Martin Jay's Downcast Eyes goes to emphasize the importance of vision and its effects on life. This reading takes a bit of a different approach to the topics we have discussed in class, but nevertheless can be compared in certain ways with readings we have done such as Miller's The Crucible and Berman's Heresy.
Though torture is not directly referenced in the reading, it can be inferred from Jay's words that sight can be quite dangerous - "The hour of greatest visibility, was also the hour of greatest danger (p.554)". Dangerous in what way? The way I understand it, sight can act as a supplement or amplifier to torture, or be used as a form of psychological torture alone. For example, in Heresy, when Doña Francisca was stripped naked and brought "on display" outside the prison cells, she faced horrific humiliation. However, her son being forced to open his eyes and look at her (and comment on her build for that matter) could also be seen as a form of torture - one that involved sight. With that said, might I ask: what would you think upon being forced to watch someone (whether it be a friend or a family member) be murdered in cold blood?
It's good of you to point out the torture that to which Francisca's son was subjected in 'Heresy,' for that is an even greater example of Jay's visibility theory than Francsica's own abuse. For while a person being tortured in front of an audience of any size may suffer under his own visibility, a more or less physically unharmed person subjected to another person's agony is a victim of his own sight - sight and visibility exemplifying two different levels of focus - and the former is the main and concentrated lens through which the psychological torment is provoked.
ReplyDeleteAs for your question, I could not begin to imagine such torment as watching someone I knew (or didn't know) be tortured or killed. But that was probably the point of your rhetoric; these things must be seen to be imagined, but hopefully they never will.
I like the tie back to visibility being a form of torture in itself that you reference. Especially remembering back to the Abu Ghraib documentary we watched, where some of the torutre was only through the prisoners being watched. One of the gaurds recounted how she helped torture a prisoner by watching him shower. No physical pain was inflicted, but by making him visible to another person, the military was torturing the prisoner. This backs up the quote from the text (The hour of greatest visibility...), because the prisoners visibility is what tortures him, not any physical pain or verbal abuse.
ReplyDeleteHey Franz! I agree that in many ways sight does amplify torture. We especially see this in the case of Abu Ghraib. Like Francisca, prisoners were stripped down as a form of psychological torture, which was also an incredible offense religiously. In many ways, this was much more traumatizing than physical pain. While, to a certain extent, physical wounds can heal, it is difficult to forget psychological trauma. The prison guards also took pictures with the tortured to further humiliate them. There were smiles and thumbs were up like some fun facebook photo next to those who were suffering. With the camera involved, torture begins to be done solely for the sake of a good photo. The power of visuals can be seen by how it influences torture and dictates how people behave and react to it. Ironically, the brutal torture was revealed due to these photos. In the documentary, we see people reporting, in text, the mistreatment of the prisoners of Abu Ghraib, but it was not taken very seriously. It was not until the photos were exposed that people began to act on the crimes. This shows how visuals, whether they are used for truth or cruelty, are very influential. It expresses in a way that words cannot.
ReplyDeleteFranz, I find the connection you draw between sight and torture to be interesting. This theme of the ethics of visual representation can also be observed in the move we watched in class, O Judeu. The torture scenes that we witnessed that were the most disturbing were those with the clearest visual and audible depictions. And that is merely from the perspective of a detached audience. Surely this carries over into first-person witnesses, in which psychological torture can be quite traumatic.
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