Abstract
The 2011 UK riots were unusual for their apparent pointlessness. The significance of the riots was in fact their lack of obvious significance. Although critical theory is often disparaged for being unduly esoteric, recent exponents like Jean Baudrillard and Slavoj Žižek are shown to be highly useful at reaching a political understanding not present within mainstream journalism. Objective and subjective violence are concepts used in order to argue that an under-acknowledged form of violence in our society is one committed by a media that systematically displaces the deeper, underlying political causes of violence through excessive focus upon merely symptomatic outbreaks.
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Introduction
Despite the fact that news reporting is nominally part of a ‘discourse of sobriety’ (Nichols, 1991), the media’s visually dominated and entertainment-oriented grammar means that an innate tendency for depicting context-free images of destruction routinely displaces underlying political issues. Substantive protests ranging from student fees protests to anti-war marches are filtered to produce metonymic images of violence, which are used to distract from their underlying causal factors. The 2011 summer riots provided a different challenge for the ideological processing mechanisms of the contemporary mediascape. These disturbances saved the media the bother of politically decaffeinating the events on screen, since one of their most commented-upon features was a lack of obvious political motivation. Many column inches and much airtime was devoted to this paradox, whereby explosive levels of violence took place merely in order to liberate consumer goods.
Traditional Marxist analysis would suggest that the politically unfocused riots were the act of an alienated lumpenproletariat lacking in class consciousness. Whilst this may be true, political analysis of these events can be further supplemented by revisiting contemporary critical theory (in particular Baudrillard and Žižek) that often tends to be prematurely dismissed due to its misrepresentation as a vacuous form of postmodern relativism. This articles argues that, properly understood, such theory in fact enables a distinctly non-relativist understanding of the otherwise confusing nature of the riots: their ultimate meaning is to be found in their apparent meaninglessness. Representing more than just tautological word play, this claim goes straight to contemporary critical media theory’s role as a countervailing force to the media’s standard operating procedure. Such theory draws out the under-acknowledged political significance of the overarching paradox that provides much of the media’s ideological power: its obfuscatory use of explicit images to hide implicit causes.
The following arguments are made for the political value of critical media theory:
Supposedly abstract and out-of-touch, critical media theory is actually able to explain such current events like the 2011 summer riots more effectively than the media’s own purportedly more practical and down-to-earth analyses.
It enables us to see more clearly a particular form of under-acknowledged media violence whose ideological subtlety is inversely proportional to the clarity of the dramatic violence that constitutes the media’s normal stock-in-trade.
It bolsters traditional political critique by providing tools with which to understand contemporary developments in the media system’s rational administration of irrational modes of discourse – the way in which the media processes violent events into sublime/desublimated objects of ideology.
Do polar bears eat people in the woods? Understanding the media’s violent misunderstanding of violence
In the illustrated magazines, people see the very world that the illustrated magazines prevent them from perceiving … Never before has a period known so little about itself. In the hands of the ruling society, the invention of illustrated magazines is one of the most powerful means of organising a strike against understanding … the flood of photos sweeps away the dams of memory. (Kracauer, 1995 [1927]: 58)
Although Kracauer’s above assessment of a media-sponsored cognitive deficit was originally delivered in the 1920s, it remains highly pertinent to today’s mediascape. The advent of digital communications has exponentially intensified the paradoxical process he describes, whereby our mediated mode of seeing ironically perpetuates barriers to perception. Kracauer’s notion that ‘never before has a period known so little about itself’ thus only needs updating due to its now anachronistic level of understatement. In a 24/7 news culture, our HD images are high definition only in a purely technical sense.
Kracauer’s analysis can be further developed using Žižek’s concept of sublime objects of ideology, which is based in turn upon the original Kantian notion of the quasi-ideological component of the concept of sublimity. For example, in a sublime experience of a natural event, our near-overwhelming level of sensation is transformed into a manageable, even highly enjoyable aesthetic experience. Žižek’s innovation is to show the ideological component of this process that extends well beyond monumental natural phenomenon into much more prosaic realms of everyday life. What might otherwise disorientate and profoundly shock us is transformed into an easily recognisable and thereby less threatening category of experience. It is in this manner that our ability to reflect upon a genuinely shocking state of affairs in which young adults can riot for sportswear is re-presented to media audiences through the well-worn, essentially meaningless, trope of violent images.
