The beheadings of journalists, aid workers, tourists and countless soldiers by the group calling itself the Islamic State (or Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant or Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) are noteworthy for their terrifying depravity, but also for the fact that they are staged as acts of political theater or, more accurately, video.
I've had occasion to write in this space, in a much lighter tone, about the alarming control that pictures seem to have in our lives today. Many of us find it difficult to do anything without documenting not so much the occasion — the trip to be baseball game with your children, or your visit to the Eiffel Tower — but any little event of even the least significance.
Now one might argue that pictures, in this age of the digital camera phone, have just gotten so cheap that we can afford to photograph everything. But there is more to the photo compulsion than this. For one thing — and on the "plus" side, so to speak — it's important to remember that taking a picture is not an act of documentation as much as it is a way of enhancing one's focus on an event. We snap pictures not only to see, but to see with a kind of mindfulness. Or at least see through our pictorial framing. It's important not to dismiss the photo urge. Pictures may come between us and what we depict, but they also focus the mind. My 13.7 colleague Marcelo Gleiser had some thoughts on documenting events earlier in the week.
Of course pictures do document, and part of what this means is that they can be shared, whether we ever get around to doing so or not. In some ways, then, the camera phone works a stand-in for the friends, or family, or co-workers who can't be with you where you now. This is also on the "plus" side. The camera symbolizes our caring about others and our membership in a community.
Of course, at the same time, it cuts us off from the people we are actually near or among. For instead of looking at things with them, through their eyes, we look at things through the eyes of those who are absent.
As we noticed a few weeks ago, there's nothing new in the impulse to take pictures. The Neanderthal did it, as did our direct human ancestors. The fact that nude photos of celebrities end up online is less interesting than the fact that celebrities — presumably like everybody else — are taking lots of photos of themselves.
But there is a dark side to the photo compulsion — and it has to do with the idea that if an event isn't photographed, it hasn't really happened. This probably has its source in the idea that we want what we see and experience and feel to be shared with others, or sharable with them. And so you want not only that prom date photo, but also a photo of how good one looked in the Ladies, or how happy one was on the dance floor, or smoking a cigarette and on and on. But this morphs into the anxiety that no pictures means nothing happened. Which is ludicrous. So ludicrous in fact that you really need to wonder how it is that we could fall for it.
Back to the ISIL videos. These creations bring the perverse logic of the picture to its final conclusion. These tortures and killings are done for the camera. That is, they are done, quite literally, for us.
And so there is only one thing we can do. As an act of self-defense or, indeed, as an act of war, we need to turn the lights out on these images. They must not be seen. They must not transmitted. They must be destroyed. This won't bring back the victims of these pitiless atrocities, but it will change — it will in some way reduce — the focus on the crime and, in turn, the attention on the criminals.
If we don't turn off the lights on these pictures, then we are complicit.
Thanks to the German Art Historian and theorist of pictures Horst Bredekamp for fruitful discussion of this topic.
You can keep up with more of what Alva Noë is thinking on Facebook and on Twitter: @alvanoe
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