The Ironic Spectator

Solidarity in the Age of Post-Humanitarianism

Lilie Chouliaraki

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745664330
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

WINNER of the 2015 ICA Outstanding Book Award

This path-breaking book explores how solidarity towards vulnerable others is performed in our media environment. It argues that stories where famine is described through our own experience of dieting or or where solidarity with Africa translates into wearing a cool armband tell us about much more than the cause that they attempt to communicate. They tell us something about the ways in which we imagine the world outside ourselves.

By showing historical change in Amnesty International and Oxfam appeals, in the Live Aid and Live 8 concerts, in the advocacy of Audrey Hepburn and Angelina Jolie as well as in earthquake news on the BBC, this far-reaching book shows how solidarity has today come to be not about conviction but choice, not vision but lifestyle, not others but ourselves – turning us into the ironic spectators of other people's suffering.

1 Solidarity and Spectatorship

Introduction: ‘Find Your Feeling’

‘Get involved. Feeling inspired? ActionAid’s supporters experience incredible feelings of happiness, warmth and pride all the time. There’s no limit to the scale of amazing feelings you can get by getting involved. To discover what your feeling might be, take the ActionAid interactive quiz today.’¹

‘Find Your Feeling: How Could ActionAid Make You Feel?’ is a 30-second quiz that invites us to explore what our ‘true feeling’ towards this major humanitarian brand might be by clicking on a number of questions: which picture moves us most, for instance? The child ‘next door’ happily swinging away? A group of protesters in Latin America or a couple of women hugging and smiling at the camera? Depending on our choice of emotions towards these distant others, we are offered a certain self-description: we might be ‘warm and fluffy’ or ‘inspired and excited’, and, having been in touch with our emotions, we are then invited to ‘click on the link’ and ‘find out more about ActionAid’.

It is the relationship between ‘how I feel’ and ‘what I can do’ about distant others, so clearly thrown into relief in the ActionAid appeal, that concerns me in this book. There is no doubt that emotion has always played a central role in the communication of solidarity, yet, I argue, there is something distinct about the ways in which the self figures in contemporary humanitarianism. This is obvious when we consider earlier Red Cross appeals, for instance, where the question of ‘what can I do?’ is raised through shocking images of emaciated children, or Amnesty International ones, where the question is answered through a call to personalized letter-writing for the liberation of prisoners of conscience. Neither of these two examples returns the imperative to act on vulnerable strangers to ourselves, asking us to get in touch with our feelings in order to express our solidarity with them.

Taking my point of departure in this new emotionality, I explore the ways in which the communication of solidarity has changed in the course of the past four decades. A crucial period for humanitarianism, the 1970–2010 time-span, is characterized by three major, seemingly unconnected but ultimately intersecting, transformations: the instrumentalization of the aid and development field; the retreat of the ‘grand narratives’ of solidarity; and the increasing technologization of communication. Whilst each transformation has been extensively explored in its own right, the co-articulation of the three and, importantly, the implications of this co-articulation for the changing meaning of solidarity, have remained relatively untouched.

In drawing attention to the new emotionality of the ‘Find Your Feeling’ appeal, then, what I propose is that the meaning of solidarity today should be approached as simultaneously defined, or overdetermined, by the branding strategies of ActionAid, by a generalized reluctance to accept ‘common humanity’ as the motivation for our actions and by the interactive possibilities of online media. It is, I argue, only when we examine solidarity as a problem of communication, that is, as a moral claim seeking to reconcile the competing demands of market, politics and the media, that we can better understand how the spectacle of suffering is subtly but surely turning the West into a specific kind of public actor – the ironic spectator of vulnerable others.

Irony refers to a disposition of detached knowingness, a self-conscious-suspicion vis-à-vis all claims to truth, which comes from acknowledging that there is always a disjunction between what is said and what exists – that there are no longer ‘grand narratives’ to hold the two together (Rorty 1989). Whilst irony is often translated into ‘postmodern’ postures of cool cynicism that reject moral attachment in favour of playful agnosticism, the spectacle of vulnerable others, I argue, complicates this posture in that, by virtue of confronting us with their suffering, it continues to raise the question of ‘what to do’ – it continues to call upon us as moral actors. The ironic spectator is, in this sense, an impure or ambivalent figure that stands, at once, as sceptical towards any moral appeal to solidary action and, yet, open to doing something about those who suffer. How has, then, the ironic spectator emerged through the communicative structure of solidarity, across time? And how does this twilight figure manage today to negotiate and resolve the tensions (political, economic, technological) of solidarity that our times press upon us?

