Terror, Leisure and Consumption

Spaces for Harm in a Post-Crash Era

Leanne McRae

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781787565265
• eBook ISBN: 9781787565258
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Terrorism
• Index: Social Sciences

This book uses a series of narrowly defined case studies from the 'wave of terror across Europe' to rethink the relationships between harm, crime, deviance, leisure and capitalism. It argues that these events enter into the accelerated media landscape as exemplars of contemporary terror because they re-code leisure spaces into spaces of and for harm. This re-coding is permissible due to the crises of the post-crash era which have seen a decline in work-as-harm due to the collapse of the structures of capitalism that support labour exchange. Instead, we have moved into an era where the corrosion of capitalism has enacted a series of violent exchanges between 'East' and 'West', employed and unemployed, consumers and terrorists, criminals and prosecutors, leisure and work. This book focuses on attacks on the Bataclan Theatre and Stade de France in Paris, the German Christmas Market van attack in Berlin, the Reina Nightclub shooting in Istanbul, the Stockholm lorry attack, the bombing of the Ariana Grande Concert in Manchester and knife attacks on London Bridge. In these case studies, terrorists target leisured spaces and create synergetic narratives of harm that are mobilised via the media to dialogue with the corrosions and violences of capitalism that percolate through the global landscape.

1

EXCHANGES OF VIOLENCE: THE SENSATIONAL PLEASURES OF CONSUMPTION

Leisure has many competing definitions as its practices and composition have evolved over time. Conventional renderings of leisure place it as ‘“residual time” left over outside of working hours’ (Tucker, 1993, p. 16). However, as working hours have changed, definitions of leisure are in flux. The rise of a ‘leisure industry’ interfacing with contemporary notions of ‘lifestyle’ intersects popular culture, consumption and capital, to commodify time and space, interest and enthusiasm. During industrialism leisure was fought for as a space for self-determination, first encoded as personal time to pursue intimate or local interests and then later, to enable workers to enter into the consumer landscape of the middle class by indulging in public and semi-private pastimes that increasingly engaged cultures of exchange. The commodification of leisure has stimulated conspicuous consumption in the pursuit of pleasure and sensation, as shopping, purchase and exchange whether in tourism, serious leisure pursuits,listening to music or any other of the expanding myriad of activities encapsulated by ‘leisure’, has evolved into a grotesque formation, exuding the worst of human behaviour, framed by the centrality of ‘special liberty’ as a defining framework for a gamut of social, political and economic interactions. This behaviour has become normalised as part of a valuable contemporary identity located in accumulation.

Deviant leisure, as a field of study, has focussed on the spaces for harm that might emerge out of risky or unsanctioned behaviour engaged during ‘leisure time’ and is focussed on mapping the regulation of bodies of marginal groups like youth and those who test the limits of socially acceptable ideas of ‘pleasure’ or ‘enjoyment’ (Smith & Raymen, 2016). Drug taking, excessive drinking, gambling and parkour operate on the edges of social acceptability, pushing out into spaces that can become corrosive to the individual and the wider social framework. The function of deviant leisure categories is to keep these harms in check and provide an edge-point to the excesses of capitalism. The field of excess must be contained or it draws attention to the ways in which all forms of leisure are increasingly tinged with harms. Deviant leisure categories are complicated as leisure increasingly carries corrosive power structures at its core. Leisure becomes the space into where the anxieties and ambivalences of corroding capitalism are emptied. The declining workspaces in the twenty-first century means that leisure takes precedence as a core mode for mobilising meaning of the everyday, and these meanings are increasingly tinged with exploitation, selfishness, anxieties, desires and fluidities. Leisure provides the node for the intersection of capitalism, consumption, pleasure and meaning-making. Emphasis has shifted from earning to spending money with the rise of rentier capitalism and shareholder structures that enable the making of money without working, simply through the possession of assets or money. Uncritical and unconscious pleasure in accumulation propels spending-as-leisure and the commodification of credit. Most insidiously, these predatory tendencies of leisure and its tethers to corrosive consumer capitalism are masked. Instead, leisure industries are hailed as forward trajectories for burgeoning economies and creative cities. They are cited as being able to stimulate intersecting policies and legislatures involving community well-being, urban rejuvenation and harm reduction. The banality of leisure circulates tethered to the assertion that ‘a degree of leisure and of exemption from contact with industrial process … [is] a prerequisite to a worthy or beautiful, or even blameless, human life’ (Veblen, 1899/2005, p. 27). As such, leisure retains a core of innocuity that distances pleasure and enjoyment from its connections to capitalism and the terrors that are attached to production and consumption in the contemporary age, in sweatshops, under persecution and oppressive conditions of exploitation, reified at the expense of solidarity and community building and defined by a war-mongering global military system. Consumers remain blameless in this leisure-space by limiting the awareness that their buying practices may perpetuate exploitation – often mediated and placated by brands situating themselves within a double-blind of critical consciousness that is inherently unsustainable – ecologically sourced coffee and slavery-free cacao only ever provide a momentary rupture in the consciousness of capitalism. Ultimately, ‘this behaviour perversely reasserts the dominance of a capitalism that has successfully incorporated and commodified dissent’ (Winlow & Hall, 2013, p. 67). Far from the spaces of production, the leisured consciousness of consumers is framed by pleasure and not by exploitation. The realities of the global landscape that permits and perpetuates the predatory politics of capitalism become a simulation of inequality in foreign (and local) places far removed from the concerns of the everyday, mediated by images that promote binarial imaginings of ‘Western liberal democracy’s preferred image of itself as inclusive, meritocratic, civilised and fair’ (Winlow & Hall, 2013, p. 2) opposed with ‘feckless, lazy and prone’ (Winlow & Hall, 2013, p. 13) imaginings of the other, supported by paternalistic global gregariousness that asserts the ‘good will’ of a benevolent capitalist marketplace into the sweatshops of the Third World, to help them enter into exploitation as if it is a favour. A narrative of deviance is pasted on top of these images. The violence is encoded to emanate out of these spaces rather than be part of wider criminal interactions between identities, consumer practices and special liberty – that form an unspoken basis of communication. Instead, violence is a product of foreign places, deployed by othered bodies. This interaction refuses to acknowledge the inbuilt forms of violence and barbarism embedded in conspicuous consumption that flow through the corporate global network and situate a sliding scale of criminality that changes in its definition depending on who, when, how and what type of violence is mobilised.

