Abstract
In this paper, we analyse how news images of the 2015 Syrian refugee ‘crisis’ visualise refugees and how, in so doing, they mobilise various forms of moral responsibility in ‘our’ mediated public life – various practical dispositions of action towards the misfortunes of migrants and refugees at Europe’s border. On the basis of empirical material from European news (June-December 2015), we construct a typology of visibilities of the ‘crisis’, each of which situates refugees within a different regime of visibility and claim to action: i) visibility as biological life, associated with monitorial action; ii) visibility as empathy associated with charitable action; iii) visibility as threat, associated with state security; iv) visibility as hospitality, associated with political activism; and v) visibility as self-reflexivity, associated with a post-humanitarian engagement with people like ‘us’. In conclusion, we argue that, important as these five categories of visibility are in introducing public dispositions to action towards the vulnerable, they nonetheless ultimately fail to humanise migrants and refugees. This failure to portray them as human beings with lives that are worth sharing should compel us, we urge, to radically re-think how we understand the media’s responsibility towards vulnerable others.
Introduction
Amnesty International’s report on the 2015 refugee ‘crisis’ 1 in Europe was entitled “The global refugee crisis: a conspiracy of neglect” (Amnesty International, 2015a). Targeting the failure of the international community to host the millions who fled Syria and other conflict zones in search of safety, the AI report urged “states to … renew their commitment to international responsibility-sharing” (Amnesty International, 2015b). In light of the subsequent national border closures along the refugees’ European route, which effectively blocked their access to the continent in March 2016, Amnesty’s call for ‘responsibility sharing’ raises important questions. How did the visual regimes of news in Europe participate in shaping collective imaginations of the refugee ‘crisis’? Which conceptions of refugees did they produce in their visual representations? And what forms of responsibility towards refugees were articulated through these representations?
The importance of these questions, however, does not only stem from their political and humanitarian urgency. They are also relevant to academic debate. Emerging research on news reporting of the 2015 crisis has already described such reporting as combining empathetic responses, in the early stages of the ‘crisis’, with suspicion or hostility, after the November 13th terror attacks in Paris (Berry et al., 2015; Georgiou and Zaborowski, 2016). Rather than unique to the recent crisis, this combination of empathy with suspicion is an established pattern in the representation of human mobility, long criticised for dehumanising refugees.
Our intention is to go beyond such critiques. Even though questions of humanity remain central to the visualisation of refugees, our interest lies elsewhere. It lies in studying the ways in which imageries of humanity open up the question of ‘what to do’ in the face of suffering – what, after Silverstone (2006: 152), we refer to as ‘formal responsibility’, or “the responsibility I have for my own acts, those aspects of life and deed which I can be held accountable for”. Analysing news visualities, then, is about identifying the various performances of responsible agency, which, by recurring in news imagery of the ‘crisis’, act as forms of ‘moral education’ (Chouliaraki, 2006). Instead, therefore, of clustering visual patterns narrowly in terms of their potential for ‘empathetic’ or ‘threatening’ agency only, as existing literature does, our analysis enables a broader range of ethico-political proposals for action to emerge in the European news of the 2015 ‘crisis’. What normative dispositions of responsibility towards refugees do news images articulate? And what do these norms tell us about the nature of this ‘crisis’? Is this ultimately a ‘refugee crisis’ or a crisis of responsibility itself?
Our analysis relies on newspaper headline images across five European countries (Greece, Hungary, Italy, Ireland, and UK) so as to create a typology of refugee visibilities, each of which proposes different forms of civic agency and responsibility towards refugees – what Chouliaraki (2006, 2008) has elsewhere analysed as the news media’s ‘politics of pity’. This typology reflects a broad repertoire of practices of responsible agency, from monitorial to empathetic to self-reflexive citizenship. Yet, we argue, none of these tropes enable ‘us’, the hosting publics, to engage with refugees as actors endowed with their own humanity. In order to grant these people with humanity and voice, we conclude, news imagery needs to move beyond notions of ‘formal’ responsibility, that is responsibility for our own actions as active citizens, towards the notion of what Silverstone, after Jonas (1984), refers to as ‘substantial’ responsibility, or “responsibility for the condition of the other” (Silverstone, 2006: 152). While the former enables action at the cost of depriving refugees of humanity and voice, the latter bears the potential for endowing refugees with ‘narratability’: the ability to articulate their own life histories, trajectories and aspirations as irreducibly human endeavours.
