Episode #177 - Transcript
So in one of her earlier essays… Susan Sontag talks about a life changing moment she experienced when she was just 12 years old. Now, she described this moment when she wrote about it…as a kind of revelation…in fact, she called it a type of EPIPHANY, that would go on to affect the direction of her thinking AND her work, for DECADES moving into the future. It was July of 1945…she was browsing through a random bookstore in Santa Monica, California…and what she came across was something she would later call “a photographic inventory of ultimate horror.”
What she came across for the first time were pictures of the horrible things that were done to people in two of the concentration camps during the holocaust of the second world war. And, you can just imagine her standing there 12 years old, in the middle of this bookstore, looking at these pictures of mangled human bodies…taking in as a young person for the first time the DARKNESS that people are capable of when their minds dip into that place…that passive state of compliance…what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil…this is the FIRST time in her life that she encounters this and Sontag later writes about how she FELT in that moment:
“Nothing I have seen—in photographs or in real life—ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously. Indeed, it seems plausible to me to divide my life into two parts, before I saw those photographs…and after, though it was several years before I understood fully what they were about......Some limit had been reached, and not only that of horror; I felt irrevocably grieved, wounded, but a part of my feelings started to tighten; something went dead; something is still crying."
Sontag didn’t know it at the time…but this TYPE of experience that she had in the bookstore… she would LATER think of it as a CLASSIC experience that EVERY person LIVING in the modern world EVENTUALLY has to have. We ALL eventually have to come face to face with IMAGES of HORRIBLE things that are going on in some distant part of the world… and THEN we gotta figure out what the best way is to DEAL with whatever feelings may come up as a RESULT of SEEING those images– this is a uniquely MODERN EXPERIENCE to Susan Sontag.
In fact the IMAGE ITSELF…is a uniquely MODERN thing that we all have to deal with.
To put it as simply as possible: we have a COMPLICATED relationship with images as modern people, and its borne out of a complicated past and if we’re being honest…looking into the future with AI created images…things aren’t lookin’ like they’re getting any easier any time soon. So maybe it’s time on this podcast we go on a little journey…and do a philosophical evaluation OF the IMAGE, more specifically, of pictures and videos, as things that are by THIS point…deeply normalized PIECES of TECHNOLOGY that we use EVERY DAY, as we go about our life.
And I can think of nobody better to GUIDE us along this journey than Susan Sontag…see, she was a HUGE fan of the work of Roland Barthes who we did two episodes of this podcast on a few years ago. And if you remember from those episodes: one of the things he was MOST interested in ANALYZING in his work was what he thought of as a sort of MODERN MYTHOLOGY that we have today, or the accepted METAPHORS that we attach to SEEMINGLY everyday things that HELP us give them meaning… metaphors that HELP our societies function.
And he did this with EVERYTHING…he looks at the mythology surrounding soap…how we always seem to be waging a war against uncleanliness in our lives, how great SOAP is for that whole process. He talks about the mythology of pro wrestling and how the messages sent by these people pretending to fight each other, a dude earing a thong throwing the atomic elbow may actually help to MAINTAIN societal order at some level. Point was: To BARTHES…it was important to look CRITICALLY AT these metaphors that we often take for granted…because in ways that aren’t always entirely obvious to us…these metaphors actually have a HUGE IMPACT on the way that people SEE the things that make up the culture they’re a part of.
Sontag takes inspiration from this line of thinking and then MAKES it her own. All throughout her career she does something very similar…she TAKES things that to US as modern people are SO NORMALIZED that we may never even really THINK about them…and then she REEXAMINES them, she REINTERPRETS them from a DIFFERENT perspective… and then brutally illustrates the social COST of having a lazy relationship with the mythology of everyday things.
What I’m saying is that by the end of the episode here today we will understand EXACTLY what Susan Sontag thinks about someone who just PASSIVELY CONSUMES pictures and videos all day, putting in VERY little effort, not even RECOGNIZING how COMPLICATED their relationship to the IMAGE really is.
