The Politics of Ethical Witnessing: The Participatory Networks of 9/11 Media Culture A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Emanuelle Wessels IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Adviser: Ronald Walter Greene September 2010 © Emanuelle Wessels 2010 Acknowledgements First, I would like to thank my advisor, Ronald Walter Greene. Professor Greene consistently went above and beyond to guide me through this project, and his insight, patience, and encouragement throughout the process gave me the motivation and inspiration to see this dissertation to the end. Thank you for everything, Ron. Thank you to Professors Laurie Ouellette, Cesare Casarino, and Gilbert Rodman for conversing with me about the project and providing helpful and thoughtful suggestions for future revisions. I would also like to thank Professor Mary Vavrus for serving on my committee, and for assisting me with crucial practical and administrative matters. Professor Edward Schiappa, whose pragmatic assistance has also been much appreciated, has been invaluably supportive and helpful to me throughout my graduate career. I would also like to acknowledge the many professors who have inspired me throughout the years, including Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Donald Browne, Thomas Pepper, Elizabeth Kotz, Greta Gaard, and Richa Nagar. Without the kindness and friendship of the many wonderful people I have had the pleasure of meeting in graduate school, none of this would have been possible either. A heartfelt thank you to my friends, including Julie Wilson, Joseph Tompkins, Alyssa Isaacs, Carolina and Eric Branson, Kate Ranachan, Matthew Bost, Kaitlyn Patia, Alice Leppert, Anthony Nadler, Helen and Justin Parmett, Thomas Johnson, and Rebecca Juriz. Kate Pearson and Joe Stansbury’s friendships have been dear to me as well. Thank you to my mother, Deborah, my brother, Victor, and my late Father Kenneth Wessels. An extra-special thank you to Mark Martinez, whose unyielding love, support, and inspiration during this time I will always cherish. i Table of Contents Chapter One : Convergence, Interactivity, and an Ethics and Politics of Seeing Media…1 Part One : Labor, Bodies, and Vision in Encounters with Media………………..1 Part Two : Situating a Theory of Viewing in Film Studies………………………6 Part Three : Trauma Politics……………………………………………………...22 Part Four : Levinasian Ethics and The Real……………………………………...25 Part Five : Ethical Witnessing and Politics………………………………………32 Part Six : Going Forward………………………………………………………...38 Chapter Two : The Conspiracy in the Participatory Network: Populism, Network Architecture, and Alex Jones’ 9/11: The Road to Tyranny……………………………...47 Introduction ………………………………………………………………………47 Part One : Building a Conspiracy: Populism and the Witness of Global Evil……50 1. The Road to Tyranny?..................................................................................50 2. A Conspiracy Defined…………………………………………………..…55 3. Constructing a Conspiracy Witness: 9/11: The Road to Tyranny ‘s Aesthetic, Narrative, and Mode of Address…………………………..….66 Part Two: Links and Loops: Building Linking Witnesses of Conspiracy Culture………………………………………………….…...78 Part Three : Testify? Viewer Responses and You Tube’s Interface………….…..84 Conclusion : Conspiracy Consequences, Certainty, and Conviction: From Ethos to Affect………………………………………………………………….....94 Chapter Three : Witnessing, Alterity, and Surveillance: Cloverfield ’s Participatory ii Spectacle………………………………………………………………………104 Introduction : Witnessing and Surveillance…………………………………....104 Part One : Monsters and Witnessing…………………………………………...105 Part Two : Cloverfield and the 9/11 Surveillance Witness……………………..113 Part Three : Interactivity, Surveillance, and Witnessing Cloverfield …………...128 Conclusion …………………………………………………………………...…138 Chapter Four : Ethical Witnessing and Participation: Control Room and its Online Spaces…………………………………………………………………..142 Introduction : Ethical Witnessing and Ideological Quilting………………...…..142 Part One : Control Room and Response-able Witnessing…………………...….153 Part Two : Interactivity, Responsibility, and Action: Control Room ’s Online Links……………………………………………………………………163 1. Control Room ’s Website and Self-Narration: Building a Witnessing Position……………………………………………………………..163 2. Beyond the Text: Linking the Ethical Witness……………………………………………...…………...