a schematic on which the Church hung the entirety of God’s created universe. Everything had its assigned place on that imagined Chain, starting with God and followed by nine levels of angels, then human beings, birds, animals, and finally rocks and stones. Under the new schema, human beings would no longer occupy their elevated position. To the contrary, God did not make man in His image, as we read in Genesis, but rather man evolved through accidental and competitive forces. We shared that same kind of birth with all the other animals. In this scheme, humans might thus wind up having no higher claim in the kingdom of created things than the apes and the chimps. “The Devil under form of Baboon is our grandfather!” Darwin wrote in his notebooks in 1885. The cosmic egg had decidedly shattered, and human essence slowly disappeared.
But that was just the beginning—or, in some significant ways, the end. In hindsight, one can sense the enormity of other basic changes in the air—the railroad would move people farther and faster than they had ever gone before and, along with the cinema, would utterly destroy the way the average person experienced time and space. The human voice, disembodied from the person, would soon move long distances over a system of telephone lines. The incandescent bulb would push daylight deep into the night. The list of advances and innovations that would occur in the nineteenth century seemed endless: the telegraph (1837), the steam locomotive (1840), inexpensive photographic equipment (1840s), the transoceanic cablegram (1844), anesthesia (1846), the phonograph (1878), radio (1896), and new and cheaper methods of industrial production. The list seemed to go on and on.
If all that were not bewildering enough for ordinary people, they would confront a further revolution in technology that would change forever the way they performed the most ordinary tasks. Typewriters arrived on the market in the 1870s. Bell invented the telephone in 1876; a year later Edison invented the phonograph. Cheap eyeglasses, made of steel, first appeared in 1843, but took another three or four decades to be affordable to the masses. The 1870s and 1880s saw the discovery of radio waves, the electric motor, the National Baseball League, and dynamite. By the end of the 1880s, everyday people could buy their first Kodak cameras. Guglielmo Marconi, the Italian inventor, received his first patent in 1896, for sending radio messages. With the invention of the internal combustion engine, scores of people would soon become auto-mobile. At the same time, the time clock would gradually fix every person to a tighter schedule. Modernity, like a mighty wind, swept across England, much of Europe, and the United States, blowing aside virtually every received idea. How to cope with the overwhelming enormity of so much change at such a fundamental level?
And then the absolutely unthinkable: God would die, or at least the idea of God would cease to define common, agreed-upon experience. The Chain and its maker both disappeared. When Nietzsche wrote his obituary for God in Also Sprach Zarathustra (1887), he meant a lot of things. But one thing in particular stands out. For almost two thousand years, the Church provided the definition of the human being. All of creation lay in God’s hands, including human beings, and every stitch of nature stayed radiantly alive through God’s constant, creative support, remaking all of existence second by second. Before the nineteenth century opened, God was not just alive in nature. He filled the world with His imminent presence. By the 1880s, such thinking, at least for intellectuals, no longer had vibrancy. God had opened his hands. And men and women and children—all his creatures, really—fell out of the comfort of his grip to fend for themselves. Without God’s constant attention, the contingent, imminent life, which had burned like a small flame, went out. Science took over the task of defining human existence. It could not hold a candle—or a Bunsen burner—to the Church.
Everything—all the usual, settled parameters of people’s day-to-day lives—would present themselves, one by one, as ripe for redefinition. It was a freeing time, an exhilarating time of prolonged experimentation and occasional moments of delight. The age promised power and pleasure, growth and the transformation of the self. But it also threatened to destroy everything people knew—more fundamentally, everything they were. It prompted Karl Marx, in his 1856 speech on the anniversary of the People’s Paper, to call for a new kind of human being: “[T]he newfangled forces of society . . . only want to be mastered by newfangled men.” Nietzsche, too, responded to the changes of the period by demanding a wholly new person, what he called “the man of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow.”
As Charles White had insisted, a static and fairly secure past would have to make way for a dynamic present—to say nothing of a wildly unpredictable future. The two towering intellects of the period, Marx and Nietzsche, held a fairly dim view of the fate of humankind. For, just as with our own technological revolution today, they both recognized the negative fallout from their own machine age. In fact, some historians argue that the discipline of sociology came into being in the nineteenth century through the efforts of Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel, because all three shared a general pessimism about the downward spiral of the social order, or as Simmel more succinctly described the times, “the tragic nature of social experience.”1 In his novel Fathers and Sons (1862), the Russian Ivan Turgenev described the philosophy of his radical hero Bazarov with a new word quickly co-opted by the philosophers: nihilism. Nietzsche expanded on the idea in his Will to Power (1885) and, a few years later, in 1888, in Ecce Homo, offered his ironically upbeat strategy for surviving the new modernism: “Nothing avails, one must go forward—step by step further into decadence (that is my definition of modern ‘progress’).”
When thinking about the mounting gloom in the nineteenth century, we should keep in mind that the term historians use to describe the century’s last years, fin de siècle, came from the title of a French play by F. de Jouvenot and H. Micard. First performed in Paris on April 17, 1888, Fin de Siècle chronicles the moral degradation that had been building in the century and which culminated around 1880. The playwrights intended the term to refer to the end: the end of human beings, as we know
them, and the end of moral and spiritual progress. The play is a statement of anti-modernism, of despair and decadence, in which characters long for the good times of the past and deathly fear the horrors of the future.
Everything was up for grabs—which made the nineteenth century a period of tremendous uncertainty, or, more accurately, of indeterminacy. Lewis Carroll got it right—nobody, neither horses nor men, seemed able to put the world back together again. Even with all the prompting from Nietzsche and Marx, the future, perhaps for the first time in any significant way, began to collapse onto the present. The chasm separating now from then narrowed. No one knew what unsettling events lay ahead, what explosions might occur in traditionally familiar and stable areas, like travel, work, and recreation, but changes started coming at a faster and faster pace. The newly invented sweep-second hand kept unwinding the present until the future just seemed to disappear. The machine, without announcing itself or without, in many cases, being invited, bullied its way into the home and the office, and took charge. Nothing was off limits.
Near the end of the century, Louis and Auguste Lumière, pioneering brothers of the art form called cinema, produced a very short film titled La Charcuterie Mécanique. Louis described it this way: “We showed a sausage machine; a pig was put in at one end and the sausages came out at the other, and vice versa. My brother and I had great fun making the fictitious machine.”2 The film offers a potent allegory on mechanical production and technological innovation, the sausage machine perhaps even standing for motion picture cameras and projectors. But the brothers also joke about the way people get ground up and spit out at the whim of every new innovation and contraption. Surely, they also intended their viewers to think about the connection of swinishness with gross consumption—selfindulgence, gluttony, and materialism—and the numbing uniformity of the sausage links. Whatever the case, the Lumières do not present a very pretty or charming picture of the living and working conditions of the average person. Even with that most exuberant, most magical of all the new machines, the motion picture camera, the Lumières created what may be the first black comedy: a world of gloom and despair, in which individuals get reduced to their essence—to meat.
Unsuspecting Souls Page 3