Victimhood and threat: a literature review
The role of visual reporting on human mobility crises has been extensively researched (King and Wood, 2001; Wright, 2002, 2004) with literature on the recent crisis growing fast (Berry et al., 2015; Chouliaraki, 2017; Georgiou and Zaborowski, 2016; Giannakopoulos and Anagnostopoulos, 2016; Malafouri, 2015; Musarò, 2017). As in broader studies of the media representation of migration (e.g. Van Dijk, 1991), visual analysis, too, identifies the refugee as a fundamentally ambivalent media figure. On the one hand, the refugee emerges as a victim of geo-political conflict in need of protection, yet, on the other, she/he appears as a threat to the nation-based order and is to be excluded from ‘our’ community (Moore et al., 2012; Nyers, 1999). This symbolic instability of the refugee, swiftly shifting between speechless victim and evil-doing terrorist, lies at the heart of critical scholarship on refugee imagery. Insofar as the refugee is trapped between these two positions, the argument has it, media visualities are informed by a deep-seated orientalism that continues to reproduce historical tropes of colonial imagery in contemporary portrayals of mobile populations (Malkki, 1996). Let us examine these two positions, in turn.
The critique of victimhood takes its starting point from two visual features of refugee representation: massification, which depicts them as a multitude of indistinguishable individuals, for instance, in the portrayals of “impressive but impersonal” images of people living in the Za’atari refugee camp in Lebanon (Berman, 2016: 102); and passivisation, in the portrayals of refugees primarily as bodies-in-need, deprived of food, clothes or shelter – what Owens (2011: 135), following Agamben, calls “humans as animals in nature without political freedom”. Both features, critics claim, contribute to the de-humanisation of refugees (Malkki, 1996). Clustering refugees into one single undifferentiated mass deprives them of their biographical specificity as historical beings (Nyers, 1999), while defining them in terms of their corporeal vulnerability alone degrades them to the status of “sub-citizens” – their physical destitution lacks the legitimacy to articulate political will or rational argument (Hyndman, 2000).
The critique of evil-doing forms part of a broader critique of agency in the representation of refugees. It draws upon two visual features of refugee agency: the attribution of sovereignty, which construes refugees as active and hopeful individuals rather than destitute bodies, and, related, the attribution of malevolence, which defines this sovereignty narrowly as the refugees’ will to harm ‘us’. Similarly to victimhood, then, agentive representation is also accused of depriving refugees of their own humanity, on two accounts. First, the attribution of sovereignty conceals the truth of refugee lives, in that it shows them to be in control of their destinies, ignoring the historical circumstances that go beyond their control: “there is”, as Sandvik (2010: 294) says, “something unsettling about the manner in which individuals in arguably desperate or dangerous situations are attributed agency…as token participants performing for a global audience”. Second, the attribution of malevolence reduces refugees to ‘faceless strangers’ (Banks, 2011: 294) who threaten ‘our’ safety: from ‘speechless emissaries’ they become potential terrorists (Malkki, 1996). Instead of a humanitarian response, their criminalised agency mobilises fear and legitimises the securitisation practices that encamp or deport them (Bleiker et al., 2013).
By relying on the tropes of powerless vulnerability and agentive malevolence, our public visualities perpetuate the ambivalence of the refugee as either a sufferer or a threat, yet never a human.
These two tropes of visual representation, however, should not be seen as antithetical to each other. Victimhood and threat are, in fact, tactically interchangeable moral claims that variously configure the humanity of refugees across time and space. This is the case, for instance, in the shift from empathy for toddler Alan Kurdi’s death to outrage for terrorist-refugees, in the course of weeks – September to November’s Paris attacks (Lenette and Cleland, 2016: 77). It is not, therefore, the distinct performative force of each category that dehumanises refugees, as the literature has it, but also, importantly, their substitutability. This performative volatility of news images, which variously constitutes refugees within changing discourses of in/humanity lies at the heart of the moralising power of public imagery. For it is such shifting claims to humanity that, in turn, regulate the unstable proposals for responsible agency towards refugees in ‘our’ mediated publicity.
Responsibility: a conceptual and analytical vocabulary
In assessing the moral significance of the visual representation of refugees as dehumanising, critical literature on visual representation is largely negative. It rightly assumes that dominant visual tropes fail to make proposals of responsible agency to their publics, yet it does not go further to explore the conceptual connections between visualisation and responsibility, nor does it appreciate the historicity of this relationship as the symbolic properties of the visual move and transform across time. It does not, in other words, capitalise on the critique of images to re-think what responsibility means or what it should mean in the context of refugee representation. Despite this under-theorising of responsibility in visual studies scholarship, the concept figures prominently in literature on media ethics (see Keane, 2003; Silverstone, 2006; Tomlinson, 2011).
