Publicity and Indifference (Sarajevo on Television)

Author(s): Thomas Keenan

Source: PMLA, Vol. 117, No. 1, Special Topic: Mobile Citizens, Media States (Jan., 2002), pp.
104-116
Published by: Modern Language Association
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 PMLA

Publicity and
Indifference (Sarajevo
on Television)

THOMAS KEENAN

The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.

-Marshall McLuhan, Understanding

Here in Sarajevo, hundreds of TV crews parade befor

offoreign journalists, reporters, and writers. Everythi
down to minutest details, and yet, nothing ...
-Jean Marie Cardinal Lustiger (qtd. in

WITH THESE EPIGRAPHS I AIM TO ABBREVIA

CITED "LESSON OF BOSNIA"-THAT A COUNTR

and a genocide happened, in the heart of Europe, on

known as the world or the West simply looked on
ans, said one to the American journalist David Rie
feel if you were mugged in full view of a policeman
rescue you" (140). Or, as Rieff says with slightly mo

200,000 Bosnian Muslims died, in full view of t

cameras, and more than two million other people w
A state formally recognized by the European Com
States [. . .] and the United Nations [. ..] was all
While it was being destroyed, UN military forces an
offering "humanitarian" assistance and protesting [
will in the international community to do
THOMAS KEENAN teaches media theory,
There
literature, and human rights at Bardis a programmatic quality to these formulations, and I w
College, where he is associate investigate
professor that program here: the complex that links what we so
call "the
of comparative literature and directs themedia" and its images with action or inaction-or more
Human Rights Project. He is the author
cisely with the expectation of action-and the relation of the hu
of Fables of Responsibility (Stanford UP,
tarian response to that expected action. You can find this pr
1997) and editor of books on the mu-
everywhere today, in military and political and historical discuss
seum and on the wartime journalism of
so-called postmodern wars or of humanitarian crises, in legal and
Paul de Man. His current manuscript,
"Live Feed: Crisis, calMedia,"
Intervention, commentaries on genocide and catastrophe, and in critical m
studies analyses
concerns the news media and contem- of what has been called the CNN effect or the
porary conflicts. the media in contemporary conflict. It seems as if we cannot talk

I04 ?) 2002 BY THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA

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I I 7. I Thomas Keenan 105

what happened in Bosnia or Somalia or

Or,Rwanda
finally, think of the president of the United
without talking about the media. Think of whose
States, the extraordinary (in so many ways)
feature films already available about the conflict
confession in Kigali of his and our inaction in the
faceMarcel
in the former Yugoslavia: even skipping of the Rwandan genocide put him squarely-
and immobile-in
Ophuls's war reporter epic documentary The front of the television:
Troubles We've Seen, from the British Welcome
Today the images of all that haunt us all: the
to Sarajevo to the Spanish Territorio Comman-
che to the Serbian Pretty Village, Pretty dead choking the Kigara River, floating to Lake
Flame,
Victoria. [... ] We did not act quickly enough
apparently no one can portray the war without
after the killing began. [...] All over the world
putting a reporter and cameras at the center of
there were people like me, sitting in offices, day
the action, which is to say that no one can pre-
after day after day, who did not fully appreciate
sent the war and tell its story without putting its and the speed with which you were
the depth
immediate presentation and the tellersbeing of engulfed
its by this unimaginable terror.
story, then and there, at the heart of the story. Or
think, in a less fictional mold, of the extraordi-
What interests me here is less the precise formu-
nary series of articles in the New York lations
Review ofof
and differences among these analyses
Books, in which Mark Danner has chronicled
than their ubiquity. The recurrence of the trope
the high and low points of the battlesacross
over so
Bos-
many different accounts and styles
nia-he was there, of course, but his articles in-
and methodological predispositions mirrors the
sistently begin with people watching television:
phenomenon it describes: the omnipresence of
"To the hundreds of millions who first beheld the gesture is the ubiquity of the camera, the
them on their television screens that August image or specter of the camera that now seems
day in 1992, the faces staring out from behind to haunt our consciousness-indeed, to form the
barbed wire seemed painfully familiar [...]," most privileged figure of our ethical conscious-
begins his 4 December 1997 piece ("America" ness, our conscience, our responsibility itself.
55). The opening sentences of the 20 November This is the situation Michael Ignatieff de-
1997 installment read: scribed some years ago-before Bosnia and
Rwanda, when the crises were those of starva-
Scarcely two years ago, during the swelter- tion and cold war proxies-in an essay on the
ing days of July 1995, any citizen of our civi- ethics of television, now the first chapter of The
lized land could have pressed a button on a Warrior's Honor:
remote control and idly gazed, for an instant or
an hour, into the jaws of a contemporary Hell. Television is also the instrument of a new kind of
Taking shape upon the little screen, in that con- politics. Since 1945, affluence and idealism have
current universe dubbed "real time," was a made possible the emergence of a host of non-
motley, seemingly endless caravan, bus after governmental private charities and pressure
battered bus rolling to a stop and disgorging groups-Amnesty International, [.. .] Medecins
scores of exhausted, disheveled people. [. . .] sans frontieres, and others-that use television
every last one a woman or a child. The men of as a central part of their campaigns to mobilize
Srebrenica had somehow disappeared. conscience and money on behalf of endangered
Videotaped images, though, persist: on the humans and their habitats around the world. It
footage shot the day before, the men can be is a politics that takes the world rather than the
seen among the roiling mob, together with their nation as its political space and that takes the
women and children, pushing up against the human species itself rather than specific citi-
fence of the United Nations compound, plead- zenship, racial, religious, or ethnic groups as its
ing for protection from the conquering Serbs. object. [.. .] Whether it wishes or not, television
("US" 56) has become the principal mediation between the

