1 Mediated Terror and the Politics of Representation
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Language Wars The Role of Media and Culture in Global Terror and Political Violence Jeff Lewis Pluto P Press LONDON • ANN ARBOR, MI Lewis 00 pre iii 25/8/05 16:12:07 First published 2005 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 839 Greene Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106 www.plutobooks.com Copyright © Jeff Lewis 2005 The right of Jeff Lewis to be identifi ed as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7453 2485 1 hardback ISBN 0 7453 2484 3 paperback Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services Ltd, Fortescue, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG, England Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Printed and bound in the European Union by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne, England Lewis 00 pre iv 25/8/05 16:12:07 For Belinda Lewis 00 pre v 25/8/05 16:12:07 Contents Acknowledgements x Introduction 1 Terrorism and Language Wars 1 The Mediation of Terror 5 Culture and the Political Signifi er 8 Cultural Politics and Globalization 11 Government, Democracy and the Mediasphere 15 Structure and Methods 17 Key Concepts 19 1 Mediated Terror and the Politics of Representation 21 Terror 21 Televisual Media and the Broadcast of Violence 31 Representation and Violence 37 The First Casualty: War and Truth 43 Conclusions 53 2 Confl ict and Culture: Civilization, History, Identity 55 Culture and Islam 55 The Clash of Civilizations Thesis 58 The Media and Cultural Division 63 Division and Identity Politics 67 History and the Roots of Islam 73 Modernization and Civil Society in the Middle East 79 Palestine and the ‘Jewish Question’ 83 The Body Politic: Interface with Globalization 86 Interdependence and the Formation of the Cultural Divide 90 Conclusions 92 3 The Meaning of 9/11: In the Midst of Infi nite Justice 94 Meaning and the Aesthetics of Terror 94 Divine Justice: Global Order 97 Citizens, Consensus and Dissent 104 Hero–Victims 108 Public Opinion and the Not-Quite-Real 110 vii Lewis 00 pre vii 25/8/05 16:12:07 viii Language Wars The Meaning of America and the Twin Towers 112 Freedom 118 Surveillance and Control 121 Conclusions 128 4 The Iraq Invasion: Democracy in the Field of Battle 130 The Purposes of War 130 From Freedom to Democracy 136 Coalitions of the Killing 139 Democracy in the Age of Terror 141 The Electronic Polis 146 Bomb the World 151 In Bed with al-Qa’ida 154 Al-Jazeera and the Alternative Media 162 Conclusions 166 5 Globalizing Jihad: The Bali Bombings at the End of Paradise 168 October 12 and Global Jihad 168 Jamaah Islamiyah 171 Paradise Defi led 174 Clash of Imaginings: Global and National Context 177 The Crisis of Contiguity 183 The Bombings: Media and Political Discourses 189 The Blind Puppeteer: Atrocity and Civil Society in Indonesia 195 Development and Recovery in Bali 200 Conclusions 203 6 The Occupation of Iraq: Rule of Law and the New Public Sphere 206 Resolution 206 The First Casualty: David Kelly and Trial by Ordeal 208 The New Iraq 214 Privatization and Occupation 219 Ordeal and Execution 223 Al-Jazeera and the Rule of Law 226 Images of Violence: Photographs and the Transformative Public Sphere 230 Ordeals at Abu Ghraib 232 The Body Politic and Abu Ghraib 238 Lewis 00 pre viii 25/8/05 16:12:07 Contents ix Theatre of War 244 Conclusions 246 Conclusion: Cultural Democracy, Difference and the End of Civilization 248 Language Wars Here and Over There 248 Democracy and Global Culture 251 The Hijab and Global Politics 255 World Government: Beware the Faithful 259 References 267 Index 277 Lewis 00 pre ix 25/8/05 16:12:07 Acknowledgements I would like to express my profound gratitude to Belinda, Jay and Sian without whose support and friendship this book could not have been written. My thanks also to Liz Shuter, John Hill and Jordie Hill for providing such a conducive space in which to write Language Wars. Thanks to the School of Applied Communication at RMIT University and to the University’s Research and Innovation sector for their direct fi nancial support. Thanks to my colleagues at the Globalism Institute for their invaluable intellectual input and good humour. My gratitude is also extended to my many students and colleagues who have made my life as an academic so rich and rewarding. I would like to acknowledge David Castle and the team at Pluto Press for their considerable faith, enthusiasm and encouragement. x Lewis 00 pre x 25/8/05 16:12:07 Introduction TERRORISM AND LANGUAGE WARS During the three-day siege in a small school in southern Russia, international audiences became absorbed by a narrative of increasingly familiar dread. The Beslan siege of September 2004 resolved itself in bloodshed. Our worst fears realized, images of injured, dead and dying children were beamed into living rooms across the