Beyond the Spectacle of Terrorism

Global Uncertainty and the Challenge of the New Media

Henry A. Giroux

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781594512391
• eBook ISBN: 9781317263128
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Henry Giroux's essay awakens us to the ways new media proliferate and circulate images and ideas of terror that order our lives, pervert our pedagogy, delimit our democracy. Recommended reading for anyone who wants to comprehend our times, our politics, our possibilities. --David Theo Goldberg, University of California, Irvine Henry Giroux is one of the sharpest cultural critics today. His new book is an important intervention on media and spectacles. It shows us the depth of the dark side, only to conclude that the same media may be deployed in recovery against the social fragmentation caused by fear and consumerism, which is essential to bringing the country back to the path of decency and justice. --Arif Dirlik, University of Oregon Prominent social critic Henry Giroux explores how new forms of media are challenging the very nature of politics in his most poignant and striking book to date. The emergence of the spectacle of terror as a new form of politics raises important questions about how fear and anxiety can be marketed, how terrorism can be used to recruit people in support of authoritarian causes, and how the spectacle of terrorism works in an age of injustices, deep insecurities, disembodied social relations, fragmented communities, and a growing militarization of everyday life. At the same time, the new media such as the Internet, digital camcorders, and cell phones can be used to energize sites of resistance, provide alternative public spheres, pluralize political struggles, and expand rather than close down democratic relations. Giroux considers what conditions and changes are necessary to reinvigorate democracy in light of these new challenges. Radical Imagination Series

Rethinking the Politics of the Spectacle in the Society of the Image

The whole situation changes as soon as all available modern means [of war] are allied to the highly symbolic weapon of their own death. It multiplies the destructive potential ad infinitum. This multiplication of factors (which to us seem irreconcilable) gives the terrorists such superiority. The zero death strategy of a “clean” technological war misses the point of this transfiguration of “real” power by symbolic power.

—Jean Baudrillard¹

The war on terror is a war of images, the firepower of the world’s television cameras striking an asymmetric balance against the weapons of mass destruction in the Pentagon’s arsenal of fear.

—Lewis H. Lapham²

It is impossible to comprehend the political nature of the existing age without recognizing the centrality of the new visual media.³ No longer peripheral to public life, these new media—camcorders, cellular camera-phones, satellite television, digital recorders, the Internet—have enacted a structural transformation of everyday life by fusing sophisticated electronic technologies with a ubiquitous screen culture while simultaneously changing the cultural production and consumption of information and images.⁴ Enabling modes of spectatorship that cannot be collapsed into a monolithic mass, they deploy unheard-of powers in the shaping of time, space, knowledge, values, identities, and social relations. Not only have these new mass and image-based media, with their new digital and electronic technologies, revolutionized the relationship between the specificity of an event and its public display by making events accessible to a global audience; they have also ushered in a new regime of the spectacle in which screen culture and visual politics create spectacular events just as much as they record them.⁵ Given that screen culture now dominates much of everyday life in the developed countries, the “audio-visual mode has become our primary way of coming in contact with the world and at the same time being detached (safe) from it.”⁶

In this age of screen culture, audio-visual representations have transformed not only the landscape of production and reception but the very nature of politics itself, particularly the relationships among nationalism, spectacular violence, and new global politics. The new media often combine notions of violence and vulnerability, fear, and uncertainty, with modern communication technologies that are changing the character and function of representations, the way everyday life is experienced, and even the conditions of politics itself. As the relationship between violence and politics is blurred in an era of permanent war, the significance as well as impact of its effects on both a small and large scale are increasingly defined and mediated through the various regimes of representation (defining good and evil, civilization and barbarism, etc.) and fields of vision deployed by the new media.