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io6 Publicity and Indifference (Sarajevo on Television)
suffering of strangers and the consciences of
those in the world's few remaining zones of
safety. [...] It has become not merely the means
through which we see each other, but the means
by which we shoulder each other's fate. (21, 33)
We can invert this slightly and say simply that
humanitarianism as we know it today-trans-
border relief-is unthinkable except in the age
of more or less instant information. The found-
ing of the International Committee of the Red
Cross in 1864 is linked directly to the possibility
of high-speed transmission by telegraph, and
contemporary relief operations since Biafra and
Ethiopia have been born and bathed in the light
of the television camera and the speed of the
satellite uplink (Brauman 15). Humanitarian
efforts sometimes seem to depend on a fairly
limited set of presuppositions about the link be-
tween knowledge and action, between public in-
formation or opinion and response. In some
cases, like that of the international movement of
human rights nongovernmental organizations,
as Alex de Waal has argued, the discussion turns
on the concept of "mobilizing shame" ("Becom-
ing Shameless" 3). In the humanitarian arena
proper, its effective founder, Bernard Kouchner,
put the coordination between media and inter-
vention epigrammatically: "sans medias, pas
d'action humanitaire importante, et celle-ci, en
retour, nourrit les gazettes" 'without the media,
there is no important humanitarian action, and
this latter, in turn, feeds the papers' (210; my
trans.)-he calls this "la loi du tapage," the law
of noise. And among military thinkers, humani-
tarians, and diplomats, the sense that television
imagery and news dispatches drive decisions
about intervention has by now gained a name of
its own-the CNN effect-and is the topic of
vigorous debates.1
Thanks to what is loosely termed public opin-
ion, which displaces or warps state institutions
and state power through emergent alternative
centers of power like the media and nongov-
ernmental organizations, the so-called famine
movement or what de Waal nicknamed the "Hu-
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PPMLAA
manitarian International" also developed as a
new sort of international actor, apparently un-
limited by traditional notions of sovereignty,
accountability, borders, interest, and the rest
(Famine Crimes 65). I propose that we under-
stand the "humanitarian action" that triumphed
in Bosnia as somewhat different from either of
the options that seem available-it is neither in-
action (a passive acquiescence or a cover-up, a
fig leaf that disguises the actual doing of noth-
ing) nor a heroic new nonstate politics of the
sort anticipated by many of the founders of the
humanitarian movement. It is an action that-
precisely because it refers, by way of public
opinion and the image, not to national interest
or the defense of the state but to "human be-
ings," "victims," "misfortune," or "suffering,"
which is to say that it refers to the order of the
ethical-opens the possibility for a political dis-
course that, for better or more often for worse,
does not have to justify itself in political terms.
Such action threatens not simply to hide inac-
tion or offer alibis for not doing other things but
more radically to interrupt, to render impossi-
ble, to block or prevent all other action.
This type of action has as its field or condi-
tion the image, sometimes precisely the image
and sometimes more generally what we nick-
name "the media" or "real time." Recall that for
Walter Benjamin, in the essay "The Work of Art
in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" at
least, the invention of the motion picture intro-
duced nothing less than a temporal explosion,
"the dynamite of the tenth of a second," such
that in what remained, the "far-flung ruins and
debris" of our daily lives or our familiar terrain,
would open up "an immense and unexpected
field of action" (236). Film and television do not
only collapse and annihilate time and distance,
as is so often said-they also make unprece-
dented times and spaces available for action,
real virtualities that are marked by the affirma-
tion of possibilities of engagement, action, or
play, as well as by the negativity of this "dyna-
mite." Field of action, okay, but what kind of
I 1 7 1 Thomas Keenan 107

