John Horne is a PhD student in the Department of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Birmingham. His thesis is on the "Western" spectator and the "Arab Spring", with a particular focus on representations of torture.
John was recently awarded an MPhil on representations of terminal illness in contemporary visual culture and the ethics of spectatorship. It focused on the role film and photography plays in challenging or compounding public taboos around death and the social exclusion of the dying. This project originates from John’s previous work as a research assistant to Dr Michele Aaron, his supervisor, analysing a photography exhibition held by NHS West Midlands in 2009 as part of the national end of life care reforms. Two chapters based on this work are forthcoming in 2013 in separate edited collections.
John also has a strong research interest in representations of madness, especially concerning the intersections between social policy and popular culture. His MA dissertation – Entertaining Madness: Questioning the Continual Appeal of the Screen Asylum – examined cinematic depictions of psychiatric institutions across the twentieth century.
John has taught on a first-year undergraduate ‘Introduction to Film Studies’ module and both lectured on and designed the content for two topics (silent film and avant-garde cinema) on a second-year film studies module. John has also been a co-editor of the North American Studies journal 49th Parallel and the editorial assistant at the Journal of American Studies. He has also worked as a writer and community director of EA WorldView. He is currently a member of the research and advocacy organisation Bahrain Watch, and is on the steering committee of B-FILM: The Birmingham Centre for Film Studies.
This thesis is about the dying individual. The institutionalisation of death in the West has led ... more This thesis is about the dying individual. The institutionalisation of death in the West has led to increasing public unfamiliarity with the actualities and banalities of dying. Accordingly, this thesis is concerned with the place where the dying individual is most commonly encountered: visual culture. How is the dying individual seen and screened? What structures are at play in their framing? And what is the spectator’s ethical relationship with – and moreover, responsibility towards – the dying individual?
The introduction looks at imagery of dying which is used to “shock”. I then examine how, over the past century, “dying has been pushed further and further out of the perceptual world of the living” (Benjamin, 1936/2007), before turning to the use of visual culture in national health projects which seek to return the dying individual to the communal fold. I identify problems, which in turn open up new possibilities for spectatorship as an act of active citizenship and solidarity. The last two chapters consider how to foster public solidarity with the dying individual in visual culture. Through photography, then film, I examine texts which unsettle the status quo and help lay the foundations for an ethics of spectatorship in the encounter with the dying individual.
Ricarda Vidal & Maria-José Blanco (eds.) The Power of Death: Contemporary Reflections on Death in Western Society (Berghahn Press), Oct 2014
In the West today, due to institutionalisation, social exclusion and clinical objectification, th... more In the West today, due to institutionalisation, social exclusion and clinical objectification, the encounter with the dying individual is typically foreclosed and screened away from public view. This sequestration is further reinforced by barriers of taboo. Film, however, screens the dying individual for public view. This chapter seeks to unravel such an apparent contradiction by focusing on the terms of the encounter itself. As exemplified by My Life (1993), filmic dying is generally structured to alleviate the spectator's death anxiety. Spectatorship provides a safe space for the taboo to be transgressed, with moral comfort offered through narrative assurances that death can be comprehended and made meaningful. However, the spectator's price of submission to such a spectacle is the foreclosure of intersubjectivity and the forgoing of their responsibility towards the dying individual.
Turning to Emmanuel Levinas, alongside recent work on the ethics of spectatorship, this chapter argues for the significance of film as a key site for interrogating and ethically rethinking the encounter with the dying individual. Wit (2001) and Lightning Over Water (1980) are suggested as films which open up an ethical space of reflection, encouraging the spectator to consider their responsibility and recognise the objectifying potential implicit in their subject position. In Wit, the spectator is interpellated as a necessary companion to Vivian's isolated request for presence as she dies from cancer. Vivian's frequent exposure of the narrative's constructed artifice, contrasts with the totalising presumptions of the "clinical gaze" encasing her. Lightning Over Water foregrounds and accentuates Wenders' (and the spectator's) complicity as a witness to Ray's dying. The film's ontological instability where documentary and fiction collide, collude and confuse, constantly refuses a stable viewing position. Both films, by insisting upon an intersubjective encounter, open up an ethical space where responsibility towards the dying individual can, perhaps, be restored.
As Walter Benjamin once observed, capturing a state of affairs that persists to the present: “dyi... more As Walter Benjamin once observed, capturing a state of affairs that persists to the present: “dying has been pushed further and further out of the perceptual world of the living”. That is, the "perceptual world of the living", as encountered by both citizen and spectator (or citizen/spectator), presently frames the lived experience of the dying individual in a manner that maximises anybody's capacity to disregard it. Consequently, the dying individual has been demarcated as Other from the ‘living’. In this paper, I will argue for the significance of visual culture as a key site for interrogating and ethically rethinking the manner in which the dying are presently encountered. As such, I respond to current health and social policies that seek to reintegrate the dying within the community.
I will consider an exhibition run by NHS West Midlands as part of the national End of Life Care Strategy. The exhibition, held in Birmingham in July 2009, displayed locally produced photographs. Its success indicated the potential application of visual culture in overcoming social and cultural taboos around death. However, the acquisition and selection of the images, I suggest, unintentionally (indeed, unconsciously) replicated the discursive frames that presently construct the dying individual as Other. It is thus problematic if reforms, however benevolent in intent, fail to challenge the devaluation of the dying. A solution, I argue, offers itself in reconsidering the ethical potential of the citizen/spectator. A Levinasian rethinking of the encounter between citizen/spectator and dying individual seeks to challenge the complicity of the former in submitting to structures of Otherness. Accordingly, “the perceptual world of the living” can once again become home to the dying individual.
"From 'The Escaped Lunatic' (1904) to 'Shutter Island' (2010), the psychiatric institution has be... more "From 'The Escaped Lunatic' (1904) to 'Shutter Island' (2010), the psychiatric institution has been a continual presence in American cinema. This dissertation seeks to ask why. Through the study of 110 films (89 viewed), what I am calling the 'screen asylum' emerges as site where madness is both entertaining and entertained. The screen asylum encompasses the full filmic spectrum of genres, budgets, talent and intentions. By treating every appearance of the screen asylum as relevant, approaches based on questions of verisimilitude and stigma can be seen to be counterproductive.
Madness is routinely untethered from individual distress requiring treatment and the institution itself is frequently fantastical and filled with excess. The screen asylum is seen as managing the spectator's own anxieties about madness. These anxieties are socio-culturally determined, with the changing face of the screen asylum reflecting historic shifts in the actual psychiatric institution. A line of continuity, from early cinema to the present, can however be traced, wherein the imaginary is screened for view and the actual is screened from view. The screen asylum is therefore a safe space which facilitates the spectator's projection of the state of madness and protection from the fate of madness."
Images of prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib were first made public in April 2004. Nearly a decade late... more Images of prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib were first made public in April 2004. Nearly a decade later, they remain amongst the most iconic, most shocking and most discussed photographs from the so-called “War on Terror”. They offer rare visual evidence of a US policy of torture, and cruel and degrading treatment. The material impact of their exposure is reflected in the refusal of successive administrations to release further photographs, citing concerns that they would provide propaganda to America’s “enemies”.
The Abu Ghraib photographs have generated countless academic articles and critical reflections. This scholarly engagement has informed and shaped key discussions around ethics, representation, suffering and spectatorship. Although commentary by Susan Sontag (2004) and Judith Butler (2009) has been particularly influential, many leading thinkers have contemplated the ethical import of the Abu Ghraib photographs, such as Linda Williams (2010), W.J.T Mitchell (2011) and Nicholas Mirzoeff (2006). Whilst acknowledging the foundational nature of these debates, this paper seeks to challenge and unsettle the centrality of the “Abu Ghraib Spectacle” to them. Through a reading of two documentaries, it first cautions against the photographs themselves, which capture only a fragment of the abuse, and occlude the agency of the Iraqi victims. It then questions the suitability of images of actual torture as sites for ethical reflection, suggesting instead that spectatorial responsibility stems from recognising structures of repression and complicity in submitting to them.
