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Commotion and fears

(Two ideas and a corollary suggested by Monika Anselment’s TV WARS)

by Jordi Font Agulló


1. A media liberalism made to measure

[...] In the same way that European imperialism resorted to racism to overcome the tension between nationalism and imperialism, the United States tried to hide imperial ambition under the cloak of an abstract universalism. [...]

David Harvey (1)


The infiltration of an ideology into the social sphere by means of modern propaganda techniques can finish by having catastrophic effects. Often, even though it can obviously play an influential role, the resulting human and social tragedy does not depend only on the pernicious nature inherent in the ideological body in question. It is evident, for example, that the gradual brutalization of the Wehrmacht (2) after the invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941 was possible owing to the political media bombardment which millions of Germans had received previously and for years by leaders who were criminals and liars, and who made proselytism of a totalitarian doctrine lacking the slightest ethical sense. The mass assassinations, the dehumanisation of the enemy, the war, were feasible from the moment when a completely distorted perceptive system of reality had been constructed by means of propagandistic manifestations. It was a universe in which an idealised vision of the community itself had little importance, and which, in turn, had its other side in the proliferation of fictitious and demonical images about “the others”.

As we have pointed out, however, the drift towards barbarism does not necessarily have to be founded on an abject ideology per se. An obvious example is that of the intellectual foundations upon which, during the last three centuries, the forms of social organisation of the capitalist West have been established; that is, the market economy and the liberal-bourgeois principles of individualism. On a theoretical level – and only in part on a practical one – liberal democracy allows the creation of wide spaces of freedom, in which apparently multiple discourses and very different opinions circulate without any kind of barrier and equally visible. In short, a hypothetically ideal state, and even a final end to the evolution of humanity as some (3) understood it during the last decade of the twentieth century. Even though its supporters try to present it as something natural in mature social and economic relations, the administration of all spheres of public and private life by the unregulated application of liberal principles in the economic field has brought about historically the extension everywhere of inequality and, at the same time, has caused conflicts of all kinds and tragedies unbearable from a rational point of view.

As a result, faced with such absurdities, the ones in control of economic and political power in a liberal post-modern society may find that the existing channels of liberty are used by those not in agreement with a prevailing order that cannot be separated from actions that are condemnable from a reasoning that takes into account the most basic human values. When this happens, it usually means that an outstanding part of the population becomes collectively organised and active in order to reject and face the policies of the ruling classes. From the logical stance of a “pure” conception of liberal democracy, it is undeniable that the more independent agents that take an active part in the socio-political context, the more solid is the democratising process. Thus, dissidence should be seen as a blessing; as the simple expression of the existing plurality. However, it is obvious that for the interests of the dominant groups that administer the capital, the appearance of opposing factors with possibilities of achieving an impact on the majority is a negative factor. When this point is arrived at, usually coercive and repressive measures are resorted to. In the liberal-bourgeois societies, however, punitive dispositions are selective and are usually never mass movements, as hyperpoliticised propaganda is not normally employed. These preventive options are typical of totalitarian solutions and, in addition, they would have a delegitimatising effect on the liberal system. Therefore, so as not to lose economic power and the capacity of public intervention, the governing powers pour out enormous resources into taking advantage – in a sophisticated way – of the channels of freedom in order to corrupt freedom itself. By the use of subtle and persuasive propaganda techniques, the mechanisms of public relations and the creation of public opinion or the fabrication of assent, once all is well directed by the mass media, the thought of a large proportion of the public is controlled, as Noam Chomsky (4) states, and the “correct values” can be instilled and attention diverted from the real problems.

In recent times, the advances in the sense of manipulation have unfortunately been considerable in the block of wealthy countries, and especially in the United States. From the first Gulf War of 1991 up to the latest military invasions, through the terrorist mortality of September 11 of 2001, it is an undeniable fact that the Western mass media have played a key role in the construction of this fictionalised vision of the world by the extension everywhere of a particular political “correction”. In reality, it is a world of shadows filled with ambiguities and contradictions, sustained by the ideological elitist suppositions (to prevent from thinking those who are not capable of doing so) of old liberal-conservative masters like Walter Lippman or John Dewey, or by deceitful and concealed expositions of international politics. As is well known, liberal hypocrisy can even justify the bombing of countries for humanitarian reasons and with the aim of restoring or extending the supposedly eternal values (5) of bourgeois democracy. Without a doubt, under the carcass of the pretext of the spreading of democratic liberalism there is hidden the transformation of a considerable part of humanity in mere human resources at the disposition of the interests and needs of those who control the global market.


