Global Media Apocalypse

Pleasure, Violence and the Cultural Imaginings of Doom

Jeff Lewis

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781137005441
• eBook ISBN: 9781137005458
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The modern world seems trapped between fantasies of infinite pleasure and the prospects of total global catastrophe. Global Media Apocalypse explores these contrary imaginings through an evolving cultural ecology of violence. Articulated through the global media, these apocalyptic fantasies express a profoundly human condition of crisis.

1

New Media – Old Empires: Celebrity, Sex and Revolutions of Knowing

All desires that do not lead to pain when they remain unsatisfied are unnecessary, but the desire is easily got rid of, when the thing desired is difficult to obtain or the desires seem likely to produce harm.

Epicurus, Principal Doctrines

Sex and the (global) city

The wedding of Prince William to Kate Middleton was the most mediated and viewed event in human history. Eclipsing the marriage of William’s own parents in 1981, the 2011 British royal wedding was telecast, podcast, tweeted, reported and skype-cast to an estimated 2 billion people across the planet (BBC, 2011a). While other great global spectacles have attracted enormous viewing audiences, the royal wedding appears to have elicited a universal romantic and nuptial imagining. Diverse viewing communities across the world were, presumably, entranced by the grandeur and glamour of the event, and a sense of shared ritual that sanctified desire, fecundity and the promise of new life and new hope.

In this context, the splendour, pageant and nuptial symbology of the wedding subsumed many alternative readings, including the horrors that attach to British sovereign and imperial history. Australian Aboriginal activist and academic Marcia Langton, for example, explains her own and her community’s support for the wedding in terms of a parallel devotion to ritual and deep tradition (Langton, 2011). Similarly, Balinese scholar I Nyoman Darma Putra parenthesized the cultural politics of caste, class and European colonialism in his appreciation of the event. For Darma Putra the royal wedding conjured much of the splendour of his own cultural traditions, particularly through regency and pageant: ‘The people, who can never afford such opulence, are invited into the lives and magnificent spectacle of the royal family’ (Putra, 2011).

While much of the media commentary invoked the ‘fairy-tale princess’ mythology that is frequently deployed for such occasions (Phillips, 1999; Berkowitz, 2000), the regal marriage also represented a particular permutation of celebrity culture within the more generalized global economy of pleasure (Lewis, 2008; Sternheimer, 2011; Stanyer, 2012). At one level, the royal wedding might be seen as a (quasi-) religious congregation, a celebrity re-rendering of community worship and libation (Frow, 1998; Rojek, 2001, 2009; Turner, 2004). Karen Sternheimer (2011) has taken up this idea, arguing that celebrity takes a secular experience, such as media entertainment, and enhances it through various forms of fantasy and the intensification of individuals and their performances. John Frow (1998) has argued that celebrity enshrines individuals with a sense of transcendence that creates ‘aura’.

In this vein, The Washington Post (2011) hosted a forum on the apparent disjunction between the religious and ritual experience of the royal wedding and its context within secularist societies like the United Kingdom. The discussion highlighted this apparent paradox, suggesting that the wedding appealed to global audiences because of an immanent and natural human disposition for worship, spirituality and ritual. The majority of posts to the discussion board claimed that sacred rituals and sites are ‘universal’, reaching to all people in all cultures and circumstances (Washington Post, 2011).

Celebrity in this sense represents a meticulously woven conflux of secular erotica and spiritual symbology. Indeed, while some may consider the royals another example of people who are ‘famous for being famous’ (Boorstin, 1961), or at least famous for being born into fame, the symbolism of regency has its own particular claims on the popular imaginary. The cultural status of royalty is shaped around invocations of the deep traditions of sovereignty and statehood, as well as claims to a divine and genetically superior familial lineage. This cast of superiority is inscribed in the discourse of social order, status and stability; it is precisely this lineage and sense of stability which feeds a government’s right to govern – its privilege and power. As we noted in the previous chapter, this social ordering is not simply an exercise of distant management, but is infused through the discourses, knowledge systems and relational networks that sustain a given social formation.

