Abstract
The latest book by prolific scholar, compelling writer and insightful researcher, Lilie Chouliaraki, The Ironic Spectator, will keep readers captivated by both its analytic precision and empirical scope. For one, it really speaks to us all: academics, activists, spectators of humanitarian aid, we have all thought through the issues that the book grapples with as we contemplate the impact of media representations of fame and famine, stardom and spectatorship, humanitarianism and the consumption of humility along with the commodification of compassion.
Chouliaraki’s book focuses on the mediation of solidarity and more explicitly on the context of mediated public discourse in relation to social action and the humanitarian imperative. The book explores how major institutional, technological and political global transformations in the past half century have also impacted on and contributed to the changes in the moral imperative of social action for the sake of distant others in urgent need of support. In a sense, the matrix of the commercialisation of the development and aid field, the rise of new media and the collapse of grand political narratives has led to a transformative outcome of solidarity in contemporary times which renders it no longer an outcome of conviction but of choice, not an output of values but the portrayal of particular lifestyles, not a focal point of others but of ourselves, thus further transforming us into what Chouliaraki terms ‘ironic spectators’ of the suffering of others and the performativity of all other actors and institutions involved in materialising such spectatorship.
Comprehensive, with clarity of thought and the precision and sharpness of each and every argument, the book is a welcome contribution to the media, communication and journalism literature, adding a critical lens into the ethics of solidarity and humanitarian politics and discourse. Chouliaraki not only deconstructs a wide range of paradigms, she manages to eloquently craft a meaningful theorisation that beautifully synthesises a wide range of theories from journalism and political communication to development studies and social and cultural theory. Despite the complexity of theorisations involved, the writing is crystal clear, compelling and wide-ranging with a distinct focus on the intricacy of the theatricality of both humanitarianism and suffering.
The Ironic Spectator is an intellectual and research assemblage of the stuff that demarcates true scholarship from accounts that simply tell a story. Yet, this book indeed tells many stories with the flair of a performativity of both the actors and the author’s criticality of conceptualisation and without the denseness and impenetrability that the analytic constructs it is situated within could have otherwise yielded. This pervasive criticality compounded with the coherency and precision of argumentation make the narration gripping.
More specifically, the scope of the book examines solidarity, spectatorship and the humanitarian imaginary through a conceptual matrix of theatricality, irony and solidarity as agonism by examining four key practices of the storied accounts of such humanitarian imaginary, namely, appeals, celebrity, concerts and news. Underlining these four empirical accounts drawn from a variety of case study and historical material is an introspective thread of self-referential scrutiny of a new story, one that contemplates a historical shift in our aesthetics of humanitarian communication from an ethics of pity to an ethics of irony. The text expressively documents this remarkable epistemic shift from its ontological, institutional and emotionalising rendering of a new social subject of solidarity that renders an ethical transformative realm of the communicative structure of humanitarianism in a technologising corporatisation of caring and thus giving. Hence, this multi-dimensionality of a new era of post-humanitarianism social subjects becomes essentially an epoch of a new visibility and complexity of such subjects that ultimately become depoliticized from a project of social justice, irrespective of their performative place in the reduction of suffering of the vulnerable other. Such iconographies of public compassion are reminiscent of mundane cosmpolitanising performativities where donating money is doing good and thus practising salvation that will ultimately legitimise one’s humanity.
Yet, Chouliaraki does not follow a simplistic narrativisation of cases of appeals, celebrity, concerts and news in order to explore the practices of instrumentalised humanitarian communication. On the contrary, she contributes an original and fresh critical analysis of the multifaceted manifestations of the solidarity of irony through a theorisation of the theatricality of humanitarianism. With insight and a solid breadth of conceptual focus, this discussion exposes two core paradoxes, namely that of authenticity as exemplified in the context of spectacle and that of agency as inherent in the power relations deeply rooted in the humanitarian imaginary. Expertly developed, this discussion is then linked to the concluding chapter that strips bare post-humanitarianism in exposing both its ironic manifestation as well as its neoliberal disposition. From here, Chouliaraki makes another breakthrough by extending the discussion beyond irony and thus illuminating a unique approach to understanding solidarity as agonism. Here, with an ingenious gaze into how a perpetual reflexivity of the spectatorial imagination can only be the way forward in engaging us with the humanity of the other, she demonstrates such argumentation as an emergence without the constraining refusal to an experiential moral judgement of the other locked in a sentimentality of pity. It is that kind of moral pedagogy that seeks to maintain a sustainable balance between being/doing good as well as engaging reflectively with the nature of such acts that leads to pathways of what Chouliaraki terms ‘agonistic engagement with otherness’. As Chouliaraki forcefully argues: ‘Without this agonistic engagement with otherness there are no moral dilemmas to struggle with, no sides to take, no stakes to fight for, no hope to change the conditions of suffering’ (p. 205).
If we are to strongly defend such pathways in maintaining the belief of the transformative potential of our public personas and lifestyles into a process of re-politicising reflexive livelihoods, being good requires a dismantling of narcissistic and corporatised discourses of solidarity. Such pathways require a critical re-evaluation of all spheres of public life and, as the text demonstrates, these are ample and diverse institutions, from international organisations and international non-governmental organisations to disaster journalism and celebrity advocacy. Herein lies a parallel strength of the book (mirroring an Arendtian problematic of politics): in unveiling the performative forces of humanitarianism, the public realm must be viewed as theatrical action in solidifying the pedagogic potential for ‘staging the spectator as actor’ in the humanitarian genre. This is because, as Chouliaraki instructs, ‘public action, prototypically reflected in protest and donation practices, becomes most effective when it combines the symbolic power of words with the physical power of bodies’ (p. 197). And, I would argue, it is this embodied and emotionalised incorporation of action in the form of articulated praxis that can converge the mere narcissistic into a habitus of change.
Indeed, through extensive empirical evidence, Chouliaraki has effectively demonstrated how four genres of public life in the humanitarian imaginary, such as appeals, celebrity, concerts and news, can negotiate the paradoxes of solidarity into post-humanitarian expressions of solidarity. Chouliaraki raises the stakes high in theorising such potential in her exploration of the ethics and aesthetics of solidarity in crafting a humanitarianism for the post-modern era.
The Ironic Spectator offers an engaging trajectory of such pathways and delineates alternative potentialities for new public possibilities and transformative communicative politics of solidarity. Not only is this a path-breaking book that will inform current debates, it will become a core text in teaching and researching in the era of click-activism, celebrity moral ideology and wristband advocacy, where citizen journalism and social media translate new meanings of the message and information sharing but where suffering, pity and salvation still remain core spectacles of our ironic lives. From celebrity to activist to ordinary subjects it is such ironic spectatorships crafted through practices of mediated communication that shape identities in the course of such action that Chouliaraki so brilliantly captures.