Marshall McLuhan once memorably observed, ‘whoever discovered water, it wasn’t a fish,’ and whilst this aperçu neatly sums up the difficulty of highlighting ideological processes whose effectiveness resides precisely in their highly naturalised unobtrusiveness, occasionally events do throw the media’s unassuming, largely unnoticeable, workaday ideology into expressively sharp relief. Thus, only a matter of days before the urban riots in August 2011, a 17-year-old boy died and four others were seriously injured after being mauled by a polar bear whilst camping on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen. As part of BBC Radio 4’s lunchtime news coverage of the incident, the presenter interviewed an English survivor of a similar previous attack. The interview concluded with the question ‘and what did you learn from your experience?’ A suitably laconic response might have been, ‘I learnt that in addition to defecating in the woods, suitably threatened by excessive proximity, polar bears also attack people.’ The media’s reporting of a polar bear attack and urban riots share the common feature of providing unusually distinct exposure of the media’s displacement of the true root causes of violence by focusing upon the excessively obvious.
Objective violence: The missing essence in the media’s portrayal of violence
Žižek is a fashionable Slovenian ‘cultural theorist’ and author of books on Jacques Lacan, Lenin and David Lynch … but he is perhaps most famous for his judgement on 9/11: ‘In a way, America got what it fantasised about.’ That ‘in a way’ is pure Žižek: moral relativism masked by rhetorical evasion. (Bearn, 2004) ‘America got what it fantasised about’ – which Žižek insinuates, echoing Baudrillard, is merely another way of saying that America got what it had coming … Amid the fog of postmodern relativism disseminated by Baudrillard, Žižek, and others, something essential is missing. (Wolin, 2004: 307)
The above quotations relating to Jean Baudrillard and Slavoj Žižek‘s writings on 9/11 illustrate the way in which theorists are routinely and inaccurately portrayed as postmodern relativists, and, as the inverted commas around ‘cultural theorist’ show, suspected of faddishness simply for having the temerity to theorise about culture. More importantly, however, such disingenuous dismissals of theory’s insights are relatively minor encapsulations of a much more pervasive ideological process of which the media is a key facilitator. It works to direct our attention away from the true systemic causes of individual acts of violence. That Bearn accuses Baudrillard and Žižek of ‘rhetorical evasion’ and Wolin suggests that ‘something essential is missing’ represents the psychological phenomena of projection and blame displacement at their purest. Contra Bearn and Wolin, it is worth noting that it was neo-conservative ‘reasoning’ from the opposite end of the political spectrum that led to the rhetorical evasion required to declare war upon an abstract noun (the War on Terror) in which something essential was indeed missing: a justifiable military target.
By contrast, Žižek’s critical media theory non-evasively strives to highlight what is essentially missing within mainstream ideological positions. He provides a helpful conceptual distinction with which to appreciate the media’s role in portraying physical violence, whilst simultaneously enacting a symbolic violence of its own: the distinction to be made between subjective and objective forms.
Subjective violence is what we common-sensically understand by the basic term ‘violence’, and is defined by Žižek on the first page of his book Violence as being that which is ‘performed by a clearly identifiable agent’.
Objective violence can be divided into two parts:
1. Systemic violence
This is ‘the often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems’ (Žižek, 2008: 1). It refers to the predominantly unrecognised levels of force and repression that form a base level, frequently dispersed, but nevertheless effective and powerful circumscription of social activity. The conventional notion of violence is widened under the concept of systemic violence to include phenomena like economic coercion. The cleaning worker on minimum wage may not be frog-marched out of the house each day to scrub toilets, but the basic economic pressures of survival becomes an effectively powerful force in its own right. This force is not normally recognised as violence, but this is the point: our political and economic systems are able to function with such ideological effectiveness because of their ability to continually set aside and highlight particular acts of violence for condemnation whilst downplaying the systematic forms of violence that the established order enacts as a daily matter of course.
‘Objective violence’ is a crucial concept for identifying those media processes that have profound social effects, but are largely invisible to the ideologically-assimilated eye:
Objective violence is invisible since it sustains the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as subjectively violent. Systemic violence is thus something like the notorious ‘dark matter’ of physics, the counterpart to an all-too-visible subjective violence. It may be invisible, but it has to be taken into account if one is to make sense of what otherwise seem to be ‘irrational’ explosions of subjective violence. (Žižek, 2008: 2)
For the media, the chastening events of 9/11 represented the epitome of such an ‘irrational explosion of subjective violence’ and, paraphrasing Kracauer, endlessly repeated images of the collapsing Twin Towers enabled people see the very world that the spectacular TV images prevented them from actually perceiving. Predicated as the media is upon this technologically-instantiated mode of non-reflexive sight, whether violent events take the cataclysmic form of 9/11 or the crass opportunism of the 2011 riots, attempts to explain the underlying causes of these violent events are undermined by the symbolic violence of a media primed precisely not to understand.
2. Symbolic violence
This is the basic form of violence ‘that pertains to language as such’ (Žižek, 2008: 1). To describe the most basic object, the words one uses necessarily involve a significantly reductive element. For an act of communication to occur at all, we need to generalise away from the otherwise overwhelming specificity of each and every encounter we have with reality. Whilst the process of reductive generalisation is inherent to any act of communication, the media’s objective, symbolic violence lies in the way it portrays subjective violence with little, if any, attempt to contextualise its underlying causes.
