Class Notes 3-6: Perversion, Humiliation & Bodies Without Value

In his chapter "The Seduction of War," Hedges describes how war perverts perception and behavior through a kind of embodied violence. This embodied violence usually transforms into different kinds of "perversions" based on power, privilege, excitement, and the emptiness of values in a war zone. In a war zone, there are no laws and no God. In a war zone, persons without power become the objects of play for the sadists and perpetrators who, because of access to guns and power, fall into a state of utter freedom from morality and law. In the perfect freedom of war, men usually decide to create new victims beyond the innocent civilians and refugees exposed to death through the fighting and shelling. These new victims are usually women.

In war, sex becomes an action that clarifies the violent sensual depravity of what war means: for Frankl, it meant that life lost "value" and victims became "animals." During episodes of war in battle zones, women's bodies become mere objects and tools for the sadistic entertainment of men "hardened" from the experience of battle, and searching for ways to escape the horrific memories of friends and family mutilated and forgotten during conflict. The momentary distraction of sexual intercourse becomes a path to amensia and a way to match the "embodied" violence of battle itself. At its root, war is about the destruction of flesh; it is about the eradication of the body. War is violence against bodies; in a battle zone, the sweat and hormones of battle conflate with the sweat and adrenaline of sex. Like with drugs, sex becomes a way to fragment the experience of time and space in a rush of amensia. Unlike drugs, sex preserves a feeling of dominance and power. In this way, rape is the quintessential action of war: it maintains the rigid gender identities of war while focusing power on the manipulation of the body as an object. It is violence personified as sex.

Hedges also noted that cultures that consume pornography are, almost by defintion, cultures that objectify the body and desire distraction from war and violence. Pornography is the objectification of the body, but without the accompanying real violence that defines sex in a war zone. As with drugs and alcohol, the puropse of pornography is to gratify its audience by encouraging the user to get "high"--in effect, to have an orgasm. For soldiers, this "high" is a necessity within the horrific context of battle.

In class, we discussed how the effects of drugs, spectacular scenes of violence, and sex all produce a perception firmly rooted in the 'now.' They are all addictive activities, because they all momentarily abolish the memories of the persons involved. Their purpose is to relieve those persons from their memories, and, by extension, the feeling they're "in" their bodies. The memories and identies of the veteran, the solider, the victim, and the witness are often full of traumatic feelings and images. These feelings haunt the person. The person wants an escape--from themselves. They choose not to reflect on their experience; as a result, those of us trying to learn from their experience often have no information upon which to form "knowledge." The knowledge may, in fact, be unattainable. If so, this is problematic, since we've also discovered how fragile knowledge can be that comes from photography, film, the newspaper, and from personal memories.

Before class ended, we discussed one more term common to Hedges and Frankl: humiliation. It seems that humiliation is the act, or series of acts, that allow a person to become an object in the perception of another. Humiliation is essential to the loss of value in war. It is also common to life outside war zones; it occurs, in fact, every time someone experiences the loss of their status as a person.

Class Notes 3-6: Masculinity and Sacrifice

Today's class began by examining two passages from Victor Frankl's memoir Man's Search for Meaning, which we used to frame and contextualize our reading from Chris Hedges' chapter from War is a force, "The Seducation and Perversion of War." In the first passage, Frankl related how the prisoner in the concentration camp lived in a place where life "lost all value." He also added that the kind of existence he lived was akin to "animal life." These passages represent what it's like to articulate life from the perspective, or point of view, of the "object," and seem to speak broadly for those persons who live through the value-less experience of war life.

War is a time and place that exists without law, rules, codes, norms, or protection. Sometimes, the laws that do exist in war work only for the benefit of those who have power, which might be an occupying army, an insurgent band, or the guards of a prison.

