Abstract
Nowadays, humanitarian organisations have a wide range of new and innovative techniques that they can use to raise awareness and money for their causes. Among the latest developments in humanitarian campaigns are free mobile phone apps, such as Charity Miles, which allows users to raise donations for a good cause as part of their daily exercise and office routines. By going for a run and telling people about it on social media, subscribers can not only help themselves stay fit or even lose some weight, but they can also support the charity of their choice, for example, the UN World Food Programme for reducing global hunger. Lilie Chouliaraki has a name for the logic behind these new ‘feel good’ communication strategies for humanitarian purposes: ‘post-humanitarianism’. In her latest book The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Post-Humanitarianism, Chouliaraki argues that we have entered the age of ‘post-humanitarianism’, which ‘situates the pleasures of the self at the heart of moral action’ (p. 4).
The book is not about the failure or success of new communication technologies with regard to how they connect us to vulnerable others, or how they democratise social responsibility or not. Instead, it is a book about what humanitarian communicative practices such as the Charity Miles app, an ‘I’m praying for them’ tweet from a westerner incorporated into a disaster news story, or a rock concert for a humanitarian cause, say about the moral and political meaning of solidarity today. The Ironic Spectator offers an intelligent and imaginative narrative on the communication of solidarity in our mediated culture. Chouliaraki detects a trajectory in humanitarian thinking that is a move away from the traditional moral disposition oriented towards the suffering of others, and a move towards a post-humanitarian disposition that is oriented at the self, which relies on individual reflection rather than on a universal notion of morality in the reasoning for action. She theorises this change as a fundamental paradigmatic shift from ‘solidarity as pity’ to ‘solidarity of irony’, and finds that this new model of solidarity ultimately fails to encourage cosmopolitan solidarity.
At the heart of The Ironic Spectator is the question of how this shift in the communicative structure of humanitarianism shapes the ways in which western spectators are invited to imagine other people’s suffering and act on it. There is no doubt about the importance of this question. As Chouliaraki explains at the beginning of the book (while referring to recent British studies), public engagement with global suffering is no higher today than in was in the 1980s, in spite of massive aid campaigns such as Live8, or humanitarian organisations’ adoption of digital communication and social networking strategies for raising awareness. Public engagement, caring about the suffering of others, matters not only because of people’s direct impact through giving money or their time to non-governmental organisations, but also because it has an impact on government spending on humanitarian aid and, more generally, on the quality of the discussion in the public sphere surrounding the vulnerability of the people in the global South.
Specifically, Chouliaraki sets out to analyse how the communication of solidarity has transformed in the West since the late 1970s by identifying changes in humanitarian imagery that functions to legitimise our engagement with suffering others. In the first two chapters, Chouliaraki manages to cover an impressive amount of historical, philosophical and theoretical ground. For Chouliaraki, the key to understanding the shift towards the ethics of irony in the communication of solidarity is an understanding of how it has emerged as an outcome of three longer-term changes in the humanitarian field: institutional, political and technological. Chouliaraki spends Chapter 1 outlining the instrumentalisation of humanitarianism: that is, the marketisation of humanitarian practice and how it has been turned into depoliticised managerialism; the death of grand narratives of solidarity (from the moral certainties of changing the world to consumerist activism); and the technologisation of communication that is characterised by the invitation for self-expression. Chouliaraki continues in Chapter 2 with a theoretical discussion on the mediation of solidarity. At the heart of her argument is an account of the ‘theatricality of humanitarianism’, which refers to a communicative structure of humanitarianism that operates in line with the conventions of theatrical performance – namely by distancing the spectator from the spectacle of the vulnerable other through the objective space of the stage (or any other framing device) whilst, at the same time, enabling proximity between the two through narrative and visual resources that invite our empathetic judgment towards the spectacle. (p. 22)
The power of theatre, Chouliaraki argues, lies in its ability, on the one hand, to connect us imaginatively with a distant other and, on the other hand, to provide us with the resources to judge why we should act on other people’s suffering.
