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ОглавлениеINTRODUCTION | Pictures at a Deposition
God himself, who has disappeared . . . has left us his judgment that still hovers over us like the grin of the famous Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland.
—JEAN BAUDRILLARD, EXILES FROM DIALOGUE
EDGAR ALLAN POE and Arthur Conan Doyle created two of history’s most memorable detectives: C. Auguste Dupin and Sherlock Holmes. Detectives so captured the imagination in the nineteenth century that writers borrowed the word sleuth, which originally referred to the dog that did all the nose work, the bloodhound, for that new superhuman, the detective. Those two nineteenth-century sleuths, Dupin and Holmes, came up with solutions for the most intricately plotted crimes—mostly acts of grisly murder. But the greatest crime of the century took place, over a period of time, right under their highly calibrated noses: the slow and deliberate disappearance of the human being.
The clues were shockingly evident. At the very outset of the century, the scaffolding of religious belief that held human beings in their elevated position collapsed. People no longer knew who they were, or what they were. Over the course of the century, the idea of the human being changed radically, and took with it traditional human sensibilities. Science and philosophy tried to resuscitate the human being, but to no avail. And then, the rising corporations—oil and railroads—took charge of everyday life. Armies of professionals followed, defining our lives for us and telling us what would make us happy and healthy and handsome.
This book examines the radical transformation of the matrices of living. The story of the resurrection of Christ redirected people’s attention in the most fundamental ways, collapsing the two extremes of birth and death through the power of theology and imagery—ashes to ashes, dust to dust. No longer could ordinary people imagine those two events in the same way. From its inception, the Church defined the human experience. Then, just after the middle of the nineteenth century, with the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, the Church lost its grip. And the human being underwent a new and radical redefinition, evident once again at the fundamental levels of birth and death. The coming of Christ gave way to the coming of science.
In the end, the human being that history had known for so many centuries simply disappeared. Such a profound loss makes any horror not just possible, but plausible. It alone does not produce holocausts, but it makes thinkable and thereby doable wholesale human slaughter and extermination.
Niall Ferguson opens his book The War of the World by pointing out that the “hundred years after 1900 were without question the bloodiest century in modern history.” But the victims, in particular eleven million Jews and Romani and homosexual men in Germany and Eastern Europe, whom the Nazis reduced to mere numbers in the wholesale and systematic operation of death called the “Final Solution,” died, for the most part, out of sight. What remains are various Holocaust museums, an assortment of documentary photographs, relics, and a raft of films. Periodically, the names and stories of actual victims or survivors will surface in the news. For a brief moment or two, the general public will applaud their fortitude and even their heroism. Elie Wiesel will periodically step forward to receive another award, while a few nuts hang in the back screaming that the Holocaust was a hoax. But what persists, above all else, is a number: eleven million. As a stand-in for monumental horror, the world focuses on that staggering number, eleven million. It has become a catchword—shorthand for the attempted extermination of an entire people.
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, human beings do not die. The Nazis did not see humans when they looked at Jews, but rather vermin and cockroaches. They saw a multitude of pests in desperate need of wholesale extermination. Following that same tradition, in the more recent past, we read of entire villages of Vietnamese “pacified”; Tutsis and Serbs “ethnically cleansed”; men, women, and the youngest of children in Darfur and Chad “lost to religious strife.” On September 11, 2001, Muslim extremists flew their airplanes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, their intense hatred of those symbols of American might forcing them to convert the human beings inside the buildings into mere incidental objects—into poor and benighted “capitalist dupes.” We read about entire Iraqi neighborhoods of insurgents “eliminated with all deliberate speed,” and of suspected al-Qaeda members whisked off in the middle of the night in black helicopters to destinations unknown, in a program with a name intended to hide its brutality and terrifying finality: “extreme rendition.”
In that shadow world—and the word shadow runs through this entire book—death leaves its mark through body counts, body bags, collateral damage, friendly fire, fragging, benchmark numbers—and, most recently, through the rising scores on video games with names like Operation Desert Storm and Enduring Freedom. How did we arrive at a state of affairs so catastrophic that fathers, sons, husbands, wives, daughters, lovers, and friends—the rag and bone of human existence—could have collapsed so conclusively into images, pixels, ciphers, ghosts, gross numbers, into the palatable euphemisms of death? Why does virtually every loss of human life now resemble that frightening model of anonymity from the inner city, the drive-by random assassination, where, once again, victims do not die but get “dusted,” “wasted,” “popped,” or “blown away,” and nobody is responsible? Under every hoodie, we have begun to believe, lurks a hoodlum: a case of our own fear turning us into racial profilers at the level of the street.