Frankl also related the perspective of the guards, or kapos, that lived in the camp with him and the other inmates. He said that there were essentially three types of guards: the sadists, the "hardened" majority that neither practiced nor prevented sadism, and the small number of those who had "pity." We discussed how all three of these positions entitled the persons in those roles status as "subjects," or people that controlled the "objects"--the prisoners.

In addition, all three of these subject positions translate to various degrees of superiority among the guards. Even those guards that showed "pity" practiced a kind of superiority; to have pity is to, in effect, declare your superiority over another person. It is a statement of power, even if it ultimately has beneficial effects on the person deemed "inferior." For example, the guards gave Frankl an extra piece of bread because of their "pity." In many ways, that pity defines the gray area of the imperial mindset, which sees other persons within conditions susceptible to its own influence, aid, and judgment.

What both the object and subject positions Frankl describes have in common, according to Hedges, is that both the object and subject in war consider themselves "victims." In war, both sides believe they are fighting for the right side. In war, both sides consider themselves in a position to judge the innocence or guilt of the other side.

Hedges believes that the psychology of the war mind necessitates the production of narratives that glorify war. We discussed how wars need heroes, or persons who themselves seem untouchable, immortal, and strong. We need narratives of these persons, usually men, because they act in ways we believe we can duplicate, learn from, and emmulate. The narrative of the hero is critical to how different sides understand the justice of their actions. If the hero is not wrong to fight, how can the fight be wrong?

Hedges also believes that those heroic narratives sanitize the experience of war, and become representations that do not connect to the actual experience of war. He uses the story of Ali, a young Palestinian lured into his death by Israeli soldiers, to explain how in real war there are no heroes, only pathology and victims. Furthermore, Ali's funeral parade produced a scene that was meant to embrace more young men and boys to the fight against the Israelis. The group that produced the parade, Hamas, used consistent messages, dramatic scences, intelligible symbols, and projected media (posters, audio tapes, and, in other cases, video) to convey their message to those men not yet converted to their platform. Their platform was, in fact, to recruit young men to become "martyrs," or persons who die attempting to fight.

We related this method of recruitment to war films, which use similiar kinds of information to attract young men into service, even if they attempt to be anti-war. Both the Hamas funeral and Steven Spielberg's film Saving Private Ryan convey the message that our lives depend on the sacrifice of young men who died. Both Hamas and Spielberg use the immediate trauma of conflict to prime their audience for the sacred seriousness of their purpose, either as a parade or in a spectacular opening scene on the Normandy coast. While the film and the parade are different experiences for different audiences, their ultimate goal sanctifies the loss of war into something honorable and worthy of respect. In addition, both films try to emphasize the masculine identity of conflict, and the attraction of war for "testing" manhood and humanity. Even though both the parade and the film emphasize sacrifice, they also use that sacrifice to different ends: Hamas explicitly argues that only through death can boys become men, while Speilberg and Hollywood generally argue that only through killing can boys become men. At any rate, both groups use war as a way to construct the masculine identity of gender.

Class Notes 3-1: September 11 & Frankl

We ended last week discussing your student comments about the Hedges chapter "The Destruction of Culture." Among other ideas, you referenced September 11 on several occasions. In the interests of locating our "knowledge" about that day, we began that class by repeating what we knew and did not know about September 11. We anticipated that since most of our texts claim memory and knowledge about traumatic events becomes distorted, forgotten, or neglected over time, our knowledge and memory about September 11 would probably be fragmented.

Indeed, our class knowledge about the day was fairly confused. We didn't know where the hijackers came from, what reponse the United States military took in response, or what the history of the attacks were. A few of us knew that Osama bin Laden claimed responsibility for the attacks, but we didn't know much about him, his life, or the events that shaped his thinking. When it came to the war in Iraq, none of us could identify the connection between the war and September 11, although a few of us believed that some of the hijackers were Iraqi, and that Saddam Hussein was possibly behind the attacks. Although this information was false, it was repeated in the media during the run-up to the invasion.

