Arguing from the Nerves: Photography in Three Guineas

"But is there no absolute view?" (Three Guineas, 13)

There are several things that we could say act as the foundation for Woolf's arguments in Three Guineas. Hailing back to A Room of One's Own she relies heavily on her ethos as a "daughter of an educated man," a woman who is self-sufficient to not only ground her own position but also give her arguments weight with the son's of educated men. She shows how her status, her rhetorical position, has been established in many respects around the same things that ground the ethos of educated men. Woolf sees that there is a kind of "nexus" in "Arthur's Education Fund," the relation to which defines the perspectives (the ethoi) of both men and women. The differences of course are abundantly clear even if the divide is as transparent as a pane of glass which invisibly separates (and perhaps we could say "sound-proofs") the two sides of the argument. Woolf's first rhetorical goal is not to shatter the glass but to see the glass, measure its scope, and more importantly convince her audience to see it as clearly as she does.

This task is inherently a difficult one. The difference which Woolf first presumes between her own ethos and her interlocutor's, as demonstrated from the very first page, implies that the two sides may see the same thing yet see it differently. The difficulty is not in simply providing the right evidence (assuming that patriarchy is not acquainted with its effects, viz. war) but of persuading her audience to perceive that evidence differently (so that war or "patriotism" becomes something else). Certainly, one could go about this by presenting arguments about the truthfulness or falsity of particular views held within patriarchal institutions (which she does), but one can just as well attempt to show the degree of discord within the "enemy ranks," as Woolf does beginning on page 12 with her interpretation of "patriotism." She shows how "patriotism" is interpreted differently by a woman than it is by educated men. This only serves to complicate the question "How can we prevent war" since it implies that the difference is a rigid one set in stone by upbringing and/or biology, meaning that each view is radically singular and no perspective can be shared on this question - there can be no agreement. Rhetorical argument implies flexibility in human perspectives, so if perspective is absolutely constituted on the basis of upbringing and biology, "the reasons, the emotions, the loyalties which lead men to go to war, [then] this letter had better be torn across and thrown into the waste-paper basket" (12). Rhetoric is the illusion of fluid perspective covering for an absolute singularity of viewpoint. This cannot be the case (and certainly Woolf  "despairs" sarcastically), but it does beg the question, "is there no absolute view?" (14). If Woolf is going to show us the pane of glass clear and simple, then ask us to shatter it, there must be a way to speak across the difference of viewpoints. Is this an "absolute" view she is seeking? I would say Yes and No.

No in the rather platitudinous sense that, of course, there cannot be an "absolute" viewpoint such that one person can see everything. Woolf does not assume that for the purposes of her argument, nor does she need to. In fact, she aptly demonstrates the impossibility of this kind of "absolute" point of view by calling up the strong disagreements among the class of people who claim an absolute rhetorical monopoly - educated men. In a daring fashion (and in quite an amusing one at that!) she criticizes the Anglican Church for its moral vacillation on war (13) which on one hand supports patriotic mania and also denies its effects morally. "So the church of Christ gives us divided counsel" (13), harking back to the Bible, "a house divided against itself cannot stand" (quite scathing!). Even the Church, who traditionally has held the "absolute" point of view fails to live up to itself on the question of war. No, there is no absolute point of view. There are no "letters of fire or gold" which hand down to us the absolute point of view (13).

But yes, there is another kind of "absolute view" which I think Woolf explicitly appeals to in Three Guineas. It is not the sort of absolute view postulated in discourse and argument, and therefore not an "absolute perspective" or founding philosophical category on which one could base an argument against war (or anything else). Instead, it is a more "bodily argument," an absolute view in the sense that it is shared among all human beings/bodies absolutely. This absolute view is not high above the ground but on the ground, and from it one can attack not vertically but horizontally (it does not presume hierarchical inequality). Photographs are "not an argument; they are simply a crude statement of fact addressed to the eye. But the eye is connected with the brain; the brain with the nervous system. That system sends its message in a flash through every past memory and presnet feeling. When we look at those photographs some fusion takes place within us; however different the education, the traditions behind us, our sensations are the same; and they are violent" (14).

Woolf appeals to a very pointed weapon here in photography. She understands that although people may differ on the question of war, as well as the other questions she provokes, photography acts as a stable point in her argument, a stable point in what can become a vertigo of viewpoints, which pricks not the rationality of the viewer as much as their body, their nervous system. The pane of glass becomes opaque as/in a photograph. Once you begin to look you cannot not see it. She uses the photos from the horrors of the Spanish Civil War to bring about a convergence of differing minds from the shared perspective of the body. Educated men, even the men who wantonly waged the First World War, cannot but be appalled by the scenes in question. They say "this is horror and disgust," which is what the women and the pacifists also say. "For now at last we are looking at the same picture; we are seing with you the same dead bodies, the same ruined houses" (14). It is not that the case has been closed (this is only at the beginning of a long polemic), but that in photographs which play off the nervous system rather than the abstract mind (which is quite malleable in education and class structures), Woolf can circumvent the aporia present in the lack of an "absolute view" in the "absolute view" of the body. Her's is a rhetoric of the body, of bodily disgust at the effects of war (and patriarchy, etc.). It is from this point, this stasis point in the argument when the pane of glass becomes obvious as both sides begin to see it clearly that the agreement can occur. It is a profound move in her rhetorical strategy which only becomes stronger as she then puts forward photos not of war but of the hierarchies that perpetuate such disasters. The subject is different but the effects are the same.