As the link between the media and power becomes more integrated, the visual theater of terrorism mimics in aesthetic terms the politics of the “official” war on terrorism. Just as the necessity of fighting terror has become the central rationale for war used by the Bush administration and other governments, a visual culture of shock and awe has emerged, made ubiquitous by the Internet and 24–hour cable news shows devoted to representations of the horrific violence associated with terrorism, ranging from aestheticized images of nighttime bombing raids on Iraqi cities to the countervailing imagery of grotesque killings of hostages by Iraqi fundamentalists. The visual theater of terrorism aestheticizes politics as it celebrates a narrow and dogmatic sacralization of politics as war.⁷ Raw violence becomes stylized as it is integrated into audio-visual spectacles that shock and massage the mind and emotions with images, meanings, and sounds that heighten an aesthetic of fear and offer the redemptive promise of a world without enemies or infidels. Defined no longer simply as a weapon of war, lawlessness, or a crime against humanity, violence in the “war on terror” has been merged into a media and religious spectacle, signifying a disturbing transformation of contemporary politics.

Echoing the discourse of the “official” war on terrorism, the violence of extremist groups as well as state-sanctioned and corporate violence are understood almost exclusively within the discourse of moral absolutes pitting good against evil. Whether it is President George W. Bush’s claim that “You are either with us or against us”⁸ or Osama bin Laden’s injunction that “You are either a believer or an infidel,”⁹ these repressive binary logics represent a public pedagogy forged in what I call the spectacle of terrorism, which devalues democratic, reasoned debate in favor of feeding an apocalyptic desire for destruction and death. As both an act of cultural production and a consuming practice, the spectacle of terrorism foregrounds a disturbing transformation in the meaning of a politics whose legitimating power is increasingly defined less through the promotion of affordable pleasures associated with consumer culture than through a steady regimen and theatricality of power that endlessly display representations of fear, violence, and vengeance. Fantasy, force, melodrama, and performance now combine to manufacture a notion of politics evoked through displays of violence and threats of terrorism offered up daily by the electronic and print media. If the media are to be believed, every aspect of life, as Brian Massumi has argued, increasingly appears as “a workstation in the mass production line of fear.”¹⁰ The loss of privilege, status, and jobs, and the deep-seated sense of uncertainty that shapes neoliberal capitalism are now conjoined and amplified by gathering anxiety, a sense of helplessness, and the dread of random violence. Cities degenerate into besieged fortresses; people of color live with the ongoing fear of incarceration; public schools are transformed into laboratories for police surveillance modeled after prisons; and the general public’s understandable desire for security, fanned by an endless array of media-induced panics over the phantom threat of terrorism, becomes fodder for reactionary policies and violent acts by both state and nonstate terrorists alike, all aimed at drawing limits on or rolling back hard-won democratic freedoms. Violence as theater emerges as part of a regime of representation used by the state in order to legitimize its increasingly bold display of force and the militarization of everyday life as its primary function. At the same time, crime and terror merge as violence becomes the only viable mediator of politics, the only form of agency available in a global world where the spaces of lawlessness grow exponentially.¹¹ The demon of economic uncertainty now combines with the demon of spectacularized violence to make generalized fear a paralyzing condition, rather than an aberration, of everyday life. Located within a “ghost sociability” of the West in which most people do not have to leave home in order to participate in society’s rituals and civic culture, the spectacle of terrorism and its hyper-accelerated media technologies now connect people to global society while reinforcing the empty space at the heart of the neoliberal social order.¹² The emergence of the spectacle of terrorism is all the more significant since, as novelist and cultural critic Marina Warner puts it, “in the realm of culture, the character of our representations matter most urgently.… The images we circulate have the power to lead events, not only [to] report them, [and] the new technical media have altered experience and become interwoven with consciousness itself.”¹³

