by Jon Lackman | 4 February 2008 | Books
In caa.reviews, Terri Weissman considers Stephen F. Eisenman’s new book, The Abu Ghraib Effect:
The 2004 appearance of photographs from the Abu Ghraib prison, which showed in horrific detail U.S. soldiers violating the human rights of supposed Al-Qaeda terrorist and Iraqi insurgency suspects … failed to instigate radical political change in the United States … Eisenman interprets this political status quo as evidence that by and large Americans took a “so what” attitude toward the Abu Ghraib torture images, an attitude he labels the “Abu Ghraib effect” … Eisenman explains the Abu Ghraib effect not through a sustained analysis of growing racism in the United States since the 9/11 attacks, or via an administration whose condoning of torture and abandonment of Geneva is a substantial change in U.S. policy, but rather through what he calls, after the early twentieth-century art historian Aby Warburg, a Pathosformel or pathos formula. In the Western classical tradition, the pathos formula is the motif of eroticized, rationalized torture as found in select art-historical examples … the pathos formula reemerges, Eisenman argues, in the twentieth century with the rise of fascism and remains alive and well today in popular culture. His evidence spans the canon of Western art …
There is much in this book to commend. It provides, for instance, a model of engaged, critical scholarship, one that makes art history relevant to today’s political concerns. Eisenman’s political commitments, moreover, are evident without ever feeling preachy or overly didactic. Dedicated to holding art history accountable for its racist representations, he debunks, in easy flowing prose, the myth that high culture somehow exists outside the desublimatory impulses that guide much of popular culture—video games, movies, pornography, etc. And in demonstrating that art’s history is not as humanist or angelic as it is often presented, he effectively shows how throughout history artists and art historians have been more than willing to service the powerful. Yet the book is not all pessimism and finger-pointing. It appears that Eisenman’s true concern is to construct a history that counters the celebration of violence as conquest and that refuses to make suffering beautiful. This counterhistory, I think rightly, is presented as the antidote to the Abu Ghraib effect …
But there is also much in this book that does not quite sit right. To begin with, it seems unfair to characterize the U.S. general population’s response to the Abu Ghraib pictures as morally blind—or worse, erotic … But perhaps my biggest concern with The Abu Ghraib Effect, and this despite a clear and admirable intention otherwise, is that Eisenman … leaves out too much of the history and politics that formed the Abu Ghraib images’s reception and thus runs the risk of falling prey to the very reifying tendencies against which Eisenman struggles.