We walk our neighborhoods unarmed, most of us, but still feeling trigger-happy. We drive the streets feeling somewhat safe, but still shaking in our shoes. Ghosts haunt us in the airport and at the supermarket; they stalk us on the sidewalks and in the shadows. Just past the edges of our well-tended lawns, a clash of civilizations, a war of terror, rages endlessly. We live in fear, and come alive in anger. How did we lose our substance and our identities so immaculately? Where have all the human beings gone? In short, when did we stop caring?
A good many historians say that most of the world, and especially Americans, move through history suffering from a case of “historical amnesia.” People too easily forget the last disaster and lose track of the last atrocity. But we do not forget because of some bout of amnesia—because of some blow on the head or because of too much alcohol. Something deeper and more radical eats away at us. In a sense, we have been programmed to experience “amnesia.” Despite the insistence from Freud that the pleasure principle drives people’s behavior, everything around us encourages turning aside from tragedy to just have a good time.
Some critics argue, Well, the numbers are just too overwhelming, the scale just too huge, for anyone to even begin to feel the pain and shock of death. Forty thousand die in a mudslide in Central America, another sixty thousand in a tsunami in Indonesia, perhaps one million or more in Darfur, and tens of millions of human beings from AIDS worldwide. I say the numbers matter little. Something more basic shapes today’s attitude toward such a ghostly way of dying. Beneath those euphemisms of death lies a grim reality; but to really see it, we first have to hold in our minds the concept of the human being as something vital and crucial. Human beings first have to come fully alive for us, before we can consider them dead. (In order to truly fall asleep, we must first come fully awake.) And, for a great many people, living seems just too confusing, too remote, or, worse yet, too difficult. The “isness” of being eludes us. A life is easy to come by, but living seems to remain just out of reach. We owe this strange state of affairs to a legacy we inherited from the nineteenth century.
Something new started in the nineteenth century: For the first time, people “had” lives. Which meant that they were in possession of an entity that one professional or agency or corporation could then manage and direct. Life existed as a concept outside of being alive, or simply living. One could objectify “life,” analyze it, make plans for its improvement. One could even redirect its course and redefine its goals.
President George Bush marked the first anniversary of his inauguration, on January 20, 2006, by reinforcing a national holiday called the National Sanctity of Human Life Day. (Note: It is only human life here that we celebrate; other animals can agitate for their own special day). The proclamation reads, in part, that on this day “we underscore our commitment to building a culture of life where all individuals are welcomed in life and protected in law.” If that sentence makes any sense at all, and I am not convinced that it does, then the sentiment sounds like something churned out by an ad agency announcing the arrival of the latest model car, one that comes complete with a lifetime guarantee. But as odd and bizarre as the proclamation sounds, it describes our current condition, where phrases like a culture of life and welcomed in life look like they might refer to something significant, or describe some actual reality, but on closer inspection point to nothing at all.
In 2008, after two years into its movement for sanctity, the White House made slight changes to the proclamation: “On National Sanctity of Human Life Day and throughout the year, we help strengthen the culture of life in America and work for the day when every child is welcomed in life and protected in law.” The White House, in order to display its much larger ambitions, had added “and throughout the year.” No more one-day sanctity for this administration. The White House also replaced the phrase “building a culture of life” with the more realistic “work for the day when . . . ” (President Bush may have found it hard to talk about building a sanctity of life after so many years of killing civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.) And finally, whereas the 2006 proclamation made reference to “all individuals,” two years later the president had lowered his sights to focus instead on “every child.”
