Spectacle - ARMINDA @ Whitman College

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Whitman College
Arminda @ Whitman College
Spectacle
2016
Spectacle
Bruce Magnusson (Editor)
Zahi Zalloua (Editor)
Follow this and additional works at: http://arminda.whitman.edu/spectacle
Global Re-Visions
Global Re-Visions
e di t e d by
Bruce Magnusson and Zahi Zalloua
University of Washington Press
Seattle and London
i n a s s o c i at io n w i t h
Whitman College
Walla Walla, Washington
Global Re-Visions
This series aims to pursue the challenges that globalization poses, and
the possibilities that it offers, in an interdisciplinary setting. Each volume seeks to promote a more nuanced understanding of timely issues
while providing critical dialogue with prior scholarship and new ways of
shaping how these issues are envisioned and framed. The series probes
to what extent our vision of globalization both alters and is altered by
the singularity and complexity of the topic at hand, compelling, in turn,
perpetual re-visions.
Torture: Power, Democracy, and the Human Body
edited by Shampa Biswas and Zahi Zalloua
Contagion: Health, Fear, Sovereignty
edited by Bruce Magnusson and Zahi Zalloua
Spectacle
edited by Bruce Magnusson and Zahi Zalloua
SPECTACLE
EDITED BY
BRUCE MAGNUSSON
ZAHI ZALLOUA
© 2016 by Whitman College
Printed and bound in the United States of America
Composed in New Baskerville and Franklin Gothic
19 18 17 16 5 4 3 2 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in
any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording,
or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publisher.
University of Washington Press
Whitman College
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Magnusson, Bruce A., editor. | Zalloua, Zahi Anbra, 1971– editor.
Title: Spectacle / edited by Bruce Magnusson and Zahi Zalloua.
Description: Seattle : University of Washington Press, 2016. | Series: Global Re-visions |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2015029036 | isbn 9780295995021 (hardcover : acid-free paper)
Subjects: lcsh: Mass media and globalization. | Communication, International.
Classification: lcc p94.6 .s696 2016 | ddc 302.23—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015029036
The paper used in this publication is acid-free and meets the minimum requirements
of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for
Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48–1984. ∞
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii
INTRODUCTION
From Events to Spectacles
Bruce Magnusson and Zahi Zalloua 3
1 MEDIA SPECTACLE AND THE NORTH AFRICAN ARAB UPRISINGS
Some Critical Reflections
Douglas Kellner 18
2 MEDIATING MEMORIES
The Ethics of Post-9/11 Spectatorship
Anneke Smelik 65
3 PREDICTION, PROXIMITY, AND COSMOPOLITANISM
IN GLOBAL SPECTACLES
Gaurav Majumdar 88
4The Biopolitics of Spectacle
Salvation and Oversight at the Post-Military Nature Refuge
Shiloh R. Krupar 116
5Dream Factory Détournement
Freewaves, Art, and Urban Redevelopment in Hollywood
Matt Reynolds 154
Bibliography 183
Notes on Contributors Index 205
201
Acknowledgments
T
he annual Global Studies Symposium at Whitman College was
conceived with the purpose of stimulating important interdisciplinary conversations on topics of contemporary relevance.
The Global Re-Visions series seeks to bring some of those discussions to
a wider audience. The 2011 symposium, “Global Media, Global Spectacles,” brought together scholars in the social sciences, humanities, and
sciences to address the global importance of Guy Debord’s notion of
“spectacle” in a contemporary age of rapid globalization, global political turmoil, and transformations of identity, space, place, power, and
ethics. The liberal arts model of education, itself undergoing profound
changes, still provides the space for intellectually rigorous discussion
across epistemic communities. In that spirit, this volume, like W hitman’s
Global Studies Initiative and the symposium itself, aims to generate critical thought about the continuing power of the concept of spectacle, as
well as its evolving forms in media, old and new. Douglas Kellner, Gaurav Majumdar, and Shiloh Krupar participated in the symposium, and
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their contributions to this volume are revised versions of their presentations. We are also grateful to Bill Bogard, Salman Hameed, and Delbert
Hutchison for their contributions to the symposium and for the ways
they have helped shape our thinking about this topic.
We extend our gratitude to all the faculty, administrators, students,
and staff who have made Whitman College so receptive an intellectual
community, where projects such as these are not only possible but
encouraged, valued, and supported. We thank President George Bridges
and Provost and Dean of the Faculty Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn for
supporting the vision of interdisciplinary inquiry with resources as well
as words. We thank the other members of the Global Studies Steering
Committee, including Gaurav Majumdar (English), Jim Russo (Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Molecular Biology), Elyse Semerdjian (History), and Jason Pribilsky (Anthropology) for helping to conceive of
and implement the symposium. Susan Bennett, in the office of the Provost and Dean of the Faculty, went above and beyond to provide logistical support. Nicole Simek read multiple versions of the introduction to
this volume, providing much-needed insight, commentary, and advice.
Above all, none of this would have been possible without the enthusiasm
and interest of the smart and dedicated students of Whitman College.
Among these, we owe particular thanks to several whose contributions
to the symposium are reflected in multiple ways in this volume. Environmental Studies and Politics major Gauri Mirashi (2011), Religion and
Geology major Kate Potter (2012), and Sociology major Nigel RamozLeslie (2011) all participated in the symposium, providing sharp and
creative commentary. English major Gabriella Friedman (2013) and
politics major Genevieve Venable (2012) provided valuable research
and editing assistance. We are consistently proud of how important our
students are to the success of the symposia, by posing probing questions, challenging the other participants to sharpen their analyses, and
elevating the quality of the discussions and resulting volumes. Finally,
we would like to thank Larin McLaughlin and Tim Zimmermann at the
University of Washington Press for their encouragement and help with
this volume.
We would like to express our gratitude for permission to reprint
Anneke Smelik’s “Mediating Memories: The Ethics of Post-9/11 Specta-
a c k n o w l e d gm e n t s
torship,” which first appeared in ARCADIA: International Journal for Literary Studies in December 2010, and Matthew Reynolds’s “‘A Massive
Multifaceted Screening Room’: LA Freewaves Curates Hollywood Boulevard,” which was published in in Public: Art, Culture, Ideas in Spring 2012
and appears here in slightly modified form.
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a c k n o w l e d gm e n t s
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spectacle
Introduction
From Events to Spectacles
Bruce Magnusson and Zahi Zalloua
U
nder what conditions do events become spectacles? What trans
forms a given event into a spectacle? Is spectacle constitutive of
human experience? Do the lure and primacy of the image
reflect a natural or ontological penchant for the visual? Or, rather, is
there something historically specific about today’s regime of the image?
The emergence of new media technology and the ability of new modes of
communication to facilitate “contact” between people across the world
could be said to have created different experiences and kinds of spectacles in the age of globalization. How might we read this moment? Does
the making of a spectacle necessarily involve an ideological process, an
abstraction and distortion of reality? Or can the subject matter of spectacles be effectively deployed for more emancipatory ends?
How we answer the latter question—Do spectacles dull critical judgment
or enable progressive action?—hints at our attitude toward globalization: Is
it a set of processes that we ought to resist or embrace? How might we
evaluate its nuances? In Society of the Spectacle, originally published in
1967, Guy Debord masterfully argued for the uniqueness of spectacles
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under late capitalism: “In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of
spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.”1 Expanding on Marx’s assertion, in Wage-Labour and Capital,
that “our wants and pleasures have their origin in society,” Debord further displaces the humanist, bourgeois subject as the locus of desire.2
Indeed, in Debord’s view, today’s consumerist society manufactures first
and foremost human desire. In the image-saturated societies of advanced
capitalism, appearance displaces reality: “Considered in its own terms,
the spectacle is affirmation of appearance and affirmation of all human
life, namely social life, as mere appearance.”3 As Eugene Arva puts it,
“the ultimate commodity becomes the image itself . . . , so it is not so
much things that we consume as their representations, which are offered
to us by the advertisement industry.”4 Other critics have been more
reluctant to attribute to spectacles a definite historical designation,
underscoring instead their fundamental role in human experience
across time and place. “There can never have been a moment when
specularity was not at least in part constitutive of human subjectivity,”
argues Kaja Silverman. “Ever since the inception of cave drawing, it has
been via images that we see and are seen.”5 To be sure, how we see and
are seen might be timeless concerns, but specularity does seem to have
taken a peculiar, if not unprecedented, form in an age of instantaneous
global reach and dissemination.
What makes an event a spectacle—an image that takes on its own
life—has everything to do with the reception of the event. And what
constitutes an event is also far from self-evident. In everyday language,
an event can refer to something as innocuous as buying a newspaper
or as memorable as an earthquake. In philosophical circles, the notion
of the event acquires a narrower meaning. Alain Badiou defines the
event as such in terms of its unpredictability and irreducibility; the
event’s “incalculable novelty” puts it at odds with the already known.6
Along similar lines, Jacques Derrida describes the event proper as
“unanticipatable novelty, pure singularity, the absence of horizon”; it
“escapes, remains evasive, open, undecided, indeterminable.”7 In short,
the event, by this understanding, exposes the limits of knowledge.
The move from event to spectacle might be said to hinge on the move
from curiosity to mastery, from unruly experiences to hegemonic reprebruc e m a g n uss o n a n d Z a h i Z a l l o u a
sentations. Making an event a spectacle arguably naturalizes it, depriving the event of its otherness and strangeness (since the event presents
itself, at least initially, as an object of wonder, something that exceeds the
observer’s horizon of expectations or intelligibility). Subsuming it into
“common sense” (famously described by Roland Barthes as “truth when
it stops on the arbitrary order of him who speaks”), spectacularizing the
event reduces it to an economy of sameness: devouring its content, and
tacitly exhausting its relevance, before moving on to the next “new”
event-to-be-spectacle.8 In this sense, the event of the spectacle is, strictly
speaking, as much created as recorded, since the (ideological) staging of
the event (the time and intensity with which a story is covered) unavoidably alters its meaning and reception. Henry A. Giroux underscores the
nefarious pedagogical aim of the spectacle, emphasizing its structural
role in the reproduction of social reality: “The main pedagogical function of the spectacle is to promote consent (though it has also functioned
coercively), integrate populations into dominant systems of power,
heighten fear, and operate as a mode of social reproduction largely
through the educational force of the broader culture.” 9 Read thus, spectacle compels attention—but only one, ostensibly dubious, kind of attention. Spectacle attests to a consumerist hunger—but a hunger that takes
on a phantasmatic character in the age of global media, where spectacular forms of mass entertainment and news dangerously intertwine.
For Debord, distortion characterizes the society of the spectacle: “The
spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous
movement of the non-living.”10 In this upside-down world, the crucial
distinction between truth and falsity undergoes a radical perversion:
“In a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false.”11
Through its abstraction and dehistoricization of events, spectacle breeds
mystification; however, spectacle not only deceives or bewitches citizens,
deforming their vision of things, but also weakens them, doing violence
to their actual being.12 According to Retort, a leftist collective of thirty or
forty “antagonists of the present order of things,” located in the San
Francisco Bay Area: “Spectacle is an exertion of social power. It does
violence to human actors just as much as does the discipline of the production line.”13 Spectacle robs citizens of their autonomy, transforming
them into mere spectators, into docile bodies—depoliticized, alienated
(from self and community), and passive individuals.
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Against this ubiquitous mystification of social life, is critique still
available? Can individuals change or rechannel their libidinal investment in the world of images? Is anything other than cataloguing spectacle’s devastating effects possible? Can we at once affirm the primacy of
the visual (the “monopoly of appearance,” as Debord put it), acknowledge its organizational role in our experience of reality, and hold out
for the possibility of resistance?14 And if so, can the logic of the imagespectacle itself be deployed in the service of critique and agency, of
unsettling the colonization of everyday life?15 In other words, can spectacle today, pace Debord, become dialogical?16
It is no longer adequate to understand spectacle as requiring only a
passive consumer; at the very least, our understanding of passivity and
agency requires a thorough rethinking. Today’s news media spectacle
ostensibly demands coproducers of knowledge; the images that the
spectator sees are no longer “chosen and constructed by someone else.”17
Debord’s nightmarish vision of a homogenized and homogenizing society of the spectacle jars with the rhetoric of 24/7 cable and satellite news
channels. CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC, to take some examples from
the United States, all purport to valorize the individuality of their viewers.18 Television audiences are constantly interpellated as mass viewing
subjects, subjects who are polled and asked to weigh in on matters or to
Tweet a response (which might be read back to the general audience by
the host of the show). Or, in the case of CNN’s iReports, viewers, armed
with the latest smartphones, are given the opportunity to literally make
the news. This Wikipedification of the news might seem empowering,
inaugurating the viewer’s move from passive consumer to active coproducer of news, but it also risks reinforcing the commodification of journalism: journalistic knowledge and in-depth analysis take a backseat to
the entertaining value of the sound bite, while viewer participation
feeds the narcissistic fantasy of self-importance. This new agency of the
viewer/spectator might be a case of ideological freedom akin to Herbert
Marcuse’s notion of “repressive desublimation,” through which “sexuality is liberated (or rather liberalized) in socially constructive forms.”19
The release of energy, far from being liberating and transgressive,
ensnares the individual further in the social system of domination. Similarly, new media and social networking sites (for example, Facebook,
YouTube, and Twitter) can often help to confirm rather than challenge
bruc e m a g n uss o n a n d Z a h i Z a l l o u a
the existing body of knowledge. Yet new technologies are not deterministic in and of themselves; they may very well contribute to the reproduction of Debord’s society of the spectacle, but they can also open up
a space for critical engagement of and with the spectacle.
Witnessing Spectacles
Updating Debord’s theory of the spectacle, Douglas Kellner, in his
chapter in the present volume, “Media Spectacle and the North African
Arab Uprisings: Some Critical Reflections,” takes up this challenge of
thinking about spectacle differently, arguing against its alleged homogenizing and totalizing dimensions. The witnessing of spectacles takes
many twists and turns. According to Kellner, the events of the 2011 Arab
Spring in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya demonstrated that everyday citizens
could harness the affective energies of the spectacle for different and
more progressive ends. No longer adequately understood as a tool of
manipulation, emblematic of a society of control whose sole function is
to reinforce the status quo, the spectacle here calls for a revised mode
of analysis. Media coverage of the uprisings, Kellner argues, reflected
“spectacle itself” as “a contested terrain that can be a force of opposition
and resistance, as well as of domination and hegemony—and can be a
site of contestation, reversal, and even revolution.” Media spectacle is,
then, a pharmakon, potentially functioning as either a poison or a remedy: at worst, it simplifies, pacifies, and depoliticizes individuals, turning them into passive consumers of visual culture; at best, its egalitarian
dimension encourages participation from all. As such, spectacle is contagious; the information that it disseminates almost instantly, reaching
an unprecedented number of spectators, can lead or contribute to domination or liberation.
The events and media coverage of the Arab Spring continue to serve
as a test case for the use and abuse of spectacle. The impact of these
images on local and global audiences was undeniably significant. The
putting on display of defiant wills, collectively mobilizing to unseat a
series of dictators, arguably made it possible for local (and global) audiences to feel scandals again.20 The same images also went a long way
toward dismantling the Orientalist perspective that “the Arab people
were passive, or an irrational mass periodically exploding in rages of
INT R OD U C TION
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anger with no constructive effects.” Still, Kellner advocates a “multicausal analysis” of the Arab Spring. Media spectacles that try to simplify
the complex genealogy of events risk falsifying that reality and contributing to mystification.
Moreover, the story of the Arab Spring is still in the process of unfolding, with the contested 2012 Egyptian presidential election and the July
2013 coup d’état (led by the Egyptian army chief General Abdel Fattah
al-Sisi to depose the Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi) being reminders of its unpredictability. Accordingly, we must resist the lure of closure,
particularly the temptation to read the events in terms of a preexisting
Western narrative or set of values that would interpret popular dissent
as desirable so long as it remains peaceful protest—so long as the
demands of democracy, dignity, and economic justice do not interfere
with the “smooth” functioning of globalization.21 In short, we must
remain faithful to the “unanticipatable novelty, pure singularity, [and]
absence of horizon” of these events. Expressing such an attentiveness,
Kellner warns against seeing the events of the Arab Spring as constituting a “revolution proper”—a destruction of the previous political
order—and prefers instead to describe the tumultuous events as “uprisings,” thus resisting the temptation to interpret them teleologically (as if
the story of the Arab Spring had already ended). Only with a more
nuanced reading of the past can we open ourselves up to the incalculable future of the uprisings.
Negotiating the gap between an event and its thematization or representation (through spectacle) becomes synonymous with the vigilant
work of critique. In her chapter, “Mediating Memories: The Ethics of
Post-9/11 Spectatorship,” Anneke Smelik attends to this hermeneutically fertile gap. Like Kellner, Smelik is committed to seeing spectacle as
a site of struggle—as potentially affording critical insights for global
spectators. At once shocking (a breach in America’s psychic shield) and
all too familiar (images of disasters belong to America’s cultural imaginary), the events of September 11, 2001 reflected what Smelik calls a
“performance of the real.” The spectacular form of the attacks blurred the
boundaries between reality and performance. Phenomenologically speaking, the events of 9/11 troubled our traditional frames of witnessing;
they involved an entanglement of the two modalities of consciousness—
perception and imagination—through which distinguishing between
what is fact and what is fiction becomes a difficult, if not impossible,
task. The images of 9/11 dramatized the extent to which fantasy informs
our everyday exposure to social reality—how, in psychoanalytic terms,
“ fantasy supports reality” and our access to the real is always already mediated by images.22 Media coverage of September 11 packaged the events
as staged performances for their viewing audience. This performance of
the real is not, however, without ethical considerations. What are desirable memories of 9/11? What role does spectacle play in this process of
remembrance? While generally sympathetic to critics who object to
anesthetized media accounts of 9/11, to its “Hollywoodization,” Smelik
insists on the need to make sense of the disaster, to “work through” the
individual and collective traumas. Toward that end, she explores the
spectacle of cinema. Avoiding the false choice between hermeneutic
mastery and cognitive paralysis, Smelik articulates an ethics of spectatorship. Against Susan Sontag’s injunction to safeguard the boundaries
separating the real and the unreal, Smelik maintains that “we require
an understanding of the performative aspect of media culture in order
to counteract its perverse effects.” Indeed, “real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies,” as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer warned us more than four decades ago.23 To better engage with
media spectacle, we must cultivate an ethical sensibility and become
more adept readers or witnesses of images. This ethical demand is perhaps most vividly tested in the media’s representations of suffering. With
the globalization of media, television spectators are solicited, seemingly
at every turn, as witnesses of suffering. Responsiveness and responsibility constitute the ethical relation to the suffering other. If the media
spectacle opens one’s exposure to others exponentially—increasing, in
turn, one’s chances of becoming a witness—then the spectator, Smelik
cautions, must resist the fantasy of pure empathy that spectacle makes
all too easy and tempting, hence the need to situate any event or staged
encounter with distant others “in its historical and political context.”
In the words of Kaja Silverman, the ethical spectator declines “idiopathic identification” (which assimilates the other to the self) in favor of
“heteropathic identification” (which recognizes the other’s irreducible
alterity).24
Similarly, in his chapter, “Prediction, Proximity, and Cosmopolitanism in Global Spectacles,” Gaurav Majumdar explores the types of relaINT R OD U C TION
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tions (with others) that rivaling models of cosmopolitanism foster and
deny, and the crucial role that spectacles play in this process. Spectacles make an affective appeal to solidarity; they motivate what can be
described as a cosmopolitan witnessing. Solidarity, however, turns out
to be a less than self-evident ideal. In its hegemonic and ideological
form, solidarity often means “utopian unity” or “euphoric empathy,” or,
in a more general fashion, a phantasmatic sense of belonging. However, in its skeptical mode, solidarity takes on a self-reflexive dimension; in its critical inflection, it entails “an awareness of incomprehension
and revisions of solidarity,” “a self-conscious, bifocal effort.” Attentively
reading Kamau Brathwaite’s poem “Xango,” Majumdar examines how
the text stages competing strands of cosmopolitanism. In Majumdar’s
reading, the poem powerfully gestures to an inclusive cosmopolitanism that celebrates “alliance and multiple combinations, without the
demand for permanence or strict definition,” yet the poem ends up
undermining this line of thought when it “subscribes to the interpellation of a mythic self that is the engine behind the calls for a spectacular
global collective.” The “failure” to uphold the more inclusive version of
cosmopolitanism requires, nonetheless, more interpretative patience. As
Majumdar argues, the force of the poem lies in its staging of the dynamics
of proximity and distance, in its dual—but ultimately compromised—
identificatory logic. Like Kellner and Smelik, Majumdar perceives spectacles as occasions for perpetual resistance, for imagining a “critically
energetic cosmopolitanism”—one that takes the longing for solidarity,
in its endless mutations and revisions, as constitutive of cosmopolitanism’s operative mode.
Compromised/Compromising Spectacles
The next two chapters pursue further the contestatory potential of spectacles through an examination of their renarrativization. Foregrounding the reception of spectacles (how and by whom spectacle is accessed),
these pieces look more closely at the grammar of spectacle: its arrangement of truth and its “reality effect.” Countering the presumed passivity
and alienation of the spectators of spectacles—the truism, since Debord,
that spectacles order desires and thus enslave members of society to
consumer culture—Shiloh Krupar and Matt Reynolds make available
a critique of (the traditional critique of ) spectacle as a phenomenon
of witless consumption, whether in Hollywood qua Hollywood or in a
“nature preserve” meticulously produced and directed by government
defense and environmental agencies. Each suggests (and this gets at
the emancipatory and active dimension of spectacles) that participation in spectacle—as audience members, activists, critics, functionaries,
victims, investors, tourists, or passersby—is multivalent. Participation is
ambiguous, if not ambivalent. Pace Debord, the spectator is never simply
inert. But is the language of agency wholly adequate here? Does a critique of spectacle presuppose a space outside of spectacle? Do spectacles
as such compromise a priori any notion of genuine participation (since
to participate, at any level, is to be interpellated and recuperable by the
dominant social order that spectacles faithfully serve and perpetuate)?
Or is the grammar of spectacle open to innovation and critical recoding? In other words, can spectacles be compromising from within? Is
détournement—the reuse of “any elements, no matter where they are taken
from,” for the purpose of re-visions, of “making new combinations” that
are corrosive to the status quo—a strategic tool, a hermeneutic technique, or an aesthetic practice for rethinking spectacle (mediation) in
less pessimistic terms as a viable and effective form of resistance?25
In “The Biopolitics of Spectacle: Salvation and Oversight at the PostMilitary Nature Refuge,” Shiloh R. Krupar argues that post-military
nature refuges exemplify the biopolitical functions of spectacle. Former
nuclear sites are particularly resonant embodiments of trauma and
memory, as contamination from the production of apocalyptic weapons systems “lives on” beneath the surface of “nature” in the soil and
water, and in the bodies of plants, nuclear workers, and other animals.
As she notes, “biopolitics is the problematization of life—including the
resources of land, animals, and other nonhuman organisms—as an
object of political power.” Krupar identifies two ideological frameworks within which to understand the Colorado post-military sites of
the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge, a former chemical weapons arsenal, and the former plutonium production facility in
Rocky Flats. In the former, the salvation framework (from death in life
to life in death) reproduces a familiar narrative of death and rebirth,
destruction and rehabilitation as a result of human intervention. What
man has put asunder, let nature (or white humans) join back together
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through the rescuing of “purity” via environmental cleanup and the
reappearance of plant and wildlife, returning the area to nature, bald
eagles, genetically improved bison, and, occasionally, Native Americans,
all under the watchful gaze of new environmental tourists and the U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service. As Krupar notes, “the material unsustainability of permanent war, and the spiral of environmental litigation,
cleanup costs, and blame constituting the Rocky Mountain Arsenal’s
history, would now be balanced in social fantasy by the site’s return to
nature and the bald eagle as harbinger.”
The Rocky Flats narrative, on the other hand, utilizes a neoliberal
framework of surveillance and oversight in an attempt to manage the
legacy of hazardous waste production into a timeless future. This is a
story of facts and figures, the expenditure of billions of dollars, and the
transformation of “waste to wilderness.” It describes the co-constitution
of nature with an economic ecosystem born of contamination and
meticulously and perpetually observed, audited, timelined, tested, budgeted, supervised, and otherwise subjected to a regime of the natural,
neoliberal in its reduction to a world of depoliticized (“cleansed”) data
management—“auditing [as] its own performance.” In the end, Krupar
advocates a criticism beyond that confined to “exposing the truth” or
demystifying spectacle (it is all too easy to denounce spectacles as “false”
in favor of an unmediated account of the refuge), for that exposure also
instigates a further consumption that can refuse to rearrange “affect,
materials, and selves differently.” Instead, she suggests that “what is
needed in such cases is a diagnostic that problematizes the visual, that
explores the relations by which something becomes intelligible . . . a practice of criticism that does not aim to deliver a new ontology, but that
aspires to disrupt current arrangements of knowledge, truth, affect, and
matter.” Krupar’s plea for a new criticism that reconfigures preexisting
horizons of intelligibility, for an alternative criticism that disrupts narratives that legitimize how we fit in the neoliberal order of things, resonates
with Jacques Rancière’s definition of politics as the struggle for “a new
landscape of the possible,” as the unsettling of “the order of the visible
and the sayable” and the questioning of the given “distribution of places
and roles.” 26 Rather than seeing knowledge and its restoration of “truth”
as the only, or rather, the most effective antidote to spectacles—a position that invariably connotes a certain paternalism and elitism—Krupar
calls for new narratives of the refuge, enjoining us to come up with new,
and ultimately more democratic, images that rework and expand our
relation to the world, or what Rancière names le partage du sensible, “the
distribution/partition/sharing of the sensible.” 27 For Rancière, emancipation from spectacles involves the transformation of “the frame of our per
ception and the dynamism of our affects,” a troubling of oppositions such
as activity versus passivity, and ignorance versus knowledge.28 “Emancipation begins,” Rancière writes, “when we challenge the opposition
between viewing and acting: when we understand that the self-evident
facts that structure the relations between saying, seeing and doing themselves belong to the structure of domination and subjection.” 29 Emancipation from the “biopolitical functions of spectacles” necessitates an
alternative form of criticism—one that is decisively less pessimistic, that
troubles the idea that life is fully compromised and wholly governed by
power as it reworks and redefines the image of the refuge.
In a similar vein, Matt Reynolds, in the last chapter of this volume,
“Dream Factory Détournement: Freewaves, Art, and Urban Redevelopment in Hollywood,” focuses on the disruptive, counter-hegemonic potential of spectacle turned back on itself. Reynolds explores the political
potential of the 2008 Freewaves biennial in Hollywood—a spectacle
constructed as commentary, critique, and a potentially transformative
set of media exposures of Hollywood as place, mythology, and contradiction. There is a self-consciousness to the Freewaves “Hollywould”
challenge to the Hollywood mythology—an ideology that attributes success, glamour, and wealth to a democratic aesthetic built on individual
talent, raw vision, and endless technological innovation. As a temple of
consumer culture, Hollywood exemplifies spectacle in its Debordian
sense and is, as Reynolds emphasizes, overdetermined. To what extent
can spectacle critique spectacle? Does “Hollywould” succeed in moving
beyond mere exposure toward a new and more just material habitat—a
more democratic “distribution of the sensible”? In contrast to Krupar’s
analysis of the materiality of memory in post-military sites of weapons
contamination, Reynolds’s contribution is a demystifying analysis of a
particular kind of excavation of what lies beneath the Hollywood of our
dreams. Redevelopment projects, gentrification, homelessness, poverty,
and urban grime in video and visual display invite participation by passersby in a rearrangement of the material structural reality on which an
INT R OD U C TION
13
14
industry of the imagination continues to build itself, and proffers a different kind of relationship to new forms of media and artistic representation. But we are still left asking whether there is political potential
in such a displacement and recasting of art in art. Has appropriation
by the Los Angeles County bus system of short video art reduced subversive politics to mundane consumption—thereby offering evidence
of how we remain ensnared in and compromised by the bewitching
logic of consumerist society? Is the avant-garde, in this case, simply
making critique cool, and thus contributing to the gentrification that
was the very subject of the critique? Perhaps. But what Reynolds highlights is less a demystification of Hollywould’s utopian aspirations—
exposing its “appearance” of egalitarianism and the underlying “truth”
of its entrapment in the society of spectacles—than an attentiveness
to the shifting perspectives that the engaged spectator might entertain
of its image. It is not a question here of simply choosing between Hollywould as a compromised image or compromising image. Like the other
contributors to this volume, Reynolds is careful not to arrest the movement of the image, to pin down its meaning(s) and thus erase its complexity. Suspending final judgment (of the type: the event was a success,
it was a failure, etc.), Reynolds opts instead to keep an eye out for what
Hollywould enables (in terms of the forms of perception and the type
of relationality between art and public spaces that it makes possible) and
what it inevitably forecloses (alternative—and perhaps more critical and
egalitarian—ways of living, of dividing up the sensible or reconfiguring
our experiences of the urban world).
The analyses that follow do not aim to provide an exhaustive understanding of spectacles. Nor do they offer a hermeneutic key for unlocking the specularity of any other texts or phenomena. Each chapter
functions as a case study, illustrating a certain staging of spectacle while
simultaneously resisting the imposition of the constraining logic of
spectacles. Debord, for instance, is a pervasive reference in this volume,
yet his ideas are always the subject of critical engagement rather than
mere application. The society of the spectacle that Debord powerfully
described in 1967 may have fully materialized in today’s global market.
But if everything is spectacle, then nothing is. Turning to specific examples
of spectacles—the Arab Spring, the attacks of 9/11, Brathwaite’s cosmobruc e m a g n uss o n a n d Z a h i Z a l l o u a
politanism, the Rocky Mountain Arsenal and Rocky Flats, Hollywould—
serves to counter the impulse for generalization (and pessimism). The
variety of responses to one of the perpetual questions of this volume—
Do spectacles dull critical judgment or enable progressive action?—indeed tells
us much about the ways we imagine globalization and global media. The
essays collected here caution against facile answers, returning to the matter of spectacles with great nuance, revealing their contested and malleable meanings, their interpretive elusiveness, and, finally, pointing to
the ways that, not unlike global processes, they remain unamenable to
disciplinary confinement.
Notes
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1983), thesis 1.
Karl Marx, Wage-Labour and Capital (New York: International Publishers,
1933), 33.
Debord, Society of the Spectacle, thesis 10.
Eugene Arva, “Life as Show Time: Aesthetic Images and Ideological
Spectacles,” Film and Philosophy 7 (2003): 118.
Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible (New York: Routledge, 1996),
195.
Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter
Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), 32.
Jacques Derrida, “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides,” in Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida,
ed. Giovanna Borradori (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003),
90–91.
Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1972), 155. The authors of Afflicted Powers identify the economy
of sameness explicitly with the assimilative logic of the market. Spectacle
names “the submission of more and more facets of human sociability—
areas of everyday life, forms of recreation, patterns of speech, idioms of
local solidarity, kinds of ethical or aesthetic insubordination, the endless
capacities of human beings to evade or refuse the orders brought down
to them from on high—to the deadly solicitations (the lifeless bright
sameness) of the market.” Retort (Ian Boal, T. J. Clark, Joseph Matthews,
and Michael Watts), Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of
War, new ed. (New York: Verso, 2006), 19.
Henry A. Giroux, Beyond the Spectacle of Terrorism: Global Uncertainty and
the Challenge of the New Media (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2006), 28.
INT R OD U C TION
15
10
11
12
16
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
Ibid., thesis 9.
“The spectacle, as a tendency to make one see the world by means of various specialized mediations (it can no longer be grasped directly), naturally finds vision to be the privileged human sense which the sense of
touch was for other epochs; the most abstract, the most mystifiable sense
corresponds to the generalized abstraction of present-day society.” Ibid.,
thesis 18.
Retort, Afflicted Powers, xi, 15.
“The spectacle is the moment when the commodity has attained the
total occupation of social life.” Ibid., thesis 42.
“[The spectacle] is not identifiable with mere gazing, even combined with
hearing. It is that which escapes the activity of men, that which escapes
reconsideration and correction by their work. It is the opposite of dialogue.”
Ibid., thesis 18, emphasis added. Debord did, however, explore the medium
of cinema—a paradigmatic example of technological innovation—for
politically subversive ends, releasing a film version of Society of the Spectacle, bearing the same title, in 1973.
Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, trans. Malcolm Imrie (New
York: Verso, 1998), 27.
“Never before has censorship been so perfect. Never before have those
who are still led to believe, in a few countries, that they remain free citizens, been less entitled to make their opinions heard, wherever it is a
matter of choices affecting their real lives.” Ibid., 22.
Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced
Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 72.
“Once there were scandals, but not any more.” Debord, Comments on the
Society of the Spectacle, 22.
See Slavoj Žižek, “For Egypt, This Is the Miracle of Tahrir Square,” The
Guardian, February 10, 2011, www.theguardian.com/global/2011/feb/
10/egypt-miracle-tahrir-square (accessed July 1, 2013).
Yannis Stavrakakis, Lacan and the Political (New York: Routledge, 1999),
62.
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans.
John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), 126.
Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible, 23.
Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman, “Methods of Detournement,” Situationist
International, ed. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets,
1989), 8.
Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (New
27
28
29
York: Verso, 2009), 103; Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy,
trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999),
29, 28.
Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: Distribution of the Sensible, trans.
Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2004).
Rancière, Emancipated Spectator, 82.
Ibid., 13.
17
INT R OD U C TION
1
Media Spectacle and the
North African Arab Uprisings
Some Critical Reflections
Douglas Kellner
With the development of capitalism, irreversible time is unified on a world
scale. . . . Unified irreversible time is the time of the world market and, as
a corollary, of the world spectacle.
—guy debord, The Society of the Spectacle
I
n the past decades, media spectacle has become a dominant form
in which news and information, politics, war, entertainment, sports,
and scandals are presented to the public and circulated through the
matrix of old and new media and technologies.1 By “media spectacles”
I am referring to media constructs that present events that disrupt ordinary and habitual flows of information, become popular stories that capture the attention of the media and the public, and circulate through
broadcasting networks, the Internet, social networking, smartphones,
and other new media and communication technologies. In a global networked society, media spectacles proliferate instantaneously, become
18
virtual and viral, and give rise to either sociopolitical transformation or
mere moments of media hype and tabloidized sensationalism.
Dramatic news and events are presented as media spectacles and
dominate certain news cycles. Stories like those of the September 11,
2001, terror attacks, Hurricane Katrina, the 2008 U.S. presidential election, the 2011 Arab Uprisings, the Libyan revolution, the U.K. riots, the
Occupy movements, and other major media spectacles of the era cascaded through broadcasting, print, and digital media, seizing people’s
attention and emotions and generating complex and multiple effects
that may make 2011 as memorable a year in the history of social upheaval
as 1968.
In today’s highly competitive media environment, “breaking news” of
various sorts play out as media spectacle, including mega-events like
wars and terrorist attacks; extreme weather disasters; or, in the spring of
2011, political insurrections and upheavals. These spectacles assume a
narrative form and become focuses of attention during a specific temporal and historical period that may last only a few days, or come to
dominate news and information for an extended period of time, as happened with the O.J. Simpson trial and the Clinton sex/impeachment
scandal in the mid-1990s; the stolen election of 2000 in the Bush/Gore
presidential campaign; or natural and other disasters that have significant destructive effects and political implications, such as Hurricane
Katrina, the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, or the Fukushima Daiichi
nuclear catastrophe. Media spectacles can even become signature events
of an entire epoch—as, arguably, were the 9/11 terrorist attacks that
inaugurated a historical period that I describe as Terror War.2
During the spring of 2011, media spectacles of the North African
Arab Uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya emerged, followed by uprisings throughout the Middle East, producing transformative events that
continue to have major consequences. Al-Jazeera, the global Arab cable
broadcasting channel and Internet site located in Doha, referred to
these events collectively as “the Arab Awakening,” a description that suggested that a new era of political struggle and insurrection was emerging in parts of the world that had been ruled for decades by oppressive
dictatorships often supported by Western neocolonial and imperialist
powers. Indeed, the overthrow of dictatorial regimes in Tunisia and
Egypt in the spring of 2011 inspired insurrectionary movements in Libya,
M e d i a S p e c ta c l e a n d t h e Ar a b U pr i s i n gs
19
20
Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria that are ongoing and taking dramatic and
unpredictable forms. Further, the North African Arab Uprisings inspired
the Occupy movements that erupted first in the United States, in September 2011, and then throughout the world.
The media spectacles of the Arab Uprisings thus generated tumultuous global spectacles of political struggle throughout the Middle
East and other parts of the world, in which political upheaval and revolution were circulated, promoted, and took a multitude of forms. I
argue that a significant dimension of globalization involves the circulation of images of popular political uprisings and insurrections. Of
course, globalization continues to reproduce neoliberal market economics and intensifying global economic crisis, but globalization also
has had a significant political and cultural dimension involving the
circulation of discourses of human rights, international law, and democratic resistance—as well as of terrorism and other, darker phenomena.
Globalization is thus highly contradictory and ambiguous, and it is
increasingly a terrain of political and social struggle. 3 This study looks
at the North African Arab Uprisings through the prisms of their circulation as global media spectacles. After describing my concept of media
spectacle, I draw some preliminary conclusions concerning the role of
media spectacle in the Arab Uprisings and contemporary history. First,
however, I want to establish a historical context for what I see as the
emergence of media spectacle as a dominant form of culture, media,
and now political struggle.
The Rise and Triumph of Media Spectacle
The emergence of media spectacle as a dominant form of “breaking
news” that came to construct major news cycles arose as a central mode
of news and information in the United States with the development of
24/7 cable and satellite news channels, which broadcast news and opinion twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. With the rise of global
media based on cable and satellite television and the Internet, the spectacle has become global. Major examples include Gulf War 1, the first
live TV war; the events of 9/11 and associated Al Qaeda terrorist attacks;
the Iraq War of 2003; and, most recently, the Arab Awakening and
Uprisings of 2011.4
D o ug l a s K e l l n e r
The infrastructure of media spectacle that generates its proliferation
is global cable and satellite television, which emerged in the 1980s era
of neoliberalism, deregulation, and increased media monopoly and
competition between different media corporations and media technologies. This period marked the rise of cable news networks that broadcast
news 24/7 and used media spectacle to capture viewers. In the 1990s,
new media and politicized forms of media proliferated, including talk
radio, Fox News, CNN, and other explosive, partisan news and information outlets. Highly politicized mainstream media is exemplified today
in the United States in the battles between the Fox News and MSNBC
cable news channels, as well as on the Internet, which has become a
contested terrain used by the Left, the Right, and everyone in between.
The epoch of neoliberalism also exhibited the rise of “infotainment,”
with the implosion of news and entertainment (seen, for example, in the
O.J. Simpson trial, the Clinton sex scandals, celebrity scandals, and the
like). Fierce competition for ratings and advertising led information
and news to become more visual and engaging, bringing codes of entertainment into journalism. News accordingly became more narrative and
tabloid, with scandals and ever-multiplying segments on fashion, health,
entertainment, and items of personal interest. In this media environment, hard politics and international news are now declining on the
major U.S. television networks like ABC, CBS, and NBC, while the cable
news networks are dominated by media spectacle and often partisan
political talk shows.
The 1990s was an era in which media spectacle accelerated in the
fields of sports, entertainment, fashion, and consumer culture, which
were always domains of the spectacle. In addition, the 1990s witnessed
the spectacle of globalization and anti-globalization movements and the
spectacle of global commodities such as McDonald’s, Nike, NBA basketball, the World Cup, and other global sports phenomena. This was also
a period, aptly known as the blockbuster era, in which spectacle came to
play an even greater role in Hollywood film.
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, blogs, Wikipedia, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter, and other new media and social networking sites further extended the ubiquitous and omnipresent media
matrix. Hence, the political economy and communications technology
infrastructure of media spectacle have generated a proliferation of
21
22
cable and satellite television, followed by the dramatic eruption of new
technologies such as the Internet and social networking media. The
Internet made it possible for more people to voice opinions and to circulate news and information through ever-expanding new media and
social networking sites, and Facebook, MySpace, iPhones and iPads, and
other new technologies enabled everyone to become part of the spectacle (if you can afford and know how to use the technology). Hence, today,
everyone from Hollywood and political celebrities, to Internet activists
in Egypt and Tunisia, to terrorists in groups like Al Qaeda can create
their own media spectacles or participate in the media spectacle of the
day—as the Occupy movements dramatically demonstrated on a global
scale in 2011.
Media spectacles traditionally have an aesthetic dimension and often
are dramatic and bound up with ritual events and competitions, such
as the Olympics, the World Cup, the Super Bowl, or the Oscars. They feature compelling images, montage, and stories; engage mass audiences;
and generate discussion and debate throughout the media.5 Spectacles
have a theatrical dimension and dramatize the key issues and conflicts
of a given society; for example, the O.J. Simpson murder trial and Clinton sex scandals in the 1990s were spectacles in which key battles concerning gender, sexuality, race, celebrity, power, and the justice and
political system played out. Spectacles also take a narrative form, becoming stories around which society is constructed at a given moment, and
they can be contested and used for various social and political ends (as
the 9/11 terror attacks were in the ensuing Terror War). Hence, media
spectacle in the contemporary era encompasses both news and information and sports and entertainment. In the discussion that follows, I
focus on how news media, social networking and new media, and popular forms of entertainment and culture helped circulate the struggles in
the North African Arab Uprisings.
The length, duration, and import of media spectacles, of course, varies. Certain media spectacles like the O.J. Simpson trial may dominate
news cycles until they are replaced by a new media spectacle, such as the
Clinton sex scandals. The September 11, 2001, spectacles of terror
helped generate an era of Terror War, with global terror networks fighting local, national, and global security and military networks, and it may
be that this historical era is coming to an end as the 2011 Arab UprisD o ug l a s K e l l n e r
ings, Occupy movements, and other popular struggles proliferate (of
course, it is likely that both cycles of media spectacle will continue and
overlap for some time).
Hence, new forms of political struggle and insurrection are emerging
as a potent and fecund field of media spectacle. In this chapter, I explore
the emergence of the new forms and strategies of struggle that erupted
in 2011 in the North African Arab Uprisings. But, first, let me further
explicate and illustrate my concept of media spectacle, and how it differs from that of Guy Debord, whose book The Society of the Spectacle had
a major impact on post-1960s critical theory and shaped my own work
in multiple ways.
Guy Debord and The Society of the Spectacle
To clarify my concept of media spectacle, I will first indicate some differences between my use of the concept and French theorist Guy Debord’s
concept of the “society of the spectacle,” which he developed with his
comrades in the Situationist International, and which has had a major
impact on a variety of contemporary theories of society and culture.6
Debord’s concept of the society of the spectacle, first developed in
the 1960s, continues to circulate through the Internet and other academic and subcultural sites today. It describes a media and consumer
society organized around the production and consumption of images,
commodities, and staged events. For Debord, spectacle “unifies and
explains a great diversity of apparent phenomena,” including media
events and programming; advertising and the display of commodities;
and stores, malls, and other sites of consumption.7
Hence, for Debord, spectacle constituted the overarching concept to
describe the media and consumer society, including the packaging, promotion, and display of commodities and the production and effects of
all media. Using the term “media spectacle,” I focus largely on various
forms of productions that are technologically constructed and disseminated through the so-called mass media and now also through new
media and social networking sites, ranging from radio and television to
the Internet and the latest wireless gadgets and social networking. Every
medium—from music to television, from news to advertising—features
multitudinous forms of spectacle; in the realm of music, there is the
23
24
classical music spectacle, the opera spectacle, the rock spectacle, and
the hip hop spectacle. Spectacle forms evolve over time and multiply
with new technological developments.
As we proceed into an era of ever-proliferating spectacle, multiple
media are becoming more technologically dazzling and are playing
expanding and intensifying roles in everyday life. Under the influence
of a multimedia image culture, seductive spectacles fascinate the denizens of the media and consumer society and involve them in the semiotics of an ever-expanding world of entertainment, information, and
consumption, which deeply influence thought and action. In Debord’s
words: “When the real world changes into simple images, simple images
become real beings and effective motivations of a hypnotic behavior.
The spectacle as a tendency to make one see the world by means of various
specialized mediations (it can no longer be grasped directly), naturally
finds vision to be the privileged human sense which the sense of touch
was for other epochs.”8
Experience and everyday life are thus shaped and mediated for
Debord by the spectacles of media culture and consumer society. For
Debord, the spectacle is a tool of pacification and depoliticization; it is
a “permanent opium war” that stupefies social subjects and distracts
them from the most urgent task of real life—recovering the full range
of their human powers through creative practice.9 Debord’s concept of
the spectacle is integrally connected to the concept of separation and passivity, for in submissively consuming spectacles, one is estranged from
actively producing one’s life. Capitalist society separates workers from
the products of their labor, art from life, and consumption from human
needs and self-directing activity, as individuals inertly observe the spectacles of social life from within the privacy of their homes.10 The Situationist project, by contrast, involved an overcoming of all forms of
separation, in which individuals would directly produce their own life
and modes of self-activity and collective practice, illustrated today by the
Occupy movements.
The correlative to the spectacle for Debord is the spectator, the reactive viewer and consumer of a social system predicated on submission,
conformity, and the cultivation of marketable difference. Debord’s concept of the spectacle therefore involves a distinction between passivity
and activity, and between consumption and production, condemning
lifeless consumption of spectacle as alienation from the human potential for creativity and imagination. The spectacular society spreads its
wares mainly through the cultural mechanisms of leisure and consumption, services and entertainment, ruled by the dictates of advertising
and a commercialized media culture.
This structural shift to a society of the spectacle involves a commodification of previously noncolonized sectors of social life and an extension of bureaucratic control to the realms of leisure, desire, and everyday
life. Parallel to the Frankfurt School’s concept of a “totally administered”
or “one-dimensional” society, Debord states that “the spectacle is the
moment when the consumption has attained the total occupation of social
life.”11 Here, exploitation is raised to a psychological level; basic physical
privation is augmented by “enriched privation” of pseudo-needs; alienation is generalized and made comfortable, and alienated consumption
becomes “a duty supplementary to alienated production.”12
Hence, Debord’s work is totalizing, with spectacle reproducing the
entirety of capitalist media/consumer society, so that for Debord everything is part of the spectacle. By contrast, I analyze specific media spectacles and types of media spectacle, such as the 9/11 attacks and the acts
of domestic terrorism and school shootings that I described in my 2008
book Guys and Guns Amok. Thus, while Debord presents a rather generalized and abstract notion of spectacle, I engage specific examples of
media spectacle and how they are produced, constructed, and circulated in the present era. In addition, I read the production, text, and
effects of various media spectacles from a standpoint within contemporary U.S. and global society in order to illuminate and theorize their
sociopolitical dynamics and culture, and more broadly, globalization
and global culture. Debord, by contrast, analyzes a specific stage of capitalist society, that of the media and consumer society organized around
spectacle. In addition, Debord deploys a French radical intellectual and
neo-Marxian perspective, while I employ a multiperspectivist model,
using Frankfurt School critical theory, British cultural studies, French
postmodern theory, and many other theoretical constructs.13
In sum, Debord’s concept of the spectacle is monolithic and overpowering. For Debord, the society of the spectacle generates a system of
domination enforcing passivity, obedience, consumerism, and submission. To be sure, Debord opposes the passive spectator of spectacle and
25
26
valorizes the active creator of situations, and he offers strategies for
forms of resistance to the spectacle that have been influential on subsequent politics and continue to be influential in an era of new media and
social networking.14 Yet Debord’s conception of creating situations tends
to valorize artistic and subcultural activity, while I suggest that media
spectacle itself is a contested terrain that can be a force of opposition and
resistance, as well as of domination and hegemony—and can be a site of
contestation, reversal, and even revolution, as I argue in this chapter.
Further, I analyze the contradictions and reversals of the spectacle,
whereas Debord tends to project a unitary and hegemonic notion of the
society of the spectacle, although he and his comrades sketched out
various models of opposition and struggle and in fact partially inspired
the rather spectacular May 1968 events in France. For an example of the
reversal of a media spectacle, or at least its contradictions and contestation, the Clinton sex scandal became a contested arena in which, surprisingly, President Clinton’s popularity rose as the scandal unfolded
and the Republicans began pursuing impeachment.15 While the 2003
Iraq War was initially presented as a triumph for the Bush/Cheney administration and the Pentagon, it was contested and soon became an unpopular war.16 Barack Obama arguably won the Democratic Party primary
because he was the only major Democratic candidate who opposed the
Iraq War in the beginning, although Obama was also a master of media
spectacle, which enabled him to win the presidency in 2008 and become
a world-class celebrity.17 Yet in an intensely polarized U.S. society, the
Obama spectacle has itself become sharply contested, as his opponents
attempted by all possible means to undermine his presidency, and the
2012 presidential election saw a sharp contest between a pro- and antiObama spectacle, with Obama decisively beating Republican candidate
Mitt Romney.18
Finally, Debord’s analysis of the spectacle is denunciatory, developing
a neo-Marxian attack on consumer capitalism. My concept, by contrast,
is diagnostic, analyzing social problems, conflicts, and key events and
transformations of the contemporary era. Debord’s notion of the society of the spectacle theorizes the emergence in the post–World War II
era of the media and consumer society and continues to be relevant in
analyzing social formations and politics. Both his social critique and
models of radical politics remain of utmost importance for critical social
theory and radical politics today. Yet the emergence of new media, new
forms of global capitalism, and new models of political struggle call for
updating Debord’s concepts in a transformed socioeconomic, political,
and cultural context. These new forms of global struggle are illustrated
in the North African Arab Uprisings and the Occupy movements, the
former of which I engage in this study.
27
The North African Arab Uprisings
During the Spring 2011 North African Arab Uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt,
and Libya, political insurgencies and hoped-for revolutions unfolded
as media spectacles that circulated images and discourses of revolt,
freedom, and democracy via global media. These insurrections—which
erupted in late January 2011 and continued to shake the world and
reconstitute the political landscape of North Africa and the Middle East
throughout 2011 and into the foreseeable future—may be seen in retrospect as inaugurating a new epoch of history, in which political uprisings and insurrections radicalize entire regions of the world and drive
out corrupt and entrenched dictatorships.
To begin, however, I should offer some caveats. Although Al-Jazeera,
CNN, and most U.S. media networks at first repeatedly used the term
“revolution” to describe the events in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, we do
not know if a thorough transformation of these societies will take place or
not. Thus, I use the more modest term “uprisings” to describe the important media spectacles and political insurrections of the Arab Spring,
which may yet be looked back on as world-historical and transformative events.19
It is, to be sure, “revolutionary” to overthrow military regimes and
corrupt dictators who have been oppressing their people for decades. It
is “revolutionary” to put aside a government and political system and
to construct another, freer and more democratic, one. It is tremendous
that self-organizing people can produce a democratic upheaval that may
fundamentally alter their political fate and future. The events of the
Arab Spring are clearly astonishing examples of people’s power, of the
masses becoming a force in history who throw off decades of oppression
and fundamentally alter the forces of sovereignty in specific societies.
However, it was initially unclear if the North African Uprisings would
28
produce a revolution proper. First, it was not certain what form the military government in Egypt, for example, would take in the immediate
future, and it remains uncertain what forms of government will emerge
in Egypt after the election of a Muslim Brotherhood candidate,
Mohamed Morsi, in June 2012, or what kind of constitution and forms
of government the Egyptian upheaval will produce after demonstrations against Morsi’s attempt to impose an Islamic constitution and
assembly on Egypt, struggles still ongoing as I write in early 2013.20
Hence, it would be premature to pronounce the ““eighteen days that
shook the world in Egypt” a “revolution” at this time—nor can we predict the form that the insurrections will ultimately take in Tunisia,
Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, and other Middle Eastern states that were
challenged by their people in the Arab Spring that blossomed into a
year of upheaval in 2011, and have since taken a turbulent course.
