Reconstruction 8.4 (2008)


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Fetishizing Death: Hyperspaces for Freedom / Dina Nashar Baroud 

 

Abstract: In this article Dina Nashar Baroud explores, using the Iraq war and its media coverage as her point of reference, a larger trend to fetishization in the emergent politics of the image. This politics as image combines the most important components of the fetish, which becomes simultaneously an illusion, a seductive commodity, and, most importantly, a pulverization of history into fragments. And yet, given the image network's intimate relationship to hegemonic technologies, the pulverization of history in favor of images is not simply something we can reject. Employing the ideological theorization of Slavoj Žižek, where ideology is not what we "believe" so much as how we live, Baroud explores what is at stake in this politics of the image fetish. It is a prolegomenon of the counter-discourse to come, which must of course reconsider what it means to run "counter" to the apparatus itself, which we all live with and use to communicate either explicitly or implicitly.


<1> The daily TV death images are becoming inevitable. The bombs bursting in Iraqi streets leaving tens and hundreds of dead bodies and body fragments are daily expected news: "Truck Bombs Kill 190 in Kurdish Area of Iraq"; [1] "[b]odies lay in the street and victims were carried away on makeshift stretchers or in the arms of rescuers"; [2] "the Iraqi police found five bodies floating in the Tigris River." [3] The reported images of death in Iraq are excessive and ugly. But is death in these images bitter to us as death in real life? What happens to death, itself, in hyperreality? [4] And is death another simulated fetish material that we encounter as any other daily displayed image?

<2> I will argue that death on TV is a fetish material that we encounter daily and that TV articulates an ideology about death by destructuring previous death ideologies like the ideology about real death and its bitterness to structure another reality about death which is anaesthetized. I will refer this to Slavoj Žižek who, in The Sublime Object of Ideology, claims that knowledge about reality—such as the reality of death—is but an ideology of that reality which is articulated by a system. He writes, "'ideological' is a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence"; [5] hence, the reality of things does not express a true knowledge of the social individuals, rather a "non-knowledge" of the individuals which the system formulates pertaining that reality.

<3> I will refer this further to Žižek's point that this "non-knowledge" is a practice of that ideology conducted by "fetishistic illusions." He writes, "[Individuals] are fetishists in practice, not in theory. What [they] 'do not know' they misrecognize, is the fact that in their social reality itself, in their social activity—in the act of commodity exchange—they are guided by the fetishistic illusion." [6] Accordingly, TV death images are "fetishistic illusions" yet part of our "social activity" which becomes, even though in an illusionary aspect, a reality. The TV screen's "fetishistic illusion" of death structures an ideology about death to become a social reality. Illusion transgresses to practice. Being a place for such transgression, the TV screen becomes a hyperspace that extends between the fetish and the reality. At the screen hyperspace, social individuals lose their knowledge about things such as their knowledge and fear about death.

<4> This system must be elaborated upon by questioning, first, the hegemony which stands behind the (de)structuring of death ideology by the TV fetish material. Second, how do TV images become a practiced ideology—how does the rhythmic display of TV images destructure the visual and verbal narrative realities of the subject in order to structure the intended ideology? Third, the paradox between the fetishistic illusionary aspect of ideology and its realistic aspect suggests a meeting ground, a hyperspace in which individuals compromise their knowledge with "non-knowledge" about death. This is the place where our "human civilization" and our humanity are being articulated.

 

Image from Nowhere, of No One

<5> Since "today capitalism defines and structures the totality of the human civilization," [7] it is what articulates our ideology. Yet there is an aporia in this hegemonic definition and that is as hegemony works on defining ideologies by fetishising "human civilization" and human history, it destructures the ideology of "human civilization." The most revealing medium of this television, which fetishizes in many ways.

