Thomas Keenan
Mobilizing Shame
What difference would it make for humanrights discourse to take the photo opportunity
seriously? Not the photo ops on behalf of human
rights, but the ones coming from the other side,
the other sides. What would it mean to come
to terms with the fact that there are things
which happen in front of cameras that are not
simply true or false, not simply representations
and references, but rather opportunities, events,
performances, things that are done and done
for the camera, which come into being in a
space beyond truth and falsity that is created
in view of mediation and transmission? In what
follows, I wish to respond to these questions by
focusing on what, within human rights activism
and discourse, has come to be known as ‘‘the
mobilization of shame.’’1
Shame and Enlightenment
It is now an unstated but I think pervasive
axiom of the human rights movement that those
agents whose behavior it wishes to affect—gov-
ernments, armies, businesses, and militias—are
exposed in some significant way to the force
of public opinion, and that they are (psychically
The South Atlantic Quarterly 103:2/3, Spring/Summer 2004.Copyright © 2004 by Duke University Press.
436 Thomas Keenan
or emotionally) structured like individuals in a strong social or cultural con-
text that renders them vulnerable to feelings of dishonor, embarrassment,
disgrace, or ignominy. Shame is thought of as a primordial force that articu-
lates or links knowledge with action, a feeling or a sensation brought on not
by physical contact but by knowledge or consciousness alone. And it signi-
fies involvement in a social network, exposure to others and susceptibility
to their gaze—‘‘a painful sensation excited by a consciousness of guilt or
impropriety, or of having done something which injures reputation, or of
the exposure of that which nature or modesty prompts us to conceal.’’2
Those with a conscience have no need of shame; they feel self-imposed
guilt, not embarrassment that comes from others. Shaming is reserved for
those without a conscience or a capacity for feeling guilty—and is required
only where an external, enforceable law is absent. Indeed, publicity and
exposure are at the heart of the concept. Webster’s hypothesizes that theword, which is consistent as far back as Old High German and before,
descends ‘‘perhaps from a root skam meaning to cover, and akin to the root(kam) of G. hemd shirt, E. chemise. Cf. Sham.’’In this regard, mobilizing shame has Enlightenment roots, as many have
pointed out. But they are contradictory ones. Kant defined Enlightenment
as the release or exit from heteronomy, from dependence or reliance on the
opinions of others, and as growing up out of shame and into courage, rea-
son, and conscience. But the sign of an accomplished Enlightenment is, he
adds, theuseofthatreasoninpublic,soastoengagewithothersandchange
their opinions.The Kantian moral subject is fully realized only when his or
her reason is liberated from the guidance, surveillance, pressure, or context
ofothers,butatthesametimewhenit isdestinedforpublicexchange,expo-
sure, or enlightenment. Reason must be employed in public, says Kant, if
there is to be any possibility of progress or social transformation; beliefs
and institutions have no hope of survival if they are not exposed to reason,
to judgments sparked by its critical force in public. Reason works when it
exposes, reveals, and argues.
Mobilizing Shame
Nooneseemstobeabletopinpointthemomentwhenthephrasemobilizingshame entered our lexicon. Robert Drinan, in his recent book The Mobiliza-tion of Shame, credits what his footnote calls ‘‘Turkey campaign documents,Amnesty International’’ as the source of the phrase, but fails to supply a
Mobilizing Shame 437
date or a title.3The first published references, though, go a long way toward
sketching the essential elements of the concept as it is practiced today.The
earliest citation I have found is from Judge B.V. A. Roling, who already put
thephraseinquotationmarksinanarticleonwarcrimespublishedin1979:
‘‘Aweakformofenforcementcanbeseenintheinfluenceofpublicopinion.
If mass violations become known, the world reacts, as it did in the Vietnam
War. That same Vietnam war demonstrates the power of this ‘mobilization
of shame.’’’4The lockstep logic of if-then, in which knowledge generates
action (reaction), seems to suggest a wishful fusion of an Enlightenment
faith in the power of reason and knowledge with a realistic pessimism that
retreatstotheshameappropriatetotheunenlightened.Thispatternrepeats
itself as the concept develops.
