Scar cultures: Media, spectacle, suffering

Abstract

The article examines the discourses and representations of suffering in public culture. Situated within cultural emotion studies, it assumes that suffering is tied to 'spectacles' of bodily injury and vulnerability. It first analyzes images and the rhetorics of suffering, pain and trauma. There is now a near-persistent visual culture of extreme and distant deprivation-voluntary, in extreme sports, or involuntary like war or starvation victims-beamed into our living rooms. Discourses of suffering deploy, I propose, a trauma-aesthetic that consists of individualization-personalization and the making of a 'barbaric space'. Visual cultures of bodily trauma constitute now a spectacle of sentiment, the article argues. Finally, I propose the emergence of a moral imagination, a sense of affective communities and a new geopolitics of the world through the discovery of the shared precarity of lives. Scar cultures, the article concludes, has a role to play in global politics because they initiate ethical, affective responses. It is through a commodification of suffering and its ethical consumption that the space is cleared for a new politics of recognition-and this politics is based on the emotional intelligence of the global community. © 2009 Mudra Institute of Communications SAGE Publications.