Contemporary flows of violence articulated by terrorism in Europe straddles these tenuous meanings. The definitional trajectories deployed by legislators as well as law enforcement determine how sense is made of this type of violence. The desire to separate terror from other forms of violent crime is centred on the idea that it is ‘more extreme than most common crimes because it often randomly victimizes civilians’ (Liem, van Buuren, de Roy va Zuijdewijn, Schönberger, & Bakker, 2018, p. 48). These added layers of intent, risk and unpredictability stimulates multiple and sometimes competing institutional regulations designed to pre-empt a type of crime that relies on shock, horror and carnage to achieve its aims. In Europe, terrorism is considered alongside organised crime as part of a ‘crime-terror nexus’ (Baker-Bell, 2014, p. 230). This removes terrorism from the narratives of war where they are situated in the United States and creates dialogue with a variety of civic and security organisations that are devoted to combating terrorism by preventing radicalisation through local intervention and social welfare. How these terrorists are situated within and activate a continuum of violence needs deeper investigation to offer understanding of how movement, crime, alienation, harm, security, the state, religion, gender, class and race all intersect via terrorism narratives and images to mask the exchange of power and oppression at the core of terrorist acts. In order to create a multifaceted approach to understanding the relationships between harm and social structures, leisure and pleasure, capitalism and movement, a reflexive understanding of the role and function of crime as a site for critical social engagement, dialogue and disagreement, resistance and compliance is needed to offer a framing context for how terrorist violence is activated and understood in the European context.

In their work on criminology, harm and deviance, Steve Hall and Simon Winlow spotlight the failures of criminological theory to account for forms of contemporary violence. They affirm that the structures and articulations of deviance, violence and punishment cannot be effectively rendered within the staid silos of criminological theory, which on the left reanimate the themes of moral panic and folk devils, while the right wing remains staunchly attached to personal responsibility and the punitive state as failing to offer harsh enough penalty to curb the causes of violence. Neither approach is appropriate or useful, according to Hall and Winlow. They instead map the complexities of a failing modernity that produces gaps in criminological consciousness that masks the spaces of crisis that produce behaviours that are nihilistic rather than resistive:

Post-war criminological theory on the left side of the political divide has been avoiding what should be criminology’s primary question: ‘why individuals or corporate bodies are willing to risk the infliction of harm on others in order to further their own instrumental or expressive interests’. Criminologists on the conservative/classical liberal side of the political divide do not shirk this aetiological duty, but their general discourse suffers from four fatal flaws: firstly, they do not explore the ontological field of harm to challenge orthodox legal definitions of crime; secondly, they tend to ignore crimes of the powerful and instead focus disproportionately on crimes of the powerless; thirdly, they tend to use rather crude positivist methods and categories that cannot capture the complexity of social life; fourthly, they regard human nature as prone to ‘evil’, which of course means that, rather conveniently, they don’t really need any aetiological theories of subjectivity over and above those concerned with the maintenance of discipline and socialisation. (Hall, 2014, pp. 145–146)

