Spectacle Is Not Repair: On the Limits of Looking
What does it mean to be surrounded by images of genocide?
“Spectacle is not repair.” – Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes
“We should be suspicious of ‘witness,’ too. In the West, in English, a witness is only ever in service of the law, their testimony only meant to convince a judge. The words and the positions they require of us are already tainted; the law won’t save us, the law is the one that kills us.” - Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide
Like many people, reading the news or going on social media since the beginning of the war on Gaza has meant encountering horrific images of human and ecological devastation. At times, it’s been easy to think about genocide deniers with disbelief, wondering how they can choose to not acknowledge the images that are right in front of them, the incontrovertible evidence, the documentation that seemingly permeates the internet. But everyone’s experience of seeing things is not the same. A photo alone can’t do the work of a political movement. It’s made me think a lot about looking and its uses. What does it mean to have #EyesonRafah or #EyesonGaza when genocidal governments will gladly massacre people in full view of the world? What does it mean to conflate “witnessing” with a form of political action, when our eyes continually fail to hold the powerful accountable?
Because of social media, people around the world have been able to witness the Palestinian genocide with an unprecedented level of detail. I think often about a tweet from the writer Malcolm Harris: “That there are Gazans with more access to global telecommunications networks than to food should make some people rethink how they understand world history and the notion of progress.” When a people undergoing a genocide has been equipped to livestream that genocide with devices created by slave labor, what is that connectivity worth? When we can watch families being starved and bombed from thousands of miles away and yet the starvation and bombing continue, what power exactly does technology confer?
The idea that images can create an emotional appeal on behalf of the oppressed is one with a long history. During the 1860s, American abolitionists circulated images of a Black man named “Whipped Peter” whose back was scarred from physical torture. The image galvanized many white Northerners around the cause of abolition and served as a graphic testament to the horrors of slavery. However, by the end of the 1800s, photographs of Black people’s torture were being used in a different kind of affective practice. Postcards and images of Black people being publicly lynched and mutilated were widely circulated as keepsakes among white communities, often stored in photo albums and attics along with treasured family memorabilia. Hortense Spillers describes this use of Black suffering for white spectacle and pleasure as “pornotroping,” where “1) the captive body [becomes] the source of an irresistible, destructive sensuality; 2) at the same time—in stunning contradiction—it is reduced to a thing, to being for the captor.”
While these two uses of photographs may appear to be radically different from each other, they’re actually more related than they might seem. There’s a sinister continuum between the white liberal circulation of the “Whipped Peter” photograph, and the twisted hunger for images of lynchings. In both instances, white people relied on images of Black people to provide them with a cathartic emotional experience. They turned to these images to structure their moral universe and justify their reactions to the world they lived in. Black people’s bodies carried the burden of proof, whether it was to give evidence of slavery’s violences or to display the effectiveness of white terror during Reconstruction and its aftermath.
Images of oppressed people’s suffering don’t inherently stir people to righteous resistance. Looking is not the same as acting. A documentary image is a material thing, co-created by weather, climate, technology, the documentarian’s emotions, affiliations, aims, and obligations, and countless other factors. But an image can’t teach you how to think, and it can’t tell you what to feel. Looking at the history of images that document violence, it becomes clear that an image I might see as damning and morally clear can also be used to comfort, protect, and titillate the oppressor. Often, the demand for such images as a form of evidence is also an exploitative, endless, and distracting one: we will recognize and legitimate the violence that occurred, if only you provide more and more graphic reproductions of that violence.
In February 2024, after U.S. Air Force member Aaron Bushnell self-immolated in protest of the Palestinian genocide, Bushnell’s loved ones sent footage of the event to reporter Talia Jane. Jane is a leftist reporter who regularly covers protest movements. On her Twitter, she talked about the emotional toll of watching the footage, her ongoing conversations with Bushnell’s friends and family, and her efforts to share information about his death in an ethical way. The same day as Bushnell’s self-immolation, Jane also shared what she called the “angry thirst for ‘gore content’”: messages from anonymous Internet users harassing her for not posting the unedited footage. “You’re a deep state piece of shit if you withhold the video…Show the unblurred version,” one message read. “Stop being a f****t and post the video. We need content,” read another. “We need content”—a chilling testament to a predatory image economy. One user argued that Jane was helping to shield Americans from the truth, comparing her to Vietnam War reporters who concealed the impacts of the war from the American public. While Bushnell’s act should be known and recognized, it’s unclear what exactly about the unblurred footage might convince someone of the truth, if they had already failed to recognize it in the thousands of real-time videos coming directly out of Gaza.
With the growth of consumer capitalism, American society has become increasingly centered on the visual. Advertising is big money. Branding is everything. Social media selves exist to be managed and curated. This ocularcentrism—this privileging of the visual over other ways of meeting the world—extends into the realm of politics. It’s a politics obsessed with the symbolic: Black Lives Matter lawn signs, white politicians in kente cloth, celebrities wearing tiny ceasefire pins to the Oscars. Can it be seen? Does it telegraph the right information to the right people? Is it a sexy image that suggests where your political sympathies might lie without requiring you to do anything about them? It’s a politics that encourages people to think that looking the part is just as significant as following through, one that flattens moments of terror and grief and unthinkable pain into “content.” A politics that encourages us to look, not as a form of education or understanding, but as a form of consumption. Journalists and everyday people in Gaza are risking their lives to share images of what is happening to them. These images carry an imperative that goes beyond looking.
Right now, students across the world are forming encampments protesting their universitys’ investments in Israel. In the U.S., they are being brutally attacked by police and fascist groups, facing tear gas, rubber bullets, physical assaults, and violent arrests. Academia seeks to make students well practiced in the art of looking, of watching and analyzing and positing. Universities boast about fostering these skills, creating critical thinkers and global citizens. But often, the last thing the university wants students to do is to truly act. Particularly when it comes to questioning the very foundations of the university, its constitutive violences and bloodstained investments, the preference is for students to passively look, to engage in dialogue and even a little discourse, but certainly not to do anything about it. The students who are occupying buildings, barricading their campuses against the cops, risking their livelihoods and their bodies, are modeling principled militancy, which is another way of saying a deep and righteous love. They are reminding us that we must live with the full implications of our witnessing, that in all of our looking we must not forget the most important questions: What do we do about the things we can see? Where do we look for the truth, and what does it ask of us?