To be sure, it is remarkable that the Egyptians threw out the corrupt
leaders and functionaries of the past three decades, but if the Morsi
government imposes an Islamic regime on the Egyptian people, or if
there is a military coup, it would be utterly inappropriate to use the
word “revolution.” This is why I suggest using the terms “uprising” and
“insurrection” to describe the upheavals in the Middle East and elsewhere in the contemporary moment.
In addition, I advocate a multicausal analysis, arguing that media
spectacles such as presidential elections, wars, and political uprisings
and upheaval have multiple causes and are caught up in a complex
matrix of events. For instance, there was not just one cause that generated the Bush/Cheney intervention in Iraq in 2003. While the official
stated reason for the United States’s entry into war in Iraq—to eliminate Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction”—was obviously
bogus, there were multiple hidden agendas that led the United States
to invade and occupy Iraq.21 These included gaining control of Iraqi oil
and establishing bases in the Middle East for future interventions; the
tremendous amount of money made by war contractors often closely
related to the Bush/Cheney gang; and a wealth of geopolitical factors.
Arguably, the Bush/Cheney Iraq intervention was organized as a
media spectacle intended to present U.S. military power as dominant in
the world and to establish new U.S. military bases in the Middle East
near the world’s largest oil supplies. A successful intervention into Iraq
would also help with the re-election of the Bush/Cheney gang. The Iraq
(mis)adventure embodied the fantasies of George W. Bush and a cabal
of neoconservative ideologues who envisaged a New American Century and the emergence of Western-style “democracies” throughout the
region. Bush imagined that he was battling the forces of “evil” and could
succeed in destroying a force of evil that his father had failed to eliminate. Thus, while the official justification of seizing Saddam Hussein’s
“weapons of mass destruction” was clearly a fake excuse, it would also be
a mistake to see the Iraq invasion simply as a grab for oil, or the result of
any other single primary cause.
Major events like the Bush/Cheney administration’s Iraq intervention
and the North African Arab Uprisings are thus overdetermined, and
have multiple causes. The dynamics in each specific case are dissimilar,
although there may be common goals, aspirations, and tactics of struggle. Hence, I do not want to argue that media spectacle is the primary
cause of current events and world history today, but instead to suggest
that it is a form in which political insurrections and struggles are represented and circulated that can become causal factors in an overdetermined matrix of events. For instance, the Tunisian Uprising could have
helped inspire an Egyptian Uprising, which apparently helped inspire
uprisings in Libya and throughout the Middle East. In all cases of the
Arab Uprisings, masses of people who had long been oppressed suddenly
rose up and demanded radical change and democratic freedoms.
The North African Uprisings thus constituted a break and rupture
with the totalitarian governments that previously ruled the region, and in
turn inspired uprisings and a cycle of struggles throughout North Africa
and the Middle East. Media spectacle became the form of the uprisings
that were circulated via Al-Jazeera and other television networks, new
media like Facebook and YouTube, and various social networking groups.
In each case, there were unprecedentedly large demonstrations in oppressive societies that had not allowed freedom of speech and assembly, and
state authoritarian governments fought back against the demonstrators,
often killing many who then became martyrs. In turn, demonstrations
often erupted at the martyrs’ funerals and continued to intensify, with
radical demands for the dictators and their regimes to go and for power
to be given to the people. In many cases, participants in the struggles
took their own videos of state violence against the protestors, which
29
30
were circulated via Twitter, YouTube, and cell phone networks on the
Internet, and in some cases through global cable TV networks. The
people were participating in the creation of the spectacles of the Arab
Awakening and Uprising, and not only because their bodies were part of
the democratic masses. Individuals within the masses also found their
own voices and helped construct the spectacle through their own D.I.Y.
(i.e., do-it-yourself) media artifacts uploaded to the Internet, circulated
via social networking, and in some cases disseminated through global
television networks like Al-Jazeera.
Looked at globally and historically, the recent North African Arab
Uprisings can be read as a set of interconnected spectacles with many
parts, as were the anti-Communist uprisings in 1989 that led to the collapse of the Berlin Wall and Soviet Empire, and then to the fall of the
Soviet Union itself, world-historical events that provide an anticipatory
parallel to the media spectacles in the Middle East. In the 1980s, demonstrations by the Solidarity movement in Poland were visible in Hungary via television and other media, helping to inspire demonstrations
in that country that in turn were visible in other Eastern bloc countries,
such as East Germany (DDR) and Czechoslovakia. The powerful images
of people uprising against the Communist regimes, demanding freedom and a new society, produced a chain of movements, insurrections,
and overthrowing of communist regimes, much like the Arab Uprisings,
as well as the collapse of bureaucratic state Communism. In this complex historical matrix, the then-dominant broadcasting media of television circulated images and forms of struggle that were seen throughout
the Soviet bloc countries, helping to produce multiple uprisings and
the delegitimation of autocratic Communist regimes, leading to the
collapse of Soviet Empire in eastern Europe, and culminating in the
fall of the Berlin Wall and the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia in
1989.22 These dramatic events of 1989 eventually led to the collapse of
the Soviet regime in the U.S.S.R, driving some people to see 1989 as the
beginning a new epoch in world history.23
Images of the spectacle of uprisings against repressive state Communist governments and social systems resonated with citizens of other
oppressed countries in the Soviet bloc, and these resonant and viral
images spread through the global broadcasting and news networks and
inspired people in neighboring Soviet bloc countries, helping to motiD o ug l a s K e l l n e r
vate people to hit the streets and demonstrate for change themselves.
Hence, throughout the Eastern bloc state communist nations, there
were uprisings and struggles, and governments resigning or being overthrown. The democratic revolutions thus inspired a whole cycle of struggle in 1989—just as we are now seeing in the Middle East and North
African Arab Uprisings.
Although such events are complex and overdetermined, and media
spectacle alone is but one factor in the complex matrix of history, it is
certainly a significant and increasingly important one as media spectacles proliferate globally through new media and social networking.
Indeed, broadcasting and new media have become ubiquitous throughout the Middle East, as they have become part of a new global media
ecology.24 In the following sections, I discuss the role of Al-Jazeera, new
media and social networking, and media spectacle in the Arab Awakening and Uprisings of 2011, but I am also concerned with providing a
contextual and multicausal analysis of these events, beginning with
Tunisia and then turning to Egypt.25 While my argument is that media
spectacle is the form in which the Arab Awakening and Uprising circulated throughout North Africa and the Middle East, media spectacle
itself is not the cause of the cascading insurrections, and each country
needs to be addressed separately in terms of its own history, society,
culture, and political regimes, which I do below.
Sparks in Tunisia
The rapid cycle of North African Arab Uprisings began when a twentysix-year-old Tunisian man named Mohamed Bouazizi, who could not find
work and was reduced to selling produce from a cart in the street, set
himself on fire in front of the local governor’s office on December 17,
2010, in Bouzid, an impoverished agricultural town. His act helped spark
uprisings in Tunisia and then in Egypt and Libya. Bouazizi’s family and
friends recount that he took these desperate measures because he had
become unbearably angry after being repeatedly mistreated by the police,
who threatened to close down his cart if he did not pay them bribes.26
On February 19, 2011, 60 Minutes broadcast an episode titled “The
Spark” that described how, following the self-immolation protest, activists in Tunisia began circulating images of Bouazizi. They made him
31
32
into a martyr, organizing marches commemorating him and protesting the oppressive Tunisian regime. The protests escalated as Tunisian
forces shot at protestors, leading to bigger demonstrations that were further energized on January 24, 2011, when dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben
Ali, who had been in power for twenty-three years, fled the country.27
I might note that the man who set himself on fire was emulating Buddhist monks in Vietnam in the 1960s, whose widely broadcast and discussed self-immolations helped generate a worldwide antiwar movement.
The global nature of spectacle was also highlighted in the 60 Minutes
episode, in which Tunisian Internet activists were interviewed. These
activists had helped mobilize the insurgency, and they were connected
to Egyptian Internet activists who would use similar tactics in Egypt,
suggesting the rise of a Youth International of Internet activists.28
While there were claims that the Tunisian Uprising was the “first Wiki
Leaks revolution” because oppressive features of the Tunisian regime
were documented by WikiLeaks, which presented notes of American
diplomats discussing the corruption of President Ben Ali and his family,
it is also believed that people already knew that their regime was oppressive and corrupt.29 Further, Al-Jazeera and other Arab networks covered
the Tunisian Uprising and circulated protests and critiques of the Ben
Ali regime.
Hence, I am not arguing that media spectacle was the key causal
force of the Tunisian Uprising; obviously, there were many factors that
alienated the Tunisians and led them to take to the streets, including the
autocratic and corrupt nature of the regime. These factors included
Tunisia’s economic situation, with declining jobs and job possibilities,
rising food prices, and worker unrest, all of which contributed to the
Tunisian upheaval that drove out Ben Ali, his family, and some of the
regime’s corrupt associates.
Ben Ali came into power on November 7, 1987, after attending physicians to the former president, Habib Bourguiba, declared that Bourguiba was medically incapacitated and unable to fulfill the duties of the
presidency. Ben Ali, previously prime minister, achieved power through
a “soft coup d’etat” and preserved Tunisia’s republican tradition, keeping power by winning two elections. The Ben Ali regime pursued neoliberal economic policies, dismantling a heavily statist economy and
winning praise from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World
Bank. While the country’s gross national product grew in recent years,
unemployment skyrocketed and educated youth were having trouble
finding jobs.30 At the same time, Ben Ali’s family and regime became
more and more blatantly corrupt, and Ben Ali became increasingly
authoritarian, alienating vast sectors of the society.
The Tunisian Uprising against the Ben Ali regime exhibited the rise
of the masses against a totalitarian dictatorship in a popular struggle
with no apparent leaders, no dominant parties, and no discernible hierarchy, with individuals from diverse classes, ages, religion, and ways of
life fusing together into a collective mass whose power frightened the
corrupt dictator and caused him to flee, after the military made it clear
that they were not going to fire on the masses of protestors. Demonstrators included older people, professional men and women, students,
workers, and the unemployed. No one predicted this momentous insurrection, and so far, to my knowledge, few have adequately described its
genealogy and prehistory.31
Indeed, the Tunisian Uprising had multiple origins and forces who
participated in the struggles, from workers to students, intellectuals,
and women. As Kevin Anderson notes:
Although not widely reported at the time, the mass strikes of 2008 in Gafsa
were one indicator of the underlying social tensions in Tunisia. This phosphate-mining region, long a center of labor unrest, has in recent decades
been wracked by mass unemployment due to mechanization. In January
2008, the Gafsa phosphate miners rose up after a rare instance of taking
on new hires at the mines showed that those hired were the beneficiaries
of corruption and nepotism. The revolt lasted six months, after which several of its leaders were imprisoned. Gafsa strikers were not supported by
the UGTT [General Union of Tunisian Works], then still tied closely to the
state. The workers did gain the support of dissident bloggers and Facebook
users, however, who launched a campaign on behalf of those imprisoned.32
Robin Morgan describes how, in Tunisia’s relatively secular and progressive society, women had earlier gained rights to contraception,
divorce, and relative equality. In the Tunisian Uprising, women sought
more democratic power and rose up against continued inequality. In
Tunisia’s “Jasmine revolution,” a blogger named Lina Ben Mhenni, known
33
to the world simply as “tunisian girl,” was one of the first to alert the
world to the Tunisian Uprising, and she called for women to join in the
demonstrations. Hence, in Robin Morgan’s words: “Women flocked to
rallies—wearing veils, jeans, and miniskirts—young girls, grandmothers, female judges in their court robes. They ousted a despot and inspired
a region.”33 In addition, as feminist scholar Nadia Marzouki notes:
34
At all the major demonstrations leading to Ben Ali’s flight from the country,
men and women marched side by side, holding hands and chanting
together in the name of civil rights, not Islam. The national anthem, not
“Allahu akbar,” was the dominant rallying cry, and the women were both
veiled and unveiled. The tone of the protests was rather one of reappropriating patriotic language and symbols: Women and men lay in the streets
to spell “freedom” or “stop the murders” with their bodies and worked
together to tear down and burn the gigantic, Stalin-style portraits of Ben
Ali on storefronts and street corners.34
Demonstrations intensified, and when the General Union of Tunisian
Works (UGTT) broke away from the ruling apparatus, joined the demonstrators, participated in a blockade against the Interior Ministry, and
supported a general strike, the military saw that the regime could not be
defended. It refused to fire on demonstrators and supported Ben Ali’s
ouster. Al-Jazeera also reported over the weekend of January 8–9 that
two thousand members of the police, who had been on the front line of
repressing demonstrations, joined the protestors. While Ben Ali desperately announced that he would not run for another term on January 13,
2011, and pledged to improve the economy and allow freedom of the
press, while also declaring a state of emergency, protesters responded
with a massive demonstration, demanding that he resign. On January 14,
he fled the country.35
On Saturday, January 15, it was announced that Ben Ali was seeking
asylum in Saudi Arabia, and that Tunisian prime minister Mohamed
Ghannouchi had declared temporary rule and promised elections for
the fall, leading exultant Tunisians to explode with joy while people
throughout the Middle East looked on with wonder. Tunisians were
suspicious of the new caretaker government, which was dominated by
members of Ben Ali’s party, the Constitutional Democratic Party (CDP).
Eventually, all members of the party were eliminated from the new coalition government, which included Tunisian blogger Slim Amamou (a.k.a.
Slim404), who had helped organize the Tunisian Uprising and was made
Minister of Youth and Sport in the postrevolutionary government.
Members of underground music scenes and subcultures had also
contributed to the uprising, including Skander Besbes (a.k.a. Skhder),
described as a “luminary of Tunisia’s electro and dance scene, [who] in
clubs and rave nights used the explosive sound system to present attacks
on the government and prepare youth for the uprising.” Andy Morgan
notes that electronic music was relatively safe as a protest form in Tunisia because it was instrumental, and “metal and rock were partially protected by English lyrics which the police didn’t understand.” Yet, Morgan
explains:
It took a rapper to galvanise Tunisia’s youth, whose frustration had been
fuelled by years of government corruption, nepotism, ineptitude and general state-imposed joylessness. Until a few months ago, Hamada Ben Amor,
aka El Général, was just a 21-year-old wannabe MC in a Stussy hoodie,
leather jacket and baseball cap. He lived with his parents and elder brother
in a modest flat in a drab seaside town south of Tunis called Sfax, where
his mother runs a bookshop and his father works in the local hospital. El
Général didn’t even register on the radar of Tunisian rap’s premier league
which was dominated by artists such as Balti, Lak3y, Armada Bizera or
Psyco M. It was a community riven by the usual jealous spats and dwarfed
by the more prolific rap scenes of Morocco and France.
Morgan recounts that on November 7, 2010, El Général “uploaded a
piece of raw fury called ‘Rais Le Bled’ (President, Your Country) on to
Facebook. The lyrics contained a resounding political attack”:
My president, your country is dead
People eat garbage
Look at what is happening
Misery everywhere
Nowhere to sleep
I’m speaking for the people who suffer
Ground under feet.
35
36
Morgan describes how “within hours, the song had lit up the bleak
and fearful horizon like an incendiary bomb. Before being banned, it
was picked up by local TV station Tunivision and al-Jazeera. El Général’s
MySpace [account] was closed down, his mobile cut off. But it was too
late. The shock waves were felt across the country and then throughout
the Arab world. That was the power of protesting in Arabic, albeit a
locally spiced dialect of Arabic. El Général’s bold invective broke frontiers and went viral, from Casablanca to Cairo and beyond.”36
This example points to the presence of an Arab public sphere that
operates across diverse media and borders, in which music, poetry, art,
and other cultural forms function to circulate forms of cultural resistance that came together in the Arab Uprising.37 While U.S. media provided very little coverage of the Tunisian Uprising, Al-Jazeera closely
covered the events, as it had during the demonstrations in Iran in 2009,
and it would continue to cover and circulate the Arab Awakening and
Uprisings. The synergy of global media television coverage with Internet, and social networking documentation and promotion, the fusion of
artists and cultural critics with the movement, and the coming together
of multiple organizations and social strata helped circulate the Tunisian
Uprising to Egypt and then the Egyptian Uprising to the entire Middle
East and beyond.
Upheaval in Egypt
Egypt has been one of the great historical civilizations and traditional
major political and cultural influences in the Middle East, but suffered for more than thirty years under the corrupt and dictatorial rule
of Hosni Mubarak, who ascended to the presidency in 1981 after the
assassination of Anwar al-Sadat. While Mubarak ostensibly introduced
a system of “democratic” elections, they were farces, with Mubarak
winning 99.99 percent of the vote in the elections of 1987, 1993, 1999,
and 2005. While Mubarak himself was old and sick, he and his cronies
were pushing for his son Gamal to succeed him, setting up a family
dynasty. The Mubarak regime was one of the most corrupt and repressive in the region, increasingly hated by its people and thus rife for an
upheaval. 38
A series of anticipatory events, circulated via the Middle Eastern and
global media, inspired the tumultuous and significant 2011 insurrection against the Mubarak regime. These events included a revolt of textile workers, who demonstrated against Mubarak in 2008 in the city of
El Mahalla el Kubra; demonstrators stomped on Mubarak’s picture,
police shot into the crowd, killing two, and the event and two murdered
workers were made martyrs on YouTube and Facebook.39 As Joel Benin
has argued, Egypt’s workers had been steadily organizing independent
trade unions outside of the state union movement dominated by the
Mubarak government, had successfully been making economic and political demands, and were an important part of the movement that overthrew Mubarak.40
While Mubarak had ruled Egypt with an iron hand since assuming
power, there were many democratic forces mobilized against him from
all sectors of society. In a series of short essays from 2005 up to the uprisings, Egyptian writer Alaa Al Aswany documented numerous critiques,
protests, and forces of opposition emerging in Egypt during the previous decade.41 Actors in these events included intellectuals, politicians,
students, and many others throughout Egyptian society. Concerning
the important role of women, Robin Morgan notes that despite decades
of dictatorship, “a long-established feminist movement has survived
there. Women had been key to the 1919 revolution against the British,
but after independence were ignored by the ruling Wafd Party.”42 Documenting specific events that helped spark the uprising, Shahin and Juan
Cole note that:
In Egypt, the passionate video blog or “vlog” of Asmaa Mahfouz that
called on Egyptians to turn out massively on January 25th in Tahrir Square
went viral, playing a significant role in the success of that event. Mahfouz
appealed to Egyptians to honor four young men who, following the example
of Mohammed Bouazizi (in an act which sparked the Tunisian uprisings),
set themselves afire to protest the Mubarak regime. Although the secret police had already dismissed them as “psychopaths,” she insisted otherwise, demanding a country where people could
live in dignity, not “like animals.” According to estimates, at least 20%
of the crowds that thronged Tahrir Square that first week were made up
37
of women, who also turned out in large numbers for protests in the Mediterranean port of Alexandria. Leil-Zahra Mortada’s celebrated Facebook
album of women’s participation in the Egyptian revolution gives a sense
of just how varied and powerful that turnout was.43
38
Hence, the Egyptian Uprising can be read as a fusing of workers,
students, women, and individuals from a diversity of popular movements.44 A PBS Frontline Report titled “Revolution in Cairo” (February 22,
2011) described how a group of young students and professionals had
for the past three years been organizing an April 6 Youth Movement,
commemorating a 2008 labor demonstration, developing a website and
Facebook page documenting the crimes of the Mubarak regime, and
organizing protests.45
After the murder by Mubarak thugs of Khalid Said, a young Egyptian
who was beaten to death by police in June 2010, Google executive Wael
Ghonim helped to establish a Facebook page called “We are all Khalid
Said” to commemorate the martyr. The Facebook page eventually had
more than 1,500,000 followers and was used by activists to educate
Egyptians and others about the horrors of the Mubarak regime and to
develop democracy movements. As Linda Herrera describes it in “Egypt’s
Revolution 2.0: The Facebook Factor,”
The events leading to Khaled’s killing originated when he supposedly
posted a video of two police officers allegedly dividing the spoils of a drug
bust. This manner of citizen journalism has become commonplace and
youth are getting more emboldened to expose the festering corruption of
a police force that acts with impunity. On June 6, 2010, as Khaled Said
was sitting in an internet café in Alexandria, two police officers entered
and asked him for his I.D. He refused to produce it and they proceeded
to drag him away and allegedly sadistically beat him to his death as he
pleaded for his life in the view of witnesses. The officers claimed that
Khaled died of suffocation after swallowing a packet of drugs. His family
released a photograph to an activist of the broken, bloodied, and dis
figured face from Khaled’s corpse. This photo, and a portrait of the
gentle soft skinned face of the living Khaled, went viral. The power of
photographic evidence combined with eyewitness accounts and popular
knowledge of police brutality left no doubt in anyone’s mind that he was
senselessly and brutally murdered by police officers, the very people who
are supposed to act in the interest of public safety.46
Ahmed Maher, Ghonim, and other Egyptian Internet activists used
the Khalid Said page and other Internet tools to organize a demonstration in Tahrir Square titled “January 25: Revolution against Torture,
Corruption, Unemployment and Injustice,” also billed as a “Day of
Rage.”47 Thousands appeared at the demonstration, which became
focused on overthrowing the Mubarak regime, and for the next eighteen days a movement centered in Tahrir Square grew that would lead
to the end of Mubarak’s rule.
There were, therefore, arguably multiple genealogies and anticipations of the Egyptian Uprising. Robin Morgan describes the role of
women in Tahrir Square, where, according to Amal Adbel Hady of the
New Women Foundation, “all generations and social classes were represented.” While Hady noticed that much more media attention was
focused on men rather than women, Morgan notes that on January 18,
2011, a woman “whom Egyptians now call ‘Leader of the revolution’ . . .
uploaded a short video to YouTube and Facebook in which she
announced, ‘Whoever says women shouldn’t go to protests because they
will get beaten, let him have some honor and manhood and come with
me on January 25.’ The video went viral. The planned one-day demonstration became a popular phenomenon.”48
In addition, there had been heavy media coverage of the Iran demonstrations and calls for regime change after an allegedly stolen election
in 2009. Indeed, for years Al-Jazeera has been promoting democracy in
the Middle East, and has regularly produced critiques of corrupt
regimes, presented demonstrations and calls for change, and debated
Middle East politics.49 Commentators noted that Al-Jazeera “has
emerged as a full-fledged political actor because it reflects and articulates popular sentiment. It has become the new Nasser. The leader of
the Arab world is a television network.”50 In addition to Al-Jazeera, an
oppositional Internet culture, as noted, had been steadily developing
in Tunisia and Egypt, including connections between youth in these
countries, who also had external help from hacker groups abroad: “In
Operation Egypt and Operation Tunisia, Anonymous and other groups
coordinated to restore citizens’ access to websites blocked by the govM e d i a S p e c ta c l e a n d t h e Ar a b U pr i s i n gs
39
40
ernment. The efforts extended beyond the Internet, with faxes used
to communicate vital information as a means of last resort. (In classic
‘lulzy’ style. Cyberactivists also caused havoc by ordering enormous
quantities of pizza delivered to Egyptian and Tunisian embassies.)”51
Egypt had suffered thirty years of a corrupt dictatorship, the Mubarak
thug regime, which had long oppressed the people and made them ripe
for revolt (as the Soviet regime had in the 1980s). 52 Likewise, the economic situation was bad in Egypt, especially for educated young people
who could not get good jobs. Yet it appears that Internet activists and
young people began the revolt in Egypt and continued to support it
throughout the struggle. As was well publicized, former Google manager Wael Ghonim admits that after the Tunisian uprising and regime
change, he and other young people used Facebook and Twitter to organize demonstrations in four different Cairo squares, unleashing massive
protests and coining the phrase “Revolution 2.0.”53 I myself received an
email from a young scholar named Bahaa Gamil Ghobrial, whom I had
met at a conference in the United States in December 2010, documenting the role of new media and social networking:
The demonstration started on Jan 25th and the call for it was done mainly
through Facebook. Because of the government’s heavy control over all the
traditional media, the Internet is the only available option for all opposition
parties and movements.
The youth who called for the first demonstration on Jan 25th belong
to upper middle class in Egypt and most of them, if not all, have Internet
access. So, I agree with the argument that information technology and
social networks, such as Facebook contributed greatly to the uprising—
propelling it forward and enabling Egyptians to self-organize. Facebook is
the second most visited website in Egypt (around 5 million Facebook users)
and it is followed by YouTube (the third most visited website). Twitter is
ranked 21 among the most visited websites in Egypt, but I believe that it
will be soon in the top fifteen most visited websites after the uprising in
Egypt. Kindly find attached two images regarding the increase of tweets
after Jan 25th.
Also, last Wednesday the new prime minister decided to unblock the
Internet after 5 days of shutting it down; so we started to use it to mobilize
citizens and encourage them to participate in the demonstrations. As you
might know, sometimes these demonstrations are not safe; so, as soon
as we reach Tahrir Square, we take photos of the demonstration and
upload them to our Facebook profiles to tell our friends that we are participating and encourage them to come over.
In addition, we currently have two teams in Egypt, anti-Mubarak and
pro-Mubarak; so, we are using new media tools, such as Facebook and
YouTube, to show pro-Mubarak people what the regime did to protesters.
Many of the pro-Mubarak people were convinced that Mubarak should step
down after watching these videos.
The survey that I conducted for my thesis was about the impact of new
media on political communication in Egypt with a special focus on the
Egyptian Presidential election in 2011. 54
There is no question that social networking and new media contributed to the Egyptian Uprising, but to the issue of whether the events can
be interpreted as a “Twitter revolution,” I would argue that new media
and social networking are only part of the story. I am against technological determinism and exaggerating the causal force of new media, and I
am hesitant at this point to use the term “revolution.” To be sure, Facebook pages commemorated martyrs who had been killed by police in
the current and previous demonstrations and, according to my Egyptian colleague cited above, YouTube and Facebook communiqués concerning repression of Egyptians helped turn pro-Mubarak demonstrators
into anti-Mubarak ones, or ones who realized his regime was finished.
Yet it is perhaps the global cable networks that broadcast “revolution”
live, as events were unfolding 24/7 on Al-Jazeera and various Arab networks, as well as on CNN and BBC. The often-saturated coverage on
global TV networks, and especially on Al-Jazeera, made the struggle in
Egypt a world-historical event of global interest, which in turn helped
to incite people to pour into the street to take part in the momentous
insurrection, as live TV footage and interviews were circulated through
global media. While there have not yet appeared scholarly investigations
of the role of Al-Jazeera and other television networks in inspiring and
mobilizing the North African Arab Uprisings, it is likely that the images
of demonstrations, uprisings, and the overthrow of regimes in Tunisia
and then Egypt inspired protestors throughout the world. 55
Indeed, Al-Jazeera has been covering and circulating protests and
41
42
critiques of the various Middle East regimes since its origins in the mid1990s.56 During the Bush/Cheney administration, Al-Jazeera was vilified as “anti-American,” and its broadcasting facilities in Afghanistan
were bombed (see Kellner 2005). Yet in subsequent years, both its Arabic and English networks have been widely praised as providing firstrate reporting and a diversity of opinion. If the Gulf War was the
“moment of CNN,” when that network’s images from Iraq and the Gulf
region were broadcast throughout the world, the North African Arab
Uprisings were “the moment of Al-Jazeera.” Hits to the network’s webtelevision site received a record number of viewers, and Al-Jazeera
English was played on various PBS and other news channels and cable
systems throughout the world. It was also available on the Internet, making it an indispensible source of news and information and a material
force in promoting and encouraging the democratic uprisings through
positive representations of the demonstrators and negative ones of the
repressive regimes being demonstrated against.57 In fact, Hillary Clinton conceded during a question-and-answer session before the U.S. Foreign Policy Priorities Committee on Information War that “Al-Jazeera
has been the leader in that [it is] literally changing people’s minds and
attitudes. And like it or hate it, it is really effective.”58
Hence, perhaps television was as influential as the Internet in inciting
and intensifying the Egyptian Uprising spectacle, since live events on TV
are so dramatic and engrossing (although to some extent the distinction
between television and Internet collapses, since Al-Jazeera, BBC, CNN,
and other major global television networks are also accessible on the
Internet). Television presents a “you-are-there” spectacle of history in
the making, as major events are covered 24/7 by cable networks, and
now the Internet. Whenever there is a significant media spectacle, global
media pour in to the spot, whether it is New York after 9/11, Iraq during
the 2003 Bush/Cheney War against Iraq, the Gulf coast during and after
Hurricane Katrina, Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, or now Egypt after
the uprisings (although with the eruption of the Libyan Uprising in late
February 2011, global media quickly refocused its attention on the new
spectacle, and in 2012 focused on the Syrian Uprising).
The global media often take the positions of the opposition movements, or of victims of extreme weather events or terrorist attacks,
because they come to empathize with the people whom they are coverD o ug l a s K e l l n e r
ing. The spectacles are punctuated by “breaking news,” and major
events like the 9/11 terror attacks, the Gulf War, and now the North
African Arab Uprisings gain massive, rapt audiences. The “big stories”
are made compelling and involving, and the proliferating feed of
images, action scenes, opinions from the street, “expert analyses,” and,
in the case under investigation, masses of people risking their lives for
their country, present exciting live television at its best. Big stories like
that of the North African Arab Uprisings grip entire regions and
become the major spectacles of their era.
While people were killed during the Egyptian demonstrations, the
army appeared neutral and people kept pouring into the streets and
squares of Cairo and other Egyptian cities, getting increasingly radicalized and becoming the stars of a global media spectacle that was energizing oppositional consciousness throughout the Middle East and indeed
the world. On the third day of the protests, the Muslim Brotherhood
leadership told its members to support the demonstrations, as young
members of the group already had. The Brothers began providing security for the demonstrators and bringing in food and medical supplies.59
Not only were women very involved in participating in the Egyptian
Uprising, but they were also instrumental “in much of the nitty-gritty
organisation that turned Tahrir Square from a moment into a movement. Women were involved in arranging food deliveries, blankets, the
stage and medical help.”60 Robin Morgan points out that “soon, unsung
protest coordinator Amal Sharaf—a 36-year-old English teacher, single
mother and member of the the organizers April 6 Youth Movement—
was spending days and nights in the movement’s tiny office, smoking
furiously and overseeing a crew of men. Google employee Wael Ghonim,
who privately administered one of the Facebook pages that were the
movement’s virtual headquarters, would later become an icon—but after
he was arrested, young Nadine Wahab, an Egyptian American expert on
new media advocacy, took over, strengthening the online presence.”61
In addition, youth cultures and artists were involved in the movement
and massive protests. As in Tunisia, the rap music community became
very involved, and Andy Morgan noted that
Karim Adel Eissa, aka A-Rush from Cairo rappers Arabian Knightz, stayed
up late into the night of Thursday 27 January recording new lyrics for the
43
tune “Rebel,” which he was determined to release on Facebook and Media
Fire. “Egypt is rising up against the birds of darkness,” spat the lyrics. “It
was a direct call for revolution,” Karim says. “Before, we’d only used metaphors to talk about the corrupt system. But once people were out on the
streets, we were just like, ‘Screw it.’ If we’re going down, we’re going down.”
He and his crew just about managed to upload the new version of the
song before Karim was called away to help with the vigilante security detail
44
who were down in the streets keeping his neighbourhood free of looters
and government thugs.62
Further, Andy Morgan points out that a diversity of musicians, from
old to young, performed daily for crowds and invigorated the participants with their music, some of which was composed especially for the
uprising:
After the uprising of 25 January, Cairo’s Tahrir Square resounded to the traditional Egyptian frame drum or daf, which pounded out trance-like beats over
which the crowd laid slogans full of poetic power and joyful hilarity. As the
Egyptian people rediscovered what it felt like to be a nation, united and indivisible, they reverted to the raw power of their most basic musical instincts
to celebrate their mass release from fear—traditional drumming and chanting and patriotic songs from the glory days of yore when Egypt trounced the
forces of imperialism in 1956 or took Israel by surprise in 1973.63
In the following days, ever-greater numbers of people congregated in
Tahrir Square, renamed “Liberation Square,” in Cairo, and global media
poured in to make the spectacle global. On the ninth day, things turned
nasty, with Mubarak sympathizers and thugs going after demonstrators
and the global media themselves. Organized thugs were bused in and
attacked protestors with knives, machetes, and other weapons; horse and
camel riders also assaulted the protestors. Foreign media personnel were
threatened and hit by thugs in front of cameras, which caught the episode; other global media workers were arrested and in some cases blindfolded and held overnight, assuring that foreign media would remain
critical of the Mubarak regime and sympathetic to the demonstrators.
There were pitched fights all day February 2 between protestors and
Mubarak thugs: hundreds of Molotov cocktails were thrown; both groups
picked rocks from the streets to throw at opponents; buildings were set
on fire; and some reporters were attacked and detained by Mubarak
thugs and then released, making February 2 and 3 days of intense drama
and spectacle, broadcast live over global media networks like CNN, BBC,
and Al-Jazeera.
Events continued to be intensely dramatic on day ten, as hundreds of
thousands of anti-Mubarak demonstrators gathered in Tahrir Square,
which had emerged as ground zero for the insurgency. Crowds also
appeared at other sites throughout Egypt, with demonstrators calling
for a “day of departure.” Over the following days, the occupation of Tahrir Square continued to expand, demonstrations unfolded throughout
the country, the army remained neutral, and the Mubarak regime
began to make concessions. Mubarak appeared on television, claiming
he would not run for president again, and then nominated Chief of
Intelligence Omar Suleimen as vice president, with whom he would
share power during the buildup to promised elections in September.
Mubarak’s concessions were perceived as too little, too late, and the
demonstrations continued unabated, calling for Mubarak to surrender
the presidency. On days fourteen and fifteen, workers joined in with
strikes throughout the country, and on day seventeen, it was rumored
that Mubarak would step down, with the military organizing a new government (a claim reiterated by CIA chief Leon Panetta). Tremendous
anticipation grew as it was announced that Mubarak was coming to
speak on television. In his long, rambling speech, however, he appeared
not to yield and the crowds roared their disapproval.
As commentators unpacked Mubarak’s ambiguous speech, it became
apparent that he said he was transferring power to Vice President Omar
Suleimen, who came on after Mubarak and told the crowd to go home.
The people in Freedom Square, however, went wild, shouting “Leave,
Leave, Leave!” and waving their shoes at the cameras, a gesture of utter
contempt in the Arab world. The Western press described Mubarak’s
stunt as a “right feint,” and an Egyptian American commentator on AlJazeera summed it up: “We was Punked!” In fact, the arrogant Mubarak
was obviously unaware of the depth of hatred of his people and thought
he could play verbal games with them, holding onto power.
Mubarak’s speech prompted President Barack Obama to respond
that “the Egyptian people have been told that there was a transition of
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authority, but it is not yet clear that this transition is immediate, meaningful or sufficient,” and for the first time Obama made it clear to Egyptian officials that Mubarak had to go. According to an anonymous
American source, the Obama administration had been “trying to walk
a fine line between retaining support for Mubarak while trying to infuse
common sense into the equation. By the end of the day, it was clear the
situation was no longer tenable.”64
On February 12, Mubarak left Cairo for his resort home in Egypt,
and reports said that the protest in Cairo’s Tahrir Square had spilled out
into surrounding streets following Friday prayers. Protesters were now
also massed outside Egypt’s state television headquarters and the presidential palace in the Heliopolis district of the Egyptian capital and, significantly, the army turned the cannons on their tanks away from the
people. Then, Vice President Suleiman came on Egyptian state television to say that Mubarak had dissolved his government and handed
over power to the military, and Egypt and perhaps much of the rest of
the Arab world exploded with joy. As the Associated Press reported on February 12, 2011:
President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt resigned his post and turned over all
power to the military on Friday, ending his 30 years of autocratic rule and
bowing to a historic popular uprising that has transformed politics in Egypt
and around the Arab world.
The streets of Cairo exploded in shouts of “God is Great” moments
after Mr. Mubarak’s vice president and longtime intelligence chief, Omar
Suleiman, announced during evening prayers that Mr. Mubarak had passed
all authority to a council of military leaders.65
Of course, the struggle for democracy and freedom was only starting
in Tunisia and Egypt, and long, tumultuous, and unpredictable struggles lay ahead for these bellwethers of the Arab Uprising, which were
beginning the transition to democracy after decades of dictatorship. Yet
we do know that demonstrations intensified right after the success of
the Egyptian Uprising in Yemen, Bahrain, Iran, and, most dramatically,
Libya, inaugurating months of intense struggle that ultimately led to
the victory of the anti-Qaddafi forces, the death of Qaddafi and one of
his sons, and the arrests of Qaddafi’s other sons, including his heir
apparent, Saif-al Islam.66
The global media had circulated images of uprisings in Tunisia and
Egypt that drove out dictators who had ruled with an iron fist for twentythree and thirty-two years, respectively, and then gave up power when
they saw that great masses of their own people were against them, while
creating tremendous excitement throughout the Arab world and the
global public sphere. The spectacle of the Arab Uprisings broadcast live
on Al-Jazeera and other global networks inspired publics throughout
North Africa and the Middle East to challenge their societies, to voice
their grievances, to militate for radical social transformation, and to
demonstrate against corrupt regimes.
Tumult in the Arab World 2011: From the Arab Spring
to a Bloody Arab Summer, Fall, and Winter
Throughout the Middle East, after the Friday prayers, demonstrations
would erupt in Bahrain, Yemen, Egypt, Syria, and other Arab countries
in what was becoming a weekly ritual as the people of the region sought
democracy and freedom.67 In Egypt, on February 6, after former prime
minister Ahmed Shafik resigned following boisterous demonstrations
that called for his removal because of his close relationship with
Mubarak, Shafik was replaced by the popular former transportation
minister, Essam Sharaf, who had quit his cabinet position in 2006 and
had joined the demonstrators to oust Mubarak. When Sharaf went to
Tahrir Square on March 4 to celebrate the change, he was hoisted on
demonstrators’ shoulders and received a tumultuous greeting, broadcast live on Al-Jazeera.
There were reports that Egypt was undertaking a thoroughgoing “deMubaraking” of Egypt’s public spaces, replacing all signs and names of
spaces citing Mubarak with alternatives, such as replacing the Mubarak
subway station sign with one that read “Martyrs of the January 25th
revolution.” Criminal investigations are being undertaken against
Mubarak and other of his ministers, including his once powerful and
feared interior minister, Habib el-Adly. Yet critics claimed that arbitrary
arrest and torture were continuing, and that government officials were
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burning documents that would indicate their complicity in Mubarakera crimes.68
Moving against the former state security apparatus, demonstrators in
Alexandria burned down the hated state security headquarters, while a
group in Cairo stormed the office and found officials burning documents. Some documents were taken out of the office, which contained
information documenting the extent to which the Mubarak regime spied
on and kept files on ordinary citizens, according to one of the demonstrators interviewed by Al-Jazeera (March 5, 2011). On March 7, AlJazeera reported that eight floors of underground cells were found in
the Cairo state security headquarters, where opponents of the regime
had been held and tortured.
Yet the dark side of the Egyptian Uprising was evident in Egypt on
March 8, when groups of reactionary men confronted brave women
in their demonstration on International Woman’s Day and told them to
return to their houses. Egypt had long been plagued with a patriarchal
society in which women were sexually harassed on a daily basis and considered inferior, and it appeared that the struggle between women and
men would be a protracted one.69 That night, fights broke out between
Christian Coptics protesting the burning of a church and Muslim thugs
who clashed with them, leaving more than eleven dead.70 The next day,
there were pictures on Al-Jazeera and other networks of Mubarak thugs
attacking peaceful demonstrators in Cairo with knives, machetes, and
whips, a horrific aftermath of Mubarak’s thug regime, which still lived on
in brutal men who had assimilated its aggressive and violent tendencies,
and who would continue to harass protestors in the months to come.
Tunisia, by contrast, was making swifter progress toward regime
change and democratic rule. On March 7, the Associated Press released a
report indicating that Tunisia had both named a new government and
was the first country in the region to close down its much-hated secret
police unit and state security department.71 Shortly thereafter, it was
announced that former dictator Ben Ali’s party had been dissolved,
although interviews with Tunisian citizens on Al-Jazeera indicated that
many people had seen no real changes in their lives.
Graham Usher argues in “That Other Tunisia,” however, that there
was a second grassroots movement in Tunisia that laid siege from January 14, 2011, when Ben Ali fled, into March, assembling in Tunis’s CasD o ug l a s K e l l n e r
bah Square and elsewhere in the country “to protest any and all attempts
by the ancient regime to steal back the revolution. Having refused to open
fire on demonstrators in the first revolution, Tunisia’s 30,000-strong
army kept to its constitutional role in the second: it guarded public
spaces, but allowed the struggle to play out between serial interim governments and what became known as the Casbah coalition.”72
Usher argues that continued demonstrations and clashes with interim
governments forced the resignation of Ben Ali–appointed governors in
the provinces; the dissolution of his political party, the Constitutional
Democratic Rally (RCD); the disbanding of the state security apparatus
and dissolution of the hated secret police; and the legalization of parties
previously banned. The struggles culminated, in Usher’s view, with the
interim government bowing to the democratic forces’ key demand for
elections to a constituent assembly that would be empowered to write a
new constitution and prepare parliamentary elections. Usher acknowledges emerging divisions within the Tunisian democratic forces and the
serious problems that they face in moving forward, including economic
disparities and lack of jobs, but sees significant advances since the overthrow of the Ben Ali regime.
Hence, Egypt and Tunisia appeared to be moving forward slowly but
surely, with unpredictable consequences through the summer and into
the fall. Yet after eighteen days of the Libyan Uprising against Qaddafi
and his family and cronies, a stalemate appeared to have been reached
in Libya, with rebel forces controlling the east and Qaddafi’s forces controlling much of the west. In Egypt and Tunisia, by contrast, the people
were attempting to come to terms with the oppression and crimes of
their authoritarian states, and were beginning the slow and often tumultuous process of rebuilding their societies. Questions emerged concerning whether the Egyptian people would have genuine input into the
building of democracy and whether new institutions and forms of power
could be built.
Impressively, the people of Egypt and Tunisia had both overthrown
corrupt dictators, and had expressed through nonviolent demonstrations their will for change and yearnings for democracy, freedom, social
justice, and dignity. As Slavoj Žižek argued, the Egyptian (and arguably
Tunisian) revolutions were secular, with demonstrators combining calls
for democracy and freedom with demands for social justice.73 The uprisM e d i a S p e c ta c l e a n d t h e Ar a b U pr i s i n gs
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ings exemplified the “People Power” movements of the 1960s, as well as
the model of the “multitude” seizing power developed by Michael Hardt
and Antonio Negri. As Hardt and Negri argued in a widely circulated
article on the Arab Uprisings: “One challenge facing observers of the
uprisings spreading across north Africa and the Middle East is to read
them as not so many repetitions of the past but as original experiments
that open new political possibilities, relevant well beyond the region,
for freedom and democracy. Indeed, our hope is that through this cycle
of struggles the Arab world becomes for the next decade what Latin
America was for the last—that is, a laboratory of political experimentation between powerful social movements and progressive governments
from Argentina to Venezuela, and from Brazil to Bolivia.”74
Hardt and Negri do not mention here the role of charismatic Latin
American leaders who galvanized social movements to win state power
in democratic elections. In his documentary South of the Border (2010),
Oliver Stone focuses on several presidents in Latin America who led
movements to produce left and center-left regimes. While Stone arguably exaggerates the role of the charismatic Latin American leaders that
he interviews in his film, and downplays the role of social movements, it
is likely that the Latin American Left evolved a progressive agenda with
a combination of charismatic leaders and progressive political parties
aligned with social movements.
The question emerges from the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions,
however, whether movements and masses without charismatic leaders
and progressive parties can construct a genuinely democratic society,
without violence. Their challenge is also to generate political leaders
and groups who nurture democratic institutions and social relations
without developing oppressive modes of power and reverting to the old
mode of authoritarian government and repression.75
Yet as the Arab Spring passed into a hot and turbulent Arab Summer,
and then into fall and winter, there continued to be intense political
repression in Egypt. Six days of demonstrations in Tahrir Square from
in late November and early December 2011 left at least forty-one dead
and over one thousand injured in what protestors were calling a “second
Egyptian revolution.” An uneasy peace ensued, and the first phase of
planned elections for a people’s assembly that would create a constitutional government took place as scheduled with an extremely high turnD o ug l a s K e l l n e r
out. The Muslim Brotherhood and more radical Islamic Salafis party
won about 50 percent and 25 percent of the first round of voting, respectively, creating fears that elections might provide the road for an Islamic
state, or a coup d’état by the military to prevent such an occurrence.76
More violence broke out during the second round of elections in
Egypt, and 2011 came to an end with very tense relations between the
Egyptian military, who continued to wield power, the emerging political
parties, and the Egyptian public. As noted, a Muslim Brotherhood candidate, Mohamed Morsi, won a close election in June 2012, had a parliamentary majority, declared autocratic powers for his presidency, and
pushed through a constitution that many Egyptians believed threatened their rights and undermined democracy, leading to protests and
rebellions against his regime, struggles that are still ongoing as I write
in early 2013.
In Tunisia, by contrast, a moderate Islamic party, Ennahda, won 41
percent of the seats in the constitutional assembly in a national election
and formed a transitional government with liberal and secular parties,
although there continues to be unrest in the country and indeed
throughout the region. Hence, just as the Arab Uprisings had multiple
causes, so too did they have multiple and highly unpredictable consequences, which will be played out in the years to come.
Concluding Comments
During the Arab Uprisings, powerful new images of Arabs and their
political awakening and uprisings circulated through the global media,
subverting notions that the Arab people were passive, or an irrational
mass periodically exploding in rages of anger with no constructive effects.
From a global perspective, the Arab Spring of 2011 represents the beginning of a turbulent uprising of the Arab people against a series of authoritarian, dictatorial, and corrupt regimes that emerged from a long period
of colonialism in the second half of the twentieth century. Anticolonialist revolts in the Arab world took the form of military coups, nationalist
uprisings and struggles, or their combination, which in North Africa
and throughout the Middle East resulted in authoritarian regimes that
had become family dictatorships, corrupted by nepotism, cronyism,
kleptocracy, and repressive state regimes of prison, torture, and murder
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52
to preserve absolute state power. While the uprisings in Tunisia and
Egypt displayed relatively nonviolent protest movements that drove dictators to flee, not surprisingly, violent state responses and repression
took place in Libya, Yemen, Syria, and other countries that in turn generated intense political struggles, still ongoing in these countries.
As I have argued, the Arab Uprisings were global, circulating via
broadcasting, new media and social networking, and word of mouth as
similar tactics of struggle were used in proximate countries during the
Arab Spring, generating media spectacles that inaugurated an era
with similar democratic revolts and uprisings throughout the world. In
this chapter, I have suggested that media spectacle can serve as a major
category for explaining contemporary culture and politics, used to
orchestrate war, terrorist events, political elections, and now political
insurgencies and revolution. I’ve attempted to explicate my concept of
media spectacle, to differentiate it from Guy Debord’s society of the
spectacle, and to present the spectacle as a contested terrain. I’ve illustrated my concept of media spectacle through analysis of the North
African Arab Uprisings of 2011, and my analysis suggests that media
spectacle is now a major feature of political opposition and resistance
and a major force against repressive regimes.
In a global media and Internet era, the state and corporations no
longer control all means of communication, and the Internet provides a
forum for political discourse of every spectrum. To be sure, the Internet
and media spectacle alone do not produce social transformation, but
mobilized and radicalized groups of people can use the Internet and
social networking for informing, organizing, and mobilizing political
movements and struggle, and the communication and messages from
mass protest movements can themselves be a significant force of social
change in the contemporary era.
Quite possibly, the media spectacles of the North African Arab Uprisings of 2011, followed by the Occupy movements, could be transformative events that should cheer advocates of a freer and more just world
and that could inaugurate a new era in history. I argue that, from the
time of the 9/11 terror attacks, we have been in a period that I call Terror War, in which spectacles of terror and fear of terrorism have driven
media spectacle and shaped the imaginary of political regimes in the
West.77 Part of the reason why the West, and in particular the U.S. govD o ug l a s K e l l n e r
ernment and intelligence services, did not anticipate the growing dissatisfaction and explosive uprisings in North Africa is that U.S. foreign
policy and the imaginary of the Western media have been obsessed with
fear of Islamic-inspired terrorism and have failed to see how masses of
people living under dictatorship have been expressing their political
opinions, mobilizing new groups and forces, and preparing to struggle
against dictatorships and corrupt regimes.
Indeed, with the North African Arab Uprisings and Occupy movements of 2011, we may be entering a new phase of history in which
people and new technologies become major driving forces of history,
and revolution is once more on the historical agenda. In this emergent
period, youth are playing critical roles in political struggle, as new thinking and political strategies are emerging to strengthen democracy and
promote democratic social transformation in the contemporary era. On
the other hand, reactionary and counterrevolutionary forces are confronting the democratic insurgent movements, creating the conditions
for a highly turbulent and unpredictable future.
Notes
1
This study is extracted from Douglas Kellner, Media Spectacle and Insurrection, 2011: From the Arab Uprisings to Occupy Everywhere (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012), and has been revised and updated to take account
of events that happened after the book’s publication.
Epigraph: Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit, MI: Black and
Red, 1967), thesis 145. Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (1967) was published in translation in a pirate edition by Black and Red (Detroit) in
1970 and reprinted many times; another edition appeared in 1983 and
a new translation in 1994. Thus, in the following discussion, I cite references to the numbered paragraphs of Debord’s text to make it easier for
those with different editions to follow my reading.
In this chapter, I expand my concept of media spectacle developed in a
series of books, including The Persian Gulf TV War (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992); Grand Theft 2000: Media Spectacle and a Stolen Election
(Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001); Media Spectacle (New
York: Routledge, 2003); From 9/11 to Terror War: The Dangers of the Bush
Legacy (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003); Media Spectacle
and the Crisis of Democracy: Terrorism, War, and Election Battles (Boulder,
CO: Paradigm Press, 2005); and Guys and Guns Amok: Domestic Terrorism
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2
3
54
4
5
6
7
8
9
and School Shootings from the Oklahoma City Bombings to the Virginia Tech
Massacre (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Press, 2008).
I provide accounts of the O.J. Simpson trial and the Clinton sex and
impeachment scandal in the mid-1990s in chapter 4 of Media Spectacle;
engage the stolen election of 2000 in the Bush vs. Gore presidential campaign in Grand Theft 2000; and describe the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and their aftermath in From 9/11 to Terror War.
My earlier analyses of globalization, continued here, include Douglas
Kellner, “Theorizing Globalization,” Sociological Theory 20 (2002): 285–
305, and Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, The Postmodern Adventure:
Science, Technology, and Cultural Studies at the Third Millennium (New York:
Guilford Press, 2001).
I engage the first Gulf War in The Persian Gulf TV War; the 9/11 and associated Al Qaeda terrorist attacks in From 9/11 to Terror War; the Iraq war
of 2003 in Media Spectacle and the Crisis of Democracy; and the Arab Awakening and Uprisings of 2011 in Media Spectacle and Insurrection.
For analyses of a diversity of types of media spectacle, see Kellner, Media
Spectacle, which includes a historical genealogy of the spectacle going
back to Greek, Roman, and Middle Eastern cultures. Here I am only
discussing media spectacle as it pertains to major sociopolitical events
of the contemporary moment and their impacts on journalism and
politics.