The earliest mentions in news articles, at least those archived in Lexis-
Nexis, quote the lawyer Irwin Cotler in his campaigns on behalf of Soviet
Jewry and dissidents. Announcing in 1983 a plan to create a center to pre-
pare amicus curiae briefs on behalf of political prisoners, showing how gov-
ernments have violated their own laws, Cotler argued that exposing the
gaps between self-professed norms and behavior could actually change that
behavior. ‘‘We intend,’’ he stated, ‘‘in the language of human rights lawyers,
to bring the mobilization of shame against the Soviet Union, to expose the
Achilles heel of their human rights violations.’’5
But the obscurity of its origins only strengthens the self-evidence of the
phrase. Today it is the watchword of the international human rights move-
ment. Here are some examples of this contemporary consensus at the level
of tactics. In a recent summary article on the state of things, Louis Henkin,
the dean of human rights law in the United States, writes that
the various influences that induce compliance with human rights
norms are cumulative, and some of them add up to an under-
appreciated means of enforcing human rights, which has been char-
acterized as ‘‘mobilizing shame.’’ Intergovernmental as well as gov-
ernmental policies and actions combine with those of NGOs and the
public media, and in many countries also public opinion, to mobilize
and maximize public shame.The effectiveness of such inducements to
comply is subtle but demonstrable.6
In practice, this modesty (‘‘under-appreciated,’’ ‘‘subtle’’) is rather false.
Mobilizing shame is the predominant practice of human rights organiza-
tions, and the dominant metaphor through which human rights NGOs un-
438 Thomas Keenan
derstand their own work, as in this response from William Schulz, presi-
dent of Amnesty International USA, to an interviewer who asked, earlier
this year, ‘‘How do you exercise your power?’’
Our power is primarily the power of mobilizing grass-roots people to
speak out. ‘‘The mobilization of shame’’ is one way to put it. The eyes
of the world shining on the prisons and into the dark corners of police
stations and military barracks all over the world to try to bring inter-
national pressure to bear upon governments which are committing
human rights violations.7
Thepervasivenessofthisconsensuscannotbeoverstated,norcanitsspecial
relationship to the mass- and especially the image-based media. The con-
cept gathers together a set of powerful metaphors—the eyes of the world,
the light of public scrutiny, the exposure of hypocrisy—as vehicles for the
dream of action, power, and enforcement. ‘‘In the absence of effective en-
forcement mechanisms’’ means: we do not have a machine, a real law, or an
institutionalized apparatus that can deliver reliable results, but we have an
informal system that attempts to approximate it.8It ought to function auto-
matically. Light brings knowledge, and publicity brings ‘‘compliance,’’ even
if it works by shame and not reason or conscience. Precisely because the
perpetrators are immature, dependent on the opinions of others, as are the
governments that might challenge them, they are vulnerable to shaming.
Judge Roling expresses the faith most simply: ‘‘If mass violations become
known, the world reacts.’’9
Becoming Shameless
The dark side of revelation is overexposure. Sometimes we call it voyeur-
ism, sometimes compassion fatigue, sometimes the obscenity of images or
‘‘disaster pornography.’’ If shame is about the revelation of what is or ought
to be covered, then the absence or failure of shaming is not only traceable
to the success of perpetrators at remaining clothed or hidden in the dark.
Today, all too often, there is more than enough light, and yet its subjects
exhibit themselves shamelessly, brazenly, and openly.10
Obviously, this ‘‘crisis’’ has important implications for the struggle for
human rights, especially in an age when its traditional allies—the camera
and the witness—have acquired unprecedented levels of public access, bor-
dering at times on saturation, and when it increasingly finds new allies,
Mobilizing Shame 439
intentional or inadvertent, like them or not, in the armies of the world’s
most powerful nations.
The crisis is not simply on the side of the audience or the public, as even
the most sophisticated commentators seem to assume, nor is it merely
one of indifference or denial or even enjoyment (voyeurism). To leave it at
that would be to leave the general structure of the shaming hypothesis or
strategy intact. But the crisis is in fact far more profound: the enjoyment or
the exposure is now, at least often enough to consider it nonaccidental, on
the side of those who appear on camera. In the age of the generalized photo
opportunity—whether the suicide bomber’s videotape, made-for-television
ethnic cleansing, or embedded reporters and videophones—what role can
publicity, the exposé, and shame (still) play?
