46 SUFFERING

Vanessa Agnew

The need to lend a voice to suffering is a condition for all truth.

(Adorno, 1973, pp. 17-18)

It is from the second book of Virgil's Aeneid (ca. 19-29 bce) and Quintus's Posthomerica (4th century) that we acquire an account of human suffering inflicted by the gods.

The reasons for Laocoon's punishment remain obscure. He tried to expose the Greeks' treachery; he desecrated holy ground by having sex there—the reasons are not really important. But like Cassandra, here was a man who could see what others could not and who would put his suppositions to the test. “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes,” he instructed his countrymen, “Beware of the Greeks, even when they bear gifts,” and enjoined them to reject the offering (Virgil, Aeneid, II, 49). To no avail: the Trojans could not read Laocoon's suffering any more than they could read the ruse-horse. The city would be overrun by Greek soldiers concealed in the wooden horse, the war would end in Trojan defeat, and Laocoon and his children suffer an agonizing death:

lle simul manibus tendit divellere nodos

perfusus sanie vittas atroque veneno,

clamores simul horrendos ad sidera tollit:

qualis mugitus, fugit cum saucius aram taurus et incertam excussit cervice securim.

With both his hands he labors at the knots;

His holy fillets the blue venom blots;

His roaring fills the flitting air around.

Thus, when an ox receives a glancing wound,

He breaks his bands, the fatal altar flies,

And with loud bellowings breaks the yielding skies.

(Virgil, trans. Dryden [1697], 110)

As a central model in the Western iconography of suffering, the effect of the Laocoon group relies on an empathetic relation with the sufferer. We are moved by Laocoons furrowed brow and contorted expression: like him, we feel ignored by our fellows, unjustly punished, restrained by the deadly snakes, doomed.

Reenactment operates similarly in this regard. Through restaging, the individual’s suffering assumes a metonymic relationship to suffering in the past. The reenactor’s suffering also func­tions as a structuring device for the narrative itself——battle reenactors starve themselves to look and feel the part of soldier, crouch cold and wet in fake trenches, and are discombobulated by the fog of simulated war. The more acute the pain, the more authentic a correlative of histori­cal experience the reenactment appears to be. Yet, the use of suffering as a narrative structuring device is also driven by the genre’s formal constraints—its emphasis on individual plight and difficulty in encapsulating complex historical processes. In consequence, reenactment narratives often depart from the historical events they mean to represent. The discovery of Australia’s east­ern seaboard by Captain Cook is told, for example, via the feel of hempen rigging in the hand, the dizzying height of the foremast, the pitching deck, the improbable climb over the lip of the fighting top (Agnew, 2010). Such a tale of sailorly derring-do would never have been worthy of telling in the 18th century like it is in the 21st. But pain, fear, loneliness, bewilderment—these

Figure 46.1 Hagesandros, Athenedoros, and Polydoros, Laocoon and his sons, marble copy of a Hellenistic original ca.

are the manifestations of suffering that give reenactment its meat and bones and make it seem a true account of the past.

In a reversal of Adorno's coupling comes the assertion that truth-telling is anterior to the expression of suffering. Philosopher Gary A. Mullen argues in this regard that truth is “a lan­guage in which our suffering can be expressed and given a central role in the determination of political practice” (2016, p. 102). In fact, what Adorno draws attention to—misleading in the standard English translation—is the need for suffering to be articulated, or to be allowed to be articulated: “Das Bedurfnis, Leiden beredet werden zu lassen, ist Bedingung aller Wahrheit” (1966, n.p.). In Adorno's passive construction, there is no agent to permit or prohibit, express or witness the articulation of suffering. Adorno suggests, rather, that suffering has to be given the opportunity to find voice. The important pendant to this is that without the possibility of articulating suffering, truth and justice cannot exist.