It is, in particular, Silverstone’s (2002: 761) account of ‘mediated communication’ as a space within which ‘an ethics of care and responsibility is, or is not, enabled’ that thematises the relationship between responsibility and the media. Developing a normative account of ethics, Silverstone draws attention to two ‘pathologies’ of responsibility, both of which suppress the potential for civic agency towards vulnerable others: complicity, which is about ‘us’ taking for granted, rather than problematising, the media representations of human vulnerability; and collusion, which is about ‘us’ treating the predicament of those others with complacency or denial. Collusion locates responsibility for in/action in the ‘active audience’ and its practices of forgetting, but it is complicity that focuses on ‘the vocabulary and discourse of representation, narrative and report’ (Silverstone, 2006: 131) – including of course visual discourse. Even though the two pathologies are interrelated, Silverstone (2002: 777) insists on the importance to recognise how complicity comes about from the symbolic work of dehumanisation performed by the media, in their effort to “translate the properly challenging other both into the comforting frames of the familiar and into excommunicated banishment”.
His moral frames of ‘the familiar’ and ‘excommunicated banishment’ are clearly associated with the aforementioned visual tropes of dehumanisation: victimhood, which brings the suffering other close to ‘our’ heart (‘the familiar’), and threat, which places her/him at maximum distance (the space of ‘excommunicated banishment’). Silverstone goes further, however, so as to explain the moralising function of these claims in terms of the media’s psychological mechanism to protect audiences from emotional trauma. Using the reductive figures of victim and evil-doer, he says, media representations fulfil ‘our’ “desire for simplicity, comfort and order in our everyday lives” (Silverstone, 2002: 777). The dehumanisation of refugees, thus, is here causally connected to a conception of responsibility as ‘working through’ – responsibility that, in its care to protect ‘us’ instead of ‘them’, subjects refugees to a “process of repression…not eradicating them but placing them elsewhere” (Ellis, 1999: 58).
While Silverstone’s critique of mediation rightly focuses on ‘complicity and collusion’ as failures of responsibility, it stops short of opening up to two key dimensions of an ethics of visibility: a conceptual and a methodological one. First, it does not explicitly establish the conceptual connection between these failures and the embeddedness of mediation in the historical power relationships of viewing. In turning the (relatively) safe West into the object of protection and treating suffering ‘others’ as ‘hurtful’ spectacles, media visualities perpetuate an ethnocentric ethics that remains absorbed with ‘our’ concerns while keeping ‘others’ outside of ‘our’ sphere of responsibility (Chouliaraki, 2006). Second, despite its appreciation of representation, Silverstone’s critique does not engage with the meaning-making function of the image. In so doing, it fails to appreciate, what was earlier referred to as the malleability and historicity of visual communication, which, depending on its symbolic properties, may go beyond the dominant tropes to offer alternative options for responsibility.
As against this approach, which relies on pre-existing suppositions about what responsibility or humanity may look like, our approach turns such presuppositions on their head. Far from defining responsibility in terms of pathologies, we adopt an open conception of responsibility as a symbolic practice of power that invests the imageries of the refugee ‘crisis’ with distinct moral claims to action. In so doing, we argue, these claims to responsibility establish the horizon of what we see, relate to, and act on in the refugee ‘crisis’ – what we refer to as ‘regimes of visibility’.
Our analysis, therefore, brackets the dominant tropes of ‘victimhood’ and ‘threat’ and treats refugee imagery as a relatively open-ended practice of meaning-making through which its subjects are variously constituted in the media – what we refer to as refugee ‘visualities’. If visibility refers, therefore, to the public horizon of what we see and relate to in the media, visuality, as Mirzoeff (2006: 76) puts it, is the semiotic domain wherein a specific ‘politics of representation’, the ‘struggle over who is to be represented’ and how, is played out. Regimes of visibility are, from this perspective, our main analytical unit, in that they provide the organising principle around which we reconstruct the specific visualities of the refugee ‘crisis’ in terms of five key visual configurations: biological life, empathy, threat, hospitality, and self-reflexivity.