The key texts of the Situationists and many interesting commentaries
are found on various websites, producing a curious afterlife for Situationist ideas and practices. For further discussion of the Situationists,
see chapter 3 of Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, The Postmodern Turn
(New York: Guilford Press, 1997); see also the discussions of spectacle
culture in Best and Kellner, Postmodern Adventure, and Kellner, Media
Spectacle. On Debord’s life and work, see also Vincent Kaufmann, Guy
Debord: Revolution in the Service of Poetry, trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). On the complex and
highly contested reception and effects of Guy Debord and the Situationist International, see Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the
Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990);
Tom McDonough, ed., Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts
and Documents (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2002); and McKenzie Wark,
50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008).
Ibid., thesis 18.
Ibid., thesis 44.
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
Ibid., theses 25–26.
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans.
John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972); Herbert Marcuse,
One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1964);
Kellner, Media Spectacle; From 9/11 to Terror War; Guys and Guns Amok;
“Media Culture and the Triumph of the Spectacle,” in The Spectacle of the
Real: From Hollywood to ‘Reality’ TV and Beyond, ed. Geoff King (Bristol,
UK: Intellect, 2005); and Cinema Wars: Hollywood Film and Politics in the
Bush-Cheney Era (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).
On the impact of Guy Debord and the Situationist International on contemporary social theory and radical politics, see the sources in note 6
above.
See Kellner, Media Spectacle.
See Kellner, Media Spectacle and the Crisis of Democracy.
I argued that Barack Obama won the presidency in part because he mastered media spectacle in Douglas Kellner, “Barack Obama and Celebrity
Spectacle,” International Journal of Communication 3 (2009), and Media Spectacle and Insurrection. I draw on these studies in chapter 1 of Media Spectacle and Insurrection.
Perhaps an anti-Romney spectacle ultimately caused the Republican
Party candidate to lose the election, with negative images of Romney circulating throughout much of the campaign. The Obama operatives early
on put up attack ads against Romney, defining him as a heartless millionaire who likes to fire people. The mainstream broadcasting media, meanwhile, constantly presented Romney’s gaffes and problematic remarks, as
with his off-record comment to rich campaign contributors that 47 percent of the population saw themselves as victims and would vote for
Obama who would give them “gifts.” Hence, the Romney spectacle in the
U.S. presidential campaign of 2012 was largely negative. On this presidential election, see my forthcoming article “Media Spectacle, the Romney Campaign, and the Triumph of Obama” (under review).
After initially using the discourse of “revolution” to describe the overthrow of dictatorships in Tunisia and Egypt, Al-Jazeera and other global
networks used terms like “Libya’s Uprising,” “Egypt’s New Era,” and
“Tunisia in Transition,” followed by terms like “the Arab Spring,” “the
Arab Awakening,” or “the Arab Uprising,” to describe the events engaged
in this chapter. Curiously, Wikipedia includes content on the events on
the pages entitled “Tunisian Revolution,” “Egyptian Revolution of 2011,”
and “Libyan Civil War (2011).” I follow Herbert Marcuse’s concept of
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20
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21
22
23
“revolution” as a rupture with the previous social order that develops
new forms of economy, politics, culture, and social relations. See Douglas Kellner, Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1984).
Editors’ note: We have chosen to keep this passage as it was written in its
original version. There is something unmistakably open about the events
of the Arab Spring. This sense of the unknown always risks becoming
eclipsed once the “official” story of the Arab Spring is written, once these
events are cynically recorded. After Mubarak came Morsi and then alSisi: Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
I develop this analysis of the multiple causes of the Iraq war in Media
Spectacle and the Crisis of Democracy.
To be sure, there were organized opposition movements to the Soviet
regimes within the east-central Europe Soviet bloc countries and within
the Soviet Union itself. For decades, these oppositional movements had
been writing critiques of the regime, sometimes clandestinely circulated, and had organized opposition to the Soviet system. On the other
hand, certainly the cascading collapse of one Communist regime after
another, seen throughout Europe and the Communist bloc on television, and discussed on radio, newspapers, and other media, helped to
mobilize massive crowds that led to the overthrow of those regimes. For
a first-person account of these events, see the narrative and concise
analysis by Timothy Garton Ash in The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of
’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin and Prague (New York: Vintage
Books, 1993, republished with a new afterword in 1999). Among other
themes, Garton Ash describes the role of the media in making images of
the oppositional movements visible to various publics and those movements’ struggle for media access. In a key summary judgment, Garton
Ash wrote: “In Europe at the end of the twentieth century all revolutions
are telerevolutions” (94). About the Prague Velvet Revolution, Garton
Ash wrote that “television is now clearly opening up to report the revolution,” signaling that Václav Havel and the oppositional movement had
won the revolution (101).
Francis Fukuyama famously argued that the collapse of Soviet Communism in the 1990s marked the triumph of Western ideas of freedom
and democracy, and thus the end of major political conflicts; see The
End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). With the
9/11 terror attacks on the United States and the resulting era of Terror
War, Fukuyama’s ideas were widely discredited. See Kellner, From 9/11 to
Terror War. To some extent, though, the ideas of freedom and democracy
are indeed part of the struggle in the North African Arab Uprisings,
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25
26
27
28
29
which revealed that many more enemies of a free society had to be eliminated before one could seriously argue that we had entered the realm of
freedom dreamed of by liberals and Karl Marx.
On the new media ecology that the Internet and other new technologies
have produced, see Mark Poster, The Second Media Age (Cambridge, U.K.:
Polity Press, 1995) and Richard Kahn and Douglas Kellner, “Technopolitics, Blogs, and Emergent Media Ecologies: A Critical/Reconstructive
Approach,” in Small Tech: The Culture of Digital Tools, ed. Byron Hawk,
David M. Rieder, and Ollie Oviedo (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
For reasons of space, I am not engaging the upheavals in Libya, which
mutated from an uprising to what has been described as both a civil war
and a revolution, events that I engage in detail in Media Spectacle and
Insurrection.
For an account of previous self-immolations that helped mobilize protest
movements, see Robert Wirth, “How a Single Match Can Ignite a Revolution,” New York Times, January 21, 2011. See also the detailed account of
Bouazizi’s life on Wikipedia, which also has a section on subsequent imitation of his self-immolation in other Middle East protest movements,
at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohamed_Bouazizi (accessed April 9,
2011). The “Werther effect” refers to mass suicides in eighteenth-century
Europe after Goethe’s hero Werther took his life in a popular novel, and
a wave of suicides occurred throughout the Middle East after Bouazizi’s
immolation, although none of the other suicides appeared to have provided sparks for a revolution.
See Robert Mackey, “Video that Set Off Tunisia’s Uprising,” New York
Times, January 22, 2011, http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/22/
video-that-triggered-tunisias-uprising/ (accessed March 10, 2011). This
article recounts how “the desperate act of the vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi,
led to protests in the town, which were recorded in video clips posted on
YouTube. By the time he died on Jan. 4, 2011, protests that started over
Mr. Bouazizi’s treatment in Sidi Bouzid had spread to cities throughout
the country.”
In addition to the 60 Minutes report, see also David D. Kirkpatrick and
David E. Sanger, “A Tunisian-Egyptian Link that Shook Arab History,”
New York Times, February 13, 2011, A1. For an excellent set of articles on
the role of media and social networking in the Arab Uprisings, see Ilhem
Allagui and Johanne Kuebler, “The Arab Spring and the Role of ICTs,”
International Journal of Communication 5 (2011), which I draw on in the
discussion below.
See Elizabeth Dickinson, “The First WikiLeaks Revolution,” Foreign Policy,
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30
31
32
33
34
35
36
January 13, 2011, http://wikileaks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/01/13/
wikileak (accessed March 10, 2011). The text was widely circulated on
the Internet. Dickinson wrote: “Tunisians didn’t need any more reasons
to protest when they took to the streets these past weeks—food prices
were rising, corruption was rampant, and unemployment was staggering.
But we might also count Tunisia as the first time that WikiLeaks pushed
people over the brink. These protests are also about the country’s utter
lack of freedom of expression—including when it comes to WikiLeaks.”
Laila Lalami argued as well, in “Tunisia Rising” (The Nation, February 7,
2011), that there were multiple causes for the uprising and that people
generally were aware of the corruption of the Ben-Ali regime. Lalami
also remarks that Western media hardly paid attention to the events in
Tunisia, although they had thoroughly covered the Iranian uprisings of
2009, as they would with the Egyptian and Libyan uprisings.
On Tunisia’s economy, see Alex Callinicos, “Tunisia: Patterns of Revolt,”
Socialist Worker, January 29, 2011, www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=
23670 (accessed April 14, 2011).
On the background and trajectory of the Tunisian Uprising, I draw on
Kevin Anderson, “Arab Revolutions at the Crossroads,” The International
Marxist-Humanist, April 2, 2011, www.usmarxisthumanists.org/articles/
arab-revolutions-crossroads-kevin-anderson/ (accessed April 14, 2011).
See ibid. Anderson also draws on Sari Hanafi, “Lessons of the Jasmine
Revolution,” Al Jazeera English, January 23, 2011, www.aljazeera.com/
indepth/opinion/2011/01/201111985641326468.html (accessed February 4, 2011).
See Robin Morgan, “Women of the Arab Spring,” Ms., Spring 2011. www
.msmagazine.com/spring2011/womenofthearabspring.asp (accessed January 12, 2013).
Nadia Marzouki, “Tunisia’s Wall Has Fallen,” Middle East Research and
Information Project, January 19, 2011, cited in Anderson, “Arab Revolutions at the Crossroads.”
See the detailed account “Tunisia Crisis: As It Happened,” The Guardian, January 14, 2011, www.guardian.co.uk/global/blog/2011/jan/14/
tunisia-wikileaks (accessed May 14, 2011). Le Monde also had an excellent blog on the success of the Tunisian Uprising, “Revivez les évènements de vendredi en Tunisie,” January 14, 2011, www.lemonde.fr/afrique/
article/2011/01/14/suivez-en-direct-la-situation-en-tunisie_1465727
_3212.html (accessed May 14, 2011).
Andy Morgan, “From Fear to Fury: How the Arab World Found Its Voice,”
The Observer, February 27, 2011, www.theguardian.com/music/2011/
feb/27/egypt-tunisia-music-protests (accessed December 12, 2013).
37
38
39
40
On the Arab public sphere, see Marc Lynch, Voices of the New Arab Public:
Iraq, Al-Jazeera, and Middle East Politics Today (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006) and Muhammad I. Ayish, The New Arab Public Sphere
(Berlin: Frank and Timme, 2008). On the Arab hip-hop public sphere,
see Ulysses, “Hip Hop Revolution,” Open Democracy, December 16, 2011,
www.opendemocracy.net/ulysses/hip-hop-revolution (accessed December 22, 2011).
For meticulous and detailed analyses and documentation of the corruption and totalitarian repression in the Mubarak regime, see Aladdin
Elaasar, The Last Pharaoh: Mubarak and the Uncertain Future of Egypt in the
Volatile Mid East (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2009). In this book, however,
Elaasar does not foresee the Egyptian Uprising and tends to overlook
democratic forces within Egypt itself. Egyptian writer Alaa Al Aswany, by
contrast, documents the emergence of profuse democratic forces and
anticipations of the uprising in On the State of Egypt: What Made the Revolution Inevitable (New York: Vintage Books, 2011). Al Aswany, author of
the acclaimed Egyptian novel The Yacoubian Building, trans. Humphrey
Davies (Cairo: American University of Cairo Press, 2006) and an excellent story collection, Friendly Fire, trans. Humphrey Davies (Cairo: American University of Cairo Press, 2009), provides in his essay collection On
the State of Egypt a wonderful set of short essays that present problems and
struggles in Egypt that predate the uprising, with each essay ending with
the statement “Democracy is the solution,” a phrase that serves as the
epigram for this section and the hope for a better Egyptian future. Al
Aswany opens his collection with an introduction, “On Tahrir Square,”
that documents his own participation in the uprising, preceded by an
analysis of why Egyptians had not rebelled in a mass uprising previously.
See Timothy Phelps, “Where Egypt’s Unrest Took Root,” Los Angeles Times,
February 9, 2011.
Joel Beinin, “Egypt’s Workers Rise Up,” The Nation, March 7/14, 2011, www
.thenation.com/article/158680/egypts-workers-rise (accessed March 9,
2011). Benin claims that workers movements had very progressive aims
from the beginning of the uprising: “At the appropriate moment, workers did not hesitate to fuse economic and political demands. On February 9, Cairo transport workers went on strike and announced that they
would be forming an independent union. According to Hossam elHamalawy, a well-informed blogger and labor journalist, their statement
also called for abolishing the emergency law in force for decades, removing the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) from state institutions,
dissolving Parliament (fraudulently elected in 2010), drafting a new
Constitution, forming a national unity government, prosecuting corrupt
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42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
officials and establishing a basic national minimum wage of 1,200 Egyptian pounds a month (about $215)” (8). For an update on the continuing
role of workers in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab Uprisings, see Joel
Beinin, “Working Class Revolutions?” The Nation, September 12, 2011,
www.thenation.com/article/162968/m iddle-easts-working-class-revolu
tions (accessed January 12, 2013).
See Alaa Al Aswany, On the State of Egypt.
Morgan, “Women of the Arab Spring,” 21.
Shahin Cole and Juan Cole, “The Women’s Movement in the Middle
East,” Tomgram, April 26, 2011, www.tomdispatch.com/post/175384/tom
g ram%3A_shahin_and_ juan_cole%2C_the_women%27s_movement
_in_the_middle_east (accessed May 15, 2011).
In “Egypt’s Workers Rise Up,” Joel Beinin writes, “The events of January–February followed a decade of escalating mobilizations among many
different sectors of Egyptian society—committees in solidarity with the
Palestinian people and in opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq; the
Kifaya (Enough) movement for democracy; doctors, judges, professors;
and, above all, industrial and white-collar workers.”
Author and journalist David Wolman was present at the failed 2008 antiMubarak demonstration and wrote an article on Egyptian Internet activism that featured Ahmed Maher and his April 6 youth movement comrades; see “The Techie Dissidents Who Showed Egyptians How to Organize Online,” The Atlantic, February 2011, www.theatlantic.com/technol
ogy/archive/2011/02/the-techie-dissidents-who-showed-egyptians-howto-organize-online/70734/ (accessed December 8, 2011). Wolman stayed
in touch with Maher and returned to Egypt as the anti-Mubarak uprising
exploded, writing an e-book on the event; see David Wolman, The Instigators (New York: The Atavist, 2011), Kindle e-book edition (accessed
December 8, 2011).
Linda Herrera describes it in “Egypt’s Revolution 2.0: The Facebook Factor,” Jadaliyya www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/612/egypts-revolution-2.0
_t he-facebook-factor (accessed December 8, 2011).
See Wolman, The Instigators.
Morgan, “Women of the Arab Spring,” 21. For another account of how
a YouTube video was used to assemble young women and men in the
demonstrations against Mubarak, see Melissa Wall and Sahar El Zahed,
“‘I’ll Be Waiting for You Guys’: A YouTube Call to Action in the Egyptian Revolution,” International Journal of Communication 5 (2011): 1333–
1343.
On the role of Al-Jazeera in Middle East politics, see Hugh Miles, AlJazeera: The Inside Story of the Arab News Channel That Is Challenging the West
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
(New York: Grove Press, 2005); Lynch, Voices of the New Arab Public Sphere;
Mohamed Zayani, ed., The Al-Jazeera Phenomenon, (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2005); and Phillip Seib, ed., Al Jazeera English: Global
News in a Changing World, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
See Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, “Post-Mubarak Egypt, the Rebirth
of the Arab World,” Washington Post, February 11, 2011, A01.
Laurie Penny, “Rise of the Digital Natives: How the Battle for the Internet Politicized Prankster Cybercollectives like Anonymous,” The Nation,
October 31, 2011.
On the Mubarak regime, see the sources in note 38.
See Ned Parker, “Crowds Swell as Protest Seeks a Leader,” Los Angeles
Times, February 9, 2011, http://articles.latimes.com/2011/feb/09/world/
la-fg-egypt-google-20110209 (accessed January 12, 2013).
Gamil Ghobrial, email message to author, February 14, 2011.
Miriyam Aouragh and Anne Alexander note that “online viewership of
Al-Jazeera English reached record growth rates during the demonstrations in Egypt (2,500%). For specific data on Egypt, see www.alexa.com/
topsites/countries/EG and for its overall growth rates, see www.alexa
.com/siteinfo/aljazeera.net.” Aouragh and Alexander, “The Egyptian
Experience: Sense and Nonsense of the Internet Revolution,” International Journal of Communication 5 (2011): 1348. Aouragh and Alexander
provide an excellent account of how Internet activists in the Egyptian
revolution used various new media in different phases of the struggle.
They recognize the importance of Al-Jazeera and global television networks as well, and argue that the Egyptian revolution presents fresh
insights into the connections between new media, satellite television networks, and political struggle.
See the sources on Al-Jazeera in note 49 above. See Leon Barkho, “The
Role of Internal Guidelines in Shaping News Narratives: Ethnographic
Insights into the Discursive Rhetoric of Middle East Reporting by the
BBC and Al-Jazeera English,” Critical Discourse Studies, 8, no. 4 (2011),
which examines internal guidelines and news production practice of AlJazeera and the BBC (although in relation to the Israel-Palestine conflict, so the study does not touch on the issues engaged in this study). My
own studies focus on how Al-Jazeera English functioned in the Arab
Uprisings and other momentous struggles and spectacles of 2011.
Barkho notes that there are differences between Al-Jazeera Arabic and
English, as well as overlaps, but as far as I know, there are no scholarly
studies of the differences between Al-Jazeera English and Arabic in covering the Arab Uprisings, and I have been confined to the Al-Jazeera
English channel and website.
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58
59
60
61
62
Marc Lynch argues, “The period from 1997–2002 well deserves the muchabused title of ‘the Al-Jazeera Era.’ Building on its successful coverage of
Iraq, as well as the second Palestinian Intifada and its exclusive access to
Afghanistan after 9/11, Al-Jazeera dominated Arab public discourse for
these crucial years.” Lynch, Voices of the New Arab Public, 128. While this is
arguably true, I would say that during the North African Arab Uprisings,
Al-Jazeera became not only a global media force, but also a voice and
primary influence on the dramatic uprisings of the period. Hence, while
the “CNN moment” marked the time when CNN became the dominant
source of news, images, and opinion during the Gulf War of 1991, AlJazeera became a globally recognized source of news and opinion during
the North African Arab Uprisings, and arguably a major force in inciting
the insurrections (an argument made by the Qaddafi regime and government officials from other countries, as well as by scholars).
Clinton’s March 2, 2011, testimony can be found on the website Mediaite,
at www.mediaite.com/tv/hillary-clinton-claims-al-jazeera-is-winning-aninformation-war-that-america-is-losing (accessed December 22, 2011). Scandalously, many cable systems in the United States do not carry Al-Jazeera,
although some, like my Los Angeles Time-Warner system, play its news
programs on some PBS channels, and, of course, it is available via the Internet at www.aljazeera.com (accessed December 8, 2011). Interestingly, in
January 2012, Al-Jazeera bought Al Gore’s cable channel Current TV to
make into an Al-Jazeera America channel, but my local Time-Warner
cable company immediately took off Current TV, although soon after
they added Al-Jazeera America to their cable lineup.
For a balanced view of the Muslim Brotherhood and the groups’ role in
the uprising, see the PBS Frontline episode “The Brothers,” broadcast
February 22, 2011; on the weekend of March 5–6, BBC Reports, however,
presented a more unsettling report on the Brotherhood, highlighting
their radical Islamic roots and current orientation. For a scholarly examination, see Alison Pargeter, The Muslim Brotherhood: The Burden of Tradition (London: Saqi, 2010). Of course, the Brotherhood is now under
close scrutiny, as it has gained power in Egypt.
Xan Rice et al., “Women Have Emerged as Key Players in the Arab Spring”
The Guardian, April 22, 2011, www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/22/
women-arab-spring (accessed May 18, 2011). See also Leil-Zahra Mortada’s
Facebook album of women’s participation in the Egyptian revolution,
which documents a diversity of activities, at www.facebook.com/media/
set/?set=a.493689677675.268523.586357675 (accessed May 18, 2011).
Robin Morgan, “Women of the Arab Spring,” 21.
Andy Morgan, “From Fear to Fury.”
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64
65
66
67
68
69
Ibid.
See Joby Warrick, “In Mubarak’s Final Hours, Defiance Surprises U.S.
and Threatens to Unleash Chaos,” Washington Post, February 12, 2011,
w w w.washingtonpost.com/w p - dy n/content/article/2011/02/11/
AR2011021106690.html (accessed January 12, 2013). Lloyd C. Gardner
provides an excellent account of Mubarak’s last days, the behind-thescene gyrations of the U.S. government, and a detailed historical account
of U.S. relations with the Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak regimes in The
Road to Tahrir Square: Egypt and the United States from the Rise of Nasser to the
Fall of Mubarak (New York: New Press, 2011).
Alan Cowell, Anthony Shadid, and David D. Kirkpatrick, “Mubarak Steps
Down, Ceding Power to Military,” New York Times, February 11, 2011, www
.truth-out.org/archive/component/k2/item/94438-mubarak-stepsdown-ceding-power-to-military (accessed May 5, 2015). For a comparative overview of how major media outlets presented Mubarak’s overthrow,
see Tony Rogers, “How Reporters Led Their Stories on a Historic Day in
Egypt,” About.com, February 11, 2011, http://journalism.about.com/od/
citizenjournalismworld/tp/Journalism-And-The-Egyptian-Uprising.
htm (accessed May 5, 2015). For illuminating accounts of the experience
of Egyptian intellectuals in Tahrir Square during the last days of Mubarak
and the transition to a new regime, see Yasmine El Rashidi, “This Is Who
Egyptians Are,” New York Review of Books, February 11, 2011, www.nybooks
.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/feb/11/this-is-the-truth-of-who-egyptiansare/ (accessed February 4, 2015), and “Freedom,” New York Review of Books,
February 12, 2011, www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/feb/12/free
dom/ (accessed February 4, 2015).
On the course of the Libyan revolution through 2012, see the account in
Kellner, Media Spectacle and Insurrection, chapter 3.
See J. David Goodman, “Friday Prayers Again Lead to Protests in Mideast,” New York Times, March 4, 2011, www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/world/
middleeast/05unrest.html (accessed March 5, 2011).
Al-Jazeera English, 12:00 p.m. PST, March 5, 2011, and Mohamed el Dahshan, “The ‘Demubarakization’ of Egypt,” New York Times, March 1, 2011,
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/the-demubaraki
zation- of-egypt/ (accessed March 5, 2011). See also Gardner, The Road to
Tahrir Square, 193ff.
The brutalization and rape of CBS reporter Lara Logan in the celebrations after Mubarak’s resignation is one of the horrors of the Egyptian
revolution. Logan was separated from her crew and brutally assaulted and
raped until Egyptian women and soldiers rescued her. See “Lara Logan
Assaulted during Egypt Protests,” CBS News, www.cbsnews.com/stories/
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70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
2011/02/15/60minutes/main20032070.shtml (accessed March 11, 2011).
On the out-of-control sexual harassment of women in Egyptian society,
see Bob Drogin, “Egypt’s Women Face Growing Sexual Harassment,”
Los Angeles Times, February 23, 2011, http://articles.latimes.com/2011/
feb/23/world/la-fg-egypt-women-abuse-20110223 (accessed February 25,
2011). There were also widespread reports that female protestors were
subjected to virginity tests. See William Fisher, “Egypt: ‘Virginity Tests’
For Women Protesters?” The Public Record, March 24, 2011, http://pubrecord.org/world/9133/egypt-virginity-tests-protesters-women (accessed
May 5, 2015). On the general problem of sexual harassment of women in
Egypt, see the illuminating essays of Al Aswany, On the State of Egypt.
On the situation of the Christian Copts in Egypt, see Al Aswany, On the
State of Egypt.
See Bouazza Ben Bouazza, “Tunisia Scraps Hated Police Unit,” March 7,
2011, Associated Press, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/
2011/03/07/AR2011030701487.html (accessed May 11, 2015).
Graham Usher, “That Other Tunisia,” The Nation, September 12, 2011.
Žižek, “For Egypt.” See also Olivier Roy, “This Is Not an Islamic Revolution,” New Statesman, February 15, 2011, www.newstatesman.com/religion/
2011/02/egypt-arab-tunisia-islamic (accessed September 12, 2011).
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, “Arabs Are eDmocracy’s New Pioneers.,”
The Guardian, February 24, 2011, www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/
2011/feb/24/arabs-democracy-latin-america (accessed March 5, 2011).
The Occupy movements present other examples of leaderless movements,
perhaps a defining feature of the uprisings of 2011, in which anyone can
participate and create their own parts in the spectacle they choose.
See David D. Kirkpatrick, “Military Flexes Its Muscles as Islamists Gain
in Egypt,” New York Times, December 7, 2011, www.nytimes.com/2011/
12/08/world/middleeast/egyptian-general-mukhtar-al-mulla-assertscontinuing-control-despite-elections.html (accessed December 9, 2011).
For a more optimistic analysis of the Egyptian elections, see Issandr El
Amrani, “A Strong Islamist Showing in Egypt’s Election Need Not Be
Cause for Panic,” The Guardian, December 5, 2011, www.theguardian
.com/commentisfree/2011/dec/05/islamist-egypt-election (accessed Decem
ber 9, 2011).
See my analysis of this epoch in Kellner, From 9/11 to Terror War.
2
Mediating Memories
The Ethics of Post-9/11 Spectatorship
Anneke Smelik
Bigger, grosser next time. Please don’t let it happen. But let me see it all the same,
as it’s happening and from every angle, and let me be among the first to know.
—ian mc ewan
Apocalypse is the non-event of the millennium.
—brian massumi
The Unimaginable
It is by now a cliché that the attack on the World Trade Center of September 11, 2001, was experienced by television or Internet viewers all
around the world as if it were a Hollywood movie. Sometimes a specific
film would emerge as a point of reference, such as the iconic images of
The Towering Inferno (1974). Mostly, the referential images related more
generally to the genre of Hollywood disaster movies: from Earthquake
(1975) and Escape from New York (1981) through the Die Hard series
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(1988–2013) to Independence Day (1991). Many commentators have mentioned the difficulty spectators had in seeing the viewing experience as
“real” rather than a Hollywood fantasy, because, as Kathy Smith writes,
their horizon of expectations had been cruelly shifted: “This was not
fantasy. These were real events, happening to real people, affecting real
lives.”1 A bit more cynical is Jean Baudrillard, who provocatively suggests
that the very reality of the images satisfies a deeper, darker, longing for
the sheer horror of it: “In this case, then, the real is superadded to the
image like a bonus of terror, like an additional frisson: not only is it terrifying, but, what is more, it is real.” 2 Spectators had become habituated
to consuming such images within the fictional framework of the Hollywood spectacle3, but “the occurrence of these events in reality was beyond
imagination”4 and thus—paradoxically—“unimaginable.” 5
Slavoj Žižek argues that it was not the attack itself that was unthinkable, but the fact that the “libidinally invested” fantasy of American
disaster movies had become reality. He points to the distorted logic of
the dream in his rather perverse and perhaps willful misunderstanding
of Freud’s theory of wish fulfillment: whereas elsewhere in the world
poor people dream of becoming rich Americans, rich Americans have
nightmares about a catastrophe that will destroy them.6 This is the fantasy that Hollywood caters to and literally cashes in on, but, of course, it
was never meant to actually happen. Both Baudrillard and Žižek argue
that the overwhelming images of the disaster fulfilled the fantasy that is
offered to us by American popular culture, as if the event had been literally prefigured. The television images presented themselves as if it were a
performance of disaster rather than “the real thing.”
In this chapter I argue that 9/11 can be understood as a “performance of memory.” By this, I refer to two structural elements that come
together here: first, anything on television acquires the quality of an
event as a staged spectacle, because images of the real are taken up in a
visual culture of repetition, pastiche, and performativity; and second,
images seem to run ahead of reality as they are framed in a fictional
story of something that has already happened in the past. In the first
part of this chapter I expand on the role of media in the performance
of memory by discussing films about “9/11.” In the second part I address
the ethical issues of a culture of performativity in relation to trauma.
Anneke Smelik
Real Virtuality of the Spectacle
Visual culture is to a large extent informed by what Walter Benjamin has
called “mechanical reproduction,” the technological possibility of infinite reproduction of images. Visual media tap relentlessly into this feature; repetition is the name of the game.7 Any image that is shown
frequently enough will become part of cultural memory. In a globalized
media dominated by Western visual culture, these images are more and
more the same for every citizen of the world. Cultural memory thus consists of a repertoire of iconic television images: the crowning of Queen
Elizabeth II, the assassination of President Kennedy, the lunar landing,
the fall of the Berlin Wall, a man stopping a tank in Tiananmen Square,
the burial of Princess Diana, the tsunami in Asia, and so on. Within that
repertoire, the attack on the World Trade Center became, in the words of
W. J. T. Mitchell, “an icon in its own right, an image of horror that has
imprinted itself in the memory of the entire world.”8
Few images, however, have been repeated as often as those of the
attack on the World Trade Center. A paradoxical effect of frequent repetition is that the repeated images actually make the image unreal and
present it as performed. This is one of the reasons why it was sometimes
hard for viewers all over the world to experience the images of September 11 as real. As Geoff King points out in his careful analysis, in the
days that followed September 11, the images were increasingly edited in
repeated sequences and organized according to storytelling conventions of temporal continuity that are filled with heroes and villains.9
Such assemblages of images enhanced the fictionalization of what was
essentially amateur or documentary coverage. The real thus further
receded, or, as Dean Lockwood puts it: “At the moment we cut through
reality to the Real, the Real appears at its most staged. . . . In effect, the
intruding Real is always already plastinated.”10 Thus, the images are perceived as a performance of the real.
The rather uncanny perception of the television images of September 11 is inextricably bound up with the confusion of the real and the
unreal. Both in postmodern theory and in media studies, the idea of a
“society of the spectacle” has become widely accepted. As Douglas Kellner writes: “During the past decades, the culture industries have multi-
M e d i at i n g M e m o r i e s
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plied media spectacles in novel spaces and sites, and spectacle itself is
becoming one of the organizing principles of the economy, polity, society, and everyday life.”11 The phrase “society of the spectacle” was coined
by Guy Debord in the 1960s as a neo-Marxist analysis of a specific stage
of capitalism. Kellner extends the notion to what he calls “technocapitalism,” a stage at which developing countries and the globalized world
are emerging into a culture of media spectacle that combines technological development with a global restructuring of capital.12 “Spectacle”
and “reality” seem somewhat contradictory terms: a spectacle is by definition not exactly realistic because it exceeds the real in some way. Yet
King introduces the notion of the “spectacle of the real” as an inclination in contemporary media culture to conjoin both spectacle and the
real in representations of “incredible-seeming reality.”13
Developments in digital technology have further increased the fundamental fusion and confusion of the factual with the virtual. Manuel
Castells calls this phenomenon “real virtuality.”14 With this contradictory slogan he points to a digital media culture in which reality has
become thoroughly virtualized. Reality or performance, fact or fiction,
true or untrue, original or copy: the different strands have become
entangled in a Gordian knot. When modern mass media produce copies of copies of copies (films that resemble disasters that in turn resemble films) and reality recedes into a simulacrum, viewers yearn for what
is lost: the real. When “the real is no longer what it used to be,” Baudrillard writes, “nostalgia assumes its full meaning.”15 In a culture of real
virtuality, the real and the authentic become desirable as lost objects. As
Joseph Pine and James Gilmore argue, people want real experiences—
for which they are willing to pay a lot of money.16 In their book Authenticity, Gilmore and Pine sketch the paradox of the experience economy:
in an increasingly unreal world, consumers desire something real, original, genuine, sincere—in a word, authentic—and this is as true for political candidates as it is for the entertainment industry.17 In a world of
performances, the public seeks the “really real.” The real and the authentic have become the holy grail of the society of the spectacle.
The passion for the real and the authentic in media culture can be
understood as a resistance to regimes of representation that turn each
image or act into a performance. I propose here to understand the
notion of spectacle as a form of performance, because in my view digital
Anneke Smelik
media push viewers to not only accept media images as a spectacle, but
to become users who can adapt the images. Thus, they become part of
the performativity of media culture.
The Performance of Memory
The development of new media and electronic technologies has also left
its impact on the way in which a culture deals with its collective memory.
Memory studies have therefore pointed to the pivotal role of media in
keeping certain memories alive, and more specifically, to the promise of
media to present memory as fresh, untainted, and even unmediated.
The notion of memory as unmediated experience has haunted media
studies of memory. According to Susannah Radstone, the memory crisis
in the late twentieth century is informed by the development of digital
technologies that seek an experience of “immediacy, instantaneity and
simultaneity.”18 It is as if the media have taken over the promise of immediacy and authenticity from memory. Ever since Marshall McLuhan
argued that media are an extension of the human senses, and also an
extension of consciousness, it has been impossible within contemporary
multimedia culture to maintain a view of memory as unmediated.19
As Vivian Sobchack explains, audiovisual technologies of the twentieth century collapse the temporal distance between present, past, and
future. There is no longer a history that happened “before” and a representation that came “after” the event, but we are moving toward simultaneity. Sobchack refers to the O.J. Simpson case, but 9/11 is of course
another example of history happening right here and now; it “is transmitted, reflected upon, shown play-by-play, taken up as the stuff of
multiple stories and significance, given all sorts of ‘coverage’ in the temporal dimension of the present as we live it.” 20 For Andreas Huyssen the
collapse of the boundary between past and present in contemporary
fast-speed media pertains to the very crisis of memory, while Radstone
claims that in the contemporary remembrance boom, memory is aligned
with issues of performativity and representation, privileging invention
and fabrication over authenticity and lived experience. 21 Although it
is an important step to understand memory as “always already” mediated, we can push the argument even further. Not only is memory
shaped by media, but media are also shaped by memory. Thus, José van
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Dijck argues, “media and memory transform each other.” 22 Media technologies structure our process of remembering, just as remembrance
affects how we make use of media devices.
If we understand a medium as a process, and not as a thing, we can
also argue that it not only re-mediates, but that the medium itself also
remembers. That is why media usually mediate one another, as McLuhan indicated in his seminal Understanding Media: “the ‘content’ of any
medium is always another medium,” he famously stated.23 Or, to put it
differently, if the past is always already mediated, then media have by
necessity to re-mediate. Mediated memory products can thus be understood as having a double mnemonic layer—that is, as being both the
cultural and the medial remembrance of something. This may also hint
at an explanation of why cultural memory seems to be shrouded in clichés and stereotypes.
The point here is that the media package the real, offering it in the
form of spectacular performance. Every “authentic” viewing experience,
as offered to us by, for example, the “live” coverage of September 11, is
framed and formatted by the media. What seems authentic, therefore,
is inevitably transformed into a staged performance. News broadcasts,
current affairs programs, and reality TV shows are as subject to performativity as Hollywood action or fantasy movies. Put a camera on it and
the real will be literally transformed into a performance. Amateur footage is now “professionalized” to the point that any qualitative distinction between the two is lost. Moreover, as Geoff King argues, techniques
such as “shaky camerawork, dodgy focus, or awkward zooms” signify that
events have not been staged.24 Often, such techniques are used in fictional movies to produce a reality effect. This works the other way around,
too, so that when the coverage of September 11 contained “numerous
such signifiers of actuality” or authenticity, it came across as something
performed.25
The Trauma of the Real
There is no doubt that the attacks of September 11 were a traumatic
event. Trauma can be defined as an excess of reality, an overwhelming
event that cannot be assimilated and defies comprehension.26 When
events reach a certain magnitude we naturally doubt their existence.
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Just as a disaster is an excess of reality for those involved, the images of
the disaster are similarly an excess of reality for the television viewer.
The horror of the real needs to be domesticated, softened, or “plastinated,” as Lockwood puts it.27 We could also say that for the viewer it is
less traumatic to view the images as performed.
The dramatic documentary 9/11 (2002), by the brothers Gédéon and
Jules Naudet, is instructive of the ways in which shocking images require
mediation and containment. While making a film about firefighters, the
two French filmmakers were coincidentally present near the World
Trade Center at the time of the attacks. They were the only ones who
filmed the first plane striking the tower, and they were in the lobby of one
tower when the other one collapsed. The most gripping moments in
9/11 are the regular thumping sounds, which are in fact the sounds of
bodies falling to the ground, the bodies of those who jumped out of the
towers. The documentary filmmakers decided on the spot that this was
just too gruesome to film, so the viewer is spared images of burning or
dead bodies or body parts.28 But the sounds that punctuate the story are
gruesome enough in themselves—so gruesome that CBS requested that
the filmmakers edit the soundtrack to cut out most of the macabre
thuds, which they deemed too traumatic for the viewer.29
The visual footage shot by the Naudet brothers on that fateful day is
awesome in its overwhelming immediacy. The gripping images testify to
the traumatic impact of events that were literally beyond words, beyond
the power of imagination, “existing in a visceral realm of shock and
pain.”30 The camera not only registers the events from within, literally
catching the dust and debris on its lens, but also captures the bewilderment, disbelief, fear, and powerlessness of the people caught in the
midst of the disaster. The commentary and the interviews that crosscut
the images of the events confirm the shocked responses of all.
The Naudet brothers tried to mitigate the traumatic impact of their
unique footage by integrating it with the image of a young fireman in
training, in typical Hollywood narrative style. The plot follows his development from innocence to experience and tells his heroic story of initiation. Stef Craps argues that the focus thus shifts from a disorienting and
shocking terrorist mass murder to comforting notions of heroism and
community, understood in a specifically American sense.31 He criticizes
the filmmakers for negating the “murdering nightmare of terrorism” by
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superimposing a moralistic story of redemptive virtue. In his view, the
documentary confirms an idealized notion of the national self-image of
the United States and even functions as a moral justification for revenge.
Indeed, 9/11 extends and inscribes itself in a long cinematic tradition
that honors firefighters: from Life of an American Fireman (1903) to The
Towering Inferno (1974), and from Backdraft (1991) to The Guys (2002)
and Ladder 49 (2004).
While I agree with Craps that the documentary filmmakers tried to
make the trauma of September 11 more palatable for the viewer by
framing it within the cultural codes of American cinema and television,
I disagree with his rather harsh critique that such a “Hollywoodization”
is necessarily harmful due to its ideological subterfuge. The documentary 9/11 makes the trauma into a “comprehensible story,” which is
exactly what the specialists say should happen with a trauma.32 The
images become a performance of memory, of something we have seen
before and can thus comprehend better. Craps seems to underestimate
not only the force of the real when it is unleashed in its full-blown rawness and directness, but also, and more importantly, the de-realizing
effect of the media images per se. As Lockwood argues, the “radical,
deconstructive potential seems to be immediately short-circuited wherever it appears.” He continues: “We are tormented with both the desire
to see everything, to have the world on hand, ‘live and raw,’ and the
suspicion, ultimately reassuring, that there really is ‘nothing to see.’” 33
The media play an important role in helping us get a grip on the trauma
of September 11 and thus “make trauma liveable, bearable.”34 In spite of
its reassuring narrative framework, the sound and images of 9/11 will
always remain shockingly real. It is precisely because of their traumatic
impact that the viewer needs a “comprehensible story” as a vehicle for
understanding.
“Osama, Osama, Please Come Back”
While there was an avalanche of poetry, novels, comic books, pop songs,
video clips, and even tattoos that provided a more or less immediate
artistic response to the 9/11 disaster, the film industry remained silent
for some years after release of the initial documentaries, such as 9/11. It
was not until 2005 that feature films were produced about the disaster,
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the first being September 12th, by director John Touhey. This reticence to
build fictional narratives around 9/11 was the result of a certain amount
of self-censorship and, frankly, embarrassment: to make a spectacular
movie about a recent disaster that in itself resembled a disaster movie
seemed inappropriate. Accordingly, some action movies were shelved or
their release postponed. The release of V for Vendetta was delayed because
some scenes were reminiscent of the terrorist attack of July 7, 2005, on
the London transport system. It was not until 2006 that the first big
budget films arrived, such as United 93, by director Paul Greengrass, and
World Trade Center, by Oliver Stone. Both of these films struggle with the
genre of the “spectacle movie”: United 93 is careful to avoid spectacularization by minutely detailing the flight of the airplane that crashed in
Pennsylvania, while World Trade Center takes the safe road by focusing
on the last two men that were pulled from the rubble alive—the story of
“true heroes.”35
To date, then, films about the terrorist attacks of September 11 are
relatively rare. One of the few exceptions is an extraordinary film made
in 2002, just a year after the attacks, which consists of eleven shorts by
famous directors from all over the world. Each film lasts exactly eleven
minutes, nine seconds, and one frame, yielding the title of the film:
11’09”01. The film received the “Special Prize” at the 2002 Cannes Film
Festival. Because the eleven short films produce an interesting kalei
doscopic vision of the September events, and resist spectacularization, I
discuss them in more detail here.
A major problem that a maker of a film about 9/11 has to solve is how
to offer a visual answer to the well-known television images of the disaster. This causes a dilemma: how do we visualize a disaster that is already
settled in our memory? One solution is to not show it at all. Thus, one of
the most moving short films of 11’09”01, by director Alejandro Gonzá
les Iñárritu, presents a virtually black screen for eleven minutes, nine
seconds, and one frame, interrupted now and then by an image of a
man falling from the tower.36 The complex soundtrack consists of ritual
prayers in a foreign language and audio footage from the disaster:
sirens, the collapsing building, bystanders screaming. The spectator
watches minutes of blackness while the murmuring voices and ambient
noise increase; then there is silence, the flash of a falling man, and so on.
Likewise, filmmaker Michael Moore does not show the attack on the
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Twin Towers in his documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004): in the beginning of the film, he presents the spectator with a black image accompanied by the ethereal music of Arvo Pärt mingled with the sounds of the
disaster and startled reactions of witnesses.
In both cases, the black screen is quite terrifying, even when viewed
years later. This is probably due to two effects: first, since the images of
9/11 have become part of our cultural and visual memory, the performance of memory can be easily evoked. While we watch the black screen,
hearing familiar sounds (in both films, the well-known sounds of someone saying “oh my God”), almost anybody can immediately visualize the
familiar images of the disaster. This points to a paradox in the culture
of the spectacle: an impressive image has impact only when we no longer
see it, because the repetition of these images has a dulling or numbing
effect. It also shows that the effect of the soundtrack is particularly powerful in a culture that privileges images over sound. Sound still has a
more direct and affective power—show a film without the sound, and its
effect is dramatically weakened. Both Fahrenheit 9/11 and 11’09”01 make
use of the emotional effects of sound.37 With sound there is no corresponding confusion about fact and fiction, while, as I have argued above,
images prompt the spectator to constantly evaluate the relationship
between reality, representation, and imagination. As King argues, sound
establishes the modality of the real and the authentic. 38 In 2002, relatively soon after the attack, these films had to look for ways of reasserting the real over the spectacle.
Another way of addressing the overwhelming visual spectacle of September 11 is by putting the terrorist attack in a broader political and
social context—for example, by focusing on different historical or political conflicts in other parts of the world. Of the eleven short films in
11’09”01, eight are about such political struggles or economic problems:
Afghani refugees in Iran; a bombing of Beirut in the 1980s; the war in
Bosnia-Herzegovina; the assassination of Salvador Allende in Chile on
September 11, 1973; a bomb attack in Tel Aviv; the ongoing war in the
Middle East; the Second World War in Japan; and the AIDS crisis in
Africa. In these cases, the attacks in New York and Washington, DC,
function as a trigger for personal memories of traumatic experiences
elsewhere in the world. This puts the American response to the attack
on September 11, as singular as that attack was, into some perspective.
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Without trivializing the horrors of September 11, the short films indicate that there are many “small histories” of violent conflicts in the
world, with large numbers of victims who are just as innocent as those
killed in the 2001 attacks, and that these are conflicts in which, more
often than not, the United States played a role. In Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore
questions the international role of the United States by filming the suffering of both wounded Iraqi citizens and U.S. soldiers, images that are
usually censured on American television. In his usual loud and provocative style, Moore also reveals the huge economic stakes held by American companies, including the oil industry, in the Iraq war.
Only two of the eleven films included in 11’09”01 are actually set on
the location and day of the attacks. Interestingly enough, both short
films feature a character who does not know what is happening, although
both characters’ apartments are located near the Twin Towers. In the
film by Claude Lelouch, a deaf French woman has her television turned
on but is not watching because she is arguing with her lover online. In
the film by Sean Penn, the only American film in the collection, a
demented widower living in Manhattan is mourning the death of his
wife. When the towers collapse, their dark shadows disappear from the
walls of his apartment and a beam of sunlight enters the room. The old
man is literally glowing as he looks ecstatically up at the sky. Does he
perhaps think he has died and is now in heaven? The images of shadow
and light are a simple but effective way to shift the perspective from
mass murder to a possible spiritual redemption.
One would normally find humor incongruous with the horrors of a
terrorist attack of the scale of September 11. However, one of the short
films in 11’09”01 makes use of humor in a rather disarming way. In
Idrissa Ouedraogo’s film, people in the streets and markets of Burkina
Faso are gathered around transistor radios listening to the news on September 11. As in many so-called underdeveloped countries, radio is still
the predominant technology of communication. A few street urchins
hear news of the attacks, but it does not mean much to them in the context of their poverty and illness. One of the boys has a mother who is ill
with AIDS and is unable to afford the necessary medication. As a consequence, he has to leave school in order to earn money. A few days after
the attacks, the boys hear on the radio that the United States is offering
a twenty-five-million-dollar reward for capturing Osama bin Laden.
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They fantasize about what they could do with such a huge amount of
money: heal the sick of Burkina Faso and allow all children to go to
school. When they think that they see bin Laden in the marketplace (a
rather comical look-alike—a lean and bearded Arabic man in a crowd
of black Africans), they get very excited and try, over the next few days,
to catch him. But the man escapes in a car, the children running after
him barefoot. They realize he has gone to the airport, and as he flies
away, they cry out: “Osama, Osama, please come back. We need you
here.” Disillusioned, the children return to their impoverished lives
while dreaming of those twenty-five million dollars. Obviously, the sentence “Osama, please come back, we need you” can be rather shocking
to a Western audience when taken out of context, but within the story it
makes perfect sense and elicits a sympathetic smile.
In most of the short films included in 11’09”01, the director shows
the impact of the terrorist attacks of September 11 on people elsewhere. More often than not, these people cannot even imagine the
extent or significance of the attack, because within their local context
it makes no sense at all. Moreover, they are overwhelmed by their own
problems and suffering: they are the widows of Srebrenica, where eight
thousand unarmed Muslim men were killed under the eyes of UN forces;
starving Afghani and African children; and victims of terrorism, war,
torture, or dictatorship. By focusing on the many problems and conflicts
in a globalized world, the eleven short films implicitly critique the dominance and arrogance of the United States for its lack of compassion and
understanding of disenfranchised “others,” an arrogance “based on its
crushing technical superiority rather than its elevated morality,” as Paul
Virilio writes.39
The Act of Witnessing
Film produces a different viewing experience than television, because
it is watched in public, on a large screen, in a dark room, and without
any distractions. 11’09”01 and Fahrenheit 9/11 do not confuse the viewer
about the ontological status of what is represented. Through aesthetic
form and rhetorical persuasion, the films try to engage the spectator.
The point here is not whether they are successful films in and of themselves (the quality of the eleven short films is uneven, and Michael Moore
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received substantial criticism for his bombastic use of rhetoric), but
rather whether they foster critical engagement on the part of the film
spectator, allowing him or her to achieve greater insight and understanding. Such an engaged subject position is, in many ways, more difficult to achieve for the television viewer: the context is missing in a live
broadcast, there is the inevitable spectacle of the real, and the television
viewer is put in a complicated ethical position. In the last part of this
article I discuss the possibility of an ethical response for television
viewers in an era of global media.
As I have argued throughout this chapter, the television viewer has a
hard time experiencing the traumatic images of the 9/11 attacks as real
rather than performed. The very moment the viewer realizes that the
images are the horrible, naked truth, the act of looking becomes less
innocent. The viewer is then thrust into the position of a witness: in
Lilie Chouliaraki’s words, “Live footage is the genre of the witness, par
excellence.”40 Of course, the image is mediated through the camera, the
network, and the television or mobile screen, and the act of viewing
takes place elsewhere and perhaps at another time. Nevertheless, the
realization of the immediacy of the images produces another way of
looking. To repeat the words of Kathy Smith: “This was not fantasy.
These were real events, happening to real people, affecting real lives.”
Viewers all over the world watched the unfolding of the disaster in the
safety of their homes or pubs, and they did so from every possible camera angle, and in slow motion. The television viewer of live disasters is in
this sense an omniscient witness. Such omniscience used to be reserved
for God, but the power of modern media is to put the viewer in the Godlike position of the all-seeing spectator.
What does it mean for the television viewer to witness a catastrophe
without actually being present at the actual time and place? Theme
parks such as Walt Disney World or Six Flags offer amusement and spectacle in such a way that the visitor can enjoy horror in safety. Similarly,
viewers of a disaster on television are witnesses without being in danger
themselves. To be a witness of a disaster “in real life” can be a traumatic
event (although, as in the case of the roadside accident, we are nevertheless drawn to it). As we have seen, trauma is defined as an experience that one cannot comprehend or master, nor fully remember. Most
people today encounter trauma through the media, which is why Ann
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Kaplan argues that it is paramount to carefully analyze mediatized
trauma as different from experienced trauma.41
While personal memory is always caught up in a process of forgetting,
change, and repression, the situation is quite different for the television
or Internet viewer, for whom the camera has recorded durable images,
from certain angles, with ambient sounds, and in a certain order. The
many recorded images of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center
do not allow the television viewer to ever forget or repress it. Moreover,
the images are by now ubiquitous in our culture, regularly repeated on
television and reprinted in many photo books, such as Sonja Bullaty,
Angelo Lomeo, and Paul Goldberger’s World Trade Center; Michael Feldschuh’s edited collection September 11; Gilles Peress et al.’s New York; and
Camilo José Vergara’s Twin Towers. The portraits of the deceased from
the New York Times were published in a book; CBS’s broadcasts of the
events came out on DVD with an accompanying book of photographs;
there are round-the-clock cameras installed at Ground Zero yielding
more images than anyone can process in a lifetime; documentaries and
fiction features were produced; the proposals for rebuilding the World
Trade Center site were hotly debated; and there was even a comic strip
made of the report by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks.42
Yet the omnipresence of the images and the omniscience of the viewer
do not necessarily lead to comprehension or constructive action. We may
see it all, but we understand little and can do nothing. In other words, the
position of the viewer is also one of powerlessness, or even passivity. Many
television viewers thus struggle with a complicated viewing position that
wavers between impotence and omnipotence.
This sense of helplessness is exacerbated by a culture of fear and anxiety. For Brian Massumi, fear, in late capitalism, is no longer an emotion
but an objective mode of being. While he has a tendency to blame the
media for creating a “landscape of fear,” he quite rightly points to capitalism’s interest in “eternalizing crisis without sacrificing profits.” 43
The psychological effect of wealth and well-being is the fear of losing
it: the safer, richer, and healthier people are, the more they dread that it
will all be taken away from them. The sociologist Ulrich Beck explains
that modern culture has given rise to a society organized around responding to risks.44 The notion of risk is generated by a preoccupation with
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safety; hence, citizens try to cover and secure themselves against any
imaginable danger—insurance policies being the most obvious expression of this. With its modern technology, modernity has produced a
“society of risk” in the sense that accidents and disasters are mostly manmade, and this is true of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001,
Madrid 2002, London 2005, and Paris 2015.