New developments in reenactment like high-resolution multidimensional scanning, aug­mented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and forensic architecture offer—or claim to offer—a technologized means of establishing the truth about the past and of uncovering and modeling the material conditions of suffering. In some respects, this technology is similar to the longstanding use of crime scene reconstruction in court cases (evidence). In other regards, the technology offers novel possibilities for investigating, representing, and “experiencing” the past through high-caliber simulations of built environments, the reconstruction of events through a range of evidentiary sources, and the possibility of virtually occupying different subject positions from multiple points of view. The technology promises to transform judicial systems because of its capacity to make crime scenes accessible to investigators and courts long after crimes have been perpetrated (Breker, quoted in Cieslak, 2016).

Nazi VR (dir. David Freid, 2017, 17 min.), a documentary short detailing the prosecution of a Nazi criminal, marks such a milestone in the use of digital technology to reconstruct and restage the past. Given the dearth of material evidence and surviving witnesses and the advanced age of the alleged perpetrators, the 2016 trial of Reinhold Hanning was a last-ditch effort to bring a perpetrator of the Holocaust to justice (Freid, 2019). Changes to German law and a precedent-setting case in 2011 allowed federal prosecutors to charge low-level functionaries with having abetted rather than directly committed crimes during World War II. Central to securing Hanning's conviction were the use of digital media and VR reconstruction. The for­mer SS guard at Auschwitz-Birkenau was ultimately found guilty of being an accessory to the murder of 170,000 people and sentenced to five years' imprisonment. Since the case was still on appeal when he died a year later, the conviction did not stand under German law (Smale, 2017).

Claiming to have witnessed neither the selections nor gassing of victims at Auschwitz, Hanning's defense rested on the assertion that he had worked at the concentration camp but possessed no knowledge of the crimes committed there. To make their case, prosecutors needed to establish precisely what the defendant had seen. Evidence was compiled from laser scans, aerial photographs, witness testimony, and historical blueprints which were used to digitally rec­reate destroyed buildings. Equipped with this VR model, the court was able to virtually inhabit the simulated genocide site, examine it from every angle, and draw on this reenactive experience to establish the defendant's guilt (Figure 46.2).

The Office for Photo Technology and 3D Crime Scene Mapping (Zentrale Fototechnik und 3D-Tatortvermessung) was commissioned by Bavarian public prosecutors to produce the 3D model of the concentration camp, and laser scanning conducted on site over a period of

Figure 46.2 A screenshot from the documentary short Nazi VR (2017) shows a mashup image of the defendant being tried as an accessory to mass murder. In the background, a low-tech courtroom sketch shows the public wearing VR headsets. These enable viewers to inhabit a 3D reconstruction and see “exactly” what the defendant saw at Auschwitz 70 years earlier. Yet, like the statue ofJustitia wearing a blindfold, it is unclear whether justice is hereby made more or less partial. Source: NaziVR (dir. David Freid).

several days in 2015. Since most of the buildings had been leveled at the end of the war, the infrastructure had to be digitally reconstructed from historical photographs, maps, and survey­ors’ records. Using technology increasingly used in the investigation of violent crime scenes, a scanner, revolving around its horizontal axis and 310^o in a vertical plane, recorded some 30 million data points per scan. According to digital imaging expert, Ralf Breker, with this kind of technology, “Details can be discerned. The tiniest trace of blood.” “We can draw virtual ellipses around the blood splatters and an algorithm calculates the ballistic trajectory of the blood drops.” Witness statements can then be compared with the scans. This visual record gives ballistics experts and physicists the possibility even long after the fact of “walking around in crime scenes and working there” (Nazi VR, 2017).

According to Breker, this recording and reconstructive work resulted in an Auschwitz model of unprecedented exactitude: “It is much, much more precise than Google Earth... The advan­tage the model offers is that [it gives] a better overview of the camp and can recreate the per­spective of a suspect, for example, in a watchtower” (quoted in Cole, 2016).

Since Jeremy Bentham’s innovation in the 18th century, the panopticon has been thought of as the ne plus ultra of information gathering. To see things with a totalizing view is, apparently, to see them with ultimate clarity. Prisons built on a circular model, surveillance towers, and CCTV allow the perpetual visibility of the subject under a regime of asymmetric power relations and monitoring.Yet, critics have long drawn attention to problems associated with the dominance of the specular. Others draw attention to problems associated with visualizing big data, particularly within a judicial context. Legal scholars Mark Lemley and Eugene Volokh argue, for example, that legal doctrine is based on conventional distinctions between reality and communication, perception and experience, physical presence and remoteness, conduct and speech, and physical and psychological harm—distinctions that VR undermines (2018). Falling into uncharted ter­ritory are thus the influence ofVR on the viewer's thoughts and emotions, proprietorship of VR experiences, blurring of the real and perceptually real, and the capacity ofVR to generate memories (Nori, 2018).