I am not sure I can answer this question, but I can offer a pair of examples
that underline the difficult situation faced by the traditional paradigm. The
analysis is provoked, in a sense, by much of the breathless media commen-
tary about the recent war in Iraq. To judge from a lot of what we heard,
you would think reporters and photographers had never gone along for a
ride in a plane or a tank before, never stood at an intersection and waited
for someone to get shot at, never done a standup during a firefight, never
had to coordinate their logistics and movements with those of the military,
neversharedmealsandcampedoutwiththesoldiersaboutwhomtheywere
reporting, and never reported favorably on the conduct of their country’s
armies. Needless to say, they have, and they have also complained bitterly
about not being able to do those things.
‘‘We’ve never had a war like this, and we got inundated by close-ups,’’
said Nightline producer Tom Bettag in March 2003, about the war that hisaging correspondent covered from a tank.
11While it is certainly true that we
have never had a war quite like this, especially not to the extent that it hap-
penedontelevision,wedohavemanyprecedentsforit. It isworthrevisiting
some of that televisual history—here, two moments from the last decade in
Somalia and Kosovo—to think about the assumptions underwriting most
discussions about the ethics and politics of human rights struggles, includ-
ing wars, in the media.
Somalia.Elsewhere,IhavewrittenaboutthetelevisingofOperationRestoreHope, the first serious post–Cold War ‘‘humanitarian intervention,’’ in So-
malia.There, I was interested in the images of the soldiers in humanitarian
action, especially on the first night of the operation, along with the images
440 Thomas Keenan
of starvation that preceded it and the images of military debacle that eventu-
ally followed it. I wrote then that the point of Somalia was the pictures, the
transmission and archiving of a new image for a military-aesthetic complex
recently deprived of the only enemy it could remember knowing.
The tenth anniversary of the events re-created in Black Hawk Down hasalready passed, and all we really have left is the movie, which impressively
omits both that opening night and the critical role of a camcorder in the
ultimate conclusion of the battle on October 3, 1993.12
And we all skipped right past the anniversary of the opening night’s
landing last December, so let me recall it for you, prime time (EST) of
December 8, 1992, as the first groups of what would ultimately be a twenty-
five-thousand-soldier force began to arrive in Mogadishu to take control of
transport facilities and enable a massive humanitarian relief operation to
proceed securely. (I leave aside many important questions here about the
wisdom of this intervention, its timing, its actual relation to the famine that
was its pretext, and so on.)
Reporting from the Mogadishu airport within (nightscope) sight of the
landing beaches, CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour narrated the
goings-on rather economically: ‘‘It was a classic media event—lights flash-
ing—people desperately trying to ask the marines some questions.’’ The
Marines—a small group of Special Forces–style commandos called a Ma-
rine Reconnaissance Unit, the vanguard of the landing—were not so enthu-
siastic about answering questions on the beach. They had come, with Navy
SEALs, directly out of the water onto the beach, and seemed a bit perplexed
to be met by reporters and cameras. As an after-action report put it later,
‘‘Theteamonthebeachweresurprisedtomeetmembersofthenewsmedia
who made their job difficult with crowds of cameramen using bright lights
to get footage of the wet, camouflaged Marines who were now brilliantly lit
up in the dark night.’’13Crowds of cameramen? Surprised? It seems that the
commandos were inadequately briefed on the full extent of their mission.
Or a little too isolated there on the USS Juneau offshore: the headline thatmorning in USA Today, after all, was ‘‘Somalia Landing Airs Live,’’ and theinstructions for the viewing public were clear: ‘‘NBC and CNN plan to air
the scheduled troop landing live at 10 p.m. ET/7 p.m. PT.’’
A few minutes after the initial landing, a Marine spokesman ‘‘came
ashore,’’ as he put it, ‘‘in a rubber boat,’’ in order to deal with the ques-
tions. The assembled journalists—some estimates put the total in Mogadi-
shu that night at about six hundred, or roughly the same quantity as were
Mobilizing Shame 441
‘‘embedded’’ with all of the U.S. and U.K. troops in the war against Iraq—
interviewed Lieutenant Kirk Coker not so much about the landing itself as
about the scene of the landing, and about what they were all doing there
at the moment. It was not quite live, but within a few minutes CNN was
playing the tape:
Sir, don’t you think it’s rather bizarre that all these journalists are standingout here during——Yes, it really was, and you guys really spoiled our nice little raid here.