Complex cultural histories become inseparable in our mediated mind’s eye with reductively familiar pictures: bombed-out downtown Beirut, emaciated African babies, Uzi-toting Israeli soldiers, and keffiyeh-wearing Palestinian stone-throwers. The media propagates a profoundly effective form of symbolic violence as its explicit spectacles supplant sustained consideration of their primary causes, past and present.
Whilst Baudrillard and Žižek are disingenuously pilloried as enthusiastic endorsers of the cynically simulated environments they merely describe, the true adherents of postmodern relativism can actually be found in a much less ethereal realm: at the heart of the US government. Ron Suskind of the New York Times describes a conversation he had with a senior advisor to George Bush Jr.:
The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’
The UK summer riots amply demonstrated the extent to which the media is complicit with the British ‘empire’s’ construction of new realities with which to distract those within the ‘non-reality-based community’.
Conclusion: Leaving Baudrillard aside
[H]ow can you cease to believe in law and order, a moral universe, co-operation, the purpose of existence, and yet still believe in sportswear? How can you despise culture but still want the flatscreen TV from the bookies? Alex Hiller, a marketing and consumer expert at Nottingham Business School, points out that there is no conflict between anomie and consumption: ‘If you look at Baudrillard and other people writing in sociology about consumption, it’s a falsification of social life. Adverts promote a fantasy land. Consumerism relies upon people feeling disconnected from the world. Leaving Baudrillard aside, just because there is no political agenda on the part of the rioters doesn’t mean the answer isn’t rooted in politics. (Williams, Guardian, 2011)
Zoe Williams’s above analysis of the riots provides another telling example of the journalistic tendency to remove troublesome context. Despite the fact that even someone from a business school is willing to quote Jean Baudrillard, for the journalist, such blatant intellectualism is unwelcome. This gives rise to the deceptively mild, but in reality, symbolically violent phrase, ‘Leaving Baudrillard aside’. Side-stepping theoretically informed analysis, Williams remains stubbornly impervious to recognition of an important insight: the twist on Kant’s notion of art as ‘purposiveness without purpose’ that the rioters provide. In a distorted reflection of the society that surrounds them, the rioters embody purposive (albeit violent) consumption without purpose. Lacking her own sense of intellectual purposiveness, Williams rejects Baudrillard on purpose. Replicating Bearn and Wolin’s above distortions, she erroneously implies that Baudrillard’s analysis of apolitical phenomena is itself apolitical.
Williams’s typically parochial journalistic dismissal of Baudrillard represents a rejection of a theory-informed sensitivity to the relationship between form and content that enables the politically crucial insight that the apparent meaninglessness of the riots is their meaning. Williams and most of her journalist colleagues appear unwilling or unable to reflect upon their role in the creation of a mediated reality from which any substantive political issues and meaningful differences of outlook have been expunged in favour of an overarching consensus that pretends that a much-vaunted ability to choose between essentially identical parties constitutes an authentic choice. In contrast to Williams, Žižek makes the crucially reflexive point,
The fact that the rioters have no programme is therefore itself a fact to be interpreted: it tells us a great deal about our ideological-political predicament and about the kind of society we inhabit, a society which celebrates choice but in which the only available alternative to enforced democratic consensus is a blind acting out. Opposition to the system can no longer articulate itself in the form of a realistic alternative, or even as a utopian project, but can only take the shape of a meaningless outburst. What is the point of our celebrated freedom of choice when the only choice is between playing by the rules and (self-)destructive violence? (Žižek, London Review of Books, 2011)
Theorists like Baudrillard and Žižek pose a profoundly practical political question: what is the true cost of living within a media system whose routine symbolic violence goes largely unnoticed? Despite being lazily dismissed as rhetorically evasive post-modernists, unlike their detractors, distinctly non-relativist theorists like Baudrillard and Žižek stubbornly focus upon the true ideological essence of violence.
Faced with the riots, media commentators were forced to confront, in an uncomfortable, unusually direct fashion, the illogical conclusion of the consumption-dominated system their profession normally sustains and facilitates. Resonant in this regard is Lacan’s observation from the final lines of his ‘Seminar on The Purloined Letter’ that ‘the sender … receives from the receiver his own message in reverse form … a letter always arrives at its destination’ (Lacan, 1972). Thus, a media that systematically propagates meaningless discourse found itself, forced by dramatic circumstances, struggling to make sense of rioters whose actions lacked any meaning beyond a blind acting out of the vacuous advertising slogan used to sell the training shoes they so enthusiastically looted. Critical media theory, by contrast, is at least able to shed light on the media’s symbolically violent complicity in that banal nostrum for our times – just do it.