Image operations

Visual media and political conflict

Jens Eder, Charlotte Klonk

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781526108654
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Still and moving images are crucial factors in contemporary political conflicts. They not only have representational, expressive or illustrative functions, but also augment and create significant events. Beyond altering states of mind, they affect bodies and often life or death is at stake. Various forms of image operations are currently performed in the contexts of war, insurgency and activism. Photographs, videos, interactive simulations and other kinds of images steer drones to their targets, train soldiers, terrorise the public, celebrate protest icons, uncover injustices, or call for help. They are often parts of complex agential networks and move across different media and cultural environments. This book is a pioneering interdisciplinary study of the role and function of images in political life. Balancing theoretical reflections with in-depth case studies, it brings together renowned scholars and activists from different fields to offer a multifaceted critical perspective on a crucial aspect of contemporary visual culture.

Part I

Using images: metaphors, processes, affects

Images of the world, images of conflict 1

Ben O’Loughlin¹

In the short story ‘The Fearful Sphere of Pascal’, Borges wrote, ‘It may be that universal history is the history of a few metaphors’ (Borges 2007, 189). The history of world politics certainly seems marked by a few recurring concepts and metaphors: the universal and the particular, the inside and the outside, the balance of power and the ideal of symmetry and actuality of chaos. If these metaphors are the basis for how we understand world politics today, then they also shape how we remember past events in world politics and anticipate its future. Does international relations become the repetition of a few types of events? Not quite; it becomes a series of events understood through the same metaphors, thereby reaffirming the notion such events are normal, in turn naturalising those kinds of event and contributing to their repetition.

The few metaphors discussed here are international relations as a family and international relations as made up of bodies in movement. Humanity or nation-states understood through kinship – the ‘Family of Man’ (Lakoff and Turner 1999, 317) – comprise a community of members which new states and peoples are born into and supported while others are rejected, ignored or punished. In modernity, the body became most prominently assumed to be the sovereign nation-state. I ask how those metaphors function and in what way these lead to violence. Certainly, kinship assumes an in- and out-group and the body in movement assumes action. But these metaphors do not float freely and dictate behaviour autonomously of their mediation. While commonsense metaphorical understandings of international relations become manifest in events and their visual representation, perhaps the creation of new visualities could generate new metaphors and alternate ways of thinking and doing international relations.

Does the changing mediation of these metaphors affect their function and whether they lead to violence? A changing media ecology offers new structures and logics of world making. News organisations’ claims to cover ‘the world’ make that world through repetitious representations that form audiences’ imaginations of geography, history and humanity (Gürsel, this volume). The digital archive means that news organisations, cultural institutions and even individuals must organise data and expression through the grid or the vortex (Mitchell, this volume); tensions between database and narrative and between mass- and self-communication could lead to new ways of expressing old metaphors of kinship and body, or create conditions for conceptual novelty and invention. In Gürsel’s terms (Gürsel, this volume), do these changing medial ‘infrastructures of worldmaking’ offer opportunities to move to an alternative few metaphors?

Conceptual metaphors involve communication in which one conceptual domain is expressed and understood in terms of another (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Lakoff and Turner 1999). International relations is often taken to operate like a family; the movement of an actor is understood as like that of a body moving through space. These metaphors are meaningful because they are embodied: we know from an early age how it feels to move from point A to point B or to feel welcomed or be estranged from a parent figure or a group. To express one thing in terms of those processes thus evokes universal meaning; the sense and structural logics that stem from these metaphors is not purely linguistic (see Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999; Steen 2011; Gavins 2014).

Critiques of media coverage of war or conflict as biased, militaristic and so on make little headway because they fail to address the conditions of political sensemaking that make those perspectives seem normal to so many people. Through the axes of the political and the medial, this chapter examines a few metaphors to address those processes through which the intelligibility of international relations is formed. The first half of this chapter introduces those metaphors, while the second addresses the media representations and regimes that visualise those metaphors and asks whether the medial can feed back and shape political thought.

Take, for example, the sovereign body floating in a sea of anarchy. For successive thinkers the state or sovereign is understood as a body in ungoverned space, managing its relations with other bodies. Thucydides wrote, ‘among neighbours antagonism is ever a condition of independence’ (quoted in Lijphart 1974, 44). In Leviathan, Hobbes wrote: ‘in all times, Kings, and Persons of Soveraigne authority, because of their Independency, are in continuail jealousies, and in the state and posture of Gladiators … which is a posture of War’ (Hobbes 1973, 65). The endurance of this metaphor is suggested by Alexander Hamilton (1788, quoted in Rossiter 1961, 54): ‘To look for a continuation of harmony between a number of independent, unconnected sovereignties … would be to disregard the uniform course of human events.’ That idea of sovereignty amid anarchy implies ‘solutions’ that assume interactions of still-discrete bodies: a balance of power that allows for the management of sovereigns amid anarchy that stops any sovereign body pushing all the others around, or a security community that perpetuates peace by collectively punishing transgressors.

We find, then, different variations on a ‘common image of the world’ (Lijphart 1974, 49) – what in the 1970s Puchala and Fagan (Puchala and Fagan 1974) called the ‘security politics’ image of the world. They found this image accurate in the decades following World War II; international relations was constituted by old, battered states and new states free of former colonial empires. However, by the 1970s outcomes in international relations were understood to be generated by various types of actor, integrating in novel ways on multiple issues, not just security. Attention since on ‘human security’ instead of just national security, and to various risks, uncertainties and connectivities, points to the possibility of finding a new world image. However, no metaphor intuitively has cognitive or embodied resonance like sovereign bodies moving in space. A network metaphor is not felt, embodied, in the same way – or not as yet.