The aura that is implicated in celebrity religiosity thus becomes more explicit in a regal lineage that continually reminds media audiences of its unique social relevance and presence within the diffuse channels of governmentality and the social imaginary. While movie stars, popular musicians and sports people may perform a social role outside their given zone of stardom, the royals are bound by history and duty to a form of omnipresence that exceeds the limits of their own corporeality or mortality. The royals, that is, are immortalized in the symbology of the state and governmentality, and their deep social incursions into the ordering and security of everyday social life. Thus, while other stars may fade in and out of fashion, the royals are maintained within the durability of statehood and the meticulous weave that sustains human order and social meaning-making. The royals, in a sense, are always there, because the state is always there (Redmond and Holmes, 2007).

Thus, even while non-royal celebrities may engage in various forms of political expression, and politicians may seek to enhance their public persona as celebrities, the royals are always and inevitably political. The royals’ historical and social primacy is subtly inscribed on the cultural web through the pervasiveness of state symbology, the processes of governmentality, and the social framing of hierarchy and privilege through normative and ineluctable organizational principles.

While we may have Lady Gaga vocalizing the liberation of transgender individuals, Sean Penn opposing American intercessions in the Middle East, or Leonardo DiCaprio proselytizing on behalf of the environment, the royals of themselves represent the durability of the state and the right to govern. This politicism is even more absolute than the articulation of causes or political party positions, as the royals represent the intrinsic and ontological condition of their ‘highness’. The British royal family, in particular, are more acutely political, as they represent the ‘supra-political’, a miraculous condition which is above the antagonistic claims of power-seekers: the royals actually represent ‘power’ per se, as they personify the divinely sanctioned state and its perpetuity as an unassailable and unitary entity.

Celebrity power and the mediasphere

I have argued elsewhere that the media are best understood as a set of interdependent relationships by which audiences, text-producers and texts interact with one another and their cultural context in order to produce meanings (Lewis, 2002, 2005, 2008, 2011). I have also argued that the media draw together the public and private dominions of community life, enabling the interconnection between individuals and various collective–social apparatuses. The notion of a ‘mediasphere’ extends this idea, acknowledging that the public and the private dimensions of a human life can never actually be disaggregated, but are entirely interdependent; the media are the primary means by which this interdependence is fostered and articulated. This mediasphere, therefore, is inevitably ‘political’, as Aristotle would define it, since it enables different discourses and knowledge systems to struggle against one another in pursuit of unity and pre-eminence. This is not the ‘public sphere’ exalted by Jürgen Habermas (1991), but the convergence of rational, sensate and emotional claims of knowing that circulate through a given social formation.

To this end, celebrities, including and especially celebrities like Prince William and Kate Middleton, are principal figures in the cultural politics of the mediasphere. In this context, the polity is comprised of creative and active audiences who engage with their celebrity and narrative dominions through various forms of conjunctive and contending cultural imaginings (Hartley, 1999; Hartley and Green, 2005; McGuigan, 2005; Silverstone, 2007; Lewis, 2008). Celebrity, in this sense, creates a nucleus for the production and social accretion of meaning, allowing individuals to assemble and organize their own conceptions and imaginings of the cultural politics by which they live their lives. Through the proliferation of images, narratives and symbols that are generated through the contemporary mediasphere and global economy of pleasure, that is, audiences create community and identity, even as these imaginings are perpetually challenged by contending knowings and knowledge systems (Lewis, 2002, 2008; Turner, 2004; Rojek, 2009).

