You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
What follows is a series of images and texts that served as the basis for discussion at one of the symposium's “open sessions” — sessions with no formal papers, whose aim was to enable relatively unstructured yet focused and sustained conversation about some aspect of the war. This particular session focused on the tortures at Abu Ghraib prison. As its facilitator, I juxtaposed some of the digital photographs of humiliated and violated Iraqi prisoners with excerpts from related texts and documents. Many of the latter were written or read by members of the Bush administration, and they thus contributed crucially to the discursive climate that made the tortures both possible and (for the administration) justifiable. Other texts included a passage from Philip Caputo's (1996) memoir of Vietnam, Rumor of War, and, in a section of the session on critiques of Abu Ghraib, a piece of political satire by Rod Corddry (2004) of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart - the comedy program that offered some of the most consistently incisive criticisms of the war.
The session elicited especially intense affective responses from participants and the “audience” (the distinction was particularly porous in open sessions). These reactions emerged, first, in response to an initial viewing of the images. Some described their response to this viewing as a “dissociation” that suggested how much the photos continue to have the power to traumatize their viewers. Others spoke of intense anxiety, of a nameless dread that seemed to result from their empathic identification with the victims. Still others expressed anger, guilt, and shame at belonging to a nation that could do such things “in our name.” To give these responses both space and shape, I proposed that we try collectively to “hold” them while focusing our discussion on three broad questions:
What do the images and texts say about the emotions that torture induces in its victims, and how are these related, in this case, to such culturally specif