Precarious spectatorship

Theatre and image in an age of emergencies

Sam Haddow

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526138439
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Drama
• Index: Literature

Precarious spectatorship is about the relationship between emergencies and the spectator. In the early twenty-first century, 'emergencies' are commonplace in the newsgathering and political institutions of western industrial democracies. From terrorism to global warming, the refugee crisis to general elections, the spectator is bombarded with narratives that seek to suspend the criteria of everyday life in order to address perpetual 'exceptional' threats. The book argues that repeated exposure to these narratives through the apparatuses of contemporary technology creates a 'precarious spectatorship', where the spectator's ability to rationalise herself or her relationship with the object of her spectatorship is compromised. This precarity has become a destructive but too-often overlooked aspect of contemporary spectatorship.

1

Enemy/image

Not knowing how to share with another gaze our own passion to see, not knowing how to produce a culture of the gaze: this is where the real violence against those who are helplessly abandoned to the voracity of visibilities begins.

Marie-José Mondzain, 2009, p. 20

An indefinite state of emergency

On 13 November 2015, nine gunmen carried out a series of coordinated mass-assassinations in Paris, killing 130 people and wounding a further 368. The attacks were claimed by the organisation known variously as ISIL, ISIS, Da’esh and Islamic State (IS), a self-declared Sunni Muslim caliphate operating out of occupied territory in Iraq and Syria that was at its strongest between 2014 and 2017. In the aftermath of the assassinations, President François Hollande declared a state of emergency, which was immediately ratified by the French parliament. This state of emergency, permitting the police and interior ministry to act without judicial approval or warrant, and allowing searches, arrests and detainment of suspects without the need for evidence, was swiftly extended to a three-month period. By late January 2016, the Prime Minister Manuel Valls was calling for it to be continued ‘until we can get rid of Da’esh’ under the justification that it is right ‘to use all means in our democracy under the rule of law to protect the French people’ (Stothard, 22 January 2016; Sharkov, 22 January 2016). Then on 10 February 2016, the National Assembly voted in favour of an amendment to the French constitution, which would enable any sitting president to declare a state of emergency without parliamentary approval (Christafis, 10 February 2016). The amendment was shelved due to lack of Senate approval, but the 2015 state of emergency was prolonged five times before finally expiring in November 2017. In effect, the emergency precipitated by the 2015 Paris attacks spurred a reordering of the law to consolidate its authority beyond the contemporary threat and above the rule of democracy.

Judith Butler offered an eloquent objection to what she saw as the hijacking of temporary panic in order to permanently increase state power. Drawing on her research into ‘grievability’ (the factors that elevate the significance of some deaths whilst obscuring others) she warned against the vulnerability of hysteria, and the dangers of bartering away civil liberties on the promise of increased security. I will quote from her at length, as she sketches out many key points of reference for this chapter.

Mourning seems fully restricted within the national frame. The nearly 50 dead in Beirut from the day before [the Paris attacks] are barely mentioned, and neither are the 111 in Palestine killed in the last weeks alone, or the scores in Ankara. Most people I know describe themselves as ‘at an impasse’, not able to think the situation through. One way to think about it may be to come up with a concept of transversal grief, to consider how the metrics of grievability work, why the cafe as target pulls at my heart in ways that other targets cannot. It seems that fear and rage may well turn into a fierce embrace of a police state. I suppose this is why I prefer those who find themselves at an impasse. That means that this will take some time to think through. It is difficult to think when one is appalled. It requires time, and those who are willing to take it with you. (2015)