Paul Virilio observed in the 1980s that accidents are connected to
modern technology. The “accident is diagnostic of technology”: the
invention of the train implies the event of derailment.45 To adjust Virilio’s example, the invention of the airplane implies the airplane crash,
and the invention of the skyscraper implies its possible collapse. Virilio
argued that a highly developed society dependent on its technology finds
itself in a constant state of fear of the accident. Or, as Massumi put it:
“It is our culture: the perpetual imminence of the accident. Better, the
immanence of the accident.”46 Television feeds this anxiety because the
constant flow of information offers the spectacle of permanent crises.
The terror of real-time television broadcast is, for Virilio, connected to
the fear that technology evokes in making the accident absolute. As he
wrote prophetically in 1995, “We will soon see the emergence of the accident to end all accidents.”47
The live aspect of television lends itself perfectly to natural or manmade disasters. An interesting sequence from Moore’s inflammatory
documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 shows how politicians deliberately played
on fear and anxiety in order to justify an unlawful war for their political
and economical purposes. In a media society, fear can take on immense
proportions, because the viewers experience the disaster as if it happened just around the corner. Viewers may “witness” a disaster on their
television sets almost every day, but when they look out the window of
their homes, the street appears calm and quiet. Such mixed emotions
result in an indefinable sense of insecurity. As W. J. T. Mitchell put it,
“We live in a time that is best described as a limbo of continually deferred
expectations and anxieties.”48
Citizens are thus trapped in a spiral of anxiety. Afraid of the disaster
that is waiting for them, viewers glue themselves to the television that
offers even more misfortune. Watching such images of doom and disaster confirms the fear that a calamity may strike at any moment. More
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perversely, fear and anxiety make the television viewer long for more
and for worse. In his novel Saturday, Ian McEwan writes: “Everyone fears
it, but there’s also a darker longing in the collective mind, a sickening
for self-punishment and a blasphemous curiosity.”49 As the epigraph
points out, such dark desires, in our media culture, are intimately bound
up with a libidinal investment in Hollywood’s fantasy world.
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Toward an Ethics of Spectatorship
The question of what kind of ethical position is available for the television viewer in a culture of “real virtuality” has, surprisingly, not been
addressed much in media studies. Susan Sontag resists the postmodern
analysis of media culture as a real virtuality because she thinks that the
disappearance of the dividing line between the real and the unreal
undermines an ethical position. 50 I disagree with this view. First, as I
have shown in this essay, we cannot easily disregard or undo the fundamental confusion between the real and the performed, the actual and
the virtual, in a globalized (and increasingly digitized) media culture.
Second, I believe an ethical position can be not only coherent with, but
also necessarily part of the critical stance I take in this essay. We require
an understanding of the performative aspect of media culture in order
to counteract its perverse effects. As David Morley and Kevin Robbins
argue, an analysis of the relation to the “mediated” and the “real” may be
complex, but it is necessary for an understanding of the psychic investment of the viewer in the images of suffering.51 Media culture may be
full of contradictions and paradoxes, but it can nonetheless be analyzed,
criticized, and accounted for.
Lilie Chouliaraki contends that media theory has only recently begun
to address the issue of a possible ethical sensibility for the viewer when
watching violence and suffering on television. One of the effects of the
globalization of media is that viewers are exposed to images of suffering
from all over the world, often of “distant sufferers” in faraway countries.52 In the case of September 11, the shock was partly due to its performative aspect; as W. J. T. Mitchell aptly remarks, the destruction of
the Twin Towers was staged as a spectacle by the terrorists. 53 The shock
was also partly due to the novel position of U.S. citizens as victims, a position of “suffering, fear, and death that many people endure on a daily
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basis in violent and insecure situations in other parts of the world.”54
Although for Europe the images were from across the Atlantic, the identification with the imagined community of the West was strong enough
to establish “a degree of proximity.”55 The famous slogan “Nous sommes
tous Américains,” made by Jean-Marie Colombani in Le Monde, demonstrated the sympathetic identification of Europeans (and others around
the world) with the United States a few days after the attack, an empathy
that was quickly lost after U.S. attacks commenced against Afghanistan
and Iraq.
When television forces the spectator into the position of the eyewitness, it “at once exposes us to, and insulates us from, actual suffering.”56
Television images of suffering elicit emotional responses that are undoubtedly complex, ranging from relief that the trauma did not happen to us,
to malicious delight and sensationalism, to sincere grief and sorrow. As
I argue above, such ambivalent feelings can easily lead to fear, inertia,
and a sense of powerlessness. A modest first step in overcoming feelings of fear and powerlessness lies in accepting the responsibilities of
being a witness. When we are a bystander in a disaster, accident, or crime
“in real life,” we can be called on to be a witness. In trauma studies, the
position of the witness is of paramount importance. 57 It carries with it
an explicit acknowledgment of the suffering of the other and a responsibility for the act of witnessing: “Exposed to trauma, the self emerges
as taking responsibility, as responding to what is happening before his/
her eyes.”58
The question here is how the television viewer of global media might
respond to the witnessing of global suffering on a daily basis. Obviously,
there are no easy answers to this question. Kaplan argues that media
images can be seen only as “at most vicarious trauma, not as experiencing trauma itself.” Such images can evoke an overwhelming response of
empathy, but also what she calls an “empty response,” when images of suf
fering “are provided without any context or background knowledge.”59
Chouliaraki suggests that a possible response to the spectacle of a terrorist attack like September 11 could be a mixture of identification and
reflexivity. Identification requires an involved spectator who is inspired
by feelings of pity and empathy that allow for the possibility of a virtual
substitution: “We are all Americans.” Reflexivity requires more distance
for “impartial deliberation and rational judgment”—for example, by
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understanding the role of the media or by putting the event in its historical and political context.60
Rosi Braidotti argues that ethics is primarily about learning how to
relate to human alterity.61 We need to acknowledge and feel compassion for the pain and suffering of others, but we also need to work
through the others’ pain and suffering. For Braidotti, that means transforming negative into positive affects: “pain into compassion, loss into
a sense of bonding, isolation into care.”62 The television image of the
suffering of the other, then, poses a challenge for the television viewer.
Whether the images are real or performed, ethical accountability remains
crucial at the very moment when watching turns into witnessing. Perhaps Donna Haraway’s notion of the “modest witness” can be of use
here. Haraway revamps the figure of the modest witness from modern
science in order to politicize practices of witnessing; in her words, “Witnessing is seeing; attesting; standing publicly accountable for, and psychically vulnerable to, one’s visions and representations.”63 Thus, we
can rethink the spectator position in terms of empathy and affinity. For
Haraway, such a position is always located or situated rather than
detached or uncaring: “Location is the always partial, always finite,” and
“Location is also partial in the sense of being for some worlds and not
others.”64 This is clearly not an individualized act of heroism. Rather,
the accountability of witnessing involves care and compassion, as well as
choice: for example, the choice for a better world. For Kaplan, too, vicarious witnessing by watching suffering through the media, for example
in an event like 9/11, involves a deliberate ethical consciousness: “Witnessing involves wanting to change the kind of world where injustice, of
whatever kind, is common.”65
As a modest witness, the television viewer can respond to real and
virtual images of suffering in two ways: affectively, through empathy or
identification, and intellectually, through reflexivity and knowledge.66
Either way, ethical accountability involves an active and affirmative
response. Such a response is always local and situated in the here and
now—for example by donating money, by being nice to the person
behind the counter in the supermarket, or by putting into perspective
“my comfort and ‘place under the sun,’” as we saw in the shorts of
11’09’’01.67 These are perhaps small, and rather modest, acts of charity,
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kindness, and care, but they are a first step out of the vicious circle of
anxiety and powerlessness in which modern media culture ensnares us.
We can resist the mediated memories of a particular disaster by using
our ability to criticize, by separating the real from the unreal, and by
allowing ourselves to be moved by the suffering of others, following our
emotional response on the path to action.
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Notes
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
I thank Robert Doran for his comments and suggestions.
Epigraphs: Ian McEwan, Saturday (London: Vintage, 2005), 176; Brian
Massumi, ed., The Politics of Everyday Fear (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993), 31.
Kathy Smith, “Reframing Fantasy: September 11 and the Global Audience,” in The Spectacle of the Real: From Hollywood to ‘Reality’ TV and Beyond,
ed. Geoff King (Bristol: Intellect, 2005), 60.
Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, trans. Chris Turner (London:
Verso, 2002), 29.
Geoff King, “‘Just Like a Movie’?: 9/11 and Hollywood Spectacle,” in The
Spectacle of the Real: From Hollywood to ‘Reality’ TV and Beyond, ed. Geoff
King (Bristol: Intellect, 2005).
Smith, “Reframing Fantasy,” 60.
Baudrillard, Spirit of Terrorism, 28.
Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (London: Verso, 2002), 15–17.
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New
York: Schocken, 1968).
W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 14.
King, “Like a Movie.”
Dean Lockwood, “Teratology of the Spectacle,” in The Spectacle of the Real:
From Hollywood to ‘Reality’ TV and Beyond, ed. Geoff King (Bristol: Intellect, 2005), 78.
Douglas Kellner, “Media Culture and the Triumph of the Spectacle,” in
The Spectacle of the Real: From Hollywood to ‘Reality’ TV and Beyond, ed. Geoff
King (Bristol: Intellect, 2005), 23.
Ibid., 34–35.
King, “Like a Movie,” 13.
Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).
15
16
17
18
19
84
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
Baudrillard, Spirit of Terrorism, 12.
Joseph Pine and James Gilmore, The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre
and Every Business a Stage (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1999).
James Gilmore and Joseph Pine, Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want
(Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2007), 1.
Susannah Radstone, ed., Memory and Methodology (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 7.
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London:
Routledge, 2002).
Vivian Sobchack, The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television and the Modern Event (New York: Routledge, 1996), 5.
Radstone, Memory and Methodology, 9.
José van Dijck, Mediated Memories in the Digital Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 21.
McLuhan, Understanding Media, 8.
King, “Like a Movie,” 50.
Ibid.
Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1995), 4.
Lockwood, “Teratology.”
This raises the question of the ethics of documentary or news reporting
itself, but a discussion of this issue lies beyond the scope of this essay.
Stef Craps, “Tussen trauma en verbeelding: De documentaire 9/11 van
de gebroeders Naudet” [Between trauma and representation: The documentary 9/11 by the brothers Naudet], in Stof en as: De neerslag van 11 sep
tember in kunst en populaire cultuur [Dust and ashes: The impact of September 11 in art and popular culture.], eds. Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik (Amsterdam: Van Gennep, 2006).
Smith, “Reframing Fantasy,” 60.
Craps, “Trauma en verbeelding.”
Caruth, Trauma, 154.
Lockwood, “Teratology,” 79.
Joanna Zylinska, “Mediating Murder: Ethics, Trauma and the Price of
Death,” Journal for Cultural Research 8, no. 3 (2004): 240.
A couple of films use Ground Zero as a backdrop, without giving it any
particular function in the story, such as Spike Lee’s 25th Hour (2002). In
contrast, Munich (2005), Steven Spielberg’s film about an Israeli death
squad determined to eliminate the Palestinian terrorists who killed
Israeli athletes during the 1972 Olympics in Munich, ends with a minute-long shot of Manhattan, with the Twin Towers still in place. The message is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is, on a symbolic level, connected to the attack of September 11. Some European films took 9/11 as
Anneke Smelik
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
a backdrop to investigate complex interethnic relations between Arabic
immigrants and white Europeans, such as the German films September
and Fremder Freund (Foreign Friend), both from 2003. September used the
images of the attack on television as the background for complicated
love relations and tells loosely connected love stories, one of which
involves a Pakistani and a German struggling over their interpretations
of the terrorist assault: the woman feels that her Muslim husband does
not take enough critical distance from the attack. Fremder Freund focuses
on a close friendship between Chris, a Berliner, and Yunus, a Yemeni;
Yunus disappears after 9/11, suggesting that he was in some way involved
in the attack. In the Dutch comedy Shouf Shouf Habibi (Albert ter Heerdt,
2004), Dutch Moroccan Muslims make passing remarks about 9/11 as if
it were an event they had already forgotten.
The image of the falling man has become one of the iconic images of
September 11; see, for example, the British documentary by Hamisch
Mykura entitled 9/11: The Falling Man (U.K.: Channel 4, 2002); the pictures at the end of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2005); or the recent
book by postmodernist author Don DeLillo: Falling Man (New York:
Scribner, 2007).
In the United States, National Public Radio has created a lasting memorial website of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center,
www.sonicmemorial.com. It is quite unique and moving to listen to the
array of ambient noise, personal voices, and music collected there; again,
the sounds seem to have a stronger affective impact than the by now
all-too-familiar images. Elisia L. Cohen and Cynthia Willis claim that
the aural memorial “commemorate[s] and sustain[s] an imagined aural
community through the creation of a digital soundscape.” Cohen and
Willis, “One Nation under Radio: Digital and Public Memory After 11 Sep
tember.” New Media and Society 6 (2004): 593.
King, “Like a Movie,” 53. Of course, even sound has now become conventionalized, particularly in action films, with fight sequences punctuated
with the obligatory thuds and crashing sounds bearing little or no resemblance to the sounds one would hear “in reality.”
Paul Virilio, Ground Zero, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2002),
36.
Lilie Chouliaraki, The Spectatorship of Suffering (London: Sage, 2006),
159.
E. Ann Kaplan, Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and
Literature (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 2.
New York Times staff, Portraits 9/11/01: The Collected ‘Portraits of Grief’ from
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43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
the New York Times (New York: Times Books, 2002); CBS News, What We
Saw (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002); Suzanne Stephens, Ian
Luna, and Ron Broadhurst, Imagining Ground Zero: Official and Unofficial Proposals for the World Trade Center Site (New York: Rizzoli, 2004);
Wouter Weijers, “Minimalism, Memory, and the Reflection of Absence,”
in Technologies of Memory in the Arts, ed. Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); and Sid Jacobson and
Ernie Colon, The 9/11 Report. A Graphic Adaptation (New York: Hill and
Wang, 2005).
Massumi, Everyday Fear, 24, 19.
Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. Mark Ritter
(London: Sage, 1992).
Paul Virilio, The Virilio Reader, ed. James Der Derian (Oxford: Blackwell,
1998), 20.
Massumi, Everyday Fear, 10.
Virilio, Virilio Reader, 183.
Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want, 321–322.
McEwan, Saturday, 176.
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2002).
David Morley and Kevin Robbins, “Under Western Eyes: Media, Empire
and Otherness,” in Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes
and Cultural Boundaries, ed. David Morley and Kevin Robbins (London:
Routledge, 1996), 141.
Chouliaraki, Spectatorship.
Mitchell writes: “The real target was a globally recognizable icon, and
the aim was not merely to destroy it but to stage its destruction.” Mitchell,
What Do Pictures Want, 14.
Douglas Kellner, From 9/11 to Terror War: The Dangers of the Bush Legacy
(Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 54.
Chouliaraki, Spectatorship, 160.
Morley and Robbins, “Western Eyes,” 141.
Caruth, Trauma.
Zylinska, “Mediating Murder,” 240.
Kaplan, Trauma Culture, 90–91.
Chouliaraki, Spectatorship, 179.
Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Cambridge: Polity Press,
2006).
Ibid., 214.
Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium: FemaleMan©_Meets
_OncoMouseTM (New York: Routledge, 1997), 267.
Anneke Smelik
64
65
66
67
Ibid., 37.
Kaplan, Trauma Culture, 122.
The need to understand the complexities of global mass media in relation to an ethics of spectatorship points to the necessity of visual literacy
in the educational system, which is still rather undeveloped in most Western countries.
Zylinska, “Mediating Murder,” 243.
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3
Prediction, Proximity,
and Cosmopolitanism
in Global Spectacles
Gaurav Majumdar
Let us trespass at once. Literature is no one’s private ground; literature is
common ground. It is not cut up into nations; there are no wars there. Let
us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves. It is thus
that English literature will survive this war and cross the gulf—if commoners
and outsiders like ourselves make that country our own country, if we teach
ourselves how to read and to write, how to preserve, and how to create.
—virginia woolf, “The Leaning Tower”
Melancholy, I think, is a sort of default vagueness, a get-out clause, a
smothering lack of focus.
—edmund de waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes
T
he production of spectacle frequently plays tricks with the relations between language and time, and between proximity and
distance. The offer of a spectacle may involve the proleptic discussion of a spectacle, the selection of temporal parts as a temporal
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whole, and the conflation of physical objects and circumstances that
share no apparent closeness or conjunction. Such tricks, as well as their
political and narrative implications, are the focus of the arguments that
I offer here, mainly through a discussion of prediction and its attendant
problems within scenes from contemporary postcolonial politics and literature, and their treatment of future spectacles. In particular, I discuss
the production of spectacles through the skepticism about proleptic
declarations and immediacy within novels by Peter Carey and Salman
Rushdie, the theater of the Arab Spring, and (for most of the discussion
here) the poignant certainties shaping the repeatedly announced return
of a divine presence, spectacular and of global scope, in Kamau Brathwaite’s poem “Xango.” Further, I read the physical and temporal immediacy or proximity offered in these spectacles as a catalyst for solidarity
through spectacle, a catalyst that encourages cosmopolitanism in a
newer, electronically mediated version of Enlightenment cosmopolitan
politics that neglects, and yet demands, cosmopolitanism as a revision of
the self’s ability to fuse its sympathies perfectly with those of others.
Spectacles and Anticipation
The assumption behind such a demand is, of course, that we can read
representations of scenes elsewhere as entirely available for one’s accurate understanding or affective intuition. That assumption shaped (and
continues to shape) not only the justifications of colonial enterprises,
but also the spectacles that colonial representations stage. A commonplace in postcolonial studies is that maps wreak epistemological violence
through the suppression of alternative viewpoints, territorial claims,
and histories of ecological devastation that went into map making.1
Peter Carey’s novel Oscar and Lucinda adds a different view to the violence of mapping by linking it with an act of anticipation. In the book, a
man named Jeffris leads an expedition that seeks to build a glass church
in the Australian Outback. Glass, the narrative reveals, is a catalyst for
physical and spiritual violence that colonialism visits on Australia: Jeffris
hacks his way through foliage and human beings during the transportation of the glass for the church to the town of Bellinger. According to
Jeffris, the glass brings a spectacular historiography with it: “Each pane
of glass . . . would travel through country where glass had never existed
G l o b a l S p e c ta c l e s
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before, not once, in all time. These sheets would cut a new path in history. They would slice the white dust covers of geography and reveal a
map beneath, with rivers, mountains and names. . . . He felt the axe in
his hands, the cut scrub, the harsh saw-teeth of mountains giving up
their exact latitude to his theodolites.” 2
In other words, for Jeffris, colonial progress would make anticipated
knowledge manifest through its violence—this is an expected vision
posited as existing fact, an instance of prolepsis that Jeffris takes to be
prediction fused with demonstration. By revealing the topographic
secrets that the vegetation concealed, “glass” (which, here, works as a
metonym for the colonial expedition itself, because of the violence it
brings to Australia, because of its role in lenses for surveillance, because
of its associations with Christian proselytization, and because of its own
fragility) would make Australia available for mapping, and would bring
clarity and insight into the landscape that the indigenous population
did not earlier possess. All of these claims hinge on declarations that
propel the colonial machine because of predicted wonders under the
surfaces of Australia, which lie, it promises its various constituencies, on
“a map beneath” that will lay bare the complexities of colonized topography for imperial understanding. Colonialism, thus, predicts a palimpsestic spectacle—a subterranean, or past, or already existing, spectacle
that awaits discovery in the present or the future.
Moral Prediction
John Ruskin makes such a predictive colonial spectacle the centerpiece
of his inaugural lecture as the first Slade Professor of Art at Oxford
University. In the lecture, Ruskin issues a widely celebrated reminder to
England’s youth in 1870: “There is a destiny now possible to us, the
highest ever set before a nation to be accepted or refused.”3 This destiny
is for England to avail, because the English “are still undegenerate in
race; a race mingled of the best northern blood,” and, free of degenerate influence, young England must use its racial advantage to decide an
issue that science itself has placed across the nation’s path: “Within the
last few years we have had the laws of natural science opened to us with
a rapidity which has been blinding by its brightness; and means of transit and communication given to us, which have made but one kingdom
G a ur av M a j um d a r
of the habitable globe. One kingdom;--but who is to be its king.” (ibid.,
punctuation Ruskin’s).
If scientific technology has made the world navigable and habitable
for England, the answer is obvious. However, as a predestined gift, the
opportunity to rule the world comes with specific demands for the English
youth. Ruskin offers them the following mission and challenge, asking,
“Will you youths of England make your country again a royal throne of
kings, a sceptred isle, for all the world a source of light, a center of peace;
mistress of Learning and of the Arts?” (ibid.). The exhortation desires
an epistemological and aesthetic colonization—England must choose if
“she” will rule the world and bring it light, and, if she does, she must also
be “mistress of Learning and of the Arts.” The choice is not merely
important; it is crucial for England’s very survival: “And this is what
[England] must either do, or perish: she must found colonies as fast and
as far as she is able, formed of the most energetic and worthiest men;
seizing any piece of fruitful waste ground she can set her foot on, and
there teaching her colonists that their chief virtue is to be fidelity to their
country and that their first aim is to be to advance the power of England
by land and sea” (ibid., 70). The appropriation of land is to be complemented by the co-optation of people into faithful colonial servitude.
Both forms of subordination signal an aesthetics of expansion that
relies on individuation, which is, at the same time, an ethical marker—a
sign, the “chief sign,” of “virtue.”
With almost syllogistic certainty, Ruskin goes on to propose that, “if
we can get men, for little pay, to cast themselves against cannon-mouths
for love of England, we may find men also who will plough and sow for
her, who will bring up their children to love her, and who will gladden
themselves in the brightness of her glory, more than in all the light of
tropic skies” (ibid., 70). That these colonized peoples will be ready to
work and care for England, and to bask vicariously in its glory, is a foregone conclusion for Ruskin. The greater challenge lies in England’s
own preparation of itself as a model for the colonized world:
She must make her own majesty stainless; she must give them thoughts
of their home of which they can be proud. The England who is to be mistress of half the earth cannot remain herself a heap of cinders[;] she must
yet again become the England she was once, and in all beautiful ways
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more; so happy, so secluded, and so pure, that in her sky—polluted by no
unholy clouds—she may be able to spell rightly of every star that heaven
doth show; and in her fields, ordered and wide and fair, of every herb that
sips the dew; and under the green avenues of her enchanted garden, a
sacred Circe, true Daughter of the Sun, she must guide the human arts,
and gather the divine knowledge, of distant nations, transformed from savageness to manhood and redeemed into peace. (ibid., 70–71)
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Endorsing a drive for seclusion, the passage orders that England “must
yet again become the England she was once” and then exceed that condition to be “so happy, so secluded, and so pure.” Desire for temporal
sameness shapes the first instance—the paradisiacal scene is a function
of nostalgia for origins or prior glory—and desire for a sealed physical
condition shapes the second—insularity and purity are its sources of
happiness. If such temporal continuity, isolation, security, and purity
are the conditions of any paradise, the “enchanted garden” of “sacred
Circe” enlarges the role of unity and conformity: it operates on propriety (its light enables the goddess to “spell rightly”) and on harmony
between heaven and earth. Ruskin concludes his views on the imperial
program by making it an aesthetic one—the English colonial mission
must be such that the once-Hellenic-now-English goddess must remove
from her sky the pollution of “unholy clouds,” conduct the global arts,
arrogate the world’s knowledge, and finally provide both aesthetic and
moral redemption.4 (Ruskin obviously overlooks—or presumes no contradiction in—his characterization of the knowledge of the colonized as
simultaneously “divine” and in need of English guidance.)
Ruskin’s rhetorical hinge-move—the one that enables him to unfurl
his grand imperialist vista—is his emphasis on the single forms of both
empire and ruler, state and sovereign, in his ringing statement that
there is “one kingdom;--but who is to be its king?” (69). Ruskin does not
care to explain how science provides the evidence that recent technological change necessitates the transformation of the world into a single
empire—in fact, for his rhetorical evidence to stand, he needs to cancel
or occlude scrutiny of that claim within his presentation of his globeconquering spectacle. As long as his logic of the unitary (one kingdom,
one king) holds, so do his colonizing plans and his aesthetics for cooptation and expansion—there is, for Ruskin, an unquestionable need
for a single kingdom and its single monarch; England should satisfy that
need. The desired conquest has its vital goad in the moral urgency and
implied global obligation of the English youth within Ruskin’s predictive spectacle.5
Of course, spectral, hidden, and projected images drove (and continue to drive) much of colonialism—witness the lure of gold and diamonds encouraging the colonization of Southern Africa, or the
perpetually deferred spectacle of “weapons of mass destruction” propelling the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq. Rather than spectacle
already on display, then, it is the strange promise of veiled spectacle that
justifies invasion in such cases. This promise that prospectively justifies
the imperial enterprise seems to share an impulse with scientific inquiry
and brings me to questions related to the arguments of Salman Hameed
in this collection: Is the revelation of palimpsestic spectacle—a concealed spectacle that awaits discovery—also not a common aim of science (and, if you like, of religion)? What cautions might science observe
in its pursuit of such spectacle, especially in concert with religious
reform and what Hameed calls “the reintellectualization of the Islamic
discourse”? 6 What kinds of temporal complications does this kind of
spectacle bring? Does the idea that the spectacle-to-be-discovered is an
extra-temporal fact not license a presumption on the part of its prospective viewers? If so, then such license would suggest that global spectacles
shape not only our experience of time and space, but also our very expectations. Intuitions or hypotheses about such spectacle would, logically,
confound description—the related description would have to limn what
we expect but have not seen or experienced. The effects that this would
have on language would require something akin to simultaneous registration and narration. How can we hope to describe precisely the experience of historical spectacles that pass us by in quick time?
Spectacle in the Present
A famous metaphor in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children suggests that
our subscriptions to historical truth are a function of our distance from
past spectacle (or the past-as-spectacle), because “the further you get
from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems—but as you
approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.
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Suppose yourself in a large cinema sitting at first in the back row, and
gradually moving up, row by row, until your nose is almost pressed
against the screen. Gradually, the stars’ faces dissolve into dancing
grain; tiny details assume grotesque proportions; the illusion dissolves
or rather, it becomes clear that the illusion itself is reality.”7
Our proximity to historical moments gives us a sense of a more intimate experience of them, which, according to the logic of the passage,
thwarts our language. It is the impossibility of detaching oneself from
current circumstances to attain a panoramic view of them, and the sheer
surplus of possibilities in current circumstances, that overwhelms historiography at such times. The imperative for the simulation of immediacy
in narrative, especially in the age of “instant” television, coerces a radical
change in narrative conventions in the explanation of spectacles of the
present. In the second volume of Time and Narrative, Paul Ricoeur points
to “emplotment,” the act of reflection that submits chronologically organized events to an act of gathering and arranging various plot components that yields a coherent story.8 For Ricoeur, such gathering necessarily
means that “the configurating act presiding over emplotment is a judicative act, involving a ‘grasping together’” that contributes plot- or genrebased coherence (ibid., 61).9 Ricoeur contends that such an act “belongs
to the family of reflective judgments” and that, therefore, “to narrate a
story is already to ‘reflect upon’ the event narrated. For this reason, narrative ‘grasping together’ carries with it the capacity for distancing itself
from its own production and in this way dividing itself into two” (ibid.,
61). This division is the gap between the event narrated and narrating a
story that is frequently drastically reduced—or, rather, removed from being
apparent in an overt way—in global spectacles and their dissemination,
producing the minimization of reflection to which I have pointed earlier.
Ricoeur proceeds to ask:
Could we not say that the preterite [in conventional narratives] preserves its
grammatical form and its privilege because the present of narration is understood by the reader as posterior to the narrated story, hence that the told
story is the past of the narrative voice? Is not every told story in the past for
the voice that tells it? Whence the artifices employed by writers of other
ages, who pretended to have found the diary of their hero in a chest . . .
or to have heard the story. Such an artifice was intended to simulate, in the
latter case, the signification of the past for memory, and in the former,
its signification for historiography. (Ibid., 98–99, emphases Ricoeur’s)
When representative of the present (in live television broadcasts and so
on), the global spectacle bars—or attempts to hold at bay—the distance
between the past and the present through its attempted conflation of
the story it tells (“the past of the narrative voice,” as Ricoeur puts it) and
an emphasis on its display of images signaling events “as they unfold”
(the putative present of the spectacle). The spectacle, thus, shrinks the
temporal lapse between the narrating present and the narrated past—
or, at least, it simulates such a reduction of the gap in time between
them. There is, frequently, the implied or overt claim to a minimal lapse
of time among the staging or eruption of global spectacles, the “live”
verbal reportage on these spectacles, and the transmission of its images
worldwide. Even when the narrative is manifestly a sustained reference to
events in the past—events that took place, say, an hour before the moment
of narration—the global telecast of the event insists on the simultaneity
of the telecasted representation and the event, almost always under the
aegis of the word “LIVE” in all capitals. It is the illusion of simultaneity
that often provokes the sense of exhilarated solidarity—a euphoric
empathy—that catalyzes hyperbolic optimism in diagnoses of events such
as the overthrow of governments in Tunisia and Egypt in early 2011. The
limits on description and perception at such moments may invite an
initially pure, and even purely joyous, vision of definite aims and virtuous social forms within the recent Tunisian or Egyptian uprising’s success. However, the excess or the historical supplements to ideological
purity or joy in such success require a wariness or a demystification of
the triumphs of the “Arab Spring.” While fresh starts, celebration, linear
progress, and drives for greater freedoms may well be the “proper”
responses to such success, the opportunities that unanticipated or nonnormative methods might afford seem to stay off television screens and
out of radio broadcasts worldwide.
Transnational Sympathy and Disappointment as Solidarity
In her contribution here, Shiloh Krupar notes the urgency of calls for
an environmental ethics “that de-ontologize[s] spectacle—in order to
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encourage responsibility and active engagement, that is, a relationalmaterial ethics.” In the stress she places on aesthetic revisions of that
which is normatively unwanted because it is deemed “unnatural,” Krupar endorses the aesthetic potential in the de-ontologized or the transnatural as the potential of the “improper,” as an instance of forms
considered inappropriate, undesirable, unnecessary, and therefore superfluous. By virtue of that sequence of qualities, it is a variety of waste. Let us
consider, juxtaposed with Krupar’s views on the “de-ontologizing force”
of such ethics, an argument that two very different philosophers—
Stanley Cavell (in Cities of Words) and Simon Critchley (in Infinitely
Demanding)—have offered within the last decade: the argument that
disappointment is the ignition for philosophy.10 How can we employ (or
even make spectacular) the transnatural to express our disappointment as international solidarity and cosmopolitan critique? What
resources and restrictions do we obtain when we employ irony and
polemic for such ends? Do newer media afford new opportunities for
ironic or skeptical dissent, or, at least, for the greater global dissemination of spectacles that contest the might of state-sponsored or hegemonic spectacles?11
While such representation would itself, of course, be part of the ideological machinery, how can it offer critical representation? How can it
depict global solidarity without sentimentalizing it or offering it as sublime? Sublimity (a topic to which I will return in my concluding comments in this chapter) seems to be the condition exploded in a wide
range of contemporary literature and film that explores global conditions through the presumption of an intimacy with elsewhere. The
bourgeois viewer might now enjoy assumptions about unprecedented
visual access (even though that is itself often edited), as well as an imagined solidarity with populations and political resistance in places other
than where he or she might happen to be. Within the last two decades,
there has been a spectacular cartography of global connections in films
like Night on Earth (1991), Chinese Box (1997), Traffic (2000), Syriana (2005),
and Babel (2006). Each of these films employs montage to depict a kind
of affective simultaneity: their characters seem to be feeling or expressing similar emotions at the same time.
The dangers accompanying such representation—the risks of assum-
ing an oceanic feeling—feed a presumptuous cosmopolitanism, one
that takes for granted a kind of universal access to the world, assuming,
at least, the world’s availability both for scrutiny and empathy. As such,
it manufactures a kind of leveling—a worldwide uniformity of feeling,
as theorized vibrantly by Bruce Robbins in Feeling Global.12 Preferring a
more cautious form of interest and sympathy, I use the word “cosmopolitanism” here to convey two senses of the term at the same time:
97
1. a strong interest in cultural practices across national boundaries, and
the viewing of the world with resistance to national attachments or prejudices; and
2. a critical alertness toward—and awareness of—multiple affiliations.
The word “cosmopolitan” comes from the Greek kosmopolites, which, in
turn, derives from kosmos (“ornament,” “order,” “world”) and polites (“citizens” or “the body politic”). As this etymology makes apparent, the word
originally suggested an “ornamentation” or “ordering” of the world or
its citizens, and gradually, after theorizations of the world-citizen by
Diogenes, Zeno, and Kant, it came to suggest perhaps its most common
meaning: “citizen of the world.”13 However, as Robbins has noted, the
priority of the sense of “ornament” in the term’s etymology is significant. Extending the logic of this etymology, cosmopolitanism ornaments the world or world citizenship. It offers an alternative to existent,
nationally or territorially bound allegiances with unbound or deterritorialized forms of affiliation and interest, and with new combinative possibilities and unfamiliar metaphors for solidarity.
Cosmetics
I would like to underscore that the word “cosmetic” is etymologically
resonant with “cosmopolitan.” The latter derives from kosmos and metic
(a “foreigner” resident in the Athenian city-state). The metics were an
active part of the daily workings of the city-state, but not recognized as
full citizens, and, therefore, never officially afforded a sufficient sense of
inclusion.14 The word “cosmetic,” then, initially signified a literal condition of “almost-belonging”—evoking an ornamental form of citizen-
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ship, a form of civic embroidery: being in, but not of. The etymological
suggestion that cosmopolitanism—like cosmetics—ornaments, embroiders, or augments surfaces also suggests that, like metics, the cosmopolitan never fully belongs to a single social, national, or cultural fabric:
embroidery is both of the surface and offset from it.
In moments of the epistemological excess of the present and a series
of complex, mobile solidarities—such as those that the “Arab Spring”
generated and that Rushdie’s metaphor of the cinema screen indicates—
the anticipation in (and of) exhilarating spectacle aggravates a longstanding tendency of commentators expressing or seeking solidarity
with movements for change on a massive scale. This is the obverse of the
colonial fondness for predicting glories and spectacular success, which
shares several attendant risks with the colonial habit of putting on display things not yet found, obtained, or realized. Postcolonial literary
expressions of such “showing before” include a crucial dimension of
melancholy that anticipatory narratives subsume in utopian visions,
whether of a great revelatory, architectural, or emotive success—or combinations of each of those factors.
In his 1917 essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud notes a crucial
quality that differentiates mourning and melancholia: “The distinguishing mental features of melancholia are a profoundly painful dejection,
abrogation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love,
inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to
a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings. . . .
[W]ith one exception, the same traits are met with in grief [or ‘mourning’]. The fall in self-esteem is absent in grief; but otherwise the features
are the same.”15 Such melancholy fall in self-esteem is a recurrent attribute in postcolonial narratives of failed emulation or the recuperation
of modular cultural forms. (It is evident in platitudes like “There will
not be another Mandela, Atatürk, or Nkrumah” or “We suffer because
we have betrayed Gandhian ideals.”) The power of those revered cultural models exceeds that of representation and resources currently
available to the postcolonial (and therefore in need of reconstitution)—
forms lost, partly because of the postcolonial’s inability to preserve or
reinforce its models for cultural self-assertion or resistance. Frequently,
the need to recover such forms is constituted through an identification
of figures representing indigenous or race-specific power for the post
colonial, linking the need to recuperate with a desire for second comings and returns.16
Offering a prospective spectacle and announcing both the liberation
and solidarity of the colonized in different parts of the world through
the return of the god Xango, Kamau Brathwaite’s poem “Xango” reworks
that simple form of identification, sometimes unwittingly.17 In Brathwaite’s poetry, such melancholy identification is paradoxically staged
through a pronounced narcissism. This chapter explores this melancholy in conjunction with the idea of the return as a trope for revision
and relocation in “Xango.” Within the logic of the poem, Xango is a
numinous figure for the African diaspora whose presence itself functions as both global spectacle and cultural solidarity (I will discuss his
religious significance more specifically, in a moment). This collaboration between the generic connotations of the words “cosmetic” and “cosmopolitan” hints at the collaboration between the aesthetic and the
political in “Xango.” The story of one part of the poem ornaments that
of the others, working as a vital accessory to stories that could just as
easily have been unrelated and underscoring the collaboration between
the cosmetic and the cosmopolitan in the poem. In this sense, tones and
identities are involved in mutual ornamentation here. Within its intuitions and declarations of Xango’s spectacular presence worldwide, the
poem interrogates tensions between the authentic and whole, on the
one hand, and the partial and performative, on the other. These are,
further, tensions between metaphor and literalism, between modernity
and orthodoxy, and between departure and arrival.
A Disembodied Voice
Brathwaite’s interrogation of such tensions expresses itself via a displaced, disembodied voice, trying to re-place (relocate) and recover its
lost power in verses that seek to announce the global spectacle of that
power (embodied in the figure of Xango), thus expressing a desire
forbidden within colonial norms. The confidence and brio with which
the speaker’s voice goes about constructing this spectacle in “Xango”
conceals the voice’s melancholic qualities, but we gain some ancillary
clues to its melancholy argument from the textual context in which
Brathwaite places it. The poem is the last, climactic text in Brathwaite’s
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collection X/Self—the title of which signals a recognition of the multiplicity of the self (gesturing to the existence of a former, or “ex-,” self,
pertinent still and constructed genealogically). This enlarges a crucial
argument and a constitutive impulse in much of Brathwaite’s poetics
and scholarly work. In his historical study The Development of Creole Society
in Jamaica, 1770–1820, Brathwaite melancholically describes the cultural impoverishment of the West Indian subaltern as a function of historical neglect: “Blinded by the wretchedness of their situation, many . . .
slaves . . . failed, or refused, to make conscious use of their own rich folk
culture (their one indisputable possession), and so failed to command
the chance of becoming self-conscious and cohesive as a group.”18
Attempting precisely such cohesion by means of a folkloric genealogy,
Brathwaite’s poem takes its title, “Xango,” from the West Indian version of
“Shango,” a spirit or deity in Yoruba spirituality and religion. Shango is a
“Sky Father,” the bearer of thunder and lightning, and, for some communities, the god of music in general, as well as of entertainment, drums,
and dance. Shango is revered as a regal ancestor, the third king of the
Oyo Kingdom. In the pantheon of the Caribbean Lukumí religion, Shango
occupies the center, representing the adherents’ West African Oyo ancestors. From these ancestors’ initiation ceremonies, slaves in the Caribbean
derived all Orisha initiations (including those performed in Cuba,
Puerto Rico, and Venezuela for several centuries). The title of Brathwaite’s poem could also be linked to “Sango,” a trade language widely
used in Chad. The title’s link with trade is significant for the poem’s
staging of a language of exchange and dissemination. Brathwaite’s mapping of dissemination extends through the figure of another important
divinity, Erzulie, who is relocated to the Caribbean from Dahomey and
invoked in the middle of the poem. Erzulie is a voodoo cluster of female
spirits, sometimes represented as the goddess of love and elemental forces.
The line evoking her—“ . . . my love / . . . my Africa”—signals a displaced
voice, trying to re-place or relocate itself (107). 19
Visual Metaphors
Brathwaite signals the poem’s rage at displacement and dispossession
by deploying various visual strategies in the text, particularly by using
blank space as an index of absence. For much of the first part of the
poem, the arrangement of lines, estranged from one another through
two lines of blank space, allows us to read the blank space in connection
with the text’s proclamations of a subversive power. (This arrangement
recurs, albeit less frequently, in the other sections of the poem.) Propelling the text’s desire for Xango’s reappearance, the blank spaces in the
text point to his currently incoherent, unavailable, or damaged presence. While Brathwaite points to the performance of culture, this is text
as a performative event that underscores its signaling of this presence.
Noting in their introduction to The Heinemann Book of Caribbean Poetry
that Brathwaite takes his models from “the griots of West Africa, the jazz
and blues men of the American South, the calypsonians and the ‘folk
songs’ of the plantation experience,” Ian McDonald and Stewart Brown
say, “Brathwaite set out to ‘break English.’” 20 Alongside its formal signs
of damage-by-colonization, the poem makes that postcolonial assertion
in Brathwaite’s poetics: it tries to “break English” through its aggressive
orthographic appropriation of grammar and standardized language
(“riddim” for “rhythm,” “un” for “one”) and through its flexing and
reconfiguration of normative language in lexical and visual puns:
the earth on which he breaks furl
in rain
bow
tears.21
This section of the poem triggers a strange semiotic weaving and unweaving in anticipation of the poem’s later processes. The word “unfurl”
becomes “un . . . furl,” signaling an interruption as well as an emergence—
an “unfolding”—into the world. Additionally, the words “furl” and
“tears” produce a visual pun: the lines themselves “furl” meaning, compacting it into parts of words that bring out the polysemy of the words
“rain bow,” both visual and lexical (“rainbow,” “rain bow”—which could
be read literally or as “bowing, subservient rain”). The “furling” of meaning continues, through new formulations: “the tiger clue” (pugmark?
urine scent? broken claw?) and “conjur man” (does this signal a conjurer
or magician, or is the formulation “conjur” a verb, an injunction to conjure up a man with the powers of Xango?) (108, 110). Manifestly disrupting standardized meaning, the blank spaces in the poem, then, work as
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visual metaphors for the overt disruption of belonging, of language, and
of racial, epistemological, and psychological coherence.
Recuperation and Historical Montage
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As marks of absence, however, the blank parts of the page can also be
read as the unoccupied or freshly opened space of potential: a sign of
what may be. Later, the poem suggests that “time and bomb and cricket,”
which were instruments for different kinds of colonial violence, now
function as, potentially, the postcolonial’s weapons (110). Timothy Reiss
notes that, in the poem’s Biblical reference to sparrows (“whose fall god
would heed as much as a human’s”), the sparrows are meek and traumatized, but “we have also seen them become something mightier: victims
who turn against the oppressors their own instruments to be free to
occupy their own geography and make their own history.” 22 The poem’s
broken, floating lines, then, demarcate spaces that have the potential to
be filled with a resistant eloquence, a new anticolonial language, an
inaugural version of which the poem itself attempts.
Recognizing new forms of (and metonyms for) colonialism, the poem
sets itself against the names of colonizers and neocolonial forces and
institutions. As it evokes the colonial aggressions of the conquistadors
and explorers Hernando de Soto and Francisco Coronado, it conflates
these figures with those of John Ford, J. P. Morgan, and Coca-Cola (109).
The formal counter to the neocolonialism (of Hollywood and multinational corporations) implicit in the latter set of names is staged through
the percussive, assertive rhythms of Brathwaite’s language, but also
through montage and switches in perspective. As its focus moves from
“my gold/en horn my africa,” to “over the prairies now” where “comanche horsemen halt,” before winding its way to the locale of Xango’s
“high life/ing in abomey,” the poem expands its network of resistance to
the United States, in solidarity with Native Americans, and then to
Benin (ibid., 107, 108, 109). The resistance of the displaced has its circuits in these contaminated associations. The poem’s subversive, global
affiliations with a series of figures announce diffuse, dispersed points of
resistance for displaced populations. Tracing these, the poem maps the
vast territory where the language of resistance—the voice of Xango—
lies submerged. This language—taken from its English moorings
and refashioned into a hybrid, affiliated series of political ripostes—
announces the capacity of the language of the colonized to combat the
authority of its supposed purity. Short sonic bursts of defiance—like
“hah” and “huh”—punctuate the text’s assertions and are often privileged so much that they form an entire line of the text. In their tattoo of
monosyllables, in their meter, and in their rhythm, the lines underscore
global solidarity, enacting a recuperation of the blues (with their tradition of monosyllables that cap a sentence or a claim), while also evoking
older West African musical traditions that nourished the blues.
Melancholic Bravado and Accumulating Returns
Even as the text accretes various traditions (the blues, Yoruba expressions, Native American legacies) and mythic figures into the figure of
Xango, it disturbs the bravado and hyperbole of its announcement
of Xango’s return: “Your thunder has come home.” It is not Xango, but
a metaphor for Xango—or (more precisely) a mixture of synecdoche
and metonymy—that has returned: the thunder both is a part of Xango
and is associated with him. It is thunder, but it is not Xango entire. The
hyperbolic last lines offer the suggestion that Xango is unbound, crossing international boundaries to form a composite identity, a collective
that manifests his enormous, global force.
Returning to Freud, I would like to note Freud’s comment in Civilization and Its Discontents that feeling global—“feeling as of something limitless, unbounded—as it were, ‘oceanic’”—suggests, as Bruce Robbins has
it, “infantile pretensions to divine ubiquity, if not of omniscience or
omnipotence.” 23 Commenting on such a fantasy in Civilization and Its
Discontents, Freud refines an idea that he derives from a letter that he
received from Romain Rolland. The letter identifies “something like
the restoration of limitless narcissism” in an “oceanic feeling” connected
with the religious sense of a union with the universe through communication with a divine sovereign.24 Freud observes that this “oneness with
the universe” constitutes “the ideational content” of the oceanic feeling,
“as though it were another way of disclaiming the danger which the ego
realizes as threatening it from the outside world” (ibid., 21). Instead of
disclaiming that danger, “Xango” seems to enlarge the vulnerability
of the ego through its apparent subscription to Xango’s universal (or, at
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least, transcontinental) presence. However, its various recognitions of
the dispersal of Xango—through its various representations of breakage, partiality, and damage—concede that Xango cannot be reconstituted as a whole. The exercise functions proleptically, announcing a
recuperation of racial and individual pride that is possible and potential,
but proclaimed as already achieved in its very articulation. Therefore,
given the asymmetries of global power and the pain of its colonization,
even the assertion that Xango’s “thunder has come home” is hyperbolic,
its hyperbole a hint of its overcompensatory melancholy. The veneer of
narcissism in this demonstrably dubious claim is already qualified in the
poem’s gestures to the difficulty of Xango’s task.
Brathwaite’s poem seems to acknowledge the need to engage the particular (forms like the blues, the Yoruba tradition, and Native American
music) and, at the same time, not to lose the movement toward an international, transracial solidarity of the oppressed. But how do we do this
without “feeling global”? The impasse produces the poem’s melancholy,
tracing affiliations in various places that are the sites of devastation and
resistance simultaneously. In The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica,
1770–1820, Brathwaite argues: “My own idea of creolization is based on
the notion [that within] inter-related and sometimes overlapping orientations . . . people in the West Indies tend towards certain directions,
positions, assumptions, and ideals. But nothing is really fixed and monolithic. Although there is white/brown/black, there are infinite possibilities within these distinctions and many ways of asserting identity.” 25
Because the trauma of one such group reflects those of others, the voice
in the poem affiliates each in its call for a reprise of Xango’s force. As
such, these affiliations declare the possibility of multiple, accumulating—
but fragile—metaphors for the return of Xango. The return must be
achieved as a form of cultural liberation, but, as things stand (amid the
legacies of colonialism and in the face of neocolonialism), it cannot incarnate Xango adequately. The move, therefore, underscores the text’s recognition of the fused urgency and impossibility of return. In a wider
theoretical gesture, it disturbs the notion that a return constitutes a literal arrival at a (geographical or temporal) point of departure.
The very modes that sustain these poetics are those that sustain more
alert, inclusive versions of cosmopolitanism: celebration of alliances and
multiple combinations, without the demand for permanence or strict
definition. The poem opens to doubt individual identity—and, therefore, the very collection of people who comprise a nation—as metaphorical and in flux, by adopting hyperbole as its mode to question actions
that the poem itself sees as hyperbolic. In short, hyperbole mirrors, and
colludes with, the poem’s cosmopolitanism, tracing several eccentric—
and even self-contradictory—paths. Thus, it involuntarily amplifies a sense
of what Bruce Robbins has called “discrepant cosmopolitanisms”—
versions of cosmopolitanism that do not align with any form of perfect
belonging.26 At odds with the belief that cosmopolitanism is either a tool
for various practices of detachment or as a gesture grounded in cautious
nationalism, Robbins’s emphasis on “discrepancy” in cosmopolitanism
derives from what he sees as the “phantasmatic” character of belonging
in the very concept of the cosmopolitan, which reinforces my discussion
here (ibid., 261). It is precisely this “discrepancy” in cosmopolitanism
that contrasts Robbins’s view of cosmopolitanism with the cosmopolitanism that Brathwaite presumably seeks. The gestures that “Xango”
makes toward Pan-Africanism or an eventually synthesized African legacy are precisely what place it at odds with history.
The poem’s rapid listing of exploited landscapes to evoke violent histories furthers its practice of simultaneous deflection and suture, a practice that Brathwaite seems to see only as the latter (as suture), but not as
the former—not, in other words, as a redirection of current conditions
into a hypothetical, spectacular, and unrealizable future As we read the
poem, we seem to be perpetually in a moment very much like Gayatri
Spivak’s version of a “vanishing present.” 27 The text’s use of metaphor—
of carrying objects beyond their boundaries—is clearly an act of relation. For Jacques Derrida and for Gayatri Spivak, the acknowledgment
of the relatedness of the world is expressed through the process of what
Derrida calls mondialisation, or “worlding.” 28 In her Critique of Postcolonial
Reason, Spivak defines “worlding” as “the reinscription of a cartography
that must (re)present itself as impeccable” (ibid., 228).29 If it is a reinscription, it is a revision, and—in an important sense—a corruption,
of this cartography. Corruption and contamination operate as forms of
“worlding,” denying spaces the illusions of hermetic distance and sanctuary from outside influence. The poem’s deflections of its scenes of
action, and its ostensibly exuberant support for a version of the corruptions of “worlding,” signal the longing for solidarity that “Xango” repeatG l o b a l S p e c ta c l e s
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edly announces. Its triumphal apostrophe in the line “Your thunder has
come home” points to an ecstatic declaration of the selective kind of
worlding. The declaration bears a utopian ecstasy: a form of mobility
produced by the unshackling of institutionalized, orthodox, and nationally bound pressures.30 If we are to enter the utopian “country of literature” that is the primary focus of my epigraph from Virginia Woolf’s
essay “The Leaning Tower,” we are forced to make a metaphorical and
imaginative leap: we leave behind the coincidence of the literal, parochial circumstances into which we are born. Making a claim for such liberation, Brathwaite’s poem seems on the verge of performing an aleatory
gesture—the simultaneously self-affirming and identity-dissolving gambit of the cosmopolitan. However, it stops just short of such radical selfrevision and swerves toward membership in the epic, continent-spanning
identity of Xango. That is to say, it subsumes itself to the spectacular
identity it evokes—in short, it subscribes to the interpellation of a mythic
self that is the engine behind the calls for a spectacular global collective, whether it be a Pan-African identity, an Arab brotherhood, or an
embodiment of Hindutva or European values. If the display of colonial
power relies on self-legitimizing violence, followed by an enforcement
of formal continuity, Brathwaite’s poem seems to both resist such violence and practice it, at the same time. Like the careening metaphysics
of the poem’s speaker in “Xango,” colonization embraces unity and
amplitude—or, more precisely, amplification—as its aesthetic modes,
equating the production and maintenance of these modes with greatness.31 The manufacture of immensity (either in scales of production or
in the scale of the product itself) is the overriding concern in each case.
