| The Iraq War and TV viewer Authors: Dražen Šumiga and Ksenija Berk |
Abstract In the first part of the article I will analyse different statements which appeared in mass media as semantically constructed entities declared by different speakers in diverse cultural environments. I will focus on the role of the holy war and the way those statements are transmitted/appear on television. In second part of this article, I focus my attention on consumption of TV news from Iraqi war. I stress the attention on how the TV news are perceived within the TV audience and try to provoke with thesis that watching TV news from war zones has become just another consumption practice of late capitalism. As the consequence of that kind of generalization, TV viewer becomes nothing else but another collateral victim of war. The right for information and media freedom in within this context becomes a new kind of ideology and another not new at all however very subtle way of advertising. Television news from war areas - in our case from the Iraqi war - have embodied the inherent ideology of advertising practices. Key Words: Mass media, Holy War, news consumption, collaterale victim, pathological narcissist, power The Iraqui War and TV viewer THE NOTION OF HOLY WAR I. Author: Dražen Šumiga In the second attack on Iraq, we have been able to see new and sophisticated ways of fighting and use of established weapons, military techniques, strategically precise plans of military action (use of satellites, smart war-heads). A success in a war depends, besides the use of sophisticated weapons also on controlling, censoring and filtering outgoing information which could endanger military actions and plans and especially its image. Mass media have also so far played a very important role in this last war in Iraq and the problem of objectivity of TV reports has to be emphasised. A very strict censorship of all outgoing information which could jeopardise the course of the war has been observed. In this respect, there was an interesting remark made by Goran Svilanovic on Serbian TV who stated that information flow about this latest war in Iraq was under even stricter supervision than in the First Gulf War of 1991 and we now have not seen any uncensored interviews with the pilots and the soldiers. Censorship of any information represents an old technique which had been already used in the previous Gulf War. The War Reporters had serious problems with access to information because the military staff was supervising every outgoing message in first stage of the war. The whole tactic was oriented to establishing such conditions as to prevent accessibility of information to the public (The Triumph of the Image, p.137). In the latest war in Iraq, both adversaries, the US president George W. Bush and Iraqui president of that time Saddam Hussein, used reasonable rhetoric to achieve military and political goals. US president Bush has again and again emphasized that the aim of the war was the liberation of the Iraqi people from tyranny and oppression and to protect the World from terrorist threat. On the other hand, Saddam Hussein stressed that Iraqi people had to fight against those forces which were trying to destroy the unity of the Muslim State. Two hours after the attack by the American-led coalition, the US president Bush gave a public speech in which he stated that USA was at the edge of liberating the Iraqi nation from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein and the rest of the World from a great danger (TV Serbia). Saddam Hussein responded with a call to all Iraqi people to engage in jihad or Holy War. He also emphasized that Iraq would win and evil would be defeated (TV Serbia). To understand the usage of Holy War in a political context, one has to define different meanings of this concept. First, it means »to fight against ourselves« which points to the need to improve oneself as an ethical and moral being (metaphysical notion). Second, it means »struggle to expand Muslim faith«. Third and last, it means »struggle against unbelievers« (Bruno Etiene, Radical Islamism, p. 214). The above mentioned statement made by Saddam Hussein was used as an instrument to motivate subjects' consciousness and subconsciousness to activate resistance against enemy/unbeliever who was trying to destroy the unity of a Muslim state. Saddam Hussein declared Holy War immediately after the first air strike with which he reinforced the loyalty of his soldiers and common people. On Serbian Television, one could see a hostile Iraqi citizen who said that the Iraq was their homeland and that he fully supported his president. After the declaration of the Holy War, Saddam Hussein in his address to the Iraqi soldiers stated that God would protect them and would harm their enemies. The Iraqi soldiers responded with a fanatical reaction and shouted how they would sacrifice everything for their president (TV Slovenia). The moment the appeal to the Holy War was pronounced, it morally and religiously bound the Iraqi viewers to respond to this appeal. It was in that particular moment when the power of such a statement had the greatest impact on its targeted audience because of the statement’s imminent efficacy to transform the reality (Oswald Ducrot, p. 254). The statement made by Saddam Hussein was at the same time an appeal to Iraqi people to fulfil his orders to fight against imperialistic forces and also a demand to fulfil their religious duty. Although there are several meanings of the word Jihad, it is interesting to acknowledge that the Iraqi viewers understood it in a particular way that their leader at the time envisaged them to. The statement made by Saddam Hussein reached its aim amongst the Iraqi viewers because they decided to interpret such a call in