Abstract
Transitioning from 2016 to 2017 in global politics is an ideal sociopolitical climate in which to absorb ideas purveyed in Global Media, Biopolitics and Affect: Politicizing Bodily Vulnerability. American news massively covered vulnerable bodies. Consider the many live-recorded, social media broadcasts of police killings of African Americans, particularly unarmed men. Audiences were flooded with media images of Europeans floundering in a tide of tens of thousands of desperate immigrants fleeing from regional conflicts to Europe. Some nations grudgingly resettled thousands of refugees, while others erected razor wire fences. Meanwhile, populists roared in Brexit; Trump’s election as U.S. President plunged liberal pundits into the five stages of grief. Considering global chaos unfolding in Tweets or SnapChats in our hand-held devices, this book’s internationalist approach usefully assesses both an embodied (fences, fears) and disembodied (e-media) situation.
Coauthors Britta Timm Knudsen and Carsten Stage apply theories of biopower and biopolitics, exploring visually affective case studies of social media activism. Knudsen and Stage contend that social media portray globalized suffering of bodies to far distant globalized audiences who react in sympathetic media-spun networks of participation. The authors suggest that “increased connectivity enabled by network media technologies has . . . increased the possibility of spreading contagious affects, feelings, and emotions” around the world. The book relies on scholars in critical cultural studies, from Laclau and Mouffe, to Derrida, Lefebvre, Deleuze and Guattari. Poststructuralism prevails in this book’s focus on embodiment and culturally prescribed reactions. Knudsen and Stage highlight “spectacles of mediated vulnerability,” contending that social media events and memes “open spaces for discursive renegotiation.” Their case studies invite consideration of cross-cultural pain and political sense-making in the present moment of instantly internationalizable currencies of media exchange.
Knudsen and Stage are faculty in the Department of Aesthetics and Communication at Aarhus University in Denmark, with expertise on interrelationships between places and emotions. Their book offers a Eurocentric view of the power of images of suffering bodies to achieve political change from environmental to philanthropic activism. Across all cases explored, from Iran to Denmark to Ukraine, there are lilts of optimism. They praise social media galvanizing sympathetic action, whether in solidarity for sufferers of illnesses, pro-democracy activists, or war’s casualties. Other cases evaluate digitally mediated charity work and group sense-making of suffering and death of soldiers in intractable, contentious wars of Iraq and Afghanistan.
The tome’s case studies focus scholarly attention onto bodies rendered disembodied by cyber-dependent interactions. Coauthors remind readers that increasingly in developed nations and in emerging economies like Kenya, large populations of media-addicted people live in a paradoxical state of simultaneous physical being and digital disembodiment. One of the areas where the book could have benefitted from some judicious reality checking (which offers productive areas for further research) is insufficient attention to feminized and White-power aesthetics of empathy. Across all chapters, the book favors exemplars of White empathy. For instance, coauthors study a blog of a young, terminally ill woman whose pale skin is seductively tattooed. They analyze global mobilization protesting the death of a strikingly beautiful young woman in a protest march in Iran. What eludes Knudsen and Carsten is that Iranian Neda Soltan’s perfect face points to the prevalence of nose jobs and other plastic surgery for women in the United States and in Iran as a shared cultural norm of surgically violent oppression against women. President Obama’s commentary on the scream-/screen-queen image of Soltan’s bloodily oozing yet gorgeous face in death may be correlated directly to her image’s ability to conform to prevailing media norms privileging Whiteness, violence against women, and war.
In the authors’ fascination with trendy cultural studies, they occasionally ignore the obvious. For example, consider their screen shots of physically attractive young, White women like the Australian “Weld Angel,” or handsome, macho Danish soldier-men’s commemorations. Such images garner more mainstream media attention and “viral” sympathy than aesthetic challenges of rendering as meaningful in social media (and in wider society) suffering and deaths of persons of color. Recalling Tinder app users’ ability to swipe images of “ugly” women left or “hotties” right, what about preponderant but ignored media images of homely Whites? What of photogenic but non-White people whose lives merit equal or more attention, but are not celebrity-ed due to systemic inequities of social media? The tome tips to theory over praxis: Future studies must grapple with Zuckerbergian technostructures preferring trivial, fake news through aestheticized, memetic social media messages tailored to electronically addled, hyper-segmented audiences.
A strength of this book is that its coauthors suggest that while social media users are cyborgesque, we may nevertheless reach out to communicate with each other across divides of demographic variables like space, nationality, culture, politics. The authors suggest the hopeful message that via social media those different from us may be normalized, humanized and materially assisted to ameliorate economic, political or social justice challenges. Problems like the glass ceiling, destruction of old-growth forests, or White supremacy are not just “above” us; rather, each phenomenon feeds on us as we devour screen(ed) content of our televisions and “smart” phones. The degree to which screens are permeable to socially beneficial ideas spreading through humanity’s affinity for archetypal stories is a key question this book invites readers to consider. Do we swipe right, or left?