We wanted to come in without anybody knowing it—
—Like it was a surprise we were here——Well, we pretty much knew that. [. . .]
So far everything’s going well, sir?Everything seems to be going well right now. We’re not being shot at
and I’m standing here talking to all of you.
Needless to say, it was no surprise to anyone. Michael Gordon of the NewYork Times reported merely the obvious on the day after the landing: thecameras and lights were already on the beach because the Pentagon had told
them to be there. ‘‘All week the Pentagon had encouraged press coverage
of the Marine landing,’’ he wrote. ‘‘Reporters were told when the landing
would take place, and some network correspondents were quietly advised
where the marines would arrive so that they could set up their cameras. . . .
But having finally secured an elusive spotlight, the marines discovered that
theyhadtoomuchofagoodthing.’’14Or,astheJointTaskForcecommander
Marine Brigadier General Frank Libutti had told reporters in Mombassa
(his headquarters) earlier that day, ‘‘I recommend all of you go down to the
beach if you want a good show tonight.’’15
There was grumbling, though, about the way the media—or the briefers
who advised them—had perhaps exposed the Marines to the risk of hos-
tile fire. As one analyst put it later, ‘‘The event was benign only because no
gunman decided to take advantage of the illuminated target area containing
both the U.S. Marines and the news media whose coverage had helped to
bring them there.’’ The key words are the last, though, not about the media
but about the Marines: ‘‘The news media whose coverage had helped to
bring them there.’’16What Operation Restore Hope taught us was that war
today—hard war as in Iraq, both times, and soft war as in Somalia—was and
remains (among other things, to be sure, but crucially) a battle of images.
A CBS television producer who was there told me later that one of the
442 Thomas Keenan
first SEALs on the Mogadishu beach had shouted to his cameraman, ‘‘Kill
the lights, we’re tactical.’’ The allegory seemed to suggest that lights were
only appropriate at the strategic level. But he missed the point: the imagery
was not just strategic—even if the very strategy of the operation did depend
on reporters, cameras, uplinks, and the rest. The imagery, and the produc-
tion and transmission of imagery, was also a tactic, a ground-level move in
the prosecution of the operation.
One need not look behind or beneath the images it produced, as if they
concealed some lurking geostrategic ambition or agenda. What was most
deeply significant about the operation was that it had no depth. It was an
operation on the surface, of the surface. The agenda—the tactics and the
strategy—was the imagery: the creation of images.
Of course, the Somalis could watch television too, and it was obvious very
quickly that the battlefield was one of pictures. The Americans used satel-
lite uplinks, the forces of General Aidid a camcorder, but the war of images
could and was fought with skill and craft by both sides. After all, the disas-
ter of October 3 (Black Hawk Down)—a disaster not only for the eighteen
dead Americans but more so for the perhaps thousand Somalis who died
that night—was also a photo opportunity and a media event. Bodies were
presented—as they had been on earlier occasions as well—for the scrutiny
of the cameras, not simply dragged around for fun. As British journalist
Richard Dowden tells the story,
Television pictures brought US troops to Somalia and television pic-
tures will pull them out. . . . The pictures raise serious questions about
the nature of news-gathering in Somalia, especially since the gunmen
clearly perform for the camera.17
It is tempting to talk about these photo ops and made-for-television
events—both the December and October ones—in dismissive terms, as if
the prearranged presence of the camera somehow renders the events it wit-
nesses less serious or less real. But the second set of images reminds us why
we have to take the first set seriously. The stakes of this mediatic scenario
are high; we cannot understand, nor have a properly political relation to,
invasions and war crimes, military operations and paramilitary atrocities—
bothofmaximalimportanceforhumanrightscampaigners—inthepresent
and future if we do not attend to the centrality of image production and
management in them.We will be at an even greater loss if we do not admit
that the high-speed electronic news media have created new opportunities
Mobilizing Shame 443
not just for activism and awareness, but also for performance, presentation,
advertising, propaganda, and for political work of all kinds.