Foremost amongst Butler’s concerns are the ways in which ‘emergencies’ distort notions of time and space. At one level, they overload their subjects with a sense of urgency, which creates a paralysis (or ‘impasse’), whilst noisily asserting that something must be done, and now. A key purpose to declaring an ‘emergency’, after all, is to signal that whatever has already happened, things can still get much worse. In conjunction with this, emergencies involve vivid demarcations of space in order to localise the threat, identifying those who will be protected and marking out those who will not. This is why the ‘national frame’ became so important in the aftermath of the Paris assassinations, reinvigorating the hyper-nationalism that had spread through France after the IS-related attacks on the staff of the satirical Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris, which had happened in January of the same year. Although the French military increased its bombing campaign against IS positions in Syria and Iraq, the principal focus of the state of emergency was the policing of domestic rather than international locations (Wazir, 6 January 2016). Its legitimacy and force was built upon a solidified conception of ‘France’ and ‘French nationality’. State apparatuses then set about emptying (or ‘cleansing’, with all of that term’s horrifying implications) any spaces that resisted this suddenly rigid, incontestable model (Toor, 29 January 2016). Activists with no ties to IS were placed under indefinite house arrest; Muslim domestic and community areas were subject to police raids; and many people were detained without stated cause or corroborative evidence (Rubin, 17 February 2016). In this instance, the emergency reveals its potential to act as a political device, a tool for the conversion of panic into a new orthodoxy. In the case of France, the sovereignty of the nation was already a pre-eminent concern – this particular emergency simply exploited that concern to promote an agenda of exclusion and exclusivity.

In this chapter I will focus on the subject of IS, and discuss ways in which they have fostered (and been used to foster) a sense of emergency amongst countries such as Britain, France and the US. I am defining ‘sense of emergency’ as the organisation of events into a cohesive threat in order to facilitate or provoke response on the part of a governing body. This is not the formal ‘state of emergency’ invoked by the French government in the example above, but a more dispersed and intangible entity that nevertheless permits extraordinary measures to be taken in the name of emergency response. To clarify these processes, I will be paying particular attention to the propaganda produced by IS for audiences in the US, UK and Western Europe since, as I will argue, they were crucial to establishing the ubiquitous menace of IS during its heyday, justifying both retributive military campaigns, and the ceding of civil liberties amongst their enemies. Although this propaganda proved all-pervasive in mainstream media and the unregulated spaces of the Internet, very little attention was paid to the ways in which it functioned as propaganda, in the service of both IS and the states with which it is at war. This chapter, then, seeks in part to redress that omission, and in doing so to observe some ways in which the ‘emergency’ constituted by IS was prepared and orchestrated in the public domain. To be clear from the outset: I am not arguing here against the circulation of images of violence. In the visual cultures of the early twenty-first century, this would anyway be pragmatically untenable. What I am arguing against is rather the distribution of such images in a way that does not encourage critical reflection on the image and our relationship with it, and looking into some of the consequences that such distribution may produce.

Making an enemy

‘I want Jihadi John to face justice.’ The first time that the then British Prime Minister David Cameron delivered this proclamation was at the G20 summit in Brisbane, Australia, 2014 (Leftly, 16 November 2014). At that time, ‘Jihadi John’, an anonymous masked executioner for IS, had appeared on four short films, in each decapitating a foreign hostage. The hostages were US journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff, and British aid workers David Haines and Alan Henning. As each of the videos were released, they were quickly reposted by Internet users to an uncountable number of websites. In Britain, Scotland Yard responded by warning that accessing these videos in their unedited format ‘may’ constitute a terrorist offence (Evans, 20 August 2014). In support of their warning, they cited Section 2 of the Anti-Terrorism Act 2006, which declares the ‘dissemination of terrorist publications’ to be an offence under the law. This rather vague legislation enabled British state apparatuses to ban the unedited videos from all mainstream media. Regulation of the Internet proved, as ever, to be much trickier, with various Internet companies reported to be facilitating the distribution of Islamic State material, either without their own knowledge or without their concern (Katz, 9 January 2019; Thomson, 18 November 2015).

In the mainstream press, however, photographic stills and edited clips of the videos were distributed, largely free from critical engagement and mostly involving hysterical condemnation of the executioner. In response to the killing of Sotloff and Foley, the US launched air strikes against IS and reported ‘Jihadi John’ wounded in early November 2014. These reports were later proven false, as he appeared in two further films, decapitating Japanese hostages Haruna Yukawa and Kenji Goto. He also featured in a longer propaganda video, at one point standing next to the severed head of US aid worker Peter Kassig and at another leading a group of IS militants in the decapitation of eighteen Syrian soldiers. When Cameron first delivered his proclamation, he stressed a desire for ‘Jihadi John’ to ‘face justice’ after being captured alive. A year later a US drone strike was reported to have killed Mohammed Emwazi, the man who had since been identified as ‘Jihadi John’. Cameron immediately declared this a ‘strike at the heart of ISIL’ and the satisfaction of his (and, given his own symbolic position, ‘our’) desire for justice (Dathan, 13 November 2015).

