ABSTRACT
In the aftermath of catastrophic events societies are faced with complex material realities. Social, political, environmental, economical, and cultural consequences follow suit – how to reform society and political identity in the case of genocide, for example; how to deal with the destruction of human life and material infrastructure; how to handle the effects of environmental catastrophes that threaten both human and non-human life; or, how to institutionalise the memory of these events. The struggle with such material questions in the face of extreme events finds a parallel in the struggle to achieve some sort of understanding of these events and their aftermath. This struggle – the attempts to come to terms with the events – occurs in the representation and signification of catastrophe. Images play a crucial role in this process. Different images and aesthetic sensibilities are mobilised in the wake of catastrophe, and coming to terms with the catastrophe is dialectically linked, in public discourse, with these aesthetic fabrications and formations, which operate at the level of epistemology rather than ontology. Because of this, images have their own forms of afterlife or aftermath. They become iconic and emblematic (the picture of the napalmed girl, for example). They prompt, repeat, resonate, and interpenetrate each other (the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima and the firemen raising the flag on the rubble of the World Trade Centre). Or, as the journalist Philip Gourevitch (2000) put it, they can revisit us, ‘remembered or imagined from various paintings or movies’ (301). The afterlife of certain images – images that implicate an epistemological, moral, or emotional move – lies in their power to inflect and crystallise explanations of what the world is like.