Kosovo. Just a week before the war over Kosovo began, in mid-March 1999,the Yugoslav and Serbian forces operating there taught the world a lesson
about publicity, exposure, the politics of information, and what Michael
Ignatieff called, as the title of his book about Kosovo, ‘‘virtual war.’’ They
taught it using those very media.
As the week of March 15, 1999, began, a set of villages about twenty
kilometers north of Pristina on the road to Vucitrn (seven kilometers fur-
ther north) were under assault, ostensibly, as the OSCE’s (Organization for
Security and Co-operation in Europe) monitors later reported, in retalia-
tion for the presence of Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) guerrillas. Report-
ers from around the world were in place throughout Kosovo, and it was
to this area (a short drive in the morning) of operations between Pristina
and Vucitrn that many of them gravitated. They found much to see and to
reporton,butthereportsfromthefrontlineatthattimeshareonedominant
self-referential trope. Reporters seemed determined to underline that they
could not see everything, that things were being hidden from them, that
the warring factions were interested in concealing the full extent of their
activities.Their reports further underlined the nature of the problem—and
of the self-understanding—by brandishing the evidence of their successful
evasion of these restrictions and repressions. The paradigm of revelation,
exposure,andshamingwereinfulloperation.Theirreportswereimportant
in the run up to the war, NATO’s first full-scale combat, and one undertaken
not in the name of national interest, imminent threat, regional stability, or
controlofterritorybutratherof humanrights,andawarthatinthemindsof
its authors in Washington and London and Brussels was a de facto apology
for their years of inaction in Bosnia and Croatia.
On March 11, an Agence France Presse (AFP) correspondent wrote from
along the shifting front lines:
‘‘Get out! You’re in a war zone,’’ barked a Kosovo Liberation Army
(KLA) commander named Labinot in Mijalic village, where the rebels
and security forces were less than 500 meters (yards) apart. Sev-
eral armored vehicles closed in on the village, as did Serbian special
forces wearing masks and bulletproof vests for protection against the
Kalashnikov-armed guerrillas.18
444 Thomas Keenan
The next day, Friday, March 12, two Serb policemen were shot and wounded
in Mijalic, and the confrontation intensified over the weekend. AP’s Anne
Thompson reported,
With the villages empty of civilians, army troops and Serb police
started looting Mijalic and Drvare and burning down houses Satur-
day, said diplomatic monitors whose mission is led by the Operation
for Security and Cooperation in Europe. While much of the shelling
was aimed at driving the rebels west over the mountains and into
their traditional Drenica region, monitors said the burning was sheer
vengeance.19
By Sunday, wrote Julius Strauss in the Daily Telegraph,
[in Drvare] the charred remains of some houses were still smolder-
ing. All the locals had fled. The only sign of life was a large and ner-
vous horse who snorted as the army trucks rolled past.The Serb police
turned us back with a swear-word and a universal gesture. Skirting
round the position through scrubby fields to the west gave a clearer
vantage point. Smoke could be seen rising from Mijalic, the next vil-
lage, which locals said had been completely torched by the Serb forces.
On top of a ridge-line aYugoslav army half-track with a heavy machine-
gun mounted and an armored personnel carrier could be seen. Some
nearby gardens and small trees had been shredded by the passage of
tanks. One could be heard rumbling into a new position just out of
our view.20
And Reuters reported on the same day:
Reporters who reached the centre of Mijalic, about six kms (four miles)
southwestof Vucitrn,foundthevillageasmoulderingruin,emptysave
for Serbian police in armored vehicles who warned of sniper activity.
‘‘Turn around. Get out of here. This is a military zone and there are
snipers firing in this area,’’ a police officer in a flak jacket ordered.
He spoke amidst shell-shattered, burned-out houses at an intersec-
tion strewn with downed electric and telephone lines.
Houses on the ridge-line above the village centre were still smoking
and at least one was in full flame. Occasional automatic weapons fire
ripped the air above the ruins.21
The next day, March 15, Carlotta Gall reported for the New York Times:
Mobilizing Shame 445
The OSCE has watched as a string of villages has come under tank and
mortar fire for more than a week now.Yugoslav army forces took over
the Albanian village of Mijalic and were guarding the entrance with a
tank and several troop trucks, keeping journalists and monitors away.