The royals generally, and the royal wedding in particular, represent an ideal locus for this cultural congregation and symbolic management. Indeed, the very survival of the royals is contingent upon their own capacity to generate navigational maps of meaning: that is, their capacity to reinscribe themselves and their social value within contemporary cultural and economic conditions. In order to resist cultural and political redundancy, the British royal family, in particular, has had to amplify its role and cultural relevance through the media and the global celebrity industry. The aristocratic ‘distinction’, as Pierre Bourdieu (1984) might call it, has had to be re-cast within an economy of pleasure, justifying and branding itself through narrative imaginings and an aura that is constituted around sexuality, as much as divine privilege.

It was certainly this dramatic narrative that was generated around Princess Diana, her sexuality, charity, betrayal and tragic death. In an ideal tabloid rendering, Diana’s life and death were imagined in terms of an eschatological doom for which the wedding of her first son became the beacon of the royal family’s redemption. In this context, the wedding allowed the global citizenry to re-enliven their fantasies of secular and divine bliss against the tawdry dis-grace of Prince Charles and his mother, the Queen.

Kate and William restored the fantasy of a future that promises abundance and glory, the fantasy enshrined in the British royal–national anthem. To celebrate this glorious Britannia, many global audiences assembled their own private wedding parties with ceremonies and celebrational regalia. Organized often by women, these parties proliferated across the planet, as, indeed, did the sale of royal memorabilia, especially imitation royal wedding rings. The most popular of these royal imitations was based on the actual blue diamond ring which William had inherited from his deceased mother, Diana, and given to his bride. Coming out of a mass production factory in Yiwu in China, the imitation rings had sold over a million units by the time of the wedding (Doran, 2011).

In many respects, therefore, the royal wedding brought together many of the primary components and motifs that drive the modern mediasphere and contemporary global economies. The imitation rings generated out of the rising industrial powerhouse of China represent the acme of the simulacra society, a society that is dominated by imitations and symbology, as Jean Baudrillard (1983, 1984a, 1984b) has described it. The ring, itself a symbol of cyclical fecundity, marshals the power of the global pleasure economy through a spectacle that is loaded with diffuse and contending meanings that attract both semiotic and fiscal value. Indeed, the imitation rings acknowledge this accretion and the desire of ordinary people to empower themselves, their everyday lives and their personal rituals with meaning, purpose and value. Such value may not approximate the vast expense of the royal wedding and regalia like Princess Beatrice’s costume, but it shares in the fecundity and force of the fantasy by which the wedding draws its social and cultural knowing.

To this end, the royal wedding links to the ‘perpetuity rituals’ that proliferate across human Holocene cultures. In a very real sense, these apocalypse nuptials conjoin the ritualized meaning of reproduction and its mobilization in the biopolitics of gender. The royal wedding fortified the imagining of female allure and male potency, particularly a male potency that is valorized through archetypical tropes of masculine danger, militarism and violence. Like many other Holocene nuptial rituals, masculinity and potency are embossed within the cultural fantasy of the warrior – that imagining of maleness that drives social progress, power and family fecundity (Wettlaufer, 2000). Thus, not only is the white maiden’s gown a fantasy of sexual purity and allure, but the red of the Prince’s military jacket represents the blood lineage, sashed by royal blue and divine right to rule; the red also represents the dangers of blood spillage that issue from supreme command. The braids of gold and white are not simply the gilded privilege of the aristocracy, but the seminal line by which the white regalia of the maiden will succumb and be fertilized.

As the watching world celebrated through frivolous or more reverential witness, the regal couple personified the might of church, state and polity – yet all the while maintaining themselves as everyday erotica and the libidinal force of human power and violence. The very fact that so many people from such diverse backgrounds celebrated the nuptial and bore witness to its potency and pleasure reflects, more than anything else, the astonishing force of this violent aesthetic and the ways in which the cultural imaginary can so miraculously refuse the implications of its joy. Through the aegis of the mediasphere, the imperial violence upon which the nuptial ultimately resides becomes diffuse as a shared fantasy of pleasure in the subjugation of its horror.