Perhaps abortion activists on both sides feel free to argue the question, “When does human life begin?” because we are so unsure, these days, of what or who is human, and what or who is alive. A great many of us, I would argue, have a difficult time knowing what it feels like to be alive. The minute we get out of bed in the morning, we confront a barrage of advertisers and professionals just waiting to sell something to us, prescribe something to us, and repeat some durable commercial mantra in our ears. To ask the question, “When does life begin?” lays bare a conception of life as something mechanistic, a process that supposes a millisecond when a switch gets thrown and that certain something called a “life” begins. Ironically, under those artificial conditions, people acquire a life from which, inevitably, all living has been drained. In the eyes of the commercial and professional world, we walk about as nothing but bipeds fitted with monstrous and greedy appetites. Who can satisfy us? No one, it seems, even though many keep us enticed and tantalized and fully distracted. But, again as the advertisers instruct, we must keep on trying; we must keep on buying and consuming.
We pay a stiff price for the erosion of human essence. Today’s wholesale torture and killing almost everywhere we look has been made easier because of the erosion of human sensibilities in the nineteenth century. Although no one talks about this, when members of the CIA torture prisoners, they no longer torture actual human beings. A radical shift in the nature of the human being, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, emptied ordinary people of their philosophical and psychic essence; and in the end made this task much easier. I locate this shift, in great part, in the collapse of the Great Chain of Being and the subsequent birth of evolutionary theory. I also point to other eroding factors, like the rise of the machine and the explosion of a capital economy. I give a name to this peculiar phenomenon of loss: the disappearance of the human being.
Loss at such a basic level produces a disregard not just for other human beings, it appears, but for all living things. According to the evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson, by the twenty-first century’s end half of all species could vanish, resulting in what he calls the Eremozoic age—an age of hermetic loneliness. One way that we might begin to reverse such an unthinkably dangerous and tragic course is by understanding the disintegration of the human being—disembodying in its broadest sense—that began in the nineteenth century. In its power to shatter traditional meaning at the most basic level, the nineteenth century marks the beginning of the modern condition and carries the seeds for the consciousness associated with postmodernism.
As people began to lose the certainty of their own sentience, nineteenth-century philosophers, artists, and the new social scientists took as their task the recalculation of what it meant to be a human being. Professionals in the emerging academic disciplines and in the laboratory sciences tried to define the basic qualities of humanness, to locate the core of human essence. It is hard to talk about the nature of experimentation because so much of the modern apparatus of science comes into being just at this time. Even the word we take so much for granted, scientist, to refer to the person and the concept, does not enter the English language until about 1840; and even then the examples intrigue and baffle. This citation from Blackwood’s Magazine, for instance, gives one pause: “Leonardo was mentally a seeker after truth—a scientist; Coreggio was an assertor of truth—an artist.” A difference in manner or attitude or style, it seems, is enough to separate the artist from the true scientist.
As I hope to show in the following chapters, the close connection between science and art makes sense. The human body, in all its forms and permutations, states of aliveness and shades of decay, took on the same kind of fascination for various kinds of emerging scientists as it did for poets and writers. London physicians began dissecting cadavers, many times before large audiences, and pursued their slicing and chopping at such a furious pace that members of a new underground profession, grave robbers, came to their aid. Under the spell of the late Luigi Galvani, the Italian physicist, doctors all over Europe and in America tried their skill at reanimating the recently dead. Parisian high society gathered at a newly opened institution, the morgue, for extended evenings of gawking, gossiping, and sipping wine and champagne. Americans ate their summer dinners on the great green lawns of cemeteries in the 1830s.
Effigies, mannequins, automatons, wax models, talking dolls—the ordinary person grew hungry to gaze at the human in all of its disembodied, lifeless forms, and to render it in all its horrendous beauty on canvases and on the pages of novels and poems. Madame Tussaud, who thought of herself as an entrepreneur and artist, showed two lavish and detailed examples, fashioned in perfect detail out of wax, of the period’s iconic image “The Sleeping Beauty.” (Were we all just waiting for the right kiss, to be aroused from our slumbers?) People began to view the body as something detached and clinical, as something removed from themselves. They went to operating theaters to look at flesh investigated, probed, poked, and sketched. The body, like life itself, turned into something that people “had.”