‘‘This is a war zone,’’ said a young Serbian soldier guarding the road, an
automatic rifle at the ready across his chest. ‘‘It is dangerous and you
must leave.’’22
Taken together, these five stories demonstrate a solid consensus about at
least one thing. This is a rather traditional war story: war means no access.
And more often than not, no access is taken as a sign of the reality, the
authenticity, of the war. It is the job of reporters, monitors, and human
rights advocates to ‘‘skirt around the positions’’ and expose the violent re-
ality. No photo ops here: only serious business.
But in fact, on March 16, the next day, something quite different hap-
pened. Correspondent Bill Neely of Britain’s Independent Television News
(ITN) reported from that very village of Mijalic, where his camera crew—
along with another crew from the BBC with reporter Angus Roxburgh in
tow—was videotaping, from the ridgeline, no doubt, as Serbian policemen
and nearby villagers looted and destroyed it. It was very good—and brave—
reporting. But what was interesting, or especially interesting, about it was
what was remarkably different from the experiences reported by Gall and
the other reporters. The men destroying Mijalic were not surprised in the
act of destruction. They were not exposed, caught on tape unawares. They
did it for the cameras. As both television reporters noted, the men ‘‘cleans-
ing’’ the village were watching the cameras that watched them, and acted
in full knowledge of the fact that their deeds were being recorded. Neely
spoke, simply and eloquently, about this knowledge:
As we are filming from afar, three men come to burn the village of
Mijalic, which until a week ago was full of Albanians. It is now being
looted by Serbs: one man, stealing a television, is a policeman. The
five men move from house to house and with a matchbox wipe Mijalic
from the map, one, a Serb civilian, robbing his Albanian neighbor’s
television.The men are making it difficult for Albanians ever to return.
The Serbs know we are filming them, but they make the law here, and
they break it. So they burn Mijalic to the ground.23
The BBC’s Roxburgh said something similar: ‘‘The village was razed before
our eyes; they knew we were filming them, they didn’t care.’’ The ITN video
446 Thomas Keenan
log, which catalogs the film shot by shot, also reports the scene succinctly:
‘‘Looters out of house waving to cameras.’’
OnMarch19theOSCEobservermissionwithdrew,unabletodoitswork.
NATO’s air campaign began a week later.
A wave. With this simple gesture of the hand, not simply cynical or ironic,not simply nihilistic, no matter how destructive, these policemen an-
nounced the effective erasure of a fundamental axiom of the human rights
movement in an age of publicity: that the exposure of violence is feared by
its perpetrators, and hence that the act of witness is not simply an ethical
gesture but an active intervention.
Mobilizing shame presupposes that dark deeds are done in the dark, and
that the light of publicity—especially of the television camera—thus has
the power to strike preemptively on behalf of justice. With a wave, these
policemen announced their comfort with the camera, their knowledge of
the actual power of truth and representation.
How should we read this wave, this repeated succession of hand gestures
quitedifferentfromtheother‘‘universalgesture’’withwhichcorrespondent
Strauss of the Daily Telegraph had been greeted just a few days earlier? It is amark of recognition and acknowledgment—a kind of wink, as one anthro-
pologist pointed out to me—first of all, it says, ‘‘We know you’re there, we
see you, we witness your presence.’’ Implicitly then it also communicates
a feeling of comfort with that presence, not simply permission to remain
but encouragement, endorsement, benevolence toward the crews and their
cameras. And the wave acknowledges—after all, these men know about
televisions—as well that it is directed not just to people but to cameras, to
being recorded, transmitted, archived, repeated. Waving to the cameras is
neverjustforthecamerasbutfortheothers, forthepublic, forelsewhere,or
the future and many futures. The wave announces itself as a performance,
marks not just the camera but the space defined by the viewfinder—surro-
gate for the screen—that it opens up for performance or demonstration.
