Capitalism seems to be everywhere. The wealth accumulated by
a so-called philanthropic economic super-class has spawned a new kind of
political elite. Through contributions to political organizations, non-profits
and disadvantaged individuals, along with the media attention that such
“socially utilitarian” acts attract, members of the bourgeoisie have even
become celebrities. But what still remains obfuscated to many – diverted,
for the most part, by the derived “philanthropic” political elite – is the Capitalist’s
effect on politics via civil society. Capitalism’s two main implications – the
idea of supply and demand, described by Smith (1776) as the concept by
which “the quantity brought to market is just sufficient to supply the
effectual demand, and no more, the market price naturally comes,” and
Consumerism, defined by Webster as “the promotion of the consumer's interests”
– make clear the consumer’s inherent sovereignty over the manufacturer. This
relationship manifests itself in the way by which civil society, specifically
photography, influences politics. Sontag (2004) suggests that
“photographs” are “‘surreal,’ a hectic euphemism behind which the disgraced
notion of beauty cowered.” Specifically, as compared to artist-rendered
pictures, “a gory battlescape…[that] is commonplace about images of war made by
artists,” when in “war photographs,” seems insensitive “to find beaut[iful].”
In spite of this moral dilemma, the consumer is ambivalent to war – unable to
deny the beauty of camera-rendered battlescapes, yet reluctant to recant “war
is hell” – and prescribes “what photographers ought or ought not to do...[the
demand that] photographs that depict suffering shouldn't be beautiful, as
captions shouldn't moralize." Despite Sontag’s implied
pro-Capitalist, anti-Marxist ideological undertones, self-proclaimed Marxist
John Berger in his Hiroshima agrees
with the consumer’s demand and Sontag’s broad concept, “collective
instruction,” but differs in reason: he repudiates the capitalist “original
sin” that Sontag so champions.
Berger argues that audiences should not look at anything but
that which is on the canvas. He suggests that beauty is irrelevant, that first
hand experience “of the victims provokes a sense of outrage” and serves as the
two-door gateway to empathy. First, through “a sense of horror and pity,” the
audience attempts to feel what the victims felt. Second, “a self-defensive”
declaration that “this should not happen again (here)” allows the audience to
consummate empathy, to “bring it back home.” To avoid residing within the
radical extremes, as in sympathy or apathy, Berger writes against the creation
of a third-party, antagonizing comparative analysis. He “refrain[s] from giving
the statistics,” arguing that they “tend to distract. We consider numbers
instead of pain...we relativize instead of refusing.”
The item of most interest, above the binomial “yes” or “no,”
is the reason why Berger believes images must be looked at for just what they
are. He suggests that the effectiveness of emotion-triggering art is based on
the nature of its consumers, their inherent goodness or evil. Berger concedes
with the capitalist argument that the consumer is more powerful than the
producer, confirming the existence of a “collective instruction.” “Is it
inconceivable that the BBC would
show these pictures?...I challenge them to do so.” What is this force that
could challenge the BBC, but the very entity who gives it a face, the only
force that controls its sponsors, the British government, the democracy?
But implicit in Berger’s acceptance of consumers’
sovereignty in a capitalist status quo is his denial of bourgeois supremacy, a
denial of amajor Marxian critique of the capitalist status quo. Berger’s
Marxism is pragmatic. He admits that, though the socialist revolution is a
must, humanitarianism should never pay toll. Berger frowns upon “a Marxist…”
who concludes her article “by evoking the likely scale of destruction, which
would be caused by nuclear weapons” and assumably undermining the human experience
because “the socialist revolution in the United
States ,” that would allegedly be the result
of these nuclear attacks, would outweigh the human losses.
Even with a pragmatic view of Marxism, Berger still
practices constraint. Berger argues against the capitalist conviction that man
is inherently evil, the one that Sontag uses to substantiate the “collective
instruction:” that beauty and explicit morality are of no need.
Sontag suggests that people are selfish and possess an
internal dilemma, because of which they look down upon beautifully depicted
images of war. She claims, referencing pictures criticizing America ’s
involvement in Vietnam ,
that “mainstream media are not in the business of making people feel queasy for
which they are being mobilized much less than disseminating propaganda.” She
quotes Leonardo da Vinci – “make the conquered and beaten pale, with brows
raised and knit, and the skin above their brows furrowed with pain…make the
dead partly or entirely covered with dust…” – but she still conforms to her
argument. She suggests that pity and fear are two entities so much so that
“pity, far from being the natural twin of fear…manages to swamp fear.”
While acknowledging a person’s innate self-interest, Berger
suggests that people are good and look to sentimental pieces to understand
trauma. He suggests images of pain should be considered solely on what they
have to offer, regardless of beauty and verbalized morals, not because of
consumers’ selfishness, but because of their innate ability to empathize. An
“interest in these pictures cannot be an art-critical one...but after
repeatedly looking at them…[the images] became a certainty. These were images
of hell.” He suggests empathy for those in “the conditions of hell” is inherent
in Man, but cannot be summoned by “list[ing] the sites, repeat[ing] the
calculations” because “[we] know” these “facts [that] are in textbooks.”
Empathy cannot be summoned through objective means because “originally” the
meanings of these facts “was so clear…what these facts mean has now been torn
out.”
Sontag describes a demand – art should not be about beauty
or explicit morals – set upon a civil society by its consumers and
substantiates its existence with her conviction, that all men are evil. Berger
agrees that a demand exists – supports it, even – but supplies an alternate
reason for its existence: the reality of man’s nature lies beyond just the
mythic “original sin.” Berger posits that man is inherently good. He concedes
with the capitalist notion that Sontag brings forward – the consumer’s free
will and the manufacture’s compliance is integral to the civil society. But
Berger suggests that this demand is not a result of the selfish tendencies of
the consumer to indulge his pity and “swamp” his fear, but to balance both in a
mixed feeling of empathy. He claims that the producer is not selfish, but is
the victim, wanting his trauma to never repeat itself. In this way, Berger’s
article is a metaphor. He uses it to further his Marxist philosophy. Like any
sort of victim, the proletariat must be understood by the bourgeois, the
onlookers. He suggests that the socialist revolution will not be violent like
the one Marx once predicted—rather, according to Berger, if the bourgeois
empathize with the Proletariat, then there will be no reason to fight one
another.