world. Governments, reporters and publics were forced once again to give expression to a sense of grief and horror that tested the extremities of our comprehension. The motif of terror seemed to fi nd a new level of depravity. Around 360 people, mostly children, were killed in the siege, and as many more were injured. Survivors described the brutality of the hostage-takers who, wearing suicide bomb-belts and wielding sophisticated military weapons, had summarily executed anyone who spoke or moved without direction. But this was not a spontaneous operation. The Chechen rebels had laid weapons, ammunition and explosives in and around the school’s gymnasium prior to the attack. The town of Beslan had been strategically selected by the rebels in order to maximize the symbolic force of their actions. Lying at the intersection of southern Russia’s ethnic divisions – Ingush, Abkhaz, Ossetians and Georgians – Beslan clearly represented for the militants the brutal hegemony of Soviet and Russian imperialism. Within the region of Ossetia, Beslan had been part of Russia since the eighteenth century; neighbouring Ingushetia was annexed to the Soviet Union in 1917. During the First World War, Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin accused the Ingush and the Chechens of collaborating with Nazi Germany and forcibly deported the great majority of these people to the central Asian republic of Kazakhstan. Tens of thousands of Chechens died in these purges and the survivors were only allowed to return to their homelands after Stalin’s death in 1953. Clearly, the cultural memory of the Ingush and Chechen militants, who are suspected of carrying out the terrorist assault in Beslan, identifi es the Ossetians with the oppression of Russian and Soviet imperial history. This memory, while constructed through various forms of tribal, linguistic and religious difference, has been 1 Lewis 01 intro 1 25/8/05 16:11:52 2 Language Wars more substantively generated through the political momentum of modernization – including the volition of ideology, nation and globalization. Thus, the formation of this difference as wars over ‘culture’ is profoundly political. The meaning of the siege in Beslan can never be disengaged from the historical, cultural and political circumstances that brought these players into confl ict at this particular place and at this particular time. It is not, therefore, suffi cient to reduce this complex matrix of causes to simple polemics – good against evil, the west against the east, Christianity against Islam. Rather, these agonisms are generated through the confl uence of historical and contemporary cultural conditions that inevitably construct, deconstruct and challenge various modes of meaning and meaning-making. Our principal term for describing this effect is ‘language wars’. These wars are constituted out of the human propensity for forming community, culture and meanings; these formative processes stimulate their own contentions both within particular social groups and between social groups. Tension, contention, dispute are all ‘expressivities’ of culture, the most acute of which manifest themselves as actual bodily violence. While language wars may be sporadic and instantaneous, marking the confl ict between specifi c semantic moments, they may also be drawn through history and more durable social and cultural formations. A sporadic contention, however, can never be isolated from the broader dynamics of meaning-making. As we will discuss in detail in Chapter 2, this interconnection of discourses and texts has been characterized by various theorists as ‘intertextuality’, a process by which all utterances are connected ultimately to each other (see Barthes, 1977, Derrida, 1974, Kristeva, 1984, Orr, 2003). In terms of ‘language wars’ we will focus on the congregation of discursive tensions that are evolving around the current phase of global terror and political violence. These tensions, however, are connected to texts and discourses that reach well back in history and which have become conscripted into current discussions and debates. In particular, we are interested in those discourses that are contributing to the construction of a revivifi ed cultural polemic which we are calling ‘the new east–west’ divide. For the purposes of this book, ‘language’ refers to any meaning-making system – image, lexical and sound-based. While we will distinguish specifi cally between the language systems of writing and image-based broadcast mediation, we will nevertheless maintain a general view that ‘language’ (discourse, text, semiosis) is the principal mechanism Lewis 01 intro 2 25/8/05 16:11:52 Introduction 3 for generating meaning and sustaining culture. We also distinguish between ‘society’ as the aggregation of individuals and communities, and ‘culture’ as the integration of meaning-making processes and these social formations (Lewis, 2002a: 12–18).