Intimacy and Spectacle
Confronting such immensity, the viewer of global spectacles meets the
seductions of the large that produce the overwhelming effect that gives
or catalyzes the sense of belonging within the immense that the speaker
of “Xango” clearly has. What does this sense of belonging, attached to
the immensity of global spectacles, do to our experience of intimacy—
within our private spaces, with participants in spectacular events, or
with the spectacle itself? As my quotation from Rushdie’s novel suggests,
language evaporates in the overwhelming semiosis of the apparently
immediate spectacular moment. The absence of language abets the
epistemological disorientation that makes the speaker of “Xango” identify (partly, but crucially) with a global community and that, according to
Guy Debord, encourages the viewer of the capitalist spectacle to assume
intimate relations with the commodity. As Debord puts it in thesis 67
in The Society of the Spectacle, “Reified man advertises the proof of his
intimacy with the commodity. The fetishism of commodities reaches
moments of fervent exaltation similar to the ecstasies of the convulsions
and miracles of the old religious fetishism. The only use which remains
here is the fundamental use of submission.”32 There is a call to relations—
an interpellation of intimacy—in the paternalism of the tyrant, a claim
to affection born of repeated displays of violence, which itself mauls
both language and fact.33 This failure of language was prominent, but
in a very different way, at a juncture like the one that we might term
“Hosni Mubarak’s Darth Vader moment”—Mubarak’s reiteration of what
he saw as a rhetorical trump card (apparently for years): “I am your
father!”—his reminder of his paternal role toward Egypt at large, even
as the number of protestors swelled in Tahrir Square in early 2011. The
abjuration of any precise or reliable language was prominent in the dual
function (a call to relations and an interpellation of intimacy) of
Mubarak’s rhetoric. Instead of Skywalker-like stupefaction and initial
silence in the face of that reminder, the famous gesture of shoes raised
toward the sky (and, tellingly, toward TV cameras)—as well as chants of
“Get out!”—instantly met Mubarak’s evocation of his paternity.
An engrossment in imaginative spectacle plays a decisive role here. In
Braithwaite’s poem, the intensity of immersion in recalled (or evoked)
spectacles is an index of the conviction of its hyperbole. Discussing the
importance of such engrossment in Western Spectacle of Governance, Mika
Aaltola explains such certainty in her gloss on John Dewey’s theory of
“combinatorics”:
The art of seeing new connections allows for the recognition of knowledge
of the what-if type. The ability of this type of knowledge to convey certainty
derives from the intensity of the accompanying experience. When the intensity reaches a high point, the term “revelatory” seems appropriate. . . . The
poignant and momentous revelatory moments carry with them a particular
sense of certainty about what is taking place. The sense of reality can be
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seen as a function of being engrossed with events in a particular way.
Interpreted in this way, the sense of reality becomes a quality attached
to circumstances; certain ways of being engrossed with events produce
a sense that a situation is especially real and true. 34
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Douglas Kellner argues in this volume that media spectacle itself is a
“contested terrain,” and that it “is now becoming a major feature of
political opposition and resistance and a major force against repressive
regimes.” These contentions provoke speculation about whether spectacular complications and contests do not feed the wider play of images
forming the social relations that constitute the spectacle for Debord. If
they do, does Debord not know that? Does his view of social relations
not include a view of such relations as contests that are mediated by
images and representations, but that are contests, nonetheless? What,
then, are the significant differences between what Kellner sees as contestations and what Debord sees as contests within social relations?
In the events of the “Arab Spring,” such contestations overtly produced social overhauls and disorientation, but they were, occasionally,
disorienting in the very form of their performance. The protestors in
various images of the “Arab Spring” appear euphoric, almost delirious.
Despite their exuberance, their ecstatic faces are also and obviously
indignant. This kind of ecstatic protest hints at the optimism, of whatever size, that defies current conditions in anticipation of the future in
all acts of protest. I would offer as evocative theorizations of this strange,
recurring fact the etymologies of the words “ecstasy” and “protest.” Etymologically, the word “ecstasy” has a subtext suggesting displacement: it
derives from the Latin ex (“out,” “out of,” or “former”) and stasis (“standing” or “position”): in other words, it signals being “out of customary
position or place.” The word “protest” comes from the Latin pro (“for,”
“on behalf of,” or “in support of”) and testari (“be a witness” or “assert”):
in other words, it connotes being “witness for, on behalf of, or in support
of” but also being “witness before”—with obvious nuances of optimism
and hope in the latter. To “witness before” has a temporal dimension,
obviously; here, that connotation almost means to “show before.” The
processual spectatorship involved in showing or seeing before demands
the ability to pierce the armor-clad spectacle that the state or any
enforcer of power both produces and privileges.
Conclusion: A Metic’s Perspective
In Picture Theory, W. J. T. Mitchell defines a “dialectical” relationship
between “illusionism and realism”: “Taken together, spectacle and surveillance epitomize the basic dialectic between illusionism and realism
in contemporary visual culture: they might be thought of as the ‘soft’
and ‘hard’ technologies for the formation of subjects in our time,
whether we characterize that time as the age of mass culture, triumphant international corporate capitalism, or in familiar rubrics like the
postindustrial and the postmodern. Spectacle is the ideological form of
pictorial power; surveillance is its bureaucratic, managerial, and disciplinary form.”35 Mitchell’s commentary implies that these two different,
but collaborative, ways of shaping state narratives dramatize (but also
contain) a conflict in narratives within global spectacles. There is, thus,
a conflict between “illusionist” narratives that seek to produce fantasies
of belonging or identification within larger collectives and “realist” narratives that seek to expose the private or covert practices through an
enforcement of literalism or rigid “reality”—in short, this is a conflict
between literary sub-genres (ibid., 327).
Should we consider this a contested spectacle (as Kellner might
describe it), or a moment in which parts of a spectacle feed a larger spectacle? Is it one in which the spectacle of the chanting crowd at Tahrir
Square, facing television cameras, dilutes the force of state-sponsored
spectacle, or are they all tiles in the mosaic of the conflict in Egypt? Does
the intimate—but also public—trauma of the CBS reporter Lara Logan,
who faced an orchestrated sexual assault from approximately two hundred men, undercut the spectacular success of the uprisings in Tunisia
and Egypt? Shiloh Krupar reminds us in this volume that every truth
generates “remainders.” Of what kinds of biopolitics might Logan’s
trauma be a remainder? Does its narration in the global media qualify
it as spectacle or event? Does the fact of Logan’s citizenship give the
assault a horrible global tinge?
The assault on Lara Logan is not only a fact that adds to the dramatic
complexity of the global spectacle and its optimistic transmission from
Egypt. The violence of such an act also reinscribes the borders of the
private and the public, conflating a euphoric moment with a sordid attack,
a public space into a stage for a concealed—or, at least, covered—locale
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to enact presumably private desires, and a moment of cosmopolitan success into one that fed racial anxieties. It is a muted form of, perhaps, the
most widely circulated spectacles of violence that feed such anxieties in
a more manifest way and on a larger scale: spectacles of terrorism. Terrorism operates as a kind of biopolitics precisely through a reinscription
and appropriation of such global spectacle. As W. J. T. Mitchell recently
noted, “The main weapon of terror is the violent spectacle, the image
of destruction, or the destruction of an image, or both, as in the
mightiest spectacle of them all, the destruction of the World Trade
Center, in which the destruction of a globally recognizable icon was
staged, quite deliberately, as an icon in its own right.”36 This latter icon
has now been transformed into a visual record of a traumatic event and
a figure for the various meanings and interpretations that coalesce—
however uneasily—in that record. It is an ignition for trauma and perhaps, in some parts of the world, for euphoria; an icon for the pain, loss,
mourning, and melancholia of various communities and individuals. It
is, by extension, an icon for the sustenance and manipulation of fear.
I would like to close by putting in conjunction with this icon the word
that forms the grounds for Stefan Al and Shiloh Krupar’s inspired coinage, “atmosfear.”37 In its gesture to the generalized fear that anxious
spectation involves, the term “atmosfear” engages older notions of the
sublime. The form of the sublime that forces us into spectation is, in
canonical views of the sublime (such as Kant’s or Burke’s), already a combination of pleasure and pain. It is, therefore and in significant part, a
masochistic exercise, if you will. Its masochism is frequently manifested
in the excitement and fascination that accompanies speculation about
the elusiveness of sources of violence (the unknown reasons for the rise
or fall of the Bush government’s color-coded “terrorist-threat” levels, the
long-mysterious whereabouts of Osama bin Laden, the unpredictable
date for the seismic shocks of the “big one” that will devastate much of
the western United States, and so on). Such an “atmosfear” feeds spectacle. Its evocation in Shiloh Krupar’s paper suggests the strong links
between a persistent anxiety in the reception of the spectacle and the
etymology of the word “atmosphere.” This word comes from the Greek,
signifying “ball” or “sphere” of “vapor”: its etymology promises visible
form, but, as “vapor,” its substance is not available to spectation. This gap
mirrors the constitutive paradox of the global spectacle—the bulk of its
substance is always elsewhere, even as it offers visual access and so stages
proximity for its audience.
In a fertile note for psychoanalytic discussions of postcolonial (or
postmodern) melancholy, Freud locates as “one striking feature of melancholia, the manifestations of dread of poverty.”38 The fuel that global
spectacles feed melancholia has its source in a form of epistemological
“poverty,” because that melancholia stems from the visual lack that the
“elsewhereness” of the spectacle brings. Thus, the melancholia in Brathwaite’s “Xango” is a function of an apparently willful drive to refuse the
elusiveness of (if not the impossibility of locating) continuous, whole
structures, forms, ambitions, and identities. Therefore, this melancholia refuses a version of cosmopolitanism that operates as a strong interest in difference not subsumed within a main textual, national, cultural,
or social fabric, but as part of it, nonetheless. The epic, global vision in
the construction of the global spectacles that I have discussed here
overlooks various irreducible, particular, or lyric impulses within the
local: in the case of Ruskin and Jeffris, its presumptions are overt; in
the case of the speaker in “Xango,” it is a melancholy correlative of an
underconsidered cosmopolitanism. While agreeing with Robbins that
“no one . . . can be a cosmopolitan in the sense of belonging nowhere,”
my argument evinces an awareness of incomprehension and revisions of
solidarity as crucial for a critically energetic cosmopolitanism.39 A cosmopolitan consumption of global spectacles would involve a self-conscious,
bifocal effort: instead of accepting conventional notions of success, it
would require revising conventional notions of failure in a mass, global
movement—the failure not of solidarity, but of a kind of utopian unity.
The recognition of that gap makes it necessary that the viewer of such
spectacle recognize a simultaneous nearness to, and distance from, the
spectacle, a recognition that encourages a preferred vantage—something
like a metic’s perspective. The cosmopolitan processing of global spectacles, thus, involves a recognition of the cosmetic self that any cosmopolitan perception demands. To paraphrase that claim: the cosmopolitan
processing of global spectacles demands a recognition that the temporal space of a spectacle and the temporal space of a spectator may be
linked by affective solidarity, but even the most well-intentioned solidar-
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ity and predictions implied—or overtly made—in global spectacles
cannot have a proleptic narrative unifying them. In short, the cosmopolitan eye involves a recognition of its own discrepancy from global
spectacles.
Notes
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1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
For a scrupulous overview of such violence, see Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), and Norman
Etherington, ed., Mapping Colonial Conquest: Australia and Southern Africa
(Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2007).
Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda (New York: Vintage, 1988), 374.
John Ruskin, The Two Paths (New York: Chelsea House, 1983), 69.
The co-optation of the Hellenic, and the absorption of the world’s
knowledge, as rightfully English feeds an especially strange contradiction in the colonial drive for the unitary. As Homi Bhabha suggests in
reference to Jeremy Bentham’s colonial views, Bentham sees the small
group as representative of the whole society—the part is already the whole.
Colonial authority requires modes of discrimination (cultural, racial,
administrative) that disallow a stable unitary assumption of collectivity.
The “part” (which must be the colonialist foreign body) must be representative of the “whole” (conquered country), but the right of representation is based on its (superior and) radical difference. See Homi Bhabha,
The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 111.
A version of this discussion of Ruskin’s speech appears in Gaurav Majumdar, Migrant Form: Anti-Colonial Aesthetics in Joyce, Rushdie, and Ray (New
York: Peter Lang, 2010), 5–7.
Salman Hameed, “Navigating Modernity: Islam, Science, and Global
Media.” Presentation at the Whitman College Global Studies Symposium, “Global Media, Global Spectacles,” February 2011.
Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (New York: Random House, 2006),
189.
Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David
Pellauer, vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
Within Hayden White’s genre classification in Metahistory (Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), the four generic types of
“emplotment” are romance, satire, comedy, and tragedy.
Stanley Cavell, Cities of Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2004), 2–3; Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment,
Politics of Resistance (London: Verso, 2007), 1.
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
The importance of “the media” in the “Jasmine Revolution” has
received extensive commentary, which stresses the role of Facebook,
Twitter, and especially the Al-Jazeera new networks as venues for dissent and forbidden information, as evident in the following new report:
“The Libyan government has attempted to impose a near-total news
blackout on the country. Foreign journalists are not permitted to enter
the country. Internet access has been almost totally cut off, although
some protesters appear to be using satellite connections or telephoning information to news services outside the country. Al-Jazeera . . . has
been taken off the air in Libya.” David D. Kirkpatrick and Mona ElNaggar, “Qaddafi’s Son Warns of Civil War as Libyan Protests Widen,”
New York Times, February 13, 2011, www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/world/
africa/21libya.html (accessed February 20, 2011). The media’s transcultural and transnational power makes it the crucial wielder of cues
for sympathy, but it also makes a resource for the protection and concealment of sources of agitation. I offer the following piece of journalism as a striking illustration of this new resource for self-protection
during the expression of dissent: “The source of the call was not known,
but authorities moved to halt its spread online. Searches for the word
‘ jasmine’ were blocked Saturday on China’s largest Twitter-like microblog, and the website where the request first appeared said it was hit by
an attack.” Associated Press, “China Cracks Down on Call for ‘Jasmine
Revolution,’” IBN Live, February 20, 2011, http://ibnlive.in.com/news/
china-cracks-down-on-call-for-jasmine- revolution/143796 -2.html
(accessed February 20, 2011).
Bruce Robbins, Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (New York: New
York University Press, 1999).
For a succinct history of political theories of cosmopolitanism, see Robert Fine and Robin Cohen’s essay “Four Cosmopolitan Moments,” in Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice, ed. Steven Vertovec
and Robin Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
See David Whitehead, The Ideology of the Athenian Metic (Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society, 1977), and Fine and Cohen, “Four Cosmopolitan Moments,” for larger commentaries on the role of metics in the
city-state.
Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in General Psychological
Theory, trans. Joan Riviere (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 165.
The Celtic Revival movement in Ireland is a prominent instance of such
desire.
Edward Kamau Brathwaite, “Xango,” in X/Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 107–110.
113
18
19
114
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
Edward Kamau Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica,
1770–1820 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 204.
Brathwaite’s notes to the poem identify Xango as the “Pan-African god
of thunder, lightning, electricity and its energy, sound-systems, the locomotive engine and its music; a great horseman. Appears also as Shango.”
Erzulie is described in the notes as “Fon (Dahomey [sic]/Haitian) goddess of love and fertility” (Brathwaite, X/Self, 130). For a detailed discussion of African gods translocated to the Caribbean, see Kenneth Anthony
Lum, Praising His Name in the Dance (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 2000).
Ian McDonald and Stewart Brown, eds., The Heinemann Book of Caribbean
Poetry (New York: Heinemann, 1992), xv–xvi.
Brathwaite, “Xango,” 108.
Timothy J. Reiss, Against Autonomy: Global Dialectics of Cultural Exchange
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 320.
Robbins, Feeling Global, 170.
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, ed. and trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1961), 20.
Brathwaite, “Development of Creole Society,” 205.
Bruce Robbins, “Comparative Cosmopolitanisms,” in Cosmopolitics:
Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 259.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
Spivak contends that, in the moment of the “vanishing present,” the
world exists in complicity (which doesn’t carry the usual connotations
of the term: “complicity” implies both positive and negative actions; it is
the condition of being folded together). Here, you are not in a symbiotic
condition, but you are in a condition of adjoining or adjacency, where
the needs of the needy might coincide with the wants of the greedy.
Wealthy multinationals cannot exist without sweatshops (82).
Jacques Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001,
trans. and ed. Elizabeth G. Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni
versity Press, 2001). In a 1999 speech to UNESCO, Derrida offers the
French word mondialisation as one that should resist its translation and its
supposed English and German equivalents: globalization and Globalisierung. Mondialisation is a term that has gained bloated and blunted significance through casual use, which necessitates a reconsideration of it and
a contract for a new education about it. It conceals a paradox that is both
against the vilification and beatification of the term mondialisation. Certain unprecedented, unchallengeable factors justify the concept of glo-
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
balization and are marked by massive techno-scientific change, including the circulation of people, commodities, modes of production, and
socio-political models and the more-or-less regulated opening up of the
world economy. However, and at the same time, the opening of borders,;
the progress of legislation, especially the practice of international law,;
and the displacements of sovereignty that globalization “calls forth”
depend less than ever on techno-scientific knowledge or power as such
(373). That is to say, mondialization is the preferred term because, under
the triumphalist heading of “globalization,” the homogenization, or supposedly equal spread of opportunity worldwide, hides historic and new
inequalities and hegemonies (what Derrida calls homo-hegemonizations).
Spivak, Critique, 228.
Compare Bruce Robbins’s commentary on Freud’s arguments about the
impulse for “oceanic” ubiquity in Feeling Global, 171.
See the discussion of the aesthetic modes of greatness in Edmund
Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998),
125–126.
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1983), thesis
67.
The words “show of force” convey precisely the sense of spectacle in the
exercise of governance or assertions of punitive law.
Mika Aaltola, Western Spectacle of Governance and the Emergence of Humanitarian World Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 177.
W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1995), 327.
W. J. T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 64.
Shiloh Krupar and Stefan Al, “Notes on the Society of the Spectacle/
Brand,” in The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory, ed. C. Greig Crysler,
Stephen Cairns, and Hilde Heynen (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2012).
Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 171.
Robbins, “Comparative Cosmopolitanisms,” 260.
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4
The Biopolitics of Spectacle
Salvation and Oversight at the Post-Military Nature Refuge
Shiloh R. Krupar
I
n 2001, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists conducted a tongue in cheek
exercise that addressed the problem of the disposal of plutonium
(Pu-239)—the material used in nuclear weapons, which has a halflife of 24,110 years. A “Plutonium Memorial” competition invited artists,
architects, and other visionaries to consider the crucial issue of nuclear
waste via a hypothetical memorial to the excesses of the U.S. nuclear
enterprise. Among the many entries, Michael Simonian’s 24110 was
declared the winner.1 Named after the half-life of plutonium, Simo
nian’s proposal called for a prominent plutonium storage facility south
of the White House on the National Mall in Washington, DC. A steel
and concrete tub would be buried in the ground holding a five-hundredton deposit of plutonium casks. Beneath a partially lifted circular lawn
cover, the concrete lip of the memorial would be embossed with portraits of politicians and scientists as well as logos of nuclear-industry
corporations. A layer of volcanic turf and gravel above the casks would
theoretically expose visitors to just 0.01 millirems of radiation annually,
as part of the 360 millirems that the average American is said to receive
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annually.2 A panoply of flared steel tabs—241 “clock totems”—would
splay out from the walkway; one would be bolted down to the ground
every century to mark the passing of plutonium’s half-life.
Aside from the uncanny affinity between enduring nuclear materials
and memory projects, the imagined memorial would contaminate the
material symbolic space of the nation and demand an ethical response
to the enduring material residues of the Cold War.3 If American exceptionalism works to externalize war and obscure militarism domestically,
then this memorial would internalize waste and compel a reckoning with
domestic toxicity and nuclear colonialism. Through a process of reverse
colonization, the memorial would materially and symbolically convert the
National Mall into a proving ground, bringing the American West—
where most U.S. military projects have taken place—into the heart of the
nation. In addition to drawing out unexpected symbolic relations with
other memorials to American wars through juxtaposition, the plutonium
memorial would turn inside out two prominent strategies of waste disposal: the American propensity to bury controversy under lawn cover and
the hiding of nuclear waste out of sight in Western deserts or the backyards of the poor.4 It could also direct attention to the way state rationalities regularize environmental exposure to toxicity—radiation, in this
case—as the background condition of everyday life. In this respect, however, the memorial risks reproducing—and possibly legitimating—banal
endemic forms of violence via toxic exposure as part of its performance,
if recognition of the way such enduring wastes persist in conditioning
the present is not achieved. Through the very act of memorializing, the
national imagination might still assimilate the ironic counter-spectacle
as part of the progress of the nation by consuming the nuclear era as
past. The plutonium-container memorial could itself become national
kitsch, with nuclear waste as destination, so that “greened” weapons and
“clean-tech” wars might continue to be waged elsewhere. This is a real
possibility, given the so-called “environmental turn” of the Department
of Defense (DOD) and the Department of Energy (DOE).
Although the memorial is a hypothetical exercise, many of the issues
it raises point to the “post–Cold War” reorganization of the military and
emphasis on environmental security, which now figures largely in concerns over national security and serves as a pretext for other national
projects. The DOD, as the largest energy user in the country, has been
T h e B i o p o l i t i cs o f S p e c ta c l e
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investing heavily in alternative energy to advance warfare under conditions of global warming and fossil fuel scarcity, making the U.S. military
a defender of green policies in Washington, DC, legislative circles. The
DOE, too, has been implementing “green upgrades” of the nation’s
stockpile, integrating environmental considerations into the life cycles
of weapons. Both the DOD and DOE have turned to the domestic environmental legacies of twentieth-century industrial-military production,
and in some cases offered concessions to populations and lands affected
by military activity. A prominent example of this is the decommissioning and remediation of numerous facilities to return them to the public,
restoring wetlands and establishing wildlife refuges on land formerly
part of bomb production facilities or testing grounds. If Simonian’s
counter-monument to the U.S. atomic project struggles with co-optation by tourism and a national narrative of progress, the recreational
consumption of vast military natures across the United States raises similarly urgent issues about cultural visibility, exposure, military ecologies,
and environmental memory.
This chapter is broadly concerned with such restructuring and the
phenomenon of the post-military or post-nuclear nature refuge. I focus
on the biopolitics of the “post–Cold War” landscape, specifically the biopolitical function of spectacle within the neoliberal state. As military
facilities and nuclear complexes are decommissioned, remediated, and
repurposed as grounds for popular recreation, such concessions can be
seen to utilize a strategic ontology of nature as separate, external, pure,
or available for consumption—nature as spectacle—to bury past injustices and abandon war’s material remains (contaminated land, sick
workers, etc.) in plain sight. It follows that military-environmental stewardship and legacy management, and even efforts to secure the health
and safety of the population, can work to maintain consent and annex
counter-histories. The environmental turn of the military shifts capacities and research infrastructures to ensure the survival of war-making
capacities and strategically disposes of military remains in order to support military realignment.
To establish and explore these claims, I consider the biopolitical
“nature” of spectacle more generally, pointing out methodological differences with “greenwashing” critiques and ideological interpretations
of spectacle. In contrast to a limited visual understanding of spectacle as
S h i l o h R . Krupa r
repressive of reality, with matter as the medium of a deceptive image, I
strive in this chapter to make an institutionally embedded, relational,
material-focused analysis of spectacle as an arrangement of truth and
relations with biophysical nature.5 I show spectacle to be an environmental project, with serious ecological-social consequences, in the context of neoliberal military restructuring. My analysis is grounded in two
key biopolitical arrangements of spectacle—salvation and oversight—
that orchestrate the disposal or denial of Cold War military remains.
Case studies of these spectacular divisions reveal that post–Cold War con
cessions and liquidation go hand-in-hand. The chapter concludes by
exploring the ethical implications of post-military nature spectacle—
namely, the challenge of engaging in criticism under conditions of toxicity, and the challenge to “exposure” as critical pedagogy.
Having started out with a hypothetical plutonium memorial in order
to introduce some general issues regarding post–Cold War cultural and
environmental developments, I continue the chapter in an allegorical
format. The scheme is loosely based on a field trip visit to a typical former DOD or DOE site that is now organized as a wildlife refuge and that
is open to the public for recreational consumption and interpretation.
This approach aims to encourage the “naturalist” tradition toward spectacle: to take the material, institutional, and environmental aspects of
spectacle seriously, and to address spectacle through popular forms of
environmental education. Beginning in an interpretive center, the
chapter offers an overview of the biopolitics of military restructuring
and nature spectacle. This is followed by two field visits to particular
manifestations of spectacle found in post–Cold War military restructuring: salvation and government oversight. The chapter concludes with a
brief reflection on exposure and criticism.
Interpretive Center: The Biopolitics of Neoliberal
Military Restructuring and Nature Spectacle
The poststructural theorist and activist Michel Foucault defined “biopolitics” as “the series of governmental strategies centered on this new
concept called life.”6 Biopolitics refers to the historical rise of biological
life as an object of state calculation and strategy. This entails the establishment of regulatory controls over biological processes, such as public
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health, births, mortalities, and so forth. For Foucault, biopolitics is modern and productive. It refers to the securing and ordering of a population; it operates through the regularization of the population and aims
to curtail unpredictable events, achieve stability, and eradicate internal
threats, which often entails judgments about the kinds of life that present a danger to the population. Biopolitics involves the power “to make
something live or to let it die, the power to regularize life, the authority
to force living not just to happen but to endure and appear in particular
ways . . . where living increasingly becomes a scene of administration,
discipline, and recalibration of what constituted health.”7
Foucault also considers biopolitics to function as a kind of moral science that produces material truths in order to manage threats and to
reproduce society and general well-being. 8 This is crucial to understanding how biopolitics largely operates today: by fostering capacities to
control, manage, engineer, reshape, and modulate the very vital capacities of the human being as a living creature. If biopolitics worked historically to organize and “know” humans for the purposes of molding
modern citizenry and solidifying the state, it also operated on a broader
biophysical level to arrange, concentrate, and mobilize the environment
and nonhumans according to particular rationales, logics, and efficiencies.9 Biopolitics is the problematization of life—including the resources
of land, animals, and other nonhuman organisms—as an object of political power.10 This is not merely a repressive power, such as acts of violence against the weak, but rather the fostering of life and creation of
new internal domains of intervention and visibility. However, these
interventions are not without negative effects or harmful repercussions. My investigation, therefore, examines the material arrangements
of truths and relationships—for example, between humans and waste—
and the politics of life and death of the post-military nature refuge.
The analysis focuses on the institutional practices that proliferate and
diffuse state power and target the population and environment as
objects of knowledge.
Examining the biopolitics of current U.S. military restructuring
offers numerous insights into the contemporary reorganization of war,
the reconfiguration of power relations under neoliberalism, the management of military ecologies and domestic residues of war, and the
environmental consequences of this restructuring. The sudden redunS h i l o h R . Krupa r
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4.1 The new visitor center at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge,
opened in spring 2011. Photo courtesy of the author.
dancy of parts of the Cold War apparatus of military capacity and the
industries that sustained it can be attributed to several national changes
and global transitions.11 The globalized defense industry and inter
nationalization of the former U.S. military-industrial core, along with
reduced U.S. social spending and the reconfiguration of the state around
coercive managerial functions—commonly ascribed to the political
project of neoliberalism—all have contributed to military restructuring and efforts to develop a more efficacious military. As a consequence
of strategies to reduce public spending, national defense has contracted, concentrated, and eliminated jobs; shut down many national
arsenals and nuclear facilities; and sought to establish professionalized
forms of accountability. Austerity and restructuring have affected the
nuclear weapons complex most dramatically, leading to the massive
decommissioning of facilities, large-scale remediation projects, and collapse of much of the moral, ideological, and symbolic legitimacy of the
Cold War.
Both the DOD and DOE have integrated environmental stewardship
into their operations, following federal environmental regulations in
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response to threats generated historically by the U.S. industrial warfare
economy. They have liquidated land holdings considered to be unnecessary military expenditures and taken various cleanup actions, remediating large swaths of land and transferring former bases and nuclear
facilities to civilian uses. Many of these sites are considered to be prime,
as well as vulnerable, real estate—vulnerable in that they are situated
in close proximity to suburban and urban development. The reclassification of former arsenals as nature refuges has also been a popular
strategy; abetted by private industry to externalize cleanup costs, the
conversion of military bases into nature refuges serves to limit human
contact with sites and environmentally reinterpret the history of the vast
U.S. nuclear and military landscape—areas of secrecy and exception,
military testing, weapons production, and, subsequently, contamination.12 This trend is often referred to as military-to-wildlife (“M2W”),
warfare-to-wildlife, or bombs-to-birds conversions. The process usually
involves the reassignment of land management to the U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service of the Department of Interior (DOI), which administers the country’s national wildlife refuge system. Essentially, that which
has been liquidated is repackaged as ecological improvement and “peace
dividends.” Restoration of military lands and the acknowledgment of
environmental devastation wrought by military activities are hard-won
triumphs. However, such military-to-wildlife conversions are also utopian projects of the nation-state, which propagate the idea that such
lands are now demilitarized and safe for public recreation and observation of nature.
Military restructuring constructs truths about what is natural, inevitable, rational, or incontestable. In spite of the history of military enclosures as national sacrifice zones—as territory within the nation where
acts of environmental devastation have been sanctioned—the neoliberal restructuring of the military and U.S. nuclear complex has framed
the disposal of land as good economic sense, public accountability,
and even generosity. Moreover, the wastes—the chemical and radioactive residues—of war are treated as mere bureaucratic and scientific
management problems pertaining only to particular sites. This has
effectively removed the political context and extensive geographies of
environmental problems, and reduced responsibility for such legacies,
by coordinating new offices, cleanup projects, and communities around
the management of contamination and waste for indefinite futures. It
also obscures the ongoing impact of such toxic residues on the bodies
that worked at the former sites, and disregards the way human and nonhuman worlds still live with the residues of industrial production as constitutive of local ecologies.
While radioactive and chemical contamination from the militaryindustrial complex has shocked many Americans, so too has the survival of nature in atomic and chemical-industrial wastelands. The DOD,
DOE, and private companies responsible for cleaning up such sites
have welcomed and strategically used such signs of natural recovery. For
instance, the presence of endangered species has been used as evidence
of a healthy rather than terminally polluted landscape, promoting the
idea that the nuclear age and industrial warfare actually preserved rather
than destroyed nature. The interpretive centers at most military-to-
wildlife conversion sites maintain that an unexpected legacy of war has
been that military occupation of land—its circumscribing and denial of
public access—protected wildlife from encroaching urbanization, real
estate development, and tourism.13 Military-to-wildlife conversions supposedly demonstrate that military activities have not just destroyed
nature but actively conserved it.
However, the complicity of military activities with ecological restoration can also be seen as a strategy of pursuing war through environ
mentalist means that makes militarization more efficient and cost
effective—that is, a strategy of “green war.” Repudiating and effectively
obscuring the history of the military-industrial basis of war, the DOD
and DOE currently acknowledge many of the negative environmental
impacts of military activity, providing in some cases concessions to U.S.
populations harmed by fallout or hazardous materials. Yet ongoing toxicity and remains of war are often eclipsed by this celebratory reorganization, which now emphasizes environmental security, stewardship,
and clean technologies in place of the former industrial processes and
negligent environmental safety (now relegated to the past). Green war
means progress and a better, cleaner, more efficient and responsible
military. Strategic environmental remilitarization absorbs challenges
to the legitimacy of the ongoing organization of war in the United States
through environmental remediation and compensation efforts.
In this respect, the closure and decommissioning of land holdings by
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the DOD and DOE, and their pursuit of environmental compliance
and stewardship, have effectively shifted resources, remaindered land,
and reduced responsibility under the auspices of ecological improvement and even genetic preservation. This has been achieved via the
strategic use of the ontology of nature as separate, external, pure, or
available for recreational consumption—nature as spectacle—to externalize accountability and displace the negative legacies of the Cold
War. For instance, spectacle is the vehicle through which the idea that
nature has returned or never left, that humans can lay waste to nature
and then re-create it, is instilled. Spectacle biopolitically arranges relations of separation between nature and humans. This binaristic thinking and the treatment of human bodies and technologies as disembedded
from the environment are part of the military legacy. Military restructuring draws on this to abandon certain responsibilities for past injustices as well as to dispose of the material remains—toxicity, waste, and
fallout—of war. The state’s investment in maintaining spectacular divisions and discrete categories orchestrates refusal of the remainders: the
polluted land, contaminated former workers, and marginalized knowledges. Spectacle serves as a tactical ontology, one that refuses to address
the complex social-ecological histories of the military and nature, of
pre-military human-nature relations, or of the profound and ongoing
material transformations of the post–Cold War landscape. Such an
ontology of separation potentially maintains a condition of colonialism
and “bare life” that evacuates the natural history and social life existing
prior to, during, and after military occupation. The ontological break
between humans and nature also functions as a kind of “species line”
in neoliberal culture, allowing the monetization of environmental damage but also converting environmental externalities into ecological
anchors—fixing waste to wilderness—and, in doing so, maintaining
treatment of nature as free disposal and ecology as container.14 Essentially, spectacle biopolitically organizes social-ecological separation for
the purposes of economic efficiency and unaccountability; the postmilitary nature refuge has been used to settle legal disputes and contain
remediation costs, to bury public criticism or annex environmental critiques to military goals, and to foster ignorance of the biophysical socialization of risk and exposure.
This marks a significant shift in the way that spectacle is methodologiS h i l o h R . Krupa r
cally delineated. It strives for a more material-relational analysis than the
frequently rehearsed admonishing of the “greenwashing” of capitalism
or the military-industrial complex. The reorientation of the military to
pursue sustainability and environmental security evidenced by militaryto-wildlife conversions, and efforts by the DOD and DOE to provide certain forms of recognition and concessions for domestic environmental
ruin, are not mere green packaging; criticizing military natures as ideological mirage does not adequately capture what is going on. Greenwashing tends to reproduce an understanding of spectacle as deception.
It also methodologically limits the act of criticism to that of exposing,
revealing, uncovering, and dismantling, from an untenable position of
privileged distance. “Spectacle,” via this practice of ideological critique,
is that which perpetuates mass deception, amnesia, and desire under
capitalism and, therefore, must be dismantled in order to know the
truth, to see the reality of the means of production, and to free social
relations. This is a limited understanding of truth as something that is
hidden and must be exposed; it risks relegating matter/materiality to
merely the medium of a deceptive image. The following two cases, by
contrast, aim to show that spectacle’s biopolitical function is institutionally embedded, relational (even if that relation is one of separation),
and constitutive of the subject and population. Spectacle is not a trans
historical phenomenon of capitalism nor a form of trickery or ruse.
Rather than repressive of reality, spectacle arranges “truth”—what is real
and possible within present conditions and the material arrangements
of visibilities, knowledges, and interventions central to governing.
If the usefulness of spectacle in terms of a critique of political economy or the mass media has been fundamentally destabilized by new
forms of capitalism, new technologies, and risk society, it might be put
to work in investigations of contemporary neoliberal biopolitics, and
studies of affect, materiality, and aesthetics. In terms of the post-military
nature refuge, spectacle becomes particularly strategic as a technology
of power and pedagogy. Drawing on Guy Debord’s notion of spectacle
as “separation,” but revised by a biopolitical understanding of separation as a material arrangement and tactical ontology, spectacle installs
an “architecture” of division between humans and nature that resuscitates ideas about purity positioned against contamination.15 The spectacle of nature as pure wilderness enables new forms of value—from the
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“biovalue” of charismatic species to rising real estate values—and demonstrates that environmental remediation and promotional behavior/
predatory capital can go hand in hand. It also mobilizes purifying auditing systems, designed to maintain the spectacle. The heavy bureaucratization of land and waste can govern in such a way that the legacies of
war and actual ecologies become superfluous to management. Combined with the popular consumption of nature—such as the tours, viewing blinds, and children’s programs promoted at military-to-wildlife
refuges—spectacular hypervisibility can function to dispose of lingering toxicity and deflect how the past still shapes the present, not merely
rhetorically but materially. The post-military nature refuge is not only a
powerful symbolic redefinition of the state in terms of environmental
protection but also, more fundamentally, a truth-telling, world-making
strategy that presents nature as recuperated from apocalyptic tragedy
and saved from human destruction in order to conceal the fact that
exposures to toxicity and contamination continue. Spectacle arranges
for unaccountability and perpetuates exposure rather than controversy.
The following sections visit spectacle in action.
“Bison-tennial” Viewing Platform: Spectacle of Salvation
Modernity’s social and environmental upheavals have been accompanied by romantic longings for nature as a source of belonging, escape,
and inspiration. A kind of modernist alienation seeking reconnection
and escape from urban, even suburban, life has fueled a growing consumer culture of nature-based tourism. For example, the national park
system inaugurated the executive withdrawal of land to safeguard natural assets. As the apogee of conservationist thinking, parks encouraged
Americans to see such land as a virtuous wildlife repository due to its
untouched and supposedly unpeopled existence, eliminating indigenous
rights to the land and customs in the process. Pristine American wilderness and virginal park scenes were, however, highly managed experimental landscapes that contradictorily represented democracy, public access,
open frontier, and national Eden. Seemingly the apocalyptic opposite,
atomic bomb complexes and military withdrawals of land for munitions
production and testing organized large “buffer zones” for security purposes.16 Despite their destructive technology and treatment of the enviS h i l o h R . Krupa r
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4.2 The Rod and Gun Club viewing blind at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National
Wildlife Refuge. Photo courtesy of the author.
ronment as blasting pad, dead zone, wasteland, or national sacrifice
area, the DOD and DOE are now often lauded for their on-site de facto
wilderness preservation. A nostalgic desire for untouched, preindustrial
nature finds unanticipated wildlife at former military sites, while parks
are frequently criticized for commercialism, overexposure, and excessive human presence.17 Adding to the allure of post-military landscapes
as somehow largely untouched by humans or development, there is no
clear distinction between protecting humans from contamination and
the conservationist agenda of limiting human contact to protect nature
from humans. The ongoing sequestration of post-military lands can be
understood in terms of biotic resurgence or national decay, biodiversity
or environmental ruin. In any case, nature is a complex, culturally laden
reference point for negotiating the meaning and organization of post–
Cold War military land.
Wilderness plays an important role in this: animal bodies, such as
that of the American bald eagle, have become indicators of survival or
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adaptation more often than guides to military practices of environmental destruction and ecocide. Pedagogical investment in animals as signs
of purity intensify the moralism of saving wilderness. The reintroduction of the American bison to post-military sites also becomes evidence
of the “return of the native” and successful recuperation. Such nostalgic
“creation stories” sanitize histories of the military, and the frontier of
the American West. Whether some animal populations are resuscitated
from near extinction, or systematically slaughtered as surplus or collateral damage in order to maintain a healthy environment, the administration of military lands as wildlife refuges positions humans as the
clear operators of a range of instruments on the social flesh and bodies of
animal and plant life.18 Humans—the cause of nature’s imperilment—
devise the means to its salvation, even attempting to “improve on nature”
through genetic manipulation or purification of some animals and plants.
Animal life is called on as a potentially generative, transformative, and
instrumental field, and as a target of discipline, efficiency, profits, and
desire. This is exemplified by the spectacle of salvation of the bald eagle
and the bison at the military-to-wildlife conversion known as the Rocky
Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge, a former DOD munitions
and chemical warfare arsenal located near Denver, Colorado. Such salvific spectacle is achieved via practices of environmental stewardship,
genetic diversity programs, popular consumption and education, nostalgia, and profound dehistoricization.
The Rocky Mountain Arsenal (RMA), now officially called the Rocky
Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge (RMANWR) and administered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, is a well-known case of military environmental reuse and reinterpretation; it has served as an
important model for the remediation and conversion of other DOD and
DOE sites. Historically part of Colorado’s long-standing support of military enclosures along the Front Range, the chemical weapons factory
was founded when federal dollars flooded the state in the mid-twentieth
century to establish a series of military facilities. On farmland northeast
of downtown Denver, the army in 1942 began producing chemical
weapons and napalm, followed by chlorine, mustard gas, and lewisite.19
Later, the facility manufactured the deadly chemical agent GB nerve gas
(sarin gas), a lethal organophosphorous compound one drop of which,
absorbed through the skin, can cause death in under a minute. Adding
still other elements to the site’s toxic inventory, the army produced fuel
mix for Cold War–era ballistic missiles, rocket propellants, the anticrop agents wheat rust and rice-blast fungus, and Vietnam-era “button
bombs,” which, when stepped on, exploded to warn of enemy infiltration. Private industry was also welcomed to the site to offset operational
costs and to maintain the facility for national security by making pesticide, insecticide, and herbicide. In the early 1980s, when the plant was
shut down, a fusillade of lawsuits broke out over the authority and responsibility for decisions about the extent of contamination and cost of
cleanup. The waste was inconceivable: eight million cubic yards of contaminated soil, basins of toxic waste, a history of leaking sewer lines and
spills, the discovery of pesticides and the nerve gas byproduct DIMP in
water supplies outside the arsenal’s grounds. The place remained mired
in messy litigation, myriad cleanup cost forecasts, murky arguments
about safety standards, and junked cleanup pacts and consent decrees
that the state of Colorado refused to endorse.
In 1986, eagles were found roosting in the arsenal’s southeast scab
of land, leading to the dawning perception of military property as wildlife preserve. The appearance of the bald eagles was vital to the transformation of this “no-man’s-land” from toxic blight to amenity. The U.S.
nation’s symbol since 1782, the bald eagle is the longest-standing entry
on the endangered species list enacted by Congress in 1940, additionally
protected by the Endangered Species Act of 1973. When the birds were
first found inhabiting the arsenal, the Fish and Wildlife Service feared
that they would eat contaminated prairie dogs and considered frightening the eagles off with noisemakers or flashing lights. The response later
shifted from recognizing eagle vulnerability to maintaining the animal’s
presence and, later, leveraging that presence to incorporate cost savings
into the cleanup. A previously unattainable coalition between Colorado
state representatives, the army, Shell, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service,
environmental groups, and local media formed in support of the redemption of the Rocky Mountain Arsenal to the status of nature refuge. The
visibility and protection of this charismatic creature politically enmeshed
with the positions of various stakeholders; eagle presence became an
integral material and economic consideration in the assessment, planning, and remediation of the site. The bald eagle was called on to rescue
purity, generate powerful affect, and create the possibility for both a
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budget cleanup and new origin story. A trope of strength in the service
of the national imaginary, the bald eagle stood for the natural and the
pure, and, as such, could recuperate a pristine nature. Further, the life of
the animal could be instrumentalized for efficiency: a faster, cheaper
cleanup, following the designation of the arsenal as an exclusive space
for nature. Under the wing of the bald eagles, a much less extensive and
expensive cleanup took place at the arsenal, in the name of minimizing
disturbance to habitat; the land had only to be fit for animal habitation,
avoiding the more costly remediation required for human residency or
usages involving extensive human contact.
The Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge (RMANWR)
was signed into law on October 9, 1992, envisioning the largest urban
refuge in the country on Denver’s front doorstep. The interaction between
the city and communities along the Front Range with the remains of
weapons production exemplifies the confluence of ecological attitudes and practices surrounding contaminated military land uses.20
The replacement of the arsenal’s mission of weapons production with
environmental stewardship has effectively prompted reinterpretation of
the history of domestic military occupation with ecological protection,
aligning the wildlife refuge with military enclosure. The RMANWR
emerged as a well-guarded sanctuary of high plains ecology that hosts
rare species and protects such animals as the bald eagle. The eagles
would come to serve as the flagship species of the new wildlife refuge.
Various government sectors, environmental groups, and at times the popular press presented the arrival of the bald eagle as an “act of nature,” a
spectacular showing of nature’s resilience and the salvation of a military
wasteland. A popular icon and charismatic species capable of grabbing
attention and attracting resources, the bald eagle was made permanently present as the outstanding on-site resident, with Bald Eagle Day
events, bald eagle mascots, bald eagle on-site tours, and bald eagle calendars and souvenirs. Visions of the RMANWR teeming with wildlife
abounded, supported by wildlife programs, eagle viewing areas, a fishing program, and tours conducted by trolley car, van, or bus.
Such representational practices, narrative and viewing technologies,
and affect were thus key to the extension of the state’s managerial powers over nonhuman life. In the case of the bald eagle, even though the
condition of life for these birds is one of ongoing vulnerability to conS h i l o h R . Krupa r
tamination, the eagle—as symbol of the state—overshadows this, disavowing the precariousness of eagle life, ironically, by focusing attention
on its protection. Naturalistic renderings of the animal dovetail with
heraldic images of the eagle as symbol of the U.S. nation, yet disidentify
with the bird’s animal materiality. The eagle serves as a cultural boundary “object” for humans that negotiates toxicity, value, and the symbolic
health of the nation. Eagles are literal biophysical absorbers of the
wastes of military-industrial modernity, but the resilience they show
toward toxicity is co-opted to secure waste disposal under the sign of
the nation.21 The material unsustainability of permanent war, and the
spiral of environmental litigation, cleanup costs, and blame constituting
the Rocky Mountain Arsenal’s history, would now be balanced in social
fantasy by the site’s return to nature and the bald eagle as harbinger of
a creation story.
The bison is also a key figure of the post-cleanup RMANWR; its
return to the arsenal is braided with that of the bald eagle. As a symbol
of the white settler nation, the bald eagle is implicated in the historic
extermination of the bison, and the bird’s actual appearance at the arsenal pioneered the way for the bison’s reintroduction to the prairie. This
reintroduction is supported by the Fish and Wildlife Service’s genetic
conservation initiative to purify and preserve the bison, and a salvationary ethic that seeks to return the land to a mythic “native” origin. It is
estimated that forty to sixty million bison once existed throughout the
North American interior; by 1900 they were reduced to a mere few hundred. The colonization of the Western frontier decimated the animal,
paralleling the forced removal of Plains-area American Indians who
relied on the bison. The expansion of the cattle industry played a central role in the destruction of the bison’s biogeography and loss of
genetic diversity. Presently, the close to one million animals in wild
and captive or semidomestic herds exist on less than 1 percent of their
former range in public trusteeship in national, state, or provincial parks
and wildlife refuges.22 The Fish and Wildlife Service now endeavors to
distribute genetically engineered pure bison in various “stockpiles”
around the country for the purpose of securing diversity. Accordingly,
biodiversity can be preserved by banking gene sequences in bison livestock. The RMANWR was selected as one of the sites to host a bison
reintroduction pilot program, to generate and preserve a population of
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“genetically pure” bison (with no cattle genes). Sixteen bison were
released from trailers into portions of the RMANWR in March 2007 as
part of this larger effort.23 The absurdity of reintroducing genetically
purified bison to lands too contaminated for human habitation indicates the extent to which former military sites function as salvific arks
for endangered species. Paralleling the contemporary reinvention of the
zoo as wildlife park and revealing the extent to which experimental,
sentimental, economic, and aesthetic factors can shape animal genomes,
the reintroduction of a small herd of bison at the RMANWR was seen as
a way to develop genetics conservation of the animal. The bison is a keystone species of the prairie ecosystem; its return to the prairie of the
former arsenal, therefore, is considered a key strategy in restoring the
ecosystem as it was before industrialization. The animal’s reintroduction nourishes an ecological fantasy of restoring native wilderness. The
bison adds cultural and historical value to the site, atones for the elimination of native heritage, and maintains the ecological integrity of the
shortgrass prairie system.
Military technologies for command, control, and intelligence often
work with imperial nostalgia for the colonized, enslaved, animal, native,
and noncitizen.24 The bison is valued as an indigenous creature that can
define native space; the animal sign mediates identification with indigeneity. Historically exterminated from indigenous life but now resuscitated to define native space as part of an authentic landscape, the visual
persistence of the bison roots out the historical violence of the frontier,
and even sanitizes the history of the animal’s extermination. Essentially, the creation story at work is a narrative of settlement, one that
sows a neocolonial terrain of power through a human-animal binary:
the human as white frontier settler and redeemer of nonhuman or
native nature. From tourist experiences of the site’s genesis that refer to
the first encounters of explorers or homesteaders, to forms of knowledge about native people as already or inevitably gone, the RMANWR is
a deeply racialized ecology: race and nature serve as historical artifacts,
with native humans and nonhumans fixed in nature and white humans
set outside the ecosystem as “creators.”
Drawing on imperial nostalgia for the frontier, the bison’s return supposedly evidences the renewability of the raw material of the original
prairie and stages visitors as the instruments of creation.25 The return of
the bison’s habitat, both literal and symbolic, overlays a moral landscape
imbued with the idea of salvation, and of humans as stewards of the ark;
reconnecting the bison with its habitat is thus a moral act. Visitors are
invited to partake in a benevolent regime of management, wherein animals are acted on to be saved, bred, archived, conserved, captured, and
displayed. This spectacular division of caretaker from nature arranges
for “wild nature” to emerge as originary, pure, and redeemed, in spite of
the ineffaceable presence of humans and the fact that such bison are
genetically engineered and “released” with intense support.26
Animal life is not only managed through technoscience at the
RMANWR but also developed as a form of promissory value creation.
The arsenal’s conversion to nature refuge has been a call to reinvest in
the land and animal life as a store of Colorado native values, which can
then be drawn on to increase the value of surrounding activities. Attendant to the establishment of the RMANWR, activities have multiplied
for the purposes of real estate development, pedagogical investments,
and further military restructuring. For instance, the RMANWR’s youthfocused education programs orchestrate an aggressive education campaign, leading thousands of schoolchildren on site for nature programs.
The strategic reproduction of the RMANWR’s origin story requires the
epistemological handing down of the spectacular ontology of the human
as creator—acting on but not of the world—and of the arsenal as pedagogical playground. The wildlife diversions on offer at the RMANWR
endeavor to re-create this knowledge through the actual bodies of young
children.27 Children are central to maintaining the spectacle of salvation. The value of this pedagogical legacy is the assurance that children
will be developed as subjects that embody and enact a salvationary ethic
as the primary mode of conduct. Such educational vitality can be conscripted to enlarge areas of consumption, such as the stimulation of
“eco-consumerism,” which trades out the industrialization of nature for
its “informatization,” as scenic images, informational utilities, and leisure activities that can serve multiple profit agendas.28 The RMANWR’s
activities of nature watching, scouting, and web-cam surveillance make
animals available for consumption through a projected stream of habitat or scenery. The experience of nature is highly mediated by the technology of viewing platforms that arrange scenic views for the seemingly
separated viewer, aesthetically divorcing visitor and nature. Such viewT h e B i o p o l i t i cs o f S p e c ta c l e
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ing blinds facilitate the consumption of nature in a romanticized preindustrial, premodern physical setting, obfuscating the drift of toxicity
and the metabolic relations between human and nature. The visible
forms of bison, eagles, and other animals are observed in reified views
of the wild as dehistoricized signs of biodiversity.
The struggle to preserve specific wildlife, however, clearly engages in
practices of domestication, even extermination, in order to promote
biodiversity. In the case of the post-military wildlife refuge, bald eagles
are made to live by the biopolitical power to keep animal life in interminable survival; the bald eagle’s ongoing RMANWR presence follows the
spectral logic of a body that eternally survives. However, this spectacle
of salvation also arranges for numerous deaths. Just as some animals
serve as national symbols, others are conscripted as biomonitoring indicators of chemical exposures and contaminant-related health effects.
Rodents or starlings, for example, often function as gauges of the health
and toxicity of the refuge; they provide a way to evaluate risks associated
with dosages and exposure routes, as well as a means for testing the
validity of laboratory models of exposures and effects.29 Salvific efforts
rationalize such violence in the name of safety, security, and care. This
is exemplified by the fate of the bison, which might be said to live out a
kind of injury through their preservation and reintroduction; not only
is their genetic suitability in question, but they have been severed from
connections to emplaced kin, habitat, and instincts developed directly
in relation to particular environments. Generally speaking, then, the
post-military wildlife refuge is a zone simultaneously of protection and
sacrifice, of salvation and extraction, of life and death.30 It is a zone of
indeterminacy, wherein waste and other evidence of the unsustainability of war necessitate a biopolitically efficacious creation story that depoliticizes socio-ecological processes and porosity, and maintains and
instrumentalizes nonhumans in relationships that are advantageous to
projects of value production.31 Animal signs can generate economic
returns; in the case of the RMANWR, animal populations were literally
brought back after historic decimation to “store up” biodiversity. Such
actions are legitimated as natural and moralized as responsible, as lifegiving—their relation to historically destructive military processes
unrecognized in the advocacy of salvation.
