Melani McAlister: Complexities of War
Like some others, I've had a hard time figuring out exactly where to jump into this rich discussion. But two posts recently caught my attention, both of which asked us to think in very nuanced ways about the contradictions of the media and the current war (and thanks to both for the images):
James Der Derian: Getting up close to the war machine has its dangers (I’ve seen many an embed go native), but it also has its virtues (hearing a two-star general tell you where he’d like to stick all the neocons). And you do get a more variegated view of war, certainly more than the NYTimes, but also more than I’ve recently been scanning in these online exchanges.
Ananya Vajpeyi I suppose one of the threads of our discussion here on underfire is proceeding as an attempt to flesh out exactly what this "somehow" gestures towards -- in other words, we are trying to figure out exactly how "the coverage of the war and the course of the war" are indeed "intertwined".
It seems to me that there are two levels of analysis here, which I'll describe as focused differently on "long dure'e" and "immediate contradictions."
The long dure'e analysis looks, among other things, at the function of spectacle, information saturation, and the meeting of "ideological" and "state" mechanisms. For this mode, which is crucial to looking at the structuring structures of our current moment, I'd notheless suggest we not forget that many of these issues did not start or stop with Vietnam. They arose, for example, and perhaps even -more- intently, in the 1990-91 Gulf war, when spectacle described pretty much everything people in the West were able to see on TV. In those moments, with the Cold War just ended, it looked like the New World Order (GHW Bush's term) would be nothing so much as image-as-event. Of course, the movement had begun long before, and in fact, one could argue that Foucault's work is about defining the much earlier demise of spectacle (punishment for display) toward a rationalized discipline/surveillance that disguised and internalized the operations of power. In ways that are truly hard to u nravel, but vital too understand, the rationalization and hidden-ness of surveillance in the modern era has worked in tension and tandem with the emergence of other kinds of spectacle in the form of media.
My own current interests, however, focus more on the immediate contradictions: James Van Derien talks about the general who hates the neocons, which makes perfect sense (I can't wait to see it in the film): the realities of death, and the limits of what the military can or should do, tend to be very real to those who go to battle, even if the whole process of militarization also pushes toward war.
I'd also point out that specific decisions led to the practice of embedding: the US military learned from the backlash after the Gulf War, when they had kept reporters out of the zones of war and let them report only from "secured" areas, dependent on military-supplied images of the fighting. The journalists filed lawsuits, the public was skeptical, and the coverage, in the end, was not as pliant as the military and policymakers had hoped (their hopes were high). For -this- Iraq war, the decision to "buy in" journalists through embedding was quite conscious, and military officials declared themselves happy with the result: embedded journalists were bonded with the soldiers who often saved their lives, and they showed the story through military eyes, so that even images of the violence of war were humanized: the humanity of the soldiers alongside, or more than, than that of the victims. (Take the documentary Gunner's Palace, which is quite extraordinary, but which also shows war like enlisted soldiers see it, with the larger politics as marginal to their daily experience of danger and boredom. Compare to Dreams of Sparrows, made by an Iraqi American, which looks at a group of Iraqis who were initially more or less pro-war, and their subsequent disillusionment as victims of violence; they can never forget the question of what the war is being fought for.)
I think Bourdieu's notion of habitus, or his even better formulation, "a feel for the game," points us toward the ways in which even a news media that is bought and sold by major corporations still and necessarily produces reporters who have their own rules of professionalization: they do what they do through a particular set of self-images, expectations, practices, and commitments that will sometimes (certainly not always) put their interests (interests understood as going well beyond economic) against those of the corporations who run the media. This is not to mention the journalists who take on the task of public critique. (And even corporations may find themselves working in some tension with state power; David Harvey's _The New Imperialism_ traces some of this very nicely.)
And what about Abu Ghraib? If we are going to talk about spectacle, the media, and images that become part of the progress of the war, doesn't our analysis also require we try to make sense of that: the power and yet ultimately the lack of power of those images? And the strange silence in the Middle East, even as Muslims there and elsewhere would ultimately take to the streets over the Muhammed cartoons?
