When is a conflict a crisis? On the aesthetics of the Syrian civil war in a social media context

Perceiving war and conflict today: Social media and the struggle over the power of interpretation

From the perspective of discourse theory, struggles over the power of interpretation unfold in the form of a conflict between discourse and counter-discourse and become arenas for processes of negotiation between powers and counter-powers (Foucault, 2008[1976]; Jäger, 2001). Discourses are not mere conglomerates of signs but practices that systematically constitute both the subject of discourse and those who are involved in it (Foucault, 2008[1969]). Discourse practices follow regulative formations; that is, constitutive epistemological rules that determine (or at least constrain) which statements are considered or recognized as meaningful or true within a particular discursive field (Doll, 2012; Foucault, 2008[1966], 2008[1969]). In other words, discourse practices are the conditions that put constraints on what can be said or seen in public discourse and how a given reality – e.g. the reality of a war or conflict – is perceived and interpreted (Maasen et al., 2006).

Public discourse is for the most part reflected in the media and usually associated with the traditional mass media, namely television, radio and the press. However, the proliferation of social media has added a new dimension to the notion of media publicity and visibility. Most recently, the conflicts related to the ‘Arab Spring’ have become prototypical manifestations of how the many-to-many communication in the social media is increasingly competing with the one-to-many communication of the mass media (Burkart, 2007; Shirky, 2008). In particular, during the Syrian civil war, videos filmed with hand-held cameras or mobile phones and uploaded to YouTube or Facebook have been providing the international public with images of (often violent) protests, military action, war crimes and human rights violations. Such footage, especially footage that contains horrific scenes, has not only been used as propaganda material to discredit or intimidate the enemy (Axford, 2011; Khamis et al., 2012; Lynch et al., 2014; Salloum, 2013; Youmans and York, 2012), but, more importantly, it introduces a new viewpoint and a counter-perspective into public discourse and the struggle over the power of interpretation of the Syrian civil war (Starr, 2012). With their high spreading rate and visibility, such videos influence the discursive generation of meaning and of what is regarded as the reality of conflict or crisis.

According to Leschke (2013), the emergence of new media with cultural and social valence that open up new aesthetic forms of representation and reach new recipient groups has been inducing a crisis of the cultural or social power of definition. This raises two questions:

In order to answer these questions, it is necessary to combine perspectives from discourse analysis and media aesthetics into a new approach that makes it possible to examine how conflicts are perceived and construed in the context of social media in general and mobile phone videos in particular. Foucault’s (1980, 2008[1969]) concept of the dipositif – a heterogeneous web of discursive and non-discursive elements – provides a useful starting point for this endeavour. However, Foucault’s concept of the dispositif, as well as his considerations on the materiality of statements, fall short of explicitly recognizing aesthetic effects such as the audio-visual and affective dimensions of sensual experiences that result from their media embeddedness. Media-aesthetic approaches recognize such effects because they focus on media-specific potentialities and features; that is, techniques and means inherent in the media that are used to process content and objects (Schnell, 2002). According to the theory of media aesthetics, perception is a relational engagement with the world: rather than being perceived in absolute terms, the world is experienced as ‘changing contextual relationships’ (Zettl, 2011: 3), meaning that the contextual circumstances of perception determine how the world is perceived and what is perceived as reality. The technical apparatus of the media plays a major role in this (Benjamin, 1936).

The above implies, first, that each medium must be considered in relation to its specific technical apparatus and aesthetics and, second, that a change in the media format potentially results in a change in perception and interpretation. Thus, in order to provide a combined analysis of the effects of mobile phone videos on media aesthetics and discourses, it is necessary to first take a closer look at the media apparatus and the discursive legacy of mobile phone images in the context of the Syrian civil war.

The media aesthetics and discursive legacy of mobile phone images

Mobile phone images, when looked at from the perspective of media aesthetics, show an ambivalent effect: on the one hand, their blurry and pixelated visual appearance stands in contrast to the notion of documentation and objectivity, which is associated with the representational function of the photographic; on the other hand, the very same visuality is testament to immediacy, authenticity and a genuine closeness both to the moment of recording and to what is recorded.