action? The answer is also Benjaminian,

for things
thoughto happen (a particularly dangerous
crossroads)ex-
this time in a different way. The privileged or a place where things happened
because
ample at the close of the artwork essay is cameras
war, waited patiently (compelling
what he labels the aesthetics of mechanized images of lives extinguished)? The camera is
warfare, which he says is discerned more clearly
there because of the danger, but its silent wit-
ness transforms the event and its "there"-that
or best "captured by camera and sound record-
ing" and not the naked eye (242, 251). Today
is what matters here. Thanks to the camera,
cameras don't simply represent conflictswhat
but it means for the event to occur, its taking
take part in them, shape not only our under-
place, undergoes a mutation. The crossroads so
standing of them but their conduct. We need to
precisely targeted in the sniper's gunsight is also
attend to these sounds and images not just as ac-blurred intersection of what our impover-
the
counts of war but as actions and weapons in ished
that theoretical vocabulary allows us to call
war-as operations in the public field, which
only event and representation, occurrence and
today constitutes an immense field of opportu-
image. This confusion cannot be written off as
nity for doing battle, as weapons in what weone toomore version of a timeless ontological co-
easily call "image contests" or "publicity battles."
nundrum (which comes first?), nor caricatured
"There was a cameraman there"-this is a as a postmodern prejudice for the discursive
fragment from a news report about a man shot
over the real, nor simply eliminated with a dec-
by a sniper in Sarajevo: laration of the moral superiority of the things
themselves. The confusion is all too real, and es-
Mr. Sabanovic got in the way at a particularly
pecially in events like those at this crossroads-it
dangerous Sarajevo crossroads. That is why there
constitutes something like an exemplary ethico-
was a cameraman there to film his near-death.
political difficulty and opportunity for us.
Because the spot is treacherous, the chances
What is at stake, finally, in this confusion is
are good that a few hours of patience by a cam-
eraman will be rewarded with compelling images
a certain experience and definition of public
of a life being extinguished or incapacitated. space and time, of publicity, and of-I think-a
(Cohen 12) crisis in our sense of public information and ex-
posure today. The corollary of the cameraman's
What difference does it make that a cameraman being there is that, in a way, we are too. The
is there, as he or she so often is? No matter camera metaphorizes the becoming public of
where, it seems, a camera regularly happens to the event, because we who watch and listen are
be there when something happens to happen. So also caught in the intersection of the sniper's
much so that it has become a cliche, a veritable and the cameraman's viewfinders-not as po-
commonplace, to say that today things don't tential victims exactly but as targets of those
happen unless a camera is there. Of course, it vectors (borrowing this sense of vector from
takes not just a camera but a network of editing, McKenzie Wark's Virtual Geography). What do
transmitting, distributing, and viewing technol- we do in watching and listening? When I say
ogies-and agents-that extend out from the "we," I mean that hazy thing called the public, a
camera to make what Marshall McLuhan so fa- rich concept sent to us by the Enlightenment
mously and confusingly called a global village. and the French Revolution and in need of exten-
But it begins with the camera and its operator, sive rethinking. If the public means us, us in our
with their having been there. exposure to others, then today "we" cannot be
What the journalist here wants us to under- something given in advance, not the sum total of
stand is the complex structure of that "there"- all of us somewhere or sometime, not a commu-
was it a place where cameras waited patiently nity or a people but rather something that comes

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Io8 Publicity and Indifference (Sarajevo on Television) PMLA

after the image, a possibility of response to an
open address. The public, we could say in short-
hand, is what is hailed or addressed by mes-
sages that might not reach their destination.
Thinking about the images at hand, we could
The lesson of those lights was clear imme-
diately after the event to the grand old man of
American foreign policy, George Kennan, who
awoke that morning in December 1992 to watch
in real time as the soldiers landed and were sur-

even say that what defines the public is the pos-
sibility of being a target and of being missed.
So the television image constitutes a field
of action: not just a representation of actions
elsewhere but a field in or on which actions
rounded by reporters and interviewed on the
beach, and he harshly assessed the damage. He
told his diary and then the opinion page of the
New York Times that he had finally seen enough:

occur-a public field, we could say, but only if If American policy from here on out, particu-
we're willing to part with some of the cherishedlarly policy involving the use of our armed
forces abroad, is to be controlled by popular
predicates of that concept.
emotional impulses, and particularly ones pro-
We can begin with this snapshot, or live
voked by the commercial television industry,
feed. Somalia, December 1992. The first Ameri-
then there is no place-not only for myself,
can soldiers of Operation Restore Hope land on but for what have traditionally been regarded
an Indian Ocean beach at Mogadishu, met notas the responsible deliberative organs of
by clan fighters or starving children but by hun- our government, in both executive and leg-
dreds of reporters, camerapeople, technicians islative branches.
... whom, as it turns out, the American military
informed in advance of the time and place of the Kennan-the architect of the cold war, the
author of the doctrine of containment, Mr. X
operation. Kouchner's claim that without televi-
himself-watches his era end on his television,
sion there is no humanitarian intervention seems
not with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the re-
to come true in a multiple and almost perverse
way here: images-there, of starving children-
unification of Europe, nor with the great border-
less coalition and its triumph in the Gulf War,
can shame governments into action, armies will
but with chaos on an African beach, disaster
undertake humanitarian rescue missions for the
breaking out of new world order with such en-
publicity value alone, and publicity can bring
the missions to an end. ergy and confusion that it threatens to tear apart
What happened there? We are not finished the institutions of government and publicity
understanding the complex of clan politics and themselves. What is threatened in Mogadishu,
paramilitary violence, the liquidation of the post- not by the clans but by the cameras and the sol-
colonial and post-cold war state, the famine and diers who are drawn to them, is nothing less
even starvation, and the succession of humanitar- than the basic structure of American democ-
ian and armed interventions and the nation build- racy: responsibility and deliberation. The ratio-
ing that followed them. But the images (from the nal consideration of information, with a view to
starving children to the gun-belted fighters, the grounding what one does in what one knows,
brightly lit landing, and the camcorder pictures now seems overtaken and displaced by emo-
of a helicopter pilot held hostage and a dead sol- tion, and responses are now somehow con-
dier dragged in the street) and the phrases (Mad trolled or, better, remote-controlled by television
images. The place of politics disappears-there
Max vehicles, warlords, the photo op invasion
and the CNN effect, and the Mogadishu line) is not only, as Kennan says, no place for him
have already decisively shaped the interpretation but no place for a decision, for the organs that
and practice of humanitarian interventions in the regulate the link between knowledge and ac-
decade since that fateful night in the lights.2 tion. Television, that virtual place, displaces the