Legacy Management Loop: Spectacle of Oversight
By the end of the Cold War, the DOE and its predecessor agencies had
acquired control over approximately 3,750 square miles to conduct a
broad range of programs, from the design, production, and underground testing of nuclear weapons, to electrical power marketing,
energy conservation, and scientific research.32 The U.S. nuclear complex occupied the majority of that land, stretching from South Carolina
to Washington State, Alaska to the Marshall Islands, with numerous
institutions, facilities, and sites involved in the development, testing,
and storage of nuclear weapons and weapons materials. These sites were
(and continue to be) fusions of local ecologies, communities, and
nuclear industrial processes, often bearing deliberate acts of territorial
devastation or treatment of the land as alienable, external, and passive
to the dictates of the nuclear activity defining the site. More than half a
century of nuclear weapons production had generated costly and complicated environmental and waste management problems, such as decom
missioning plutonium processing buildings, remediating contaminated
soils and water systems, and emptying and re-containing million-gallon
tanks of highly radioactive waste. DOE assessments of the magnitude
and extent of environmental contamination varied, as did estimates of
the cost of environmental restoration and waste disposal—from $100
billion to $1 trillion. In 1997, the DOE set remediation costs around
$227 billion for a seventy-five-year period.33 As this inventorying of land
and facilities took place, DOE external performance and internal operational reviews strategically realigned the department’s mission to dispose of unneeded assets, such as land holdings that were in excess of
current and anticipated future needs. With disposal the norm, the DOE
sought programmatic ways to close and relinquish certain sites. It continues this work today.
However, large amounts of contamination found at DOE sites and
the longevity of most nuclear materials also forced the DOE to develop
a program for managing hazardous areas in perpetuity, including
administering knowledge about those sites, negotiating state and federal environmental compliance agreements, maintaining any cleanups, safeguarding the population, and cultivating transparency for
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4.3 Aerial view of the former Rocky Flats facility in 2007, approximately two years after
the completion of remediation. Photo courtesy of the U.S. Department of Energy.
public relations. Because of the crisis of accountability and the controversial history of nuclear weapons production in the United States, the
response has been to develop an enduring institution, agency, or community that would maintain nuclear-waste monitoring indefinitely.34
Not surprisingly, where contamination from former industrial processes is considered to be extensive and dangerous to the population,
the DOE has treated the radioactive and chemical legacies of World
War II and the Cold War as a bureaucratic management problem. This
can be attributed largely to Congress’s charge to the DOE to accelerate
the reduction of site-specific environmental hazards, and to expeditiously streamline both its land holdings and management operations. 35
The difficulty of dealing with extensive contamination and the longevity
of nuclear materials, which challenge the very activity of administration, has led the DOE to implement “end-states” during cleanups, a
risk-based approach to remediation that contains costs and opens the
door for constant auditing procedures. Such auditing is a strategic
spectacle of management that maintains appearances of knowability
and accountability, in relation to the end-state. This enterprising form
of “governing by making visible”—oversight—minimizes the impossible
mandate that the DOE monitor waste and contamination indefinitely at
a growing number of decommissioned and remediated DOE facilities
under its purview. Essentially, such hyperregulation manages to minimize DOE’s mandate to that of “making appearances.”
Examining the conversion of the former plutonium production facility Rocky Flats to nature refuge, and DOE’s legacy management activities there, provides further insight. Considered to be one of the largest
nuclear closure projects in the world and a model for other decommissioned nuclear facilities across the United States, Rocky Flats shows how
such transfiguring of waste to wilderness and naturalizing of the site
serves as the means for disposing land and minimizing the terrain of
that which must be governed. The ability to convert a nuclear facility,
formerly hosting some of the world’s most contaminated buildings, into
a nature refuge required the production of powerful truths about the
site and relations with the land. The cleanup tactically carried out ontological separations of waste and nature, humans and waste, in order to
install a new land administration reality that would regularize efficiency
and reduce uncertainty via a spectacle of government oversight. Legacy
management, which stipulates that the DOE will maintain cleanup compliance in perpetuity, treats environmental problems as technical issues
and further reduces the management’s purview: it maintains only what
must be managed in order for the government to appear to be governing, in the ultimate endgame of Congressional oversight. Accountability
and favorable public relations are sought through constant institutional
self-audits and performance assessments, in an attempt to mitigate the
historical controversies of sites such as Rocky Flats.
Icon of the Cold War, economic powerhouse of the Denver and Front
Range area, and popular target of peace and antimilitarism activists,
the Rocky Flats plant was plagued by fires and accidents, leaving an
ignominious legacy of contaminated buildings, soil, and water in the
aftermath of its forty-plus years of operation. Constructed in 1951 near
Denver and operational by 1952, the plutonium plant was essentially
a giant “machine shop” of metals; it was built for the purposes of recovering and recycling scrap plutonium, manufacturing plutonium and
highly enriched uranium components, and producing nuclear bomb
“pits”—trigger devices for nuclear warheads.36 The wilderness surround
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ing the plant served as an expandable dumping ground, where industrial wastes of the assembly line were cast off—their threat canned and
buried, or dispersed by burning, spraying, or most often simply forgetting. The idea that waste could be sequestered and left to the elements,
canned and shipped off somewhere else, or rhetorically removed
meant that ecology was not a consideration but an afterthought of
waste’s contradictory refusal to disappear. 37 As a result, waste relentlessly drifted, crept, became airborne, and seeped out through socioecological transformation—accumulating in underground plumes,
within worker bodies, bodies of water, the soil and air, the crawl spaces
of downwind homes, and in newspapers, court cases, and local lore.
Eventually the situation resulted in the first FBI raid on a federal
agency for environmental violations in U.S. history on June 6, 1989—
known as “Operation Desert Glow.” The 6,500-acre site was placed on
the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s National Priorities List,
the federal government’s program to clean up national-priority waste
sites, popularly known as Superfund.
Original estimates said the cleanup would take seventy years and cost
$37 billion. Kaiser-Hill Waste Disposal Services, the company hired by
the DOE to remediate Rocky Flats, declared completion of the project
on October 13, 2005.38 They had concluded cleanup fifty-six years
ahead of schedule at a savings of $29 billion.39 Thus, the first dismantling of a nuclear weapons plant was also the DOE’s first accelerated
closure pilot project within the weapons complex. The accelerated
cleanup of Rocky Flats mobilized risk-based approaches to safety that
determined the end-state of the site, project baselines that calculated
the uncertainty of cost and bracketed cleanup actions to a predefined
budgetary horizon, and performance-based contractual arrangements
that circumscribed regulation to the role of advocating end-state achievement. The first of its kind to be awarded at a major DOE program level,
an incentives-based contract between the DOE and Kaiser-Hill over the
Rocky Flats cleanup enabled Kaiser-Hill to complete the job thirteen
months ahead of schedule for a large company bonus.
Accelerated closure was achieved by repeating the familiar pattern
of extracting radioactive and hazardous wastes physically and rhetorically from the site. This extraction took two forms: moving the waste
off-site or burying it below the site. In a massive, federally choreoS h i l o h R . Krupa r
graphed shift in the spatial division of waste storage, 62,000 shipments
of waste departed Rocky Flats from 2000 to 2005.40 Waste was also moved
“off site” through burial. The cleanup of Rocky Flats hinged on a surface/subsurface dichotomy: a conservative allowance of radioactivity for
the top three feet of ground and a 2,000 percent increase of radioactivity
three to six feet below (beyond six feet anything was allowed, since contamination at that depth, according to the DOE Rocky Flats site manager
at the time, did not pose a danger to the surface).41 This epistemological
divorce of surface from subsurface allowed for a containment strategy
that asserted geologic depth as a permanent externality and expandable
waste frontier.
The determination of “wildlife refuge” as the desired end use for
the site was crucial to the entire cleanup process; it shelved the need to
consider or respond to the ecology, rendering further discussion with
regard to the level of cleanup unnecessary. Conclusions were drawn,
eliminating uncertainty. Against the chaos of the unknown ecological
transformations taking place at Rocky Flats, the establishment of this
desired end-state fixed in place the maximum allowable risk essential
for the expedited turnover of the site to the public.42 Refuge designation
entrenched certain conceptions of nature and waste implicit within
modern weapons manufacturing: that waste could be removed or fixed
to land, and that nature was static and separate from the human. This
tactical ontology legitimated the wildlife refuge as the latest form of
human-technical intervention at the site, effectively harnessing waste to
material and discursive practices associated with the production and
valorization of nature. Rather than investigating the uncertain ecology
and contingent material exchanges between humans and the environment, this form of land administration has led to the regularizing of the
site as natural and, consequently, to regulating as if to not exist at all.
Now administered jointly by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and
DOE after the transfer of the majority of the land to the DOI, the Rocky
Flats National Wildlife Refuge is slated to open to the public for outdoor
recreational opportunities, while ensuring safety from residual hazards.
The memorandum of understanding between the DOE and Fish and
Wildlife Service mandates that the DOE must continuously monitor
only the DOE-retained internal property, and not the rest of the refuge,
essentially circumscribing liability and the DOE’s management burden.
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Essentially, the refuge minimizes the terrain of the DOE’s responsibility, by disposing of territory to the Fish and Wildlife Service and by
instrumentalizing ecological processes in the service of waste management. The de facto benefit of associating ideas of purity with nature also
helps to reduce the activity of regulating so that it appears to not exist,
since inaction looks natural. In this sense, the refuge “solution” to Rocky
Flats signals less managing—“more for less.” The post-cleanup regulatory framework stipulates that the service maintain an “overlay refuge”
across the entire area, including the DOE-retained property.43 An overlay of grassland is a powerful vehicle of naturalization, producing an
unexceptional landscape.
To support and sustain the accelerated cleanup model, the DOE established the Office of Legacy Management (LM), which maintains the
remedial actions taken at sites such as Rocky Flats, where portions of the
land remain under DOE custody after cleanup. In 2003, the threat of
administrative collapse antagonized by large-scale hazards and the claims
of safety elicited from the DOE prompted the department to bureaucratically formalize an agency at the federal level that would be responsible for
the long-term containment and control of facilities. “Legacy Management” refers to all activities necessary to ensure the protection of human
health and the environment following the completion of cleanup, disposal, or stabilization at a former nuclear complex site, in perpetuity.
“Legacy” in this context also refers to preserving documents and, by
extension, the histories of DOE sites that have undergone closure and
remediation. However, the LM manages DOE responsibility for nuclear
legacies by imposing rationalities and distancing devices that provide
visible signs of order, such as regulatory frameworks, metrics employed
in monitoring sites, and mission statements about compliance. Technical fixes are favored over long-term outcomes based on transformational
ecology or social justice. In doing this, the LM can be seen to diffuse
responsibility and even rationalize inaction by focusing on the upkeep
of appearances. The LM’s goal of providing a long-term sustainable solution to the legacy of the Cold War, then, is more idealized than realized.
In the case of Rocky Flats, the LM must review the site, excluding the
large area deemed suitable for nature refuge use, no less than once
every five years in relation to radioactive contaminants with extremely
long half-lives.44 Although environmental change requires that ongoing
surveillance extend beyond the boundaries of contained sites and that
continual improvements of the cleanup be made in relation to the life of
the hazard, the LM is only charged with monitoring the small parcel of
land still under DOE custody. Technical land-use controls and containment measures are supposed to limit exposure to any contamination
left in place. The LM actually contracts out this environmental monitoring of the Rocky Flats site; it outsources state functions to the private
sector, insulating the LM from direct accountability for the material
consequences of the Rocky Flats accelerated cleanup. The LM also utilizes telemetry to dispatch its monitoring demands: it has implemented
the System Operation and Analysis at Remote Sites (SOARS) project
to obtain real-time data from sixteen sites in nine states for the purpose
of evaluating remediation progress. In general, by focusing on and
developing technical instruments of oversight, Legacy Management in
effect externalizes the damage done by weapons production and entrepreneurial remediation to the environment. It also disposes of social
controversy and institutional memory: the LM withheld support for a
museum dedicated to the site, remained absent from debates about
what text should be placed on information signage at the future Rocky
Flats National Wildlife Refuge, and—most notably in terms of information management—advocated the disposal of five hundred boxes of
public-record files on Rocky Flats, in the name of reducing government
waste and securing information.45 Basically, Legacy Management proceeds by a logic of devoting expertise to and developing techniques for
making residual hazards, contamination, and wastes “known,” without
necessarily finding out, archiving, or reassessing what they are. Monitoring oversight serves more in terms of social regulation than long-term
accountability of war’s material remains.
Originally charged with thirty-seven sites in 2003, the LM had
extended its managerial oversight to eighty-seven sites in twenty-eight
states and Puerto Rico by September 30, 2010. The DOE predicts that
LM supervision will extend to 129 former nuclear-related sites by 2020,
and 145 sites by 2050.46 As a result of the increasing number of accelerated cleanups and the augmenting responsibility of the LM to oversee
sites that require some form of post-closure management, the LM has
focused energy on maximizing its productivity as a manager. The LM has
reduced its original workforce, maintaining a ceiling of fifty-eight fullT h e B i o p o l i t i cs o f S p e c ta c l e
141
142
time employees. It was designated as a “high-performing organization”—
the second office in the federal government to receive this distinction
of “doing more for less.” The LM labors to show the quality control of
its oversight via displays of its own management and organizational performance. The LM, in this respect, is a devoted auditing system, established to administer post-closure DOE sites in perpetuity—an ultimately
unadministrable charge. Auditing serves as a way of producing truths
that create a barrier to defend against risk, and that essentially make the
land superfluous to the LM’s management of itself: “in audit what is
being assured is the quality of control systems rather than the quality
of first order operations.”47 Legacy Management endeavors to build
accountability and trust because it produces some measure of transparency; the LM relentlessly performs itself as an organization for the
public to see, through banal affirmation of its validation procedures.48
Auditing its own performance, as a display of self-discipline and moral
authority, legitimizes the LM’s claim to effective regulatory power. Yet
such auditing is also a means of disposal: it sets up a moral call to action,
but with the “end” of containing the social and material legacies of the
Cold War through the logic and language of its own system and a priori
measures.
At the historical moment of the DOE’s decommissioning and decontamination of former facilities, the LM maintains appearances of governing, namely through the spectacle of relentless performance audits
related to its own management functions. While the LM’s stated purpose is to take care of the population and secure health and the environment, it achieves something else: normalizing hazards in the bureaucratic
language of “managing legacies,” and maintaining the appearance of
safety and institutional oversight within limited means—even reducing its own staff and operational costs in order to do so. The LM appears
to govern, in perpetuity, through a spectacle of self-surveillance that actually minimizes the act of governing. The LM currently seeks to economize even its own appearances of managing under the auspices of
“sustainability”—sustaining the management of nuclear waste in perpetuity. This type of administration is ironically justified under the pretense of human safety.
Just as the remediation activity at the mesa of the former plutonium
plant discouraged conversation about deep, unresolved contradictions,
Legacy Management has further depoliticized the site, eclipsing the
controversial history of Rocky Flats and denying its socio-ecological and
politico-ethical complexity. Auditing spectacle secures the appearance
of the control system (which serves as the sign of accountability) by disposing of the contingencies and embeddedness of the land in sociohistorical processes. The LM does not disavow the injuries of the DOE’s
former Cold War policies, but rather disavows how such injuries continue to shape social relations. By developing the office and practice of
Legacy Management, the state is “both channeling what is desirable and
seemingly purging what is unwanted from both the record and reality,
constantly making real life more closely approximate the model contained in the documents and records. . . . Modern power is thus based
on more than the gaze, on more than the watchful eye and on more
than mere surveillance . . . it is based on the ability to purify.”49 The
emphasis on the purity of the refuge detaches biotic assets from a landscape of radioactive contamination, dividing and devaluing bodies still
“intoxicated” with nuclear history and nuclear materials. Illness is a
kind of material-environmental memory of Rocky Flats in the form of
embodied waste or exposure to waste. The Rocky Flats labor activist
Terrie Barrie, whose husband worked as a machinist at the Rocky Flats
plant and has sought compensation for occupational illness, suggests an
intimate connection between the nature refuge, institutional oversight,
and ongoing exposure: “I worry that people may forget about the workers now that it’s [the Rocky Flats site] a big grassy field where deer play.
That place made people sick, and we have to remember that. Never in
a million years did I think the cleanup would be finished before my
husband got paid.”50 If biopolitics is about the administration of land
and life, then the Rocky Flats case reveals a form of management that
arranges land and humans as residual. This administration disposes of
waste—and, by extension, former workers, environmental memory, and
controversy—through a spectacle of oversight that, ultimately, suspends
other possible responses and human involvement.
Conclusion: Exposure, Spectacle, Ecology
The two case studies discussed here, involving the Rocky Mountain
Arsenal and Rocky Flats, illuminate some of the ways that militaryT h e B i o p o l i t i cs o f S p e c ta c l e
143
144
industrial restructuring has seemingly entailed “closure” on the Cold
War, such as the return of nature and new creation stories, and government oversight of the legacy of waste and harmful effects of nuclear
production. These function as tactical spectacles that can inoculate
responsibility for ongoing harm; hyper-visibility facilitates disposal of
the negative legacies and, through mass exposure, offers opportunities
to consume the positive popular culture of environmental education,
stewardship, and compensation. They annul the linkages between the
former missions of these sites in everyday lives, health, and ecologies.
While arguing for better cleanup or even better monitoring of ongoing
hazards is important, doing so would not resolve the stark division
between humans and nature, humans and waste, entrenched by the
spectacles of salvation and government oversight explored here. Current military restructuring strategically implants the spectacular ontology of nature as separate and pure. Combined with auditing practices
that externalize waste to nature in order to minimize governing, spectacular biophysical divisions effectively reduce government responsibility
and, in doing so, can work to legitimate remilitarization elsewhere under
the auspices of “green war.” Critical responses are needed that excavate
this—that de-ontologize spectacle—in order to encourage responsibility and active engagement, that is, a relational-material ethics.
How criticism is to be produced under conditions of toxicity, uncertainty, secrecy, spectacle, and so forth is an important contemporary
issue. A primary motivation of criticism is to “expose the truth,” which is
a central tenet of most approaches to “spectacle” as a critical hermeneutic. While this is important in revealing, for example, deceitful contamination, the approach is less adequate to the task of addressing the
conditions of everyday toxicity and banal forms of death attendant to
social organization around war or even the pursuit of life and the health
of the population. Critiques of “greenwashing” are a permutation of
this methodological problem: while frequently revealing important
structural shifts, they rarely help interpret—let alone intervene in—the
material relations or truth productions that are at work. Environmental exposés tend to perpetuate certain truths about nature—ones that
make nature the passive victim of contamination or a realm of lost
purity, that pit human culture against nonhuman nature, and that treat
waste as that which contaminates the purity of both sides of the human/
145
4.4 Denver and its suburbs lie on the horizon of the Rocky Flats National Wildlife
Refuge. Photo courtesy of the U.S. Department of Energy.
nonhuman opposition.51 Different methods are needed to understand
the more indeterminate and banal forms of everyday exposure and death,
which are nonlocalizable, excessive, ambiguous, and without closure.
While important evidence and stories about subterfuge and secrecy,
with respect to the environmental harm produced by U.S. military operations and bomb production, have been produced in such exposés, “visibility,” unfortunately, does not necessarily guarantee that anything will
be done. “Making visible”—as the endpoint of critique—is further put
in question by forms of violence that are hypervisible from the start;
“exposing the truth” does not ameliorate, for example, the way the postmilitary nature refuge spectacularly arranges for the consumption of
exposure, as part of its tourist maneuvers and environmental education
opportunities. Through cultivating spectacular consumption of nature’s
salvation, via government oversight supposedly in perpetuity, such sites
are displaced in place, forestalling ethical consideration of the way the
past persists in conditioning the present or the complex ecological relations at present. Further, spectacle effectively normalizes quiet deaths,
cancers, and environmental exposures to toxicity as inevitable, or even
146
natural. The post-military nature refuge is part of a system of abandonment that secures exposure, wherein spectacle arranges for the consumption of—and subjection to—exposure.
What is needed in such cases is a diagnostic that problematizes the
visual, that explores the relations by which something becomes intelligible. Rather than resting on a depth model and empiricism as the endpoint of critique, this would be a practice of criticism that does not aim
to deliver a new ontology, but that aspires to disrupt current arrangements of knowledge, truth, affect, and matter. Rather than refine representation of the world in relation to some preexisting truth, the task
would be to rearrange affect, materials, and selves differently, to reject
ways of doing things by encouraging a material-relational ethics that
builds collective responses. Such an ethics emphasizes composition and
formations of nature: “any stabilities that are produced need to be provisional, working categories, that enable rather than disable further
learning and another reconstitution of nature.” 52 While this may be unsettling for many environmentalists and may unseat ethical approaches
that rely on arguments about nature or truth, this practice of critique
would not seek the “social construction” of nature or truth as its endpoint. Rather, its de-ontologizing force—its unraveling of truth claims
and placing of truth production back into social-ecological projects—
would be set on rearranging material social relations, and thereby opening the present to other possibilities. This criticism would be resolutely
materialist; it would not advocate “the end” of nature but, by contrast,
would endeavor to understand—and intervene in—nature’s ongoing
biopolitical composition, with real consequences for different modes of
existence.
To advance such a critical project, I have endeavored in this chapter
to show some of the biopolitical operations of spectacle. Accordingly,
spectacle does not refer to representations as illusory or detached from
“true reality.” Instead, spectacle—and the social relations of visibility
that it installs—is instrumental to the organization of regimes of perception, and to forms of collective experience, population management,
and social-ecological order that, in this case, allow for abandonment and
exposure. I demonstrated this through the cases of the post-military
nature refuge and high-performing nuclear waste management office. I
considered spectacle as a strategic ontology that arranges biophysical
relations in particular ways—namely through the separation of nature
and human, and human and waste, as an arrangement of disposal and
denial. I offered some initial ways to think about the intimate relations
between nature and bureaucracy, preservation and waste, the human
and nonhuman, life and death, and ecology and politics, and to begin
developing ethical responses that are appropriate to such a condition.
The post-military nature refuge, and the spectacular arrangements of
both salvation and oversight, force our reckoning with seismic ethical
disturbances. As the biophysical evolution of surface-only, risk-based
cleanups roll out within the material everyday world, critical investigations cannot remain fixated on “pastoral illusions” or deceptive images.
Securing the truth and revealing artificiality is secondary to the inherently political project of understanding productions of ontology and
arrangements of relations and of “life,” for humans and the biophysical world. It follows that the nature refuge, for example, is not “spectacle” in terms of a “greenwashing lie” or false surface; rather, spectacle is a
biophysical composition of a human/waste binarism supposedly anchored
to a surface/subsurface division of remediation standards, with resolutely material effects.
Not only were military test sites, ground zeros, nuclear facilities,
and war monuments living and evolving ecologies, but they remain so
today. They are natural and still industrial, technological, and representational; material transformations are always already taking place. The
positive surface restoration of such sites, and their disposal via environmental education consumption or legacy management of waste, is a
reaction to devastation too deep to measure. However, this should not
let humans off the ethical hook.53 On the contrary, the interweaving of
atomic geopolitics and military practices with cataclysmic bio-evolution,
which de-stratifies the discrete territories of military zones and wildlife refuges, demands ethical responses that are more and different from
technical monitoring and nature re-creation in the remains of war. 54
The ethical fallout of U.S. military productions calls for the undertaking of a “post-sublime and post-ecocidal meditation” on military-towildlife conversions. 55
This is a challenge for criticism, in that the critic cannot remove herself from ecological considerations, for the purposes of developing
more robust ideas about ecological and aesthetic integrity. To become
147
148
part of ecology through practicing criticism means grappling with the
material connections between human bodies and other bodies—the
material “stuff” of humans and that of the world. The emphasis on composition, therefore, is crucial. Ethics and aesthetics are conceived and
practiced as integral to a more exuberant criticism and politics. Aesthetics can be understood to refer not only to what is perceived within the
realm of art but also, more broadly, to the ordering of knowledge and
sense perception and the configuration of what is intelligible and/or
possible within a given political order. Essentially, aesthetics gives rise
to the very possibility of politics because it refers to the biopolitical
arrangements of relations and visibilities.56 Against the notion that representations are false in a project to reveal truth, which methodologically separates the critic from the material under consideration, this is a
messier approach to critique. It explores representations and artistic
practices as “ways of doing and making” that potentially call into question old structures and interpretations, develop novel kinds of political
subjectivity, and contest the biopolitical organization of life—what is
protected, devalued, brought back from the dead, or laid to waste as an
unrepresented expenditure or figure of non-value.57 Such an approach,
then, attempts to intervene in the arrangements of affect, economies,
and materials that constitute social relations, the social field of action,
and, therefore, political community. A more experimental diagnostic
attempts to rearrange the usual cartographies of conventional, bounded
landscapes and bodies; to gesture toward new coalitional possibilities;
and to generate new and uncanny intimacies between people, nonhumans, and even inorganic materials.
We live in a world in which toxicity and exposure are not the exception but the rule. In this chapter, I have endeavored to show how spectacle has been deployed to arrange for the abandonment of the
mounting material remains of World War II and the Cold War, intensified by current global U.S. military restructuring. Such spectacles
t actically distance the harmful legacies of war and convert waste and
catastrophe into patriotic excess or nostalgia, abstract statistics, or opportunities to consume nature’s resilience and animal charisma. Certain
humans and nonhumans pay invisible “toxic debts” so that overall society and military support can live on. “Military remains” cover an increasingly broad range of what might be considered the detached remainders
of the living under the social organization of war, such as “othered”
residual populations, economically redundant workers, exposed and
cancer-ridden communities, as well as contaminated land, nuclear and
hazardous wastes, abandoned facilities, and repudiated industrial material culture. The material ethics and aesthetics that I have only gestured
toward here might then attend to the ways the residual is arranged and,
furthermore, how material remains linger on and persist as potential,
in spite of rationales in operation that would deny their existence. The
biopolitics of salvation and oversight show that methodologies are needed
in order to excavate spectacle by drawing on material remainders—bald
eagles, the knowledge of former nuclear workers, the stubborn materiality and abiding presence of nuclear waste. War’s remains are material
sources for potent counter-histories and counter-truths that can deontologize spectacle and reorganize which entities, communities, or
ecologies enter politics. Attending to the remainders—which are everywhere around and within “us”—can inspire experimental responses to
the toxic open door of green war.58
Notes
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
“Plutonium Memorial Design Competition,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 58, no. 3 (2002): 39.
Nuclear Energy Institute, “Radiation and Human Health Fact Sheet,”
October 2003, http://nuclear.inl.gov/docs/factsheets/radiation_human
_health_1003.pdf (accessed October 23, 2011).
This chapter incorporates select material from my book: Shiloh Krupar,
Hot Spotter’s Report: Military Fables of Toxic Waste (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2013).
Mira Engler, Designing America’s Waste Landscapes (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2004), 232.
Shiloh Krupar and Stefan Al, “Notes on the Society of the Spectacle/
Brand,” in The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory, ed. C. Greig
Crysler, Stephen Cairns, and Hilde Heynen (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage,
2012).
Éric Darier, “Foucault and the Environment: An Introduction,” in Discourses of the Environment, ed. Éric Darier (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 28.
Lauren Berlant, “Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency),”
Critical Inquiry 33, no. 4 (2007): 756.
Stuart J. Murray, “Care of the Self: Biotechnology, Reproduction, and
149
9
10
150
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
the Good Life,” Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine 2, no. 6
(2007), www.peh-med.com/content/2/1/6 (accessed January 14, 2011).
Leerom Medovoi, “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Ecology:
Sustainability as Disavowal,” New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/
Politics no. 69 (2010): 141–142.
Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, “Introducing the New Materialisms,”
in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, eds. Diana Coole and
Samantha Frost (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 32–33.
John Lowering, “The Production and Consumption of the ‘Means of
Violence’: Implications of the Reconfiguration of the State, Economic
Internationalisation, and the End of the Cold War,” Geoforum 25, no. 4
(1994).
David Havlick, “Logics of Change for Military-to-Wildlife Conversions in
the United States,” GeoJournal 69 (2007).
John Wills, “‘Welcome to the Atomic Park’: American Nuclear Landscapes and the ‘Unnaturally Natural,’” Environment and History 7 (2001):
460–461.
Nicole Shukin, Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 184–185.
Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern
Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 72–79.
Wills, “‘Welcome to the Atomic Park,’” 450.
Ibid., 462.
Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel, “Cows and Sovereignty: Biopower and Animal
Life,” Borderlands 1, no. 2 (2002), www.borderlands.net.au/vol1no2_2002/
wadiwel_cows.html (accessed July 17, 2001).
Lewisite is a blistering agent with similar effects to mustard gas but with
an odor of geraniums.
Alan Berger, Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America (New York: Prince
ton Architectural Press, 2007), 67–70.
Kathryn Yusoff, “Biopolitical Economies and the Political Aesthetics of
Climate Change,” Theory, Culture and Society 27, nos. 2–3 (2010): 74.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, “Draft Reintroduction Plan for Bison at
RMA-NWR” (2007), www.defenders.org/sites/default/files/publications/
draft_bison_reintroduction_plan.pdf (accessed July 21, 2011).
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, “News Release: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to Establish Pilot Bison Project at Rocky Mountain Arsenal National
Wildlife Refuge” (January 10, 2007), www.fws.gov/mountain-prairie/
pressrel/07-01.htm (accessed July 21, 2011).
Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis,: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural
Society (New York: Routledge, 2000), 166–173.
Matthew Chrulew, “Managing Love and Death at the Zoo: The Biopolitics of Endangered Species Preservation,” Australian Humanities Review
no. 50 (May 2011), www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/IssueMay-2011/chrulew.html (accessed November 28, 2011).
Clayton Pierce, “The Promissory Future(s) of Education: Rethinking Scientific Literacy in the Era of Biocapitalism,” Educational Philosophy and
Theory 44, no. 7 (2011).
Timothy Luke, “Nature Protection or Nature Projection: A Cultural Critique of the Sierra Club,” Capitalism, Nature, and Socialism 8, no. 1 (1997):
51.
National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, “The Use of Wildlife Biomonitoring at Hazardous Waste Sites,” Research Brief 19 (1998),
tools.niehs.nih.gov/srp/researchbriefs/view.cfm?Brief_ID=19 (accessed
August 8, 2013).
Joseph Masco, “Mutant Ecologies: Radioactive Life in Post-Cold War
New Mexico,” Cultural Anthropology 19, no. 4 (2004).
Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Ken Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 37.
U.S. Department of Energy, “Report on Audit of the U.S. Department of
Energy’s Identification and Disposal of Nonessential Land” (January 8,
1997), www.aforr.org/IG-0399.html (accessed June 18, 2011).
Marc Fioravanti and Arjun Makhijani, Containing the Cold War Mess:
Restructuring the Environmental Management of the U.S. Nuclear Weapons
Complex (Takoma Park, MD: Institute for Energy and Environmental
Research, 1997), http://ieer.org/resource/reports/containing-cold-war
-mess/ (accessed August 12, 2013).
Joseph Masco, “Mutant Ecologies,” 535.
U.S. Department of Energy Office of Environmental Management,
Report to Congress: Status of Environmental Management Initiatives to Accelerate the Reduction of Environmental Risks and Challenges Posed by the Legacy of
the Cold War, DOE/EM-0004 (Washington, DC: U.S. DOE, 2009).
Len Ackland, Making a Real Killing: Rocky Flats and the Nuclear West (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999).
Jennifer Gabrys, “Sink: The Dirt of Systems,” Environment and Planning D:
Society and Space 27, no. 4 (2009): 669.
U.S. Department of Energy Office of Public Affairs, “DOE Certifies
Rocky Flats Cleanup ‘Complete’” (December 8, 2005), http://energy.gov/
articles/doe-certifies-rocky-flats-cleanup-complete (accessed August 12,
2013).
151
39
40
41
42
152
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
Mary Buckner Powers, “First DOE Weapon Site Meets Cleanup Target,”
Engineering News-Record, October 24, 2005; Ed Bodey, “Closure Is in
Sight,” Rocky Flats Endvision 11, no. 1 (January 19, 2004), 1, 3.
Todd Hartman, “Rocky Flats Wraps up Radioactive Cleanup,” Rocky Mountain News, October 8, 2005, 6A.
Martin Schneider, “Rocky Flats: R.I.P.,” Weapons Monitor Complex 16, no. 42
(2005), 13.
U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Region 8, and the State of Colorado, “Final Rocky Flats Cleanup Agreement,” State of Colorado Docket #96-07-19-01 (July 19, 1996).
U.S. Department of Energy Office of Environmental Management and
U.S. Department of Interior Fish and Wildlife Service, “Memorandum of
Understanding,” Federal Register 70, no. 54, FR Doc 05-5597 (March 22,
2005).
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Region 8, the State of Colorado,
and U.S. Department of Energy, “Rocky Flats Legacy Management
Agreement,” CERCLA 8-96-21, RCRA (3008(h)) 8-96-01, State of CO
Docket 96-01-19-01 (February 2007).
Peggy Lowe, “Udall Opposes Idea of Radiation Warning Signs, Consent
Forms,” Rocky Mountain News, January 6, 2005; Ann Schrader, “Protests
Stir Energy Agency to Preserve Flats Papers,” Denver Post, June 8, 2008,
B28.
U.S. Department of Energy Office of Legacy Management, “LM Site
Management Guide aka the ‘Blue Book,’” Revision 11 (June 2011), www
.lm.doe.gov/WorkArea/linkit.aspx?LinkIdentifier=id&ItemID=1834
(accessed August 23, 2011).
Michael Power, The Audit Explosion (London: Demos, 1994), 15.
Marilyn Strathern, “Robust Knowledge and Fragile Futures,” in Global
Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, ed.
Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005).
Elizabeth Dunn, “Escherichia coli, Corporate Discipline and the Failure of
the Sewer State,” Space and Polity 11, no. 1 (2007): 43.
Kimberly McGuire, “No Clean Slate for Rocky Flats,” Denver Post, November 28, 2005, 1B, 6B.
Gay Hawkins, The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005).
Steve Hinchliffe, “Reconstituting Nature Conservation: Towards a Careful Political Ecology,” Geoforum 39 (2008).
Rosalyn Diprose, “Toward an Ethico-Politics of the Posthuman: Foucault
and Merleau-Ponty,” Parrhesia 8 (2009).
Dianne Chisholm, “Ellen Meloy’s Deep Nomadology (How to Map the
55
56
57
58
Heartland of a Nuclear-Age Desert),” rhizomes 13 (2006), www.rhizomes
.net/issue13/chisholm/chisholm.html (accessed December 5, 2011).
Ibid.
Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: Distribution of the Sensible, trans.
Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2004)
Yusoff, “Biopolitical Economies,” 86.
John Beck, Dirty Wars: Landscape, Power, and Waste in Western American
Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009)
153
5
Dream Factory Détournement
Freewaves, Art, and Urban Redevelopment in Hollywood
Matt Reynolds
I
n October 2008, the Los Angeles–based media arts organization Freewaves staged its eleventh biennial festival in Hollywood, California.
The event took place over a five-day period and featured the work of
more than 160 artists. It included experimental video and new media
installations, performances, lectures, walking tours, and interactive exhibitions. Most importantly, the art on display was not confined to a specific
location but was shown in storefronts, tattoo parlors, galleries, hotel lobbies, restaurants, and on building facades and theater marquees along
Hollywood Boulevard and elsewhere in the neighborhood. According to
Freewaves director Anne Bray, the festival’s mission was to “transform the
world-famous boulevard into a massive, multi-faceted screening room . . .
[showcasing] both the glamorous Hollywood myth and its gritty but
changing reality.”1 The event was named Hollywould. For Bray and other
festival organizers, this title evoked the metonymic relationship between
the neighborhood and the entertainment industry. But the deliberate
pun also had a serious intent, as mentioned in the press release: “By placing Hollywood in the conditional tense, Freewaves invited artists to imag154
155
5.1 Freewaves, ad for Hollywould festival, 2008. Photo courtesy of Anne Bray
and Freewaves.
ine what could be, while exploring the role of art in mass-media-saturated
culture and the future of gentrifying neighborhoods.” 2
To the city of Los Angeles, Hollywood is an incorporated suburb, but
to the rest of the world it is “the Dream Factory,” a mythological location
associated with the golden era of movie studios, stars, and famous celebrity haunts like the Brown Derby and Sardi’s. The neighborhood began to
decline in the 1950s due in part to the relocation of studio production
facilities to the San Fernando Valley and LA’s Westside, while the region’s
Dr e a m Fa c t o r y D é t o ur n e m e n t
156
boom in suburban tract homes persuaded many middle-class residents
to relocate. In the 1960s and 1970s, Hollywood saw a rise in crime rates
and homelessness, while at the same time becoming more affordable to
lower-income and ethnically diverse communities, including Thai, Armenian and Salvadoran populations. For decades, Hollywood was home
to sex shops and massage parlors, cheap motels, apartment buildings,
churches, and take-out stands. The Hollywood Redevelopment Project
(HRP) was adopted by the Los Angeles City Council in 1986. The fortyyear program has already succeeded in increasing the urban density of
the area, attracting billion-dollar corporate investments in commercial
real estate, and expanding the city’s access to public transportation.
Major projects like the Hollywood and Highland urban entertainment
center, the Loews Hotel, W Hotel and Residences, condominium construction, and high-end retail outlets have drastically transformed the
scale of the neighborhood, while simultaneously threatening to displace
smaller businesses and communities. The branding of Hollywood’s
renewal has capitalized on its association with media, entertainment,
and glamour to market revitalization.3 As a result, the urban landscape
of Hollywood is now a media-saturated environment on par with New
York’s Times Square.
Freewaves challenged artists and viewers to confront many of the preconceptions and stereotypes about the city by using Hollywood’s renewal
as a framing device. By asking artists to “place Hollywood in the conditional tense,” festival curators posed an implicit critique of redevelopment. Hollywood as it exists today is an imperfect place, the call for works
seems to imply. But the arts can help invent that future perfect space in
which the marginalization of communities and voices that so often
results from gentrification need not necessarily take place. The conditional tense here raised important questions about art’s engagement
with its context and its capacity to produce social awareness. By so deliberately engaging its surroundings, the festival attempted to compete with
and disrupt the commercial spectacle of Hollywood Boulevard.
The concept of spectacle, as informed by Marxist philosophy and
theorized by figures like Henri Lefebvre, Georg Lukács, and Guy Debord,
connotes a shift in capitalist relations, away from a production model
to one of consumption. Debord argued that the individual under late
capitalism is inundated by images from all forms of mass media. These
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5.2 Freewaves, detail of map of Hollywood Boulevard with locations of artworks
and performances, 2008. Courtesy of Freewaves.
images obscure and alienate the subject from the social conditions
that produce class inequality and injustice. In The Society of the Spectacle,
Debord asserted: “The whole life of those societies in which modern
conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles.” For Debord, the spectacle is not merely a “collection of images; rather it is a social relationship between people that is
mediated by images.”4 Debord and other members of the Situationist
International, a group of artists and revolutionaries active in Paris in the
1950s, sought to undermine the commoditization of everyday life through
détournement and the construction of “situations.” Détournement, or “the
creative pillaging of preexisting elements,”5 when combined with a staged
situation (defined by the group as a “moment of life concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a unitary ambience
and a game of events”),6 was designed to disrupt the passive consumpDr e a m Fa c t o r y D é t o ur n e m e n t
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tion of images, events, and the orderly flow of goods and services. In this
chapter, I argue that the performances, installations, and curatorial strategies of Hollywould might best be thought of as an attempt to détourn
urban renewal itself through the creation of situations designed to
reframe the neighborhood’s ongoing transformation for viewers, tourists, and local residents. However, it is not clear whether the visibility and
legibility of the festival was undermined by the attempt to counter one
form of spectacle with another.
Situating Freewaves
Precedents for the 2008 Freewaves biennial can be found in the urban
arts and theater festivals staged in Avignon, France, in the 1960s and
1970s. Bernadette Quinn argues that the cultural and political transformations brought about by civil rights, feminism, antiwar efforts, environmentalism, and gay rights were instrumental in questioning the
hierarchical boundaries that separate the visual and performing arts
from other forms of popular media. Under the direction of Jean Vilar,
Avignon’s festival was a pivotal point in rethinking how such events
could better develop a relationship with place:
[In Avignon] the concept of the festival . . . was being developed as something to be enacted with and through local and visiting populations, as
opposed to something simply presented to them. The intention was that
local residents, organizers, directors and performers would effortlessly
interact with each other and with their place, bringing it alive to the sounds
and sights of music, dancing and art, in a spirit of festivity. To this end,
festival events were housed not only in conventional venues but in the
open-air, on streets and in squares as well as in cafes and restaurants.
Events were programmed to happen at all times of the day and night. . . .
As such, [these events] signaled a move away from earlier attempts to use
the arts festival, and the arts more generally, as a means of defining and
maintaining social distinctions.7
More recently, this model has become an important and popular global
phenomenon. Toronto’s NuitBlanche, the 2004 Berlin Biennial Von Mäusen
und Menschen (Of Mice and Men), and New Orleans’s Prospect.1 triennial
are examples of urban arts festivals that differentiate themselves from
more established biennials and art fairs like those held in Venice, São
Paulo, or Art Basel (in Basel, Switzerland, in addition to “franchises” in
Miami Beach and Hong Kong). The latter are characterized by dedicated art spaces, elite crowds of curators and collectors, and exclusive
exhibitions and parties. The former have attempted to expand the
audience for art by commissioning work that solicits more active viewer
participation and engagement, emphasizes performance or objects
made from ephemeral materials, and showcases it in commercial buildings, public plazas, sporting venues, or empty lots.
Echoing Vilar’s efforts to incorporate the history and lived environment of a particular place, artist and media theorist Victor Burgin called
for an art that would be “ justified as an activity and not merely as a
means of providing supplementary evidence of pecuniary reputability.”8
Such activity would create a “situational” encounter between performer,
object, viewer, and context. All dimensions would be active at once, thus
exploding the myth of the autonomous work of art and its reified status
within the museum or gallery setting. More recently, scholars have
advanced Burgin’s theories by invoking the spatial contingencies built
into numerous contemporary artworks. Over the past decade, there has
been an expansion of “spatial,” “relational,” or “dialogical” contemporary art practices—a phenomenon that has gained wide currency at the
global level—along with an increasing critical engagement with these
works.9 Such work deliberately accounts for the dynamic between art
and context. A few examples include works by the Thai American artist
Rirkrit Tiravanija, who feeds New York gallery-goers curry and rice;
Danish collective Superflex and their model for portable biogas units
(“Supergas”) to be mass-produced and distributed to rural families in
sub-Saharan Africa; and Ala Plástica, which worked with local communities in the Río de la Plata basin of Argentina to develop ecological
reclamation and social awareness projects.
While there has been a renewed interest in artistic practices of this
kind, critical assessments remain focused on the individual or group col
lective actively constructing an event or object to dictate viewer responses.
However, as Nikos Papastergiadis argues, we need to account for the
space of art’s exhibition as a partner in determining meaning and message: “As art operates in an expanded field, the process of critical feedDr e a m Fa c t o r y D é t o ur n e m e n t
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back, interruption, and transformation multiplies.” Papastergiadis is
referencing art historian Rosalind Krauss’s famous dictum that during
the 1960s sculpture abandoned its pedestal in favor of a more direct
dialogue with its surrounding context, expanding the very definition of
sculpture itself. The “expanded field” thus includes those practices modeled by artists like Joseph Beuys, whose “social sculpture” performances
in Germany in the 1970s used the museum or gallery as a platform for
dialogue about social and political issues. Papastergiadis continues: “The
consequences of this model demand multi-linear forms of engagement
and an openness to unpredictable responses, for the process of dissemination and contextualization is no longer designed as an apparatus that
serves and promotes the originality of the art work, but has become an
active force in the construction of a field of aesthetic experiences and
social meanings.”10 Freewaves attempted to use the urban environment
of Hollywood as just such an expanded field during the 2008 festival.
Instead of providing a neutral showcase for original artworks, the neighborhood and its storied history activated a broader range of “aesthetic
experiences and social meanings.” Hollywood became a collaborator and
coauthor, an active participant in a manner unique from the relational
pieces of someone like Tiravanija or the Avignon festivals of Vilar
described above. Instead, Hollywould sought to create a dialogue around
urban renewal and to question art’s capacity to both facilitate and challenge the ongoing gentrification of the city.
Freewaves’s own unique history offers an important framework for
understanding Hollywould. The organization emphasizes active community engagement, an issue-oriented focus, and curatorial strategies that
challenge the hierarchical aesthetic experiences of the “White Cube”—
that modernist viewing space that cues spectators to artistic value while
separating the work from its social and political environment. Bray, herself a practicing artist, founded Freewaves in 1989 to develop and promote Los Angeles as “a center for media production and exhibition
independent from the hegemonic commercial and sociocultural ideologies of Hollywood.”11 Bray’s prior experience included work as a video
programmer for Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), one
of the city’s most important independent art spaces. LACE was founded
in 1977 as an artist-run nonprofit in El Monte, a suburb of Los Angeles,
and later relocated to downtown at the edge of the city’s Skid Row. Its
goal was the “exhibition of cutting-edge contemporary art in Los Angeles” at a time when the city lacked a devoted, independent space for
the display of new works and new artists. In the late 1970s and early
1980s, LACE’s progressive programming gave many now well-established
artists—such as Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelley, Johanna Went, Tony Oursler, Lari Pittman, and Asco, the pioneering Chicano arts collective—a
place to experiment at the intersections of performance and media.
When the HRP was in its early stages, the Community Redevelopment
Agency was in search of an “arts organization that would infuse fresh
vitality and a new audience base into the area.”12 LACE was invited to
relocate its offices and gallery to a renovated building on Hollywood
Boulevard. Freewaves began sharing administrative space with LACE in
2005, and shortly thereafter, Bray and LACE director Carol Stakenas
started to discuss the possibility of using Hollywood Boulevard as a staging ground for the biennial. Hollywould was, in part, an expression of the
collaborative relationship between the two organizations.
Early on, Freewaves established a template for unconventional curatorial strategies and the use of non-art spaces for the exhibition of experimental media works. All Over the Map, the 1998 biennial, combined
video screenings with performances, installations, and workshops, and
was designed to reach spaces and communities not traditionally served
by independent media production or exhibition, including South Central Los Angeles, East L.A., and inland suburban areas. In 2000, Air
Raids showed video and multimedia work at more than thirty locations,
including LACE and the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Little Tokyo
location, as well as on video billboards, public television channels, and
television monitors in karaoke clubs. During non-biennial years, Freewaves remained active by promoting alternative media in the region.
For example, Bray worked with local public schools, libraries, and community groups to “repackage” festival works for educational settings.13
These efforts were characteristic of the organization’s desire to promote
video art as a medium that could speak to diverse audiences, from community groups and school kids to educated, affluent museum and gallery goers. Freewaves has also been an important voice for social justice
and change in L.A. Following the 1992 riots—an uprising that demonstrated the potential mass impact of “alternative media” in the form of
George Holliday’s home video of Rodney King being beaten by LAPD
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officers—Freewaves helped produce two programs that sought to reframe
the incident from racial perspectives often ignored by mainstream
television.14
Freewaves is always on the move, always playing at different locations
or exhibiting outside traditional venues. The dispersal of previous festivals throughout the sprawling geographic region of Los Angeles has
often made it difficult for the organization to establish itself as a point
of reference on the cognitive maps of audiences invested in the city’s
visual arts. The organization’s decentralization has made it difficult
to brand the festival—an activity that has become increasingly vital to
larger arts institutions in the current era of mega-museums and internationally renowned biennials like those in Venice, São Paulo, Shanghai,
and elsewhere. This issue was clearly on the minds of Bray and fellow
organizers, who recognized the value of situating the festival in Hollywood as a way to “transform the biennial . . . into a site-branded, high
visibility event.”15
In a recent history of Freewaves, media scholar Ken Rogers argued
that the organization’s “adaptive approach to achieving its mission, along
with its relentless focus on the present—the here and now of its own
practice—complicate an empirical or object-centered account of its history.”16 Rogers’s statement applies equally to any empirical or objectcentered account of Hollywould. A brief summary of the curatorial process provides a glimpse into the complexities and contingencies built in
to the 2008 event. Freewaves enlisted a series of curators to select the
works that would be exhibited. The curatorial team, like the works
themselves, reflected the international scope of the festival and included
academics, independent media curators, critics, filmmakers, and artists.
Bray made a careful attempt to include representatives from Europe,
Asia, Central and South America, and the United States. Freewaves’s
open call for submissions included the stipulation that entries should
“represent an alternative to mainstream media or directly relate to ‘Hollywood.’”17 After reviewing submissions, commissioning new works, and
enduring months of negotiations with willing venues, the curators narrowed down the finalists, and Bray herself began the process of matching individual pieces to the spaces that would best suit their exhibition.
Screenings took place at fifty arts organizations and businesses.18 Spaces
and works were matched up according to the amount of visibility each
venue provided in relation to average rates of consumer traffic, number
and positioning of monitors, and duration of playing time, which ranged
anywhere from continuous twenty-four-hour loops to one-minute animations. Ultimately, Freewaves’s strategy produced an event that was
difficult to assess, even for the organizers. The festival was experienced
by so many, and in so many different ways, that no single account could
be termed definitive. The contingencies built into the exhibition of works
and performances, coupled with the unpredictability and carnivalesque
environment of Hollywood itself, produced a constantly shifting platform from which to take in the festival. Chance encounters between
artwork and audience were a deliberate curatorial strategy best summarized by the festival’s open call: “Selected festival works will be installed
in this urban hall of mirrors—in screening rooms, art centers, stores,
vacant walls—intersecting with audiences where they live, recreate and
shop.”19 Nevertheless, there were dominant themes and strands of
encounter consistent to the event, and those works, installations, and
performances that self-reflexively and affectively engaged with the neighborhood, and the dramatic transformations taking place in the built
environment, were the most compelling.
The majority of the festival consisted of video works playing on monitors in various locations around the neighborhood.20 These might best
be referred to as site-specific installations. As Anna McCarthy argues in
Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space, “The quotidian geography of TV in public is composed of sites where commerce and bureaucracy, purpose and drift, routine and event interweave.” 21 For McCarthy,
the screen often serves a site-specific purpose, a phrase most commonly
associated with the discourse surrounding public art. She adds that the
“material elements of the ‘television setting’ play as important a role as
the image in the positioning of subjects both in the site of viewing and
within wider geographies of power and knowledge.” 22 Hollywood was
both subject and subject matter of a number of works, including Rajorshi Ghosh’s Hollywood Boulevard, Daniel Nord’s The End, Ryan Lamb’s
Skylarking 3, Laurel Beckman’s Terrazzo, and Peter D’Agostino’s LA: Dean
BURST (all from 2008). These works emphasized the site-specific strategies employed by the curators throughout the festival.
Ghosh’s Hollywood Boulevard defied all attempts to locate the action
depicted within the frame. If the work could be said to have a scenario,
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it would be that of the amateur filmmaker who left the camera running
with the lens cap on, but a cap not quite large enough to block out the
entire image. What the viewer sees is a large black circle with a tiny ring
around the outer edge that captures the fleeting, flickering gestures of
passersby on a busy urban street. The imagery was coupled with loud
noise, including what sounds like buskers who play the bottom of a plastic bucket using drum sticks—an activity that is part of the iconography
of tourist zones in large urban centers, including Hollywood.
Like Ghosh’s work, Daniel Nord’s The End had a site-specific dimension. The video played on a television monitor situated in the display
window of Larry Edmunds Bookshop, an independent bookstore that
specializes in film-related titles and memorabilia. The screen showed an
edited montage of final shots from dozens of classic Hollywood movies.
