Media, War and Postmodernity

Philip Hammond

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415374934
• eBook ISBN: 9781134188338
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Media, War and Postmodernity

investigates how conflict and international intervention have changed since the end of the Cold War, asking why Western military operations are now conducted as high-tech media spectacles, apparently more important for their propaganda value than for any strategic aims.

Discussing the humanitarian interventions of the 1990s and the War on Terror, the book analyzes the rise of a postmodern sensibility in domestic and international politics, and explores how the projection of power abroad is undermined by a lack of cohesion and purpose at home. Drawing together debates from a variety of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, Philip Hammond argues that contemporary warfare may be understood as 'postmodern' in that it is driven by the collapse of grand narratives in Western societies and constitutes an attempt to recapture a sense of purpose and meaning.

Chapter 1
Postmodern war in a world without meaning

What is ‘postmodern war’? As Steven Best and Douglas Kellner observe, although the term is very common today, it is often used loosely, sometimes as little more than a fashionable buzzword (Best and Kellner 2001:63, 85). Even in the academic literature there is scant agreement about what is distinctive, and what is distinctly ‘postmodern’, about contemporary war. Writing on the topic is diverse in terms of the disciplinary background of different authors (from Media and Cultural Studies to International Relations), the perspectives adopted (some taking a broadly postmodernist perspective, others rejecting it), and the issues which are emphasised. The critics who have addressed the question of postmodern war most directly have tended to focus on technological change. Writers such as Chris Hables Gray and James Der Derian have investigated the new technologies of the digital battlefield, and the new military doctrines and media strategies which have accompanied their development. Yet while these authors offer some important insights into the nature of contemporary warfare, it is partly the emphasis on these essentially technical issues that has sometimes led to a lack of clarity about war’s relationship to postmodernity. There is a tendency toward technological-determinism in this discussion, as when Der Derian argues that ‘a revolution in networked forms of digital media has transformed the way advanced societies conduct war and make peace’. For Der Derian, information technology is not ‘a neutral tool of human agency’; rather, ‘it determines our way of being’ (Der Derian 2003:447, 449). Though it is undoubtedly the case that warfare as waged by the Western military is more high-tech than ever before, this in itself provides no grounds for claiming that it has become ‘postmodern’. It would be just as logical to understand the role of technology in terms of modernity, as Kevin Robins and Frank Webster (1999:161) implicitly do in describing military ‘technophilia’ as expressing ‘an entirely rationalistic and technocratic attitude towards the world’.

There is, however, a second, very different and apparently unrelated discussion of postmodernity, which has little to say about technology, and which has instead focused on shifts in politics and international relations. Here, writers such as Zaki Laïdi and Christopher Coker have argued that, for better or worse, the system of sovereign nation-states which arose in the modern era has undergone some fundamental changes since the end of the Cold War. Conflict and international politics are ‘postmodern’ in that the era of the modern nation-state has passed. Works by the one set of writers almost never acknowledge the existence of the other discussion, but this chapter contends that these two camps are not as unconnected as they may appear. It is just that those authors who concentrate on developments in military technology or the production of media spectacles tend to confuse cause and effect. The focus on these relatively superficial factors leads to a correspondingly weak sense of the underlying roots of the changes they identify. Instead, this chapter argues, the most important shifts to consider in seeking to understand postmodern war are political. Within each discussion, there are varying assessments of whether the new forms of postmodern war are positive or negative for Western societies and for their governing elites. It is argued here that they are negative: contemporary warfare is ‘postmodern’ in so far as it is driven by a collapse of ‘grand narratives’ in Western societies.

The end of the Cold War

In a brilliant analysis, Zaki Laïdi argues that the end of Cold War has left us in ‘a world without meaning’. His key insight is that the end of the Cold War ‘buried two centuries of Enlightenment’ (1998:1). That is to say, the fall of the Berlin Wall signalled the end, not only of communism, but of all forward-looking collective projects for the foreseeable future. In postmodernist terms, one might say that the end of the Cold War represented a collapse of grand narratives (1998:8). This has most obviously had a debilitating effect on the Left and on national liberation movements in the Third World, for whom the ideas through which they had staked a claim on the future now stand discredited. Less obviously, but just as importantly, what Laïdi calls the ‘crisis of meaning’ has fundamentally affected Western societies and their governing elites. Put at its simplest, the West has lost its cohesion because it has lost its enemy. The ideological cement which anti-communism provided as a negative justification of Western capitalism has crumbled away, and the system of institutions through which international relations were organised throughout most of the post-Second World War era has lost its justification. These are significant problems, but the crisis of meaning entails yet more than that. Western elites have lost the political wherewithal to cohere their own societies around a meaningful project and to give them a sense of a future goal.

