‘Despicable beauty’: the embedded sublime and the poetics of violence in Iraq war reportage
2023; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 38; Issue: 8 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/0950236x.2023.2243907
ISSN1470-1308
Autores Tópico(s)Media Studies and Communication
ResumoABSTRACTThis essay argues that Iraq war reportage participates in an embedded sublime that offers aestheticized and racialized spectacles of war at a distance. The US military media embedding program aimed to decisively shape the media's representation of the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq. But embedding journalists within military units proved challenging, as the programme confronted both the ironies of framed narratives and a destabilising media and internet environment. Reading Anthony Swofford's Jarhead, Evan Wright's Generation Kill, and Dexter Filkins' The Forever War, I argue that their hypermasculine representations of war show a powerful desire for poeticized violence and for scenes of despicable beauty. These scenes draw on classical formulations of the sublime in Kant, depending on racial hierarchies and imperial narratives as they represent the killing and suffering of people of colour in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Global South. Yet the embedded sublime often produces an ethical hesitation in readers and viewers allowing them to participate as spectators of war at a distance. I explore strategies that challenge this logic in Iraqi blogger Riverbend's Baghdad Burning and journalist Nick McDonell's The End of Major Combat Operations, resisting this tendency to embed, aestheticize and normalise representations of violence in the 'The Forever War' era.KEYWORDS: MediaIraqembeddingwarnarrative AcknowledgmentsMany thanks to Peter Nicholls for his generous and incisive comments on earlier versions of this article. I am grateful to have presented my research to the NYU Cultures of War and the Postwar Research Collaborative, the NYU Centre for the Humanities Cold War Media working group, the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at NYU, the English Graduate Student Organisation Conference at SUNY Albany, the Department of English at the University of Miami, and the Borough of Manhattan Community College, and thank all of the participants for their comments and suggestions. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers at Textual Practice for their helpful and incisive comments.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 See, for example, George Packer, 'Home Fires: How soldiers write their wars.' The New Yorker, April 7 2014, and Michiko Kakutani, 'Human Costs of the Forever Wars, Enough to Fill a Bookshelf', New York Times, Dec. 25, 2014.2 Anthony Swofford, Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles (New York: Scribner, 2003), pp. 6-7. All subsequent citations in text.3 Judith Butler, Frames Of War: When Is Life Grievable? (New York: Verso, 2009) 64-74.4 Alessandra Stanley, 'A Nation At War: The TV Watch; Networks Make the Most Of Their Frontline Access', New York Times, March 21, 2003. https://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/21/us/a-nation-at-war-the-tv-watch-networks-make-the-most-of-their-frontline-access.html Web. For a trenchant critique of this approach, see David Shields, War Is Beautiful: The New York Times Pictorial Guide to the Glamour of Armed Conflict* (New York: powerHouse Books, 2015).5 For a discussion of this logic see: Deer 'Mapping Contemporary American War Culture', College Literature, 43.1 (2016), pp. 66-70; Patrick Porter, Military Orientalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); and Hamid Dabashi, Post-Orientalism: Knowledge And Power In Time Of Terror (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2009) pp. 209-28.6 See Butler, Frames Of War, Sylvia Shin Huey Chong, The Oriental Obscene: Violence and Racial Fantasies in the Vietnam Era (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2011), and Sinan Antoon, 'Embedded Poetry: Iraq; Through a Soldier's Binoculars.' Jadaliyya, Jun. 11 2014. http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/18082/embedded-poetry_iraq;-through-a-soldiers-binocular Web.7 Butler, Frames Of War 100.8 See Jean-Francois Lyotard, 'Representation, Presentation, Unpresentable', in Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991) pp 119-28.9 See Caleb S. Cage, War Narratives: Shaping Beliefs, Blurring Truths in the Middle East (College Station: Texas A&M UP, 2019).10 'Public Affairs Guidance (PAG) On Embedding Possible Future Operations/Deployments In The (Centcom) Area Of Responsibility (AOR)', United States Department of Defense, February 2003. https://fas.org/sgp/othergov/dod/embed.html. Web.11 See David Nye American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).12 FM 30–26 Basic Field Manual, Regulations for Correspondents Accompanying U.S. Army Forces in the Field 1942, United States. War Department (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1942) Par. 1. Web. Accessed Aug 30 2017.13 See Andrew P. Cortell, Robert M. Eisinger and Scott L. Althaus, 'Why Embed?: Explaining the Bush Administration's Decision to Embed Reporters in the 2003 Invasion of Iraq', American Behavioral Scientist, 