Neither the concept of the spectacle nor the practice of terrorism itself is new, each offering a distinct and complex genealogy that has been engaged by a number of contemporary theorists. But the merging of the spectacle, terrorism, war, and politics beginning with the September 11th terrorists attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City suggests something unique about the deadly power and battle of images in contemporary global culture. A cinematic politics of the visceral has replaced a more measured and thoughtful commentary on human suffering and alienation, the bequeath of a stunned and stunted postwar generation of intellectuals, artists, and others working in the public interest. Representations of fear, panic, vulnerability, and pain increasingly override narratives of social justice; pure entertainment, as a return to the hyper-real, enshrines audio-visual representations of the gruesome, opening up a new and “important chapter … in the contemporary war of images.”¹⁴ Death and suffering are now inscribed in the order of politics and the power of the image such that the alliance between terror and security in the contemporary era cannot be understood outside of how the spectacle shapes and legitimates social relations. This new chapter in the politics of media no longer simply turns individuals into shoppers or reproduces the logic of commodification; on the contrary, the ingestion of market-driven fantasies has given way to a consumption of fear, dread, and degradation. Powerful images now register a kind of premodern violence as part of a broader strategy of shock that is meant to either paralyze people with fear or justify their indulgence in grotesque fantasies, allegedly sanctioned by the divine, which allow them to watch the ritualistic degradation of other human beings. Or, when the spectacle of terrorism is used by governments, as in President George W. Bush’s celebration of “shock and awe” as a form of spectacularized violence, it becomes the primary pedagogical tool to incorporate the populace into the racial fantasies of empire and the illusion of national triumphalism packaged as a victory of civilization over barbarism. As acts of terrorism and the modalities of the spectacle converge, a new species of technological magic is produced in which shock becomes the structuring principle in creating certain conditions of reception for the images and discourses of terrorism and fear. Fear, as both an experience and a practice, has become the first principle in the spectacle of terrorism (though hardly its only principle); consequently, fear is now being used as a powerful force that flaunts an indifference to social justice while simultaneously working to distance audiences from any sense of critical engagement.

Violence, with its ever-present economy of organized fear, is no longer viewed or experienced merely as a side effect of war, greed, exclusion, and criminal behavior; it has become fundamental to a deliberate strategy of representation, marked by an excess of hyper-real visual displays of violence, in which the spectacle is central to a species of political rebirth that puts life back into a social order where only a vague and celluloid memory of consumption exists. Spectacular images of the “shock and awe” bombing of Baghdad by U.S. forces under President George W. Bush; the beheadings of hostages such as Nicholas Berg, Paul Johnson Jr., and Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl; the destruction of sixteenth-century mosques (as in Banja Luka, Bosnia) or of Buddhist statues (as in Bamiyan, Afghanistan)—all are intended to highlight and give legitimation to a reading of politics and agency in which more tactile categories such as fear, death, survival, life, and security replace the more abstract and modernist principles of truth, reason, and justice.¹⁵ This is a politics in which violence becomes central to a war of images, and the spectacle becomes central to legitimating social relations in which the political and pedagogical are redefined in ways that undercut democratic freedom and practices. Mass and image-based media have become a new and powerful pedagogical force, reconfiguring the very nature of politics, cultural production, engagement, and resistance. Under such circumstances, it becomes all the more urgent for educators, artists, and citizens to develop a new set of theoretical tools to comprehend how visual representations of shockingly horrific violence are shaping the very nature of politics at a time when global media are conscripted into the worldwide war on terror. What might it mean to understand, engage, and transform the spectacle of terrorism as part of a broader struggle over the culture of politics, new media technologies, and democracy itself?

In what follows, I want to argue that while the merging of terror, violence, and screen culture has a long history, a new type of spectacle—the spectacle of terrorism—has emerged in the post-9/11 world, inaugurated by the video images of the hijacked planes crashing into the World Trade Center. This event, I suggest, not only signals a structural transformation in the pedagogical power of the image but also constitutes a space for a new kind of cultural politics. I begin this discussion by examining the changing nature of the spectacle in contemporary society, analyzing the spectacle of fascism and the spectacle of consumerism as two different expressions of what I call the terror of the spectacle. I then attempt to address the emergence of the spectacle of terrorism by focusing primarily on the emergence and popularity of one graphic instance of the spectacle of terrorism: the beheading videos that have been used by Iraqi insurgents in their attempts to resist Western occupation. I then argue that earlier discourses of the spectacle, from Guy Debord’s classic definition to the recent work of Douglas Kellner,¹⁶ while performing an important theoretical service in engaging the spectacle as a central aspect of cultural politics in the contemporary era, need to be revised so as to provide the theoretical tools required to fully understand how the spectacle has changed as a pedagogi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Acts of Translation: The Crisis of Democracy in the Age of Fear — An Introduction
• Rethinking the Politics of the Spectacle in the Society of the Image
• Index
• About the Author