Humanity and responsibility in refugee imagery
Even though these visual categories are drawn out of and informed by a Content Analysis of refugee news in European newspapers across five countries (Greece, Italy, Hungary, UK, and Ireland) at three key moments of the crisis, 2 ours is not a quantitative analysis of news images. It is a conceptually-driven semiotic analysis, whereby our five-part typology emerges out of the dialectic between these newspaper images (51 in total) and our theory-informed questions of humanity (how do refugees appear in these images?) and agency (who or what appears to feel and act with or on them?) (see Chouliaraki, 2006, 2008). It is this dialectic that enables us to map out the visual patterns through which responsibility acquires meaning in the reporting of the 2015 refugee ‘crisis’ news.
The assumption behind this conceptual typology is that these empirically-grounded patterns stand in a relationship of tension to theory; they are not reflections of a ‘universal’ conception of responsibility but neither are they random singularities. They are typifications of recurrent visual practices, which routinely work to massify, infantilise, or vilify refugees, therefore standing as illustrations of broader logics of news representation across Europe. Insofar as these logics reflect and reproduce historical norms of representing the self and ‘other’ in Western public cultures (Boltanski, 1999), our categories have the status of, what Flyvbjerg (2005: 16) calls, ‘paradigmatic cases’ of research: “cases that highlight more general characteristics of the societies in question”. It is precisely these paradigmatic logics that are reflected in the regimes of visibility we now discuss.
Visibility as biological life
Images that depict a ‘mass of unfortunates’ on fragile dinghies or in refugee camps situate refugees within a visual regime of biological life – a field of representation that reduces their life to corporeal existence and the needs of the body (Boltanski, 1999). This biological subjectivity entails a thin definition of humanity as an ‘anthropological minimum’ (Mehta, 1990) – a humanity fully reliant on Western emergency aid or rescue operations to survive and so inevitably dispossessed of will and voice. Insofar as refugees are portrayed as ‘life’ to be governed, this regime of visibility can be thought of as ‘biopolitical’: a field of symbolic power that produces human bodies as ‘living matter’, subject to humanitarian benevolence of the West (Vaughan-Williams, 2015). Even though these bodies are deeply political, in that they emerge at the intersection of corporeal and geopolitical relations of power between the West and the global South, they lack civic status; their dehumanisation is, in this sense, an effect of these very power relations that claim to sustain them as human bodies, in the first place (Ticktin, 2011).
Which proposals of responsibility does biopolitical humanity articulate? This regime situates refugees and ‘us’ in a relationship of, what Boltanski (1999: 13) calls, ‘generalised pity’ – a relationship with human suffering “from the standpoint of distance, since it must rely upon the massification of a collection of unfortunates who are not there in person”. Characteristic of foreign news, in imagery of UN camps and/or dinghies in the sea, this visual distance from refugees invites a ‘monitorial’ relationship with those it depicts. It simply registers the facts of their existence and offers minimal context for their suffering – news, for instance, hardly connects the exodus of Syrian refugees from their country with the escalation of the Syrian conflict. With no causal link between these two, the ‘crisis’ is regularly portrayed as a humanitarian ‘emergency’ rather than as a failure of international politics and particularly of Western structures of governance (Calhoun, 2004). Echoing Schudson’s (1998) ‘monitorial citizenship’, this form of responsibility refers to a light-touch ‘checking up’ on events that enables a vague awareness of the plight of refugees but invites no critical reflections of the conditions of this suffering.
Visibility as empathy
Unlike biological life, the regime of empathy privileges intimate snapshots of individuals or couples, such as a crying child, a mother with her baby or a rescue worker in action. While massification, in the previous regime, takes the perspective of distance and ignores the uniqueness of people as persons, individuation adopts a close-up perspective and has the potential to offer a more humanised representation of refugees. It is, in particular, the imagery of the child that figures as emblematic of the individualised visualities of empathy (Burman, 1994).
An exemplary manifestation of innocent vulnerability, the child has historically operated as an instrument in mobilising tender-heartedness and parental love: “children dramatise the righteousness of a cause”, Moeller (2002: 39) claims, “by having their innocence contrasted with malevolence (or perhaps banal hostility) of adults in authority”. The photograph of the lifeless body of toddler Alan Kurdi, the Syrian boy who drowned on the coast of Turkey in September 2015, gained iconic status precisely as a signifier of adult failure, the failure to offer protection to a child (El-Enany, 2016). It is this sense of failure that challenged the Western self-description of the caring parent and shifted the news narrative of the ‘crisis’ towards sentimental pity – a self-oriented emotion that celebrated ‘ourselves’ as a benevolent public as much as it showed care for vulnerable others (Mortensen and Trenz, 2016: 350).