In his (2008) documentary Standard Operating Procedure, Errol Morris challenges the spectator to recognise the limitations of looking. Through interviews, highly aestheticised reconstructions and forensic analysis, Morris unsettles both the photographic and discursive frames surrounding the most reproduced images from Abu Ghraib. Morris also highlights the gaps in the archive: the photographs destroyed or censored; the interrogations that took place away from the camera’s gaze; the images that never existed of US officials crafting policy. Alex Gerbaz (2008) has suggested that Morris’s interview technique (using the Interrotron device) offers the possibility of a Levinasian ethical encounter between spectator and Other. Gerbaz, however, takes the “face” of the Other too literally, and fails to account for the role of the Third in the encounter. I argue instead that Morris’s film ultimately entrenches a Western-centric “field of representability”, not least through omitting Iraqi voices entirely.
Martha Rosler's 1983 film, A Simple Case for Torture, uses magazine and newspaper articles to reveal the role of both media and academia in sustaining a debate on the legitimacy of torture. It offers new possibilities for unsettling the wider discursive frames around torture, without recourse to actual images of abuse. Moreover, Rosler exposes how the Spectacle fosters fantasies to counter more unpalatable content, entrenching a division between the Western “Us” who consume these images, and the non-Western “Them” who threaten to disrupt such a lifestyle. Read against the grain of the Abu Ghraib Spectacle, Rosler’s film posits an alternate, ethical, encounter with the unseen tortured Other: an encounter where the spectator is made to face up to their complicity in submitting to repressive structures.
Tin Tin Tytin (2012) is a short film made by unknown Bahraini activists. It takes place against t... more Tin Tin Tytin (2012) is a short film made by unknown Bahraini activists. It takes place against the backdrop of the Bahrain uprising, which began on February 14th 2011 and continues to this day. Circulated online and shot with inanimate objects, it dramatises the arrest, torture and death of a citizen (figured by a horn) who won’t stop honking “Tin Tin Tytin”, the coded revolutionary rhythm meaning “Down with [King] Hamad”. The narrative echoes the fate of five Bahrainis tortured to death by security forces in 2011.
Torture - “the conversion of absolute pain into the fiction of absolute power” (Scarry, 1985) - exposes the ideological vulnerability of regimes whose recourse to such brutality serves as a marker of civic illegitimacy. For many decades, countless Bahrainis have suffered physical and psychological torture. The West, especially Britain, has been historically complicit in sustaining such a system. In April 2012, former senior British police officer John Yates, hired to reform Bahrain’s security forces, dismissed allegations that torture was still occurring, remarking: “But that would be on YouTube”. Actual torture, however, is rarely captured on camera.
Whilst the spectator’s exposure to real suffering has, with caveats, been advanced as an ethical, necessary, act (Sontag, 2003; Chouliaraki, 2006), this paper contends that torture unsettles such assumptions, finding value in fictional and symbolic representation. Footage of torture may offer evidentiary value, however the spectator will always-already be aligned with structures of repression, framing the encounter on the torturer’s terms. Using Tin Tin Tytin, this paper argues that the ethical act is not one of witnessing the suffering body, but rather recognising the structures that oppress it. The horn’s constant refrain creates a continual appeal to the spectator to think beyond the torturer’s framing. The film both represents repression and reveals how vulnerable to exposure repressive ideology can be.
Cinema has been generally neglected in accounts of the psychiatric institution; silent film even ... more Cinema has been generally neglected in accounts of the psychiatric institution; silent film even more so. Whilst major figures, such as D.W. Griffith, Buster Keaton and Lon Chaney, are central to early representations, their respective films have been seldom discussed and never considered together. This paper aims to restore the visibility of silent representations and argue for their significance to both early cinema and popular conceptions of the psychiatric space.
Following 'The Escaped Lunatic' (1904), the screen asylum offered the promise of containing madness, a force threatening both social and narrative stability. In films such as 'Good Night, Nurse' (1918) and 'The Monster' (1925), the asylum frames a space of unbounded potential, both comic and horrific. Characters give madness material form through physical difference and the exhibitionist performance of irrational acts. Accordingly, the asylum interior provided a haven for what Gunning (1995) terms the "cinema of attractions" to go underground. Here, the outward projection of spectacle dominates over narrative absorption, entertaining the spectator through a "series of visual shocks".
Whilst cinema was projecting the screen asylum as a site of entertainment, conditions in public institutions were far from pleasurable. The early twentieth century saw patients subject to overcrowding, abuse and sometimes sterilization. Furthermore, somatic therapies developed in the 1920s sought to shock patients in a manner similar to the screen asylum's treatment of its spectators. This paper, then, seeks to locate the spectator as a social actor and question the ethical nature of their entanglement in the asylum spectacle.
As Walter Benjamin once observed, capturing a state of affairs that persists to the present: “dyi... more As Walter Benjamin once observed, capturing a state of affairs that persists to the present: “dying has been pushed further and further out of the perceptual world of the living”. That is, the "perceptual world of the living", as encountered by both citizen and spectator (or citizen/spectator), presently frames the lived experience of the dying individual in a manner that maximises anybody's capacity to disregard it. Consequently, the dying individual has been demarcated as other from the ‘living’. In this paper, I will argue for the significance of visual culture as a key site for interrogating and ethically rethinking the manner in which the dying are presently encountered. As such, I respond to current health and social policies that seek to reintegrate the dying within the community.
I will consider an exhibition run by NHS West Midlands as part of the national End of Life Care Strategy. The exhibition, held in Birmingham in July 2009, displayed locally produced photographs. Its success indicated the potential application of visual culture in overcoming social and cultural taboos around death. However, the acquisition and selection of the images, I suggest, unintentionally (indeed, unconsciously) replicated the discursive frames that presently construct the dying individual as other. It is thus problematic if reforms, however benevolent in intent, fail to challenge the devaluation of the dying. A solution, I argue, offers itself in reconsidering the ethical potential of the citizen/spectator. A Levinasian rethinking of the encounter between citizen/spectator and dying individual seeks to challenge the complicity of the former in submitting to structures of otherness. Accordingly, “the perceptual world of the living” can once again become home to the dying individual.
As Benjamin (1936/1968) once observed, capturing a state of affairs that persists to the present:... more As Benjamin (1936/1968) once observed, capturing a state of affairs that persists to the present: “dying has been pushed further and further out of the perceptual world of the living”. This absence has been further compounded by the excessive medicalisation of the natural death, with its tendency to exorcise the subjectivity of the dying individual from clinical consideration. Put another way: the lived experience of the dying individual is currently framed by society in a manner that maximises anyone's capacity to disregard it.
In this paper, I will argue for the significance of the filmic representation of the dying individual as a key site for interrogating and ethically rethinking the manner in which the dying are presently encountered within “the perceptual world of the living”. As such, I respond to current health and social policies that seeks to reintegrate the dying within the community. Following Baumann’s (1993) call for an ethics which “readmits the Other as a neighbour”, I caution against strategies that are orientated towards accommodation rather than equality. Such approaches, however benevolent in intent, risk perpetuating the social devaluation of the dying by failing to address the objectifying discourse which presently constructs them as different from the ‘living’.
Cinema presents itself as a place where the responsibility of the individual towards the dying other can be questioned. This is not simply the spectator’s responsibility of presence, but the necessary recognition of the objectifying potential implicit in their subject position. Accordingly, I will consider recent scholarship in the ethics of spectatorship and its application of Levinas’s thought (Aaron, 2007; Downing & Saxton, 2010). Levinas stresses the ungraspable subjective presence of the other and warns against the tendency of the self to constitute the other within a totalising discourse. In emphasising the intersubjective and contractual nature of spectatorship, Aaron identifies the ethical encounter as one that generates reflection, encouraging the spectator to consider the responsibility of their response to the other. I will turn to Lightning Over Water (1980) and Wit (2001) as texts which engender precisely this ethical spectatorship.
