3. Atrocity and the Discourse of Violence - E-mediate

Atrocity, celebrity, deictics:
a new heurethics for media
A Dissertation Submitted to the Division of Media and Communications of the European Graduate School in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy By Peter Hulm June 2004 Dissertation defended August 2004 Awarded: Magna Cum Laude Defense Committee: Avital Ronell (New York University) Diane Davis (University of Texas at Austin) Wolfgang Schirmacher (European Graduate School) The thesis was revised, taking into account material published in 2005, in
accordance with the Committee's comments and discussions with the reviewer
Mark Daniel Cohen. Acknowledgements to all four for their valuable
suggestions. In quotations from authors, / indicates the break between pages cited. 1. Abstract
Atrocity presents a unique challenge both to media and to philosophy.
Atrocity, not suicide, it is suggested, is the key issue for modern
philosophy[1]. Atrocity annihilates all attempts to give life meaning and
destroys forever a subject's possibility of seeking justice as well as the
individual's relation with the world. For media, concerned with assembling
the contingent into socially approved meanings, atrocity remains an
irreducible anomaly. The suffering of victims never really becomes news
more than momentarily, while the issue never goes away from the public
agenda, but remains there unresolved. The difficulties, it is suggested,
come from the philosophical challenges posed. But, along with celebrity, atrocity is a major tool of modern politics[2],
employing the same tools of repression and panopticism in a totalitarian
biopolitics. Rather than an anomaly, atrocity is only human behavior acting
at one extremity. Posthumanism[3], particularly in its practical applications that form the
core of thinking for Jacques Derrida and Gregory Ulmer, Donna Haraway and
Avital Ronell, provides guidance on how the media, to do justice to
atrocity, can create a new 'heurethics' (ethics that requires invention),
starting from the standpoint of 'positioned knowledge' (deictics). A number
of contemporary artists, ranging from Chantal Akerman and Claude Lanzmann
to Steven Spielberg, Peter Greenaway and Jean-Luc Godard, open doors on the
same vistas. This dissertation introduces a number of new terms into communications
theory: language-event, the culture of interruption, the penumbra of the
present, aporias of knowledge, terminality, bricollage, deictics and
heurethics (among others). It also challenges a number of traditional
conceptions within specific disciplines, particularly the political and
social sciences, with regard to violence, justice, celebrity, and, of
course, atrocity.
Table of Contents Atrocity, celebrity, deictics: a new heurethics for media 1 Abstract 3 Prologue: Watching Ronald Reagan's Funeral 6 Funerals as Rituals 6 Re-creating the Teflon President 7 The power of television myth 8 The Problem of the 'Natural' 9 The subject produced by interpellation 11 Jean Baudrillard's Critique of the Subject 12 Reagan's funeral as a language-event 13 The excluded subject and the accidental 16 The discourse of immediacy 17 Derrida's Questions on Mourning 18 Contesting the Real 19 Fitting the event to the discourse 20 Discourse transposition 21 The Culture of Interruption 22 Rethinking institutions 26 1. Atrocity and Aporias of Knowledge 27 Aporias of choice 30 2. Atrocity and the Discourse of Violence 33 Tribal violence 34 Defining violence 35 Misreadings of violence 35 Punishment 36 Redress for wrongs 36 Community, kin and outsiders 38 Compensation rules define the tribe 39 A threat of violence maintains the law 39 Drawing boundaries 40 Intimidation and 'lynching' 40 Violence as Other 41 Placing violence in society 43 Violence and terrorism 44 Violence and the media 45 Forcing Knowledge into Repressed Memory 52 3. The irreducibility of atrocity 53 Defining atrocity 55 Positioned thinking 56 The 'justifications' for atrocity 57 Terminality 58 The assumption of power over bare life 60 Terminality without ideology 61 Apocalyptic visions 62 Tyrannical thought 63 War as preservation 63 The excluded middle 64 Two Views of Evil 64 The questionable banality of evil 65 The banality of good 67 The new disciplinary order 68 Science and technology vs. the