As the human being disappeared, ghosts and shades began taking their place; and they mouthed off—making their presence known with shouts and murmurs, screams and curious clatterings and bangings, from this side and from the beyond. Fictional characters, too, filled the pages as shape-shifters. Some characters made their presence known as invisible beings. Others walked the city in their sleep or in their half-awake state, while still others prowled under the influence of the full moon. They hovered, like Christ on the cross, off the ground, neither fully on earth nor yet in heaven, pulled between this world and the one beyond. Characters fell into comas and trances and drifted into a special nineteenth-century state called “suspended animation.” Real people succumbed to hypnotic suggestions; others fell into deep trances. And in the world of fiction, still others moved about as specters, poltergeists, zombies, shadows, and doppelgängers. They lived in coffins, loved in graveyards, and, most powerfully, took up residence in the popular imagination.
Edgar Allan Poe embraced every last weird creature—those barely half-alive, those trying to come to life, and those fully disembodied. For him, every house was haunted; every soul was tainted. Each of his stories seemed to explore with a kind of otherworldly delight some paranormal part of the age. Poe rose to worldwide prominence as the poet of death and the macabre. Only America, in the darkest part of the nineteenth century, could have produced such a writer.
To see his spirit up close, I mention only one story here, the satirical “The Man That Was Used Up: A Tale of the Late Bugaboo and Kickapoo Campaign,” which Poe published in 1839. In it, he recounts the story of a rather stout military commander, Brevet Brigadier General John A. B. C. Smith, who gets torn almost completely apart by battle. On meeting with the unnamed narrator, Smith reconstructs himself, part by part and limb by limb, ending with eyes, ears, toes, teeth, and tongue, until he stands before the narrator, Poe tells the reader with piercing irony, “whole.” (The general’s character resembles that ambulating machine from Karel Čapek’s 1921 play R.U.R., a creature so strange and so foreign that Čapek had to coin a new word to describe it, a robot.)
Poe published that story before he reached thirty years of age; but he was prescient. The traditional notion of the human being got used up. It was a thrilling, liberating idea—anything was possible—and, at the same time, a hopelessly depressing one. What would people finally become? Who were they? How could they be reconstituted? More important, what would finally become of each one of us, the heirs to that nineteenth-century seismic shift? Could we find someone to put all our Humpty Dumpty pieces back together again?
Virginia Woolf famously wrote, with her usual sense of assurance, that “on or about December 1910, human character changed.”1 Some literary historians have pointed to the publication, in 1914, of W. B. Yeats’s collection of poetry Responsibilities as a document that records, on the eve of the First World War, the radical change in human nature. One of the more familiar poems in that volume, “The Magi,” gets at the new sensibility through the theme of disappearance: “Now as at all times I can see in the mind’s eye,/In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones/Appear and disappear in the blue depth of the sky.” As telling as these writers are, the dates, for me, come too late. For me, the change began as soon as the nineteenth century opened.
The disappearance of the “pale unsatisfied ones” continues to clog the imagination. The Bush administration brought to the world “ghost prisoners” in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, and at Bagram prison in Afghanistan. We hear of “the disappeared” in Latin America; the “ghosts of war” in Vietnam; and the “ghost fighters” in Lebanon. The CIA refers to its own clandestine operatives as “spooks.” We also periodically learn about those disappeared souls who have undergone extreme rendition, and who have been sent to who knows where, for who knows what kind of treatment. The Pentagon designated its prisoners at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib as “security detainees” or “unlawful combatants,” thus denying them prisoner of war status and allowing the United States to hold them indefinitely without judicial rights or privileges.
One of the images burned into the popular imagination shows a prisoner at Abu Ghraib, a pointed hood covering his head and a loose-fitting gown draping most of his body, his arms outstretched, electrical wires dangling from his arms, his whole being seeming to float on top of a box—a ghostly, spectral nineteenth-century icon from a twenty-first-century war. Even while film itself has disappeared, we have in the Iraq War the first digital images of horror.
How easy the United States military makes it for us to forget that the wired-up prisoner began the year as someone’s husband or brother or fiancé; that under the hood and gown one can find flesh and bone and blood. How gross that we need reminding that the outline we see is not something called a “security detainee”—whatever that might mean exactly—but a human being; not a stuffed mannequin but a live human being. How horrid that we have to remind the torturer—and us—that he is applying electrodes to one of his own kind.
