Saddam Hussain Video: We too were there
The historic posting of a cellphone video of the execution of Saddam Hussain shows the lag in adjusting to new technologies: the mobile phone is now seen as a communication device that extends the circle of participants in an event and can even make a private situation public.
Images and videos may be made anywhere and anytime with cellphones on a spontaneous basis and disseminated almost in real time. These videos appear clandestine but there can also be a naivete in their making: the impact of visual images is poorly understood by most, including those capturing images this way.
The execution video, capturing insults and prayers as well as the moment of the gallows, crystallizes not “Saddam” but everything that has been said as well as what has been thought in the violent “post-Saddam” era. Linking the visible with the articulable in a new way, changes not just what but how we see the execution and Iraq situation.
Studies of “visual culture” usually don’t capture the effects of shifting what was supposed to be invisible and unheard, into the visible and overheard. It remakes reality. There is an additional element, related to my previous posting about mobile phone videos, and less obvious because mobile phones capable of making images or videos are still not owned by most. Held up to spontaneously capture a clip of a situation or moment, cellphone videos are usually viewed immediately with others. “Hey look, its us 30 seconds ago!” They are collective confirmations of togetherness, the gesture of holding the camera-phone almost a form of reaching out. And, they confirm a set of relations between the assembled people, objects and the environment.
The video is a portrait of a moment, a scene or assemblage of personalities, affordances and dispositions.There is an intimate quality to their use and this makes the Saddam execution video chilling to anyone who has made a cellphone video. We see the video from the maker’s perspective and experience it as a “coming into a relationship with” what has been captured.
Now we too were there.
January 6th, 2007 at 12:06 pm
See also:
Saddam’s execution: a defining moment for new media?
January 6th, 2007 at 1:17 pm
Great post Rob. I have been thinking alot about the most recent events in the ‘post Saddam era.’
The video clip of Saddam’s hanging really has changed the way that we experience political events. It has also changed the way sovereignty operates. Now that internet users can see every grizzly detail of Saddam’s death, it leaves me with a bit of an strange feeling. Does this form of publicized hanging change perceptions of human dignity and justice in contemporary politics? Is Saddam, as one of the most famous dictators of all time, somehow being denied a dignified death through the popular access to these images? Why would I even think about a dignified death for a dictator?
What exactly does the ‘visual’ tell us here, and are we actually experiencing and witnessing something new? Yes, cell-phones and new mobile cameras have allowed new access to event. Saddam’s hanging (and your post) makes me think about what transformations in technology are revealing for the possibility of dignified ways of life. Quite obviously, there has always been ways to ‘experience the moment.’ However, we must find ways to understand how new technologies of the image are transforming experiences of life, love and politics at an alarmingly fast pace.
January 16th, 2007 at 11:34 pm
Some Latin American Cynicism
Many questions came to my mind when this cellphone video hit the cyber-waves, most of them tending toward the suspicious (I blame my Latin American side for that). First I wondered about security at the event and then I began to think it strange that there was not more outcry from the U.S. It seemed, to me, a bit too neat.
The re-storying of the event and the distraction from critics who decried this hanging, not just for being on a holy day, but for eliminating a key informant for the horrors of the chemical warfare sponsored by the U.S. in the region.
How convenient, I thought, to mask, through a ghastly side show, the workings of well puppeteers for lack of a better term. It seems the equivalent of the way propaganda experts flood airwaves and cyber-waves with stories that will facilitate general amnesia. I would venture to call it a species of visual anaesthetic!
January 19th, 2007 at 7:10 am
This is a very interesting thread. I’ve been thinking about how some of the central concepts in the evolving canon of research on cellphone use might be used to interpret the significance of the execution video. Three concepts in particular run throughout the canon and serve as shorthand for perceptions of how cellphone uses affect space, time, culture, social relations: anytime, anywhere, perpetual contact and absent presence. The first two have received a lot of ink. The latter, less… but it is the one I think is most useful for understanding the overlap of visuality and aurality in cellphone uses now. The phrase describes when non-users encounter a cellphone user. We are present but simultaneously rendered absent (Gergen in Katz & Aakhus 2002: 227). As a stranger, not a friend, to the security guard who made the video, I did not feel a sense of coming into a relationship with the maker when I viewed the video. Instead, I felt a kind of embarrassment akin to witnessing, through overhearing, a too-intimate phone conversation. Absent presence is also used in postcolonial studies to describe the lack of attention paid to minority populations by a majority population, whose culture is hegemonic. Both definitions of absent presence carry a sense of witnessing without being seen and a sense of perpetually encountering experiences that are not our own, via speech, words, and images produced by others.