The first notion derives from the affectivity of mobile phone images; that is, their inherent emotional attachment. According to Hüppauf (2008), blurriness is in stark contrast to the documentary in that it is the aesthetic means of empathy and imagination. Blurriness creates a space of vagueness that leaves no room for the affirmative or for political and moral judgments. It is a space in which perception becomes uncertain and starts to wander off. Therefore, it runs counter to the logic of representation and reflection. This logic is guided by the principle of unambiguity and acuity, which presumes that the objects of the physical world accord with the image. Blurriness is simultaneous presence and absence: it stands for the claim to truth through evidence and for the ambiguity of conceivability. It thus disregards the traditional understanding of the image and breaks with the idea of visual representation. However, because the images are liberated from reflection and no longer serve merely illustrative purposes, they are free to become actors themselves and to contribute to the production of what they seem only to mirror.

The second notion is linked to the ‘low-grade video image’ (Dovey, 2000: 55) as it appears in camcorder footage that is used in documentaries. According to Dovey, the low-quality video image ‘has become the privileged form of TV “truth telling”, signifying authenticity and an indexical reproduction of the real world’ (p. 55, emphasis in the original). The blurriness of the video images implies that the recording corresponds to what was in front of the camera. Techniques such as to-camera close-up and shaky camera and an embodied intimacy of the technical process create a feeling of immediacy to the presence and the filmmaking. Moreover, the technological opportunities provided by the mobile phone itself – its camera and online functions – reinforce this effect in that closeness and (potential) immediate global dissemination are closely connected in the media dispositif itself (Goggin, 2007; Schwinghammer, 2010).

A particular authenticating effect arises when blurriness appears to be an unintended result of the recording process in the form of a mistake or disturbance. This lack of acuity gives an image a special degree of authenticity because it testifies to the absence of the subject and its origin in an uncontrolled interaction between the object and the technical apparatus (Hüppauf, 2008). What happened during the 2005 London bombings provides central points of reference in this connection: only a few minutes after the bombings, people who were stuck in the London underground used their mobile phones to take photos of what was going on and sent them directly to the BBC. Within less than one and a half hours after the first incident, they were shown on the television news, in reports and on over a thousand websites. Pixelated and of a low quality, these images showed a gloomy setting with indistinct human figures and blurred lights. According to Dohnke (2008), these mobile phone images were not mere accounts of eyewitnesses but of affected people. They provided viewpoints right from the centre of events, produced in the very moment of action. The low quality of the mobile phone images seemed to originate in and testify to not only the difficult circumstances of their production but also their genuineness and authenticity. What these images actually showed was of secondary importance – what was really important was the mediated atmosphere they created: they aroused the viewer’s emotions and had an affective impact. Owing to their specific aesthetics, these mobile phone images became emblematic accounts of the media representation of the critical situation during and after the London bombings.

This aesthetic effect is consistent with the findings of the Shifting Security study reported by O’Loughlin (2011): when a group of people was shown footage of US airstrikes in Iraq in 2003, their most intense reaction was to scenes in which the image turned black and only the sound of gunfire was heard. The audience likened this experience to the effect of horror movies and referred to the power of imagination. O’Loughlin linked this strong audience reaction to the stimulation of the imagination by a certain combination of ‘present and absent sounds and images’ (O’Loughlin, 2011: 86, original emphasis). This aesthetic effect is of great importance in the analysis of the mobile phone video selected for this article and will later be examined more closely. First, it is necessary to take a closer look at those linguistic aspects of the term ‘crisis’ that resonate with its discursive presence in order to connect the aesthetics of mobile phone images to the perception and interpretation of a given conflict situation as something critical.

YouTube videos as an instrument of war and conflict: The Syrian civil war

The civil war in Syria began in mid-March 2011. It was preceded by the violent suppression of demonstrations in the city of Dara’a, which had been in response to the arrest of schoolchildren who had scrawled graffiti demanding the fall of the Syrian regime. Following this incident, men, women and children took to the streets to express their solidarity and to demonstrate against arbitrary arrests by police, the government’s emergency legislation, corruption and nepotism. Although the Syrian regime tried to contain the protests through a combination of vague reform promises and use of force, the protests spread across the country within a few weeks. To suppress the protests, the regime resorted to military force, deployed snipers, besieged cities, conducted mass arrests and tortured prisoners. Even so, the intensity of the protests increased and, in response to the violence, the demands of the protesters changed and became more and more radical (Asseburg, 2013; Schumann and Jud, 2013).

