Traces of violence: Representing the atrocities of war
| DOI | 10.1177/1748895818789448 |
| Author | Eamonn Carrabine |
| Date | 01 November 2018 |
| Published date | 01 November 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Thematic Section: Visions of war and terrorDebate and Dialogue |
789448CRJ0010.1177/1748895818789448Criminology & Criminal JusticeCarrabine
research-article2018
Debate and Dialogue
Criminology & Criminal Justice
2018, Vol. 18(5) 631 –646
Traces of violence:
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atrocities of war
Eamonn Carrabine
University of Essex, UK
Abstract
This article explores the relationships between war and representation through the use of visual
images, and takes a cue from the French cultural theorist Paul Virilio, who has written extensively
on the militarization of vision in ways that have yet to be fully recognized in criminology. It then
outlines some of the disputes surrounding documentary photography, not least since one of the
main factors driving the development of the medium was the desire to record warfare, before
turning to recent efforts to reconfigure the violence of representation by focusing on what has
been termed ‘aftermath photography’, where practitioners deliberately adopt an anti-reportage
position, slowing down the image-making process and arriving well after the decisive moment.
This more contemplative strategy challenges the oversimplification of much photojournalism and
the article concludes by reflecting on how military-turned-consumer technologies are structuring
our everyday lives in more and more pervasive ways.
Keywords
Criminology, photography, representation, Virilio, war
In the 20 years since Ruth Jamieson (1998) urged criminologists to study war in a more
critical, sustained and systematic way three main approaches have developed in the dis-
cipline: one that examines war as a state crime (Green and Ward, 2004) and a second
perspective characterizing military operations as a form of transnational policing
(Degenhardt, 2010), while a third regards war as a corporate crime (Ruggiero, 2008).
Attempts have since been made to advance new conceptual inroads into the relationships
Corresponding author:
Eamonn Carrabine, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, Essex, CO4 3SQ, UK.
Email: eamonn@essex.ac.uk
632
Criminology & Criminal Justice 18(5)
between criminology and war at many different theoretical, methodological and empiri-
cal levels.1 In this article I explore the relationships between visual images and armed
conflict to forge connections with the emerging field of visual criminology (Brown and
Carrabine, 2017) and complement the different perspectives advocated by Vicenzo
Ruggiero and Sandra Walklate in this volume. In his earlier call for a ‘new criminology
of war’ Ruggiero (2005: 245–246) argues that attention must be given to questions of
ideological legitimation, not least since war often possesses an ‘aura of sacredness’ and
‘collective celebration’, and advocates a closer scrutiny of the representational practices
involved in the cultural crafting and containment of war. Acts of war inevitably unleash
divisions and considerable effort is devoted to containing the ‘disruptiveness of military
violence – making wars potentially more intense cultural productions than any peace-
time phase of life’ (Keller, 2001: x). By focusing on the cultural dimension the sugges-
tion is that this should constitute a fourth criminological approach to war, in ways that
offer distinctive analytical gains, along the lines set out in Mann’s historical sociology.
For Mann (1993: 9) it is the ‘struggle to control ideological, economic, military, and
political power’ that provides the ‘central drama in social development’ and crucially ‘all
four are necessary to social existence and to each other’. Although I will be concentrating
on cultural analysis (or the ‘ideological’ in Mann’s framework) the overall point is that a
comprehensive criminology of war should be alive to these four different, but overlap-
ping, sources of social power.