Despite the humanising potential inherent in the individualisation of suffering, however, child imagery is held accountable for infantilising refugees; for depicting them predominantly as distressed, clueless and powerless: “Children”, as Burman (1994: 241) puts it, “…plead, they suffer, and their apparent need calls forth help […]”, echoing “the colonial paternalism where the adult-Northerner offers help and knowledge to the infantilised-South”. Infantilisation may thus aim at mobilising empathy in the name of ‘our’ common humanity, yet, in portraying refugees as children in need, it ultimately deprives them of agency and voice.
What form of responsibility does the regime of empathy make possible? This is a responsibility of charitable giving, which encourages a relationship of compassion and care, yet also reminds us of the refugees’ otherness. They are outsiders both physically, literally on the border, and symbolically, lacking history and complexity. This ambivalent agency ultimately constitutes a moralising response towards refugees, which can momentarily inspire affective responses of guilt but ultimately remains fleeting and unstable, swiftly shifting into rival affective moods of indignation or fear – as indeed happened on the night of November 13th 2015.
Visibility as threat
Visualities of threat, peaking after the November 2015 Paris attacks, consist of masses of refugees walking through motorways on the Balkan route or squeezed in rescue boats; and of aggressive young men wearing balaklavas and participating in riot scenes. Characterised by both massification, as in biological life, and singularisation, as in victimhood, the regime of threat differs from the previous two in thematising not empathy but fear – the anxiety that ‘our’ social order is disturbed by racial and cultural ‘others’ (Gale, 2004).
Instrumental in the mobilisation of fear is the shift from imageries of the child towards, what Buchanan et al. (2003: 9) call, ‘threatening young males’, young men with dark skin who appear to trespass ‘our’ own space. In contrast to portrayals of bodies-in-pain as signifiers of ‘common humanity’, visualities of threat rely on the racialisation of refugees, where skin colour and clothing operate as signifiers of evil ‘otherness’ in ‘our’ midst – also reflected in animalistic references to ‘swarms’, ‘flocks’, or ‘cockroaches’, in the UK media. While, then, the emotional proximity to crying children casts refugees as objects of care, the physical proximity of dark-skinned men turns them into ‘les enragés’, intimidating ‘others’ who threaten ‘our’ safety (Boltanski, 1999: 12–13).
What form of responsibility does this regime make possible? This is a responsibility of ambient threat that prioritises the indiscriminate closing of borders over care for victims of war (Chouliaraki and Georgiou, 2017). While military security is a constitutive dimension of sovereign nation-states, security is also part of the biopolitical apparatus of the media insofar as refugee visualities of aggression and violence legitimise civic dispositions of proactive protection, a “permanent vigilance against global insecurities” (Chandler, 2010: 296).
The implication of this form of responsibility is, thus, not only the vilification of those who are not like ‘us’. It is also, importantly, ‘our’ subjectification into practices of perpetual self-responsibility that validate the exclusion of others. The popularity of imageries of threat and their ‘stop migration’ politics, for instance, relies precisely on this ‘biopolitics of responsibility’, which can swiftly replace the crying child with “the bearded male refugee” and so “rather than compassion, … elicit feelings of apprehension and fear” (El-Enany, 2016: 14). Rather than the visualities of dark skin alone, it seems that it is primarily the substitutability, as innocent children turn into evil terrorists, that operates here as an instrument of security.
Visibility as hospitality
This visual regime involves imagery of pro-refugee protests across Europe, notably the ‘Refugees Welcome’ marches in September 2015. They depict masses of citizens marching across city centres, holding banners or placates with messages such as ‘refugees welcome here’, ‘refugees are human beings’, ‘let them in’, ‘be human’, ‘20.000? Are you joking?’ etc. Such visualities of concerted action represent acts of hospitality, that is, acts of “welcoming the other in one’s space, with or without any expectation of reciprocity” (Silverstone, 2006: 139). In combining the affirmative posture of conviviality, in ‘let them in’, with the critical spirit of denunciation against ‘our’ decision-makers, ‘are you joking?’, visualities of hospitality work through a reversal of humanisation. In contrast to threat, which sets ‘us’ up against evil ‘others’, this one places ‘us’ in the position of the evil-doer; it is now ‘our’ politicians who harm refugees rather than the other way round. This redistribution of the figures of pity is typical of activist agency – a form of civic agency that seeks to critique the establishment and “help create visibility for the perspectives and experiences of marginalised groups” (Polletta, 2006).