Such atrocities do not just happen at our military prisons, but in our civilian prisons, and in our detention centers as well. The New York Times, in a May 6, 2008, editorial titled “Death by Detention,” detailed the horror of what the newspaper calls an “undocumented foreigner.” It seems that an immigrant from Guinea, Boubacar Bah, overstayed his tourist visa. Immigration authorities picked him up in 2007 and incarcerated him in the Elizabeth, New Jersey, detention center. As with most of our prisons in America, a private company runs the Elizabeth detention center. While incarcerated, Mr. Bah purportedly fell and fractured his skull and, although he was “gravely ill,” guards shackled and locked him in a “disciplinary cell.” As the Times reports: “He was left alone—unconscious and occasionally foaming at the mouth—for more than 13 hours. He was eventually taken to the hospital and died after four months in a coma.”
Those in charge of such facilities—prisons, detention centers, military brigs, and compounds—invest the word immigrant, in effect, with the same evil as the words prisoner or enemy combatant or suspected terrorist. As with prisoners at Guantánamo or Bagram or Abu Ghraib, immigrants in federal custody have no right to legal representation; most of them cannot defend themselves; many do not even speak English, and thus have no idea of the charges leveled against them.
Using the nineteenth century as its foundation, Unsuspecting Souls tries to figure out how we got to such a bizarre state of affairs—especially in this country—where the idea of immigrant went from marking the greatness of this country to becoming a stand-in term for freeloader and felon. The book explores what it means to be a modern human being, the assumptions on which that definition rests, and where those assumptions came from. The book also entertains ideas about where we may be heading. It shows how even the most ridiculed theories of the nineteenth century shaped our own interior lives, and created who we are today. Seen against the backdrop of the nineteenth century, key cultural artifacts that once seemed odd and complicated fall more neatly into place. For instance, only a radical alteration in attitude toward the human being could bring about something as revolutionary as nonrepresentational art, whose beginnings point to the late-nineteenth-century Russian artist Kazimir Malevich. Imagine: canvas after canvas without a single person, in a time when artists made their reputations painting the human figure. If people disappeared from the canvas, the loss of human essence helps explain, in great part, why they left—even if we do not know where they went. We might well ask, Have we all become unsuspecting victims in that great caper called disappearance? Are we all, in effect, nonrepresentational?
The erosion of human essence continues at a furious pace. If we hope for change in the world, we must regain our sense of being, our sentience. What does it mean to be alive, to be human, in this, the twenty-first century? Philosophers and artists, writers and teachers have always asked such questions. Nowadays, we also hear it from politicians and corporate executives, from advertising mavens and design engineers. But these latter types, who enjoy positions of authority and power, of course, have ulterior motives and hidden agendas. And their answers demean and simplify. They define our lives only in the narrowest of ways—as voracious consumers, fragile immune systems, frightened political subjects, and finally as cogs in a high-powered, relentless machine, over which the average person has utterly no control. We confuse the fact of their power and authority with outright intelligence. We believe that they know better than we what we need. That is not the case. And so, we need to be asking those fundamental questions ourselves: Who are we and what can we become?
Unsuspecting Souls shows the frightening price we pay in not questioning prevailing assumptions and attitudes toward the life and death of other people—the minority, the poor, the vagrant, the person of color, the outsider, the so-called enemy, and the so-called stranger. For reasons I hope to make clear, this drift toward insubstantiality and disappearance has particularly victimized Americans. The rough-and-tumble way we negotiate with people, with the environment, with the other, and particularly the way America has over the years dealt with other countries—the assumptions of overwhelming force and power, the disregard of human rights—owe their insistence, in great part, to those transfiguring events of the nineteenth century. But then so does the current resurgence of evangelical fundamentalism and the renewed debate between evolution and creationism. In fact, these two things, the ferocity of America’s foreign policy and the tenacious commitment, by many, to fundamental religions, forged their intimate relationship in the nineteenth century.
In the course of this book’s writing, the Marine Corps charged five of its men with plotting and carrying out the rape of a young Iraqi woman, dousing her body with gasoline, and setting her on fire, in the Iraqi city of Haditha on November 19, 2005. The men then allegedly killed the rest of the family and, for good measure, burned their house to the ground. Immediately after setting the house ablaze, the supposed ringleader is said to have announced in a matter-of-fact way, “They’re dead. All of them. They were bad people.”
