Slow Looking: The Ethics and Politics of Aesthetics: Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005) Mark Reinhardt, Holly Edwards, and Erina Duganne, Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007) Gillo Pontecorvo, director, The Battle of Algiers (Criterion: Special Three-Disc Edition, 2004)
| Published date | 01 August 2008 |
| Author | Michael J. Shapiro |
| Date | 01 August 2008 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0305829808093770 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
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© 2008 The Author(s)
Millennium: Journal of International Studies Vol.37 No.1, pp. 181–197
ISSN 0305-8298; DOI: 10.1177/0305829808093770
http://mil.sagepub.com
Slow Looking: The Ethics and
Politics of Aesthetics
Michael J. Shapiro
Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005)
Mark Reinhardt, Holly Edwards, and Erina Duganne, Beautiful Suf-
fering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 2007)
Gillo Pontecorvo, director, The Battle of Algiers (Criterion: Special Three-
Disc Edition, 2004)
This review essay treats three texts: Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect,
Trauma, and Contemporary Art; Mark Reinhardt, Holly Edwards, and
Erina Duganne, Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffi c in Pain;
and The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo.
Keywords: aesthetics, ethics, pain
Introduction: ‘Slow Looking’
In his novel Slowness, Milan Kundera displays a keen awareness that
images of suffering in daily media are both partial and brief. At one
point his narrator, who is traveling with his wife, notes that their stay
in a chateau ‘coincides with the period when, everyday for two weeks
[the television news media] showed the children of an African nation,
whose name is already forgotten, ravaged by war.’ The children appear
‘thin, exhausted, without strength to wave away the flies walking
across their faces.’1 Later in the novel, when the images are no longer
being carried by the television networks, the narrator remarks that
‘the situations history stages are floodlit only for the few minutes’ and
continues:
No event remains news over its whole duration, merely for a quite
brief span of time, at the very beginning. The dying children of
Somalia whom millions of spectators used to watch avidly, aren’t
they dying any more? What has become of them? Have they grown
1. Milan Kundera, Slowness (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), 12.
Millennium: Journal of International Studies 37 (1)
182
fatter or thinner? Does Somalia still exist? And in fact did it ever exist?
Could it be only the name of a mirage?2
As Kundera’s narrator points out, the impressions left by stark images
of suffering carried in news media have too brief an exposure to have a
lasting effect on people’s sympathies. In contrast, while the momentarily
timely images carried by news media may be ephemeral, the genre of
the exhibition, which yields an accompanying and enduring catalogue/
text, is one in which what becomes effaced as a news event is restored,
reflected on, and made publicly available for extended ethical and political
negotiation. Museum exhibitions have sufficient exposure over time to
‘frame’ and often ‘reframe’ a society’s conversations.3 Like some other
artistic genres, they make available for extended public witnessing and
discussion what daily media has forgotten. Mieke Bal’s contribution to
a remarkable and timely volume, Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the
Traffic in Pain, which was issued as a companion volume to an exhibition
by that name at Williams College (28 January–30 April 2006), points to
the more enduring effects of photographic exhibitions. Just as Kundera’s
novel is an ode to slowness, to the savoring of life’s vivid presence, Bal
recommends ‘slow looking’ as an approach to the images and curatorial
organization that comprised the Beautiful Suffering exhibit and endures in
the accompanying text. Bal’s recommendation sets up the genre-reception-
empathy issues I am exploring as I treat the way recent texts in diverse
genres encourage thinking about the ethics and politics of aesthetics.
Specifically, in this review essay I examine Beautiful Suffering: Photography
and the Traffic in Pain along with two other texts: Jill Bennett’s Empathic
Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art and the recent DVD version
of Gillo Pontecorvo’s film The Battle of Algiers, reissued with new and past
commentaries and interviews that are contained in two supplementary
DVDs. The three texts have strong contemporary resonance because pain and
suffering, which are the central focus in all three, are objects of current policy
and contentious public reaction and debate, which intensified after images
of the abuse of ‘detainees’ at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq achieved public
notoriety. While as Kundera points out through his fictional characters, pain
and suffering have a brief public life as images in daily news media, other
media genres summon a more analytic reaction, not only because of their
subject matter but also because of both their ‘ideology of form’4 and their
availability for ‘slow looking’ and thus extended reflection. They endure to
provoke both sensation and criticism, resonating with embodied memories
2. Ibid., 79.
3. The museum exhibition’s effects of framing and reframing society’s conver-
sations is developed in Richard Sandell, Museums, Prejudice and the Reframing of
Difference (New York: Routledge, 2007).
4. The concept of the ‘ideology of form’ is by Fred Jameson, in his early work.
See for example his The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982).
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