I then took the opportunity to explain a little about the life of Osama bin Laden, especially his traumatic experiences in Lebanon in the early 1980s, his participation in the Afghan-Soviet war in the late 1980s, and his declarations of war against the US in the 1990s. We contextualized September 11 by placing it firmly in the shadow of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Our knowledge about the event was also tempered by some personal experiences, such as seeing one of the hijackers in person, in Brooklyn, before the attacks.

Since traumatic events often produce fuzzy thinking, we turned to Victor Frankl's memoir Man's Search for Meaning in order to clarify and illuminate some of his experiences inside a concentration camp. The passage we spent the most time with centered on his description of "objectification," which he defined as the ability to turn an experience into a kind of distant observation. The observation of objectification occured simultanesouly with the traumatic experience, and was Frankl's method of escaping the worst moments of the camp.

In one particular scene, Frankl described trying to imagine giving a lecture about the camp while, at the same time, attempting to endure hunger and homesickness. He imaged himself in a lecture hall giving a talk. We discussed the ways this became a moment of pure fantasy. It allowed Frankl to leave his body behind. For us, this is really the issue at the heart of becoming an object: the total rejection of embodied identity, and the complete withdrawal into another reality. That other reality became, for Frankl, a way to escape the rigors of the camp. It also suggested, to us, the extreme limits of human identity---an identity without a body, or only partially connected to a body.

Class Notes 3-6: Orders of Business

A polished, creative response to a movie from our war films list, Short 2, is due this Wednesday. At the end of the day Wednesday, I'll also hand back the interview assignment. Remember, I will average the grade of any revised draft you re-submit to me within a two week period following Wednesday.

We're going to put down our Hedges book for awhile today. We start on Vonnegut's "Slaughter-House Five" this weekend.

Some of the participation centered around a few people's ideas today--in the interests of a more general participation, I encourage the rest of you to speak freely. Today was generally the first day I noticed a kind of fuzzy recollection about our reading assignment. If this occurs again, we'll have to figure out ways to ensure we can communicate better. I'm open to suggestions.

If you have ideas about the 'Women and Iraq' lecture on March 20th, please let me know.

Essay Two: The War Film

4-5 pages
Due March 29

Your first essay detailed and explained the experience of visiting the New York Historical Society’s exhibition on slavery. One of the purposes of the assignment was to intimately engage with the objects and representations of the past. This was similar in purpose to your interview with an older relative. Together, the two experiences connect through a desire to understand the past as a space and place that produced the present, even if the people or events that produced the present are now invisible or forgotten. The representation of slavery, like your relative’s memories, is a type of “knowledge” that we can use to understand the initial “shock” of an experience. Experience and knowledge form the large and small events that embed themselves in the history of our identity.

One of your ongoing goals in this course is to try and develop your own language to describe, sensitize, and comprehend the effects of this “shock” and “knowledge” in different contexts. In this sense, you must expand your role as witness to that of scholar. A scholar, for our purposes, is a person committed to explaining, re-defining, and revising previous understandings of war, conflict, memory, and identity. This delicate and sensitive task requires you to collect information from different mediums, sources, and perspectives in order to write from the greatest possible position of authority on the topic.

For this assignment, you will become a scholar of two different films that try to imagine war. The assignment requires that you watch two different kinds of war films: a film that explores the experience of conflict, and a film that explores the aftermath of conflict. Your must explain both what the films say and how they say it. You will have to situate the films in their original historical context, mostly by summarizing who produced the films, why they were made, and how audiences reacted to them at the time they were released. Your ultimate purpose for the essay must assert an argument about what film more effectively represents the complex experience of war and conflict: the film that shows war, or the film that shows its aftermath? This argument must be stated clearly in your first paragraph, and the rest of the essay will support your assertion, and provide your readers with information about your films.

In order to support your assertion, you will have to follow the instructions above by paying close attention to how the films plot their narrative, or story. To accomplish this, you must first summarize exactly what you believe the film says. Use the following questions to help guide you through the process of the assignment. The essay will require a minimum amount of research, a bibliography, and should refer, when possible, to texts and ideas from our course.