International observers and NGOs such as the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement describe the situation in Syria as catastrophic and disastrous and refer to it as a humanitarian crisis (IRC and RCM, 2013). This situation has been exacerbated by the rise of the ‘Islamic State’ (IS) in the region (Steinberg, 2014). Today, the Syrian crisis has reached a new dimension, with hundreds of thousands of refugees crossing the European borders, posing tremendous challenges to the international community (Wieland, 2015). Another factor that is aggravating this situation is the restricted access to information on recent developments in Syria. Foreign journalists are not allowed to enter the country and were in some cases attacked by the Syrian military. The Syrian news media have been controlled by the government since 2001 and provide only a biased perspective on events (Ortiz, 2013; Pies and Madanat, 2011; Wimmen, 2011). As a result, international journalists and observers depend on the social media for reporting and for getting a picture of the situation in Syria (Gerlach and Metzger, 2013). In this restricted environment, ‘mobile phone videos became virtually the only way to report on protests’ (Comninos, 2011: 9), and YouTube is now the central platform for citizen video reporting in the absence of professional news coverage, despite widespread reservations among journalists and mainstream media about the accuracy of the accounts since late 2012 (Lynch et al., 2014; Youmans and York, 2012).

The Syrian regime initially intended to block internet access but then decided to allow access to Facebook, Blogger and YouTube to enhance its means of surveillance (Youmans and York, 2012). However, the Syrian government’s attempts to maintain control over the news agenda and insurgent behaviour backfired badly. After a while, political activists started to smuggle mobile phones, cameras and laptops into Syria. Soon, videos disseminated via mobile phones and uploaded on Facebook or YouTube provided the international public with images that showed how demonstrators and protesters were shot dead or brutally beaten by regime forces (Axford, 2011; Khamis et al., 2012; Youmans and York, 2012). Thus, as the security forces tried to repress news reports and identify protesters via social media platforms in order to arrest them, the rebels and the protest movements produced a large amount of video material (Comninos, 2011; Gerlach and Metzger, 2013; Khamis et al., 2012).

Just as the conflict in Syria became increasingly violent and brutal, so did the scenes depicted in the videos on YouTube. The short clips became part of the conflict, with each side producing its own propaganda material or using material provided by the other side to discredit or intimidate the enemy. In such an unclear information situation, it is easy for the conflicting parties to call into question the sources and facts referred to by the other side (Khamis et al., 2012; Salloum, 2013). However, these videos are of substantial probative value to the rebel groups in that the footage is evidence of the regime’s brutality and legitimates the rebel groups’ accounts and actions (Gerlach and Metzger, 2013).

However, not only the content of the videos began to change but their aesthetics did as well. Whereas during the first years of the war, many of the videos uploaded on YouTube were of low quality, those that have been made available recently have been of increasingly high quality, promising a higher resolution and a close war experience. ¹ The following section provides a description of the mobile phone video that was selected for this article; it was taken during the early period of the war when the majority of videos from the region were low-quality footage.

Discursive and media-aesthetic effects on the perception of a Syrian crisis

In terms of visual appearance, the aesthetics of the mobile phone video of the Syrian man who filmed his own death resembles the general aesthetics of mobile phone images as described above. The blurry, shaky and pixelated images give the video an ambivalent quality and a feeling of suspension that make it adaptable to different perceptions and interpretations. This is illustrated by the dispute over its authenticity that was mentioned earlier. In Foucault’s terms, the issue of authenticity is a regulative formation that emerges as a constitutive rule for the existence, validity and relation of statements on the Syrian conflict in public discourse. The news media, in their need to deliver an authentic depiction of events and provide evidence that supports their accounts, create a space of truth-telling in which the lack of certainty as to the authenticity is compensated for by other accounts that depict similar events and provide the audience with indicators that may prove that the footage and the accompanying statement are true. The cited media reports illustrate the on-going struggle over the power of interpretation in the context of the situation in Syria. Within this struggle, the issue of authenticity functions as an epistemological condition that allows for different statements to be connected to one coherent discursive thread and gives validity to these statements in the discursive spaces of truth-telling (Meis, 2013). Thus, not only do the news media reports on the mobile phone video give the protesters’ story of the on-going events in Syria a broader public reach; they also, and more importantly, confirm the protesters’ account of reality and the critical state of the situation in Syria.