In the subsequent empirical chapters, Chouliaraki analyses the aesthetics and ethics of four genres of humanitarian imagery: appeals, celebrity, concerts and news. In these chapters she brings together an impressive range of academic research from different disciplines, and offers a fresh methodological framework for analysing the humanitarian performance of these genres that is based on two perspectives: how they employ strategies of authentication and moralisation in their respective attempts to set up an emotional relationship between spectators and vulnerable others; and how they constitute the spectator as a moral actor. In the chapter on appeals, which adapts previously published writing, Chouliaraki shows a trajectory that goes from photorealism as proof of the authenticity of suffering, and the associated grand emotions (such as pity and guilt) as motivation for solidarity to the contemporary moment’s reflexive style, which disengages suffering from emotions in favour of a reflexive engagement with oneself. The reflexive performativity of contemporary appeals, Chouliaraki argues, means abandoning the theatre structure and introducing the logic of corporate branding into the morality of solidarity. Here, she is clearly alarmed by the risk of narcissism developing as part of this logic: ‘as long as our relation to others is only accomplished through an imagination of ourselves, solidarity can never become a matter of commitment and justification’ (p. 77).
In the last empirical chapter, which will appeal especially to scholars working on participatory journalism, Chouliaraki examines BBC stories about devastating earthquakes ranging from Tangshan, China in 1976 to Haiti in 2010. Here, she both draws on the distinction between television and post-television narratives, and examines post-television news in the context of the differentiation between convergent news and live blogging, thus ultimately identifying a shift from ‘hybrid narratives, mixing professional and non-professional testimony, to hypertextual ones, driven by input from “ordinary” witnesses’ (p. 139). She argues compellingly that simply having more voices in news narratives is not enough to challenge the hierarchies of human life, or to make a news text more democratic. Chouliaraki finds that post-television news moves away from the theatrical model and adopts the moral imagination of post-humanitarianism by abandoning the authorial, objective voice of the journalist and coherent narratives of suffering for a cacophony of personal testimony. In developing her bold arguments on the changes in journalistic witnessing, and in general on the public’s responses to humanitarian imaginaries, Chouliaraki invites the reader to explore further these questions empirically.
The final chapter theorises the shift from ‘solidarity as pity’ to ‘solidarity as irony’. Importantly, Chouliaraki, finding both paradigms inadequate for legitimizing the moral imperative to act towards vulnerable others, also offers an alternative vision of humanitarian communication. The Ironic Spectator then moves beyond an examination of the changes in humanitarian communication, and uses the story of historical change as a means to imagine solutions that can be implemented in present-day humanitarianism. While the empirical chapters are fiercely critical, in the final chapter Chouliaraki takes a more optimistic tone. Humanitarian imaginaries are not immobile, as Chouliaraki has shown, and thus the rise of an ironic, self-centred spectatorship is not inevitable. The core argument of the book is that the communicative practices of humanitarianism have a performative force: they constitute the meanings, emotions and moral dispositions for the spectators vis-à-vis suffering others. Drawing on Hannah Arendt and many others, Chouliaraki advocates an alternative communicative structure that she calls the ‘solidarity of agonism’. She wants to salvage the theatre as a central space for the everyday moral education of the West. The agonistic theatre, Chouliaraki asserts, educates us into dispositions of solidarity through the two key requirements of solidarity: the mobilisation of empathy and the establishment of contemplative distance between self and other.
In The Ironic Spectator, Lilie Chouliaraki provides a valuable contribution to the field of mediated humanitarianism and offers a wide-ranging treatment of the humanitarian imagery, while combining historical, philosophical and critical theoretical approaches. Chouliaraki’s work is excitingly productive in its scope. The author not only outlines the problems that are present in the paradigms of pity and irony, but makes practical suggestions as to how we can move toward a more cosmopolitan version of solidarity. First, she argues that the sufferers need to have a voice in humanitarian communication, so that the audience can emotionally engage with them. Second, she argues that humanitarian communication needs persistently to educate us about the reasons why we should care for others. Only then, she argues, is there hope for a deeper political change. It is morally educating to read such a thought-provoking and passionately argued text. The Ironic Spectator is a compulsory read for all scholars and practitioners working in the field of humanitarianism.