I have sleep issues. Here's why.

In 2006, the world was captured by the horror of the photos that emerged from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The images—prisoners held in stress positions, smeared with menstrual blood, organized in human pyramids, posed in sexually charged ways—ripped through what remained of the invasion’s credibility and justness. The grim realities of war and torture were, frame by frame, brought home to roost. And despite the best efforts of conservative pundits and government officials to withhold the images from the public, the network bested every attempt at enclosure. In the months following their release, of course, it became clear that (perversely) many of the photos were not as damning as our collective revulsion seemed to suggest. Errol Morris’ documentary, Standard Operating Procedure, for example, revealed the true horror of the photos: many of them depicted nothing more than the daily goings-on of military detention centers. Very few of the images depicted, with any certainty, a breach of military protocol.

Six years later, we find ourselves grappling with a similar story. Last week, images of three US Marines urinating on, defacing, and taunting the bodies of three dead Afghan civilians surfaced online. Since their emergence, they have circulated widely, eliciting responses of disgust, revulsion, horror, and grief. Just as with the Abu Ghraib case, we have since witnessed a wave of ritual admissions of guilt and harsh condemnations from our political elites. All of this, of course, is entirely predictable and necessary. The images and the actions that they represent are vile and grotesque, reminding us that even as Obama engineers yet another ‘savior’ maneuver by withdrawing troops from the region, the horrors of war are as real, as common, as visceral as ever.

Yet I’m troubled by a particular aspect of the way in which this story has been reported, or, rather, something that seems to be missing from the coverage altogether: an account of the deaths that anticipated the acts of desecration. That is to say, everyone seems (rightly and justifiably) outraged at the pervese abuse of the bodies, but apparently unbothered by the presence of the bodies; the state-sanctioned murder of civilians that must be the grisly antecedent to the photos. The problem, it seems, is the desecration of the dead Afghanis, not the dead Afghanis themselves. The horror at what anticipated the scene that we actually see—murder in the name of peace—is nowhere to be found.

One might respond to this observation by contending that, of course the deaths themselves are atrocious, but the death of innocents is perhaps to be expected. It has, after all, been normalized (even standardized) within the visual lexicon of war. This assessment is at least partially true. It is right to draw attention to our desensitization to the victimized and murdered body. It is a grim and necessary reminder of the Hollywoodization of war; that ensemble of representative practices that conspire to erase from the visual register the affective qualities of loss.

But it must be repeated that this interpretation, understandable as it is, remains sorely incomplete. The lack of horror expressed at deaths that preceded the desecration speaks to something more political, more systemic, and more deeply troubling than simple desensitization. How is it that our horror, revulsion, and condemnation emerged only after, and not in direct response to, the murder of innocents? Where is the outrage for the original crime? When we start to think on such questions, a disquieting proposition creeps up on us: these lives were only apprehended as such, as specifically human lives (and even this remains questionable), when the myth of the righteous American was breached. The bodies in the images, it seems to me, have become less the bodies of murdered citizens and more points of departure from which we might explore the rupture of the American military psyche. Only when the ‘nobility’ of the military project was interrupted by an apparently anomalous act of disrespect, were these Afghanis apprehended as subjugated subjects. We have been left, in turn, with a distinctly Amero-centric and deeply troubling reaction to the photos: ‘how could they do that?’ ‘how could this happen’ ‘they must be punished for their actions’ ‘they will be held accountable.’

In almost every permutation of this reaction, the pathogenic perversity of the Marines in question has been made central. The murdered Afghanis become, at best, grim foils to an overly psychologized reading of the soldier. The desecration of the bodies, it follows, has become another opportunity to reflect upon the psychological violence of the military-industrial complex. The political consequences of this shift in focus should not be understated, and will be my subject here.

Judith Butler, in her 2009 volume, Frames of War, provides us with an effective lens through which to understand just why the invisibility of the depicted deaths ought to trouble us more than it has. Throughout her text, Butler attempts to address the general question of why, in times of war, certain lives are grievable and mournable, while others are not? How is it that Americans can express revulsion and outrage at the death of their own at the hands of terrorists while failing to apprehend as horrific the murder of Iraqis and Afghanis by their own government? What institutional, political, and social forces act on our bodies and our senses to regiment grief, and to what ends (or into whose service) is this regimentation put?