So to get us started on that…Susan Sontag might want to START by saying…that pictures and videos are OBVIOUSLY the PRIMARY method of communication IN our modern world… but how many of us REALLY speak the LANGUAGE of pictures and videos? And she’s not asking… can you look at pictures and understand what they’re about…I mean, obviously…people are SATURATED by them, what Sontag’s talking about is: how many of us have REALLY taken the time to break down what these kinds of images ARE and ALL the functions they serve in culture?
Might be helpful to try thinking about what we call an IMAGE…like you come from an alien civilization, that’s never used IMAGES to send information to each other before…maybe this civilization evolved with really big ears or something. How do you think an alien species would see pictures and videos?
Well aside from noticing that this is how A LOT of people get their ENTIRE understanding of what’s going on outside their immediate surroundings…the OTHER thing an alien might notice is that WHAT a picture or video IS at the most fundamental level is something that’s DESIGNED to be a SIMPLIFICATION… of more complex modes of human experience. Now what would the alien with the big ears be TALKING about when they SAY that?
Well, take a photograph for example. The THINKING here applies even at just a MATHEMATICAL level…just from a raw mathematical perspective…whenever you’re going from an N dimensional representation of something to a LOWER dimensional representation of something… you are LOSING a lot of information about it.
So in the CASE of a photograph, when you go from a human experience that’s OTHERWISE in three dimensions, across a landscape of FIVE senses, various mental faculties that you’re filtering it through… and you REDUCE that experience into a two dimensional photograph… to a purely visual, single sensory form…again we HAVE to start by acknowledging that you are SIMPLIFYING that moment…and LOSING a TON of information about it in the process. What an alien might SAY about the concept of a picture is that it’s a pretty interesting thing…it is FUNDAMENTALLY something that takes complex situations and SIMPLIFIES them into something that can be CONSUMED visually in an instant.
And on ONE level we ALL KNOW this. I mean, a picture’s worth a thousand words people say right? That’s what they DO. But ANOTHER thing an alien might want to point out…is that: GIVEN the fact that a picture or a video HAS to simplify reality…and GIVEN our tendency to USE these images as the primary way that we connect with things that are happening in the world…isn’t it a bit PROBLEMATIC, that the IMAGE is ALSO something that is SO EASILY manipulated, by people?
Now before Susan Sontag launches into her FULL BLOWN critique of the image and its ROLE in society…the first thing she might want to start by saying is that she’s ALWAYS looking at the image from a perspective of ambiguity. She FULLY acknowledges that images can be used for GOOD AS WELL as EVIL. Which is also to say that DEPENDING on who’s GIVING you the images that you’re looking at…images can be used to INFORM the population…as well as to DECEIVE the population.
And some of this is BEYOND OBVIOUS to us living in 2023, which I think speaks to how dead on accurate Susan Sontag WAS about this in her analysis. I don’t think I gotta tell ANYONE listening to this about how many cool things you’ve been able to see because of pictures and videos, that in most other generations of being alive…you’d just never have the opportunity to see… I mean the super bowl for us used to be chasing a raccoon around with a stick in your back yard.
And this obviously extends from COOL things that you see… to things that are less fun…you see pictures of distant political realities, natural disasters, war, famine…Susan Sontag would want to say that the connection to events that pictures and videos can provide, on ONE level, is TRULY inspirational. I mean imagine the kind of AWARENESS a person could have about what’s going on in the world that they live in… if they were able to get access to images ABOUT what’s going on in a way that they could TRUST.
But that TRUST thing. Ya see…that’s where it starts to get complicated to Susan Sontag. Cause something ELSE we all know in 2023, is that pictures and videos are NEVER presented to you in a totally UNBIASED way…images are ALWAYS given to you in a way that tries to drum up a particular emotional RESPONSE to them. And Sontag would say this is PART of the RELATIONSHIP you HAVE with pictures and videos that you can NEVER take for granted.