In the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, assessments of the future were highly positive. Scenes of jubilant East Berliners marching toward political freedom and capitalist prosperity, soon replicated in other East European countries, provided a powerful vindication of Western societies. Indeed, Laïdi argues that the ending of the Cold War was itself initially understood by reference to familiar Enlightenment themes: the apparent validation of the market and of liberal democracy seemed to affirm the notion that history had been following a teleology of freedom and liberation. The moment of triumph, however, was also a moment of terminus: the project was at an end. Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ thesis captures this double-edged character of the end of the Cold War: his argument is at once triumphalist and an acknowledgement that there is no longer any vision of the future:

The end of history will be a very sad time … the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.

(Fukuyama 1989)

Fukuyama admitted feeling ‘ambivalent’ about the West’s triumph, anticipating the ‘prospect of centuries of boredom’. The end of history did not represent a transcendence of the previous state of affairs, but offered only the prospect of its gradual generalisation. Market democracy, Laïdi (1998:35) remarks, ‘aspires neither to reach a new objective nor to construct a new horizon of meaning. It seeks simply to confirm the viability of the existing reality’. Fukuyama’s diagnosis was that other ideologies, notably Islam, did not pose the same kind of challenge as communism had in the past. In place of the clash of world systems of the Cold War, there was henceforth only the prospect of ad hoc responses to relatively minor, local threats. Leaving aside, for the time being, the question of whether this assessment has to be revised in light of the War on Terror, it should be noted that, in terms of conflict too, the moment of victory also implied purposelessness. In the post-Cold War era: ‘Political actions no longer find their legitimacy in a vision of the future, but have been reduced to managing the ordinary present’ (Laïdi 1998:7).

This is not to say that there have been no attempts to recover a sense of purpose and meaning. On the contrary, Western intervention in the international arena has been driven by a desire to do just that. Furthermore, the end of the Cold War offered new opportunities for foreign intervention: there was no longer any ideological alternative to Western capitalism, and no Soviet deterrent to the exercise of US military power. Initial assessments of these new realities were upbeat. Indeed, in retrospect, they appear wildly optimistic – a revivified United Nations (UN) would henceforth be able to act on moral principles and not be hampered by the Soviet veto; there would be a ‘peace dividend’ as money formerly spent on the arms race was put to better use; there would, in President George H. W. Bush’s phrase, be a ‘New World Order’. Yet although there were fewer restraints than ever on the use of military force and the open pursuit of US interests and influence around the globe, the overarching rationale for action had also collapsed. In Laïdi’s terms there is a dislocation between power and meaning (1998:8). If international intervention since the end of the Cold War has been driven by a search for a new sense of purpose, it has also been undermined by the crisis of meaning. As Laïdi (1998:11) comments:

The end of utopia has brought the sanctification of emergency, elevating it into a central political category. Thus our societies claim that the urgency of problems forbids them from reflecting on a project, while in fact it is their total absence of perspective that makes them slaves of emergencies. Emergency does not constitute the first stage of a project of meaning: it represents its active negation.

From the 1991 Gulf War to the War on Terror, launched a decade later, intervention has been opportunistic and reactive, responding to perceived threats and crises rather than acting in accordance with some strategic project.

If the Gulf War provided a focus for the initial optimism about the end of the Cold War, it soon became apparent that future conflicts were unlikely to follow the same pattern. No sooner had Bush Snr. proclaimed a New World Order than critics were pointing to the actual disorder which seemed to reign. The break-up of Yugoslavia and the USSR, from 1991, suggested to many commentators that a resurgence of ethnicity and nationalism was fuelling conflict. Analysts such as Samuel Huntington (1993) and Robert Kaplan (1994) argued that there were new sorts of divisions and threats emerging. For Huntington, the political Cold War divide had given way to more deep-seated cultural antagonisms, particularly between Western Christendom and Islam; while Kaplan contended that the security of the West was menaced by the existence of failed states and zones of ‘anarchy’. In either analysis, there was little that could be done. The deep-rooted cultural divisions which Huntington claimed to have identified did not seem susceptible to change, and Kaplan said that the West was ‘not in control’ of the anarchic world he described (quoted in Kaldor 1999:147). As Laïdi notes, the new importance of identity stemmed from an ‘exhaustion of universalism’. Post-Cold War ‘ethnic’ conflicts could also be seen as ‘the expression of a harshly felt loss of meaning’ (1998:53, 54). Rather than representing a revival of the national idea, conflict was driven by the collapse of existing nation-states: it arose less from a resurgence of formerly suppressed ethnic identities, than from the crisis of state legitimacy precipitated by the end of the Cold War. The rise of Croatian nationalism, for example, was a far from spontaneous process: linguistic and cultural differences had to be exaggerated or even invented in order to give the break-up of the federal Yugoslav state the appearance of a more positive demand for recognition. What appeared as new claims for sovereign autonomy were only ‘a “moment” in the process of decomposition and disintegration’ (Laïdi 1998:61).