Essay Two Outline Questions

Introduction: What two films am I writing about? What are my thoughts about the narrative of each individual film? What do these narratives have in common? What do these narratives not have in common? What film, for me, is more effective at communicating the experience of war and conflict? What are my reasons for believing this? How can I prove why I believe this? Do I state my reasons clearly?

Remember, you are not trying to prove whether all war films about the war experience or its aftermath are better than all others. You are only speaking for two films you watched, or any other films you’ve seen and may aid your argument.

Supportive Paragraphs (Historical Info): Do I clearly and factually provide information about the historical environment for each film I watched? Does the information I summarize provide the names of the director and producer(s) of the films? Do I name the year it was released? Do I summarize two or three reviews of the film from major national publications or websites? Do I provide enough contextual information about the actual war the film references and represents? Do I understand enough about that conflict to accurately describe its relationship to this film? Do I organize my information about these two films in separate, organized paragraphs? Do I cite my sources correctly within my sentences?

Remember, how you organize this essay is up to you—you may talk first only about one film and then the other, or you may want to switch going back and forth at different times to prove your point better. It’s up to you.

Supportive Paragraphs (Narrative and Structure): Do I identify and explain the principal characters and their relationship to the overall narrative? Do I explain what character(s) the film wants audiences to identify with? Do I explain how the film achieves this identification, and do I emphasize the places where this is relevant to my argument? Do I explain what I believe the narrative of the film means? Do I explain why I believe this story is effective or non-effective according to my argument? Do I explain my reasons clearly? Do I explain the key moments of the film when they’re relevant to my argument?

When I discuss key moments of the film’s narrative, do I discuss how the structure of the film works—do I explain point of view, do I describe the editing, and do I describe the location of the camera? Do I describe any other special effects necessary to the film’s representation of the narrative? Do I explain how these techniques relate to my argument about what film ‘works’ better to prove its point?

Conclusion: Am I confident that, up to this point, my reader already understands what film I find more effective and why? Am I confident, up to this point, that my readers understand my reasons for choosing the film I find more effective at communicating the experience of war? Am I confident that I have explained my reasons for my argument using organized paragraphs that reference key moments of each film, and explain how the films create those key moments? Am I confident that my vocabulary goes beyond “effective” or “not effective” when I describe these reasons—in other words, am I confident that I have invented my own language to describe what these films say, and how?

Does my conclusion go beyond re-stating the ideas in my introduction? Does my conclusion take the opportunity to connect my ideas to other ideas from the course, or from other texts? Can my conclusion reasonably connect back to previous assignments? Does my conclusion make connections to other situations I have knowledge about, either from the news or from my own experiences? Does my conclusion offer the reader something new to consider besides what I’ve already said? Do I finally conclude the essay leaving the reader conscious of my style, intelligence, and insight? Do I use the conclusion as an appropriate place to show-off my knowledge and make insightful comments about the broader implications or contexts of my subject?

Clarity, Organization, and Flow: As I guide the reader through my essay, do I emphasize the ideas I want readers to remember? Do I connect these ideas back to my arguments? Do I remind the reader, at appropriate moments, how my examples refer back to my arguments? Do I account for other explanations or opinions, and, if so, do I explain why I don’t defend those explanations instead? Is my vocabulary suited to my ideas, arguments, and explanations? Is my style clear, focused, and impressive to read? Is my essay free of distracting grammatical errors or typos?

Student Comments: The Destruction of Culture

The following are edited excerpts from your worksheet comments. You were asked to respond to the Chris Hedges' chapter called "The Destruction of Culture."