Thewaveannounces—itperforms, itenacts—thatthere’snohidinghere,
nothing in the dark, nothing to be ashamed of. And it demonstrates this
for the very instruments that are known for their revelatory abilities—the
wave says, ‘‘Expose this, this that I am exposing for you.’’ Like the hand at
the end of Keats’s strange little fragment ‘‘This Living Hand,’’ the waving
hands of Mijalic each say, ‘‘See here it is, I hold it toward you,’’ and they do
what they say.24
Mobilizing Shame 447
Is it a gesture of contempt? A statement of power against the power-
lessness of the witnesses? Or is it an announcement of impunity? Or just
a happy wave of contentment, that of a satisfied shopper? Does it imply
superiority, or the overcoming of a feeling of inferiority? Is it cynical, or
desperate, or wanton, as the reporter suggests?
All these interpretations are possible, but I prefer to try to read the act as
an act and not simply as a message. In that sense, it challenges the Enlight-
enment presuppositions I have been following. It suggests that the camera
does not simply capture what happens and convey that elsewhere in the
form of knowledge or information, of something to be acted on. Rather, the
waveisanaction,notonlyafacttoberevealed(althoughitisthataswell)but
an event that takes place, for the camera, as if to demonstrate to it, through
it, something about it and its actual force in the world. The wave sends its
message by doing it: we know you are watching, we know that you know
that we know you are watching, but . . . and then it turns out that there is no
but. If the classic formula of denial is ‘‘We know very well, but nevertheless[we do it anyway],’’ then this is not a matter of fetishism or denial. Here, we
all know everything, and there are no second thoughts, no buts. We know,
and hence we enact our knowledge, our status, our sense of the complete
irrelevance of knowledge.We are news, information, knowledge, evidence,
yes, because we are doing it, making it. In this sense, the Croatian theorist
Boris Buden is right to adopt Baudrillard’s slogan about the ‘‘transparency
of evil’’: ‘‘If there is a lesson to be learned from the Yugoslav disaster, it is
about the transparency of evil. Nothing has happened in these ten years of
war that wasn’t ‘entirely predictable’—if it wasn’t announced outright and
in advance.’’25
Conclusion
Nightline producer Bettag’s comment, quoted earlier, that ‘‘we got inun-
dated by close-ups’’ has an unexpected resonance now. Close-up means nodistance, and self-exposure. So what difference does it make, for those of us
who have to respond, when the technologies of exposure become opportu-
nitiesforperformance,exhibition,self-exposure?Whatbecomesofshame?
One does not have to sympathize with Karl-Heinz Stockhausen to suggest
that aesthetic categories are relevant here. The aesthetic finds itself in ex-
treme proximity to the ethico-political now; the proximity is perhaps dis-
comforting to some, but it is also the condition of any serious intervention.
448 Thomas Keenan
That intervention, though, will have to enter into political dispute, not from
the safety of a distance or the ethical certainty of a good conscience. The
closer we get the more uncertain things are. What difference does all this
exposure make, here and there? Only time and force will tell.The time and
the force of those images will surely have something to do with it. That is
why we have a responsibility—ethical and political—to attend to them.
Notes
I am grateful to my hosts and audiences at the Center for Religion and Media (New York Uni-
versity), the Center for the Study of Theory and Criticism (University of Western Ontario),
and the Center for German and European Studies (University of Wisconsin, Madison), and to
my colleagues and students at Bard College, for their reactions to this essay and to the Mijalic
videotapes.
1 A few sentences in this essay were drawn from pieces I have written about similar topics:
‘‘Publicity and Indifference: Media, Surveillance, ‘Humanitarian Intervention,’’’ in Rheto-rics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, ed. Thomas Levin et al. (Karlsruhe: ZKMand Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002), 544–61; ‘‘Looking Like Flames and Falling Like
Stars: Kosovo, the First Internet War,’’ in Mutations, ed. Rem Koolhaas, Stefano Boeri,Sanford Kwinter, Nadia Tazi, and Daniela Fabricius (Barcelona: ACTAR and Bordeaux:
Arc en reve centre d’architecture, 2000), 84–95; revised version, ‘‘The Other Europe,’’
in Social Identities 7.4 (2001): 539–50; and ‘‘Live from . . . ,’’ in Back to the Front: Tourismsof War/Visite aux armées: Tourismes de guerre, ed. Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio(Caen: F.R.A.C. Basse-Normandie, 1994), 130–63.
