In Two Gazes: Western Publics in the War on Terror
Dr Andrew Hill
Speaking in February 2006 at the thinktank the Council for Foreign Relations, Donald Rumsfeld described the War on Terror as the ‘first war’ to be fought:
In an era of e-mails, blogs, cell phones, BlackBerrys, Instant Messaging, digital cameras, a global internet with no inhibitions, hand-held videocameras, talk radio, 24-hour news broadcasts, satellite television. There’s never been a war fought in this environment before.
As Rumsfeld’s analysis suggests, the War on Terror has been subject to a dramatic profusion in the means of documenting and disseminating imagery of the conflict – in a way that had not previously been witnessed. (Rumsfeld’s analysis can in part be read as a response to the capacity of this environment to expose aspects of the War on Terror he and his colleagues in the Bush administration would have preferred not to have seen the light of day).
The need to think through the implications of the ways in which the War on Terror has seemingly been opened up and rendered visible to publics at the level of media coverage of the conflict, but also in regard to more fundamental questions of seeing, stands at the heart of my recent book Re-Imagining the War on Terror: seeing, waiting, travelling (Palgrave, 2009).
Whilst in the Babelic profusion of commentary and analysis of the War on Terror Western publics (a vast, amorphous conceptualisation perhaps, but a necessary one all the same) have primarily been configured as audiences and spectators, it is important to consider a far less well surveyed dimension of the conflict – the way in which these publics have themselves been positioned as seen, how they have come to find themselves caught in two gazes, and in turn, the position this has served to locate them in, in the midst of this ‘war’.
The Enemy’s gaze
The first of these gazes I want to point to is that of the Enemy. Western publics have rarely encountered depictions of the Enemy’s gaze whilst a conflict is taking place. In the Vietnam War – a conflict that in many ways witnessed an opening up of the visual depiction of war – whilst certain images, such as Mai Nam’s 1966 photograph of an United States F-105 pilot ejecting after his plane had been hit, did achieve a profile in the West, Western publics were confronted with comparatively few images of the conflict as seen from a North Vietnamese standpoint.
Rather, historically – in the Vietnam conflict itself, and before and since – deliberate efforts have been made to foreclose Western publics’ awareness of the terms in which the Enemy sees. The latter can be understood as stemming from both the fears an encounter with the Enemy’s gaze might provoke, and the possible value of this gaze as an instrument of propaganda.
In the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq – as in other conflicts – Western publics have had the greatest chance of encountering the Enemy’s gaze if it depicts the enemy as victim. (Just as it is as victim that Western publics are most likely to encounter the Enemy depicted in general). In both the 1991 Gulf War and the Iraq War for example, images of these conflicts seen from an Iraqi perspective were for Western publics largely restricted to brief excerpts of Saddam Hussein and his ministers taken from Iraqi television – the exception being footage of Iraqis lying wounded and dying in hospitals and medical centres, of which repeated excerpts were shown (again, often gleaned from Iraqi television).
Where the War on Terror has marked a break with this paradigm is in the proliferation of imagery produced and distributed by the Enemy, that, above all through developments in digital technology, have become accessible to Western publics in a way not seen previously. This has included videos of Western hostages seized in Iraq, Bin Laden’s video appearances, footage of the Enemy carrying out their missions, and – in a case from June 2007- a suicide bomber ‘graduation ceremony’ held on the Afghanistan-Paksitan border, presided over by the Taliban’s military commander Mansoor Dadullah.
Two intersecting aspects of the significance of these depictions of the Enemy’s gaze are worth emphasising. Firstly, this imagery establishes that the Enemy does indeed possess a gaze, and as such it serves to enhance and render ‘more real’ the awareness of the existence of the Enemy, in the sense that as Sartre (1957:256) contends, ‘my fundamental connection with the Other-as-subject must be able to be referred back to my permanent possibility of being seen by the Other’. At the same time, taking up Lacan’s conception of ‘the gaze’ as the individual subject’s conception of an abstract realm of the Other’s vision, this realisation serves to render Western publics at the mercy of this gaze. (And here it’s worth noting how in his 1962-3 seminar on anxiety, Lacan locates exposure to the Other’s gaze as a – it might be argued the - fundamental source of anxiety). Secondly, this imagery – and here the videos of Western hostages being held, and in certain cases, executed in Iraq (and elsewhere) are particularly notable – renders visible the Enemy’s ability to capture and kill its opponents, making all too clear the possible consequences of exposure to this gaze.
