The Pornographic Barbarism of the Self-Reflecting Sign

Abstract

“Fundamentally, such violence is not so much an event as the explosive form assumed by an absence of events. Or rather the implosive form: and what implodes here is the political void … the silence of history which has been repressed at the level of individual psychology, and the indifference and silence of everyone. We are dealing, therefore, not with irrational episodes in the life of our society, but instead with something that is completely in accord with that society’s accelerating plunge into the void.”² Despite the heated debates and huge mass public demonstrations about the rights and wrongs of Iraq War in 2003, the biggest shifts in the British and American publics’ perception of the conflict occurred through a series of vivid, defining images at various crucial stages. Thus what proved to be undue optimism was at its peak during the fall of Baghdad and the Ozymandias-like toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue, complete with a forewarning of the cultural misunderstandings to come when a U.S. soldier momentarily draped the U.S. flag around the statue’s face. Further grounds for Western triumphalism were provided with the images of a disorientated and disheveled Saddam shortly after his capture on December 13, 2003, with the bathos of his last underground hiding-place that contrasted markedly with the pictures of abandoned palaces.

This paper is an edited version of a similarly entitled book chapter from: Hillel Nossek, Annabelle Sreberny, and Prasun Sonwalkar, eds., Media and Political Violence (Creskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2005), 349–66; and also an edited version of a similar article in International Journal of Baudrillard Studies 4, no. 1 (January 2007), http://www.ubishops.ca/BaudrillardStudies/vol4_1/taylor.htm..