War without Bodies: Framing Death from the Crimean to the Iraq War (War Culture)

From the nineteenth century onward, technology has disseminated images and descriptions of war with increasing volume and speed. Thanks to the invention of the telegraph and photography, nineteenth-century noncombatants had access to firsthand accounts from correspondents and visual images of armies at war. Continuing technological innovations such as tele vi sion and satellite communication eventually led to images transmitted via live video directly from the battlefield. However, this ready access to more reports and images did not result in the end of war because, despite the proliferation of accounts of vio lence, their impact was muted by the way in which they were framed. From the British involvement in the Crimean War (1853-1856) to American media coverage of the Gulf (1990-1991) and Iraq War (2003-2011), the framing of war has meant that the deaths of both soldiers and noncombatants were made invisible. These frames included the trope of masculine self-sacrifice as a "good death" in the nineteenth century, the gamification of war from the early twentieth century onward, the focus on psychological rather than bodily damage in the creation of the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and the derealization of violence at a distance in "drone vision." This framing pro cess helped sustain a war culture that mobilized popu lar support for military operations and minimized the cost of state-sponsored vio lence by representing "war without bodies."Early in the twentieth century, H. G. Wells pronounced that World War I was "the war that will end war," and Ernst Friedrich in Krieg dem Kriege! (War against War!) (1924) published graphic images of the damage to bodies in the conflict, but wars continued to be fought. Proclamations such as that by Wells and the publication of graphic images by themselves have not been enough to make war unimaginable. War is very much imaginable when the damage to human bodies is made invisible, which is the effect of representing "war without bodies." By this I do not mean that no bodies are involved, but that the absence of bodies Note: Page numbers in italics refer to figures. "Historically the bodies of civilians are the most damaged by the increasing mechanization and derealization of warfare, but this is not reflected in the representation of violence in popular media. In War Without Bodies, author Martin Danahay argues that the media in the United States in particular constructs a "war without bodies" in which neither the corpses of soldiers or civilians are shown. War Without Bodies traces the intertwining of new communications technologies and war from the Crimean War, when Roger Fenton took the first photographs of the British army and William Howard Russell used the telegraph to transmit his dispatches, to the first of three "video wars" in the Gulf region in 1990-91, within the context of a war culture that made the costs of organized violence acceptable to a wider public. New modes of communication have paradoxically not made more war "real" but made it more ubiquitous and at the same time unremarkable as bodies are erased from coverage. Media such as photography and instantaneous video initially seemed to promise more realism but were assimilated into existing conventions that implicitly justified war. These new representations of war were framed in a way that erased the human cost of violence and replaced it with images that defused opposition to warfare. Analyzing poetry, photographs, video and video games the book illustrates the ways in which war was framed in these different historical contexts. It examines the cultural assumptions that influenced the reception of images of war and discusses how death and damage to bodies was made acceptable to the public. War Without Bodies aims to heighten awareness of how acceptance of war is coded into texts and how active resistance to such hidden messages can help prevent future unnecessary wars"-- Provided by publisher Contents Introduction: two photographs Chapter 1 Sacrificial Bodies: fenton, tennyson, and the charge of the light brigade Chapter 2 The Soldier’s Body and Sites of Mourning Chapter 3 War Games Chapter 4 Trauma and the Soldier’s Body Chapter 5 Sophie Ristelhueber: landscape as body Conclusion: future war without bodies Acknowledgments Notes Works Cited Index About the Author