Now in certain cases this can seem pretty harmless and it’s not something we doubt or really put too much thought into. Think of an online dating profile. We ALL KNOW the person sending you their picture WANTS you to think of them IN a particular way. They got the LIGHTING just right. They take a picture from a very SPECIFIC angle. Maybe they’re one of those people that have the exact same creepy smile in every picture looks like they photoshopped their smiling head in to different locations. Now I’m smiling in the mountains. Now I’m smiling while holding a puppy! It’s all very calculated by the person giving you the images, and we ALL accept that this person is trying to get people to FEEL a certain way about them– this seems FINE.
But how about when that SAME thing goes on when you’re watching the news? The front that news stations put on is that the pictures they’re showing you are an accurate representation of what’s going on in the world. But ALMOST like someone with an online dating profile…Susan Sontag would want us to recognize that those pictures the news is giving you are HAND SELECTED to produce a certain emotional response as well. And by the way…the people that TOOK the pictures you’re seeing…it’s not like THEY don’t have agendas. If the person making the online dating profile wants their pictures to LOOK a certain way…the PHOTOGRAPHER ALSO wants their pictures to look a certain way. They’re always going for the BIG NEWS STORY or sensationalism, they’re always taking pictures in the STYLE of photography that THEY TAKE, they’re considering what’s the next chapter in the narrative THEY’VE been producing about whatever they’re taking pictures of. Point is its not like these photographers are Buddhist monks out there in the field…THEY have agendas as well, and EVEN the presence of the camera ITSELF changes what reality is to Sontag.
But if THAT weren’t enough…THEN once the pictures get in the HANDS of the NEWS STATION. Depending on the news station…again…try looking at this like you’re coming from another planet where they don’t HAVE images…consider JUST how much our GO TO METHOD for REPRESENTING REALITY can be MANIPULATED to justify almost COMPLETELY opposite outcomes.
Images can REVEAL pieces of reality, yes…but images can also be STAGED to put out a FALSE depiction of reality. Images can be used to make people aware of NEW political voices, yes…but images can ALSO be used to slander dissenting political voices so they never get off the ground. Images can be used to promote STEREOTYPES…I mean, take your pick of which group YOUR particular news station wants you to DEMONIZE and then hand selects pictures that get you to hate them more…but, THEN AGAIN images can ALSO be used to give people a peek INSIDE another culture they’d never otherwise have, and maybe that fosters more RESPECT between people, maybe that leads to UNDERSTANDING.
Images are used to get people riled up, wanting to invade another country, think of the pictures of the giant buildings supposedly containing weapons of mass destruction before the US invaded Iraq in 2003. Then again images are ALSO used to frame public perception in a way where people DON’T want to get involved, think of a news station featuring pictures of a protest where the people are burning the American flag.
If there’s any part of you that doubts whether or not the EMOTIONAL CONTENT of an image is determined by the way that its PRESENTED to people…consider the fact…that even the exact SAME image…presented in two different locations…can take on two VERY different MEANINGS just because of the CONTEXT it's connected to. For example, an image of a man kneeling during the national anthem of a football game…in ONE place that image is presented, with certain captions, music and commentary behind it…that image is seen as an act of solidarity and protest against police brutality. Then again in another place, with DIFFERENT captions, music and commentary…it’s seen as an act of disrespect to the flag and the military personnel who fight to protect it.
Now again that’s the exact same PICTURE. So Sontag would want us to ask the question: what percentage of a picture’s meaning lies in it being a neutral snapshot of something that happened…and what percentage of it lies in how the picture is specifically being presented to people?
Pictures are SNAPSHOTS of an instant…that masquerade as a documentation of reality…when in fact they are almost always being used by people as a MANIPULATION of reality. A manipulation of your emotions. Once again like our ALIEN friend from before said: a picture or a video is FUNDAMENTALLY something that takes complex situations and SIMPLIFIES them into something that can be CONSUMED visually in an instant.
