Page 63 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

46 Johanna Sumiala

channels of communication (see e.g. van Dijk 1999: 6). They were shown
on several Internet sites and international and national television channels;
printed in numerous newspapers; and eventually published in books dealing
with the scandal (see e.g., Danner 2004). An event that first took place
inside a U.S. army prison ended up affecting the network society on a global
scale.
One of the most prominent images of AG featured in the media was an
image of a hooded man (Jabar) positioned on a box, having wires attached to
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both hands and supposedly to his penis. In another AG image, a naked man
stands in front of the camera with his arms spread wide, feet crossed, and
his naked body covered with dirt and excrement. At the level of the obvious,
what are being circulated here are the two torture images as objects, but there
is more than that. As Latour points out, it is subjectivities, justifications, the
unconscious and personalities that circulate as well (2005: 207). Drawing
on Latour’s (2005: 217) terminology, I consider the AG images to be actors
operating in a large web of circulating mediators communicating with one
another, constituting new kinds of associations and relationships. For Latour,
circulation involves a process of making connections between disparate actors
and of making sense of these connections. In other words, an actor can gain
strength only by associating and establishing relationships with others (see
e.g. Latour 1988: 160).
In the first part of the chapter, I explore the role of the new media
technology and images establishing encounters with each other. In the
second part of the chapter, my focus is on one specific type of an encounter:
a relationship between the spectator looking at the image and the tortured
represented in the image. I argue that to understand the circulation of the
relationship between the spectator and the other in the image one needs
to analyze a visual practice structuring the act of seeing: the gaze (see e.g.
Morgan 2005: 2–6, 2007a; Seppänen 2005). In this connection, I apply
Arjun Appadurai’s (1997) idea of social and cultural imagination describing
the dynamics of fashioning imagined association stimulated by different
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visual interactions with the image (see also Burke 2001). I ask what kind of
religious associations potentially circulate through the practice of imagination
between the spectator and the image. Finally, I draw some preliminary
conclusions about circulation and its ethical implications in contemporary
network society.

Tracing circulation

My analysis starts with a basic Latourian notion that circulation of the two
images is established around a series of encounters between technologies,
artefacts, and humans (see e.g., van Loon 2005: 9). According to Latour,