52.5 (January 2009), 659–60. Web.14 Capt. Michael Doubleday, (1996) DoD news briefing, 9 May, 1996, cited Heinz Brandenburg, 'Security At The Source', Journalism Studies, 8.6 (Oct 2007), p. 952-53. As Brandenburg notes, the term first appeared in Field Manual FM 46-1: Public Affairs Operations (Washington, DC: Headquarters, Department of the Army, 1997).15 Stephen Farrell, 'Embedistan,' At War: Notes From the Front Lines, New York Times, June 25, 2010. Web. https://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/25/embedistan-2/#more-2089516 OED 'Embed.'17 David A. Anderson, 'Freedom Of The Press In Wartime', University of Colorado Law Review, Winter, 2006, University of Colorado Law Review 77 U. Colo. L. Rev. 49, 6 & 13 see n114 p30. Web.18 For the remarkable range of journalists' responses to embedding, see Bill Katovsky and Timothy Carlson, Embedded: The Media At War In Iraq (Lyons Press, 2003); Judith Sylvester and Suzanne Huffman, Reporting from the Front: The Media and the Military (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005); and Mike Hoyt and John Palattella, eds., Reporting Iraq: An Oral History Of The War By The Journalists Who Covered It (Hoboken, NJ: Melville House, 2007), pp. 97-111;19 Brandenburg, p. 955.20 Hoyt et al, p. 104.21 Mieke Bal, 'Images of Pain', in Mark Reinhardt, Holly Edwards and Erina Duganne (eds.), Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007) 112.22 See James Campbell, 'Combat Gnosticism: The ideology of First World War Criticism', New Literary History, 30 (1999), p. 204. See also Kate McCloughlin's discussion of 'Credentials' in Authoring War: The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011), pp. 21-50, 158-60.23 Katovsky, 'Introduction', Embedded, p. xv-xvi.24 William Nelles, 'Stories within Stories: Narrative Levels and Embedded Narrative', Studies in the Literary Imagination, 25 (1992): 92.25 See Katovsky and Carlson, p. 229-34.26 David Barstow, 'Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon's Hidden Hand', New York Times, April 20, 2008. Web. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/us/20generals.html27 Adrian R. Lewis, The American Culture of War: The History of U.S. Military Force from World War II to Operation Enduring Freedom, 2nd Edition (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 440-41. See also Hoyt, pp. 97-8.28 Lewis, pp. 440-41.29 David Vaina, 'The Vanishing Embedded Reporter in Iraq', Pew Research Center, Oct 26, 2006 https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2006/10/26/the-vanishing-embedded-reporter-in-iraq/30 Stacey Peebles, Welcome to the Suck: Narrating the American Soldier's Experience in Iraq (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), pp. 21. See also Peebles' more recent discussion, 'The Forever Wars' in Jennifer Haytock, ed., War and American Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2021), pp. 254–68.31 Lawrence Freedman, Strategy: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 234–5. See also, Patrick Deer, 'When the Medium is War: Marshall McLuhan, Media, and Militarization', Textual Practice, Special Issue, Reading McLuhan Reading, 35.9 (2021), pp. 1507-24.32 Bryan Whitman, quoted in Katovsky and Carlson, p. 207.33 Peebles, p. 36.34 Anthony Swofford, Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles (New York: Scribner, 2003), pp. 6-7. All subsequent citations in text.35 Susan Brook, Literature and Cultural Criticism in the 1950's: The Feeling Male Body (Palgrave, 2007) 2.36 Peebles, p. 33.37 Roy Scranton, 'The Trauma Hero: From Wilfred Owen to 'Redeployment'and 'American Sniper.'' Los Angeles Review of Books, 25 Jan. 2015. Web. 5 Jan. 2016.38 The NYT reprint of the opening section on March 2nd, 2003, during the run up to the invasion of Iraq, omits the last sentence. https://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/02/books/chapters/jarhead.html39 For the Revolution in Military Affairs, 'transformation', and the 'Rumsfeld doctrine' in Afghanistan and Iraq war planning, see Andrew Bacevich, America's War in the Greater Middle East (New York: Random House), pp 178-80, 224–32 & 247-49, and Adrian Lewis, pp. 406–9 & 432–8.40 See Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd Ed. (New York: Routledge, 2007), Mary Favret, War at a Distance; Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2009), and Patrick Deer, Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire and Modern British Literature (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009).41 Laura Doyle, 'The Racial Sublime.' Romanticism, race, and imperial culture 1834 (1780), p. 35. See also, Donald E. Pease, 'Sublime Politics', boundary 2 Vol. 12. 3 - Vol. 13. 