<6> War in Iraq, which takes the form of a televised war, illustrates a fetishization through its fragmented narrative methods. At the beginning of the 21st century (2003), we are told, the United States' administration, headed by President George W. Bush, started the war on Iraq. Bush, apparently, was the decision maker of war on Iraq, that war which is still being reported daily with scenes of individual bodies both dead and living. These bodies are without history. The real existence of individuals are now reduced to one instant, one camera shot. The bodies of the individuals are displayed in a frozen, flat image attached to an abstract history, that of war and terrorism. In this process, real images of the dead individuals satisfy the intended scenario of war.

<7> Memories of these individuals are erased and instead replaced by other memories drawn by the US administration. The only preserved memories are rare, short and insignificant ones of some targeted politicians, recognizable leaders of Iraq and media personal (reporters) where, then, names and titles are mentioned: "Sahar al-Haydari, 40, a correspondent for an Iraqi news agency, Aswat al Iraq, killed in Kabul" [8] and "[t]he director of a local hospital was also killed." [9] The rest die with no names and no titles, sacrificed for the sake of televisual materialism.

<8> Nevertheless, in the context of television, Bush similarly lacks real existence and history. Carol V. Hamilton, in "Being Nothing: George W. Bush as Presidential Simulacrum," explained that Bush is nothing and his nothingness is the result of him being a commodity that has been produced only to exist through media. He functions only in front of TV camera as an image. [10] Accordingly, Bush is an apparent hegemony existing only as TV image. His existence is only to provide media with materialism to be displayed: his image as materialism; his hegemony as materialism; his hegemony's consequences as image.

 

Seductive Dead Body

<9> This twinning of Bush and dead Iraqis is an admission that TV is the powerful and seductive milieu in which ideology is articulated. But how does this work? Baudrillard believed that seductivity is more powerful than power itself, [11] and that TV seductivity is a magnet which, by displaying "pieces of information," empowers a destructured ideology:

But such seduction has no more meaning than anything else, seduction here connotes only a kind of lucid adhesion to simulated pieces of information, a kind of tactile attraction maintained by the models…it has no other concern than the optimal self-management of its memory bank. Pure magnetization. [12]

Seduction is a "tactile attraction," a "magnetization," which tries to establish an existence for itself, in which "pieces of information" become the ideology. Virilio, when interviewed by Carlos Oliveira, agrees with Baudrillard that media is a magnet. He also adds that its power takes the form of a neo-totalitarianism replacing the previous lost Left and Right totalitarianisms. [13]

<10> What is featured in this neo-totalitarianism is the rhythmic occurrence of the displayed "pieces of information": Iraqi corpses daily. Hakim Bey, in "The Information War," describes the effectiveness of this rhythmic occurrence:

[T]he excessive mediation of the Social, which is carried out through the machinery of the Media, increases the intensity of our alienation from the body by fixating the flow of attention on information rather than direct experience. [14]

To Bey, media's totalitarianism drives the audience towards a constant attentiveness which prevents any real encounter. Consequently, the more persisting media is in holding attention, the more successful it is in empowering its brutal embodiments such as Bush's war and his claimed liberation of Iraq. You cannot stop the rhythm or even delay it, else the magnet fades in its attraction. Rhythmic occurrence is the guarantee to keep you constantly alert in the media sphere. You, consequently, become visually addicted and visually attached to the rhythm. You cannot miss any occurrence, instead you wait and even search for the next occurrence; you trade your personal rhythm for the media's rhythm. Your "direct experience" goes with the "flow of attention on information." The image of blood in the streets of Iraq becomes a rhythm which is now totally synchronized with what we see and what we desire to see. Michael Howard, for Guardian International Pages, notes that "[p]olice say that on average they find between 40 and 50 bodies in the capital everyday." [15] These bodies, evacuated into images, are the basis of our synchronized media rhythms.