Interested spectators, tourists, and general passersby could watch “The
End” repeating endlessly. For me, Nord’s piece and the curatorial decision to install it in one of the city’s longest independently owned niche
bookstores—a commercial space that is ironically threatened by the rising costs and overhead of a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood—was an
especially poignant reminder of the possible effects of the city’s renewal.
As rents rise, smaller businesses are giving way to chain stores, clubs,
and high-end restaurants. Nord’s work is, in many ways, a metaphor for
this urban dynamic.
Skylarking 3 was described in the program as an “aerial video exploring Hollywood with a video camera attached to a bundle of helium balloons.” 23 The device was released from the rooftop of LACE on a blustery,
cloudless day. After a rapid ascent over the gallery, the camera, buffeted
by the winds, relayed a jerky video consisting of an unedited eighteenminute view of the buildings and street below, a narrow section of Holly
wood Boulevard between Wilcox and Schrader. Because of the weather
conditions, the work had the appearance of time-lapse photography or
an accelerated video capture. This low-budget aesthetic was reinforced
by a lack of sound. Skylarking 3 resisted the illusion of mastery that philosophers like Roland Barthes and Michel de Certeau have associated
with aerial views of the city. Instead, the camera was tethered to its origins, and I consistently found myself wanting it to break free or zoom
out to present a panoramic view of the neighborhood. This stubborn
insistence on gazing squarely at one place mirrored the synoptic mode
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5.3 Daniel Nord, The End, installation view of video playing in the window of Larry
Edmunds Bookshop, 2008. Photo by Doug McCulloh, courtesy of Freewaves.
of looking encouraged in Hollywood. One need only think of the Walk
of Fame—the two-and-a-half-mile stretch of stars embedded in the sidewalk on which the names of famous personalities associated with the
film and entertainment industry are written. Visitors to Hollywood are
constantly looking down, often at the expense of seeing the businesses,
people, and social interactions taking place around them.
Like Skylarking 3, Beckman’s Terrazzo utilized the Walk of Fame to com
ment on how visitors see the street in Hollywood. The work was pro
jected onto the side of a six-story commercial tower owned by the Church
of Scientology. And while the subject matter was, at first glance, abstract,
the description and context made the message explicit. Terrazzo reimagined the Walk of Fame, animating a nameless star along Hollywood
Boulevard recognizable from the reflective terra-cotta glass embedded
in the sidewalk. The star then folded in on itself, making a series of
polyhedron shapes. Periodically, the interior of the changing shape was
replaced with photographs of cardboard, wood planks, or other cheap
construction materials. Thus, the work suggested parallels between the
street and shelter, a direct statement about homelessness, a condition of
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5.4 Laurel Beckman, Terrazzo, installation view of projection onto the side of
a building owned by the Church of Scientology, 2008. Photo by Doug McCulloh,
courtesy of Freewaves.
life recognizable to anyone who has walked more than a few blocks
along Hollywood Boulevard. During the work’s projection, Scientology
employees briefly questioned the use of their property as a screen. But
after speaking with Bray and Beckman (who operated the projector), no
formal complaint was raised and the work’s exhibition continued as
planned.24
Video art pioneer Peter d’Agostino’s LA: Dean BURST featured
scenes from the James Dean film Rebel Without a Cause (1955). The work
played at the Hollywood Book and Poster Company and was also
screened at the historic Egyptian Theatre as part of a longer program
of videos thematically grouped by their relation to the industry and
space of Hollywood.25 D’Agostino used a triptych format to juxtapose
scenes from the original movie with recent footage of the Griffith Park
Observatory, the location for many of the original movie’s most dramatic moments. The new footage revisited the observatory’s famous
pendulum, the balcony that featured the knife fight between Dean and
actor Corey Allen, and the bronze bust of Dean that sits in the plaza
outside the observatory. D’Agostino’s work exposed Hollywood’s close
relationship to, and exploitation of, death as a marketable commodity.
Commercial cinema’s capacity to capture and immortalize celebrities at
the height of their fame and beauty, and the nostalgic reverie many movie
fans have for the spaces where a film was shot, were at the core of LA: Dean
BURST. Like the Walk of Fame, a memorial site for the personalities,
craftspeople, and entertainers now largely dead and gone, Hollywood
was foregrounded by D’Agostino as a site of “thanatourism,” or “dark
tourism,” that capitalizes on the highly marketable desire for visitors to
encounter spaces associated with death, grief, and remembrance.26
Even when works did not engage with Hollywood as theme or subject,
the neighborhood context provided a constant interpretive frame to
facilitate meaning. For example, Ivan Limas’s At the Light of Dawn (2007)
was shown at Hollywood Camera and Music, an electronics store that
also sells musical instruments. At the Light of Dawn consisted of the artist
facing the camera and slowly removing a series of veils covering his face,
one by one. As one covering was removed, another one was revealed
underneath. The veils were made out of bandannas, flags, niqab, and
other “culturally iconic scarves.” The ethnic background of the protagonist was unidentifiable, although his skin tone was “brown.” But did
viewers read him as Latino or Middle Eastern or perhaps Indian? The
work raised questions about how differences were distinguished and
the capacity for visual codes to define and stereotype ethnicity. What
made the video especially effective was the location of its exhibition.
The piece mimicked the genre (for lack of a better term) of the suicide
bomber’s video confession and impending martyrdom, exaggerating
and at the same time undermining the aura and threat of surveillance
and the fear of the racialized other.
José Carlos Teixeira’s Essay on Unsheltered Bodies (2008) created a
poetic response to an equally emblematic state of existence in the city—
homelessness. The ten-minute work used time-lapse photography and
impressionistic voice-over narration to reflect on those generic urban
spaces often occupied by homeless people: freeway overpasses, medians,
parks, and so on. In contrast to the site-specific context of At the Light of
Dawn, Teixeira’s work played as part of the festival’s Transit TV program, during which short works were screened on television monitors
installed on Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority buses. For the duration of the festival, monitors on over two thouDr e a m Fa c t o r y D é t o ur n e m e n t
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5.5 Ivan Limas, At the Light of Dawn (2007), installation view in the window of Holly
wood Camera and Music, 2008. Limas’s work plays on the video monitor over the ATM.
Photo by Doug McCulloh, courtesy of Freewaves.
sand city buses showed looped videos that traveled throughout the city.27
As one of these videos, Teixeira’s work was seen by tens of thousands of
Angelenos as they passed by many of those same spaces used by homeless people.
Since the HRP’s beginnings, the neighborhood has witnessed a
marked decline in sex-related activities and businesses. A number of strip
clubs and massage parlors have closed or moved. And solicitations and
prostitution—once common activities along Hollywood Boulevard—
have all but vanished from the commercial district.28 One of the remaining holdouts is Bizzy B, a boutique specializing in costumes for exotic
dancers, lingerie, and erotic toys. Throughout the festival, Robert Ladislas Derr’s Man in Relation to Men played on a monitor behind the cash
register’s counter. This installation unmasked the many contradictions
that characterized the urban art festival as it played out in Hollywood.
The work is one long take and begins with a shot of a blank backdrop. A
hand slowly lowers a toy action figure into the frame, and for the next
twelve minutes, the same hand systematically fills the frame with plasticM at t R e y n o l d s
rendered professional wrestlers, cowboys, army men, and comic book
characters. Every time a figure is placed in front of the camera, a dissonant note is played on the soundtrack, as if several strings on a harpsichord were being hit with a hammer. The work ends when the frame is
filled with action figures and there appears to be no more room to fit
additional toys in front of the camera. Humorous in tone, the work’s
explicit engagement with “masculinity and its commercial commoditization” was, at first glance, an unconventional fit with Bizzy B’s merchandise. While it is tempting to view the curatorial decision to install the
video in this context as a critique of the store and its own contribution
to the commodification and objectification of women, in this context
the work instead makes a case that sexual objectification is no longer
limited to the display of femininity. Instead of indicting the store and
its contents, the work’s exhibition along Hollywood Boulevard asked the
viewer to consider how the commercial film industry has historically
been implicated in the exploitation of women (and men). In other
words, the exhibition of Man in Relation to Men created the opportunity
to reflect on how the industry and the space of Hollywood is economically dependent on exploiting sexuality for profit. (Whether anyone
actually performed this critical evaluation is, of course, unknown.)
In addition to displaying experimental media works, Freewaves
approached other organizations to contribute to the festival. Members of
the Los Angeles Urban Rangers and UCLA’s Center for Research in
Engineering Media and Performance (REMAP) created performancebased, interactive activities and websites to reframe the urban space of
Hollywood for viewers and audiences. Freewaves curator and outreach
coordinator Sara Daleiden, who is herself an artist and member of the
Los Angeles Urban Rangers, a collective of artists, architects, and academics who began developing “guided hikes, campfire talks, field kits
and other interpretive tools to spark creative explorations of everyday
habitats, in our home megalopolis and beyond.” 29 Daleiden invited choreographer Sara Wookey and urban designer Deborah Murphy to be
DeTour guides. The DeTours were conceived as interventions within the
urban environment and might be thought of in terms similar to the Situationist dérive. In part, the dérive was a repurposing of city space in which
small groups of people were encouraged to drift or stroll through urban
locations while rejecting the prescribed activities and behaviors of their
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5.6 DeTour members participating in Actions of Time and Space on Hollywood
Boulevard, 2008. Photo by Corina Gamma.
surroundings.30 In Actions of Time and Space, Wookey and Murphy asked
participants to perform a series of tasks while walking along the boulevard. For example, they directed pairs of people to stand next to one
another facing in opposite directions, link arms, and walk back and forth
along the sidewalk, trusting their partner to guide them out of the way of
other pedestrians and obstacles. DeTourists were asked to make a singlefile line and walk in a zigzag pattern through a mid-block crosswalk without a traffic light—a potentially hazardous activity in this traffic-clogged
location.31 In another performance, architect and urban planner James
Rojas oversaw a workshop featuring props, 3-D models, and maquettes
positioned over a map of the neighborhood. The workshop was staged in
front of LACE’s entrance and encouraged participants and passersby to
move the architectural models around the urban grid as a way of visualizing different iterations of the city’s development.
DeTour guides were aided by cell-phone technologies, imaging systems, and GPS monitors provided by REMAP. Tour guides and audience
members utilized the phones to map their routes, view relevant images,
and take photos that were then uploaded to a central server to be disM at t R e y n o l d s
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5.7 James Rojas (top center) oversees a workshop about Hollywood’s future devel
opment at LACE’s entrance, 2008. Photo by Doug McCulloh, courtesy of Freewaves.
played at specific locations later in the festival, providing documentation of the tours alongside images of daily activities in and around the
neighborhood. Following the festival, these digital images were archived
and made accessible via REMAP’s website.32 But REMAP’s presence
extended beyond the tours as well: “Acting as catalyst for neighborhood
input to what Hollywood could be . . . REMAP created a Cultural Civic
Computing System embracing a variety of media projects with Hollywood residents, workers and business people that were presented as
mobile media tours, interactive installations and participatory presentations.”33 Prior to the festival, REMAP distributed cameras with audio
and video recording capabilities to residents at the newly built Gay and
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Lesbian Elders Housing, school kids at the LeConte Middle School,
Business Improvement District staff, and crews of street cleaners that
regularly patrol Hollywood Boulevard. In addition to providing the
technology, REMAP also offered workshops on how to use the equipment. Their goal during Freewaves was to create “environments that
help people record, interpret and express . . . their social concerns, their
shared identities, and their civic participation.”34 The resulting collection of materials produced during the festival was labeled “RemappingLA: Hollywould” and was made accessible through both the REMAP
and Freewaves websites. REMAP held out the possibility of a comprehensive and long-lasting effort to engage local residents in the neighborhood’s ongoing transformation. But while the center’s website contained
a wealth of ethnographic data, it remained confusing, difficult to navigate, and cumbersome in its presentation of information.
Hooray for Hollywould?
Rosalyn Deutsche and Malcolm Miles have written extensively about the
role of art in large-scale urban renewal projects.35 Both Deutsche and
Miles assert that art in public places can frequently mask the gentrification of urban space that results from renewal, a process that invariably
“conceals the very existence of those inhabitants already living in the
frequently vital neighborhoods targeted for renovation.”36 Historically,
art has often been complicit in the transformation of space for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many. The “Bilbao effect” is by now
a well-known strategy through which iconic art and architecture further
enrich an already entrenched oligarchy of wealthy institutions, patrons,
collectors (and artists) while sapping resources from local arts communities and infrastructures. While the desired transformation of a
once-blighted area can bring welcome and needed tourist revenue, it
simultaneously tends to create low-wage service-sector employment and
the social displacement of already marginalized groups who inhabited
the neighborhood or region targeted for revitalization.37
A comparison between Hollywould and more recent biennials illustrates the complex dynamics that result from the intersections between
art and the urban environment. The 2004 Berlin Biennial (BB4) and
Prospect.1, held in New Orleans in 2006, were, like Hollywould, siteM at t R e y n o l d s
specific. Because Berlin and New Orleans are affected by ongoing
social and economic upheavals as a result of, respectively, political
reunification and natural disaster, these events were also defined by
their engagement with the issue of urban revitalization. Von Mäusen
und Menschen (Of Mice and Men) was organized by art superstar Maurizio
Cattelan, along with co-curators and Wrong Gallery founders Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick. The exhibitions and installations took
place in a series of venues along the city’s Auguststrasse in the Mitte
district, formerly part of East Berlin. Auguststrasse was once a predominately Jewish district that has, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, become
a fashionable, gentrifying neighborhood filled with old buildings, art
galleries, and cafes. BB4 was staged not only in those spaces reserved
for art but also in a church, an abandoned elementary school for Jewish
girls, private apartments, a cemetery, and Berlin’s Kunst-Werke, the event’s
host institution. In the catalogue, Cattelan made a curious yet deliberate point of trying to disassociate the biennial from its surroundings:
“Don’t think this is a show about Berlin. Even if it takes place on one of
the city’s streets, it is not a show about Auguststrasse, or even about Mitte
in the year 2006.”38 A review in Artforum countered Cattelan’s claim by
stating what would otherwise seem obvious: “‘Of Mice and Men’ cast the
city as a kind of living museum. . . . In this regard, BB4 raised increasingly pertinent questions about the degree to which biennials should
engage their respective locales.”39 BB4, according to the reviewer, was
haunted by Berlin’s traumatic past, the specter of the Holocaust and the
neighborhood’s Jewish history, and the city’s decades-long enforced
division and separation. For Cattelan to try to efface this history in his
introduction is problematic on a number of levels. His claim is ironic
because it seems to repeat modernism’s reification of art as a transcendent force free of social and political meaning and therefore isolated
from its context. What his statement may also do is relieve Cattelan and
his fellow curators from any guilt about contributing to the dynamics of
displacement and gentrification that museums, galleries, and festivals
often facilitate within the urban environment.
Two years after BB4, New Orleans inaugurated its own biennial. The
event was the brainchild of then-New Museum curator Dan Cameron,
who was explicit in attempting to link the event to the city’s revitalization after the Hurricane Katrina disaster.40 Prospect.1 promoted itself as
173
174
a biennial with a social conscience, prompting artists to deliberately
address relevant issues affecting New Orleans communities living in the
post-Katrina landscape. Mark Bradford’s sculpture Mithra became the
iconic symbol of the biennial. Dubbed Noah’s Ark by locals and critics,
Bradford’s work made obvious reference to that other disastrous flood.
The work took the form of a large sea vessel and was built using salvaged
plywood and poster board plastered with found advertisements and
slogans and placed on an empty lot in the city’s Lower Ninth Ward,
the predominantly African American neighborhood where much of the
devastation occurred. Other installations were spread throughout the
city and displayed in unconventional settings. Churches, funeral parlors,
and Harrah’s Casino temporarily housed works, as did more traditional
venues, including galleries, the Contemporary Art Center, the New
Orleans Museum of Art, the George and Leah McKenna Museum of
African American Art, and the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation. While the biennial did feature numerous local artists, much of the
“talent” was shipped in from New York, Los Angeles, and other international centers to give the event greater art world credibility. In addition
to Bradford, Prospect.1 featured big names like Cao Fei, Cai GuoQiang,
Shirin Neshat, and Julie Mehretu.
Cameron was forthright about his motivations. New Yorker art critic
Peter Schjeldahl quotes the curator calling himself a “tourism promoter.” Schjeldahl states that “contemporary biennials are machines for
bringing people to places, funded by parties with vested interests in the
migration.”41 But using the festival as an engine for revitalization comes
with its own set of problems. Prospect.1’s publicity and much of the critical press that covered the event depicted post-Katrina New Orleans as a
tabula rasa in which the ruins of the city become fertile ground for
adventurous creativity. In one case, the German artist Katharina Grosse
literally used an abandoned double shotgun–style house and the surrounding property as a canvas for her large orange “mural.”42 Such
visions of New Orleans too neatly dovetail with critiques of neoliberal
strategies for free market economic growth that capitalizes on largescale disasters (like floods and earthquakes) as a way to remake cities by
abandoning governmental regulations or codes that might assist those
populations disproportionately affected by those same disasters.43 In
other words, as abandoned New Orleans neighborhoods become the
canvas for artists and curators, they also become attractive properties
for investment capital and new development opportunities.44
Any discussion of the urban arts festival risks repeating the bifurcation between “art” and “life” that Freewaves worked hard to complicate.
Instead, it might be more appropriate to think of Hollywould as an “urban
spectacle” that sought to question, rather than accelerate, the neighborhood’s continued gentrification. Yet attempting to assess the impact of
the Freewaves 2008 festival on the landscape of Hollywood is difficult,
even seven years after the event took place. On the one hand, curators
and event organizers had hoped that the festival would provide an opportunity to “bridge the avant-garde and alternative media art world [with]
the popular culture-oriented residents, shoppers and tourists.”45 They
concluded that although the obstacles to staging a successful festival were
high, overall their efforts to expose new audiences to alternative media
and to create new working relationships between the organization and
the surrounding community were worth the effort. On the other hand,
Freewaves’s final report to its board of trustees acknowledged its inability
to overcome the different audience expectations about whether and
how to reorient viewer reception in the designated commercial zones
and spaces of an already highly mediated environment: “The new strategy for the arts to be part of neighborhood redevelopment . . . did not
bear true to our experience. . . . We found successful artists reticent
toward our more community-accessible art approach and we found
shops and restaurants less than eager to show art.” 46 Ironically, Hollywould was given no money by the Community Redevelopment Agency,
despite that same agency’s support for other public art projects and the
likelihood that the festival would increase tourism and foot traffic in the
neighborhood. In one telling anecdote, Bray spoke of a skeptical business manager who openly questioned why anyone would want to watch
video art.47 Ultimately, the contradictions surrounding the visibility,
accessibility, and critical interest in Hollywould was the defining feature
of the festival itself.
The 2008 Freewaves festival was built on the modern spectacle that is
Hollywood Boulevard. Writing as a member of the Situationist International, Debord declared: “The construction of situations begins on the
175
176
5.8 The author talks about the connections between glamour and spectacle in
a McDonald’s restaurant on Hollywood Blvd. during a DeTour.
ruins of modern spectacle.”48 That it was often difficult to distinguish
between ruin and revitalization during Hollywould is perhaps proof of the
complex and contradictory aspects of staging an event that uses one kind
of spectacle (the arts festival) to critique another (the commercial tourist
zone). As Kevin Gotham argues, such contradictions are inherent to
urban spectacles: “The major point is that urban spectacles cannot be
analyzed separately from other spheres of social activity but only as part
of a wider totality that includes new forms of technology, bureaucratic
organization and capital in the development of globalized tourism.” For
Gotham, these spectacles thus “represent a complex, multi-faceted reality, a mixture of repressive and resistant qualities that have to be analyzed in terms of the dialectical concern with conflict and contradiction.” 49
While Hollywould succeeded in promoting dialogue around the continued transformation of the city, it is worth asking whether Freewaves contributed to the neighborhood’s ongoing gentrification. In the end, it was
telling how easily the spectacle of the boulevard and Hollywood’s glamorous mythology overwhelmed Freewaves’s critique of urban renewal.
The festival’s immateriality and ephemerality often made it difficult for
individual works or performances to stand out. Because of this frequent
lack of visibility, I would argue that the festival ultimately did not contribute to the neighborhood’s gentrification.
The “conditional tense” curators sought to elicit from participating
artists implied a utopian dimension for the role that art should play in
urban renewal—one in which short video pieces might elicit critical
awareness of revitalization’s effects on the neighborhood’s ethnically
and economically marginalized communities. At the same time, Freewaves may have overlooked the ways in which art can so easily be co-opted
by the bottom-line goals of commercial development. While much of
what transpired over the course of the five-day event was lost amid the
visual noise of Hollywood, the 2008 festival set in motion ongoing
efforts that may yet prove to have a meaningful social impact. In late
2011, LA County buses began showing short works of video art to the
one million riders traveling daily along the city’s busy streets and bustling neighborhoods. 50 Freewaves was awarded a grant by the MacA rthur
Foundation for “Out the Window,” which developed and expanded the
Transit TV program. The organization’s website foregrounded the project’s idealistic aims: “A lofty yet sincere goal of ‘Out the Window’ is to
pierce the beige walls of anonymity as seen from the cursory, mobile
platforms of the bus, delivering to bus riders the human faces behind
the facades.”51 The effects of this latest program—like Hollywould—are
difficult to quantify. But by engaging a captive audience accustomed to
passive entertainment with issue-oriented videos, and by asking viewers
to think critically about their immediate surroundings and the evershifting urban environments in and around Los Angeles, Freewaves
continues to cultivate art’s capacity to transform the shared community
of everyday spaces.
Notes
Research for this project was supported by a postdoctoral fellowship
at Carnegie Mellon University’s Center for the Arts in Society and a
Louis B. Perry student-faculty research grant from Whitman College. My
thanks go to Elizabeth Hockett for her outstanding assistance and general good cheer. I am especially grateful to Anne Bray and Sara Daleiden
for their time and generosity in sharing archival materials in addition to
their own candid assessments of the festival.
177
1
2
3
4
5
178
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
Freewaves, “Hollywould . . . ,” press release (August 26, 2008).
Ibid.
Mitchell Landsberg, “There’s A New Buzz in Hollywood,” Los Angeles
Times, November 8, 2001, http://articles.latimes.com/2001/nov/08/
local/me-1798 (accessed March 18, 2015).
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith
(New York: Zone Books, 1994), 12.
Libero Andreotti, “Architecture and Play,” in Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2002), 217.
Situationist International, “Definitions,” in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1996), 702.
Bernadette Quinn, “Arts Festivals and the City,” Urban Studies, Vol. 42,
No. 5/6 (May 2005) 930.
Victor Burgin, Situational Aesthetics: Selected Writings of Victor Burgin, ed.
Alexander Streitberger (Ithaca, NY: Leuven University Press, 2009), 8.
The work of scholars and curators such as Burgin, Nicolas Bourriaud,
Grant Kester, and Claire Bishop have been at the forefront of addressing
these categories and labels and their broader social impacts. See, for
example, Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics
of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012) and Grant Kester, The One and the
Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2011).
Nikos Papastergiadis, Spatial Aesthetics: Art, Place and the Every day (London: Rivers Oram, 2006), 12.
James Moran, “All Over the Map: A History of L.A. Freewaves,” in The
Sons and Daughters of Los: Culture and Community in L.A., ed. David James
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 181.
Claudine Isé, “Considering the Art World Alternatives: LACE and Community Formation in Los Angeles,” in The Sons and Daughters of Los: Culture and Community in L.A., ed. David James (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 103.
Anne Bray, “The Community Is Watching, and Replying: Art in Public
Places and Spaces,” Leonardo 35, no. 1 (2002), 20.
Ibid.
Freewaves, L.A. Freewaves 2008 Festival Final Report, Report to Board of
Directors, (Hollywood: Freewaves, 2009).
Kenneth Rogers, “We Are Here, We Could Be Everywhere: Freewaves
and the Use Value of Video History,” in 20/20: Twenty Years of Media Art,
ed. Heidi Zeller (New York: DAP Press, 2010), 16.
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
Freewaves, “Hollywould” Open Call (February 6, 2008).
Freewaves, L.A. Freewaves 2008 Festival Final Report, 5.
Freewaves, “Hollywould” Open Call.
Except when explicitly stated, the videos discussed were single-channel
installations or projections.
Anna McCarthy, Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space (Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2001), 1.
Ibid., 9.
Freewaves, “Festivals,” http://freewaves.org/past-festivals/2008/Hollywould/(accessed June 6, 2010).
The Church of Scientology owns several historically significant, wellpreserved buildings in Hollywood. The church’s desire to cultivate celebrities as both proselytizers and revenue sources is well documented and
provides a plausible explanation to account for these significant real
estate holdings. Given Scientology’s notorious secrecy and its spotty participation in civic governance, it is doubtful that Beckman was making
any specific commentary on the group’s presence in the city. It may be
more likely that the large building offered an acceptable “screen” for
Beckman’s piece rather than making any direct connections between
Scientology and homelessness.
The screening was entitled “Holly Would If She Could . . . ” and was coprogrammed with L.A. Filmforum. These works were shown together in
a single program that played at the historic Egyptian Theatre on the
second night of the festival.
Linda Levitt, “Death on Display: Reifying Stardom through Hollywood’s
Dark Tourism,” The Velvet Light Trap 65 (Spring 2010): 62.
Examples of specific closings or relocations include Frederick’s of Hollywood lingerie shop and the Erotic Museum of Hollywood.
Los Angeles Urban Rangers, “Orientation,” http://laurbanrangers.org/
site/menu/orientation (accessed June 10, 2010).
For a more detailed definition of the dérive, see Tom McDonough’s “The
Dérive and Situationist Paris,” in Guy Debord and the Situationist International, ed. Tom McDonough(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).
My knowledge of and participation in the festival came as a DeTour
guide. The topic of my tour examined the affinities between glamour
and surveillance as modes of vision associated with seeing and being seen,
stardom and criminality.
Freewaves, “Hollywould Map,” http://la.remap.ucla.edu/Hollywould
(accessed September 17, 2010).
179
34
35
36
37
180
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
Ibid.
Malcolm Miles, Art, Space and the City: Public Art and Urban Futures (London: Routledge, 1997) and Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial
Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
Loretta Lees, Tom Slater, and Elvin Wyly, Gentrification (New York, Routledge, 2007), 12–13.
See, for example, Evdoxia Baniotopoulou, “Art for Whose Sake? Modern
Art Museums and Their Role in Transforming Societies: The Case of the
Guggenheim Bilbao,” Journal of Conservation and Museum Studies 7 (2001),
doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/jcms.7011.
Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni, and Ali Subotnick, eds., Von
Mäusen und Menschen [Of mice and men] (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz,
2006), 83.
Jennifer Allen, “The 4th Berlin Biennial”, Artforum, May 1, 2006, 282.
Peter Schjeldahl, “Come On Down,” The New Yorker, November 11, 2008.
Ibid.
David Ebony, “Chromatic Theater,” Art in America, September 2011, 6.
See, for instance, Naomi Klein’s discussion of “disaster capitalism” in The
Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2007) for
numerous examples of this phenomenon.
Although Cameron frequently acknowledges his outsider position, the
tabula rasa effect might further be exacerbated by his foundation’s relationship to the geographical setting of the biennial, presenting a conflict
of interest alarmingly familiar to today’s contemporary art world. The
New Orleans Prospect biennials are run by Cameron’s not-for-profit 501(c)
(3) organization U.S. Biennial, Inc., with Cameron himself as artistic
director. Finally, because it markets itself as a tool for the city’s revitalization, the economic impact of Prospect.1 on New Orleans was consistently
foregrounded in press releases, reviews, and the organization’s own
website, which claimed that “the direct economic impact of Prospect.1
on the city of New Orleans, including hotels and restaurants, goods and
services, contract employment and media exposure, was $25 million.” It
should be pointed out that Prospect.2, the second New Orleans biennial,
had to be postponed because of revenue shortfalls brought about the defunding of groups like the National Endowment for the Arts, the financial crisis of 2008, and the BP gulf oil spill. Prospect.2 press release, www
.neworleansonline.com/pr/releases/releases/Prospect%20New%20
Orleans%20Announces%20Artists%20and%20Venues.pdf (accessed
March 18, 2015).
Ibid.
47
48
49
50
51
Anne Bray, interview with the author, June 29, 2010.
Guy Debord, “Report on the Construction of Situations and on the Inter
national Situationist Tendency’s Conditions or Organization and Actions,”
in Stiles and Selz, Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, 706.
Kevin Gotham, “Theorizing Urban Spectacles: Festivals, Tourism and
the Transformation of Urban Space,” City 9, no. 2 (July 2005): 5.
Freewaves, “Out the Window,” http://out-the-window.org/ (accessed Sep
tember 3, 2011). The program is a collaboration among the Echo Park
Film Center, Public Matters, UCLA REMAP, and Freewaves.
Ibid.
181
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199
Contributors
Douglas Kellner is George Kneller Chair in the Philosophy of Education at
UCLA and is author of many books on social theory, politics, history, and
culture, including Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary
Hollywood Film, co-authored with Michael Ryan; Critical Theory, Marxism, and
Modernity; Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond; works in
cultural studies such as Media Culture and Media Spectacle; a trilogy of books on
postmodern theory with Steve Best; and a trilogy of books on the media and
the Bush administration, encompassing Grand Theft 2000, From 9/11 to Terror
War, and Media Spectacle and the Crisis of Democracy. Author of Herbert Marcuse and
the Crisis of Marxism, Kellner is editing the collected papers of Herbert Marcuse,
four volumes of which have appeared with Routledge. Kellner’s Guys and Guns
Amok: Domestic Terrorism and School Shootings from the Oklahoma City Bombings to the
Virginia Tech Massacre won the 2008 AESA award as the best book on education.
With Meenakshi Gigi Durham, Kellner has co-edited Media and Cultural Studies:
KeyWorks, and with Rhonda Hammer, Kellner has co-edited Media/Cultural
Studies: Critical Approaches. Kellner’s Cinema Wars: Hollywood Film and Politics in the
Bush/Cheney Era was published in 2010, and his latest book, Media Spectacle and
Insurrection, 2011: From the Arab Uprisings to Occupy Everywhere, was published in
2012. His website is at http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/kellner.html.
201
202
Shiloh R. Krupar is a geographer and Associate Professor of Culture and Politics in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Her research
has explored several interrelated areas: military landscapes; model cities and
urban spectacle in China; environmental, juridical, and financial disasters;
medical hot spotting; and biocultures These diverse and multi-scalar areas
are drawn together through an overarching focus on spectacle and waste,
political economy and biopolitics, cultural politics, queer ecology, and environmental ethics. Collaboration and performative methodologies, such as
absurdist humor and institutional mimicry, are central to her practice. The
recipient of a Quadrant fellowship, her book Hot Spotter’s Report: Military Fables
of Toxic Waste (2013) explores the politics of nature conservation, contamination, and compensation issues at decommissioned military sites in the western
United States. Krupar’s research has been published in such venues as Society
and Space, Public Culture, Radical History Review, Social Semiotics, Liminalities, cultural geographies, and Medicine, Conflict and Survival. SAGE’s 2012 Handbook of
Architectural Theory includes her co-authored chapter on theories of spectacle
and branding (with Stefan Al, University of Pennsylvania). Her collaborative
long-term art project “The National Toxic Land/Labor Conservation Service”
(with Sarah Kanouse, University of Iowa) works at the intersection of art,
research, and government policy to address the toxic afterlife of U.S. militarism and has been featured in the “Ecocultures” exhibition (George Mason
University, 2011), FigureOne Gallery (Champaign, IL, 2013), and the “Monuments to Cold War Victory” show (Cooper Union, NYC, 2014; Wende
Museum, Los Angeles, 2016). Bruce Magnusson is Associate Professor of Politics at Whitman College. His
teaching and research interests are in global, transnational, and comparative
politics, with a particular focus on Africa. His work has been published in
Comparative Politics and Comparative Studies in Society and History, as well as in
multiple volumes on comparative and African politics. His current research
addresses questions at the intersection of ethnicity, security, and violence.
Gaurav Majumdar is Associate Professor of English and Director of the
Encounters program at Whitman College. His book, Migrant Form: Anti-
Colonial Aesthetics in Joyce, Rushdie, and Ray was published in 2010. He is
currently working on two book projects, one on informality in modernist
works and the other on links between solidarity and failure in postcolonial
literature.
Matt Reynolds is Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Culture Studies at Whitman College. His research explores the role of art and media in
C o n t r i bu t o rs
urban renewal projects. He has published in edited collections and scholarly
journals, including most recently the Journal of Urban Design, the Journal of
Urban History (forthcoming), and Public: Art/Culture/Ideas. He is currently
completing a book project on how art facilitates and challenges the city of
Hollywood’s ongoing gentrification as a result of urban redevelopment.
Anneke Smelik is Professor of Visual Culture and the Katrien van Munster
chair at Radboud University Nijmegen (Netherlands). She is coordinator of
the MA program “Creative Industries.” She has edited From Delft Blue to Denim
Blue, Contemporary Dutch Fashion (forthcoming, 2015); Thinking through Fashion:
A Guide to Key Theorists (forthcoming, 2015); Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture; The Scientific Imaginary in Visual Culture; Technologies of Memory in the
Arts; and Bits of Life: Feminism at the Intersections of Media, Bioscience, and Technology. She is author of And the Mirror Cracked: Feminist Cinema and Film Theory and
several books in Dutch on issues of visual culture, including a book on cyborgs
in popular culture. Anneke Smelik is project leader of the research program
“Crafting Wearables; Fashionable Technology” (2013–2018), funded by the
Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research.
Zahi Zalloua is Associate Professor of French and Interdisciplinary Studies
at Whitman College and editor of The Comparatist. He is the author of Montaigne and the Ethics of Skepticism (2005), Reading Unruly: Interpretation and Its
Ethical Demands (2014), and Beyond the Jew and the Greek: Continental Philosophy
and the Palestinian Question (forthcoming), and the editor of Montaigne after
Theory/Theory after Montaigne (2009). He has also edited issues of L’Esprit
C réateur (2006) and SubStance (2009) and coedited, with Nicole Simek, a
special issue of Dalhousie French Studies on representations of trauma in French
and Francophone literature (2007). Zalloua’s other publications address globalization, literary theory, interdisciplinary approaches to philosophy and
literature, experimental fiction, and gender studies.
C o n t r i bu t o rs
203
Index
Page numbers in italics refer to authors of chapters.
A
Aaltola, Mika, 107–8
ABC, 21
absence, marks of, 100–102, 107
Actions of Time and Space (Wookey
and Murphy video work), 169–
70, 170fig.
activists, 11; and Arab Uprisings, 22,
31–32, 38–40, 60n45, 61n55;
Internet activists, 22, 31–32, 38–
40, 60n45, 61n55; labor activists,
143; and nature refuges, postmilitary, 137, 143; Youth Inter
national of Internet activists, 32
Adorno, Theodor, 9
advertising, 4, 21, 23, 25
aesthetics, 22, 76; and colonialism, 91–
92, 106; and cosmopolitanism,
91–92, 99, 106; and Freewaves
biennial (2008), 160, 164; and
nature refuges, post-military, 96,
125, 132–33, 147–49; and “White
Cube,” 160
Afflicted Powers (Retort), 5, 15n8
Afghanistan, 42, 81; Afghani children, 76; Afghani refugees in
Iran, 74
Africa, 74–76; African diaspora,
99; and Pan-Africanism, 105–
6, 114n19; Southern Africa, 93;
sub-Saharan, 159; West Africa,
100–103; and “Xango” (Brathwaite), 99–103, 105–6, 114n19
205
206
AIDS in Africa, 74–75
Air Raids (Freewaves Biennial 2000),
161
Al, Stefan, 110–11
Ala Plástica, 159
Alaska, 135
Alexander, Anne, 61n55
Alexandria (Egypt), 38, 48; state
security headquarters, 48
alienation, 5, 10, 25; and Arab
Uprisings, 32–33; and Freewaves
biennial (2008), 157; and 9/11
terrorist attacks, 126
Al-Jazeera, 19, 27, 29–31, 55n19,
62n57; Afghan facilities bombed,
42; and Egyptian Uprising, 39,
41–42, 45, 47–48; in English, 42,
61nn55–56, 62n58; and Tunisian
Uprising, 32, 34, 36, 48, 113n11
Allen, Corey, 166
Allende, Salvador, 74
All Over the Map (Freewaves Biennial
1998), 161
Al Qaeda, 20, 22
alterity. See otherness
alternative energy, 118
alternative media, 161–62, 175
Amamou, Slim (“Slim404”), 35
Ambient Television: Visual Culture and
Public Space (McCarthy), 163
American West, 117, 128, 131–32;
as frontier, 131–32; Western
deserts, 117
Anderson, Kevin, 33
Anonymous (hacker group), 39–40
anticolonialism, 51, 102
anti-Communist uprisings (1989),
30–31
anti-crop agents, 129
anti-globalization movements, 21
antiwar movements, 32, 137, 158
anxiety, 78–80, 82, 110
index
Aouragh, Miriyam, 61n55
April 6 Youth Movement, 43, 60n45
Arab Awakening and Uprisings
(2011), 7–8, 14, 18–53, 107–10;
in Egypt, 7, 19, 22, 27–29, 31–
32, 36–52, 59n38, 60n44, 61n55,
107, 109; in Libya, 7, 19, 27–29,
31, 42, 46, 49, 52, 57n25, 113n11;
as media spectacles, 7–8, 18–32,
42–43, 52, 107–10; as “multitude”
seizing power, 50; in Syria, 20, 28,
42; in Tunisia, 7, 19, 22, 27–29,
31–36, 39–41, 43, 46–52, 57n29,
109, 113n11. See also Arab Spring;
Arab Summer
Arabian Knightz (rap group), 43–44
Arabic immigrants, 84n35
Arab Spring, 7–8, 14, 27–28, 50–52,
55n19, 56n20; and cosmopoli
tanism, 89, 95, 98. See also Arab
Awakening and Uprisings (2011)
Arab Summer, 50
Arab world: anticolonialism in, 51;
Arab brotherhood, 106; Arab
language, 36; Arab public sphere,
36; and Egyptian Uprising, 45–
47; as laboratory of political
experimentation, 50; Orientalist
perspective on, 7; and shoe waving, 45, 107. See also Arab Awakening and Uprisings (2011)
Argentina, 50
Armenian populations, 156
army, Egyptian. See military, Egyptian
army, Tunisian. See military, Tunisian
Art Basel (Switzerland), 159
Artforum, 173
art galleries. See museums/art
galleries
artistic practices, 26; and Arab Uprisings, 35–36, 43; and Avignon festival, 158–59; and “Bilbao effect,”
172; and Freewaves biennial
(2008), 13–15, 154–77, 155fig.,
157fig.; and 9/11 terrorist attacks,
72–78; and public art, 163, 172;
and viewer participation, 158–60.
See also aesthetics
Arva, Eugene, 4
Asco (Chicano arts collective), 161
Ash, Garton, 56n22
Associated Press, 46, 48
Aswany, Alaa Al, 37
Athenian city-state, 97–98, 111
“atmosfear,” 110–11
At the Light of Dawn (Limas video
work), 167, 168fig1
Auguststrasse (Berlin, Germany), 173
Australian Outback, 89–90
authenticity: and nature refuges,
post-military, 132; and 9/11
terrorist attacks, 68–70, 74;
and “Xango” (Brathwaite), 99
Authenticity (Gilmore and Pine), 68
Avignon (France) festival, 158, 160
B
Babel (2006 film), 96
Backdraft (1991 film), 72
Badiou, Alain, 4
Bahrain, 20, 28, 46–47
Bald Eagle Day events, 130
bald eagles, 12, 124, 127, 129–31,
134, 149
ballistic missiles, 129
Barrie, Terrie, 143
Barthes, Roland, 5, 164
Baudrillard, Jean, 66, 68
BB4 (Berlin Biennial), 158, 172–73
BBC, 41, 45, 61n56
Beck, Ulrich, 78
Beckman, Laurel, 163, 165–66,
166fig., 179n24
Beirut bombing, 74
belonging: “almost-belonging,” 97;
and cosmopolitanism, 10, 97,
101–2, 105–6, 109, 111; and
nature refuges, post-military, 126
Ben Ali, Zine El Abidine, 32–34,
48–49, 57n29
Ben Amor, Hamada (“El Général”),
35–36
Benin, 102
Benin, Joel, 37, 59n40, 60n44
Benjamin, Walter, 67
Ben Mhenni, Lina (“tunisian girl”),
33–34
Bentham, Jeremy, 112n4
Berlin Biennial (2004), 158, 172–73
Berlin Wall, 30, 67, 173
Besbes, Skander (“Skhder”), 35
Beuys, Joseph, 160
Bhabha, Homi, 112n4
“Bilbao effect,” 172
Bin Laden, Osama, 75–76, 110
biodiversity, 127, 131, 134
biogas units, 159
biopolitics: and Arab Uprisings, 109–
10; defined, 119–20; as moral
science, 120; and nature refuges,
post-military, 11, 13, 118–19,
124–25, 134, 143, 146–49; and
nonhuman organisms, 120, 123,
128, 132, 134
Bishop, Claire, 178n9
bison, genetically improved, 12, 128,
131–34
Bizzy B boutique (Hollywood),
168–69
black screen, 73–74
blogs/bloggers, 21; in Egypt, 59n40;
in Tunisia, 33–35; video blog
(“vlog”), 37
blues, 101, 103–4
Bolivia, 50
Bosnia-Herzegovina war, 74, 76
index
207
208
Bouazizi, Mohamed, 31–32, 37,
57nn26–27
Bourguiba, Habib, 32
Bourriaud, Nicolas, 178n9
BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, 19,
180n44
Bradford, Mark, 174
Braidotti, Rosi, 82
Brathwaite, Kamau, 10, 14–15, 89,
99–107, 111, 114n19
Bray, Anne, 154, 160–62, 166, 175
Brazil, 50
“breaking news,” 19–20, 43
British cultural studies, 25
“The Brothers” (Frontline), 62n59
Brown, Stewart, 101
Buddhist monks, 32
Bullaty, Sonja, 78
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 116
Burgin, Victor, 159, 178n9
Burke, Kenneth, 110
Burkina Faso, 75–76
Bush, George H. W., 29
Bush, George W., 29. See also Bush
administration
Bush administration, 93, 110; Bush/
Cheney administration, 26, 28–
29, 42
Business Improvement District
(Hollywood), 172
buskers, 164
“button bombs,” 129
C
Cai GuoQiang, 174
Cairo (Egypt), 37–41, 43–48, 50, 107,
109; Heliopolis district, 46; state
security headquarters, 48; strikes
in, 59n40
calypso, 101
Cameron, Dan, 173–74, 180n44
Cannes Film Festival (2002), 73
index
Cao Fei, 174
capitalism, late, 3–4, 24–27, 68, 107;
corporate capitalism, 109; fear in,
78–80; and Freewaves biennial
(2008), 156; and nature refuges,
post-military, 125–26; “technocapitalism,” 68
Carey, Peter, 89–90, 111
Caribbean Lukumí religion, 100
Casbah coalition, 49
Casbah Square (Tunis, Tunisia),
48–49
Castells, Manuel, 68
Cattelan, Maurizio, 173
Cavell, Stanley, 96
CBS, 21, 71, 78, 109
celebrities, 21–22, 26, 155, 166–67,
179n24
cell phones, 30, 170
Celtic Revival movement (Ireland),
113n16
Certeau, Michel de, 164
Chad, 100
charismatic leaders, 50
charismatic species, 125–26, 129–30,
148
chemical weapons, 11, 122–23, 128–
29, 134, 136, 150n19. See also
Rocky Mountain Arsenal (RMA)
Chile, 74
China, 113n11; Tiananmen Square
(Beijing), 67
Chinese Box (1997), 96
chlorine, 128
Chouliaraki, Lilie, 77, 80–81
Christian Coptics, 48
Church of Scientology tower (Hollywood), 165–66, 166fig., 179n24
CIA (Central Intelligence Agency,
U.S.), 45
cinema screen, metaphor of, 93–94, 98
Cities of Words (Cavell), 96
citizen journalism, 38
Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud),
103
civil rights, 34, 158
classes, social: and Arab Uprisings,
33, 39–40; and Freewaves biennial (2008), 157
Clinton, Bill, 19, 21–22, 26; sex/
impeachment scandal of, 19,
21–22, 26
Clinton, Hillary, 42, 62n58
CNN, 6, 27, 41–42, 45, 62n57;
iReports, 6
Coca-Cola, 102
Cohen, Elisia L., 85n37
Cold War, post, 117–21, 124, 127,
129, 135–37, 140, 142–44, 148;
and “closure,” 143–44
Cole, Juan, 37
Cole, Shahim, 37
Colombani, Jean-Maria, 81
colonialism: and Arab Uprisings,
51; and cosmopolitanism, 89–
93, 98–106, 112n4, 113n16; and
124; nuclear colonialism, 117
Colorado, 11, 128–30, 133, 137
“combinatorics,” 107–8
“common sense,” 5
Communism, 30–31, 56nn22–23
conservationism, 126–27
Constitutional Democratic Party
(CDP, Tunisia), 34–35
Constitutional Democratic Rally
(RCD), 49
consumerist society, 4, 5–6, 10–11,
21; and Debord, 4, 23–26; and
“eco-consumerism,” 133; and
Freewaves biennial (2008), 13–14,
156, 168–69; and nature refuges,
post-military, 118–19, 124, 126,
128, 133–34, 145–46, 148
contamination, 11–13, 118, 122–23,
125–27, 129–30, 132, 134–37,
139–41, 143–44. See also nuclear
waste
Contemporary Art Center (New
Orleans, La.), 174
contraception, 33
Coronado, Francisco, 102
corruption, 27, 47, 51, 53; in Egypt,
28, 36, 38–40, 44, 49, 59n38,
59n40; in Tunisia, 32–33, 35, 49,
57n29
cosmetics, 97–99, 111
cosmopolitanism, 9–10, 14–15, 88–
112; and alliances, 10, 104; and
anticipatory narratives, 89–90,
98; and Arab Uprisings, 107–10;
and belonging, 10, 101–2, 105–
6, 109, 111; as “citizen of the
world,” 97; and colonialism, 89–
93, 98–106, 112n4, 113n16; and
“cosmetic,” 97–99, 111; cosmopolitan witnessing, 10; defined, 97;
“discrepant cosmopolitanisms,”
105; etymology of, 97–98; as
“euphoric empathy,” 10; identitydissolving gambit of, 106; and
intimacy, 96, 106–8; and melancholy, 98–100, 104, 110–11; and
metic’s perspective, 97–98, 111–
12; and oceanic feeling, 96–97,
103, 115n30; and prediction, 89–
93, 112; and solidarity, 10, 89,
95–99, 102–6, 111–12; and spectacle in present, 93–95; and temporal space, 88–89, 92–95, 104,
111; utopian visions of, 10, 98,
106, 111; and “Xango” (Brathwaite), 10, 99–107, 111, 114n19
Craps, Stef, 71–72
creation stories, 128, 131–34, 144
Critchley, Simon, 96
index
209
210
criticism, 11, 118–19, 124–25, 144–
49; “greenwashing” critiques, 118,
125, 144, 147; public criticism,
124
Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Spivak),
105
cronyism, 51
Cuba, 100
cultural contexts, 20, 22, 25, 27; of
Arab Uprisings, 35–36, 43–44;
of colonialism, 98–101, 104; of
cosmopolitanism, 97–98, 100–
101, 104; cultural liberation, 104;
cultural memory, 67; of Freewaves biennial (2008), 154–55,
158, 164, 166–67; of nature refuges, post-military, 118–19, 127;
of 9/11 terrorist attacks, 67–68,
72, 74, 78
Current TV (cable channel), 62n58
Czechoslovakia, 30; Velvet Revolution, 30, 56n22
D
D’Agostino, Peter, 163, 166–67,
179n25
Dahomey, 100, 114n19
Daleiden, Sara, 169
Davies, Humphrey, 59n38
Dean, James, 166–67
Debord, Guy, 3–7, 10–11, 13, 14,
16n12, 16nn15–16, 16n18, 68,
156–57, 175–76; Society of the
Spectacle, 3–4, 23–27, 52, 107–
8, 157; spectacle as “separation,”
24, 124–25
DeLillo, Don, 85n36
democracy: and Al-Jazeera, 39, 42;
and Arab Uprisings, 8, 20, 27,
29–31, 33, 36–39, 42, 46–53;
in Egypt, 36–38, 46–47, 49–51,
59n38, 60n44; and Freewaves
index
biennial (2008), 13; in Latin
America, 50; and nature refuges,
post-military, 13, 126; in Tunisia,
33, 36, 48–50; Western-style
“democracies,” 29, 56n23; and
wilderness, 126
Democrats, 26
Denver (Colo.), 128, 130, 137
Derr, Robert Ladislas, 168–69
Derrida, Jacques, 4, 105, 114n28
desire, 4, 10, 25; and colonialism, 91–
93, 98–99, 113n16; and cosmopolitanism, 91–93, 98–99, 101,
109–10, 113n16; and nature refuges, post-military, 125, 127–28;
and 9/11 terrorist attacks, 68,
72, 80; in “Xango” (Brathwaite),
99, 101
De Soto, Hernando, 102
DeTourists, 169–71, 170fig., 176fig.,
179n31
détournement, 11, 157–58
Deutsche, Rosalyn, 172
The Development of Creole Society in
Jamaica, 1770–1820 (Brathwaite),
100, 104
Dewey, John, 107–8
Diana, Princess, 67
Dickinson, Elizabeth, 57n29
dictatorships, 7, 19, 27, 29, 51–53,
107–8; in Egypt, 36–41, 44–47,
49, 107; in Tunisia, 32–35, 47–
49; victims of, 76, 107. See also
names of dictators
Die Hard (1988–2013 films), 65–66
DIMP (nerve gas byproduct), 129
Diogenes, 97
disaster movies, 65–66, 68, 71–76, 79
distance: and cosmopolitanism, 10,
88, 93, 95, 111; and nature refuges, post-military, 125; in
“Xango” (Brathwaite), 10
divorce, 33
D.I.Y. media artifacts, 30
DOD (Department of Defense),
117–19, 121–28; environmental
stewardship of, 117, 121–28; and
field trip visits, 119; and Rocky
Mountain Arsenal, 11–12, 14–15,
128–31
DOE (Department of Energy), 117–
19, 121–28, 135–43; account
ability of, 136–37, 141–43; and
“end-states,” 136, 138–39, 142,
146; and field trip visits, 119; and
legacy management, 137, 139–44;
LM (Office of Legacy Management), 140–43; and Rocky Flats,
11–12, 14–15, 131, 136fig., 137–43;
and SOARS (System Operation
and Analysis at Remote Sites),
141; and stewardship, 117–18,
121–28, 144
DOI (Department of Interior), 122,
139
drumming, 44, 100; and buskers,
164; daf (frame drum), 44
DVDs, 78
E
Earthquake (1975 film), 65
earthquakes, 42, 110, 174
Eastern bloc countries, 30–31, 56n22
East Germany (DDR), 30
economic contexts: of Arab Uprisings, 20, 32–34, 37, 40, 49; economic justice, 8; in Egypt, 37, 40,
59n40; financial crisis (2008),
180n44; of Freewaves biennial
(2008), 169, 177; of nature refuges, post-military, 12, 122, 124,
129–30, 132–36, 138, 141–42,
149; of New Orleans biennial
(2006), 174–75, 180n44; of 9/11
terrorist attacks, 74–75, 79; in
Tunisia, 33–34, 49. See also consumerist society
Egypt, 7, 19, 22, 27–29, 31–32,
36–52, 59n38, 60n44, 61n55;
April 6 Youth Movement, 43,
60n45; coup d’état (July 2013),
8, 28; “de-Mubaraking” of, 47;
embassies, 40; Islamic state in,
28, 51, 62n59; Kifaya (Enough)
movement, 60n44; military government of, 28; National Democratic Party (NDP), 59n40;
overthrow of government in, 95;
patriarchal society in, 48; and
“Revolution 2.0,” 40; revolution
against British (1919), 37; and
“second Egyptian revolution,” 50;
state television headquarters, 46;
Tahrir Square (Cairo), 37–41, 43–
47, 50, 107, 109; Wafd Party, 37
Egyptian Theatre (Hollywood), 166,
179n25
“Egypt’s Revolution 2.0: The Facebook Factor” (Herrera), 38
Eissa, Karim Adel (“A-Rush”), 43–44
Elaasar, Aladdin, 59n38
El-Adly, Habib, 47
elections, Egyptian, 59n40; for
people’s assembly, 49, 50–51;
presidential, 8, 36, 41, 45
elections, Iranian, 39
elections, presidential, U.S., 28, 52;
Bush/Gore (2000), 19; Obama/
McCain (2008), 19, 26; Obama/
Romney (2012), 26, 55n18
elections, Tunisian, 32, 34, 49, 51
11’09”01 (2002 film), 73–77, 82
El-Hamalawy, Hossam, 59n40
Elizabeth II, Queen of England, 67
El Mahalla el Kubra (Egypt), 37
El Monte (Los Angeles, Calif.), 160
index
211
212
empathy, 9–10, 81–82; and cosmopolitanism, 10, 89, 95, 97; “euphoric
empathy,” 10
“emplotment,” 94–95
The End (Nord video work), 163–65,
165fig.