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I 7.I | Thomas Keenan Io9

national
public place, substitutifig emotion for forces, or the dead American soldier.
reason,
But what then of Bosnia, where everything
immediacy for the delay proper to thought.
seemed
In somewhat more complex but no more visible as it happened, and yet on the
the-
contrary,
oretical terms, Paul Virilio has suggested it is said, virtually nothing happened in
that this
phenomenon, the displacement of the response?
traditionalAs David Rieff wrote, "[N]o slaugh-
ter sphere
rational-critical experience of the public was more scrupulously and ably covered,"
and "it [did]
by what is nicknamed "emotion," characterizes in no good"-"we failed" (223, 222):
general contemporary televisual publicity:
[T]he hope of the Western press was that an in-
formed
The space of politics in ancient societies was citizenry back home would demand
that their governments not allow the Bosnian
the public space (square, forum, agora ...). To-
Muslims
day, the public image has taken over public to go on being massacred, raped, or
forced
space. Television has become the forum for all from their homes. Instead, the sound

emotions and all options. We vote while bites

watch-and "visual bites" culled from the fighting
bred
ing TV. [...] We are heading toward a cathodiccasuistry and indifference far more regu-
larly
democracy, but without rules. [...] There than [they] succeeded in mobilizing peo-
is no
ple of
politics possible at the scale of the speed to act or even to be indignant. (216)
light. Politics is the time of reflection. Today, we
If the lesson of Somalia was that cameras made
no longer have time to reflect; the things that we
things react
see have already taken place. And we must happen and sometimes too quickly, Bosnia
seems possi-
immediately ... Is a real-time democracy to tell the opposite story: a brutal combi-
nation
ble? An authoritarian politics, yes. But of overexposure
what is and indifference. Soma-
proper to democracy is the sharing lia
of was hyperactivity; Bosnia inactivity, just
power.
When there is no longer time to share, what doThis
watching.was the cliched meaning for
we share? Emotions. (71-72; mywhich
trans.)
Sarajevo became the metonym. Let me
cite just three examples, from war correspon-
This compelling immediacy of the media,
dents, ofthe
the trajectory that travels from a cer-
magnetic pull of the image and the microphone,
tain expectation about the putative power of
has been testified to by the highest officials
images of the
to despair at their failure and even to
United States government and military (Minear,
anger, from Mogadishu to Sarajevo.
Scott, and Weiss 46). Images, they certify,
On make
26 January 1993, only nine months into
things happen, sometimes too quickly. the siege,can
We in a dispatch that won her the first of
and should dispute the contention that discussion
many prizes for coverage of Sarajevo, CNN's
and sharing disappear in the putative Christiane
instantane-Amanpour reported on a creeping de-
ity of the live transmission-as if it did not
spair have
with the televisual:
its own temporality, its own internal structure, its
delays and frames and decisions-but there
Takeisany
noday in the life of this city. The sights
are so familiar, perhaps they have lost their im-
debating the claim that the image (and especially
pact. [.. .] Around noon another mortar falls.
the image of catastrophe) has the power to cir-
More not
cumvent or pressure political institutions and people are killed and injured. They are
rushed to the hospital. The emergency ward is
just in so-called democracies.
full. Surgeons labor to save lives. The operating
In Somalia, events seemed dictated by the
theater is awash in blood. Early on in the war the
CNN effect, with the attendant displacement
staff were patient with photographers, hoping
of deliberation by emotion and hence theperhaps
short- their pictures would shock the world
circuiting of the public sphere, whether into
it was
doing asomething. The world has done noth-
matter of the starving children, the proud
inginter-
and the doctors have lost hope and patience.3

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I O Publicity and Indifference (Sarajevo on Television) PMLA