However, the mobile phone video not only provides an eyewitness account of the critical situation in Syria by displaying an unseen death, it also serves as ‘evidence of the intent to kill’ (Martin, 2012: 21). From the perspective of discourse analysis, visibility in public discourse is a central factor for something to be recognized as being existent. Images function as devices that can be used to make objects, subjects, issues, relations, orders, and so on visible or invisible in public discourse (Maasen et al., 2006; Mersch, 2006). When understood in this way, the unseen, or invisible, death of the cameraman creates a paradox: on the one hand, it raises doubts as to whether what is being displayed actually is an instance of death and whether it is a real account of someone’s death, as well as to the veracity of all further implications on the Syrian conflict related to it. On the other hand, the fact that the cameraman’s death is invisible to the viewer has an exceptional discursive impact: given that there is no visual evidence, the unseen and uncertain nature of this death becomes the reason for its high visibility in public discourse. This is a result not only of its applicability to a regulative formation in discourse but also of its particular aesthetics, which creates an ambivalent and threatening sentiment that resembles the nature of crisis and comes to signify the situation in Syria.

Another important aspect is that the mobile phone video is not just an eyewitness account of the Syrian civil war, but that it is also an immediate account of the people who are affected by it, just as the images of the 2005 London bombings were. The shaky, unstable, fast-moving images and the unclear, unfocused view of the surroundings correspond to the cameramen’s ‘nervousness, stress, fear, and excitement’ (Mroué, 2012: 30) and appear to be caused by the trembling and shaking of his body. These highly charged images, which can be interpreted ‘as fleeting testimonies to unseen protesters’ deaths, and brief digital memorials’ (p. 20), provide a highly affective account of the life-threatening crisis situation in Syria, with the video’s point-of-view perspective and the strong bodily attachment of the mobile phone that is conveyed through its aesthetic appearance playing important roles. As Mroué puts it, those who watch the video become witnesses to the same things that were seen by the cameraman and his camera. To put it figuratively, not only have the cameraman’s eye and the camera lens merged to become one body but, because of the video’s particular aesthetics, the viewer’s eye gets involved in this bodily entanglement as well. Thus, the critical state in which the cameraman finds himself is transferred to the viewers, drawing them right into the crisis of the Syrian civil war.

A comparison of the blurry images of the mobile phone video and the high-quality images of the Syrian protests released by the state-owned media (e.g. Al Jazeera English, 2011b) reveals another aspect that testifies to the life-threatening character of the crisis situation in Syria. According to Mroué (2012), the reason the images published by the state-owned media are stable and clear is that tripods were used in their production. Tripods can provide a solid foundation not only for aiming a camera but also for aiming automatic weapons. Two things are associated with this: first, the state media outlets’ clear and stable images are discursively connected to the lethal violence of the armed forces deployed by the Syrian regime. Second, the two ways of shooting one can see in the video – by using a rifle and by using a camera – signify the two conflicting sides: the regime forces, who are armed with automatic weapons, and the protesters, who are armed with their mobile phones. The mobile phone video in question thus serves as visual evidence of the disproportionate violence and cruelty the Syrian state has been using against civilians (Mroué, 2012), which in turn is evidence of a severe national crisis.