Endandered Species Act (1973), 129
endangered species, 123, 128–32
England, 90–93
Enlightenment, 89
Ennahda (Islamic party), 51
entertainment, mass, 5, 21–22, 24–
25, 155–56
environment, natural, 11–13, 116–49;
binaristic thinking about, 124,
147; devastation of, 89, 122, 135;
and education, 119, 128, 133, 144–
45, 147; and externalities, 124;
and mapping, 89; and memory,
118, 143; monetization of damage
to, 124; and national security,
117, 123, 125; protection of, 126,
130–31; and purity, 12, 118, 124–
26, 128–33, 140, 143–44; and
reintroduction of species, 131–34;
and remediation, 118, 121–24,
126, 128–30, 135–36, 138, 140–
42, 147; and stewardship, 117–18,
121–28, 130, 133, 144; and violations, 138. See also nature refuges,
post-military
environmental groups, 129–30, 146,
158
Environmental Protection Agency,
U.S., 138; Superfund (National
Priorities List), 138
Erotic Museum of Hollywood, 179n28
Erzulie (voodoo cluster of female
spirits), 100, 114n19
Escape from New York (1981 film), 65
Essay on Unsheltered Bodies (Teixeira
video work), 167–68
index
ethical positions: and colonialism,
91–93; environmental ethics,
95–96; and nature refuges, postmilitary, 117, 119, 132–34, 142,
144–49; and 9/11 terrorist
attacks, 9, 66, 77, 80–83, 87n66;
relational-material ethics, 144;
of spectatorship, 9, 77, 80–83,
87n66
Europe: European values, 106; and
9/11 terrorist attacks, 81, 84n35
exceptionalism, American, 117
exposure: and Freewaves biennial
(2008), 13; and nature refuges,
post-military, 12, 117–19, 124,
126, 134, 141, 143–46, 148; and
9/11 terrorist attacks, 9
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
(Foer), 85n36
extreme weather events, 19, 42, 173–
74. See also Haiti earthquake
(2010); Hurricane Katrina; types
of disasters, e.g., earthquakes
F
Facebook, 6–7, 21–22; and Arab
Uprisings, 29, 35–41, 43–44,
113n11; and Tunisian strikes,
33; as virtual headquarters, 43;
“We are all Khalid Said,” 38–39
Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004 film), 74–77, 79
Falling Man (DeLillo), 85n36
fantasy, 9, 80; and cosmopolitanism,
103, 109; and nature refuges,
post-military, 12, 132; and 9/11
terrorist attacks, 8–9, 66, 70, 77;
of self-importance, 6; in “Xango”
(Brathwaite), 103
FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation),
138
fear, 5, 44, 78–80; “atmosfear,” 110–
11; fear of accidents, 79; “land-
scape of fear,” 78–79; and 9/11
terrorist attacks, 81, 110
Feeling Global (Robbins), 97
Feldschuh, Michael, 78
feminist movements, 37, 158
festival events, 154, 158–63. See also
Freewaves biennial (2008); names
of other biennials and festivals
films. See Hollywood; titles of films
firefighters, 71–72
Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S., 12,
122, 128–29, 131, 139–40
floods, 174
Foer, Jonathan Safran, 85n36
folk culture, 100–101
Ford, John, 102
Foreign Policy Priorities Committee
on Information War, U.S., 42
fossil fuel scarcity, 118
Foucault, Michel, 119–20
Fox News, 6, 21
Frankfurt School, 25
Frederick’s of Hollywood lingerie
shop, 179n28
Freedom Square (Cairo, Egypt), 45
Freewaves biennial (1998), 161
Freewaves biennial (2000), 161
154–77, 155fig., 157fig.; branding
of, 162; comparisons of, 172–77;
curatorial process of, 162–64,
177; and decentralization, 162;
and education, 161, 169–72; final
report of, 175; and gentrification,
13, 155–56, 158, 160, 163–64,
170–72, 171fig., 175–77; history
of, 160–62; and homelessness,
13, 156, 165–68; and LACE (Los
Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), 160–61, 164, 171fig.; “Out
the Window,” 177; precedents
for, 158–60; and REMAP (UCLA
Center for Research in Engineering Media and Performance), 169–
72; Transit TV program, 167–68,
177; and video works, 14, 161–69,
165fig., 166fig., 168fig., 177. See
also Hollywould
Fremder Freund (Foreign Friend) (2003
film), 84n35
Freud, Sigmund, 66, 98, 103,
115n30
Friday prayers, 46–47
Frontline Report (PBS), 38; “The
Brothers,” 62n59; “Revolution
in Cairo,” 38
Front Range (Colo.), 128, 130, 137
Fukushima Daiichi nuclear catastrophe, 19
Fukuyama, Francis, 56n23
G
Gafsa (Tunisia), 33
Gardner, Lloyd C., 63n64
Gay and Lesbian Elders Housing
(Hollywood), 171–72
gay rights, 158
GB nerve gas, 128
gender, 22; and Arab Uprisings, 39;
and Freewaves biennial (2008),
168–69; gender equality, 33–34.
See also women
General Union of Tunisian Works
(UGTT), 33–34
genetic manipulation, 12, 124, 128,
131–34
gentrification: and Berlin Biennial
(2004), 173; and Freewaves biennial (2008), 13, 155–56, 158, 160,
163–64, 170–72, 171fig., 175–77;
and New Orleans biennial (2006),
173–74, 180n44
geography, 89–90, 102, 104, 122,
162–63, 180n44
index
213
214
George and Leah McKenna Museum
of African American Art (New
Orleans, La.), 174
Germany, 84n35, 158, 160
Ghannouchi, Mohamed, 34
Ghobrial, Bahaa Gamil, 40–41
Ghonim, Wael, 38–40, 43; arrest of,
43
Ghosh, Rajorshi, 163–64
Gilmore, James, 68
Gioni, Massimiliano, 173
Giroux, Henry A., 5
glass, 89–90
globalization, 3–5, 14–15, 114n28;
and Arab Uprisings, 8, 20–21,
25, 27; and 9/11 terrorist attacks,
76, 80
global media: and Arab Uprisings,
27, 30–31, 36–37, 41–45, 47,
51–52, 61n55, 109, 113n11; and
9/11 terrorist attacks, 67, 77,
80–81, 87n66
global spectacles: and Arab Uprisings, 20, 107–10; and “atmosfear,”
110–11; and cosmopolitanism,
93–96, 99–100, 106–12
global warming, 118
Goldberger, Paul, 78
Gonzáles Iñárritu, Alejandro, 73
Google, 38, 40, 43
Gore, Al, 62n58
Gotham, Kevin, 176
GPS monitors, 170
Greengrass, Paul, 73
“greenwashing” critiques, 118, 125,
144, 147
Griffith Park Observatory (Hollywood), 166
griots, West African, 101
Grosse, Katharina, 174
Ground Zero, 78, 84n35. See also
World Trade Center
index
Gulf War I, 20, 42–43, 62n57
The Guys (2002 film), 72
Guys and Guns Amok (Kellner), 25
H
hacker groups, 39–40
Hady, Amal Adbel, 39
Haiti earthquake (2010), 42
Hameed, Salman, 93
Haraway, Donna, 82
Hardt, Michael, 50
Harrah’s Casino (New Orleans, La.),
174
health, human, 21; and biopolitics,
119–20; and nature refuges, postmilitary, 118, 119–20, 123, 134,
138, 140, 142–45, 147, 149; and
9/11 terrorist attacks, 78
Heerdt, Albert ter, 84n35
The Heinemann Book of Caribbean Poetry
(McDonald and Brown), 101
Hellenism, 92, 112n4
herbicides, 129
heroism, 71, 73, 82
Herrera, Linda, 38
Hindutva, 106
historical contexts, 3–5; of Arab
Uprisings, 19–20, 22–23, 27,
29–31, 33, 36, 41–42, 46, 52–53,
54n5; of Berlin Biennial (2004),
173; of cosmopolitanism, 89–90,
93–95, 100, 102, 105; counterhistories, 118; and dehistoricization, 5, 128, 134; of Freewaves
biennial (2008), 159–62, 172; of
118, 120–26, 128, 131–32, 134,
137, 140, 142–43; of 9/11 terrorist attacks, 9, 69, 74–76, 82;
world-historical events, 27, 29–31,
41, 53; and “Xango” (Brathwaite),
100, 102, 105
historiography, 94–95
Holliday, Rodney, 161–62
Hollywood, 11, 13, 21–22, 154–56,
160–72, 175–77; Bizzy B boutique, 168–69; blockbuster era
of, 21; branding of, 156; Business
Improvement District, 172; carnivalesque environment of, 163;
Church of Scientology tower, 165,
179n24; Community Redevelopment Agency, 175; and cosmopolitanism, 96, 102; cultural codes of,
72, 155, 164, 166–67; and disaster movies, 65–66, 68, 71–76,
79; as “the Dream Factory,” 155;
Egyptian Theatre, 166, 179n25;
Erotic Museum of Hollywood,
179n28; Frederick’s of Hollywood
lingerie shop, 179n28; Gay and
Lesbian Elders Housing, 171–72;
and gentrification, 13, 155–56,
158, 160, 163–64, 170–72, 171fig.,
175–77; Griffith Park Observatory, 166; Hollywood Book and
Poster Company, 166; Hollywood
Boulevard, 154, 156, 157fig., 161,
164–66, 168–70, 170fig., 172,
175–76; Hollywood Camera and
Music (electronics store), 167,
168fig1; “Hollywoodization,” 9,
72; and HRP (Hollywood Redevelopment Project), 156, 161, 168;
and LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), 160–61, 164,
171fig.; Larry Edmunds Bookshop, 164–65, 165fig.; LeConte
Middle School, 172; as mediasaturated environment, 155–56;
mythology of, 13, 154–55, 176;
narrative style of, 71–73; and
9/11 terrorist attacks, 9, 65–66,
71–76, 79–80, 82, 84n28, 84n35;
spaces of, 156, 160–67, 169–70,
170fig., 172, 177; and “spectacle
movie,” 73; utopian aspirations
of, 14; Walk of Fame, 164–65,
167; and “Xango” (Brathwaite),
102. See also Freewaves biennial
(2008); Hollywould
Hollywood Book and Poster Company, 166
Hollywood Boulevard (Ghosh video
work), 163–64
Hollywood Camera and Music
(electronics store), 167, 168fig1
Hollywould, 13–15, 154–77, 155fig.,
157fig.; Actions of Time and Space
(Wookey and Murphy video work),
169–70, 170fig.; curatorial process of, 162–64, 177; LA: Dean
BURST (D’Agostino video work),
163, 166–67, 179n25; and
DeTourists, 169–71, 170fig.,
176fig., 179n31; The End (Nord
video work), 163–65, 165fig.;
Essay on Unsheltered Bodies (Tei
xeira video work), 167–68; Hollywood Boulevard (Ghosh video
work), 163–64; At the Light of
Dawn (Limas video work), 167,
168fig1; Man in Relation to Men
(Derr video work), 168–69;
“Remapping-LA: Hollywould”
(REMAP video work), 172; Skylarking 3 (Lamb video work),
163–64; Terrazzo (Beckman video
work), 163, 165–66, 166fig.,
179n24. See also Freewaves biennial (2008)
Holocaust, 173
homelessness, 13, 156, 165–68,
179n24
Hong Kong, 159
Horkheimer, Max, 9
index
215
216
horror, 66–67, 77; “plastinated,” 71
HRP (Hollywood Redevelopment
Project), 156, 161, 168
human rights, 20
Hungary, 30
Hurricane Katrina, 19, 42, 173–74
Hussein, Saddam, 28–29
Huyssen, Andreas, 69
hyperbole: and Arab Uprisings, 95;
and cosmopolitanism, 95, 103–
5, 107; hyperbolic optimism,
95; in “Xango” (Brathwaite),
103–5, 107
I
illusion, 94–95, 105; and Freewaves
biennial (2008), 164; “illusionist”
narratives, 109; illusion of mastery, 164; and nature refuges,
post-military, 146–47
images, 4, 6, 20, 22–24; and Arab
Uprisings, 7, 41–43, 51; and colonialism, 93; and cosmopolitanism,
93, 95, 108, 110; deceptive images,
125; of falling man, 73, 85n36;
14, 156–58, 163–64, 170; of Gulf
War I, 42; iconic television images,
67; “mechanical reproduction”
of, 67; and nature refuges, postmilitary, 118–19, 125, 133, 147;
and 9/11 terrorist attacks, 8–9,
65–67, 71–74, 77–82, 85n36, 110;
and nuclear sites, 13
imaginary, national, 130
imagination, 24–25; and cosmopolitanism, 106; and Freewaves biennial (2008), 13–14; and 9/11
terrorist attacks, 8–9, 65–66, 71,
74; and nuclear waste, 117; and
the “unimaginable,” 65–66, 71
index
immediacy: and cosmopolitanism,
89, 94, 106–7; and 9/11 terrorist
attacks, 69, 71–72
imperialism, 19, 44, 89–93, 132.
See also colonialism
Independence Day (1991), 66
indigenous populations, 90, 98, 126,
132. See also Native Americans
Infinitely Demanding (Critchley), 96
“infotainment,” 21
insecticides, 129
International Monetary Fund
(IMF), 32
International Woman’s Day, 48
Internet, 18–23; and Arab Uprisings,
19, 30, 32, 36, 38–40, 42, 52,
57n29, 60n45, 61n55, 113n11;
and 9/11 terrorist attacks, 65, 78;
shutting down of, 40, 113n11
iPhones/iPads, 22
Iran, 46; Afghani refugees in, 74;
demonstrations (2009), 36, 39
Iraq War (2003–2011), 20, 26, 28–29,
42, 60n44, 62n57; and colonialism, 93; and 9/11 terrorist
attacks, 75, 79, 81
irony, 96, 142, 173, 175
Islamic discourse, 93
Islamic Salafis (Egypt), 51
Islamic state, 28, 51, 62n59
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 84n35
J
Japan, 74
“Jasmine revolution” (Tunisia), 33–
34, 113n11
jazz, 101
Jeffris (in Oscar and Lucinda), 89–
90, 111
July 7, 2005, terrorist attack
(London, Eng.), 73
K
Kaiser-Hill Waste Disposal Services,
138
Kant, Immanuel, 97, 110
Kaplan, Ann, 77–78, 81
Katrina (hurricane), 19, 42, 173–74
Kelley, Mike, 161
Kellner, Douglas, 7–8, 10, 18–64,
67– 68, 108– 9, 201
Kennedy, John F., 67
Kester, Grant, 178n9
keystone species, 132
Kifaya (Enough) movement, 60n44
King, Geoff, 67–68, 70, 74
King, Rodney, 161–62
Krauss, Rosalind, 160
Krupar, Shiloh R., 10–13, 95–96,
109–11, 116–53, 202
Kunst-Werke (Berlin, Germany),
173
L
labor unrest: in Egypt, 38, 59n40;
in Gafsa (Tunisia), 33; in Tunisia,
33–34
LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary
Exhibitions), 160–61, 164,
171fig.
Ladder 49 (2004 film), 72
LA: Dean BURST (D’Agostino video
work), 163, 166–67, 179n25
Lalami, Laila, 57n29
Lamb, Ryan, 163–64
language, 88, 93–94; and breaking
English, 101–3; and cosmopolitanism, 100–103, 106–7; Sango
(trade language), 100; in “Xango”
(Brathwaite), 100–103
Larry Edmunds Bookshop (Hollywood), 164–65, 165fig.
Latin America, 50
Latinos, 167
“The Leaning Tower” (Woolf), 106
LeConte Middle School (Hollywood),
172
Lee, Spike, 84n35
Lefebvre, Henri, 156
legacy management, 118, 123–24,
126, 128, 133, 135–44, 147
Lelouch, Claude, 75
lewisite, 128, 150n19
liberation, 6–7; cultural liberation,
104; in “Xango” (Brathwaite), 99,
104, 106
Libya, 7, 19, 27–29, 31, 42, 46, 49,
52, 57n25, 113n11; Libyan revolution, 19
Life of an American Fireman (1903
film), 72
Limas, Ivan, 167, 168fig1
literature, 89, 94–96, 106, 109.
See also titles of literary works
LM (Office of Legacy Management),
140–43
Lockwood, Dean, 67, 71–72
Logan, Lara, 63n69, 109
Lomeo, Angelo, 78
London transport system terrorist
attack (July 7, 2005), 73, 79
Los Angeles (Calif.), 14, 154–55,
160–61; City Council, 156; East
L.A., 161; LAPD (Los Angeles
Police Dept.), 161–62; Little
Tokyo, 161; Metropolitan Transportation Authority, 167–68,
177; riots (1992), 161–62; Skid
Row, 160; South Central, 161;
Westside, 155. See also Hollywood
Los Angeles Urban Rangers, 169
Lukács, Georg, 156
lunar landing, 67
Lynch, Marc, 62n57
index
217
M
218
MacArthur Foundation, 177
Madrid terrorist attack (2002), 79
Magnusson, Bruce, 3–17, 202
Maher, Ahmed, 39, 60n45
Mahfouz, Asmaa, 37
Majumdar, Gaurav, 9–10, 88–115,
202
Man in Relation to Men (Derr video
work), 168–69
mapping, 89–90, 100, 102
Marcuse, Herbert, 6, 55n19
Marshall Islands, 135
martyrs: and Arab Uprisings, 29,
31–32, 37–38, 41, 47; and subway
signs, 47; suicide bombers as, 167
Marx, Karl, 4, 56n23
Marxism, 156
Marzouki, Nadia, 34
mass media, 23, 68, 87n66, 125; and
Freewaves biennial (2008), 155–
56, 158. See also global media;
media culture; media spectacles;
television
Massumi, Brian, 78–79
McCarthy, Anna, 163
McCarthy, Paul, 161
McDonald, Ian, 101
McDonald’s, 21, 176fig.
McEwan, Ian, 80
McLuhan, Marshall, 69–70
media culture, 9, 24–25, 68–69,
80–82
MediaFire, 44
media spectacles, 6–9, 18–53, 54n5;
aesthetic dimensions of, 22; Arab
Uprisings as, 7–8, 18–32, 42–
43, 52, 107–10; as “contested
terrain,” 108–9; Iraq War as, 28;
and 9/11 terrorist attacks, 67–
68, 110; not key causal force,
29–32, 41, 52; and Obama, 26,
index
55n18; and 24/7 cable/satellite
news, 6, 20–22, 27, 30, 41–42,
61n55, 62n58
media studies, 80
mediations, 5, 16n12, 24; “always
already” mediated, 69; and cosmopolitanism, 11; and Freewaves
biennial (2008), 157; mediated
memory, 9, 69–70, 82; and
133; and 9/11 terrorist attacks,
9, 69–71, 77, 80, 82
melancholy, 98–100, 104, 110–11
memory: “always already” mediated,
9, 69; collective memory, 69; cultural memory, 67, 70; environmental memory, 118, 143; and
Freewaves biennial (2008), 13,
167; institutional memory, 141;
materiality of, 13; mediated memory, 9, 69–70, 82; and nature refuges, post-military, 118, 141, 143;
66–67, 69–70, 72–74, 78, 82,
85nn37–38; and nuclear sites, 11,
13; performance of memory, 8,
66, 69–70, 72–74, 85nn37–38;
personal memory, 78; remembrance boom, 69
memory projects, 117
memory studies, 69
metics, 97–98, 111–12
Miami Beach (Fla.), 159
Middle East, 19–20, 27–31, 34, 36,
39, 42–43, 47, 50; and Freewaves
biennial (2008), 167; and 9/11
terrorist attacks, 74. See also Arab
Awakening and Uprisings (2011);
Iraq War (2003–2011); names of
Middle East countries
Midnight’s Children (Rushdie), 93–94
Miles, Malcolm, 172
military, Egyptian, 43, 45–46, 51
military, Tunisian, 33–34, 49
military, UN, 76
military, U.S., 28, 75, 117–28, 144,
147–48; accountability of, 121–
22, 124, 126; and chemical weapons, 11, 122–23, 128–29, 134;
and compensation efforts, 123;
and “green war,” 117–18, 123,
125, 144, 149; and legacy management, 118, 123–24, 126, 128,
133, 135–44; military contractors,
28, 121; military-industrial core,
118, 121–23, 125, 129, 143–44;
military-to-wildlife conversions
(“M2W”), 122–23, 125–26, 128,
147; and nuclear weapons, 11–12,
116–18, 121–23, 126, 135; and
remainders, 109, 124, 148–49;
restructuring of, 117–25, 133,
144, 148; and stewardship, 117–
18, 121–28, 130, 133, 145. See also
DOD (Department of Defense);
DOE (Department of Energy);
nature refuges, post-military
Mitchell, W. J. T., 67, 79–81, 86n53,
109–10
Mithra (Bradford sculpture), 174
Mitte (Berlin, Germany), 173
modernism, 126, 160, 173
Molotov cocktails, 44
Le Monde, 81
mondialisation, 105, 114n28
Moore, Michael, 73–77, 79
Morgan, Andy, 35–36, 43–44
Morgan, J. P., 102
Morgan, Robin, 33–34, 37, 39, 43
Morley, David, 80
Morsi, Mohamed, 8, 28, 51, 56n20
Mortada, Leil-Zahra, 38
“Mourning and Melancholia”
(Freud), 98
MSNBC, 6, 21
Mubarak, Gamal, 36
Mubarak, Hosni, 36–41, 44–47,
56n20, 59n38; criminal investigations against, 47; “Darth Vader
moment,” 107; departure of,
45–46, 63n64, 63n69; and paternalism, 107; speech of, 45; sympathizers of, 41, 44–45, 47–48
multinational corporations, 102,
114n27
Munich (2005 film), 84n35
Murphy, Deborah, 169–70, 170fig.
Museum of Contemporary Art (Los
Angeles, Calif.), 161
museums/art galleries, 141, 159–
60, 162, 173. See also names of
museums/art galleries
music, 23–24; and Arab Uprisings,
35–36, 43–44; electronic music,
35; Shango as god of, 100; underground music scenes, 35; and
“Xango” (Brathwaite), 100–101,
103–4
Muslim Brotherhood, 28, 43, 51,
62n59
Muslims, 84n35
mustard gas, 128
Mykura, Hamisch, 85n36
MySpace, 21–22, 36
mystification, 5–6, 8, 16n12; demystifying spectacle, 12, 14; and Freewaves biennial (2008), 14
N
napalm, 128
narcissism, 6, 99, 103–4
narratives: anticipatory narratives,
89–90, 98; and cosmopolitanism,
89–90, 93–95, 98, 104, 109,
112; of death/rebirth, 11; and
“emplotment,” 94–95; Hollywood
index
219
220
narratives (continued )
narrative style, 71; “illusionist”
narratives, 109; and media spectacles, 19, 21–22; narrative form
of spectacles, 19, 21–22; national
narrative of progress, 117–18,
123; and nature refuges, postmilitary, 11–13, 118, 130; and
9/11 terrorist attacks, 71–73;
proleptic narrative, 88–90, 93,
104, 112; “realist” narratives, 109;
state narratives, 109; Western
narrative, 8
Nasser, 39, 63n64
National Commission on Terrorist
Attacks, 78
National Democratic Party (NDP,
Egypt), 59n40
National Endowment for the Arts,
180n44
nationalism, 97, 105–6
National Mall (Washington, DC),
116–17
national park system, U.S., 126–27,
131. See also nature refuges,
post-military
national security, 117, 123, 125–26,
129; environmental security, 117,
123, 125
Native Americans, 12, 102–4, 131,
167
“native” origins, 131–34
natural disasters. See extreme weather
events
nature as spectacle, 118–19, 124–26
nature refuges, post-military, 11–13,
116–49; and charismatic species,
125–26, 129–30, 148; criticism
of, 11, 118–19, 124–25, 144–49;
and endangered species, 123, 128–
32; interpretive centers at, 119,
121fig., 123; and keystone species,
index
132; and legacy management, 118,
123–24, 126, 128, 133, 135–44,
147; and “M2W” (military-towildlife conversions), 122–23,
125–26, 128, 147; and “native”
origins, 131–34; oversight framework for, 12, 119, 135–45, 147,
149; and remainders, 109, 124,
148–49; Rocky Flats National
Wildlife Refuge, 11–12, 14–15,
136fig., 137–43, 145fig.; Rocky
Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge (RMANWR), 11–12,
121fig., 126fig., 128–34; salvation
framework for, 11, 119, 126–34,
144–45, 147, 149; and tourism,
11–12, 118, 123, 126, 130, 132–33,
145; as wilderness, 12, 124–28,
137–38. See also military, U.S.
Naudet, Gédéon, 71–72
Naudet, Jules, 71–72
NBA basketball, 21
NBC, 21
Negri, Antonio, 50
Nehretu, Julie, 174
neocolonialism, 19, 102, 104, 132
neoconservatives, 29
neoliberalism, 20–21; and nature
refuges, post-military, 12, 118–
22, 124–25; and New Orleans
biennial (2006), 174–75; and
“species line,” 124; in Tunisia, 32
neo-Marxism, 25–26, 68
nepotism, 33, 35, 51
Neshat, Shirin, 174
New American Century, 29
new media, 3, 6, 18, 21–23, 26–27;
and Arab Uprisings, 29, 31, 40–
41, 43, 52, 61n55; new media
advocacy, 43; and 9/11 terrorist
attacks, 69. See also names of new
media, e.g., Facebook
New Museum (New Orleans, La.),
173
New Orleans biennial (Prospect.1),
158–59, 172–75, 180n44; Mithra
(Bradford sculpture), 174
New Orleans biennial (Prospect.2),
180n44
New Orleans Jazz and Heritage
Foundation, 174
New Orleans Museum of Art, 174
New Women Foundation, 39
New York (Gilles et al.), 78
New York City, 42, 74, 156, 159;
Times Square, 156. See also 9/11
terrorist attacks
New Yorker, 174
New York Times, 78
Night on Earth (1991 film), 96
Nike, 21
9/11 (2002 documentary), 71–72,
84n28
9/11 terrorist attacks, 9, 14, 65–
83; and act of witnessing, 8–9,
74, 76–82; artistic response to,
72–78; and ethics of spectatorship, 80–83, 87n66; and Hollywood, 9, 65–66, 71–76, 79–80,
82, 84n28, 84n35; “live” coverage
of, 70; as media spectacle, 19–
20, 22, 25, 42–43, 52; and performance of memory, 8, 66,
69–70, 72; and real virtuality,
67–69, 80; trauma of the real,
70–72, 74, 81
9/11: The Falling Man (2002 documentary), 85n36
Noah’s Ark, 174
nonhuman nature, 120, 123, 128,
132, 134, 144–45, 147–48
nonviolence, 49–50, 52
Nord, Daniel, 163–65, 165fig.
North African Arab Uprisings. See
Arab Awakening and Uprisings
(2011)
nostalgia, 68, 92, 127–28, 132, 148,
167
NPR (National Public Radio), 85n37
nuclear facilities, 11–12, 116–18,
121–23, 126, 135–44, 147; cleanup
of, 135–41, 143–44, 147; closure
of, 137–38, 140; nuclear-industry
corporations, 116. See also Rocky
Flats
nuclear waste, 116–19, 122–24, 126,
135–40, 142–44, 146–48; burying
under lawn cover, 117, 138–40,
143; half-lives of, 116–17, 136, 140;
hiding in deserts/backyards of
poor, 117, 139; radioactive waste,
122–23, 135–36, 138–40, 143.
See also plutonium; uranium
NuitBlanche (Toronto), 158
O
Obama, Barack, 26, 45–46, 55n18
Occupy movements, 19–20, 22–24,
27, 52–53, 64n75
oceanic feeling, 96–97, 103, 115n30
oil industry, 28–29, 75
older persons, 33–34, 39, 44
Olympics, 22, 84n35
On the State of Egypt (Davies), 59n38
“Operation Desert Glow,” 138
Orisha initiations, 100
ornamentation, 97–99
Oscar and Lucinda (Carey), 89–90,
111
Oscars, 22
otherness, 5, 9, 76, 82, 149, 167
Ouedraogo, Idrissa, 75–76
Oursler, Tony, 161
“Out the Window,” 177
oversight, 12, 119, 135–45, 147, 149
Oyo Kingdom, 100
index
221
P
222
Palestinians, 60n44; Intifada, second, 62n57; Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, 84n35
palimpsestic spectacles, 90, 93
Pan-Africanism, 105–6, 114n19
Panetta, Leon, 45
Papastergiadis, Nikos, 159–60
Paris (France), 157; Paris terrorist
attack (2015), 79
Pärt, Arvo, 74
passivity, 5–6, 7, 10, 13, 24–25, 51;
157–58, 177; and nature refuges,
post-military, 144; and 9/11 terrorist attacks, 78
paternalism, 12, 107
PBS, 38, 42, 62nn58–59, 161; Frontline Report (PBS), 38
peace activists, 137
Penn, Sean, 75
Pentagon, 26
“People Power” movements (1960s),
49–50
Peress, Gilles, 78
performativity: and Arab Uprisings,
44, 108; and cosmopolitanism,
99–101, 106, 108; and Freewaves
biennial (2008), 163; and LACE
(Los Angeles Contemporary
Exhibitions), 161; and nature refuges, post-military, 12, 137–38;
66–74, 77, 80, 82, 85nn37–38;
performance of memory, 8, 66,
69–70, 72–74, 85nn37–38; performance of the real, 8–9, 67–69,
77; and “Xango” (Brathwaite),
99–101, 106
pesticides, 129
pharmakon, 7
phosphate miners, 33
index
photo books, 78
Picture Theory (Mitchell), 109
Pine, Joseph, 68
Pittman, Lari, 161
plutonium, 116–19; half-life of, 116–
17. See also nuclear waste
“Plutonium Memorial” competition,
116–19
plutonium production facilities, 11,
135, 137, 142. See also Rocky Flats
Poland, 30
police: arrests by, 43–44, 47; in
Egypt, 37–39, 41, 43–44, 47;
LAPD (Los Angeles Police Dept.),
161–62; secret police, 37, 48–49;
in Tunisia, 31, 34–35, 48–49
political contexts, 19–23, 26–27;
of Arab Uprisings, 7–8, 19–20,
25–29, 37, 39, 45–53, 108; of
Berlin Biennial (2004), 173; of
cosmopolitanism, 88–89, 99,
102–3, 108; Enlightenment cosmopolitan politics, 89; and executive withdrawal of land, 126; of
158, 160; of nature refuges, postmilitary, 11–12, 122, 125–26, 129,
134, 143, 147–48; and “new landscape of the possible,” 12; of 9/11
terrorist attacks, 9, 68, 74, 76, 79,
82; radical politics, 25–27, 29; in
“Xango” (Brathwaite), 102–3
pollution. See contamination
postcolonialism, 89, 98–99, 101–2,
111
postcolonial studies, 89
postindustrial era, 109
postmodern theory, 25, 67, 80,
85n36, 109, 111
poststructural theory, 119
poverty, 13, 75–76; and nuclear
waste, 117. See also homelessness
prediction: and cosmopolitanism,
89–93, 112; moral prediction,
90–93
progress, national narrative of, 117–
18, 123
progressive action, 3, 7–8, 15; and
Arab Uprisings, 33, 50, 59n40;
and LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), 161; in Latin
America, 50
prolepses, 88–90, 93, 104, 112
Prospect.1 (New Orleans biennial),
158–59, 172–75, 180n44
prostitution, 168
proving grounds. See nuclear facilities
proximity: and cosmopolitanism,
10, 88–89, 94, 111; in “Xango”
(Brathwaite), 10
Puerto Rico, 100, 141
purity, 118, 133; and Arab Uprisings,
95; and colonialism, 92; and
118, 124–26, 128–32, 140, 143–44;
in “Xango” (Brathwaite), 103
Q
Qaddafi, Muammar, 46–47, 49,
62n57
Qaddafi, Saif-al Islam, 47
Quinn, Bernadette, 158
R
race-specific power, 90–91, 98, 104
radiation, 116–17, 123–24
radio, 23, 75, 95; NPR (National Public Radio), 85n37; talk radio, 21
radioactive waste. See nuclear waste
Radstone, Susannah, 69
“Rais Le Bled” (song), 35–36
Rancière, Jacques, 12–13
rape, 63n69, 109
rap/rappers, 35–36, 43–44
rave nights, 35
real-estate development: and Freewaves biennial (2008), 13, 156,
174–75, 177; and nature refuges,
post-military, 123, 125–27, 133
reality, 3–6, 8–9; and cosmopoli
tanism, 94, 109; and Freewaves
biennial (2008), 13–14, 154, 176;
and nature refuges, post-military,
118–19, 125, 137, 143, 146; and
9/11 terrorist attacks, 8–9, 66–
72, 74, 77, 80, 82; performance of
the real, 8–9, 67–69, 77; “realist”
narratives, 109; “reality effect,”
10, 70; “real virtuality,” 67–69,
80; “spectacle of the real,” 68;
trauma of, 70–72
“Rebel” (song), 43–44
Rebel Without a Cause (1955 film),
166–67
recreation, 118–19, 122, 124, 139,
147
regulation, government. See oversight
reintroduction of species, 131–34
Reiss, Timothy, 102
religious significance: and Arab
Uprisings, 33; Biblical references,
102; and colonialism, 93, 102;
religious fetishism, 107; and
“Xango” (Brathwaite), 99–100,
102–3, 107, 114n19
remainders, 109, 124, 148–49
REMAP (UCLA Center for Research
in Engineering Media and Per
formance), 169–72; Cultural
Civic Computing System, 171;
“Remapping-LA: Hollywould”
(REMAP video work), 172
representations, 4–5; and Arab
Uprisings, 29, 42; colonial representations, 89, 112n4; and cosmopolitanism, 89, 95–96, 98, 104,
index
223
224
representations (continued )
108, 112n4; and nature refuges,
post-military, 130, 146–48; and
9/11 terrorist attacks, 8–9, 68–
69, 74, 82; in “Xango” (Brathwaite), 104
Republicans, 26, 55n18
resistance, 6, 11, 26; and Arab
Uprisings, 7, 20, 36, 52; and
cosmopolitanism, 10, 97–98,
102, 104, 108; and 9/11 terrorist
attacks, 68; perpetual resistance,
10; in “Xango” (Brathwaite),
102, 104
responsibility: and act of witnessing,
9, 81; and nature refuges, postmilitary, 95–96, 124, 129, 134,
140, 144; and 9/11 terrorist
attacks, 9, 81; to suffering
other, 9
Retort (leftist collective), 5, 15n8
revitalization. See gentrification
“Revolution 2.0,” 38, 40
“Revolution in Cairo” (Frontline), 38
revolutions, 7; and anti-Communist
uprisings (1989), 30–31; and
Arab Uprisings, 8, 26–28, 41,
53; Egyptian revolution (1919),
37; “first WikiLeaks revolution,”
32; “Jasmine revolution,” 33–34;
“Revolution 2.0,” 38, 40; “Twitter
revolution,” 41; as “uprisings,”
27–28, 41, 55n19; and women,
33–34, 37–38
Reynolds, Matt, 10–11, 13–14, 154–
81, 176fig., 179n31, 202–3
rhetorical persuasion, 76–77; and
colonialism, 90–93
rice-blast fungus, 129
Ricoeur, Paul, 94–95
Río de la Plata basin (Argentina), 159
risk, 78–79; and colonialism, 98; and
index
nature refuges, post-military,
124–25, 134, 136, 138–39, 142,
147; “society of risk,” 79, 125
Robbins, Bruce, 97, 103, 105, 111,
115n30
Robbins, Kevin, 80
rocket propellants, 129
Rocky Flats, 11–12, 14–15, 136fig.,
137–43; accelerated cleanup of,
137–41, 143–44; closure of, 138;
National Wildlife Refuge, 139–
43, 145fig.; and information signage, 141; and museum, 141
Rocky Mountain Arsenal (RMA),
11–12, 14–15, 128–31, 143;
cleanup of, 12, 129–30; closure
of, 129; National Wildlife Refuge
(RMANWR), 11–12, 121fig.,
126fig., 128, 130–34; and bald
eagles, 12, 124, 127, 129–31,
134, 149; and bison, 12, 128,
131–34; viewing blinds, 126fig.,
133–34; visitor center, 121fig.
rodents, 134
Rogers, Ken, 162
Rojas, James, 170, 171fig.
Rolland, Romain, 103
Romney, Mitt, 26, 55n18
Rushdie, Salman, 89, 93–94, 98,
106–7
Ruskin, John, 90–93, 111
S
al-Sadat, Anwar, 36, 63n64
Said, Khalid, 38–39
salvation framework, 11, 119, 126–
34, 144–45, 147, 149
San Fernando Valley (Calif.), 155
Sango (trade language), 100
São Paulo (Brazil), 159, 162
sarin gas, 128
Saturday (McEwan), 80
Saudi Arabia, 34
scandals, 7, 19, 21–22, 26
Schjeldahl, Peter, 174
school shootings, 25
scientific technology, 90–93. See also
technological innovations
sculpture, 160, 174
secularism: in Egypt, 49; in Tunisia,
33, 49, 51
self-immolations, 31–32, 37, 57n26
September (2003 film), 84n35
September 11 (Feldschuh), 78
September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
See 9/11 terrorist attacks
September 12 (2005 film), 72–73
sexual harassment, 48
sexuality, 22, 168–69
Sfax (Tunisia), 35
Shafik, Ahmed, 47
Shanghai (China), 162
Shango (Yoruba spirit/deity), 100,
114n19
Sharaf, Amal, 43
Sharaf, Essam, 47
Shell, 129
Shouf Shouf Habibi (2004 film), 84n35
Sidi Bouzid (Tunisia), 31, 57n27
Silverman, Kaja, 4, 9
Simonian, Michael, 116–18
Simpson, O. J., trial of, 19, 21–22, 69
simultaneity, 69, 95–96, 105
al-Sisi, Abdel Fattah, 8, 56n20
Situationist dérive, 169–70
Situationist International, 23–24,
54n6, 157, 175–76
Six Flags, 77
60 Minutes, 31–32, 57n28; “The
Spark,” 31–32
skepticism, 10, 89, 96, 175; skeptical
dissent, 96
Skylarking 3 (Lamb video work),
163–64
Slade Professor of Art (Oxford Univ.)
lecture, 90–93
slaves, 100–101
smartphones, 6, 18
Smelik, Anneke, 8–9, 10, 65–87, 203
Smith, Kathy, 66, 77
SOARS (System Operation and
Analysis at Remote Sites), 141
Sobchack, Vivian, 69
social awareness, 156, 159–60
social justice, 49, 140, 161–62
social networking, 6–7, 18, 21–23,
26; and Arab Uprisings, 29–31,
36, 40–41, 52. See also names of
social networks, e.g., Facebook
society of the spectacle, 5–7, 14,
23, 25–26, 52, 67–68. See also
Debord, Guy
solidarity: and cosmopolitanism, 10,
89, 95–99, 102–6, 111–12; in
Egypt, 60n44; as phantasmatic
sense of belonging, 10; in
“Xango” (Brathwaite), 102–6
Solidarity movement (Poland), 30
Sontag, Susan, 9, 80
soundtracks: and Freewaves biennial
(2008), 164, 169; lack of, 164;
85nn37–38
South Carolina, 135
South of the Border (2010 documentary), 50
Soviet Union, fall of, 30, 40,
56nn22–23
“The Spark” (60 Minutes), 31–32
Spielberg, Steven, 84n35
Spivak, Gayatri, 105, 114n27
Srebrenica widows, 76
starlings, 134
stereotypes, 70, 156, 167
Stone, Oliver, 50, 73
street cleaners, 172
index
225
226
strikes, Egyptian, 45, 59n40
strikes, Tunisian, 33–34; in Gafsa
(2008), 33; general strikes, 34
Subotnick, Ali, 173
subway signs, 47
suffering: “distant sufferers,” 80; and
9/11 terrorist attacks, 9, 75–76,
80–83
suicide bombers, 167
Suleimen, Omar, 45–46
Super Bowl, 22
Superflex (Danish collective), 159
Superfund (National Priorities List),
138
“Supergas,” 159
surveillance: and colonialism, 90;
and cosmopolitanism, 90, 109;
167, 179n31; and nature refuges,
post-military, 12, 133, 140–43;
self-surveillance, 142
sweatshops, 114n27
Syria, 20, 28, 42, 47, 52
Syriana (2005 film), 96
T
Tahrir Square (Cairo, Egypt), 37–41,
43–47, 50, 107, 109; and “Day of
Rage,” 39; renamed “Liberation
Square,” 44
tattoos, 72
technological innovations, 16n16,
21–24; and accidents, 79; and
Arab Uprisings, 40, 53; and colonialism, 90–93; and Freewaves
biennial (2008), 13, 170–72;
and 9/11 terrorist attacks, 68–
69, 79
Teixeira, José Carlos, 167–68
Tel Aviv bombing, 74
television, 6, 23; and act of witnessing, 76–80; and anti-Communist
index
uprisings (1989), 30; and Arab
Uprisings, 29–32, 36, 38, 41–43,
45–46, 57n28, 61n55, 107, 109;
and “breaking news,” 19–20, 43;
and cosmopolitanism, 94–95,
107; cultural codes of, 72; and
event as staged spectacle, 66; and
fear/anxiety, 78–80; and Freewaves biennial (2008), 161–64;
“instant” television, 94; and “live”
coverage, 95; and 9/11 terrorist
attacks, 65–67, 70–72, 75–82,
84n35; reality TV, 70; 24/7 cable/
satellite news, 6, 20–22, 27, 30,
41–42, 61n55, 62n58. See also
names of television networks
temporal space, 88–89, 92–95, 104,
111
Terrazzo (Beckman video work), 163,
165–66, 166fig., 179n24
terrorism, 73, 79, 84n35, 86n53;
domestic terrorism, 25; Islamicinspired, 53; as media spectacle,
20, 22, 25, 42, 52–53, 110; and
“society of risk,” 79; victims of,
42, 76. See also 9/11 terrorist
attacks
Terror War, 19, 22, 52
Thai Americans, 156, 159–60
“thanatourism,” 167
“That Other Tunisia” (Usher), 48–49
thugs, Egyptian, 38, 40, 44–45, 48
Time and Narrative (Ricoeur), 94–95
Tiravanija, Rirkrit, 159–60
torture, 47–48, 51, 76
Touhey, John, 72–73
tourism: and Freewaves biennial
(2008), 158, 164–65, 167, 172,
175–76; and nature refuges,
post-military, 11–12, 118, 123,
126, 130, 132–33, 145; and New
Orleans biennial (2006), 174;
“thanatourism,” 167; “tourism
promoter,” 174
The Towering Inferno (1974 film), 65,
72
toxicity, 117, 119, 123–24, 126, 128–
29, 131, 134, 144–45, 148–49.
See also nuclear waste
Traffic (2000), 96
trauma: and Arab Uprisings, 63n69,
109; and colonialism, 102, 104;
as excess of reality, 70–71; mediatized vs. experienced, 77–78; and
9/11 terrorist attacks, 9, 66, 70–
72, 74, 77–78, 81, 110; and nuclear
sites, 11; vicarious trauma, 81; in
“Xango” (Brathwaite), 102, 104
trauma studies, 81
tsunami in Asia, 67
Tunis (Tunisia), 48–49
Tunisia, 7, 19, 22, 27–29, 31–36, 39–
41, 43, 46–52, 109; and Bouazizi,
Mohamed, 31–32; and caretaker
government, 34–35; and coalition
government, 35; Constitutional
Democratic Party (CDP), 34–35;
Constitutional Democratic Rally
(RCD), 49; and cosmopolitanism,
95; electro and dance scene, 35;
embassies, 40; “first WikiLeaks
revolution,” 32, 57n29; Interior
Ministry, 34; “Jasmine revolution,” 33–34, 113n11; Minister
of Youth and Sport, 35; national
anthem of, 34; new constitution,
49; overthrow of government in,
95; second grassroots movement
in, 48–49; “soft coup d’état” in,
32; state of emergency in, 34;
state security department disbanded, 48–49
Tunivision (TV station), 36
25th Hour (2002 film), 84n35
24110 (“Plutonium Memorial” winner), 116–17
24/7 cable/satellite news, 20–22, 27,
30, 41–42, 61n55, 62n58. See also
names of cable/satellite networks
Twin Towers (Vergara), 78
Twitter, 6–7, 21; and Arab Uprisings,
30, 40–41, 113n11; “Twitter revolution,” 41
U
UCLA, 169–72; Cultural Civic Computing System, 171–72; REMAP
(Center for Research in Engineer
ing Media and Performance), 169–
72; “Remapping-LA: Hollywould”
(REMAP video work), 172
Understanding Media (McLuhan), 70
unemployment: in Egypt, 40; in Tunisia, 31–33, 49, 57n29
United 93 (2006 film), 73
“uprisings,” 8, 27–28, 41, 55n19
uranium, 137. See also nuclear waste
urban grime, 13
urban renewal, 156, 158, 160,
164, 172–74, 176–77. See also
gentrification
Usher, Graham, 48–49
utopian visions: and cosmopolitanism, 10, 98, 106, 111; and Freewaves biennial (2008), 14, 177;
and nature refuges, post-military,
122; “utopian unity,” 10; and
“Xango” (Brathwaite), 10, 106
V
Van Dijck, José, 69–70
“vanishing present,” 105, 114n27
Velvet Revolution (Czechoslovakia),
30, 56n22
Venezuela, 50, 100
Venice (Italy), 159, 162
index
227
228
Vergara, Camilo José, 78
V for Vendetta (2005 film), 73
victims, 11, 42; and 9/11 terrorist
attacks, 75–76, 80–81; in “Xango”
(Brathwaite), 102, 107
video works: aerial videos, 164–65;
and Arab Uprisings, 29, 37–39,
41, 57n27; on LA County buses,
167–68, 177; and Freewaves biennial (1998), 161; and Freewaves
biennial (2000), 161; and Freewaves biennial (2008), 14, 161–
69, 165fig., 166fig., 168fig1, 175,
177; and 9/11 terrorist attacks,
72; and “Out the Window,” 177;
as site-specific installations, 163–
67; video billboards, 161; video
blog (“vlog”), 37; video confessions, 167
Vietnam, 32
Vietnam War, 129
vigilante security, 44
Vilar, Jean, 158–60
violence, state: and Arab Uprisings,
29, 48, 51–52, 107, 109–10,
115n33; and biopolitics, 120; and
colonialism, 89–90, 102, 105–6;
of mapping, 89–90; and nature
refuges, post-military, 117, 120,
134, 145; and “show of force,”
115n33; and toxic exposure, 117
Virilio, Paul, 76, 79
visual, primacy of, 5–6, 16n12, 24,
74; “making visible,” 145; and
145–46; visual access, 96; visual
literacy, 87n66; visual metaphors,
100–102
Von Mäusen und Menschen (Berlin
Biennial), 158, 172–73
voodoo, 100
index
W
Wafd Party (Egypt), 37
Wage-Labour and Capital (Marx), 4
Wahab, Nadine, 43
Walk of Fame (Hollywood), 164–65,
167
Walt Disney World, 77
Washington, DC, 74, 118; National
Mall, 116–17. See also 9/11 terrorist attacks
Washington State, 135
wealth, 78, 172
“weapons of mass destruction,”
28–29, 93
websites: and Arab Uprisings, 38–
40, 42; and Freewaves biennial
(2008), 169, 171–72, 177; and
New Orleans biennial (2006),
180n44
Went, Johanna, 161
“Werther effect,” 57n26
West: and Arab Uprisings, 8; imagined community of, 81; and Orientalists, 7; visual culture, 67, 81;
Western audiences, 76; Westernstyle “democracies,” 29, 56n23;
Western values, 8
West Africa, 100–103
Western Spectacle of Governance
(Aaltola), 107–8
West Indies, 100, 104
wetlands, 118
wheat rust fungus, 129
Wikileaks, 32, 57n29
Wikipedia, 21; Wikipedification
of news, 6
wilderness, 12, 124–28, 137–38. See
also nature refuges, post-military
Willis, Cynthia, 85n37
witnessing of spectacles, 7, 10, 38;
accountability of, 82; and Arab
Uprisings, 108; and “modest
itness,” 82; and 9/11 terrorist
w
attacks, 8–9, 74, 76–82; omniscient witnesses, 77–78; vicarious
witnessing, 82; “witness before,”
108
Wolman, David, 60n45
women: and Arab Uprisings, 33–34,
37–39, 43, 48; in Egypt, 37–39,
43, 48, 63n69, 109; and rape,
63n69, 109; and sexual harassment, 48, 63n69, 109; in Tunisia,
33–34; and veils, 34. See also
gender
Wookey, Sara, 169–70, 170fig.
Woolf, Virginia, 106
workers, 33; in Egypt, 37–38, 45,
59n40, 60n44; and Freewaves
biennial (2008), 172; at nuclear
facilities, 118, 123–24, 138, 143,
145, 149; sick workers, 118, 123–
24, 138, 143, 145, 149
World Bank, 32–33
world-citizen, 97
World Cup, 21–22
worlding, 105–6
World Trade Center, 65, 67, 71, 75,
110; Ground Zero, 78, 84n35;
rebuilding of, 78. See also 9/11
terrorist attacks
World Trade Center (2006 film), 73
World Trade Center (Bullaty, Lomeo,
and Goldberger), 78
World War II, 26, 74, 136, 148
Wrong Gallery, 173
X
“Xango” (Brathwaite), 10, 89, 99–
107, 111, 114n19; blank spaces in,
100–102; disembodied voice in,
99–100; divine presence in, 89,
100–101, 103–6; and melancholy,
99–100, 104, 111; and returns,
89, 98–99, 103–6; visual metaphors in, 100–102
X/Self (Brathwaite), 99–100
Y
Yemen, 20, 28, 46–47, 52
Yoruba tradition, 100, 103–4, 114n19
Youth International of Internet activists, 32
YouTube, 6–7, 21; and Arab Uprisings, 29–30, 37, 39–41, 57n27
Z
Zalloua, Zahi, 3–17, 203
Zeno, 97
Žižek, Slavoj, 49, 66
index
229

Spectacle - ARMINDA @ Whitman College

Transcription

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