Spectral reality, spectral feeling : photographed corporeality and the aporia of indifference

Abstract

This dissertation starts with the assumption that the photograph of real suffering incites real feeling on the basis that photography is believed to give us real information about the world. Although it appears as if photography can circumvent the issue of mediation, both Susan Sontag and Jean Baudrillard suggest that the knowledge of reality gained by the Western spectator through photography is often that of a spectral reality, whereby the viscerality of violated bodies is subsumed by virtuality. The distinction between reality and the Lacanian understanding of the Real can thus be brought to bear on photography’s capacity to represent the corporeality of violence and death and the susceptibility of this reality to derealisation. Photography’s empirical unreliability may fail to incite what is deemed to be a morally appropriate reaction to the violence the spectator is exposed to. This dissertation thus situates itself in the popular debate surrounding photography’s capacity for (de)sensitising its viewer in order to take issue with the critical treatment of the spectator’s indifference. The second movement of this dissertation thus focuses on the spectral sense of feeling elicited by the image of violence to investigate the contemporary ontology of indifference and its relation to photographed corporeality. This leads to the unsettling of the assumption that the spectator’s indifference is an anomaly which ought to be countered and for which blame can be apportioned. This dissertation argues, following Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt, that indifference to photographed violence should be considered a definitive characteristic of spectatorship and it must be understood as such if ethics is going to seriously contend with the problem of indifference. The widespread sense of indifference on the part of the spectator of photographed violence is thus reviewed through the aporetic nature of indifference and the challenges it poses to what may be called an ethics of corporeality, posited by Judith Butler and Giorgio Agamben, which relies too heavily on the supposed impact that the sight of abjection has on its viewer.