In Wit, the spectator is interpellated as a necessary companion to Vivan’s isolated request for presence. They are made aware of the incomplete nature of their gaze, through the texts frequent exposure of its dramatic artifice. This is contrasted by the totalising presumptions of the “clinical gaze” encasing Vivian, which considers her an interesting research subject rather than a subjective presence. Lightning Over Water foregrounds and accentuates Wenders’s, and the spectator's, complicity as a witness to Ray's dying. The film’s ontological instability, where documentary and fiction collide, confuse and collude, refuses a stable viewing position. However, Ray’s performance as/of a dying man requires a viewer, for without a witness his actions are worthless. Spectatorship, whilst ethically charged, becomes a performative act, posthumously producing the ungraspable experience of Ray’s existence. In insisting upon an authentically intersubjective encounter, both texts therefore place the onus on the spectator to consider their responsibility in ensuring the unfettered nature of this exchange.
In contemporary society, suicide still retains the power of taboo, often seen as a selfish and co... more In contemporary society, suicide still retains the power of taboo, often seen as a selfish and cowardly act. In an institution as ideologically conformist and concerned with machismo as the police force, that taboo is strongly enforced. The loss of any officer creates a crisis which is typically resolved through an excessive public display of police unity, however this remembrance is generally denied to the policeman who takes his own life. An understanding of this is informed by relevant discussions concerning death within institutions, individual role constriction, mourning and working-through, areas that can be informed in turn by a study of screen presentations of police suicide.
Fictional police characters appear within a wide spectrum of permitted psychological behaviour, from the highs of reckless self-endangerment to the lows of depressive loneliness. Suicide, however, exists outside the boundaries of this acceptable representation and accordingly is seldom seen. An analysis of those films and television series where police suicide is portrayed can therefore be instructive. By focusing on how the dead are - or aren't - remembered, patterns emerge regarding the ways in which the crisis of representation, triggered by the death, is resolved. Cinematic examples tend to treat the death structurally and symbolically in ways that reinforce and reinscribe the cultural taboo. Conversely, on the small screen, commercial concerns and televisual form can provide the opportunity and the space for the dead to be portrayed and remembered as individuals.
Bahrain's Uprising: Resistance and Repression in the Gulf (Edited Book), 2015
The 2011 uprisings that started in Tunisia and swept across the region have been extensively co... more The 2011 uprisings that started in Tunisia and swept across the region have been extensively covered, but until now the Gulf island of Bahrain has almost been forgotten from the narration of events that have dramatically changed the region. Bahrain's Uprising examines the ongoing protests and the state’s repression, revealing a sophisticated society shaped by its political struggle against a reactionary ruling elite that see’s the island as the bounty of conquest. The regime survived largely through foreign political and economic patronage, notably from Britain, America, and Saudi Arabia – a patronage so deep, that the island became the first immediate target of the Arab Spring’s counter-revolutionary mobilisation that continues today. The book explores the contentious politics of Bahrain, and charts the way in which a dynamic culture of street protest, a strong moral belief in legitimate democratic demands and creative forms of resistance continue to hamper the efforts of the ruling elite to rebrand itself as a liberal, modernising monarchy. Drawing on powerful testimonies, interviews and conversations from those involved, this broad collection of writings provides a rarely heard voice for the lived experiences of Bahrainis and the research of young scholars studying them. From the trial speech by one of the most prominent political leaders of the uprising, to the evocative prose of an imprisoned poet, the book harnesses the power of storytelling, to lead into scholarly articles that address the themes of space, social movements, postcolonialism, social media, and the role of foreign patrons. Published on the eve of the 2016 bicentenary of British-Bahrain relations, the book in particular focuses on the role of the British government, together showing the depth of historical grievance beyond the sectarian narrative that has come to define the limited reporting of events in the country. Bahrain’s Uprising provides a powerful insight into the Arab Spring's forgotten front, and will be of lasting value not only to scholars and students of the Middle East, but also to activists seeking to learn from, and build upon, Bahrain history and the uprising's legacy.
This thesis is about the dying individual. The institutionalisation of death in the West has led ... more This thesis is about the dying individual. The institutionalisation of death in the West has led to increasing public unfamiliarity with the actualities and banalities of dying. Accordingly, this thesis is concerned with the place where the dying individual is most commonly encountered: visual culture. How is the dying individual seen and screened? What structures are at play in their framing? And what is the spectator’s ethical relationship with – and moreover, responsibility towards – the dying individual?
The introduction looks at imagery of dying which is used to “shock”. I then examine how, over the past century, “dying has been pushed further and further out of the perceptual world of the living” (Benjamin, 1936/2007), before turning to the use of visual culture in national health projects which seek to return the dying individual to the communal fold. I identify problems, which in turn open up new possibilities for spectatorship as an act of active citizenship and solidarity. The last two chapters consider how to foster public solidarity with the dying individual in visual culture. Through photography, then film, I examine texts which unsettle the status quo and help lay the foundations for an ethics of spectatorship in the encounter with the dying individual.
Ricarda Vidal & Maria-José Blanco (eds.) The Power of Death: Contemporary Reflections on Death in Western Society (Berghahn Press), Oct 2014
In the West today, due to institutionalisation, social exclusion and clinical objectification, th... more In the West today, due to institutionalisation, social exclusion and clinical objectification, the encounter with the dying individual is typically foreclosed and screened away from public view. This sequestration is further reinforced by barriers of taboo. Film, however, screens the dying individual for public view. This chapter seeks to unravel such an apparent contradiction by focusing on the terms of the encounter itself. As exemplified by My Life (1993), filmic dying is generally structured to alleviate the spectator's death anxiety. Spectatorship provides a safe space for the taboo to be transgressed, with moral comfort offered through narrative assurances that death can be comprehended and made meaningful. However, the spectator's price of submission to such a spectacle is the foreclosure of intersubjectivity and the forgoing of their responsibility towards the dying individual.
Turning to Emmanuel Levinas, alongside recent work on the ethics of spectatorship, this chapter argues for the significance of film as a key site for interrogating and ethically rethinking the encounter with the dying individual. Wit (2001) and Lightning Over Water (1980) are suggested as films which open up an ethical space of reflection, encouraging the spectator to consider their responsibility and recognise the objectifying potential implicit in their subject position. In Wit, the spectator is interpellated as a necessary companion to Vivian's isolated request for presence as she dies from cancer. Vivian's frequent exposure of the narrative's constructed artifice, contrasts with the totalising presumptions of the "clinical gaze" encasing her. Lightning Over Water foregrounds and accentuates Wenders' (and the spectator's) complicity as a witness to Ray's dying. The film's ontological instability where documentary and fiction collide, collude and confuse, constantly refuses a stable viewing position. Both films, by insisting upon an intersubjective encounter, open up an ethical space where responsibility towards the dying individual can, perhaps, be restored.
As Walter Benjamin once observed, capturing a state of affairs that persists to the present: “dyi... more As Walter Benjamin once observed, capturing a state of affairs that persists to the present: “dying has been pushed further and further out of the perceptual world of the living”. That is, the "perceptual world of the living", as encountered by both citizen and spectator (or citizen/spectator), presently frames the lived experience of the dying individual in a manner that maximises anybody's capacity to disregard it. Consequently, the dying individual has been demarcated as Other from the ‘living’. In this paper, I will argue for the significance of visual culture as a key site for interrogating and ethically rethinking the manner in which the dying are presently encountered. As such, I respond to current health and social policies that seek to reintegrate the dying within the community.