Now KNOWING this…you can really rack your brain thinking of what ANYONE is really up to when they take a picture or video. Susan Sontag says in her book On Photography: pictures are both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. And what she’s saying is that whenever you take a picture or a video of something…you are always CONSTRUCTING SOMETHING in terms of the MEANING of the picture. As well as OBSCURING something about reality that the picture can’t POSSIBLY include. She says:
“… there is something predatory in the act of taking a picture. To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.”
To Susan Sontag, to take a picture of SOMETHING or SOMEONE is to OBJECTIFY it in a way…you are taking a moment, FREEZING it…and TURNING IT INTO a THING…that you or other people can THEN appropriate and USE in whatever way you WANT.
Now we’re going to expand on this more but let’s take THIS point by Sontag, that to photograph is to objectify, as the first piece of evidence she’s going to present in making her case…that maybe when we’re thinking about the PROBLEMS we have with pictures and videos…maybe the real problem…lies in US…as the people that are RECEIVING these images, and ASSUMING the pictures and videos have a LOT MORE legitimacy than they actually deserve.
BECAUSE she’d say…why is this suddenly a problem with PICTURES and VIDEOS… when it WASN’T a problem in previous generations with paintings or the written WORD as a depiction of reality? Well the REASON its a PROBLEM…is because MOST people don’t SEE a picture and think of it as an artists DEPICTION of reality…they see it as just the TRUTH.
We say things like this…we say PICS or it didn’t happen. Someone tells you one of your coworkers got up on top of their desk naked and was screaming at everybody in the office and you say oh come on I don’t believe that…but if they show you a VIDEO of it, well I guess that must have HAPPENED.
And its a tough spot to be in as modern people because on one hand, we SEE a PICTURE someone took…and on one level…this visual moment as it is FRAMED in this camera shot, DID ACTUALLY HAPPEN. But WITHOUT that critical thinking APPLIED to the picture, on ANOTHER level you have no idea what you’re even looking at.
Fact is: pictures and videos DON’T have to come with a disclaimer on them that says everything we’ve already said in this episode…as Susan Sontag says a picture DOESN’T need to come with a caption on it that says: This is the truth. The people LOOKING at the picture or the video just ASSUME that it’s the TRUTH, on a level they NEVER DID with paintings or the written word.
And if you say back to this well… not ME. Not me, I’m not one of these MORONS that just accepts things as the TRUTH.
Well, to USE one of Sontag’s OWN REBUTTALS to this kind of person…she’d probably say back to them: hey, so…when you watch a video or see a picture of something that you think is really cool…and then afterwards you find out that it was completely fake or staged. Are you disappointed when you hear that? Little bit? Well WHY are you disappointed? If you’re not BRINGING to the image a STAMP of legitimacy that it PROBABLY doesn’t deserve yet. I mean KNOWING as much as we DO in 2023 about HOW images are USED to GET you to FEEL a certain way…why would EVERYONE not be taking EVERY image they SEE with a grain of salt at first?
And that’s part of her larger point here. You know, if ANY portion of this episode so far has come off like its OBVIOUS to you, of COURSE images always have an agenda behind them…then WHY do SO many intelligent PEOPLE continue living their lives, consuming content every day, giving images a FREE PASS on ANY level?
When you’re shopping for a car and a used car salesman comes up to you and starts telling you about how the car you’re looking at is PERFECT for you…you’re thinking oh really? Is that what the car is? The car is perfect for me huh…hmm you’re ALWAYS looking for what his ANGLE is…and RIGHTFULLY SO be cause he’s trying to SELL you something. When an ADVERTISEMENT comes on you’re thinking what are they trying to sell me and how are they trying to sell it? This is a HEALTHY way of THINKING about these interactions.
Well, whenever a picture or a video is presented to you…to Susan Sontag you should be putting those images through a SIMILAR TYPE of critical analysis. The DEFAULT orientation towards ANYTHING that’s CLAIMING to represent COMPLEX reality in the two dimensional image form, should BE one where you’re asking FOLLOW up questions…you should AT LEAST asking: WHO is giving me this image? WHY are they giving me this image? WHAT do they want me to FEEL having SEEN this image? HOW is this image being presented? How is it edited? KNOWING that a picture is always obscuring SOMETHING…what might be OBSCURED about reality if I took this PICTURE to be the gospel truth?