At the same time, however, even though refugees may occasionally figure in these visualities, for instance marching along in a ‘I’m a refugee’ t-shirt, they are largely marginalised by Western citizens. They may be linguistically recognised as human on protest banners but their humanity is undermined by their invisibility as political actors. Despite having important stories to share, they are deprived of, what Arendt (1998: 297 [1968]) calls, “the relevance of speech” and have become replaceable and unseen. Mediated hospitality is, it seems, purely symbolic; it is enacted through the portrayal of discursive claims to the humanity of refugees while reserving the actually humanising capacity of public visibility to Western actors.
The form of responsibility that the regime of hospitality proposes is, consequently, an ambivalent responsibility of trans-national solidarity. Drawing on the repertoire of civil society, this responsibility is the only politicised form of solidarity articulated in the space of mediated publicity. Yet, insofar as it is performed on behalf of rather than together with refugees, it subjects them to the dehumanising condition of voicelessness, whereby the defence of their rights takes place at the cost of marginalising their voice. Despite, thus, its public intervention in favour of international law and in support of refugees, the responsibility of solidarity may be subjecting refugees to, what Paik (2016) calls, ‘epistemological violence’: in the name of politicising their case, marginalised groups are inevitably entangled with Western practices and discourses that ultimately perpetuate their own exclusion.
Visibility as self-reflexivity
Two different types of imagery participate in this regime of visibility: celebrity benevolence, which is characterised by a ‘show business’ aesthetic, and social media graphics, characterised by a playful reflexivity. The former involves images of celebrities in support of refugees – Angelina Jolie, Vanessa Redgrave or Susan Sarandon. These are marked by a focus on the celebrity figure, in camps or beaches, hugging, helping or talking to refugees. In so doing, these images capitalise on the representation of co-presence so as to transfer symbolic capital from the former, famous and prestigious, to the latter, anonymous and destitute, with a view to raising awareness for their predicament and to claiming recognition for their cause (Sandvik, 2010). Embodying an ‘aspirational’ form of agency, these images perform solidarity not only by giving voice to the suffering of refugees but also by routinely educating ‘us’ into compassionate ways of feeling and acting (Chouliaraki, 2013). By physically enacting such dispositions of compassionate care, celebrity visualities act as metonymies of empathetic publics at large, inviting ‘us’ to engage with those excluded at Europe’s borders.
The visualities of social media graphics refer to the remediation of tweets about the death of toddler Alan Kurdi, disseminated by Western as well as Middle Eastern actors. Reproduced in a small number of news outlets, these news pieces present us with re-visualisations of the original death scene, the boy’s body on the beach, in a range of imaginary contexts – Alan in heaven or in a Western child’s bedroom. Characterised, on the one hand, by the substitution of photographic realism with the artistic aesthetic of cartoons or drawings, and, on the other, by a register of confessional intimacy (‘I am sorry’ or ‘I feel shame’), these remediated tweets establish a relationship of reflexive guilt with their topic. This is the case, for instance, in a drawing of Alan’s body on the shore and an adjacent one, subtitled ‘Europe’, with a picture of Alan’s clothes hanged to dry – the ironic message being that Europe cares more about procedures rather than human life itself.
Despite their different aesthetic properties, these two visualities, celebrity and aesthetic playfulness, converge in their attempt to humanise refugees through acts of co-presence and confession that aim at expressing our compassion with their suffering. Yet, both imageries ultimately displace the presence of refugees, as the latter are either overshadowed by the glamorous presence of celebrity or fictionalised by the digital drawings of twitter. Even though this displacement of the other in favour of ‘us’ is also a feature of the regime of hospitality, the difference between the two lies in the ways each invests the refugee ‘crisis’ in moral claims. Images of protest, let us recall, focus on combinations of empathy with denunciation, critiquing the exclusionary politics of European elites; these ones, in contrast, replace critique with the self-oriented and depoliticised affectivities of celebrity and twitter culture.
In both cases, echoing earlier image patterns, an ambivalent form of humanity traverses the visualities of self-reflexivity: spoken about, rather than speaking, refugees gain visibility but they are not the ones in control of it. Visually marginalised as part of a glamorous spectacle featuring, what Mostafanezhad (2016: 28) calls, the “aestheticised cosmopolitan celebrity care”, or idealised in the amateur illustrations of twitter, the irreducible humanity of refugees fades in the background. The form of responsibility that emerges out of these visualities is, what Chouliaraki (2013: 3) calls, ‘post-humanitarian’: a responsibility that retains an ethics of solidarity towards vulnerable others yet, deeply suspicious of politics, turns to the self as its key source of this ethics of care. Be this the celebrity performance or the self-reflexive tweet, it is because ‘we’ feel this way that refugees are worthy of ‘our’ attention. In replacing the politicised responsibility of the protest with the post-humanitarian ‘narcissism’ of celebrity news and tweets, this visual regime privileges pleasurable and fleeting forms of consumerism while ignoring the dehumanising effects inherent in its communitarian voices. As a consequence, refugees become the vehicle for a conversation that takes place exclusively by ‘us’ and about ‘us’.
