Disposable Futures. Brad Evans

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СКАЧАТЬ of politics that colonizes the imagination, denies critical engagement, and preemptively represses alternative narratives. The spectacle harvests and sells our attention, while denying us the ability for properly engaged political reflection. It engages agency as a pedagogical practice in order to destroy its capacity for self-determination, autonomy, and self-reflection. It works precisely at the level of subjectivity by manipulating our desires such that we become cultured to consume and enjoy productions of violence, becoming entertained by the ways in which it is packaged, which divorce domination and suffering from ethical considerations, historical understanding and political contextualization. The spectacle immerses us, encouraging us to experience violence as pleasure such that we become positively invested in its occurrence, while attempting to render us incapable of either challenging the actual atrocities being perpetrated by the same system or steering our collective future in a different direction.

      

      We must do more than concentrate on how the spectacle works to culture disillusionment, domination, and depoliticization. There is a need to specifically recognize the question of agency in ways that force us to look at the more uncomfortable issues of human desire and our own shameful compromises and complicity with the system. What is more, we must also be concerned with the internal contradictions that characterize spectacles, how to identify and sustain oppositional moments, and how to develop successful strategies for creative resistance and rethinking what the political might actually mean for us going forward.

      All networks of power retain a capacity for resistance. Without this counter-force to domination, as Michel Foucault understood all too well, there would be no power relationship. Power by definition is relational, and thus is constituted by the capacity to resist. It is never totalizing. Having said this, we cannot stress enough how the intersection of violence, subjugation, and the media has produced yet another complicated twist in the drama of the spectacle—one that offers a distinctively different set of political registers for grasping its effects on both the contemporary and future shape of media and the broader global public sphere. Interrogating the spectacle of violence in our dystopian times demands a new pedagogical awareness that must open new lines of thinking that gesture beyond its normalization.

       Voyeurs of Suffering

      Spectacles of violence are powerful modes of public pedagogy that function, in part, to fragment and alienate an active and engaged citizenry, transforming it into a passive audience. Who is targeted tells us a great deal about the strategic ambitions and rational underpinnings of the violence. Contemporary neoliberal societies deal with spectacles of violence in a particularly novel way. Unlike previous totalitarian systems that relied upon the terror of secrecy, modern neoliberal societies bring most things into the open. They continually expose us to that which threatens the fabric of the everyday. Even the violent excesses of neoliberal societies—which past generations would surely have viewed as pathologically deranged—are all too easily repackaged for acceptable public consumption. While serial murder, excessive torture, cruel and unusual punishment, secret detentions, and the violation of civil liberties are deeply ingrained in the history of Western imperial domination, in the contemporary moment they no longer elicit condemnation, disgust, and shame. Rather, they have become normalized—celebrated even—in both popular culture and state policy. A lack of public outcry in response to both reports of government torture and its legimation by high-ranking government officials such as former vice president Dick Cheney are surely linked to an explosion of coldblooded portrayals of torture in the mainstream media, extending from the documentaries and news that provide graphic detail of the activities of serial killers to more highbrow fare such the highly acclaimed television drama 24, or the Hollywood film Zero Dark Thirty, with their depictions of utterly unscrupulous characters as admirable, almost heroic, figures. Whereas popular representations of torture prior to 2001 were typically presented as acts of atrocity, the post-9/11 climate has accepted such representations as common fare, even those depictions of blatant human rights violations designed to elicit the audience’s respect. Today’s screen culture thus contains within it “an echo of the pornographic in maximizing the pleasure of violence.”⁷²

      Consider in this context the justification offered by director Kathryn Bigelow for the depiction of torture in her film Zero Dark Thirty: “Those of us who work in the arts know that depiction is not endorsement. If it was, no artist would be able to paint inhumane practices, no author could write about them, and no filmmaker could delve into the thorny subjects of our time.”⁷³ There is no doubt some truth to what Bigelow points out here. It is incumbent upon the arts to waken us out of our dogmatic slumber. If art has any purpose, surely it is to disrupt what we take for granted, and thereby dignify voices and affirm differences that are customarily dismissed. Art in this regard is not simply communication. It is inseparable from the fight for the articulation of new sensibilities that by their very nature reveal and challenge the violence of the contemporary moment. Or else it merely becomes product or the worst type of sentimentality. What Bigelow’s statement fails to grasp, though, is the manner in which her movies (including The Hurt Locker) actively celebrate the militarization of entertainment while lacking any critical edge whatsoever in terms of their representations or a broader narrative. Not only does she fail to offer any meaningful rupture of mainstream representational narratives that continue to normalize the use of torture and indefinite detention, but she becomes complicit in her rendering of such atrocities as legal, useful, and necessary acts “of our time.” While she depicts violence as ubiquitous and inevitable, it is surely the absences in her films that define their overarching messages. Indeed, in The Hurt Locker, the voices of disposable “Arabs” are almost fully written out of the movie’s dialogue, while those who are killed in action (including the British mercenaries) are shown as having more rational and compassionate qualities. Also written out of her script is the fact that torture often does not even work in securing vital information. More often than not, it prompts its victim to say anything in order to get the torture to cease. Not only does the film make the false claim that the use of torture on the part of the CIA led to Bin Laden’s killing, it also, as Naomi Wolf points out, “makes heroes and heroines out of people who committed violent crimes against other people based on their race—something that has historical precedent.”⁷⁴ A desire for violence, it seems, is the surest guarantee of survivability throughout Bigelow’s movie scores.

      A case against artistic neutrality is likewise stressed by Slavoj Žižek: “Imagine a documentary that depicts the Holocaust in a cool, disinterested way as a big industrial-logistical operation, focusing on the technical problems involved (transport, disposal of bodies, preventing panic among the prisoners to be gassed). Such a film would either embody a deeply immoral fascination with its topic, or it would count on the obscene neutrality of its style to engender dismay and horror in spectators.”⁷⁵ Hence, for Žižek, Bigelow’s claim to political neutrality is not only absurd in light of the subject matter, which is by nature deeply political, it is a mockery of the art of cinema, which cannot be divorced from the political content it consciously chooses to screen:

      One doesn’t need to be a moralist, or naïve about the urgencies of fighting terrorist attacks, to think that torturing a human being is in itself something so profoundly shattering that to depict its neutrality—that is, to neutralize or sanitize this shattering dimension—is already a kind of endorsement. . . . This is normalization at its purest and most efficient—there is a little unease, but it is more about the hurt sensitivity than about ethics, and the job has to be done.⁷⁶

      Indeed, it would appear that the spectacle of violence now mimics a new kind of—to quote Susan Sontag—“fascinating fascism” that overtly politicizes representations of violence and discredits critically engaged aesthetics.⁷⁷ Torturing people is now a mainstay of what might be called the “carnival of cruelty” designed to entertain and exhilarate on the screen, while in real life torture is militantly sanctioned as a security necessity. At the same time, mainstream entertainment programming is flooded with endless representations of individuals, government officials, and the police operating outside of the law as a legitimate way СКАЧАТЬ