> Melani McAlister
James Der Derian: Getting up close to the war machine has its dangers (I’ve seen many an embed go native), but it also has its virtues (hearing a two-star general tell you where he’d like to stick all the neocons). And you do get a more variegated view of war, certainly more than the NYTimes, but also more than I’ve recently been scanning in these online exchanges.
Ananya Vajpeyi I suppose one of the threads of our discussion here on underfire is proceeding as an attempt to flesh out exactly what this "somehow" gestures towards -- in other words, we are trying to figure out exactly how "the coverage of the war and the course of the war" are indeed "intertwined".
It seems to me that there are two levels of analysis here, which I'll describe as focused differently on "long dure'e" and "immediate contradictions."
The long dure'e analysis looks, among other things, at the function of spectacle, information saturation, and the meeting of "ideological" and "state" mechanisms. For this mode, which is crucial to looking at the structuring structures of our current moment, I'd notheless suggest we not forget that many of these issues did not start or stop with Vietnam. They arose, for example, and perhaps even -more- intently, in the 1990-91 Gulf war, when spectacle described pretty much everything people in the West were able to see on TV. In those moments, with the Cold War just ended, it looked like the New World Order (GHW Bush's term) would be nothing so much as image-as-event. Of course, the movement had begun long before, and in fact, one could argue that Foucault's work is about defining the much earlier demise of spectacle (punishment for display) toward a rationalized discipline/surveillance that disguised and internalized the operations of power. In ways that are truly hard to u nravel, but vital too understand, the rationalization and hidden-ness of surveillance in the modern era has worked in tension and tandem with the emergence of other kinds of spectacle in the form of media.
My own current interests, however, focus more on the immediate contradictions: James Van Derien talks about the general who hates the neocons, which makes perfect sense (I can't wait to see it in the film): the realities of death, and the limits of what the military can or should do, tend to be very real to those who go to battle, even if the whole process of militarization also pushes toward war.
I'd also point out that specific decisions led to the practice of embedding: the US military learned from the backlash after the Gulf War, when they had kept reporters out of the zones of war and let them report only from "secured" areas, dependent on military-supplied images of the fighting. The journalists filed lawsuits, the public was skeptical, and the coverage, in the end, was not as pliant as the military and policymakers had hoped (their hopes were high). For -this- Iraq war, the decision to "buy in" journalists through embedding was quite conscious, and military officials declared themselves happy with the result: embedded journalists were bonded with the soldiers who often saved their lives, and they showed the story through military eyes, so that even images of the violence of war were humanized: the humanity of the soldiers alongside, or more than, than that of the victims. (Take the documentary Gunner's Palace, which is quite extraordinary, but which also shows war like enlisted soldiers see it, with the larger politics as marginal to their daily experience of danger and boredom. Compare to Dreams of Sparrows, made by an Iraqi American, which looks at a group of Iraqis who were initially more or less pro-war, and their subsequent disillusionment as victims of violence; they can never forget the question of what the war is being fought for.)
I think Bourdieu's notion of habitus, or his even better formulation, "a feel for the game," points us toward the ways in which even a news media that is bought and sold by major corporations still and necessarily produces reporters who have their own rules of professionalization: they do what they do through a particular set of self-images, expectations, practices, and commitments that will sometimes (certainly not always) put their interests (interests understood as going well beyond economic) against those of the corporations who run the media. This is not to mention the journalists who take on the task of public critique. (And even corporations may find themselves working in some tension with state power; David Harvey's _The New Imperialism_ traces some of this very nicely.)
And what about Abu Ghraib? If we are going to talk about spectacle, the media, and images that become part of the progress of the war, doesn't our analysis also require we try to make sense of that: the power and yet ultimately the lack of power of those images? And the strange silence in the Middle East, even as Muslims there and elsewhere would ultimately take to the streets over the Muhammed cartoons?
> Melani McAlister