Concluding reflections: visibility and responsibility in the refugee ‘crisis’
Our aim, in this article, has been to map out the regimes of public visibility within which refugees turn into objects of ‘our’ responsibility. This is important, we claimed, because such regimes of visibility organise the spaces of publicity wherein refugees are constituted as subjects through moral claims to humanity and we are invited to respond to them through performances of responsible agency. Regimes of visibility, in other words, are key spaces of moralisation that produce and regulate the public dispositions by which we collectively take responsibility for the plight of distant others.
The five regimes of visibility that emerged through our taxonomic analysis make a contribution to existing literature by complicating its historical tropes of refugee representation, victimhood and threat, in two important ways. First, our typology suggests that these two tropes, far from homogenous clusters of visual representation, are in fact complex categories characterised by internal differentiation. Second, our typology shows that, dominant as they may be, these two tropes do not exhaust the full range of representational possibilities of the refugee ‘crisis’. Let us discuss each insight in turn (under Problematising the regimes of refugee visibility), before we conclude with brief reflections on the norms of responsibility that circulate in our spaces of publicity – what Arendt calls the ‘space of appearance’ (Arendt, 1998 [1968]) (in Problematising responsibility in the space of appearance).
Problematising the regimes of refugee visibility
The first insight, that victimhood and threat are by no means straightforward categories of visibility, is grounded on the underlying similarities that have emerged across the five visual regimes. Biological life and empathy, for instance, share the moral claim that the vulnerable other requires our care. They differ however in their portrayals of the other’s body and the meaning of care: the body-in-need appears as an anthropological minimum, in biological life, and as an anthropological maximum, in empathy. This distinction between a mass of destitute bodies and a crying baby face is here not only a matter of emotional distance or proximity but also, importantly, a matter of ethical commitment – to a latent form of responsibility in the former, where care is about the monitorial action of ‘registering the news’, versus a charitable responsibility, in the latter, where care is about shedding a tear, signing a petition or donating goods for the innocent sufferer. While, therefore, their emphasis on the body-in-need evidently situates both categories under the theme of victimhood, their dispositional topologies introduce nuance into this visual regime.
The visualities of threat and hospitality, in a parallel move, both work on the assumption that refugee imagery is not only about who we care for but also who we denounce and, therefore, introduce antagonism in their representations of vulnerability. However, their visualities and proposals for responsibility differ drastically. The distinction between a mass of threatening young men approaching ‘our’ borders and a mass of protestors carrying ‘refugees welcome’ banners is not only a matter of vilifying or humanising the imagery of refugees but also, importantly, a matter of ethical commitment; commitment to a responsibility of security, which is about protecting ‘ourselves’ from ‘them’, in the former, versus a responsibility of hospitality, which recognises the political and moral obligation to protect ‘them’, in the latter.
The second insight of our analysis stems from the emerging category that does not simply complicate but, in fact, fully interrupts the polarity of victimhood and threat. The visualities of social media, for instance twitter graphics that re-appear in the news, rely on the assumption that it is neither the suffering body nor the presence of an evil-doer that mobilises moral engagement with refugees. It is, instead, ‘our’ own representations of them, in drawings, collages or retouched photographs, which become the vehicles for ‘our’ agency. Even though this regime still belongs to the traditional visualities of the body-in-need, it breaks with the previous ones in that it appropriates such imageries in a new, playful aesthetic and subordinates it to a moral discourse of self-expression. Its aim is digital connectivity with others like ‘us’ instead of connectivity with the refugee either as victim or as threat. This post-humanitarian visibility is, from this perspective, a new, digitally-driven regime that avoids questions of political causality and facilitates a self-centred form of civic agency.