I will consider an exhibition run by NHS West Midlands as part of the national End of Life Care Strategy. The exhibition, held in Birmingham in July 2009, displayed locally produced photographs. Its success indicated the potential application of visual culture in overcoming social and cultural taboos around death. However, the acquisition and selection of the images, I suggest, unintentionally (indeed, unconsciously) replicated the discursive frames that presently construct the dying individual as Other. It is thus problematic if reforms, however benevolent in intent, fail to challenge the devaluation of the dying. A solution, I argue, offers itself in reconsidering the ethical potential of the citizen/spectator. A Levinasian rethinking of the encounter between citizen/spectator and dying individual seeks to challenge the complicity of the former in submitting to structures of Otherness. Accordingly, “the perceptual world of the living” can once again become home to the dying individual.
"From 'The Escaped Lunatic' (1904) to 'Shutter Island' (2010), the psychiatric institution has be... more "From 'The Escaped Lunatic' (1904) to 'Shutter Island' (2010), the psychiatric institution has been a continual presence in American cinema. This dissertation seeks to ask why. Through the study of 110 films (89 viewed), what I am calling the 'screen asylum' emerges as site where madness is both entertaining and entertained. The screen asylum encompasses the full filmic spectrum of genres, budgets, talent and intentions. By treating every appearance of the screen asylum as relevant, approaches based on questions of verisimilitude and stigma can be seen to be counterproductive.
Madness is routinely untethered from individual distress requiring treatment and the institution itself is frequently fantastical and filled with excess. The screen asylum is seen as managing the spectator's own anxieties about madness. These anxieties are socio-culturally determined, with the changing face of the screen asylum reflecting historic shifts in the actual psychiatric institution. A line of continuity, from early cinema to the present, can however be traced, wherein the imaginary is screened for view and the actual is screened from view. The screen asylum is therefore a safe space which facilitates the spectator's projection of the state of madness and protection from the fate of madness."
Images of prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib were first made public in April 2004. Nearly a decade late... more Images of prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib were first made public in April 2004. Nearly a decade later, they remain amongst the most iconic, most shocking and most discussed photographs from the so-called “War on Terror”. They offer rare visual evidence of a US policy of torture, and cruel and degrading treatment. The material impact of their exposure is reflected in the refusal of successive administrations to release further photographs, citing concerns that they would provide propaganda to America’s “enemies”.
The Abu Ghraib photographs have generated countless academic articles and critical reflections. This scholarly engagement has informed and shaped key discussions around ethics, representation, suffering and spectatorship. Although commentary by Susan Sontag (2004) and Judith Butler (2009) has been particularly influential, many leading thinkers have contemplated the ethical import of the Abu Ghraib photographs, such as Linda Williams (2010), W.J.T Mitchell (2011) and Nicholas Mirzoeff (2006). Whilst acknowledging the foundational nature of these debates, this paper seeks to challenge and unsettle the centrality of the “Abu Ghraib Spectacle” to them. Through a reading of two documentaries, it first cautions against the photographs themselves, which capture only a fragment of the abuse, and occlude the agency of the Iraqi victims. It then questions the suitability of images of actual torture as sites for ethical reflection, suggesting instead that spectatorial responsibility stems from recognising structures of repression and complicity in submitting to them.
In his (2008) documentary Standard Operating Procedure, Errol Morris challenges the spectator to recognise the limitations of looking. Through interviews, highly aestheticised reconstructions and forensic analysis, Morris unsettles both the photographic and discursive frames surrounding the most reproduced images from Abu Ghraib. Morris also highlights the gaps in the archive: the photographs destroyed or censored; the interrogations that took place away from the camera’s gaze; the images that never existed of US officials crafting policy. Alex Gerbaz (2008) has suggested that Morris’s interview technique (using the Interrotron device) offers the possibility of a Levinasian ethical encounter between spectator and Other. Gerbaz, however, takes the “face” of the Other too literally, and fails to account for the role of the Third in the encounter. I argue instead that Morris’s film ultimately entrenches a Western-centric “field of representability”, not least through omitting Iraqi voices entirely.
Martha Rosler's 1983 film, A Simple Case for Torture, uses magazine and newspaper articles to reveal the role of both media and academia in sustaining a debate on the legitimacy of torture. It offers new possibilities for unsettling the wider discursive frames around torture, without recourse to actual images of abuse. Moreover, Rosler exposes how the Spectacle fosters fantasies to counter more unpalatable content, entrenching a division between the Western “Us” who consume these images, and the non-Western “Them” who threaten to disrupt such a lifestyle. Read against the grain of the Abu Ghraib Spectacle, Rosler’s film posits an alternate, ethical, encounter with the unseen tortured Other: an encounter where the spectator is made to face up to their complicity in submitting to repressive structures.
Tin Tin Tytin (2012) is a short film made by unknown Bahraini activists. It takes place against t... more Tin Tin Tytin (2012) is a short film made by unknown Bahraini activists. It takes place against the backdrop of the Bahrain uprising, which began on February 14th 2011 and continues to this day. Circulated online and shot with inanimate objects, it dramatises the arrest, torture and death of a citizen (figured by a horn) who won’t stop honking “Tin Tin Tytin”, the coded revolutionary rhythm meaning “Down with [King] Hamad”. The narrative echoes the fate of five Bahrainis tortured to death by security forces in 2011.
Torture - “the conversion of absolute pain into the fiction of absolute power” (Scarry, 1985) - exposes the ideological vulnerability of regimes whose recourse to such brutality serves as a marker of civic illegitimacy. For many decades, countless Bahrainis have suffered physical and psychological torture. The West, especially Britain, has been historically complicit in sustaining such a system. In April 2012, former senior British police officer John Yates, hired to reform Bahrain’s security forces, dismissed allegations that torture was still occurring, remarking: “But that would be on YouTube”. Actual torture, however, is rarely captured on camera.
Whilst the spectator’s exposure to real suffering has, with caveats, been advanced as an ethical, necessary, act (Sontag, 2003; Chouliaraki, 2006), this paper contends that torture unsettles such assumptions, finding value in fictional and symbolic representation. Footage of torture may offer evidentiary value, however the spectator will always-already be aligned with structures of repression, framing the encounter on the torturer’s terms. Using Tin Tin Tytin, this paper argues that the ethical act is not one of witnessing the suffering body, but rather recognising the structures that oppress it. The horn’s constant refrain creates a continual appeal to the spectator to think beyond the torturer’s framing. The film both represents repression and reveals how vulnerable to exposure repressive ideology can be.
Cinema has been generally neglected in accounts of the psychiatric institution; silent film even ... more Cinema has been generally neglected in accounts of the psychiatric institution; silent film even more so. Whilst major figures, such as D.W. Griffith, Buster Keaton and Lon Chaney, are central to early representations, their respective films have been seldom discussed and never considered together. This paper aims to restore the visibility of silent representations and argue for their significance to both early cinema and popular conceptions of the psychiatric space.
Following 'The Escaped Lunatic' (1904), the screen asylum offered the promise of containing madness, a force threatening both social and narrative stability. In films such as 'Good Night, Nurse' (1918) and 'The Monster' (1925), the asylum frames a space of unbounded potential, both comic and horrific. Characters give madness material form through physical difference and the exhibitionist performance of irrational acts. Accordingly, the asylum interior provided a haven for what Gunning (1995) terms the "cinema of attractions" to go underground. Here, the outward projection of spectacle dominates over narrative absorption, entertaining the spectator through a "series of visual shocks".
Whilst cinema was projecting the screen asylum as a site of entertainment, conditions in public institutions were far from pleasurable. The early twentieth century saw patients subject to overcrowding, abuse and sometimes sterilization. Furthermore, somatic therapies developed in the 1920s sought to shock patients in a manner similar to the screen asylum's treatment of its spectators. This paper, then, seeks to locate the spectator as a social actor and question the ethical nature of their entanglement in the asylum spectacle.