Human beings… have learned to adapt and survive in a LOT of different environments over the course of history…we’ve learned to survive from the Serengeti all the way to the arctic tundra. Well the environment you have to survive in now is one where you are SATURATED by images that are trying to get you to FEEL a certain way. And if you don’t DEVELOP and PRACTICE this critical thinking ABOUT the images that you’re consuming, and then BRING those skills to every moment…you’re going to ALWAYS be at the MERCY of the person that’s GIVING you your images.
Think of what it was like to BE a person in MOST of the western world before the protestant reformation. Where your ACCESS to scripture, your ACCESS to what you considered to be the TRUTH about reality around you was ONLY available to you through a PRIEST who spoke the language that the bible was WRITTEN in. Whether or not what the dude was saying was actually IN the bible or not…you have no way to VERIFY…you would just have to be AT the MERCY of what he SAID was written down. We need to start thinking of our ability to READ the images around us in a similar way.
We need to HOLD ourselves to a higher standard Sontag thinks.
And I know…I know. You go to work all day. It’s SUPER tiring…you just want to go home and be able to relax…I just want to look on my phone and have a little break…Iwind down and watch the shows that tell me about what’s going ON in the world. I get it. But it’s NOT GOOD enough to Susan Sontag. She’s calling on us to be BETTER…she’s asking us to PUT IN THE EFFORT to SPEAK THE LANGUAGE of this new TECHNOLOGY we’re using everyday called pictures and video. Apply the SAME LEVEL of CRITICISM you would to the used car salesman…or else ACCEPT your fate as someone that’s just getting FINESSED every day of your life.
Now IF that was something you wanted to do…MAINTAINING this level of AWARENESS is NOT JUST knowing the specific TACTICS people use when giving you images that we talked about earlier…the other HALF of this to Sontag is to ALSO try to understand YOUR RELATIONSHIP to the images in a social and ethical context as well.
See because something ELSE she would want us to recognize is that it’s NOT JUST the way a picture or video is framed and distributed that can affect the way a viewer receives it…but part of the CONTEXT…of ANYTHING that people consume…is the FREQUENCY that they’re consuming it.
So KNOWING that…in the case of pictures and videos…when it COMES to seeing images of things like violence and war and the suffering of other people, things we CARE about that might SHOCK us like Sontag was shocked in the bookstore when she was 12…it would be ONE thing to Susan Sontag…if we saw a picture or a video like that once every YEAR or so. But again the REALITY of the world that we live in…is that we are SATURATED by images like this.
And WHAT HAPPENS Sontag says is that WHEN OTHER people’s pain…that’s going on SOMEWHERE ELSE in the world, when that becomes a ROUTINE, NORMAL part of your day…you NATURALLY become desensitized to it. People NATURALLY try to find SOME WAY to DOWNREGULATE their emotional response. She says, "we cant process all the evil we can be exposed to..." and it becomes next to impossible for these IMAGES to AFFECT us EMOTIONALLY in the same way they used to–now they’re NORMAL to us.
Couple this with the ABILITY we have AS members of western culture in PARTICULAR…where we have this sort of Hollywood muscle that we’ve developed since we were kids…we have this ability to transform anything that we see on one of these screens, into something that’s purely a spectacle. We have this EMOTIONAL distance where everything is viewed by us through a screen so it never seems quite as REAL.
Another great line Sontag says at one point is that in the western world…we have the luxury of PATRONIZING reality. And you can UNDERSTAND where she’s COMING from…I mean we have…going on RIGHT NOW…the most photographed war in the HISTORY of the world…and some people in the western world wake up, every morning…and what they’re RELATIONSHIP to this conflict has become…is that they’re EXCITED to turn on the news every day, and HEAR the most recent update on all the horrific tragedies that are going on… as though its just a TV show or a movie that they’re into. That’s if…after being a YEAR INTO it…they’re still even INTO the TV show or if they’ve MOVED ON to other shows. We have the LUXURY of patronizing reality to Sontag, because we’re not one of the people that actually has to LIVE in it.