2. From the sweetening of hell to the land in its illumination

[...] You sent your lights Your bombs You sent them down on our city Shock and awe Like some crazy TV show [...]

Patti Smith, Radio Baghdad (6)


We are, therefore, faced with a fraud of reality in the midst of the era of information, whose greatest ally is the (re)presentational practices of the mass media – especially television. The seriousness of the situation does not lie only in the fact that, on many occasions, the moving images shown on television do not correspond to the truth of the facts, but rather that this medium has largely succeeded in making invisible the trickery of the liberal excuse by imposing the illusion of counting on an ineffable media network, which would be the mirror of the outside. As a result, according to this criteria, the use of warlike coercion and violence on the part of the West would be related to the desire to extend good (that is, liberalism) everywhere. Convincing people of the sincerity of this mission is the task of some mass media which normalise what would be unthinkable (7) for an enlightened mentality of our time, and which also tend to erase any signs of immorality or criminality evident in the neo-colonialist enterprise. This camouflage requires a visual presentation that minimises real barbarism; that is, sequences of images shown at great speed with techniques that give priority to the impressionist perception over the analytical, and at the same time enveloped in the subtlety of merely rhetorical liberal messages.

If in the beginning, we have remarked on the power of totalitarian publicity to lead almost an entire nation to a consciously criminal behaviour, as a comparison it is also a worrying factor that in the so-called democratic countries of today, the mass media perform a strong propagandist function while simulating an irreproachable objectivity. This hyperreal simulation was diagnosed by Jean Baudrillard (8) a few years after the first Gulf War, even though it was a provincial estimate, as Susan Sontag (9) has rightly pointed out, if we take into account that these visual habits only affect the population which lives in the wealthy areas of the planet. It is true that, in the poorly named First World, the media carried out an ignoble exercise of communicational rhetoric, an unfortunate deception of the masses. However, the French philosopher committed the mistake of comparing, with a certain frivolity, what is wanted to seem credible with what can be known from a critical point of view or from seeking the truth. The acceptance of a presupposition of these characteristics meant the involvement of imperialist aggression, the denial of critical resistance and implied, in a perverse way, that real suffering (10) is difficult to distinguish in the midst of the continuous hyperrealist visual flow.

Warlike actions being shown as if they were video games, which on the other hand, were also an attempt to reassert Western technological superiority, started off a new media era. The key to everything was to disguise the censorship – nearly always present in all conflicts in which the United States and the Western block take part – by emitting a landslide of pictures that hid while they showed (11). What happened during the Vietnam War would not now be tolerated, in which the relaxing of censorship propitiated a huge pacifist movement. It is evident that during recent years the main objective of news programmes has been to manufacture public opinion in order to “protect” (12) ordinary people from reality. That is, to sweeten violence, the raw image of hell on earth, especially when the fire of hell is stoked by the imperialist war machine. Therefore, the essential objective to maintain – or pretend – the support of the interventionist policies of the governing powers.

A legitimate reaction against this kind of news trickery is to claim a transparency in the images taken by numerous reporters on the same war fronts; those which do not hide the details of horror and pain inflicted by Western democracies. It must be pointed out that in the mass media, spurred on by the spectacularisation and impulses of the audiometre, the offensiveness of the pictures is not surprising. But is always a question of scenes – loaded with racist significance, European-centred and colonialist – that record atrocities committed by the “enemies” (for example the video-executions) or civil wars between different people (often qualified as tribes or bands) considered exotic or distant. Another solution could be to demand the withdrawal of this dehistoricised and atomised vision (13) that television news programmes capitalise on. A way of revealing the difference between the mass media and the truth could be, on the one hand, to examine in detail the discourses that claim to “correctly” interpret events and, on the other, to carry out a deconstruction of the systems of production and editing of images. Partly linked with this objective, the many lines of work which define the field of the visual arts in our time – despite the limitations which affect its public reception – without a doubt, meet the conditions required to collaborate satisfactorily in the questioning of this mystified construction of reality which is smothering us.

In some mass media in which entertainment and show occupy a privileged position in the ranking of market interests, acts of violence, large-scale terrorist attacks, war in its maximum technological and visual expression (Black Hawk helicopters, invisible planes, intelligent missiles, the armour of impressive tanks, the colours of camouflage uniforms, terrible explosions, buildings collapsing...) play a paradigmatic role. To pay attention to the way these events are (re)presented is essential in order to grasp the importance of what they are trying to hide and, at the same time, it gives us clues about the ideological bases which activate the technical functioning of the communicational mechanism. For more than a decade the artist Monika Anselment has been working in this direction. By a clever use of the photographic medium, between the fine arts and the communication media (14), with her camera set up in front of the television, she dedicates herself to capturing filmed moments related to “the world civil war” (15) in which the United Sates and its allies are involved. Literally, it is an appropriation of television material to convert it into a single static image. The interest in this representation called TV WARS arises precisely from the existing lag between the moving image that flows on the television screen and the photograph finally captured, the result of a prolonged exposure.