The story of this book is, in this sense, a story of the communication of solidarity in the West at a historical turning point. This is the point when the expansion of the field, the end of the Cold War and the explosion of the media came together and ushered a paradigmatic change in the ways in which we are invited to perceive ourselves as moral actors. Even though the West cannot be regarded as a homogeneous sphere of safety, just as the global South cannot equally be seen as one single sphere of vulnerability, my use of these terms preserves nonetheless a historical and political distinction that is crucial to my story: the global division of power that, in unequally distributing resources along the West–South axis, reproduces the prosperity of the former whilst perpetuating the poverty of the latter. In the light of this division, the communication of solidarity becomes simultaneously the communication of cosmopolitan dispositions – public dispositions towards vulnerable others shaped by the moral imperative to act not only on people close to ‘us’ but also on distant others, strangers we will never meet, without the anticipation of reciprocation (Calhoun 2002; Linklater 2007a,b).

If I look at humanitarian communication as the main carrier of this imperative, this is because humanitarianism has successfully incorporated into its self-description a series of distinct altruistic claims, from the religious tradition of agape or care towards the stranger-in-need to the secular requirements to save lives or protect rights, which, despite their differences, have managed to create a relatively coherent moral order that defines our times as an ‘empathic civilization’ (Rifkin 2009). Instead of understanding humanitarian communication in a narrow manner, as institutional appeals strictly emanating from the field of international organizations, however, I treat it as involving a range of popular practices beyond appeals, such as celebrities, concerts and news. I consider these practices to be humanitarian to the extent that each uses its distinct aesthetic logic, for instance the personifying power of celebrity, the enchantment of the rock concert or the professional witnessing of the journalist, so as to confront us with the spectacle of distant sufferers as a cause that demands our response. In so doing, these practices form part of a dispersed communicative structure of cosmopolitan ethics that mundanely acts as a moralizing force upon western public life – what, in chapter 2, I introduce as the ‘humanitarian imaginary’.

In following the mutations of these communicative practices across time, the story of the book is essentially a story of how changes in the aesthetics of humanitarian communication are also changes in the ethics of solidarity. It is a story about how the move from an objective representation of suffering as something separate from us that invites us to contemplate the condition of distant others towards a subjective representation of suffering as something inseparable from our own ‘truths’ that invites contemplation on our own condition, is also a move from an ethics of pity to an ethics of irony. This is an epistemic shift² in the communication of solidarity, I contend, in that it signals the retreat of an other-oriented morality, where doing good to others is about our common humanity and asks nothing back, and the emergence of a self-oriented morality, where doing good to others is about ‘how I feel’ and must, therefore, be rewarded by minor gratifications to the self – the new emotionality of the quiz, the confessions of our favourite celebrity, the thrill of the rock concert and Twitter journalism being only some of its manifestations.

Whilst all ethics of solidarity involves an element of ‘egoistic altruism’, ironic solidarity differs from other versions in that it explicitly situates the pleasures of the self at the heart of moral action, thereby rendering solidarity a contingent ethics that no longer aspires to a reflexive engagement with the political conditions of human vulnerability. The decline of grand narratives has undoubtedly contributed to the rise of the ironic disposition, but, as I show below, this contingent ethics of solidarity has a more complex history that forces us to examine all three dimensions of its emergence – not only the political, but also the professional and the technological. In telling the story of humanitarianism’s four key communicative practices, I, therefore, choose to focus on the various ways through which appeals, celebrities, concerts and news have, in time, come to accommodate the tensions of the field by increasingly relying on the marketing logic of the corporate world as well as the digital technologies of media culture – and, in so doing, they have also come to respond to the political collapse of narratives of common humanity with the celebration of a neoliberal lifestyle of ‘feel good’ altruism.