As Walter Benjamin once observed, capturing a state of affairs that persists to the present: “dyi... more As Walter Benjamin once observed, capturing a state of affairs that persists to the present: “dying has been pushed further and further out of the perceptual world of the living”. That is, the "perceptual world of the living", as encountered by both citizen and spectator (or citizen/spectator), presently frames the lived experience of the dying individual in a manner that maximises anybody's capacity to disregard it. Consequently, the dying individual has been demarcated as other from the ‘living’. In this paper, I will argue for the significance of visual culture as a key site for interrogating and ethically rethinking the manner in which the dying are presently encountered. As such, I respond to current health and social policies that seek to reintegrate the dying within the community.
I will consider an exhibition run by NHS West Midlands as part of the national End of Life Care Strategy. The exhibition, held in Birmingham in July 2009, displayed locally produced photographs. Its success indicated the potential application of visual culture in overcoming social and cultural taboos around death. However, the acquisition and selection of the images, I suggest, unintentionally (indeed, unconsciously) replicated the discursive frames that presently construct the dying individual as other. It is thus problematic if reforms, however benevolent in intent, fail to challenge the devaluation of the dying. A solution, I argue, offers itself in reconsidering the ethical potential of the citizen/spectator. A Levinasian rethinking of the encounter between citizen/spectator and dying individual seeks to challenge the complicity of the former in submitting to structures of otherness. Accordingly, “the perceptual world of the living” can once again become home to the dying individual.
As Benjamin (1936/1968) once observed, capturing a state of affairs that persists to the present:... more As Benjamin (1936/1968) once observed, capturing a state of affairs that persists to the present: “dying has been pushed further and further out of the perceptual world of the living”. This absence has been further compounded by the excessive medicalisation of the natural death, with its tendency to exorcise the subjectivity of the dying individual from clinical consideration. Put another way: the lived experience of the dying individual is currently framed by society in a manner that maximises anyone's capacity to disregard it.
In this paper, I will argue for the significance of the filmic representation of the dying individual as a key site for interrogating and ethically rethinking the manner in which the dying are presently encountered within “the perceptual world of the living”. As such, I respond to current health and social policies that seeks to reintegrate the dying within the community. Following Baumann’s (1993) call for an ethics which “readmits the Other as a neighbour”, I caution against strategies that are orientated towards accommodation rather than equality. Such approaches, however benevolent in intent, risk perpetuating the social devaluation of the dying by failing to address the objectifying discourse which presently constructs them as different from the ‘living’.
Cinema presents itself as a place where the responsibility of the individual towards the dying other can be questioned. This is not simply the spectator’s responsibility of presence, but the necessary recognition of the objectifying potential implicit in their subject position. Accordingly, I will consider recent scholarship in the ethics of spectatorship and its application of Levinas’s thought (Aaron, 2007; Downing & Saxton, 2010). Levinas stresses the ungraspable subjective presence of the other and warns against the tendency of the self to constitute the other within a totalising discourse. In emphasising the intersubjective and contractual nature of spectatorship, Aaron identifies the ethical encounter as one that generates reflection, encouraging the spectator to consider the responsibility of their response to the other. I will turn to Lightning Over Water (1980) and Wit (2001) as texts which engender precisely this ethical spectatorship.
In Wit, the spectator is interpellated as a necessary companion to Vivan’s isolated request for presence. They are made aware of the incomplete nature of their gaze, through the texts frequent exposure of its dramatic artifice. This is contrasted by the totalising presumptions of the “clinical gaze” encasing Vivian, which considers her an interesting research subject rather than a subjective presence. Lightning Over Water foregrounds and accentuates Wenders’s, and the spectator's, complicity as a witness to Ray's dying. The film’s ontological instability, where documentary and fiction collide, confuse and collude, refuses a stable viewing position. However, Ray’s performance as/of a dying man requires a viewer, for without a witness his actions are worthless. Spectatorship, whilst ethically charged, becomes a performative act, posthumously producing the ungraspable experience of Ray’s existence. In insisting upon an authentically intersubjective encounter, both texts therefore place the onus on the spectator to consider their responsibility in ensuring the unfettered nature of this exchange.
In contemporary society, suicide still retains the power of taboo, often seen as a selfish and co... more In contemporary society, suicide still retains the power of taboo, often seen as a selfish and cowardly act. In an institution as ideologically conformist and concerned with machismo as the police force, that taboo is strongly enforced. The loss of any officer creates a crisis which is typically resolved through an excessive public display of police unity, however this remembrance is generally denied to the policeman who takes his own life. An understanding of this is informed by relevant discussions concerning death within institutions, individual role constriction, mourning and working-through, areas that can be informed in turn by a study of screen presentations of police suicide.
Fictional police characters appear within a wide spectrum of permitted psychological behaviour, from the highs of reckless self-endangerment to the lows of depressive loneliness. Suicide, however, exists outside the boundaries of this acceptable representation and accordingly is seldom seen. An analysis of those films and television series where police suicide is portrayed can therefore be instructive. By focusing on how the dead are - or aren't - remembered, patterns emerge regarding the ways in which the crisis of representation, triggered by the death, is resolved. Cinematic examples tend to treat the death structurally and symbolically in ways that reinforce and reinscribe the cultural taboo. Conversely, on the small screen, commercial concerns and televisual form can provide the opportunity and the space for the dead to be portrayed and remembered as individuals.
Bahrain's Uprising: Resistance and Repression in the Gulf (Edited Book), 2015
The 2011 uprisings that started in Tunisia and swept across the region have been extensively co... more The 2011 uprisings that started in Tunisia and swept across the region have been extensively covered, but until now the Gulf island of Bahrain has almost been forgotten from the narration of events that have dramatically changed the region. Bahrain's Uprising examines the ongoing protests and the state’s repression, revealing a sophisticated society shaped by its political struggle against a reactionary ruling elite that see’s the island as the bounty of conquest. The regime survived largely through foreign political and economic patronage, notably from Britain, America, and Saudi Arabia – a patronage so deep, that the island became the first immediate target of the Arab Spring’s counter-revolutionary mobilisation that continues today. The book explores the contentious politics of Bahrain, and charts the way in which a dynamic culture of street protest, a strong moral belief in legitimate democratic demands and creative forms of resistance continue to hamper the efforts of the ruling elite to rebrand itself as a liberal, modernising monarchy. Drawing on powerful testimonies, interviews and conversations from those involved, this broad collection of writings provides a rarely heard voice for the lived experiences of Bahrainis and the research of young scholars studying them. From the trial speech by one of the most prominent political leaders of the uprising, to the evocative prose of an imprisoned poet, the book harnesses the power of storytelling, to lead into scholarly articles that address the themes of space, social movements, postcolonialism, social media, and the role of foreign patrons. Published on the eve of the 2016 bicentenary of British-Bahrain relations, the book in particular focuses on the role of the British government, together showing the depth of historical grievance beyond the sectarian narrative that has come to define the limited reporting of events in the country. Bahrain’s Uprising provides a powerful insight into the Arab Spring's forgotten front, and will be of lasting value not only to scholars and students of the Middle East, but also to activists seeking to learn from, and build upon, Bahrain history and the uprising's legacy.
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Papers by John Horne
The introduction looks at imagery of dying which is used to “shock”. I then examine how, over the past century, “dying has been pushed further and further out of the perceptual world of the living” (Benjamin, 1936/2007), before turning to the use of visual culture in national health projects which seek to return the dying individual to the communal fold. I identify problems, which in turn open up new possibilities for spectatorship as an act of active citizenship and solidarity. The last two chapters consider how to foster public solidarity with the dying individual in visual culture. Through photography, then film, I examine texts which unsettle the status quo and help lay the foundations for an ethics of spectatorship in the encounter with the dying individual.