1, (Spring - Autumn, 1984), pp. 259-79.42 See Fred Moten, Stolen Life (Durham: Duke UP, 2018) pp 1–32 & p 270n6, and David Lloyd, Under Representation: The Racial Regime Of Aesthetics (New York: Fordham UP, 2018) pp 44-66.43 See Lloyd 59: 'it is precisely the requirement of mediation, the mediation of culture and of the ethical formation of the disposition of the subject, that enables the subject to partake of the public sense that the aesthetic both forms and instantiates.'44 Evan Wright, Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War (New York: Penguin, 2004), p. 171.45 Wright, p.171.46 See Wright, pp 112-13.47 Sylvia Shin Huey Chong, The Oriental Obscene: Violence and Racial Fantasies in the Vietnam Era (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2011), pp. 24.48 Wright, Generation Kill, p. 174.49 Fredric Jameson, The Benjamin Files (New York: Verso, 2020) p 188.50 See Immanuel Kant, Critique Of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Cambridge: Hackett, 1987), pp. 114-15.51 See for example Lyotard's 'The Sublime and the Avant-Garde', in The Inhuman, pp. 89-107.52 Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence, trans. Steven Rendall (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997). See especially, pp. 26-9.53 See the Oxford Research Report, 'Learning from Fallujah: Lessons Identified, 2003-2005', Nov 1, 2015. Web.54 Dexter Filkins, 'A Nation At War: In The Field, First Marine Division; Warm Welcome And Stubborn Resistance For Marines', New York Times, April 8, 2003.55 Antoon par. 12 & par. 8. Antoon's essay focuses on US veteran war poet Brian Turner's Here Bullet (2005). For discussions of the ways Turner's work self-critically confronts American moral responsibility, see Catherine Irwin, 'Framing War: The Politics of Embedded Reporting in Brian Turner's Here, Bullet', Pacific Coast Philology, 50.1 (2015), pp. 103-26; and Patrick Deer, 'Beyond Recovery: Representing History and Memory in Iraq War Writing', Modern Fiction Studies, 63.2 (Summer 2017), 324-8.56 Antoon par. 15.57 James Hill, 'Diary Notes From the Invasion: Sandstorms, Bodies and Burning Tanks', New York Times, March 19, 2008. http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/19/diary-notes-from-the-invasion-sandstorms-bodies-and-burning-tanks/?_r=0 Accessed June 27th 2023. See also Hill's interview with CSpan where Hill defends his use of the photo, 'Iraq War Photographer Interview: James Hill', Aug. 14, 2003,https://www.c-span.org/video/?177808-4/iraq-war-photographer-interview58 See Roger Luckhurst, 'Iraq War Body Counts: Reportage, Photography, and Fiction', Modern Fiction Studies, 63.2 (Summer 2017), pp. 357–65.59 See 'Chronology of DOD Policy on Images of the Honors Provided to American Casualties', Return of the Fallen, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 152, April 28, 2005. https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB152/index.htm60 Katherine J. Harrison, Silver Spring, Md. 'Letter to the Editor', http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,993130-2,00.html Accessed Nov. 4th 2015.61 Adam Jasper And Sianne Ngai, 'Our Aesthetic Categories: An Interview with Sianne Ngai', Cabinet, 43 Forensics (Fall 2011), p. 10. On blocked or suspended agency, stuplimity and the Kantian sublime, see Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2005), pp. 265–72.62 Shields, p. 7.63 Shields, p. 9.64 On 'unilateral' reporting, see Dahr Jamail, Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket Books, 2007), and Patrick Cockburn, 'Embedded journalism: A distorted view of war', The Independent Nov 23 2010. Web.65 The Committee to Protect Journalists lists over 350 journalists killed between 2001 and 2021. See https://cpj.org/data/killed/66 Riverbend, Baghdad Burning http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/ The blog runs from August 17th, 2003 to October 22nd, 2007 and was published in book form as Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq (New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2005) and Baghdad Burning II: More Girl Blog from Iraq (New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2006). See also Firas Al-Atraqchi, 'Interview: Iraqi blogger Riverbend', Aljazeera, 9 Apr 2006. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2006/4/9/interview-iraqi-blogger-riverbend Web.67 For Riverbend's posts on Fallujah, see https://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/search?q=Falloojeh See also Ross Caputi, Richard Hil, and Donna Mulhearn, The Sacking of Fallujah: A People's History (Amherst: UMass Press, 2019).68 Riverbend, 'Wednesday, April 14, 2004, Media and Falloojeh … ' n.p. http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/2004/04/69 See, for example, Salam Pax, 'Baghdad Blogger: How to have Fun in Baghdad (2006)' https://youtu.be/6O8VT1cX5i4 Web. On Salam Pax and Riverbend, see Michael Otterman and Richard Hil, Erasing Iraq: The Human Costs Of Carnage (London: Pluto Press, 2010), pp. 38-53.70 For examples of the disfiguring of literary language in contemporary US war writing, see Denis Johnson's recent Vietnam war novel, Tree of Smoke (2007), which ends with a poem entitled 'Vietnam' burned on a ritual pyre, 'His poem whirled upward as an ash', p. 596. Kevin Powers arguably demonstrates a willingness to disfigure the poetic in order to render the brutal costs of war in his lyrical novel, The Yellow Birds (2012). See Deer, 'Beyond Recovery', pp. 312-35.71 Rachel Galvin, News of War: Civilian Poetry 1936–1945 (New York: Oxford UP, 2018) 16. See also pp 36, 263 & 297.72 Nick McDonell, The End of Major Combat Operations (San Francisco, McSweeney's, 2010)73 Nick McDonell, The Bodies In Person: An Account Of Civilian Casualties In American Wars (New York: Penguin Random House, 2018), p. 224 n.4.
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