<11> This destructuring constitutes our lived reality of war; space and time are dismantled to induce a "non-knowledge" about what happened and is happening. The dismantling of death images is realized by exposing these images in serial, static, and indifferent occurrences. Same Baghdad always seen: almost the same atmosphere, similar streets and gray colors; always "[b]lood and concrete…scattered across the streets." [16]. Everything is so persisting in sameness. This sameness erupts into boredom when we are annoyed by such scenes or wait for more details to be displayed. But these reactions, as implied by the infinitude of any serialized rhythm, eventually wane. The audience reacts with less and less intensity until, as if their watching was some form of deep meditation, total (visual) passiveness is achieved. The streets and names are displayed but with no interest to know. With such rhythmic dismantling, death assumes a "reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its" [17] context.


Watched Freely Ever After

<12> The ideology about death further attains its reality by destructuring, besides places, names and time, narrations about death. The mega-narration which fabricates death—its causes and victims and its credibility and validity—has been destructured to define fetishistic illusions about death. Men are excessively presented as the only sex in the death image. In "Sex, Gender and September 11," Hilary Charlesworth and Christine Chinkin noticed that images addressing terrorism and war appear mostly with no dead women. [18] This gentrification of the images of terrorism destructures death's gender-blind being.

<13> Another feature of narration goes further to destructure the experience of death. In conventionally stating death events, life comes first, followed by cause of death, then death, and declaration of death at the end. This logic is what Michel Foucault has presented in The Birth of the Clinic as a structure in which death can be related to its opposition (life), thus reasoning itself at least in its phasing. [19] Death comes after life and before declaration. But this logic is repositioned by media. Media interplays with expressions creating a destructuring of the conventional death syntax. Parts are substituted and even eliminated from the statement: life (of the dead) is eliminated from the picture; cause (killing) is blurred in its reasoning and even substituted by another cause: liberation. "'The Iraqi Army and Coalition Forces are committed to the people of Diyala, they are committed to fighting for the Iraqi people's security,' said Maj. Gen. Benjamin Mixon." [20] Commitment and security are in the picture whereby death and killing fade and disappear from the picture.

<14> Destructuring has also allowed the possibility of shifting or sliding syntax into a paratactical composition, forwarding and rewinding the media's display. [21] The result is, then, that any combination becomes feasible: effect-declaration-death-life; or, death-cause-life-declaration. In this destructuring, fetishized death is no longer presented in sequence of events; space and time are lost again. Sorrow's places, its necropolises, have no significance because there is no end in destructured expressions, no beginning. The dead bodies were nowhere and will go nowhere. They freeze—live happily ever after—to a moment and place of nothingness where everything is possible and never ending, yet ending.

<15> Death, in here, is fantasized. But this fantasizing of the narration is another part of how death attains its "social reality":

What they do not know is that their social reality itself, their activity, is guided by an illusion, by a fetishistic inversion…They know very well how things really are, but still they are doing it as if they did not know. The illusion is therefore double: it consists in overlooking the illusion which is structuring our effective relationship to reality. And this overlooked, unconscious illusion is what may be called the ideological fantasy. [22]

Therefore, the reality, what individuals know, is effectively structured by its counterpart, fantasy: "[t]hey know very well" that their ideology is guided by a fantasy yet they follow. The whole ideological articulation is a fantasy narration that individuals would believe in and practice in their daily life. In other words, individuals are guided into not practicing what they know as real and into practicing fantasy, which in turn becomes reality.

<16> Ideology is articulated when this fantasy transgresses into practice and reality. This happens in a space which is located neither in the induced fantasy nor in the real, rather in a space which stands between both, the TV screen. This space is a hyperspace stretching between the distinct realms of fantasy and reality. For the displayed death in Iraq, the screen is that hyperspace stretching between the fetish images of the dead and their audience.

<17> The TV screen is a hyperspace because it hyper-realizes illusion and hyper-fantasizes reality. By hyper-realizing, the fetish death becomes recognizable to real audiences and consequently that fetish/fantasy becomes creditable and then real. At the screen hyperspace, the fantasy of death becomes a reality to the audience; fantasy is restructured by the televisual system to articulate an ideology about death. Death becomes a seductive materialism projected against dismantled space, time and logic.

