Laughing at Abu Ghraib

Laughter is essentially not an external but an interior form of truth; it cannot be transformed into seriousness without destroying and distorting the very contents of of the truth which it unveils. Laughter liberates from external censorship but first of all from the great interior censor; it liberates form the fear that developed in man during thousands of years: fear of the sacred, of prohibitions, of the past, of power…it [laughter] helped to uncover this truth and to give it an internal form…Laughter showed the world anew in its gayest and most sober aspects.

It was the victory of laughter over fear that most impressed medieval man. It was not only a victory over mystic terror of God, but also a victory over the awe inspired by the forces of nature, and most of all over the oppression and guilt related to all that was consecrated and forbidden...It was the defeat of divine and human power, of authoritarian commandments and prohibitions, of death and punishment after death, hell and all that is more terrifying than the earth itself.

-Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World






I begin with a set of questions that I don’t have the answers to. I think the answers or discussion produced from these questions hold a great deal of significance for me and I will come back to these questions in future posts.

Can you laugh in the face of horror?
Does laughter change an individual’s capacity for interaction with what is instinctually refused, abject?
Is this laughter linked to a liberation from a fear of death and injury?
What is the space between refusal and acceptance and is it filled with empathy?
Is empathetic laughter a way of collapsing of the boundary between self and other?

According to Bakhtin, part of what characterizes Medieval folk humor which forms the basis of Carnival laughter is the lack of separation between the object and subject of the laughter. The one doing the laughing can never be separate from the world at which the laughter is directed. This interconnection is important I think. This absolute importance and contingency on not being able to create distance between the self and the other in the act of laughing is what I am interested in thinking more about while considering the photographic evidence of torture that took place at Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq.

The images connected to torture and humiliation at Abu Ghraib first began to circulate after a 60 Minutes broadcast in April 2004 followed by a Seymour Hersh article “Torture at Abu Ghraib” in the New Yorker in May of the same year. It seems an average response to the images might be to look at them, shake ones head at the horror, and then stop looking. Maybe its too difficult to examine how anyone looking at these images might themselves be implicated in them- implicated in the logic that produced them. I have been looking at these images regularly since they began circulating. I have kept them in my studio and periodically try to engage them. I can’t fully explain why I think it’s important to look at the visual evidence of an event that provokes nausea, disgust and disorientation in me. Yet, I think we should all be looking at these images, individually and collectively. I believe there is something to be gained from looking at and facing these images which constitute extreme forms of violence - at once political and sexual. Why would anyone want to provoke such deeply unpleasant experiences in themselves? I think it’s because the alternative to looking might be something far worse. It may mean a deeper implication and participation in perpetuating these forms of violence.

But it isn’t just looking that I am proposing. The title of the post is Laughing at Abu Ghraib. I am suggesting that there is a space for laughter in interacting with the images of horror. I am not referring to derisive and objectifying laughter that operates on a necessary distance between the self and object of laughter. This objectifying laughter relies on distance and the pleasure produced though a process of reduction and isolation. Instead I am interested in the possibilities of Bahktin’s analysis of Medieval folk humor and Carnival forms of laughter that are liberatory in their form and function. An unofficial popular answer to power and hierarchy and it’s uses of fear related to punishment and death.

Does laughing at Abu Ghraib construct a space for me to identify with both the victims and perpetrators of the violence? I am struck in looking at the images by the universality of body language, of the language of posing and display connected to photographic representation. These are the same poses we have all have taken, thumbs up, ‘I was here’ tourist poses - snapshots to remember our experiences, a point of future reflection and remembrance. Of course I have different contexts for posing for the camera, but the point of relation between these guards and myself has to be considered if I am to engage in this idea of a liberatory form of laughter. The ability or developing the capacity to equally identify and empathize with the guards and the prisoners is what I am after through engaging in laughter. If I begin to inhabit these images I feel myself begin to dissolve. The instinct is to turn away but if there is a way to stay through laughter then maybe this disintegration of distance between me and what is pictured in these images opens the possibility of moving through them and coming out the other side.