This DROWNING of our emotional response due to OVER SATURATION by violent imagery…is something we need to ALWAYS critically look out for as well.
Because ANOTHER thing an alien from another planet might think is REALLY INTERESTING about this technology of pictures and videos…is how they can PRODUCE in people that are passively consuming them…almost COMPLETELY OPPOSITE RESPONSES. They can produce MOBS of people who are frothing at the mouth to carry out some OTHER person’s POLITICAL ends…running back to their image-dealer like they’re a methadone clinic…Sontag says the modern world TURNS people into IMAGE JUNKIES.
But on the OTHER hand the alien might say…this technology of the image can ALSO be used to turn people apathetic…to make people feel like they have a FALSE SENSE of FAMILIARITY with the suffering of others…and then to feel SATISFIED with just FEELING SYMPATHY for the people we see in pictures…rather than actually DOING something about it. She says as much in this quote right here but then LAYS DOWN the Sontag HAMMER in the next line after that she says:
"Thinking about images of suffering is not the same as doing anything about suffering. To treat the images of suffering as equivalent to the suffering itself is to participate in a cult of nostalgia."
And it’s RIGHT here…that her CRITIQUE of the way that we usually interact with images, is going to overlap with a critique she has of the way we interact with reality more generally in the modern world. Remember, if PART of our modern mythology is that IMAGES legitimize reality for us, we SEE them as truth…almost the same way that SCRIPTURE legitimizes reality for a religious person…then it’s NOT SURPRISING from the perspective of Sontag that this would PRODUCE what she’s calling here something like a CULT of Nostalgia.
Think about it: how COMMON is it for a modern person to equate HAVING an experience…with taking a PICTURE of themselves having an experience? How common is it for people to look back on what they’ve DONE in their lives by referencing a giant collection of PICTURES that they have on their phone?
Life for this kind of person…TRAVELING or doing NOTEWORTHY THINGS… becomes more about a process of collecting pictures of the stuff they’ve done than it does about actually LIVING the moments they’re in. The FOCAL point of this person’s life then…becomes about the PAST. The PRIMARY CONCERN becomes about COMMEMORATION to Susan Sontag…it’s about REMEMBERING instead of doing.
Now…more on that in a second…but I KNOW there’s gotta be someone out there thinking, well that sounds like a bit of a cartoon as an example. I mean who REALLY goes around their life…they got a camera with a lanyard around their neck so they wont lose it…who really goes around ust SNAPPING pictures of everything never living any of the moments they’re a part of? Isn’t it possible to do what I do? Where I try to LIVE the moment FIRST as DEEPLY as I can…and then I snap a picture at the END of it so that I have something to browse through later in life when the geriatric care professional is giving me a sponge bath.
Ok sure, but ANOTHER angle that Sontag might want you to CONSIDER…is that WHEN you have this URGE as a modern person that you HAVE to COMMEMORATE the MOMENT with a PHOTO or else SOMETHING is gonna be LOST. Recognize, you’re also LOSING something of the moment just BY COMMEMORATING it.
Meaning, when you take a picture…again, it’s not just you taking a NEUTRAL snapshot of some events that are occurring…you are LOSING part of the moment that you are capturing. In fact, to Susan Sontag…in a way you are KILLING the moment that you’re capturing. You are KILLING the moment’s ability to BE anything OTHER than what it currently is that you want to SEIZE control of with a picture. You want to take WHATEVER is going on now, REDUCE it down into a picture and then preserve it in formaldehyde sitting on the shelf in your phone.
She says” “Just as the camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a sublimated murder--a soft murder...All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt."
And again if we try to step outside the perspective of a modern person for a second…WHY would the visual, simplified commemoration of the moment… EVER be MORE IMPORTANT to you than your full EXPERIENCE of the moment in the present? Well there’s certainly many explanations for this but ONE of them is that you are a member of a cult of nostalgia.