Anselment’s visual plunder originates from a formal election responding to a previous pictorial conception and results in the obtaining of the immobility of the picture format. It is, therefore, the attainment of a distancing. As Bertold Brecht (16) emphasised, a simple replica of reality says very little about that reality and, as a result, the solution is to create something, an evocative device that allows us to articulate a reflexive connection. In this direction, Monika Anselment carries out a suggestive visual transaction which takes us away from the “war reports” emitted by the BBC, ntv, Euronews, CNN, Arte or even Aljazeera – as regards this channel, it is an indirect collecting, as the artist only photographs the fragments of images which are used in the news of the Western mass media – to a dialectic of individualised confrontation/tension (17) between ourselves (spectators – receivers) and the chosen image. And this new relation is possible owing to the physical structure of the traditional picture which all the shots taken by the German artist take on. The attainment of this appearance has certain indisputable aesthetic and ethical results. On the one hand, the photographs presented with an almost pictorial finish increase the sensation of estrangement by losing the stamp of the media and, on the other, statism situates the viewer in front of a stimulating landscape, – which in a vague way reminds him of an abstract painting –, favourable to awakening something more than the contemplation of beauty.

In fact, with her televised “landscape-like” recycled images, Monika Anselment places the pretended objectivity of the mass media in crisis and proposes an active observation to the viewer by potentatiating a reflective way of looking in order to face the decentring and the saturating stagnation caused by the infinite multitude of decontextualised images, that are projected by the communicational universe. The critical involvement of the artist is evident, but it is also subtle and complex because what at first appears as a fascination for the incandescen t flames of hell-on-earth – the ambivalent attraction of the charm of the catastrophic –, finally turns out to be, the capturing of the light which must make possible a way to denounce the pain and injustice which lie behind the multicoloured visual veil. A veil woven with images, in part, denaturalised – as if they were special effects made in Hollywood – and which only partly approach the truth. The success of these photographs, therefore, we find in its change into instruments which shed light on the dark areas of the political-economic system that decides, to a great extent, the fate of millions of citizens, and also, in the fact that in an extremely elegant way they unveil the accommodating complicity of the news channels.

Neocolonial wars, suicide attempts, hypocritically humanitarian bombings in the name of liberal values, massive abductions, biochemical terrorism..., become, in their television dimension, a set of ingredients which, well seasoned, turn into a fabulous cocktail, a kind of crazy television show as Patti Smith laments in a broken and sententious voice. While the show spreads generalised acquiescence and provokes the distortion of the real world, on the streets and houses of Baghdad, Basra, Fallujah, Kabul, Kandahar; Mosul, Ram Allah... a storm of steel has fallen and is still falling. Altogether, it fashions a climate of commotion and fear which, naturally, takes its victims, but which does not leave unharmed a considerable fringe of the population which lives in the countries of the elite aggressor and its allies; unfortunately, they are left tied (18) to the paralysis caused by fear.


3. Corollary: to resist dispossession

[...] Simultaneously, the increase of production and the PNB runs parallel to the destruction of life (natural resources) and the transformation of humanity into human resources, which implies a new expression of racism. [...]

Walter D. Mignolo (19)


The mass media, as we have argued, make up one more – important – piece in a whole conglomeration (IMF, World Bank, external policies of the USA, Japan and the European Union) destined to consolidate a neoliberal project and its adoption of new forms of colonialisation. A process of accumulation that, after the economic crisis of 1973, has abandoned the strategies of an expansion of capital for the direct line of dispossession (20). Matters such as the appropriation of natural resources, the destruction of the environment, the progressive destruction of the public sector, the relocation of enterprises... In a nutshell, the destruction of the basic requirements which make the balance of life and socio-political fairness possible. Dispossession implies an act or coercion, a great act of war if necessary. We live, therefore, in dangerous times, in the age of a “capitalism which smacks you in the face” (21). In addition, to make this robbery legitimate in liberal terms involves other dispossessions at the same time. That is, in a critical and intellectual order and, even at more intimate levels which affect the private and spiritual independence of the individual, the same freedom of conscience and reason. This signifies that we must be alert so as not to submit to a phase of deception and generalised indifference. To avoid this situation means to restore the critical vitality of a culture which, faced with the profound commercialisation of the unconscious (22), does not shrink from conflict and rebellion. Not to be aware of this matter means to sink in silence (23) and the positive adulation of an abusive system. Next step could be the brutalisation of daily life and the exaltation of the warrior quest.