Turning to Emmanuel Levinas, alongside recent work on the ethics of spectatorship, this chapter argues for the significance of film as a key site for interrogating and ethically rethinking the encounter with the dying individual. Wit (2001) and Lightning Over Water (1980) are suggested as films which open up an ethical space of reflection, encouraging the spectator to consider their responsibility and recognise the objectifying potential implicit in their subject position. In Wit, the spectator is interpellated as a necessary companion to Vivian's isolated request for presence as she dies from cancer. Vivian's frequent exposure of the narrative's constructed artifice, contrasts with the totalising presumptions of the "clinical gaze" encasing her. Lightning Over Water foregrounds and accentuates Wenders' (and the spectator's) complicity as a witness to Ray's dying. The film's ontological instability where documentary and fiction collide, collude and confuse, constantly refuses a stable viewing position. Both films, by insisting upon an intersubjective encounter, open up an ethical space where responsibility towards the dying individual can, perhaps, be restored.
I will consider an exhibition run by NHS West Midlands as part of the national End of Life Care Strategy. The exhibition, held in Birmingham in July 2009, displayed locally produced photographs. Its success indicated the potential application of visual culture in overcoming social and cultural taboos around death. However, the acquisition and selection of the images, I suggest, unintentionally (indeed, unconsciously) replicated the discursive frames that presently construct the dying individual as Other. It is thus problematic if reforms, however benevolent in intent, fail to challenge the devaluation of the dying. A solution, I argue, offers itself in reconsidering the ethical potential of the citizen/spectator. A Levinasian rethinking of the encounter between citizen/spectator and dying individual seeks to challenge the complicity of the former in submitting to structures of Otherness. Accordingly, “the perceptual world of the living” can once again become home to the dying individual.
Madness is routinely untethered from individual distress requiring treatment and the institution itself is frequently fantastical and filled with excess. The screen asylum is seen as managing the spectator's own anxieties about madness. These anxieties are socio-culturally determined, with the changing face of the screen asylum reflecting historic shifts in the actual psychiatric institution. A line of continuity, from early cinema to the present, can however be traced, wherein the imaginary is screened for view and the actual is screened from view. The screen asylum is therefore a safe space which facilitates the spectator's projection of the state of madness and protection from the fate of madness."
Talks by John Horne
The Abu Ghraib photographs have generated countless academic articles and critical reflections. This scholarly engagement has informed and shaped key discussions around ethics, representation, suffering and spectatorship. Although commentary by Susan Sontag (2004) and Judith Butler (2009) has been particularly influential, many leading thinkers have contemplated the ethical import of the Abu Ghraib photographs, such as Linda Williams (2010), W.J.T Mitchell (2011) and Nicholas Mirzoeff (2006). Whilst acknowledging the foundational nature of these debates, this paper seeks to challenge and unsettle the centrality of the “Abu Ghraib Spectacle” to them. Through a reading of two documentaries, it first cautions against the photographs themselves, which capture only a fragment of the abuse, and occlude the agency of the Iraqi victims. It then questions the suitability of images of actual torture as sites for ethical reflection, suggesting instead that spectatorial responsibility stems from recognising structures of repression and complicity in submitting to them.
In his (2008) documentary Standard Operating Procedure, Errol Morris challenges the spectator to recognise the limitations of looking. Through interviews, highly aestheticised reconstructions and forensic analysis, Morris unsettles both the photographic and discursive frames surrounding the most reproduced images from Abu Ghraib. Morris also highlights the gaps in the archive: the photographs destroyed or censored; the interrogations that took place away from the camera’s gaze; the images that never existed of US officials crafting policy. Alex Gerbaz (2008) has suggested that Morris’s interview technique (using the Interrotron device) offers the possibility of a Levinasian ethical encounter between spectator and Other. Gerbaz, however, takes the “face” of the Other too literally, and fails to account for the role of the Third in the encounter. I argue instead that Morris’s film ultimately entrenches a Western-centric “field of representability”, not least through omitting Iraqi voices entirely.
Martha Rosler's 1983 film, A Simple Case for Torture, uses magazine and newspaper articles to reveal the role of both media and academia in sustaining a debate on the legitimacy of torture. It offers new possibilities for unsettling the wider discursive frames around torture, without recourse to actual images of abuse. Moreover, Rosler exposes how the Spectacle fosters fantasies to counter more unpalatable content, entrenching a division between the Western “Us” who consume these images, and the non-Western “Them” who threaten to disrupt such a lifestyle. Read against the grain of the Abu Ghraib Spectacle, Rosler’s film posits an alternate, ethical, encounter with the unseen tortured Other: an encounter where the spectator is made to face up to their complicity in submitting to repressive structures.
Torture - “the conversion of absolute pain into the fiction of absolute power” (Scarry, 1985) - exposes the ideological vulnerability of regimes whose recourse to such brutality serves as a marker of civic illegitimacy. For many decades, countless Bahrainis have suffered physical and psychological torture. The West, especially Britain, has been historically complicit in sustaining such a system. In April 2012, former senior British police officer John Yates, hired to reform Bahrain’s security forces, dismissed allegations that torture was still occurring, remarking: “But that would be on YouTube”. Actual torture, however, is rarely captured on camera.
Whilst the spectator’s exposure to real suffering has, with caveats, been advanced as an ethical, necessary, act (Sontag, 2003; Chouliaraki, 2006), this paper contends that torture unsettles such assumptions, finding value in fictional and symbolic representation. Footage of torture may offer evidentiary value, however the spectator will always-already be aligned with structures of repression, framing the encounter on the torturer’s terms. Using Tin Tin Tytin, this paper argues that the ethical act is not one of witnessing the suffering body, but rather recognising the structures that oppress it. The horn’s constant refrain creates a continual appeal to the spectator to think beyond the torturer’s framing. The film both represents repression and reveals how vulnerable to exposure repressive ideology can be.
Following 'The Escaped Lunatic' (1904), the screen asylum offered the promise of containing madness, a force threatening both social and narrative stability. In films such as 'Good Night, Nurse' (1918) and 'The Monster' (1925), the asylum frames a space of unbounded potential, both comic and horrific. Characters give madness material form through physical difference and the exhibitionist performance of irrational acts. Accordingly, the asylum interior provided a haven for what Gunning (1995) terms the "cinema of attractions" to go underground. Here, the outward projection of spectacle dominates over narrative absorption, entertaining the spectator through a "series of visual shocks".
Whilst cinema was projecting the screen asylum as a site of entertainment, conditions in public institutions were far from pleasurable. The early twentieth century saw patients subject to overcrowding, abuse and sometimes sterilization. Furthermore, somatic therapies developed in the 1920s sought to shock patients in a manner similar to the screen asylum's treatment of its spectators. This paper, then, seeks to locate the spectator as a social actor and question the ethical nature of their entanglement in the asylum spectacle.
I will consider an exhibition run by NHS West Midlands as part of the national End of Life Care Strategy. The exhibition, held in Birmingham in July 2009, displayed locally produced photographs. Its success indicated the potential application of visual culture in overcoming social and cultural taboos around death. However, the acquisition and selection of the images, I suggest, unintentionally (indeed, unconsciously) replicated the discursive frames that presently construct the dying individual as other. It is thus problematic if reforms, however benevolent in intent, fail to challenge the devaluation of the dying. A solution, I argue, offers itself in reconsidering the ethical potential of the citizen/spectator. A Levinasian rethinking of the encounter between citizen/spectator and dying individual seeks to challenge the complicity of the former in submitting to structures of otherness. Accordingly, “the perceptual world of the living” can once again become home to the dying individual.
In this paper, I will argue for the significance of the filmic representation of the dying individual as a key site for interrogating and ethically rethinking the manner in which the dying are presently encountered within “the perceptual world of the living”. As such, I respond to current health and social policies that seeks to reintegrate the dying within the community. Following Baumann’s (1993) call for an ethics which “readmits the Other as a neighbour”, I caution against strategies that are orientated towards accommodation rather than equality. Such approaches, however benevolent in intent, risk perpetuating the social devaluation of the dying by failing to address the objectifying discourse which presently constructs them as different from the ‘living’.