At the heart of these aesthetic and ethical transformations, I conclude, lies a fundamental mutation in the communicative structure of humanitarianism. This is the retreat of the theatrical structure of solidarity, where the encounter between western spectator and vulnerable other takes place as an ethical and political event, in favour of a mirror structure, where this encounter is reduced to an often narcissistic self-reflection that involves people like ‘us’. Any radical alternative to this dominant ethics of solidarity, I propose, needs to start by reclaiming the theatricality of the public realm, the sense of the world beyond the West as a really existing, albeit different, world, which confronts us with the uncomfortable but vital questions of power, otherness and justice and, in so doing, keeps the possibility of social change in the global divisions of our world alive.

But first things first. In this introductory chapter, I set the scene for the exploration of solidarity as a problem of communication by introducing each of the three key dimensions of this communication: the institutional, where I discuss the implications of the increasing expansion and concomitant instrumentalization of the aid and development field; the political, where I address the end of grand narratives and the ensuing rise of individualist morality as a motivation for action; and the technological, where I show how the new media have facilitated an unprecedented explosion of public self-expression, thereby also changing the premises upon which solidarity is communicated. It is, as I have said, only in the light of these three dimensions that we can begin to make sense of the shift from the objectivity of the theatre to the new emotionality of the mirror as a paradigmatic shift in the very meaning of solidarity.

The instrumentalization of humanitarianism

The ‘Find Your Feeling’ appeal is informed by an emphasis on ‘inspiration’ that, as Richard Turner, ActionAid’s ex-head of fund-raising, put it, focuses on making people ‘feel great if they give, but [doesn’t] make them feel rotten if they don’t’.³ Leaving the needs-based iconography of poverty behind for inducing negative feelings of guilt, the inspiration-based approach is about inducing positive, warm feelings and, in so doing, aims at motivating longer-term support for the organization’s cause: ‘we’d like to think’, as Turner continues, ‘that the kind of supporters we attract are likely to give to us for longer and give more than if we’d increased our response rate with hard-hitting, more needs-based advertising.’⁴

Reflecting a general tendency in the aid and development field, this is the language of corporate communication that, instead of traditional strategies of dissemination, prioritizes the strategy of branding: the cultivation of a deep emotional attachment to a particular commodity, the NGO brand, with a view to guaranteeing customer loyalty to this brand. Whilst the emotional focus of branding deprives humanitarian communication of an argumentative rationale for solidarity, an issue I explore in chapter 3, what concerns me here is the broader point that our moral encounter with human vulnerability is now cast in a particular logic of the market.

Humanitarianism has, of course, never been antithetical to the market and has, in fact, been theorized as a quintessentially liberal idea born out of capitalism, for instance as the benign face of the expansion of labour markets beyond the West (Friedman 2003; Bajde 2009). Yet, the contemporary articulation of humanitarianism with the market is a rather recent development that reflects a shift within capitalism from, what Boltanski and Chiapello call, a classical liberal to a neoliberal conception of public morality (2005). In the light of this shift, we may argue that, whereas modern humanitarianism was grounded on the crucial separation between a public logic of economic utilitarianism, applicable in the sphere of commodity exchange, and a private logic of sentimental obligation towards vulnerable others, applicable in the sphere of individual altruism and increasingly in institutionalized philanthropy, late modern humanitarianism, what I here theorize as post-humanitarianism, increasingly blurs the boundary between the two. In so doing, it manages both to turn the ever-expanding realm of economic exchange into a realm of private emotion and self-expression and, in a dialectical move, to simultaneously commodify private emotion and philanthropic obligation.

Starting in the 1980s and gaining full momentum in the early 1990s, two developments have brought about this shift towards what Cheah (2006) calls the instrumentalization of the aid and development field – that is, the subordination of the other-oriented aims to save lives and change societies to the self-oriented imperative of profitable performance in the humanitarian sector itself. These are the marketization of humanitarian practice and the production of administrative knowledge in the discipline of Development Studies.

The marketization of humanitarian practice is a consequence of the explosion of international organizations (IOs) and international NGOs (INGOs) in the aid and development sector. Aid agencies, for instance, expanded their operations by 150 per cent in the 1985–95 decade whereas, in the USA alone, their numbers rose by a hundred in the 1980–90 decade (from 167 to 267) and almost doubled in the subsequent one, 1990–2000 (from 267 to 436).⁵ Marketization has, in this sense, emerged from these organizations’ strong competition for survival in a sector that has not only become more densely populated⁶ but has also come to depend primarily on project-based funding by transnational intermediaries and state donors. In the 1990–2000 decade, to give an example, funding levels rose nearly threefold, from $2.1 million to $5.9 million, reaching more than $10 million by 2005–6, whilst the distribution of these funds has increasingly shifted to depend on bilateral aid and state budgets’ earmarking, thereby rendering strong state interests a key criterion for INGO fund-raising (Smillie & Minear 2004: 8–10, 195; Barnett 2005: 723–40; Barnett & Weiss 2008: 33–5).