On reflection, however, it was difficult to discern the exact terms of this satisfaction. Through the worldwide distribution of the films in which he features, ‘Jihadi John’ gained international notoriety and significant political capital, both for IS and for their adversaries. This notoriety and capital far exceeded the limitations of Emwazi himself, and were not terminated with his death. Long after his demise, his picture was still being used to inspire fear and admiration; his videos were still reproducing the violence that he actually and symbolically wrought upon his victims. His name became symbolic of the broad and brutal reach of IS propaganda. And that name is highly significant. ‘John’ was one of four Beatles-inspired monikers given by hostages in a Syrian jail to their anonymous tormentors (Anon., 26 February 2015). The composite ‘Jihadi John’ was then coined and distributed by the British press ostensibly for its catchy alliteration, and the easy styling of archetypal villain that it afforded. But there are deeper implications to this composite. For one thing, the name precluded the division of its points of reference. Since at least the events of 11 September 2001, ‘Jihad’ (a Muslim’s duty to maintain their religion, translatable as ‘struggle’) has become shorthand in western press and politics for armed conflict, with the derivation ‘Jihadi’ commonly applied as warrior, soldier or terrorist. In terms of self-identification, the ‘Jihadi’ is a ‘warrior’ or ‘soldier’ involved in a holy obligation. Alain Badiou defines such figures as creatures of excess, who exist at the intersections between ‘courageous death and immortality’ and do things that are beyond the limits of ‘our vital and social determinations’ (2012, pp. 43, 41).

Clearly, however, the moniker ‘Jihadi John’ was not created either for or by Emwazi. As Simon Cottee pointed out, he would never have embraced the nickname on his own terms because ‘in his mind he [was] a warrior, not a banal John’ (Saul, 3 March 2015). ‘Jihadi John’ was a name externally applied to a ‘terrorist’, a process designed to highlight an inverse, passive quality of ‘excess’. We did not name him a terrorist simply in order to clarify what he could do, but also to justify what could be done to him. Which brings us back to the final part of Cameron’s statement. On behalf of the ‘we’, ‘I’ desire (where desire carries the full force of a national government and its international allies) that ‘Jihadi John’, this persona who embodies qualities that exceed the ‘human animal’ should ‘face justice’. But ‘face’ how? Turn towards, be faced with, or experience? None of these definitions are interchangeable, nor is it clear to which Cameron is referring. In the act of my citation I can now assume what Cameron understood by the final word of his statement, because ‘Jihadi John’ was killed. The ‘justice’ was death. Cameron legitimised this definition of ‘justice’ by citing Article 51 of the UN Charter, which guarantees ‘the right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a UN member’ (Bowcott, 13 November 2015). He called the killing of Emwazi both ‘an act of self-defence’ and ‘the right thing to do’. Thus, the exceptional acts that may be done to the Jihadi are circumscribed within international law. Justice, we are to assume, was ‘faced’. Or at least, Mohammed Emwazi was killed.