citizen 69 The place of language 71 Atrocity and humor 72 Motors of prejudice 73 4. Experiencing and Inflicting Atrocity 75 Seeking to remain inside the law 75 The first hours 76 The destruction of narrative 76 Retaining the human 77 Surviving atrocity 77 The difficult of speech 78 Inflicting atrocity 79 5. Witnesses and bystanders 82 Percepticide 82 Celebrating defeat 83 The politics of the blind eye 84 6. Atrocity and Justice 85 Crime and punishment 85 Nietzsche and Rawls 86 Derrida and Justice 88 Private experience and public presentation of atrocity 89 7. Atrocity and celebrity 91 Twelve characteristics of celebrity 91 Napoleon, the self-made celebrity 94 Visibility, observability and gossip 95 The power of crowds 96 The twilight of the icons 99 8. Extralude 101 9. Aporisms: atrocity, celebrity and the arts 102 Godard and Disenchantment 104 Greenaway: Waiting for Prospero - or Oblivion? 108 Chantal Akerman: The Claims of Silence 110 Claude Lanzmann: Mission Impossible 111 David Lynch: The Feeling of What Happens 112 Steven Spielberg: The Claims of Sentimentality 113 Joseph Heller: Getting into Death 121 Orwell's Sadists 124 Imagining Argentina: Hollywood does Argentina's dirty war 127 10. Reporting Atrocity 130 What is unspeakable in atrocity? 131 11. A postmodern critique of media 134 Media and crowds 134 News on television 138 Television's Technologies of Desire 141 The idle gaze 141 In the moment 142 The male gaze of news vs MTV 143 The degree zero style in news 144 The delegated gaze 144 Advertising: the concatenation of images 145 12. A deictic ethic and aesthetic 146 Refusing the delicious fruit 147 Developing a new relationship to experience 148 Re-thinking the Unthinkable 149 Understanding the Event 151 The place of technology 152 Indiscernibility 152 13. Deictic media practices 154 Positioning knowledge 156 Heurethics 158 Valuing Stories 158 The traps of knowledge 159 Deictic strategies: (1) Performative philosophy 160 Deictic strategies: (2) Interactivations, wild sociology, meta-cinema
161 Deictic strategies: (3) Making the political personal 162 Deictic strategies: (4) Question your qualia 165 Deictic strategies: (5) Paralinguistic parallelisms 171 Deictic strategies: (6) The citizen journalist / journalist citizen
174 Deictic strategies: (7) The Death of the Reader 189 Multiplex television 199 The meaning of contingency 199 14. Conclusion 201 Epilogue: Reviewing the Photos from Abu Ghraib and the Video Biography of
John Kerry 205 The Photos at Abu Ghraib 206 John Kerry's Video Biography 207 Bibliography 209
Prologue: Watching Ronald Reagan's Funeral "The patient is not cured because he remembers. He remembers because he
is cured." - Jacques Lacan[4]
Funerals as Rituals Funerals, like poetry, make nothing happen[5]. Both seek to eliminate the
accidental. Given that, except in dreams, the contingent is always
insistently present, both poetry and rituals are judged by their
effectiveness at incorporating what cannot be predicted and assigning it a
meaning in the form itself. The process of ritualization thus determines
what is significant and what is not. As a result, in ritual, there are only
two ways of dealing with the contingent. Where it cannot be absorbed into
the symbolic occasion (such as the death itself), it is ignored. Otherwise,
it is considered a challenge to the ritual's ability to give meaning to
itself (the assertion of its sacredness[6]). Out of this continually
unresolved tension society makes its meanings.[7] Mary Douglas, Irish Catholic-born and the modern anthropologist most
concerned with rituals in industrial societies, concedes that in common
usage "ritual has become a bad word signifying empty conformity" (1970:19).
Against this, she argues that even today societies use ritualism "to
signify heightened appreciation of symbolic action"(26). Translating this
into postmodern terms, with its "incredulity towards metanarratives"
(Lyotard 1979:xxiv) - whether Marxism, progress or anthropology - this
suggests that ritual must somehow today create the meanings it wishes to
assert and win appreciation for its symbolic actions, and it can do this
most easily by calling on a storehouse of readily available significations
already current in society, reshaping these to its immediate purposes. That
is, one must be alert