Giles Rabine, reporting live for France 2 tried to move them. But I could not. This United

from Sarajevo just after the fall of Srebrenica, Nations soldier was looking at me. He did noth-

on 13 July 1995 commented simply that, after ing. He just looked. For me, it was so long." (1)

thirty-nine months of televised siege, "the Sara-

The scene is shocking, doubly so by virtue of the
jevans have had enough of being interviewed,
videotape. The civilian victim is not only crippled
being filmed, being photographed; they've had
by a sniper but is also in possession of images of
enough of us watching them die, live, without
his attempted murder. The reporter can thus watch
trying to do anything to save them. And who's
the interviewed person's story on TV as it is told
to say they're wrong?"
to him. And the images are somehow not just of
They were not wrong. Roger Cohen of the
Faruk Sabanovic or of what happened to him on
New York Times took this as the premise for the
the street in Sarajevo; they are for Cohen an alle-
searching article I quoted earlier. In May 1995, he
gory, images of something more confusing, of the
reported from the besieged city, on the front page
loss of orientation-in images-that has affected
of the Sunday New York Times, about what he and
our sense of reality. Watching this tape, its inert
the headline call a "postmodern war." Postmod-
star next to him, Cohen seems paralyzed by the
ern for many reasons, but mainly because it's a
sight of people watching: "Faruk [...] lies [.. .]
matter of images, of what the reporter finds to be
with a video"; "a United Nations soldier looks on,
a dangerously blurred boundary between event
motionless"; "'This United Nations soldier was
and representation, and of a certain paralysis, the
looking at me. He did nothing. He just looked."'
apparent re- or dislocation of the field of knowl-
Thanks to images like these, we are all like
edge and action to the screen of a monitor and the
that UN soldier, just looking, or, like the cam-
entry of those representations into the field of the
eraman, waiting. That is their rich allegorical
things and events they ought simply to represent.
meaning, their hermeneutic supplement: they
Here is his lead for the article, headlined "In Sa-
mean the inaction that they demand of their pro-
rajevo, Victims of a 'Postmoder' War":
ducer and their viewer.

Faruk Sabanovic, a pale and gentle-featured

The images capture more than the maiming of
youth, is a thoroughly modern victim of war.
Mr. Sabanovic; they capture the increasingly
He lies in the main hospital here with a video
surreal and sordid nature of the three-year-old
of the moment when he was shot and became
Bosnian war. A civilian is shot on a city street;
a paraplegic.
a television cameraman, waiting at a dangerous
There he is, outside the central Holiday Inn,
crossroads to see somebody killed or muti-
walking briskly across the street, his hair ruf-
lated, films the shooting; a soldier sent by the
fled by the wind. The crack of a shot echoes
United Nations as a "peacekeeper" to a city of-
in Sarajevo's valley. He falls. He lies on his
ficially called a "safe area" watches, unsure
side. He is curled in an almost fetal position. A
what to do and paralyzed by fear. The elements
United Nations soldier looks on, motionless.
of this troubling collage are also elements of
A Sarajevan man arrives, screaming abuse at
what some military analysts are now calling
the soldier, who eventually moves his white
"postmoder" or "future" war. (1)
United Nations armored personnel carrier. This
slight movement is enough to cover the civilian
as he rushes out to retrieve Mr. Sabanovic,
In the hospital, Cohen sees a taped image f
Sarajevo and in it the whole new troubling t
whose lithe body has turned limp.
"It's strange when I watch the video, I feel like
metonymized. As the space and time of w
it's somebody else," said Mr. Sabanovic, who is happens shifts onto the screen, all sort of bo
20. "But I remember it so well. After I was hit, I aries collapse, even while he is there in Sara
felt my legs in my chest. Then I saw my feet. I He enumerates the transformation or the d