This comparison reveals a relationship between the mobile phone video and the destructive nature of crises. The shaky, pixelated images that make up the video appear to be a result of the destructive crisis situation from which the Syrian protesters report while being right in the middle of it; whereas the high-quality images provided by the state are antithetical to the mobile phone footage in that they appear to be unaffected by the critical situation in Syria. The interplay between the low-quality mobile phone video images and the high-quality images disseminated by the state-owned media thus becomes evidence of the regime’s intent to stay in power (Martin, 2012). Figuratively speaking, the regime’s images negate the existence of a crisis in Syria and testify to its willingness to maintain its hegemonic role in the struggle over the definition of the situation. However, visualizing the steps that are necessary to produce the high-quality images – setting up the tripod and the camera, focusing the camera, and so on – reveals the ‘phoney’ character of the images. Compared with these images, the blurry, shaky, unstable images produced by the protesters appear to be more sincere because they provide a genuine, uncensored account of the events in Syria and ‘report to the world what they are going through over “there”’ (p. 31). As a result of the particular aesthetics, the mobile phone video from Syria becomes part of a counter-discourse that upholds the story that there is a crisis situation in Syria and contradicts the version of reality that is constructed and presented by the Syrian regime.

This aspect becomes all the more evident when the mobile phone video is compared with the ‘Collateral Murder’ footage, released by WikiLeaks, of the US airstrike in New Baghdad, Iraq, in 2007. The video shows the killing of people as seen through a helicopter gun sight. According to Christensen (2014), the reason the ‘Collateral Murder’ footage has had a significant impact is that it is ‘visual evidence of the gross abuse of state and military power’, which itself is evidence of the ‘overt imbalance in power between the filmer and the filmed’. This is undermined by a variety of factors, including the blurriness of the images and the openness with which the media technology behind the images becomes apparent. Moreover, Christensen notes, what makes these images so powerful is that the viewer knows that the footage was made public as a result of an act of deliberate disobedience. This is also true of the mobile phone video from Syria in that filming street protests and other incidents may not be prohibited by law, but it still is undesired and sanctioned by the regime (Youmans and York, 2012). Thus, recording the video was a courageous act of insurgency against the brutal powers of the state. If we agree with O’Loughlin (2011) that it is not so much the image itself as what it represents that can elicit a strong public reaction, then we might also say that the aesthetics of images have a considerable visual effect that is a result of what this video from Syria represents – an imbalanced abuse of state power and a courageous act of insurgency – and how the situation in Syria has been interpreted.

The specific character of the mobile phone video that provides evidence of a crisis becomes all the more apparent if we look at the criteria listed by Neumaier (2013). The cameraman’s troubled voice in the video leaves no doubt that he is fully aware of the crisis situation in which he finds himself. The anxiety and nervousness that is mediated by his voice, his loud breathing and wailing, and the shakiness of the footage, which is caused by his shaking body, are all evidence of the mental stress that is experienced by people who are affected by a crisis. The incident shown in the mobile phone video is just one of many similar events in this conflict, as is characteristic of crises in general. The sequential quality of events is not only indicated in the news reports cited earlier but can also be observed on YouTube, which hosts numerous videos of incidents that are similar to the one depicted in the mobile phone video. The inability of people affected by a crisis to change the situation on their own is evident in the fact that the cameraman was shot (and may have died), unable as he was to escape the approaching gunman who was taking aim at him. The undetermined quality of the mobile phone video in terms of what it actually shows and the authenticity of the video are in line with the criterion according to which crises are a result of unknown powers and processes.

As we have seen, the aesthetics of the mobile phone video provide evidence that there is a crisis in Syria. Key aspects are the ambivalent character of the video in terms of its authenticity and documentary value, as well as the genuine closeness and immediacy that it reflects. These aspects make it adaptable to the ambivalent character of crises and particularly useful in the struggle over the power of interpretation of the Syrian Civil War. The uncertainty of its aesthetics, which calls for imaginative and interpretative completion, becomes a constitutive factor in that it shapes the perception of the Syrian civil war as a crisis. This perception of the war as a crisis is intensified by the fact that the viewer becomes embedded in the aesthetic realm of the mobile phone video as a result of the merging of the perceptive fields of the cameraman, the camera and the viewer. If we return to O’Loughlin’s (2011) argument that the viewer’s imagination is stimulated by a combination of audio-visual presence and absence, we see that the approach he borrows from the French sociologist Luc Boltanski – who distinguishes three possible topical connections to a media event by the viewer: denunciation, sentiment and aesthetic, with the last-mentioned being merely the experience of a spectacle – does not consider the perceptive and interpretive implications of media aesthetics in all their bearings. As the above analysis indicates, mobile phone videos such as the one from Syria are particularly useful in the struggle over the power of definition of a given war or conflict because of their specific aesthetics, which elicits a particular reaction or mind-set alongside discursive relations.