I am especially concerned with the use of images as historical evidence, so as to think
through the relationships between war and representation, and understood as cultural work:
‘armed conflicts are shot through with signs, and the processes of signification are shot
through with conflict; warfare is, among other things an aesthetic enterprise and art, among
other things, a site of battle’ (Keller, 2001: xiv, emphases in original). A diverse range of
pictorial material can be examined from a visual culture perspective, as Keller’s account of
the Crimean War makes clear, and such sources are best regarded as contested ‘traces’ ena-
bling us to ‘imagine’ the past more creatively, not least since they record a ‘point of view’
and constitute forms of ‘eyewitnessing’ (Burke, 2001: 13–14). Images engage dynamics of
seeing and not seeing, and can draw attention to absence as much as presence, mediating
reality and posing important questions over what lies beyond the frame. As such the focus
of this article is not simply images of war, or even a war of images, but rather war is under-
stood to be fundamentally an ‘image event’ (Padiyar et al., 2017: 2), where the means of
representation have long been central to the logistics of warfare. This point is derived from
the French cultural theorist Paul Virilio whose work addresses the significance of war, archi-
tecture, media, technology and perception in ways that have yet to be fully recognized in
criminology. The article begins by setting out Virilio’s central arguments before discussing
some of the diverse ways in which war has been represented by documentary photographers
in their efforts to challenge the oversimplification of much photojournalism.
This article takes part inspiration from the fact photographers have made significant
bodies of work on war and have questioned the idea of a photograph bearing neutral wit-
ness to events. It also seeks to examine the dynamic of spectacle and surveillance, the
mixing of means of communication with those of destruction, at the core of Virilio’s
penetrating critique of how technological innovations are transforming contemporary
life. The role of war in modern technological development is a sustained theme is his
work, as is the reconceptualization of the traditional ‘theatre of war’, where the
Carrabine
633
conventional role of wartime media to disseminate propaganda directed at civilians is
now accompanied by forms of representation targeted at combatants themselves. The
first part sets outs Virilio’s arguments in more detail, the second highlights some of the
ongoing ethical dilemmas photographers face when they document political violence.
The third and fourth parts discuss efforts to reconfigure the violence of representation
before addressing how the world itself has been transformed into a target.
Virilio, War and Representation
In his provocative account of how military ‘ways of seeing’ have transformed social rela-
tions Virilio (1989: 7–8, emphasis in original) insists that there is no war ‘without repre-
sentation’ and that it
can never break free from the magical spectacle because its very purpose is to produce that
spectacle: to fell the enemy is not so much to capture as to ‘captivate’ him, to instil the fear of
death before he actually dies.
His distinctive claim is that alongside the ‘war machine’ there has always existed a
‘watching machine’, which is concerned with providing an accurate picture of the ene-
my’s shape and size, so that while Virilio’s historical sweep is vast he is especially con-
cerned with how cinematic techniques have become integral to modern conflict. As he
famously puts it ‘War is cinema and cinema is war’ (Virilio, 1989: 34, emphasis in origi-
nal), and so the starting point for his argument is the First World War, which as the first
great military-industrial conflict also introduced new logics of perception. A little later
he wrote:
The year 1914 not only saw the physical deportation of millions of men to the battlefields. With
the apocalypse created by the deregulation of perception came a different kind of diaspora, the
moment of panic when the mass of Americans and Europeans could no longer believe their eyes,
when their faith in perception became slave to the technical sightline: in other words, the visual
field was reduced to the line of a sighting device. (Virilio, 1994a: 13, emphases in original)
His overall argument is that there has been a ‘progressive dematerialization of warfare’,
in which technologies increasingly replace human beings, machines replace warriors on
the battlefield, reducing the soldier to ‘a cog in a servomechanism’ (Kellner, 1999: 109).
These themes are present in some of Virilio’s earliest writings, including a study of the
massive concrete bunkers that the occupying German army constructed along the western
and northern coast of France to prevent an allied invasion. Some 15,000 were built during
World War Two along a defensive ‘Atlantic Wall’ and the sheer scale of their construction
was a potent symbol of total warfare for Virilio, transforming Europe into an enormous
fortress. Yet at the same time they seemed strangely anachronistic, and the destruction of
European cities from aerial bombardment completely shattered the myth of impregnabil-
ity in such defensive, frontier installations. From 1958 to 1965 he photographed these
elaborate, sinister relics abandoned to the sand, sea and wind. An exhibition of the photos
along with drawings, cartography, diagrams, documents and his own writings...
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