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I 1 7 1 Thomas Keenan III

that coincides with the emergence of the

moment video-
they were crippled, so abruptly
tape: states are replaced by militias or other in-
comprehension is difficult," he writes, bu
formal groupings; armies and peoples become
what exactly happens so abruptly, the crip
indistinguishable; central authorities
or the disappear;
watching? Surely Cohen means the
and "live images of suffering, distributed
denness of world-
the rifle shot, caught on tape, bu
wide, sap whatever will or ability there may
dangling be
modifier betrays the ambiguity
to prosecute a devastating military
most campaign"
alert to: the difficulty of discerning
(12). Looking is not acting, in Sarajevo
and or in
video repetition. In the face of this diffi
New York, and for Cohen the diffusion of im-some reservations, or som
Cohen proposes
ages goes hand in hand with a jections,
more disturbing
which although they are not form
dispersion or evisceration of the
andconditions ofat best, constitute somethin
are hesitant
action: lost are centrality, authority, borders and
a systematic critique of this postmodern c
clear distinctions, principles, and muchtroubles
tion-it more. him and with him "reality
The triumph of images figuresrajevo
this for Cohen: surreal, unreal, endless. Th
becomes
they sap the will in war, he says,too
and much
yet paradoxi-
watching, too much mediation,
cally the war is one of images, fought
therewith images. so that even the subject o
in Sarajevo,
image is alienated from it, split from hims
Mr. Sabanovic got in the way at a particularly
feel like it's somebody else," says Saban
dangerous Sarajevo crossroads. That is why there
now sharing the position of the immob
was a cameraman there to film his near-death.
one who just watches. The sniper and wha
Because the spot is treacherous, the chances
hen calls "the twisted video" together redu
are good that a few hours of patience by a cam-
eryone to
eraman will be rewarded with compelling a paraplegic-inert, paralyzed by
images
just looking. And yet Cohen finds a moral fo
of a life being extinguished or incapacitated.
story in the prone twenty-year-old, "a str
and
A compelling image is a weapon, a conviction
and the cam- that rise far above the ba
violence of his
eras sometimes seemed like the best guns had video with its succinct acc
by the Bosnian government,ing of a was
which directionless
de- war in which civilian
live on
prived of almost all other military camera." Without direction, pullin
equipment.
subject
Certainly most of the journalists of the un-
in Sarajevo image apart from himself, the
of live death comes
derstood this and recognized that their work was to mean for Cohen at o
not simply impartial. Didn't Somalia
an excess suggest,
of imagery and a failure of the pro
after all, that images could be of those images-no
compelling, that action, no comprehens
teleguided public opinion could only
force action?
difficulty and a certain indetermination
Cohen, in the late spring ofruk
1995, has seenfor his part, thanks the cam
Sabanovic,
enough to withdraw that conclusion. There
the United are
Nations, he says, is "just here t
no compelling images: "Thus, just as the world
consciences. [...] And I know they brought
has long watched the crushingto of
theSarajevo-so
hospital in their ambulance only be
endless as to become increasingly unreal-the
the camera happened to be there. I have t
people of Sarajevo may now watch
that from their
I despise them" (12).
hospital beds the moment they were
So crippled,
in the end so the two viewers agree t
abruptly that comprehension is the
difficult" (12).
tape has effects but disagree about
The image sparks a crisis, not
they just inand
are, ac- these opinions recapitulat
tion but in comprehension, and the
crisis ofsentence
a certain idea of publicity. The sy
that speaks of it also tells the metrical
story of aopposition
more of the interpretat
profound disturbance. PeopleMogadishu
can watch versus
"the Sarajevo-confirms tha

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112 Publicity and Indifference (Sarajevo on Television) [PMLA

theoretical status and the actual function of the And that means that the crisis is not merely one
public image are in question. Sabanovic believes of inaction. What is lost in Bosnia is nothing
in the CNN effect: "they brought me to the hos- less than the Enlightenment and with it the dis-
pital [...] only because the camera happened to covery of the public sphere as the site where
be there." Cohen fears that the camera and the knowledge and action are articulated. They feel
watching cripple our responses, that "images obliged to ask, then, "whether there is any rela-
sap [the] will." The strong version of his hypo- tionship between the degree or extent of public
thesis has also been articulated by Jean Bau- information and practical or moral engagement
drillard, who thus forms a symmetrical pair with by those who receive it" (Introduction 7).
Virilio. Baudrillard suggests that "Bosnia exem-
plifies total weakness": "the West has to watch The important point is that there is a sharp dis-
crepancy between what we know and what we
helplessly" in a "military masquerade where the
do, and this discrepancy has been neglected in
virtual soldier [ . .] is paralyzed and immobi-
most previous analyses. Yet this gap between
lized" ("When the West" 87). And "the Bosnians
knowledge and action is full of meaning for ap-
[...] end up finding the whole situation unreal,
prehending history as well as the present. In addi-
senseless, and beyond their understanding. It is tion, this contrast causes us to rethink the success
hell, but a somewhat hyperreal hell, made even of the so-called Enlightenment project: the pas-
more so by their being harassed by the media sive Western observation of genocide and other
and humanitarian agencies. [... T]hus they live war crimes in the former Yugoslavia amounts to
amid a type of spectral war" ("No Pity" 81). a toleration of the worst form of barbarity and
Some American commentators have drawn gives us pause to wonder whether, behind the
radical conclusions from this proposition, and al- rhetoric of European progress and community,
there is not some strong strain of irrationality
though it is in a certain sense highly disputable
that, if laid bare, would call into question the de-
there is nevertheless something extremely impor-
gree of enlightenment the civilized West has
tant at stake here, which this radicalization can
managed to attain at the century's end. (8)
help clarify. Thomas Cushman and Stjepan Me-
strovic, in a collection of essays they edited, This
It is not clear just how far Cushman and Mestro-
Time We Knew, attempt to measure the signifi-
vic are willing to go in "call[ing] into question"
cance of what seems an obvious failure: the last
the Enlightenment axioms threatened by the
time around, we might have been able to say we
"gap between knowledge and action" in Bosnia.
didn't know what was happening, but throughout
The specter of irrationality-always opposed to
the second genocide in Europe in this half century, a normative reason-and the progressivist hint
we have no such excuse. Because of television
in the word attain suggest that the editors re-
and the rest of the "daily barrage of information main committed to the questionable project. But
and images," it is not possible for "even the most what happens if we seize on the insight that the
disinterested viewer to ignore the grim reality ofEnlightenment and its public sphere are in ques-
genocide." Their "Baudrillardian" hypothesis: tion and try to move beyond the simple desire to
recover them, to rescue them from their tempo-
Lack of action proceeds [...] from the fact that
rary loss? Suppose they are the problem.
the mediated images of the world are mere rep-
What failed in Bosnia? We often say that we
resentations that lend an air of unreality to the
failed and imply that "we" means this well-
things they represent. [. . .] Media watchers
lose touch with reality, [.. .] stand passively byknown public of the so-called Enlightenment
or engage in self-serving forms of ineffectiveproject. But the more we rely on and retreat to the
action, [their] voyeurism and individualism idea that the public sphere collapsed, the more we
feed[ing] on televised images of evil. (79)shore up a notion whose apparent solidity may be