The crisis of the power of definition introduced by the prevalence of the use of mobile phone videos is thus linked to the perception and interpretation of the Syrian civil war as a crisis in that the crisis of the definition of what the videos actually are is manifested in the videos themselves: it is not entirely clear whether they are true, authentic and credible accounts of the events in Syria or whether they are false, fake and fictional accounts that create a ‘phoney’ image of the Syrian civil war. In addition, when seen in relation to the contrasting images provided by the state-owned media, the mobile phone video from Syria becomes an act of resistance to a repressive and violent regime because it provides an account of reality that deviates from the way reality is presented by the state-owned media. The video achieves this by relying on the discursive and aesthetic effects that are related to its uncertain authenticity, its openness to imagination and interpretation, and its affective display of an instance of death (or near-death). Hence, the video is an aesthetic weapon of protest and resistance and, as such, part of a counter-discourse that undermines not only the hegemonic discursive order but also the aesthetic order that is used in an attempt to dominate the perception and interpretation of the Syrian civil war. The mobile phone video is thus a prototypical manifestation of crisis: it not only documents the life-threatening, frightening and destructive situation in Syria that culminates in asymmetric violence and senseless killing but also signifies the impetus behind these protests and acts of resistance, namely the hope of a new beginning and change in Syria after war.

Conclusion

This article explored the struggle over the power of definition of the situation in Syria by analysing a mobile phone video that was recorded during the conflicts in Syria. To understand the perceptive and interpretive impact of images of war and conflict, it is necessary to take a closer look not only at the underlying discursive relations but also at the aesthetics of images. The research perspective taken in the analysis, which combines approaches from discourse analysis and media aesthetics, is particularly suitable for this purpose. Although the analysis presented in this article is of a primarily explorative nature, the validity of its findings becomes apparent when we look at other mobile phone videos of this type that are available on the internet. Thus, more cases and mobile phone videos should be examined to verify and complement the findings and allow for more general statements. One suitable case is the mobile phone video that captured Neda Agha-Soltan’s death during the 2009 Iranian election protests, because it was taken from a different camera angle and has a different aesthetic perspective. Other mobile phone videos from Syria could be included in the analysis as well, such as the video of Basil al-Sayed’s death or that of a cameraman of the Free Syrian Army who recorded his own death while filming conflict action in Syria. ⁵

As the analysis has shown, the representation of death in the context of the Syrian civil war plays a significant role in the public perception and interpretation of the situation in Syria as a crisis. This makes the interaction between crisis perception and media representations of death a promising issue for further research. Given the visual media’s inherent affinity with death, which was pointed out most prominently by Roland Barthes (1989) with reference to photography, and the historical and linguistic connection between weapons and cameras (Elter, 2008), questions arise concerning the interplay between the particular aesthetics of mobile phone videos and the affectivity of death and how this interplay is related to the perception and interpretation of war and conflict. To answer these questions from the perspective of discourse analysis and media aesthetics, a genealogical study of the visual representation of death in war and conflict should be conducted that gives attention to shifts in the visibility of death (or the lack thereof) and its representation across historical periods.

The various social media platforms that exist today host an abundance of mobile phone videos of fatal incidents that occurred during conflicts. Because these videos shape the perception and interpretation of war and conflict, they warrant extensive research. The social media environment not only creates perfect opportunity structures for civil actors to present their immediate and directly affected viewpoint to the entire world. As the German journalist and expert on terrorism Peter Neumann told CNN in September 2014, it also provides terrorist groups such as IS with risk-free and low-cost ways to spread fear among the global population by establishing a routine of expectations, to recruit new members on a large scale and, thus, to pose a threat to their declared enemy and international security (Mullen, 2014). The videos of the beheadings of Western journalists have once again demonstrated the effects that the media have on the perception and interpretation of a given conflict situation and how the different resulting perceptions and interpretations influence the actions of international stakeholders (Hebel, 2014; Kämper, 2014; Vale, 2014). For the time being, we are far from fully understanding the implications of these new media phenomena. We must engage more extensively in focused academic and media-sophisticated research to keep pace with these fast-evolving developments.