<18> By hyper-fantasizing, audiences are compromised in their knowledge and recognition. They become free from any recognition, with(out) knowing it and with(out) feeling it: they escape bitterness and fear of death because the TV screen is seductive, able to magnetize the audience into the articulated ideology. But if death and its (lost) bitterness is an articulated ideology, isn't real bitter death an articulated ideology? Thus, many hyperspaces have been established where fantasy meets with reality. The question then becomes a matter of how we articulate knowledge, fear, and bitterness. At the time being and before our moment of freedom, at the TV hyperspace, we know that there is real death in Iraq, yet at the moment we destructure this to know that there is only the real image of death in Iraq. But perhaps, paradoxically, the ideological impasse does not involve returning to some lost reality, which is always subsumed into the image schemes of those who produce our televised wars; rather, we must recognize that to achieve justice in the digital age, we must allow that justice too is a fantasy, our fantasy, an ideology that can be articulated (realized) only if we are willing to truly become an image humanity.

 

Notes

[1] Damien Cave, "4 Truck Bombs Kill 190 in Kurdish Area of Iraq." The New York Times, August 15, 2007, Foreign Desk. [^]

[2] Michael Howard, "60 Killed in Iraq as leaders hail in violence: Car bombs hit precinct not known as 'hot' area Security clampdown cuts toll of street shootings." Guardian International Pages, February 19, 2007. [^]

[3] Alissa J. Rubin, "Attackers Kill 39 in Iraq; massacre details emerge." The New York Times, July 18, 2007. [^]

[4] Jean Baudrillard has presented, extensively, a discussion of the lost origin and reality which is substituted by "the hyperreal order and…order of simulation." See Jean Baudrillard. Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Harbor: The university of Michigan Press, 1999), 1-14. [^]

[5] Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, in Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed., Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 716. [^]

[6] Ibid., 720. [^]

[7] Rex Butler, Slavoj Žižek: Live Theory (New York: Continuum, 2005), 147. [^]

[8] Cave, "Bombs and Gunmen in Iraq Kill at Least 22 and Wound 55." The New York Times, June 8, 2007. [^]

[9] Rubin, "Attackers Kill 39 in Iraq; massacre details emerge." The New York Times, July 18, 2007. [^]

[10] Carol V. Hamilton, "Being Nothing: George W. Bush as Presidential Simulacrum," ctheory a144 (2004) (accessed January 8, 2006). [^]

[11] Baudrillard, Seduction (Montréal: New World Perspectives, 2001), 8. [^]

[12] Ibid., 163-166. [^]

[13] Carlos Oliveira, "Global Algorithm 1.7: The Silence of the Lambs: Paul Virilio in Conversation," ctheory ga107 (1997) (accessed January 8, 2006). [^]

[14] Hakim Bey, "The Information War," ctheory a022 (accessed January 8, 2006). [^]

[15] Howard. "60 Killed in Iraq as leaders hail fall in violence." Guardian International Pages, February 19, 2007. [^]

[16] Cave, "Bombs and Gunmen in Iraq Kill at least 22 and Wound 55." The New York Times, June 8, 2007. [^]

[17] Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, in Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed., Rivkin and Ryan (Oxford: Balckwell, 2007), 716. [^]

[18] Hilary Charlesworth and Christine Chinkin, "Sex, Gender and September 11," The American Journal of International Law 96, no.3 (2002): 600. [^]

[19] Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (New York: Vintage, 1994), 144. [^]

[20] Cave, "4 Truck Bombs Kill 190 in Kurdish Area of Iraq." The New York Times, August 15, 2007. [^]

[21] Virilio, in Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light (London: Continuum, 2002), wrote that: "The 'time machine'…is finally with us," indicating time which now can be rewind, forwarded as desired. [^]

[22] Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, in Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed., Rivkin and Ryan (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 721. [^]

 

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