Opinion

On Instagram I see the body of a Palestinian toddler, an ad for a wetsuit, Oprah talking

How can we just go about our business – having coffee with friends, booking family holidays, watching Netflix – while Gaza’s overwhelming horror unfolds within our field of vision?

Children photographed in Khan Yunis this week: I saw one small boy filming himself singing a prayer to the prophet Mohammed, his sweet voice trembling, until his song was cut short by the flash and blast of the Israeli missile that took his life. Photograph: Getty Images

Mark O'Connell's face
Mark O'Connell
Sat May 18 2024 - 07:00

Surrealism is so embedded in the experience of everyday life that its pervasive presence has become difficult to recognise. Like psychoanalysis, the movement that directly informed its fierce disruptions, it hides in plain sight, disguising itself by being everywhere at all times. If you use social media, and your experience of it is anything like my own, you will have some sense of what I mean. Instagram, in particular, has lately come to feel like a radical experiment in violent Dadaist juxtaposition, whereby a slick proliferation of consumerist spectacle is continually ruptured by images of terrible violence and suffering.

The last time I went on Instagram, I took conscious note of what I was seeing, of the contrast between these things, and of the effect it was having on me. I saw the body of a Palestinian toddler, crushed and eviscerated by a ferocious technology of war; I saw an ad for a wetsuit; I saw a screenshot of a joke someone had made on Twitter; I saw an image of another dead child, carried by a weeping man, against a background of rubble and fire and devastation; I saw the television presenter Oprah Winfrey talking about a recently-published novel by Colm Tóibín; I saw the tiny hand of a child, reaching through a small hole in a wall separating Rafah from Egypt, trembling as it grasped for a bottle of water; I saw a guy talking about a coffee grinder that employs an ingenious new reversible mechanism to extrude old coffee grounds; I saw a news story revealing that a man who had driven his car into a group of anti-war protestors in Manhattan was in fact a cousin of Meir Kahane, the American-Israeli founder of a far-right terrorist organisation called the Jewish Defence League; I saw an ad for a stretching app that promised to help me alleviate tight hips by increasing my squatting depth; and I saw a small boy filming himself singing a prayer to the prophet Mohammed, his sweet voice trembling, until his song was cut short by the flash and blast of the Israeli missile that took his life.

And then I stopped scrolling, because there are only so many horrors a person can take in, no matter how many banalities intersperse them. And I was struck by how strange it all was, and how sickeningly contemporary – this proliferation of violently juxtaposed images. Somehow it would all be less disturbing if it were only the horrors, without the commercials and other frivolities. It’s the power of the contrast that makes the experience not merely horrific, but somehow existentially disorienting. Because you are trying to hold two irreconcilable realities in your mind at once: one that is centred around coffee grinders and fitness programmes and celebrity book clubs, and another that is composed only of acts of ferocious violence against vulnerable people.

In an obvious sense, there is nothing new about this: the world has always contained terrors and delights, banalities and wonders. And there is nothing new, either, about lives of comfort and heedless privilege lived closely alongside experiences of abject suffering and injustice. But the current savagery in Gaza is happening right in front of our eyes, unfolding in real time on the tiny screens in our hands. The awful vividness of its presence, its continual irruption into our visual field: this seems to me like a new thing, a new way of experiencing the world’s horrors. I wonder what a surrealist like Max Ernst, whose art channeled the mechanised nightmares of the first World War, would have made of these sophisticated machines we carry with us, showing us now a pair of lightweight summer trousers, now the face of a slaughtered child.

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This terrible absurdity reached a peak earlier this month when the Met Gala, the annual fundraising event for New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, coincided with the Israel Defence Force’s assault on Rafah. Photos of celebrities in grotesquely elaborate and expensive outfits proliferated alongside images so violent and upsetting they were almost impossible to look at.

There is a tendency, one to which I myself am not immune, to talk of social media as though it were somehow distinct from “real life”. But social media, with all its strangeness and crassness and misinformation and occasional hilarity, is precisely real life, and an increasingly central part of it. And this split-screen effect, this juxtaposition of worlds – an image of a desirable consumer product, a photograph of a dead child, a comedian doing a funny little front-facing camera monologue – is in some ways too real, excessive in its representation of what the world is actually like.

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Over the last seven months or so, as imagery of Israel’s slaughter of Palestinian civilians has become a daily presence in our lives, I have heard a lot of people say that they feel as though they are going insane. (The person whom I have most often heard saying this is me.) How can we just be going about our business – having coffee with friends, booking family holidays, watching Netflix, going to our little jobs and living our little lives – while this overwhelming horror unfolds within our field of vision?

The only sane response to this situation is to feel that you are going insane. But what is insane is reality itself, a reality in which such horrors are not only permitted, but facilitated and paid for by the most powerful people on the planet. We are just seeing the manifestations of this insanity with an insistence and clarity that we are unaccustomed to. The surreal horror of this split-screen effect is no more or less than the horror of what the world is like.

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