In response to this daunting set of questions, Butler suggests that, through the differential operation of practices, norms, and institutions, certain lives in this world are constantly produced and reproduced—framed—as non-lives, not-quite-lives, or lives not fully living. To expunge a body from the world by force becomes of little ethical trouble when that body is neither apprehended nor understood as a life per se. If a particular body is never a subject—that is, if it is never seen to inhabit those conditions under which it may flourish and contribute to our own networks of survivability—it need not, indeed cannot, be grieved. This is what Butler calls “the differential distribution of grievability.” Far from being absolute or automatic or purely affective, as we often assume it to be, our capacity to experience grief over the loss of another is powerfully regulated by the conditions of our sociality. This means that whether or not we perceive a life as such, and by extension, whether or not we see the loss of that life as worthy of our grief is, in some measure, produced rather than inherent.

The ideological work of producing and sustaining war, then, which can ultimately be distilled to the policing of the border between those allegedly under threat of elimination and those seen to perpetuate that threat, is the work of regulating grief. It is the work of “framing” certain groups as non-lives so as to block our capacity to grieve them, for to grieve them is to accept their ontological significance. And for Butler, to accept this significance is to recognize our shared condition of precarity, or the fact that there is no life that escapes destructibility. As she puts it:

War sustains its practices through acting on the senses, crafting them to apprehend the world selectively, deadening affect in response to certain images and sounds, and enlivening affective responses to others. This is why war works to undermine a sensate democracy, restricting what we can feel, disposing us to feel shock and outrage in the face of one expression of violence and righteous coldness in the face of another (p. 52).

Butler, I think, is quite right in locating this regulation of affect as the very basis of the discursive, political, and institutional frames used to justify the American incursions into Iraq and Afghanistan. And with that in mind, it is possible to return to the question at the center of this essay: why do we show horror and revulsion at the desecration of bodies, but not mourn the loss of the lives that once resided therein? Why do we (or perhaps how can we), out of disgust, spring to the defense of these particular bodies while continuing to expunge lives from the planet by military force?

In my estimation, the lifelessness of the bodies depicted elicits no horror or revulsion in itself because, viewed through the frame that began and sustained a decade of war, they were never alive, to begin with. How can one mourn that which never lived; that which never appeared within an affective or political frame that invested it with the qualities of living—precarity, contingency, interdependency? The bodies, in this circumstance, are just that—bodies. It becomes difficult to look at these images and see murdered civilians. To do so would require us to accept that they were once engaged in and alive to the world, an interpretation that prevailing perceptual frameworks attempt to render impossible. Rather, our focus is racked toward the ‘honorable soldier’ figure as he fractures, ruptures, and diverges from his socially sanctioned moral station. We pathologize and internalize, pondering the incidental failures of the military-industrial complex, ruminating on the ways in which it normalizes and divorces from the burden of consequence the actions of particular soldiers.

And this is why, like the photos from Abu Ghraib, these images are not as incendiary (to use one of Butler’s evocative terms) or threatening to the powers-that-be as our revulsion might suggest. Certainly, they have a powerful affective quality, but the disruption they engender can only ever partial, insofar as the frame of interpretation, apprehension, and affect that enables the war itself—that there are lives in the world that are not lives—remains stable. Even in our disgust, we seem to mourn not the life that has been eradicated, but the violation of the body that remains. That is to say, we remain inside the frame established for us by the architects of war. Far from being deeply politically disruptive, then, our sharp outcry over these particular images (while certainly warranted and necessary) does little to trouble the assumption that there is some ‘better’ way to conduct war. Our collective guilt and shame, then, regardless of our good intentions, will remain politically blunt if we fail to connect the disgraced body to the life that was torn from it.

Of course, it would be irresponsible and authoritarian to suggest that we have somehow ‘grieved wrong.’ This essay is not meant to suggest that this is the case. Rather, I am asking that we consider seriously where and how our grief moves; what it apprehends, what it fails to see, what it establishes as memory, and what it seems to forget. To follow our grief in this way, to think about and remark upon where it drifts and more importantly, where it does/dares not, is to begin to sketch the contours of the frame in which we reside; an exercise of uncovering guided by the hope of undoing.