Across eras, these concepts have shaped the image of world politics held by leaders, citizens and scholars. International relations is obsessed with images of the world – the image of the Westphalian system, the image of the Cold War, the difficulty of finding an image of a world post-sovereignty. In his 1918 Fourteen Points speech, Woodrow Wilson set out a vision of US aims in World War I of creating a postwar world by translating the principles of liberal idealism into actual institutions. In 1945, after the US, China, Russia and the UK met at Dumbarton Oaks just outside Washington, DC to plan the United Nations, the US realist scholar Hans Morgenthau wrote:

[In 1918] we witness the heroic and futile attempt to transform the political scene according to the postulates of liberal rationality. At the end of the journey, we are in the presence of a less heroic and, we are afraid, no less futile attempt to model the political reality in the image of Machiavelli’s thought. (Morgenthau 1945, 145)

For Morgenthau, Machiavelli was a utopian thinker because he sought to unify Italy. By applying Machiavelli’s image, the leaders of 1945 were trying to unify the world by creating the UN. The point is that this is how many scholars and practitioners of international relations conceptualise the relation between theory and practice: it is possible to make the world in accordance with an image, an image derived from a theory, a theory that rests on a conceptual metaphor. Given that metaphors underpinning international relations barely changed between Thucydides and World War II, the history of IR can be seen as the realisation of a few key images.

This chapter begins with that slip, the slip made when people talk about an ‘image of international politics’; they mean a mental construct, not a visual image. For example, John Ikenberry (2011) argues that we see change today. The Westphalian system upon which the liberal order is built is crumbling. The 1648 Treaty of Westphalia marked an agreement in principle that the sovereignty of nation-states prohibits interference in each other’s affairs. Today, the international community has a duty to intervene in sovereign states to protect human rights (R2P or Right to Protect). There are global uncertainties and non-state threats, while a systemic financial crisis emanates from the ‘lead’ state, the US (Ikenberry 2011, 286). Ikenberry argues we need a new image of international relations since the Westphalian system no longer reflects how sovereignty and authority operate. However, Ikenberry never reflects on how such images function or the relationship between mental images (which may be intersubjectively held) and visual images of those mental images. Visual images may reinforce mental images, but could also challenge them. In which case, we must ask how. Do new visual, mediated images come about through routine or exceptional moments of media usage?

This matters because if the contention is true that the practice of international relations is the enactment and realisation of a few images, then strategic actors will try to shape which images are in play and how these images are realised. This idea is not new. Nietzsche wrote, ‘Truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation and decoration’ (Nietzsche 1989, 250). Selection as well as intensification, translation and decoration must all involve some degree of reflexivity by actors, since choice of language in politics is never purely habit. Nevertheless, the question emerges of why there is so limited a choice. We might ask, do we control our memory of international politics or does our memory – manifest as a few images – control us? If metaphors or images trap actors, how can we escape these traps? For if the causes of violence can be attributed to understandings of politics that become entrenched, if actors’ perceptions of events run down tramlines with little possibility of deviation, then it becomes difficult to move on from grievances and conflict and build political relations differently.

Let me be clear: we are not concerned with how actors think international relations should work and the agreements they reach to put that into practice. We are concerned with how actors understand international relations at all. Many scholars have already identified a certain continuity in the underpinning myths, symbols and metaphors of international relations. I will focus on two metaphors: international relations as family – the kinship metaphor – and international relations as involving bodies in movement – latterly the sovereign state. The explanations of international events offered by international relations theories like realism and liberalism only operate in terms of second-order processes. There are first-order, underlying causes – deeper understandings, I argue – a few core metaphors that form the image of world politics.

Diplomacy: kinship and religion

Iver Neumann (Neumann 2011) traces the history of the myths and metaphors underpinning diplomacy. He argues that contemporary diplomacy is based on religion and kinship. Since Augustine, the idea circulated that the world is made up of cities united in God, and that cities must be united in peace and justice. Diplomacy signifies human weakness: it is needed when people have strayed from God. Envoys between city-states and eventually between states became necessary. They were not to be harmed because they are the means to peace, for all God’s children to be one. Christian states tried to extend this principle of reciprocity and non-harm to Ottoman and Chinese leaders, with varying results, but by modernity these practices were widespread (Neumann 2011). The family in these more secular times was the international community.

Ian Clark’s (Clark 2005) history of international society documents how different concepts of kinship have allowed states to demarcate ‘rightful’ members of that community. In the sixteenth century that society was characterised as universal, both because all God’s children belonged and because of the idea that all humans were capable of rationality. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries membership was restricted to certain states because of their conduct and their level of ‘civilisation’, with barbarians excluded. Membership expanded in the mid-twentieth century with the birth of postcolonial states and the principle of self-determination. Clark speculates that membership of international society may be contracting in the twenty-first century because it is conditional again – conditional on granting and realising certain levels of human rights.

Membership of the international family becomes manifest visually and verbally. In recent Iran–US relations, for example, Iran’s President Ahmadinejad began to communicate directly to US President Bush. Ahmadinejad sent a letter in 2006 writing as if they were brothers, both men of God trying to uphold moral communities or nations-as-families. Ahmadinejad admonished Bush personall...