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I I7.I Thomas Keenan I13

implicated in the disaster.

they have the What if the
relevant information, they belief
will act. in
It is the
this public was part of an old conceit."
failure, "It was the
if conceit
theoffaith
jour- in
the obviousness, the nalists
evidence or self-evidence
[...] that if people back home could only of
be told and shown what
the pictures and the automatic was actually
chain of happening
reasoning
they inspire, was not in Sarajevo failed
what [. . .] then they
but would
was want their fail-
the
governments
ure itself? At stake is to do something" (41,
the program that216). expects
that, as David Rieff puts
The conceit
it, "oneor fantasymore
of this kind
picture,
of public or
one more story, or one more
sphere must, correspondent's
after Bosnia if nowhere else, con-
tend with of
stand-up taped in front what weacould call the rule of silence-
shelled, smoldering
building would bringno people
image speaks for itself, let alone
around, speaks
would force
directly
them to stop shrugging to our capacity
their for reason. Images always
shoulders, or like the
United Nations, blaming the victims"-one
demand interpretation, even or especially emo- more
picture would force tional
something
images. There is nothing
to immediate
happen about (223).
What if that expectation about
them. This implies a secondinformation
rule, of unintended and
illumination was part consequences
of the or misfiring.
problem? The story of Bosnia is
To draw out the most radical conclusion one of images that might have signified genocide
from Cushman and Mestrovic: what if some or
part
aggression or calculated political slaughter but
of the Enlightenment-not its failure but rather
seemed for so long to signify only tragedy or dis-
the faith we put in the informative power ofaster
im- or human suffering-and hence were avail-
ages-didn't just fail to stop what happenedable
butfor inscription or montage in a humanitarian
prevented it from stopping? What if the disaster
rather than a political response. So what failed in
continued because the cameras and the images
Bosnia is an idea or an interpretation (and a prac-
were there and were supposed to make a differ-
tice) of publicity, of the public sphere as an arena
ence by virtue of what they showed? of self-evidence and reason an idea that we now
Hypothesis: To the extent that we imagine
must challenge, not to put an end to the public
or take for granted the articulation between
sphere but to begin reconstituting it.
knowledge and action, which seems to define As it happened, the images were open
the public sphere, that connection is bound to
enough to demand only that we "do something,"
fail. But what can only be thought of as a failure
and the problem concerns, in short, this some-
in those terms is, in another sense, the success
thing (see Keenan, "Do Something"). The naive
of a political strategy, and if we continue to
consolation is that an image's content or meaning
think that images by virtue of their cognitive
is self-evident, even analytically implied by the
contents or their proximity to reality haveinformation,
the by "what [is] actually happening."
power to compel action, we miss the opening ofdo something the world did, something that
And
new fields of action that they allow. amounted to, as Rieff puts it in the sharpest
phrases of his book, "administering the Serb
What if we think about this understanding
of publicity not as a failure or as the emergence
siege" and becoming "accomplices to genocide"
of irrationality but as an alibi, a conceit, or a 189). The combination of the traditional
(147,
consolation? I borrow these words again from
tasks of peacekeeping-which require military
David Rieff, who suggests in Slaughterhouse
observers to be stationed on or between the front
that this failed in Bosnia: a naive hope, a conso-
lines and hence in the zone of any possible mil-
lation, and a conceit, the consolation of images
itary offense like air strikes-and the new hu-
and the dream of public information. Here'smanitarian
the tasks of escorting convoys across
collapsed public in a sentence: "People [...]of confrontation meant that the humanitar-
lines
console themselves with the thought that ian
onceoperation was an active impediment to any