As virtual reenactments of the 1974 Milgram experiment have convincingly shown,VR dis­rupts our ideas about the real, as well as our affective responses to the simulation. In a new per­mutation of performance artist Rod Dickinson's Milgrim Reenactment (2002), inflicting virtual pain on an avatar elicited subjective, behavioral, and physiological responses among the experi­mental subjects (Slater et al., 2006). The authors of the study concluded that the “objective ‘real­ity' of [the avatar's] pain” was of “secondary importance” to these responses (Cheetham et al., 2009). Whereas Dickinson's artistic reenactment highlighted problems of agency and historical distance (representation), the virtual Milgrim reenactment raised questions about the nature of empathy in relation to the social dilemma posed by obedience to authority. The study's find­ings were inconclusive as to whether test subjects sought to avoid inflicting virtual pain because they shared the affective state of the avatar (they experienced empathy) or because of their own aversive state of personal distress (Cheetham et al., 2009).

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's reading of the Laocoon group in Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1987 [1766]) makes a case for the different aesthetic possibilities of various media. Over and against Horace's assertion in Ars Poetica that the expressive possibilities of one medium are just like those of another (ut pictura poesis), Lessing insists that sculpture is poetry's inferior. The statue fixes a moment in time, whereas poetry trades in time. It narrates and contextualizes. The Laocoon of Hagesandros, Athenedoros, and Polydoros has a mouth that emits only a fearful, half-suppressed sigh, not rage and not an agonized scream, the natural expression of physical pain (pp. 9, 12).Virgil's literary character, in contrast, bellows in agony. We do not judge Laocoon for this unrestrained expression of pain, which in another context might be regarded as unseemly. From our reading, we already know Laocoon as a patriot and caring father (pp. 7, 27). He has a history and a life, and it is to this life that Lessing would have Laocoon restored.

We can extend Lessing's and Adorno's insights to question the expressive possibilities of digital media and the relation of suffering to the pursuit of truth and justice. Employed in the courtroom,VR reconstruction based on high-resolution scanning has made it possible to bring historical cases to trial and achieve judicial convictions where incriminating evidence would have been otherwise insufficient. Yet the new technology posits truth as the inevitable outcome of massive data capture and 3D reconstruction, even when this digital data capture relies on 3D modeling in the first place (what Fabrizio Gallanti in forensic architecture calls “reverse architecture”). Asserting the primacy and comprehensiveness of the visible also begs the ques­tion as to what cannot be seen, and also not heard, felt, tasted, and smelled. The victim's suffer­ing, for one, seems incidental to an enterprise that asserts an isomorphism between big data, digital reconstruction, reenactment, interpretation, and total knowledge. Perhaps we would do well to recall that suffering is not merely the business of the individual and his or her personal experience: it weighs upon the subject but not on the subject only. According to Adorno, wran­gling with suffering is a precondition for truth-telling and for the exercise of justice—not the other way around. Over and against the assumption that suffering stands opposed to objective knowledge comes an invitation to consider another possibility. Adorno leads us away from a dependence on big data, the infinite proliferation of viewpoints, and virtual experience. “Leiden ist Objektivitat, die auf dem Subjekt lastet; was es als sein Subjektivstes erfahrt, sein Ausdruck, ist objektiv vermittelt”: Suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject; what he or she expe­riences as the most subjective aspect of themselves is, when expressed, itself conveyed objectively (Adorno, 1966, n.p.).

Further reading

Allard, A. J., and Martin, M. R., ed., 2016; Milgram, S., 1974; Motrescu-Mayes, A., and Aasman, S., 2019; Presner, T., 2004; Raneri, D., 2018.