The question of “What Next Lebanon?” was answered just hours after editors at the Washington Post wrote the headline and selected a signifying moment to accompany it for Sunday's paper. However, the “what’s next” has already happened – death and more death, mostly civilians, and mostly children. Fifty-six people.
It is Sunday afternoon and the news reports from Lebanon are increasingly grim. As I write this post, I imagine the photo and news editors at many of the nation’s newspapers shifting through the hundreds of pictures being transmitted back by satellite across the planet. I imagine how one or two pictures will come to signify what is being reported as the bloodiest day in the two-weeks of fighting being Hezbollah and Israel.
But here we are stuck with the larger rhetorical question -- "What next Lebanon?" and its visual referent. More than 60 years ago, Alfred North Whitehead observed that symbolism is fallible, whereas direct experience is infallible. Yet, we cannot escape the symbolism embedded in words and images of war.
Symbolism is fallible because it works within a system of notions. As Whitehead contends, symbolism can induce actions, feelings, emotions, and beliefs about things.
"The human mind is functioning symbolically when some components of its experience elicit consciousness, beliefs, emotions, and usages, respecting other components of its experience."
The photographer is positioned in such a way as to maximize experience so that the symbolism is both explicitly and implicitly caught in a fragment of time. In Lebanon the symbolism of a devasted urban landscape is often juxtaposed in the Western media against the symbolism of Israeli artillery wrapped in smoke. In Lebanon, a lone figure negotiates his or her way through an agonized frame of twisted, smoldering metal. The symbolic, however, is socially and culturally constructed and must therefore be learned to make any sense.
The symbolism of "What Next Lebanon" anchors in our mind an image of the past, present, and future. We read through the literal nature of the picture presented to us to make inferences and associations. This is the way our mind works. We have a catalog of images in our memory banks to draw on -- Kosovo, Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, Haiti, El Salvador, and this latest picture of Lebanon burning no longer surprises or shocks us.