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I 4 Publicity and Indifference (Sarajevo on Television)
other participation. This action was not just the
"fig leaf" that Rieff too lightly calls it but an af-
firmative choice: "the wish that there be no inter-
vention" (189, 176). And this project was best
accomplished by intervening: stationing UN
troops close enough to Bosnian Serb forces that
the peacekeepers would be either targets of West-
ern air strikes or easy hostages for the Serbs; and
escorting humanitarian convoys, which always
obligated the UN not to, as they put it, "compro-
mise the humanitarian mandate" by antagonizing
the aggressor. As Rieff says, "This convergence
of interest between the UN and the Chetniks was
not an exceptional situation" but the structural
law of the operation (175).
And it happened thanks to the images, from
which we expected something rather different.
But images, information, and knowledge will
never guarantee any outcome, nor will they
force or drive any action. They are, in that sense,
like weapons or words: a condition, but not a
sufficient one. Still, the only thing more unwise
than attributing the power of causation or of
paralysis to images is to ignore them altogether.
If they can condition some action (and, indeed,
in Sarajevo and elsewhere that's exactly what
happened), then it is only at the risk of indirec-
tion-the unexpected outcome, we might say:
here, the humanitarian one. We cannot, at least
not without repeating what seems to me the
basic strategic error here, neglect to expect the
unexpected. Because images are so important,
we cannot count on their obviousness, fall for
the conceit that information leads ineluctably to
actions adequate to the compulsion of the image.
There is no compulsion, only interpretation and
reinscription. The image is left to wander and to
drift from context to context, nothing but surface
and frame, and this fate is what we can call, bor-
rowing words from Cohen, the image's "banal
violence," the banality of a "succinct account-
ing" on video. The image has no guaranteed
meaning and remains only to testify, to demand,
to induce a responsibility-even if, as Avital
Ronell argues about the videotape of Rodney
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PPMLAA
King being attacked by the Los Angeles police,
"it is a responsibility that is neither alert, vigi-
lant, particularly present, nor informed" (305).
The responsibility of the viewer is coexten-
sive with the lack of self-evidence of the image:
it dictates nothing, compels nothing. It can al-
ways be used, though, which is to say that it can
and must always be interpreted, and the terrible
failure of Bosnia was that a certain understand-
ing of the public sphere-"the thought that once
[people] have the relevant information, they will
act"-allowed or even produced an interpretive
complacency. "Surely one more picture, or one
more story, or one more [. . .] stand-up [. ..]
would bring people around, would force them to
stop shrugging their shoulders"-nothing is less
sure, less certain, precisely because we think
that such a result is certain. Images never speak
for themselves, never make anything in particu-
lar happen, even if they seem often to make
something happen and are now indispensable in
war, but into the gap that they opened rushed the
humanitarian action, displacing all other op-
tions-which means that the accounting, how-
ever succinct, does not stop. The image remains,
without guarantees, always available for reinter-
pretation and reuse, of necessity the focus of an
endless vigil and a struggle for reinscription.
This is the predicament of that "new kind of pol-
itics" Ignatieff announced, which comes into its
own most pressingly when the possibility of mil-
itary intervention is introduced into the tradi-
tional nexus of television and humanitarianism.
A politics that "use[s] television [ . .] to mobi-
lize conscience" and "that takes the world rather
than the nation as its political space," however
unavoidable and actual it has become, neverthe-
less remains just that: a politics, not a solution
but a struggle. In this new media state, the battle
takes place in public (in fact, the public sphere is
constituted by the irreducibility of this battle),
not the public as the last refuge of that dream or
consolation of information properly acted on but
another public, in another space and time, virtual
and visual and nevertheless real enough, tenu-
I I 7 I i Thomas Keenan I 15

ous, uncertain, where everything is openBrauman,

to abuseRony. "La piti6 dangereuse." Les medias et l'hu-
and appropriation ... shaky ground indeed.
NOTES
The research for the essay could not have been accomplished
without a Title F leave from the State University of New
manitaire: Ethique de l'information ou charite-spectacle.
Brauman and Rene Backmann. Paris: CFPJ, 1996. 9-60.
Clinton, William Jefferson. "Remarks by the President to
Genocide Survivors, Assistance Workers, and U.S. and
Rwanda Government Officials." Kigali Airport, Ki-
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House. 31 Oct. 2001 <http://clinton4.nara.gov/Africa/
19980325-16872.html>.
Cohen, Roger. "In Sarajevo, Victims of a 'Postmodern' War."

York, Binghamton, and a semester as a fellow at the Joan New York Times 21 May 1995: 1+.

Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, Cushman, Thomas, and Stjepan G. Mestrovic. "Editors'
in the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard Note." Cushman and Mestrovic, This Time 79-80.
University, which are hereby gratefully acknowledged. . Introduction. Cushman and Mestrovic, This Time
' The literature in these debates is extensive-in France 1-38.

it includes in particular Kouchner; Brauman; and Boltanski; ,eds. This Time We Knew: Western Responses to
and in the United States it stretches from Benthall's ground- Genocide in Bosnia. New York: New York UP, 1996.
breaking work to Neuman; Seib; Minear, Scott, and Weiss; Danner, Mark. "America and the Bosnia Genocide." New
Strobel; Gow, Paterson, and Preston; Girardet; Rotberg and York Review of Books 4 Dec. 1997: 55-65.
Weiss; and important studies by Gowing and by Livingston, . "The US and the Yugoslav Catastrophe." New York
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2 For a more thorough account of how the Somalia inter-
de Waal, Alex. "Becoming Shameless: The Failure of Human-
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Rights Organizations in Rwanda." Times Literary Supple-
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3 Amanpour was then just back from Somalia; on 30
. Famine Crimes: Politics and the Disaster Relief In-
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Dizdarevic, Zlatko. "As Bad as Things Were, the Empti-
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Magazine 10 Apr. 1994: 36+.
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Girardet, Edward, ed. Somalia, Rwanda, and Beyond: The
West. The attitude towards us has been changing-certainly,
Role of the International Media in Wars and Humanitarian
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Crises. Crosslines Spec. Rept. 1. Dublin: Crosslines, 1995.
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