How bad could they have been? Bad enough, it seems, that those Marines no longer counted the Iraqi civilians as human beings. In fact, the military refers to all Iraqis as “Hajis,” a reference to those who have made the hajj, a pilgrimage to Mecca. I have heard them called worse things by GIs—“ragheads,” “desert monkeys,” and even “sand niggers.” Iraq and Afghanistan just present the most recent examples in the endless process of the United States denigrating people we perceive as the other, in anticipation of our attacking them, or in our outright killing of them. In good nineteenth-century fashion, the fact that the overwhelming majority of America’s enemies turn out to be people of color makes the process of denigration a much easier task, since people of color already occupy a lower place in the ordering of races.
To understand events like Haditha, we need to know the history of that most lethal erasure that brought us to such a state of affairs, the disappearance of human sensibilities that began in the nineteenth century. We need to address the problem at its base, for the erosion of human essence runs very deep and very powerfully throughout our past. Toughness and power, strength and force, have become in our own time valued and privileged personal virtues. We are all, in the face of such a well-hidden but insidious force of erosion, unsuspecting and unwitting victims. Can a society hang together as one extended fight club, or one unending cage fight? We should not conceive of life as an extreme sport.
If we are to regain our senses, atrocities like Haditha must no longer seem like routine acts in a ruthless world. They must, once again, surprise and repulse us. I know that, with minimal effort, we can make sense of such events—we are at war; soldiers are young and jumpy; and on and on—but the logic of Haditha and Hamdaniya and Mahmoudiya and a host of atrocities at other, similar places—not to mention those prisons both known and secret—must confound normal logic and once again disgust the great majority of us. And we must remain disgusted: Torture and this country’s commitment to it must replace the latest TV show and film as major topics of concern and interest.
We must return the inhuman treatment of others to the nineteenth-century category from which it escaped—the aberrant. To argue about what constitutes torture should seem extraordinary and extrahuman to us. We simply cannot raise waterboarding, say, to a level where we parse its grisly elements to determine if it is truly torture or not. We must laugh out loud at the Justice Department’s argument that if GIs carry out humiliating and harsh treatment of prisoners suspected of being members of al-Qaeda, then no torture has taken place. We cannot allow the Justice Department to make people disappear twice—once as prisoners and once more as suspected terrorists. Torture is barbaric and beyond the boundaries of decent discourse.
Many historians have seen the nineteenth century as the beginning of the modern world. Someone like Tony Judt, writing in The New York Review of Books, has taken as his signposts on the road to modernity innovations like “neoclassical economics, liberalism, Marxism (and its Communist stepchild), ‘revolution,’ the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, imperialism, and ‘industrialism’—the building blocks of the twentieth-century political world.”2 But typically what is left out of the description is that the “isms” helped drive out the people, the theories helped displace the humans. Put another way, the “isms” would not have been so easy to implement if the human beings had not disappeared first. And thus I want to focus on the human “building blocks.” I want to discover what happened to them.
In 1866, Cyrus West Field succeeded in laying the transatlantic cable. Samuel F. B. Morse, the inventor of the telegraph, witnessed its completion. (Morse’s first tapped-out message on May 24, 1844, to his assistant Alfred Vail, reverberates through the rest of the century: “What hath God wrought?”) The New York Tribune said the cable would bring about “a more sympathetic connection of the nations of the world than has yet existed in history.”3 Morse himself saw bigger things. He predicted the cable would signal an end to war “in a not too distant future.”4 Today, nearly one hundred and fifty years later, we have upped the technology and use the Internet to make that same sympathetic connection with other nations. Still, the drive to destroy the enemy continues; and still the number of enemies proliferates. Technology will not fix our human condition. Only a change in attitude can truly affect social problems. And that requires not high-level technological know-how but only the most basic technical skills—reading, analyzing, and understanding.
This book rests on a firm belief: that human beings carry the capacity for continual self-critique and wholehearted renewal. We must once again recognize ourselves as actors and agents in the shaping of both political and social ideas, not just so as to rescue ourselves, but also to broaden the community we share with others. I see no other way to put a halt to the current fascination with torment and torture and the threat of total annihilation of the planet—people, plants, and animals—through war. H. G. Wells warned of the end of civilization in his 1898 novel, The War of the Worlds, about the attack of England by aliens from Mars. More than one hundred years later, Niall Ferguson took his title for his new book from Wells’s tale of science fiction, for very much the same reasons—this country seems to have been invaded by aliens, motivated solely by arrogance, might, imperial hubris, and a thorough disregard for the other. Science fiction has become fact.