the typical cultural and historical environment of Iraqi culture. The same word would not have the same meaning outside this particular environment. The declaration of the Holy War – Jihad encouraged the desire of Iraqi people to fight for their country with all the necessary means and defend it with their faith (TV Slovenia). By closely observing the statements of both the US president George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein, one could notice that they both resorted to similar ideological mechanisms and concepts which are familiar and well known in their environment. For example, in his speeches the US president George W. Bush often used words like evil, great danger, war against terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism. Whereas Saddam Hussein used similar concepts like evil, Holy War, war against the enemies/unbelievers. In order to justify the war and the use of the military force in Iraq, the American government constructed an image of the enemy even before the war. As Douglas Kellner already ascertained, the same conceptual framework had been used in the First Gulf War where the mass media presented the war as a conflict between good and evil (Douglas Kellner, The Persian Gulf TV War, p. 63, 64). It is important to mention 11 September 2001 which essentially influenced the perception of relations between the East and the West. The words like evil, great danger and invisible threat would not have the same effect on the American public and their support for the new war in Iraq if 11 September had not happened. In the beginning, Saddam Hussein succeeded in creating the enthusiasm and support for his cause by his statements and appeals to Holy War, but the effect did not last for long. - Ducrot, Oswald (1998): Izrekanje in izrečeno, ŠKUC, Filozofska fakulteta, Ljubljana. - Etienne, Bruno (2000): Radikalni islamizem, Cankarjeva zalozba, Ljubljana. - Hoover, Stewart and Lundby Knut (1997): Rethinking Media, Religion and Culture, Sage Publications. - Kellner Douglas (1992): The Persian Gulf Tv War, Westview Press, Oxford. - Mowlana, Hamid; George Gerbner; Herbert Schiller (1992):Triumph of the Image, The Medias War in the Persian Gulf- A Global Perspective, Westview Press, Oxford. - Rippin, Andrew (1993): Muslims, Their Religious Belief and Practices, Volume 2 (Contemporary Period), Routledge. - Television sources: Television Slovenia, Television Serbia. The Iraqui War and TV viewer II. TV VIEWER AS A COLLATERAL VICTIM OF INFORMATION WAR TERROR Author: Ksenija Berk »Within the logic of capitalism the free press is simply another market and in its totality every person it touches must pay for it; for the people, freedom of the press costs twenty cents per head. « In second part of this article, I focus my attention on consumption of TV news from Iraqi war. I stress the attention on how the TV news are perceived within the TV audience and try to provoke with thesis that watching TV news from war zones has become just another consumption practice of late capitalism. As the consequence of that kind of generalization, TV viewer becomes nothing else but another collateral victim of war. The right for information and media freedom in within this context becomes a new kind of ideology and another not new at all however very subtle way of advertising. Television news from war areas - in our case from the Iraqi war - have embodied the inherent ideology of advertising practices. The ideological nature of advertising relates to the combination of symbolic messages with a rhetorical function. What should never be forgotten is that advertisements are never ideologically impartial; as Goldman pointed out 'treating meaningful activities as raw materials to be re-worked into signs in the interest of maximizing commodity sales inherently locates advertisers in the field of ideology' (Goldman 1992: 85). Advertising provides a particular representation of reality - a specific construction of media presented consumption of reality. The control of meaning and the imposition of particular codes for preferred interpretations are connected with larger political distribution of power. We can treat TV viewers as social subgroup, but let us not forget they are formed of very differentiated television audiences. As such, they certainly have the capacity to interpret and redefine media texts. However, as long as people are functioning primarily as 'consumers', critical or otherwise, they are still lending their support and social power to the dominant system, consumer capitalism. The 'resistance-through-reading' critics (Tetzlaff 1991:10) have mistakenly posited conspicuous consumption – the ironic 'I watch it, but don' believe it' mode as a means of rebellion against a system predicated upon that very activity. News consumers spend hours watching news of Iraqi war. While they were watching, they have meanwhile consumed the product - in our case war news - and played the game. This so-called mental habit of dismantling images as said by Elaine Scarry can lead to a certain ironic stance that does little but 'let us dwell in the comfort of our own 'knowingness' (1985:69). As consumers, citizens and critics alike, they turn to orient themselves in relation to theatrical spectacle rather than the reality of events themselves (Scarry 1985:59). Meanwhile the TV-war-news-viewers are increasingly infantilized and marginalized from the real means of politics and economic power. As a result, their most fundamental human problems are mediated, trivialized and distanced. In exchange, the 'ideology of freedom' has come to mean the freedom to consume images rather than freedom to shape reality of war behind the images. The TV viewer is a passive observer. To paraphrase Sonntag (1997) - to shoot a picture means