Cinema presents itself as a place where the responsibility of the individual towards the dying other can be questioned. This is not simply the spectator’s responsibility of presence, but the necessary recognition of the objectifying potential implicit in their subject position. Accordingly, I will consider recent scholarship in the ethics of spectatorship and its application of Levinas’s thought (Aaron, 2007; Downing & Saxton, 2010). Levinas stresses the ungraspable subjective presence of the other and warns against the tendency of the self to constitute the other within a totalising discourse. In emphasising the intersubjective and contractual nature of spectatorship, Aaron identifies the ethical encounter as one that generates reflection, encouraging the spectator to consider the responsibility of their response to the other. I will turn to Lightning Over Water (1980) and Wit (2001) as texts which engender precisely this ethical spectatorship.
In Wit, the spectator is interpellated as a necessary companion to Vivan’s isolated request for presence. They are made aware of the incomplete nature of their gaze, through the texts frequent exposure of its dramatic artifice. This is contrasted by the totalising presumptions of the “clinical gaze” encasing Vivian, which considers her an interesting research subject rather than a subjective presence. Lightning Over Water foregrounds and accentuates Wenders’s, and the spectator's, complicity as a witness to Ray's dying. The film’s ontological instability, where documentary and fiction collide, confuse and collude, refuses a stable viewing position. However, Ray’s performance as/of a dying man requires a viewer, for without a witness his actions are worthless. Spectatorship, whilst ethically charged, becomes a performative act, posthumously producing the ungraspable experience of Ray’s existence. In insisting upon an authentically intersubjective encounter, both texts therefore place the onus on the spectator to consider their responsibility in ensuring the unfettered nature of this exchange.
Fictional police characters appear within a wide spectrum of permitted psychological behaviour, from the highs of reckless self-endangerment to the lows of depressive loneliness. Suicide, however, exists outside the boundaries of this acceptable representation and accordingly is seldom seen. An analysis of those films and television series where police suicide is portrayed can therefore be instructive. By focusing on how the dead are - or aren't - remembered, patterns emerge regarding the ways in which the crisis of representation, triggered by the death, is resolved. Cinematic examples tend to treat the death structurally and symbolically in ways that reinforce and reinscribe the cultural taboo. Conversely, on the small screen, commercial concerns and televisual form can provide the opportunity and the space for the dead to be portrayed and remembered as individuals.
Book Reviews by John Horne
Books by John Horne
The book explores the contentious politics of Bahrain, and charts the way in which a dynamic culture of street protest, a strong moral belief in legitimate democratic demands and creative forms of resistance continue to hamper the efforts of the ruling elite to rebrand itself as a liberal, modernising monarchy. Drawing on powerful testimonies, interviews and conversations from those involved, this broad collection of writings provides a rarely heard voice for the lived experiences of Bahrainis and the research of young scholars studying them. From the trial speech by one of the most prominent political leaders of the uprising, to the evocative prose of an imprisoned poet, the book harnesses the power of storytelling, to lead into scholarly articles that address the themes of space, social movements, postcolonialism, social media, and the role of foreign patrons. Published on the eve of the 2016 bicentenary of British-Bahrain relations, the book in particular focuses on the role of the British government, together showing the depth of historical grievance beyond the sectarian narrative that has come to define the limited reporting of events in the country.
Bahrain’s Uprising provides a powerful insight into the Arab Spring's forgotten front, and will be of lasting value not only to scholars and students of the Middle East, but also to activists seeking to learn from, and build upon, Bahrain history and the uprising's legacy.
The introduction looks at imagery of dying which is used to “shock”. I then examine how, over the past century, “dying has been pushed further and further out of the perceptual world of the living” (Benjamin, 1936/2007), before turning to the use of visual culture in national health projects which seek to return the dying individual to the communal fold. I identify problems, which in turn open up new possibilities for spectatorship as an act of active citizenship and solidarity. The last two chapters consider how to foster public solidarity with the dying individual in visual culture. Through photography, then film, I examine texts which unsettle the status quo and help lay the foundations for an ethics of spectatorship in the encounter with the dying individual.
Turning to Emmanuel Levinas, alongside recent work on the ethics of spectatorship, this chapter argues for the significance of film as a key site for interrogating and ethically rethinking the encounter with the dying individual. Wit (2001) and Lightning Over Water (1980) are suggested as films which open up an ethical space of reflection, encouraging the spectator to consider their responsibility and recognise the objectifying potential implicit in their subject position. In Wit, the spectator is interpellated as a necessary companion to Vivian's isolated request for presence as she dies from cancer. Vivian's frequent exposure of the narrative's constructed artifice, contrasts with the totalising presumptions of the "clinical gaze" encasing her. Lightning Over Water foregrounds and accentuates Wenders' (and the spectator's) complicity as a witness to Ray's dying. The film's ontological instability where documentary and fiction collide, collude and confuse, constantly refuses a stable viewing position. Both films, by insisting upon an intersubjective encounter, open up an ethical space where responsibility towards the dying individual can, perhaps, be restored.
I will consider an exhibition run by NHS West Midlands as part of the national End of Life Care Strategy. The exhibition, held in Birmingham in July 2009, displayed locally produced photographs. Its success indicated the potential application of visual culture in overcoming social and cultural taboos around death. However, the acquisition and selection of the images, I suggest, unintentionally (indeed, unconsciously) replicated the discursive frames that presently construct the dying individual as Other. It is thus problematic if reforms, however benevolent in intent, fail to challenge the devaluation of the dying. A solution, I argue, offers itself in reconsidering the ethical potential of the citizen/spectator. A Levinasian rethinking of the encounter between citizen/spectator and dying individual seeks to challenge the complicity of the former in submitting to structures of Otherness. Accordingly, “the perceptual world of the living” can once again become home to the dying individual.
Madness is routinely untethered from individual distress requiring treatment and the institution itself is frequently fantastical and filled with excess. The screen asylum is seen as managing the spectator's own anxieties about madness. These anxieties are socio-culturally determined, with the changing face of the screen asylum reflecting historic shifts in the actual psychiatric institution. A line of continuity, from early cinema to the present, can however be traced, wherein the imaginary is screened for view and the actual is screened from view. The screen asylum is therefore a safe space which facilitates the spectator's projection of the state of madness and protection from the fate of madness."
The Abu Ghraib photographs have generated countless academic articles and critical reflections. This scholarly engagement has informed and shaped key discussions around ethics, representation, suffering and spectatorship. Although commentary by Susan Sontag (2004) and Judith Butler (2009) has been particularly influential, many leading thinkers have contemplated the ethical import of the Abu Ghraib photographs, such as Linda Williams (2010), W.J.T Mitchell (2011) and Nicholas Mirzoeff (2006). Whilst acknowledging the foundational nature of these debates, this paper seeks to challenge and unsettle the centrality of the “Abu Ghraib Spectacle” to them. Through a reading of two documentaries, it first cautions against the photographs themselves, which capture only a fragment of the abuse, and occlude the agency of the Iraqi victims. It then questions the suitability of images of actual torture as sites for ethical reflection, suggesting instead that spectatorial responsibility stems from recognising structures of repression and complicity in submitting to them.
In his (2008) documentary Standard Operating Procedure, Errol Morris challenges the spectator to recognise the limitations of looking. Through interviews, highly aestheticised reconstructions and forensic analysis, Morris unsettles both the photographic and discursive frames surrounding the most reproduced images from Abu Ghraib. Morris also highlights the gaps in the archive: the photographs destroyed or censored; the interrogations that took place away from the camera’s gaze; the images that never existed of US officials crafting policy. Alex Gerbaz (2008) has suggested that Morris’s interview technique (using the Interrotron device) offers the possibility of a Levinasian ethical encounter between spectator and Other. Gerbaz, however, takes the “face” of the Other too literally, and fails to account for the role of the Third in the encounter. I argue instead that Morris’s film ultimately entrenches a Western-centric “field of representability”, not least through omitting Iraqi voices entirely.