Contemporary criminologists, they argue, should begin to seek out ways to resituate a ‘realist’ approach to harm and deviance in order to wrestle power away from the dominant right-wing and faltering left-wing approaches that offer little insight into the conditions where ‘although the crime rate in England and Wales diminished after 1992, violence diminished only a little, while some forms of serious violence, such as robbery, continued to rise’ (Hall, Winlow, & Ancrum, 2012, p. 3). Understanding this peculiar context for harm and violence within an increasingly affluent society cannot be articulated by the conventional codes of criminology. Instead, Hall and Winlow argue that there has been a shift in the construct of the social where community bonds and ties have corroded, beginning with the strategic intent to destroying the working class by the Thatcher government to make way for the post-industrial changes wrought by a new information, financier and service economy that involved ‘living on thin air’ as a liberation from the drudgeries of labour in the factory. This was ‘passed off by neo-liberal ideologues as an act of “creative destruction” promising better things to come’ (Hall et al., 2012, p. 4). But instead, the ‘better things’ were limited to only an elite group of actors within the social network. This is a violence of the empowered asserted onto the disempowered who are told it is for their own good. They were left with increasingly unstable, part time and tenuous working and living conditions. The working class were atomised and walled-off within low- (or no-) income housing estates and in the emerging consumer economy were encouraged to view each other as both a threat to gainful employment and therefore pathway to conspicuous consumption and also as a marker against which to measure their own value through competitive consumption. This narcissistic evolution of human subjectivity away from community and into selfishness is mediated by an aggressive (violent) consumption:

It is not simply the lack of a real social life but the emergence of an imaginary social world to replace it and organise atomised individuals into a frenetic competition that is the most criminogenic aspect of life in advanced modernity. (Hall et al., 2012, p. 7)

These conditions have stimulated cultures of crime where the subjects of Hall, Winlow and Ancrum’s (2012) research display ‘the total irrelevance of distinctions between “legal” and “illegal”’ (p. 52) as a core lexicon for their daily sense-making. They understand there is a ‘game of getting rich by entrepreneurial means’ (p. 54) and that their drug dealing, petty crime and thug life, is no different to the violence of the corporate elite who appropriate and pervert legal systems to advance their interests. These strategies, however, are not called criminal but are rather, situated in ‘the required social network or cultural capital’ for empowered forms of appropriation. The deployment of cultures of harm in the everyday has been sanctioned by a capitalist system built on the exploitation of people, social systems and environments under the guise of ‘special liberty’. This has been the true ‘trickle down’ effect of capitalism – not of money but of harms. These harms are inflicted in the concerted and deliberate effort to accumulate and masked by the pursuit of pleasure and sensation in that accumulation that dislodges people from temporal continuities and histories that might reveal the consequences of these attitudes and practices. The criminal activities of the ‘deviant’ groups interviewed and investigated by Hall and Winlow are not resistive. They are not protesting the capitalist exploitation they live with; they are aping it. Treadwell, Briggs, Winlow, and Hall (2012) go so far as to demonstrate that the London riots in 2011, stimulated by the murder of Mark Duggan, actually evolved into something far more pragmatic. They affirm:

Amongst our interviewees, there is a remarkable degree of agreement on this issue: the riots were about looting, and represented an opportunity to advance the consumer and financial interests of the self. (Treadwell et al., 2012, p. 17)