Mohammed Emwazi and ‘Jihadi John’, however, were not the same entity. The latter was a persona, created by its enemies in order to be an enemy.¹ His name indicated that he both came from and othered the interior, and was thus the product of a divided self. Once his progenitor had been unmasked, there were numerous excavations of Emwazi’s past, and attempts to uncover precisely what had led him to ‘become’ this person. Most of these excavations, however, failed to ask why the British press and politicians had felt it necessary to create this persona in the first place. And the jubilant reports of Emwazi’s death completely missed the point. In destroying the man who had performed as ‘Jihadi John’, that figure was immortalised, and his division of the British self was set in stone. It was an example of what Jacques Derrida, in a response to the attacks on 9/11, called ‘autoimmunitary suicide’: self-destruction by virtue of aggressive defence (Borradori, 2004, pp. 94–96). The journalist Patrick Cockburn wryly supposed the killing of Emwazi a ‘symbolic victory in a war that is full of symbols’. But as he pointed out, since martyrdom for the faith is the key objective for many IS militants, the symbolism of Emwazi’s death was entirely one-sided (Cockburn, 13 November 2015). In fact, the principal consequence of the death was the absolute severing of the man from the persona. ‘Jihadi John’ never ‘faced justice’, since juridical process might have uncovered Emwazi’s face and depleted the power of enemy that was bestowed upon him. As it is, he will always be a masked (faceless) man, and the actions for which he has become known will continue to be repeated, thus enacted, in the videos and in the photographs. True, he will not murder any more foreign hostages on video; but the masked executioner is an easily replaceable figure. In January 2016, in fact, IS released a video showing a different masked man with a British accent, later identified as Siddhartha Dhar, executing a hostage by shooting him in the back of the head. Eager to play their part, the British press immediately consolidated this persona as the ‘new Jihadi John’. The enemy without a face is easily recycled.

Given this recyclability, it was always clear that the prevalence and popularity of the films in which the original ‘Jihadi John’ appears would quickly decrease in circulation. But this is of little consequence if they are simply replaced with newer figures that fulfil the exact same function. And even taking this into account, the political expediency of ‘Jihadi John’ did not end with Mohammed Emwazi’s death. In fact, in the short run, it was amplified – as a rallying cry for IS, and as a justification for the suicidal aggression of its adversaries. Killing the actor only strengthened his signature performance. In the aftermath, however, very little attention was paid to this performance as a performance, which is where this chapter now turns.

Filming executions

In December 2014, the journalist and presenter Victoria Coren Mitchell issued the following entreaty to her readers:

Our readiness to be spooked by murder footage from Syria benefits three groups: the propagandists behind it; those who would restrict our civil liberty in the name of ‘terrorism prevention’; and a modern media so obsessed with hits, traffic and advertising sales that it has long forgotten a world where it did not depict corpses, or irresponsibly cover suicide, for fear of causing further damage. In a very deep way, these groups are all taking part in the same sick game. Don’t let us play along. (Coren Mitchell, 14 December 2014)

Although Coren Mitchell’s concerns and sentiment are highly laudable, the strategy of complete disengagement that she proposes had by that point become pragmatically untenable. The propaganda produced by IS continued to draw new recruits just as it provided ever-more legitimacy to restrictions on civil liberty – in November 2016, for example, the so-called ‘snooper’s charter’ became law, which provided the British police and security services unprecedented access to personal information and new powers of ‘hacking’ data en masse (Travis, 29 November 2016). The charter, inevitably, was energised with arguments of ‘security’ in the face of terrorist threats.

This, of course, is nothing new. A.C. Grayling points out that ‘emphasising security over civil liberties’ was a prevalent feature of UK legislature in the 1990s, often as a response to the perceived threat of the IRA (2009, p. 18). It is in the professional interests of such legislators to amplify a contemporary threat to the maximum degree, and the IS execution videos were purpose-built for such amplification. The instantly iconic aesthetics of the masked executioner and the shaven-headed, orange jumpsuited victim were effortlessly integrated into popular culture, attaining a power through notoriety that was exploited by both IS and its enemies to shore up militaristic, political and ideological agendas. Were it not for this widespread distribution and exploitation, perhaps Coren Mitchell’s advice could have been feasible – although this is doubtful, since they were always made to be seen. Foley, Sotloff, Haines, Henning, Kassig, Yukawa and Goto were killed for the purposes of creating films, not vice versa. So when speaking of ‘execution videos’, it should be remembered that the video is not reducible to the execution. What is more, in fact, the term ‘execution video’ is imprecise for these particula...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note on images and content
• Introduction: Emergencies and spectatorship
• 1 Enemy/image
• 2 Two tales of my dying neighbours
• 3 ‘in the grip of the monster’
• 4 Theatre, exposure and the exterior
• Epilogue
• Appendix: A brief history of emergencies
• References
• Index