Twitter-volution

Less than five months after the wedding, the streets of London were again beamed across the planet. In the midst of ongoing global economic stress and severe governmental austerity measures in the UK, London and surrounding suburbs erupted into violent and chaotic street riots. It was as though the horrors that had been subsumed within the meticulously ritualized royal nuptial had escaped the authority and symbolic order that had contained them – as if the meticulous weave of history, hierarchy and governance that we have described above suddenly frayed and unravelled into a disorderly entanglement of somatic urges.

While beginning with community protests over a police shooting in Tottenham, the street violence rapidly escalated into something less specific and more widespread. The protest, it seems, stimulated a more seditious social apoplexy which brought adolescents and younger adults into the streets to rob and attack commercial buildings, shops, financial institutions and hotels. The global vision of the arson and larceny was framed by a peculiar carnivalesque that exposed the limits of the police and their authority, social legitimacy and capacity to control the sensate eruption and mayhem.

Bewildered by the frenzy and somatic energy of these attacks, senior police and public officials appeared nightly on the news, condemning the attacks and the apparent disregard for law and law enforcement. The British Prime Minister David Cameron was particularly scathing about the parents of these children, whom he regarded as relinquishing their personal and community responsibilities. The Prime Minister threatened the perpetrators of the mayhem that they would be detected and ‘feel the full force of the law’. Commentators on the liberal left argued that the break-out was an effect of unemployment, poverty and the government’s austerity measures, which had savaged England’s poorest people, including particular migrant groups, the low-skilled and university students (Ponticelli and Voth, 2011).

Reaching beyond the origin of the events in Tottenham, the ‘unlawful shopping’ and arson attacks spread to a number of migrant and economically strained suburbs like Brixton, and then into arts and student precincts like Salford. Excited by the mass-messaging of Twitter and other social media, the carnival of riots even reached the more middle-class suburbs like Croydon, where at least one major building was razed to the ground. While many of the rioters had adopted a Robin Hood demeanour, this coup de joyeux was soured by violent assaults and ultimately the deaths of 15 people, including three Armenian immigrants who were run down trying to protect the family store from rioters (BBC, 2011b). News interviews with the supporters of the deceased made it clear that the assault and deaths were implicated in issues of ethnic difference, and that the Turkish–Armenian community in Manchester and Birmingham was rallying to protect its property against the marauding outsiders (SBS News, 9 August).

These ethnic fault-lines and the break-out of youthful sedition were not, however, the greatest concern of the London Mayor, Boris Johnson. For Johnson, the most significant issue was the effect of the riots on London’s reputation, particularly as the city was preparing to host the 2012 Olympic Games. Like China’s 2008 Olympics, the British Games represented the opportunity for the world’s first industrialized and non-revolutionary democratic nation to present its ideological and economic dignity to the global community. For Johnson, the erratic and self-gratifying rioters merely sullied that grandeur with petty and hedonistic lawlessness: nothing more significant than that. The Games, like the royal wedding, restored London to the top of the world’s popularity charts.

The carnivalesque of the London riots might be simply explained in terms of a riotous youth break-out, little more than a schoolyard brawling that escaped the parameters of authority through the amplitude of social media. The vision of young adolescents in hoodies and tuques contrasts radically with the royal London of gilded uniforms, tiaras and horse-drawn carriages. This is the London of state and orderly conduct, hierarchy and etiquette – the London of City Bank or the Bank of England, both of which were, remarkably, spared by the rioters and their mysterious confluence of anger, sedition and carnal exubera...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Introduction: Out of the 9/11 Decade
• 1 New Media – Old Empires: Celebrity, Sex and Revolutions of Knowing
• 2 Under the Volcano: The Cultural Ecology of Nature
• 3 Hyper-Pleasure: Consumer Rituals and Transactions of Desire
• 4 Menace: Westernism, Media and the Cultural Ecology of Violence
• 5 After the Apocalypse: Refugees, Human Rights and the Global Media Future
• Conclusion: Peace
• References
• Index