By complicating the space of publicity of the refugee ‘crisis’, our typology further problematises ongoing debates on the media-related pathologies of responsibility. Complicity and collusion, to recall Silverstone, are here proven to be not the only but just two of the many types of relationships that ‘we’ are invited to practice, as we encounter images of refugees. ‘Our’ engagement, in other words, with the news’ proposals for action, is not exhausted to those two inherently deficient options: comfortable familiarity with the refugees’ sameness or fear of their radical otherness. Instead, as we saw, there is a wider range of performances for civic agency that the regimes of refugee visibility articulate for us – monitorial citizenship, tender-hearted benevolence, vigilant nationalism, cosmopolitan activism or self-reflexive confession. The key question is whether this diverse range of proposals ultimately manages to redeem the notion of responsibility from a pathological practice of othering to a practice that humanises refugees and recognises their cause.
Problematising responsibility in the space of appearance
On this question, our analytical insights converge with previous literature. In line with existing research, we, too, have established that, despite their internal variation, all regimes of visibility are ultimately informed by symbolic strategies of dehumanisation. Whether these are strategies of massification, vilification, infantilisation, marginalisation or aestheticisation, the refugee appears in Western spaces of publicity as a deeply ambivalent figure: a body-in-need, a powerless child, a racial ‘other’, a linguistic token or a sentimental drawing. Even though, as we just saw, ‘we’ are invited to engage with various proposals of agency, the refugees’ own agentive capacity is hardly ever asserted – paradigmatically, only as evil terrorists in the visualities of threat.
At the heart of this ‘crisis’ of humanity, we argue in conclusion, lies a crisis of responsibility itself. This is specifically a crisis of the notion of responsibility that informs Western understandings of visuality as moral education, namely Silverstone’s ‘formal’ responsibility. Even though formal responsibility, the obligation to ourselves for our acts, is important in that it gives rise to a plurality of proposals for civic agency for ‘us’ as Western citizens, it ultimately fails to grant refugees the opportunity to also “be seen and heard as […] equal”, as Arendt (1998 [1968]: 50) would put it, in the space of appearance.
In order to address this exclusionary bias, we instead propose the notion of substantive responsibility, ‘responsibility for the conditions of the other’ (Silverstone, 2006). Pace Silverstone’s own utopian account of substantive responsibility as ‘unconditional hospitality’ for the ‘other’ (Dayan, 2007), our Arendtian approach to this concept emphasises the relational and narrative character of this form of responsibility. Rather than the focus on ‘my’ actions, in formal responsibility, substantive responsibility begins from the human capacity to establish communities of belonging through the sharing of stories (Cavarero, 2000).
Drawing on Arendt’s normative argument that the public performance of voice is a world-disclosing practice, where narration “enable(s) individuals and collectives to experience—and not just intellectualise—th(eir) responsibility” (Macphee, 2011: 178), we propose that ‘our’ regimes of visibility treat the space of appearance as, in principle, open to all. Substantive responsibility here does not necessarily mean that refugees are de facto treated as equal participants in this space, but rather that the boundaries around ‘who speaks’ in these spaces become permeable and open to be claimed by a plurality of voices that seek social and political recognition.
It is precisely these boundaries that remain impervious to outsiders in the visual regimes we explored in this article, as refugees have been consistently spoken about and spoken for but never spoke for themselves. To be substantially responsible, in this context, does not only mean to stop silencing others in order to speak for or about them; it also means to stop speaking about them through ‘our’ own stories. It presupposes, instead, that the lives of others are worthy story-telling material; that, for instance, they appear in images that they have photographed themselves; through actions that portray them as creative and knowledgeable actors rather than as victims or terrorists; as citizens with views on the causes of the ‘crisis’ and as professionals with ideas and aspirations. Such stories can present refugees not as acted upon but as acting with us ‘in a common world’, wherein the positions of acting and suffering are interchangeable by all. It is this quality of being able to tell one’s own stories, to appear as a speaking and acting subject, what Cavarero drawing on Arendt, calls the ‘ontological altruism’ of narratability (Cavarero, 2000: 90), that we recommend be recovered in the visual regimes of ‘our’ mediated publicity.
These concluding reflections on substantive responsibility are meant to contribute to a re-thinking not so much of ‘best practice’ in news imagery, though this is important too, but to the conditions of possibility that enable such imagery to emerge in the first place. While, inevitably, the space of appearance is traversed by systemic relationships of power, sovereign and biopolitical, it is important that we turn these relationships into a site of struggle, where the norms of humanity, agency, and responsibility are constantly at stake. For it is, ultimately, in this space only that refugees can appear to us as actors and reveal their humanity in the presence of equals.
Footnotes
Funding
The authors received funding from the Department of Media and Communications, LSE for ‘The Mediation of Migration’ project.