…172 Conclusion : Vision, Action, and Response-ability…………………………….177 Conclusion: Ethical Witnessing and a Politics of Peace………………………………180 Bibliography …………………………………………………………………………...189 iii Chapter One Convergence, Interactivity, and an Ethics and Politics of Seeing Media Part One Rationale: Labor, Bodies, and Vision in Encounters with Media In “The Gaze of Biocinema,” Kiarina Kordela proposes an alternative model of cinematic spectatorship to account for current state of global capitalism. Applying Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s notions of immaterial and affective labor, Louis Althusser’s model of ideology, and the concept of the gaze borrowed from Lacanian psychoanalysis 1, Kordela forwards the concept of biocinema. The biocinematic experience, she contends, occurs when spectators are interpellated as materializations of immaterial or affective labor power by the gaze of the Big Other, the capitalist means of production, which constitutes spectators as laboring-subjects under its gaze. Cinema, as a component of the culture industry in empire, captures spectators’ feelings, affects and responses, thereby refiguring them as affective laborers who, through their interaction with a component of the culture industry, work on its behalf when they look at its spectacle. Through Kordela’s account, the working of Empire through media appears as a seamless totality, fully functioning in its ability to produce laboring subjects in global capitalism. The possibility for escape, excess or resistance to this model seems unlikely, for 1 The gaze, according to Lacan, is that which looks at the subject from outside, the Big Other which forces the looked-upon to see their own lack, to experience oneself as a “blind spot” or gap within the symbolic order. In other words, I can never see you from the place that you see me, and the affect of this realization is profoundly terrifying and anxiety-inducing. 1 [T]he gaze always emerges not from the subject but from the object; yet in biopolitical production, the object in question becomes the means of production which, due to their universal (global) character, entail a gaze capable of seeing the totality of the world order (162). In this model, the screen stands in as the gaze of global capitalism, and performs the biopolitical function of regulating, disciplining, and constructing a body, generating affect and re-territorializing it as affective labor. The cinematic apparatus, or technologies of production and image construction, serve as the “mechanisms of biopower” (153), which enable this process. There is, in Kordela’s approach, only one type of gaze produced by this screen, that of global capitalism, and hence only one type of subject formation occurring, that of the emergence of the affective laborer. The outcome seems unavoidable, for, argues Kordela, biopolitical society, and the instantiation of biocinema, entails “collapse of the opposition inside-outside” and “collapse of the traditional dualism regarding power” (160). Kordela is referring to biopower/empire’s erosion of any notion of the Cartesian cogito (existence as constituted through recognition of self-awareness), for, as she demonstrates, we come to “be” in global capitalism through processes that eclipse an inner sense of self. If inner spaces no longer exist as such, or have been wholly captured by the workings of biopower, then it is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine encounters with media that entail any kind of affective experience beyond or in opposition to global capitalism’s operations of working. 2 As a response to projects such as Kordela’s this project revisits ethical theories of trauma grounded in the concept of witnessing. With an emphasis on media viewership and interactivity, I assess the ethics and politics of convergence culture. Returning to early formulations of the cinematic apparatus in the 1970s, which used Lacanian psychoanalysis as their starting point, I will trace the possibilities, and limitations, offered by the current landscape of media convergence. Some of the key questions that I will address in this project include: Are there alternative models for imagining a gaze, vision, and subject formation in the current moment of global capitalism? Should there be? Are there sites, spaces, and formations of media culture that allow or enable different sorts of approaches to mediated ethics of vision to emerge? Are there sites that foreclose upon such moments? How is media convergence implicated in the processes of ethical witnessing? This project attempts to map constructions of mediated subjectivity and visual culture through structures of spectatorship, which now must be expanded to include interactive and participatory “new” media platforms. I begin with an application of Lacanian theories of viewing with Emmanuel Levinas’ phenomenological ethics to discuss the ways in which the witnessing-subject, constructed as a product of mediated encounters, can be produced when confronted with the traumatic outside of the other’s presence. I pay specific attention to the ways technologies of viewing and engaging/interacting with media work in tandem