The nihilism of this position demonstrates the extent to which capitalism now masquerading as (accelerated) consumerism corrodes understandings of the self in society and promotes exchanges of violence. It is now only through consumerism that ordinary people can gain some sense of social distinction as measured against others around them and in relation to the fetishisation of the elite and super-rich that appear to transcend any and all social, economic, cultural and legal regulations and responsibilities – freedom from responsibility to others has become the dominant trope of our time. Widespread political apathy generated by ongoing corruption and perversion of legal and governmental systems designed to regulate and moderate abuses of power – as seen in the bailouts of major banks during the GFC and the continued payment of monies to chief executive officers whose recklessness precipitated the crisis; governments and organisations changing legislation and laws when they no longer suit their corporate interests; and strategic and systemic robbing of the public coffers in the pursuit of tax havens by corporations and the wealthy – create conditions where ‘the majority tend to follow consumer culture’s injunction to dedicate their lives to personal pleasures and “new experiences”’ (Treadwell et al., 2012, p. 9) rather than invest in a political system that stubbornly continues to exclude them and is deaf to their concerns. Instead, barbaric leisure is embraced through the culture of consumerism where pleasure and enjoyment are the only requirements, rather than critical thought or civic action. The complexity cascades when increasingly ‘“enjoyment” takes the form of the “sensation”, a distracting burst of sensuous pleasure with a brief symbolic life, a “hit” of hyper-reality’ (Treadwell et al., 2012, p. 9) not only distracts from the inherent violence of consumer capitalism, but masks the threads that seam the real with the imagined. It is in these seams that the conditions of the everyday, and the ruthless pursuit of consumerism can be adequately contextualised. The spectre of actual violence is enfolded as spectacle – imaged in the catastrophe of 9/11, the collapse of the World Trade Center towers with plummeting bodies – that create a perverse entertainment landscape knitting with Hollywood imagery in a hyperreal rupture where the simultaneous horror of the real and pop culture consciousness cohere. Sensation, outrage, perversion and pornography are the dominant literacies of our time: empathy accelerated as if our outrage rather than our inaction means and matters more. It is another form of violence, within the self and towards the victims. The violence of entropy is enfolded in a media cycle where history repeats, perversions recycled, abuses perpetuated infinitum. These experiences may appear shocking because they ‘were once absorbed by inherited social structures of family and community, and the state’s welfare cushions’ (Mishra, 2017, p. 13). This is no longer the case as the individual is reified and selfishness valued. However, modernity’s major characteristics are embedded in difficulty, trauma, crisis and catastrophe. The post-World-War-Two landscape, where social welfare, human rights and equity enjoyed increased visibility after the horrors of concentration camps, was only a blip in the history of human society most often characterised by widespread inequities and injustice. Pankaj Mishra (2017) evocatively opines:

in recent decades has it been acknowledged that the history of modernization is largely one of carnage and bedlam rather than peaceful convergence, and that the politics of violence, hysteria and despair was by no means unique to Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy or Communist Russia. (p. 17)

It is the insights of Winlow and Hall that connect these perspectives as we track the conditions of ordinary people living with the fallout of accelerated globalisation, hyperreality, conspicuous consumption and special liberty. Steve Redhead (2011) acknowledges this in his book We have never been Postmodern, when he writes that these are ‘new times, often engaging the same “old enemies”’ (p. 1). By re-purposing Latour, Redhead (2011) demonstrates how ‘modernity is all that there is’ (p. 2) and how it sustains conditions of crisis that perpetuate across time and space. When modernity motivates the colonial these tensions stretch and snap. The modern project represented in Empire and the ever-expanding push into foreign regions under the guise of civilising the other asserts a special kind of violence that is internalised by the colonised. This is in evidence when Empire collapses and the colonies turn towards the imperial core via immigration. Here we begin to see that there is only colonisation and ‘we have never been postcolonial’. Empire reaps (rapes) new resources to pillage back into the fetishistic economies of sale within Empire: New spices, chocolate, slaves, coffee, oil – luxuries. In exchange, the colonies look to Empire to gain civilization and later, a piece of the prosperity. The rhetoric of Empire is so powerful; it creates a new reality where the people of the colonies believe in the greatness of those that have conquered them. How can they think otherwise? ‘Images of Britain were the staple diet of a British-oriented colonial education system, as were general narratives about the wonders of the imperial metropolis’ (Jensen, 2014, p. 2). The colonised return to the homeland through migration first and then as refugees as the cascading violences of modernity accelerate. In the first instance, they are begrudgingly welcomed as even a staunch imperialist acknowledges the importance of benevolent abdication to the will of the worshipping hoards. This is how they mark themselves as civilised. In the second instance, the colonised are reviled as a symptom of their own failure – an inability to not be invaded in the first place and then to enter into the modern global market place on their own terms – to be good consumers. Between the first and the second instances Empire changed, faltered and failed. But it never became postcolonial. It could never embrace or engage with the formerly col...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Terror in Our Times
• 1. Exchanges of Violence: The Sensational Pleasures of Consumption
• 2. Mobility, Movement and Meaning
• 3. Žižek, Zombies and the Apocalypse
• 4. Security and the Civic: Entertaining Terrorism at the Eagles of Death Metal Concert and Stade de France
• 5. Christmas in Berlin
• 6. Rave and Reina: Terror in Turkey
• 7. Shopping in Stockholm: The Terror of the Flâneur
• 8. Manchester Music: Dangerous Women and the Terror In-between
• 9. Night-terror: London Bridge is Falling Down
• Conclusion
• References
• Index