Even though the proliferation of humanitarian agencies has been hailed as contributing to the cosmopolitan ethos of global civil society, in that INGOs ‘breed new ideas, advocate, protest, and mobilize public support’, as Mathews argues, and, in the process, further ‘shape, implement, monitor, and enforce national and international commitments’ (1997: 52–3), we can clearly see that such proliferation entails a major risk. Insofar as it takes place within an economy of scarcity, where many agencies bid for limited funding, the competition for resources inevitably tends to foster compliance with the rules of the western donor market rather than with real priorities in the global South. Indeed, despite the expansion of the field and the provision of ‘more aid than ever before’, as Barnett and Weiss claim, ‘the bulk of resources [are] controlled by a few donor countries that [are] more inclined to impose conditions and direct aid towards their priorities’ so that, they conclude, ‘the least fortunate [are] getting the least attention’ (2008: 34).

The aims of humanitarianism, to provide relief and secure sustainable development in the global South, are thus made possible by a regime of economic relations that simultaneously subjects these aims to the priorities of western entrepreneurship – sustainable funding and renewable contracts for the organizations themselves. This paradox at the heart of the field, the ‘inhuman conditions’ of humanitarianism, ultimately serves to reproduce rather than change the economic relations of subordination between the wealthy West and the poor South: ‘while a degree of mass-based cosmopolitan solidarity has arisen in the domestic domains of Northern countries,’ Cheah argues, ‘it is unlikely that this solidarity will be directed in a concerted manner towards ending economic inequality between countries because Northern civil societies derive their prodigious strength from this inequality’ (2006: 494).

Despite, therefore, its benign objectives of maximizing efficiency and increasing accountability to donors, the financial regime of the aid and development field ultimately legitimizes a neoliberal logic of governance that turns the cosmopolitan aspirations of humanitarianism into the corporate aspirations of the West and, in so doing, not only fails to serve the ideal of global civil society but delivers harmful effects on vulnerable others. Drawing on three different case studies of INGO project implementation, for instance, Cooley and Ron (2002) persuasively demonstrate how ‘agency problems, competitive contracts, and multiple principals generate incentives promoting self-interested behaviour, intense competition, and poor project implementation’ (2002: 18); the competitiveness built into this system, they conclude, is ‘deeply corrosive’.

If the instrumentalization of humanitarianism is enacted through institutional practices on the ground, it is primarily legitimized through the scientific knowledge produced in the field of Development Studies. Born in the 1960s as a response to the need to study the processes of decolonization and the evolution of the new states, Development Studies has always been marked by a key tension between normative theory, showing what ideal societies or states would look like, and best practice, making concrete policy recommendations that are applicable in the here and now (Schuurman 2009). Even though this has historically been a productive tension that propelled critical research in the field, there has recently been, according to theorists, a definitive tip in the balance towards policy rather than normative theory (Biel 2000; Kothari 2005).

This means that Development Studies is today largely abandoning the critical perspectives of political economy, which thematized inequality as a systemic cause of underdevelopment and linked inequality to noneconomic issues – thus further connecting Development Studies to the disciplines of Politics, Sociology or History and Anthropology. Instead, what today dominates the field is what Fine (2009) calls ‘new development economics’: the neoliberal economics of the (post-)Washington Consensus, which favours micro-economic, rather than macro- or structural economic, approaches to development, and methodologically positivist, rather than critical reflexive, research designs.

The former, micro-economic approaches, favour an emphasis on the logistics of capital circulation within specific markets, whils...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Detailed Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Solidarity and Spectatorship
• 2 The Humanitarian Imaginary
• 3 Appeals
• 4 Celebrity
• 5 Concerts
• 6 News
• 7 Theatricality, Irony, Solidarity
• Notes
• References
• Index