Their imaginative politics of FIAT facilitates over-exposure to certain “grievable” lives, while censoring imperial frames and masking death through structural violence

Under what conditions does this quality of "absolute pastness" counter the forces of melancholy and open up a more explicit form of grieving? Is this quality of "absolute pastness" that is conferred on a living being, one whose life is not past, precisely the quality of grievability? To confirm that a life was, even within the life itself, is to underscore that ~ life is ~ grievable life. In this sense the photograph, through Its relauon to the future anterior, instates grievability. It makes sense to wonder whether this insight is not related to Sontag's imperative: "Let the atrocious images haunt us. "35 Her imperative suggests that there are conditions in which we can refuse to be haunted, or where haunting cannot reach us. If we are not haunted, there is no loss, there has been no life that was lost. But if we are shaken or "haunted" by a photograph, it is because the photograph acts on us in part through outliving the life it documents; it establishes in advance the time in which that loss will be acknowledged as a loss. So the photograph is linked through its "tense" to the grievability of a life, anticipating and performing that grievability. In this way, we can be haunted in advance by the suffering or deaths of others. Or we can be haunted afterwards, when the check against grief becomes undone. It is not only or exclusively at an affective register that the photograph operates, but through instituting a certain mode of acknowledgment. It "argues" for the grievability of a life: its pathos is at once affective and interpretive. If we can be haunted, then we can acknowledge that there has been a loss and hence that there has been a life: this is an initial moment of cognition, an apprehension, but also a potential judgment, and it requires that we conceive of grievability as the precondition of life, one that is discovered retrospectively through the temporality instituted by the photograph itself. "Someone will have lived" is spoken within a present, but it refers to a time and a loss to come. Thus the anticipation of the past underwrites the photograph's distinctive capacity to establish grievability as a precondition of a knowable human life-to be haunted is precisely to apprehend that life before precisely knowing it. Sontag herself makes less ambitious claims. She writes that the photograph can be an "invitation ... to pay attention, reflect ... examine the rationalizations for mass suffering offered by established powers."36 It is my sense that the curated exhibition of the Abu Ghraib photos at the International Center for Photography did precisely that. But what is most interesting to me about the increasing outrage and exasperation Sontag expressed in her writings on 9/11 and in her article "Regarding the Torture of Others" is that it continued to be directed against the photograph not only for making her feel outrage, but for failing to show her how to transform that affect into effective political action. She acknowledges that she has in the past turned against the photograph with moralistic denunciation precisely because it enrages without directing the rage, and so excites our moral sentiments at the same time as it confirms our political paralysis. And even this frustration frustrates her, since it seems a guilty and narcissistic preoccupation with what one can do as a first-world intellectual, and so fails again to attend to the suffering of others. Even at the end of that consideration, it is a museum piece by Jeff Wall that allows Sontag to formulate this problem of responding to the pain of others, and so, we might surmise, involves a certain consolidation of the museum world as the one within which she is most likely to find room for reflection and deliberation. At this moment, we can see her turn both from the photograph and from the political exigencies of war to the museum exhibition that gives her the time and space for the kind of thinking and writing she treasures. She confirms her position as an intellectual, but shows us how this piece might help us to reflect more carefully about war. In this context, Sontag asks whether the tortured can and do look back, and what they see when they look at us. She was faulted for saying that the photographs from Abu Ghraib were photographs of "us," and some critics suggested that this was again a kind of self-preoccupation that paradoxically and painfully took the place of a reflection on the suffering of others. But what she asked was "whether the nature of the policies prosecuted by this administration and the hierarchies deployed to carry them out makes such acts [of torture] likely. Considered in this light, the photographs are us. Perhaps she was saying that in seeing the photos, we see ourselves seeing, that we are those photographers to the extent that we share the norms that provide the frames in which those lives are rendered destitute and abject, and are sometimes clearly beaten to death. In Sontag's vjew, the dead are profoundly uninterested in us-they do not seek our gaze. This rebuff to visual consumerism that comes from the shrouded head, the averted glance, the glazed eyes, this indifference to us performs an auto-critique of the role of the photograph within media consumption. Although we might want to see, the photograph tells us clearly that the dead do not care whether we see or not. For Sontag, this is the ethical force of the photograph, to mirror back the final narcissism of our desire to see and to refuse satisfaction to that narcissistic demand. She may be right, but perhaps it is also our inability to see what we see that is also of critical concern. To learn to see the frame that blinds us to what we see is no easy matter. And if there is a critical role for visual culture during times of war it is precisely to thematize the forcible frame, the one that conducts the dehumanizing norm, that restricts what is perceivable and, indeed, what can be. Although restriction is necessary for focus, and there is no seeing without selection, this restriction we have been asked to live with imposes constraints on what can be heard, read, seen, felt, and known, and so works to undermine both a sensate understanding of war, and the conditions for a sensate opposition to war. This "not seeing" in the midst of seeing, this not seeing that is the condition of seeing, became the visual norm, a norm that has been a national norm, one conducted by the photographic frame in the scene of torture. In this case, the circulation of the image outside the scene of its production has broken up the mechanism of disavowal, scattering grief and outrage in its wake.