The FOCAL point of your life is on COMMEMORATING the PAST as opposed to changing the present. Your memories are more important to you than your dreams. Remakes of the same shows and movies from your past, rehashing of the same tropes of old songs, events or games from the past, all of this matters MORE to someone in a cult of nostalgia than a focus on reimagining, or reINTERPRETING things in a NEW light. In the most extreme cases…the collection of pictures on someone’s phone becomes not a collection of moments that were fully LIVED…but a collection of moments that you ALMOST lived…that were tragically cut short by the fixation you had to commemorate it, because the PICTURE of the moment is what legitimizes it.
You could say…the technology of the picture or the video ENABLES you to have a FALSE SENSE of familiarity with the past events of your life. To the point where you look BACK on them and NEVER really feel like you missed OUT on anything about the experience.
To Susan Sontag…this GENERAL attitude THEN gets applied to the way the modern member of the cult of nostalgia sees the SUFFERING of other people. They equate SEEING the images of people suffering… with KNOWING the suffering of other people. SEEING PICTURES or VIDEOS of what is going on allows them to feel a FALSE SENSE of familiarity with what other people are going through.
Then they think as LONG as they CONTINUE to SEE IMAGES of the suffering that’s going on, EDUCATING themselves they call it…and as long as they post #neverforget, being an ACTIVIST they call it…as long as they COMMEMORATE what went on with these other people that suffered and SHARE the images with other people…as a deluded cult member, they actually feel through doing this stuff as though they’ve legitimized the suffering of others… by making a sarcastic post on social media they actually are able to believe they’ve done something substantive there.
Sontag would say again, we have fallen into a place as a society where we focus far too much on commemoration, and not enough on contemplation…in other words: we focus on remembering things instead of DOING things, and PASSIVELY, UNCRITICALLY CONSUMING these pictures and videos people give us ENABLES us to do this…and we CARRY this emotionally disconnected, complicit attitude around with us in a LOT of different things…but one maybe UNEXPECTED place you can see it she says is in the mythology that surrounds our modern concept of a museum.
Not sure if this is COMMON knowledge that everybody knows about…but fun fact the ORIGINS of the modern museum actually come from HUNDREDS of years ago and rich people that were living in Europe that had these things called curiosity cabinets. The idea is: if you’re a rich person living during the age of exploration…and there are these people traveling all over the world bringing back these artifacts that are mysterious…and these merchants that are trying to make some money off this stuff tell you oh this is a magic lamp from india! Oh this is a DRAGON bone we found in the caribbean…if you’re a rich person and you wanted to have something interesting to show guests when they come over to your house for dinner…you just bought this stuff. You say oh a dragon bone you say…hmm I guess I’ll put that in my CURIOSITY cabinet.
And it wasn’t just DRAGON bones it was a lot of REAL stuff too: point is…this was a cabinet with a SMALL selection of old stuff, bankrolled by the social elite, FUELED by just intellectual curiosity…and then they USUALLY have a fun narrative that goes ALONG with the artifacts that tells an interesting story about how the world is out there on the seven seas or how the HISTORY of the world came to be to where we are now.
Well to Susan Sontag, the experience of the modern person in a museum today is NOT entirely unlike this. You show up. You pay $20. And you walk around the halls VERY QUIETLY LOOKING at all this stuff that someone ELSE has the resources to collect. You’re given a particular narrative about the history of the world and how all this stuff fits IN to that narrative. And then you LEAVE the museum feeling just a little more CULTURED than you were when you walked in the ENTRANCE.
That’s the MYTHOLOGY connected to GOING to a museum. IN other words a bunch of culturally privileged people, that’s US…PAY money to go satisfy their intellectual amusement…and then they’re GIVEN an oversimplified narrative of how these things in the museum FIT IN to past events…and then you can LEAVE the museum and pat yourself on the back for understanding things more.