Martha Rosler's 1983 film, A Simple Case for Torture, uses magazine and newspaper articles to reveal the role of both media and academia in sustaining a debate on the legitimacy of torture. It offers new possibilities for unsettling the wider discursive frames around torture, without recourse to actual images of abuse. Moreover, Rosler exposes how the Spectacle fosters fantasies to counter more unpalatable content, entrenching a division between the Western “Us” who consume these images, and the non-Western “Them” who threaten to disrupt such a lifestyle. Read against the grain of the Abu Ghraib Spectacle, Rosler’s film posits an alternate, ethical, encounter with the unseen tortured Other: an encounter where the spectator is made to face up to their complicity in submitting to repressive structures.
Torture - “the conversion of absolute pain into the fiction of absolute power” (Scarry, 1985) - exposes the ideological vulnerability of regimes whose recourse to such brutality serves as a marker of civic illegitimacy. For many decades, countless Bahrainis have suffered physical and psychological torture. The West, especially Britain, has been historically complicit in sustaining such a system. In April 2012, former senior British police officer John Yates, hired to reform Bahrain’s security forces, dismissed allegations that torture was still occurring, remarking: “But that would be on YouTube”. Actual torture, however, is rarely captured on camera.
Whilst the spectator’s exposure to real suffering has, with caveats, been advanced as an ethical, necessary, act (Sontag, 2003; Chouliaraki, 2006), this paper contends that torture unsettles such assumptions, finding value in fictional and symbolic representation. Footage of torture may offer evidentiary value, however the spectator will always-already be aligned with structures of repression, framing the encounter on the torturer’s terms. Using Tin Tin Tytin, this paper argues that the ethical act is not one of witnessing the suffering body, but rather recognising the structures that oppress it. The horn’s constant refrain creates a continual appeal to the spectator to think beyond the torturer’s framing. The film both represents repression and reveals how vulnerable to exposure repressive ideology can be.
Following 'The Escaped Lunatic' (1904), the screen asylum offered the promise of containing madness, a force threatening both social and narrative stability. In films such as 'Good Night, Nurse' (1918) and 'The Monster' (1925), the asylum frames a space of unbounded potential, both comic and horrific. Characters give madness material form through physical difference and the exhibitionist performance of irrational acts. Accordingly, the asylum interior provided a haven for what Gunning (1995) terms the "cinema of attractions" to go underground. Here, the outward projection of spectacle dominates over narrative absorption, entertaining the spectator through a "series of visual shocks".
Whilst cinema was projecting the screen asylum as a site of entertainment, conditions in public institutions were far from pleasurable. The early twentieth century saw patients subject to overcrowding, abuse and sometimes sterilization. Furthermore, somatic therapies developed in the 1920s sought to shock patients in a manner similar to the screen asylum's treatment of its spectators. This paper, then, seeks to locate the spectator as a social actor and question the ethical nature of their entanglement in the asylum spectacle.
I will consider an exhibition run by NHS West Midlands as part of the national End of Life Care Strategy. The exhibition, held in Birmingham in July 2009, displayed locally produced photographs. Its success indicated the potential application of visual culture in overcoming social and cultural taboos around death. However, the acquisition and selection of the images, I suggest, unintentionally (indeed, unconsciously) replicated the discursive frames that presently construct the dying individual as other. It is thus problematic if reforms, however benevolent in intent, fail to challenge the devaluation of the dying. A solution, I argue, offers itself in reconsidering the ethical potential of the citizen/spectator. A Levinasian rethinking of the encounter between citizen/spectator and dying individual seeks to challenge the complicity of the former in submitting to structures of otherness. Accordingly, “the perceptual world of the living” can once again become home to the dying individual.
In this paper, I will argue for the significance of the filmic representation of the dying individual as a key site for interrogating and ethically rethinking the manner in which the dying are presently encountered within “the perceptual world of the living”. As such, I respond to current health and social policies that seeks to reintegrate the dying within the community. Following Baumann’s (1993) call for an ethics which “readmits the Other as a neighbour”, I caution against strategies that are orientated towards accommodation rather than equality. Such approaches, however benevolent in intent, risk perpetuating the social devaluation of the dying by failing to address the objectifying discourse which presently constructs them as different from the ‘living’.
Cinema presents itself as a place where the responsibility of the individual towards the dying other can be questioned. This is not simply the spectator’s responsibility of presence, but the necessary recognition of the objectifying potential implicit in their subject position. Accordingly, I will consider recent scholarship in the ethics of spectatorship and its application of Levinas’s thought (Aaron, 2007; Downing & Saxton, 2010). Levinas stresses the ungraspable subjective presence of the other and warns against the tendency of the self to constitute the other within a totalising discourse. In emphasising the intersubjective and contractual nature of spectatorship, Aaron identifies the ethical encounter as one that generates reflection, encouraging the spectator to consider the responsibility of their response to the other. I will turn to Lightning Over Water (1980) and Wit (2001) as texts which engender precisely this ethical spectatorship.
In Wit, the spectator is interpellated as a necessary companion to Vivan’s isolated request for presence. They are made aware of the incomplete nature of their gaze, through the texts frequent exposure of its dramatic artifice. This is contrasted by the totalising presumptions of the “clinical gaze” encasing Vivian, which considers her an interesting research subject rather than a subjective presence. Lightning Over Water foregrounds and accentuates Wenders’s, and the spectator's, complicity as a witness to Ray's dying. The film’s ontological instability, where documentary and fiction collide, confuse and collude, refuses a stable viewing position. However, Ray’s performance as/of a dying man requires a viewer, for without a witness his actions are worthless. Spectatorship, whilst ethically charged, becomes a performative act, posthumously producing the ungraspable experience of Ray’s existence. In insisting upon an authentically intersubjective encounter, both texts therefore place the onus on the spectator to consider their responsibility in ensuring the unfettered nature of this exchange.
Fictional police characters appear within a wide spectrum of permitted psychological behaviour, from the highs of reckless self-endangerment to the lows of depressive loneliness. Suicide, however, exists outside the boundaries of this acceptable representation and accordingly is seldom seen. An analysis of those films and television series where police suicide is portrayed can therefore be instructive. By focusing on how the dead are - or aren't - remembered, patterns emerge regarding the ways in which the crisis of representation, triggered by the death, is resolved. Cinematic examples tend to treat the death structurally and symbolically in ways that reinforce and reinscribe the cultural taboo. Conversely, on the small screen, commercial concerns and televisual form can provide the opportunity and the space for the dead to be portrayed and remembered as individuals.
The book explores the contentious politics of Bahrain, and charts the way in which a dynamic culture of street protest, a strong moral belief in legitimate democratic demands and creative forms of resistance continue to hamper the efforts of the ruling elite to rebrand itself as a liberal, modernising monarchy. Drawing on powerful testimonies, interviews and conversations from those involved, this broad collection of writings provides a rarely heard voice for the lived experiences of Bahrainis and the research of young scholars studying them. From the trial speech by one of the most prominent political leaders of the uprising, to the evocative prose of an imprisoned poet, the book harnesses the power of storytelling, to lead into scholarly articles that address the themes of space, social movements, postcolonialism, social media, and the role of foreign patrons. Published on the eve of the 2016 bicentenary of British-Bahrain relations, the book in particular focuses on the role of the British government, together showing the depth of historical grievance beyond the sectarian narrative that has come to define the limited reporting of events in the country.
Bahrain’s Uprising provides a powerful insight into the Arab Spring's forgotten front, and will be of lasting value not only to scholars and students of the Middle East, but also to activists seeking to learn from, and build upon, Bahrain history and the uprising's legacy.