In the context of the War on Terror the fears have come to take on a more definite sense of threat, as underlined by the way in which the Enemy has ‘infiltrated’ and come to ‘exist within’ Western societies – as evident in, for example, the September 11 attacks and the subsequent strikes on Madrid (March 2004) and London (July 2005) – with these attacks serving to confirm that these fears have moved from the realm of the abstract to assuming a locatable reality. These attacks have served to foreground the awareness that the Enemy’s gaze can indeed be trained upon Western publics, ‘Right here, where they are’, provoking the realisation that the suffering audiences witness in these hostage videos could come to be inflicted upon these publics as they go about their everyday lives. As such this imagery serves to emphasise the Western subject’s vulnerability and their status as a possible, visible target of future attacks.
The State’s insecure gaze
The second gaze I want to turn to that Western publics have come to find themselves subject to in the War on Terror is that of the State. The history of the terms in which Western publics have been subject to this gaze has been extensively analysed. My concern here is with the way in which, since the September 11 attacks, this gaze has been extended in response to – or, using the justification of – the threat of terrorist violence. This is a process that has occurred broadly across Western countries, in the United Kingdom, across Europe, and in the United States where the debates around the legality of ‘wiretapping’ (for which can be read ‘electronic surveillance’ in general) have been extensive. (Whilst it might be argued that the extensions of this gaze is less specifically or ‘purely’ visual than that of the Enemy’s gaze just discussed – being in one respect concerned with generating data – they remain bound up with the visual, with the reading of this data and the actions this reading leads to tied to questions of visuality and surveillance).
Two dimensions of the expansion of this gaze are worth highlighting. In one respect this expansion generates a fear about being watched over by the State that ties into the general sense of anxiety associated with the Other’s gaze (pointed to by Sartre, Lacan and a body of other analysts). However, this fear takes on an added dimension given the State’s relationship to the Law and the expansion in the power to detain citizens that has accompanied the extension of this gaze since September 2001.
At the same time though – and perhaps less obviously – the expansion of this gaze can be understood as enhancing the fears around precisely the type of threat it is intended to guard against. At one level this gaze seeks to reassure publics that they are being watched over. At another however, this gaze suggests that such is the nature and scale of the threat faced by Western publics that this threat remains always imminent and needing constantly to be watched out for – on as broad a scale as possible (see for example the image above). In so doing the expansion of this gaze serves to increase the anxiety it is purportedly intended to reduce. Indeed, the repeated assertion by security officials in the United Kingdom that future attacks will take place, serves, it can be argued, to fundamentally destabilise the efficacy of this gaze, and to highlight the limitations of the State and its strategies of seeing, contributing to a sense of desperation that nothing can really be done to halt this threat.
How to look good naked
How then have these two ‘competing’ gazes come to shape the position occupied by Western publics in the War on Terror?
Firstly, it is worth pointing to the way in which Western publics find themselves perpetually at risk of exposure to both gazes. Such is the proliferation of visual, surveillance technologies, and the capacity for unidentified individuals to deploy these technologies, that whilst we are aware we may be being watched over, we typically remain uncertain of when, where and by whom we might be being watched at any point in time.
Secondly, these two gazes serve to position Western publics as potential targets and victims. This is perhaps most obvious in the case of the Enemy’s gaze, but it is there too in the extension of the State’s gaze in response to the threat of terrorism, in terms of the justification for this gaze being underpinned by the threat of publics becoming targets. At the same time the State’s gaze serves to position members of these publics as potential aggressors, that need to be watched over for what they might be up to. And here the broader ties between the War on Terror and the rise of a more general discourse of security obsessed with how people behave in public – confirmed again to me by a recent visit to the US, but increasingly apparent in the UK as well – is evident.
More broadly then – and this is a good point to conclude upon – these two gazes give rise to a subject whose visual profile and presence is foregrounded as a source of ongoing anxiety. Such a dynamic is evident at a rather different level in the contemporary West, in the plethora of television shows devoted to the anxiety of appearance: How to look ten years longer, How to look good naked etc – that can themselves be located as symptoms of an anxiety about being seen, which the proliferation in the circulation of imagery and image producing technology has served to heighten. In the case of the War on Terror that stakes are somewhat higher: it is as visible targets and as needing to be watched over to be protected, that in this conflict Western publics have come to be configured and to see themselves.
References
Lacan, Jacques, (1962-1963) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Anxiety, Book X. Unpublished. Translated by Cormac Gallagher from unedited French manuscripts.
Sartre, Jean Paul (1957) Being and Nothingness: an essay on phenomenological ontology. London: Methuen.
Andrew Hill is Research Fellow in Visual Culture in the Centre for Research in Socio-Cultural Change, The Open University. a.hill@open.ac.uk. You can buy his recent book Reimagining the War on Terror at this link, a preview chapter is available here