Others have viewed the nineteenth century as a series of disparate events, or have focused on one small topic. I see a crucial, overarching theme in the century’s seemingly unrelated discoveries, innovations, and inventions: the desperate struggle to find the heart of human essence before time ran out. My hope, the hope of this book, is that by understanding that erosion of basic humanness in the nineteenth century, we can reclaim our own sense of being in this, the twenty-first century. Looking back may be the best way to move forward. To move the arrow forward means having to draw the bow back.
One way of looking back, and the best way of doing it over and over again whenever we desire, is with one of the key inventions of the nineteenth century, the camera. Shortly after its introduction in the middle of the nineteenth century, the camera pushed actual events aside and made people pay strict attention to the reproduction of the real thing: The image took charge over the actual. The camera very quickly became a popular household appliance, a plaything for middle- to upper-class families. It also very quickly got consigned for specialized tasks, so that at every major crime scene, for example, some photographer stood by, ready to document and frame, to catch details that the eye could not possibly take in, and of course to create a permanent record of the evidence.
Driven by the desire to capture the look and feel of actual experience, technological advances quickly made the images in the still camera move, giving the illusion that one was watching real life; and suddenly inventors brought it to little tent theaters in Europe: moving pictures, or motion pictures, or what we more commonly call today film. The camera of course exploded in the next century into a succession of screens—besides film, we have TV, the computer, various sorts of electronic games, and a variety of handheld devices—BlackBerrys and personal digital assistants—each with its own tiny touch screen. Even with all that innovation and invention, I grant the old and familiar still camera center stage in this book. I will spend an appreciable amount of time talking about the camera’s importance in shaping perception in the nineteenth century. But, equally as important, I also use the camera as a tool for converting the succession of chapters in this book into a more graspable reality.
I ask the reader to consider each chapter as a “snapshot,” a term that first described a way of hunting, dating from 1808, which involved a hurried shot at a bird in flight, in which the hunter does not have enough time to take perfect aim. Sir John Herschel, who coined the word “photographic,” applied the phrase snapshot, in 1860, to capturing events, in a hurried and offhand style, with a still camera. Here’s the first instance of the word in the Oxford English Dictionary: “The possibility of taking a photograph, as it were by a snap-shot—of securing a picture in a tenth of a second of time.” For Herschel, time is crucial—do not think, just shoot. By 1894, the phrase had made it into newspapers and journals, and into the recognized organ of the profession, the American Annual of Photography: “Many think it is just the thing to commence with a detective camera and snap-shot.”
An odd locution, the “detective camera,” but by 1860, when Herschel used the phrase, cameras had become small enough and light enough so that even amateurs could use them with agility and speed. Manufacturers designed the Concealed Vest Camera, one inch thick and five inches long, so a person could hide it under a coat or jacket with the lens poking through some small opening in the cloth, with the idea that one could use such a camera for all kinds of detective work—professional and amateur—in sleuthing or where the person wanted to capture real candid situations. The camera, in a sense, disappeared from sight.
The camera captures shadows, the dreamy images that make up so much of experience. The phrase “shadow catcher” got attached to the photographer and ethnographer Edward Sheriff Curtis, who set out in the 1890s to document the rapidly vanishing American Indians. He attempted to make a permanent record of some eighty tribes across North America that he saw disappearing in his own time. William Henry Fox Talbot, who invented the negative and positive technique for taking and developing photographs, so intimately connected with the early days of the camera, says, not so much about Curtis, but about the process of taking photographs itself: “The most transitory of things, a shadow . . . may be fettered by the spells of our ‘natural magic,’ and may be fixed forever in the position which it seemed only destined for a single instant to occupy.”5
It is all about shadows, about the past. We can try to capture the past with some specificity, but events come to us only as shadows. The camera captures this better than any other appliance, certainly better than any other nineteenth-century invention. This is especially true of the detective camera, working its magic while completely out of view. I have tried, myself, to recede as much as possible in order for the extraordinary events of the nineteenth century to fully display themselves.
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 their 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.