You leave the museum…and the feeling that washes over you is…hmm, well WASN’T THAT interesting. But there’s not a SINGLE reason in the world Sontag thinks that if the mythology SURROUNDING the museum was different…the average person that leaves the museum might INSTEAD feel FIRED UP about a new perspective they have of things…about taking ACTION in the world they live in.
Imagine a museum that was centered around NOT JUST an inert commemoration of THINGS THAT HAVE HAPPENED in the past…but INSTEAD a museum that focuses on taking an artifact, acknowledging the way it is usually perceived, but also acknowledging the MANY other PERSPECTIVES that you could be VIEWING this thing from that would CHANGE your entire VIEW of it.
Picture how different someone living in the United States felt about the Berlin Wall as opposed to someone living in East Germany. Now apply that to every artifact in a museum, and add in TONS of ALTERNATIVE perspectives that would allow people to UNDERSTAND their history more broadly, feel more CONNECTED to their history, ala Simone Weil they might RECEIVE the universe more openly rather than trying to project a homogenous worldview onto it…there is NO REASON to Susan Sontag why someone LEAVING a museum doesn’t have an ENTIRELY new perspective on the world of the PRESENT DAY.
There is NO REASON WHY the experience someone’s paying for when they GO to a museum can’t be about SHAKING OFF, the emotional DISTANCE between them and the events of the world…not adding ANOTHER layer of separation, where its about shaking people OUT of complicity with the oversimplified narrative, not just giving them MORE of the narrative…there’s no REASON why we HAVE to continue with this mythology that if you’re BORED when you go to a museum…you must just be a moron…wow…you know it’s not because of the insufferable self-gratification that’s going on all around you, gross…no it’s because you lack the intellectual sophistication to be AMUSED by this curiosity cabinet.
Museums are missing out on a BIG opportunity there she thinks, but ANYWAY. To wrap up this episode today Sontag says at one point: “Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into ACTION…or it withers.”
We CANNOT be satisfied with just REMEMBERING the suffering of other people…we can’t just sit around just THINKING about it…and things like museums, documentaries, the pictures and videos we look at on our phones…these are things that if we’re NOT CRITICAL about the way that we engage with them all the time…they allow us to fall DEEPER and DEEPER into this cult of nostalgia. Again, to Susan Sontag we are in a constant fight against this numbness, this apathy from our overexposure to images…but we’re ALSO in a constant fight against people who are trying to manipulate your emotions by PRESENTING images in a particular way–and I guess ONE THING’S FOR SURE…
PASSIVELY…going through your life…TAKING this content in like it’s just some PLEASURABLE THING that you’re enjoying…UNDERSTAND the consequences of not being CRITICAL of your RELATIONSHIP to pictures and videos. We ALL know SOMEBODY who’s not putting in ANY effort in that area…and you can see the evidence of it in the simple, toxic way that they view other people. What level of effort are YOU putting in? Where do you exist along this spectrum of people…that are at the mercy of the PRIEST giving them their scripture?
We need a new approach to our RELATIONSHIP with images. And just like if there was A PERSON in your life that was manipulating your emotions and for whatever reason you can’t get AWAY from this person maybe they’re a family member or a coworker. You’d BE a wise person to set up some clear BOUNDARIES with that person. You WOULDN’T just give them a free pass to DICTATE your emotional well being for the day.
But pictures and videos are just ONE example of a technology we use that to Sontag is so normalized in our lives that we may be under thinking it. On the NEXT episode of the podcast, which will be out by the end of the month…we’ll be looking at ANOTHER example of what you could call a modern technology we’ve normalized. Susan Sontag is gonna offer a critique of the metaphor…and more specifically, how the metaphor IMPACTS the way that people understand and TALK about things like illness and disease.
Because if the way we PASSIVELY consume images goes on to hurt people in ways that we never intended…the way that we PASSIVELY use metaphors goes on to hurt people that are suffering from things like cancer. On next episode we’re about to see what happens when one of the great American cultural critics of ALL TIME…gets us to QUESTION the specific WAYS that we use LANGUAGE DESCRIBE things that we don’t TRULY understand.
Thank you for listening. I’ll talk to you next time.