Furthermore, as Laïdi’s analysis also makes clear, this process of disintegration was not confined to former Eastern bloc or Third World states. The same dynamic could be seen in demands for regional autonomy in Western countries such as Italy, Belgium or Canada (1998:41–2). These demands may not have resulted in war, as they did elsewhere, but the crisis of legitimacy which gave rise to them was real enough. Just as the end of the Cold War threw the international order into question, it also undermined the established framework of Left and Right in domestic politics. The end of grand narratives robbed the political process of meaning: in place of competing visions of the good society, politics was reduced to a technical managerialism. If international intervention appeared to offer a way to offset this crisis of meaning, it was also undermined by it. It was, says Laïdi (1998:37):

as if the West were giving the impression of wanting to spread its values without knowing in what name it was acting … wanting to advocate a sort of abstract, almost dogmatic universalism in a foreign territory at the same time as a destructive relativism [had] set up on its home ground.

Without a coherent and confident vision of the future of their own societies, Western elites have found the projection of power abroad to be uncertain and dangerous. While one might have expected the end of the Cold War to bring greater security, removing the threat of nuclear confrontation between the superpowers, it has instead brought a heightened sense of vulnerability and risk. With no ‘horizon of meaning’, it becomes difficult to make sense of the present and the future is regarded with fear. As Laïdi (1998:13–14) puts it: ‘Western societies … feed on the theme of the unknown, because there really is a drying-up of references that could be the basis for constructing a new social or global order’.

Postmodern wars

Two very different types of conflict have been seen as exemplifying postmodern war. For many commentators, taking their cue from Jean Baudrillard, the Persian Gulf War is the main reference point (Baudrillard 1995; Best and Kellner 2001; Der Derian 2001; Gray 1997). In this perspective, it is the advanced Western countries, particularly the US, which wage ‘postmodern war’, using high-tech ‘smart’ weaponry. Others, however, take the term to be more or less synonymous with the intrastate conflicts, such as those in the former Yugoslavia, which emerged after 1991 (Duffield 1998; Kaldor 1999; Møller 1996). For these writers, it is relatively low-tech wars in Eastern Europe or the Third World which are key.

Both views are considered below in light of Laïdi’s analysis. First, in relation to Baudrillard’s essays about the Gulf War, it is argued that the conflict can indeed be understood as an instance of ‘postmodern war’, not so much because of the way it was fought as a high-tech media spectacle, but rather because it was a response to the Western elite’s post-Cold War crisis of meaning. With regard to the second type of war, characterised by the disintegration of weaker states, Mary Kaldor’s (1999) ‘new wars’ thesis is perhaps the most influential analysis. These ‘new wars’, and the West’s response to them, are considered at greater length in the next chapter, but Kaldor’s argument is briefly discussed here in order to outline the relationship between these two conceptions of postmodern war.

The 1991 Gulf War

Baudrillard is usually interpreted as making two main observations about the 1991 Gulf War (see, for example, Hassan 2004:70–3; Hegarty 2004:98–9; Robins and Webster 1999:155–6). Firstly, that the conduct of the war was new, using ‘smart’ computer-guided weapons to kill from a distance: America’s technological superiority and use of overwhelming force made the conflict so one-sided that it could not properly be understood as war in the traditional sense. Secondly, that the deluge of information and images produced, not a representation of the reality of war, but a sanitised media spectacle in which it was impossible to distinguish the virtual from the actual. Baudrillard does make these points, and yet, as his English translator points out, similar arguments were also made by critics hostile to postmodernism (Patton 1995:18). Noam Chomsky, for exa...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Postmodern war in a world without meaning
• Chapter 2 The humanitarian spectacle
• Chapter 3 The media war on terrorism
• Chapter 4 Culture wars and the post-Vietnam condition
• Chapter 5 Security and vulnerability in the ‘risk society’
• Chapter 6 Postmodern empire and the ‘death of the subject’
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index