2 As defined in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, unabridged, 3rd ed.3 Robert F. Drinan, The Mobilization of Shame: A World View of Human Rights (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2002), v.
4 B.V. A. Roling, ‘‘Aspects of the Criminal Responsibility forViolations of the Laws of War,’’
in The New Humanitarian Law of Armed Conflict, ed. Antonio Cassese (Naples, Italy: Edi-toriale Scientifica, 1979), 199–200. Thanks to Ewen Allison for the citation.
5 Cotler quoted in David K. Shipler, ‘‘Soviet Is Assailed over Emigration,’’ New York Times,March 20, 1983, A4.
6 Louis Henkin, ‘‘Human Rights: Ideology and Aspiration, Reality and Prospect,’’ in Real-izing Human Rights: Moving from Inspiration to Impact, ed. Samantha Power and GrahamAllison (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 24.
7 Bill Steigerwald, ‘‘Human Rights and Wrongs,’’ Pittsburgh Tribune, March 29, 2003.8 Sharing Information and Building Skills: Tools for Casework, AAAS Workshop on Sci-
ence and Human Rights, May 17, 2001, Washington, D.C.; available online at http://
mailman.aaas.org/pipermail/per/2001-May/000002.html (viewed January 5, 2004).
9 Roling, ‘‘Aspects of the Criminal Responsibility,’’ 200.
10 See Alex deWaal, ‘‘Becoming Shameless: The Failure of Human-Rights Organizations in
Rwanda,’’TimesLiterarySupplement,February21,1997,3–4;andStanleyCohen, ‘‘Govern-mentResponsestoHumanRightsReports,’’HumanRightsQuarterly18.3(1996):517–43.
Mobilizing Shame 449
11 Quoted in Brian Lowry and Elizabeth Jensen, ‘‘The ‘Gee Whiz’ War,’’ Los Angeles Times,March 28, 2003.
12 To his credit, on the contrary, Nuruddin Farah includes this in his new account, Links(Cape Town: Kwela, 2003), 239–40, 245.
13 Anon., ‘‘Mission Profile: Operations PROVIDE RELIEF and RESTORE HOPE, Somalia,
1992–1995,’’ available online at www.specialoperations.com/Operations/Restore Hope/
Operation1.htm (viewed January 5, 2004).
14 MichaelGordon, ‘‘TVArmyontheBeachTookU.S.bySurprise,’’NewYorkTimes,Decem-ber 10, 1992, A18.
15 Quoted in Seymour Topping, ‘‘Suspend Hostilities,’’ Columbia Journalism Review (March/April 1998): 58–60.
16 Charles W. Ricks, ‘‘The Military-News Media Relationship: Thinking Forward,’’ Decem-
ber 1, 1993, available online at www.carlisle.army.mil/ssi/pubs/1993/media/media.htm
(viewed January 5, 2004).
17 Richard Dowden, ‘‘TV Brings US Grim News of Mogadishu,’’ The Independent,October 7,1993, 10.
18 Calin Neacsu, ‘‘Kosovo Rebels under Fire after Milosevic Rejects NATO Again,’’ Agence
France Presse, March 11, 1999.
19 Anne Thompson, Associated Press AP Worldstream, March 14, 1999; Sunday 12:56 ET.
20 Julius Strauss, ‘‘Serbs Unleash ‘Scorched Earth’ Policy on Kosovo,’’ The Daily Telegraph(London), March 14, 1999, 9. My emphasis.
21 Reuters, March 14, 1999.
22 CarlottaGall, ‘‘ForVillagesof Kosovo,WarIsPartof DailyLife,’’NewYorkTimes,March16,1999, A10.
23 Bill Neely, ‘‘Serbian Scorched Earth Policy,’’ ITV Nightly News, March 16, 1999; also
broadcast as ‘‘Serbs Ravage Kosovo Village,’’ CNN/The World Today, March 16, 1999,
8:39 pm.
24 John Keats, ‘‘This Living Hand, NowWarm and Capable,’’ in The Complete Poems, ed. JohnBarnard (New York: Penguin, 1977), 459.
25 Boris Buden, ‘‘Saving Private Havel,’’ Zagreb, May/June 1999; available online athttp://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9904/msg00325.html (viewed
December 1, 2003).