Fortunately and deservedly, works such as TV WARS show that, by the use of formal aesthetic operations it is possible to contribute to the creation of a dissenting response in the face of the prevailing dispossession. At the present time it is no small thing to imply that behind and under the balls of fire and blazing skies there are hundreds of thousands of destroyed lives. And the most outstanding thing is that the artistic position of Monika Anselment is sincere in not hiding the attraction for the visual intensity of the (re)presentation of the warlike actions. But, at the same time, even though she does not reject the attraction for the perceptive duality – between the grotesque and the beautiful – of war (24), she makes it very clear that a true history of war will never contain the slightest trace of virtue.

Translated by Victòria Oliva Buxton


(1) David Harvey, El nuevo imperialismo, Madrid, Ed. Akal, 2004, p.54.

(2) Véase: Omer Bartov, L’armée d’Hitler. La Wehrmacht, les nazis et la guerre, Paris, Hachette Littératures, 1999.

(3) Sobre esta cuestión, véase por ejemplo: AA.VV., A propósito del fin de la historia, (Introducción de Alan Ryan), València, Ed. Alfons el Magnànim, 1994.

(4) Véase: Noam Chomsky, “El control de los medios de difusión. Los espectaculares logros de la propaganda”, Actos de agresión, Barcelona, Ed. Crítica, 2000, pp. 8-41.

(5) Véase: Alex Callinicos, Contra la Tercera Vía. Una crítica anticapitalista, Barcelona, Ed. Crítica, 2001.

(6) Fragmento de la canción “Radio Baghdad” que forma parte del último trabajo discográfico de Patti Smith, Tramping’, 2004.

(7) Véase: John Pilger, “La despiadada complicidad de los medios occidentales con la carnicería iraquí”, 18/11/04 a www.rebelion.org.

(8) Sobre este asunto véase el primer capítulo de: Christopher Norris, Teoría acrítica. Posmodernismo, intelectuales y la Guerra del Golfo, Frónesis-Cátedra, 1997, pp. 15-39.

(9) Véase: Susan Sontag, Ante el dolor de los demás, Madrid, Ed. Punto de Lectura, 2004, p. 125.

(10) Ibídem.

(11) Vid.: Pierre Bourdieu, Sobre la televisió, Barcelona, Edicions 62, 1997, p. 20

(12) Vid.: Arundhati Roy, “La soledad de Noam Chomsky”, 19/2/04, a www.rebelion.org.

(13) Vid.: Pierre Bourdieu, op. cit., pp. 113-114

(14) Vid.: Jean-François Chevrier, “El quadre i els models de l’experiència fotogràfica”, Indiferència i singularitat. La fotografia en el pensament artístic contemporani, Barcelona, MACBA, 1997, pp. 195-210.

(15) Vid.: Giorgio Agamben, Estado de excepción. Homo sacer II,1, València, Ed. Pre-Textos, 2004, pp. 9-49.

(16) Citado por Walter Benjamin en “Pequeña historia de la fotografia”, dentro de W. Benjamin, Sobre la fotografía, València, Ed. Pre-Textos, 2004, pp. 21-55.

(17) Vid.: J.F. Chevrier, op. cit.

(18) Vid.:: Arundhati Roy, “¿Con qué detergente lavas? El poder público en la era del imperio”, 22/10/04 a www.rebelion.org.

(19) Walter D. Mignolo, Historias locales/diseños globales, Madrid, Ediciones Akal, 2003, p. 25.

(20) Vid.: David Harvey, Op. cit.

(21) Vid.: Jacques R. Pauwels¸El mito de la guerra buena. EE.UU en la Segunda Guerra Mundial, Hondarribia, Ed. Hiru, 2002, p. 297.

(22) Vid.: Fredric Jameson, Una modernidad singular. Ensayo sobre la ontología del presente, Barcelona, Gedisa, 2004, pp. 13-22.

(23) Vid.: Peter Weiss, La estética de la resistencia, Honadarribia, Ed. Hiru, 1999, p. 1059.

(24) Vid.: Tim O’Brien, “Cómo contar una auténtica historia de guerra” a Las cosas que llevaban los hombres que lucharon, Barcelona, Ed. Anagrama, 1993, pp.66-82.


Source: TV WARS / ed. by Fundació Espais, Girona, 2005.