we maintain the status quo. A TV reporter becomes an alley of that special thing, whatever it is, which makes a certain scene interesting and worth of viewer’s consumption even then when the focal point of interest is pain, suffering or misery of another human being. Let's for the moment make an excursion on Hitchcock's movie Rear Window which is explicitly a movie about the desire of eye, the one, which Lacan in his famous Four fundamental concepts of psycho-analysis names as the appetite of an eye. We can suggest that TV news appear as an object of appetite (Lacan, 1980:54). In our case the TV screen functions both-ways as Lacanian window through which the viewer can gaze and as a Sartrian eye when it is about reporting from war zones. TV viewer is through the consumption of war news convicted to the world of shootings, copies, simulacrums... Photographers are committing 'soft murder' with their work. (Sonntag, 1977:18). And jet there is something predatory in a work of a cameraman. Shooting and filming people with cameras and photographic lenses are a way of committing violence upon them. We see them as they can never see themselves and we get to know them the way they could never possibly know themselves. Photographing and shooting turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. For as much as camera is a sublimation of firearms, shooting people becomes a sublimated murder – a soft murder of very sad and very frightened post-modern society. Everyone has some relationship with terror. For TV viewers it is an anesthetized distance, violence via remote control, voyeurism. War news become a fetish to embody the more mundane and constant violence which surrounds us in our societies. War correspondents have a unique relationship to terror, a hybrid condition that combines both voyeurism and direct participation. For these 'participant observers' violence is not a matter of 'values' in the moral sense of the term, but instead a 'value' in the economic. They need terror to realize themselves in both a professional and spiritual sense, to achieve and maintain their culture identity as 'war correspondents'. “When the camera is focused on those who have been literally reduced to bodies, dead bodies,” writes Max Kozloff (1987:210), “the photograph's exploitation is shameless. The dead are recommended as subjects because they lack any defence against the camera and because they have top political value.” The war-news viewer becomes nothing more but a typical hitchcockian hero with all the features of pathological narcissist, the form of subjectivity that characterizes so called 'society of consumption'. (Zizek, 1985) War news – in Zizek's terms – are the material presence of a fragment of reality, object of exchange circulating among subjects, serving as a kind of guarantee, pawn, on their symbol relationship. Cold object of subjectivization have also became the victims in Iraqi prison Abu Graib. Through merely fetishist report modes, they were reduced on news objects solely for their victimization through explicit sexual torture practices, where rituals of power were clearly executed through sexual rituals. Media focused on repeating commentaries, ever repeating visual exposed parts of their bodies, explicit sadistic sexual acts and humiliations. The question posed was whether the soldiers of US Army were doing it out of their sadistic pleasure and boredom or were they just doing what they were told to do – obeying the orders. A TV viewer has become a voyeur of 'forbidden things'. Look, look! shouted the media and continued their visual pressure on audience as if the gaze could kill too. The TV stations each and every day promise the viewer fictitious freedom to condemn what they see. Apparent power of judging gaze, misused through media process of fethishization of sexual abuses, does not give the viewer the opportunity and power for punishment, but castrates him for his passivity and deprives him from any power at all. Consequently, the TV-war-news viewer becomes a hidden collateral victim of a war reporting, a passive subject who is actually aware of problem but does not want to interfere for the war is ugly, dirty and lethal and supposedly somewhere far away. - Goldman, R. (1992): Reading Ads Socially. London: Routledge. - Kozloff, Max (1987): The privileged Eye: Essays on Photography. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. - Lacan, Jacques (1980): Stirje temeljni koncepti psihoanalize. Ljubljana: Cankarjeva zalozba. - Pedelty, Mark (1995): War stories: the culture of foreign correspondents. New York: Routledge. - Scarry, Elaine (1985): The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. - Sonntag, Susan (1977): On Photography. New York: Doubleday. - Tetzlaf, David (1991): Divide and Conquer: Popular Culture and Social Control in Late Capitalism. Media, Culture and Society, 13 (1), 9-33. - Zizek, Slavoj (1985): Patoloski narcis kot druzbeno-nujna forma subjektivnosti. Druzboslovne razprave, 2 (2), 105-141. - Ksenija Berk is an MA student of the Anthropology of Visual Arts on Ljubljana Graduate School of the Humanities (Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis). Her fields of research are graphic design, power and the image, political graphics, aesthetics and avant-gardes. She works as a critic, writer and author in the fields of visual arts and consults on design and art projects. Dražen Šumiga is an MA student of the Anthropology on Ljubljana Graduate School of the Humanities (Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis). His fields of research are relationship between East and West, political philosophy, theories of self and its deconstruction. He works as a philosophical and literaray critic on National Radio and writes for different newspapers. |