On National Symbols: “[Hedges] is saying that a nation would use its cultural resources as an excuse to keep a war going. I think this is important because it tells you that a nation would try to cover up the real reasons they go to war.”
--Sharla

On Wartime Culture and Its Aftermath: “The things that inspire us during a war have no value when the war is over. The only value is to use it toward war’s nostalgia. This is important because realizing how feelings change after war makes you wonder [whether] war is the only difference in your life. “You” have not changed.

Not embracing a history is wrong if you have the power to understand it.”

--Jennifer K.
“Things like songs, books, poems, and film excite us during time of war, but when the war is over it’s awkward & embarrassing to listen, read, or watch. People realize their actions and behavior, and see they were foolish. I felt this was important because the media influences people and certain facts are not given to the public. When the conflict is over, people come to their ‘senses’ and evaluate the whole situation. When people feel embarrassed about their actions, they hide their guilt and blame the other side to justify their cause. Like Hedges says, “Each side creates a narrative. Each side insists they are the true victims.”
--Lydia
On Patriotism: “Hedges emphasizes how people easily express war in their culture” (professor’s italics).

--Jessica

On the Seduction of War: “Hedges talks about how war begins to control the lives of the citizens and the government. He refers to it as a “trance.” Support for the war takes over every aspect of life, like an obsession. It’s important because it shows how manipulative war can be.
It has a relationship with the title of the book. He describes the extremes to which the government succumbs…just so they can justify the continuation of the war, and people believe, or at least they want to believe, that they are fighting for the good side. And in a way [it] gives their life meaning.”
--Diane
On the Truth of War: “In reality, it is difficult to put down exactly what the “atrocity” may be. There can be a distortion of facts, or at best, a manipulation of what exactly happened. It is important because what you see is not always what you get. During our last class, we spoke about war images and how those images and their captions can be vague and elusive to the point and extent of incomprehensibility as consumers of mass media.”
--Jennifer R. (Eun Jung)
“What a person remembers during a time of stress or trauma can change people who witness war. How can someone recover information if the information has changed depending on what the person remembered? It is difficult to look at a situation when it is traumatic.
--Karen

On Fear: “Fear can change the feelings of people toward each other. This…reminded me of September 11th. Before 9/11 people did not really live in fear of … the people who attacked us. The victims will always fear the culture or country that harmed them.”
--Christine

Response to Christine: “Fear can cause people to forget about the facts.”

On the Destruction of Culture: “Not only is the destruction of culture in wartime mental or symbolic, it is physical as well. Hedges talks about…buildings, monuments, towns or villages being destroyed and possibly forgotten. Their destruction has affected the right to remember where they once stood. There were many places forgotten and monuments not built or give recognition (for example, Sept 11).
--Mariella

On Genocide: “We have gone over how enemies come about. One group of people don’t see another group of people as their social norm, so they automatically become the enemy. That group will try to destroy the other group’s culture because they don’t see it fitting into this world.”
--Ching
On Cultural Suicide: “During war the state destroys itself, too, because anybody who doesn’t support the state becomes an enemy, too. I think it’s important because during war we can hurt our own culture. We tend to consider anybody who doesn’t support us to be an enemy and this destroys the unity of a culture or country.”
--Gabriel

On the Infrahuman: “When communities are at war, they de-humanize the enemy so it is easier for them to cope with the fact that they are destroying other human beings. I think it’s important because in every war we’ve had, that issue becomes the reality. We can see it today. Everywhere is this concept of “war on terrorism.” Everyday, on the news, in the newspapers, some television show somehow alludes to the war in Iraq.
We separate ourselves from the enemy.”
--Kim

On Hatred: “The author is trying to address the nationalist leaders’ views on how the cause should be promoted and why it is a real cause. This happens in all major events, including the September 11 attacks. The reasons for these events are because of a “difference” between people. Many do not understand the others “enemies” and turn that into a form of hatred. I think this is important because many people view the enemy as non-human and different and that is because they don’t try to understand them.”
--Samantha

On Caste: “Many countries have racism, meaning they believe in caste.”
--Taranjit